February 15, 2014; Embarked USS George H.W. Bush, Warning Area 72, Atlantic Ocean
As I had learned at the Academy, room selection and roommate pairings are important and cutthroat in the Navy. Lucky for the ladies of the Sharktank, we’d scoped out our accommodations on the multiple under-ways before deployment. We knew exactly where onboard the ship we wanted to be, and so we put our request in early. It helped that the Carrier Air Group commander—the man in charge of all twelve hundred people attached to the nine squadrons aboard—had raised daughters and knew that if his girls weren’t happy, no one was happy. So needless to say, we got our stateroom of choice.
As officers onboard, we were lucky. Even though six women living in 350 square feet seemed cramped, our enlisted were housed in massive dormitories called berthings. They shared one room with two hundred others, the beds were stacked three deep. When you looked at it that way, five roommates wasn’t so bad. On the boat, the only people with their own rooms were our squadron commanding officers, XOs, and a high-ranking foreign aviator I would come to know well.
As senior as these men were, even they had to share bathrooms. The admiral, the ship’s commanding officer, the CAG, and a few other officers had their own staterooms and bathrooms, but being in charge of 7,500, 4,000, and 1,200 people, respectively, they’d earned it. There’s a saying in the military: “rank has its privileges,” and there’s no place where those words ring truer than on an aircraft carrier.
Our stateroom, located two decks below the flight deck, was a definite luxury. Most aviators, including top brass, had rooms directly below the floating runway. If you’ve never heard a jet landing or launching off a flight deck at night, imagine standing next to a brick wall as a car, going 150 miles per hour, crashes into it. If that’s not earsplitting enough, think of being trapped in a dumpster with the entire Boston Red Sox team beating on it with aluminum bats. I’m not exaggerating; living and working directly below the flight deck is that loud. Ricocheting and intensifying through the metal, the sound is deafening, so the Sharktank, tucked below the racket, was prime real estate.
Just like we’d asked for the room early, we’d also meticulously planned its aesthetic. In the two months we lived on the boat during workups, we spent our evenings watching HGTV and planning like tiny house designers, writing shopping lists and drawing sketches for the space. After months of Amazon deliveries, packing, and hauling our goods onboard, our deployment had finally begun, and we were ready to put it all together. Given that we had to cram everything we needed into a room that was not much bigger than a walk-in restaurant cooler, we had to get creative to make all the gear fit. This involved the six of us channeling our inner Bob Vilas and using our dads’ carpentry skills to install custom-built laundry shelves and storage platforms. We weren’t halfway across the Atlantic before we were dialed in and had everything in its place.
The Sharktank was divided into two parts by a bank of closets that ran down the middle of the room. On the side closest to the outer wall of the ship was a narrow walkway with six racks (Navy term for bunks) lining the sides. The racks were stacked two high and adorned with curtains made of designer fabric that one of the Sharktank moms had sewn for us. On my bed, I had three memory foam pads over the standard, government-issued mattress, and my sheets rotated between a Russian ballerina print that I bought on a trip to St. Petersburg and a colorful, geometric pattern. Even within the Sharktank, my rack was my retreat. The only space on the ship that was truly mine. A comfortable, happy oasis where I could be alone, and the introvert in me could escape from the constant stream of people.
The other side of our room was our living space. Each of the six of us had a rigid, metal chair and desk that dropped down from our storage locker, like a Murphy bed. The desk was just large enough to fit my Macbook Air and a small cup of coffee, but nothing else. There were also two aluminum sinks and medicine cabinets for our toiletries, the shelves of which were lined with professional-grade OPI shellac nail polish in every color. A man I’ll call Lumberjack, in his short tenure as boyfriend, had helped me set up a movie projector, a ten-foot drop-down movie screen, and he’d even installed surround sound. The walls, of course, were decorated with colorful decals and posters that transformed the space from boring battleship gray to a cheerful, girly space. I kept a hydroponic herb garden next to my desk and the boot dryers to air out our leather boots. We all had throw rugs under our chairs—mine was a whimsical Trina Turk—and one of our best purchases was a cordless vacuum for the endless strands of hair that tended to build up on the carpet.
