Another Great Day at Sea Read online

  I was working my way through this analogy-reminiscence when we were met by Commander Christopher Couch whose businesslike pleasure it was to take us on a tour of this massive—and massively crowded—space. He was in his mid-forties, I guessed, and his hair was cut like everybody else’s on the ship. I always like to be in the presence of people who are good at and love their jobs—irrespective of the job—and if ever there was a man in love with his job it was Couch. He began by explaining that the E-2C Hawkeye had an eight-bladed prop and that this had only recently been made possible by advances in materials technology. Made sense. I thought back to First World War biplanes with their twin-bladed props and maximum speeds slightly faster than a bike’s. I had no chance to make notes; there was so much to see and it was impossible to keep up with all the model numbers, engine parts, fuels, tools and spools, functions and processes and purposes, many of them dissolving in a torrent of acronyms.

  ‘Wow,’ I said during a brief lull in Couch’s litany. ‘This is the most A-I-E I’ve ever been in.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Acronym Intensive Environment,’ I said, feeling both smart and stupid at having risked a first joke in a new place.

  ‘That’s a good one,’ said Couch in a tone suggesting that there are only bad ones.

  Light was pouring in through huge spaces on either side of the hangar: the port and starboard elevators that took planes up to the flight deck. The sea was racing past, a film of light and sky projected from within this vast and silhouetted auditorium. I would like to have watched more of this nautical epic but we were not here to admire the view. Couch’s recitation of specs and engine parts, however, was occasionally punctuated by mention of something I could humanly relate to: the beach. It came up several times, this beach, but he wasn’t taking a detour into how he liked to spend his vacation—he was talking about ‘the long logistical pipeline back to the beach’. Ah, he was still on the job; the beach was the mainland where spares were kept and more complex repairs could be made. I started calculating ways in which I might incorporate this bit of metonymy into dinner-party chat back at London beach. I couldn’t think of a single way, but I liked the logic of his usage, the way it performed two tasks simultaneously. It made the deployment seem like a pleasure cruise (if you love your job this much it is sort of a paid vacation) and it also did the opposite: made everything that happened on the mainland seem like buckets-and-spade stuff, a holiday, compared with the serious shit that went on here.

  We came to the other end of the hangar, near the very back of the boat, the fantail as they call it in the trade. This was where the jets’ engines were tested. At night, a full test would take about eight hours, and it was a source not of amazement but of incomprehension to Couch that anyone would contemplate missing a single minute of this epic performance without concluding that their lives had been thoroughly wasted.

  4

  The beach came up again, at Carrier Control Approach, which we visited after dark.

  ‘Back at the beach, the field is always there,’ said one of the guys, looking up quickly from his screen. It sounded like the beginning of one of those coded radio announcements from the BBC to the French Resistance ahead of D-Day. Either that or a line from a draft of a Wallace Stevens poem. There followed a long interval of silence before whatever was happening on-screen allowed him to resume and complete. ‘Yeah, their field is always there. Whereas our airport moves.’

  There were sixteen people in the CCA, all zipped up in cosy military jackets, monitoring what looked like a billion dollars’ worth of computer screens and radar maps. It was icy as a Vegas hotel and dark as a nightclub. There was even some UV light, emphasizing the white, ghostly, snowy stuff that hung from the ceiling in readiness for Halloween. The temperature had to be kept low because of the equipment but it also meant that there was no chance of anyone dozing off and taking a nap. Just trying to keep warm meant the brain was in a state of constant high alert. The darkness brought out the greens, purples, yellows and reds of the screens. There was an air of relaxed and chilly attention. Someone was drinking coffee from a clear mug with a slice of orange in it—a strange drink. A supervisor stood in the middle of the room, looking over people’s shoulders, checking to see how they were doing their jobs. He was a trainee supervisor and someone was watching over him too. Thus the naval hierarchy towers over the boat like the island over the flight deck. I started to wish I’d worn a thick pullover and wondered what coffee with a slice of orange tasted like. But mainly I was glad I had no one looking over my shoulder, checking on how I was doing my job.

