Anyone watch "Carrier" on PBS last night?

Cafe Society
1

Carrier follows aircraft carrier USS Nimitz in a 6-month deployment around the world.

We watched the first two episodes last night. Aside from the really annoying music (when did it become acceptable to have music with vocals playing while people on the show are talking? You couldn’t hear what they were saying over the music!), it was pretty good. I hadn’t realized just how young the crew is on our aircraft carriers.

One nitpick: everyone talked about how hard they had to work, and I believe they work hard. But I can’t believe that 18 hour days are normal for some positions on the boat. A person can’t go for 6 months on 6 hours or less sleep every day without developing health problems.

2

When I deployed, three ships, five or six deployments, I’d be lucky to get six hours of sleep a day. And there was no way it would be six hours of uninterrupted sleep. This was typical:

Midnight to 4am, watch on the bridge.
430am to 6 sleep.
6am to 630 chow.
630am to 11 meetings, division/department work.
11am to 1130 chow
Noon to 4pm watch on the bridge
430pm to 600 work
6PM to 630 chow
630pm to 800 work
8pm to 1100 sleep
1130pm to 4am watch again.

Not a lot of sleep there. That’s the number on problem at sea, and that’s a lack of sleep. This is 100% true.

The aviators get a hell of a lot more time off than ship’s company does, that’s for sure.

3

HA! And just for emphasis, HA!!!

Lack of sleep was my biggest issue when I was in the Navy (in submarines).

I went for four months once without getting more than 3 hours of sleep in a row. Once, I got less than 12 hours of sleep in a whole week.

On a submarine, you have three watch rotations who stand rotating shifts. A typical rotation goes as follows:

0000-0600: SLEEP
0600-1200: Watch (e.g. in the Control Room, Engineroom, etc.)
1300-1700: All-hands drills
1800-2400: Admin duties

0000-0600: Watch
0600-1200: Mandatory training
1300-1700: All-hands drills
1800-2400: Watch

0000-0600: SLEEP
0600-1200: Training
1200-1800: Watch (drills in the middle)
1800-2400: Admin duties

This is the best possible case for a 3-section watch rotation, and you only get two nights of sleep every three days. Also, during your time off-watch, you have to work on your qualifications, including standing under-instruction watches.

Now stir up the mix. We went to extended “Section Tracking Party” (a modified Battle Stations) when doing super-secret spy shit for months on end. Each off-going EOOW (Engineering Officer of the Watch) stood a full watch in the control room after their watch back in engineering. We were therefore standing watch for 12 hours on, 6 hours off. During that 6 hours, we assisted with track reconstruction. This only left about 2-3 hours every 18 for any possibility of sleep.

We also went to actual Battle Stations numerous times, when everyone on the ship was up. We stood Battle Stations for 12-14 hours at times. When the Battle Stations was secured, if you had the watch, you stood it, even if it meant you would be up all night.

You can damn well bet it affected my health. :mad:

But I’m not bitter or anything. :wink:

P.S. They mentioned during the show how much the sailors were making, if you added up all the hours they actually worked. I recall once figuring out (on watch) that, even though I was an officer, I was making much less than minimum wage. :dubious:

4

I stand corrected!

So am I the only one a little… disturbed at the thought that there’s a bunch of sleep-deprived young sailors in control of a whole lot of really big bad weapons?

5

P.P.S. Also, even when I did hit the rack for any sleep, I would be awakened if any equipment that was my responsibility went down. I was expected to stay up until the problem was resolved. This might take hours, and if I ended up losing the only opportunity I’d had for sleep in 24+ hours, that was just too bad.

To this day, you can bring me out of any sleep, however deep, by simply saying in a low voice, “Mr. [robby], the Officer of the Deck requests your presence in Engineering as soon as possible. There’s a problem with [whatever].”

Of course, the enlisted guys in my division actually had to do the repair work, so wasn’t like I was going to complain to anybody.

6

And coming in at number two is the rocking motion of the ship lulling you to sleep
(esp. on amphibious ships with little or no keel)

7

I served on the USS Ranger CV-61. There were many sea periods where we never got more than 3.5 hours a sleep in a row and worked up to 20 hours days for long periods. 18-22 years olds seem to be able to do this for very long periods. Large caffeine intakes helped of course.

During the Westpac I was on, I was also the training PO. This means besides my normal work and my watches, I did everything possible to get all of the electrician mates trained in watches. We were at sea for a then record 110 days straight. Before we hit port I had enough men qualified for switchboard watch that we were down to one watch a day. My Sr. Chief told me he had never seen half the division on a carrier qualified before. My reward for this was to only stand a day watch and thus actually have up to 12 hours of free time to sleep or relax. This was a huge reward, especially for a third class.

The airman and pilots were indeed the privilege class. Us engineers grew to despise them at times. But that leads to many long stories.

Jim

8

Would you feel any better if I told you that a bunch of sleep-deprived sailors were in charge of a nuclear reactor? (Actually, two reactors in the case of the USS Nimitz.)

That’s one group, BTW, that you haven’t seen at work on the show. And you won’t. (All nuclear engineering spaces are classified.)

9

It comes on for us tonight. We have it queued.

10

Regarding the actual show, I thought it was pretty well done, overall.

