206: Somewhere in the Arabian Sea

As they say these words, "The aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln is heading home." After an extended deployment to put it in the news, I'm guessing you might have seen some of the coverage. Their time at sea was extended to over nine months, taking a toll on the crew. They were reported food shortages, resupply issues, exhaustion that comes from months at sea with no break at all. Stars and stripes, and Navy times, reported sailors attempting to jump overboard, although the journalists weren't able to get that confirmed. What is life on this kind of Navy ship like during this kind of deployment? A year ago, we did an episode of our show on an aircraft carrier during a war in the same waters the Lincoln was in, the Arabian Sea. There's just a few months after September 11th, we were on the USS Stennis. They were dropping bombs in Afghanistan in the early stages of that war. And on that show, you really get a sense of the drudgery of so many of the jobs and also just how dangerous some of the jobs are is a very vivid picture. And so today, with the crew of the Lincoln in mind, we thought we would play you that hour. It is, I have to say, a surprisingly entertaining episode. We saw many things that surprised us, starting with the interview that kicked off the hour. Let's just jump in. My name is Kreevon Scott, I'm just filling up the vendor machines. Is that your full-time job? Yes. Is your full-time job? Yeah, filling up vendor machines all day for 12 hours. A few weeks ago, this American life producer's Alex Bloomberg, Wendy Durin, and I flew halfway around the world, spent some time with the USS John C. Stennis. The Stennis is one of two aircraft carriers that are launching jet fighters to support the ground troops in Afghanistan. Alex has only talked to Kreevon Scott. What are the big sellers? I'm like, right now, it's Snickers and Starbursts. Snickers goes real fast. What's the least favorite candy on onboard? Bonkers, the fruit juice. We got boxes of those and still have them. Sometimes if we don't have anything else, we'll just put all rows of bonkers and they'll still stay in here. Some people hate bonkers, they just know what it likes about them. But we've been ordering a whole lot of new stuff, so I've been trying to keep a whole variety of things in here. Like, crunching much, we just got the crunching much, and the cheeses we normally didn't have in here. Cheeses? Yeah, the cheeses. We give her how much cheese it's in there. Our enemies need this to say are not supplied with crunching much. Yes, we're at war. And yes, that means thousands of Americans are in Kandahar and Kabul, another very dangerous places doing very dangerous things. But for every person on the front lines, there are dozens back in them up, with equipment, logistical support, and cheeses. This aircraft carrier has only a 50 or 60 pilots on board who actually drop bombs, who actually take part in combat. Everyone else is here, over 5,000 people, to get them in the air. Back home, over the last few months, we've heard about the pilots, heard about the people doing more heroic work. But everybody else on this ship is also at war. It's also far from home. It's also sacrificing something to be here. And we wanted to hear their stories, too. It's one thing to turn your life upside down to go shoot bullets at bad guys. It's another to give up everything, to go feel candy machines, 12 hours a day. In the months since the USS Stennis embarked with the Arabian Sea, Grivon has only gone outside twice. If you picture for a moment what an aircraft carrier looks like, the deck of the ship, that big, flat deck, is where jets take off and land. So you can't just walk around up there. She sees daylight maybe once a day. She's 20 years old. It's her first time away from home. You know, the hardest part is just missing home. The homesick. If I can get over that, then I'll be alright. And when I first got here, I was like, really bad. I cried every day and felt like that, but it's like, my parents are really helpful. They email me every day, so. Today in our program, everyday life, aboard a ship at war, what it's really like, if you never served on a ship like this, believe me, there is so much you don't know. From WB Easy Chicago, Susamerican Life, I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us. Disamerican Life, our episode from early 2002, continues about life on an aircraft carrier. So Alex Boenberg and Wendy Doran and I went to the Stennis together and throughout this hour, you're going to hear from all three of us. We got to the Stennis about six weeks after the ship arrived in the North Arabian Sea. The other aircraft carrier and duty there, the theater Roosevelt, the Stennis Plains during the day, and the Stennis sends them at night. This means it revelry is called over the ship's PA system to wake everybody up for work. At 7pm, we expected a bugle, or at least a recording of a bugle, but it turns out to be sort of no frills. "Revelry-revelry, all you need out." From the time we get up, we're led everywhere by a group of public affairs officers who are contrary to what you think they might be. We're contrary to what we suspected they'd be anyway, good humor, and quite helpful. Our first day, they lead us down a long passageway. Every 15 feet or so, there's a junction, and other hallways go off to the left or right, and ladders go up and down. It's like walking through a big habit trail. "Make a left turn." "Keep going." Remember, the boat is huge, it's four and a half acres. The most of the life of the ship takes place here, and the eight stories of rooms and passageways below the flight deck. There are no windows in these decks, and the boat is so big that in good weather, it doesn't really even sway. And so most of the time, the sensation is less being at sea than being underground, and some sort of huge subterranean Warren. "Can I cut through?" "You're constantly squeezing by people coming from the other direction." "Hey, you." "I'm still awake." "After five minutes of winding our way through these narrow corridors, we come to a big rounded steel door. It's maybe five feet tall, airtight, it's got a big lever in the middle. Someone turns it, and we climb through. Into one of the largest rooms we've ever seen." This is the hangar deck, it's two football fields long, three stories tall, entering it, like walking through a closet door, and finding yourself at the pitcher's mound in the astradome. We walk past parked fighter planes, hundreds of people, all scurrying around, pushing hand trucks, talking into walkie talkies. And then we arrive at the hangar bay door, which is basically a three-story hole in the side of the ship. "It's night time. Peering out, we can make out the shadowy outline and red running lights of another huge boat, rolling at the same speed