Watch Team Remus

Flash Post #13

I’ve been working on and off on a post about my deployment to Iraq, but it’s been a challenge, and as a result I haven’t posted anything in over six months now. Just this morning, standing in the shower and thinking of how I might rectify this problem, I recalled an incident–a “sea story,” if you will–from my time as a Propulsion Plant Watch Officer aboard USS George Washington. While I have already covered, in broad strokes, that period of my life in my retrospective series, this was one of those minor incidents that just didn’t make it in. But, well, it’s kind of funny, and so perhaps worth relating just to emphasize that those years weren’t all gloom and doom (and, again, I haven’t even gotten to Iraq yet).

So there I was…

…sitting in the Watch Officer’s chair in the Number One Enclosed Operating Station (1EOS) aboard USS George Washington. I don’t remember exactly what we were doing–and even if i did, it would probably be classified–but apart from me there were… honestly, I’m not even sure if I can say how many of us were in 1EOS because that might also be classified. But rest assured, there were definitely other people in there with me. Most of them were members of the watch-team who, like me, were assigned to a particular station within 1EOS, but there was one exception–someone who wasn’t assigned to a station in 1EOS.

Anyone who has served as a nuke aboard a Nimitz-class CVN is free to skip to the next sub-heading, but for all others, it is worth noting that the propulsion plants (there are two of them) are complex. They cover a lot of area, with a lot of equipment. Just within the EOS, we had multiple consoles, shelves upon shelves of procedures and technical manuals, all manner of communications equipment, and even a printer–nothing fancy, just a typical, run of the mill, office desktop printer, connected to the Reactor Department’s internal server and accessible from any number of computers on the same server, not just my station in 1EOS.

Outside EOS… well, outside EOS, the spaces were downright cavernous. Full of pumps, piping, valves, switchboards, electronics, electrical generators, and not least of all some huge (and I do mean huge) main propulsion engines. So if it took multiple people just to operate what was in 1EOS (a relatively small, “enclosed” operating station), you can imagine we needed even more people to watch over and operate the wider propulsion plant. While most of these other people were required to remain within certain boundaries, relative to the equipment they operated, we also had some “roving” watchstanders, who were free to move about the plant, perhaps even into EOS, whether because they were responsible for equipment that was spread out all over the plant, or because they had a supervisory role that required them to be able to (a) check-up on and/or assist multiple other watchstanders during the course of a typical watch and (b) discuss complex operations with me, the Watch Officer, in EOS, and then relay them to other members of the watch-team.

It was also not uncommon for some of those roving watchstanders to find a reason to come to EOS–ostensibly to make a report or to talk through an upcoming evolution–but really they just wanted to enjoy the relatively more pleasant ambient conditions in EOS as compared to the rest of the plant (with steam piping, heavy machinery, and electronic equipment pumping out all kinds of heat and noise). A more pleasant place to come and shoot the shit during a long watch, you know? Of course that wasn’t supposed to be a reason to come to EOS: roving watchstanders were supposed to rove, after all, not chat it up in EOS, and as a Watch Officer I was supposed to limit access to EOS to the bare minimum number of personnel precisely to prevent it from becoming a place where people showed up just to “shoot the shit.” In fact, it was such a well-known problem that our Assistant Reactor Officer, a full Commander and something like the Reactor Department’s “Executive Officer” (second in command), made a point of regularly entering EOS at odd hours to enforce compliance.

But just as we Watch Officer’s were supposed to keep conversations limited to strictly professional matters (even within EOS, regardless of who was present) but sometimes didn’t, we also didn’t always rigorously enforce “access controls” on EOS, even knowing we might get caught and have to explain why [insert roving watchstander] was standing in his undershirt beneath the air-conditioning vent, without a book open, and not engaged in a deep technical conversation with the Watch Officer. First, because even I, a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute and (in my pre-Iraq War days, after which I think I mellowed considerably) not the most empathetic fellow, didn’t want to be too much of an asshole. Second, it was nice to get an outside opinion sometimes, especially contentious matters. For example…

What should we call our watch-team?

This was actually a semi-professional discussion. At the very least, it was implicitly sanctioned by the Reactor Officer who, to promote esprit de corps and raise morale during the ramp up to a major inspection, had encouraged watch-teams to adopt team names. While I suppose it might have been theoretically possible to have such a discussion outside of watchstanding hours, that would have been impractical to say the least. As anyone who has served aboard a US Navy warship will know, members of a watch-team do not necessarily see each other much outside of watch. That is because ships in general, and nuclear propulsion plants in particular, are complex beasts. That is to say, they are not just one thing: as I said above, there are electronic systems (computers and such), electrical systems (cabling and switchboards and electrical generators), mechanical systems (piping and pumps), and–near and dear to me–lots of water (with chemicals, too). Specialists, not generalists, are needed to operate and maintain all this equipment. There are, for example, Electronics Technicians for the electronics, Electrician’s Mates for the electrical systems, and Machinist’s Mates for the mechanical systems. And within those, there are even further subspecialities. For example, some machinist Machinist’s Mates are trained as Engineering Laboratory Technicians (for all the chemicals!). While a propulsion plant watch-team is made up of all of these specialties (and more), outside of watchstanding duties, the members of any given watch-team will have other duties completely unrelated to standing watch. And for those duties, which will often take up even more time than standing watch, they will be assigned divisions arranged not by watch-team, but by specialty.

