Another Great Day at Sea Page 7

  ‘Why was he getting kicked out?’

  ‘Doing drugs. He popped some meth together with . . . ’

  ‘Other drugs?’

  ‘Other friends. The policy was zero tolerance then, like now. But people did it before and they kept doing it and I fell in with that crowd. Afterwards he wanted to continue doing drugs and I wanted to continue doing the Navy so our two paths did not go together.’

  ‘What was his job in the Navy?’

  ‘He was a damage-control man.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem the most appropriate line of work for someone with his recreational interests.’

  ‘I know. Why he ever joined the Navy I’m not quite sure.’

  Everyone on the carrier smiled while they talked to me; some laughed, but Sonia’s answers were punctuated with giggles as though she was constantly reminded of the underlying absurdity of things. That might be one of the enduring pluses of dabbling in drugs. But how about being on restriction—what was that like?

  ‘It sucked and the stigma of everyone seeing that you were on restriction was embarrassing. The extra work wasn’t so bad. I wasn’t able to go home for Christmas. I didn’t get to go home for the holidays and that sucked.’

  Before now I had not made a connection between things sucking and sucking things up. Now it seemed obvious that something sucking was a precondition to its being sucked up. Though of course the number of things one had to suck up was not limited to things which sucked. And the things that sucked most—like getting sucked up into the air intake of a jet engine—were things that could not be sucked up. I had drifted off somewhat so I was glad that our conversation was interrupted by someone who came in with a couple of work questions for Sonia. I looked around the room but there was nothing to notice in these shipboard offices. But hang on . . . Wasn’t that a mirror and a rolled-up dollar bill on the far side of her desk . . . ? Ha ha, no, of course not, it was just a note I made to myself, for comic effect, while Sonia was talking to her colleague.

  When her shipmate’s queries had been dealt with Sonia resumed her story and I gave her my full attention again. It was only after being on restriction—near the end of her third year—that she’d decided to make a career of the Navy. Before that she’d intended getting out after the four years she’d signed up for—though she still credits that initial decision to join with turning her life around.

  ‘I would either have been dead or in jail if I hadn’t joined the Navy. I was living with a dealer at one point.’

  Again, clarification was needed. ‘Living with him romantically?’

  ‘He wasn’t a boyfriend. He was a friend’s roommate.’

  ‘And he was a meth dealer?’

  ‘No, a pot dealer. But it’s not a healthy lifestyle.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, making one of my doomed attempts to sound clever. ‘For one thing the phone is always ringing.’

  ‘Well, he had a cell phone.’ Of course he had a cell phone that could be turned to noninterruptive Silent mode. I was showing my age, thinking back to my twenties, to the 1980s, when drug dealers had a single land line that was engaged the whole time and rang again the moment a client hung up.

  ‘I was living in Kirkland, Washington, working for Domino’s. The people I was living with weren’t paying rent so we got kicked out of our place. We were buying drugs instead of paying rent. It was nice working at Domino’s because we could make our own dinner but it was not a good life.’

  I almost quipped, ‘Handy for when you get the munchies’ but thought better of it. Instead I asked her about how and when she’d gotten into drugs in the first place.

  ‘I graduated high school and got in with the wrong crowd. Lots of drinking and smoking. My friends and I like to drive. There was a lot of drunk driving. Smoking while driving.’

  Sonia had grown up in Seattle, Washington. In some ways it was perfectly normal—and not a great cause for alarm—that, as a teenager, she liked drinking and smoking pot. That, after all, is what teenagers do. It’s when you throw driving into the mix that things swerve off somewhere potentially and easily lethal.

  ‘Anyway, I had to get a waiver to come in because I had smoked pot and because it was on my record. The recruiter was like, “You only smoked pot three times . . .” And in my mind that meant “in one day” but I didn’t complete the sentence.’

  We all laughed. It was like a moment of shared and hilarious empathy in an NA session where you look back at the good times on drugs and they seem so good you wonder if they might even have been the best times, especially after the second time you had your stomach pumped and ended up in rehab, the time before last.

