by Geoff Dyer
The state of the toilets was the single biggest source of grievance while I was on the boat, and it continued to be a contentious issue after I’d returned to the exquisite privacy of my owner-occupier lavatory at home. The mother of one of the sailors wrote a blog about the state of the toilets and how they were adversely affecting the mental and physical well-being of the crew (faced with a lack of toilet opportunities, they were drinking less and therefore becoming dehydrated). This blog found its way onto various media outlets, prompting the Captain to send a fifteen-hundred-word response on Facebook to family and friends of the crew. It’s a remarkable document, notable for statistical precision, the vigour with which speed of repair is presented and defended, and the thoroughness with which causes of blockage are itemized:
Inappropriate items that have been flushed down the commode and caused clogs during deployment include feminine hygiene products and their applicators, mop heads, T-shirts, underwear, towels, socks, hard-boiled eggs, and eating utensils.
There have been ZERO (0) clogs caused by toilet paper and human waste.
As for claims of ‘increased health issues, such as dehydration, and increased urinary tract infections’, the Captain simultaneously rebuts the claim and offers an alternative explanation for why the last-mentioned might have arisen: ‘There have been 60 total cases of urinary tract infection during deployment with two major spikes occurring immediately following port visits.’
34
I went to see Fish the Bish again—at his suggestion. As I sat down I noticed a quotation from John Wesley taped to the wall over his desk: a faultless creed, gently in keeping with the exhortations to excellence seen elsewhere on the boat:
Do all the good you can
By all the means you can
In all the ways you can
In all the places you can
At all the times you can
To all the people you can
As long as ever you can.
Even though we were speaking at close range—three feet max—his eyes were always fixed on the middle distance and, as befits a man of faith, his gaze would often turn upward. This was all the more striking since there was no middle distance: we were in his small, low-ceilinged office so the maximum depth of focus required was maybe a couple of yards. But that is what faith does: it enables you to see the bigger picture and expand your horizons (though when there are no horizons in view this could be counted as a delusion). It also suggests that the other person—in this case, me—is not an individual but a congregation, that the chair Fish was sitting on was some kind of pulpit. I don’t mean to be uncharitable. Maybe if I’d gone to him with a specific problem, if I’d been in need of pastoral care or help, he’d have looked me in the eye and put a theologically comforting arm around my shoulder. But in this context he was there not to console or chat but to hold forth. I was especially conscious of this when he explained that chaplains in the British Navy assume the rank of the person they are with. This seemed more American than British and yet I had the sense, throughout our audience, of being outranked.
When I asked him about the people who came to see him he told me about the ones who didn’t. It was hard to persuade officers to come because of their ‘zero-defect mentality’. The chiefs—sailors who started out as enlisted men and had worked their way up to E-7 or E-9—were reluctant to come, too, as they were grounded in ‘an older, tougher style of man-management’. Which left, I suppose, almost everyone else. And often it wasn’t that they had specific—let alone religious—problems.
‘Something about being at sea, especially standing a long watch, encourages us to think of big questions,’ he said. Not for the first time I found that someone I was speaking to was making a point that I had intuited myself. It was good to have my fantail belief confirmed by . . . well, by a higher authority, I guess.
Perhaps the key part of the Bish’s operation was that what was said to him had the status of a Confession, freeing people to speak in confidence in an environment in which it was hard to keep anything private. If at the end of their sessions people talking to the Bish decided they needed to see the ship’s psychiatrist then he went too. ‘But I don’t lead and I don’t follow—I walk alongside.’ (How he managed this in the crowded and narrow corridors of the boat was not something I felt I could raise: I liked the idea and took the point.)
I’d warmed to the Bish as our conversation proceeded—and that, it seemed, was not uncommon. According to the Bish many of the people who sought him out ended up by saying, ‘ “Chaps, I don’t know what it is, but it’s good to have you around.” But if they ask for better weather I have to tell them I’m in sales, not production.’
