Correspondent: Warship Tx Date: 1st December 2002 This script was made from audio tape – any inaccuracies are due to voices being unclear or inaudible 00.00.01 Aircraft taking off 00.00.08 Peter Snow There are few weapons more formidable than a United States Navy nuclear- powered aircraft carrier. 00.00.16 Peter Snow Four and a half acres of sovereign American real estate able to fight a war anywhere in the world. 00.00.23 Peter Snow This July the USS Abraham Lincoln was ordered out of its homeport with a new mission: To fight President Bush's war on terror and to stand by for his order to strike Iraq. But this ship is not just a gigantic war machine. It's 6000 people too. 00.00.47 Peter Snow People who must live long periods away from those they love, who face the extra fear of not knowing how they will perform in combat, and long backbreaking hours of work amidst the heat, noise and danger of an active carrier's flight deck. 00.01.05 Peter Snow By October the Lincoln had taken up station in the Arabian Gulf close to the border of Iraq. The sailors and officers on deck made it clear that if called upon this warship was ready. 00.01.18 Title Page WARSHIP 00.01.27 Graphic USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72) North Arabian Sea October 10th 2002 05h45 00.01.39 Boatswain Patrick I know we are getting busy with flight operations and stuff like that going down. We're rock and roll, man. We've got to get this done, we've got to get this done, we've got to get this done. That's bad. 00.01.48 Boatswain Patrick We've been out here. We're half way done and guess what happened again? We're getting back to that rush mode. If you're short and you can't do something, speak up and let them know. 00.01.57 Boatswain Patrick You know Chief will back you up. If you can't do it, you can't do it. He'll live with that. However, you try to do something that's basically impossible, put you in the hurt locker, that's not good voodoo. That's bad, bad shit. 00.02.09 Peter Snow Thirty-nine years old Boatswain Mike Patrick is in charge of a team of yellow shirts. Their job is to manoeuvre the carrier's eighty aircraft on, off and around the flight deck, a potentially lethal place in which to work. 00.02.25 Peter Snow FOD, or Foreign Object Detection, is a ritual of carrier life, a meticulous search of the flight deck for anything, no matter how insignificant, that shouldn't be there. A tiny piece of metal, even a loose rag, is a real hazard to men and machines. 00.02.42 Yellow shirt FOD is a real big deal. We've just had a FOD walk down and this is what we find out on the flight deck that shouldn't be there. If any of this stuff gets into a jet engine then that jet engine is toast. So we have to walk the deck four or five times a day to ensure that this stuff doesn't get into the jet engines. 00.03.00 Boatswain Patrick Just another damn day in paradise. God bless America. 00.03.03 Aston Chief Warrant Officer MIKE PATRICK Air Boatswain Mate 17 years in the Navy When I saw an old Boatswain one time coming across that deck and that old crusty son of a gun was out there just pounding that deck and everything like that. It was hot and everyone responded to him. A lot of people didn't like him much but the respect was there. 00.03.14 Boatswain Patrick That guy jumped overboard a lot of people would have went with him because he knew what he was doing and he knew how to do it. Young sailors just bonded to him. And I was one of those young sailors and I said, hey, I like that. I said I want to be that. 00.03.25 Boatswain Patrick I want to be that officer one time that my sailors can respect me and can go from there and can be that leader you know, that leader of leaders. 00.03.32 Boatswain Patrick Patriotic, heart and soul. Heart and soul. Well I've been patriotic when I came out of my mama. I mean I'm motivated, I came out there ready to rock and roll. 00.03.41 Peter Snow The navy has been Boatswain Patrick's life for seventeen years. During the last Gulf War his ship was in dry dock and he was disappointed to have missed the action. 00.03.50 Peter Snow Now, with the Lincoln poised ready to strike against Iraq, Boatswain Patrick has no doubts about why they'll be fighting. 00.03.57 Boatswain Patrick The whole situation with 9.11 gave everybody a reality check. I mean if it didn't, somebody needs to get that light bulb turned back on. The President's not going to let this happen again and if Saddam Hussein is building those type of weapons and if he says that they got them, then I believe that they have. 00.04.17 Boatswain Patrick And I do not want it to happen again to our country, no, and will it happen again next week? I pray not. But it's the future, my kids, your kids, anybody's kids, you know throughout the world. 00.04.29 Peter Snow Thirty-two year old Lt. Dave "Knuckles" Kneeland from Oakland, California is the pilot of a FA-18 Hornet fighter jet, and a member of a squadron known as the Fist of the Fleet. For Knuckles, flying has always been in his blood. 00.04.45 Lt. Kneeland My dad was a crop duster for twenty-six years and I kind of grew up in the area where the base is at, and I always wanted to do a fighter pilot thing and I always enjoyed just the fact of flying and the speed. 00.04.58 Wingman Okay. We already got the hack, we got civic? 00.05.03 Peter Snow This morning Knuckles is being briefed for a bombing and close air support exercise by his wingman. 00.05.10 Lt. Kneeland Close air support, what it means is that we're on station overhead and if somebody needs some help, we're there to support them. Let that be just do and show a force maybe flying over a little bit, dropping out some flares just to show, hey look, I can conquer these guys, here they come. Or dropping bombs and helping out some of our troops when they're under fire. 00.05.31 Lt. Kneeland Just go out there and actually just simulate. 00.05.33 Wingman Simulate. 00.05.33 Lt. Kneeland Simulate it? 00.05.34 Wingman Yeah. 00.05.38 Peter Snow The single-seat Hornet flies at more than a thousand miles an hour. It's armed with an array of high explosive weaponry and there is very little room for error. 00.05.48 Aston Lt. DAVE "Knuckles" KNEELAND FA-18 Hornet Fighter Jet Pilot First deployment We strive to be perfect on every aspect, every aspect and I think we are the hardest critiques of ourselves, because we want the brief to be perfect. 00.06.00 Lt. Kneeland We want the radio, just checking in on the radio, we want to be very professional, precise, and you know I do this a way, maybe I didn't say stand by on aux, I said, stand by to check in on aux or something. Just the switching of words, it wasn't right and it has to be precise and everyone holds themselves to a high standard like that. 00.06.22 Aston Chief Petty Officer THOMAS N. AMANO Runs the Hangar Bay I'm going to bring this EA6P Prowler up to the flight deck and it's gonna be offloaded because they need it today for today's flight operations. 