206: Somewhere in the Arabian Sea

After an extended deployment, the put it in the news, I'm guessing you might have seen some of the coverage. Their time at sea it 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, whether 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 that 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, and they were always 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. That's just a jump here. My name is Cree Run Scott, just filling up the Vinda Machines. Is that your full-time job?

Yes. Is your full-time job? Yeah.

“Fill in up Vinda Machines all day for 12 hours.”

A few weeks ago, this American life producer's Alex Spumberg, Wendy Durin, I flew halfway

around the world. Spence a time when the USS John C. Stennis. Stennis is one of two aircraft carriers that are launching jet fighters to support the ground troops in Afghanistan. Alex is the only talk to Cree Run Scott.

What are the big sellers? I'm like, right now it's Snickers and Starburst. Snickers goes real fast. What's the least favorite candy on onboard? Bancers, the fruit shoes.

We got boxing gloves and still have them. Sometimes if we don't have anything else, we just put all rows of bunkers and they'll still stay in here. So people hate bonkers. They just know what you like from.

We've been ordering a whole lot of new stuff, I've been trying to keep a whole variety of things in here. Crunchy much. We just got the crunchy much. And the cheese.

It's we normally didn't have in here. Cheese. Yeah, the cheese. We'll give it how much cheese it is.

“This to say, are not supplied with crunchy much.”

Yes, we're at war. And yes, that means thousands of Americans are in can to harm and cobble. And are the very dangerous places doing very dangerous things. But for every person on the front lines, there are dozens back in the map. 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 of bad guys. It's another to give up everything to go feel candy machines, 12 hours in the head. In the months of the USS Dennis embarked with the Arabian Sea, three of them is only going 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 on 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 home's sick. If I can get over that, then I'll be all right. 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 to email me every day as well. 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.

WB Easy Chicago, South American Life, America Last, stay with us. On all of it, with me, Allison Stewart will talk about art, music, theater, literature, history, food, well, all of it. Here in-depth, insightful interviews with authors like Zady Smith, musicians like Steve Earl, actors like Kate Winslet and Bionne, you never know who you'll hear next.

That's all of it.

“Available or ever, you get your podcasts.”

This American Life, or episode from early 2002, continues at that life on an aircraft carrier.

So Alex Blumberg and Wendy Doran, 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, since planes during the day.

That means it revels the ship's PA system to wake everybody up for work at 7pm. We expected a bugle, at least a recording of a bugle, but it turns out to be sort of no frills. 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'll counter it at what we suspected they'd be anyway. Good humor didn't quite help.

Our first day, they laid 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 habitat trail. "Make a left there?" "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 in 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, in some sort

of huge, subterranean warrant. "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 hanger 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 Astridown.

“We walk past Park Fighter Plains, hundreds of people, all scurrying around, pushing”

hand trucks, talking into walkie talkies.

And then we arrive at the hanger bay door, which is basically a three-story hole in the

side of the ship. "It's night time, carrying out, we can make out the shadowy outline and red running lights of another huge boat, traveling at the same speed we are, maybe a hundred yards away. A half dozen steel cable stretch between the two ships, helicopters, dip and swirl 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." "We tend to come in and mark similar experience 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 pairs 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 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 M16 in my hand. Do you wish you had a job which would put you more in the front lines?" "No, no.

Now with my wife and stuff, I'm very happy with what I am." "You feeling danger here?" "No. I mean, the most of 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've got 70 plus aircraft 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 join the Navy to straighten out my life or I join the Navy because I wanted something more." "Okay, I'm Jessica Phillips, I got here six days ago, so I've only, I'm going through

training right now, so everything's still a blur, I don't, how long 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 at Barnes

"Before I never even paid attention to military people, you know, it was so what you're in the Navy, you know, your drunkard sailor or marine, you know, you go, people call you bullet sponge, you're not, why would you do that, you know, and 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, 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 him I had two girl roommates at the time, and I looked into my sitting, "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 him like money for that months, 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, there were big 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 ask people for money, pretty much, I have been like, "Listen, I'm on a road trip, most people have me money, you know, five bucks or something, but you don't want to do that for so long."

So I was just like, I was 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 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, "I'm sitting outside, and something that comes up to talk to me, and he said something about what you're doing tomorrow, and I said, I'm going to go home and join the Navy, and he was like, "What?"

Like, he was just like, "What are you talking about?"

