Resurfacing

Been underway for a few days, mostly beneath the cloud of a "limited bandwidth" environment, meaning no internet and very little e-mail access. For some of my younger shipmates this is a crisis of major proportions. For me, it's back to the future.

This is my third Navy assignment to sea duty, each with expanding envelopes of connectivity from the sea to family, friends, and the rest of the world. Today I feel as though I've resurfaced, perhaps temporarily, from the Twilight Zone.

My first deployment as an air wing flight surgeon in a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier occurred in the late spring and early summer of 1993. We had no internet, no e-mail, and no phone service. We relied on snail mail while underway and pay phones when ashore in a foreign country. We numbered our handwritten letters sequentially, because they would seldom arrive in chronological order. So if the last letter I received from home was #6 when everyone was doing fine, and then I got #9 saying "We're all better now," I had to wait patiently, and somewhat nervously, for the rest of the story in either #7 or #8. Except sometimes one or both of them never came, leaving me indefinitely clueless. Some of that cluelessness persists to the present day.

Prior to the deployment I looked forward to the port visit schedule, a typical "Summer Med Cruise" idyll .  Many of the crew booked plane tickets and hotels for spouses to join them in exotic ports of call in Mediterranean playgrounds. But the old salts knew better and saved their money. Thanks to bigots in Bosnia and some dude named Saddam in the Middle East, most of those port visits were cancelled. During the six month deployment we spent all but 18 days at sea...without e-mail, phones, or internet. Whenever we did actually get off the ship for a port visit, the first thing that most of us did was wait for hours in crowded lines at pay phones for the chance to call home, collect. Kathy was thrilled to hear my voice when she answered the phone, disappointed to hang up a half hour later, and livid when she got the $300 phone bill at the end of the month. We were not exactly flush at the time.

"Don't call!" she said when I embarked in another aircraft carrier for my second deployment in the late fall/early winter of 1997. "It's too hard to hang up, and we can't afford the bill." She was right, of course, as usual. BUT, at least we had e-mail then. So even though we still perferred the romance of writing actual letters in longhand, sequentially numbered of course, we also had the relative luxury of real time e-mail communication when and if we wanted or needed. The ship also had phones available, but you had to buy a phone card to use them. I recall they were some outrageous price like $10 a minute, which no doubt included the MWR cut. So I didn't call. Well, except for Christmas Eve when I got to use one of the ship's POTS ("Plain Old Telephone Service") lines  for free to call Kathy in Michigan where her large extended family was gathered at her parents' house. "Why are you calling?" she scolded. "You're interrupting the present opening." (This was really a big deal in her family then. I would have been upset too.) So I never called again during that deployment.

Now I'm on a highly sophisticated communications platform, where I have ready access to e-mail, multiple telephone lines, internet, Facebook, Twitter, and other cybercoms that I don't begin to understand. But the bandwidth-challenged environment of the last four days has sent me back to the future to that first deployment, where I wrote a lot and accomplished a number of goals like earning a surface warfare designator and logging almost 100 hours of flight time off the deck. Amazing what you can get done when you're not able to surf the net. Same is true of the last four days. Wrote a lot, read a lot, accomplished a lot.

Now we are back to normal communications. Haven't exactly rushed back to the internet. I plan to continue writing, reading, and accomplishing some other goals. And, no I don't plan to call home until we are back at the pier.