Transcript of 206: Somewhere in the Arabian Sea

As I say these words, the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln is heading home after an extended deployment that put it in the news. I'm guessing you might have seen some of the coverage. Their time at sea was extended to over 9 months, taking a toll on the crew. There 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 Though other journalists were unable to get that confirmed. What is life on this kind of Navy ship like during this kind of deployment? Well, years 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. This was 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.

It 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 Creavon Scott. I'm just filling up the vending machines.

Is that your—

Is that your—

Your first job?

Is this your full-time job?

Yes.

It's your full-time job?

Yeah. Filling up vending machines all day. For 12 hours.

A few weeks ago, This American Life producers Alex Blumberg, Wendy Dorr, and I flew halfway around the world to spend some time on 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 is the one who talked to Prevon Scott.

What are the big sellers?

Um, like, right now it's Snickers and Starburst. Snickers goes real fast.

What's the least favorite candy on board?

Bonkers, the fruit chews. 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.

So people hate Bonkers?

Yeah.

Nobody likes Bonkers.

We still got them, but we've been ordering a whole lot of new stuff, so I've been trying to keep, like, a whole variety We got a variety of things in here. Like Crunch 'em Munch, we just got the Crunch 'em Munch, and the Cheez-Its we normally didn't have in here.

Cheez-Its?

Yeah, the Cheez-Its.

The different kind of Cheez-Its.

Our enemies, needless to say, are not supplied with Crunch 'em Munch. Yes, we're at war, and yes, that means thousands of Americans are in Kandahar and Kabul and other very dangerous places doing very dangerous things. But for every person on the front lines, there are dozens backing them up with equipment, logistical support, and Cheez-Its. This aircraft carrier has only 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, we've heard about the people doing more heroic work. But everybody else on this ship is also at war. Is also far from home, is 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 fill candy machines 12 hours a day. In the months since the USS Stennis embarked for the Arabian Sea, Krivon 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 planes 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 homesickness. If I can get over that, then I'll be alright. When I first got here, I was like really bad. I cried every day and stuff like that. But it's like my parents are really helpful. They email me every day.

Today on 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 WBEZ Chicago, this is American Life.

I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

On All of It with me, Alison Stewart, we'll talk about art, music, theater, literature, history, food, well, all of it. Hear in-depth, insightful interviews with authors like Zadie Smith, musicians like Steve Earle, actors like Kate Winslet, and beyond. You never know who you'll hear next on All of It, but it's always worth listening. That's All of It, available wherever you get your podcasts.

This is American Life. Our episode from early 2002 continues about life on an aircraft carrier. So Alex Blumberg and Wendy Dorr and I went to the Stennis together. And throughout this hour, you're gonna hear from all three of us.

We got to the Stennis about 6 weeks after the ship arrived in the North Arabian Sea.

The other aircraft carrier on duty there, the Theodore Roosevelt, sends planes during the day. The Stennis sends them at night.

This means that reveille is called over the ship's PA system to wake everybody up for work at 7 PM. We expected a bugle, or at least a recording of a bugle, but it turns out to be sort of no-frills. "Reveille, reveille!

All hands, even 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. Well, contrary to what we suspected they'd be anyway. Good-humored, 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 habitrail.

Make a left, sir.

Keep going.

Remember, the boat is huge. It's 4.5 acres. But most of the life of the ship takes place here, in the 8 stories of rooms and passageways below the flight deck. There are no windows on 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 in 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 5 minutes of winding our way through these narrow corridors, we come to a big rounded steel door. It's maybe 5 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 2 football fields long, 3 stories tall. Entering it, it's like walking through a closet door and finding yourself at the pitcher's mound in the Astrodome. We walk past parked fighter planes and 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 3-story hole in the side of the ship.

It's nighttime. Peering out, we can make out the shadowy outline and red running lights of another huge boat traveling at the same speed we are, maybe 100 yards away. A half dozen steel cables stretch 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 2 pallets. Lieutenant Commander Mark Semler explains that they're bringing on enough food for 5,000 people for 30 days, plus machine parts, bundles of food. People pass boxes of fresh pears 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 6 months.

I feel like I'm doing my job the same way, and this is pretty much normal.

It's not like being on the front lines with an M16 in my hand.

Do you wish you had a job which put you more in the front lines?

No, man, no.