00.06.33 Peter Snow Aircraft are maintained overnight in the hangar bay and one of four massive elevators are used to shuttle aircraft to and from the flight deck. 00.06.43 Peter Snow Flight deck crew are obsessive about chocking and chaining aircraft. And you can see why. On the confined space of the flight deck there's a real possibility of an unchained plane rolling overboard. 00.06.58 Chief Petty Officer Amano The aircraft elevator's capacity ranges from a hundred thousand pounds to a max capacity of a hundred thirty thousand pounds. We have our elevator operators who watch our weight, make sure we don't overload. Otherwise we can't get it up to the flight deck when we have to start taking stuff off. 00.07.17 Peter Snow Once on the flight deck, Boatswain Patrick's team park the plane into its slot for the first flight plan of the day. 00.07.27 Music 00.07.44 Peter Snow Before every flight planes are configured for the mission that they will fly and that's recorded in the plane's maintenance logbook. 00.07.53 Lt. Kneeland This is the nerve centre of maintenance. This is maintenance control. Eighty-one here is on the radio with Dog and our flight deck control senior chief up there so they can communicate and tell them what jet's up, where the jet's at, if it's ready or if it's not ready. 00.08.08 Lt. Kneeland So we're just typically in here reading the book trying to look and see what we can expect. They'll give us a brief here on how the jet's running and how everything's looking. Today's kinda nice actually. It should be a fun hop today. 00.08.24 Aston Commander BRIAN TOON Air Boss (Ex-fighter pilot) These guys are some of the very highly trained pilots in the world. Their training process begins nine to twelve months prior to this where we get the entire air wing together and practising all sorts of missions that they will be asked to do. And by the time we deploy on our six- month deployment they are at the peak of their readiness. 00.08.36 Graphic Primary Flight Control Centre (Pri- Fly) 10h30 00.08.46 Boatswain Patrick You guys ready to rock? Come on up. Get your cradle back on and let's have some fun. 00.08.55 Mini Boss It's time for all personnel to shift into the proper flight deck uniform, helmets on, goggles down, sleeves rolled down, life vests on and securely fastened, check chocks, tie down chains loosely about the deck. 00.09.05 Mini Boss Check jet blasts are not pointing towards a nearby aircraft or weapons, verify all control surfaces are clear, stand clear of exhausts, stand clear of starter units, let's start the aircraft, let's start them up! 00.09.19 Boatswain Patrick You know they call it the greatest show on Earth. The flight deck, there's nothing like it to me. Every time you go on that flight deck it's a rush. I look at it this way. Sailors work from flight op to flight op, zero nine to zero one, humping tow bars, tying up chains, consistently on the flight deck, moving back and forth, you know, and they re-enlist for it. 00.09.39 Boatswain Patrick And you say, why in God's name are they re-enlisted for something that's so brutal physically and mentally. And they do it because it's a rush. 00.09.48 Boatswain Patrick Subtitles Spark, a lot of times there'll be Two planes waiting for cat 4. 00.09.52 Boatswain Patrick Subtitles They did a hell of an Outstanding job, outstanding. 00.09.55 Boatswain Patrick On the flight deck things don't happen like they're supposed to all the time you know. Things change in a microsecond and when they change in a microsecond you gotta be out there and click, you gotta make things go. 00.10.13 Lt. Kneeland This is our G-suit here. Basically there's bladders here across our stomachs and hook into the jet every time you pull a little bit more than three Gs, airflow comes in, inflates our bladders here and keeps the blood to the head so that it doesn't have us pass out. 00.10.29 Lt. Kneeland G-lock it's called. Loss of consciousness under G and helps us sustain a little bit more G capability. 00.10.37 Lt. Kneeland This is a torso harness. What this does is it actually straps us into the ejection seat. The ejection seat we're strapped in eight ways. Two at the waist, two at the shoulder and four on the legs, and this is what keeps you in the seat. And up top here is the survival vest. 00.10.58 Lt. Kneeland I don't think there's any complacent pilots in the fighter community because we are so busy. Even if we're just sat there drilling holes in the sky you're usually in formation. That means you can't be complacent. 00.11.08 Lt. Kneeland If you daydream you could smack into each other. Your heart's starting to pump, starting to get a little adrenaline in you; it's the whole thing. You definitely get the rush every single time. 00.11.21 Boatswain Patrick Subtitles I'm a little fired up man; the adrenaline's going on pretty good today. 00.11.28 Peter Snow Ensuring that Knuckles' Hornet is ready to fly and has been correctly set up for his practice mission is the job of a brown shirt aircrew, their leader known as a plane captain. 00.11.38 Lt. Kneeland Subtitles I'm doing an evaluation form - Did you get it? 00.11.44 Peter Snow But ultimately it is Knuckles who must check that the work has been done to his satisfaction. 00.11.50 Lt. Kneeland Subtitles He did a great job; he always does a good job! 00.11.54 Peter Snow This is his first carrier deployment, which makes him, in Navy parlance, a nugget. 00.12.00 Lt. Kneeland The reason they call them a nugget is because they've invested so much money in you. So basically you're kind of like a gold nugget. You're getting out there and you perform the best you can. 00.12.14 Lt. Kneeland I think it's self-induced pressure. You don't want to let the team down; you don't want to let the air wing down. You just want to perform the best you can. 00.12.23 Peter Snow On the flight deck pilots and deck crew are totally reliant on each other. 00.12.28 Lt. Kneeland You learn to keep your head on a swivel to find out what's going on around you. Like if you're taxiing your aeroplane you're barely missing a couple of aeroplanes, maybe a foot or less, so you kind of keep your head out. 00.12.38 Lt. Kneeland It's supposed to be other people in charge of that, but ultimately you're the one who signed for the aeroplane and if anything happens to it, you're the one who's going to get in trouble for it. 00.12.49 Commander Toon My position, with my assistant the mini boss, we run the air department; five hundred and fifty hard-working men and woman that launch the catapults, operate the arresting gear that recover the aircraft. 