ARTICLES

God Bless the Essex
and Those Who Sail Her

WE CAN DO WHAT THEY DO BUT THEY CAN'T DO WHAT WE DO

By James McCoy

Father Aidan Logan, 51, takes advantage of his solitary drive to work at Thirty-second Street to make his morning meditation. Gregorian chant rises like incense from his tape deck.

Father Aidan is called by his first name since he's a Trappist monk on leave from St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts; contemplation and reflection, yes, that is his game. He has invited me along for a day in his life as navy chaplain. So, I importune, what pious thoughts are you thinking?

"Well, I'm usually going over in my mind what I didn't do yesterday," he replied, "what meetings can I get out of. I just had time to escape, say Mass, to eat lunch, send one email ... I would say, one of the major skills you have to develop is which meetings to go to," he went on, "to be in the loop. Once we get out to sea, there's real work to do and less meetings. And that way I can walk round the ship and talk to people. I usually do that twice a day.

We pull into a vast parking lot, walk through a gate and into a Star Wars movie. For the U.S.S. Essex, 11 stories high, looms over you like an Imperial Star Cruiser. As we draw near the gangway, it becomes clear that one does not embark to the deck of this 844 feet long ship but worms one's way into its bowels. The crew has nicknamed the Essex "gator" ("alligator"). because it can disgorge amphibious assault vehicles and air cushion landing craft (hovercraft) from its jaws.

A sign says "All tigers check in forward brow." What's a tiger? I ask.

"That's you," Father Aidan replies; and visitors like me that day, for the Essex, a participant in San Diego's December 3 parade of lights, would sail from 32nd Street navy base to downtown.

"It's very upstairs and downstairs...." Father Aidan is saying as, once in the ship, we burrow through "kneeknockers." (The ship is divided into watertight compartments with the result that to move forward or back horizontally frequently means going up and down; I start to imagine us trapped in a nautical crossword puzzle, but Father Aidan, who has been on the Essex months at sea, has filled in the blanks in his own mind, made the connections between "forward brow" and "wardroom" and "stateroom" and "forecastle" and "vultures row.") "...between the officers and the enlisted," Father Aidan finishes his statement. "Chaplains, we're in the best situation: we're most involved with the people."

The wardroom is for officers only. After going through a cafeteria line Father Aidan and I sit down there for breakfast; space is limited, so as soon as we find a table with two places open we sit down and I am introduced and small talk is made. After breakfast, the first officer gets up and leads the day's announcements. A couple officers stand up and ask that the tiger crew be kept from prowling into dangerous parts of the ship such as engineering. Towards the end of the announcements Lieutenant Eugene Chan gets up. "Good morning," his voice rings throughout the wardroom, "I'm back. I just want to say there s a sovereign God in heaven." His wife just had a baby. "Thank you for the flowers to my wife Amy."

After the breakfast broke up, I caught up with Lt. Chan. "She had a really grueling 30-hour labor," he said. Chan described himself as a Christian. "This is such a close and tight wardroom," he added. "A whole slew of guys called. There was just an outpouring of love from this wardroom."

I caught up with Father Aidan in the passage leading away from the wardroom. He was talking sotto voce to one sailor while further down the passage two sailors were talking trash to each other. I could hear nothing of Father Aidan's conversation until he punctuated it with an audible "God put me there that day," just as one of the sailors punctuated his conversation with a loud obscenity. (Father Aidan later explained that that sailor with him had been accused of shoplifting somewhere but instead had been with Father at the time and therefore was not guilty.)

When asked whether there was a time when he was pressured to turn in someone who was guilty, Father Aidan recalled a death which turned what should have been a routine operation into a tragedy. (In its official website -- www.essex.navy.mil -- the Essex is described as "second to the Navy's hospital ships in medical support" with its emergency physicians, operating rooms medical labs, and room for 600 patients.) An investigation later found out that, in a factory error, the canister dispensing the anesthetic had its valves switched. Within hours of the fatality, one by one the doctors and nurses who had been present in the operating room came to Father Aidan to tell him what they thought had happened. Knowing this, one investigator called upon Father Aidan.

