The time-honored slogan says “join the navy and see the world.”
If they were really honest they’d say “join the navy and see a different world,” at least as far as serving on an aircraft carrier is concerned.
Fox News recently joined sailors on board the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN 69), the flagship of a strike group on a six-month deployment in the North Arabian Sea.
While the deck of an aircraft carrier is one of the most recognizable places in the world – it’s been the backdrop for dozens of war movies and even more documentaries – few know what happens beneath.
The four-and-half acres of black top is where the high-octane action happens.
On average a jet is launched every 60 seconds or retrieved every 45 seconds. It’s a dangerous ballet that involves absolute coordination and concentration, and for a news cameraman is one of the most visually rich environments anywhere.
But what you seldom see are the cramped places where the majority of the ship’s 4,500 sailors work and live while at sea.
In the bowels of this massive ship there are berths, gyms, and barber shops, there are laundries, cafeterias, maintenance hangars and briefing rooms. There are communications, radar and intelligence huts, not to mention medical stations and rest rooms. And that’s without going near the complex engineering parts of the vessel that provide the power and propulsion for the carrier. There’s even a TV studio and in-house radio station.
Connecting all these hard to find places are endless gleaming corridors and knee straining metal stairways. On the largest, most powerful warships in the world there are no elevators (with the exception of one for planes), no escalators, conveyors or even winches.
If you want to get camera and transmission equipment into the ship you have to recruit a handful of burly sailors and manually heft it up and down several flights.
In this practice, the ship’s old hands are easy to spot. Their heads do an instinctive half turn to avoid butting the low ceilings while descending and walk with high step to avoid tripping when navigating the thousands of bulkhead doors. A complex sequence of numbers painted at regular intervals on the walls is the only way to help you know your location. For those not trained in the code there’s really no way of knowing where you are.
And then there’s the noise. The constant roar from above as the busy F18 Hornets accelerate to take off AND to land. Too few revs on touchdown and they’ll not be able to power off at the other end if they miss the crucial arresting wires.
The ships’ top guns affectionately call this failure to land ‘bolting’ and if you have the misfortune to be the last one to do a ‘bolt’ they suspend a massive metal one right above your seat in the briefing room.
There’s no disguising the dubious honor in a room that sits directly under the flight deck impact zone so that your fillings vibrate every time another jet returns to the carrier.
Body movements learned the hard way, indecipherable directions and intolerable noise. Not things the average journalist can master in a mere three days.
As I said – a different world.