Not with my wife and stuff. No, I'm very happy with what I am. You feel in danger here?

No.

I mean, the most those guys got is rifles and missiles that 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.

Thanks, Chief.

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 6 days ago. So I've only— I'm going through training right now. So everything's still a blur.

I feel—

I don't—

how long have I—

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, 2.5 years ago, working at the mall in a Barnes Noble and living in the same small town where she'd grown up in Ocala, 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 didn't understand why people— I never personally, for me, I never thought I'd be in the military. It was a— It was a split-second decision. The place where I live is considered the black hole.

It's—

nobody gets out of there. Like, most 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 my— I had two girl roommates at the time, and I looked at them and I said, "You can have all my stuff." I packed up my— 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 rent and everything. He's like, "You need to find a new roommate." I get in my car, which was an '89 Mustang, and just putter away.

Jessica had no idea where she was headed. There were vague thoughts of finding someplace cool and applying to college. She made her 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 to gas station and ask people for money, pretty much. I'd be like, "Listen, I'm on a road trip." Most people hand me money, you know, $5 or something. But she can 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, it was, we were having a party and everybody was like partying 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? Like, he's just like, what are you talking about? I was like, I think I'm gonna pack up and go home and join the Navy. I was like, this is what I need to do.

And how—

why did the Navy pop into your head? Why Navy?

You know, I have no idea. I think my manager at Barnes Noble was in the Navy for 2 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 sea is our classroom. They use like the intro to some hardcore rock song. I think it's a Limp Bizkit song. Maybe not. Maybe it's a Godsmack. I don't know, but there's the carrier and it's racing across and they've got the jets flying over and they 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, you know, the picture. And then they're like, most people go to school, but this is our classroom. And then it says GoNavy.com. So then I was like, hey, you know, maybe I will.

From the time you told from the time you told that guy at the party you were going to join the Navy to the time you were in the Navy, how many days passed?

6?

5? That was a Friday, and that Wednesday I was in boot camp.

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 was it for you? Like, once you were in boot camp, did you have second thoughts?

Did I ever have second thoughts? We first get on 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 starts yelling. It's the basic boot camp 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? So they get us, they bus us to the Navy boot camp 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 they were, when I call your name, yell out your social. And they yell out my name, and I'm standing there yelling my Social Security number, and they're telling me I'm not 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 5. Gosh, this day is so clear. It's 5 in the morning, and it's like you don't— you're looking at a stranger, and you understand everything they're feeling. Like, 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. 'Cause I do too.

It 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, uh, I'm in it, you know, it's a job. I'll, you know, I do that my 8 hours a day and then I'm done. I'll be able to get my college money." If you'd asked me before as a civilian, I'd have been like, "Oh, war, make 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, so 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 my— sacrifice myself for what has happened. And 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 said 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 O3 deck with Senior Chief Barbara Mendoza. An electronics repair shop. A room in charge of anti-submarine warfare, an air traffic control center, a conference room that they actually call the war room, the office of the admiral who's in charge of this ship and the 6 other ships and 2 nuclear-powered subs which travel with it at all times protecting it.

This is Civic.

Civic means?

Intelligence. They're 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 in Las Tenas in 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 raps on the door.

They're not going to be able to hear me.

On the door is a sign-up sheet for bands who you 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 is just echoing. I mean, 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?

Um—

A lot of stuff. That song is, uh, that comes from my ex-wife. I recently got divorced and came out of nowhere. I got blindsided, so I draw on my personal experiences.

And then where do you perform?

Uh, we performed at Steel Beach Picnic a couple days ago.

Where's that?

Up on the flight deck. Every holiday, uh, it's like Christmas, they have bands performing on the mess decks or in the, uh, the hangar bay. They're gonna have a Super Bowl halftime show. They're gonna play in the hangar 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 now 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 in line for a half hour to get onto 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 this off.

You want to talk about something interesting?

Sure, let's talk about something interesting.

My job's not interesting. No. It's tedious.

What are you liking about being on board?

I actually love the Navy. I don't like my job per se, but I love the whole military. I like the lifestyle.

Which part of the lifestyle?

It becomes kind of like a big family. You just, you know, y'all live together. Y'all dress and talk and eat the same exact things. You know, we shower in the same exact showers. It becomes like a culture.

