In the otherwise made-for-TV-moviesque 1980 “The Final Countdown” there is a scene in which an officer aboard the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz walks over to an enlisted rating who is monitoring radio traffic.
“Neem-itz?” says the officer, repeating an accented phrase heard over the radio. “Who’s that?”
“A Russian trawler,” says the enlisted man, euphemistically referring to the transparent disguise used by the Soviet intelligence-gathering vessels that routinely shadowed US carrier groups during the Cold War.
“What’s he want?” the officer asks.
“One big fish!” the rating jokes, pointing at the deck of the carrier beneath his feet.
As much a star of the movie as Kirk Douglas or Martin Sheen was the Nimitz herself. Filmed on board and using planes from the carrier’s air wing, the cheesy “carrier travels through time” plot snuck in a great deal of verisimilitude about the carrier lifestyle… the cramped quarters, flight deck operations, general quarters. For these things, I have always had a soft spot in my heart for “The Final Countdown” and by extension, the USS Nimitz.
So when I found myself tramping up a ramp from the pier onto the same flight deck elevator that Sheen took his leave from at the conclusion of the film, it was, if not a dream come true, at least a modest fantasy realized.
I was climbing aboard the carrier at her current berth at Naval Base Kitsap in Bremerton, where she is undergoing a twelve month refit project. I was with a tour group of Coast Guard auxiliarists and their families, courtesy of my stepfather. Leading our tour was Commander Brent Johnson, the command chaplain aboard Nimitz. Later, whenever I had need to grapple mentally with the immense scale of the vessel, I had only to tell myself, “Here is a ship that requires not just a reverend, but an entire organized team of clergy to pray for her and all the souls aboard.” That’s how big the Nimitz is.
There are nominally 2500 of those souls, not counting various air wings and other attached commands. During refit, the planes and aircrew have been removed and more or less replaced by great piles of heavy machinery and scores of shipyard construction workers. It’s no minor thing to take a warship apart and put it back together again in the right order, and it’s not done lightly; Nimitz will undergo one more of these between now and her expected end of life in 2025. This one, Commander Johnson said, is primarily to install shipboard wifi. Apparently, the iPad explosion has reached the Navy.
Actually, there are many major and minor systems being maintained or upgraded during the refit work; the Nimitz-class carriers may spend up to twenty percent of their lifespan in the shipyard undergoing repairs and modernization. The Navy expects to get fifty years out of them. When I reflect that Nimitz was christened the year I was born, the reality of that number really hits home. It also compares impressively with the lifespan and expectations we have for our own sailboat, Insegrevious. Although I have to note, modestly, that my own shipboard wifi installation project didn’t take much more than five minutes, with no dead spots.
Other than those that take the planes from the hangar deck to the flight deck, and a few specialized ones for armaments, machinery, or casualties, there aren’t really any elevators on board. You get between decks on ladders, not much different in construction or angle than the one leading down into the cabin from the cockpit Insegrevious. As the youngest person in the tour group by probably two decades, I spent a lot of time waiting around at either end of these ladders as duffers with various joint ailments clambered resolutely up or down. While there, I had plenty of time to marvel at the mirror sheen reflecting my stunning visage from any brass-clad fitting in view. To see such a high degree of upkeep, in the middle of what was basically an active construction project, spoke volumes about the morale and motivation of the crew.
The Navy personnel aboard were, uniformly, polite, attentive, and professional. It was clear in their faces that they had been spending long days performing exhausting manual labor that had little to do with the picture the recruiters must have painted for them, but they were positive and upbeat and quick to crack a joke. One of Commander Johnson’s subordinates who was assisting with the tour had just joined the ship, coming in from Marine Helicopter Squadron One, the unit that is responsible for ferrying the president around by helicopter. He introduced himself as “The Sermonator.”
Although the ship may not have been at her prettiest, going aboard during an overhaul exposed much that might not normally be seen on a tour. Access panels were off, exposing the massive framing of the ship, showing the vast ventilation systems, and showing even more of the great bundles of wiring that form the nervous system of a modern warship. Wandering down the average corridor, you might already imagine you were seeing most of those cables and ducts; I frequently hit my head (helmeted, fortunately) on wire bundles in the narrow passageways. Many of them are exposed for rapid inspection and damage control. But it turns out they are only a fraction of the total. I have a hard time tracing my paltry 12v systems around… suddenly, a 2500-person crew starts to make a lot of sense.
Of course, such a big crew demands a great deal of support, which demands even more crew. The specialization began to boggle as we toured one of the mothballed messes, where we met two Culinary Specialists who, when not painting or mopping, spend their time making up box lunches for pilots who might not be able to make regular mess hours. Commander Johnson had scads of statistics at hand designed to illustrate the grand scale of the vessel, but they were unnecessary. Everything aboard her speaks to the complexity of the design and operation.
And yet, there are surprising commonalities with average boats and sailors. The focus on constant maintenance and upkeep as a necessary bulwark against chaos and danger was reinforced with a call over the 1MC, repeated each day, for the crew to man cleaning stations. At that point, almost every rating around us obediently stopped their refit job, got out brooms or rags, and started to tidy up. In the middle of unfinished construction. To a lubber, this might seem madness, but it brought home our own efforts during projects to try to keep the boat clean and orderly; when you’re living and working on her, you can’t let entropy get the upper hand.
We tromped up and down a bewildering array of ladders, through identical gray passageways, across the vast flight deck cluttered with materials and parts awaiting installation, and around the “island”, the signature structure of a carrier sticking up awkwardly off to one side. Most of the activities on the ship are coordinated from the island when she is operational, but the spaces there were largely abandoned as the guts were being worked on below. The primary flight control deck was mothballed, screens and consoles wrapped in plastic, waiting for the return of planes, looking lonely with the sole stretch of graffiti visible on the ship scattered across a pillar in the middle. Signed by visiting luminaries such as Aerosmith, the pillar seemed like a testament to the rebellious, testosterone-fueled nature of the pilots who normally dominated the space and made it seem even emptier.
One level below pri-fly is the main bridge, which we snuck into quietly as a small team of sailors and contractors were working there. In another echo of the concerns of the sea that absorb sailors on big ships and small, they were discussing man-overboard recovery drills. A 100,000 ton behemoth doesn’t make a Williamson turn in a flash. Of course, having helicopters as an option puts a different spin on the problem.
Our group filed quietly past that small team and then huddled up on the opposite side of the bridge to listen to some of the details on the day-to-day activities of managing a busy carrier. The radar was running, the consoles here were energized, and the picture was much different from that one deck above: the bridge spoke of a ship, even in the middle of a refit, that was very much ready to go. There, to my astonishment, Commander Johnson launched into his own story about, you guessed it: a Russian “trawler.” The tour was not yet over, but my Nimitz experience was complete.