"That was the first time I had to gently but firmly insist on the confidentiality," Father Aidan recalled. "The chaplain is the only one aboard who has that absolute confidentiality by law." Not just the laws of the Church but even navy law. "So whatever is said to me stays with me; unless the person gives me the permission to act on it.

"As the chaplain, I have immediate access to the captain," he went on. In fact, "a couple times a day the he'll ask me, 'what's the mood of the ship?'" Father Aidan's face becomes grave. "And I tell him."

This access with boldness is an anomaly in a navy where most concerns must scramble up the rungs of hierarchy. It is with difficulty that, on the way to Father Aidan's office, I scramble up steps so steep that they seem like ladders. "What are these called in nautical terminology?" I ask. "Ladders," Father Aidan replied.

Father Aidan calls his home-office a "stateroom," and by the ship's standards, it is a luxury, especially since he has it to himself. It would look like a dorm room at San Diego State, except instead of posters of beer babes Father Aidan has a TV tuned to EWTN. "I usually turn this on to see what Mother Angelica is up to," he says. "I leave it on all day, and usually that's a good jump off: 'Oh, what's that, Father?' 'That's the pope.'"

The ship can hold 3,200, including Marines, underway; at home port (which is San Diego) there's "about a thousand" on board, Father Aidan said, estimating that a third of those are Catholic. "Among the officers it tends to be higher." I asked him why and he said that the second most college-educated religious group in America is Catholics (Jews are the first but tend not to go into the military).

Among Catholics in the navy, "you've got two constituencies," he said. "You've got the Filipinos who are used to a very ethnic parish, and then you've got the navy folks who move around a lot."

Supply Officer Charlie Lillie, 40, drops by to see Father Aidan. Lillie comes from a Byzantine Catholic family; his grandfather was Russian. "I have on my desk there a set of Rosary beads that my grandfather used. That's really made an impression on me." So much so that before Sunday Mass, Lillie knocks on doors to gather those too sheepish to come on their own. "I lead the flock," he smiled, "a lot of them all they need is a little push. Young kids just need some encouragement," said Lillie, with 19 years in the navy.

"The main rubric is fear of embarrassment," Father Aidan agreed.

Nevertheless, about 200 make it to Sunday Mass, usually held in the forecastle (pronounced "folksill") since "it's the one covered area where they get fresh air," Father Aidan said. "You're outside, you can see the horizon." You can also see the links in the ship's anchor chain, gigantic as the bumps on Leviathan's spine. Weather permitting (the forecastle can be awash in waves), Father Aidan says one of the three Sunday Masses there when the ship is underway.

"Here's my $500 toilet," said Father Aidan, alluding to the Department of Defense's ability to take a simple item and make it expensive. He shows me a rod of jungle-gym thickness running the length of the chapel's side wall; made of steel, it has been arc-welded in place. "I could have a row of Marines doing pull-ups on this thing. All I wanted was a curtain rod."

The blue curtains hanging from it soften what would otherwise be a harsh, gray worship space. The chapel lighting is also soft, and the altar is made of a light-colored wood. More colors can be found in the crucifix behind the altar, an icon in the gentle Byzantine style. Not every ship has a permanent chapel, but Captain Steven Gilmore wanted it, and allotted Father Aidan $200,000 to spend. "And I spent it," he said.

Adjacent to the chapel the sailors have a TV room; every once in a while Father Aidan has to tell them to turn it off while he says daily Mass. "We have to have Casablanca once a week," he says smiling. The sailors' taste in film runs to extremes: "Either blood, gore, and sex, or very sentimental."

During the next four weeks before Christmas, he predicted that It's a Wonderful Life would be watched by misty-eyed sailors at least three times a week. "That's their source of theology: popular media," he said.

