one more thing

I forgot to mention-- for those of you who may have been trying to get in touch with me for the last three weeks, I screwed up the mail forwarding/ out-of-office autoreply thing. So if you have tried to e-mail me at my normal email addresses, I have not gotten your emails. Write a comment on here with your address and I'll email you.

amphib life

Well, I've been living on the carrier for three weeks now, and despite all the improvements in quality of life over the DDG, since there are 5000 people and only so much bandwidth, the internet is too slow to even write a blog post. So here I am, and I will try to catch you up as much as possible.

I'll start with now, then go back in time. Perhaps even write a few more entries and pre-date them for easier reader comprehension, though I'm not even sure that's possible (to change the date). At least I finally figured out how to log into this site after trying ever link in arabic and still not getting to the login screen. You'd think having a satellite connection on a US Navy ship (that even has domestic US phone numbers everywhere in the world) the default sites would be in english, but even on google I have to add the "/en" to the address. And if anyone else is wondering how to access blogger on an arabic server, you can get a link to it in english from www.google.com/en.

So today marks 2 months of deployment, exactly. Well not completely exactly, probably minus half a day or so to account for the day lost when we crossed the dateline, but then the 10 hours or so we gained while transiting west. Anyway... I'm now on my third ship of the deployment (but we've still only had one port visit). After Singapore, I went to the USS Abraham Lincoln, the carrier in my strike group, as a "desron fellow". Basically, they take junior officers from the various ships in our DEStroyer squadRON, which includes 4 of the "surface combatants" or "smallboys"- though if you're a surface warrior you're not allowed to call them that- we deployed with. Anyway, they take JOs and send us to the DESRON staff embarked on the carrier for a few weeks to help augment their watches and give us the staff experience. In other words, I am on vacation. I work, but it's planning and coordination stuff.. staff work... with no division to manage, no bridge watch, essentially none of the things that routinely stress me out on the ship. In a way it's not as fulfilling, because I'll admit sometimes I do enjoy the stressful bridge watches where I actually get to run events for the whole ship, and the excitement of accomplishing something like a major ASW exercise with my division. But, in the end, I thoroughly enjoy standing the same 6-hour watch every day (sitting down, in combat, monitoring comms and maintaining our tactical display), working out, sleeping, and doing unfrenzied planning and writing messages, making powerpoints, etc. A lot of the work is similar... it just has the feel of a job versus being my entire life. It helps that you often don't even know the carrier is underway because it doesn't roll at all no matter the sea state (since I've been onboard at least)... it just feels like a big, floating office building. I still wear a uniform anytime I'm not asleep or working out... have to walk about 100 feet to the head, i mean bathroom, and wouldnt dare take a shower barefoot... still on call protecting your freedom 24/7.. etc etc. I can even laugh and have fun with the people i work with since they're mostly my peers (versus as a division officer where most the people I work with are my subordinates) and we can even use first names. In general I just feel like a human being again, and it is very nice.

Well part of our role as DESRON, at least for now, is running a task force of coalition vessels in the gulf all under the same mission. I can't go into great detail for obvious reasons, but basically, we are coordinating between ships from 5 or 6 different countries, telling them what to do, and reporting to our seniors. This is in addition to our duties within the strike group. Well anyway, our commodore (he is my ship's CO's boss, and runs our staff of about 15) is in charge of running a big multi-national exercise this week, and now I'm on a big-deck amphib with two others and the commodore, running the exercise from here for the week. It seems we could have done it from the ABE, but here we are, and it makes a little sense since the ship we're on is actually playing in the exercise. So here I am, on watch at 4am, finally writing in my long-lost blog since I have the connectivity to actually do it. The funniest part is that we're working out of the ship's Landing Force Operations Center or LFOC, where the marines normally plan their landings (duh) for amphibious ops... what amphibs are meant for. Yet this ship deployed without any marines, which is why the four of us get to work out of this huge space with about 12 computers, 8 comms circuits, 5 large screen displays (one which gets TV input as well, very nice).. and so on. And, get this: I am wearing desert cammies. Please feel free to laugh at this. I feel like it's halloween. But this is our fifth fleet (mideast AOR) off-ship uniform... so here we are. Not sure what I need to blend in with, or what I could possibly blend in with anyway, but here I am, at 4am on a ship in the middle of the ocean in desert BDUs. I'll post a photo on here if I ever get one so you can all revel in the humor as well.