  ‘I got busted before I joined the Navy. That was the whole reason I joined. My parents paid it off on condition that I went into the Navy.’

  ‘Were they in the military?’

  ‘They were both in the military, yes.’ I liked this style of answering a question: not simply ‘yes’ or ‘no’, but repeating the question as a declarative affirmation.

  ‘So they were glad that you went into the Navy?’

  ‘They were happy that I joined. They weren’t happy that I got into trouble after I joined.’

  ‘That figures,’ I said, happy with the way that these little Americanisms came so naturally to me on the boat. ‘And when you joined, how did you find boot camp? A jolt to the system presumably.’

  ‘The yelling didn’t bother me. The yelling was just stupid. I didn’t like the PT and getting up early.’ Of course she didn’t like getting up early. Getting up early is not what stoners do. Sonia, it had become obvious in the course of our conversation, was extremely easygoing. And that, it turned out, was the problem.

  ‘I’m a follower. Peer pressure’s a bitch for me. It just happened the group that I got into did drugs. So I did too.’ And now she was in the Navy where being a follower was a good thing—if the things you followed were orders.

  Once Sonia had been on restriction and decided to get serious about the Navy she realized she didn’t like the way she felt smoking pot. This was part of the big turnaround in her life but take a few things out of the mix (driving, Navy, trouble) and the trajectory described was less dramatic and not at all unusual—almost universal in fact. Though regularly cited, the Manichean jail-or-dead alternatives are often accompanied by some variant of a third: just growing out of . . . Most everybody likes smoking pot for a while and then gradually most everybody doesn’t. Or at least they realize that they like not being stoned more than they like being stoned. Seen like that Sonia’s early life was not an aberration but exemplary: the perfect illustration of a phase.

  Sonia’s voice was giving out but it had been fun talking to her. She was committed to the Navy as a career even if the fit was not absolute. It had made her life better but it hadn’t reconfigured her personality and the potentialities she contained to the extent that it had with some people I spoke to. Often a life other than the Navy seemed inconceivable to people in it; or rather they seemed inconceivable outside of it. Only a small imaginative move sideways was necessary to sense that what seemed—what was—thoroughly impressive in uniform could be somewhat limiting and limited outside of it. Sonia retained, even if only through that giggle, the disruptive and unruly potential for a life that was not subject to routine, discipline and orders. Which made her willingness to abide by these standards and rules even more admirable. I asked how old she was, and what her plans were for the future.

  ‘I’m twenty-eight now,’ she said. ‘I’d like to stay in to do my full twenty. Retire here as chief.’

  She was sounding really throaty now, not surprisingly, after all this talking, so I asked just one more question. What about her ex-husband. Did she know what he was up to?

  ‘Last I heard he was working in a tattoo parlour.’

  This elicited another round of giggles—an acknowledgment that life’s absurdities do not prevent it sometimes acquiring the formal perfection of a sonata—that subsided into a major
coughing bout on Sonia’s part, the kind of coughing fit you get after you’ve just taken a hit on a gravity bong.

  A sense of purpose and order—even, I am tempted to say, of narrative—was emerging, unbidden, from my time in the carrier—courtesy of Paul, with whom I had established a relationship of easygoing camaraderie. Having seen a former drug user, he asked, was I interested in seeing a drug counsellor? It seemed an excellent idea so we stopped by her office and made an appointment for the next day.

  3. Not her real name

  17

  The ready rooms of all of the squadrons started out the same way: rows of wide seats lined up to face a whiteboard and TV, giving them the look of business-class cabins on airliners, before the advent of sleeper beds. Like all squadrons on the boat, the VFA-15 (Valions) had taken this template and customized it as extensively as possible. They’d re-tiled the floor in their colours and with their yellow lion insignia. They’d rigged up a hefty sound system so they could play Boston, Linkin Park and a band that sounded like a cheesy version of Slayer. They also had a bar football table, a couch and a popcorn machine.

