by Andrew Watts
The captain rolled his eyes. “Not that. What about the Crossing the Line ceremony? Are we ready for that? This is big, XO. This is big. Think you can handle this?” He smiled and winked at Victoria. He tried to be charming, but it just came off as creepy.
Victoria should have known. The captain wouldn’t have been so excited about ASW training. But the Crossing the Line ceremony…now that was right up his alley.
Crossing the Line was a tradition which dated back at least two hundred years. It celebrated the first crossing of the equator during that crew’s underway period. It was a ceremony that reminded Victoria of a fraternity initiation. Lots of gross and physical trials for the first-timers, known as Pollywogs. And lots of laughs for the already-initiated, known as Shellbacks.
This would be Victoria’s fourth time. While she was happy to allow her men to partake in the ritual, it was starting to get old for her. She had more pressing things to do.
A knock on the door. “Sir, CS2 with—”
“Enter,” bellowed the captain.
An enlisted woman brought in a tray with a pot of coffee and a plate of cookies. The captain looked it over, rubbing his hands together. “Alright! Now this is…wait. Now what the hell is this? These are chocolate chip. Now SUPPO told me that CS1 was making me sugar cookies.” He looked at the young enlisted woman, who was clearly terrified to be in this room with the most senior officers on the ship. “Where are my sugar cookies?”
“Sir, I’m not sure…um…if you want, I can…”
The captain frowned and waved her off. “No. Forget it. You’re dismissed.”
When she was gone, the XO said, “Sir, in answer to your question, the master chief and I have gone over the schedule for the Crossing the Line ceremony. We’ve reiterated to the chief’s mess to make sure that safety and respect come first.”
The captain ignored him and picked up the phone. “CS1, this is the captain. I thought you were making me sugar cookies. Where are my sugar cookies?”
Victoria’s face reddened. She looked at the XO and the master chief. They were looking down at the ground, expressionless. This was embarrassing behavior for a ship captain. He was supposed to be an example for all the ship’s officers and crew. Above reproach. Instead, he often behaved like a child king.
One of her life’s greatest disappointments was when she’d realized that not all commanding officers were like her father. He had surrounded himself with similar leaders, so she had never seen the bad ones. To her, every military officer was a gentleman and a scholar. The type that put his men first and worked hard to get the job done right. Victoria had assumed that all leaders in the military were like this. Then she’d finished flight school and gone on her first deployment.
It was like finding out that there was no Santa Claus. They didn’t always put the smartest and most capable leader in charge. Just the highest-ranking. And while the US military’s bureaucratic personnel system did well in selecting many great leaders for promotion, many subpar ones also slipped through the cracks.
In his famous novel about the Civil War, The Killer Angels, Michael Shaara had written that there was “nothing quite so much like God on earth as a general on a battlefield.” She wasn’t sure about generals on the battlefield, but she had seen ship captains at sea. Their power was absolute, and often unchecked. They had absolute control and absolute responsibility. They were held accountable for everything, but only if it was made known to their superiors. When mistakes were made public, commanding officers were often fired for “lack of confidence.” Many commanding officers became extreme micromanagers to ensure that their men didn’t make any errors. That was when one would encounter situations like the captain who insisted on being notified of every change in status, no matter how minute the detail.
Oftentimes, the ship captain’s bosses were hundreds if not thousands of miles away. Everything the ship captains did was private. If they screamed at their subordinates like madmen, no one would know. If that got the best results, it became a part of the culture. Many times, junior officers not used to making their own decisions would replicate this leadership style, because that was what they had “grown up” with.
With that absolute power, and the Navy’s long tradition of hierarchy, tradition, and etiquette, came a sense of entitlement. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Ship captains in the Navy needed to be strong-willed and determined not to succumb to the temptation to behave like a tyrant. While it could be effective and gratifying in the short term, it was also demoralizing and counterproductive in the long run.
The captain said, “Alright, fine. Next time.” He hung up the phone and shook his head.
The master chief said, “Excuse me, Captain, XO, Air Boss. I must attend to something.”
The senior enlisted on the ship, the command master chief was well respected by all the officers and crew. Victoria had only known him for a few months, but she knew the type. He had seen it all, and dedicated his life to the Navy. She had instantly liked him. He was also adept at getting out of these sessions with the captain, a skill Victoria needed to improve.
The phone rang again. “Go.” He looked surprised at what he heard. “What. Now? Alright, tell him I’ll call him immediately.” The captain hung up. “You two will have to excuse me. The commodore wants me to give him a call.”
The commodore was the captain’s boss. He was deployed on an aircraft carrier in the Middle East. Due to the time differences, meetings were often at odd hours.
The news that Victoria would be able to get out of this room earlier than expected was a welcome surprise. “Alright, sir, thanks.” Both she and the XO left the captain’s cabin and went their separate ways.
Victoria walked back to the hangar. Her men had finished the engine wash, and both helicopters were now folded and stuffed in the two hangars. The flight deck was quiet. The ship must have been traveling slowly, as she could hear the waves gently lapping the hull.
