Another Great Day at Sea Page 8

  ‘Either that or “ma’am” is alright,’ said Paul. We had sat down, were working on our omelettes again.

  ‘She was so not intimidating it would be easy just to slip into calling her Nora,’ I said. ‘What would happen if I’d done that?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘What would happen if you did that?’

  ‘If I called her Nora? Everything would come to a halt,’ he said. ‘Including my career.’

  19

  I wanted to speak again with Disney. I’d taken him as the embodiment of a type sketched by Diane Ackerman in her book about flying, On Extended Wings: ‘Then aviation went through a military phase, out of which we still haven’t evolved. The sky was no longer a mystery, but an invisible nation, territory to be tamed; and planes were just machines, as the people who flew them should be: efficient, cool, stoic, strategic, regular guys, no namby-pambies, who imposed their will on lesser mortals, and knew that, even though the meek might inherit the earth, the strong would inherit the meek.’ When we met up again, however, Disney’s shaven-headed confidence had turned to tact and diplomacy —to the extent that he asked me not to print the explanation for his call sign. And the earlier crack about two-seater planes was just good-natured ribbing, he said.

  ‘But the thing about solo flying is that your mistakes are your own,’ he explained. ‘You’re as good as you’re gonna be on that day. It’s just you, on your own in the office, with the best view on the planet.’

  ‘D’you actually get time to look around?’

  ‘When we were taking off from the Indian Ocean into Afghanistan, it was an hour and ten minutes driving up the boulevard as we called it. There was plenty of time to look around then.’

  I’d heard that during eventless flying time like that pilots sometimes plugged in their iPods and rocked out in the stratosphere. Disney was unable to confirm or deny such stories, but he did speak of the routine of flying in terms that I would hear several times more in the course of my stay.

  ‘You’re flying a video game. You’re a weapons and sensors operator more than you’re a pilot. The plane is easy to fly. Flies itself almost.’ And then, with no change at all in his low slow drawl, he began to talk about a different order of experience. ‘You’re flying at night, on a gorgeous, clear night. At thirty thousand feet, with the night-vision goggles on, it’s like flying through space. You see stars that you never thought you’d see before. Especially if you’re over water —that’s like flying in deep space.’

  So there it was, still intact despite the technological advances and laconic delivery: the lyricism of night flight as first and famously evoked by Saint-Exupéry. It was as if he had revealed something intimate to me, the experience that was at the core of his being: a realm of poetry accessible only to those whose world-view is based on technology, knowledge and calculation rather than wide-eyed wonder. Something similar had happened a couple of nights earlier when I’d been sitting with the Captain and his friends as they smoked their cigars. Amid the talk of service and the fun of flying the Captain had suddenly spoken of how ‘with no light pollution, on a night when there’s no haze, you can see the majesty of the Milky Way.’ And Disney, the kid who’d excelled at video games, for whom it all came down to hand-eye coordination, on keeping an eye on the dials and switches and the data, was having the transcendent experience craved by mystics, shamans, seekers and acidheads.

  His evocation of the stars reminded me of a moment in Maurice Herzog’s mountaineering classic Annapurna. Herzog and his companion Louis Lachenal have conquered the summit but the triumph brings them —and two other members of the expedition who had come to their rescue —to the edge of death as they struggle, snow-blind, shattered, frost-bitten, down the mountain. ‘The sky was blue —the deep blue of extreme altitude, so dark that one can almost see the stars.’ A few moments later they are engulfed in an avalanche. The privileged glimpse of stars is —as Saint-Exupéry repeatedly and rather grandiloquently insists —underwritten by the inherent danger of the enterprise, the daily possibility of dying: ‘the final smash-up,’ as he called it in Wind, Sand and Stars.

  ‘Have you ever had to eject?’ I asked Disney, wondering, too late, if such a question broke a taboo, tempted fate.

  ‘I have not.’

  ‘Ever got close?’

  ‘I guess it depends on your definition of close. But I, uh, managed to salvage the situation well before I reached an envelope where I had to think about getting out.’

