Carrier
I watched the entire ten hours of PBS's documentary
CARRIER | PBS (the life of an Aircraft Carrier) the other week. I think I was the only person of those I know who did. That put a bit of a dent in what all else I got done that week, but it was worth it. I was immersed engaged captivated. I spent most of year once on one of those things. A television special like this answers two questions for me: What was going on around me back then, what was it all about? And who was I then? The first because you never see more than a small slice of the total reality of a ship like that from your own perspective. Secondly you remember just enough to have this, let you understand how you may have appeared to others.
 Big Grey and Underway The USS Ranger with VF 21 probably in the socal op area for the 1979 Westpac.
There were no real false notes that I saw in this documentary. I attribute this to the care of the film team, to their decision to live with the crew for the duration of the cruise and not just drop by to grab footage and clear out. Also they understood that the ship is (in any given instance) its crew not the steel. This, they said, was advice from the captain, and there is a quote to this effect prominently displayed on the documentary's web site. Further they understood enough to film the demographic center of the crew. Which largely is a peck of people in their first few years out of high school. The command master chief makes this observation at one point, he wouldn't need to say that to anybody whose been on a carrier. I don't think I ever met the Ranger's Master Chief. Of course I was with the air wing not ships company [technically detached to ship's company] and besides I took strenuous effort in those days to keep as much distance as I could between myself and any chief petty officer. Officers especially fighter pilots have had their lives vastly detailed and romanticized elsewhere in popular culture so that they need only be brought in to round this story out.
The film makers followed a select group of people around for the cruise allowing them to represent the crew at large and get to know some individuals well enough to see what things meant to them
CARRIER . The Crew | PBS. I thought this worked well and there four crewman in particular that I saw myself relating to. First of all AN Christian Garzone: because he was a cut-up. He clearly lacks that instinct for crisp military severity, but beyond that he was a serious intelligent, and sincere person, and painfully young. He, I identified with. AOAN Chris Altice also. He was a lot like all the people of my cohort who I knew well: A fretter, not really sold on the Navy. One foot in one foot out. Frankly that described most of us then. SSgt Randy Brock was the image of the non commissioned officers (e4-e9) I admired and would sometimes imagine becoming, but their reality, people on their second and third enlistments, was not my reality then, and I don't think I understood them very well. Or gave them their due. LCDR Kevin McLaughlin was like many of the officers I knew. Being enlisted I didn't know any of them well, but the familiar officers. The pilots who would come down to the CVIC for post flight debriefings. The ones like the pilots in my own squadron. Something about LCDR McLauglin also reminded me of the 1630s I worked with. The documentary did not appear to talk to anyone from my own rating.
The documentary made be more aware of the frission of my own changing attitude towards the Navy over the years. I've always had a natural sympathy with sailors and those in service, but I've thought about it more the last several years, and have worked towards a greater understanding of the life they lead, and the work they do, while at the same time arriving at a much sharper view of what is called National Security and the role of the professional military (and its attendants) in a nation which intends democracy. Dreams; though, are the final realm of how you feel. I've had reoccuring dreams of embarking on a second cruise, dreams of intense mundaneness, which began as soon as I left the fleet. I imagine if I could I'd do it again.
A ship has a history and life beyond any particular crew of course
CARRIER . The Ship | PBS. But if you know these stories, you know the ship, the ship abstracted. The documentary got all the key things in place, the work, the ports, military life of an airfield. The emphasis on everydayness sometimes masked the critical and highly visible nature of a forward deployed carrier. The purpose and progress seemed distant. You get close to a central truth of carriers if you view them through the lens of being a special type of air-base. Their movement potentials a facet of their whole only. Their primary nature as an air power military instrument. All the same, the logic of their best use, is understood through the traditional notions of sea-power. The emphasis placed on the thirteen carriers required the Navy evolve as a hybrid institution (even further allowing for Marine airpower dedicated to the separate idea of ground troop support to coexist with it). This has made the Modern U S Navy a very complex entity.