we are, maybe a hundred yards away. A half dozens steel cable stretched between the two ships. Helicopters dip and swerve back and forth. And then out of the darkness, two pallets, with hundreds of pounds of food, come swinging in on a cable." "We just took on two pallets." Lieutenant Commander Mark Semler explains that they're bringing on enough food for 5,000 people for 30 days. Press machine parts, bundles of food, people pass boxes of fresh paris and strawberries and avocados, fire brigade style. The entire operation takes over 250 people. And though everyone knows they're at war, in most jobs, it doesn't feel like a war. "Not at all. We do our job." "I know everything that's going on, but it just feels like, okay, we're living on the boat for six months." "I feel like I'm doing my job the same way and this is pretty much normal. It's not like being on a front line with an M-16 in my hand. Do you wish you had a job, which would you put your more in the front lines?" "No, no, no. Now with my wife and stuff, no, I'm very happy with what I am." "You feeling danger here?" "No." I mean, the most those guys got is rifles and missiles if they couldn't fire this far out into the ocean. "No, actually, I feel like this is one of the most secure places you can be. I mean, we've got 70-plus aircraft, you know, looking for the enemy. When I'm not on a ship, I feel like it could happen anywhere. Anytime you drive over a bridge or go to a public place, it could happen, and I definitely feel safer out here." The average age on board the ship is 21 years old, and when you ask people how they ended up here, the most common answer is, "I don't know." They just shrug and say they were failing out of school or they wanted to see the world or they wanted money for college. Almost all the enlistment stories can be summarized as either, "I joined the Navy to straighten out my life," or, "I joined the Navy because I wanted something more." "Okay, I'm Jessica Phillips. I got here six days ago, so I'm going through training right now, so everything is still a blur. I don't know how long ago, I don't even know what day it is, Wednesday, Thursday." When I asked Jessica Phillips my question about how she ended up on this ship, she looked up at me and said, "Do you really want to hear this story?" It all began, she said, two and a half years ago, working at the mall and a barn's a noble, and living in the same small town where she'd grown up in O'Cala, Florida. "Before I never even paid attention to military people, you know, it was so what you're in the Navy, you know, you're a drunken sailor or marine, you know, you go, people call you bullet sponge, you're not, why would you do that, you know?" I understand why people, "I never personally, for me, I never thought I'd be in the military." It was a split second decision. The place where I live is considered a black hole. nobody gets out of there like most Those people live and die there, and that's just the way it goes. You grow up with the same people, everything stays the same. I couldn't take it anymore. So I told them I had two girl roommates at the time, and I looked at them and said, "You have all my stuff." I packed up a suitcase and I was like, "I'm leaving," and I left that night, and I left them like money for that month's right and everything, so you need to find a new roommate. Again my car, which was an '89 Mustang, and just put her away. Jessica had no idea where she was headed. They were vague thoughts of finding someplace cool and applying to college. She made a way up the coast to Raleigh, North Carolina. Jessica ended up stopping in Raleigh, moving in with friends. But without a job, she had to find other ways to make ends meet. You know, I used to go gas station, a gas station, and asking people for money pretty much. I was like, "Listen, I'm on a road trip, and most people hand me money, you know, five bucks or something." But she'd only do that for so long. So I was just like, "I'm sitting there, and I was trying to figure out what I did this for. First of all, like I gave up all my stuff. I'm almost broke. I went, you know, I was just like, "I need to figure out what I need to do. I need to do something with myself." So everybody was, we were having a party, and everybody was like, "Party in, and I'm sitting outside, and some guy comes up to talk to me, and he said something about like, what are you doing tomorrow?" And I said, "I'm going to go home and join the Navy." And he was like, "What?" He was like, "Why are you talking about it?" I was like, "I think I'm going to pack up and go home and join the Navy." I was like, "This is what I need to do." And why did the Navy pop into your head, why Navy? You know, I have no idea. I think my manager at Barnes and Noble was in the Navy for two years. She was a yeoman, but that was like 20 years ago. And that kind of like came back to me, and I think this sounds so cheesy though, but it was like a Navy commercial came on in between television or something. It's the one where they say that the CD is our classroom. They use like the intro to some hardcore rock song. I think it's a lit biscuit song. Maybe not. Maybe it's a God's Mac. I don't know, but there's the carrier, and it's racing across, and they've got the jets flying over, and they've got the people like all smiling in their nice uniforms, and sitting in class, doing their schoolwork, and the people who are sitting in front of the radar and looking at the picture. And then they're like, "Most people go to school, but this is our classroom. This is GoNavy.com." So then I was like, "Hey, you know, maybe I will." From the time you told the guy at the party you were going to join the Navy till the time you were in the Navy, how many days passed? Six, five. That was a Friday, and that Wednesday I was in bootcamp. When I got back, I actually got a copy of the commercial from the Navy. The entire thing takes 15 seconds, and Jessica's memory of it is pretty much perfect. Why should you consider getting an education in the Navy? This is one of your classrooms, Navy, accelerate your life. And how is it for you? Like once you're in bootcamp, did you have second thoughts? Did I ever have second thoughts? Well, first down the bus, it's a whole nice trip, everybody's polite to you, everything else. Then you get on the bus, and you're sitting there. Some guy gets on the bus and tells you you're not home anymore and start to yell at it. It's the basic bootcamp thing. I'm not your mama, your papa. You know, stop talking, I don't want to hear it. So I was just like, okay, they're just trying to scare me, whatever, you know, I'm sitting there laughing. I'm like, God, this is such a movie. I was like, how stereotypical is this? They bust us to the Navy bootcamp in Great Lakes, and we get off the bus, and it's the middle of the night. It's cold, and they're yelling