  Envelope! Love it! We’d been talking a few minutes earlier about the beauty of flying at night, as though through deep space, and now we were back within the linguistic envelope of the pilot’s routinely laconic argot. And the downside of flying at night, Disney reminded me, was that you often had to land at night too.

  ‘Nights like these where there’s a moon out so you can see what’s going on —that’s less stressful. But a dark night with terrible weather, low cloud, the boat pitching and you can’t see it till the last seconds —that is a terrifying experience. You have instruments telling you what’s going on but it’s just a postage stamp of a boat down there. Even with all the technology we’re still very visual and what you can’t see terrifies you. You’ll land and have trouble getting out of the aircraft because your legs are shaking so much and you’re like, What in the hell am I doing this for? That was just stupid.’

  ‘How about taking off at night? Is that more straightforward?’

  ‘In some ways I hate a night catapult shot more than I hate a night landing. You sit there, they dim the lights down but your eyes take time to adjust. They shoot you off the front end and on a dark night you’ve got no visual reference, no idea where the horizon is. It’s like getting shot into a black hole. You only have your instruments to trust. On the way down, even on a dark night, you can often see the lights of the ship out in front of you. But when you get shot off Catapult One, the edge lights go and you’re in the dark. So you climb, get your night vision on, try to figure out what’s going on.’

  The odd thing about this was that Disney seemed completely unfazed by what he was saying. Routine, lyricism, terror —all of it was recounted in the same slow, unexcited drawl.

  Everything about taking off and landing from a carrier had gotten safer but Disney said something I would hear elsewhere on the carrier. ‘A lot of our lessons are written in blood. It’s not necessarily a dangerous business, just terribly unforgiving of mistakes.’

  20

  When we had stopped by to arrange a time for a meeting with the drug counsellor she was wearing a blue T-shirt, and I had glimpsed part of what was evidently a large tattoo on her upper arm. She was in uniform now and the tatt was concealed. To make room for Newell and me, she had to retreat to the far side of her office and sit right under a gun-metal shelf. I worried that she might bang her head when she stood up—it is not only the tall who are at risk.

  ‘A little while back, I gather, drugs were a big problem in the Navy,’ I said in a warm-up sort of way.

  ‘Still is,’ she said, needing no warm-up at all.

  ‘Oh really? Tell me about that.’

  ‘For some reason now people like to create or just make stuff up for addiction. The new thing is a bath salt—’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Bath salt. They inhale it. And then of course you’ve got the whole inhaling sewage to git the high.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes. Why? I don’t know why. But they do. And then you’ve got the classic computer cleaners: inhale it. Pen markers. Git the high. But the biggest thing now is the spice. The spice is a fake marijuana really. I heard about the spice back when I was a counsellor in Japan. It was legal. They were selling it like if you go to a clothing store. Now, with the spice it’s rampant because they can’t really test for it.’

  I was learning a great deal in a very short space of time, all of it entirely new to me, much of it confusing. It was the conversational equivalent of a catapult launch from the flight dec
k at night: instead of taxiing along the runway, you are just shot off into the darkness, trying to get your bearings.

  ‘Can we go back a paragraph or two?’ I said. ‘I’ve not heard of bath salts.5 And I’ve certainly never heard of people getting high on sewage. I mean what part of the sewage process—’

  ‘I couldn’t even tell you. I don’t have that research. Bath salts though, I do have a paper about that. They contain it in a bag and they just kind of inhale it. I don’t know what the process is.’

  ‘What’s the high like?’

  ‘I have no idea, sir.’

  ‘You mention sewage, but you don’t know anything about it?’

  ‘It’s more high schoolers and teenagers that are experimenting on sewage.’

  ‘Just so I’m clear, sewage addiction or sewage abuse—whatever you want to call it—is or is not a problem in the Navy?’

  ‘Definitely not.’

  ‘Ah.’ I’d been worried that she might bash her head at the end of our conversation. I wondered now if she had banged it before I came in. Or, looked at another way, she had a highly developed kind of negative capability, was able to bear two completely contradictory ideas in that head of hers without any sense of their cancelling each other out.

  ‘More of our problem in the Navy is probably the spice, because it’s not detected,’ she continued. ‘But it gives you the equal amount of high that marijuana would give.’