In the meantime, if you're interested in what my own ship has been up to, check out this article about a recent maritime security/ humanitarian mission they did (also a big PR stint for the Navy): http://www.military.com/news/article/navy-news/uss-shoup-tows-disabled-dhow-to-safety.html

Hmmmm what else? I had meant to post an entry about Wog Day but by now that's old news so I'll write a couple sentences now and post a photo later when I get a chance. The basic story is that when you cross the equator at sea, tradition says that you have to prove to King Neptune (who comes aboard your ship) that you are ready and worthy to enter his territory and go from being a Wog (one who has not crossed the equator before) to a Shellback. There's a big ceremony-- it used to be a big hazing fest back in the day (for navy sailors, fishermen, everyone) but now it's sort of tame, at least in the modern US Navy that cannot condone hazing. The shellbacks on the ship run it, and can make the wogs do whatever they want short of hazing. We did a lot of silly, embarassing things like quack like ducks and waddle everywhere, eat breakfast lying on our stomachs with our hands behind our backs (I'll post a photo of this), and everyone's favorite, blow water out of padeyes (the indentions in the flight deck where you hook up the chocks to tie down aircraft) as it kept getting poured back in. So the last couple of hours were on the flight deck and we got soaked with green "slime" (dyed water), flour sprayed onto us while wet (took two days to wash it all out of my hair)... did some more padeye slime-blowing, PT... etc. You get the idea. Then in the end we all became Shellbacks. Funny story but I was actually already a shellback, but since it wasn't with the navy and didn't have my certified shellback card on hand, no one believed it counted (it was when I did a yuppy summer environmental program in high school where we sailed around the Galapagos). I do enjoy this sort of thing though so I was happy to do it again.

What else... at one point I thought it might be interesting to describe life on the carrier in all its details, but then I started watching the PBS show "Carrier" about the Nimitz (one of the nice things about the carrier over the DDG is that they have TV-- still only two channels of AFN or Armed Forces Network, but still.. it's nice to occasionally get to actually watch news, sports, etc). And honestly this show is serious reality TV, I don't know if there's as much drama on the ABE, and if there is I havent seen it, but the day to day stuff is really similar. And VERY different from the DDG. For example, there are about 6 different gyms to choose from, there's a rugby team (I went to one practice, in the hangar bay, but now practices conflict with my watch schedule).. not only do they serve fresh produce but they have mangos, avocados (regularly), bananas... Oh and once a week the wardroom hosts a movie night with pizza, wings, a movie on a big screen, and beer... fake stuff, but still. Not even o'douls but heinekin fake beer. Still sorta gross but it's a really nice gesture. What else... hmm OK well I think that's about it for now.

I've now taken two hours to write this post in between doing actual watch standing stuff, and it's now 0600 so i thought I'd note that I'm very glad I dont have to listen to the way they do reveille every day. For some reference, first I'll tell you how they do it on
A: Shoup: Play a song over the 1MC (ship PA system), OOD choice but has to be tasteful, no real requirement. Except every time I pick the song people call my music choice "gay" no matter if it's classic rock, oldies, r&b. The most popular genre seems to be country. Anyway, point is, we play a song (instead of saying "reveille, reveille, all hands heave up and out, reveille,") then say "breakfast for the crew".
B: Abe: Say reveille. They may also pipe it-- traditionally the bosun pipes different tones to mean different things... from reveille to chow to sweepers. Some ships pipe, some ships say the words (we voted at one point and I was one of the few on my ship who didnt find piping extremely annoying), and many ships do some of both, keeping in mind that piping for 20 seconds straight first thing in the morning ends up causing a lot of people to start their day pissed off.
OK, well the way they do it here is: pipe reveille. then say reveille (usually it's only one or the other). start playing a song for about 30 seconds, then stop, read the POD or Plan of the Day and give some weather updates, play another 30 seconds of the song (but so far they're 2 for 2 for not playing the entire song), then pipe breakfast. It's ridiculous. it's basically just 5 minutes of annoying noise.

Oh- I forgot to mention the best part of being on the carrier-- I actually enjoy my job, and I don't find myself bitching and complaining all day long. So that's good.

reminding myself i'm bad at blogging...