“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 how, 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 young man, 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 and between television or something. It's the one where they say that the Seas are classroom, they use like the intro to some hard core rock song, I think it's a lit biscuits song, maybe not. Maybe it's a god-smack, 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 were sitting in front of the radar, and looking at the certain, you know, 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 until the time

you were in the Navy, how many days passed? Six, five, 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 is it for you?

Like, once you're in boot camp, did you have your 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 boot camp thing.

I'm not your mama, your papa, you know, stop talking out, want to hear it. So I was just like, "Okay, they're just trying to scare me, whatever." And you know, I'm sitting there laughing, I'm like, "God, this is such a movie." I was like, "How's Theo typical is this?" So 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 you all, you're social, and they yell at my name, and I'm standing there yelling my social security number, they're telling me not doing it loud enough, and I'm thinking, "What did I do?

What am I doing here?" And it's like, it's five, gosh, just 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." 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, because I do too."

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, it's a job, I'll, you know, I do that on my eight 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, I want 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, I sacrifice myself for what has happened." And it's, I don't even know how to correctly say it, but when you realize it 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 what they would

“talk about it, and almost startled tongue would creep into their voices, as if they were”

a surprise 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 status.

Here's what we pass walking down just one hallway, on O3 deck, we've seen your chief Barbara

Mendoza, an electronics from Hare Shop, a room in charge of anti-submarine warfare, and our 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 these six other ships and two nuclear powered subs which travel with it at all times, protecting it. This is Civic.

Civic means intelligence? Isn't that really that intelligent? No, they are. This is the Air Wing Commanders office.

“Towards the back of the boat some corridors have red lights on instead of white, indicating”

people are asleep. We pass the guy playing Nintendo, video games of all sorts are huge in the 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 in the door. I've been not going to be able to hear me. On the door is a sign-up sheet for bandits who can use the room as a rehearsal space. There are lots of bands on board, this one is called recoil.

You can feel the door is just echoing and we're just vibrating. The guys in recoil work on planes are 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 dry your inspiration from?

A lot of stuff, that song is 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? We performed at the Steel Beach picnic a couple of days ago. Where's that?

Up on the flight deck? Every holiday, it's like Christmas, they have bands performing in the mess decks or in the hangar bay. They're going to have a Super Bowl halftime show, they're going to 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. Not just a few hours since we saw the resupply operation, we're in the ship's library,

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 her to one of the computers, which she can do email. While she waits, I ask her a better job, which involves moving airplanes around from one spot to another.

But she cuts his off. You want to talk about something interesting? I actually love the Navy, I don't know. 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 know, y'all, of the other y'all, dressed and

like a culture. Summer's friend Melissa walks into the library, she's older than summer, 25, summers just 19. And it's 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 for that extra hour after work to read him. How to assume that summer would also be writing to people back home. But she tells me now, she's writing to friends on the ship. She only way to keep up with people, she says, everybody works different hours, and there is a lot to keep up with.

“Yeah, the only 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.

Rumors are amazing on a ship, because people get bored, I don't gossip, and it just goes way out of proportion, like it's really actually kind of funny. To the rumors on board, I have to do with when they're going to get to go to shore. These circulate constantly. Is that a big subject?

Just like, you know, other people, it's kind of like high school sometimes. And it's 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. Must be 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.

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. Plaining, serving food, or doing laundry. Thousands of pounds of day of laundry, it's decking bags, it's new. Right now, I'm opening the dryers, the dryer holds about a hundred pounds of laundry.

Jason, it turns out, actually it doesn't mind his 90 days doing wash. I don't know, I really like laundry, actually. Yeah, yeah, I feel good. It's swash and laundry, it's not, 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 start-ups and all that, and laundry was a good rakes, because it's really simple. Here, all you do is go in the wash, take another wash, put in the dryers, you know, and they're 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 Porta's ship, 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, but, of course, you hear rumors about 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, and not allowed to have any friendization 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 uniform and you're always in uniform. So, I've had a mis-election a lot, you know, I do, I grew up in a very affectionate home, like she's, you know, hug every now and then. Jason tells me another rumor, too, he's heard, you say goodbye, and Wendy and Alex and I

good on 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 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, the person who oversees the day-to-day operations of

the status.

“So, we were upset, what sort of story were we putting together anyway?”

I went 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 just ten 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 this tennis, 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

A date is when you sit too near each other, you should be a minimum he tells them

of two but with support.