‘So, will you walk with me to the psychiatrist?’ I said to the Bish as I got up to leave. I wasn’t cracking up and I wasn’t cracking wise either: I actually had an appointment but was unsure how to get there. The fact that it was a happy ship did not mean that everyone aboard was happy; I wanted to see another strand in the pastoral/disciplinary safety net that kept the ship functioning smoothly.
The psychiatrist was one of the most civilian-seeming people on the boat, a young guy whose hair looked fashionably rather than militarily short. He was Brandon Heck, a lieutenant, more widely known as ‘the Psych’. Unlike the Bish, who’d sung like a canary, the Psych kept his cards so close to his chest they were behind his back. More in the habit of asking questions than answering them, he had a way of responding that fulfilled the minimum conditions of a reply without any elaboration or excess. He did this without recourse to the technical language of psychiatry, so the effect was to minimize any disturbances or problems people had. This, for all I knew, was part of the treatment he offered, a preemptive way of normalizing the abnormal. I wasn’t with him long.
Since for many people joining the Navy was ‘an alternative to going to college’, the main problem, he said, was simply one of ‘adjusting to living away from home for the first time, especially in a place where sitting outside listening to birds is just not an option’—not with the roar of birds launching and recovering it wasn’t. People were ‘still in high school mindset—banding together in certain divisive ways.’ With problems de-emphasized in this way the solution was correspondingly reduced from a cure to finding a way, ‘stressful as this environment is, to something they can get comfortable with.’
In keeping with this I came away from my brief session with the Psych believing that I hadn’t needed to see him at all. Or would have done were it not for one aspect of the current deployment that, he said, caused ‘particular challenges’. This was the practice of individual augmentation whereby individual crew members sent to Afghanistan in Marine or Army units had encountered and experienced things without any of the group preparation and support that is such a crucial part of life in the USMC and or the infantry. Parachuted in, as it were, and airlifted out afterwards, they were left to process what had happened individually, back in the company of an entirely different set of people from whom they had earlier been removed.
As it happened I’d recently read What It Is Like to Go to War in which Karl Marlantes writes about something similar happening within the Army and the Marines. In the Second World War people came home slowly, gradually, by boat, as part of a unit. In Vietnam, and in Iraq and Afghanistan, the swift return and dispersal of the group was accelerated and increased, something that may well have played a part in the drastic increase in PTSD. To counter this, Marlantes believes, there is a need for a similarly ritualized reversal of the process by which young men were transformed into fighting machines in order to re-assimilate them to civilian life once more. I mentioned this to the Psych. In fact, listening to the tape again, I realized that I spent longer telling the Psych about Marlantes’s diagnosis and proposed cure than he had telling me about the problem of individual augmentation in the first place. At the end of my exhaustive summary, you can just about hear the Psych, barely audible above the usual background din, nodding over steepled fingers, sa
ying, ‘Uh-huh.’
That night I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking back to the man-overboard scare, of a lone sailor, drifting towards death in the ocean’s heaving blackness.
I had an iPod crammed full of music but had ended up, whenever I had time, always listening to the same thing: Sviatoslav Richter playing Bach’s Forty-Eight Preludes and Fugues. It’s not difficult to work out why I’d narrowed down my choice of music to this one thing that, like the sea, is forever changing into some other thing. From the first notes of the opening prelude you are not just listening to music; you have entered a different realm, a realm of absolute perfection—of constantly altering perfection—in which nothing sucks or has to be sucked up. (The same, obviously, cannot be said of Beethoven who was drawn, relentlessly, to the enormous suck of the world and the self.) On this night, though, I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t lose myself in the music intended as a substitute for sleep. I kept thinking of a castaway lost in the vastness of the sea until this image turned into an identical and opposite scenario. A ship goes down with all hands—except one. The lone individual floating in the sea is actually the sole survivor, as in the line from the Book of Job quoted by Melville in the epilogue to Moby-Dick: ‘And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.’
