Summer 2014; Embarked USS George H.W. Bush, North Arabian Gulf
From May 28 until August 2, the Bush remained at sea. That’s seventy-two days with no port calls. Normally, the Navy tried to make sure we pulled into port every month, but with the dire situation in Iraq, and Ramadan, which occupied almost the whole month of July, we stayed at sea. Ramadan, the sacred time of fasting and religious practice, is so important in the Middle East that the Navy tries to keep Sailors respectfully out of port and away from trouble during its observance.
One small respite during this period of time was a special care package that arrived on the boat for the Jet Girls. The care package was from Ashley, who had gone on deployment with her squadron ahead of us and had recently gotten back to the US. Since she’d been in the Gulf just a few months before, she knew exactly what a group of girls would want and need.
As soon as we got the box into the Sharktank we tore it open. Charcoal face masks, EOS lip balm, neon sports bras, dried apricots, snacks, glitter nail polish, our favorite magazines, lollipops for Taylor in the plane. In the care package she included a letter with all the gossip from Virginia Beach plus crucial tips like which salon to get our hair done at during our next port call in Dubai. My mother had sent plenty of care packages to me, all intimate, thoughtful, and loving. But nothing my mother could send could rival a care package sent by a Jet Girl who knew exactly what we needed.
But eventually no care package from mom, a Jet Girl, or Mrs. Santa Claus could give us what we needed. We needed to get off the boat.
Seventy-two days is a hell of a long time, especially in the summer heat in one of the hottest places on earth. To give you an idea of how long seventy-two days at sea is, the Navy, after day forty, entitled us to a beer day, which meant a day off from flying and a barbecue on the flight deck with a couple of warm cold ones. Since the consumption of alcohol is forbidden on US ships, when the Navy issues you beer at sea, you know it’s getting bad.
At this point it was the little things that got me through—the rewarding feeling of crisply striking a day off the calendar. One more day gone, you could tell yourself and look at row after row of days completed. One of the very valuable lessons I learned during Plebe Summer at the Academy is that while the all-powerful Navy can have nearly complete control over your life, and seemingly have power over the sea and the air, the Navy can’t stop time. No matter what challenge the Navy is putting you through, no matter how impossibly hard things get, time moves on and there is a limit to everything, even deployments.
Another help at this time was my mother. She would religiously email me, telling me everything that happened at home, including all those mundane and deeply boring-to-most details of life back in the States. During the summer she was at Grammy’s cottage on Torch Lake, she told me about the temperature in the mornings, the wind conditions, the food she was cooking; she described a particularly bad yet funny-looking way my dad wiped out while waterskiing. There was no detail she left out and I could read her emails and for a moment escape the boat and waterski with my dad. In return I would tell her everything I could about the boat. The good and the bad. And as we neared seventy-two straight days at sea, something very creepy was happening.
One afternoon Carolyn and I were approached by an officer who was part of the ship’s company, meaning he was not an aviator, but a member of the crew. “Girls,” he said, looking right and left, sketchily checking his surroundings. “Follow me.” He pulled us into a back office. “We need to talk.” After much hemming and hawing he got to the point. “I’ve recently been informed that you’ve been running a brothel out of your room.”
“What?!” we both exclaimed in unison.
But the officer—our peer—just stared.
“Wait,” Carolyn said. “Is this a joke? Someone really said that?”
He nodded. “Yes. One of my Sailors. He heard it from multiple sources.”
I chimed in. “Surely you nipped it in the bud and told him to stop gossiping about officers, right?” I’d known this officer from my days at the Academy. I went on. “You know me. You know I would never do that.”
“Well,” he said, fumbling. “Let me just tell you what I heard. One of my enlisted reported that he was in your hallway the other night and saw men coming in and out of your stateroom all night long, and they were half naked with only towels around their waists!”
“How did they know it was our room?” I asked.
“Well, you know, everyone knows about the Sharktank, and he said that the room had a ‘Girls Only’ sign on the door,” he smirked. “Why would a dude’s room have that?”
Carolyn and I both looked at each other. We wanted to laugh, but we also wanted to punch the guy. Carolyn, who kicked ass so much harder than 99.99 percent of the guys I have ever met in the military, had also suffered harassment. She had grown up wanting to be a fighter pilot as long as she could remember—before such a thing was even possible for women. Her father was a Navy pilot and she’d been born with the dream. A dream she had fought for. She’d risen to the top of every group she’d ever participated in and she could fly circles around most of the single-seat dudes I knew, and that only spurred jealousy and resentment. Even her call sign, TATL, was an inside joke with cruelty in its heart. The guys who gave Carolyn the name TATL, which stood for The Accident That Lived, told her the nickname came from a biking accident she’d bounced back from, but behind her back they joked otherwise. With profound dignity, Carolyn ignored those jokes and even embraced her call sign. But now with this clipboard-carrying weasel openly questioning if she and I were operating a brothel in our stateroom, it was almost more than we could take.
Almost breathless with anger, she reined her emotions in and calmly asked, “Was the sign on the door pink with a Minnie Mouse logo?”
He squinted. “It was…”
“Was it a Minnie Mouse sign?” I repeated Carolyn’s question.
