Another Great Day at Sea Page 9

  Either way, it seemed, the Navy was not capable of hanging on to Jax. She’d been in for twelve years but was getting out. The Navy was keen to keep her—understandably, since it had invested a phenomenal amount of money in developing her skills, experience and expertise—but her mind was made up. (I didn’t ask if she was in a relationship, but at her age the question of children was on the horizon. It’s one thing to be a mother with a three-year-old kid at home, on deployment as a mechanic; quite another to be away for seven months flying combat ops.) So, what was she going to do when she got out?

  ‘Environmental research.’

  ‘On the damage done by tearing through the atmosphere supersonically?’

  ‘My degree was in environmental science,’ she added, but you did not need a degree to see that she had wreaked a disproportionate amount of ecological havoc for one so young. ‘I have a lot of bad karma that I need to work out,’ she said, joking and not joking.

  As we were walking back to our rooms Paul bumped into someone he knew—he was always bumping into people he knew—who said that, if we were interested, this would be a good time to take a look at one of the male berthing areas. (We’d been meaning to do this for several days but it had never quite worked out.)

  The dorm was illuminated by soft red light that was quite cosy: homely even, in a massive sort of way. We walked down the corridors between six-packs (three-tier bunks stacked either side of a partition). We’d had our royal-visitors interlude back in the bakery; now we were having a Whitman walk-through. Each rack had a curtain to pull along its length for privacy. Most people were racked out already, it seemed, either sleeping or listening to music on their iPods; a few were getting ready to turn in; a handful were still at computer terminals or chatting quietly.

  ‘How many people here?’ I whispered as we were leaving.

  ‘Two hundred and eighteen men, rank of E-6 and below.’

  ‘Jeez, that’s a lot of guys.’

  ‘Yep, that’s a lotta attitudes back there,’ said our guide as we exited the berth. Not surprisingly, these attitudes manifested themselves mainly as fart, deodorant and aftershave: smell and anti-smell—thesis and antithesis—creating a synthesis of both.

  22

  One of the perks of having my own room was the freedom to fart whenever I felt the urge. The disadvantage was that Newell invariably knocked on my door seconds after I’d done so. It was almost as if, by breaking wind, I had summoned him—a faster and more efficient method than calling him on the phone. On this occasion he and the snapper had come to tell me that our visit to Flight Deck Control had been moved forward so we had to get up there right away.

  Flight Deck Control was the fiefdom of Lieutenant Commander Ron Rancourt, a man seriously in love with what he did. More in love—if such a thing was possible—than the other people I’d met who were seriously in love with what they did. He had a commanding view of the flight deck from his chair in what he called ‘the nerve centre of flight operations’. In front of him was a glass-covered table with a plan of the flight deck, on top of which were little model planes and helicopters, variously adorned with different coloured nuts. It was like a large-scale board game called Carrier Strength or Flight Deck—though Ron referred to it simply as the Ouija board. After all the blinking lights, data streams and illuminated coordinates on plasma screens it was nice seeing this hands-on throwback to the days of the Battle of Britain when WAAFs would broom little cardboard planes around a giant map of our island fortress. Nostalgic feelings were entirely appropriate as it turned out; after this deployment Ron’s quaintly efficient board would be replaced by a new electronic system in keeping with the super-tech style of operations elsewhere on the ship. Around the edge of the board, under the glass, were banknotes of various denominations in many different currencies.

  Ron’s hair was clipped short. He smiled all the time that he was talking. He was engaged totally by our conversation but—such is the absolute concentration demanded by his job—a simple task like talking to me meant he had a good 20 or 30 per cent concentration left over for whatever else was going on. And there was quite a lot else going on. Even by the crowded and busy standards of the boat this was a crowded and busy spot with people coming and going the whole time. One of these was a guy in a red cape and a kind of Star Wars outfit, complete with helmet and vizor: part of the Halloween festivities that had earlier included an entirely serious-sounding announcement, over the Main Circuit, that a ‘zombie attack’ was in progress. Amid the background clatter and distraction of equipment, phones ringing and voices calling out coordinates, Ron enunciated his role with an unerring clarity of purpose. He was responsible for the safety and movement of all the embarked aircraft on board: sixty-six in total.

  ‘When we’re launching and recovering aircraft we have to be going into the wind and heading straight. But that’s when the ship is most vulnerable. So the shorter we make that launch and recovery window the better. We’re always shooting for effectiveness, always shooting for a thirty-minute window from launching the first bird to recovering the last.’ (How long would I need to be on the carrier before hearing the planes referred to as birds lost its thrill? How long before I was able to spontaneously use the term myself, for it to come tripping off my tongue as naturally as birds to the trees?) We were, it goes without saying, in one of the lulls outside that window now. Another advantage of this tight window, from the point of view of the rest of the crew, was that the crash and thump of jets landing and taking off was concentrated into bunched periods of hellish noise, rather than a continuous nerve-jarring din. But that din, for Ron, was as soothing as a lullaby—or anti-lullaby, one designed to keep his team awake and in a state of constantly high alert for hours on end. I asked him what kind of shifts he put in.

  ‘Fourteen to sixteen hours every day.’

