A gray dawn breaking

photos: sunrise in the Straits of Messina, highlighting Mt. Etna - May 2009

There is an undeniable allure to the morning 4-to-8s, inexplicable to the average landlubber. Perhaps the mystique is bred solely of exhaustion; after all, there’s never enough sleep beforehand. You struggle, bleary-eyed, out of the rack, slapping fruitlessly at your alarm blinking coldly: 0230, 0230. You bless all those blue lights in Combat and the red lights in the passageways, because by the time you stumble down to Main Control, you’re not blinking so furiously in that stark whiteness, blowing hot and loud. The forced routine of the round keeps you moving. An apple in one pocket, a granola bar in the other – breakfast an eternity away – and, finally, you emerge wide-eyed into the night air for the last part of the round, topside.

Even pulling down on the bar to close the door behind, I’m staring up, eyes trained. Cloudy or clear? crisp and dry? heavy with fog? – I’m picking out stars, wind on my cheek, listening, smelling, smoke shimmering from the stacks, nav lights glowing; I’m forcing my eyes to adjust, judging visibility and illumination, squinting at the horizon, distant and shady. I head aft. If it’s clear, the multiplicity of stars arrests me; and I stare up, sky dense, layers upon layers, blinking, deep into the inky darkness, picking my way across the panoply: Orion, the Pleiades, Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper, Polaris. North. I judge our heading, overlaying it on the mental picture I started outlining back in Combat.

On my way forward, my feet gauge pitch and roll, adjusting as I lean into the wind, striding up the weather decks, boats tied down, dim green light of batteries charging, crouched and waiting. Usually up on the foc’sle, time allowing, my feet stumbling over ground tackle, I stop and look out, scan the horizon, wait for relative motion. Other vessels, the lights of land, the greens and whites and reds along that thin line between sky and sea, blinking on and off, some steady, some coming, some going. Aspects, sizes, distances, all compared exhaustively against the radar scope burned behind my eyes. Then, finally, up the ladders and a visual scan around the bridge catwalk, eyes pressed to binoculars, double-checking.

Entering the bridge at last, saluting the officer of the deck, it’s all double-checking now, confirming details etched in my mind. Distance and direction to land, safe water, territorial seas, nearest port. Friendly forces. Shipping. Patrol boxes, tracklines, “hot spots”, hazards. I listen and watch, judge the alertness of the bridge team, check my equipment, darken the bridge: it’s never black enough. Review the logs, the charts, the night orders I wrote (it seems an eternity ago) yesterday evening, before escaping to bed, before the phone calls, answered half-asleep. Engines, radios, intelligence, tasking, and then, the passdown, nodding, knowing the words before they’re said, agreeing.

I wait. I’m sure. I offer my relief.

The start of the watch is slow. That’s normal: I have to get my watch section accustomed, night-adapted, set in their routines. A half hour in, around 0400, and always for break-ins – and they’re inevitably there, aren’t they? it’s the best watch for training – the session starts. We review the plan of the day and anticipate responsibilities, plan actions. Rehearse wake-up calls for the captain and XO. Calculate sunrise; shoot morning stars. Review casualty procedures, in detail; run mini-drills. Memorize Rules of the Road. Calculate time-speed-distance overnight, and to our next waypoint. Watch the sun rise; shoot amplitude or azimuth for gyro error. Knock out checklists. Hunt for bad guys. Sign off boat checks. Secure nav lights; re-set the bridge for day. Smell the sweet scent of breakfast, curling up to the bridge, the only time the watch ever seems to drag, those last thirty minutes with your stomach crying out and well-nourished reliefs finally plodding up the ladder, mumbling lazy, satisfied reports and you hearing nothing, begging only for waffles or orange juice or biscuits and gravy.

It’s gone fast, and now you’re saluting the watch away, checking your logs, a final touch of the cap, heading below. Time to start the day. But, maybe if you were lucky, maybe somewhere, maybe in the midst of all that rush, maybe while the break-in ran for a head call or dug for a star chart or calculated a fix, maybe you slipped outside for a minute, draped over the bridge rail, looking up, looking out, lost in the vastness of sea and sky and stars and sun, the as-yet-unseen sun, golden only in its clouded reflection, not even risen yet; maybe you braced against wind and wiped away rain and tasted the salt spray on your lips; maybe you just stood, still, alone and small, a dot in the middle of the vastness. Maybe you remembered why you’ve done more in the past four hours, before reveille, than many on land do all day.

