THREE A CIVILIZATION UNTO ITSELF, SWISHING THROUGH THE CRUSHING VOID ON A NAVY DESTROYER Indian Ocean and Andaman Sea, Winter 2005
In late December 2004, not long after the Okinawa-based Marines had completed their humanitarian mission in the typhoon-lashed Philippines, an earthquake and subsequent tsunami devastated Indonesia, Thailand, and Sri Lanka. The USS Abraham Lincoln’s Carrier Strike Group, in port at Hong Kong, immediately changed its mission from keeping the commercial sea-lanes open to disaster relief. What had been a pulse (a planned deployment) became a surge (an emergency one). The Nimitz-class carrier fired up its twin nuclear reactors and proceeded to Indonesia at best speed (up to thirty knots).[29] It was followed by the USS Bonhomme Richard Expeditionary Strike Group, located just south of Guam at the time. Thus began Operation Unified Assistance.
The carrier Abraham Lincoln and the amphibious assault ship Bonhomme Richard (named after John Paul Jones’s frigate in the American Revolution) functioned as the two command posts. Nearly a hundred Navy and Marine helicopters began a ship-to-shore circuit, delivering supplies and evacuating the most gravely ill and wounded. This was in addition to assistance provided by Navy engineers, rescue swimmers, doctors, and medical corpsmen. The Abraham Lincoln had a long record of disaster relief, including the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines and the annual flooding in Bangladesh.
In fact, there was no more suitable organization in the world for emergency assistance than the U.S. military, with its air and sealift capacity, and the ability of its nuclear carriers to reprocess seawater into hundreds of thousands of gallons of fresh drinking water. After the tsunami, sailors aboard the Lincoln stopped taking showers in order to provide as much water as possible to the victims.
The tsunami relief effort demonstrated a navy’s soft power. To wit, a carrier strike group offered an impact on land that was out of proportion to its small, nonthreatening footprint, located as it was some miles offshore.
Though the world (and Muslim Indonesians, in particular) was taken aback by the Navy and Marine effort, it was something the military did all the time as part of its normal battle rhythm. Every time a U.S. warship stopped at a port in the developing world, part of its crew conducted a humanitarian Comrel (community relations exercise). In the Horn of Africa, I had reported on covert operations to kill al-Qaeda terrorists, even as I embedded with an Army civil affairs team engaged in relief projects in the same area. Multiple tasking—acting sequentially as warriors, local governors, and relief workers—constituted the very definition of an imperial-like, expeditionary military.
If anything, the Global War on Terrorism, by forcing the U.S. military to embrace the concept of flexible response, made it easier for a carrier strike group to help in a humanitarian emergency. For example, though the strike group’s navigators planned for a deployment in the vicinity of China and the Korean Peninsula, they carried sailing charts for all of Asia, including Indonesia—something they would not have done before 9/11.
While the USS Abraham Lincoln was still off the northwest tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, engaged in humanitarian assistance, I headed to Singapore to link up with the strike group. My plan was to take a Navy plane from Singapore to the Abe (as the Abraham Lincoln was fondly called by sailors), and from the carrier hop a helicopter to a guided missile destroyer, where I would spend a few weeks among blue water grunts.
Singapore stunned me with its manic cleanliness and efficiency. Arriving at the airport was like being slotted onto a fast-moving conveyor belt, with worker bees at designated stops where my passport was stamped, my money changed, and my checked luggage delivered within ten minutes of deplaning. A metered cab smelling of freshener awaited me at the end of the process. The geodesic architecture and rows of stone pyramids atop a shopping complex created an aura of sterility, central control, and placelessness that reminded me slightly of Dubai. The taxi flew down and around sleek highways and rotaries landscaped with young trees and clipped hedgerows to my hotel, located amid a forest of other skyscrapers that resembled computer memory sticks.
In three decades, Singapore had gone from a dirty, malarial hellhole of overpowering smells and polluted, life-threatening monsoon drains to a global economic dynamo that topped businessmen’s lists for efficiency and quality of life. Singapore was so easy to negotiate that I thought of it as beginner’s Asia. In the early 1960s, it was as poor as many countries in sub-Saharan Africa; by the 1990s, this city-state, one-fifth the size of Rhode Island, had a standard of living higher than Australia. Credit for the miracle went to one man: an English-educated ethnic-Chinese barrister, Harry Lee.
Harry Lee is worth a few words. While he might at times have violated some of the democratic principles for which America stood, for the U.S. military in Southeast Asia he was a godsend.
In the best short analysis of Lee’s career, the Australian editor and intellectual Owen Harries writes that Lee’s political philosophy was the upshot of his experiences in the 1940s, which served him better than any standard university education could have.1 In the first half of that decade, Lee observed up close a society thrown into chaos, followed by the ruthless brutality of Japanese occupation. Japanese rule in Singapore taught Lee all he needed to know about human weakness—specifically, that the fear of physical punishment dramatically altered behavior. But in the second half of the decade he went to study at Cambridge, and was stunned by the civility of a society established on the rule of law.
When Harry Lee returned to Singapore, roiling cultural and political forces in the region made it hard to be an optimist. The feudal Chinese majority was divided by clan and dialect, with the exception of a small group of English speakers to which Lee’s family belonged. Within the Chinese community, the dominant political force was the local Communist Party. Then there were the Indian and Malay minorities, the latter particularly important as Singapore was immersed in a Malay area. (Singapore, or Singapura, is Malay for “city of the lion.”) Malay culture, Harries explains, was “hierarchical, deferential, and characterized by an easygoing cronyism that shaded into corruption.” Then there was Indonesia, adjacent to Singapore and the Malay Peninsula, where Sukarno, the most anti-Western leader in the third world, was about to run amok through the manipulation of the largest Communist Party outside of the Warsaw Pact.
It was this social and political reality that Harry Lee had no choice but to engage. Upon entering politics, he changed his name back to the traditional Lee Kuan Yew. As a defense against Sukarno’s Indonesia, he supported a merger between Singapore and Malaya that was consummated in 1963, with the creation of Malaysia. Two years later, he split from Malaysia, creating an independent city-state that would forge a first-world military and education system.
The virtual dictator of Singapore, he organized a meritocracy that would become the envy of the world. Lee himself remained uncorrupt; despite his immense power he killed no one and was careful to observe legal limits, even as he governed in the spirit of an enlightened despot rather than as a democrat. Through Machiavellian tactics that combined Oriental toughness, inspired by the Japanese fascists, with an almost anal-retentive Western legal code, inspired by English constitutionalism, he single-handedly built an Asian replica of ancient Athens despite being surrounded by chaotic third-world regimes. Trash cans were filled with cigarette butts because no one dared to throw them on the sidewalks, for fear of a hefty fine. The city was full of leafy parks, even as walls and offices were empty of the photo of the man who had created it all. Singapore was, allowing for size, America’s most prosperous and dependable ally in the Pacific, practically a home port for the U.S. Seventh Fleet.
The city-state’s multi-ethnic military meritocracy, its nurturing concern for the welfare of its officers and enlisted men alike, and its jungle warfare school in Brunei were second to none. Singapore offered the only non-American base in the Pacific—Japan far to the north excepted—where U.S. nuclear carriers could be serviced. “The Sings, well, they’re just awesome,” a Navy analyst in Washington had told me. Singapore’s intelligence tips and other help in hunting down Islamic terrorists in the Indonesian archipelago had been of a standard equal or superior to that of America’s most dependable Western allies. CNN Jakarta bureau chief Maria A. Ressa writes in Seeds of Terror that Singapore “has been the only nation in the world to be completely transparent about its terrorism investigations, releasing pictures and biographies of everyone arrested under its Internal Security Act.”2
Whenever I sat with influential figures of the Arab and ex-communist worlds and posed the question, Who was the greatest minor man of the twentieth century, not someone on par with Churchill or Roosevelt, but a tier below: the kind of man your country needs at the moment? the answer was never Nelson Mandela or Vaclav Havel, but invariably Lee Kuan Yew. Some journalists and intellectuals who had never wielded bureaucratic responsibility, and who preached moral absolutes from the sidelines, disliked him. But Western leaders—Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, and Margaret Thatcher, to name a few, each of whom understood the need for moral compromise in the face of implacable, violent forces—rightly held him in awe. Lady Thatcher observes: “In office, I read and analyzed every speech of Harry’s. He had a way of penetrating the fog of propaganda…. He was never wrong.”3
Surrounded by this glittering, orderly prosperity that lay just a few miles across the Strait of Malacca from the feudal, ethnic violence of Indonesia, and reading in the newspaper my first morning in Singapore about terrorist bombings in Baghdad, I couldn’t help believing that the situation in Iraq would have turned out better (and more amenable to the West) had President George W. Bush read Lee Kuan Yew’s tragic-realistic book about how he had created contemporary Singapore, rather than the idealistic work of former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky about bringing democracy to the world—the book that, as it happened, the President was handing visitors to the Oval Office.
Lee’s transformation of Singapore from an exotic hellhole to a post-industrial trading tiger was so complete that the old Singapore appeared at first glance to have vanished. But it was the old Singapore that I wanted a glimpse of, for the sake of another great name with which this city-state is associated: Joseph Conrad. You couldn’t go to sea, as I intended, without thinking of him.
Conrad, a turn-of-the-twentieth-century English writer of Polish origin, might have been history’s greatest foreign correspondent, on par with Herodotus, for in the guise of fiction a writer can tell the truth more easily.[30]
On almost every page of his most richly developed works, Conrad re-creates the overwhelming compactedness of what journalists experience when they are alone in far-off places: the sorts of vivid and searing memories that burden reporters till the end of their days, because they don’t fit within the strictures of news as defined by their editors. But while journalists have a tendency to go weepy whenever covering the weaker side in a conflict, Conrad, in his rationalism and analytical compass, never gives way to his emotions.4 Because he knows that the record of human experience indicates just how many problems simply have no solutions, his fictional correspondences from the tropic seaboards evince a majestic, god-like objectivity in which humankind is at once loved and deeply pitied.
