I am going to regret sharing this. It has been twenty years since the worst experience of my life, and it is happening to 20,000 American sailors right now. The timing blows my mind and I’m afraid to share this because it “doxxes me” in a way that I have never been comfortable with. I mean, I’ve remembered the “swift boat” story the whole time since that story occurred, as a story, right before this happened in my own life.
In full candor, I did not intend to sign up for a carrier. My plan when I joined the Navy was to join the submarine service and do 9-month patrols on a ballistic missile submarine, part of nuclear deterrence that was intended never to actually be fired, but to be able to just in case. By that time though, talk was already underway to convert some of these subs to the new SSGN mission. Perhaps that was part of why, but the Navy had other ideas, and when my orders came in, they were to a carrier, a very particular one which was the newest in the fleet and the most dangerous, statistically, to my division: in the two years of my training pipeline, two nuclear sailors had been killed aboard my new ship, one from each of the other two nuclear rates, an electrician and a mechanic. As an ET, my friends and I joked that one of us would be next if assigned to that ship. At one point, I remember making a joke to my two roommates, who were both planned carrier guys, that I might want to off myself if I got assigned to a carrier, unless it was that one, because it was due to kill an ET anyway. And in the fall of that year, when orders were handed out, mine were to none other than that ship that we had all joked about, the way that we told dead baby jokes around the facility. We had a dark sense of humor, and I had to hold back on jokes anyway because people took me too seriously.. I still have that problem sometimes.
At the time, I was admittedly devastated just by the orders, but I made the best of it as I always do. Or did, I don’t know if I do anymore. But at the time, kind of my life philosophy was about the premise that free will vaguely exists, but has significant constraints that we can’t control, and the path to happiness can only be threaded within choices that are available to us. I did not believe that there was any utility to dwelling on the downsides of a situation that I had no control over. My family offered support as well, and were glad I would be on a surface ship with email and even phone calls. My mom bought me a compact sewing machine so that I could implement the advice of my wacky mechanic chief at Power School, who had made his ship side hustle around a sewing machine. I adjusted my attitude. I bought a motorcycle. I took a really epic road trip across America to get to the ship, growing a short beard during leave. I looked good actually, and men and women bought me drinks. It was actually a little weird. I had a leather jacket and everything, and I’m laughing out loud at the absurdity of it now.
I got to the ship early, because they asked me to catch them before a workup cruise. I’ll still never really know how far we got, because we never got to land, but it got cold enough. It was 12 days steaming, so I like to imagine we got all the way to Alaska and back. The ship can legitimately do close to a thousand miles a day in a pinch, and it’s only about 1300 nautical miles. It was kind of awesome. But… I was not supposed to feel that way. My attempt at a good attitude was not well received by my peers, and things got difficult. Frankly, it is really a teamwork environment, as it’s largely about learning the job from your peers… and well, I did not manage to integrate well into that social hierarchy at all. It was a philosophical disconnect in one sense; it was just neurodivergent clashing in another. But ultimately, it ended up being the most isolating and stressful experience of my life. Work was all day for the most part, whether day or night, it was 12 hours a day, 7 days a week – 84 hours.
Mind you, some of that time was flexible for training tasks, but sometimes that was just stacked on top as well. At one point, it was twelve hours basically split between watch and cleaning every single day, and maybe a little more if some chief or officer wasn’t satisfied with something. It was actually very often a work day that began at 6 am and continued past midnight, if there was a drill or casualty or in some cases just flight ops. A lot of the time, people would just keep everyone else up in solidarity or spite. It was a lot, and I honestly couldn’t keep up. I fell behind in my watch qualifications right away, because when I could spend time with other people on watch, they didn’t want to talk about the stuff I needed to know. They wanted to goof off, and honestly so did I, so it was kind of hard to force it. Inevitably, people would want to “blaze”, something we were actually warned of in the training pipeline – that is, to spend no time at all on the topic before signing off on understanding. Frankly I was confused as hell and thought that was just how things were here, that people expected limited conveyance of specific knowledge, that it would all somehow be self-evident in the end. The problem of course is that you arrive at the ship full of theoretical knowledge of how the systems are supposed to work, and no knowledge of where stuff is and what the numbers are supposed to be. Not everything is supposed to be a predictable percentage. And apparently there are a lot of things that get ignored, like the indicator that persistently says 0.8 when it’s supposed to say 0.7, but it’s been checked and rechecked and the chief knows it’s not a big deal and if you write it down the way it is, you’ll create a lot of redundant work for everyone. Honestly, I really wanted to be honest and this whole setup was hard for me to tolerate. But then the way that it was pushed to me was simple: to hold me to a higher standard that I could not meet on my own without help. It sucked pretty badly and was self-perpetuating. At one point I was assigned extra hours by one person, and then told by the other person “supervising” those extra hours to spend them on an irrelevant task, and then got yelled at by a third guy for obeying the order from the officer instead of the wink from the chief. It would be far too long a story if I mentioned all of the interesting and important details just from those few months. At this point, my work time was a little beyond 84 hours a week and closer to 100; and yet it felt like I never made progress toward anything. It’s not that there wasn’t any fun at all. Flight operations were exciting to watch, in the limited free time I could get for it. I found time in the evenings to call home a few nights a week, but as support it was never remotely enough.