... but I suppose there are some of you out there who like to hear about my life. So here goes. I'm one full month into a 7-month deployment, so that's good. Though I am already through 1.5 containers of chocolate covered espresso beans, which i was supposed to limit myself to one per month, so that may become a problem around August or September. Speaking of rationing snacks, it's really bizarre but as much as I love food in general in life, there isn't really anything specific that I miss. I keep trying to think of stuff for friends/family to send me in care packages and I can't think of much. Mostly it just makes me sad that everyone else (especially my roommate on the ship) gets a care package every 2 or 3 weeks when we get mail, and I want to feel loved (yes i know if you're reading this you love me, so thanks, no need to pity me..)... but I keep reminding myself that I actually don't really care a whole lot for material things, and the things I do care about I already have, like my ipod and books and a pirate do-rag. And it also turns out I don't wear pirate do-rags, so that's sort of a waste of space, even. Oh, and I have my camera, but I'm bad at thinking of good times to take pictures. Aside from that, I have taken a few that I suppose I should share with you all, so if I have the patience after I finish writing this, perhaps I'll add a few to this post.

So, right now I'm in Singapore, our first real port visit of the deployment. We did stop in Hawaii for a couple of days, but it was a working port and I only had one day off. I saw a couple of navy friends stationed there, spent one evening at the beach drinking fruity, overpriced beverages and watching the sunset behind the palm trees, but otherwise it was pretty unmemorable. I hope we'll get to stop there on the way home, too, and I'll actually get to climb a mountain or go snorkeling or diving or something. Anyway, we're in Singapore for a few days, most notably for our Change of Command tomorrow, which is where our current CO leaves and we get a new one. So a lot of us in leadership positions have spent a fair amount of time going through paperwork, walking the new CO through our spaces on the ship, etc, but I did get Wednesday evening and yesterday off to see the city. And luckily it's pretty small, so I did get to see most of it. First we (my roommate Shaunnah, and another girl from the ship, Lis) checked into our ridiculously nice hotel room, then we wandered around to find food. I really wanted some indian food, but we were so starving we ended up eating when we smelled a food court in an area called Bugis. English is the main language here, but the stall I decided to get food from didnt have anyone speaking english, so I just pointed at a couple of things that looked like curried vegetables and chicken, though i'm still not sure what it was. Anyway, most things here are way more expensive than at home, especially now with the US dollar so weak, but I managed to get a giant plate of food (i think the "chicken" was actually some sort of bean curd or something, but was delicious) for the equivalent of about $1.50. Then walking around later I had some fresh squeezed dragon fruit juice which was a little weird but good. We didn't do much else the first night but wandered around in and out of street markets and just taking it all in. We got back to the hotel and wandered down to the spa, where for the equivalent of US$130 you could get a 60 minute massage, or, for free, you could go to the "relaxation room" or in one of the three hot tubs, sauna, steam room, or showers with those crazy rain shower heads. So Shaunnah and I spent about an hour there, and then i crashed at about 10. We had talked about going out drinking/dancing/what have you, but I was majorly sleep deprived and passed out as soon as I hit the bed. Then yesterday we wandered around some more, saw a couple hindu temples and a mosque, spent at least an hour just walking through Chinatown, and went for a "bumboat" ride along the Singapore River, where the tour guide/ boat driver didn't speak English but they did have a tape recording of a very peppy American guy giving a tour that they played in the back of the boat, which was pretty hilarious. OK.. not much else was too exciting, and I think i'm getting into too great detail about Singapore anyway, so i'll move on...

Well, as far as work (and therefore my life) goes, I was getting very excited for the changes that are sure to come with the new captain, but now it turns out I'm going over to the carrier in our strike group for at least a month as a "desron fellow" for our destroyer squadron-- basically my captain's boss who's in charge of the 5 smaller ships that deploy with the carrier. They like to take junior officers from the ships for a few weeks at a time to learn what it's like over there and to be a sort of liaison to the ship. I was really excited about escaping here for a month or so, until the timing worked out such that I will be missing the first month of our new CO's tenure, AND I'll be missing some really awesome port visits with Shoup while i'm gone, since they're splitting from the rest of the strike group for a few weeks. I can't tell you details now for obvious reasons but in a couple of months I'll let you all know, and probably whine about it some more then, too. But in the end I think it'll be good to get away for a little while. I'm also trying to figure out my future right now, since i have this "oceanography option" to stay in the navy but as a meteorology/oceanography officer-- basically instead of going to a second ship, at the end of this year i'd go forecast weather or map the ocean floor or something, at a shore facility. This sounds like an obvious choice, but I'm starting to think more about my long-term future and honestly I dont think I want to make the Surface Navy or oceanography into a career, so I'm sort of torn about what to do. But... in the end I'm fairly sure I'll do the oceanography thing, which will land me most likely in Mississippi, San Diego, or Monterey, CA. As those of you in Seattle already know, I'm pretty heartbroken about having to leave Seattle, but I suppose either way I'd have to eventually.