Conrad’s Singapore was all that was available to me. My Navy friends had counseled only hiking gear for my time on ship, and thus I lacked the formal clothes for any appointments with political and business leaders. The short time that I had here I spent on foot, walking from one landmark of late-nineteenth-century British Singapore to another: from Raffles Hotel, with its tiled roof, wicker furniture, and palm-and banana-fringed white arcades; to the Anglican glory of St. Andrews, with its lazy overhead fans; to the Central Fire Station, which, with its striped russet and white stonework, was reminiscent of Mamluk mosques in Egypt; and finally to the classical pile of the Hill Street Police Barracks by the Singapore River, where the boats of Conrad’s day took refuge from storms.
In Conrad’s sea stories, individuals are thrown back upon their own failings by the isolation of an unfamiliar and inhospitable setting, so Singapore and its world of the Eastern Seas, rather than mere exotic bric-a-brac, become a laboratory for the dissection of the human character.
That dissection is never more intense than aboard a ship, where individuals are crammed together and cut off from land-based entanglements. In such a minute universe, under the most ascetic of conditions, reputations are made that are the opposite of fame, because outside the narrow world of seamen, no one will ever hear of them. To Conrad, a ship is nothing less than a planet sailing alone through black eternity.
To such a planet I was headed. After a few days in Singapore, I left the pampered environment of the global business world and reentered the aesthetically impoverished, gray-riveted monastery of the U.S. military, without which, for want of security of the sea-lanes, that business community might not have existed.
A U.S. Navy lieutenant in khakis met me in the luxurious lobby of my hotel and drove me to Singapore’s Paya Lebar Air Base, where several U.S. Navy C-2 Greyhounds shuttled sailors, journalists, and officials from various Washington agencies to the Abraham Lincoln on a daily basis. With 5,500 sailors aboard at any one time, the Abe was less a boat than a small city, requiring an entire section of this foreign military base just to fly people on and off it. On my flight would also be eleven sailors, two Turkish journalists, and an interagency team from the Department of Defense and U.S. Agency for International Development, which was developing a plan to permanently embed civilian relief workers on Navy hospital ships in future emergencies.
The C-2, a miniature version of the C-130, was the most uncomfortable plane I ever flew on. I faced backward in a windowless fuselage, wearing a tight helmet with ear pads, strangled inside a four-way harness and a life vest. For two and a quarter hours we vibrated violently in the disorienting blackness before beginning a steep descent. Landing on a carrier facing backward with no visual warning was like being in a car crash. All of a sudden I was smashed against the seat as though against a cement wall. Then the hatch opened to reveal a stunning line of F-18 Hornets on a tarmac. As I stepped onto the vast flight deck, it was only the water swiftly running beside me that indicated where I was, for a carrier is so big that one has no physical sensation of moving through an ocean, let alone at thirty knots.
On the flight deck the passengers were yelled at by an air transport officer, who marched us down ladders and through a bewildering series of narrow passageways into a tiny room, where we handed in our helmets and life vests, and signed a logbook. I was then hustled into another room where I learned that the helicopter that would take me to the destroyer would leave in an hour. In the meantime, I got a nickel tour of the carrier—the ultimate articulation of the industrial age and the urbanized anonymity that accompanies it, in which each door and hatchway led to a different neighborhood, and every function was so compartmentalized that the fighter pilots, the combat operations team, the nuclear reactor technicians, the fire brigades, the bridge controllers, and so on had little to do with one another, and knew or cared less about the others’ jobs. One of the few common intimacies for onboard sailors was renting fishing rods, in order to try their luck at the edge of the deck whenever the carrier slowed its engines.
The heart of an aircraft carrier is the hangar, many hundreds of feet long with a four-story-high ceiling, and jam-packed with F-18s and E-2 Hawkeye surveillance planes, which are moved up to the flight deck on massive elevators. These were not the happiest times for the F-18 pilots, normally the studs on board. Because of the tsunami emergency, most of their training runs had been canceled and it was the helicopter pilots who were suddenly in their glory. Nevertheless, the fighter pilots bucked up their morale by going ashore to assist in the relief work.
I almost lost my guide amid the crowds of Navy maintenance crews and civilian contractors. In the hangar, more than on the flight deck, you got a sense of the “boat’s” gargantuan size. Carriers and submarines are “boats,” while cruisers, destroyers, and frigates are “ships.”
In the middle of the tour I got yanked away and told my helicopter was leaving early. Again I was barked at and rushed up to the flight deck. More fiddling with strange harnesses and life vests. Then, as though lifted high above the deck on puppet strings, with the windows of the SH-60 Seahawk open and the wind’s muffled roar pouring into my ears, I skidded along the Indian Ocean through low-hanging tropical rain clouds off the coast of Sumatra and headed for the USS Benfold. I was glad to be on my own again, the only civilian passenger on the helicopter, away from the world of Washington that the Abe Lincoln, in the midst of a front-page emergency, had come to represent. Congressional delegations and television crews visited carriers; few went to destroyers.
Approaching the USS Benfold’s starboard quarter, the Seahawk hovered to one side of the fantail, which also functioned as the flight deck, and then executed a sharp sideways jink at the proper moment, after the pilot had assessed the up-and-down movement of the ship. As wind exploded on the flight deck and safety nets were drawn down along its sides, swarms of men and women in vests and helmets encircled the helicopter. In white vests was the medical team; in green the “comms” element for communicating to the bridge; in red the fire brigade; and in blue the chalk-and-chain detail, which anchored the chopper onto the flight deck so that it would not be tipped over, or be blown off by the wind. It was all just one facet of “helicopter ops” on a surface warship.
As I ran off the chopper, my back bent over by the wind, the crowd of seamen in their assorted vests cleared a path. I climbed a ladder onto the aft missile deck, at the rear of the two smokestacks, where an officer in pressed khakis, alone among sailors in blue coveralls, greeted me. He then led me inside to “officers’ country.” In a moment I was in the captain’s stateroom, where a coffee and tea service had been prepared with fresh fruit.
I had arrived at my destination—the front line of a fighting oceanic (“blue water”) navy. Because it was the Navy, everything from the terminology to the rank structure to the array of different uniforms was bewildering. I was aboard the USS Benfold, or DDG 65 (Hull number 65), an Arleigh Burke–class guided-missile destroyer that packed ninety launch cells in its two vertical launch systems (VLSes) with Tomahawk missiles for striking land targets, SM-2s (standard missile-2s) for shooting down aircraft and missiles, Harpoon missiles for hitting other warships, and anti-submarine rockets. The Navy had fifty-five such destroyers, as well as four Spruance-class ones. But the Spruance-class destroyers lacked the SPY-1 Radar and Combat System Integrator, which provided three-dimensional vision far over the horizon. Arleigh Burke destroyers could see and kill anything before anything could see and kill them. Well, not quite: another Arleigh Burke–class destroyer was the USS Cole, attacked in 2000 by suicide bombers in a fast boat, who pulled up to the warship and exploded themselves while the Cole was in a Yemeni port to take on fuel.[31] Seventeen sailors were killed.
Incidentally, Arleigh Burke, Spruance, Benfold, and Cole were all names of naval heroes, often Medal of Honor winners. The connection between these names and the ships’ crews was often quite personal, as I would learn.
The destroyer, as the name suggested, was the ultimate surface warship.[32] It was the original submarine hunter and frontline defender for an aircraft carrier. Its crew of thirty-two officers and 330 enlisted sailors embodied the oceanic naval equivalent of infantry grunts. “We suck up all the punishment in order to protect the big deck [the carrier],” explained Lt. Comdr. David Dunn of Roswell, New Mexico, the ship’s executive officer (XO), who had greeted me on the missile deck.
As a lieutenant commander, Dave Dunn was the Navy equivalent of a major in the other services. He was one of four crew members in the captain’s blue-carpeted stateroom with me. There was the ship’s captain, Comdr. Donald Hornbeck of Indianapolis, the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel. Aboard ship, function took precedence over rank, so he was referred to as “Capt. Hornbeck” rather than “Comdr. Hornbeck,” even though he had not yet reached the higher rank of a naval captain. Whereas Capt. Hornbeck—a former civilian geophysicist and planner on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon—was dry and cerebral, with a stony expression, the XO, Lt. Comdr. Dunn, was chatty. There was, too, Master Chief Petty Officer Terry Craddock of Eufaula, Alabama: the senior enlisted man on the USS Benfold, the equivalent of a Marine or Army sergeant major. A big and soft-spoken African American, Master Chief Craddock was the lord-god-protector and enforcer of the enlisted ranks, which accounted for 90 percent of the ship’s crew. The fourth crew member in the stateroom was Ensign Mitch McGuffie of Goliad, Texas, the equivalent of a second lieutenant. A graduate of Annapolis who had worked on John Kerry’s senatorial staff, Ensign McGuffie, a tall and intellectually serious young officer, would be my guide during my first days on the Benfold.
I was told that I would have “free roam” of the ship. I could go anywhere I wanted, except for the cryptology room, and walk in on almost any meeting. Yet, even as I was welcomed by the ship’s command, I knew that I would have to escape officers’ country and make my way among the enlisted ranks. It was the enlisted sailors of a destroyer who were at the heart of naval warfare. Given the rise of the Chinese Navy, they might be just as important in future years and decades as marines and Army Special Forces had been in Iraq and Afghanistan.
After the welcome session, Ensign McGuffie showed me my “stateroom.” Though the term conjures up something spacious and elegant, in fact it was a cubicle, with three coffin-like racks for two officers and me. Still, such accommodations constituted the top of the social hierarchy compared to the “berthings” in the bowels of the hull, where enlisted sailors slept as many as forty to a room. The overwhelming reality of all ships, especially military ones, is the premium on space. It is a claustrophobic existence amid the hostile sea. Unlike land, there is no place to go AWOL. People were inches away from one another at meetings. Thus, strengths and flaws of character were magnified and noticed quickly.
