Another Great Day at Sea Page 4
A stranger to the workplace, I needed only a short time on the boat to realize that the workplace—not pubs, parties or clubs—is the great breeding ground of crushes. Over the years I’d developed a strong idea of all the things about office life that I could not tolerate—like using a shared toilet—but it occurred to me now that I couldn’t take the drain and strain of having crushes on my co-workers. One was spared that at home alone—but one was missing out on it too.
We chatted some more, me and the bright-eyed mechanic who, it turned out, was from Wyoming. (‘Wyoming!’ I trilled. ‘Really?’) It also turned out that another part of our meeting failed to conform to the usual woman-with-car-talking-to-manly-mechanic scenario. Namely that this mechanic had a husband at home who was an ex-Marine. Ah. And they had a four-year-old daughter. Her dad—the dad of the woman I was talking to, grandfather of the four-year-old—was a mechanic and she’d always wanted to be a mechanic herself. It was easy to imagine her as a teenage tomboy, able to mend punctures or tighten a climbing frame that had gone wonky. She was twenty-two now and, looking at her (which I had no desire not to do) I found it difficult to imagine anyone doing what they were doing more contentedly. I dismissed this as soon as I thought it, as soon as I looked around at everyone else, at all the other mechanics and engineers who were going about their business with such concentrated contentment. Even the people who weren’t working were working out, on the exercise bikes or in one of the fitness classes which seemed a 24/7 feature of the hangar deck. Everywhere you looked, everyone was doing something, if not working on the planes then pushing or towing things on trolleys. It was like Whitman’s ‘Song for Occupations’ in an entirely military setting (with a special emphasis on avionics): a vision of a fulfilled and industrious America, each person indispensable to the workings of the larger enterprise, no friction between the person and the task. Which made me think: why not name an aircraft carrier after Whitman? And why stop at Walt? Why not re-brand all the carriers and give them the names of poets? Show me one good reason why the USS Ronald Reagan shouldn’t be called the USS Emily Dickinson.
1. I have recorded what I saw and heard, and my impressions of what I saw and heard. For an investigation of sexual abuse in the US military see Kirby Dick’s documentary The Invisible War.
7
On a boat where everyone worked hard, everyone acknowledged that no one worked harder than the guys operating and maintaining the catapults. The night before we met, Leading Petty Officer Jonathan Dicola had finished work at midnight. Got to sleep at one. Was up at five thirty. Nothing unusual about that—a fairly average day in fact. But it’s not just the length of the days, the conditions take some beating too. The temperature in one of the rooms connected with the cat—the Launch Valve Room, I think it was called—was 110 degrees (way hotter than the bakery) and some of the guys spent the bulk of their sixteen-hour days in there.
My untrained ear was having trouble keeping up with Dicola’s explanation of what the various parts of the cat were called. These, let’s say, were failures at the level of the noun. They were exceeded by systematic failures at the level of the verb: what these nouns—these various parts—did. But while the workings of the catapult were complex, the consequences of its not functioning properly were easy to grasp. On one occasion, a vertical stabilizer on a jet didn’t work, and the plane flipped into the water, killing all five people aboard. On another boat a plane was launched before one of the crew got clear and the wing took his head off. (If it wasn’t always clear which of these and other incidents recounted by Dicola had actually been witnessed by him, that is testament to the spirit of shared responsibility that binds together everyone who works in a particular part of the Navy.) Another time the topside PO (Petty Officer) was still underneath when the aircraft went full throttle and sucked him up into the intake.
‘Jeez. When did that happen?’
‘Maybe ’96 or ’97. So now they wait for the topside PO to come out and wait for the shooter to say, “Go to military power” and the aircraft goes to full tension. Over the years they learn from those mistakes. We’ve also had incidents like the chief who wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing and ran between the plane and the JBD. The blast blew him up over the JBD. He was tore up pretty good after that. It wasn’t funny at the time,’ he said, laughing. ‘But, you know: Where was your mind?’
You can see this incident, or one very like it, on YouTube. Amazingly, you can even see the—or a—guy getting sucked cartoonishly into the jet intake. That’s quite funny too—because, against all odds, he lives to tell the tale. Instead of getting sucked in, through and out the other end, like meat through a mincer, he caused the engine to blow up and cut out and he came slithering out the way he’d gone in. A few days later he appeared at a press conference, bandaged up like a mummy, but understandably chipper given the implausible fact of his survival.
It made sense to go from the barely comprehensible workings of the catapult to the equally impressive world of the arresting gear. During one of his doomed attempts to explain what was happening, Dicola had likened the cat to a double-barrelled shotgun; at the other end of the boat ABE3 Jefferson Maldonado told me to think in terms of a giant syringe with the cable serving, presumably, as . . . Well, I wasn’t sure which part of the analogy the needle fitted into—and not just because of my usual mental shortcomings. I was wearing earplugs, it was difficult to hear, and every few minutes a jet would come screaming and crashing down and it would be impossible to hear anything. In spite of all this racket and the attendant jar and crash, the equipment on display—a bunch of massive metal tubes the size of oil pipelines leading into other tubes—did not register the slightest strain or movement. The plane was either a bolter or it had caught one of the other wires (our wire was the third of three).
