Jeff Edwards is a retired U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer, and an Anti-Submarine Warfare Specialist. He is currently working as a civilian expert consultant to the Fleet Anti-Submarine Warfare Command, the Navy's think tank for high-tech undersea warfare. His naval career spanned more than two decades and half the globe -- from chasing Soviet nuclear attack submarines during the Cold War, to launching cruise missiles in the Persian Gulf.
He puts his extensive experience as a Surface
Warfare specialist to work in his new novel,
TORPEDO.
In a plot that could easily be ripped from
today's headlines, TORPEDO combines an accident
at a nuclear power plant, an illegal arms
deal, and a biological warfare attack, to
ignite a crisis that could draw Western Europe,
the Middle East, and the United States into
all-out war. TORPEDO mixes the elements of
a classic sea chase novel with state-of-the-art
technology to create a cutting-edge Surface
Warfare Thriller.
[Have an opinion on this article? Go to the Discussion
Forum to sound off.]
By Jeff Edwards
Sailors hate the Midwatch. It’s practically a law of nature. Water is wet, what goes up must come down, and Sailors hate the Midwatch.
Who can blame them? Nobody wants to crawl out of the sack at one-thirty in the morning, often after only an hour or two of sleep, to go stand five hours of watch on the Bridge, or in Combat Information Center, or the Engineering spaces. It’s especially entertaining if you happen to be in a three-section watch rotation. Then your day runs something like this: stand watch from 0145 (1:45 a.m.) to 0645 (6:45 a.m.), work your normal ship’s routine from 0645 to 1630 (4:30 p.m.), and then roll right back on to watch from 1645 (4:45 p.m.) to 2145 (9:45 p.m.). Then, after going at it for 19 hours straight, you start the next series of rotations. Throw in Flight Quarters, Damage Control Drills, Man Overboard Drills, General Quarters Drills, Abandon Ship Drills, and a bit of training just to keep the crew on their toes, and a 19-hour day can quickly stretch into 24 hours. It works out to being awake around-the-clock for one day out of three. By comparison, the other two days in the rotation are merely exhausting.
Mind you, this is what a three-section watch rotation looks like when everything goes well. If something comes up -- your equipment malfunctions, you’re directed to board and search a suspected smuggling vessel, or your ship is ordered into the enemy’s back yard to conduct missile strikes -- all bets are off, and sleep goes out the window. All of these things make Sailors treasure their sack time. Anything that gets between a Sailor and a few hours of precious sleep becomes suspect at best, and is usually despised. The Midwatch commands the top of the list. It doesn’t nibble at a Sailor’s sleep time; it devours sleep in great bloody chunks. And it comes around for another meal every three days, just about the time the Sailor’s body is starting to feel human again.
Okay, I’ve explained to some minimal degree why it is that Sailors despise the Midwatch. Now I have a small confession to make... I like the Midwatch. Sometimes I even love the Midwatch. I’m generally very careful not to utter those words in the presence of other Sailors, lest I become a candidate for Psych-Eval, but it is true. I really do like the Midwatch.
I certainly don’t enjoy the sleep depravation. The Midwatch knocks me for a loop just like it does everyone else: a fact that I’ve done more than my share of grumbling about over the years. But a person can get a lot of thinking done during the Midwatch. And it was during a Midwatch that I finally began to understand the real job of the United States Military.
During the Midwatch, at say three in the morning, only a handful of crewmembers are awake: the Bridge crew, the teams in Sonar Control and Combat Information Center, a skeleton crew of Engineers, roving Sounding and Security watches, and a few others. The rest of the crew is asleep, catching a few hours of downtime between watches, drills, and emergencies.
Now here’s the funny thing ... The Sailors who are lucky enough to be in their
bunks at three a.m. probably don’t know who’s got the watch. It’s
plenty of work keeping track of your own watch schedules; no one really
has time to bother with someone else’s. So, at three in the morning,
when a Sailor is sleeping, he or she generally has no idea who’s running
the ship.
This came to me in the wee hours of the morning, while I stood watch as Conning Officer on the Bridge of a destroyer in the Persian Gulf. I was standing in the dark, on the port side Bridge wing with the hot desert wind in my face, scanning the ocean for navigation hazards. Unlike the open ocean, there are about a thousand things that a ship can collide with in the Persian Gulf. There are oil platforms, fishing nets, cargo ships, tankers, and all manner of weird floating debris. You have to be especially careful about the small wooden boats that the locals call dhows. Ships and oil platforms are easy to spot. They show up on radar, and they’re nearly always lit up in accordance with International maritime safety regulations. Dhows are a different matter. Their low freeboard and wooden construction can make them nearly invisible to radar. They are generally dark in color, so they’re difficult to spot in the darkness, and they often run with no lights at all. On a really dark night, it takes unceasing vigilance to avoid collision. All that stands between your vessel and disaster are the eyes of the Conning Officer, the Officer of the Deck, and a couple of Seamen assigned to lookout duty.
As I raised binoculars to my eyes for what seemed like the five-hundredth time that night, I realized that I held the life of every sleeping Sailor on that ship in my hands. They didn’t know that I was standing the Conn. They didn’t know who was standing Officer of the Deck, or Aft Lookout, or the Damage Control Console watch, or the radar watch in Combat Information Center. They didn’t know, and they didn’t care. They knew that someone had the Conn, and that someone had lookout duty, and that someone was running the Engineering plant. The sleeping Sailors didn’t need to know who we were. They knew we were there, protecting them, and protecting the ship while they slept. And that was enough.
It came to me as I stood on that Bridge wing, that the Midwatch is an excellent tool for understanding America’s military. Every night, while nearly three hundred million Americans sleep, a few hundred thousand men and women in uniform stand the watch. It’s a small fraction of the population: less than one percent.
They stand watch aboard ships, in aircraft, in infantry units, aboard submarines, in armored fighting vehicles. They stand watch from the Artic Circle to the Antarctic, from office buildings to defensive positions in the desert. And they do it every day, and every night, whether the rest of us pay attention or not.
At this particular moment in history, most Americans happen to be aware of the men and women serving this country. But, after the news stories have died down, and the public eye has moved on, the men and women of our military will still be there. We won’t know their names. We won’t know who they are. We won’t need to know. We’ll sleep soundly, knowing that we are protected. And that will be enough.