“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, they'll tell them well then, make sure it doesn't look like a date. Which else 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 and the statuses female. The average age on board, as we've said, is 21 years old, that is thousands of young people whooped 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 Garell, 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 Mestec, 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 interviews. 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 Renn. This turned out to be a mistake for Port Lieutenant Garell. "I'm just ready to go home, get on a wire to go home." "How can you choose a service?" "A corridor?"

"Really corridor?" "Yeah.

“That's how I do it in Texas instead of you going to jail, I didn't send you to the Marm service."”

"They give you a choice of jail or the Navy." "Yeah, or the arm service, any arm service." "You don't have to tell me the answer, what kind of trouble were you in?" "Oh, drugs." "Yeah."

"Yeah." "How much jail would you have had to do?" "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 is not of course, but Lieutenant Garell 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 is sending out here."

"No, because people get flown out the ship, and almost every month, you know, saying we're doing drugs, all kinds of stuff, so now it is whatever you got inside of you, that's

“what it makes, you know, and that's what's going to change, you know, saying if you don't want”

to be changing, you ain't going to be changing, so." "I can practically hear the acid eating wet, Lieutenant Garell's stomach at the sensor. I rack my brain for the most completely neutral question I can ask." "So, what do you do?" "So, you know, on your job, like, what does there to do?"

"He just walking around out there, if I ate out, he's walking around, and check spaces." "And what are you looking for?" "There's people who have a 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'm going to look at them." "I can't tell if I catch the expression on the Lieutenant's face." "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 this boat is like a low boat right now."

"All right, you're done, and if anyone ever asks you to do interview again, say no." This is what Lieutenant Garral 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 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 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 crews? What are we going to do after we get back from crews?" "How often are you asked this question?"

"Oh, several hundred times a day." So, literally, I mean, I walk around the 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 that they 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

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 that they appear every day, one from the air wing and one from the ship. The interesting thing is that I will ask them, hey, do you know what the Secretary of State is? And that's about a one and three get it right.

Do you know how the Secretary of Defense is? 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. They're very hard work in the context of the big mosaic that's going on. You I was later we stood in a passageway and listened to the Captain's Daily Message.

“The board of us at JNC Stennis, good day to the captain, D35 a combat operations over Afghanistan.”

This is an incredibly uncertain time for all of us aboard the war on global terrorism tensions between Indian Pakistan, separate warnings from the President of the United States to Iran and Iraq. But the PA announcements which give you an even deeper sense of who the crew is, and what it means to supervise the ship load of young people.

Our 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 up to me. He thanks him for the hard work on the problem. The 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 we've done that every Navy shower is supposed to be short. We expect the water to run for no more than two minutes. So the trick is turn the water on, get wet, turn it on, soap up, turn it 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

turn the water back off again. Coming up, what it's like to drop a bomb on and Afghanistan in a minute from Chicago Public Radio. When our program continues, it's a American life from here of glass. With the USS Lincoln finally heading home, after making the news because of the toll that it's 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 produces Alex Plumberg, Wendy Dore, 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, a monitoring the region for al-Qaeda and nautical traffic. We visited the briefing room of one of the air squadrons on the Stennis, a squadron that caught itself the world-famous screwbirds. On a desk, there's

a big jar of red licorice and some homemade blondies that someone's girlfriend send everybody. On the wall, there's this underground newspaper, The Aviator's Print, which is in the style of the onion. Stories in the headlines of all consist of these inside jokes like new billet added to air-wing watch, which we don't understand it 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 that 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 Pompom. Pompom.

“Yeah, fascinating. Yeah, there's a story behind it though. I think I know it. What was it? Oh,”

one of us sitting here, call sign, Pompom, was a cheerleader and college. Good friends and 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 4 a.m., none of these guys sit down in their flight suits to watch an intelligence briefing that comes in over close circuit TV. Then the young guy named

Steve Koffer stands up in front of him. All right, good morning. Briefing here for our XAR mission 702705 and we've got Ganzo in 706, like you to act as a fill. Watching him, it occurs to me how rare it is, isn't it? To hear somebody speak in your own language for 10 minutes and not understand a word he

feet dry, you know, we're going and for feet wet, we'll go to Masira there.