Still, "every evening there's Bible study, or something like that." Father Aidan used the Gospel according to St. John, chapter six, for a series called the "The Truth About the Eucharist" which he included in the weekly "Mary, Star of the Sea, Catholic Community Aboard USS Essex" bulletin. Other bulletins contain old-fashioned question-and-answer style catechesis by Father Aidan, cribbed, from the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

While the priest prepares for the 11 a.m. daily Mass, first-class petty officer Alex Gonzales comes in, the only sailor worshiping in the pews that day. After Mass, I ask Gonzales why he gave up his lunch break to come. "That doesn't bother me," he replied. "I want to make it a habit to come." He said that his father had recently abjured him never to forget God.

At Father Aidan's battle station a sailor is swabbing the deck so that it glistens with water; during a battle this triage area would be slick with blood. Triage is where the ship's doctors sort the incoming wounded into three categories: those who will survive without immediate medical attention, those who will die without immediate medical attention, and those who will soon die no matter what. It is for those last that the naval authorities have assigned Father Aidan here while the other ship's chaplain, an Episcopal minister, has been assigned sick bay as his battle station. "They recognize that we can do what they do" -- priests like ministers can always pray with the dying -- "but they can't do what we do" -- only priests can administer the sacraments of Confession and the Anointing of the Sick.

Even in time of peace, the navy can be a dangerous place. "Someone in the military somewhere gets killed every day in some mishap," Father Aidan says.

"It's wet, sir!" Father Aidan is warned as he begins to walk over that half of the triage deck which the sailor has just mopped. Father Aidan tacks toward the dry half, begging the sailor's pardon more than once.

There's an expression for someone who no matter where he stands ends up being in the way: "like a Marine in a fire drill." Do the Marines in turn have an expression, "like a chaplain in a fire drill"?

No, Father Aidan laughs. Anyway, it's not that way in his case. "I've found they're used to having me around. I go to all the drills. If they weren't used to having me around, they would say I was in the way."

When we get to sick bay, Dr. Steven Banks, the senior of the two permanent ship's surgeons, greets us. Father Aidan asks permission of the emergency medicine physician to show me around. No permission is necessary, Dr. Banks smiles, saying, "the man of God's always authorized."

With a noise like the roar of many waters, a noise like the voice of a storm, like the thunder of the Almighty, like the tumult of an armed camp, the Marine helicopters take off from the flight deck.

Father Aidan wears a "Mickey Mouse" flight deck helmet with his name on it while we stand on vultures row watching the two attack and two transport helicopters take off and land one by one over and over again. Later, when the exercises are over, he points out the pilots in their flight suits bestriding the deck. "Those are the gods," he remarks.

I asked Father Aidan whether patriotism had a positive or negative effect on piety.

"You're on this incredibly powerful warship," he replied after some thought, "and we just rule the seas." Since the Soviet Union lost the Cold War, the U.S. Navy has had no rival. "When you're involved in something like that, it becomes a visceral patriotism. And as I said to you before, the very liturgical and hierarchical nature of the ship disposes them to piety."

Screwing up his face, he adds, "I'm not saying they're pious."

Father Aidan introduced me to the ship's captain. Captain Gilmore was walking the deck, chewing gum and chatting with various visitors. The day's exercise -- though unusual with a tiger crew on board -- was basic, just a scale being played by a world-class concert pianist. But when in an orchestrated attack the helicopters are hopping and the Harrier jets are jumping off the flight deck and the hovercraft are flying out of the dry well deck and the amphibious craft are hurtling more than 1,000 Marines to an assault area "it gets," as Captain Gilmore put it, "kind of interesting."

Later that day he ended his message on the P.A. with these words; words, Captain Gilmore believes, which allow everyone to stay focused on the important things they do as a crew; words for which he has received an awful lot of compliments from every rank and rate: "God bless the Essex and those who sail her," he said, "the captain out."

"He always says that," Father Aidan smiled. "He's Catholic by the way."

TOP