‘I hope we catch one,’ Maldonado said, looking and sounding as hopeful and forlorn as he must have done when he and his friends went on fishing trips in the Dominican Republic. He’d moved to New York when he was eleven and joined the Navy when he was eighteen. He was the same age as Dicola and they were both going to put in their full twenty. Which meant—I felt like someone calculating how little time a convicted murderer would serve, outraged by the leniency of the sentence—they would be out in eight years, aged thirty-eight. Looked at in another way, their Navy careers would have spanned roughly the same time as Ryan Giggs’s at Man United. The way Jefferson spoke about it, however, comparisons with managers rather than players seemed more appropriate.
‘Thing about this job,’ he said in one of those epic understatements which seemed such a feature of naval life, ‘is that it teaches you to deal with stress.’ Immense, almost unimaginable quantities of the stuff.
‘If a 747 had a tail hook we could stop that,’ he claimed a few moments later. ‘That’s what they say. I don’t know if it’s true.’ Just in the normal routine of things, planes came in at 140 mph and stopped in 108 feet (or just over a second). There was 2200 feet of cable with a breaking strength of 215,000 pounds. The whole operation was, as he put it, ‘maintenance intensive’. The cable had to be replaced every 2500 traps and the bit out on deck that the plane actually hooked on to was good only for a hundred. Given what it was subjected to, I was surprised it lasted that long.
As with the cat, accidents are extremely rare but the effects of a cable snapping are catastrophic. You can see such a thing happening on the USS George Washington in 2003. An F-18 comes in to land and hooks the wire which, at the extreme limit of its extension, breaks. The pilot ejects just before the plane skids off the deck and into the water. Then the cable lashes back like a limb-severing whip. A yellow-shirt jumps clear like a kid skipping rope. Incredibly he does this not once but twice as it scythes down anyone and anything else in its path.
Another plane crashed in and this time the equipment slammed, shuttled and recoiled in a din of massively contested force.
‘We caught one,’ said Jefferson, as if we were sitting quietly on
a lake in the Adirondacks—leaves turning brown in the fall, a few clouds—and had hooked a sleek and especially valuable fish.
8
Travellers to Thailand will be familiar with the way that when the national anthem comes on the radio everyone stops whatever it is they’re doing—issuing you with a ticket for a train that departs from Chiang Mai for Bangkok in two minutes—and listens. It was the same here with the Captain’s daily address to the ship’s company. We were in a walkway—of course we were in a walkway, we were always in a walkway—on our way to the chapel, but froze, mid-stride, as the Captain reminded everyone that it was ‘a great day to be at sea’. I suppose it was, given the sun, clear skies and the lack of typhoons and incoming torpedoes. What I didn’t realize was that the Captain always told everyone what a great day it was. Despite this, he always managed to re-italicize or re-emphasize the ‘great’, as though yesterday had not been quite as great, and today, while in many ways indistinguishable from the interminable days that had gone before, was somehow better and greater, thereby raising the possibility that tomorrow might be even greater. It became a standing joke among the crew, and I wondered what would happen when they were making their way back across the Atlantic in November, in Force 9 gales and twenty-foot waves: would he manage to maintain their belief in something they already regarded with a degree of affectionate irony? For now, they expected and looked forward to these daily affirmations of greatness, would have been sorely disillusioned, possibly even mutinous, if he’d summed up the day as merely ‘tolerable’, ‘OK’ or ‘fine’. There was something very American about this ability to dwell constantly in the realm of the improvable superlative.
The next part of his speech was devoted to publicizing the achievements of the Avenger of the Day, a member of the crew who had been selected for his or her outstanding work irrespective of what that work happened to be.
After this it was down to emailed suggestions from the crew about how things could be improved, how the great days at sea could be made greater. On the one hand, this was a way of turning gripes into suggestions for problem solving: the toilets (the heads) employed a new vacuum system that was prone to blocking and so, at any one time, a number of lavatories seemed to be out of action. This, evidently, was an ongoing source of grievance, one that the Captain was always having to address. On the other hand it was part of the larger ethos of individual and collective improvement that pervaded the ship. I was always seeing little notices exhorting the ship’s company to do better. Sometimes these would take the form of generalized encouragement: ‘STOP looking at where you have been and START looking at where you can be!’ Other times they would encourage the traditional pride of a given department or division—‘Setting the standard for excellence’—which bled, naturally, into rivalry. Among the various squadrons of the air wing there were constant and competing reminders and claims to be ‘The Tip of the Spear—Stay Sharp’. The Spartan (Helicopter) Squadron’s ‘Command Philosophy’ was broken down into increments:
Take The Fight To The Enemy And Win
Bridge The Gap Between Good And Great
There Is Great Honor In Service To Country
Everyone Is Important
Be Meticulous Stewards Of The Assets We Employ
I loved these and the many other reminders to do better, to improve, but my favourite was somewhat uncertain in intention and effect: ‘It’s not broke you’re just using it wrong.’
