Documentary : Saratoga’s Task: Watch for War, Wait for Action : The U.S. aircraft carrier has patrolled the Red Sea for four months, living with the constant threat of hostilities.

First there is the shriek of twin jet turbines winding up to full power, then the sudden smack of a catapult that hurls the F/A-18 fighter into flight and sends a tremor through this aircraft carrier, the size of a city block. One by one, the planes lurch off the deck and into the dusk.

The Saratoga, originally bound for the Mediterranean and quiet port stops in Marseilles, Cannes and Tangier, was diverted on Aug. 4, two days after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, to the Red Sea to join what will soon become the largest naval buildup since the Korean War.

Here, the Saratoga--a relic of the 1950s and the U.S. Navy’s second-oldest aircraft carrier with combat patrols off Vietnam, Lebanon and Libya on its logs--has been largely responsible, along with its 10 sister ships, for turning away virtually all commercial cargo bound for Iraq through the Gulf of Aqaba.

The interdiction effort has reduced overall shipping traffic in the normally bustling Red Sea by 80%. And as a Jan. 15 United Nations deadline nears for Iraqi troops to pull out of Kuwait, this naval task force known as “Battle Group Red Sea” is also quietly targeting, charting, briefing and training to become a rolling, floating platform for a deadly aerial assault against the forces of Saddam Hussein.

Says Lt. Cmdr. Mark Fox: “The role of aircraft carriers is really to persuade those who don’t want to do business with us to do business with us--our way. The beauty of naval forces is you can be blunt when you need to be.

“I’m not wishing for war,” he adds, gathering his gear to launch another aerial patrol over northwestern Saudi Arabia. “The military man is probably the one who wants peace the most, because he’s the one who’s going to pay the price the soonest. However, if there is a war, I’m the best guy to fight it. If the house burns, I’m the one to put the fire out.”

The Saratoga is a floating city of 4,600 people, with eight decks above the flight deck and eight decks below. It gulps 150,000 gallons of jet fuel a day, another 120,000 gallons of diesel fuel; serves 20,000 meals a day, desalinates 300,000 gallons of water for drinking and washing, pumps 200,000 gallons of sewage. Running the Saratoga, someone calculated, costs $434 a minute.

Two days before setting out for the Mediterranean on the carrier’s first cruise in 18 months, the orders came in for the Red Sea. The captain radioed the engineer room to crank up speed to 25 knots. The guys in engineering looked at the same turbines that have been turning the propeller shafts since 1956, crossed their fingers, and turned up the boilers. A trip that was supposed to take 10 days took only 5 1/2.

Except for eight days in port in Turkey, the crew of the Saratoga has been at sea ever since--four months, or almost twice as long as a normal deployment. The carrier’s pilots have also flown more than twice the normal number of sorties--7,500 of them. The flight deck is so slick with jet fuel it’s slippery even in tennis shoes. There has been little time to shut it down and scrub it.

There’s an alert on this night, ordered by command headquarters in Riyadh for fear of a preemptive strike from Iraq. Men are at combat stations. The fighter jets rocket off the deck all night long, turning the warm autumn darkness into a cacophony of screeching engines and hissing steam.

Lt. Mitch Dudney, an officer in the aviation maintenance division with an Alabama drawl, is engaged in two of his major pastimes of this long voyage: missing his wife and thinking about what his career might have been had he been just a little younger than his 42 years.

A lot of new Navy officers are going into the space program, he notes. “That’s my biggest regret about the Navy: too late to join the space program. . . . I think you’re going to see stuff like the starship Enterprise, planetary travel, space stations. And I think you’ll see that in our lifetime now.”

Dudney figures that, with the end of the Cold War, peace is the wave of the future. “There will always be that group of some people who want to rule everybody else. But I think those days, hopefully, are mostly over,” he says.

Still, the possibility of combat is something nobody forgets, not for a minute, not with the news updates about the United Nations and Iraq interspersed with scenes from the flight deck on the ship’s closed circuit TVs. Most of the crew, Dudney says, doesn’t question whether there ought to be a war or not.

