Time-Speed-Distance

It's a simple equation. Speed x Time = Distance. In its simplest form, how long it's going to take you to get where you're going. Solve for any variable. Or substitute and solve for two; pick the better solution. Master the basic equation, internalize it, I was told, and someday, you'll be a successful Operations Officer.

It's true. The equation never escapes you. Calculate an intercept. Open CPA (closest point of approach). Develop tracklines and meet up with other ships for replenishment at sea, slowly closing and maintaining stand-off distance while the elements nudge you irregularly. Conduct formation steaming. Launch and recover helicopters during "lily pad" operations (flying a helo back and forth between two ships). Figure fuel burn rates and balance fuel economy with operational need. Plan the day's events. Track targets, calculate maximum effective range, engage the enemy, fight the ship. Time-Speed-Distance.

Eventually you're thinking it without even using the math, internalizing it, knowing it, living it. I race my watchstanders, to their endless frustration and my eternal satisfaction - they work it on paper, on the computer, the calculator, on the maneuvering boards and the radar scope; I think it. The numbers become beings to me, take life, become tangible. This is the math I love, the kinetic, real-life, applicable calculations. Multi-variable equations to model, without theorems or proofs, the seemingly unpredictable movement of a ship buffeted by an array of elements. The books, the theories, the 3-minute and 6-minute and radian rules: they only get you so far. The math of shipdriving is an art as much as a science, and I struggle to explain it, to talk as well as do, to coach; it simply is.

As we steam onward, westward, time melts away under us. Time zones fail to catch us, but the sun and stars and moon are constant in their paths about us, our path about them. Time is measurable, is real; it is at once always the same time, always Zulu, always the time of the sun overhead at local apparent noon; and yet "back home", wherever that is, while we bake at mid-day, it's dark and colder and a whole other day of the week. Time ceases to flow linearly, elastic, inextricable from speed and distance.

You never get a second chance, except going west, on those interminable 6-turned-7-hour midwatches, where the one-o'clock hour is so much sweeter the second time around. And with day following day undistinguished, with sliding six-hour watches that refuse to allow you a set schedule, with operations, planned and unplanned, at all hours of the day and night, there is no day, no date, no distinction; only an unceasing routine and the regular tolling of ship's bells to regulate and to cling to.

Never send to know for whom the bell tolls...