“Staterooms,” “berthings,” “ropeyarns” (running errands), “bosun” (deck crew chief), and other words flew at me, either unfamiliar or meaning something very different than they would have on land. Nautical English, because of its reliquary strangeness, awards a special camaraderie to those who use it, something I had observed with marines, another naval force, in the Iraqi and West African deserts. Floors were “decks,” stairs “ladders,” and walls “bulkheads.” “Doors” went through bulkheads, while “hatchways” went through decks. Bathrooms were “heads,” because in the days when ships could only sail with the wind at their backs, the toilet was placed at the “head” (front) of the ship, so that the wind could carry away the smell quickly. The front of the ship was the “bow,” the rear the “stern.” “Starboard” indicated the right side facing forward, “port” the left. The deck near the bow of the ship was never the front deck, but the “forecastle,” the rear deck the “fantail.” Making it stranger, forecastle was pronounced “focsle.” Enlisted sailors from small towns, some with barely a high school education, could rattle off these words in the course of normal conversation. This was in addition to the scientific and military terms they employed. Many a sailor would tell me, “When I call my folks at home and talk about what I’m doing here, they barely understand what I’m saying.”
Dinner commenced soon after I had arrived aboard. In officers’ country meals were served in the wardroom, decorated with blue carpets and tablecloths, and graced with a picture of Hospitalman Third Class Edward C. Benfold of Audubon, New Jersey, a Navy corpsman killed at the age of twenty-one in the Korean War. He was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously for his bravery. Every officer on board knew the story of how Eddie Benfold had moved from position to position in the face of intense artillery fire, treating the wounded. When two grenades were hurled at a group of wounded marines, he picked up the grenades and threw himself against onrushing enemy soldiers, killing them and himself in the process. The story did not go with the face, that of a smiling, angelic boy who appeared to be in his late teens at most.
Looking at Eddie’s face, I thought of Smitty, the soulful Navy corpsman with the Marines in Niger, who had previously served in Iraq, and who, it seemed to me, might actually have had the heart for such an act.
At dinner I was confused by the exotic uniforms. Soldiers and marines had two or three kinds at the most. In the Navy, there were nine uniforms for enlisted men alone. For example, there were dress blues for formal occasions in wintry climates and dress whites for such occasions in the tropics. Then there were the even more formal dinner dress blues and whites with cummerbunds. On ship, officers and senior enlisted sailors wore pressed khakis, while the lower ranks wore pressed blue utilities when standing bridge watch. Yet almost every officer and sailor could also wear blue coveralls. It depended upon where in the ship they would be working that day.
There were also women present in the wardroom. Because I had spent the bulk of my time covering frontline field units, the presence of women in the armed forces had remained an abstraction to me until I arrived at the Benfold, which had about fifty of them. As I would see, more than refining or softening the American military, they completed its internalization as a separate caste.5
Here on a destroyer women served in frontline positions, and men had slightly longer hair and more ordinary physiques compared to the marines and Army Special Forces troops I had known. Whereas the Marines were a cult, the Navy was a calling—a way of life. Esprit de Corps came from a ship’s isolation, the multiple levels of nautical and military jargon that only those on board could understand, and the way each officer and sailor addressed the other: employing the honorifics of “Mister” and “Miss.” Marine grunts in Iraq and Djibouti had complained to me that on Navy ships they were treated as second-class citizens. They didn’t realize that because of the hostile environment of the high seas, and the number of young people jammed together on board, iron discipline was a life-giving necessity, enforced through an unquestioned and minutely stratified hierarchy.
Following dinner, Ensign McGuffie—Mr. McGuffie to his subordinates—gave me a tour of the intestinal passageways (p-ways), with which I would have to become familiar to get around on my own. It was so confusing that the first days I used the map-numbering system: if a door had 1-222-1 on it, that meant I was at the waterline, 222 feet to the rear of the bow, and starboard from the center of the beam.[33]
It happened that my first night aboard there was an Un-Rep (underway replenishment), the naval equivalent of an air-to-air refueling.
The object of this Un-Rep was to transfer 200,000 gallons of diesel fuel and twenty pallets of food and equipment from a fast combat support ship, the USNS Rainier, to the Benfold.[34] It was an overcast night, and the sky and ocean were black. To catch up with the Rainier, the Benfold accelerated from “one-third” engine speed of four knots to a “full” speed of twenty-five knots.[35] The wind hissed and the rooster tail of white water behind the propellers rose several stories in the air, leaving a wide wake of phosphorescent white against the black void.
Stage by stage, the Benfold closed the distance: 9,000 yards, 8,000 yards, until after fifteen minutes, the $1-billion steel behemoths, weighing 8,300 tons and longer than one and a half football fields, came alongside a ship of even greater proportions, weighing 40,000 tons because of the fuel it carried. Now only 160 feet separated these two wonderfully ancient-looking ships, gray armored spirits of the industrial age.
There was a deafening holler of wind as a churning funnel of white-water rapids formed between them, the explosions of foam concentrating, it seemed, all the power and energy of the ocean. One by one, lines were shot across the Benfold’s deck from the Rainier and hauled in by “deck apes” and “deck monkeys” (the lowest-ranking enlisted sailors), who latched them onto fairleads, pelican hooks, and pulleys. It had begun with a single red string fired by an M-14 rifle, to which a rope was then attached, followed by a cable. Soon gigantic fuel hoses and pallets were sliding from the Rainier across to the Benfold, as deck apes with blue construction helmets and orange vests began a snake dance with the cables that controlled the line tension, so as to carefully “bring in the groceries.” A chief petty officer boomed orders over a loudspeaker, even as another communicated with the Rainier in whole sentences through signal flags. The world was a roaring black abyss sprinkled with white water and a flurry of yellow lights from the two vessels. It was like a docking in space.
Sometimes the aircraft carrier itself would refuel the Benfold. But the Benfold crew was not crazy about this type of maneuver. Not only did the carrier tower above the destroyer only 160 feet away, but because carrier crews did not do Un-Reps very often, there was a lot of fumbling around. “It’s like having sex for the first time with a girl,” one sailor remarked.
Very few navies in the world could perform an Un-Rep, which depended less on technology than on sheer seamanship. I wondered how many people in the Pentagon knew about this maneuver or, more to the point, could appreciate it. Watching the whole extravaganza, a chief petty officer told me, “It’s how we won World War II” in the Pacific, for it was a long-haul navy’s ability to resupply warships thousands of miles from friendly ports that had provided a pivotal advantage over the Japanese.[36]
World War II had a meaning on the Benfold that it lacked elsewhere I had been with the military. Marines and Army Special Forces had many proud moments in Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Iraq, and so on; for them the Second World War had receded into antiquity almost. But for destroyer crews, World War II marked the last time that surface warships had been engaged in sustained, close-quarters combat.
The captain, Comdr. Hornbeck, sat in a high blue chair on the starboard bridge wing, silently observing the Un-Rep. He spoke only if there was a problem, and this time there wasn’t. Navigating the ship during the Un-Rep was the responsibility of the conning officer, who kept the ships from colliding by minute attention to compass direction and continuous adjustment of speed and rudder angle. Overseeing the conning officer was the officer of the deck. Standing next to the captain, binoculars around their necks, these two officers ran the Un-Rep by means of mathematical calculations and an instinctual reading of the sea and its biblical swells, for it was common to do an Un-Rep in the midst of a storm.
Both the conning officer and the officer of the deck were shy and diminutive female ensigns in their early twenties: Michelle Mecklenburg of San Diego, a graduate of the ROTC program at the University of California, Berkeley; and Lori Boles, an Army brat from Augusta, Georgia. Mecklenburg was of Peruvian descent, Boles an African American.
Lori Boles, the officer of the deck, told me about a previous Un-Rep she had directed in these waters immediately after the tsunami, when the bodies of dozens of adults and children were swept into the white water between the ships. “It was a floating cemetery,” she said. “Because we also saw shoes and clothes and the insides of houses, it was like whole lives were passing by us.”
The tsunami was real and traumatic, marking the first time many of the Benfold’s sailors had seen dead bodies. In the spring of 2003, they had fired Tomahawks into Iraq from another destroyer, and then run over to a television to learn from CNN what they had hit. For them, Iraq had been an abstraction, a video game almost. But going ashore by helicopter to help in the relief effort at Banda Aceh in Sumatra, they had observed trees, bridges, and houses laid down in an inland direction, as if by high-pressure fire hoses. In less than a month, there had been 117 helicopter landings on the Benfold, breaking a record. It was a natural disaster, not a war, that had toughened these sailors, turning more than a few into salty veterans.
I drew the curtains on my rack. I had just a few inches of extra room to sleep on my side without my hip hitting the rack above me; it was still more space than marines transiting the Pacific in World War II had had.[37] At first, my stateroom felt like a closet, though as I began to organize myself in coming days, it would seem to grow in size. Sleeping like this was merely one aspect of the strange world of a surface warship. You were constantly oppressed by valves and pipes and low ceilings (“overheads”) that further narrowed the p-ways, and by steep, narrow ladders that barely felt wide enough for squirrels. There was also the loud, vibrating hum of air conditioners, and the constant announcements and clanging alarms that 24/7 invaded racks and toilets even.
The only escape was the deck. Every time you went outside you passed through an airlock created by two watertight doors that you opened and closed by swinging heavy iron latches, which caused your ears to pop violently. This allowed for a pressurized environment inside that was a defense against chemical weapons. It was one discomfort after another. Sailors only looked normal; they were often chubby or gangly, as well as unshaven during much of a voyage.[38] Yet in ways that were subtle and, therefore, took time to appreciate, they could be just as tough as marines and Special Forces soldiers.
Breakfast in the wardroom was at six, and officers’ call at 7:10 a.m. The latter took place on the port side of the aft missile deck, pouring rain or shine. As an inhabitant of officers’ country, I was required to go. In attendance were not only the officers but all “khakis,” meaning the senior chief petty officers who, because of their high noncommissioned rank, were entitled to wear pressed khaki uniforms or, depending upon their task that day, khaki belts over their blue coveralls. Throughout my odyssey with the American military, I had always been impressed by the authority wielded by the enlisted ranks, a testimony to the country’s mass democracy, which kept in check the power of the elites. But the Navy went one better than the Army and Marines in this regard, by giving senior enlisted men and women sartorial equivalence with officers.[39] It was a symbol of something I would get to know more about: the aura of “the chiefs.”