at you to stand against the wall, and why can't you stand still, and everything else, and when I call your name, yell at your social, and they yell out my name, and I'm standing there yelling my social security number. You're talking about doing it loud enough, and I'm thinking, what did I do? What am I doing here? And we're, it's like, it's five, gosh, this day is so clear. It's five in the morning, and it's like, you're looking at a stranger, and you understand everything they're feeling. That was one of the few moments where you look at somebody and you're like, I know exactly what you're thinking, and I know what you're feeling, because I do too. You got better, of course, and Jessica was satisfied with the Navy. At 22, she says, she's been to countries and seen things she never would have otherwise. But her feelings about the Navy became even stronger after September 11th. As far as September 11th, a personal reflection of what it does, you become a little bit more patriotic. Before it was kind of like, Navy, I'm in it, you know, it's a job, I'll, you know, I do that my eight hours a day, and then I'm done, I'll be able to get my college money. If you asked me before as a civilian, I'd have been like, oh, war, big love, not war, let's go for the hippie side of it. But now it's just kind of like, I want to cry, I'm tired, I'm going to start crying, but I look at my family, and it's just like, I'm willing to die for, you know, these people on the street, the people you're walking by, I'm willing to give sacrifice myself for what has happened. It's, I don't even know how to correctly say it, but when you realize that you're really fighting for something, and for somebody, it kind of gets more personal. Almost everyone we talked to said some version of this, even people who happened to be doing jobs they hated. They all felt proud to be out there defending their country. And sometimes while they would talk about it, an almost startled tone would creep into their voices, as if they were as surprised as anyone that this crappy job felt so different than all the other ones they'd ever done. They felt they were doing something that mattered. To give you a sense of the variety of things going on at any given moment on board the Stennis, here's what we passed walking down just one hallway, on a three-deck with senior chief Barbara Mendoza, an electronics from hair shop, a room in charge of anti-submarine warfare, an air traffic control center, a conference room that they actually called the War Room, the office of the admiral who's in charge of this ship and the six other ships and two nuclear-powered subs which travel with it at all times, protecting it. This is Civic. Civic means intelligence? Then not really that intelligent, no they are. This is the air wing commander's office. Toward the back of the boat, some corridors have red lights on instead of white, indicating people are asleep. We pass a guy playing Nintendo. Video games of all sorts are huge and with Stennis and off hours. A guy runs past us with a bloody nose. We never find out the story behind that. There's a workout room and next to it a locked door that music's pouring out of. Barbara wraps on the door. They're not gonna be able to hear me. On the door is a sign-up sheet for bands who can use the room as a rehearsal space. There are lots of bands on board. This one's called recoil. You can feel the door, it's just echoing, it's just vibrating. The guys in recoil work on planes or on the flight deck. It can be hard to work out their schedules so they're all free to rehearse at the same time. So where do you draw your inspiration from? A lot of stuff. That song comes from my ex-wife. I recently got divorced and came out of nowhere, I got blindsided so. I draw my personal experiences. And then where do you perform? We performed at the Steel Beach picnic a couple days ago. Where is that? Up on the flight deck. Every holiday, sight Christmas, they have bands performing in the mess decks or in the hanger bay. They're going to have a Super Bowl halftime show, we're going to play in the hanger bay. The Super Bowl is sort of tricky for an aircraft carrier. They've scheduled a day off from flying, but the quality of the ship's satellite TV reception depends on which direction they're heading. So the plan was this, at the start of the game they would set course in the most TV friendly direction, at the slowest possible speed. When they got to halftime they would turn the 97,000-ton ship around and then chug back as fast as possible to where they began, while recoil and other bands played. And then, when the game started again, they would set out again in that first TV friendly heading, at the slowest possible speed. It's not just a few hours since we saw the resupply operation, we're in the ship's library. It's 11.30 at night. Summer Anderson is on a schedule where her work shift just ended. But before she goes to sleep, she comes here and waits online for a half hour to get into one of the computers where she can do email. While she waits, I ask her about her job, which involves moving airplanes around from one spot to another, but she cuts it off. Summer's friend Melissa walks into the library, she's older than summer, 25, summer's just 19. And it's here to write email back home. Well, I'm a single mom, for my son's kindergarten class CS2 email. So that's why I stay up for the out extra hour after work to read them. I had assumed that Summer would also be writing to people back home. But she tells me no. She's writing to friends on the ship. It's the only way to keep up with people, she says. Everybody works different hours. And there is a lot to keep up with. The only thing about the ship is rumors fly. It's amazing. I found out the other day that I liked somebody I never even met. The rumors are amazing on a ship. Because people get bored. I don't gossip. And it just goes way out of proportion. It's really actually kind of funny. Most of the rumors on board have to do with when they're going to get to go to shore. These circulate constantly. The second biggest subject? Just other people. It's kind of like high school sometimes. Like a small town in the outskirts of nowhere, you know how everybody knows everything about everybody. I mean, you can walk up to someone like at the name tag and be like, "Oh, that's who they were talking about." Okay. This conversation about rumors ends up getting Alex and Wendy and I in a little bit of trouble, mostly because of me. I find the entire subject so interesting that I bring it up the next place we visit. The ship's laundry. I'm having what I think is a perfectly innocent conversation with an airman named Jason Bask. His regular job is to work on high-tech aviation electronics. But the way the Navy works is that when you first report to a ship, you do 90 days at one of the jobs that nobody signs