Once upon a time, military life was familiar to most civilians. The arts rendered it comprehensible even to those who had never served. At midcentury, shows like Mister Roberts (1948) and The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial (1953) were all the rage on the stage, to say nothing of the rush of World War II fiction. Even the “service comedy”—a film genre that has since gone the way of the dodo—pollinated the minds of the public with some sense of what it meant to be in uniform. Operation Petticoat (1959) may not have been an accurate portrayal of life at sea, but at least it didn’t make the U.S. Navy seem exotic.
Yet if this new volume from the British writer Geoff Dyer is any indication, a career devoted to the service of one’s country is presently regarded as a curiosity. To be sure, Dyer writes that he was in thrall to “war and soldiering” as a youngster, devoting much time to “making and blotchily painting Airfix models.” He even writes, rather unbelievably, that he once pondered whether he might have been better off as a member of our Marine Corps, daydreaming about being a “jarhead” and having “ ‘Semper Fi’ tattooed on a properly muscular forearm.”
The conceit of this book is that Dyer observes a variant of his purported fantasy in a two-week spell on the aircraft carrier George H. W. Bush, during which time he was writer-in-residence. Yet his tone bespeaks bewilderment at the U.S. Navy and its ethos. Dyer is a pleasingly candid writer, but he reveals perhaps more than he intends to when he is dismayed by the absence not only of “booze” on board but also any “trappings or decorations of alcohol,” such as bars. “This was not life as we know it or want it,” he glumly reflects. Again and again, he tests what he finds at sea against what he is familiar with on land—even the most trivial of things, such as the kind of mustache worn by his chaperone, Ensign Paul Newell, which he describes as being “almost entirely extinct in civilian life.”
Dyer ruefully notes that, back home in London, the “most irritating noise” he has to put up with is the “occasional leaf-blower” (“You know how loud—how maddening—that is?”) leaving him unprepared for the booming clamor on the ship. He asks Ensign Newell, incredulously, “And this goes on all night?” Was he expecting a Trappist monastery? At least he records the ensign’s hilariously matter-of-fact answer for posterity: “Round the clock. It’s an aircraft carrier. We’re sort of in the business of flying aircraft.”
A few pages later, Dyer sets up his description of mealtime on the George H. W. Bush by noting that he is “the worst kind of fussy eater,” whose pickiness about food goes back to boyhood. “I grew up hating all the food my parents cooked, [and] was always being told I didn’t eat enough to keep a sparrow alive,” he writes. Predictably, Dyer finds the food provided to commissioned officers in the wardroom “revolting.”
“The smell of cooked meats and the jet fuel they were cooked in made me heave,” he writes. Later, he concedes that there was nothing really wrong with the steak he was served at a “Steel Beach Party” except that it was “an undisguised lump of meat”—and, of course, unaccompanied by beer. “It was extraordinary, in a way, that there could be a party like this without a keg in sight, just bath-sized troughs filled with ice and soft drinks, Cokes and waters,” he writes.
At another point, Dyer recounts an episode when he was made to wait to go online on one of the carrier’s scarce laptops, only to have his account unceremoniously freeze up: “Inside I was screaming but I didn’t howl or whine, didn’t even raise my voice. I was haemorrhaging tears, my head was a balloon pumped full of blood.”
I will say this for Geoff Dyer: He is not afraid of overstatement. But his griping makes him seem absurd in his surroundings. After reading of his “dread” at the prospect of having to share quarters (“six in a room!”), we must take his Marine dreams with a healthy dose of skepticism. References to avant-garde European filmmakers (Andrei Tarkovsky, Werner Herzog, Claire Denis) do not enhance his credibility, nor does his proposal that the USS Ronald Reagan be rechristened the USS Emily Dickinson.
He is, at least, intellectually honest enough to be impressed with many of those inhabiting the USS George H. W. Bush. At times, he even seems star-struck by the armed forces, as when he observes that his civilian status resulted in treatment that suggested that he “outranked everyone,” such as when he was given the right-of-way in tight corridors: “This willingness to step aside, to let me pass, was a demonstration, at the level of courtesy, of a larger point: they were willing to lay down their lives for me, for us.”
At the same time, we sense that Dyer’s bafflement often gets the better of him. Lieutenant Commander Ron Rancourt is called “a man seriously in love with what he did,” which echoes Dyer’s approving invocation of Walt Whitman’s “Song for Occupations” in describing the indefatigable work ethic of those he encounters. Yet when we learn that Rancourt will soon be retiring to devote himself to home-schooling his children, partly out of his dissatisfaction with public schools, we can hear the wind go out of Dyer’s sails: “He wasn’t saying it in a crazy way at all, but he still sounded a little crazed to me.” On top of everything else, Rancourt is dubious about the expansion of government and “outraged” over Obamacare. “There was quite a lot to disagree with,” Dyer admits.
Dyer accounts for the difficulty he has “recording even the simplest things, such as someone’s name and rank,” by confessing that “of all the kinds of writer I was not, ‘reporter’ was top of the list.” Actually, he is competent with technical details, but such proficiency does not mask a lack of comprehension of the sort of men and women who sign up for a life of service and risk. Dyer proclaims it “odd” that one pilot “seemed almost completely unfazed” in describing a perilous “night catapult shot,” and he spends a paragraph itemizing the many things that no one complains about missing—“restaurants or bars” and “windows with views” and “trying on clothes in shops” and “walking home at night as it’s about to rain and getting to your door just as it starts pouring.”
Geoff Dyer can’t believe it. His title is inspired by a favorite saying of the ship’s skipper: “What I didn’t realize was that the Captain always told everyone what a great day it was,” he writes, adding that “there was something very American about this ability to dwell constantly in the realm of the improvable superlative.” True enough. But it might have been more accurate to take a page from Mark Twain and call this book The Innocent On Board.
Peter Tonguette is at work on a book about Peter Bogdanovich.