Officer’s call, conducted by the XO, Lt. Comdr. Dunn, and the ship’s senior noncom, Master Chief Craddock, lasted only a few minutes, with each man making a series of terse announcements followed by orders. Immediately following, each of the officers and chiefs met with their own divisions, so the aft missile deck and the adjacent fantail were filled with sailors meeting in separate semicircles. Following that, everyone on deck went below to brief his or her own department. By 7:45 a.m., every sailor on board knew what the XO and master chief expected of him, translated into specifics by his or her immediate superior. As a service forged in loud seas and reeling ships before the invention of bullhorns, repeating commands verbatim down the chain, followed by salutes and other decorum—even if the distance from one verbal link to the next was only a few feet—was the only way to assure accurate communication.
The first morning I surveyed the deck. The inky blue water was relatively calm: a level three sea on the Beaufort scale of wind force, which goes from one through twelve. The dense mountains of Sumatra were close enough to form a rugged pattern, yet still far enough to remain unknown. The term “landscape” entails a personality, an intimacy; and Indonesia at this ten-mile distance, even though I was inside its coastal waters, did not quite have one. I stared at shadows only. On the other hand, I was already developing an intimacy with the USS Benfold. John Steinbeck had written that in her “beautiful clean lines,” a destroyer is “completely a ship, in the old sense.”6 But it was also the modern version of a Civil War ironclad, a linear descendant of the Monitor and Merrimack: an instrument of orchestrated violence and deception. Even the handrails were crooked because right angles meant a stronger radar signature.
The next generation of destroyer on the drawing boards looked like a combination of stealth bomber and submarine that rode on the surface. The bridge was completely enclosed and the sloping deck was there for weapons and electronic surveillance, not for human beings. I felt privileged to experience a destroyer while it was still a ship.
Gunner’s Mate 2nd Class Steven Breakhall of Richmond, Virginia, a kid with a shock of blond hair who had volunteered for the SEALs after 9/11 and did not quite survive Hell Week, gave me a tour of the Benfold’s deck plate, from the forecastle to the fantail. What gave the forecastle of a destroyer its familiar look, especially to boys who built model ships, was the 5-inch gun sticking out of a squat, revolving mount. You didn’t have to see it fire to understand its violence. All you had to do was climb several stories down a ladder into its deep magazine smelling of oil and metal, and hold your ears against the whining siren of its loader assembly, and observe the belligerent speed with which the hydraulic cradle loaded the projectiles. In heaving seas during World War II, the gunner had to be careful to fire on the up-roll; nowadays a computer gyroscope made the adjustment.
Behind the 5-inch gun came something that was missing from the model toys of World War II: twenty-nine vertical launch cells, distinguished only by a series of hatches barely rising over the deck plate. Each self-contained cell held either a Tomahawk, an SM-2, or an anti-submarine rocket, the last of which fired 12,000 yards over the sea where a parachute opened, allowing it to fall into the water to attack a sub under its own guidance system. Behind the VLS cells was the tapering superstructure, which culminated with the mast and yardarms. But except for the shrouds, there was nothing here that resembled a sailing vessel. Everything was made of steel. There was a robotic device with a 20mm gun sticking out of it that sailors referred to as “R2D2 with a hard-on.”[40] When it fired, it sounded as if all the machines in the world were grinding in unison to a halt, sending a shudder throughout your body—earplugs were little help. Behind R2D2 were clusters of giant steel radar bubbles, dishes, and antennae, providing vision from the surface to 90,000 feet up and dozens of miles in any direction.
Walking behind the bridge and along the two stacks, Gunner’s Mate Breakhall pointed out the electronic-warfare equipment, the various machine guns for obliterating small boats, and the cluster of chaff launchers for dispersing aluminum debris into the air to serve as radar decoys. Dropping down to the aft missile deck, he noted sixty-one more VLS cells, four giant Harpoon launchers for use against enemy warships, and six tubes for shooting anti-submarine torpedoes into the water. The last were for subs nearby, while the ones fired out of the VLS cells were for subs farther out. All the weaponry was orchestrated by the Aegis system, which informed the crew what weapons and defensive electronic devices to use and when.
Steve Breakhall thought it was all just neat, decent compensation for not making it into the SEALs. To note that such an array of weaponry might never be used was to miss the point, for by monopolizing the use of force over a large oceanic space, destroyers like the Benfold—along with the rest of a carrier strike group—were able to ensure satisfactorily safe and predictable commercial sea-lanes. In such a fashion, commerce and subsequent globalization could occur. Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore certainly would not have prospered to the extent that it had without all this neat stuff.
“Don’t be too impressed,” one deck ape warned me. “Sometimes the multi-million-dollar radar sucks, and we have to man visual lookouts for a large piece of plastic or dead animal near the ship that might be a mine.” True, but for all the headlines it garnered, terrorism was still more of an irritant to a blue water navy than a strategic threat.
Of course, that might change. For a better sense of where sea warfare was going, I needed to talk to the sailors. After all, if there was one thing I could count on with the military, it was that the people were more interesting than the equipment. In particular, I gravitated toward sailors and officers who had earned a certain reputation among their fellow seamen.
Among the first enlisted men I met was Petty Officer 2nd Class Robert Contreras, twenty-two, of San Fernando, California, the tactical information coordinator in the CIC (combat information center), a freezing and cavernous region of blinking green computer terminals where the quieter it was, the more that was going on. Contreras spoke in a slightly hesitating manner, as though his words were trying to keep up with the speed of his mind, as registered in his eyes. He had dark hair, a pale and clammy face, and the concentrated expression of the kid who had won the science fair at high school, but had yet to go out on a date. Had Contreras grown up in a secure and prosperous suburban environment, that’s probably what would have happened to him, and it would have been his country’s loss.
Instead, he was the oldest of six children of divorced parents, who had to hold down a job as a store clerk to help pay the family’s bills. To make matters worse, he was a screwup in high school. He could have gone to the local community college, but figured he would have fallen into the same bad habits. He learned that the Navy would pay for him to go to college somewhere far from his home. Moreover, one of his grandparents had been a corpsman, so he enlisted. The Navy straightened him out, making him the geek that he was always meant to be. Contreras’s ability to cold-crunch probabilities at a nearly inhuman speed was so legendary in his department that when I mentioned his name to Capt. Hornbeck, the latter’s eyes lit up. He, too, held Contreras in awe.
Petty Officer Contreras worked with the radar and electronic-warfare supervisors to run and design the war games in the CIC. “Our surface radar can see twenty-five miles, but through a data link with another ship I can see sixty miles,” he explained, after I pleaded with him to cut out the math jargon and acronyms. “I’m also the air controller. I can see further than the fighter pilots because I’ve got access to the whole strike group network. During OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom], the network was so vast I could see all the screen activity from the Mediterranean to the Strait of Hormuz.”
After every air attack into Iraq, Contreras had to make sure that only friendly air was returning to the carrier group. But it wasn’t always clear on the screen if a signal was a “friendly” or not. A plane might cut corners on a pre-designated flight path because the pilot really knew what he was doing, not because he was an infiltrator. Thus, sometimes you had to decide on instinct. In OIF, Contreras’s judgments were nearly perfect. “He’s a goddamn second-class petty officer,” one of his commanding officers told me later, “yet when we were having trouble early in the war, getting the radar and weapons systems to electronically shake hands with each other, he figured out how to do it on a higher frequency.” Contreras was too modest to tell me the things I heard from others.
During OIF, Contreras’s destroyer, the Arleigh Burke–class USS Higgins, was the closest American warship to the Iraqi coast, coming as close to shore as its draft would allow. His department constituted the Navy’s main unit for theater ballistic-missile defense—meaning he and about fifteen other operators were the front line for warning Patriot missile batteries about incoming Scuds. Of twelve missiles fired by Saddam Hussein, the operators detected eleven by noticing oddities of speed and altitude, amid the clutter caused by the U.S. military’s own activities. (The one they missed landed in a Kuwait City shopping mall in the middle of the night, causing relatively little damage.)
Just as the expeditionary American military boasted iron majors, Contreras represented something newer still, the “strategic corporal”—someone barely out of his teens, who with one keyboard tap can affect the lives of thousands, as well as the foreign policy of a great nation.[41]
So I asked him, given his experience and all the technical magazines he read, what worried him the most about the Benfold.
“Sub-surface threats,” he responded. “This ship is much less vulnerable to air attacks. But we can only hunt subs to the degree that we need to by calling greater radar attention to ourselves. We need a remote mine-hunting capability and a hangar to support helicopters for tracking what’s underwater.”[42] In other words, Contreras was worried about the future: about China.
Then there was Sonar Technician Guns 2nd Class Kate Szlamas of Falmouth, Maine, also in her early twenties, with blond hair and a frank, eager expression that told you the Benfold was where she was meant to be. Her dad had been in the Navy, and she didn’t want to go to college like everyone else she knew. After four years in blue coveralls, she was looking forward to reenlisting for another four years. “Unlike my friends who went to college, I now have a marketable skill.” The Navy had thrown courses in oceanography, digital electronics, and acoustics at her, and consequently she lectured me about the electronic signatures of Indian, Pakistani, and Russian submarines. Like Contreras, hers was a world of blinking green lights where she played chess blindfolded, by figuring out how to position the ship in the event of an approaching sub, which she knew was there because of the sound pulses she heard. Like Contreras, I had to frequently slow her down and get her to explain things in nonscientific English. It might be telling that the first time she played No Limit Texas Hold’em in a mess hall full of enlisted sailors, she beat everyone at the poker game except for one other sailor.