“I try to be a military professional,” he says. “We’re paid to carry out the policies that are set by the President and the Congress, so as military people, we’ll do what we’re told to do, and do it the very best way we can. I don’t think it’s up to us to determine what the reasons are.”

Lt. Cmdr. Tony Barnes, assistant strike officer for the ship, says letters from kids at home make him feel better. “Thank you for protecting us. I hope you don’t die. I think you are brave,” says one.

“They kind of reassure us this is not like the Vietnam conflict, where the people didn’t support you,” Barnes says. “The mood on board, we haven’t really changed. I’m amazed at how we’ve all been able to maintain our state of readiness. We’re all afraid to let our guard down, because we’re all afraid that’s when something’s going to happen. So we stay up all the time.”

“I think we’re hoping this thing settles peacefully,” says Lt. Cmdr. Randy Smith, who works in the carrier’s control tower. “But we’re kind of getting antsy--we should either do something, or else when it gets time for us to go home, we go home. It’s the old play-me-or-trade-me type of thing.”

In the Saratoga’s combat direction center, the dimly lit nerve center of the ship, the Saratoga’s tactical action officer sits in an elevated chair surrounded by high-tech computer-radar gadgetry. The chair looks suspiciously like Capt. Kirk’s aboard “Star Trek’s” Enterprise.

It is on his command--on orders filtered down from the captain, the admiral, or even higher--that the Saratoga’s Sea Sparrow short-range surface-to-air missiles, or any of the other formidable weapons available within the escort group, would be used.

Though the Saratoga is one of the oldest ships in the fleet, its combat direction center is the most modern in the U.S. Navy, able to gather on a huge video screen a network of data generated from throughout the region--from the ship’s own radar, from the Saratoga’s own mini-AWACs planes, the E-2C Hawkeyes, and from pilots’ radio reports.

The result is a blue-lit image of the Red Sea and western Saudi Arabia pocked with blips representing every ship sailing the Red Sea and every aircraft in the air above it. Ships bound for Aqaba that might have to be boarded by interdiction ships in the battle group are flagged. Aircraft on questionable courses are watched closely for possible interception by fighters from the Saratoga.

“What are we looking for out there? Anything. And everything,” said Cmdr. Rick Eason, the carrier’s operations officer.

In the wake of the U.N.’s resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq after Jan. 15, the Saratoga’s watch is particularly vigilant over the ridge of mountains extending south from Jordan into western Saudi Arabia. An Iraqi Mirage jet might try to fly in behind that ridge, below radar range, to lob an Exocet missile at the aircraft carrier.

The Saratoga has at its disposal a dizzying array of electronic weaponry to counter such attempts by jamming enemy radar--most of which its officers refuse to discuss.

“Basically, we can find it, we can know what it is, we can locate it and we can jam it,” says Lt. Cmdr. Mike Higgins, who is heading this evening’s watch.

The Iraqis have been constantly moving their truck and trailer-based missile launchers, and the crew of the Saratoga has been busy tracking them in an attempt to detect patterns. In a war situation, the Iraqis’ only recourse, should the location of their launchers be pinpointed, would be to turn off the radar guidance systems or face a dead hit against the missile launcher, says Higgins.

Eight decks below the Saratoga’s hangar deck, a room the size of a football field contains every conceivable gauge, needle, phone and computer needed to monitor the four engines and eight boilers that power the carrier’s four huge propellers.

Below that are the boiler rooms themselves, huge sweatshops in the bowels of the ship where temperatures approach 130 degrees.

This is the place that keeps the ship cutting through the water, that generates the electricity to power it and creates the steam needed to drive the catapults and cables that trap and launch the planes.

It is the worst duty aboard ship. Not only is it hot, it is probably the most dangerous place to be in the event of an accident or attack. The boilers themselves are temperamental; a boiler room accident earlier in the deployment aboard the carrier Iwo Jima killed 10 sailors.

