Dyer - Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the Uss George H.w. Bush

A LSO BY G EOFF D YER

Zona

Otherwise Known as the Human Condition:Selected Essays and Reviews (United States only)

Working the Room: Essays and Reviews 19992010

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi

The Ongoing Moment

Yoga for People Who Cant Be Bothered to Do It

Anglo-English Attitudes: Essays, Reviews and Misadventures 198499

Paris Trance

Out of Sheer Rage

The Missing of the Somme

The Search

But Beautiful

The Colour of Memory

Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger

Copyright 2014 by Geoff Dyer

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies. Simultaneously published in the United Kingdom by Visual Editions, London.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

This work is part of a series entitled Writers in Residence.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dyer, Geoff.
Another great day at sea : life aboard the USS
George H.W. Bush / Geoff Dyer.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-307-91158-2 (hardcover)978-0-307-91159-9 (eBook)
1. George H.W. Bush (Aircraft carrier). 2. United States. NavySea life. 3. SailorsUnited States. I. Title. II. Title: Life aboard the USS George H.W. Bush.
VA65.B456D94 2013 359.94350973dc23 2013024607

www.pantheonbooks.com

Photographs copyright Chris Steele-Perkins

Jacket photograph by Chris Steele-Perkins
Jacket design by Pablo Delcn

v3.1

In loving memory

Phyllis Mary Dyer
27 July 192529 June 2011

Arthur John Dyer
30 November 191930 November 2011

1

We were going to be flying to the carrier from the US Navy base in Bahrain on a Grumman C-2A Greyhound: an ungainly propeller plane, more war- or work-horse than greyhound. There was nothing sleek or speedy about it. The sky was doing what it always did at this time: waiting for the sun to show up. The sun is the only thing that happens to the sky in this part of the worldthat and the stars which were nowhere to be seen. The temperature was pleasant; a few hours from now it would be infernal. Sixteen passengers, all Navy except for me and the snapper, gathered round the back of the Greyhoundalso known as a COD (Carrier Onboard Delivery)listening to the safety briefing. Our luggage had been weighed and taken away for loading. Despite my protests, I had to hand over my computer bag as well, something Id never let happen before. It had to be stowed because when we landed on the carrier, when the plane touched down and hooked the arresting wire, we would go from 140 mph to 0 mph in a couple of seconds: the trap, the first of many words that I heard for the first time, or rather the first of many times that I heard a familiar word used in a completely new way. I knew what the trap referred and pertained tothe hook, the arresting wirebut was unsure how to use it. Did we make the trap? Hit the trap? Come in for the trap? The trap: it existed in isolation from other words, abruptly and permanently arrested from the normal momentum of syntax.

Then there was the word cranial: in this context not an adjective (as in massage) but a noun referring to the head-, ear- and eye-protectors that were handed out for the flight. Unnoticed, I noticed now, the sky had brightened from grey to blue. We put on our float coats, carried our cranials and filed onto the plane. There were two seats on either side of the aisleall facing backwardsand two windows on either side of the fuselage, each the size of a dinner plate. It was not the sort of environment in which one could complain about the lack of leg room, though that was one of the striking features of this aircraft. Others were fumes and noise.

The ramp wed walked up winched itself closed and sealed us in. Further safety checks were made. This involved shining a torch as though to see if there were holes in the fuselage. There must have been more to it than that but holes in a fuselage are good things to check for, obviously. The woman who made these checks was the military equivalent of a flight attendant. She was wearing a sand-coloured flight suit, looked as tough as a woman in an Annie Proulx story. There was nothing of the trolley dollynothing Chicken or beef? or Doors to manualabout her, but when she sat down in front of me, prior to take-off, I saw that her hair had been plaited and pinned into a tight bun on the back of her head. The Navy allowed women to keep their hair long. I wasnt surprised, exactly, just pleased thats how things were.

We were not taxiing but a noisy increase in power had taken place and the noise was deafening. Id thought the noise was deafening when wed first boarded but back then I didnt know anything about noise or deafeningness. It sounded like the flight of the Phoenix. Felt like it tooeven though we were not actually moving, let alone flying. This was the moment, evidently, to put on my ear-pinching cranial. Having done that I sat there, strapped tight, struck by the undisguised use of the rivet in the seat in front. Everything in the plane was ripped, scuffed, scratched, stripped. Tubes, pipes, cables and superstructure were all laid bare. Commercial passenger planes from the worlds poorest countries outdid this one when it came to frills; even to compare this plane to anything in the fleets of the budget airlines of the West would give a distorting impression of luxury. Passenger comfort was not a factor in any part of the design process.

Having worked itself up to a state of unstoppable intensity the plane accelerated along a runway for so long it seemed that we were attempting the logically impossible: driving overland to the carrier. At last the groundglimpsed, through the window just behind and to my leftdropped away. We flew over a blur of Gulf but it was neck-achingly awkward, craning backwards to look through the porthole, so I reverted to sitting tight in this silently noisy, vibrating, heavily laden tube, studying rivet patterns.

After forty minutes the bumpy ride became jumpier still as we descended, bucking the bronco air. There was a stomach-draining lurch and heave. We were landno we werent! The flight attendants arm came up in a spiralling lasso gesture to indicate that we had missed the arresting wire and were bolting: going up and around again.

We circled and tilted round, descended again. This time we thumped down and came to a dead stop. Instantly. It was sudden, but not as violent as Id expected and fearedpossibly because we were facing backwards and so were forced into our seats rather than thrown forward and out of them.

The ramp-hatch at the back of the plane was lowered to reveal that we had landed on another worldalbeit a world with the same pure blue sky as the one we had left. Rotating radars, an American flag, the island (another old-new word, referring to the bridge and assorted flight-ops rooms rising in a stack from one side of the deck: an island on the island of the carrier). The hatch continued to inch its way down, revealing the flight deck itself, populated by vizor-faced beings in red, green, white, yellow jerseys and float coats. Parked jetsF-18sand helicopters.