Too, like Contreras, Szlamas had been in OIF aboard the USS Higgins, a destroyer with which every member of its crew felt an intense affinity. The hero for which the Higgins was named, Marine Col. William R. Higgins of Danville, Kentucky, had been killed in Lebanon shortly after he was kidnapped by pro-Iranian terrorists in 1988, while he was working for the United Nations. Col. Higgins had refused the advice of U.N. colleagues to remove the U.S. flag on his U.N. uniform, even though it put him in especial danger. The fact that his was a recent story—one that did not hearken back to a half-century-old war—helped give young sailors like Szlamas a particular identification with him.
A large portion of the Higgins’s crew had been transferred to the Benfold as part of a “sea swap,” which allowed a ship to remain at sea without having to return to port in order to give its crew a rest. The Big Navy liked the idea because it was efficient; the sailors I met hated it, because their esprit de corps, they said, was closely related to an emotional bond with a particular ship.
At the same time, Petty Officer Szlamas liked the fact that the Navy was no longer in a scheduled existence, and deployments got changed or extended because of events like wars and tsunamis. She had gone ashore at Banda Aceh to do disaster relief and encountered the world media for the first time, for which she and the sonar girl who sat next to her didn’t much care. “They were like a mob, in your face, getting in the way of what we were doing.”
“Come, let’s go,” they told me, “we’ve got to run checks on the fishes,” referring to the torpedoes.
I just wandered around every day for four weeks, meeting people. It was sort of like an academic conference where the conversations you had in the hallways were more worthwhile than the panel discussions. Quarters were so close on a destroyer that the head was no less common a place for a long conversation than a stateroom or, for that matter, the entrance to the sonar bubble in the narrowing hull at the bottom of the ship. In a head down in berthing, I met Petty Officer 2nd Class John Strange of Albuquerque, New Mexico, who asked me about the different translations of Dostoevsky’s novels, which he was reading on ship. “I’ve been to the Seychelles, Hong Kong, Singapore. The kids I went to high school with have gone nowhere. I bank $36,000 yearly after taxes. That’s a lot of money in Albuquerque.”
Then there was a nineteen-year-old deckhand from the Deep South who had joined the Navy partly to escape the alcoholism in his extended family. He told me he had been saved by Jesus, with whom he spoke every night.
In the sweaty, loud commotion of the engine room—down several stories on a ladder to the ship’s bowels—amid an intestinal, Dickensian maze of pipes and catwalks, and a temperature of 105 degrees, I had a long conversation with Petty Officer 1st Class Robert Wynot of Weston, Massachusetts. Petty Officer Wynot had joined the Navy thirteen years before, because he needed discipline and didn’t have money for a proper college education. He did exceptionally well on his aptitude tests, so the Navy sent him to study nuclear propulsion (“nuke school”); he mastered college-level physics, trigonometry, and thermodynamic theory. “But being the kids that we were”—Wynot always spoke finely, in the way of a wise and calm old man—“we had a fight. I spit on another seaman’s locker and was thrown out. I was busted from seaman to seaman recruit,” the equivalent of a private.
Next, he was ordered to work twelve-to fourteen-hour days in the engine room of a frigate for a year. The humiliation of being thrown out of nuke school and having to work his way up from the bottom of the hierarchy affected Wynot deeply. It made him an adult. In the intervening year he won seven Navy achievement awards, and was recently ship and squadron sailor of the year.[43] He had been at sea for most of the past five years, but was happy to be going home for the birth of his second boy. Like many others I met, he had a forgettable face that I’ll never forget.
I went down another long ladder to a catwalk, at the base of the vertical launch cells: here I encountered Gunner’s Mate 1st Class James Vigliotti of Suffolk County, New York, who maintained the missile unit. Before coming to the Benfold, Vigliotti had been a trainer for the new Iraqi Army. It took several meetings to get out of him the fact that he had been awarded a Bronze Star in Iraq, and was a leader of an operation that captured number seven in the notorious deck of cards, the fifty-five most wanted figures from the Saddam Hussein regime.[44] I was used to such modesty. When I asked Vigliotti whether he had any doubts about the way the Iraqi Army was being formed—picking people from scratch to be colonels, corporals, and so on—he replied: “The Continental Army was stood up in the same way. For me,” he continued, “the only depressing thing I encountered in Iraq was the negative shit on the news each night.” This was early 2005, remember, a year before the Samarra mosque bombing.
I never argued with people. I wanted only to experience their lives and points of view. The Benfold was a civilization unto itself, swishing through the crushing void. As opposed to a carrier, a destroyer is a “small boy,” where after two weeks or so you became quite familiar with the crew and its routine. There was the boredom of smoking on the flight deck under leaden tropical rain, and the exhilaration of a steel beach picnic, when the chief petty officers barbecued burgers and hot dogs topside for the officers and junior enlisted sailors. At night, there was the release offered by Eddie’s, the mess deck for the junior enlisted ranks, named after Eddie Benfold. Here, on long tables with plastic swivel chairs under oppressive fluorescent lights, young sailors, their tattoos showing on their forearms, played No Limit Texas Hold’em while listening to patriotic country music singer Toby Keith’s “American Soldier.”
There were also “ice cream socials.” As corny as that might sound, keep in mind that alcohol was forbidden, and the officers and senior noncoms constantly had to contrive events to break the tedium of a long sea deployment. African-American History Month was a particularly welcome diversion, whose celebration with lectures and songs at Eddie’s was attended by blacks and whites alike. After all, we all knew one another.
Things happened, and were anticipated. An enlisted sailor made a gesture of committing suicide by hanging himself in the windlass complex, in view of other sailors. Capt. Hornbeck called an all-hands-on-deck meeting to discuss it. “I want to look you all in the eyes,” he said, “not send out an internal e-mail.” Actually, the crew’s reaction was severe. Nobody felt sorry for the badly injured sailor. The feeling was, if he really wanted to kill himself he could have; a stunt like this only makes him a coward.
A few days later, before docking at the next port, I heard some deck monkeys discuss the low HIV rate there, which they had researched on the Internet. One declared: “I don’t want to fuck a virgin. I want someone who knows what she’s doing. A virgin’s no better than using your own hand.”
The officers ran the ship, but the chiefs made it happen. The very word “chief” defined a senior noncommissioned officer in a way that “sergeant major” did not in the other services. The chiefs taught the ropes to the young officers, who were often straight out of the Naval Academy. The chiefs were the fathers-mothers-priests-dictators for the grunt sailors. Some of them had whored their way for years around the Pacific. They smoked. Burly and über–working class in a prosperous, old-fashioned 1950s sense, the chiefs just oozed authority without trying to.
When I asked the chief of chiefs on the Benfold, Master Chief Craddock, what was the most important thing he did, he replied, his face a few inches from mine: “I don’t put up with any stuff. Anyone gives me stuff, they’ll be sorry.” Indeed, the very intensity of human contact among hundreds of sailors in a dangerous and claustrophobic environment meant that not one, but many lines in the sand had to be drawn.
Helping to draw those lines was Chief Master-at-Arms Darrell McWilliams, a massively built African American from Detroit, who had spent years in the Persian Gulf, forcibly boarding ships suspected of breaking the sanctions regime against Iraq. “One time,” he told me in his soft, pleasant, well-enunciated voice, “a captain would not slow his ship down for an inspection, so I had to physically lift him up and carry him away from the bridge. I just love law enforcement.”
He went on: “I’m an outsider here. I can’t get too close to people, because I may have to bring charges against them. I can bring charges against anyone except the captain. My authority is directly from him.”
The holiest, most laid-back place on the Benfold was the chiefs’ mess. A chief petty officer could walk into the officers’ wardroom, but no officer, not even Capt. Hornbeck, would enter the chiefs’ mess uninvited. Whereas the wardroom served meals at appointed hours, the chiefs’ mess offered hot food, coffee, and a movie 24/7. “Instead of grog, we now have coffee, filtered through a sweat sock,” someone remarked. “That’s why for Western navies it’s been downhill the last hundred years.” The wardroom was a dining room, the chiefs’ mess an after-hours lounge that never closed. By tradition, there is no shoptalk when Navy officers dine in a wardroom, while the chiefs’ mess is where much of the work of a ship gets done. “If you’re thin-skinned, you can’t come in,” I was told the first time I crossed the threshold into the chiefs’ domain.
“What do you do?” I asked one chief. “As little as possible,” came the rude reply. “Who am I?” he went on. “The biggest asshole on the ship.” I ate about half my meals in the chiefs’ mess, where I learned my way around the Benfold.
Bosun’s Mate Chief Andrew Rader of Newark, Ohio, whose low stocky frame moved like a tumbling boulder on deck, was described to me by his fellow chiefs as “good-to-go,” the highest accolade in the noncommissioned officer lexicon. Bosun Chief Rader hung out a lot in the chiefs’ mess, appearing to do nothing except watch movies with a droopy look, extenuated by a mustache that he had grown between port visits and that curved down to his chin. In fact, he knew everything that was going on among the deck apes whom he commanded.
During Un-Reps, Chief Rader’s profanities were peppered with a deadpan sarcasm. “You,” he said, referring to one sailor, “taught me something new today, [that] if you put the hook upside down in the wrong position, it won’t work.” Not waiting for a reply: “Roger that, fucking retard…” He then turned to me with his hands held out, pleading, “It’s all about safety.” He wasn’t kidding. The smallest change in the relative position of the ships could put tremendous tension on any one of the lines, so if they were not secured well, they could whip back like an elastic band and literally take a few heads off.
“I have a philosophy,” Chief Rader explained to me afterward. “I hate you all equally. Look, I can’t be their friend. But at times, I have to be their father or mother.” The sailors understood. One quiet and sensitive female confided to me: “Chief Rader’s awesome, he really looks out for us.” Rader was the ultimate salt, a twenty-year veteran who had joined the Navy out of high school and spent thirteen of those years at sea on destroyers, destroyer tenders, fast-attack oilers, and frigates, always working topside. He had the memorable experience of spending his first Christmas in the Navy as an eighteen-year-old male in the Philippines. He was in Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Most importantly, he understood the young seamen under him.