  We’d got here half an hour before the birds would start landing. As the time for recovery drew near the atmosphere changed, from attentive to highly focused. With the screens full of data I was reminded, as I had been on the flight deck, of the financial markets, this time with some kind of crisis beginning to make itself felt: a plunge in the FTSE 100, a devastating surge in the NASDAQ. I’d never been in an environment where a slow intensification of concentration was so marked. One of the screens went down. Came back again. I’d heard of the stress of air traffic control, had seen United 93 in which the controllers manoeuvre aircraft from the path of the hijacked planes. This was more stressful in a way—‘our airport moves’—but the number of planes was minimal compared with however many thousands it was that came barrelling in over London every day, hoping to squeeze into a landing spot at Gatwick and Heathrow without circling for hours in a rush-hour holding pattern. The controllers had a distinct way of speaking to the pilots. Firm enough that the idea of not complying did not even occur; relaxed enough that no one would feel they were being bossed around (thereby engendering the reflex urge to do the opposite).

  Plasma screens displayed numbers, data and radar info; others transmitted the action on deck as planes came thumping down in the dark, one after another. The picture quality was roughly that of CCTV footage in a Stockwell off-licence. Everything went like clockwork—a phrase which, in this context, sounds several centuries out of date. The birds were all back.

  And would stay back till morning. That’s right: flight ops finished at about 2140! Newell had known this all along. The talk about planes coming and going like Lionel Richie, all night long, had been just a joke. Everyone was home and would stay home. We were going to have a quiet night in. There would actually be a long interval of what passed, in these parts, for silence.

  Lights Out—at ten p.m.—was preceded by an announcement broadcast over the whole ship: a little parable followed by a prayer. It was a nice way of rounding off the day and binding the ship together, those sharing a dorm with two hundred others, officers in a room for six, and the privileged few who had rooms to themselves, who lay in their bunks in the tired knowledge that if they woke in the night needing to pee the basin was only a yard away.

  There may have been no jets landing but my stateroom was regularly engulfed by new sources of industrial clamour that earplugs were powerless to keep at bay. I was jolted awake throughout the night but always managed to get back to sleep, partly because the default silence was anything but. It wasn’t even white noise, more like dark grey shading into black as air, water, heat, coolant and—for all I knew—ammunition or loaves of bread went whistling, howling, surging, clanking, pouring and thumping through the gates and alleys of the carrier’s life-support system.

  5

  Breakfast in the Ward Room was a fried reek of congealed eggs, bacon and other horrors avoided—if not ignored—in favour of cereals, tinned fruit and yoghurt. After that we went right to the source, to the kitchens where it had all been prepared. Showing us round was Warrant Officer Charles Jakes from New York City. He was African American, and had spent twenty-five of his forty-four years in the Navy. In a way that I was becoming accustomed to Charles ran—as opposed to walked or strolled—through a description of his mission and his routines. He was in charge of 112 cooks and 180 food attendants, serving seven places to eat on ship. Increasing quantities of the stu
ff served in these venues were pre-prepared rather than cooked from scratch (which saved money and time, cut down on staff and accounted, in part, for why meals on the boat were less than appetizing).

  The idea, Charles explained, was to go forty-five days without running out of anything. And twenty days without running out of fruit and veg. He took us into a freezer—the size of a Manhattan apartment—and talked us through its contents. Eight thousand pounds of chicken, five thousand pounds of steak, four thousand pounds of hamburger. Waiters in American restaurants always employ the first person singular when announcing and describing the day’s specials. ‘I have a lamb casserole with a radish reduction,’ they will say, as though this interesting-sounding confection has been summoned into existence by his or her descriptive efforts alone. In Charles’s case this grammatical habit took on gargantuan proportions.

