Another Great Day at Sea Page 6

  ‘It’s a respectable profession,’ said a voice in the blue-tinged darkness.

  ‘An honourable profession,’ said another.

  I had not been on the boat long but I understood what they meant and believed in it absolutely. I asked what they were doing and where they were when the 9/11 attacks happened.

  ‘I was on the Enterprise,’ the Captain said. ‘We’d left the Gulf on 9/9 and were headed south to port call in Africa. Then 9/11 occurred and the CO of the ship watched what was going on. He turned the ship around and started steaming towards the coast of Pakistan. As they felt the ship turning the whole crew cheered. When things happen the president says, “Where are the carriers?” We are part of world events, part of history as it’s made. If something happens we go to where history is made. We’re the tip of the spear.’

  ‘But you don’t need to talk to old guys like us about this,’ Jeff said. ‘There are a lot of people on this boat who’ve been in ten years now. Kids who were in the heartland, who had never seen the ocean, who, when 9/11 happened said, “I’m gonna make a difference.” No need for a draft or recruitment.’

  ‘About those kids,’ I said in the direction of the Captain. ‘Was the Avenger of the Day your idea?’

  ‘No, that was up and running before I took command. But it’s interesting because normally these kids wanna stay away from the Captain!’ How I liked these guys, the ease with which they went from talking absolutely seriously about serving their country to just joking around. ‘What I introduced was the phone call home. But that can backfire too. The mom picks up and she’s like, “What did he do now?” ’

  We sat there in a row, chuckling, looking out at the night-dark sea.

  14

  I had perfected my end-of-day routine. At 2140 I put on my thick towelling robe and flip-flops, trotted to the head and showers where I showered quickly, dried off and darted skinnily back to my room. For ten minutes I lay on my rack reading Norman Polmar’s Aircraft Carriers: A History of Carrier Aviation and Its Influence on World Events, volume I (1909-1945), until the little story and prayer came over the Main Circuit just before Lights Out. Sometimes the stories were jokey (a bit from Charlie Brown about a field of pumpkins and nothing but sincerity as far as the eye can see); other times they were a bit cheesy: stuff about dancing like no one was watching, loving like you’d never been hurt. But I always liked the next bit: the prayer, when God would be thanked for granting endurance to those on watch, for bringing rest to tired eyes and those suffering from exhaustion. After that I turned off my bunk light and basked in the luxurious fact of being in my own room with its guarantee of sleep and rest. Some nights I lay awake for ages, thinking how nice it was, having my own room in which I could enjoy a night’s sleep.

  And some nights I lay in my bunk thinking about the weird perk of having ended up here. Asked, nine months earlier, if there was ‘somewhere unusual and interesting’ I’d like to be writer-in-residence I didn’t hesitate: Sir, an American aircraft carrier, sir!

  It had to be American: circumstantially, because these days we—the British—don’t even have a carrier; personally, because of the accents, the audible symptoms of the top-to-bottom, toff-to-prole hierarchy that is so clearly manifest in the British military. If I’ve been in America for a while and am about to fly back to LHR from JFK or LAX my heart sinks when I hear again a substantial concentration of British accents. To have locked myself away on a British aircraft carrier—if one had existed—would have been to have condemned myself to being on a shrunken version of our island kingdom (which is often thought of as a kind of gigantically expanded carrier). Sitting in on a US ship, on the other hand, would be like staying in a small town in America (albeit one organized along unusually clear hierarchical lines), surrounded by American voices, American friendliness, American politeness, American Americans. That, I knew, would be a source of pleasure and happiness.

  The attraction of a carrier—as opposed to a US battleship, or bank or hospital or whatever other institution might have hosted me—was similarly straightforward. I was born in 1958 and, as that earlier story about me and Nigel Raeburn on the bridge of the bus illustrated, my childhood was dominated by the Second World War. I loved planes, military planes especially, the Battle of Britain particularly. Like almost every other boy of my age, long hours spent making and blotchily painting Airfix models meant that I had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Second World War aircraft. This plane-spotter’s know-how was backed up by a limited if sometimes deluded idea of what these planes were used for: Stukas dive-bombed Polish cities, Hurricanes and Spitfires fought off Heinkels and Dorniers in the Anglo-blue skies of 1940, the de Havilland Mosquitoes of 633 Squadron attacked a factory making fuel for V-2 rockets, Lancasters busted the Mona dam and destroyed industrial targets deep in the Ruhr valley, bomb-laden Mitsubishi Zeroes plunged into US aircraft carriers. Within the narrative of the Second World War—to liberate the world from the tyranny of Hitler and the Japanese—I also had a sense of the larger strategy in which these aircraft played a part. This expanded understanding pretty much ended with the coming of the jet fighter (Messerschmitt 262 and Gloster Meteor) and the end of the war. I kept making models of later jets—the Dassault Mirage, the Blackburn Buccaneer, the English Electric Lightning among others—but I didn’t know what they did or where or why they were deployed. They just flew incredibly fast and looked amazing on Perspex stands.