“I get people from Puerto Rico to Samoa, from Maine to Texas, from all over the United States and its territories, men and women, and I have to treat each one slightly differently. Whenever a new sailor arrives,” he went on, “I talk to him alone for twenty minutes. I ask pointed questions: Are your parents divorced? Were you the nerd or the jock in high school? I need to know fast what makes them tick.” Rader was worried about a new generation of enlistees, what he called the “video game kids,” who never worked with their hands and didn’t know the difference between a Phillips and a flat-head screwdriver. With a what’s-this-world-coming-to expression, he exclaimed, “I mean, I ask for a mallet and they don’t know what it is.”
The bosun, or boatswain, was—along with the officer of the deck, the conning officer, and the quartermaster—the last real seaman in a post-modern navy. His job, and especially the related one of beachmaster, had a heroic function in the World War II landings at Normandy and various Pacific atolls. It was the deck chiefs who had directed Army and Marine assault units from the five-fathom point to the high-tide mark on the beachhead.
While Chief Rader made it happen on deck, where old-fashioned seamanship was required, Chief Charles Benoit of Yakima, Washington, another old salt with nearly seventeen years in the Navy, made it happen when it came to surface warfare. “Sinking a U.S. ship would make a pretty big statement,” he coached me in the chiefs’ mess. “The last people who did that were the Germans and the Japanese.” In the coming weeks, Chief Benoit, who lacked a college degree, would connect some of the dots concerning the theories about the future of sea warfare I had heard at PACOM and at the Pentagon. It was Benoit who tutored the officers, Annapolis graduates among them, about the ins and outs of fighting enemy submarines from the Benfold.
From Chief Benoit I learned that submarines tended to operate in the “layer depth” several hundred feet below the surface, where cooler temperatures and greater water pressure optimized the movement of sound waves; but that Chinese diesel subs could hide in the upper surface layers, amid diesel-powered fishing fleets, the same way someone in green camouflage could hide in a jungle. The United States had been late coming to the challenge of a growing Chinese submarine fleet, Benoit told me. He noted that pre-programmed data identifying Soviet subs had been installed in the Navy’s sonar-triggered combat systems toward the end of the Cold War. But rather than install data about subs from other navies like those of the Chinese and the Iranians into our systems in the 1990s, the Navy had let the technology wither until recently. Chief Benoit was always thinking. For him, the ferrying of rice and water to Banda Aceh by small boats and helicopters during the tsunami emergency had shown him how, using similar tactics, a carrier strike group could insert “guys with guns.”
Quartermaster Chief Paul Bischoff of Milwaukee had a peering-into-the-distance gaze that recalled the photos of Charles Lindbergh just before he had crossed the Atlantic. Chief Bischoff’s grandfather had been a bosun’s master chief, and when Bischoff attended his second cousin’s Navy boot camp graduation ceremony at Great Lakes, Illinois, he knew that’s what he wanted to do. He enlisted before finishing high school. His first deployment was aboard the USS Savannah, an oiler that was among the oldest, homeliest ships in the Navy. Right after he left it, the Savannah was decommissioned and chopped up into razor blades. “But for me she was beautiful,” Bischoff said while we sat atop the vertical missile launchers one sunny day. “When I first saw that monstrous steel hulk against the blue, I said, ‘That’s it, she’s mine.’
“Being at sea is fun,” he went on. “You get to make it up because nobody knows what happened there, that’s why there are all these great sea stories.” As a quartermaster, Bischoff plotted the Benfold’s course on the paper charts with a pencil, eraser, parallel ruler, and compass. That skill, along with the bottom-contour charts of the ocean that evoked old etchings, would soon be gone, as the Navy increasingly veered toward electronic navigation on computer screens. “Now it’s all about being as gray as we possibly can,” he said. “The only teakwood left on a surface warship are the handrails on the bridge wings. The U.S. Navy preserves traditions as artifacts, but not as living things.”
Yet there was still romance left, especially at dusk on the bridge wings, after the dying sun had painted a bar of gold leaf over the water. There was something about being at the highest point on deck after the sun dropped down and the stars came out and the wind hit you in the face that encouraged conversation. This was especially true of a warship, where sunset meant “darkened ship” all the lights went out so the starscape appeared even more brilliant, and the bow cut a majestic phosphorescent trail of white water on account of the twenty-five-knot speed.
It was while arcing around the northern tip of Sumatra, from the Indian Ocean to the calmer Andaman Sea, that I got to know the women aboard better. The women I met either loved the Navy or hated it: either they couldn’t wait to reenlist or couldn’t wait to get out. Unlike the men, there was no in-between for them. The female officers were as petite and feminine as some of the female noncoms were manly. Of course, there were exceptions, like one attractive deck ape I met on the port-side bridge wing who delivered a monologue about how her brothers and cousins had all joined the Navy and Marines, and thus she enlisted after high school without thinking about it. But a few months into her enlistment, with close to four years still to go, she realized that it was not for her.
“In berthing the guys mainly read porno,” she said. “There are too many fat girls, too many dykes, there’s no possibility of a bath, I give myself a pedicure once a week to remember what I am. I got punished for kissing another deck ape in Hawaii—he was just a good friend.” (In fact, the chief master-at-arms had caught several couples alone together in a fashion that forced him to break it up and bring reprimands. He felt bad about it, but as he told me, “After all, this is a U.S. Navy warship, and these people knew what they were signing on to.”)
On the other hand, there was Ensign Melissa Jolley of Salt Lake City, also from a service family. Both she and her brother were graduates of the U.S. Naval Academy. She loved being on ship. Looking out over the blackness of the Andaman Sea, she told me about the first time she got seasick, something that occurred to even the most hardened sailors under certain conditions. “It was on a family fishing trip off the Oregon coast. We got caught in a storm. I was so miserable that I crawled up into a fetal position and didn’t move for hours. But now I’ve got my sea legs.” I had to remind myself that these women were frontline troops, and would be tested as such if a new cold war of the seas ever ensued.
Like her, the other officers aboard, whether Naval Academy graduates or not, were transparently brainy and middle class in a way I had not encountered in the Marines and Army Special Forces. They had not come to the Navy the way quite a few Army and Marine officers had to their service branches: as a way to rise out of social and economic difficulties. Rather, many of the officers aboard the Benfold had come here by happenstance. Often there had been a single individual—a mentor—whom they encountered briefly at church or in high school, who had pointed them in a direction different from the rest of their peers. Then there was that indefinable factor—some people just had a calling to go to sea, like one officer from the beautiful sand hills of north-central Nebraska who, whenever he stared out at the water, missed home, yet at home as a boy always longed for the sea.
Among the exceptions was Ensign Michelle Mecklenburg, the conning officer for the Un-Rep. She had gone to Berkeley on a Navy ROTC scholarship because it was the only way she could afford school. Being in ROTC at a campus with a radical reputation wasn’t that bad, she said. A lot of students from places like Orange County quietly came up to her to say they approved of what she was doing. There were actually a few Berkeley graduates among the officers. They drew a portrait of a school where the student body was increasingly more conservative than either the faculty or the area residents.
Whereas the Marines were a working-class warrior cult and Army Special Forces had a southern, Confederate edge, coupled with an exotic Latino component, their Navy officer brethren were the math-science whizzes who, without necessarily being musclemen, nevertheless liked the athleticism of the outdoors. They were conservative only in the same moderate, nonideological way that business, science, and engineering graduates often were.
It was all in the element. Marines and Special Forces occupied ground, they fought physically and got dirty. The job of Navy officers was to remain undetected and then kill from over the horizon. It was a different sort of aggression, in which everything was reduced to math equations. There was so much technical knowledge to absorb that one-third of the time spent in Navy boot camp was in the classroom. Even on ship, nearly every officer was studying for one oral examination or another—in basic engineering, surface warfare, small-boat operations, helm safety, etc.—to help him or her advance in rank or function.
Looking at the nameplates on the doors of the officers’ staterooms told you just how much specialized training was involved: electronic warfare officer, main propulsion officer, missile strike officer, combat systems officer, signals intelligence warfare officer, navigator, gunno…Officers and chiefs usually addressed one another by acronyms that described their function. “How are you doing today, MA1?” “Very well, CSO.” MA1 was the first-class chief master-at-arms; CSO the combat systems officer. Chief Rader was called BMC, bosun’s mate chief; Paul Bischoff was addressed as QMC, or quartermaster chief. And so it went.
Just as every marine was a rifleman, every officer and sailor was a firefighter, because every combat situation aboard a warship was also a fire or flood situation, or both. Several times a week there were extensive fire drills where whole sections of the ship were sealed off from one another, and all the hatches and scuttles closed, as many a sailor lumbered around with a mask, fire helmet, and compressed air tank.
The Benfold loitered for many days around the Indian Ocean and Andaman Sea, doing “plane guard” for the Abe: the destroyer’s lights served as a point of reference for the carrier’s F-18 pilots on their maneuvers, even as the Benfold’s swimmers and small-boat units were ready to rescue a downed pilot. The Abe’s F-18 pilots were finally getting the training hours denied them during the tsunami aid effort.
Following the last air drill, the crew of the Benfold prepared to enter the Strait of Malacca, to help police that vital waterway, and to begin the voyage across the Pacific back to the ship’s home port of San Diego. First there was an all-hands-on-deck wash-down to the tune of rap and country-rock songs blasting over the loudspeaker. Chief Rader was everywhere cursing, and scrubbing with a small sponge obscure corners of the non-skid deck himself. “We’re not going to look like some rust bucket Russian ship when we pull into Singapore,” one of his fellow chiefs declared. “We want the Benfold to look like a young, strong, virile lady, in order to intimidate the enemy.”
The fifteen-hour passage down the Strait of Malacca to the pier at Singapore, where we would tie up for two days before continuing onward, began at 10 p.m. The narrow channel was the busiest shipping lane in the world, with easy-to-miss shoals and eddies everywhere. Capt. Hornbeck stationed himself on the bridge all night and the next day, until the Benfold docked.