00.13.05 Commander Toon We fuel the aircraft and move the aircraft around on this twelve hundred square feet of real estate we call the flight deck. 00.13.17 Commander Toon In about a minute from now you'll see a FA-18 Hornet positioned on catapult number four begin his hook-up to the catapult with his nose wheel. 00.13.28 Commander Toon He will proceed to go to full power, he'll signal the man on the deck with a salute that he's ready to go fly. 00.13.36 Commander Toon That salute will be acknowledged. He'll give the thumbs up and the catapult will be fired, accelerating the aircraft from zero to a hundred and twenty knots in about three hundred feet of travel. 00.13.48 Aircraft taking off 00.14.11 Peter Snow If there is a war with Iraq, Knuckles is one of the pilots that will be expected to drop both conventional and smart bombs with absolute precision. They practice bombing runs day and night using the carrier as a target. 00.14.34 Lt. Kneeland What it is, "bomb the wake", basically low level ingress about five hundred knots, five hundred feet, and then at a certain distance from the ship we pop up and come in and bomb the back end of the ship. 00.14.45 Lt. Kneeland Basically there's no time for mistakes, especially when you do low-level stuff and you're down low and you have your nose pointing towards the water. 00.14.53 Lt. Kneeland You try not to get fixated on the target or in this case the back end of the ship, the wake, and definitely you want to pull off, and sometimes it gets a little unnerving throwing your plane down at the dirt like that. Today we were just kind of having fun down there close to the ocean. A great day for flying. 00.15.13 Peter Snow But how does Knuckles feel about the possibility of dropping real bombs on real targets? 00.15.18 Lt. Kneeland I've been in combat but I haven't actually dropped on anything yet, so I can't really tell how I would feel. You're working your ass off, you're trying to do the best you can, but as far as assimilating that to people or buildings, I do not. I just feel there's an objective for me to get accomplished. 00.15.39 Peter Snow Since July the Lincoln has patrolled the waters at the mouth of the Arabian Gulf and provided close air support for US ground forces in Afghanistan. 00.15.47 Peter Snow But later this month the Lincoln will move into the Gulf where her aircraft will patrol the no-fly zone over Southern Iraq and if ordered by President Bush strike at the heart of Saddam Hussein's regime. 00.16.05 Peter Snow Eighteen thousand meals are cooked every day around the clock. All new sailors have to serve time on the mess decks. Twenty years old Naveed Muhammad is one of them. He's an aircraft electrician, but today he has the job of counting the lines, so the chefs know how many people to cook for. 00.16.24 Naveed Muhammad All the new sailors have to do this. Next. It's in your contract. You have to do ninety days of service for what we call down here is cranking. 00.16.35 Naveed Muhammad First class. Another first class. 00.16.38 Naveed Muhammad It gets pretty crowded over here sometimes. When you've got a big line it gets crowded. 00.16.49 Aston Electrician's Mate NAVEED MUHAMMAD Food Order Attendant First tour of duty I'm looking forward to getting back to my job in nine days because in nine days I'll be done with it down here and then I'll be pretty much doing my own job which I was trained for was an electrician. 00.17.05 Naveed Muhammad To me it's easy because I work with electricity you know lighting, working with catapults on the flight deck, stuff like that. Right, next! 00.17.16 Peter Snow Operating in the hazardous waters of the North Arabian Sea poses many unforeseeable dangers. Not far from here a US Navy destroyer, the USS Cole, was severely damaged by a Zodiac high-speed launch piloted by suicide bombers loaded with high explosives. 00.17.23 Graphic Captain's Bridge 11h30 00.17.33 Aston Captain DOUGLAS K. DUPOUY Commanding Officer USS Abraham Lincoln I can't tell you there's one specific threat that would rank above others. We watch everything with a very close eye and we're trained towards everything with a very close eye. So we're prepared for virtually anything, any specific threat can get you any one time so you have to be prepared for all of them. 00.17.51 Watch Officer Right now there's a group three merchant tanker out, and we're trying to get visual ID on it, hoping that he will stay clear of us where we can continue uninterrupted with our flight ops. 00.18.01 Peter Snow A captain and officers on watch treat all vessels as suspicious until proved otherwise. 00.18.06 Watch Officer Anything that we do have suspicions about we'll alert the specific teams and we have the resources to send a helo out, a helicopter out to go take a look at them and clear up any problems or anything that may arise. 00.18.23 Peter Snow Having flown combat missions against Iraq during the last Gulf War and made over a thousand carrier landings, Captain Dupouy knows only too well what it's like to land on a flight deck. 00.18.34 Capt. Dupouy Well, landing on an aircraft carrier is very challenging. It's done safely so consistently because we have what I think is very good training. That's not to say incidents don't happen but we certainly train consistently and continuously towards safe operations. 00.18.56 Lt. Whitely Hey, I just got e-mail from Erin, and Ava took her first steps today, three steps. My little girl, she's just past one year old and she took three steps today. 00.19.10 Aston Lieutenant RICH "Wolfy" WHITELY Pilot & Landing Signals Officer Carrier Air Wing 14 Well obviously I would like to have seen it, but we're out here doing an important mission so I always knew when I got this job there's be significant sacrifices, so kinda just goes with the territory I guess but it's still a little bit sad. All right, we need to start moving towards the platform. 00.19.30 Peter Snow Lieutenant "Wolfy" Whitely is in charge of a team of Landing Signal Officers, LSOs. They're pilots too and it's their responsibility to assess the toughest part of a pilot's job - landing on a floating airstrip. 00.19.43 Lt. Whitely All right, got my float coat. Every good LSO needs a cool pair of shades and some earplugs. 00.19.53 Peter Snow This afternoon, Knuckles is one of the pilots whose landings Wolfy will grade. 00.19.58 Lt. Whitely And that should be it. We're all set. 00.20.00 Lt. Whitely That's Bobby. He's the team lead. We've got Snap; he's the back-up assistant team leader. Hoop's on the team too. Each one of these guys is a pilot. 00.20.11 Cdr. Toon Stand clear of the port catwalk and foul line. The deck is open. Land aircraft. 