Personal Essay
The C-2 had been in the air about an hour when the crew signaled with their hands. Here we go, here we go. I was facing backward, which is not how you expect to land on anything, and the seats were not built for comfort so much as for the fact that every inch of that cabin was already claimed by cargo. Then the deceleration hit, 105 miles an hour to zero in about two seconds, and your whole body registers it before your mind catches up. The tailhook had caught the wire. We had landed on the USS George H.W. Bush.
This was November 2013, and I was part of the Navy's Distinguished Visitor Embark program, which for twenty four hours turns civilians into guests aboard an aircraft carrier at sea in the Atlantic. When the door opened I remember thinking I had stepped onto the Starship Enterprise. Crew in different colored jerseys moved across the flight deck in a choreography that had clearly been rehearsed thousands of times, yellow shirts and purple shirts and red shirts, each color a job, each job essential to keeping sixty to seventy five aircraft moving without anyone losing a hand or a life.
What stays with me is not the machinery, though the machinery is extraordinary. It is how much of a floating city that ship turned out to be. There is a convenience store called Big Texas, its proceeds funding crew welfare and entertainment. There is a Starbucks inside something called the Lone Star Cafe. There is a library where a chaplain named Peters showed me a program called United to Read, where sailors record themselves reading storybooks so their children back home can hear a parent's voice at bedtime. The ship carries fifteen hundred computer terminals for a crew that runs between forty five hundred and six thousand people, and there is no cell signal, no wifi, nothing. During certain exercises they shut down every electronic device on board just to measure how much the ship emits, and you'd watch the whole crew go quiet like that, by design, on command.
Near the crew galley there was a single table set with one place setting, reserved for POW and MIA service members, a quiet fixture nobody had to explain to me.
The ship's doctor told me about the walking blood bank, sailors who sign up in advance to give blood in an emergency rather than storing it, because storage takes space and space on a carrier is the one thing nobody has enough of.
I thought about all of this recently when I read that the USS Abraham Lincoln had been at sea for nearly nine months. Twenty four hours on the George H.W. Bush was enough to understand that this is a community as much as it is a warship, a small dense city where people work, worship, study for the careers waiting for them after service, and somehow sleep through announcements in the middle of the night because they have learned to. Twenty four hours gave me a glimpse. Nine months is a different thing entirely, and I found myself glad, genuinely glad, that the Lincoln is finally coming home.
To the men and women who serve, on that ship and on every other one, thank you. What I saw in twenty four hours, you live for months at a stretch, and I don't take that lightly.