Summer's friend Melissa walks into the library. She's older than Summer, 25. Summer's just 19, and is here to write email back home.

Well, I'm a single mom. For my son's kindergarten class, he has to email me, so that's why I stay up for the extra hour after work to read them.

I'd 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's a lot to keep up with.

The other thing about the ship is rumors just fly. It's amazing. I found out the other day that I liked somebody I never even met. You know, it's just— rumors are amazing on a ship because people get bored, idle gossip, and it just goes way out of proportion. Like, it's really actually kind of funny.

Most of the rumors on board have to to do with when they're going to get to go to shore. These circulate constantly. The second biggest subject?

Just, you know, 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, look at their 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 Best. 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 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, stacked in bags to the ceiling.

Right now I'm opening the dryer. This dryer holds about £100 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 feel good.

It's just washing laundry. It's not— my regular job is really complicated, and sometimes I have a hard time comprehending all the electronical 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, you just throw it in the washer, take it out of the wash, put it in the dryer, 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 learned just minutes before in the library. I've heard there's a lot of rumors on board a ship. Like, there's always rumors. What are some of the rumors that you've heard?

Oh, you always hear 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 port. And 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 of about like what ports that we're gonna hit on the way back, because everybody wants to go to Australia. But then 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?

Getting a lot of trouble. You're not allowed to have any fraternization on the ship. So that's another thing that's— it's kind of rough, you know. I haven't had much physical contact on 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. So I miss affection a lot. I do. I grew up in a very affectionate home, and I like to just get a hug every now and then.

Jason tells me another rumor or two he's heard. We say goodbye, and Wendy and Alex and I go down to get some food. Perhaps 15 minutes later, one of the public affairs officers informs me that Jason and I had been overheard talking about rumors on the Stennis. 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, the 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 8 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 when, of course, they say no, he'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 closed 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 Garell, one of these very smart, very capable people saddled with the thankless job of escorting us around the ship, a job which the lieutenant compared to herding 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 Garell 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 Wren. This turned out to be a mistake for Port Lieutenant Corral.

I'm just ready to go home. Been on the water too long.

How come you chose the service?

Uh, court order.

Really?

Court order?

Yeah, so that's how they do it in Texas. Instead of you going to jail, they send you to the armed service.

They give you a choice of Jail or the Navy?

Yeah, or the armed service, any armed service.

You don't have to tell me the answer to this, but what kind of trouble were you in?

Oh, drugs. Yeah.

How much jail would you have had to done?

7 years.

So how do you like it?

It sucks. It's like a prison on water. That's what it is. I don't really like it.

This was not, of course, what Lieutenant Gorell was hoping for from young Kevin. I asked, hoping to turn things to a more positive area, if Kevin is changing. Do people grow when the courts send them out here?

Nah, 'cause people get flown off the ship almost every month, you know what I'm saying, for doing drugs or all kind of stuff. So nah, it's whatever you got inside of you, that's what makes, you know what I'm saying, that's what's gonna change you, you know what I'm saying. If you don't want to be changed, you ain't gonna be changed, so.

I can practically hear the I can feel the acid eating away at Lieutenant Gorrell's stomach at this answer. I rack my brain for the most completely neutral question I can ask. So what do you do? So on your job, like, what is there to do?

We just walk around all day for 8 hours. We walk around and check spaces.

And what are you looking for?

Just people having sex, fights, anybody drinking, doing stuff they ain't supposed to do on the boat. So 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 glance over and catch the expression on the lieutenant's face. But the fact is, like, 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 yeah, this boat is like a love boat right now.

Alright, you're done.

If anyone ever asks you to do an interview again, say no.

This is what Lieutenant Gorell has to deal with all day long in the service of his country. As for the loveboat aspect of living on the Stennis, a number of men and women both pointed out, with the 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 gets them 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 McDonnell, 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?

Oh, several hundred times a day. So literally, I mean, I walk around a ship and I see the sailors and I have to come up with a little shtick 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 McDonough 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 which 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 the young folks up here, I have the Sailors of the Day up here every day, one from the air wing and one from the ship. The interesting thing is is that I will ask them just kind of, "Hey, do you know who the Secretary of State is?" And that's about a 1 in 3 get it right. "Do you know who the Secretary of Defense is?" And maybe a little higher percentage, but not much more, because they're 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 No, no, no.

