By Kurtis Hiatt
“HERE WE GO!”
Those three words were the only warning that we were seconds away from landing on an aircraft carrier in the Atlantic Ocean.
Just an hour earlier last Wednesday, we had reported for duty at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia, donning safety vests, helmets and goggles. Our “bird” was a COD, or carrier onboard delivery, a cargo plane stripped down to its steel and wire innards. Ushered inside through the tail of the aircraft, we strapped squarely into place, three seat belts crisscrossing our waists and shoulders, as smoke from its engines wisped around our ankles. The onboard servicemen closed the tail.
A dozen faculty and staff from the George Washington University had become sailors for day.
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An aircraft carrier is a runway on water, a behemoth of a ship that towers 20 stories above the waterline and stretches three and a half football fields long. It’s a centerpiece for supporting the military’s aircraft capabilities—sailors land, launch, refuel and maintain the birds around the clock—during both peacetime and war. Our carrier for the overnight trip was the USS Theodore Roosevelt.
The GW group was led by Vice Admiral (retired) Mel Williams Jr., associate provost for military and veteran affairs, who organized the event with Jason Lifton, special assistant, as part of the Veterans Accelerate Learning Opportunities and Rewards’ (VALOR) faculty and staff military awareness program. The goal: to see what sailors do and how they do it—and how those experiences can translate to academia. Getting thrown onto a carrier was a pretty good way to do it.
“My role is one of ambassador,” Adm. Williams said. “My hope is that everyone on this trip sees, experiences and senses what our men and women in uniform do, and understands how their experiences translate to the classroom. VALOR brought the group here so they could see and experience this, and form their own opinions themselves. I don’t want to do that for them.”
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Feet flat on the floor, we braced ourselves, wondering, would we “trap”? A successful landing means the COD’s tail hook, which extends from the back of the aircraft on an eight-foot bar, traps, or catches one of the four steel cables stretched widthwise across the runway. At the same time, the pilot pushes the engine to full power—just in case we miss and he has to take off again before speeding off the other side—resulting in a jerk and skid that lasts only seconds. Our bird, which had been traveling a whopping 150 miles per hour, halted to a stop in just 300 feet.
The group, which included Provost Steven Lerman; Ali Eskandarian, dean of the Virginia Science and Technology Campus and College of Professional Studies; Michael Feuer, dean of the Graduate School of Education and Human Development; and Toni Marsh, associate dean for new initiatives in CPS; unloaded onto the flight deck, about 130 miles off the coast of North Carolina.
In the minutes it took to deplane and walk a few steps below the flight deck, a plane or two had landed in our wake.
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On a given day, an aircraft carrier can recover and launch hundreds of planes and is equipped with the weaponry necessary for air, strike, surface, undersea and electronic warfare. Our ship, which was still in training after coming out of its “refueling and complex overhaul” in preparation for a spring 2015 deployment, had reached a milestone—200 launches and recoveries—the day before we arrived.
Each recovery and launch requires an expertly orchestrated production led by sailors both on and below the flight deck—3,000 the day we were on the USS Theodore Roosevelt, but closer to 5,000 or 6,000 during deployment when the ship has its air wing, or dedicated aircraft, assigned to it. Above and below deck, thousands of other service members clean, serve food, control air traffic and provide medical and dental care.
There are also teams that prepare for visitors like us, who were part of the Distinguished Visitor (DV) program, which gives civilians a firsthand look inside the Navy as a way to spread the word about the work the men and women on board do each day. The hotel services team set up our bunks (two to a room, compared with the berthing of about 200 sailors in another part of the ship) and the public affairs officer (PAO) and his reports had the duty of carting us around.
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The sailors run a tight ship. Executive Officer, or XO, Commander Jeff Craig greeted us before we headed back up to the flight deck, where we watched dozens of F-18s recover and launch.
“The guys who are working on the flight deck—18-, 19-, 20-year-old kids. They’re out there in the middle of the night, pitching deck, no moon, no horizon, two wands, multimillion-dollar aircraft in front of them—and they’re taxiing them around,” Mr. Craig told us. “We put responsibility in people very young—it’s yours to do what you need to do.”
That was clear. On deck, with nothing but blue sea extending out in all directions, we watched the yellow shirts (the “shooters” who catapult the aircraft), white (safety), blue (plane handlers), purple (fuelers), green (maintenance), red (weapons) and brown (plane captains) recovering and launching planes every 40 seconds during daylight and every 60 seconds at night. With each came a rumble, skid, whoosh—all muffled through our helmets. Just below, a hanger, nearly as massive as the flight deck above, was ready for planes to descend via one of four elevators off the side of the flight deck. (Because the ship wasn’t deployed, the hanger sat mostly empty; planes were landing and launching for practice, resting mostly to refuel.)
Up and down steep metal staircases without railings, and through a labyrinth of hallways with doors and hatches in every direction, we followed our public affairs officer and his team to the mess halls—which can serve 18,000 meals a day—for dinner and breakfast, met the senior medical officer in the hospital wing, the oral maxillofacial surgeon in the dental wing and the mass communication specialists, the writers and videographers who document each day on the ship and produce a newsletter that hits mess hall tables every morning.
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Through conversations with the enlisted and officers—the 18-year-olds up to the 60-plus-year-old oral maxillofacial surgeon—we heard over and over that the ship is a happy one with high morale and sailors working together toward the common goal of readying the ship for the upcoming deployment.
“The visit to the USS Theodore Roosevelt gave us the opportunity to see firsthand the incredible work of the people who serve on it,” said Dr. Lerman, who, along with others in the group, had the opportunity to meet five GW midshipmen who were on board for the summer. “The combination of preparation, training and commitment to a crucial mission provides a wonderful model for how individuals can work together as a team to accomplish great things.”
The sailors also emphasized the importance of education and the increasing number of sailors who want to get degrees—and work through the nights to get them done.
Dr. Eskandarian said through traversing the “complex ecosystem of an aircraft carrier,” he learned how GW leadership can “continue to shape academic programs so they are military friendly.”
Many of GW’s academic programs are well suited to support service members, such as the School of Nursing’s Transition to Nursing B.S.N., general education and degree programs in police and security studies at the College of Professional Studies as well as instruction that will complement military experience in the School of Medicine and Health Sciences and the online MPH@GW at the Milken Institute School of Public Health.
At CPS specifically, Ms. Marsh said she plans to examine online programs and explore credit options with the “extremely transferable” skills and information that sailors learn at sea in mind.
“People who are skeptical of the ability of American youth to perform complex cognitive and behavioral tasks should spend a day on the USS Theodore Roosevelt,” Dr. Feuer said.
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As the hours waned to our departure time on Thursday, we started to feel the effects of an evening of sleep interrupted by the shakes, booms and emergency training calls—and a reveille at exactly 0600.
Before leaving, we had an opportunity to meet Commanding Officer Capt. Daniel Grieco. In following military tradition, Dr. Lerman presented him with a George Washington University coin. Mr. Grieco emphasized how hard the crew on the ship work and thanked us for meeting the sailors and incorporating what we learned into our daily work.
In just a few hours, we were back on our COD with the last of the unknowns to hurdle—the launch. By this time, the smoke at our feet and bare steel that surrounded us was somehow normal—or at least not unfamiliar.
We felt a jolt as the steam-powered catapult took us from zero to 165 in a matter of seconds, shooting us off the runway.
Back on the mainland, we brought with us our newfound appreciation for the U.S. Navy, some souvenirs and—according to the service member who met us on arrival—the trademark scent of jet fuel.