Respect the Deck

Others of their generation are back home flipping burgers or taking classes or engaging in other low-risk pursuits.

But several hundred young sailors--some of them mere teenagers who have never before been away from home--are doing a job that is arduous, exacting, dangerous and crucial to the ship’s military mission.

These are the unsung sailors who work the flight deck, “the roof,” the 4 1/2 acres of controlled chaos where dozens of powerful, delicate and sometimes unpredictable jet aircraft are taxied, parked, repaired, armed, disarmed and armed again in a continual cycle of launch and retrieval.

“The deck is where the action is,” said Shelven Marshall, 19, of Hot Springs, Ark., as he worked on an F/A-18 Hornet. “You are never bored on the deck.”

If the commander in chief decides that either Saddam Hussein or Moammar Kadafi needs a load of American firepower dropped on his front porch, there is a good chance that it will be up to the 76 warplanes aboard the Kitty Hawk to do the deed, with speed and ferocity.

And unless young deck sailors such as Lamanuel Hamilton from Mendenhall, Miss., Damien McAllister from Russelton, Pa., Salvador Ortiz from Pacoima and others do their jobs correctly, all the college-educated aviators, supercomputers and multimillion-dollar avionics will be for naught.

The Navy unflinchingly brands the deck the most dangerous workplace in the military. The Kitty Hawk’s psychologist--known informally as the ship’s S.O.B., “shrink on board”--says deck jobs are high-risk and high-excitement.

“The only thing as dangerous as working the deck is being a window washer in New York,” said McAllister, 22, with a wide grin. “My mother says she’s scared every time she thinks about what I do. She’s scared but proud.”

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The ways you can get killed or injured on the flight deck are numerous and equally unpleasant: blown overboard or scalded by jet blast, run over by a 55,000-pound plane, sucked into an engine, hit by flying debris, set on fire by jet fuel, run over by an emergency vehicle, sliced in two by a broken arresting wire, and more.

“You have to have respect for the deck,” said Hamilton, 22. “You can never get comfortable on the deck.”

The work has to be accomplished night and day in an environment where the roar of jet engines is so deafening that most communication is accomplished by hand signals and where the wind and the pitch and the roll of the deck can make it nearly impossible to remain upright.

For all of its hardships, deck work is highly prized. To perform well as a deck sailor is to earn substantial bragging rights.

“The deck is the only place to work,” said Ortiz, 20.

“I want to show people what I can do,” said Cornelius Hampton, 20, from Kansas City, Mo., who joined the Navy when the only civilian job he could find was in a fast-food restaurant. “I want a challenge.”

If the danger of the flight deck is apparent, so too is the racial and ethnic diversity of the work force. And, now, for the first time, women sailors are part of the Kitty Hawk’s crew, including some who are destined to work the deck and are every bit as motivated as their male shipmates.

“It’s an adrenaline rush you can’t believe,” said Tanya Howe, 19, of Buckeye, Ariz., after getting her first up-close look at the deck during an “event,” which is Navy-ese for a series of landings and catapult takeoffs.

“A lot people think teenagers are lazy and no good,” said Kimberly McIntyre, 19, of Palm Springs. “I’m going to show them they’re wrong.”

Training aboard the Kitty Hawk is relentless, an estimated 8,000 takeoffs during an average deployment in all kinds of weather and sea conditions. It is not unusual for an event to take 12 hours or longer, with little time for rest.

“We give them a lot of responsibility,” Chief Warrant Officer Robin Todd, a crash and salvage officer with 23 years of service, said of the young sailors in his charge. “They grow up real quick.”

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Navy Seaman Wade Gilbert, 19, of Weatherford, Texas, had never seen an aircraft carrier until he joined the Kitty Hawk just a day before it left San Diego for a six-month deployment to relieve the carrier Enterprise patrolling the western Pacific, the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf and enforcing the “no fly” zone in Iraq.

“It’s a lot bigger than I thought,” Gilbert said of the Kitty Hawk.

It’s a common reaction.

The 12 aircraft carriers in the U.S. Navy are the largest, most technically complex and most feared warships the world has ever known.

The Kitty Hawk rises 201 feet above the waterline, weighs 86,000 tons, has more than 2,400 compartments and spaces, and requires a crew of 5,500 officers and enlisted personnel while on deployment. Four aircraft elevators and five weapons elevators service the deck.

The flight deck is 1,065 feet long and 273 feet at its widest. But those numbers can be misleading.

The same aircraft that land on the Kitty Hawk in 750 feet can require 4,000 to 5,000 feet or longer to land at Miramar, Fallon or Lemoore naval air stations. And although the deck seems huge, it fills up very quickly with sailors, equipment and aircraft.

