There was a lot to take in—or not to be able to take in. Like the size of the flight deck. How big was it? Impossible to say. It was as big as it was. There was nothing to compare it with. Well, there were people and jets and tons of other equipment, but there was nothing bigger than it—except the sea and sky which always serve to emphasize the lack of everything else. So in tangible, physical terms the carrier was the world and, as such, was all that was the case.
I was not the first writer ever to set foot on an aircraft carrier. One of my predecessors had been hauled up by a sharp-eyed editor for fiddling his expenses. Such things are not unheard of in journalism but this time the editor had him banged to rights: claiming taxi fares during the period when he’d actually been on board the carrier.
‘I know,’ said the journalist. ‘But have you seen the size of these things?’
I’d heard another story, about two brothers working in different sections of the same carrier who didn’t set eyes on each other during the seven months of their deployment. It didn’t matter whether stories like these were factually correct: the truth to which they attest is that carriers are big. Big as small towns. Big enough to generate stories about how big they are.
The flight deck is not only big; it is also overwhelmingly horizontal. That’s what the carrier has to be: a pure and undisturbed length of horizontality, one that remains that way whatever the sea pitches at it.
The teams in their colour-coded jerseys and float coats reminded me of a time I’d visited the Chicago Stock Exchange with the traders in their colour-coordinated blazers on the dealing floor, all gesturing and clamouring in a repeated daily ritual that made perfect sense, the consequences of which were potentially catastrophic. Here too the functions of each team were clearly differentiated from one another according to a colour code I did not yet understand—except for the brown shirts. We were on one of the most technologically advanced places on earth but the guys in grease-smeared brown jerseys and float coats, draped with heavy brown chains, looked like they were ready to face the burning oil poured on them from the walls of an impregnable castle. The combination of medieval (chains) and sci-fi (cranials and dark vizors) didn’t quite cover it, though; there was also an element of the biker gang about them. All things considered, theirs was one of the toughest, roughest looks going. No wonder they stood there lounging with the grace of heavy gun-slingers about to sway into a saloon. Every gesture was determined by having to move in this underwater weight of chain. I couldn’t keep my eyes off them. They weren’t posing. But in this silent world everyone is looking at everyone else the whole time, all communication is visual, so you’re conscious, if you’re a guy with a load of chains hanging from your shoulders like an ammo belt, that you’re the fulfilment of some kind of fantasy—not a sexual one, more like a fantasy of evolution itself. And they weren’t swaggering; there was just the grace that comes from having to minimize effort if a task is to be properly done, especially if a good part of that task involves standing around waiting with all that weight on your shoulders.
The air was an ecological disaster. It was hot anyway, and the heat reared up from the deck, dense with the fumes of jet fuel. Whenever a jet manoeuvred towards the catapults or back to its parking slot or to the elevator there was a wash of super-heated wind, like Death Valley with an oil-gale blowing through it. We were in the middle of the sea and it smelled like a garage with fifty thousand cars in it, each suffering a major fuel leak.
Critics argue that the First Gulf War and the invasion of Iraq were all about America’s insatiable need for oil. What did we need this oil for? To sustain our presence here, to keep flying missions. The whole enterprise reeked of oil. Planes were taking off. The fact that cranials insulated us from the ear- and sky-splitting noise emphasized the tremendous forces at work. There was an acute sense of thousands of years of history and refinement—the refinement of the urge to make war and the need for oil in order to do so—converging here.
The purpose of an aircraft carrier is to carry aircraft. Launching and recovering planes is, as Newell had drily pointed out, the name of the game. As a plane prepared to take off, a woman in a green jersey, perched on the edge of a kind of manhole, signalled to other members of the ground crew. Others in green and red signalled to each other with absolute clarity. Everyone was in contact, visually, with everyone else but the jets were the centre of attention, and the pilots flew the jets. All eyes were on the jets. The pilot was the observed of all observers. There was no room for anything even slightly ambiguous. There was a guy near the front of the aircraft, keeping low, making sure he didn’t get sucked into the jet intake, and two other guys almost behind the wings—the final checkers—each crouched down on the heel of one foot with the other leg stretched out in front, also keeping low, making sure they weren’t hit by the jet blast. How Pina Bausch would have loved to have gotten her hands on this scene! And thank God she didn’t! (Same with Claire Denis whose film Chocolat ends with a lovely sequence of the gestural language of African baggage handlers and whose Beau Travail gazes longingly at the bodies and ballet of soldiers in the French Foreign Legion.) For the beauty of this performance was inseparable from its setting and function. The elaborate, hypnotic choreography on display was devoted entirely to safety, to the safe unleashing of extreme violence. Violence not just in terms of what happened hundreds or thousands of miles away where the planes were headed, but here, where the immense forces required for launch were kept under simmering control.
Up until a certain point a plane can be touched by members of the ground crew. Then the JBD (Jet Blast Deflector) comes up behind the plane. The plane goes to full power—it is only now that one appreciates that the plane, prior to this moment, has been idling, dawdling. The wing flaps are jiggled. Final checks. Thumbs-up between the pilot and the last two members of the ground crew who scurry away, staying low. The plane is flung forward and in seconds is curving away from the end of the carrier, over the sea. In its wake there is a wash of steam from the catapult tracks. After a few moments the catapult shuttle comes back like a singed hare at a greyhound race. A minute later another plane from a neighbouring catapult blasts into the sky.
With the first part of the launch and recovery cycle completed there was an interlude of quietness, though even during the busiest times there had been a lot of hanging about; at least one of the coloured-castes of crew were lounging about in a state of relaxed alertness. John Updike asks, in one of his books about art, if there is such a thing as an American face. I don’t know, but looking at the guys on the flight deck, unfaced by cranials and vizors, persuaded me that there is such a thing as an American walk. Even overweight cops have it: an ease and grace, a subdued swagger. It used to be identified mainly with race—a black thing—but now it seems a cultural and national quality.
Through the dazed silence we walked towards the stern of the boat to better observe the planes landing, past the side of the island where a sign warned, quite reasonably:
BEWARE OF
JET BLAST
PROPELLERS
AND ROTORS
All of which were gathered here in great abundance. Over this warning, like the sign of a giant casino, was the white number 77. There was much to see, lots of it on an enormous scale—but my escort was always tapping me on the shoulder, pointing to hoses, pipes, hooks, chains and other small things that could be tripped over.
We could see the planes high up in the blue distance, plane-shaped specks coming round in an immense circle. As they approached the carrier their wings were all the time tilting slightly, first one way and then the other, adjusting, compensating. Three arresting wires—thick as rope but thin and wiry in this context—were stretched across the rear of the deck. On the port side of the boat, very near the back, the landing signal officers—all pilots themselves—communicated detailed refinements of approach to the pilot.
The planes thump down and then, rather than slowing down—as