At the end of our long patrol this spring, we took on perhaps a dozen friends and relatives for the last short leg home, up the California coast. Two nights and a day, a short sojourn after our long adventures. Most hid in the wardroom, watching movies; the unluckier ones spread-eagled on bottom racks, sick. The more curious among them toured common spaces or spectated at special evolutions: getting underway, mooring, boats launched and recovered. Relative, yes; but no passenger, this man.

No; he appeared wordless, a shadow on the morning 4-to-8, settling silent in XO’s chair on the port side, steaming coffee mug in hand, unbidden, dark against the darkness of the foggy night, alert, watching. I suspected he’d made a round of the ship beforehand, likely more thorough than mine. He said little. He’d been in the merchant marines for years, captained ships, run a fleet out of Singapore, lately retired, still youthful, unbowed, eyes bright. He sat and kept watch with us, comfortable, listening, smelling, feeling, looking, poised. Through the sunrise; and then, upon relief, slipped away down below; breakfast called.

Yes, that man – he was a sailor. He knew.

To the lonely sea and the sky

It's hard to adjust to the landlubber's life after being six months away at sea. I keep thinking this is only a port call, with sailing orders set in a day or two. I am strangely silent, uncomfortably formal and polite, withdrawn and taciturn: it's odd having to explain yourself after living half a year with shipmates who knew you more intimately than you yourself, who ate, drank, slept, breathed, watched, and endured the exact same boredom and adventures as you. Words, in the end, weren't even necessary, except to acknowledge orders or repeat back commands; only a simple look across a crowded bridge, and it was done.

There is the ceaseless watchfulness to break myself of. The unending hurry, the restlessness and impatience, the lack of time. It is particularly hard to let back in all the trivialities that so consume our daily lives back on the beach: car batteries and utility bills and noisy neighbors and church politics. All the domestic fluff you leave behind when you cast off lines. It all seems such vanity, such chasing after the wind.

But hardest, for me, is the confinement. For months it was just us, bobbing around in endless vastness of wind and sun and sea and sky. Every morning the sun crept above the horizon in the east; every evening, it slowly sank with ephemeral flash in the far west. Nights, the sky dripped with stars, the Milky Way reaching out with uncharacteristic brilliance and clarity. Below, the sea kept pushing, the dolphins diving under the hull and the flying fish scattering like spindrift before you. Day after day, in monotonous expanse. No buildings to hide the gathering clouds; no city lights to drown out the moon and planets, Jupiter overhead, red Mars consorting with blue Venus in the east, the moon rising cold and white and full.

I came back, and made for the hills, whence came my salvation, of sorts. The mountain paths of the Sierras climbed on and on ahead of me, one trail forking into the next. The untamed river rushed and curled and spread out lazily in the sun, over smooth, round stones. The air was fresh, bright, undimmed by smog. At night, the stars hung low. You could almost believe you had only to wake for the next firewatch, to share your adventures over coffee and hot cocoa, to sink slowly into quiet sleep and sweet dreams and wake before dawn with the birds' eager chirps.

Society, of course, waited at the bottom of the mountain, as it had crouched on the pier, eager, ravenous, ready to devour us with its pettiness. I do not want to speak or explain. Gossip bores me. Why are the windows up? Why are we sitting inside when the sun shines or the night calls? There are fresh fruits, fresh vegetables, fresh milk and cheese. Why are we eating, blindly, from drive-throughs? (Why is the rum always gone?!) What are all these rules, these laws, these restrictions and hierarchies? At sea, there is only the captain, imperious and imperial.

On our last day underway, a retired merchant marine captain, one of our "Tiger Cruise" guests, appeared wordlessly on the bridge while it was still dark to perch in the XO's chair and stand the morning 4-8 watch with us. He said little, just gazed out at the lightening sky and darkening waves and watched and listened and smiled.

I didn't ask why. No need.

Prejudice

It is such an ugly word. I like to tell myself I'm beyond it, past the myopia; blind and all-seeing. I like to say that because skin color means no more than hair or eye color to me; because gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status or class, appearance, physical abilities or disabilities, job, talents, marital or family status, height, weight, educational accomplishments, religion or lack thereof - because this laundry list of descriptors are no more to me than the variety of fruits in the supermarket; that because of this, I am blissfully non-prejudicial. I buttress this with the fact that despite (or perhaps because of) growing up in a very multi-cultural area, I didn't realize there were race tensions until the Rodney King riots when I was in junior high; reinforce it with the rather surprising fact that I was the only white child marching in a Black History Day parade at school one year, and I barely noticed it; reassure myself by the fact that I don't use skin color to describe strangers or ask about someone's ancestors' accomplishments or care how bourgeois someone's money is.

