I was happily lit up from the vodka I inhaled at the ritual Folks At The Railroad Track End of the Subdivision Happy Hour.” Two of us from the street were heading out to the Forrestal that night, so the gaiety was slightly muted by the realization that the crushing schedule was beginning to roll over us and would soon swamp these precious summer interludes as Cruise got closer and closer.

Moose is one of our two Carrier Air Group Landing Signals Officers- or CAG LSO, in our clipped parlance. He is a happy A-7 driver by trade and a generally unhappy Administrative Officer by assignment. Like all of us, he has at least three jobs on a good day. On a bad day, the little jobs rise up in a tidal surge and wash over us in a wave of screaming minutiae. Me, I’m the Air Wing Intelligence Officer, Security Manager, Top Secret Control Officer, ADP Officer, Naval Warfare Publications and a couple more I can’t remember at the moment.

Mostly, I’m the Spy.

Moose was doing about the same things I had been doing twenty minutes earlier when I rolled up into his driveway. His wife and new daughter were on the couch looking askance at the pile of flight gear piled up by the door. I demanded a cold lager as toll for the road and with a flurry of thrown kit bags we piled into the Beetle and were roaring down the highway to the coast. It being Sunday there was much traffic headed east toward the beaches. Having Moose and his gear in the car made the ride more stable than normal as we rocked over the Buckman Bridge and flew down J. Turner Butler Boulevard toward Mayport. We were out of beer and good ideas long before we swept up to the sentry at the gate to the Naval Air Station. Things were starting to look very serious.

The guard waved us through with a minimum of fuss and we preceded sedately down the main drag toward the carrier piers. We passed the Destroyers and Cruisers rafted out in the basin to our right and the silent rows of helicopters on the ramp to our left. The Big Boats are parked all the way at the back of the base, past the runways and adjacent to the main shipping channel of the St. John’s River.

Forrestal was going to sea to accomplish a few pieces of basic airplane business and would not be accompanied by the usual carnival that goes along with a full-blown Battle Group deployment. The Small Boys would rest in port this week, and I imagined all the midwatches settling into the night, scribbling in the green logbooks, reading old f***books and letting the babble of the TV mask the low mechanical breathing of cold-iron ships. On FID, they would be climbing down into the boilers to light then off in an hour or so to have pressure up to sail on the morning tide.

The VW’s oversized pipes burbled as we rounded the turn onto the Carrier Pier and Forrestal loomed before us. I always impressed every time I see a Carrier up close. They are ugly and massive and bristle with radar arrays, masts, antennas and mysterious lights. They are huge and ominous and sometimes they are even home. The two-year ride on USS Midway, (CV-41) had acquainted me with World War II standards for shipboard life. This time, the big steel thing was USS Forrestal (CV-59), first of the supercarriers.

She was named for the first Secretary of Defense, James V. Forrestal, whose life had some remarkable echoes of the reorganization of the American defense establishment. In addition to “first” Secretary Forrestal was also the last of the cabinet-level Navy positions that had existed since the adoption of the Constitution. She was commissioned in 1955 as the first supercarrier. That was six years after SECDEF Forrestal hurled himself from the tower at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. She was lead in her class, which included Saratoga, Ranger and Independence

Tonight, I was going to move onto the big grey house where I would spend the bulk of the next nine months. We had to pass two more ID checks to get close and the last guard was kind enough to let me drive right up to the foot of the brow that led to the Quarterdeck. There are two means of access to a Carrier in port; the Quarterdeck is where the Officer of the Deck (OOD) stands his watch and where the officers come and go. The Enlisted Brow consists of two massive ramps that lead up to Elevator Three and there is an endless ant-like stream of dungaree-clad troops humping supplies and duffel bags up into the Hangar Bay.

Moose manhandled the bags out of the back seat and I got lucky and found a parking space in the second row back from the security zone. Since we were going on our little jaunt without our Carrier Group Staff and some of the Wing there was actually a place to park on the pier while we were gone. I hated to leave the car out in the salt breeze, but there wasn’t a real good alternative. I walked back to the foot of the brow, picked up my bags, took a deep breath and started up the ladder.