  ‘Let’s go back to the period when drugs were much more prevalent in the Navy,’ I said, re-crossing my legs like a chat-show host about to get to the dank heart of the matter. ‘When was the peak time of drug use in the Navy?’

  ‘I don’t think there was a peak time. I think it was pretty constant. I mean probably two years ago when they found out about spice, that was the biggest news we ever got, when the spice came out.’

  ‘How about back in the sixties and seventies in Vietnam? Soldiers came back from Vietnam with heroin problems. And there was a lot of grass too. Would there have been a similar thing going on in the Navy at that time?’

  ‘Hmm. I wouldn’t compare it to, like, past wars. Current use for drugs is a man will go to Iraq and Afghanistan and come back with post-traumatic stress disorder and the only way they can cope is drugs.’

  ‘Which drugs would they use for that?’

  ‘A lot of cocaine and a lot of marijuana.’

  This came as a surprise. I’d heard that there had been some success using Ecstasy to treat PTSD. That made total sense: before it became a rave drug Ecstasy was used in marriage counselling. But coke? Surely, that was not going to help you out if you had PTSD.

  ‘It’s not,’ she said. ‘But for some reason it’s very accessible.’

  ‘Do people have addiction problems with other illegal drugs like that—like coke and marijuana?’

  ‘Not illegal drugs necessarily because by the time they get in trouble I don’t see them. They’re separated from the Navy.’

  ‘Then I’m slightly confused,’ I said. ‘What exactly are you treating people for?’

  ‘Alcohol.’

  Ah, good old alcohol. Always the eventual winner. We went on to discuss the problems of drinking, of young people getting drunk when the ship was at port. In a way I couldn’t see what the problem was: young people want to go out and drink a gallon of beer. Especially if they’ve been on a dry ship for seven months. What could be more normal than that?

  ‘As for drugs,’ I said. ‘You started by saying it was a huge problem in the Navy. But everything you’ve said makes me think it’s not. Especially compared to kids of the same age in college.’

  ‘As a Navy society, drugs have been more rampant because of the spice. Versus the civilian world of course they’ve always had that problem but in Navy life it’s been huge now because of PTSD, spice, bath salts addiction. But yes, comparing it with civilian life it’s not comparable.’

  ‘Sure you’re not going to give me the dope on the sewage scene on ship?’

  ‘I don’t really know about that. Seems teenage kids have a bag of shit and inhale it. Why? Guess there’s the methane.’

  ‘Must be the ultimate cheap high. Though the high sounds incredibly like a low.’

  ‘They call it the bowel bong,’ quipped Newell, joining in.

  ‘Imagine the hangover,’ I said. ‘I mean, most drugs make you feel like shit the next day.’

  I thanked her for her time, cautioned her again about banging her head as she stood up, and we said our goodbyes. It had been a strange conversation, reminiscent, in some ways, of the ones you have when you’re young and getting stoned with friends, the whole thing flowing along with barely a pause, frequently hilarious but often, for quite long stretches, making no sense at all. Drugwise, there was a huge problem—and there was no problem. Lots of people wanted to git the high—were willing to do anything to git the high—but it seemed like hardly anyone was actually gittin’ the high.

  Listening to the tape in my rack that night, after Lights Out, I thought the conversation seemed, if anything, even more bizarre once it had been freed from the tacit laws and patterns that shape face-to-face conversation. I started saying the phrase ‘git the high’ and its variant, ‘gittin’ the high’, over and over, at first chuckling happily to myself and then laughing out loud, gittin’ the high just from saying ‘gittin’ the high’. If I’d had the equipment and ability I’d have gone back in time and used my computer to build a big dance track—a choon, as they probably don’t say anymore—around those samples, ‘git the high’ and ‘gittin’ the high’. From Ibiza to Detroit and London it would have eschewed the elevating pseudo-spiritual bollocks of Josh Wink’s ‘Higher State of Consciousness’ in favour of straight-ahead hedonism; it would have become a house classic, available in multiple remixes, all climaxing repeatedly with the diag- nosis and warning turned on its head, building to that anthe- mic, gospel-tinged admonition: ‘G . . . G . . . G . . . Git-the . . . . Git-the . . . Git-the . . . ’ until, finally, inevitably, it arrives, the raise-your-hand-in-the-air, eyes-the-size-of-night-vision-planets release: ‘GIT THE HIGH!’