up for when they join the Navy. But the Navy has to have someone do or you can't actually run a Navy. Cleaning or serving food or doing laundry. Thousands of pounds a day of laundry. Steck them bags and see them. Okay, right now I'm opening the dryer. The dryer holds about 100 pounds of laundry. Jason, it turns out, actually, doesn't mind his 90 days doing wash. I don't know. I really like laundry, actually. Yeah, I mean, I feel good. It's swash and laundry. My regular job is really complicated and sometimes I have a hard time comprehending all the electrical systems and memorizing all the different systems and the startups and all that. And laundry was a good break because it's really simple. Here all you do is throw in the washer, take another wash, put in the dryers. You know, and there's not too much complication. And then, at the end of this perfectly nice conversation, I bring up the new thing that I've learned just minutes before in the library. I've heard there's a lot of rumors on Port of Shep, like there's always rumors. What are some of the rumors that you've heard? Oh, you're always here rumors about when we're going to pull in, when we're not going to pull in. You know, when we're going to see a porting, then a lot of rumors about when we're going home because some people say we're going to stay longer, some people say we may leave earlier. Rumors about like what ports that we're going to hit on the way back, because everybody wants to go to Australia. And of course, you hear rumors about like different girls and different guys sleeping together and people getting in trouble and getting caught for that. What happens if they get caught for that? You're getting a lot of trouble. You're not allowed to have any frankenization on the ship. So that's another thing that's kind of rough, you know. I haven't had much physical contact in a long time. Even just a hug every now and then you're not really supposed to do that in uniform. And you're always in uniform. And I miss affection a lot. I do. I grew up in a very affectionate home and I just get a hug every now and then. Jason tells me another rumor or two he's heard. You say goodbye and Wendy and Alex and I go down to get some food. For about 15 minutes later, one of the public affairs officers informs me that Jason and I had been overheard talking about rumors on the status. Rumors about men and women sleeping together on board. And that within minutes, this had been reported up the ranks all the way to the ship's executive officer. A person who oversees the day-to-day operations of the Stennis. People were upset. What sort of story were we putting together anyway? I won't bore you with the details of several rather tense conversations. Let's just say that we had inadvertently hit a nerve. It's been just eight years since women were first deployed onto combat ships and aircraft carriers. It's just 10 years since the Navy was forced to rethink how women were treated in the service in the wake of the tailhook scandal. This is all still enormously sensitive. Sensitive enough that this conversation in the laundry was enough to raise red flags up and down the chain of command. At some point, we're brought in without our tape recorders to meet the ship's executive officer. A friendly but tightly wound man named Jeff Miller. And he explains that when new crew members arrive for duty on the Stennis, he personally gives the speech, reiterating Navy policy on male female relationships. A policy he sums up for them as, "No dating." A date he tells them is as simple as two people walking side by side, closely. Heads leaning together and talking. A date is when you sit too near each other. You should be a minimum he tells them of two butt widths apart. When he spots crew members sitting closer than that, he'll ask them if it's a date and win of course they say no. They'll tell them well then make sure it doesn't look like a date. Which all seems sensible enough. This is a workplace like any other, and you can't sleep with people you work with. But consider what the Navy is up against in trying to make this policy work. 12% of the crew on the Stennis is female. The average age on board, as we've said, is 21 years old. That is thousands of young people, cooped up together in a close space for months at a time, far from home. Trying to keep people from having sex with each other in that situation is, in a sense, fighting nature itself. In any case, after that incident, the Public Affairs officers felt that it was necessary to monitor our interviews a little more closely. Lieutenant Jeff Guerrell, one of these very smart, very capable people, settled with the thankless job of escorting us around the ship, a job which the Lieutenant compared to hurting cats, was with me on the mess deck, not long after all this came to pass. We had some time to kill, and I saw a group of talkative young sailors who looked like they might be talkative interviewees. I asked Lieutenant Guerrell if it would be okay to talk with them, but worried about their big mouths. He steered me instead to a serious looking sailor named Kevin Ren. This turned out to be a mistake for Port Lieutenant Guerrell. I'm just ready to go home. I don't know why it's so long. How can you chose a service? A court order. Really court order? Yeah, so that's how they do it in Texas. Instead of going to jail, they send you to the armed service. They give you a choice of jail or the name? Yeah, or the armed service, any armed service. You don't have to tell me the answer to this. What kind of trouble were you in? Oh, drugs. Yeah, so. How much jail would you have had to do? Seven years. So how do you like it? It sucks. It's like a prison-owned water. That's what it is. I don't really like it. This is not, of course, what Lieutenant Guerrell was hoping for from young Kevin. I asked, hoping to turn things to a more positive area, if Kevin is changing. If people grow when the court's sending out here. No, because people get flown out to Sydney almost every month, you know, saying we're doing drugs or all kinds of stuff tonight. It's whatever you got inside of you. That's what makes, you know what I'm saying. That's what's going to change, you know what I'm saying. If you don't want to be changed, you ain't going to be changed. I can practically hear the acid eating wet with Lieutenant Guerrell's stomach at this answer. I rack my brain for the most completely neutral question I can ask. So what do you do? What's your job? What is there to do? We just walk around our day for eight hours, walk around and check spaces. And what are you looking for? There's people having sex, fights, anybody drinking, doing stuff they ain't supposed to do on the boat. Hopefully we'll get to see, but I haven't seen anything yet, so. You haven't seen anything yet? No, I've been looking though. I've got to catch the expression on