Like a Native American with a buffalo, when it came to space, we wasted nothing. Six yoga mats lined the wall, sets of dumbbells were stacked in corners, and a rack was suspended midair with six matching laundry baskets secured on top. We even had our own coffee and tea bar with loose-leaf tea, a kettle, and a Keurig coffee maker with French vanilla creamer and every kind of sweetener. A few of our squadmates’ wives even went to the trouble to send packages every month, replenishing our lip balm and magazines. Hard to imagine how they took time to ensure we had the girly comforts while they were juggling broken dishwashers, kids, jobs, all on a meager military salary. With all of the little luxuries of home, we were somewhat able to escape the industrial, stark environment of the rest of the ship.
Though the comforts of the Sharktank were great, my five roommates were the best part. Our group of six was comprised of three aviators who flew the E-2 and three who flew F/A-18s. The E-2 is not a jet, but a turboprop plane used for early-warning detection. It’s a support aircraft, equipped with a huge radar that serves the very important role of coordinating the fighters in both Air-Air and Air-Ground employment. Basically, they were the quarterbacks of the air wing, but they were also saving our butts, should we get ourselves in precarious situations. The E-2 squadron on the Bush was known as the Bear Aces and my roommates were nicknamed Blonde Bear, Little Bear, and Tall Bear. Having the Bears in our room definitely served as a counterpoint to the more anal-retentive Jet Girls. Compared to us, the Bears were chill and easygoing, like longboard surfers of Tailhook Aviation and jet aviators were the shortboarders.
The Jet Girls earned the nickname “the Triple As” for our extreme type-A personalities but also for the acronym for Anti-Aircraft-Artillery fire—the deadly weaponry that we’d encounter in combat. The three of us were the initial members of the wolf pack: Carolyn, a single-seat F/A-18 pilot and the first and only female pilot in the history of her squadron since its founding in 1935; Taylor, another F/A-18 WSO, and me. Taylor not only was a WSO like me but we were also very similar. Both of us were good at being buttoned up and devoid of most emotion when we needed, but when alone we could laugh together, cry together, and best of all, be authentic in the widely competitive microcosm in which the Sharktank existed. Carolyn, Taylor, and I were as tightly strung as a perfectly tuned guitar, and since we couldn’t control much on the boat, often our OCD tendencies manifested in cleaning.
Not surprisingly, the three Bears, strolling in and tossing their bags and papers on the floor, weren’t on our same level of organization or cleanliness. Not only did they make the messes, they weren’t likely to pitch in with the normal chores it took to keep the Sharktank up to standards. Let’s just say if Goldilocks stumbled into the house of these Bears, she wouldn’t have had a clean dish for her porridge.
After getting wound up over their sloppiness a few times early on, we realized we’d all have to adapt if we were going to survive the nine months together. The Jet Girls would need to chill out, and the Bears would have to neaten things up. Both happened rather quickly, and the Sharktank remained an escape, a little princess palace inside what could have been a giant, floating penitentiary.
Our stateroom quickly became legendary. From the admiral, to the ship’s captain, to the lowest enlisted, everyone had heard of the epically appointed Sharktank, and like a far-off land in the days of yore, rumors spread about the exotic things that lay inside it. Since there were only two staterooms for all female aviators, everyone knew our whereabouts, and this, while fine at first, grew creepy the more often curious Sailors came to see it. Enlisted and officers alike would find excuses for passing by our stateroom.
“Heard you guys have a vacuum. We spilled a bag of coffee on our carpet, can I stop by to borrow it?”
Even though the enlisted weren’t supposed to transit Officer Country (the restricted area in which we lived), often young boys passed slowly by our door, their necks stretching like Inspector Gadget. Or some of them on tiptoe by the exhaust vents, sniffing the lavender shampoo, fabric softeners, and French facial creams that poured from our room into the hallway. We wrote off the lingering, figuring the novelty would fade, not realizing it would become troublesome for the Sharktank.