Another Great Day at Sea. Geoff Dyer

by the simplest of solutions: having women around. Just over a fifth of the ship’s company were women. Only men in senior positions were old enough to remember what it was like to have men-only boats. One of these explained to me that the main difference, after women came aboard, was ‘that the boat smelled a bit nicer because the guys showered more.’ Other than that, what surprised him was the speed with which resistance to the idea of gender integration was followed by two related and equally baffling questions: what had all the fuss been about—and why didn’t we do this earlier?¹

      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