Yes We Could

I’ve chosen to tell this past year’s – diagnosis, treatment, and recovery – in the context of my career, perhaps because that is the most appropriate and least damning story arc. But there are others frames I set aside along the way: say, the 2008 presidential election.

There is no causative factor, of course; only a happenstance correlation. It was back around the time of Key West, back around that heart-stopping lump I felt, that I started to follow the meteoric career of this amazing 2004 DNC speaker, the kid with the funny name from the South Side of Chicago, thrust onto the national stage by none other than John Kerry: Barack Obama. In Alabama, in January, while I was being run through the gauntlet of tests, neon bandages around my elbow from the constant blood-letting, that I walked into a library in West Mobile to see how I, and shockingly, three dozen of the most diverse crowd I'd ever seen gathered in the South, could help elect this man president. While the tests dragged on, and the detailer called to tempt me with the grand surprise, unsustainable, of my dream job, I pounded the streets of middle-class black neighborhoods in Mobile and walked past parades of Mardi Gras revelers, registering voters and talking up the impending primary, which due to its concurrence with Fat Tuesday, was held (in Mobile alone in the state) a week early. Since we were in drydock, I carved out the time to drive 8 or 9 hours round-trip to Birmingham on a Sunday to again see the most incredible cross-section of Southern population, gathered in record-breaking numbers of maybe 12K-15K, to reassure each other that this inspirational man speaking before us was no illusion; the America he touted no idle dream. I walked up naively with handfuls of extra tickets entrusted to me from the Mobile office and was instantly mobbed by hundreds of eager, desperate fellow Americans. Desperate for hope. Desperate for change.

Yes we could.

When I went to Rhode Island for TAO school, that abortive attempt at normalcy my gut told me was doomed to fail, given the biopsy taken on the eve of my departure, the Pennsylvania primary already loomed large, and I made arrangements to drive over and volunteer one weekend. While the eventual diagnosis scotched those lofty goals, my immediate redirection to California enabled me to join a call center and reach out to hundreds of primary voters in Indiana. I registered the leather-clad during Pride Weekend, the arugula-eating in Nob Hill, and the surreally cloistered in far exurbia. In late May, I flew up to Oregon and pounded the streets of Bend, Beaverton, and Portland in anticipation of their primary; Oregon's record-breaking crowd of 75,000 packed into the Waterfront Park rally the day I left. Later that summer, I flew to Arizona and lettered campaign signs with my mother – a devout Hillary Clinton supporter I like to think I helped convert – in a tiny house in the Hispanic ghetto. Did I mention that by this time, I was going through treatment? That I was struggling to focus through the searing pain that was destroying everything within me from blood cells to tastebuds? That I was working 30+ hours a week, gritting out the exhaustion and the dizzying sickness with thoughts of ship commissionings and $1 million security contracts? That I was bandanna-clad, scarf-wrapped guarding my delicate bald scalp and radiated neck from the summer sun? I didn’t, but no matter. It was secondary to me then, too. We needed this moment. We needed this change.

Yes we could.

The primaries wound up. I watched the historic acceptance speech from my apartment in San Francisco, cheering wildly with my roommate, all else forgotten. I followed the general election from the road, sporadically. By now, treatment was over, and I was rushing to catch up. As I drove cross-country to bring my car from Alabama to California at last, I no longer feared to tape my “Obama ‘08” bumper-sticker in my back window while driving through the South. My Obama t-shirts started conversations in small towns and big cities alike, and I couldn't stop handing out leftover pins and paraphernalia. People were emerging, squinting, unsure, out of every forgotten corner of America to wish, to hope, just barely over their fear that a long-held dream might just come true, that we had a future, that we, Americans, could truly have a voice, a long-slumbering power stirring awake.

I watched the final presidential debate, or the majority of it, huddled with a couple dozen flight-mates around a TV in Nagoya during an all-too-brief layover to the other side of the world. South Africa was abuzz with the possibility that a man with an African father might be elected American president. In South Africa, the only reason black men finally won the presidency is that their black majority at last earned suffrage. In America, they amazed, a black man might win because white people voted for him. It was a game-changer.

Yes we could.

Election night itself, I was underway, or getting underway, en route to my new life, the one I'd left behind. We were in the middle of TACT, in San Diego. We'd been anchored for a few hours earlier in the afternoon, and despite my exhaustion of endless operations, night and day, I'd been glued to the wardroom TV the whole time, watching early election returns as the polls closed in the East. Then we set special sea detail, and it was dark; I was on the bridge, and my pocket wouldn't stop buzzing. My roommate was frantically texting me electoral college updates, and when that seemed decisive, I begged her for Senate numbers. Just as we weighed anchor, my mother called. I thought it was an emergency and decamped to the bridge wing. "OBAMA WON!!!! AAAHHHHHH!!!" she screamed. "That's great, Mom," I whispered. "I'm at special sea detail right now."

We left for the OOH before the inauguration; providentially, our departure from Honolulu was delayed a day and some hours; long enough to watch the august event in its entirety, again from the wardroom television via the propagandistic AFN (Armed Forces Network). We left as the world was changing, and all that we heard of home in the interim seemed distant and unreal - a dying economy, a sagging stock market, torture, Guantanamo, Supreme Court, budget fights, bank bailouts.

Even in our port calls, we seemed to cross stars with the new administration. We stopped in Malaysia days before Hillary Clinton flew to Southeast Asia for her first foray as Secretary of State.We sweated through India and Pakistan as Obama shook hands with Musharraf in the White House for the first time. We were moored in Bahrain when the President flew out, unexpectedly, to meet with troops in Iraq and Kuwait and Afghanistan. Leaving Jordan and through the Suez as Obama made his much-heralded Egypt speech to the Muslim world. Sailing through the Med as the First Family traveled Europe and was lambasted by press for hugging the Queen in England and sight-seeing in Paris. As we chased down suspected pirates in the Gulf of Aden for one of our biggest operational accomplishments, Arlen Specter switched parties to set up a sea change in the Senate. Days before we pulled back into Alameda, Norm Coleman finally conceded and Al Franken was sworn in on Paul Wellstone’s Bible. The Senate was at 60. Mission accomplished.

There are new crewmembers now, like our new Weapons Officer who served on the Inaugural Committee and hobnobbed at all the balls, who haven’t the faintest clue the path I hiked last summer. Back home, now, the mass of Americans have sunk, deaf and dumb, into their lives of quiet desperation, worried by recession and distracted by Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett and opinion polls, back into the lethargy, forgetting so easily, relinquishing the terrific power they so recently held.

The moment is past.