A bright white moon began to rise over the horizon, washing the calm Pacific Ocean with its light. She stayed for a few moments, enjoying the tranquil view. Victoria needed these moments. The pressure that she placed on herself was enormous. She recognized it, but wasn’t able to stop it.
She was incredibly self-driven. The type of person who had to be number one at everything she did. Even now, she couldn’t relax. For someone like her, relaxing was a chore. Another self-imposed task that she thrust on herself in hopes of some type of productivity improvement.
Still, she tried. Victoria had seen the statistics on the effect of prayer and meditation on performance. She had read up on the habits of other successful people, and many of them included time for this in their daily routines. So every day, she scheduled time to meditate alone for twenty to thirty minutes.
That time slot had once been allotted to prayer—until her mother had died. She didn’t pray anymore. Like having conversations with her father, it only made her resentful.
The 1MC announcer came on. “Taps, Taps. Lights out in five minutes. Stand by for evening prayer.” She rolled her eyes. Evening prayer on Navy ships was a nightly ritual. It was nondenominational, of course. Or multidenominational. Whatever. To her it was just a reminder of her own complicated relationship with God.
The XO’s voice came on. The XO was a good man. He had a tough job—cleaning up the messes of the child king. “Shipmates, as we sail in calm seas, and prepare to cross the equator in a few days, we are reminded of how lucky we are. Lucky to be born in a freedom-loving country. Lucky to serve alongside such great shipmates. As we all know, right now our nation is facing a growing conflict in the Middle East. So it is important for us to remember that many of our brothers and sisters in arms are not in calm waters like we are. It is with this in mind that I will read part of the Navy Hymn. The original hymn was written in the 1800s by an Englishman named William Whiting. When he was thirty-five years old, he was in a violent storm. He believed that God had spared his life by commanding the raging seas to cal
m. The hymn is thought to have been inspired by a passage from Psalm 107, in the Bible. With that, I’ll read…”
Victoria smiled. The XO was a devout Evangelical Christian, and a historian. It was probably hard for him not to say too much.
“Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea.
Amen.
Goodnight, Farragut.”
Plug spoke while furiously pressing the buttons and moving the directional pad of his controller. “It’s a long story.”
“Come on,” Juan pleaded. He was the odd man out, the only one without a video game controller.
The pilots were playing a World War II multiplayer shooter game. One of the 2Ps (the term commonly used for 2nd pilot or copilot) had brought his PlayStation on the ship. On nights when they weren’t scheduled to fly, the junior pilots took over the unused wardroom and played for a few hours, using the big screen on the far wall.
The wardroom was the eating and gathering place for the officers on the ship. A few of the surface line officers played cards on one of the tables. A few others were about to go on the midwatch—the zero dark thirty duty section that controlled the ship while everyone else slept. They chowed down on midrats. Midnight rations. The fourth meal of the day, where sailors standing the midnight watch grabbed leftover grub to get them through until sunrise.
“It’s pretty tragic,” Ash “Caveman” Hughes said. He was one of the two other 2Ps.
“Come on. How’d you get it?” Juan pressed. He was just glad that he didn’t have to keep talking about his awful flight. He needed a funny story to cheer him up.
Plug never took his eyes away from the screen, but he told the story like a man who had told it many times before, and usually at a bar.
“So there we were. A few dozen miles off the coast of Colombia…”
“You did your first cruise here too?” Juan was surprised. It was pretty rare for ships to come down to do Eastern Pacific deployments nowadays, with the cutbacks and all. Pretty much everyone either went to the Middle East, to the Eastern Med, or to the Western Pacific.
“Let me tell the story, alright?” Plug paused for effect. “So there I was, starting up the engine for maintenance rotor turn, when out of nowhere comes this freaking little seagull—”
“I heard it was an osprey,” Caveman said.
Plug glared at him. “Don’t interrupt, 2P. Like I was saying, the seagull came out of nowhere, flew through the rotor disk, and miraculously didn’t get chopped in half…”
“That’s such bullshit.”
“No way.”
“’Tis true, my friends. We have video—”
“Do you?”
“Well, actually, now that you mention it, in the video it is hard to see. Some say that the avian in question may have just been blown by the rotor wash and then slammed into said hangar. But one should never ruin a good story with the truth, so…the osprey…it gets injured—”
Juan said, “You said it was a seagull.”
“Whose story is this? The bird…it gets injured. And I, having studied zoology and biology at one of the great academic institutions in the world—”
“I thought you said you were a general sciences major. Isn’t that for guys who flunk out of—”
“Hold your tongue. I studied a lot of female biology.”
The group in the wardroom, all paying attention to the story now, laughed.
“And I watched the TV series Planet Earth about fifty times. Plus, graduates of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute like myself are held to a higher standard than you mere mortals. A general science major there is like a PhD at most schools. The point is, I was the only person qualified to nurse this animal back to life.”