  5 This was in October 2011. By June the following year everyone had heard of the effects of bath salts, courtesy of Rudy Eugene, who, while under the influence of the substance, chewed off the face of a homeless man, Ronald Poppo, before being shot dead by police in Florida. Or so it was widely reported at the time. The autopsy revealed no trace of bath salts in Eugene’s body, but it is hard to see how the drug will ever recover from this catastrophic piece of adverse publicity.

  21

  Imagine this: you’re sitting in that boring old thing a commercial airliner. You say ‘hi’ to the attractive woman—early thirties, blonde—next to you. When dinner arrives you get talking, ask what she does. She might say she’s in the Navy. Expecting the next answer to be ‘I’m in avionics’ or ‘radar’—or, if you are thoroughly unreconstructed, ‘I work in the hair salon’—you ask what exactly she does. Or, in response to that opening question, she might reply, ‘I’m a pilot,’ in which case you follow up with ‘What kind of pilot?’ Either way, assuming she’s in the mood to chat, she will at some point concede the truth: I’m a fighter pilot, flying F-18s, off a carrier.

  I was not in the position of that excited passenger: I was in the still more fortunate position of talking to Jax (her call sign) in the ready room of her squadron. In the imagined civilian context of the preceding paragraph her hair was blonde; here, it seemed the same colour as her flying suit. The first thing to ask was how she came by her call sign.

  ‘When you land the jet too hard you get a maintenance code of 904. And you have to put the jet up on jacks every time you land too hard. The area code for Jacksonville is 904. In my first squadron I didn’t like to go around so I made sure to land even if it broke the jet. It did not win me many friends on the maintenance crew but it got me a call sign.’

  ‘You didn’t take your bolter like a man?’ said Newell.

&nbs
p; ‘I did not. I took my landing like a woman.’

  Aside from the fact that she was a woman flying jets—one of a handful of women on the carrier to be flying and the only one flying solo—her story conformed closely to that of others except in one important particular: Top Gun played no part in making her want to become a pilot. She grew up in Colorado. Her father was an intelligence officer in the Air Force. The Navy paid her college fees—at Northwestern University in Chicago. After a year she chose aviation, became a pilot and ended up here, in the ready room, talking to me.

  I’d asked her to tell me her story briefly; I wasn’t expecting it to be that brief. During all her training, for instance, did she encounter any kind of resistance to the idea of a woman entering this high citadel of manliness?

  ‘All of us have had an experience of old-style chauvinism. But throughout flight school it was always very fair. And still is. If I’m not flying the ball well everyone knows.’

  ‘Flying the ball?’

  ‘The landing lens. There’s a single light source in the middle that we call the ball and you reference it to a line of green lights. When you’re high, the ball is above the datums; if you’re low it’s below the datums. You try to centre the ball. Based on what your power is the ball will actually move.’

  ‘So there’s nothing to it really?’

  ‘Not really.’

  We have an idea of the fighter pilot as swaggering, macho, thrust forward into the world by the G-force—strictly speaking that should be negative G—of implacable self-belief. Jax was as nice as pie. Couldn’t have been nicer or less swaggering but, by commenting on the ‘level of arrogance that is needed and then bred into you’ by training and profession, she tacitly admitted to a determination and fixity of purpose below that nice-as-possible manner. (Would it make sense to say that she had an inner swagger? Is such a thing even conceivable?) Any residue of that old chauvinism must have put more challenges in her way than confronted a male of similar age and equivalent abilities. It wasn’t possible, surely, that she’d ended up in a position that so many others aspired to—at the very tip of the frequently cited spear—without having wanted to get there more than anyone else? Or were the Navy’s meritocratic procedures of selection and advancement so refined that someone of outstanding natural talent could end up flying jets without the aid of rocket-booster ambition?