Only the Animals
Page 17
Here I go again, letting my irritation get in the way of what I should really be saying. I don’t think you will mind, Ms Plath – you understood the cathartic uses of a good cleansing female rage. But I must tell you how I lived, and how I died, in order to keep my place in this modern menagerie of animal souls.
* * *
I was born into captivity in 1973, a decade after you took your own life. My mother was proud of being one of the original bottlenose dolphins recruited for the US Navy Marine Mammal Program when it was first established. She liked to remind me of my luck at having been born in an elite military training facility. Her point was, I think, that I should be grateful I wasn’t born into useless aquarium captivity. This is how she managed her guilt about bringing me into her world, a child who would never know freedom. Is it worse to have freedom and lose it, or not know what it is in the first place? I can’t say I’ve missed it.
Back in 1962, when my mother was in the group of dolphins and California sea lions selected for training, they were kept initially at Point Mugu in California. The Navy trainers quickly realised that the dolphins could be counted on to return to them after being ordered to find or fetch objects, even in open water. The program was expanded and moved to Point Loma in San Diego, and a sister research laboratory was set up in Hawaii. One of the dolphins in the cohort, Tuffy, soon had a breakthrough experience. She successfully carried an important message and supplies down to aquanauts living in the US Navy’s experimental habitat, SEALAB II, which had been placed in a canyon off the Californian coast, more than sixty yards underwater.
Tuffy used to keep my mother and the other dolphins entertained by mimicking the conversation between one of the aquanauts – who was about to emerge from SEALAB II after spending a world record of thirty days down there – and President Johnson, who had called to congratulate him. The aquanaut was in a decompression chamber, and the helium gas had made his voice high and squeaky. The President gamely pretended not to notice that he was speaking to someone who sounded like Mickey Mouse.
My mother was always bothered by the stupidity of the Navy’s dolphin-naming policy: why recruit us because of our superior intelligence then give us dumb names like Tuffy? Her theory was that the Navy anticipated a public-relations disaster, and hoped that our goofy names might signal that we were not considered to be combatants, that we were not so different from Chuck and Loony at the nearest SeaWorld. But those in charge had the program classified through the chilliest years of the Cold War, from the late 1960s to the early 1990s. We could have been given proper combat names or titles for those decades and the public would have been none the wiser. Instead, it was my mother’s special fate to be called Blinky for her professional life, and mine to be called Sprout.
* * *
My mother’s cohort, MK6, was trained to protect assets such as ships or harbour constructions by alerting human handlers to the presence of enemy divers in the surrounding water. In 1970 she and four other dolphins in her team were sent to Vietnam on their first tour of service, to guard a US Army pier in Cam Ranh Bay. They patrolled the area and warned their handler when saboteurs were detected nearby. Her team was subsequently credited by some for preventing the pier being blown up, though of course this was disputed. The program has always had more detractors than admirers.
In the stoic tradition of military parents, my mother didn’t tell me much about her experience in Vietnam, but I could sense some of what she went through because of certain physical stress points throughout her body. She did say that the most difficult part was being transported there and back in a primitively repurposed Navy vessel. My daughter loved that story, and often asked her grandmother to repeat it. She couldn’t believe how old-fashioned the vessel was, how basic the resources. By now, a decade after my own death, I’m sure my daughter is deployed to conflicts around the world within hours’ notice, transported in the utmost comfort in some kind of fancy bio-carrier that fits into any type of Navy vehicle: ship, helicopter, aircraft, spacecraft. These technologies are developed faster than humans have time to assimilate what they mean – they outstrip men morally in the end, stunning them into submission, and they drag the rest of the world’s species along for the ride.
Once my mother had finished her tour of duty and returned to San Diego from Vietnam, the Navy decided to breed some of the next generation of military dolphins within the facility. To that end, she was allowed to mate with her choice of partner among the males in the bachelor pod. Who my father was is irrelevant, as is usually the case in matrilineal societies. I was raised by my mother and the other females among whom I lived, and by my human trainer, Petty Officer First Class Bloomington. I loved him deeply, and not in a Stockholm syndrome sort of way as my mother sometimes teased. I think she was jealous of our bond. Her generation had been trained by men who were a strange blend of traditional and iconoclastic. Those men were attracted to the safe hierarchies of the military, but they were also caught up in the Zeitgeist that had been developing as post–Second World War certainties gave way to the unpredictable, boundary-pushing conflict with the Soviets. Fantastic rumours circulated about scientific and military advances the Soviets were making with the use of animals: bats that could detect weapons stockpiles; cats inserted with bugging devices; pigeons guiding nuclear warheads.
