After an hour or so of stomach churning turbulence, the C-2 makes a slow banking turn and a sickening dip to then fro. The seats face toward the rear of the plane and I'm strapped in tight against the backrest, cranial headgear and earplugs not really helping to muffle the whine of the props but making it impossible to hear anything else. There aren't any windows so I have to take the word of the flight crew member who shouts, "Five minutes!" Until the clown yells it again 10 minutes later.
Then suddenly, Wham! An instant of a few Gs sitting on my chest and the trip's over: I've just gone from over one hundred miles per hour to zero in the space of a second. The ending is anti-climactic. Taking off from a carrier in one of these lumbering beasts, I'd later learn, is where the real drama lives (you wonder whether or not the catapult has given you enough speed to straighten out and fly when it feels like you're nearly vertical and about to go tail first into the water ahead of the rushing ship set to run you over). But I wouldn't get to experience that joy for several more years, as a civilian software developer bopping around the Gulf just before Desert Storm.
Back in May of '83, the aft of the plane opens and the noise and heat of an active carrier flight deck hits me like a freight train. I go into sensory overload as I'm led out past a plethera of roaring jets and bombs and fuel lines being carted and dragged haphazardly in all directions by what looks to be an army of kids my age decked out in a rainbow of different colored jerseys. I know what none of it means but I do know I want nothing to do with any of it.
As I pass through the hatch into the island structure and the noise muffles, some joker sneers, "We'll see you back out here soon." No, no, I think. I'm destined for other things. Down into the air conditioning of the carrier intelligence center (CVIC). Closed off from the great unwashed. Just a bunch of us eggheads sitting around gleaming computer displays, tracking Soviet naval activity, wired on caffeine and gray matter. I quickly learned that we chosen few were merely the lesser unwashed, a shit hole within a shit hole. And the AC competed with a choking cloud of nicotine-laced smoke hanging perpetually in the air. The work itself was often fascinating, if morally frustrating (at least for me, somewhat of a rare animal: a died in the wool liberal working in military intelligence).
How in the world did I end up here? After all, I was just a year removed from protesting the recent federal selective service registration requirement, and vowing to defeat the evil of a Reagan-based growing military-industrial complex. Well, it came down to money and opportunity: I had neither and needed a kick in the ass to get my life moving. The plan then morphed into the thought that I'd go into the Air Force or Navy as a journalist (it was good enough for Hunter Thompson, after all). That hit a snag when I learned about the minimum two year waiting list for journalism training. The recruiter noticed my shrinking interest in things once that came to light and quickly began to spin Navy Intelligence as a "perfect" alternative. It was journalism, after a fashion. Top secret journalism, but that makes the assignment all that more exciting! The recruiter laid it on thick. The aptitude tests were pretty stringent but I somehow managed to make the grade, so off I went.
I despised but survived boot camp and actually enjoyed intelligence training in Denver (it was more like college than the military). We could wear civilian clothes and had university-style dorm rooms. But that wasn't the real Navy, isolated as we were in the mountains of Colorado and the seemingly more relaxed style of the Air Force. Now, though, I was thrust amidst the "real" Navy with a vengeance. Hard to get more in your face than an aircraft carrier at the beginning stages of a six month deployment, especially in 1983, with Beirut nearly boiling over, Libyan wacky monster Muammar threatening to sink my new home down to the bottom of the Mediterranean, and all manner of Soviet muscle buzzing beside, above and below us on a constant basis. But it wasn't boring, that's for sure.
As a Navy Intelligence weenie, I was privy to a lot of the goings on that my fellow shipmates were not. It certainly helped to know exactly why our port visits were regularly cancelled. I was eventually assigned to the Tactical Analysis Plot (TAP), an intelligence center within the intelligence center on the ship. You needed a Secret clearance to gain access to CVIC but better than Top Secret to get into TAP: what they called (and still call) Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI). Typical government alphabet soup. This work center was subsequently moved to Flag (Admiral's) operations spaces and re-christened the Supplemental Plot (SUPPLOT). It might sound glamorous and the work was interesting but TAP was a hellish environment to exist in. It was a room about fifteen feet in length and barely three feet in width. Generally three people worked there per shift (twelve on, twelve off, seven days a week at sea). Everyone assigned there smoked but me and there was little ventilation. Large acrylic maps ran along the length of both walls, with little magnetic "pucks" marking various air, sea, and land-based entities (friendlies and adversaries). The particulars of these charts would vary depending on our current area of operation: sometimes it was the North Atlantic, sometimes the Caribbean, and often just off the coast of Norfolk, VA, but usually it was "the Med." I can still recite the names and characteristics of all the Soviet naval anchorages in that body of water, the manner in which their inhabitants communicated and what that chatter and their subsequent movements meant, though I have no particular desire to remember them (those memories are lodged permanently in my lizard brain, alongside every episode of the Brady Bunch, and certain tingle that's stimulated whenever I see somebody doing coke on TV or the silver screen).
We had a teletype machine in TAP that continuously printed out messages coming in from numerous sources on developments in the world, from strategic geo-political happenings to tactical operational force movements. The sound of its rat-a-tat-tat still reverberates through my subconscious some 27 years later. We'd analyze these reports and compare the data to historic behavior to predict actions, positioning and recommended reactions (or pro actions, if possible). I'd write up our findings and produce a daily briefing book for the Captain. I honed my typing skills, for sure. And learned a lot of stuff about shit that has since become obsolete, a master of early eighties operational intelligence trivia. No scandalous misuse of power or other egregious moral dilemmas of the type found at more strategic positions in "the community." What I remember most about all this was blasting Nina Hagen and Elvis Costello on the tape deck while writing up the Captain's briefing book on the nightshift, my eyes watering from the blinding ubiquitous smoke. Also the thrill of finding a link, a pattern, in the mountains of data, triggered by some obscure factoid I'd memorized. Like the kind of kick I still get running down an elusive bug in the software I develop today. The bugs were different but the process strikingly similar.
Sometime during all this, I spent a couple weeks cleaning our berthing and doing the division's laundry as most junior enlisted end up doing at some point, along with the constant sweeping and swabbing and buffing of passageways for the weekly inspections of same. We even got to visit a couple ports in our six and a half months of "club Med" that year (Taranto, Livorno, and the ubiquitous Naples, Italy and Athens, Greece). We made up for it next time we deployed to these waters in late '84/early '85, but the three straight months between port visits in '83 (mid-July to mid-October) was tough. To make matters worse, the Marine barracks was bombed just after we finally stepped foot on land again in Naples so they instituted an emergency recall and a few hours later we were booking through the very narrow and heavily trafficked Straits of Messina at 40+ nautical miles an hour on a beeline to Lebanon. That was an interesting sight (and navigational endevor).
Ah, good times. Somewhere in there, I turned a very sober 21. It was well over a month on either side of a drink for me on the big day, but I'm pretty sure I've since made up for that deprivation. And then some.
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