“Then they suit up. It's a crazy amount of survival gear, 20 to 25 pounds work, including”

the parachute, survival knife, radios, players, and something called a bloodshed. Screwbirds commanding officer, Ross Myers, a trimman with a call sign monkey buyer, is ditched onto his navy coveralls and neat black glitters. Pulls on out to show us. It's piece of paper with an American flag and a serial number, but the same message in several languages. Arabic, English, Dari, Pisto, Uzbek, which would have to be for Uzbekistan, Persian,

varsie, and then in English it gives a translation. 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, 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 scubaids head out to their planes. Mercury 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 they get enough lift into 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 scubaids Ross Myers, aka Monkeybutt, 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

under one of four cables that are stretched across the deck. An airman named Dave Cruz explains how it works. 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 a man.

They're talking to the love of the radio. Right now, they're talking to that next or coming in, which is a Tomcat, which is three quarters of a mile, who's calling the ball, and stating this fuel state, one or five, on course, on gripe path, three quarters, on parable. Four-and-five, Tomcat ball, a point-o.

Roger ball, 28 knots down the angle. I know it's about a quarter of a mile.

Right now, I can tell you, y'all, y'all, y'all, y'all and ball.

And you know, good to go. Is that everything that's in the deck? Yeah. And it's historic. And it just ruins.

So one wire, and then it's historic. 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, the pilot can't straighten out as a perch enough.

And the other soes have to wave them off. They can get a little tense. Here comes another one. Just as bad as how he's doing. All right, he's turning it into the three-quarter mile now.

Roger ball, 28 knots down the angle. And right now, it's a little too low. I know, the pilot should be telling a little, a little, uh, throttle. Don't settle. Power.

One deck below, and the blue diamond squadron briefing room. The taco pilot named Jeremy Marken about what it's like when things don't go well during the landing.

“You know, as it happens, maybe you lose an important instrument inside, it's nighttime.”

And there's weather. And see, you're in the goo, we call it inside, you know, the clouds. It's dark. So you gotta tell yourself you gotta fly the best pass ever and you come down and, um, 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 got guys screaming at you. 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, uh, taxing into the one wire there. High speeds and realize they caught you and, uh, your legs are shaking.

You're still in blow, your light just still on and the air boss says we got you. You can relax now and, uh, it's kind of hard to relax right away. You can't get online for a little bit. So, uh, you said the hook misses the back of the boat back a couple inches. What does that mean?

The hook, it's a hook at the back of the boat, uh, I wouldn't, I mean,

The blue diamond's briefing room is just like the scooper's room.

Only a little more Spartan and a little more macho, including the nicknames, which make monkey butts and almost dignified by comparison. Balls, scrooed, itchy, like I had itchy for a while to my last name. Ball seed is, looks like ball's, I just are like some kind of disease. Both Alex and I hung out with the blue diamonds for about an hour.

I interviewed Dave Ball seedus on one side of the room. Well, 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. I wanted to take to get that yesterday.

Anywhere from, I don't have two hours, depends on where you're going.

“And what's it like over there because it was a look like?”

It's, uh, I don't know, it's actually, it looks, it looks, uh,

pretty in the amount of areas. Snow on the mountains looks like real nice, uh, 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't, but we'll have to be for now. Okay, it's a (bleep) hole. It really is, there is absolutely nothing down there. I don't see anything worth fighting for down there. It's, it's, it's all sand, rocks.

I don't know how they lived down there. Yeah, it's probably not much different from, uh, you know, how, you're, uh, like, glamorous or something. California or something. I mean, there's, you doons and mountains, uh, um,

it looks like a beautiful country, so. There's no color, there's no irrigation, no lakes, no streams, no farms. It's just, just brown and some snow. So, uh, it's pretty ugly. When you're actually doing what you're doing, it's, you,

you're kind of so busy that you don't have a lot of time to sit back and go, hey, you know, kind of look at the scenery, but, um, it's those moments of those, those pauses, those moments you have 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 and it looks so beautiful.

And then you get snap back into what's going on down there and, uh, you've got to refocus.

“This is, maybe, uh, sort of a bone heads to the in question, but is it hard to drop upon?”

Oh, you're, like, almost a moral sensor. Oh, emotional, it's, uh, it's, it's a, it's a double-edged emotion, you know, it's, uh, it's, what you train for your whole life. The fact you're doing it, doing it correctly, and, uh, you drop your target, drop your bomb in the target, that's an emotional feeling of, hey, I, I did my job,

and, uh, just so that was trained and I did it, I did it well. Um, why you're up there, I don't really think about the, uh, the other side of the sort, uh, I'm, you know, 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 statistics, 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. It 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 Revoli 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 ones to begin. Every now and then we get to watch a chick movie, and we've got to watch step mom the other day. Yeah, it looks step mom, still make noise.