  ‘Is anyone else able to do your job?’

  ‘I’m the only aircraft handling officer on the ship.’

  ‘What happens when you get sick?’ asked the snapper.

  ‘I don’t get sick.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, taking over, tag-style. ‘What happens when you want to watch TV?’

  ‘TV is poison.’

  ‘Ah, OK. But I’m struggling a bit with the maths of your day,’ I say. ‘Let’s say you put in a fifteen-hour day . . . ’

  ‘I go to my room, read a bit to unwind and then I have my alarm set at four to go to the gym. At a minimum I try to get five or six hours sleep a night.’

  I mentioned that studies had shown—studies, needless to say, which I’d not even seen, let alone read—that after a certain number of hours of work people get less efficient, make more mistakes.

  ‘I get to a point when my train of thought is not as sharp, probably round the fourteen-hour mark.’

  I had lost my train of thought somewhere around the fourteen-word mark. So I looked at the miniature planes on the board in front of Ron’s chair, decorated with little pins, nuts and other bits and pieces—green, blue, yellow and purple—all symbolizing something about the status of the aircraft, its readiness and its requirements. A purple nut meant the jet needed fuel. A yellow block meant TOD (tail over deck) or TOW (tail over water).

  ‘You see some planes have washers on them,’ said Ron. ‘Which means . . . ?’

  My hand shot up—Me sir! Me sir!—and I called out the answer before the snapper had a chance even to open his mouth. ‘It means the plane needs a wash!’

  ‘That’s right.’ Oh, the bliss of getting answers right, of doing so publicly and being seen to be the cleverest boy in class.

  ‘Do I get one of those bills as a prize?’ I said, pointing at the money beneath the glass.

  ‘That comes later,’ said Ron. ‘Now, what about these planes with a wing nut on them?’

  ‘Something to do with the wing?’ snapped the snapper. ‘Fold up the wings maybe?’

  ‘You got it,’ said Ron. The snapper had equalized, but here’s the thing that marks me out as a
leader, as SEAL material. I didn’t sit there glowering, sulking or licking my wounds. Before Ron asked his next question, before I even knew there was going to be another question, I was looking round the board to see what other symbolic cargo the planes were carrying. So by the time Ron asked the question, about the planes with a little jack on them, I had already—repeat: Alpha, Lima, Romeo, Echo, Alpha, Delta, Yankee, already—worked out the answer by reference to intel gained just hours before from Jax, and was able to sing it out before he’d even finished his sentence.

  ‘The aircraft’s been jarred on landing and needs to be put on jacks, sir!’ I didn’t wait for Ron to say, ‘Affirmative’ or ‘Cor- rect’, I just held my arms aloft, fists clenched, basking in it. In what? In that raising-the-flag-on-Iwo-Jima, watching-the-Zulus-slink-away-from-Rorke’s-Drift glow otherwise known as V for victory in a Q for quiz.

  There was no time to gloat. Ron was continuing his explanation of what went on here. Like Charles in the kitchens he used the first-person possessive when talking about the flight deck, as in ‘getting a damaged aircraft off of my flight deck.’ This intense personal investment in the site of his expertise was justified on the grounds that he’d been doing it—or working his way towards it from his early days as an enlisted man—for twenty-eight years. For a long time working on a flight deck was regarded as the most dangerous job in the world; now, Ron explained, it was ‘the safest most dangerous job in the world.’6 At least on his watch it was. In twenty-eight years there’d been no deaths or serious injuries on any of the decks he’d worked.

  The birds would soon be launching and recovering. With the tempo and intensity of concentration and activity increasing, the snapper and I would need to leave—but not before another triumph on my part. The money under the glass, round the edges of the table; what was the story behind that?

  ‘A fine paid by any visitor who touches it or puts stuff there.’ This had proved a profitable form of taxation. When they were stateside and receiving visitors every day they collected four thousand dollars in a nine-month period—all of it donated to a scholarship programme. I had put my coffee on Ron’s Ouija board—but only after checking that it was OK to do so!

  ‘That’s correct,’ he said. ‘You had my permission.’

  6. Annie Dillard arrived at a similar conclusion when she became fascinated by a stunt pilot in her book The Writing Life: ‘I had thought that danger was the safest thing in the world, if you went about it right.’

  23

  Ron had been so passionate about his job that it was impossible to imagine him not doing it. Or, to put it the other way around, it was impossible to imagine the job being done by anyone other than him. So it came as a surprise when Paul revealed, over dinner, that Ron was ‘getting out’. He’d mentioned that he had three daughters who were all being home-schooled by his wife—a task he would now share with her. I wanted to ask him more about his planned voluntary renunciation of high-level, high-stress responsibility in favour of this deep entrenchment in domestic life and education, so we arranged to go back there the following day, right after we got off the bird. That’s right, we were going for a spin in a helo (pronounced heel-oh): an MH-60R Seahawk.

  The helos are first up and last back in any launch and recovery cycle. During flight ops there are always a couple of helos in the air. They patrol the area around the ship in case of attack or, more plausibly, a plane going into what Spitfire pilots used to call the drink. (Possible elision of two distinct idioms, one from Black Hawk Down, the other from the Battle of Britain: ‘We have a bird in the drink! Repeat: the bird is having a drink!’)