It is all an uncomfortable illusion. I discovered that, this patrol.

It is not, I suppose, surprising. My father came of age in a city bombed by Germans night and day. Most of the earlier and more extended generations of my mother's family were killed in the Holocaust, or the raids and slaughter that preceeded it, to the point that my grandfather spent much of his adult life hunting for living relatives like needles in so many haystacks, combing phonebooks in cities around the world with sizeable Jewish immigrant populations. He eventually found (among others) a first cousin he thought he'd lost, who, along with his older sister, had hidden as children with a Catholic family in France. The older sister, who kept a graphic diary of their tribulations, eventually "converted" back, but this younger brother embraced Catholicism, eventually rising through the ranks to become - when my grandfather sought audience with him - Archbishop of Paris. There were once rumors he was in the running for Pope. He is gone now, sleeping with the others.

When I was in elementary school, there were still West Germany and East Germany and Berlin. West Germany was très moderne; East Germany produced female Olympic swim champions with hairy chests and deep voices; to Berlin went all the outreach music and drama and sports groups, to spread the good news of Western capitalism and maybe, to taste the dangerous bleakness of the Iron Curtain. Until one year at Thanksgiving, my family sat around in shock and whispered news of the Berlin Wall's incredible crumbling. That year, my mother purchased an enormous new National Geographic Atlas of the World. It showed Germany as a whole country, unified, asterisked - it hadn't happened yet;it was yet in expectation, not without a little fear. Germany had been partitioned for a reason.

But I digress.

For one of the operational periods of this deployment, we worked for a coalition task force commanded by a German admiral. (Later in the patrol, command shifted, as scheduled, to the French.) Our initial interaction withthe Admiral and his flagship was over chat, in an English still oddly accented even on-screen. They weren't the easiest to work with, or for. For our part, we were new to the operational area and to the operating guidelines. The stereotypical gruffness, curtness, rigid and directive control, all bore out in action. The pride, too: despite the "coalition" in our collective title, they repeatedly and intentionally monopolized the action, relegating us to the sidelines and claiming the glory for themselves.

Or maybe that's just how I saw it, through increasingly unsettled, prejudiced eyes. I think it was the day I watched the rotund German admiral proudly strutting across our flight deck to greet our commanding officer that I realized my almost physical revulsion. It struck every time I heard them speak over a voice circuit, read their operational directions, argued with them over tasking; even when I saw their brusque Saxon chat. All sorts of ugly stereotypes filled my mind, despite my best, most conscious efforts to banish them. I was unutterably relieved, finally, to leave them behind, more to abandon my new-discovered jadedness than to actually shift tactical control.

I experienced something similar in Gibraltar. I was with a couple of coworkers, shipmates, friends, and we were trying to find a restaurant on the waterfront for a wardroom function with the other officers. An older German man in a thick, faded navy blue cable-knit sweater intercepted us. "Where are you going? Maybe I can help you get there." We handed him our well-creased map. "Are you in the American Navy?" he asked.

I can't remember all he said. We were careful not to reveal too much of our operational schedule or activities, both still classified. He warned us not to jump off a cliff on the back side of the rock into the waters below, a wild idea carried out (surprisingly, safely) by a daredevil few US Navy sailors some months back. But mainly he was still stuck in the past. He didn't look quite old enough to have seen much, if anything, of WWII, but his entire conversation was couched in it. The post-war occupation. Limitations on shipbuilding and military reconstitution, industry, politics. Pride. A wounded pride glinted sharply from his pale blue eyes. He kept us talking there for a long time. He was suppliant, but proud, undaunted, challenging us in the subtext to both respect his country's accomplishments and yet pity him for our restrictions that kept them from achieving so much more. I felt sick. I kept picturing Nazis and freight-cars bound for concentration camps and piles of emaciated bodies. It wasn't his fault. I smiled and formed a few words, like you do when you're drunk, and was immensely relieved I didn't have to do the bulk of the talking.