Moose was already at the Quarterdeck and saluting the OOD when I got there. I fumbled around with my duffel bag on my shoulder and found my ID card, showed it to him and managed a salute without quite dropping the bag on his feet.

“Sir!” I said crisply: “I report my return aboard!”

He waved us through with a smirk. He had seen dozens of us show up in about the same condition that night and realized a certain accommodation to the usual standards of good order would have to be tolerated. Twelve steps and a watertight hatch later and we stood in Hangar Bay One. To my left the great empty cavern stretched nearly eight hundred feet. We would not get our airplanes until the fly-on tomorrow and the great void dwarfed the dungaree clad humans who wandered back and forth.

The great elevator door was closed to my left. Upon it was a huge brass plaque which held the names of the 137 men who died in the flight deck inferno on that awful day in the Gulf of Tonkin. They still show the platform videotape of that horror in Shipboard Fire Fighting School. The sequence begins with a flight deck filled with aircraft fully armed for the morning Alpha Strike over the North. Suddenly, a Zuni missile slung on a waiting airplane accidentally fires into the densely packed mass of machinery. Seconds pass as a single Chief Petty Officer races alone toward the mounting conflagration and then the sudden detonation of 500LB bombs that blossom like awful flowers on the black deck. Pieces of airplanes (and worse) emerge periodically from the conflagration.

That fire went on for a day. There were many heroes and long rows of the canvas-shrouded dead on the hangar bay. These were sobering images and not ones I wanted to entertain at the moment. Moose was already trundling off forward to the tunnel that leads through Air Intermediate Maintenance. I hurried and caught up to him at the portside ladder that snakes up to the 02 level where the Air Wing staterooms are located. Lugging my bags up the narrow ladder brought back memories of the USS Midway and the humid summer weather of the Japanese when I carried a hundred cases of soda from the pier to the ready room to slake the thirst of a fighter squadron about to deploy to the North Arabian Sea.

The memories were intensified by the smell. That is perhaps the most pervasive of the senses when you think about it. The odors of the carrier rise like a wave around you. Hot Oil. Old cleaning solution. Liquid wax. Decaying insulation. Ozone from the zillion miles of cable in the races that hang like ganglia from the overhead of every passageway. Through it all, underlying and unifying is the ever-present kerosine perfume of Jet Propulsion Fuel Number Five, or JP-5. We put it in our airplanes, and, through the maze of interconnected pipes and holding tanks, we shower in it and drink it with our coffee.

These ships are dimensions unto themselves. Steel islands of America. Small town-sized with bakeries, gas stations, hospitals, video games and a TV station. No portholes; nearly all of us live like moles in the endless miles of tunnels. We get to the top of the ladder and I follow Moose down one of them to a little converted bunkroom called the Stateroom Assignments Office.

The place was in cheerful disarray. In accordance with venerable tradition, the furniture was clearly scrounged from other offices and some past budget year. The paint has been through several not altogether harmonious iterations and the coffee pot is cooking some particularly vile black substance that might originally have been coffee. The service counter is battered aluminum. The sailor on watch is disheveled and in wrinkled dungarees. He has been dealing with the arriving throng of happy campers and produces a grimy variant of the universal Navy green log-book, this one marked with the words “Key Log” on the front.

I identify myself and gain the key to compartment 02-33-1L. Happily, this means I am already almost home. My stateroom is the next one down the passageway on the starboard side. I kick my duffel down the tiled passageway and trace my finger over the blue plastic plaque that identifies the place as the residence of the CAG Spy. I insert the key and the door swings open to darkness. I hit the light switch and the compartment is illuminated by the pale florescent glow.

“Chop”- short for the traditional “Porkchop” sobriquet which identifies all Naval Supply Officers- peers owlishly from the upper rack. He fumbles for his glasses and says “Spy! Welcome Home!”

I drop my bags on the deck. “I suppose it’s too late to expect bar service in this place?”