00.20.19 Lt. Whitely It's important that we grade all the passes aboard this ship because it's a method to keep the performance at the highest levels. The grades become public information so it's a matter of personal pride that your grades reflect a pretty high grade point average. 00.20.33 Lt. Whitely Your reputation around this ship is staked on your landing grades. Since we have such competitive guys, type-A personalities that make it to this business everybody's trying to do really well. 00.20.47 Cdr. Toon I need to watch my attention here as we bring in a FA-18 Hornet. Set Hornet. The landing signal officers are out on the platform there. They provide guidance to the aircraft as he's on final approach, giving the pilot help with his line-up and his glide slope. 00.21.07 Aston Commander BRIAN TOON Air Boss And if he has an emergency aircraft with some type of abnormal configuration, i.e. his flaps are not fully down, he may have engine problems or even be on a single engine approach they can talk him basically from the air back onto the deck. 00.21.27 Peter Snow If a pilot miscalculates his approach and fails to hook the arresting wire on landing it's called a bolter. 00.21.33 Lt. Whitely This guy had a high start. 00.21.35 Lt. Whitely To get a good landing we're looking for someone to fly a steady 3.5 degree glide slope all the way to touchdown 00.21.44 Lt. Whitely Bolter, bolter. That was a bolter. That's not a good way to start a recovery. 00.21.53 Cdr. Toon When a pilot touches down he goes to full power in anticipation of the aircraft going around in case he doesn't catch a wire he needs to have power on the aircraft to accelerate and go flying again. 00.22.08 Lt. Whitely Until I say the deck is clear no one is allowed to land. 00.22.24 Aircraft computer Altitude, altitude. 00.22.34 Lt. Whitely We won't say anything to the pilot if they're doing just fine. If they need our help that's when we'll speak up. 00.22.40 Lt. Whitely We don't want erratic movements. The margins for error are very very slight so we need guys to be smooth and most importantly to be predictable. 00.22.49 Lt. Whitely That is an escape net that we'll jump into if necessary if an aeroplane crashes on the back of this ship, or is about to. What's going to happen is that we're all going to go ahead and try and pile into that thing, try and escape the burning wreckage. 00.23.06 Cdr. Toon Here's another FA-18 lining himself up on final approach here. 00.23.11 Peter Snow On landing a pilot has to make sure his plane's tail hook catches one of the four arresting wires that stick up just four inches from the deck. 00.23.20 Landing Signal Officer Hornet three sixty. 00.23.21 Lt. Whitely Hornet. Got a clear deck. 00.23.29 Cdr. Toon The arresting gear wire is played out decelerating and bringing the aircraft to a stop, his hook goes up separating himself from the wire and the wire is withdrawn back into the battery. 00.23.49 Cdr. Toon You see each of these aircraft are actually landing with their missiles and bombs they carry, and several of these aircraft that you see just landed have just returned from a five hour mission over Afghanistan. 00.24.06 Cdr. Toon The last aircraft to land is always the tanker. It provides a little extra gas if a pilot has trouble landing aboard for whatever reason. The tanker is always the last to land. It's our safety valve. 00.24.22 Cdr. Toon Fixed wing recovery complete. LSE chocks and chains spot five. 00.24.26 Lt. Whitely What's going to happen now is we'll all leave the flight deck. We all go back down into that room with the hydraulic pump and then we're going to talk about the grades and make sure we don't have any contentious passes. 00.24.41 Lt. Whitely Shortly after we've recovered the tanker you'll see a helicopter recover and that's our search and rescue asset. Onboard the helicopter is a search and rescue swimmer qualified aircrew man or woman that's able to jump in the water if need be and help a pilot who may be injured and unable to help himself get aboard the helo hoist. 00.25.12 Peter Snow It's not only the pilots' landings that are being graded. The way the LSOs grade is graded as well, a process of continuous assessment, all aimed at helping the pilot improve his performance. 00.25.31 Landing Signal Officer Right, 102, forty-second interval, fifteen second groove length, settling close, a little high on the ramp. 00.25.40 Pilot That's exactly what I saw, that's great. Thanks. 00.25.48 Landing Signal Officer 413, thirty-nine second interval, eighteen second groove length, little slow in the middle, little closer on the ramp. 00.25.56 Lt. Whitely Nice job, Knuckles. 00.26.00 Lt. Kneeland What they told me was a thirty-nine second interval. What that means is from the plane in front of me to actually the box in when he landed was thirty-nine seconds. The optimum is forty-five seconds. 00.26.13 Lt. Kneeland Then they told me I had an eighteen second groove length, and what you want to do is basically, groove length is from when your wings level coming into the groove getting ready to land and the optimum between that is fifteen and eighteen, so there I was within limits. 00.26.25 Lt. Kneeland Thirty-nine was a little on the short side, maybe I could have waited a second or two before I turned off the beam there, like I say always if you do something wrong put it in your pocket and keep it there for next time. 00.26.40 Graphic Female Berthing 16h30 00.26.41 Peter Snow Twenty-four years old Jill Ameperosa is one of nine hundred women aboard the Lincoln. She works a fourteen-hour night shift. 00.26.51 Jill Ameperosa Right now it's four thirty in the morning. My morning that is. Actually it's sixteen thirty afternoon. First thing in the morning I think what my kids have done the night before, see what went wrong or what went good. Hopefully they didn't do anything to get themselves hurt. 00.27.12 Jill Ameperosa There's sixteen of them on day shift, sixteen of them on night shift and they're the youngest sailors that we usually have in our squadron. They're my subordinates. 00.27.26 Jill Ameperosa I take care of them so they're my children. Don't want them to get hurt, want them to be safe, do what they're supposed to do, where they're supposed to be. 00.27.33 Peter Snow Jill has one of the dirtiest jobs on the carrier. She and the brown shirts under her command spend the night scrubbing, cleaning, oiling, greasing and fixing planes so they're for flight ops the following morning. If they don't do their jobs, the jets don't fly. 00.27.52 Peter Snow Equipment checks are vital. If a tool has been chipped the missing piece could be sucked into a jet's engine. Even rags have to be signed in and out. 00.28.02 Aston Aviation Maint. 3rd Class JILL AMEPEROSA Plane Captain Doing it now, make sure all the tools are in the tool pouch where they're supposed to be. Make sure everything's good working order, tips aren’t chipped, not broken, making sure it's good for my shift to come and relieve day shift. 