Tobruk was the hardest, though. I've mentioned how my father's cousins fought and were captured there. How I read of the desert campaigns and Rommel's brilliancy in Churchill's history. The loss of life, the reversals of fortune, the direction of the whole war turning on "Torch" and Alexander's march to the sea. We toured the French and Allied cemeteries. It was solemn and sobering and humbling. But first, our Libyan hosts took us to the German cemetery. The French and Allied cemeteries were stark, sand-colored, unobtrusive. The Germans' memorial committee had erected an imposing brick monument, a castle with thick walls, two stories, an immense, imposing square on the cliff overlooking the city. We all piled out of the cramped bus into oppressive heat and blinding sun. I almost couldn't enter, where in the darkness, a shrine of sorts paid homage to the thousands of dead Germans who had conquered, then lost, the city, leaving abandoned tanks and miles of bloodshed, taking thousands of prisoners before eventually succumbing, themselves.

Inside, you stepped into the blazing sun in a large inner courtyard. Each side of the inner walls was carved with names, top to bottom, except the wall toward the city, which bore enormous, stylized soldiers and their countrymen, in service and in mourning, in relief against black granite, unwavering and undaunted. Beside them, a list of Libyan battles. I couldn't look. They were young servicemen, like us, sworn to fight and die for their country; but they had empowered Rommel, Hitler, the Nazis, the death machines. I couldn't move past that, not even in a memorial to the dead, sleeping in ignorance. The dead, soldiers, like us.

Climbing thick, winding stone staircases, you emerged again into the sun, on the wide parapet a good fifty feet above the memorial's floor, offering a commanding view of the city. In defeat, victory. It was hard to look. I felt sick. It wasn't the height.

Each time, again and again, I berated myself for my feelings, shrinking in shame. I was supposed to be beyond this, evolved or educated away from such crude, animal reactions. There's no pat answer to this one. Just humility, and a sick realization that I'm no better than those I'd so smugly judged.

Shadows

Last summer, with endless hours in hospital waiting rooms, UCSF shuttles, and hooked up to IVs (I'd say "hours to kill", but that's a bit morbid, in context), I gingerly began leafing through pages of Winston Churchill's magnificent, exhaustive, 6-volume History of World War II.

Wide-ranging in scope, astonishing in detail, intuitively prophetic in political repercussions, strategically masterful, intimate, unforgivingly and proudly British, and above all, rewardingly well-written, this exhaustive personal account propelled me, week after week, through its 4000+ pages and 10 years of tumultuous world events.

I never got as far as WWII in school history classes. Anyway, it would have been American-biased and blinkered, only from December 7, 1941, onward. Iwo Jima and Normandy and the atom bomb. My historical knowledge was generally confined to old war movies, the Diary of Anne Frank, and familial horror stories of the Holocaust. As a teenager in East London, my dad had lived through the Blitz, but claimed to remember only a few highly selective, polished, gems of sanitized stories from the long onslaught. Churchill's detailed history gave me new inroads, new insights, new questions to ask my father, provocative enough to elicit little vignettes nobody in the family had yet heard. Trips to Lake Geneva as a child, dodging Nazi guards. Blacked-out windows on Tube trains. Air-raid shelters dug in London backyards. Peace in our time.

I'd made it to Volume IV when we set sail back in January. Perhaps it was inevitable, given the strategic reach of the Britannic Empire's naval power, but I slowly realized that our deployment was retracing (though, admittedly, out of order) the great naval battlefields of WWII. We began in Pearl Harbor, where we moored for fuel just across from the USS ARIZONA memorial. We sailed through contested Pacific islands, through the Filipino Straits of Surigao (Battle of Leyte Gulf), stopping in Malaysia and Singapore; where on the US Naval base, there is a memorial to the great British sea battle for the fortress. Sailing across the Indian Ocean, port calls in India and Pakistan unsettlingly revealed how steeped those countries' naval forces were, still, in British colonial tradition.

I asked my father to mail me the last three volumes of the series. It seemed fitting to read them as we sailed these waters, redolent with history. The Free French were being installed in Madagascar as we anchored in the Maldives. The air war raged in Iraq and Persia and critical convoys sailed the Red Sea while we patrolled in the Gulf. I sat at a chokingly formal Indian reception, devoured by mosquitoes, while Churchill and Roosevelt debated Indian independence and Mahatma Gandhi refused to eat. The British swept into Athens to flush out Greek communists while I crawled around abandoned gun mounts on a wind-swept Santorini. We steamed through the Straits of Messina just after the Allies' great amphibious assault, wandered through a Rome unscathed from surrender, stared searchingly at Pius XII in the Basilica, and scrambled to the top of the great Rock of Gibraltar to look out, at last, on unfettered Allied control of the Mediterranean.

In between, we watched episodes of Band of Brothers.