  My favourite model was the two-seater McDonnell F-4B Phantom, a jet that was both sleek and densely laden with armaments. And not just armaments: it was also dense with decals: navy on the side of the fuselage, red lightning bolt jagging along the top and up the tail fin, star-and-stripe roundel on the wings and near the jet intake. The box showed a Phantom about to take off from a carrier, after-burners ablaze, while steam rolled across the flight deck from a launch that had occurred a few seconds earlier—exactly the kind of scene that I would end up witnessing, daily, on the George Bush. As with other jets—the Blackburn Buccaneer or Dassault Mirage—I had no idea what real Phantoms were doing in the skies over Vietnam at the very moment that I was making 1:72 scale versions of them at home. Obviously some kind of understanding—destroying a country, winning battles in a losing war—came later but the aesthetic intoxication of military jets never went away. Even while my friends and I were busy opposing the Falklands War we also felt a flush of late-imperial, aeronautical pride that the Sea Harriers (‘I counted them all out and I counted them all back’) launched from HMS Invincible and HMS Hermes performed so effectively against the Argentinean defences. In the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union had rendered a lot of military planes operationally redundant, I jumped at the chance—a kind of inverse ejection—to fly in a MiG-29 over Moscow.2 That, as the kids say, was pretty cool, but since all of the devastating power and glamour of military aviation was concentrated on a carrier, I wanted to be there too, at the tip of the spear—or to have a ringside view of it anyway.

  And maybe something else was at work too. As a boy I had loved war and soldiering. I grew out of this entirely healthy infatuation and, when I was a student, my life began to assume the opposite of a military bent in that, through a combination of passive ambition and luck, I became, as adults say, my own boss. Freed from the chain-of-office-command, I acquired a weird kind of self-discipline—all but indistinguishable from self-indulgence—that became second nature. But during afternoons when I could not bring myself to write and in the evenings when I did not feel under any compulsion to try, I read more and more about the military, becoming increasingly fascinated by a world that was the polar opposite of my own. I got particularly obsessed with reading about the US Marine Corps to the extent that, in a softly lit, armchairish sort of way, I began to wonder if, in another life, I might have joined the Marines, might have been a jarhead and had ‘Semper Fi’ tattooed on a properly muscular forearm. In fact, when I said I didn’t hesitate about wanting to be on a carrier I was not being quite accurate; I hesi
tated between the possibility of being writer-in-residence on a carrier or in Camp Pendleton, the Marine base near San Diego, California. I hesitated and dithered. I didn’t know if they’d even let me into Pendleton (where the food, I’m guessing, is even worse than on the Bush) but in the end I opted for a carrier. It panned out, they allowed me aboard, and that’s where I ended up, in my bunk, in my own room, drafting this passage.

  2. In the unlikely event of anyone wanting to know more about this or my earlier love of model aircraft, see the essays ‘The Wrong Stuff’ and ‘The Airfix Generation’ in either Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (US) or Anglo-English Attitudes (UK).

  15

  What a difference a consonant and vowel can make. Having been up on the bridge the previous afternoon, the following morning I was taken down to the brig. I’d heard the word before, in films, never in real life, and now I was seeing one, seeing a brig (though the word seemed to demand that it was preceded by a solid and definite article, not an indefinite article, as if there were only one brig—the brig—that somehow manifested itself in different ways, in different settings). The brig: the word had its own glamour, was a high-security metaphor for the kind of charismatic rebellion embodied by Jack Nicholson in The Last Detail, or—extending the linguistic catchment area slightly—Paul Newman in the box in Cool Hand Luke or Steve McQueen languishing in the cooler in The Great Escape. Physical confinement, in such cases, exists in order to demonstrate a refusal to be psychologically confined, the uncrushable freedom of the unruly spirit that will not submit to authority.

  In charge of the brig was Petty Officer Young, a small no-nonsense woman with metal-framed glasses and hair pulled back in a tight carceral bun. She’d been a mom at twenty, did two years of college, married at twenty-eight, was a teacher’s assistant, had been in landscaping and retail and joined the Navy at thirty-two. It was like a life lived backwards, somehow, even if she was only now achieving her long-time ambition: ‘I always wanted to be in law enforcement.’ A strange ambition until you consider that quite a few people pursue the opposite goal—of law-breaking—from a young age with similar dedication.

  Before I looked at the cells Petty Officer Young explained to me what you needed to do to end up here. Minor offences meant you were put on restriction.

  ‘What sort of offences are those?’ I asked.

  ‘Falsifying your log books, persistent lateness, sleeping on watch, talking back to an officer, disrespecting an officer, calling him a bad word, telling him he’s acting like a bad word.’

  ‘And what about that word “restriction”? What does that mean?’

  ‘Restriction requires that you muster and roll call several times a day. You’ve probably seen them lined up in the hangar deck.’