A few hours later, we stood in a passageway and listened to the captain's daily message.

Aboard USS John C. Stennis, good day. This is the captain. Day 35 of combat operations over Afghanistan. This is an incredibly uncertain time for all of us aboard. The war on global terrorism Tensions between India and Pakistan. Separate warnings from the President of the United States to Iran and Iraq.

But the key announcements which give you an even deeper sense of who the crew is and what it means to supervise a shipload of young people are announcements like this one from the ship's executive officer, Jeff Miller.

The real topic I need to talk about right now is fresh water. For some reasons we're not completely sure of, we've gotten ourselves in a little bit of a bind with the amount of fresh water we have on board.

He's upbeat. He thanks them for their hard work on the problem. He urges them on to more. The tone is like a great high school football coach.

So here's what I need you to do, and I need all 5,000 of us to work on this one today. We need to make sure that we're taking short Navy showers. That's a little redundant. Every Navy shower is supposed to be short. We expect the water to run for no more than 2 minutes. So the trick is, turn the water on, Get wet, turn the water off. Soap up, turn the water on. Rinse off, turn the water back off again. If you're taking a Hollywood shower right now, you're going to hurt the ship. Right now, for the next 10 to 12 hours, if we can turn this around and start to build up our water reserves, we can avoid going to water hour.

Coming up, what it's like to drop a bomb on Afghanistan in a minute from Chicago Public Radio. When our program continues.

This American Life, I'm Ira Glass. 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 rerunning 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 producers Alex Blumberg, 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 some homemade blondies that someone's girlfriend sent everybody. On the wall, there's this underground newspaper the aviators print print, which is in the style of The Onion. Stories and headlines all consist of these inside jokes like "New Billet 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 Frenchy, Tink, Chewy, Fish, Rain Man, Mr. Burns, That last one for a pilot who supposedly looks like the character on The Simpsons.

This is Pom Pom.

Pom Pom.

Interesting.

Yeah, fascinating.

There's a story behind it though.

I think I know it.

Hmm, what was it?

Oh, one of us sitting here, callsign Pom Pom, was a cheerleader in college.

We're very close here.

One of them shows us the official drawing of the squadron mascot and quietly points out that it's a bird whose wing has a middle feather extended, like a middle finger.

At 4:00 AM, 9 of these guys sit down in their flight suits to watch an intelligence briefing that comes in over closed-circuit TV. Then a young guy named Steve Kofor stands up in front. All right, good morning. Briefing here for our XAR mission 702, 705, and we've We've got Gonzo in 706.

I'd 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. Divert field, we're working blue water ops.

If we need to divert and our feet dry, you know where 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 worth, including a parachute, survival knife, radios, flares, and something called a blood chip. Screwbird's commanding officer, Ross Myers, a trim man with the call sign Monkey Butt stitched onto his Navy coveralls in neat black letters, pulls one out to show us. It's a piece of paper with an American flag and a serial number, with the same message in several languages.

Arabic, English, Dari, Pashto, 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 screwbirds head out to their planes.

An aircraft carrier's main mission is to fly planes. 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 to get enough lift under their 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 Screwbirds, Ross Myers, aka Monkey Butt, says that in his 16 years of service, he's personally seen 6 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 4 cables that are stretched across the deck. An airman named Dave Cruise explains how it works. The pilot looks at something called "the ball," which indicates if he's coming in on target, and talks to guys called LSOs. They're fellow pilots, actually, who stand right on deck.

And it's up to the LSOs to guide them in.

They're talking to him over the radio?

Right now they're talking to that next one coming in, which is a Tomcat, which is 3/4 of a mile. He's calling the ball and stating his fuel state.

115, on course, on glide path, 3/4 mile, call the ball.

115, Tomcat ball 8.0.

Roger, ball 28 knots down the angle.

Right now it's about a quarter of a mile. Right now you should tell him you're on ball and it should be good to go.

He's right over the edge of the deck.

Yeah.

92 short, 92 short, went to one wire, 92 short.

The one wire is the wire closest to the rear of the boat, and if you catch it, That means they were dangerously close to going too low and slamming into the back of the carrier. Sometimes a pilot can't straighten out his approach enough, and the LSOs have to wave him off. It can get a little tense.

Here comes another one. Just describe how he's doing.

All right, he's turning into the 3/4 mile now.