00.28.27 Jill Ameperosa Tool logbook. Each shift we have to sign out every tool that we use, make sure all the tools are accounted for before I sign for it. 00.28.43 Peter Snow By late afternoon it's still over 100 degrees on the flight deck. Boatswain Patrick and his team have launched and recovered over sixty aircraft, but he for one would rather be in the cockpit. 00.28.56 Boatswain Patrick Between you and me, if I had a joystick between my legs and I can go in Mach Three, I'd be happy every day. Oh my God. 00.29.06 Boatswain Patrick If they complain I don't really kinda listen to them. I say, hey you're lucky, I wish I had the intel or the knowledge to go inverted and stuff and fly every day. To me, that would be, Oh my God. 00.29.27 Boatswain Patrick Team effort. All the way. I depend on him, he depends on me. We all depend on each other. I know he's got my back, I know I've got their back. We got a team effort. 00.29.39 Peter Snow Jill's team is the same age as her and almost exclusively male. Imposing her authority on them is a challenge. 00.29.47 Jill Ameperosa If you're nice to one person just a little bit everybody else expects, well she'll be nice to me. Can't play favourites so you have to be tough on them. If you give them an inch they'll take a mile. 00.30.00 First crew member She's very good. She knows her stuff and there's a lot I can learn from her. 00.30.05 Second crew member She gets in everybody's face and everything like that to make sure everybody that they get their job done and they know what they're doing. 00.30.11 Third crew member When she wants the work to be done you need to do it, no matter what the cause. 00.30.16 Fourth crew member I wouldn't piss her off if I was you. 00.30.23 Jill Ameperosa They're like a dog. If a male tells the dog what to do they're gonna listen. A female tells the dog to sit down, they're gonna be like, who are you talking to? It's like the Alpha male they still got wild in them, so you know it takes a lot. 00.30.39 Jill Ameperosa Hey, I'm in charge. I don't care if I'm a female and I'm littler than you. You're gonna listen to me, like it or not. That's just how it is. We're in the military. You respect the uniform I wear. 00.30.51 Peter Snow Jill always checks the deck before her night crew begins work. 00.30.54 Jill Ameperosa I gotta make sure the jets have at least six chains on them, all the doors are secure. I make sure the jets are secure just to be sitting on the flight deck, find out its position so when all my guys come in I can tell them where their jets are at. 00.31.15 Naveed Muhammad I just wear this shirt because we have to have something past our elbows, so they cannot be exposed. 00.31.23 Peter Snow Out of the six thousand on the Lincoln Naveed Muhammad is the only Muslim. 00.31.29 Naveed Muhammad I am taking out my rug, which I normally pray on, and the reason why I put it this way so is you know nobody can really walk in front of me and I can pray without being bothered. 00.31.39 Peter Snow It's not easy having to pray five times a day on a warship that's constantly changing direction. Naveed's Mullah back in Washington DC has given him special dispensation not to worry about facing Mecca. 00.31.52 Naveed Muhammad To me religion is very very very important. If you're a Muslim and you go off your faith and you change your religion you cannot convert back again. So you have to practice the religion. 00.32.04 Aston Electrician's Mate NAVEED MUHAMMAD When I checked on board, on board USS Abraham Lincoln I asked everybody if they minded me praying like that or if they would be offended if I practised my religion. Both in my shop and over here most of the guys told me no. 00.32.20 Graphic Squadron VFA-25 Ready Room Alert 15 18h00 00.32.21 Peter Snow Even though Knuckles has already spent five hours in the air his work for the day is not yet over. He's never completely off duty. 00.32.29 Lt. Kneeland I am on the alert status, Alert fifteen. Basically you have to be in your full flight gear. Got the helmet there, my napbag ready to go, in case they call away an alert for whatever the reason may be. 00.32.41 Lt. Kneeland We basically have to be off the flight deck in fifteen minutes, so there's different types of alert, but this one's Alert fifteen, so you're usually in your ready room in your complete gear for a couple of hours. 00.32.55 Lt. Kneeland Quite comfortable. At the moment I'm just writing an article that I've been asked to do for one of our approach magazines that goes out to Naval Aviation, kind of like lessons learnt in a jet, so I'm trying to drum up something on that. 00.33.22 Boatswain Patrick I'll take care of that. 00.33.34 Peter Snow For pilots who have been flying missions over hostile territory and have spent as much as seven hours in the air, the first glimpse of the carrier on their return is always a welcome sight. 00.33.47 Lt. Kneeland You're in the cockpit for probably eight hours. There's not much room in there and your bum starts getting hurt a little bit. 00.33.58 Peter Snow It's not only the pilots who are exhausted. The continuous cycle of launch and recovery starts to take its toll on the yellow shirts as well. 00.34.07 Boatswain Patrick I gotta do what I can do, man, to keep up with the young kids, because it's like a domino effect. If they see the leader go, then all of a sudden then boom boom boom boom. And they're eighteen, nineteen years old. 00.34.17 Boatswain Patrick They see that old son of a gun out there rock and rolling continually kicking butt with them and they say, what the hell, and they'll keep it up. 00.34.25 Boatswain Patrick Then every once in a while you give them a handshake, you know, pop them on, you know, headbutt them, pop them on the cranial and stuff like that and motivate them and stuff. You're in there. You're in there and that's a good thing. 00.34.35 Peter Snow Fighting exhaustion is not the only thing they have to deal with. At the back of their minds is the possibility of going to war at any time. 00.34.42 Boatswain Patrick It's an emotional roller coaster, you know, and everybody deals with it their own way. There were two guys staring at that beautiful sky and I asked them what are you thinking about. 00.34.52 Boatswain Patrick And one of them told me, Boson, I'm thinking about my wife and my kids and what's going to happen here pretty soon. 00.34.58 Boatswain Patrick And I looked at him, I said, whatever happens, are you ready, man? And he said, Sir, I'm ready to rock. I said, me too, baby, and I said, be ready. It's gonna take you by surprise. 