Long Way Out
This is an excerpt from my novel, written 10 years after I was commissioned in the Navy. It is about my experience when I checked aboard my first ship.
Start of Day 2 onboard. Time 0300, First bridge watch 0400 – 0800 (4 a.m. – 8 a.m.)
Brenda awoke to her first early morning at sea, after having settled into her rack sometime after midnight. Three a.m. had arrived so suddenly. She reached to the side of her pillow and silenced her watch alarm, hoping the beeps hadn’t disturbed Julie in her rack below. The ship rocked and rolled and pitched with the seas. She could hear the metal of the ship stretching and creaking, and she remembered that before, she had only heard that sound when she was far below decks. She felt worse than she ever had, even worse than she had felt in school when she had forced herself out of bed, weighed down with the flu or a cold. She turned her pillow over and pressed her face against it. Her head felt sluggish from seasickness, and her eyes throbbed with shooting pain from exhaustion, but the coolness she felt from her pillow gave her a moment’s relief.
Less than three hours of sleep before her first watch! But three hours of sleep a night was the norm aboard surface ships, and you were lucky to get that, people had told her. She forced her eyes to stay open. In one hour, at 0400, she would have to show for her first bridge watch in the regular rotation. She now grasped the type of strain and pressure that lay ahead, how it was going to feel and how it was going to affect her. There would be four more years of predawn and midnight watches, four more years of wishing like anything for rest, and four more years of disrupting her body’s normal cycle – for a way of life she had learned she did not want.
She eased her head up from her pillow. She had to get dressed and get going. In her life, she had made all the wrong choices, been wrong about everything! Outside the hull, she imagined the seas churning the ship, beating against the destroyer and tossing it, heeling it to port and to starboard, pitching it forward and then aft. The shock and vibration was loud; she could feel the vibrations in her body and in the sides of her metal rack when she touched them.
She pushed her gray wool blanket aside; she could hear the engines droning, and feel them tremor as if they were operating on the deck just below her stateroom. The sound of the engines propelling the ship against the force of the seas followed a rhythmic pattern as the ship climbed each oncoming wave, pitched over the crest, and slammed flat into the trough. After the shock waves dampened, a stillness persisted for a second before the engine drone picked back up, and the stateroom walls began to shudder again, along with the entire contents of the room. The metal chairs, desks, sink, cabinets, and rack frames vibrated at different frequencies.
The destroyer was a mere dot in the ocean, and powerless against these seas. Julie told her that the storm wasn’t going to let up for another day or so. She got nervous that she hadn’t yet gotten out of her rack. She couldn’t be late for her first watch! She would have to make herself accept this life; she had made herself accept her lifestyle in engineering school, why not this? This was only the start of her second day onboard, underway.
She realized that overnight, the air in the stateroom had turned stuffy and humid. Her skin felt clammy and her nightclothes had a slight dampness to them. Then, above the background noise, she heard the ventilation system kick on, and she began to feel a draft of cold air flowing over her rack curtain. She pitted her will against the seas and sat up slowly. She had committed herself to a role in which her peers and shipmates depended on her to take her bridge watch. It had been her alone, who had obligated herself to performing these shipboard duties. As she sat up in her rack, it came over her that she had once again landed herself in a setting where listening to her body and to her feelings was forfeited. She would have to continue to brush her feelings aside, fight them, and ignore them, to function at all.