My biggest impressions so far:

  1. I’d forgotten how young most people are in the Navy. (I myself was in from age 22 to age 33, and I’m 39 now.)

  2. I was surprised at how many women were on board. I’ve heard about women hitting the fleet, but it was different somehow seeing them actually serving on board ship.

  3. For most of the first show, the Navy seemed a lot more laid-back than the Navy I remember. Then they had that all-hands muster for a chem-light in the water, and as I watched the XO flip out, all those pleasant memories came rushing back to me. :slight_smile:

11

My wife didn’t believe me about this sleep thing until I told her about waking up on the toilet. I think I dozed off there and slept for about twenty minutes.

12

I got it trouble once with a new Ensign as he caught me sleeping on watch. A serious offense except that it during one of those wonderful 4 week sea periods where we were on 20 hour days. When the Ensign explained how he caught me sleeping, thankfully he was meticulously honest and included the fact I was standing and leaning forward against the switchgear electrical control panel.

The Cheng verified with me and I had admitted to the offense. He then asked me how much sleep I was getting and then requested that the Ensign drop the matter. He also suggested I drink more coffee, so there would not be a repeat of the incident. He finished up by thanking me for not insulting his intelligence and claiming that I was just resting my eyes.

If the matter had made it out of the Department, I would have been busted down in grade and probably put on restriction for 20 days.

Jim

13

Yep. Wonderful stuff. Thankfully when I took my nap on the shitter I was on my own time, such as it was.

I got another hour in the rack and was back to work.

14

Watching it brought back a lot of memories; the mix of sadness and excitement at starting a cruise, and the chills of manning the rails to pay respects to the Arizona. Oh yeah, and the “high school” atmosphere. The amount of drama, like the little squabbles in the berthing area…yeah.

I was in from '84 to '91 and women were just starting (or just about to start) to serve aboard combatant ships; I was a little envious, but not enough to stay in any longer. I did my time on a destroyer tender, very different from a carrier.

Ohhhh yeah. I got sent to get yelled at by the XO one time; not a disciplinary matter, thank goodness, but still terrifying. I made sure to avoid crossing paths with her after that. :smiley:

As far as the lack of sleep, my experience was different; I was in the Repair Department, which took care of other ships, so we didn’t have a lot to do underway. We stood watches in CIC[sup]1[/sup] (because being an auxiliary ship we only had IIRC three OSes[sup]2[/sup], so the ETs[sup]3[/sup] from Repair filled in), but that was usually one four-hour watch per day, and the rest was mostly downtime when we weren’t doing fire drills and whatnot.

Notes for non-Navy folks:

  1. Combat Information Center, where we kept track of all the other ships out there and radio traffic; ours was much less sophisticated that the ones you usually see on TV, since we couldn’t shoot back even if we wanted to.
  2. Operations Specialists; the folks who usually do all that stuff.
  3. Electronics Technicians; the folks who repair and maintain electronic equipment.
15

I was an OS as well, but our CIC was very busy, as was our ship. I was on a CG, which everyone knows stands for Constantly Gone.

I stood FOTC watches and was on the Strike Team for Tomahawk. Collateral duty was secret control. These made for busy days all around.

16

I loved the guy who said that callsigns were the devil. That they were stupid things you did while drunk and that his callsign was FUNGUS which stood for F**K You New Guy U Suck.

17

I liked it a lot. I didn’t think the music was too distracting (and having “Driver’s Seat” by Sniff N The Tears for perfect for showing the pilots taking off and zooming around). It wasn’t as staid as most PBS documentaries are, that’s for sure - you see sailors sweat, and get dirty, and curse, and quarrel, from the Bridge to the depths of the ship.

Even young doctors in residencies are getting more sleep nowadays. Any chance the Navy might decide it’s better to have a calm, well-rested crew rather than a frazzled, sleep-deprived one, and change the watch schedules accordingly? Starfleet seems to have solved the problem. :wink:

Anyone notice the series is made by Icon Productions, Mel Gibson’s company, and that he’s listed as co-exec producer?

I’m definitely gonna watch all ten of the shows.

18

The Navy has been talking about this a lot. Things are a lot better now with more duty sections, and this makes a huge difference in port. I won’t minimize this.

There are some “smart ship” improvements that show some promise as well.

That said, though, getting these things going is labor intensive - and very little can change that. If you need a lookout on the bridgewing, you need a lookout there - you can’t replace him with a camera or something. Same with people on consoles in CIC - they’re all doing different jobs. And personnel are stretched so tight that losing people in a division leaves you with very few backups.

So that’s the long and short of it. Your ships are run and maintained by twenty-year-olds with no sleep. Have been for years. And for the most part everything gets done and done well, which has always amazed me.

19

It is the official policy of the U.S. Navy to neither confirm nor deny the presence of really big bad weapons on board.

20

Looks like they did show us a little of the nuclear reactor spaces tonight - or was that auxiliary equipment that wasn’t the actual nuclear plant?

Another pair of strong episodes tonight, I thought. The maybe-rape incident was intriguing; a lot went unspoken by all concerned. And too bad that the redneck sailor was too blotto during his heart-to-heart with the black sailor on the beach in Guam to really understand and take on board what the guy was saying to him.