Roger, ball 28 knots down the angle.

And right now he's a little too low. Right now the pilot should be telling him to give it a little throttle.

Don't settle.

Power.

Power. Wave off. Wave off.

One deck below, in the Blue Diamond Squadron briefing room, I talked to a pilot named Jeremy Markin about what it's like when things don't go well during a landing.

Who knows what happens? Maybe you lose a an important instrument inside and it's nighttime and maybe there's weather and so you're in the goo, we call it inside the clouds, it's dark. So you tell yourself you gotta fly the best pass ever and you come down and you know, just one thing leads to another and next thing you know you're looking at the back of the boat and you're close to it and you got guys screaming at you and you put in the afterburners and you, hook touches down a couple feet past the back of the back of the boat and you go taxi into the one wire there at high speeds and realize they caught you and your legs are shaking, you're still in blow, your lights are still on, and the air boss says, "We got you, you can relax now," and it's kind of hard to relax right away. You kind of got to unwind for a little bit.

You said the hook misses the back of the boat by a couple inches.

What does that mean? Well, if the hook hit the back of the boat, that means your plane hit out the back of the boat. 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 macho, including the nicknames, which make Monkey Butt sound almost dignified by comparison.

Balls, Screwed, Itchy. I got Itchy for a while because my last name's Balsitas.

Looks like balls-itis or like some kind of Both Alex and I hung out with the Blue Diamonds for about an hour. I interviewed Dave Balsides on one side of the room while Alex interviewed another pilot, Jeremy Markin, 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?

Uh, anywhere from an hour and a half to 2 hours. Depends on where you're going.

And what's it like over Afghanistan? What's it look like?

It's, I don't know, it's actually, it looks pretty in the mountainous areas. Snow on 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?

You can, but we'll have to beep it out.

Okay. It's a shit hole. It really is. There is absolutely nothing down there. I don't see anything worth fighting for down there. It's all sand, rocks. I don't know how they live down there.

Yeah, it's probably not much different from, you know, out near like Glamis or Southern California or something. I mean, there's dunes and mountains. It looks like a beautiful country, so.

There's no color. There's no irrigation, no lakes, no streams, no farms. Just brown and some snow. So it's pretty ugly.

When you're actually doing what you're doing, you're kind of so busy that you don't really have a lot of time to sit back and go, "Hey," you know, kind of look at the scenery. But those moments of, those pauses, those moments you have and you look around, it's, the world's a beautiful place, you know, and it's kind of weird to imagine up that high and you're looking down and it looks so beautiful and then you get snapped back into what's going on down there and You gotta refocus.

This might be a sort of a bonehead civilian question, but is it hard to drop a bomb?

Oh, you mean like in almost a moral sense or? Yeah, emotional or whatever. Oh, emotional? It's a double-edged emotion, you know. It's what you train for your whole life. The fact you're doing it doing it correctly, and you drop your target, drop your bomb on the target, that's an emotional feeling. Hey, I did my job, and just as I was trained, and I did it well. While you're up there, I don't really think about the other side of the sword. It's my job to go up 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 on 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 Reveille first called everyone to work. For most people, it's the end of the workday. In the mess hall on the second deck, Cynthia and David have just finished their dinner, and they're waiting for the 8 o'clock movie, Exit Wounds, to begin.

Every now and then we get to watch a chick flick.

Yeah, we got to watch Stepmom the other day.

Yeah, like Stepmom, Steel Magnolias. They haven't shown that one lately.

They've got it on board.

There are TVs just about everywhere people are not working on the ship, with 2 channels of movies and network shows 24 hours a day.

Every Tuesday night, we have a movie night where we'll pick a movie through email. We vote on what we want to see.

I voted for Miss Congeniality.

I was hoping to watch that.

I'm gonna watch that tonight.

As did I.

Sitting there side by side in their 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 2, she's on book 4. 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 3 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 sea, 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 got 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 for me. Thank you for 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 berthing 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 is 6 feet long, a foot and a half tall, and about 2 feet wide.

And it's set up in the birthing, it's set up kind of in eras, you know, and like you'll have this one little neighborhood that listens to this music and, you know, I'm in over the old folks place. Most of us listen to like country music or something slow.

So 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. It's a I have a Tweety Bird comforter, Tweety Bird pillows, Tweety Bird wallpaper around my rack, so—

You don't see that stuff down in the male birthing. At all.