the Lieutenant's face. In fact, these people are pretty well behaved on this boat. No, that's not true, that's not true. I don't know who told you that, but this boat is like a love boat right now. Try it, you're done. If anyone ever asks you to interview again, say no. This is what Lieutenant Guerrell has to deal with all day long in the service of his country. As for the love boat aspect of living on the status, a number of men and women both pointed out incredibly long work hours, who has the energy? By this point, perhaps you've noticed that everyone you've heard so far this hour sounds very, very young. One of the most amazing things about the Navy, and the military in general, is that it takes people who are so young and then get some to operate something as huge and complicated as the Stennis. When I get a chance to visit the bridge and interview the captain of the Stennis, James McDonald, he makes clear that he is intensely aware of the youth of his crew. When he walks through the decks, they tend to chat him up, but on a very narrow range of, are we there yet, questions? When are we going home? When is the end of cruise? What are we going to do after we get back from cruise? How often do you ask this question? No, several hundred times a day. So, literally, I walk around a ship and I see the sailors and I have to come up with a little stick to make sure that I portray it correctly. It's not very satisfying to just say, we don't know, although that's the truth, we don't know. Another thing Captain McDonald is very aware of is the need to keep everybody in touch with how they are contributing to the overall war effort. Every single day he gets on the ship's PA system and reviews any international news might have consequences for the Stennis. Just to kind of keep the crew connected, I just like to make sure that they keep focused on why we're out here. It's very easy, as I'm sure you've probably seen, to start letting your mind drift about other things other than the task at hand. When I have young folks up here, I have the sailors that are day up here every day, one from the air wing and one from the ship, the interesting thing is that I will ask them just kind of, "Hey, do you know who the Secretary of State is?" And that's about a one in three get it right. Do you know how the Secretary of Defense is? And maybe a little higher percentage, but not much more. Is there so focused on their world that it really kind of is our job to help them break out of that a little bit and put their very hard work in the context of the big mosaic that's going on? A few hours later, we stood in a passageway and listened to the captain's daily message. But the PA announcement which give you an even deeper sense of who the crew is and what it means to supervise a shipload of young people, announcements like this one, from the ship's executive officer, Jeff Miller. He's up, he thanks him for the hard work on the problem, he urges them on to more. The town is like a great high school football coach. Coming up, what it's like to drop a bomb on an Afghanistan in a minute from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues. It's a American life and I reglass with the USS Lincoln finally heading home after making the news because of the toll that its long deployment took on its crew. We are re-running an episode of our show that first aired in early 2002, not long after 9/11, at the beginning of the war in Afghanistan. When this American life producer, Alex Bloomberg, Wendy Dorr, and I visited the USS John C. Stennis, an aircraft carrier that at the time was cruising somewhere in the Arabian Sea, flying bombing missions over Afghanistan, and monitoring the region for al-Qaeda nautical traffic. We visited the briefing room of one of the air squadrons on the Stennis. A squadron that calls itself "the world famous screwbirds." On a desk, there's a big jar of red licorice and homemade blondies that someone's girlfriends send to everybody. On the wall, there's this underground newspaper, The Aviator's Print, which is in the style of the onion, stories and headlines of all consists of these inside jokes like New Bill It Added to Air Wing Watch, which we don't understand at all, but everybody else seems to find hilarious. On the backs of the leather chairs, the pilots sit on, are their call signs, the official nicknames they use over the radio on their missions. There's Frenchie, Tink, Chewy, Fish, Rainman, Mr. Burns. That last one for a pilot who supposedly looks like the character on the Simpsons. This is pom-pom. Yeah. Pom-pom. Interesting. Yeah, fascinating. Well, yeah. There's a story behind it, though. I think I know it. What was it? One of us sitting here, call sign pom-pom, was a cheerleader in college. Good friends are very close here. One of them shows us the official drawing of a squadron mascot and quietly points out that it's a bird whose wing has a middle feather extended, like a middle finger. At 4am, nine of these guys sit down in their flight suits to watch an intelligence briefing that comes in over close circuit TV. Then a young guy named Steve Calfour stands up in front. All right. Good morning. Briefing here for our XAR mission, 702, 705, and we've got Gonzo in 706, like you to act as a fill. Watching him, it occurs to me how rare it is as an adult to hear somebody speak in your own language for 10 minutes and not understand a word he's saying. The vert field, we're working blue water ops if we need to divert and we're feet dry. You know, we're going and if our feet wet, we'll go to Masira there. Then they suit up. It's a crazy amount of survival gear, 20 to 25 pounds worth, including a parachute, survival knife, radios, players, and something called a bloodshed. Scrooberts commanding officer Ross Meyers, a trim man with a call sign monkey button stitched onto his navy coveralls and neat black letters, pulls him out to show us a piece of paper with an American flag and a serial number with the same message in several languages. Oh, Arabic, English, Dari, Pistote, Uzbek, which would have to be for Uzbekistan, Persian, Farsi. And then in English, it gives a translation, it says, "I'm an American and do not speak your language. I will not harm you. I bear no malice towards your people. My friend, please provide me food, water, shelter, and necessary medical attention. Also, please provide safe passage to the nearest friendly forces of any country supporting the Americans and their allies. You will be rewarded for assisting me when you present this number to American authorities. The Scrooberts head out to their clients. Naircraft carrier's main mission is to fly a plane. When you see what it takes to launch or land a jet on a boat, what you realize is that human beings should not be doing this at all. The runway is just too short. For the planes they get enough lift under the wings, the