LITMIR.BIZ

      7

      On a boat where everyone worked hard, everyone acknowledged that no one worked harder than the guys operating and maintaining the catapults. The night before we met, Leading Petty Officer Jonathan Dicola had finished work at midnight. Got to sleep at one. Was up at five thirty. Nothing unusual about that—a fairly average day in fact. But it’s not just the length of the days, the conditions take some beating too. The temperature in one of the rooms connected with the cat—the Launch Valve Room, I think it was called—was 110 degrees (way hotter than the bakery) and some of the guys spent the bulk of their sixteen-hour days in there.

      My untrained ear was having trouble keeping up with Dicola’s explanation of what the various parts of the cat were called. These, let’s say, were failures at the level of the noun. They were exceeded by systematic failures at the level of the verb: what these nouns—these various parts—did. But while the workings of the catapult were complex, the consequences of its not functioning properly were easy to grasp. On one occasion, a vertical stabilizer on a jet didn’t work, and the plane flipped into the water, killing all five people aboard. On another boat a plane was launched before one of the crew got clear and the wing took his head off. (If it wasn’t always clear which of these and other incidents recounted by Dicola had actually been witnessed by him, that is testament to the spirit of shared responsibility that binds together everyone who works in a particular part of the Navy.) Another time the topside PO (Petty Officer) was still underneath when the aircraft went full throttle and sucked him up into the intake.

      ‘Jeez. When did that happen?’

      ‘Maybe ’96 or ’97. So now they wait for the topside PO to come out and wait for the shooter to say, “Go to military power” and the aircraft goes to full tension. Over the years they learn from those mistakes. We’ve also had incidents like the chief who wasn’t paying attention to what he was doing and ran between the plane and the JBD. The blast blew him up over the JBD. He was tore up pretty good after that. It wasn’t funny at the time,’ he said, laughing. ‘But, you know: Where was your mind?’

      You can see this incident, or one very like it, on YouTube. Amazingly, you can even see the—or a—guy getting sucked cartoonishly into the jet intake. That’s quite funny too—because, against all odds, he lives to tell the tale. Instead of getting sucked in, through and out the other end, like meat through a mincer, he caused the engine to blow up and cut out and he came slithering out the way he’d gone in. A few days later he appeared at a press conference, bandaged up like a mummy, but understandably chipper given the implausible fact of his survival.

      It made sense to go from the barely comprehensible workings of the catapult to the equally impressive world of the arresting gear. During one of his doomed attempts to explain what was happening, Dicola had likened the cat to a double-barrelled shotgun; at the other end of the boat ABE3 Jefferson Maldonado told me to think in terms of a giant syringe with the cable serving, presumably, as . . . Well, I wasn’t sure which part of the analogy the needle fitted into—and not just because of my usual mental shortcomings. I was wearing earplugs, it was difficult to hear, and every few minutes a jet would come screaming and crashing down and it would be impossible to hear anything. In spite of all this racket and the attendant jar and crash, the equipment on display—a bunch of massive metal tubes the size of oil pipelines leading into other tubes—did not register the slightest strain or movement. The plane was either a bolter or it had caught one of the other wires (our wire was the third of three).

      ‘I hope we catch one,’ Maldonado said, looking and sounding as hopeful and forlorn as he must have done when he and his friends went on fishing trips in the Dominican Republic. He’d moved to New York when he was eleven and joined the Navy when he was eighteen. He was the same age as Dicola and they were both going to put in their full twenty. Which meant—I felt like someone calculating how little time a convicted murderer would serve, outraged by the leniency of the sentence—they would be out in eight years, aged thirty-eight. Looked at in another way, their Navy careers would have spanned roughly the same time as Ryan Giggs’s at Man United. The way Jefferson spoke about it, however, comparisons with managers rather than players seemed more appropriate.

      ‘Thing about this job,’ he said in one of those epic understatements which seemed such a feature of naval life, ‘is that it teaches you to deal with stress.’ Immense, almost unimaginable quantities of the stuff.

      ‘If a 747 had a tail hook we could stop that,’ he claimed a few moments later. ‘That’s what they say. I don’t know if it’s true.’ Just in the normal routine of things, planes came in at 140 mph and stopped in 108 feet (or just over a second). There was 2200 feet of cable with a breaking strength of 215,000 pounds. The whole operation was, as he put it, ‘maintenance intensive’. The cable had to be replaced every 2500 traps and the bit out on deck that the plane actually hooked on to was good only for a hundred. Given what it was subjected to, I was surprised it lasted that long.

      As with the cat, accidents are extremely rare but the effects of a cable snapping are catastrophic. You can see such a thing happening on the USS George Washington in 2003. An F-18 comes in to land and hooks the wire which, at the extreme limit of its extension, breaks. The pilot ejects just before the plane skids off the deck and into the water. Then the cable lashes back like a limb-severing whip. A yellow-shirt jumps clear like a kid skipping rope. Incredibly he does this not once

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