Juan looked at the other 2Ps. They were smiling, but also not taking their eyes off the video game screen as they tried to kill each other.
Plug said, “So for the next two weeks, we kept the albatross in a cage in the hangar—”
“Did the captain know?”
“Yes, the fucking captain knew. How the hell could the captain of a goddammed ship at sea not know there was a fucking pelican on board in a cage? Come on, junior. Listen up. So the albatross was nursed back to health by none other than yours truly. I fed him little bits of fish from the galley. I filled his little water bowl with…well, with water.” He turned his head from side to side, emphasizing the greatness of his achievements.
“Until one day, when that cute little bastard was ready…when he looked healthy and could flap his wings in a strong and vibrant fashion…we released him—triumphantly—into the wild.”
Caveman took his eyes off the screen and raised his eyebrows. He coughed to signal that there was more to the story.
Plug said, “And to our delight, the great winged beast flew up into the sky and lived happily ever after…” He finally took his eyes off the screen and looked at Juan.
“So how’d you get your call sign, then? I thought this was the story about how you got your call sign.”
“Ah, well—perhaps I left out one minor detail. You see, the ship drivers—”
One of the surface line officers listening smiled and said, “Now don’t go blaming it on the SWOs, Plug.”
Plug sighed. “But it was their fault. You see, Juan—may I call you Juan? Of course I may, I’m a HAC, and therefore I can call you whatever the hell I want. You see, Juan, one thing you’ll learn about these goddamned SWOs is that, for all their prowess in nautical navigation, they don’t always think about the bigger picture. Like, for instance…if you take an injured bird onto your ship, and you’re near land, then travel west one thousand miles into the freaking Pacific for two weeks straight, and then release the bird, you’re pretty freaking far away from land at that point. You’re a pilot, Juan. How far can you fly before you need food or water? Or a freaking break from flying.”
Juan smiled. “How far were you from the coast?”
“When we picked up the seagull, we were about fifteen miles from the coast.”
“And when you released him?”
“I want to say it was about two hundred and forty nautical miles out to sea. So there was no freaking way that bird was making it to land. The SWOs had condemned him to a short life of starvation and panic.”
Caveman said, “Dude, take responsibility. Seriously. We haven’t even gotten to the good part.”
Juan said, “What’s the good part?”
Plug said, “Well, this seagull must have had its own navigational instincts. Because we let it go, and I shit you not, the thing just circled around the boat for a couple of days. Like a poor old puppy, coming back to its master. He kept coming down to the flight deck, and people would give it crackers or a piece of their dinner. Come to think of it, everyone probably fattened him up so much I wonder if he wasn’t over his gross weight limits. Didn’t anyone do a weight and balance on that thing before he flew?”
Caveman said, “And then…” He motioned for Plug to get to the point.
“I’m getting there. Easy, son. And then…I was starting up the engine on our helo one Sunday morning. And there he is…the albatross…flying around. I swear he was looking at me. He was gliding there, into the wind, just off the starboard side of the ship. I can still see him. That magnificent orange beak. Those puffy white and grey feathers. He was such a noble creature. Full of pride and wonder. But he kept getting closer. I thought it was awesome that he was showing so much affection for me. Gratitude, even? Not like you shit 2Ps who don’t know what the word means.”
Caveman held up his middle finger.
“He was grateful that I was able to nurse him back to life. Until he came over the flight deck and tried to cross to the other side. The rotor wasn’t turning this time. But the engine was. And he must have gotten too close
because…” He shook his head for effect. Mock sadness.
Juan said, “He got sucked up in the engine intake?”
Plug nodded. “I could see it happening and pulled back the engine power control lever into the off position. But it was too late. A poof of white feathers, and he was gone. We scraped up his remains and had a short ceremony. I mean very short. Okay, we pretty much just threw pieces of that damn bird overboard as we found it. But I will tell you this—every bar we hit at every port stop for the rest of the deployment, I swear to you that we toasted that damn bird and his unwavering dedication to duty. He was fearless…” Plug feigned wiping a tear away from his eye.
Juan said, “And the callsign?”
“Well, you know the soft cushiony engine plugs that we put in the intake and exhaust ports to keep them clean of debris, right?”
“Of course.”
“Well, the guys on my last deployment kept making jokes about how I used the bird as the engine plug. So, there it is. Plug.”
Juan slapped his knee and nodded. Big smile. “Ah. I finally get it. Good story.”
Plug said, “Yup. How’d you get Spike as your call sign?”
Juan shrugged. “The senior pilots thought that my hair was spikey.”
“Huh. Well…that’s a good story, too.”
The door opened and the air boss walked in. “Good evening, gentlemen.”
The pilots paused the game and sat up a little straighter. “Evening, ma’am.”
She looked at the screen and then at the three 2Ps and one HAC. “Plug, did you get done with the maintenance plan for next month?”
“Uh…”
“The one that I asked you to have on my desk tonight?”
He put the video game controller down on the table. “I was about to get started.”
She looked at her watch. “Please have it on my desk within the next hour.”
