Haze Gray and Underway

Robert and I have spent ten hours over the last five nights watching PBS's documentary, Carrier, filmed onboard the USS Nimitz, and it was pretty damn cool.

I have been fascinated by flight deck operations for as long as I can recall. I think the first five minutes of "Top Gun" are just about the best five minutes of moviemaking ever. It's just such an amazing process (and dangerous as hell), and it gives me shivers every time.

The filmmakers took a six-month cruise with the Nimitz to the Middle East, and focused on a handful of the five-thousand-plus crew. Especially with the junior enlisted personnel, it was a pretty sharp contrast to see them doing their dangerous/difficult/complicated jobs handling/launching/landing billions of dollars of jets, missiles and bombs, then goofing off on their free time like the kids they were.

Robert completed his first Navy enlistment before we met -- he was in Vietnam, while I was at home climbing trees and blowing up things with Black Cat firecrackers. After a few years as a civilian, after the kiddo was born, he decided to go back on active duty. He went to San Diego first, and then the kiddo and I were going to join him out there to travel on to our first duty station: Naval Hospital, Pearl Harbor. We were going to Hawaii. Wahoo.

Soon before we were scheduled to leave for California, Robert called. There'd been a change, he said. Did the phrase "haze gray and underway" mean anything to me?

Instead of Pearl, we went to Naval Station, Charleston -- and I loved it. Of all the places we lived, Charleston was my favorite and the one I'd love to go back and visit first. He was assigned to a ship there that was definitely gray, but as for the underway . . . well, around base, its hull number was 18, and around base, it was called Building 18, or the USS NeverSail.

It did cruise, actually -- they went to a space shuttle launch to help recover the boosters (or whatever was *supposed* to fall off the shuttle), and they had to leave port when Hurricane David hit, then they sailed down to Mobile to go into drydocks for more than a year. And soon after Robert left, they did an Indian Ocean cruise. But the extent of his cruising was something like three weeks.

Carrier covers the Nimitz crossing the international date line and the transformation of polliwogs into shellbacks. Wogs have never sailed across the line; shellbacks have. It used to be a real hazing sort of thing, but that doesn't happen anymore. (Because, as one sailor said, too many whiny people f*cked it up for everyone.)

Not only is Robert one of the few retired sailors who never made a cruise, he's also one of the few retired wogs.

Like I said, the filmmakers focused on a handful of sailors and Marines, both enlisted and commissioned -- everything from the lowliest unrated kid who swabbed decks to the gum-chewing CO of one of the fighter squadrons -- and both good and bad.

One of the bad was this little goofball racist who just happened to be from, ta-dah, Jay, Oklahoma. Jay's a little wide spot in the road in northeast Oklahoma -- not a bad little town. I used to have family up there.

That aside, here's this dipshit self-described redneck racist f*ck whose excuse is, "I grew up this way." More than one of his defenses began with "Back home . . ." (He also mentioned that he'd made a mistake in joining the Navy; he should have gone into the Marine Corps like his brother. Yeah, like they don't have blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Filipinos, etc in the Marine Corps?) (And like someone who can't handle being onboard one damn big ship in the middle of the ocean is going to really shine in the close world of the Corps??)

After incident after escalating incident, the guy got booted out with an other-than-honorable, and was proud of himself for it. He was going back home where he belonged.

I may just have to drive up to Jay and kick his ass. Rachel10:26 AM