So, for example, when I wasn’t on watch, my primary duty was to be the Reactor Laboratory Division Officer (in charge of the Engineering Laboratory Technicians). I had nothing at all to do with the Electronics Technicians, Electrician’s Mates, and Machinist’s Mates (the ones who weren’t Engineering Laboratory Technicians, that is). All this to say, I could hardly call a meeting to discuss the Reactor Officer’s initiative of coming up with watch-team names when we weren’t on watch, because all those other watchstanders would be out doing whatever their Division Officers (or Chiefs, or Leading petty Officers, or Work Center Supervisors, etc., etc.—think “eight different bosses”) assigned them to do, hence the need to discuss this on watch. With, you know, the team.

Now, on that subject, I honestly don’t remember what the leading contenders were for our watch-team name on that fateful day in 1EOS, but at some point either (a) I called in the Reactor Mechanical Operator (one of the roving watchstanders), (b) the Reactor Mechanical Operator happened by and we put the question to him opportunistically, or, perhaps most likely, (c) the Reactor Mechanical Operator walked in to volunteer a name of his own initiative. In truth, it does not matter how it came to be, but at some point the Reactor Mechanical Operator put forward his own suggestion for what we should call ourselves: “Team Penis.”

I of course (and I’m not being coy here) swiftly admonished the Reactor Mechanical Operator for his grossly unprofessional suggestion, and the Reactor Mechanical Operator then hung his head in shame and returned to roving the plant (or maybe he didn’t–again I didn’t want to be too much of an asshole, so we might have just changed the subject and talked a while longer before he finally headed out). But ultimately, we in 1EOS turned back to our consoles and did what good propulsion plant watchstanders are supposed to do: we watched the propulsion plant. And at some point between then and the end of the watch… the Assistant Reactor Officer walked in. He walked in, strolled around to the opposite side of the space where our printer was setup on a shelf against a bulkhead, and happened upon an unattended slip of paper, freshly printed and hitherto unnoticed by myself or the rest of the EOS team. He picked the slip of paper up, held it before him with one hand, adjusted his glasses with the other, and began to examine it.

Then, after a time, sounding somewhat puzzled, he said “Watch Officer, what is… Team Remis?”

The Assistant Reactor Officer then held the slip of paper towards me, showing the words Team Penis printed on it in big, bold letters, clear as day–except for one thing. The font he–the Reactor Mechanical Operator–had used was a kind of cursive script, such that the P was connected to the e in a way that made it look kind of like an R, and the n, in typical cursive script, had two humps instead of one, making it look like an m. Hence the Assistant Reactor Officer’s question, “Team Remis?”

Calmly, I shifted in my seat and turned to look the Assistant Reactor Officer square in the eye…

Now, I suppose at this moment I could have told him, “Sir, I believe that says Team Penis. I was just admonishing the Reactor Mechanical Operator about that after he suggested it as a watch-team name. I guess he left and printed that out as a joke.”

But of course jokes don’t go over so well in front of the Assistant Reactor Officer–not on watch, and not with this one, anyway, and probably least of all when invoking… sexual organs. Even at the height of my hard-nosed-borderline-sociopathic pre-Iraq War days, I wasn’t going to dime a watchstander out like that. Not over something that stupid, anyway. But then I couldn’t exactly say “Sir, I don’t know anything about it,” either, lest he dwell on it some more and, after further study, realize it said Team Penis.

Though, to the uninitiated, it might come across as an over-reaction, I have no doubt that if things had gone down that way, the Assistant Reactor Officer would have launched an investigation the likes of which have not been seen since one Thanksgiving at Alice’s Restaurant. We’re talking eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was… pictures of the approach, the getaway, the northwest corner the southwest corner and that’s not to mention the aerial photography levels of overreaction. He would, as likely as not, have called our reliefs, pulled the entire team off watch, and then–and this would have been a certainty, no flip of the coin about it–questioned each one of us separately to get to the bottom of it, starting with the Watch Officer. And then, when no one confessed and no one pointed out the guilty party, he’d have had the Reactor Department’s IT staff (we had a few Electronics Technicians trained to administer our own servers–again, lots of specialization) pull whatever records they could about which computers made printouts to the 1EOS printer that day and whose login was used for each of those jobs. And then, once he’d identified the guilty party and questioned him not only on his own decision-making but also who else knew about what he’d done and covered up, he might even have learned that I and the entire 1EOS watch-team had known about it after all and lied. At which point, well, there might just have been an Incident Report all the way up to the 4-star Admiral who, in an unbroken line of succession going back to Rickover, was charged by Congress with overseeing the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program fleet-wide. And then that Incident Report–describing a gross lapse in integrity and professionalism not specific to any particular class of ship or propulsion plant–would have been disseminated to the entire nuclear Navy as a point for discussion and training. Heck, they might still be training on it today if that had happened!

So instead of all that, and without a moment’s hesitation, just sitting there and looking the Assistant Reactor Officer square in the eye, I said, “Yes, sir. Team Remus. That’s the name we decided on for our watch team. See, sir, we’re trekkies, but we didn’t want to be too obvious about it. So, you know how, in Star Trek, there are the Romulans, and their home planet is Romulus? Well, you know, we took it another degree of separation. Like, how Romulus in another context was also mythical founder of Rome, and he had a twin brother named Remus–both raised by wolves according to the mythology. Anyway, we decided to call ourselves Watch Team Remus, like, as a subtle nod to Romulus and the Romulans on Star Trek, you know?”

To which the Assistant Reactor Officer thought for a moment, then nodded, smiled, and said, “I like it. Very cerebral!” And with that, he set the sheet of paper back down on the printer, exited 1EOS, and we variously laughed or sighed with relief.

So here’s to Watch Team Remus! Oh, and, uh, happy Navy Birthday, I guess? What is it, 249 today?