“Basically, if you get hit in the main machinery room, you’re gonna die. If something happens to the ship, we’re going to be the last ones off of it,” says Ensign Michael DeWitt. “This steam down here is heated to 950 degrees, 1,200 pounds of pressure. . . . It’ll cook you like a chicken. . . .

“They’re a different breed,” DeWitt says of his boiler room crew. “It’s almost like a rebel-type person. They don’t always have high enough scores to go work on the radar or something, but they’re very mechanically inclined. A main engine went down and they worked 36 hours straight to fix it. They saved the Navy $250,000.”

Near dusk the next day, VFA-81--one of the F/A-18 Hornet fighter squadrons--is preparing for another aerial patrol in the northern Red Sea.

“This is an aviator’s paradise,” says Lt. Mark Fox. “The sky is always blue, the deck is always steady, there’s free gas overhead (in an aerial refueling tanker). If I have to be at sea, I think this is the place to be.”

On the other hand, the nearly four months of high-readiness activity has begun to tell on pilots.

“It’s kind of like being in the locker room before the game. How long can you sit there before you go out and play?” said Rear Adm. George N. Gee, commander of the battle group.

The Saratoga’s commander, Capt. Joseph S. Mobley, a prisoner of war in Vietnam for five years after his plane was shot down, says some of the pilots have begun coming to him: not openly seeking help, but just wanting to talk.

“I guess they just want reassurance that other people have had the same thoughts that they’re having right now, when they’re really, seriously contemplating the possibility of combat,” Mobley says.

“I think you can say it has affected everyone’s performance and attitude. There’s a good deal of keying up. But morale is remarkably high. The men have been at sea for four months now, and they don’t want to go. They want to stay.”

“For me personally,” said Lt. Barry Hull, a pilot, “there were these intense highs and lows when we first got here. There was also the anxiety of the unknown. . . . Now I think we’re much more prepared for the situation.”

This evening, Hull and Lt. Cmdr. T. L. Hoffman are being briefed for a patrol over northwest Saudi Arabia in their F/A-18s. They watch a video showing the latest weather reports, then huddle at the back of the room to go over the mission.

“We’re gonna have one of those yahoo recoveries (landings), descending out of 28,000 (feet) at 400 knots,” Hoffman says. “It’s a night recovery, so keep that in mind.”

For both, that’s a little sobering. Aiming a jet traveling at 180 miles an hour at a narrow slot on a shifting carrier deck is hard enough by day; at night, it can be downright unnerving.

“At nighttime, you can kill yourself in a heartbeat,” Hull says.

Hull tried to explain it all to some kids in his hometown in Spartanburg, Fla., who wrote to him asking what it was like to be a fighter pilot in Operation Desert Shield. He answered all their letters in one of his own, and the local paper published it.

“Dear Mrs. Melton’s class,” he began, “It was very nice to receive your letters. I enjoyed reading them, and it was a nice break from the hot, long days we spend in the Red Sea. In general, we stay busy and do a lot of flying. It’s just as exciting as you can imagine, and I am fortunate to be flying the F/A-18 Hornet. . . . We land our planes on the boat by catching a hook on the back of the jet that catches a wire when we touch down. Otherwise, without the hook and wire, we would just roll off the end of the boat and into the water, and that would be a bummer.”

All goes well with Hull and Hoffman’s patrol this night. They get high marks for their landing approaches, which means they stand to win a squadron pool: free dinner at the next port--maybe Haifa, Israel, for Christmas--bought by the guys with the worst landings.

The jets scream in. Upstairs, Seaman 1st Class Franklin Parker, a jet mechanic, is about to try to get some sleep, something that’s not always easy to do here.

“I wanted to get away from the house, a small town in Georgia. There’s something else to see, I’m pretty sure, you know?” he says. “And now I’m here, I’ve seen all these places, but you know, there’s some pretty wild stuff goes on in a person’s mind when he’s out here like this.”

He thinks for a moment. “But the bang, you know?” he says as another jet slams down onto the deck. “Every time you hear it, it kinda rocks you to sleep.”