I crashed around for about an hour, ensuring that Chop’s sleep was destroyed, opening drawers and generally marveling at the size of the compartment. When I last ventured over the bounding waves, I was a LTJG and entitled to a rack in a four-man stateroom, one drawer, half a hanging locker and shared use of a desk. There I passed an interesting though somewhat claustrophobic twenty-four months. Now, with my exalted rank I was entitled to a plush two-man room. I regarded the ancient carpet remnant with satisfaction and periodically bounced on the coffin-sized lower bunk to which my seniority entitled me. I had an entire hanging locker to myself and no less than four complete drawers. I banged my head on the medicine cabinet door and played with the TV set.

It was two in the morning before I got my eyes closed and let the sounds of the living ship lull me to sleep. The 1MC, or Voice of God, cut in at 0600 sharp.

“Reveille, Reveille! All hands turn to and trice up!” I hear boots moving along the passageway outside and the red glow of the night lighting which filters through the air vent changes to white. Light leaks around the oval outline of the door. I have a small hangover and the wool blanket which swaddles me is enormously comforting. I’m not ready for this. I resolve to skip breakfast and roll over and get another twenty minutes sleep before the insistent reminder of a full bladder forces the issue.

I find my khaki pants and venture out in search of the head. The passageway outside the door turns out to be the mustering place for the S-5 division. A dozen sailors line the bulkheads, some cutting up and some sprawled unconscious on the tile. I put on my grim and purposeful face and push my way through, going thwartship like I know what I am doing.

I get lucky. There is an Officer’s head only thirty feet down the passage. It smells like they all do; a combination of urine, disinfectant, saltwater flush and ancient corruption. It works, though, and is as clean as you can expect a thirty-six-year-old steel men’s room to be.

I am already a big winner. I have found nearly fifty percent of everything I will really need on this ship: my bed and the head. Once I find the wardroom and my General Quarters station there are really no further requirements. In fact, some of the Junior Officers on my first tour-maintained GQ in their beds and had reduced their needs to only the first three functional locations.

Returning to my stateroom, I had a powerful desire to return to the rack and stay right there where it was safe. Regrettably, the first order of business was to find at least three different ways to get out of the compartment to fresh air and learn them well enough that I had a fighting chance to find them in smokey darkness if that was required. Nothing for it, but to do it. I shot the shit with Chop and half listened to Connie Chung on the CBS Morning News. I did forty pushups before donning my wash khakis (cotton burns, but does not melt) and put on my brown leather shoes (ditto). Attired in the at-sea uniform of the day I completed my ensemble with an Air Wing ballcap, since we were still in port and you have to be covered on the flight deck and in the hangar bay. I couldn’t stall any longer. It was time to go to work.

For someone who so desperately hates starting new jobs I have found a career that makes a semi-annual practice of it. There is an awful feeling of disorientation when you first arrive in the rabbit’s warren that is the Carrier. Nothing makes sense; ladders go up and down at random. Decades of ship modifications have created passageways that end sometimes in blank welds. All turns appear the same and claustrophobia builds as you wander in the looking glass world.

Having been lost on six of these beasts, I had a working knowledge on how to crack the code. I can read compartment numbers and there is a general method to the madness. I knew the Carrier Intelligence Center (CVIC) was located vaguely amidships on the 03 level. Clutching my briefcase, I wandered aft till I found a ladder and clambered up. I peered around and discovered I was well forward, up by frame 20, so I knew I had to work my way aft to about frame 199. I followed the passageway in that direction, stepping carefully over a knee-knocker rib every twenty feet. Walking past a fire-fighting station I saw an arrow that pointed to ‘port’ (left) saying “Flight Deck”.

Last chance to forestall the inevitable. I followed the arrow and stepped over some aviation fuel hoses and poked my head out of a water-tight door into the Florida dawn. I found myself in the starboard catwalk looking down at the pier. Two-yard tugs were visible far below straining mightily to push our Leviathan away from the land. The Carrier didn’t seem to want to go, but the impressive persistence of the tugs seemed to be winning the issue. I could see by the widening gap between the hull and the mooring camel that there was no longer a link to the shore, save by air.

