30 April 2008
 
Attica

Secretary Gates, that gray man in the big job, announced yesterday that his Navy has temporarily added a second aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf as a "reminder" to Iran.
 
That is what the great machines are sometimes. Reminders.
 
I shared some of the angst with the crew of the Nimitz last night on the television deployment. The length of the show, hour upon hour, is actually a marvelous primer for what the experience is like, particularly the recurring presence of some irritating young faces with fiercely-held opinions.
 
That is what deployment is about. Living in small places with incompatible people on extended missions to “remind” people of the consequences of incompatible conduct.
 
The television Nimitz is locked in time. For this ten-hour marathon, the ship and its swarming Hornet aircraft are buzzing impotently above a changing ground struggle in Iraq.
 
It is a blunt instrument not directly applicable to the summer of 2005, on the eve of the great al-Quida surge in al Anbar Province, and before the surge that seems to have seized the west back from the foreign Sunni fighters.
 
You can see the fatigue on the faces from the existential situation: raw power restrained, no bombs dropped in hundreds of combat sorties. With the film crew now so omnipresent on the ship, the guard is down, and tired people are speaking frankly. We all get tired and bitter out there, and cranky when small things go awry in the rhythm of numbness.
 
I recall a visit by a USO troupe to a ship out in the Gulf one time. It was intended to perk us up, and I think it was an entourage that included a couple Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. I saw one of the women, All-American in her pert youth, and was shaken out of my numbness and into a profound funk.
 
The troupe was onboard for a couple hours and then off on the COD to the beach. With their departure I began again to count hours and days again in the grim knowledge that life could not start again for months; no caress, no touch, no tenderness.
 
That sort of sensory deprivation is not true on the warships of the modern Navy. Women are fully integrated into the crews, though not in numbers that are anywhere near parity. I am proud that the service has implemented a complex social experiment in a heavy industrial environment. It was a challenge, and it is not over.
 
I knew years ago though that it could be done when I was on Nimitz a decade ago. Women had been selected for the first time to fly strike aircraft in regular Fleet squadrons. The Hornet, all digital and fly-by-wire, did not require brute strength to horse around in the sky like the hulking Tomcat. On one training mission launched from Nimitz to strike targets in the Nevada desert, severe weather and towering thunderstorms blocked the route.
 
Only two pilots made it to the target, since most of the strike package had to divert or wave it off. Both of the ones who made it were consummate professionals. Both hit the range successfully. The most accurate hit was debriefed later in Mission Planning. It had been a hairy flight dodging the thunderheads. The pilot was carrying a helmet bag and smelling of JP-5. Her nails, when the Nomex gloves came off, were painted hot pink.
 
I happened to be riding Nimitz as a senior evaluator in the final exam before the battle group deployment to the Persian Gulf. The final exercise was complex and heavily scripted. The effort was real enough, though largely fictional. There was no question about whether the ship would deploy, regardless of how we nit-picked their performance.
 
Our racks were crap, since we were just visiting. I hung out in Mission Planning, trying to stay out of the way, with side trips to Flag Plot and Ship’s Signals Exploitation and CIC.
 
Between bouts of activity I would go to Attica to smoke. The television depiction does not deal much with the issue. Perhaps the Navy has succeeded in tamping down the use of tobacco. They certainly have made it a hassle. Riding all the PACFLT carriers as we did, there was a chance to observe the behavior modification on the crew as practiced by each of the Commanding Officers.

I can read you the warning on the pack of smokes on my desk right here, so don't start with me. 
 
In 1979 in the Fleet, a pack of Marlboros went everywhere with me, rack and work and dirty-shirt wardroom. They cost a quarter at the Ship’s Store, and you could smoke everywhere except in the magazine and the flight deck. We did. In an endless continuum of gray, it was colored with smoke of the same color. We must have had three or four Class Alpha fires a day, normally when watches changes, and the still smoldering contents of a butt-kit were dumped into a shit-can.
 
It was only prohibited at General Quarters, and the sigh of relief when we secured from drill was palpable when the 1MC made the call “The smoking lamp is lit in all authorized spaces.”
 
I could still smoke in the Mission Planning spaces on Forrestal in 1990, thought the noose on the tobacco habit was tightening like emphysema.
 
By the later 1990s, smoking was banned in all enclosed spaces, and it had always been forbidden on the flight deck. That left the weather decks as the only places where smokers could go. Since the Navy, bless its little pointed head, had not seen fit to ban the practice altogether, it was left up to the individual CO to determine the conditions, times and locations where people could light up.
 
There is no agony like serving at sea under a Skipper who is a jerk. Aircraft Carrier Commanding Officers share many characteristics. The weeding-out process is severe, since selection to Flag Rank is nearly assured if nothing goes horrible wrong in the two-year period of absolute accountability for five thousand twenty-something kids. Accordingly, some Skippers are a little anal.
 
On one of the older boats we rode, the Skipper had passed “martinet” and gone straight to “asshole.” He decreed that smoking would only be permitted on the fantail, only when the ship was secured from flight quarters, and that full underway replenishment gear be worn: harness, lifejacket, the works. A First Class Petty Officer was assigned to keep things moving at the head of the line.
 
Worse than prison. The line of tired kids sometimes stretched the entire length of the hangar bay, the eyes showing quiet desperation.
 
Nimitz had another answer, and more humane. On the 0-2 level amidships the catwalk below the flight deck was enclosed with grenade mesh welded to the steel. The area was narrow and stretched thirty or forty frames in length. At night, the light was provided by red navigation lights.
 
At night, the scene was more eerie than the Casbah. Women were in the Fleet in numbers by then, and jammed together in the narrow space the brightly colored flight deck jerseys were muted, couples huddled where they could against the steel in the crimson glow, eyes hooded.
It was a Kasbah of intrigue and fatigue, and the deployment had not even begun.
 
On the carriers, aviation personnel apply non-nautical terminology to just about everything, mostly to irritate the officers who do not fly, and are responsible for keeping things ship-shape. The flight deck is sometimes called “The attic.”
 
Between the grenade wire and the dim red light, it was not a great leap for theNimitz smokers to name their haven after another place of enforced seclusion:
 
“Attica.”
 
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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