  ‘You’ve got it nice in here,’ I said to the duty officer—who doubled as DJ and chose the evening’s movie on the TV—behind his bank of computer screens.

  ‘Yep, if we had a keg, it’d be perfect,’ he said. They didn’t have a keg, but they did have bottled beer. Nonalcoholic, of course, but just the action of opening the bottle, chucking the top into the trash and taking a few pulls of this cold, beer-coloured drink felt good. I found myself thinking of pilots in Kent during the Battle of Britain: pissing it up in evening-long sessions at the Dog and Duck and scrambling for their Spitfires the next morning, the remains of hangovers still parching up good parts of their brains. I’d have loved it there then and I was loving it here now, joshing around, playing bar football, eating popcorn and rocking out to Boston—embellished, from time to time, with a bit of low-intensity air guitar from one of the guys.

  When we’d finished playing bar football—jeez, I’d forgotten how tough that game was on the lower back—I wandered over to a section of the wall devoted to photos of the guys’ wives, girlfriends and kids, all sent recently with nice messages and annotations. There was a picture of all the wives and girlfriends together, back in Norfolk, Virginia, dressed up on a mid-deployment dinner, paid for by the men. It would be dishonest if I did not remark (in the privacy of these pages, I mean; at the time I kept the thought to myself) that some of the Wags were nice-looking, smoking hot, frankly, though that was not the point of the wall. It was a lovely and wholesome thing, the wall. Everything about it was great but I wondered if one of the guys in the squadron didn’t have a girlfriend, how the wall made him feel, if it left him feeling lonesome and marooned. Except, looking at the wall and doing a quick calculation it didn’t seem that there were any pilots left over (and therefore out). Not everyone had kids but everyone had a sweetheart—and all of these sweethearts were women. The same, statistically, could not have held good for the boat as a whole. Race did not seem an issue on the boat. Having women on board had turned out to be one of the big nonissues. And now legislation had been passed which meant you could be openly gay, getting rid of the earlier code of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”4

  There was no reluctance, however, to tell and talk about the difference between flying solo and flying two-seater planes.

  ‘Two-man planes are a pilot and a piece of self-loading baggage,’ said one of the pilots (call sign ‘Disney’) as I was hurrying out of the door. I wanted him to expand on this but another pilot (call sign ‘Lurch’) was taking me up to Vulture’s Row to watch the launch and recovery through his night-vision goggles.

  I’d been up there—a catwalk high up in the island—once before, in daylight, and it was like being a vulture perched on a telegraph wire, waiting to see what happened to the other birds. You didn’t have to wear a cranial, just earplugs. I could hear the voice of the Air Boss but, with my earplugs in, could not make out what he was saying. It gave his orders the disembodied quality of the muezzin in a minaret, calling the faithful to prayer.

  Even without NV it was a lovely night: moon tilted over on its back, streaks of cloud, sea glittering, oil wells burning orange in the distance, jets roaring off the deck. In the darkness the violence of flight ops was drastically intensified. The jet blast was a solid core of flame burning with such ferocity and force that it seemed the Jet Blast Deflector would melt like reinforced chocolate.

  Lurch handed me the goggles. I put them on and entered the NV trance. It took no getting used to. I could see everything on deck: the ground crew scurrying around and lounging, the machinery sharp-edged and unmistakable. All green, of course, green punctuated by lots of white, in just the way NV is presented in the movies but a lot clearer. (I wasn’t looking at the night-world through the kind of goggles you could pick up in an Army and Navy surplus store or from an ad in the back of Soldier of Fortune; this, I’m guessing, was the best NV money could buy, probably the kind of NV money couldn’t buy.)

  After a pilot had landed, he parked the plane and climbed down the step-ladder to greet the members of the flight-deck crew who’d been responsible for his plane. They all huddled round. He fist-bumped each of them. The last thing he did, before disappearing below deck, was to walk to the front of his plane and pat it on the nose, as if it were a horse.