On warships the bridge was traditionally a very formal place, where dress whites or khakis were worn and nobody was permitted without permission. In recent decades standards had gone down, with ship’s ball caps and coveralls becoming commonplace. Now tradition was coming back. Capt. Hornbeck required khakis and, in place of ball caps, combination hats: the formal service hats with visors and interchangeable white and khaki tops. Though Don Hornbeck was hard to get to know on account of a quiet and serious manner, I gradually learned that his crew genuinely liked him and his decisions. Said one warrant officer: “He’s one of the few captains who calls me by my name, rather than by ‘you fucking idiot or asshole.’” “He’s very calm, he doesn’t get angry,” another noncom said. On the bridge, he sat in the raised captain’s chair, from where he let the ensigns work out one navigational challenge after the other, inserting himself only when he saw they were close to panicking. Then he would say something like, “Come right rudder five degrees,” allowing them to move on to the next issue. “I remember when I was an ensign,” he whispered to me, “I’d get intimidated every time a big ship came within five miles.”
Lt. Comdr. Dunn, the executive officer, was less popular, but as he told me, it was his job to be so. As second-in-command, he handled the thankless administrative minutiae that permitted the captain to remain within big-think territory. The XO wrote the evaluations, inquired into infractions, checked the cleanliness of the berthings, wrote the plan of the day, and so forth.[45] He took all the hits so that the crew could revere their commander. The same division of labor existed within Army and Marine battalions.
To ride with a carrier strike group through a major international waterway was an unforgettable experience. There was a certain mystique about driving a ship through constrained waters with a high landmass on either side. As dusk fell the armada formed up in single file, each vessel about 4,500 yards distant from the other. First came the USS Shiloh, a Ticonderoga-class cruiser, bigger than a destroyer with a slightly larger crew; then the Abe itself, followed by the USS Shoup, another Arleigh Burke–class destroyer. After the Shoup came the Rainier, the support ship that had given us diesel fuel a few days earlier, with the Benfold guarding the rear. Somewhere lurking in the mouth of the strait or the nearby seas might also have been the USS Louisville, a Los Angeles–class, fast-attack nuclear submarine. Only a few people on the ship, including the captain and the signals intelligence shop, knew exactly where it was.
Even before we entered the strait proper, cargo ships, fishing boats, tugs that were hauling barges, and tankers bringing oil to the demographic and economic fleshpots of Asia were all over the rippling blue, lacquered surface of a level-one sea. The conning officer was clad in blue utilities, for Capt. Hornbeck had decreed that noncoms could navigate the ship just like the officers. “Steady on course 145 degrees,” said the helmsman, another noncom. “Very well,” the conning officer replied.
With darkness, the bridge took on the quiet, pulsing tension of an operating room, with twenty officers and noncoms peering out through binoculars and hovering around computer screens that displayed everything from rudder angles and shaft revolutions per minute to the minutes and seconds of latitude and longitude. One quartermaster, checking the depth meter and looking at a chart, remarked that a nearby shoal had the “shape of Shrek’s head.” A sprinkling of lights were always closing in on us from the blackened sea, only to pass to the sides of the Benfold as we overtook one tanker and fishing vessel after the other. Odd lights that didn’t make any sense at all had to be quickly resolved into a pattern. It was like a fast slalom run with dry thunder and stars overhead. The strike group constituted the big rigs of the road, barreling at ninety miles an hour down an interstate, overtaking passenger cars going at fifty. All night long, sailors in helmets and Kevlar vests manned .50-caliber light machine guns with night-vision goggles, prepared to shoot at any boat with hostile intentions. But the captain and executive officer had informed the crew that the strait was the workplace for many a poor fisherman. Therefore, small boats “would have to work hard to convince us of hostile intentions.”
A flaming sun rose over what Joseph Conrad called “the great thoroughfare of the East,” as the suggestive outlines of the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra appeared on the port and starboard sides, respectively. Little by little, officers and sailors began filtering up to the bridge for the morning watch, cleanly shaven for the first time in weeks and wearing their dress whites, which tradition demanded for entry into a port. By mid-morning, the khakis and blue coveralls and utilities had disappeared, and everyone was in white with battle and campaign ribbons on their chests. From a crew of grubby individualistic sailors, the Benfold became a dazzling movie set. Even the sailors behind the machine guns now wore whites under their green flak vests.
The Abe and the other ships soon began their sequential entry into the harbor, studded with tankers and buoys, as the skyline of Singapore appeared and the blue water turned to green.
The anchor crew was mustered by Chief Rader, while an officious ethnic Indian came on board from a pilot boat to guide the Benfold in. “All hands man the rails,” boomed the order over the loudspeakers, as the deck became braided with sailors standing at ease in their whites.[46] Thus began the sacred and timeless formality of an arrival by sea, as moving to the soul as my airport arrival into Singapore two weeks earlier had been soulless.
Tugs pulled and pushed the Benfold against the USS Shoup, which had arrived before us, the two destroyers separated from each other by giant rubber fenders known as “Yokohamas.” Rigidly controlled Singapore was not Yemen, where the USS Cole had been attacked. Moreover, the U.S. Navy was taking precautions it hadn’t always done before that incident. Bomb and mine squads swept the pier prior to the Benfold’s arrival. Singapore Navy corvettes were maintaining a small-boat exclusion zone, and Singapore Navy divers were inspecting nearby ferries and barges.
As the Benfold tied up, sailors raised the “first ensign” on its jack staff. Brought back into use after 9/11, the first ensign featured red-and-white stripes and a yellow rattlesnake emblazoned with the words “Don’t Tread on Me.” The pennant had been a symbol of resistance to the British during the Revolutionary War era. With the solemn ceremony complete, all the sailors not on watch changed into civilian clothes, streamed off the gangplank into waiting liberty buses for the journey downtown, and promptly got plastered.
It was the first time they had been off-ship for six weeks, when in late December they had gotten the word to steam out of Hong Kong toward tsunami-devastated Indonesia. It’s hard to explain, but there was something about being confined in tight quarters on a ship that made you want to start drinking the moment you were on shore. Just as when I had arrived in Dubai after weeks embedded with marines in Iraq, the first thing I noticed was the smell of expensive women’s perfume.
Though a sprawling city-state of 3.5 million, we all wound up at the same bars along the Singapore River—the very same riverfront where in Conrad’s day sailors caroused, swapped sea stories, and were ripped off by locals. Little had changed, despite the global Disneyland ambience of the high-priced restaurants and breweries. As drunk as everyone got, sailors were careful to address those of a higher rank with the prefix of “Mr.” I noticed a group of tourists aghast at the behavior of some of the chiefs, wrestling on a restaurant floor. They’d never imagine, I thought, that these clowns without social skills could, when sober, deliver a briefing on future threats in the Pacific more incisive than many an academic.
After two more days of bacchanalia we departed, en route across the Pacific to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, and then to San Diego. Free from the pier, the Benfold steamed southeast out of the Strait of Malacca, then turned northeast into the South China Sea, between Vietnam and Malaysian Sarawak on the island of Borneo.
Officers’ Call at 7:10 a.m. the next morning, February 8, 2005, found us in the heart of the South China Sea. Tropical rain clouds, a darker steel gray than the ship, slid across the beam as rain sprayed lightly on the deck and we all stumbled a bit to keep our balance. Quartermaster Chief Paul Bischoff had arrived a few minutes early to smoke a cigarette with the other chiefs and savor the view. He was smiling. “Finally I feel like I’m on an ocean,” he told me. There was no serious weather, just the normal rocking generated by a jagged, foam-encrusted sea, now that the Benfold was a reasonable distance from land. The pleasure cruise was over, as were the hangovers from Singapore. The tilting of the ship intensified, and taking a shower became an acrobatic feat. Chairs and other objects had to be secured with bungee cords. A quiet, lugubrious mood set in, as sailors went about their work and chores: sub-surface warfare, air defense, and communications drills; urinalysis tests; course corrections for the route out of the South China Sea and through the Philippines. The list went on. The pressure on people never ceased.
Late afternoon of the following day saw us exit the South China Sea into the Balabac Strait, between the northern tip of Borneo and the Philippine island of Palawan. But before entering the strait there was another Un-Rep, to take on 200,000 gallons of fuel. The Shiloh, the Shoup, and the Abe also took on fuel, the Abe a whopping 800,000 gallons for its fighter jets and surveillance planes. The great big gas station in the South China Sea was the USNS Tippecanoe, a six-hundred-foot-long oiler. It was quite a pageant: the cruiser Shiloh and the destroyer Benfold on either side of the Tippecanoe, with their fuel lines attached in the heaving sea, and the destroyer Shoup and the carrier Lincoln close behind, waiting their turn at the pump.
The Balabac Strait brought us into the Sulu Sea, amid the various island groups of the Philippines: Palawan to the northwest, the central Philippine islands to the northeast, and Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago to the east and southeast, where I had been eighteen months earlier with Army Special Forces. Light machine guns were manned topside, for this was the lair of the Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah terrorist groups. The USS Cole incident was never far from people’s minds, though, as one petty officer with counterterrorism experience remarked, “All I’d need to do is spray bullets from an assault rifle at our radar array, and I would do enough damage to mess up the entire combat system for a while.” Truly, the exposed architecture of these destroyers was not suited for an age of unconventional attacks. The Benfold was like a clunky old software program with too many upgrades on it.
In fact, the U.S. Navy was at a fork in the road, and it had to take both directions at once. On the one hand, a street-fighting, green water Navy was required for littoral combat along terrorist-infested coastlines, such as the southern Philippines and the Indonesian archipelago. A new class of fast, small ships was being built for that purpose. Contrarily, the rise of the Chinese Navy, coupled with tensions in the Taiwan Strait and the Korean Peninsula, meant that a World War II–type sea battle, made faster and more furious by the latest missile and electronic technology, was also a possibility in the worst-case-scenario world of the military. Thus, as soon as the Benfold was out of the tsunami disaster zone, both officers and sailors busied themselves with war games.