“Haven't shown that one lately, they've got an important.”

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, 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 Ciginiale at the end of something to watch that tonight.

Has 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, and 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 in her three kids off of welfare.

And it worked. They're all doing great now, she says. And I've said this before, people laugh at me, but when I come out to see, it's like a break for me, because at home I got kids to take care of,

Go to work and go to sleep, kill time in between, so it's kind of a break me and 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 is 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, and you'll have this one

little neighborhood that's listens to this music, and 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. So I have a Tweety Bird Comforter, Tweety Bird Pillows, Tweety Bird Wallpaper around my rag, so you don't see that stuff 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 chief's mess, a special dining room for the ship's chiefs. There may be 30 tables with chair stacked on top, and the floors are shining 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, 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 Randy, they're jumping off the elevator, and they have a picture of a sharp, kind of like swell bowl, 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 whatever other friends of Brent, they go out and bring offers the biome 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,

they say they're not telling a story right. 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 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 these guys up here are happy. It become like everybody is the, the whole division's father and mother all rolled into one.

“They need to cry in your shoulder, you let them cry in your shoulder, you need to”

kick them in the butt, you kick them in the butt, I mean, you're listening 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 know somebody at the command and they can talk to that chief, you know, you 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 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.

Anytime 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 officers' 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 run 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 this 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 our women's force applies to food services as well. Later in our cabin, Wendy Eyre 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 and most expensive fighter planes in the world of the 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 I ran 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 I could get kind of loud. And sure enough, we were working up several times that first night by the thumps in 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 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 lambda 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." 1, 2, 3, 4, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9. What we waited for the loud sound happened again? Iron, I handed the microphone back and forth between our bunks, and recorded our

“conversation. It was a problem that there'd be alarms going off and stuff, right?”

I mean, it just wouldn't just be like a horrible accident and then nothing, like, you know. And then no sound. They'd be saying all hands to your stations. That's sort of thing, right? I'm sure I'm sure if it really gets better on here those bells of some sort.

The loud sound never happened again, and eventually we fell asleep,

though I were left to tape recorder running just in case. We were out for maybe half an hour when we were woken up again. The scene here you guys have a lot to tell the patrol, "Poss of feed, number two, reactor plan, reactor mechanical hazardous system, late at number two, loss of feed in number two reactor plant, reactor mechanical and casualty assistance teams report to number two reactor room, casualty assistance teams, that can't be good, right?

After a half an hour, in which I tried to convince myself that my stomach ache was not radiation sickness and I would try to figure out how I 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

It breakfasts 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 1040 in the morning. And Barbara Mendosa, the chief would 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 stennis. "I come out here every day before I go to bed. Um, very peaceful. I do a lot of thinking on here.

“I relax, lots, and um, 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 of Ravian Sea. The waters of 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 many people have been

traveling by sea across this?" "You know, um, I always wonder. I look at big bodies of water like this.

I always wonder how many ships around the bottom of the storm. So that's one of the things that I like to think about when I'm out here. And the wonder if there's a wonder that how many ships are around 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 mighty, maybe in the history of the world." "Is that cool? How cool is that?"

"Yes." After the starboard side of the ship, we can see the USS Port Royal, detecting our back. "We Americans are here for now." "Wow, glass." "This was thanks today to Vice Admiral James shortman, who at the time that we recorded the show in 2002, ran career groups seven for the Navy. And to the public, there's office and navy journalists who showed us around the stennis. Programme in Doza, Jeff Grail, Cheeto Peplar,

and David Michael Ross. Also, thanks to the MPR's Charlie Mayer, Richard Bloomberg, and Stephen Leather of Stars and Stripes, original music for this hour by John Kimbero. Thanks to the also that this American life partner Catherine Durnam, like 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 at free, you get bonus episodes, get solo newsletter, where it recommends

stuff to see in here and also do some behind-the-scenes stuff about the show. Anyway, the join with this American life dot org slash life partners, 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 Torim Altia,

who describes this personal life these days this way. It's like a low voter right now. I'm at her glass. Back next week, the most stories of the American life. Next week on the podcast of the American Life, a guide connects two AI chat bots, so instead of talking to him, they're talking to each other. What happens next is kind of amazing, each chat bot 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 the next week on the podcast on your Google Public Radio station. [BLANK_AUDIO]