Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H. W. Bush.

Stewart, Matthew

Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H. W. Bush. Geoff Dyer. New York: Pantheon Books, 2014, $24.95, hardcover, 191 pp.

This book is a delight. The English essayist, novelist and genre-bending author Geoff Dyer spends two weeks aboard the super carrier USS George H. W. Bush, fulfilling a boyhood love of ships and finding much to admire and much to enjoy despite his self-professed unsuitability for life at sea. As this review is being written the Bush is fully engaged in combat operations directed against ISIS/ISIL, begun in August 2014. Dyer's visit, however, occurs in October 2011 during the drawdown period of Operation Enduring Freedom, ostensibly a time of more quiet routine; nonetheless, the din of activity, the long work days, and the sense of duty and mission he routinely encounters impress Dyer.

The vessel is huge, noisy, crowded, cramped, and occasionally smelly; 5,000 people are packed together for weeks on end. Dyer sees the Bush as the floating equivalent of "a small town in American (albeit one organized along unusually hierarchical line)," where he is "surrounded by American voices, American friendliness, American politeness, American Americans" (61). The Bush is also a floating industrial site, "crowded as a Bombay slum, with an aircraft factory--the hangar bay--in the middle" (21).

The ship's motto is "Freedom at Work," and Dyer takes obvious pleasure in learning about the jobs done by the enlisted crew and their officers. Warrant Officer Charles Jakes oversees the 112 cooks on board and manages a food inventory clearly worth millions of dollars. A female airplane mechanic--who goes unnamed, it would seem, because Dyer develops a crush on her--works with skill and ease atop the wing of a plane. Petty Officers Heath and Young are in charge of the brig, or the brig as Dyer coins it, in a moment where the phrase must have channeled back to his and ship-loving boyhood, but they have no customers, a testimony to the ship's order and to the absence of alcohol first lamented, but then applauded by Dyer. There scarcely seems a person on board who is less than super-committed to his or her job.

In all this we see that Dyer is anything but the condescending anti-American, anti-military European intellectual. While he must find a way to hold his own against an obnoxious Texan beef baron, and thought he has some minor fun at the expense of the ship's drug counselor, for example, and while he demurs, plausibly enough, with the versions of Evangelical Christian theology that he encounters, he nonetheless eschews easy or unmerited sarcasm. Indeed, in regards to the religious feelings of the crew and the Christian practices that frequent the ship, the avowed atheist happily admits the warm feelings that hymns and simple prayer bring to him, and the reader cannot imagine that in the name of higher rationality he would seek to deprive those who sing and pray out of true belief of their effects. As with religious feeling, so with old-fashioned marshal virtues--indeed more so. Dyer understands, tolerates and enjoys a sort of second-hand, keep-your-distance glow from the religious elements. He openly approves of men and women who speak plainly about duty, patriotism and service. "I had not been on the boat long," he writes when three pilots declare that their profession in honorable, "but I understood what they meant and believed in it absolutely" (58).

As is typical of his essays, Dyer becomes the central character, and here he plays the oldest, tallest, thinnest, most out of shape, most out of place person on the ship. Also by far the most spoiled and fussiest. He immediately sets himself to work on securing a private room, for he is a man, as he admits early and repeats for effect, who dreads sharing space. The "six-pack" sleeping arrangements for the crew seem Dante-esque to him. Nor can he abide the ordinary chow served to the crew, and is pleased, no, delighted to befriend the Captain's cook, who supplies him with gourmet meals as the trip winds down. Another professional whose skill the author lauds.

At his most philosophical, Dyer muses on his status as both a visitor and writer. In a situation that would seem to call for him to adopt the role of embedded reporter, he baldly opines that he is the worst reporter imaginable. He cannot remember details; data escapes him; his mind wanders even in the presence of people whom he admires and in situations that he truly finds interesting; his observations are just as often associative as they are sequential or logical, and the associations can be more or less idiosyncratic. Nor can he distance himself from the crew, almost all of whom elicit warm feelings and respect. He can't even hang on to his laptop on the flight to the ship, leaving it behind for someone else to retrieve. All of this Dyer concedes, summarizing his peculiar position thus: "So there I was: a tourist with a notebook, a marine anthropologist whose data was so thoroughly mixed up with the means of obtaining it that it probably had no value as data, only as a memoir of a collection of camera-less holiday snaps" (134).

Yet, for all that he puts himself at the center of things, and notwithstanding his protestations of his own poor reportage, the reader comes away with much detailed knowledge of life aboard the ship, and, what's more, with a feel for the life and duties of those on board. As for detailed knowledge, how many readers, for example, will be familiar with the aircraft catapult used aboard the carrier and ably described by the author? How many with the workings of the arresting gear, which--imagine!--brake the aircraft from 140 mph to a dead stop in two seconds? Do readers already know about the Launch Valve Room? (Better take a water bottle if you visit.) As for feel, to state the obvious, the entirety of this skillfully written book brings forth the feel, but there are passages especially worth noting, many of which reveal the finer sensibilities of the men and women aboard the ship.

Another Great Day at Sea takes its title from the inspirational phrase used daily by the ship's captain as he makes his announcement. It is part of the Writers in Residence series founded by the philosopher Alain de Botton and dedicated to supporting the long-form essay and to inspiring collaborations between writers and photojournalists. Each writer-photographer pair chooses an important institution in which to spend a brief residence. Readers can be grateful that Dyer was offered the chance to participate in the series, and without hesitation requested an assignment aboard a US Navy aircraft carrier. The book is testimony to the skill of one of the finest living writers and to so much that is good about America.

Reviewed by Matthew Stewart, Boston University.