crew actually has to drive the boat at top speed into the wind. Then, the front wheel of the plane is attached to machinery under the deck, the catapult, which literally flings it off the edge of the deck like a pebble from a slingshot. Landing the plane on the deck is much harder than taking off, and it's very, very dangerous. The head of the Scrooberts, Ross Meyers, aka Monkey Butt, says that in his 16 years of service, he's personally seen six of his friends crash into the back of the boat while trying to land. None of them survived. Basically what you're trying to do is latch a hook that hangs from the back of your plane onto one of four cables that are stretched across the deck. Nairman named Dave Cruz explains how it works. The pilot looks at something called the ball, which indicates if he's coming in on target. It talks to guys called LSOs, the fellow pilots actually, who stand right on deck. And it's up to the LSOs to guide them in. They're talking to them over the radio? Right now they're talking to that next one coming in, which is a top cat, which is three quarters of a mile, who's calling the ball and stating the fuel state. The one wire is the wire closest to the rear of the boat. If you catch it, that means they're dangerously close to going too low and slamming into the back of the carrier. Sometimes a pilot can't straighten out as a perch enough, and the LSOs have to wave them off. They can get a little tense. Here comes another one. Just described how he's doing. All right, he's turning into the three quarter mile now. Roger ball, 28 knots down the angle. And right now they're doing too low. Right now the pilot should be telling him kind of a little throttle. Power, power, wave off, wave off. One deck below in the blue diamond squadron briefing room. Detecto pilot named Jeremy Marken, about what it's like when things don't go well during the landing. Who knows what happens? Maybe you lose an important instrument inside, it's nighttime, and there's weather. And so you're in the goo, we call it inside, you know, in the clouds it's dark. So you've got to tell yourself you've got to fly the best pass ever, and you come down. You know, just one thing leads to another, and next thing you know, you're looking to the back of the boat, and you're close to it, and you've got a guy screaming at you. You put in the afterburners, and you hook touches down a couple of feet past the back of the back of the boat, and you go taxi into the one wire there, high speeds, and realize they caught you, and your legs are shaking, you're still in blow, your lights are still on, and the airboss says we got you. You can relax now, and it's kind of hard to relax right away, you can't get online for a little bit. You said the hook misses the back of the boat back a couple inches, was that me? The hook hit the back of the boat, that means your plane hit the back of the boat, it wouldn't be good. The Blue Diamond's briefing room is just like- the screwbirds room, only a little more Spartan and a little more mocho, including the nicknames, which make monkey butts sound almost dignified by comparison. Balls, screwed, itchy, I got itchy for a while because my last name is Balsytis, which looks like Balsytis, or like some kind of disease. Both Alex and I hung out with the Blue Diamonds for about an hour. I interviewed Dave Balsytis on one side of the room, while Alex interviewed another pilot, Jeremy Marken, on the other side. And what struck us when we got home is how closely they agree on some things, and how far apart they are on others. How long does it take to get to Afghanistan? Anywhere from an hour and a half, two hours, depends on where you're going. And what's it like over at the moment? It's, uh, I don't know, it's actually, it looks, it looks pretty in the mountain series. Snow in the mountains looks like real nice mountain peaks. What does it look like when you fly over Afghanistan and you fly over these targets? I can't cuss, can I? I can, but we'll have to beep it out. Okay, it's a s*** hole. It really is. There is absolutely nothing down there. I don't see anything worth fighting for down there. It's, it's all sand, rocks. I don't know how they live down there. Yeah, it's probably not much different from, uh, you know, how, you're, uh, like, glamorous, something in California or something. I mean, it's, you know, dunes, mountains. So, um, it looks like a beautiful country. So no color. There's no irrigation, no lakes, no streams, no farms. It's just, just brown and some snow. So it's pretty ugly when you're actually doing what you're doing. It's, you're kind of so busy that you don't only have a lot of time to sit back and go, hey, you know, kind of look at the scenery. But, um, if there's moments of, those, those pauses, those moments you have in and you look around, it's, uh, the world's a beautiful place, you know, and it's kind of, it's kind of weird to imagine up that high and you're looking down, it looks so beautiful, and then you get snapped back into what's going on down there, and, uh, you got to refocus. This is, it might be a, uh, sort of a bone head civilian question, but is it, is it hard to drop a bone? Oh, you're, like, in almost a moral sense or emotional. It's, uh, it's, it's, it's a, it's a double-edged emotion, you know, it's, uh, it's what you're training for your whole life. The fact that you're doing it, doing it correctly, and, uh, you drop your target, drop your bomb on the target, and it's an emotional feeling. Hey, I did my job, and, uh, just as I was training, I did it, I did it well. Um, while you're up there, I don't really think about the, uh, the other side of the sorta. I'm, you know, it's my job to go out there and drop bombs, and so I do it. I feel no remorse about dropping a bomb on them down below. It's not sadistic, it's just, I think it's the right thing. Someone came into our house and trampled on our land, and, to go in their land, and absolutely pulverize them, makes me feel very warm inside. I think that's great. I'm just glad I can be part of the team that's out here doing it. You know, dropping bombs on the bad people. I sleep at night. It's 7.30 in the morning, and it's over 12 hours since Reveley first called everyone to work. For most people, it's the end of the work day. In the mess hall in the second deck, Cynthia and David have just finished their dinner, and they're waiting for the eight o'clock movie, exit wounds, to begin. Every now and then we get to watch the chick movies. Yeah, we got to watch Stepmom the other day. Yeah, like Stepmom's, still magnolia. They haven't shown that one lately. They've gotten them bored. There are TVs just about everywhere people are not working on the ship. With two channels of movies and network shows, 24 hours a day. Every Tuesday night, uh, we have a movie night. We'll pick a movie through email. We vote on