Whatever purpose the US Navy could imagine for us dolphins, they were convinced the Soviets were ten steps ahead of them. They trained my mother’s team firmly, as subordinates. They were not interested in building a relationship with them as individuals, but in what they could get out of them as a group in a utilitarian sense. My mother claimed it was better that way, the trainer–trainee relationship less fraught with emotion and need.
But Officer Bloomington was different. When he started working with me in the late 1970s, he was only twenty-one, skinny, newly graduated from college with a marine sciences degree made possible by his Navy scholarship, and ridiculously proud of his tattoo of a seahorse on the sole of his foot (anywhere else and the enlisters would have given him grief for it). One of his professors at college had briefly worked in the Caribbean laboratory established by John C. Lilly in the ’60s to carry out all sorts of bizarre, unconventional research on dolphin–human communication, and he got Officer Bloomington onto Lilly’s work. It was far too unorthodox for Officer Bloomington – he knew he would never dare do the kinds of things that Lilly had – but it encouraged him to think of dolphins differently. One of Lilly’s experiments, for example, required the researcher to take LSD then climb into an isolation tank with dolphins beneath it in a sea pool, to communicate with them on alternate sound waves. Another involved the researcher living in isolation with a dolphin for months in a laboratory flooded with sixteen inches of seawater.
I think Officer Bloomington suspected Lilly was a bit of a creep – so many of the photographs in Lilly’s books featured his female research assistants, who all happened to be gorgeous women with long red nails, happy to give horny dolphins belly scratches or hand jobs. But in the interests of my education he read to me from these books, and from anything else about dolphins he could find, scientific or imagined. He would get secretly stoned and read to me about Johnny Mnemonic, a foul-mouthed cyborg dolphin who’s a US Navy veteran and a heroin addict. He organised a screening for the trainee dolphins of the Mike Nichols film The Day of the Dolphin, projecting it onto the wall opposite our pens. We found the movie quite funny, though we knew it was intended to be serious, because the dolphins playing the characters Alpha and Beta (who were being trained by some bad guys to blow up the President’s yacht) kept saying rude things that only dolphins could understand about the lead human actor in the underwater scenes.
When The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was published, Officer Bloomington read it to me so many times I can still remember most of Chapter 23 by heart (it’s a short chapter):
It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man
had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much – the wheel, New York, wars and so on – whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man – for precisely the same reasons.
Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for titbits, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own means shortly before the Vogons arrived.
The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double-backwards-somersault through a hoop whilst whistling the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish.
That used to crack Officer Bloomington up every time he read it, though it might have had more to do with the quality of his weed. Sometimes, on nights when I couldn’t get half of my brain to fall asleep, I would amuse myself thinking up alternate lines for the dolphins’ final message to humans, with the restriction that I could only use titles of songs I’d heard being played on the radio at our facility. The line would depend on my mood, and what I’d been asked to do that day. Some days it would be ‘Da Ya Think I’m Sexy?’ On days when I was feeling sentimental: ‘Call Me’ or ‘We Don’t Talk Anymore’ or ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’. On bad mood days: ‘Tired of Toein’ the Line’.
* * *
Each morning, Officer Bloomington took me from my home pen at Point Loma out into the training area, laid on a rubber mat in the boat. The first skill he taught me to master was how to wiggle myself overboard once he’d pointed my tail in the right direction; the second was how to get myself back onto the boat unassisted at the end of the session. I quickly learned to retrieve a Frisbee, balancing it on my nose like a regular showoff. Over time, our training sessions became more challenging, geared towards teaching me to identify and locate features on the sea floor that might be useful or dangerous to the Navy, such as dropped equipment or mines buried in sediment.
Officer Bloomington understood from the beginning that I knew exactly what was going on. More than anything, he wanted to earn the moral right to give me commands by demonstrating that he considered me to have a form of consciousness as complex as his own. As our relationship developed, he relied less and less on food-reward training, disliking it because it assumed that my needs were base, and also because of the cruel anti-foraging muzzles that had been standard issue in my mother’s day.
It was a partnership, one that I was born into, but still. He liked to say we had a true I/thou relationship, quoting some philosopher or other – that we related as subject to subject, not subject to object, and communicated with our whole beings. In another life, I think he would have used his skills differently, as a scientific researcher who observed and recorded, rather than as a handler who had to elicit certain behaviours from us to keep his job. He figured out long before his contemporaries that we use a combination of high- and low-frequency sounds – clicks, buzzes, creaks, whistles – to convey information and emotion, and he learned to identify the signature whistle of each dolphin under his command, which is our own form of naming.