OK, this is much longer than I intended, and I do have some work to do... but first, here are some pictures.

This is just an average sunset from our flight deck, with an SH-60B helicopter in the background. I think I took this one when we were in the Sulu Sea, around the Phillipines.


I couldn't help but take this one from a little courtyard in Singapore, where they had tables with checkerboards carved/painted on, and dudes playing checkers and chess. Just like Harvard Square, but without the Au Bon Pain.


And here's Singapore from the bumboat. Tropical flora, crazy modern architechture, and some mythology... the "merlion" fountain protects the city. Lion because the name Singapura means "Lion City".

swo

So i got my SWO (surface warfare officer) pin, as you can see in this photo.. basically it's the culmination of all my qualifications on the ship over the last year and a half. A big pain in the ass but a relief now that i have it, and i thought i'd give you all a visual of what exactly it is. It's the weird gold thing above "US Navy" seen here...

free willy

I tried the blogging thing and it didnt do much for me then, but with limited connections to the outside world, I think i'll just resort back to it for this deployment. or at least today. Anyway, this photo is the cover page of a liberal hawaiian weekly paper that came out over the couple days I was in Hawaii w/ the ship on our way to do a USW (undersea warfare) exercise. The timing is not a coincidence; there has been a ton of lawsuits all over the country (world?) about the use of sonar and its effects on marine life over the last year or so, and they literally had just come out with the latest litigation for the hawaiian opareas in time for our exercise. Without getting into too much detail, basically they just put out a bunch of ridiculous requirements for us to power down or secure sonar if we see any marine mammals (particularly whales... especially since it's mating season for humpbacks). Now I'm a tree-hugging hippie (or at least compared to my navy counterparts, so they tell me) and you'd think i wouldnt want to kill the whales, and, well, i dont. But I am also the ASWO, anti-submarine warfare officer, and for this particular exercise I was pretty much in charge for my ship, which meant I had to be in charge of all our MMM- marine mammal mitigation- measures. And man is it a pain in the ass to keep logs of every time you see a whale, how far away it is, its bearing, what it's doing, etc etc, and update every 5 minutes... all while stopping the exercise completely if it's too close. I mean, can we say poor planning? There are plenty of places out there, in the Pacific even, where there aren't a bajillion whales, so why did we pick such a heavily whale-populated area to do a sub-hunting exercise where we're using sonar the whole time? Not to mention I ended up spending more of this week dealing with whales, training lookouts, reporting sightings, drafting messages, etc, than i did looking for subs. Oh, and then when we did secure our sonar because we were in the middle of a big pod of minke whales, everyone up to the three-star admiral in charge of the eastern pacific fleet wanted to know why. It's this big catch-22, they want you to protect the whales, but then when you follow the rules and do it, everyone and their mother wants to know why. Sort of like how they tell you to shoot the guy in self-defense if you have to, but then if you do it, you get detained and questioned for a million years after. Or at least that's what i imagine it would be like. So anyway, I just wanted to share this funny newspaper cover and give everyone a sense of the crap i do that keeps me awake 20 hours a day. Now i'll just wonder if anyone besides me will read this? Well if you do, please comment, because like i said, I'm sort of desperate for contact with the outside world... and it's only been 2 weeks so far. Scary.

update - warning: this may bore you to tears

Well i've started the turnover to my new job. now, in addition to the average of 8 hours a day i spend on watch (4-6 hours at a time, for example, one day i'll have watch 23-03, then again 12-18, then 03-07) and all the regular meetings and briefs and stuff, I'm trying to learn my new job, get to know the new division, take my friend mark's (whose job i'm taking as ASWO... see an earlier post where i define that) disorganized paperwork and trying to organize them because apparently he cant, and so on. Oh and every day or two we have an ASW scenario where for anywhere from 6-12 hours at a time i go to combat and direct ships and aircraft to prosecute submarines even though i have no idea what i'm doing and it's a total shitshow, and i never really learned how to do this so i dont really know how to do it better until i learn the right way. This may sound like fun to some of you who like the glamour of the military, and yes, fighting submarines is kind of cool, but trust me: it is not fun. Maybe it would be if I ever had any idea what was going on, if I got more than 3 hours of sleep at any given time, and if I had hope for progress... but right now i'm a giant pessimist. Anyway, my new boss just told me that 45 minutes of sleep is as restful as 8 hours, so i'm going to go sleep for 45 minutes and probably end up proving him wrong. on a final note if anyone is actually reading this please dont worry about me, i just had to get my bitching out. I cant bitch and complain to my friends here because some of them have it even worse than i do, plus it's just annoying when people like me whine all day long.