what we want to see. I voted for Ms. Ciginiality. I was hoping to watch that tonight. As did I. Sitting there side by side, and they're matching navy blue jumpsuits, they look like they're best friends. If there was such a thing for a man and a woman to be on a navy ship, they're both reading the left behind series. He's on book two. She's on book four. They love playing the game of life on Cynthia's PlayStation, and they both enjoy a good chick movie. David joined the navy so he could get out of his small town in Iowa. And Cynthia joined so she could get her and her three kids off of welfare. And it worked. They're all doing great now, she says. I've said this before, people laugh at me, but when I come out to see, it's like a break for me because, you know, at home, I got kids to take care of, house to take care of, and I get out here, and all I get to do is take care of myself. Go to work and go to sleep, kill time in between, so it's kind of a break being out here for me. Even though she has 11 years of service and he has 13, both with decent rank, this is how they live. David sleeps in a room called a birthing with 196 other guys, and he's one of the oldest at 34. Each sailor gets a bunk bed with a locker underneath it, and their entire personal space, his six feet long, a foot and a half tall, and about two feet wide. And it's set up in the birthing, it's set up kind of in areas, you know, like you'll have this one little neighborhood that listens to this music, and I'm in over the old folks' place, most of us listen to country music or something slow. See, I live in a 26 person birthing, so it's not quite as bad as 197. A lot of us have brought stuff to make it kind of homey. Mine's Tweety Bird. So I have a Tweety Bird Comforter, Tweety Bird Pillows, Tweety Bird Wallpaper around my rack, so if you don't see that, they're down in the mail birthing, at all. It's now very late, meaning nine in the morning, and senior chief Barbara Mendoza invites us to the Chiefs of Mass, a special dining room for the ship's chiefs. There are maybe 30 tables with chairs stacked on top, and the floors are shiny and clean. The room is quiet, aside from the pleasant electric home of refrigerators and drink machines, and the far-off purring of the ship's engines. In the center of the room, five middle-aged men are sitting around one of the tables. It's their nightly card game, they're playing hearts, and they're passing around a picture of someone jumping into the ocean during a recent break when they were allowed to swim. This is a perfect shot. You have a ranny, they're jumping off the elevator, and they have a picture of a shark trying to swallow them up. Nobody can decide, though, whether he's going in or being spit back out. It's up to your interpretation. The person who made this picture, this fake picture on the computer, is the person you just heard, Bobby, Bobby Boucher, which is not his real name, Joel, which is not his real name, explains. Well, his real name is Mike, we call him Bobby. You want to know why? Bobby goes over here to a bar with one of our other friends, Brent. They go out and bring offers to buy him something. We went to the to the, they do this over and over. Tell a tip story, tell them about the girl in Singapore, and then they all start laughing. And then they finally tell the stories, barely getting through them, because someone is always interrupting and you say they're not telling the story right. You got to tell the tip, Bobby. If you picture how the Navy works, there are the enlisted men, and then there are the officers. The enlisted, and you've met lots of them on today's show, usually come into the Navy at 18 or 19 years old, straight out of high school. Officers come into the Navy as officers, with higher rank and privileges. The chiefs are the highest ranking enlisted people. And anyone in the Navy will tell you, they will run the Navy. They're the buffer between the bosses and the people who actually do the work. We have to keep the high echelon people from bothering these guys. Let them do their job, you know. At the same time, getting the job done so that these guys up here are happy. They become like everybody's, the whole division's father and mother all rolled into one. They need to cry on your shoulder, you let them cry on your shoulder, you need to kick them in the butt, you kick them in the butt. I mean, you listen to their problems, you talk to them, you try to help them. And that's probably what most of us spend most of our time doing. Every day the Don says, somebody comes to him with a problem, back home they need to solve. And the Don, his real name is Brent, helps them out. Often this means getting on the phone and contacting another chief out there somewhere. There's a whole chief to chief network. You know, the chief that I need to talk to knows somebody at the command and they can talk to that chief, you know, and get this whole thing going. It's a fraternity. We work together and that's one of the biggest things about being a chief. We are one. I mean, the goal once you start out in a Navy, if you have a good chief from the beginning, your goal is to be a chief. I mean, your goal is to be that chief. And for me, that was the goal. It was a guy named Chief Wal-Matt. He was my first chief in the Navy and he was there. Any time I needed anything, he was always there. Late one night, Lieutenant Garell and a TV crew from San Diego and I are on our way back to the state rooms. When Garell invites us into the officer's mess for a bowl of cereal before bed, inside there's a group of officers talking in another table and one enlisted man breaking down the serving line. It's late and most of the people in the ship are in bed, so we're eating cereal and talking when the enlisted man appears with a huge tray of food. We all look at each other, no one asked him to fix us anything. Just thought you all might like a snack, sir, the enlisted man says to Garell and puts the tray on our table. The tray contains 12 chicken breast sandwiches, each with lettuce and a slice of American cheese on hamburger buns. There are four of us and we already have our cereal. Apparently, the pal doctrine of overwimming force applies to food service as well. Later in our cabin, Wendy, Iron, I talk it over. Being on an aircraft carrier, we're surrounded on all sides by the lopsidedness of American military superiority, just the very fact of the carrier itself. No other country even has one like the Stennis, the US has 12. But it's the chicken sandwiches which somehow make that fact real. It's not just the size and strength, but the attention to detail, which fully conveys the sheer uncontested might of the American military. Not only does the Navy give each pilot one of the fastest and most expensive fighter planes in the world to fly, not only does it provide him with the most accurate