  The sea was a prairie of glitter-green. Moon and oil well acquired circles of white light around them. Up overhead—where before there was almost nothing—was a multitude of stars, unimaginably dense, more light than sky, more star than not-star.

  4. For the record, I asked but no one told. No one responded to my request to speak to someone who was openly gay (and no one mentioned being homosexual in the course of conversations about other stuff). Newell’s explanation was that this too was a nonissue so that in relation to three of the big areas of potential intolerance and bigotry the Navy was just about as advanced as any other institution on earth. Except there was, surely, a degree of friction or incompatibility between the evangelical Christian right and the gospel of freedom of sexual expression. Also, in reference to race and gender you don’t have to come out as black or female; there is merely the unalterable fact (within reason) of your physical condition. Whereas declaring your sexual orientation was a disclosure of your inner being, of your psychological life. So people might have decided that it was better to just keep quiet about something in a world where plenty of other stuff was kept quiet in the interest of the smooth running of the ship and keeping human relations as uncomplicating as possible. Especially since everything about sex — which meant, principally, going without it — was left unsaid. (There was, of course, another possibility: the fact that no one wanted to speak to me — or, more accurately, that no one wanted to take the time out of their already busy days to talk to me about being gay — did not mean they weren’t willing to tell friends or people in their dorms.)

  18

  The following morning signalled the start of a gradual improvement in where and what I ate. Instead of eating breakfast in the Ward Room we upgraded to the Flag Mess. Now this was more like it. The table was covered in a crisp white cloth, places had been set and waiters took your orders—or at least you ringed the things you wanted on a slip of paper and they took away the paper and returned with your food. Decent coffee and tea too. The downside was that I had never been more nervous about etiquette in my adult life.

  There were sixteen people round the table, in flying suits and a variety of uniforms, all of them buttering toast and tucking in to eggs. It was a highly persuasive answer to the Taliban, this breakfast: fourteen men and two women, one of whom, seated at the head of the table, was Rear Admiral Nora Tyson. Five thousand people on the boat and she outranked them all. I say that but perhaps the hierarchy was complicated by the Captain’s proprietorial command of the ship itself. Although she outranked him in the Navy it was still his boat; did tradition decree that while she was here
she was sort of his guest and deferred to him, could not just come on board and say, ‘Set a course for Abadan, we’re gonna kick some Iranian butt’?

  My omelette arrived and I started to relax, partly because it was a rather nice omelette (with peppers, onions and tomatoes). Newell and I were way down the table; the place to my right had been vacant when we arrived but was now taken by someone whose name and rank I failed (as usual) to register. He seemed to tick off every possible option on the menu (those are the things I do register) before offering the most succinct argument for the effectiveness of carriers that I had yet heard.

  ‘We can turn up anywhere and wreak destruction twenty-four hours a day,’ he said. But this, it turned out, was not the start of a chest-thumping advert for American sea power. ‘People know all about our ability to rain steel on their heads,’ he went on. ‘They’ve had that on TV for twenty years straight. But in the event of natural disasters, when the ability of a state or city to function has been destroyed we can provide continuity of operations. That’s what the USS Reagan did, diverting to Japan after the tsunami hit.’

  There was, of course, an acronym for this: MOOTW (Military Operations Other Than War). I was about to reprise my AIE joke but the admiral was taking her leave of the table and we all stood up. She was in her late forties, I guessed (everyone in a senior position looked like they were in their late forties), and was wearing a flying suit. Paul introduced me as she walked past. She was an admiral in the US Navy, from Memphis, Tennessee, and she made me feel as though we’d just bumped into each other on Main Street, that she had nothing particularly pressing to do, would actually have chatted quite happily but didn’t want to take up my time. She asked if everyone was looking after me OK, asked about my books—she was an English major!—and then left the room to go about the not undemanding business of running the Carrier Strike Group. I had addressed her as ‘Admiral’ throughout our conversation but was not sure if this was correct.