  ‘I aim to eat my way through everything on the boat,’ he said. ‘So, going back to the US, I got a million dollars or less left for the last forty-five days.’ It made Paul Newman’s boast in Cool Hand Luke—‘I can eat fifty eggs’—seem pitiful, the equivalent of ordering a single softly boiled egg on toast. Speaking of eggs, we moved from freezer to fridge to gaze at 230 boxes of them, which made a total of 575 dozen eggs. This looked like a lot but I calculated that it added up to only just over one egg per person; hence Charles’s eagerness to offer reassurance. ‘These are not the only eggs. Most the eggs are frozen. These here are just back-up.’ Good to know.

  En route to one of the store rooms, we passed another chill box which was actually the morgue. ‘Ain’t nobody in there at the moment,’ he said. ‘And if there was there’d be a guard outside.’ That was good to know too.

  As we entered the store room Charles warned that it was in a seriously depleted condition. At the beginning of the deployment stuff would have been piled so high we would not be able to see over the stacks. Now, near the end of deployment which, he hoped, would clean the place out, they were rarely more than four feet high.

  First thing we saw was a low-level expanse of popcorn (‘they just love popcorn round here’). Beyond the popcorn were six-pound tins (like big pots of paint) of Country Sausage Gravy, Great Northern Beans, Victory Garden Pork and Beans, Popeye Leaf Spinach, Heinz Dill Kosher Sandwich Slices . . .

  Like a mother whose son has turned up unexpectedly Charles kept stressing that levels were this low because we only had forty-five days at sea left, that, relatively speaking, there was almost nothing to eat.

  Before moving into the bakery we donned little paper Nehru hats. The bakers, from New York, Texas, Chicago and California, were lined up to meet us. They bake eight thousand cakes a week, not counting the ones made for special ceremonies in port (epic cakes iced in the colours of the American flag and the flag of the host country). Our visit was not ceremonial exactly but they had prepared some samples for us. I love cake, cake is my popcorn, and I was glad to be able to tuck in as though it were the snapper, not me, who was always picking at his food like some high-achieving anorexic. It was incredibly hot in here—hot, as Philip Larkin remarked in a different context, as a bakery.

  ‘You’re not troubled by the heat in here?’ I said.

  ‘Uh-uh,’ said one of the bakers. ‘Sometimes it gets pretty hot.’

  ‘This is not hot?’

  ‘This a really cool day.’

  The visit was as near as I was ever likely to come to being a touring politician or a member of the royal family. I actually found I’d adopted the physical stance of the monarch-in-the-age-of-democracy (standing with my hands behind my back) and the corresponding mental infirmity: nodding my head as though this brief exchange of pleasantries was just about the most demanding form of communication imaginable.

  From the bakery we moved into one of the real kitchens: the heart (attack) of the whole feeding operation where Charles resumed his narrative of singular endeavour: ‘I aim to prepare maybe four thousand . . . ’, ‘When I’ve eaten twenty-five hundred pounds of . . . ’ I’d got it into my head that this was not just a figure of speech, and now found it impossible to shake off the image of the genial and willing Charles scarfing his way through piles of meat, potatoes and vegetables, gorging his body beyond its performance envelope, a Sisyphus scrambling up a mountain of food, a calorie-intensive reincarnation of the Ancient Mariner. In its way it was a far more impressive feat of solo perseverance than even the pilots could achieve.

  All around were boiling vats as round and deep as kettle drums. A lot of meat was being prepared, plastic bags stuffed full of barbecue chopped pork.

  ‘Hmm, smells good,’ I said, instinctively remembering that nine times out of ten the most charming thing to say in any given situation will be the exact opposite of what one really feels. The truth was that the smell was a sustained and nauseated appeal on behalf of the Meat-Is-Murder Coalition or the Transnational Vegan Alliance. But what can you expect when you’re in the middle of the ocean with five thousand hungry bellies to stuff, most of them needing plenty of calories to fuel their workouts at the gym?