bombs in the history of warfare to drop, it also feeds him at any hour of the day more chicken sandwiches than you can possibly eat. It gives him a room to hang out in with his own official nickname on the chair and a practice space for his band. Someone somewhere stitches monkey butt into his flight suit. The other countries don't have a chance. You've never slept in bunk beds with your boss until you slept in bunk beds with your boss on an aircraft carrier. By Navy standards, the room Iron I shared was luxurious, only two of us, not 200 or 600. But the problem with the room everybody warned us was that it was right below the flight deck and it could get kind of loud. And sure enough, we were woken up several times that first night by the thumps in the clanks of the plane's landing and taking off. Still we figured we could manage. Then the second night, a bus ran full speed into the wall by my head. That's what it sounded like. The steel wall, six inches from the top of my head, had just suffered a collision with a very fast moving bus. It was the loudest sound I'd ever heard. And here's what it's like to be in a bunk bed with your boss on an aircraft carrier when you've just heard the loudest sound you've ever heard if your boss is my boss. What happened next was this. The loudest sound I'd ever heard happened again and I have to stress this is not a normal loud sound like a rock band or a car horn or even a stick of dynamite exploding. This is a sound that's only made when things that shouldn't happen happen. It's the sound of disaster, of destruction, it is the sound of catastrophe. I lay there stunned for a second and then I heard Ira jerk into action so as feet swing down from the top bunk. I actually said the words "You're right man" as I threw off my blanket and started to run. And then I looked behind me and I saw Ira digging through his equipment and I realized I was running for the door and Ira was running for his tape recorder. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, that's… While we waited for the loud sound to happen again, Ira and I handed the microphone back and forth between our bunks and recorded our conversation. It was a problem though there'd be alarms going off and stuff, right? I mean, it just wouldn't just be like a horrible accident and then nothing, you know. And then no sound, right? They'd be saying like all hands to your stations, that sort of thing, right? I'm sure if it really gets better and here there's bells of some sort. The loud sound never happened again and eventually we fell asleep, though I were left the tape recorder running just in case. We were out for maybe half an hour when we were woken up again. Loss of feed in number two reactor plant. Reactor mechanical and casualty assistance teams report to number two reactor room. Reactor assistance teams? That can't be good, right? After half an hour, in which I tried to convince myself that my stomach ache was not radiation sickness and Ira tried to figure out how we could get down to the ship's nuclear reactors to report on the accident, another PA announcement came on, just like the first, but with one additional sentence. That breakfast we learned what had happened. The loud sound, that was a routine test for one of the catapults and the PA announcement had been a routine drill. The two things were totally unrelated. Both things they said happened almost every day. Thank you very much, Alex, for that report. There's only thing that happened on the stand is that I keep thinking about in the weeks since we returned. It was at the end of our very last day there, which meant 1040 in the morning. Barbara Mendoza, the chief who had been kind enough to invite us to the chief's mess, took Alex and Wendy and I, outside to the very back of the ship, the fan tail, looking at the water in the sky. It's one of her favorite places on the stand. If I come out here every day before I go to bed, very peaceful, I do a lot of thinking out here, I relax a lot, and I really like it. I mean, look at it, it's beautiful, there's no other place to be. You look out at the North Arabian Sea, the waters the military vessels have sailed for thousands of years. Persians were here 500 years before the birth of Christ. Alexander the Great sent ships here, the Ottomans, the Chinese, the Romans, the Portuguese, all of them, great naval powers in their day. Hey, Chief, do you ever think about the fact that you're serving over here in this particular ocean, this particular body of water, how long people have been traveling by sea across this? You know, I always wonder when I look at big bodies of water like this, I always wonder how many ships are on the bottom of this floor. So that's one of the things that I like to think about when I'm out here, I wonder if there's a hundred of how many ships are out here on the bottom that never made it home. Hundreds, over hundreds of them, you know, from all the wars that we've been through. Here you are working for the mightiest baby in the history of the world. Isn't that cool, how cool is that? After the starboard side of the ship, we can see the USS Port Royal, connecting our back. We Americans are here for now, we'll outglass. Best of thanks to Nate Advice Admiral James Shortman, who at the time that we recorded this show in 2002 ran Curia Group 7 for the Navy, and to the Public Affairs Office and Navy journalists who showed us around the Stennis, Barbara Mendoza, Jeff Garelle, Cheeto Peplar, and David Michael Ross. Also thanks to the MPR's Charlie Mayer, Richard Bloomberg, and Stephen Weaver of Stars and Stripes, original music for this hour by John Kimbrough. Thanks to the American Life Partner, Catherine Dernum, Life Partners to Porto Show with Donations, with a very straightforward goal to help us continue making the show. When you sign up, you get to listen ad-free, you get bonus episodes, you get some newsletter where I recommend stuff to see in here, and I also do some behind-the-scenes stuff about the show. Anyway, to join, go to thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners, that link is also on the show notes. Thank you for considering this. This American Life is delivered to Public Radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always to a program's co-founder, Mr. Tori Malatia, who describes his personal life these days. This way, it's like a love boat right now. I remember a glass. Back next week, more stories of this American Life. Next week on the podcast, with this American Life, a guy connects two AI chatbots, so instead of talking to him, they're talking to each other. And what happens next is kind of amazing. Each chatbot insists on trying to help the other until they figure out that neither of them is human. And then, they try to stop their conversation, and they find they can't. Next week on the podcast, on your local Public Radio station.