00.35.07 Boatswain Patrick It could be happening at one o'clock in the morning, the adrenaline's gonna flow, your heart's gonna pound one hundred beats per minute, then I went over to the other sailor and I said, what are you looking at? 00.35.16 Boatswain Patrick He said, man, it's beautiful, ain't it? I said, It don't get no better than this. This is why I stay at sea all the time. It's the prettiest thing you ever seen in your life. 00.35.28 Peter Snow But months away from home really can take their toll. Jill's husband is also in the Navy serving on another carrier. 00.35.36 Jill Ameperosa Subtitles We never see each other. We never see each other more than four months in the last three years. It's tough. Two days after I get home he leaves. It's just too hard. I used to love him. But you can't love somebody you don't know anymore… That's why we're in the process of a divorce. 00.36.12 Peter Snow Meal times can also be a struggle if you're the only Muslim on board. 00.36.18 Naveed Muhammad They don't cook Halal food, but you know, me, I just try to stay away from meats. I have a lot of spaghetti, noodles. 00.36.28 Naveed Muhammad Stuff like that, because, see, being that there aren't many Muslims on the ship, they really don't know about it, and I don't really want to tell them to change their whole menu. I mean, I'm sure if I asked them they might consider it or something like that. 00.36.57 Jill Ameperosa I told you. Move over. 00.37.00 First crew member I'm getting out of here. 00.37.03 Second crew member You gonna eat that? 00.37.04 Jill Ameperosa I'm gonna try to. Gimme the ketchup, please. 00.37.11 Second crew member That's why I filled up on bread and peanut butter. 00.37.14 Jill Ameperosa That's why I got mashed potatoes and bread and stuff. Hey, what about her? A hundred thousand dollars. 00.37.26 Third crew member My charge is two bucks a pop. 00.37.29 Fourth crew member That's starting, but if they're especially funky, you know what I mean? 00.37.32 Jill Ameperosa Oh, in her dreams, he was a porn star. They're pointing out chicks they would have sex with and how much it would cost to have sex with each one. They're cool. 00.37.41 Jill Ameperosa We all work together and even back home we hang out together, so it's like all of us brothers and sisters and we work so close upstairs, we're all looking out for each other all of the time. We're each other's family out here. I'll find some good ones for you. 00.38.02 Fourth crew member We've already found all the good ones. 00.38.05 Second crew member Maybe you go and point at… 00.38.06 Jill Ameperosa You're attractive. You wanna go get drunk? 00.38.10 Chef How's your dinner? 00.38.14 Jill Ameperosa It wouldn't be right to lie to your face. The tuna's pretty gross, but I'll survive. 00.38.23 Naveed Muhammad That's my fiancée. Ah, that's a card. Kind of wild, but she sent it for my birthday. She's a Christian actually, but she wouldn't mind converting her religion for me, and she told me that three or four times. Look, if you want me to, I can convert my religion, because she loves me, and I love her and she doesn't want the religion thing to be in between. 00.38.54 Lt. Kneeland There's four of us that live here. As you can see, we have a kitchen sink over here to the left. That's about all we have. This is one of my roommates Chewy's desk here. You can see there's not much room. 00.39.05 Lt. Kneeland This is, this is my desk here. My lovely wife here and my little baby here that should be born some time in March. Come back here, we've kind of jimmy- rigged this a little bit to keep the light out in case someone is sleeping. 00.39.20 Lt. Kneeland Up here I've actually got a pretty good deal. I've got a little extra storage. I've kind of jimmy-rigged a television up there to watch a little baseball. Not much room as you can see and it gets a little noisy. 00.39.30 Lt. Kneeland You can usually feel the planes going right over the top of you and the room shakes. But we have earplugs and we have music, and we sleep with, you actually get used to it amazingly but, or you get so tired you just sleep through anything. 00.39.44 Aston Lt. DAVE "Knuckles" KNEELAND But this is our humble home, this is it, we try to make the best of it for six months. A lot of people say, hey you know you sacrifice to do what you do, but it's not, it's not really us, we kind of chose what we wanted to do, pretty much everybody. 00.40.00 Lt. Kneeland It's the families that are actually sacrificing the normalcy of a family, having a dad there, or there's plenty of mothers out here as well. 00.40.09 Lt. Kneeland But it's the family members back home that are sacrificing, because we all chose to be here, so I have a great respect for the family back home, for everybody's family. 00.40.20 Fiancée Hello. 00.40.21 Naveed Muhammad Hello. Hi, honey, it's me. 00.40.22 Fiancée Hello. 00.40.24 Naveed Muhammad Hello. 00.40.26 Fiancée Hi. 00.40.28 Naveed Muhammad Were you still sleeping? 00.40.30 Fiancée Yeah. 00.40.32 Naveed Muhammad I'm sorry about waking you up. 00.40.34 Fiancée That's okay. 00.40.36 Naveed Muhammad So, how have you been? 00.40.37 Fiancée Honey, I need money. I'm broke. I paid October's rent but the lady in the office is bugging me for last month's rent, and she said if we don't pay it in three days we're gonna be evicted. 00.40.51 Naveed Muhammad I know, what I did right now was I went online and I asked for some money from Navy Relief. If we get it from there, then that's our only way. If not them, I don't know of any other way, I mean. 00.41.07 Fiancée Well, I only have three days. I mean, what am I supposed to fucking do? 00.41.11 Naveed Muhammad I'm in the middle of the ocean floating around. I'm doing the best I can from out here. And other than that you know I really can't do anything about it. I don't know if you can ask Tammy or if you can ask your family for some help? 00.41.24 Fiancée No, I can't. I don't go around asking people for favours. 00.41.30 Naveed Muhammad Well, honey, I'm sorry then. I mean, you know I've tried. What else can I do, you know? I really can't do anything else. Just don't worry. I miss you honey. 00.41.40 Fiancée I miss you too. 00.41.43 Naveed Muhammad I love you. 00.41.44 Fiancée I love you. 00.41.45 Naveed Muhammad Bye. 00.41.46 Fiancée Bye. 00.41.47 Naveed Muhammad Women, man. Sometimes they go crazy. 00.41.54 Peter Snow The crew will be away for six months, maybe longer. Only on her return will Jill see her three-year old child. 00.42.02 Jill Ameperosa He won't talk to me when I call home. He'll say hello, answering the telephone. And then I'll be like, hey Justin, what are you doing? Talk to my grandma, and he'll give the phone right to my mom. 00.42.13 Jill Ameperosa At first it was different because he was so little he didn't care. And then now that he's older he told before I came on this deployment, go away, slapped me in my face, go away, go play with your aeroplanes. I'll be by myself. Go away. Leave me alone. Well, that was hard. 00.42.34 Peter Snow But in this environment family can also be a comfort. 