  I had indeed, just a few hours earlier, while an exercise class was in progress and everyone else was going about their business of fixing up planes. They were standing at attention, clearly regretting the added increment of inconvenience to which they were being subjected. Everything about the Navy system of discipline advertised the advantages of not getting deeper into trouble. Better to suck up being on restriction and then get off restriction and enjoy that as a pleasure and a bonus rather than sucking up whatever comes your way at the tier below restriction. Better to improve than to get worse. But not everyone does.

  ‘Miss three musters and you’re here on bread and water for three days. More serious offences, you’d skip restriction and come straight here.’

  ‘Such as?’ I asked (picturing myself being frog-marched to the brig for throwing a chair through a computer screen).

  ‘Assaults. Homicidal tendencies. If somebody on the flight deck got really mad and tried to shank someone with a screwdriver they’d be here.’

  ‘Has that happened?’

  ‘It has not. But it could.’

  Hungry for gossip, for anecdotes, I asked Petty Officer Young if she could give me examples of serious stuff that had happened.

  ‘With all due respect I have no authority to describe or discuss particular cases.’

  I felt like I’d been told off, like I’d taken a tentative step towards trouble, towards the brig (in which I was already standing). I’ve always hated getting told off. If you’re not going to tell me then what the bad word am I doing here? I thought to myself. Petty Officer Young, meanwhile, was telling me about another category of inmate: enemy prisoners of war. I’d like to have seen some of them, maybe even poked at them with a stick from behind the safety of the cell bars, but the brig, today, was devoid of all prisoners, friendly or hostile (pronounced American-style, as in ‘youth hostel’).

  Within the brig there were two individual cells and a large dorm cell that could sleep fifteen. I studied both with the appraising eye of a real estate agent. While somewhat basic the accommodation benefitted from high levels of security. There were no windows, but since almost no one on board had an ocean view this did not represent a diminution of privileges enjoyed elsewhere on the boat. In a sense the brig represented not a removal from but an extreme concentration of the experience of being on the carrier. For everyone except the pilots and helicopter crews the carrier was a kind of prison ship. So I guess the real punishment of being in the brig would be the annihilating boredom. There was a TV in the dorm cell. I am not a lawyer, but it’s possible that access to TV is a constitutional right, even if having it on seems a human rights abuse, conceivably a form of torture.

  We were joined by Petty Officer Heath. He’d signed up for the Navy at twenty-three because ‘the environment I was in at home didn’t have much promise.’ Prior to the Navy he’d built trailers, driven semitrucks, just bouncing from one thing to another. He was twenty-eight now, with four kids back home.

  The ironic life of prison guards was plain to see. They had no guests but were obliged to spend their days in the joint. They were running a deeply unsuccessful establishment whose lack of business was the price paid for the great successes achieved elsewhere in town. From my point of view it would have been much better if the jail had been occupied, by sailors in the process of being punished or, ideally, an Al-Qaida suspect, one of those guys with a gleaming black beard and a gentle expression whose eyes burned darkly with some implacable faith and who—for all we knew—was just a devout Muslim and a caring father.

  ‘So what do you do when you’ve got no customers?’

  ‘Before you got here I was touching up the paint,’ said Petty Officer Young.

  ‘I clean,’ said Petty Officer Heath.

  The place was plenty clean, and resolutely empty, one of the few places on the ship whose intended purpose rendered it (compared to the kitchens working flat out, the flight deck taking its daily pounding) redundant. It was a small space, so small that it felt strangely full of itself, crowded with unutilized function. The brig even contained its own caption in the form of an unused sponge, on the spotless sink, with cell block printed in large letters. The last thing I did before getting out of the brig—thereby risking another telling off—was to ask if I could have that sponge, take it home as a souvenir.

  16

  After doing time in the brig—about forty minutes—I wanted to meet someone who’d been in trouble or, at the very least, had been on restriction. With his usual unfailing efficiency Ensign Newell promptly took me to meet YN2 Sonia Martin.3 When I came into her office Sonia wouldn’t shake my hand. Ah, attitude, right from the start! Because she had a heavy cold. The opposite of attitude, then, more like a highly developed sense of citizenship and disease-prevention of the kind that stopped the Bahrain bug taking over the whole ship, turning the p to t. In London I’ve often gone to literary parties and been greeted with a kiss only for the kisser to then declare, ‘I’ve got a terrible cold.’ I was therefore well disposed towards Sonia right from the start—though, naturally, I kept my chair as far away from her as possible. So, what had she done to get put on restriction?

  ‘I disobeyed a lawful order.’

  I extended my right arm,
hand outstretched as if to say, ‘We are all friends here, please speak freely, it’s all off the record’; with my other hand, I took notes.

  ‘I was found in a space with my then husband. We were sleeping but . . . He was getting out of the Navy, he was on restriction so he was stuck on the ship and I stayed with him.’

  There was quite a bit to unpack in this capsule summary. I asked Sonia to back up, to give more details. They had met on the ship, he was getting kicked out and they got married shortly before this was due to happen. The ship was in port at San Diego . . .