It was starting to look real goddamn serious indeed. I turned around and looked across the black non-skid coated flight deck. The catapults were energized for the Carrier Qualifications that would be starting that morning out in the Warning Area east of Jacksonville. Hellish looking wisps of oily white steam drifted from the cat tracks. I noticed every handrail on the ship was coated with a thin film of oil. Fifty feet from my room my hands already were grimy and sticky. My khaki pants were already getting the tell-tale black rings around the pockets.

I watched the land move away another few grudging feet and bowed to the inevitable. I retraced my steps to the main passageway and continued my journey aft. I began to see familiar names on the hatches: Captain’s Country, Flag Country, Combat direction Center, Strike Operations. Sure enough, the OZ division (known from this abbreviation as the Land of OZ, where nothing makes sense) presently appeared on my right. I knew I should have found the Wardroom first, but it was too late. I turned the knob, stepped over the knee-knocker and pressed the buzzer on the cipher lock to the inner security door….

To enter the demented land where there is no time but the eternal Now. There is no Time in the work spaces of a carrier; or perhaps put better there is nothing but Time. It comes in little and big chunks, not synchronous, non-linear. It spurts and sputters with no regard to the gentle rhythms of the tide and the dusk and the sweet rays of dawn. The Navy has reorganized the universe into peculiar elliptic constellations all its own. In the Carrier galaxy, the great grey ships hurtle in long orbits termed the Work Up and Deployment cycle. Within this space-time continuum there are eccentric periods in which the Carrier is non-contiguous with the steady atomic clock of the earthly universe.

In these periods, shipboard time is plastic and subject to infinite revision. It can be molded into queer bits termed “cycles” and “events” which have no particular relationship to biologic cycles of beings optimized to hunt and gather in a diurnal world. There are no natural rhythms there, only the roaring of great machines and lunatic chronometers that measure the passing of the day at Greenwich observatory, in the savage time zone known as Zulu.

There is no sun below the decks of the carrier, only a crazy quilt of bright and dimmed lights which have no particular relationship to whether work is in progress or not. For example, an earthly twenty-four-hour day might be sliced into a period called a half-day/half-night cycle. This is intended to allow pilots to land in the day to gain the requisite feel for the deck and then transition through the dusk into the awesome feat of a controlled crash into a tiny area of a pitching black deck positioned in the vertiginous black velvet of a black-ass moonless night. In order to ready themselves for this mission, briefings are conducted two hours prior to each launch event. Two hours before the brief the Air Intelligence Officer (“AI”) and Meteorologist (“Weather Guesser”) begin to screen the messages and gather the material to ensure the information is current and accurate.

That means for a launch event scheduled at noon, preparations begin at 0800. For a dawn launch, we rise at 0200. The carrier world operates on the principle of “Cyclic Operations.” In view of the number of aircraft aboard and the difficulty in moving them up and down from the hangar bay to the flight deck, there are normally airplanes parked in the landing zone. In order to launch and recover, the Air Boss directs the Handler to move them to an area of the deck which is not currently in use. The elegant way to achieve this is to shoot them off the front end and thus empty the landing zone for others to return. The day begins with airplanes massed aft in a pack and after a number of launch events, ends with the bow stacked. It sounds easy, but it is an intricate ballet which pits the Boss and the Handler against the Admiral’s daily list of requirements.

CAG is somewhere in the middle, trying to fly the airplanes safely, qualify the aircrews, and manage flight hours so that the fiscal books balance at the end of the quarter. Sometimes even send the jets roaring across the beach to deliver high explosives in anger, though not today.

There was talk that the Cold War might be teetering on a Cold Peace. We would have to see how that all unfolded in the book we wrote about it: “The Last Cold War Cruise.”

It was interesting, just like the two-day NATO summit just concluded in Vilnius, Lithuania. That used to be a member of the Warsaw Pact, the alliance that opposed NATO in Eastern Europe. They decided to defer consideration of a measure extending membership to Ukraine, which under NATO terms, would have also included kinetic conflict with the Russians.

That is a hell of a way to start the week, you know? The Chinese are muttering that we are already in a new Cold War with them. They are building aircraft carriers, and there are indications the American armed forces are confronting some issues similar to the ones the Russians discovered when they started the Special Military Operation last year.

I guess we will see, you know?

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
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