This began in December and by March, it was getting really hard. Support back home was not holding up. My girlfriend was starting to see other guys and wasn’t available when I called. But soon I couldn’t call or email or much else anyway, because we would go into communications blackouts during certain portions of the deployment.
Once we were actually “on station” it was radio silence a good portion of the time, and without peer support “at work” and no personal time on the ship to find friends in other divisions, I really began to fall apart. I did get through most of it though, and managed to “hold out” until Easter. That would be the last full watch rotation before our time on station ended, and the last time I would need to cover shutdown watches in Dubai to allow others to go ashore. I knew that if I asked medical for help, I would be suspended from watchstanding and made useless, because nuclear is not allowed to be on medication, but I no longer believed I could survive without some kind of intervention. Really I just needed someone to talk to. They said the price of that was pills and whatever consequences came with that. But, I could hold off a couple weeks, if I thought I could survive. And maybe I came just a little short of getting to the other side, because it was during that last port call that it came crashing down. Ironically, it was someone who thought he was hooking me up, an officer from New York who had a friend in common with me. Chatting on watch that morning, I told him a little about what I had been going through, but that I was relieved to have made it almost to the end so that I could avoid letting anyone else down in terms of watch relief, at least during the last Dubai stop. He came out of nowhere, it seemed, by ordering me to do exactly what I had just told him I was glad to have avoided: wake up my shipmate to take over the watch (ruining his port call), and report myself to medical. I did not want to do any of that. I had no choice but to comply. The doctor made me wait some time, and filled out paperwork that amounted to firing me from my primary job. That was mid-April, just after easter.
I have a photo of my TLD dated May 15, so I must be remembering dates wrong.
The TLD is not technically a uniform item, but a piece of equipment worn by every working nuke. Timed Light Dosimeter, also known as a personal dosimetry device. When you have one of these, you’re useful, or at least, usable. When you are suspended from nuclear watchstanding for a reason like misbehavior or medical treatment, you become a non useful body, or nuke waste, or a shitbag.
I have another photo dated May 17th of me in the reactor control office – can’t share that one. Photos of Dubai that day – ahh, so I’m just getting my port calls mixed up. Yes, the last Dubai visit was May, and April was the “hump day” break.
I actually have a bunch of photos from “that fateful night” and the photos are clarifying my memories. It was the last day of the last port call in Dubai. It wasn’t really the end of the world to miss half a watch there and then, but my peers made it feel that way.
I can’t find proof in my photos of exactly the order of operations, because I was not taking that many pictures on the ship around then.
The trip did have its moments. Here is a rendezvous with Europe’s one aircraft carrier at the time.
okay so here’s the concrete evidence. May 17, our last day in Dubai, was also my last nuclear watch. And what’s weird is that in the rest of my pictures, life was actually starting to look up. I had made a few friends in other departments. I had a good time in Dubai and bought an engagement ring for the girl waiting back home. I got a new camera on that trip, and started getting slightly better pictures.
One of those slightly better pictures is of the fellow junior ET I had been so scared of screwing over. Ironically enough, he was really the only support I had in the division. I might have been able to recover things if the timing had just been a little different.
This picture doesn’t mean much to most people but it’s the gateway to hell in my memories. The Strait of Hormuz. I would like to be able to go there on peaceful terms one day. That day is not today.
And that brings me back to why I am telling this story. I need editing to get to a shareable version, but dang. From late February through May of 2006, we did figure eights off the coast of Iran to support the war in Afghanistan. We did a little of the old blitzkreig toward the beginning and my job was just to participate in the reactor department’s work making steam. We blew up some guy. We crashed a jet. We did underway replenishments. We launched a lot of jets. We caught most of them again, in fact all but one time we got it back at the end of the day. We identified about a dozen roadside IEDs and were able to send explosive disposal teams to clear them, saving an estimated 30 US Marine lives. 10,000 people gave half a year of their lives in this endeavor, at a cost to taxpayers of somehow four billion dollars. So you do the math and two billion dollars to save 30 lives is sixty seven million dollars per life saved, which I guess is really quite a bargain compared to what a stealth fighter costs right? As long as you don’t value the half year of 10,000 lives, 10,000 families separated from someone for that time, 5000 man years, the equivalent of 100 25 year olds giving up the rest of their natural lives to save 30… 3 to 1 and a few dozen millions of dollars a piece is worth it, right? Until you realize we didn’t actually need to do all that to save thirty marines, we could have just… not had those marines out there in the first place. We could have put those billions of dollars into practically anything and saved more than a couple dozen US soldiers’ lives. Even at that same time, President Bush had a side project, PEPFAR, that saved far more lives than the twenty year War on Terror did, for a fraction of the cost of my one deployment which made no measurable dent in our long term policy goals.
It was the best and worst experience of my life, sure. I could write a full length book exploring my own story and the consequences. But it’s not really about me. It’s about twice as many sailors now, not just one CSG of 10,000 people but two of them. Two carriers, at least four submarines, and a handful of cruisers, destroyers, and other ships. Two wings each of various kinds of aircraft, I think at this point largely a mix of F-35s and the F/A-18 derivatives we flew.
I just don’t think it’s the right thing to do. And it’s a very timely trigger for me to be back there now.
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