It’s been just about a month now since I stepped off of the USS Nimitz. Well, was flown off, more accurately.
I took a month off to let is sink in just what I was there for. It is SO easy to hype up such a trip right after you get back. And I did over on Twitter and FriendFeed.
But I wanted to do a blog post about what I remember of the trip. Not a long one. Enough words have been written by others to occupy your reading time for hours. More on that later.
But just a short one.
Here it is: young people rock.
I remember standing by myself watching pilot after pilot flying aircraft onto a moving deck at night just by watching a small few rows of lights. It is a task that nothing I do in my life will ever come close to in difficulty.
But I watched as 19-year-olds guided the planes to their spaces a foot or two from the water’s edge. I watched as other young people piloted one of the most expensive pieces of machinery around. These were people half my age and I can barely drive my car around, much less do what these young people are doing every day. Yeah, there were a few adults around who had a few scars on their backs, I’m sure, and they were guiding the younger ones and making sure they had the training to get the job done, but the young faces I saw doing the dangerous work of keeping one of the most expensive weapons platforms the world has ever seen working and working flawlessly just takes away any doubt that our next generations will be just fine, thank you very much.
We were there just a few days after five of their crew members were laid to rest thanks to a helicopter mission that had gone horribly bad. That was a reminder that these kids are putting their lives at risk every day to keep me safe.
So, what was I there for? My mission was to study how the social media team on board the Nimitz uses Twitter and other methods to get the word out about what 5,500 people are doing out at sea. I also met the Twitterer who keeps the “FlyNavy” account bubbling along. Families, I’m told by some of the sailors I met on board, watch every word.
I also saw myself as the photographer for the group and rented a huge 600mmF2.8 lens that let me get some of the closer photos of pilots landing.
The Navy, we were told, invites VIPs and others on board every day to be a proxy for all of us who can’t get a tour of a ship that’s spending our tax dollars in a very large way. This was the first such trip of bloggers, so they were watching to see if we’ll do anything different from all the other journalists, movie crews, TV crews, and other VIPs who visit.
Some other things I remember:
1. You gotta be in good shape. Up the stairs. Down the stairs. Up the stairs. Down the stairs. No elevators here.
2. I remember that the pilots said they get afraid EVERY TIME they come in for a landing. Jennifer Jones got a podcast with one of the pilots we met. It’s interesting that you can’t train the human brain to get rid of fear. But you can train it to work around it.
3. The captain — right in the middle of telling me something that I’ve now forgotten — turned around in mid speech and picked up his phone, called someone down on the deck, told someone to get his act together, then turned around and continued his conversation with me without missing a beat.
4. I watched TopGun hundreds of times (we used to play it over and over on the TVs in the store I worked at in Silicon Valley) but take that feeling and ramp it up 1000x when you are 20 feet from an F-18 taking off. There is no HD camera that can capture the sensory overload you experience when on the deck of an active aircraft carrier. I can’t imagine I’ll have another experience quite like that.
5. The Navy is much more open than I expected it to be. At times I couldn’t tell that I wasn’t walking around some high tech company. When we visited the war room they asked that we not take video or photos of the screens (a request I get quite often when hanging out at companies in Silicon Valley) but they let us watch all we wanted. We visited with tons of sailors all over the ship and they never refused to answer our questions.
6. It’s going to be tough for everyone in the Navy to get into social networking. Why? Bandwidth. There are no cell phones out at sea and the bandwidth to satellites is a precious resource that is metered out to those who need it. Much like water in a drought. Sailors can use Twitter and Facebook in the computer room, but getting time on a computer is tough and the bandwidth isn’t fun.
7. I came away with a new respect of the word sacrifice. The sailors are away from their families months at a time and they aren’t able to just turn on their iPhones and call home or do Skype calls due to the limitations in bandwidth.
8. They look for the simplest solution, not the “coolest” or “geekiest.” Especially true of when we visited the guys who keep the database of every plane on board. Hint: it’s not on a computer.
Anyway, Andy Sernovitz wrapped up the trip best. “They are doing it for us.” Andy also linked to all the bloggers and their reports.
I especially liked these reports, but they were all good:
Carroll “Lex” LeFon, former F-18 pilot who hung out with us during the tour (he is retired and got a flight back to see his old buddies). He’s a great writer and gave his impressions of hanging out with a bunch of clueless bloggers.
Guy Kawasaki who noted how close I was to death, in a funny way.
Jennifer Van Grove looks mighty mean holding a gun.
Chris Pirillo said it gave him a whole new respect. So did TechMama Beth Blecherman. That was the overwhelming reaction after we got back to our cars.
Bill Reichert, Silicon Valley VC, pulled out 10 management lessons he gained.
Anyway, thanks to Guy Kawasaki (who is the one who got me onto the list) and Dennis Hall (who puts together these embarks for the Navy) for inviting me.
Check out my complete set of hundreds of photos (they are all in the public domain so you can use them for whatever purpose you want — they are high enough resolution so you can print posters out, for example). I shot a few HD videos, like this one, too (make sure you visit those and watch them in HD, I shot those on my Canon 5D MK II and they are the sharpest videos of anyone in the group):
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