“Well, yeah…”
“You know that was a prank, right? That room with the sign on it is a guy’s room,” I said. The officer turned bright red. Carolyn laughed, but I was fuming. What this meant was that an enlisted Sailor had been hiding outside what he wrongly assumed was the Sharktank at all hours of the night, in a hallway that was supposed to be restricted to officers only. The Minnie Mouse sign that read “Girls Only” was posted on our neighbor’s—fellow male aviator’s—door as a joke. The Sailor told his friends and his officer boss a ludicrous story and the officer blindly believed him.
“Did you even fact-check this kid before approaching us?” I asked.
“Uh, well…” he stuttered. “Um, I told the guy I would check it out.”
I started to boil. “But instead of actually taking a half second to ‘check it out,’ you just accused us of running a sex shack? You’re really that dense? There are only six fixed-wing female aviators on this five-thousand-person ship and you thought we would throw our careers to the wind so we could make some cash on the side?”
“Well, that’s … uh … what…” The officer continued making petty excuses.
“Dude,” I told him, “you’re out of your lane. We are done here.” Carolyn and I left him and went back to our stateroom feeling infuriated, let down, and a little unsafe knowing that Sailors who were not supposed to be in our restricted area had been lurking at all hours. Moreover, we longed for the reprieve of port to just get off the boat and escape the grind, if only for a few days.
September 5, 2014; Dubai, UAE
Dubai is Vegas served in a pot of couscous, the perfect place to blow off steam. Taylor, Carolyn, and I splurged on a club-level luxury suite in the Grosvenor House, a sleek, London-affiliated, four-and-a-half-star hotel on the beach. But before we even checked into our rooms, the first order of business was brunch.
In the Middle East, the weekends fall on Friday and Saturday, and in the more liberal locales like Bahrain, Muscat, and Dubai, Friday brunch is the main event of the weekend. Up to this point in my life, I’d had plenty of epic brunches stateside, but the smorgasbord we devoured that day in Dubai is, to date, the best I’ve encountered. Thanks to a solid month of meticulous research and planning by the Jet Girls, about twenty of our squadronmates dined at the fanciest Brazilian steakhouse in Dubai with a waitstaff of five bringing us round after round of filet mignon, lamb, and chicken churrasco fresh off the grill, along with all the mimosas and cocktails we could drink.
On one of my trips to the ladies’ room, I found myself with a group of women in abayas, the head-to-toe robes worn by local Muslim women in Dubai. I could only see their eyes, then seconds later, they pulled off their flowy robelike dresses and what I saw underneath made my heart stop.
“Gucci … Versace,” I whispered to myself, commenting on the gorgeous clothes hidden under their robes. Looking perfectly chic, the women touched up their makeup and took selfies on their iPhones before draping their scarves and coverups back on and heading out. It was as if someone dropped a cloak over a cage of magnificent birds. I was mesmerized.
Stumbling out of brunch, we were all a hot mess. It was time for an afternoon siesta, though not all of us made it to bed. Later that night, I heard stories—one pilot passed out in a shopping cart, in his hotel room, on the twenty-sixth floor. Another passed out midsentence with his pants around his ankles while FaceTiming his wife. It was the perfect kickoff for a port call.
Not that our penchant for partying was something to brag about. While some may think fighter pilots are cocky playboys and party animals, the truth was, in stressful, rigid environments like ours, blowing off steam became part of our natural rhythm. It was necessary for our sanity. When aviators pulled into port, we let loose to unload the stresses we carried from combat, the squalid living conditions, the near misses, the months spent tirelessly working in the most austere environments. And though most of us wouldn’t admit it, the things we’d seen and experienced in Iraq weighed heavily. Witnessing ISIS’s barbarity and utter disregard for human life was burden enough, but what really bugged us was that we couldn’t do anything to stop it.
President Obama was still of the mindset that ISIS was the responsibility of the Iraqi government. Militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria were murdering people at such a shocking rate statisticians couldn’t keep up, but we hadn’t been authorized to use lethal force. We had trained for years to counter this kind of threat. We could have saved countless lives. But we were being told by our senior-most leaders, many from ivory towers seven thousand miles away, that the situation in Iraq wasn’t bad enough yet. Our hands tied, we had to exercise self-control and patience. The VIPs and international media crews onboard the Bush recording our every move only intensified these frustrations.
So when we finally hit port in Dubai we spent four days in the swimming pool, drinking twenty-dollar beers and forty-dollar cucumber cocktails like we were at a two-dollar happy hour. It was as if we were getting back a little of the college life many of us had missed, hanging out with fifty to sixty of our favorite air wing friends and fellow aviators, and making trip after trip to the swim-up bar.
Several times during deployment, I’d heard that pulling into port in Dubai and Bahrain would involve lots of “man stew,” but I never fully understood the term. Well, after seeing fifty guys in a pool, the name became clear and even clearer when I noticed that after nine hours, none of them had gotten out of the pool all day. I peered into the slightly murky lukewarm water.
“Taylor,” I said, slowly turning to the Sharktank ladies, my nose crinkling. “We’ve all been drinking … all day. And none of these guys have gotten out to pee. Not once.”
She shook her head, realizing the same thing at the same time.
“Man stew” was all she said.