The war game conducted the day we entered the Balabac Strait was typical. Political tensions inside China (Country Orange) over Taiwan (Country Blue) had led to an exchange of fire just south of the Taiwan Strait, between the Chinese and Taiwanese navies and air forces. The nearby Abe strike group, including the Benfold, could not help being drawn in. Confusion, as much as anything, ramped up the violence, for it was hard to know, as one officer remarked, “who’s who in the zoo.” The Chinese had fired a missile barrage at Taiwanese ships that were also vaguely in the direction of the U.S. strike group, causing an American plane to take out a Chinese one, leading, in turn, to an attack on the Benfold.
The drama played out in the CIC, or combat information center, where the TAO, or tactical actions officer, led the response. Though it all happened via headphones and computer keyboards, the stress level was acute because a wrong decision would lead to a catastrophic missile strike on the ship. Programmers in the CIC wore flash gear—semi-fire-retardant hoods and gloves—in case their screens exploded. Imagine the anxiety in a cockpit when a plane was facing serious mechanical difficulties and the pilot was trying to calmly work through the problem with his co-pilot. It might have been a game, yet it felt real. As one of the chiefs said later, “The pucker factor was strong,” a reference to the tight assholes in the CIC.
Everything was spoken in code and acronyms, in order to communicate as much information as possible with as few words as possible. Naval warfare was divided into five areas: air, surface, sub-surface, strike, and electronic. Each of those areas had its own commander (or “watchstander”) in the CIC, who spoke to the TAO to convey important news; or to request a judgment from him that the commanders or their pre-programmed computer systems could not make. While the TAO was being fed information vertically from the five watchstanders, he also had to communicate horizontally with the other ships in the strike group, and with watchstanders elsewhere on the Benfold regarding damage on board. He had seconds, not minutes, to make decisions. Being a TAO was a perishable skill, like speaking a foreign language. The TAO was usually a middle-level officer in his late twenties or early thirties.
The TAO’s job was further complicated because American naval ROEs, or rules of engagement, manifested the subtlety of a new cold war. There were legal issues regarding when the TAO could and could not fire. Thus, he had to refer some decisions to Capt. Hornbeck, something unnecessary in an all-out, World War II–style struggle. It was like conducting an orchestra that every few seconds had to play different music. The object was more deception than aggression: getting the other side to shoot first so as to gain the political advantage, without having to absorb the hit.
The TAO that day was Lt. Scott Wilbur, an Annapolis graduate from Wellfleet, Massachusetts.[47] After the drill, he told me, “Sometimes I was not getting enough information from the watchstanders, other times I was getting too much. It’s all about proper communication. Identifying the threat and applying the restrictive ROEs were the hardest parts, since once you decide you can kill someone, it’s easy.”
“If we don’t communicate well, we die. It’s that simple,” another lieutenant emphasized.
Early the next day we reached the other side of the Sulu Sea and entered the heart of the Philippines, between Mindanao and the smaller island of Negros. The calm sea was like milky satin as dolphins played on the starboard side of the ship. Later, in the Bohol Sea, we were enveloped by a fog that continued to strengthen as the strike group entered the Surigao Strait, which, in turn, led into Leyte Gulf. The steep mountains of Leyte peeked through the mist: watercolor brushstrokes only. I strained for a glimpse, as though looking into the past. Everybody on the bridge knew the significance of where we were; the captain had already explained it over the loudspeakers.
Leyte Gulf was where Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur made his promised “return” to the Philippines on October 20, 1944, after being forced to withdraw from Corregidor two and a half years earlier. Gen. MacArthur had walked onto the beach at Leyte from an offshore landing boat, almost knee-deep in water. It might have been the most famous staged photo op of World War II. The campaign at Leyte and the Surigao Strait would mark the first real breach of the inner defensive line of the Japanese Empire: a line that, besides the Philippines, included Formosa, Okinawa, and the home islands of Japan. Close-quarters combat ensued in Leyte Gulf and the area around it from October 1944 through December: at sea, on the beaches, and in the jungly hills. The cost was 15,584 American casualties, including 3,504 killed, and the death of 49,000 Japanese troops.7 From Leyte, the Americans had gone on to capture the main Philippine island of Luzon.
The Abraham Lincoln strike group was now driving through a graveyard of American and Japanese sailors. In the last fierce naval engagement of World War II, six American ships and twenty-six Japanese ones were sunk in the Surigao Strait and adjacent waters. Never again would the old “tin can” warships play such a role in war.8 With the majestic gray silhouettes of the Shiloh and the Abe a few miles ahead of us, it was as though the strike group were an honor guard in silent procession through these ghostly waters.
The Benfold began to roll and plunge as the Philippines receded behind us, and we entered the vast Pacific, which between here and the Marianas island chain was called the Philippine Sea. Soon we were in waters 20,000 feet deep, with the surface resembling a granite and white-capped mountain range of steep cliffs and dizzying canyons, in the perpetual motion of a level-seven sea. You felt every movement of the ship. Still, the Pacific, as the name suggested, was less unruly than the Atlantic, where sailors had memories of empty mess halls because so many of the crew could not get up from their racks, except to vomit.
Beyond the Marianas, the Pacific was a thundering, faceless, hard-to-pin-down immensity, empty of human habitation with the exception of scattered islands. Unlike the Philippine Sea, here it had no name. Between the Marianas and Hawaii, a stretch of over three thousand miles, it was simply the Pacific, identified by the Mid-Pacific Mountains that sat on the ocean floor. It was a landscape you could imagine only with a depth meter, as when the Benfold passed over the Mariana Trench and the instruments revealed that the seafloor lay more than seven miles below.
Standing watch on the bridge one especially turbulent night—when waves crashed in spiraling formations on the forecastle, and granules of salt lay in your hair and everywhere topside—was Ensign Zephyr Riendeau of Colebrook, New Hampshire, with whom I shared a stateroom. Zeph was a dark-complexioned and intense young officer, with an engineering degree from Drexel University in Philadelphia. I had watched him stumble into the stateroom before dawn for two nights running. He had had bridge watch throughout those nights, despite a grueling daytime drill schedule that included several “murder boards”—when fellow officers fired technical questions at you, to prepare you for exams. Truly, the Navy officer corps was a world where a lot of high achievers put tremendous pressure on themselves, and on one another: the Ivy League with uniforms and a strong NASCAR following. Ensign Riendeau had barely slept in days.
“Why do you do it?” I asked.
“I could have a well-paying job with a company like DuPont, and be home every night. But life is supposed to have meaning,” he said simply. “Whenever I’m ready to collapse on the bridge at three a.m., I think of the chiefs’ retirement ceremony and the clanging bell that declares, ‘While others slept, you stood the watch.’”
Officers have a similar ceremony when they retire, but for some reason it is that of a senior chief, with decades in the service, that really hits home. After all, officers know many honors and compensations. But a chief has only the honor bestowed upon him by the brotherhood of seamen, the kind of honor of which Conrad writes.
The retiring chief will walk between two lines of side boys (enlisted seamen like himself) while a bell is rung. A folded American flag will then be passed from one side boy to another until it is handed to the chief, as his wife and children look on. Then a poem about “Old Glory” is recited:
I have been soiled, burned, torn and trampled on the streets of countries that I have helped to set free.
It does not hurt for I am invincible…
Short speeches follow. At the end, there is the reading of “The Watch”:
For twenty years
This sailor stood the watch.
While some of us were in our bunks at night
This sailor stood the watch…
He stood the watch for twenty years
He stood the watch so that we, our families and
Our fellow countrymen could sleep soundly in safety,
Each and every night
Knowing that a sailor stood the watch….
Then the bell rings one final time, just as it has rung for high-ranking officers and dignitaries coming aboard a ship or going onshore since the 1500s, since the days of the great Spanish, Dutch, French, and British navies. That last ring signals that the retiring chief can now, too, be thus honored, and that he finally stands relieved of watch duty. It is the only time that sailors will see a chief cry.
The sea journey from the Marianas to the Pearl Harbor Naval Station in Hawaii, where I would leave the ship before it continued on to San Diego, took ten days. Yet, it seemed longer as Sunday, February 20, lasted for a full two days, because of crossing the International Date Line late one night and having to set the clock back twenty-three hours. For those on the bridge, one break in the monotony was the appearance of gulls when we passed within twenty miles of Wake Island. Otherwise, it was more Un-Reps, oral examinations, and fire and engineering drills that went on unabated from dawn till dusk. I overheard one deck seaman complain to his chief, “I’ve only slept two hours in the last three days.” One of the exercises concerned an imaginary fuel leak in the Dantesque horror of the engine room, when the electricity was deliberately switched off and we stumbled around on catwalks in the dark in 105-degree temperature. With us were test evaluators from the carrier, who had come aboard by helicopter to judge the performance of the Benfold’s own evaluators. “If you think we’re being anal about this, you’d be right,” one evaluator from the carrier told me. By now channel fever had set in: no one could sleep because of the anticipation of seeing spouses, girlfriends, boyfriends, and so on for the first time after a five-month sea voyage.
Yet the Pacific would not end. For many days there was nothing to look at but foaming water with eight-foot swells. Your mattress during this period functioned more like a trampoline than a bed, as the bow kept dipping to the waterline only to fly back up one or two stories above it. To know that most of the planet was undulating ocean was one thing; to tangibly experience it another. Usually the ship was traveling at twenty-five knots directly into the wind, making the relative wind speed on the bridge wings around forty knots. It was painful to go outside, despite the magnificence of the sunrises and the sight of the Southern Cross crawling over the horizon around two in the morning.
Along the way to Hawaii we passed the strike group of another Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, the Carl Vinson, going in the opposite direction to relieve us.[48] A day did not go by without a big American naval presence in the Pacific Rim.[49]
ТЕЛЕГРАМКанал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками
Книжный Вестник
Бот для удобного поиска книг (если не нашлось на сайте)
Поиск книг
Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах
Любовные романы
О психологии, саморазвитии и личностном росте
Саморазвитие
Детективы и триллеры, все новинки
Детективы
Фантастика и фэнтези, все новинки
Фантастика
Отборные классические книги
Классика
ВКОНТАКТЕБиблиотека с любовными романами, которая наверняка придётся по вкусу женской части аудитории
Любовные романы
Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров
Фантастика
Самые популярные книги в формате фб2
Топ фб2
книги