Being English, having grown up in a land of out-of-service payphones and faulty trains, my immediate response to this was ‘But what if it is broken?’ What I really liked, though, was the way that the message demonstrated and reflected its own irrefutable truth: that the language, while broke (as opposed to broken), still functioned in spite of being used wrong (incorrectly).
9
When we eventually got to the chapel we were shown around by Commander Cameron Fish—Fish the Bish as he was known during a stint with the Royal Navy. In his late forties, I guessed. He had a narrow face, narrow as the prow of a long boat, but he was at pains to emphasize the breadth of religious belief on the boat. The chapel was there in accordance with constitutional guarantees of religious freedom, not because they were evangelical, he said, sounding more than a little evangelical. Accordingly the chapel changed function—changed religion—depending on who needed it and for what at any given time. The numbers attending were broadly in line with the churchgoing population of the United States—if an adjustment was made for the fact that a disproportionate part of the ship’s population was from the Christian heartland of the South and the Midwest. There were, the Bish thought, maybe twelve sailors on board who were Jewish by religion, fifteen or twenty Muslims and eight Buddhists, but right now the chapel was being readied for the Pentecostal Bible study class.
The Bish asked Curtis Bell, who was leading the class, if we could stick around. Curtis was wearing a digital camouflage uniform and large spectacles (specially designed, it seemed, for close study of books with many words in very small print). The extreme gentleness of his manner stood in sharp contrast to his heavy, perfectly shined boots. I suspect his impulse, understandably, was to not have us there, but he wrestled quickly with his conscience and, with great courtesy, didn’t simply agree to let us stay but invited us to do so.
There were only seven people in attendance but that’s enough, once the singing starts, to constitute a congregation and choir. One of the women led the singing, setting up the call—‘Glory to his name’—joining in the response and moving on to the next call: ‘Down at the cross’. I love gospel, especially like this, with no instruments, just uplifted American voices and loose rhythmic hand clapping. To be honest, within thirty seconds the atheist’s spirit was moved, tears were trickling down his unbelieving cheeks. Christianity! American Christianity! African American Christianity! The choir of voices, the chain of hands clapping, the promise of freedom and the history of acceptance, resilience and resistance—of breaking the chains—that is there in every line. Oh, I could feel the happiness of it, the joy of being ‘wondrously saved from sin’ even though the whole idea of sin—and, consequently, being saved from it—was complete nonsense. But it really was a lovely hymn and when it ended I could feel the whole hallelujah-ness of it in myself and the warmth that comes from being in the presence of good people.
Having brought the singing to a close the sister whose name I did not catch moved on to the next phase of the evening.
‘I give you all the Glory, all the Honour, all the Praise. Thank you. Thank you for your Holy Spirit. Thank you for sending down your Son to die on the cross.’ Thank you for this and thank you for that, thank you for everything, and a special thank you—this was me, extrapolating—for the suffering that gives us the opportunity to thank you for the possibility of bringing our suffering to an end. It was a massively extended and spiritual version of impeccable manners.
‘Alright! We are in for a treat tonight. Amen. We’re gettin’ this man full of fire. He’s gonna come down and give you what thus sayeth the Lord. He’s gonna take you up on each scripture. He’s gonna break it down so that you know exactly what this scripture meant. He’s not one that takes scriptures out of context. He’s gonna make you understand so you’re like in kindergarten. Make it plain as day. Amen. He’s a true man of God. He follows the spirit, he leads by the spirit. He does everything in decency and orderly. Everything is all of one accord. Amen. I give you none other than brother Curtis Bell.’
Before brother Curtis could take the stand there was another round of singing. It only a took a line—‘There is power in the precious blood of the lamb’—and there I was, back in it again, in the small tide of voices ebbing and flowing, calling and calling back.
‘Pow-er . . . ’
‘Power Lord!’
‘Power . . . ’
‘Power Lord!’
Lovely though it was, the singing had to come to an end so that we could get on with the Bible study part of the evening. Cur
tis needed a whiteboard and brother Nate was sent to get one. A sister read out a passage of Romans chapter 10, verse 9. ‘That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.’
To understand this in context, Curtis explained, you had to bear in mind what had come before. For example: ‘For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God.’
There followed a confusing exegesis, accompanied by Curtis writing the essentials on the whiteboard: ‘Righteousness = justified = redemption = salvation = saved.’
It was a terrible shame. The singing had been so wonderful but now the evening had descended into low-level lit crit of a text that didn’t merit any kind of serious scrutiny. It was no better than an aged mullah reducing the complexities of the world to something that could be resolved by a close study of the Qur’an. Curtis was a righteous, spiritual, decent man—he was all the things he had been described as being: a fine man, but he had pledged his light to darkness, had chosen ignorance rather than knowledge and all his knowledge was no more than the elaboration of ignorance. The gap between that and the singing, so heartfelt and full of the spirit, was huge even though the two shared a similar inspiration and belief.