Water conservation was always of critical importance aboard any Navy ship; all crewmen, officer or enlisted, male or female, were treated to several training and indoctrination films before their first tours of duty aboard ship on the proper and approved method of taking a Navy shower.
First use just enough water to get your body wet.
She’d heard of some captains who cut the water to the shower heads if the usage meters showed someone spending more than five minutes under a running stream. It wasn’t that bad on the Jeff, thank God, but the rules were strict, and if the nearly six thousand men and women aboard used the fresh water supplies too quickly, then there were standing orders posted for rationing.
Then, with the water off, work up a lather an soap yourself down.
Brewer had always been somewhat fastidious, and the thought of the population of a fair-sized city crammed cheek by jowl inside a steel can, most of them young and athletic, most of them putting in eighteen-hour days of some of the most grueling work in the world, and not enough water for daily showers was fairly disgusting. There was always a slight stink of sweat and humanity clinging to the carrier’s berthing areas, the natural consequence of too many bodies in too little space.
After you’ve scrubbed yourself, turn on the water again, using just enough to remove the soap The snake was a relatively new addition to the Jefferson, one installed just a couple of months ago during her last rotation back Stateside. Scuttlebutt had it that several city commissions and representatives from the California state legislature were interested in the thing, that there was talk of passing laws requiring houses in the southern part of the state to have them installed in order to enforce water conservation measures there.
Remind me never to live in California, she thought. One of the few sybaritic luxuries that she’d learned to enjoy during her lifetime was a good, long, piping hot shower ― and since coming aboard ship that luxury had taken on the dimensions of an addiction, one that she could never get enough of. After spending sixteen hours or more wrapped up in a stinking flight suit, the thought of coming here to face the snake could be damned near unbearable.
The worst of it was that the snake didn’t work all that well, though she didn’t know if the flaw was in the snake’s design or somewhere in Jefferson’s plumbing. The best the thing could manage was an anemic stream of tepid water, when it was supposed to blast the skin with a high-powered jet. When she’d complained about it to Group Seven, the ship’s engineering and hull department, they’d laughed and told her to get in line.
“Shit, Commander, you want us to tear half the ship apart so’s you can get a decent shower?” one old-Navy pipe fitter chief had asked, grinning at her around the stub of a reeking cigar. “Maybe you got yourself in the wrong career track, know what I mean?”
She could have reported the guy for that crack ― published Naval standards about what constituted sexual harassment in the wake of the Tailhook scandal were exhaustive, specific, and draconian ― but she preferred to handle that sort of thing with professionalism and wit, not a reliance on regulations. She’d replied with an icy, “And maybe your people are in the wrong jobs if they can’t make the plumbing on this ship work,” and let it go at that.
Grimly, she continued sluicing the soap off her body, occasionally giving the shower attachment another shake, as though the hose were blocked and a good shake might free it. Navy showers were just one of the countless adjustments Brewer and the other women serving aboard the carrier had had to make as the price of equality, and generally the feeling was that if the men could put up with it, so could the women. Still, she wasn’t entirely certain whether the low pressure in the women’s head was something everyone aboard suffered with, or whether it was a problem restricted to the shower head reserved for female personnel. If it was the former, there wasn’t anything to be done about it. If the latter, then someone was having some twisted fun at the women’s expense… or worse, they were using this particular form of harassment to let the women know that they weren’t wanted aboard, and something most certainly would have to be done about that.
But Brewer wasn’t sure how to go about finding out which it was. What was she supposed to do, walk up to the ship’s Exec and ask him whether or not his shower was hot? Ask to inspect the enlisted men’s shower heads? Or demand a return to the bad old days when men and women had shared one of the carrier’s shower heads on a rotating schedule? God, that had been a nightmare.
Their last overseas deployment, earlier in the year, had been a comedy of inconveniences and logistical headaches. A shared shower head had been just one of the problems. After the Kola Peninsula deployment, Jefferson had returned to Norfolk for refits and resupply in May, while her carrier wing had transferred to NAS Oceana for training. Normally, a Stateside deployment would last for at least six months, but with things going to hell all over the world, the U.S. Navy’s twelve-carrier fleet was stretched to the absolute limit… and maybe a bit beyond. After only four short months, Jefferson had been ordered to sea again; the men and women of CVW-20 had said good-bye to families and loved ones at Oceana, then flown their aircraft out to a rendezvous and trap aboard the carrier as it cruised several miles offshore in the Atlantic.
Some reworkings when the ship had been back in Norfolk over the summer had made things considerably better for the female contingent; they still were forced to take a multi-deck detour from points aft of the hangar deck, but they at least now had one whole, entire shower head that belonged to them and them alone.
She had to keep reminding herself that things were improving for the women aboard… but they still had a long way to go. The women had their own berthing and shower facilities now. Most of the men accepted them, too, despite the inevitable jokes about “Amazons” and “skirts.” In most ways, it was no worse than being stationed ashore; an aircraft carrier was such an enormous place it was sometimes almost possible to forget that you were actually aboard a ship at sea.
A sudden thunder followed by a harsh rattling sound from overhead was an adequate reminder, however. The thunder had been suspended for most of the day by the lull in flight operations that had brought them through the straits from the Aegean Sea, but it was in full force once more, with a full flight schedule resumed almost the instant the Jefferson had left Turkish waters. It was even noisier one level up, on the 0–3 deck, where most of the enlisted men were quartered directly beneath the “roof.”
She released the sprayer’s button and hung it back on the side of the shower stall, still feeling a bit gritty and soap-filmed. Her hair, she decided, would just have to wait for another time. She kept it cut short, the blond tresses reaching only halfway down between ear and shoulder so they wouldn’t interfere with wearing a flight helmet, but even that much was a pain to keep clean when the water was as sluggish as this. The guys had the right idea there; most had crew-cuts, and some wore little more up top than razor stubble, which made washing their hair as easy as passing a washcloth over their scalp. Some of the other women in the squadron had already taken that step and cut their hair so short the skin showed through. Brewer wasn’t quite ready for anything that drastic… but each time she took a shower in here, the day got just a little closer.