Sent to me by a friend who served on Destroyers.

Dennis

I guess that I never thought about what I was doing as deeply as this fellow.

Being on those long deployments I'd get caught up in the ship's routine, not fully understanding that what were doing every day was keeping her ready for war.

The Navy is an arrangement of hardware and duties whose reality is concealed from the civilian world and also from the other military branches, save those Marines who have served on ships.

The Navy's main job is to project power and defend assets by putting to sea a fleet of vessels that go wherever the oceans flow. Being that the world is mostly covered by salt water, that's a lot of territory.

When a ship gets underway it takes itself, a little self-contained world, into a place which consists of the sea and the sky; nothing else at all: no buildings, no streets, no mountains, no valleys; no reassuring physical references whatever. There is merely the sky and the sun and perhaps the moon, with the evening stars swinging in the indifferent heavens.
The sea may change colors; the sky may cloud up; the weather may turn harsh, but there is still nothing reminiscent of the port one has departed. It is as though the waters of the Great Flood had taken everything and you are there upon your steel-plate Ark, waiting for the white dove and Mount Ararat.

Only sea travel can give an idea of the ocean's vastness. Imagine if you will that you are looking at a map of the Pacific from Hawaii to San Diego. If that distance was a meter on the map, your little destroyer would be approximately the size of an average bacterium, invisible except with a microscope. And probably never to be located, for, unlike bacteria, our destroyer would likely be the only one in that space, the ultimate needle in an aquatic haystack.

By way of reference, if you were a crewmember on board the International Space Station you would be very much closer to civilization than the crew of that destroyer, because the Space Station flies at about 250 miles above earth. With each orbit it passes close by Cleveland and Dubai, Hong Kong and Paris, near enough to see traffic on highways, boats on rivers. Your destroyer's crew will see only the occasional leaping dolphin from the first hour they leave port until the dawn of the day they spot Oahu. If they leave Hawaii bound for Sydney, they will at midpoint be closer to the center of the earth than to their destination, with days of empty, friendless water ahead and behind.

People who say they love the sea usually mean that they love it from the shoreline, a place where the ocean is very easy to love. There one enjoys the solid security of the land, and all its comforts; the ocean is a thrilling but safe thing, a caged tiger which snarls but can do no harm. The breakers which have traveled days expend their power upon the pilings of a pier or the sandy beach, dying for the pleasure of tourists.

It is, of course, very much different on the open sea. There the largest ships are thrown about like toys, and our little destroyer does not so much sail upon as through the peaks and troughs. At this point its sailors are most aware that they are owned by the ocean. In those rough hours duty is reduced to whatever it takes to run the ship in a more-or-less consistent line, and avoid injury to its contents, some of which is human flesh.

Wars are fought in these conditions.

The peacetime Navy goes about its business in the wash and spray because its business is preparing for war, and because nothing can be done about it except to forge on. A sailor does not love the ocean; he loves the sea, which is to say, the whole of the experience. The ocean to him is a moody, changeable roadway that is seldom the same two journeys in a row. The ocean is his opponent, his challenger.

Nor is the Navy sailor a match with his civilian counterpart. The civilian sailor sees the ocean as a highway for commerce. His job is to get something from one port to another. His work is to run the ship so that it will accomplish that task. The Navy sailor has the same job, but it is a minor consideration compared to the larger role of operating the ship underway, practicing war for the whole journey. In fact, ports are to Navy sailors merely places to refuel and take on stores. The destination is far less important than the journey. In the Navy, each ship is an autonomous machine practicing war everywhere it goes.

And so, when that destroyer reaches Pearl Harbor, or Sydney, or San Francisco, it has been in some phase of war status every nautical mile of the way. Civilians often wonder what the Navy does when there isn't a war. The answer to this is that there is always a war. The ship never knows a moment of peace from the minute of its commissioning to the day it is cut up for scrap. Neither for that matter, do the sailors, who have only small breaks in the ports where the ships come to pause for a few hours or days in their work.

Thanks Bob. I have been on Navy ships twice, both LPH (Landing Platform Helicopter) types, the Boxer and the Tripoli. I went to Vietnam on the Boxer, LPH-4 and then deployed offshore with my squadron on the LPH-10, Tripoli. While aboard I thought often of ships at war in WW2 and actual videos I had seen of huge ships such as battleships, carriers and so on taking hits from torpedoes, bombs or shells from other ships. I definitely earned my pay as a door gunner in a helicopter in Vietnam but I could not imagine the terror of being below decks during a battle knowing at any minute you could take a direct hit, as with the Arizona, and go down. One thinks of these ships as being indestructible due to their size and yet many videos show them taking a couple of torpedoes and literally breaking in half and going down in a matter of a couple of minutes. Definitely scary to say the very least.

It comes down to every one of our service branches earning well deserved pay even when there is no actual fighting war.

Dennis

Thanks Bob. I have been on Navy ships twice, both LPH (Landing Platform Helicopter) types, the Boxer and the Tripoli. I went to Vietnam on the Boxer, LPH-4 and then deployed offshore with my squadron on the LPH-10, Tripoli. While aboard I thought often of ships at war in WW2 and actual videos I had seen of huge ships such as battleships, carriers and so on taking hits from torpedoes, bombs or shells from other ships. I definitely earned my pay as a door gunner in a helicopter in Vietnam but I could not imagine the terror of being below decks during a battle knowing at any minute you could take a direct hit, as with the Arizona, and go down. One thinks of these ships as being indestructible due to their size and yet many videos show them taking a couple of torpedoes and literally breaking in half and going down in a matter of a couple of minutes. Definitely scary to say the very least.

It comes down to every one of our service branches earning well deserved pay even when there is no actual fighting war.

Dennis