So precious is space on the flight deck that aircraft are often parked with their tails hanging over the side of the carrier in an alignment called TOD (tail over deck). Planes are parked and chained down with only 18 inches separating wingtips.

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“There’s no room for screw-ups on the deck,” said Marla O’Brien, 22, of Rohnert Park in Northern California.

During an event, when planes are being launched at a rate of up to one every 30 seconds, the deck is in constant motion.

Add darkness, a blown tire or two, planes that break down in inopportune spots, showers of sparks from tailhooks hitting the arresting wires, maybe high seas and inclement weather and the result can be treacherous. A plane on a wet deck has been likened to a cow trying to stand on a kitchen floor.

“It’s a mental challenge to make the deck work efficiently,” said Cmdr. John Wilson, the ship’s safety officer. “What looks like chaos to the uninitiated is actually carefully orchestrated.”

From vantage points in the ship’s tower (“the island”), a variety of officers have a view of the deck and can relay orders to officers below.

Senior enlisted men who work the deck, such as Robin Todd of Indiana, Geno Ferrera of Chicago and Michael Rodriguez of San Diego, are in radio communication and can use hand signals to instruct their crews. The average sailor on deck is on his first (and only) deployment of the aircraft carrier.

“They call me the old man,” laughed Rodriguez, a nine-year veteran who is 28 years old.

“You want to keep an eye on ‘em, but most of them act like adults,” said Ferrera, 29, an 11-year veteran.

“Working a carrier deck is definitely a young person’s kind of job,” Wilson said.

In fact, a Navy study showed that 74% of the enlisted sailors on a carrier are between 17 and 25 years old. Only 2% are 40 or older.

Most of the sailors working the deck have completed four weeks of aviation training after boot camp. The others have been assigned deck duty to give them a taste of shipboard life before they decide what specialty they want to seek, a process called “striking for a rating.”

“I want people who are self-confident but still scared,” said Lt. Cmdr. Ed Stacks, the ship’s aircraft landing officer, who started his career as a seaman working a carrier deck. “I don’t want anyone on deck who isn’t scared. He’s untrainable.”

The ship’s commanding officer, Capt. Steven J. Tomaszeski, a veteran helicopter pilot, is equal parts traditionalist and innovator.

He is a stickler for officers wearing their hats (“covers”) when they are on the bridge, a formality that some skippers overlook at sea. On the other hand, he is the first captain to bring a psychologist on a deployment to help his crew cope with the enormous stress of their work, their crowded living quarters and the separation from their families.

“I’ve got kids at home older than some of these kids on the flight deck,” Tomaszeski said. “We train them, we supervise them and we demand a lot from them. They will learn things and experience things that other people can only imagine.”

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Because of the inherent danger of the flight deck, the Navy stresses safety.

“I’ve seen one man hit by a plane,” Tomaszeski said. “I never want to see another.”

Safety officers are on the roof whenever there is an event. All accidents are investigated by the safety officer and his staff, and their reports are forwarded to the Navy’s fleet safety center in Norfolk, Va., for review.

The newest sailor on deck can call a halt to a plane’s movement if he or she sees something ominous. All that is required is to use the time-honored signal for danger: fists clenched and forearms crossed to make an X across the chest.

Twice a day the flight deck undergoes a FOD (foreign object debris) walk-down. Dozens of sailors walk the length of the deck in search of minute pieces of dirt or metal or a lost tool or metal screw or anything else that could be sucked into an engine and cause a fire or crash.

The FOD walk-down is a kind of metaphor for working the flight deck. It is labor intensive, unglamorous and built on the principle that even the smallest error can have tragic consequences.

Accidents are rare, but they happen. Just two days after the Kitty Hawk left San Diego, a deck sailor was hurt during flight operations.

Benjamin Hein, 20, of Boulder, Colo., opened a steel hatch to check the pressure valves for the steam catapults that launch the planes when a firetruck backed into the hatch. Hein tried to jump clear but the falling hatch clipped his foot, breaking four bones.

He was treated in the ship’s hospital, but the next day, much to his dismay, doctors decided that Hein should be evacuated to San Diego so more X-rays could be taken.

As corpsmen loaded Hein onto a stretcher into a C-2A Greyhound--a turboprop that ferries men and supplies to the carrier--Robin Todd was there to assure him that his buddies will be awaiting his return, probably when the Kitty Hawk stops in Hong Kong.

An ambulance met the Greyhound as it landed in Coronado. “I’ll be back,” Hein said as he was lifted into the ambulance. “I don’t want the guys doing this deployment without me.”

Tomaszeski mentioned Hein’s mishap in his nightly broadcast to the crew, along with other bits of news. The accident gave emphasis to Tomaszeski’s oft-repeated message about safety: “Keep your head on a swivel and your eye on your shipmate. Do it safely and press on.”