Untitled Document

The Wine Dark Sea

The Terrible Accident

07 NOV: I went to bed about 0330 this morning. Too much caffeine in my veins for sleep to come. I lay in a strange fugue state in my rack, trying to read a novel.

I lit a cigarette in the darkness and my room-mate woke up to tell me the atmosphere was a little intense.

I crushed it out in a foul humor just about the time they called away "Man Overboard."

I first heard it reverberate through the steel overhead from the Air Boss's flight deck 5MC as he shouted to launch the alert helicopter. They thought they had a real one: The Captain morning explained on the 1MC that the fantail watch saw a light go over the stern and vanish in to the blackness of the twenty-five knot wake astern.

The Watch did the usual outstanding job; which is to say, if I was blown over in the blackass night, I would be deeply and eternally grateful that the kid wasn't asleep in the paint locker and was instead doing his job and peering resolutely in to the gloom.The helo skimmed in concentric search pattern as the Thorne and FID conducted man overboard muster.

We did a pretty good job and all but a couple sleepyheads had been tallied within twenty-five minutes, and their shipmates found the last stragglers in not much over a half hour.

The numbers tallied, the ships rang up twenty-five knots again and re-commenced the race over the horizon. I awoke bleary at quarter to nine. At the stroke of nine it turned into ten o'clock with the time zone shift and suddenly it was lunchtime without the luxury of sleeping late. I crashed though a quick shower and headed up to Mission Planning to unlock the tippy-top secret materials for the happy planners and the eighteen hour day began.

I am not a happy camper. We got the last of the seven contingency mining plans out late this afternoon and the Grownups began an assault to standardize the first twenty messages we sent out two weeks ago.

I came into an ugly black humor spawned of frustration and fatigue. All those hours during the three week delay I spent driving around Jacksonville with a blue canvas briefcase loaded to gunwales full of America's most sensitive war plans was essentially for nothing.

So the bottom line is that now we are back to the drawing board and the planning must be completed. Pronto. Without them we will be naked when we get to the Med.

It is one-thirty as I write, and my young airwing officers are pumping through the first three contingency plans again. Everyone is tired and I had to send the first rewrite back. At this rate, we will probably go through another forty or fifty rewrites of the original thirty-two, just in time to rewrite them to the Admiral's standards so we can send them to the Mandarins at COMSIXTHFLT.

So I figure we have got to do these things for another 80 iterations or so. We had diskettes everywhere, all filled with an undetermined variety of the four©five rewrites we have done just to get this far. I insisted on an administrative safety stand down of about four hours to get our shit together and threw all the pilots out Mission Planning.

I don't think I made many friends today. Nor, in point of fact, do I particularly care. This system completely sucks, top to bottom.

Shit. It is way too soon to be this burned out. I'm not impressed with the level of participation by the squadrons...or some other folks, for that matter. Maybe there is just too much stuff to do.I feel the pungent sense of loss for my family hard for the first time. I am looking at the picture of the boys over my word processor and I have to swallow hard. They are standing tall, both dressed in little sport coats and positively beaming.

God, I miss them. High point of the day: went outside for a walk from the catwalk above my stateroom back to the island. Wind was gusting down the flight deck to between 50-60KTS. Grey day. The gale blew my rolled-up sleeves down. 72 steel degrees.

Not winter yet. No flying. Plenty of time to pace up and down under the florescent lights in Mission Planning.

Had a cup 'o soup for late lunch,skipped lunch and dinner in the wardroom and had two kraut dogs and a bowl of popcorn with hot sauce for dinner. Lets see how fucked up tomorrow is going to be. Four days to Rota and five to the MED.The air of unreality is exceptional. I have a hard time believing this is all happening. Maybe when the haze of tiredness eases off I will see this strange and malevolent cloud dissipate.

08 Nov. It is really the ninth as I write. It is 0530 and we have worked through the night again. Scuttlebutt has it the President will be on the ship prior to the Saltwater Summit with Gorbechev off Malta. That would drive a schedule change and would pull us out of Exercise African Eagle.

I would love to meet the former youngest Naval Aviator if he comes.

Haircut tomorrow at fifteen hundred just in case.

There was a terrible accident today on the second deck. Heard them call away "Medical Emergency, Medical Emergency" on the 1MC just after noon. I didn't hear them say it was a drill.

Later they called away "Now activate the Walking Bloodbank," which is a program by which selected blood donors race down to Sickbay and roll up their sleeves.

I was walking down to the Ship's Store and got stopped by the Master at Arms while walking up forward. I climbed the ladder to the hangar bay and went forward about seventy frames and down again. The Store was on the right side of the accident, whatever it was, and I got a $4.25 Seiko watch so I wouldn't have to bang up the Rolex on the steel of the bulkheads. Later, when I came back into the carrier intel center, I saw the Ship's Company Gang huddled around the computer drafting the OPREP to CINCLANTFLT.

The accident was more grotesque than I could imagine. A young sailor was conducting preventative maintenance on one of the five-hundred pound armored hatches when the thing crashed down and crushed his head between the hatch and the knife edge lip.

At last report, he was breathing mechanically. Body in good shape. Brain dead.

We are just over half way across the Atlantic and storming on toward Gibraltar. It occurs to me that I have been outside for five minutes in the last week.

10 NOV: More blur. Bed for a couple hours at 0730. I've never been so tired in my life. Nothing is right. All the messages are fucked up. I've been working on these things for five weeks and every time someone looks at a target plan they add something. Every time DCAG looks at one our standard format changes. On one revision we are busy taking all the "zeros" out of the east longitude notations. On the next we are putting them back in.

We typists are slap-happy. The planning teams- mostly squadron CO's and XO's- are cranky. They are trapped in Mission Planning and they aren't flying or sleeping and things aren't fun. The air conditioning can't handle the number of people and it reeks of sweat and tobacco and the peculiar Army-Navy Surplus smell of all old military things.

Same agenda as yesterday. Phone calls starting at eleven or noon or something. I'm woozy and nothing makes much sense. I'm back hunched over the typewriter for most of the day. I can work for about twenty minutes and then get up for more coffee and smoke a cigarette with whoever is hanging out in CVIC admin by the front door. The atmosphere is too thick with sweat and tension in Mission Planning to add smoke.

I stopped by the Air Wing admin office to check my box. I see the Flight Surgeon and he looks tired, too. He kept the Airman with the crushed head alive all night.

He said the kid is in a vegetative state. His life maintenance significantly exercised the Ship's medical capabilities. It would have been a field day for folks needing organs back home.

Doc says: "He tried to leave in a bag instead of a helo but we kept him."

As it turned out, when he got to the Naval hospital at Rota, they let him die. I guess they didn't have as much invested in him as the Doc did, and turned it over to nature.