00.42.38 Lt. Kneeland I had a very unusual double generator failure in the Hornet. Basically I lost all my electrical power and flying an electrical jet, that doesn't really work too well. 00.42.46 Lt. Kneeland When it happened I was actually twenty miles away from the ship and I lost all my navigation aids, everything, and I didn't know, I knew the ship was that way somewhere and I had no displays, I had absolutely nothing. 00.42.59 Lt. Kneeland I thought to myself, man, I hope I land this okay, because If I don't land I may have to eject, because I'm out of juice basically. 00.43.07 Lt. Kneeland And I kinda looked down and like well, at least the ocean's kinda calm. And luckily I found the ship, able to talk to somebody, but the realisation of hey, it's not just me anymore and my wife: It's me and my wife and our baby. 00.43.22 Lt. Kneeland It changes your perspective a little bit. So, hey, training took over and everything was fine. So I luckily got aboard. 00.43.33 Peter Snow Jill's night is not going well. A member of her team has disappeared. 00.43.39 Jill Ameperosa A guy wants to take off and go do on his own plan when he has a jet. We're already short plane captains anyway, and he wants to do his own program, and I get shafted into covering his work, so it can get done and the jet can fly. 00.43.56 Jill Ameperosa It screws everybody over. The dude took off and nobody knows where he's at. I had to do that shit. 00.44.03 Jill Ameperosa Go find Stopper and get him on that damn jet. Bye. I'll go man it up till he gets there. 00.44.23 Jill Ameperosa No, I'll take it because you know how I'll shit on his fucking ass when he gets there. Doing selfish work. Nobody knows where he's at. 00.44.34 Jill Ameperosa No, you're doing more than your work. There's no reason why we all have to suffer because he wants to take off. He's JQ. He's a fucking asshole. I already got it set up. 00.44.55 Peter Snow By late evening the crew of the Lincoln are preparing for an address by President Bush. Speculation is building about what he is going to say. 00.45.05 Aston Chief Warrant Officer MIKE PATRICK I think he's going to basically tell them the bottom line. He's going to let everybody know it's coming, if it's going to come or not. 00.45.11 Boatswain Patrick And he's gonna, he's gonna tell us hey, Saddam doesn't act up we're gonna rock and roll, you know, and you know nobody likes war. People die in war, you know, and that's an unfortunate incident. 00.45.22 Boatswain Patrick However, in this case, the people, you know, I don't want nobody to die, nobody. Because I think we're human and in this case so we save more lives and we can save more lives and stuff like that, especially with all the biological chemicals and stuff like that he's got. Let's get it out. 00.45.39 Boatswain Patrick I don't think people really realise that, in my heart. I watch the news on CNN and people talking about you know how, you know, if we go in there we'll take lives, and stuff like that, which is going to happen. But the lives he can take with simple chemicals, man. It's, it's unheard of. 00.45.59 Boatswain Patrick And to let this man go crazy and let him do something like that. Our president says it ain't gonna happen and I back him a hundred per cent ten on that. I believe that. 00.46.07 Lt. Kneeland I don't harbour any hatred really towards anybody, to be quite frank with you. Hey, and that's just a way from my upbringing. Everybody's unique and everyone's a unique individual and they each have their different religions and their different philosophies and how the world evolved and their beliefs. 00.46.29 Lt. Kneeland Hey, you know, that's great, you know. I'll listen to it. Sure, you bet. It's interesting. You want to listen to mine? No? Okay, that's no big deal. You do? Sure, here's my side. 00.46.39 Lt. Kneeland Just because we don't agree on one thing doesn't mean we can't, we have to hate each other. That's what makes everybody unique in the world and, but as far as harbouring any hatred towards anybody, no. 00.46.55 Lt. Kneeland Do I think there was innocent people killed in 9.11? Absolutely, from all over the world. 00.47.05 Naveed Muhammad They kept on showing that image again and again, you know. That plane going through the World Trade Centre on TV and news was just shocking. That's all it was, a shock. It looked just like a movie, you know, but it was reality. 00.47.21 Naveed Muhammad And after that, a lot of people have asked me, are you against the war? And I'm like no, because what they did, you know, was wrong. You know, basically they used the word Jihad. 00.47.33 Naveed Muhammad That's not Jihad because Jihad is supposed to be if you wan to protect Islam if somebody is trying to mess with your religion, like if you're praying or something. You're practising your religion and they're not letting you do that, then it is considered Jihad. 00.47.48 Naveed Muhammad So by killing all those innocent people, it's not Jihad. And there were Muslims in those buildings, so it was straight up terrorist attack. So what I say to that, I'm all for it. 00.48.02 President Bush Tonight I want to take a few minutes to discuss a great threat to peace and America's determination to lead the world in confronting that threat. 00.48.15 President Bush The threat comes from Iraq. It rises directly from the Iraqi regime's own actions, its history of aggression and its drive towards an arsenal of terror. 00.48.29 Peter Snow The mood was sombre as many on board realised how close they were to going to war with Iraq. 00.48.38 President Bush It has given shelter and support to terrorism and practises terror against its own people. I have asked congress to authorise the use of America's military if it proves necessary to enforce UN Security Council demands. 00.48.55 Peter Snow For Boatswain Patrick, it was a welcome call to arms. 00.49.02 Boatswain Patrick Can you imagine one, one day a man getting chemicals into the water supply and waking up and you having your family you know just dead, having, or something could happen in that way another 9.11, and you're sitting there going like, oh shit, I should have done something. 