It's now very late, meaning 9 in the morning, and Senior Chief Barbara Mendoza invites us to the chief's mess, a special dining room for the ship's chiefs.

There may be 30 tables with chairs stacked on top, and the floors are shiny and clean. The room is quiet aside from the pleasant electric hum of refrigerators and drink machines and the far-off purring of the ship's engines. In the center of the room, 5 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 of someone jumping into the ocean during a recent break when they were allowed to swim.

This is a perfect shot. You have Randy there jumping off the elevator, and they have a picture of a shark kind of like swallowed— well, trying to swallow him 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 Brent offers to buy him something.

Well, okay.

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 to say they're not telling the story right.

Tell them about the tip.

No.

Tell them the tip.

You gotta tell them the tip, Bobby.

Yeah.

If you picture how the Navy works, there are the enlisted 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 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.

It become like everybody's, your 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. 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, whose 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, we can 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 the Navy, if you have a good Chief from the beginning, your goal is to is to be a chief. I mean, your goal is to be that chief. And for me, that was the goal. Who was your chief? Uh, it was a guy named Chief Womack. He was my first chief in the Navy, and he was there anytime I needed anything. He was always there.

Late one night, Lieutenant Guerrell and a TV crew from San Diego and I are on our way back to the staterooms when Guerrell invites us into the officers' mess for a bowl of cereal before bed. Inside, there's a group of officers talking at another table and one enlisted man breaking down the serving line. It's late, and most of the people on 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 Guerrell 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 4 of us, and we already have our cereal. Apparently the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force applies to food service as well. Later in our cabin, Wendy, Ira, and 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, most expensive fighter planes in the world to 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 he 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've slept in bunk beds with your boss on an aircraft carrier. By Navy standards, the room Ira and I shared was luxurious. Only 2 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 and the clanks of the planes 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. Like the steel wall 6 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, saw his 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.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. Thanks.

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. If it was a problem, there'd be alarms going off and stuff, right? I mean, like, it just wouldn't just be like a horrible accident that— and then nothing, like, 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, I'm sure if it really gets bad around here, there's bells of some sort.

The loud sound never happened again, and eventually we fell asleep, though Ira left the tape recorder running just in case. We were out for maybe half an hour when we were woken up again.

This is the engineering officer of the Washington Center control. Loss of feed in number 2 reactor plant. Reactor mechanical casualty assistance team, later number 2 reactor room.

Hold on. "Loss of feed in number 2 reactor plant. Reactor mechanical and casualty assistance teams report to number 2 reactor room." Casualty 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 he 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.

Reactor mechanical casualty assistance team, later number 2, reactor room. This is a drill.

At 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 one more thing that happened on the Stennis that I keep thinking about in the weeks since we returned. It was at the end of our very last day there, which meant 10:40 in the morning, and Barbara Mendoza, the chief who had been kind enough to invite us to the chief's mass, took Alex and Wendy and I outside to the very back of the ship. The fantail, looking at the water and the sky. It's one of her favorite places on the Stennis.

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. We 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 know, 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, um, I always wonder when 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— I wonder 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 Navy in the history of the world.

Isn't that cool? How cool is that?

Off to the starboard side of the ship, we can see the USS Port Royal protecting our back. We Americans are here for now. While it lasts. Special thanks today to Vice Admiral James Andy Shortman, who at the time that we recorded this show in 2002 ran Carrier Group Seven for the Navy.

And to the Public Affairs Office and Navy journalists who showed us around the Stennis: Barbara Mendoza, Jeff Gurell, Cheeto Peppler, and David Michael Ross.

Also thanks to NPR's Charlie Mayer, Richard Bloomberg, and Stephen Lever of Stars and Stripes.

Original music for this hour by Jon Kimbrough. Thanks today also to This American Life partner Katherine Durnam. Life partners support our 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 this little newsletter where I recommend stuff to see and hear, and I also do some behind-the-scenes stuff about the show. Anyway, to join, go to thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners.

That link is also in the show notes.

Thank you for considering this. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio The American Exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr.

Tory Mallettia, who describes his personal life these days this way: It's like a love boat right now. I'm Ira Glass. Back next week for more stories of This American Life.

Next week on the podcast of 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. That's next week on the podcast or on your local public radio station.