And we stopped in Tobruk. Tobruk has great personal meaning for me. Two of my father's cousins, fighting with a South African brigade, were captured there and spent the remainder of the war as Italian, then German, POWs. I'd tracked down one of them, still alert and in his 90s, in South Africa this past fall, to elicit incredible tales of a displaced farm boy whose sweetheart waited patiently on the Cape Town pier, years notwithstanding, for her hero's return.

We were the first American warship to stop in Libya in over 40 years. The local political delegation apologized that all Tobruk had to offer us was a long tour of battlefields, cemeteries, and memorials, but that was what I sought: that was why I'd come, I guess. (Tobruk wasn't even on our initial schedule; Tripoli was.) I wandered around in the blistering heat and touched the gravestones - English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Czech, Greek, Jewish, South African, Free French, Polish, Indian, African. Not forgotten. On top of one of the gravestones was a red paper poppy, the sort they sell in England for memorial days, with the name of a South African soldier, unknown to me, who'd been taken in Tobruk, survived the war as a POW, and passed away in the fulness of life, surviving nearly into the 21st century. Requiescat in pace.

There are no just wars, only justifications for wars. Still, as we sailed homeward across the convoyless Atlantic, cleared at last of U-boats, headed at the close of Churchill's final book into an uncertain post-war modernity, I was left dangling in the great abyss between past and present, ideal and reality, war and politics, posturing and progress. Somewhere, that indomitable spirit yet lurks; the sleeping giant only dozes; the moralist hasn't forgotten. The Empire - tarnished, dusty, and transferred - still stands, a string of lights flickering around the world's oceans, waiting only for electrification.

Making History

We recently visited Tobruk, Libya, of WWII historical fame. We made some of our own history there: we were the first US warship to visit the country in over 40 years. Here is a Navy press release about our trip: BOUTWELL visits Tobruk.

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.

Credit by Exam

The Coast Guard, luckily for me, (and mainly from tight resources) relies heavily on OJT - on-the-job training - to qualify its personnel. That's a good thing, because I've never been one to revel in extended classroom "butt time".

Back in junior high and high school, I schemed every trick imaginable to escape from the stultifying confines of those terrible four walls of lecturehood. Testing out, two classes at once, credit for outside activities, dual-credit classes; and my personal favorite, "excused" absences for the purpose of furthering legitimate extracurricular activities. (I missed more than a few days of high school to perform in paid gigs out-of-state. Those were cool chits to route!) It was all about the electives, then, anyway: how many pointless core requirements could I clear out of my day to make room for the good stuff?

College was, quite, the culmination of these years of curiously channeled creativity. In college, lectures were not compulsory; only results counted. I traded somnolent droning for dark tables of dusty books dug from the Bodleian's stacks, runs around the sports grounds to memorize ancient languages, and the midnight-to-0500 shift at the keyboard, typing away furiously at the essay due at daybreak.

Class time it wasn't. It keeps nagging me, somewhere back of my mind, that perhaps I should go back to school one day - fully funded, no less; career-enhancing, certainly. One day in mandatory training explodes that deceptively tempting thought. Classrooms and I don't cohabitate comfortably.

Here, then, I've been busy knocking out "credits by exam", as it were. I was excused from nearly two full months of mandatory pre-arrival training on the proposition that I would gain all that knowledge by doing, on the job, on this patrol. I am a practical learner; we've been busy; it's been ideal. Plus, instead of parking my butt in a plastic chair to blink my eyes sleepily at an soporific instructor, determined to close the last of the hundred Argusian eyes, I've kept watch in the sunshine and the wind on the bridge wing; I've darted around in the dim blue air-conditioned hum of CIC; I've crept through the ship late at night, in port, between endless days of drills and exercises and assessments, skipping the pub crawl to trace the firemain and diagram damage control systems.

There's still the oral board at the end. Which always, despite my level or source of preparedness, challenges me, if only because I overthink the questions and doubt my communicative abilities. Put me on the bridge in bad weather with a distress call from a small sailboat; put me in CIC as we're corralling a runaway skiff or creeping up, defenses at maximum alert, to a suspect vessel late on a dark night. Put me on the conn as we navigate a tight spot. Let me do, demonstrate, train, coach, take action. I trust the kinetics. The academics I study.

In this I have, at last, succeeded. I have earned my key qualifications, with (hopefully) a couple more to follow shortly, before I leave. This time, my reward was not electives, free time, or near-residence at the music faculty. This time, my reward was 6th Fleet operations - the Mediterranean. Work and play. Anything but the classroom.