  Our tour concluded with a look at another store room. Notwithstanding Charles’s warning about the paucity of supplies, the acute lack of any sense of shortage gave rise to a form of mental indigestion. It was reassuring looking at these tins, seeing them stacked, knowing one would not—I would not—be sampling their contents. But what a disappointment if the carrier sank and treasure hunters of the future discovered not the sunken gold and jewels of galleons from the days of the Spanish Armada but thousands of cans of gravy and kosher sandwich slices: the lost city of Atlantis re-imagined as a cut-price hypermarket that had slipped beneath the waves.

  6

  For the duration of my stay the carrier remained a three-dimensional maze of walkways, stairs and hatches but at some point we always ended up back in the hangar bay—the second most interesting place on the boat (after the flight deck). We passed through there straight after our tour of the kitchen and would do so later the same day, after dark, when it was illuminated by a pale yellow light (less visible from a distance). Now the Arabian sun was peeking through the open expanse of the elevator bay, eager to get a glimpse of whatever was going on in this outpost of industrial America.

  Like a buffalo brought down by a lion who then summons the rest of her pride to tuck in, an F-18 was being pecked, prodded and taken apart by a gang of mechanics and engineers. They swarmed over it, drawing metallic entrails from the fuselage, digging into its cockpit and burrowing away in the bowels of the engine. They did this with the utmost care, many of them wearing the soft suede or chamois over-shoes I’d noticed earlier—the heavy industrial equivalent of carpet slippers—to prevent damage to the plane’s delicate skin. The concern was reciprocated: little padded pouches were tied to the sharp edges of the plane’s fins and wings so that heads were not gashed as people hurried by.

  A brown-shirted woman was perched on the wing, cross-legged as if at a festival of future archaeology, concentrating closely on the all-important part she was unscrewing. Having taken the component out of the wing she was now coating it with some kind of grease, glue, anti-freeze, lube or whatever. I apologize for the discrepancy between the precision of the task and the imprecision of my description of that task. I have never liked anything that involves engines, oil or fiddly intricate work even though it is, in a way, in my blood. My dad served his apprenticeship and worked at Gloster Aircraft Company, where one of the first operational jet fighters, the Gloster Meteor, was built. Some days he and his workmates would eat lunch outside, munching their bread-rationed sandwiches, watching planes take off and fly around the shirey skies. (My parents were much on my mind while I was on the boat; my mum had died four months before I came on board; my dad would die, quite suddenly, three weeks after I got back.)

  A couple of planes away a fuel cell bladder was being replaced. It looked like a cross between a black python and a massively deflated paddling pool. The work was being overseen by a civilian who, like
almost all the civilians on the boat, was ex-military (a Vietnam vet from helicopters, search and rescue). If you met him in the street you would guess straightaway that he had been in the military: a directness, a strength (physical, yes, but also of purpose and identity), an instinct for straight talking that is manifest even when (especially when) silent. A young woman was curled up yoga-ishly on the wing of this plane too, replacing something. The fact that she was wearing a cranial and an oil-smeared brown jersey made her eyes even more luminous. I was glad to have an excuse to talk with her. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, as you do when your fingers are oily. It wasn’t exactly a gender-reversal thing going on, but the essential choreography of the scene was being acted out in garages throughout the world: a woman being told what’s wrong with her car, in terms barely comprehensible, by a swarthy grease monkey confident of his knowledge and not embarrassed about the oil-smudged pictures of chicks, mainly blonde, who provide a silent chorus of assent when the complexity of the repair and its estimated cost is eventually revealed. No pin-ups like that here, of course: less, I think, because the women on board might find such things offensive than because any man who even considered such forms of decoration would instantly feel like a total dick. A limp dick at that. It’s striking how many of the world’s little problems—and many of its big ones too—are eliminated by the simplest of solutions: having women around. Just over a fifth of the ship’s company were women. Only men in senior positions were old enough to remember what it was like to have men-only boats. One of these explained to me that the main difference, after women came aboard, was ‘that the boat smelled a bit nicer because the guys showered more.’ Other than that, what surprised him was the speed with which resistance to the idea of gender integration was followed by two related and equally baffling questions: what had all the fuss been about—and why didn’t we do this earlier?1