 CV 61 catching some rays on a quite day
A good deal of the fun with a show like this is looking for the differences (and similarities) between the USS Ranger then and the USS Nimitz now. Primarily - going for the big and obvious: women and email on board ship. We didn't have that. I wrote the same thing here six years ago, at that time it was a real eye-opener. This was on the occasion of an NBC documentary on 17 April 2002 on life aboard the USS John C Stennis, CV 74. I see I even wrote then (06 May 2002): "It seems to me every five to ten years somebody runs a piece like this - one of the networks, Frontline, Nova, somebody - and I usually watch it." I believe the Stennis is the ship that replaced the Ranger in the fleet. John Stennis, a US Senator, was a democrat. I didn't even know DoD let ships be named after democraters, warms my heart it does. It was interesting to see a fuller look into gender integration at sea, and a couple of years after the previous documentary. It largely confirmed my suspicions that with a little practice this is a viable way of crewing a warship. Which undoubtedly makes long at-sea periods less of a mind warp (which really kicks in only when you get back to port) and makes rotating to shore billets easier for everyone. Email still strikes me as a bit of a double edged sword. I saw that while they shut down email at times to preserve operational security, Email, ubiquitous communication with home in general seemed to be the accepted norm. Curiously overall it didn't seem to make people happier than the rather sketchy fleet post office mail I recall. Many would think I'm wrong here, but it's a matter of formalism, of unity of principle. The distance is the reality here. Hourly communication with home only allows elements of closeness an illusion that isn't real to enter. I can see this making things more difficult for many.
Another thing that frankly surprised me was how much the tools, the mission and daily life were essentially unchanged from my cruise on the USS Ranger
USS Ranger Museum Foundation. Its still planes, wires and catapults. Even with these 3rd generation nuclear super carriers. These ships CVN-68 Nimitz-class are essentially just bigger versions of the Ranger
Forrestal class aircraft carrier - Wikipedia. The biggest difference the nuclear power plant debuted with the USS Enterprise just a few years after the USS Ranger (though not again for a decade until the USS Nimitz) The other essential modifications were accomplished with the USS Kitty Hawk and subsequent ships Moving the island back behind the second starboard elevator and moving the port elevator to aft. The jets are incrementally better, Guided munitions have come into their own, but it's still jets and jet pilots. Nothing substantially different is slated to replace it
Gerald R. Ford class aircraft carrier - Powerset.The areas of concern are still Korea Taiwan and the Persian Gulf (although the Shah is less of a concern). Its still about being prepared to keep the sea lanes trade routes open which means its still about high-granularity maritime surveillance (though they didn't say so). For the people it's still about water and port calls. Some of the documentaries most evocative scenes were the rough weather scenes. I can still remember an episode on the Ranger where briefly our task force entertained the idea of squeezing by a typhoon in the straits of Formosa north into the Philippine sea to continue routine flight operations. The Typhoon enforced its own ops plan and we ended up spending three days north of Luzon with it, while it passed by. I recall the protractor we taped to the overhead with a nut suspended from a thread so we could measure the angles the ship took to. It can be really amusing (in a warped sort of way) when a big ship like a carrier starts to roll in a heavy sea.
While none of the ports they made matched the concentrated debauchery of Subic Bay, they seemed to have fun. Guam only contained aspects, more civilized bar hopping experience, sand and sun like a day-out on Grandee island (the recreation facility at the mouth of Subic bay). We visited Pusan and Phattya beach, stopped at Yokuska twice. I visited Tokyo on one of those occasion. They visited Kuala Lumpur and Bahrain. And they visited Perth, which the Ranger never quite made it to - due to the incident. I'm still bitter about that. C'mon it was 600 ft long and three stories high, w'dya mean you didn't see it?
The Navy in todays world, may seem difficult to get a grasp on. The wars we find ourselves fighting now are not the Navy's fight. The Nimitz came and went from the Persian Gulf on that cruise flying several hundred sorties I imagine, of only uneventful reserve air support. Here as it often has been over the history of the United States; the Navy's role, its participation in defense, is strategic defense. Keeping the lid on - on all the various cans of worms out there. Simply by being sufficient potential force to answer for any action. I admit to a certain tendency to read between the lines here and for all the noise about the sprung threat to the homeland, to see in the quiescence of the carriers, that the danger of certain vectors of radical Islam, while real, are not a major strategic threat. And are undoubtedly capable of being dealt with smaller, smarter, and logarithmically cheaper than they are now.
Since world war two we've had an army group in Germany a portion of another in Korea. Large but formaly established units with dependent facilities. Air force squadrons cycle between stateside and forward bases, England, Turkey. Since the first gulf war the Air Force also took on onerous enforcement of the Iraqi no-fly zone from bases in the middle east. The Army is now in the middle of one of the longest set of repeated field deployments into an active combat zone in its history. Navy life; though, has always been about deployments and separation, it's never been a comfortable family life. Whether ships were sailing into hostile waters or not when you're out there, you are away.
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