00.49.15 Boatswain Patrick But no, I had to sit on my butt and have my hands tied. I, I wouldn't want to live with myself with that. I wouldn't want to live myself and I think, I think the President feels that way. 00.49.26 Boatswain Patrick I think he doesn't want to take any chances. All right, you know, they got us once, you know. Get us twice; shame on us, man. 00.49.33 Naveed Muhammad Me, I'm not really a political kind of guy, you know. Just a simple guy that wants to live just a simple life, just like everybody else. 00.49.42 Naveed Muhammad But whatever happens, you know, whatever our President decides, I'm all with it because that's my job, you know, to follow orders and he's the man in charge. He says there's war, there's a war; he says there isn't then there isn't. 00.50.02 Graphic Catapult 3 5th Flight Plan of the Day 23h00 00.50.04 Peter Snow War or no war, the carrier continues its relentless cycle of flight operations. By day the flight deck is a dangerous place; in almost total darkness even more so. 00.50.16 Peter Snow But the carrier's purpose is to launch aircraft, no matter what the circumstances. 00.50.20 Aircraft taking off 00.51.01 Boatswain Patrick Yeah, I'm tired. I'm tired. My troopers are tired too, and if they can make it I can make it. Sometimes you just, you got to close your eyes and say, oh Lord, give me strength and then you just, it happens. 00.51.14 Boatswain Patrick Soon as you get on the deck, oh man your mind's completely up, no matter how tired, you're not. You say, I'm not tired: I can continue with the plan of the day. I'm on deck again. Take that deep breath and go. 00.51.28 Peter Snow But for Knuckles and the other pilots landing at night can test their nerves to the limit. 00.51.35 Lt. Kneeland Night flights are different. They're just different. The first one at night I was scared to death. Plays a lot of tricks on you at night. You get vertigo sometimes. I call it the slide for life. 00.51.46 Lt. Kneeland You're up there and it's just completely black around you, and you have no peripheral vision and just feels like you're just sliding downhill. 00.51.53 Lt. Kneeland You don't see a shape at all, you're just concentrating on your landing all the way to touch down and hopefully you catch a wire. But you don't see the ship itself until you're pretty much crossing the ramp. Quite humbling. 00.52.06 Music 00.52.25 Boatswain Patrick It's a mental thing. You'd be surprised what the mind can do if you put into it. You gotta do it. Either that or you get fat, and I can't get fat. 00.52.43 Boatswain Patrick You know a lot of people think it's crazy to work out at one o'clock in the morning, especially if you've been up for seventeen hours, but you just gotta do what you gotta do. 00.53.02 Boatswain Patrick I call this the make-me-feel-good man, do a good day's hard work and pounding the deck and you go up there and you put four plates up and you know you did something. This gives me the challenge to kick ass and take anything. 00.53.30 Jill Ameperosa I gotta drop this off. Somebody lost it. We have to keep all of our rags accounted for, because the most dangerous thing to a FA- 18 motor is a rag. So we have to make sure we have them all accounted for. 00.53.46 Jill Ameperosa This was out in the hallway. I don't know if it's one of ours. 00.53.50 Crew member All right. 00.53.51 Peter Snow Stopper was eventually found and not surprisingly did his work. 00.53.54 Stopper We just had a disagreement and now everything's fine. We really don't talk much that way. We don't get in trouble. 00.54.05 Graphic Hangar Bay Resupply 04h30 . 00.54.13 Peter Snow The carrier's appetite is voracious. Every week the Lincoln is supplied with eight hundred and fifty thousand gallons of aviation fuel. 00.54.29 Peter Snow Every day the crew of six thousand consume six hundred and sixty gallons of milk, six hundred and twenty pounds of hamburger meat, eight hundred pounds of fresh vegetables and a hundred and eighty dozen eggs. 00.54.48 Peter Snow Night shift is nearly at an end. Before clocking off Jill must check that the planes have been cleaned and are ready for handover to the day crew. 00.55.00 Jill Ameperosa All of it. All the rivets. 00.55.04 Jill Ameperosa They're washing the aircraft for corrosion prevention, make sure all the grease that does hold the dirt in, they get all that off, and we start with fresh preservatives and grease and all that. Day crew will be in in about twenty minutes. 00.55.29 Peter Snow Jill's long night is over. All too soon she'll have to do it again. 00.55.35 Jill Ameperosa I'll go take a shower and go to sleep. I'll listen to a CD and maybe remember the first song, so tired, just pass out. 00.55.53 Peter Snow The moment Knuckles has been training for has arrived. Today, he flies over hostile territory. No more practice runs. This time it's for real. 00.56.04 Lt. Kneeland A little more focused, absolutely. No question about that. We'll be heading into Iraq this afternoon and this evening. Oh, I'm sorry, Afghanistan. I take that back. 00.56.33 Lt. Kneeland See you in about seven hours. See you later, bud. 00.56.44 Peter Snow Knuckles' mission is to fly close air support over Afghanistan for US forces pursuing last remnants of Taliban and Al Qaeda. 00.56.55 Aircraft taking off 00.57.20 Lt. Kneeland Any time you fly over anybody's country that doesn't want you to be there it's dangerous. All it takes is one lucky BB to hit you. None of us are complacent going over there. 00.57.28 Lt. Kneeland You could be tanking, break something off and suck it down your intake. Next thing you know, you're having to eject over enemy territory and that's not good for anybody. 00.57.37 Peter Snow But what's really on Knuckles' mind is the future, the looming conflict with Iraq. 00.57.43 Lt. Kneeland As far as Iraq, that would definitely not be boring. You're going into a situation where they do have air defence systems and they can target you and the adrenaline's going to be pumping. 00.57.54 Peter Snow Pilots of the Abraham Lincoln are presently flying missions over Iraq in support of Operation Southern Watch. On November Sixth Hornet pilots made their first combat strikes destroying two Iraqi SAM missile sites. 00.58.08 Peter Snow Whether these turn out to be the first shots in the Second Gulf War remains to be seen. The Abraham Lincoln is due to leave the Arabian Gulf at the end of December. 00.58.18 Peter Snow Any decision to delay the return of the Lincoln would be a clear sign that war is imminent. 00.58.26 End music 00.58.30 Peter Snow For more information on tonight’s programme please visit our web site at: www.bbc.co.uk/correspondent 00.58.30 Credits Presenter PETER SNOW Camera BRIAN GREEN DALE RODKIN Music Composed by ROBERT HARTSHORNE Dubbing Mixer PHITZ HEARNE VT Editor BOYD NAGLE Graphic Design STEVE ENGLAND Production Team ALEXANDRA CAMERON CHARLOTTE DAVIS SARAH EVA MARTHA O’SULLIVAN Production Manager JANE WILLEY Unit Manager SUSAN CRIGHTON Film Research NICK DODD Web Producer ANDREW JEFFREY Associate Producer ROB WHITING Picture Editors ASHLEY SMITH JOHN KERRY Deputy Editor DAVID BELTON Produced & Directed by ANTHONY MAKIN 00.58.52 Editor KAREN O’CONNOR © BBC MMII 00.59.09 End BBC Correspondent 1 1