The Island of Misfit Boys

It’s Friday night here on the ship, though Friday night is a bit of a foreign concept here.

Life is slowly reverting to normal, or at least deployment normal. The comforts that have been missing so much over the last few weeks are trickling back in. Peanut butter, bread, fresh fruits and vegetables. Yesterday we got mail for the first time in a month, bringing packages and letters from home.

The temperature here is sweltering. In walking past a door to the outside of the ship, even when shut, you feel the radiating heat from outside. I haven’t been outside during “daylight” hours in three days, ever since the heat index crept into the triple digits. It keeps going up, each day bringing it a little higher. In 3 days, the heat index will top 150 degrees, which is something that I personally don’t enjoy.

Still, even here, with Friday night being a foreign concept (see me, in my office, at midnight), you still have time for some fun. Watching the sunset with a close friend, huddling 4 people onto two beds to watch a movie on a laptop, you have fun, you forget about the constant work for a few hours.

In a funny way though, I wish everyone had these hours. Everywhere. It’s annoying when you have to work round the clock, but you know that from Friday evening until Monday morning, the emails you need answers from will not be replied to. It’s agonizing in a way, knowing that you’ll continue working and playing the waiting game. I remember Fridays back in port, which were a few meetings, PT, and a long lunch. You normally went home early, you couldn’t wait to be out the door. Here it’s a matter of necessity. We work 7 days a week, so it’s aggravating to end up waiting on someone for something as nonexistent as a weekend?

But when I get home? Don’t bother shooting me an email after 1500 on Friday, I won’t see it until Monday morning anyway.

Another day underway, but already you feel the gentle uptick in the energy as we get ready for the next country we’ll be operating in. Planning meetings are in full swing, gear is being staged, and everyone is doing the little things needed to get ready to work.

Some relief came yesterday with a badly needed peanut butter shipment via UNREP. As I write these words, though, I realize that shipboard life is a foreign concept to many of you reading, so I’ll do my best to guide you through a bit of it.

First, there is no gmail (sorry if you’ve been emailing me), or any web based email. All the sites are blocked, so if you didn’t set up your email to forward before you left (See: Me), you don’t get it. Internet is ridiculously slow and unreliable. Sometimes you will lose all communications (email, internet access, phones) for a day. For a while there we lost them for parts of most days.

The living conditions are tight, and I don’t know the worst of it. The berthing spaces have 100 beds or “racks”, two or three high. I’m in a (relatively spacious) 8 man stateroom, which is common for the junior officers onboard. 8 people in bunkbed like setups. We share a table, a sink, and lockers for our clothes and personal effects. It’s small and dark, but it could be a lot worse.

Supplying a ship is a constant issue. In the middle of the ocean, it’s impossible to run out to buy things that you’re running low on. We’ve had no mail in a month, though it should start arriving shortly. We run out of things (as previously mentioned), Diet Pepsi (which apparently we will NOT be getting resupplied with), peanut butter, cheese.

An UNREP is one way to replenish supplies, as we did yesterday. An UNREP is an underway replenishment. A supply ship pulls up 150 feet away from your ship, and they sail ahead parallel to each other (note: 150 feet is an extremely small space, especially when you’re dealing with ships upwards of 900 feet long). Lines are run from ship to ship to provide fuel, and helicopters take pallets of goods from ship to ship.

Food onboard the ship isn’t great. Large amounts of it are items that can be frozen and then made later. Saturday nights are often pizza and wings night, which is a treat.

The days are long. While operating, the radio calls for personnel start at 0500. If you can sleep through it, reveille is at 0600 (the call over the radio to wake up). My first meeting is at 0800, so if I can sleep through the early calls I can generally rest until about 0700 when the people in my stateroom start to wake up.

The rest of the day goes like this: meeting, work, lunch, work, meeting, work, dinner, work, meeting, work, sleep. I try to work out, either between lunch and dinner or after the meetings have ended for the day, and rarely get to bed near midnight.

So the days are long, but you get into a rhythm. On quieter nights you watch movies with friends and hang out. On busy nights you look up and realize that any chance of calling home and not waking anyone has passed.

Life on the sea is exciting and romantic, but the daily grind can be grueling and exhausting. That’s the best summary I can manage.

Things dragged a bit recently. Work pulls at you, personal issues pull at you, and before you know it you’re feeling exhausted and depressed. You don’t realize the toll it has exacted until you get pulled aside by friends asking if you feel ok, if there is anything they can do.

I had hoped getting underway would invigorate me, and it has. It’s more than that though. Two of my dearest friends took it upon themselves to cheer me up. So we hung out, watched movies, told stories, worked out. Over the last two nights they went out of their way to cheer me up

Last night I found myself on the flight deck in the middle of the ocean. The sky was clear and the night sky was gorgeous, the stars shining away without any light to dim the sight. As I stood there I realized that I had a great day, for the first time in a while.

Today will be another.

Time is funny while deployed. Twice today I discussed it with friends, in different ways; about how sometimes it slips by as if bundled, about how sometimes it drags on in painful bits and lurches.

One friend just deployed himself, and is shocked at how a month has already passed. It seems like he just left home, and he has already spent a month at sea.

It reminded me of a passage on time from one of my favorite books. A conversation among men in a war decades before, recounted by the author towards the end of his days:

Like it or not, time really is a matter of relevance. We all have rhythms built into us. It wouldn’t much matter if all the timepieces in the world were destroyed. Even animals have a kind of internal clock. Sea anemones expand and contract with the tides even when they are put in tanks. Men are a little different. John Locke wrote that we only experience time as a relationship between a succession of sensations. No two moments are alike. Often time drags. It dragged for most of us toward the end on the Canal. I think it won’t drag much here. I have a feeling we are going to be living very fast very soon.

Time is a funny thing while deployed. You work 7 days a week. You wake up early in the morning, you go to bed late at night, and even if you slip away to exercise, to read, to watch a movie- you are still at work. The metal confines of the ship’s hull form your little corner of the world. Each day is a mirror of the one before and a preview of the one to come. You can have a conversation and suddenly it is three days later, and you have no idea where the time went. You can wait on an email and after your patience has run thin realize it has not even been an hour. It starts and stops. Comes and goes.

The second conversation was with a dear friend, sad because she was missing home.

Weekends are hard here. Harder than any other time. Most of my days are spent in a bit of a fog. The calendar, the days of the week, all fade into the background. What day is it? Does it matter? Yesterday I went to 3 meetings, I worked out, I read, I did my job until late at night and then I went to sleep. Today I will go to 3 meetings, I will work out, I will read, I will do my job until late at night and then I will go to sleep. Tomorrow? More of the same. It has been described, correctly and on more than one occassion, as Groundhog Day.

Yet I still know when it’s a weekend. I know without checking, on some basic level of understanding. During the week you feel the hum of home without realizing it. Your friends pepper you with emails from their offices, sharing jokes and stories. Family send lengthy emails sharing details of their day.

On the weekends, people who are not confined to a ship live. They make plans. You get bits and pieces, short notes on the way to something else. Hints of concerts and restaraunts, of family events and special times. You find yourself counting down to Monday, as ambiguous as the concept is here, simply to be part of the cycle again. Weekends are hard here.