“Ah, glad you could join us, Commander Boyle. Please have a seat,” said the deputy.
The commodore nodded to acknowledge him and then resumed squinting at the PowerPoint.
“You misspelled airborne. There’s no E at the end,” grumbled the commodore.
“Sir, I think there is,” replied the lieutenant in a nervous voice.
“Look it up, then. And change the font. Who put this in Calibri font? The admiral’s staff has put out specific guidelines for all his briefs. We’ve been over this.” He shook his head in disgust. “Calibri.”
The baggy-eyed lieutenant typing at the computer mumbled something under his breath. Boyle didn’t catch it, but the deputy smiled.
“What was that?” said the commodore.
“I’ll fix it, sir.” He made a few changes and began rearranging the words on the screen to fit better.
Commander Boyle smiled inwardly. Senior officers, during speeches to their junior officers, often liked to say that they envied them. But the truth was that Boyle didn’t miss this staff officer bullshit one little bit.
Boyle’s career was a winding road. He had stepped on and off the golden path towards admiral too many times to count. There was one unbreakable commandment known to all military personnel organizations. Thou shalt not have a gap in thy service record. And James Boyle didn’t just have a gap.
He had a chasm.
A 1990 graduate of the University of Notre Dame, Boyle had served honorably for eight years as a surface warfare officer. His first assignment as a junior officer had been aboard the USS Missouri, one of the last of the US Navy battleships. He had stood watch on the bridge in 1991, the night they had begun firing their sixteen-inch guns into Kuwait, the booming of which still reverberated in his chest cavity.
After eight years as an overachieving junior officer, James Boyle had decided — against all advice from his chain of command — to get out and go civilian. The choice for him had been about family. His kids had barely seen him, and his wife was tired and stressed out from raising them alone for months on end.
Things had gone well in the private sector. He’d excelled at his job and had been rewarded with rapid promotions and generous bonuses. His wife and he had decided to purchase a new car — a BMW, which delighted his mother-in-law. They’d joined a country club. He’d begun networking more — playing rounds of golf with company executives and getting calls from high-end headhunters.
But something was missing.
Behind the smiles and raised glasses of congratulations was an emptiness that James Boyle couldn’t make go away.
But he missed the brotherhood, and he missed the sense of fulfillment that came with a life of military service. His corporate friends were often awed by his stories — but he no longer wanted to tell them. Boyle was barely thirty years old in 2001, but he felt like he was already turning into an old man — reminiscing about the good old days, when he was miserable aboard a ship.
After long talks with his wife — some featuring her wiping teary eyes — she’d agreed to support him in his quest to go back to active duty. It wasn’t quick or easy. The Navy personnel weenies had made him go through all sorts of medical screenings and jump through paperwork hoops. But eventually, James Boyle had been recommissioned back into active-duty Navy service.
That was in August of 2001. Just before the world had changed overnight.
Within weeks, he was underway, and sailing toward the Middle East. His ship was sortied in response to the September 11th attacks, and by October he was standing watch while his destroyer fired Tomahawk missiles at targets in Afghanistan.
As it turned out, getting out of the Navy had only hurt his career so much. He was promoted to commander, and he was even selected for a coveted commanding officer billet. He wouldn’t make admiral. There were too many holes in his record for that. But he might just make captain someday. More importantly, he was happy. His time in corporate America had given him a new appreciation for everything that the military had to offer.
After his recent change of command six months ago, Boyle had been temporarily assigned to the USS Ford as she went through sea trials, and while he awaited his next set of orders. Then the call came a few weeks ago. The Farragut needed a captain. And like any good officer, Boyle was more than happy to take another command.
Now, he stood on board America’s newest aircraft carrier, with a new command and a new challenge on the horizon, watching two junior officers squirm under the scrutiny of his new boss.
At times like this, when he watched young junior officers as they tried to appease the nitpickings of their senior officers, all he could do was laugh to himself. To the JOs, their whole world was right here on this ship. The commodore was their god. And thus, two of the best and brightest that the United States had to offer were held in brutal misery over which font must be used in the daily PowerPoint brief. These two junior officers would go on to do great things. But for now, this was their penance for having that privilege.
“Sir, I just checked — airborne has an E at the end.”
“That’s what I said,” came the commodore. The lieutenant glanced up but didn’t say anything. He just made the change. The commodore said, “Easy there, Lieutenant. It takes a big man to admit when he’s wrong.”
The lieutenant looked back up.
The commodore said, “I’m not a big man.” Then a large grin broke out on his face.
The lieutenant smiled nervously back at him and resumed typing. Boyle stifled a laugh. At least the commodore had a sense of humor.
Both of these young officers were on the commodore’s staff. One was the Destroyer Squadron (Desron)’s operations officer. The other was the future operations officer. There must have been fifty people on board the aircraft carrier with the term operations officer in their job title, each one working for a different staff or squadron. The operations officers were essentially the managers who planned things like ship movements and aircraft missions.
In a lot of ways, working on the carrier reminded Boyle of working in a large corporation. There were dozens of silos, each one filled with personnel that were very experienced in their own function, but had much less understanding of what lay in the other silos. In a business, there might be separate departments for IT, human resources, sales, marketing, finance, manufacturing, and R&D, each silo filled with people dedicated to performing their specific task.
On the aircraft carrier, it was the same thing. The different groups formed their own cultures. The nuclear engineers who operated deep within the bowels of the carrier hadn’t seen sunlight in two weeks and had strict safety schedules about how many minutes they could stay in their hot duty spaces. But they would be like a deer on a highway if they went topside onto the carrier’s flight deck. The flight deck crew who spent all day launching and recovering aircraft, on the other hand, were highly attuned to that environment, but they probably couldn’t tell you the first thing about nuclear power. The junior officers on the commodore’s staff, who spent all day meticulously planning what each ship was going to be doing for the next six weeks, were flabbergasted when they met some of the F-18 pilots who didn’t even know the name of the destroyer only ten miles away. Everyone had a job to do, and they became experts at those jobs. The carrier environment was so complex that few, if any, were experts in everything.
That’s why men like the commodore, the CAG, and the admiral got the big bucks.
There were significant differences between life on the carrier and in corporate America, however. When Boyle had worked in the business world, he had often heard his colleagues complain of never being able to detach from work. They were always answering emails and many times had to work at night after putting the kids to bed. Boyle laughed at that sentiment. On deployment, work really was constant. You lived with your fellow employees. You often ate with — or at least in sight of — your boss at every meal. The phone often rang at all hours of the night because there was something that the watch standers needed you to know about. Work was literally 24/7. And there was no family, video chat, or phone calls. Not until you pulled into port every eight weeks. And the “time off” during port visits was spent with none other than your fellow employees. Eat, sleep, drink, work, play. It made no matter. Military life was all-consuming. And that was just the Navy. It was nothing compared to what some of the ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan had to go through.