35
It was actually the snapper who was escaping, whose deployment was coming to an end. One of the last pictures he took before heading back to the beach was the one he’d had in mind right from the start, from our first morning on the boat: the infinite mirror of corridors, at night, lit by the red glow of safety lights, when there was little foot traffic and a long exposure allowed the walkways to reflect on their own immensity. I’d been struck by this hall-of-mirrors thing myself, had jotted down variants of that phrase—‘infinite-mirror effect’, ‘tunnel of mirrors’—in my exercise book. It was a good thing to have noticed. Then, after I got back to the beach myself, I read Tom Wolfe’s 1975 essay ‘The Truest Sport: Jousting with Sam and Charlie’, about pilots flying missions from a carrier during the Vietnam War. Wolfe had been through the walkways too, had noticed the way that ‘as you look on and through these hatchways, one after the other, it’s like a hall of mirrors.’
I read it with a steady oh shit sensation of self-confidence draining away. And the hatchways were only part of my worries. I’d ended up feeling less conspicuous on the boat, not Didionly invisible but more at ease and confident around the people I ran into every day. I cracked more jokes, expressed my personality a bit more. The downside was that I’d ended up feeling less and less confident about the work I was supposed to be doing. For the previous year or so I had been more admiring of the books of reportage coming out of Afghanistan and Iraq—by David Finkel, Dexter Filkins, Evan Wright and others—than almost any of the novels I’d been reading in the same period. What skill it took to notice and to record stuff, often in the midst of danger that was real and immediate. Whereas I had trouble recording even the simplest things such as someone’s name and rank. The longer I spent on the carrier the more convinced I became that, of all the kinds of writer I was not, ‘reporter’ was top of the list.
As a reporter Wolfe also had the advantage that his pilots were flying real combat missions and ended up getting shot down and ejecting over the sea, but there was no getting away from the simple, noncircumstantial truth: ‘The Truest Sport’ was a brilliant piece of reporting and writing, impossible to improve on except insofar as . . . I got myself into a right old state; the way that I kept circling back to that phrase ‘except insofar as’ was proof of that. I mean, what kind of phrase was that? What kind of writer would use that, even once, except one who was caught like a rabbit in the headlights of another writer’s brilliance. ‘Like a rabbit in the headlights . . . ’ I was in the infinite feedback loop, a mirror-hall of self-doubt, intensified by the way Wolfe improved on his unimprovable essay with The Right Stuff.
Taking off and landing from a carrier had gotten safer since the time of Wolfe’s essay—it had already gotten safer by the time Wolfe was writing his piece—but in essentials the carrier experience hadn’t changed significantly since Vietnam, or since the Second World War. It’s all about noisy planes taking off and landing on a flat platform in the middle of the ocean—Wolfe likens it not to a postage stamp but to ‘a heaving, greasy skillet’—and large numbers of people living together in cramped conditions, eating greasy-skillet food. Photographs of life on board a carrier in the build-up to the Battle of Midway are remarkably like ones you could take today, like the ones the snapper had been snapping. Allow for small adjustments in clothing and technology and the pictures were practically identical.