By the time I was fully trained, the Navy had five marine mammal teams, each with specialist skills. My mother wanted me to join MK6, but I was placed instead in MK7, a dolphin-only team who specialised in finding and tagging mines embedded in the ocean floor. The other two dolphin-only teams, MK4 and MK8, worked on locating floating mines in the water column and mapping out safe underwater passages for troop landings onshore. MK5 comprised sea lions (who have no sonar ability but better underwater directional hearing and low-light vision than we do) briefed with naval equipment recovery. There were a few beluga whales in that team, recruited because they also use sonar but can withstand colder water and dive deeper than we can. We didn’t see much of the sea lions or whales except on joint training exercises, when we were all operating under strict rules of engagement. I think this suited those in charge of the program. They preferred us to focus our need for communication on the humans training us, and perhaps didn’t like to think of us coming up with secret plans and clever tricks together. It reeked of mutiny.
* * *
My first tour of duty was in the Persian Gulf in 1987, during the Iran–Iraq war. My MK7 team was deployed to search the ocean floor for embedded mines for a set radius around the 3rd Fleet Flagship USS La Salle in the harbour in Bahrain. MK6 was also deployed, to escort oil tankers from Kuwait through safe waters. It was thrilling to finally be part of a real mission after so many years of training, and I remember feeling closer to Officer Bloomington than ever before. I would use echolocation to scan for mine-like objects and report back to him if I found one, knocking a black buoy beside the boat to confirm a sighting. He would then send me to deposit the anchor of a buoy close to the object to alert other Navy vessels, until the object could be checked and deactivated by a specialist team of divers.
We lost two dolphin team members on that mission, not due to sea mines accidentally detonating (this happens rarely, as we are trained not to disturb them and they are programmed to detonate only when a large metal object passes overhead). The dolphins were machine-gunned to death near the surface by Iranian boat-patrol units who had figured out what we were doing. Some native wild dolphins were also killed this way, though we’d tried to keep them away from the area by acting territorially. Officer Bloomington took this especially hard. He hadn’t anticipated it as a consequence and blamed himself for their deaths. He felt that the skilled Navy dolphins at least had a chance of defending themselves, but the native dolphins had been put directly in harm’s way. He tried to record their deaths officially so that this could be prevented on future missions, but his superiors blocked him, worried about a public outcry.
* * *
Back at the San Diego training facility at the end of this mission, I was given a few years to recover from active service, after which I was allowed to breed. I like to think I didn’t make the same mistake as my mother, who had encouraged me to believe I had a better life in the Navy than I ever could out in the wild. I apologised to my daughter so often for bringing her into a world of captivity that she found it ridiculous. As it turned out, she was given a choice. When she was born in 1993, our program was being downsized (or ‘right-sized’, as the expensive consultants liked to call it) in the aftermath of the Cold War, and many of our team members were being retired or released. The Navy put some of the oldest dolphins up for sale to leisure facilities and parks around the US, but nobody was buying – by then, most aquariums or dolphinariums were doing their own breeding in-house.
One morning in the autumn after my daughter was born, Officer Bloomington took all the dolphins under his authority, including me, my mother and my baby girl, out into the bay and released us without giving a specific task or return command. He explained what was happening, speaking respectfully as he always did, trusting us to understand. He anticipated a long, drawn-out retirement process where federal permits would be needed before any of us could be released into the wild, and he wanted to spare us the fate of being trapped where we were no longer needed, or sold off to some depressing sea life park.
My mother decided to try out life in the deep blue sea again. She was forty-seven by then, the only surviving Vietnam War vet from her team. She and I both knew she didn’t have much time left, and I understood that she was really choosing a free death, whereas the other six who decided to join her were choosing a free life. They are the only seven dolphins ever recorded as not having returned to their handler in the history of our program. Officer Bloomington stated the cause as unusual disobedience in his logbook and almost lost his job over it, but he’d stalled for long enough to give the escapees a good chance of not being recaptured.
He named her Officer, so that she might always have a fitting military title as a first name. He understood the significance of her birth for all of us: the third generation of a female military family. Females have served in the US military for much longer than anybody realises, he liked to remind his colleagues in the ’80s, when the gender issue was heating up and most of the men were intransigent. Back then, the Navy Marine Mammal Program was still in full swing, with over a hundred dolphins, many of us female, and a massive operating budget. But the men laughed at him. They didn’t like to think of us as male or female; we were just animals.
* * *
Soon after my mother had decided to die free, a new dolphin arrived at our base in San Diego. His name was Kostya. He was Russian, part of the Dolphin Division trained at the Soviet Navy’s secret base on the Black Sea. They too had run into funding difficulties in the years after the Cold War thawed. Kostya and most of his team were up for sale, and the Soviets were prepared to sell to anyone who could afford the exorbitant price, even if the buyer was the very enemy against whom these dolphins had been trained to work.