on parenting and morality

Last night i got into a pretty heated discussion with some of my friends about the responsibilities of parenting. It was one of those conversations where I felt like a big liberal, and smiled a little to think that all my friends from home, college, etc still think that I'm (relatively) conservative. Not that everyone in the military is much more politically conservative than I am, but I definitely still think the majority of them are, when I get looks of disgust for saying things like "I think two gay men can and should be allowed to raise a child together."

Anyway... though we did talk about gay parenting, most of the conversation was about the morality of divorce. We went through several hypothetical scenarios, but for this post I'll stick to one: if you have a child with someone, are you morally obliged to marry/ stay married to
that child's father/mother? We'll break this up to two sub-questions:

1. If you get knocked up (or knock up a girl), should you marry him/her?
I don't think you necessarily should. I really didnt think this was an interesting question until I realized yesterday that I have so many friends who think you should marry him/her just because you got pregnant. Obviously if you love the person and would otherwise get married, being pregnant certainly wouldn't stop you. But in a case where you wouldn't marry them if you didn't get pregnant, I don't think you should marry them just because you got pregnant. That's just asking for disaster and unhappy marriage. However, the popular answer yesterday was that yes, you should marry them, it is your moral obligation for the child's well being and development that you marry the child's father/mother-- the reason being that that way the kid is supposed to have a "normal" childhood and learn "proper" gender roles. My retort that the kid is more likely to have a screwed up childhood with unhappily married parents was overturned by my friends because, as they said, all unhappily married parents should either try to work it out and get along, or otherwise fake that they get along, for the child's benefit. Anyway, for the second subquestion:

2. Say the child's parents are already married when they have the child. Down the road, the parents become unhappy together. Are they morally obliged to stay together (either forever or at least till the kid leaves home) for the child's well being? In other words, is separation/divorce immoral?
I strongly believe that they are NOT obliged to stay together, nor should they. The opposition argued that it's selfish to get divorced, and if you have a child, you must invest more in the child's well being than your own. I agree that as a parent, your child is more important than yourself- and I think any good parent would agree. HOWEVER, I think that in the case where the kid's parents are unhappily married, it is in the child's best interest to get a divorce! This seems really obvious to me, but I learned that it's not obvious nor widely agreed upon by intelligent, educated young people. I think, especially from friends with divorced parents growing up, that it's better for a child to have happily divorced parents than to have unhappily married parents. Yes, it's difficult for kids to grow up having two families, spending the holidays with a different parent every year and so on, but I think it's A LOT more difficult for a kid to grow up in a home where the parents don't get along and don't love each other. Maybe they learn "normal" and "correct" gender roles, namely that a "normal" family has a mom and a dad living together, but they certainly don't learn the "right" things about love and happiness. I personally think it's a lot more important for a child to learn the value and importance of love and domestic happiness even if it means learning that from step-parents than for the child to be trapped in an unloving home but where the mother and father still live together.

We all agreed that you shouldn't marry someone or have a child with someone unless you want to spend the rest of your life with that person. But life isn't always that easy and straightforward. And it IS possible for good people to fall out of love. Sad to think, I know, but we see it happen. I certainly hope that I marry and have children with someone I love and continue to love for the rest of my life, but if I don't, I will consider separation/ divorce for myself but even more for the kid(s)! Because I think that's the right thing to do. Do I value happiness more than gender roles? I don't really think that's the question, but perhaps I do. I admit, I do think happiness and love are pretty damn important. Maybe this is because my family has a history of depression and I have spent a lot of time reflecting on happiness, but that aside, I really believe that everything ties into happiness-- success, fortune, good parenting, health.

And life's not fair-- maybe the kid growing up with divorced parents will have a tougher childhood than the kid with happily married parents, but I think he'll have a MUCH easier childhood than the kid with unhappily married parents. And in the end, having to deal with difficult issues during childhood isn't necessarily a bad thing, just like it isn't necessarily a bad thing as an adult. If life were always easy it would be boring. And there's a lot more to learn from tough times. Anyway, this is a topic for another day.