Much is made of the swagger and confidence of pilots, especially Navy pilots, the ones who land on carriers the size of postage stamps or skillets. But confidence is essential to writing too. You can’t do it without talent but you can’t do it without confidence either—and Wolfe had taken a shark-sized bite out of mine. Once your confidence goes other things start to go with it. You fall into depression. You begin to dread the page, the words, the futility of putting the latter on the former. I was like a pilot in the process of losing it: the veteran of thousands of arrested landings and catapulted lunches—I mean launches—who just can’t do it anymore. Who gets the shakes at the mere thought of being hurled off the deck and into the black dog of night. Constantly on the brink of seeing the Bish or the Psych and telling them that he can’t do it anymore, that a zero-defect mentality has given way to a zero-ability mentality, to zero ability. Lying awake at night knowing that the thing he is—a pilot, a Navy pilot—is really the thing he was, that it’s only a matter of time before others find out too. So by the time he gets suited up and ready to go he’s already exhausted and used up. Climbs into the cockpit, connects all the tubes and harnessing, goes through the checks and is shocked to discover, all over again, what he’s been discovering for a while now: that there’s no place on earth he’d rather not be. Still able to process all the information and data coming his way from the flight deck and the instrument panels but none of it sufficient to drown out the words that are sounding through his head: Abort, Abort, Abort and Eject, Eject, Eject. But who sits there and braces and gives the thumbs-up and hangs on as, once again, he’s flung out to sea. Who’s maybe OK while he’s airborne and up there, flying the mission, on cruise control, enjoying the view, but feels sweat trickling down his ribs as the time comes to take his place in the recovery formation, who is so convinced that this time he’s going to slam into the fantail that he comes in too high, misses all the arresting wires and bolts. Which means he’s got to go round again, got to go round and come back and do the whole damn thing again which has become more difficult as a result of that earlier failure . . . If only, he thinks, he could be one of the guys on the deck, watching the planes come in, not doing it himself, just observing others doing it; not writing it, just reading about it.
36
For several days all the talk on board had been about the upcoming Steel Beach Party. The night before this much anticipated holiday I got back to find the usually empty corridor outside my room crowded and noisy with activity, with people—civilians. Their leader—fierce, bald, in his early sixties, still strong-looking—introduced himself as Harvey. He was from Texas and had masterminded the Steaks for Troops programme whereby God-knows-how-many tons of steak had been flown in, loaded aboard and would be served on the flight deck tomorrow by the folks milling around the corridor. That’s who they were; but who, Harvey wanted to know, was this limey and what was he doing on board? (I am tempted to quote him as saying ‘limey asshole’ but I think this came slightly later in our exchange, and that, for the moment, limey was noun rather than adjective.) I told him about my time on the boat, how I’d been with a photographer who left yesterday.
‘Better not try to take my picture,’ said Harvey, ‘or I’ll rip your lips off.’ I had become so accustomed to the extreme courtesy, consideration and politeness of everyone on board that I was so
mewhat taken aback by this threat. Not that I took it personally or entirely seriously; it seemed one only had to say something slightly out of line and Harvey would threaten to rip one’s lips off. Twenty minutes after telling me he’d rip my lips off he told me how he’d told someone else he’d rip their lips off. His fondness for this aggressive turn of phrase in no way disbarred you from being in receipt of his considerable generosity and hospitality: long as you had your teeth you could eat his steaks with or without lips. So when he said I should join him and his crew for dinner I tagged along and found myself seated right next to him—an honour that the other people on his team seemed neither to begrudge nor envy.
I piled my plate in such a way as to make it look like it was piled up even though there was almost nothing on it—just the usual bits of pasta and a couple of dollops of lukewarm sauce. Harvey had made his money from burgers; the Steaks for Troops initiative was a way of giving something back. Before coming aboard the carrier he’d been on a cruiser, an experience which had made a great impression on him.
‘I’m from Texas. We like guns in Texas. That cruiser’s got some big guns. Bullet guns.’
‘What, as opposed to ray guns, you mean?’
I enjoyed joshing with Harvey though the cut and thrust was diminished by the fact that he was deaf in one ear and that was the ear, naturally, that I was talking to. For top-quality banter you need sharp ears, you have to be an alert listener, and Harvey was somewhat hampered in that regard. He never smiled. There was just a lone-star twinkle in his hard-ass eyes, as he referred to me and those like me as ‘media puke’. Over dinner, he told a long and complicated story about a black Air Force commander fucking someone’s wife. Harvey had him followed by a former FBI agent and this agent slid the resulting file across a table in a diner to Harvey. The file included a photo showing this black officer taking the woman with whom he was having an affair into an abortion clinic. I wish I could have followed the story. It certainly seemed to touch on fundamentals—race, sex, betrayal, the rights of the unborn—but even after I had asked him to clarify certain details I could not untangle the ethical twists and turns. It occurred to me that we had not been bantering at all; or maybe only one of us had been—which meant that neither of us were.