  We got suited up in float coats and helmets—not cranials, actual solid helmety thingies—and prepared to board. The bird came in to land and chain gangs rushed forward to anchor it. As always happened at moments like these—the interface of man and machine—there was a sudden coming together of the technologically advanced and the extremely basic. Among those rushing forward was a squeegee guy who started wiping down the windshield. It was as though the bird had stopped at a red light and he needed to work his squeegee hustle before the pilot had a chance to decline this unrequested clean. The old crew stepped off and we—a crew of four plus me and the snapper—took their places. We strapped ourselves in—or rather, since my straps were in such a tangle, I had to be strapped in, like a lanky toddler being settled for the night. Our feet rested, toughly, on ammo cases. Everywhere were more straps, clips, fixings. Everything could be clipped to, fixed to and detached from everything else. As we were about to take off the ground crew crouched like runners in a middle-distance race about to dash forward again—but they were just bracing themselves against the downdraft.

  It didn’t feel like take-off. More like a slight wobble caused by the Gulf conveniently lowering itself fifteen feet.7 And then we were off and the carrier was beneath us. How big was the carrier? Again, it was impossible to say. From the air it was the only thing around—the only game in town—and therefore of no particular size, relatively speaking.

  Condensation dripped from pipes over our heads. There was a constant mist of cold steam blowing from somewhere. We began making the rounds, round and round. It was a bit confusing: why was it only the port side of the carrier that swung reliably into view every ten minutes? Because, it turned out, although we were going round and round we were not going round and round the carrier, just round and round one side of it. The starboard side was patrolled by another helo.

  The helos’ mission was search and rescue, their motto ‘So that others may live’. As co-pilot Theresa Parisi put it, ‘In order for us to make a difference somebody else has to have a very bad day.’ She was the only female in search and rescue, and she’d got into this line of work because she was told she couldn’t.

  Through our headsets she and the pilot started to explain what the bird could do but I interrupted with a question that had been troubling me since we boarded. When talking about the—or a—‘bird’, was one referring to a helo or a plane or both?

  ‘If you’re on the ground,’ Theresa explained, ‘it can mean both, as in “Which bird am I flying in?” But once you’re in the air “bird” refers just to rotary aircraft, to helos.’

  With that uncertainty cleared up she and the pilot resumed their summary of how the bird could hover at ten feet at ten knots, or fifteen feet while completely stationary. From either of these heights the swimmer can jump into the water. From seventy feet the swimmer can descend on a rope. This is what the crew members want to do: they want to jump the swimmer. I was familiar with the phrase ‘jump the shark’ but not ‘jump the swimmer’. Great expression! After I got back to London I would be walking down the street and suddenly call out, ‘Jump the swimmer!’ If my wife was with me she would call back, ‘Swim the jumper!’ and we’d go down the street together shouting out, ‘Jump the swimmer!’ and ‘Swim the jumper!’ like a couple of crazy people.

  To give us a sense of what jumping the swimmer involved the winch was lowered, with a survival basket attached. If you were lost at sea with sharks taking bites out of your feet it would be lovely to see the bird coming to rescue you like this but, in doing so, the helo turns the sea into a terrifying aquatic inferno as if livid at having to give up one that it had claimed as its own. Your bad day gets abruptly worse right before it gets better. We hung there for a while, gazing down at the rotor-tormented sea, then climbed away.

  I had only ever been in a helicopter once before, over a glacier in New Zealand, so it was a real thrill being up in the bird like this—for about twenty minutes. Then we settled into the remainder of a three-hour shift that, for the crew, had become as routine as driving a flying bus in perfect weather with a couple of .50 cals (at least I’m guessing that’s what they were) poking out of either side in anticipation of trouble that never looked like coming. Nobody was having a bad day. The swimmer was not going to be jumped—the jump would not be swum—so the crew passed the time just shooting the breeze. I got the impression this is w
hat they did every day, in different permutations, according to who was flying with whom: they flew round and round and chatted. Today they were talking about the Steelers (whose name, I had learned since hearing it on the bridge a few days previously, was spelled like that).

  ‘Yeah, I got a buddy who’s a Steelers fan and he’s got a Steelers room in his house. You’re not allowed to enter the Steelers room if there’s not a Steelers game on TV. And you can’t go watch a Steelers game unless you have a Steelers jersey on. So he’s kind of brainwashed his kids from an early age. It’s quite impressive.’

  While this monologue was in progress the crew chief on the right side was eating an orange and so, coincidentally, was the rescue swimmer on the left. Both chipped in from time to time with their own thoughts about the Steelers. I enjoyed hearing the relaxed back and forth of chat on my headset though I was often unable to tell who was talking—unless it was Theresa. It was like having voices in your head, thoughts that were not your own. The carrier kept going by. The steady thump of the rotors made it impossible to stay awake. I slumped forward in my harness, voices fading into the clatter of dream. When I lurched awake the voices had moved on to ice hockey and someone was telling the others about a game he’d gone to.