Flipping around last night, I stopped on the premiere of the PBS series “Carrier.” A film crew spent six months straight with the deployed crew of the USS Nimitz, and it’s public television at its best (meaning little narration, mostly the words of the crew).“If you ain’t ordnance, you ain’t s***!”
“We build bombs and move them around the ship, and we’re at the bottom of the pecking order.”
“Our blood pumps about 1,000 miles an hour.”
“If you die, you die. That’s just the way it is.”
“My father was a pimp or something. My mother was a prostitute.”
“You know me, man. I worry about everything.”
“(On deck) you keep your head on a swivel, because everything changes so fast.”
“Personally, I don’t even get the war – why we’re fighting for someone else’s freedom when we barely have our own.”
“On ship, there are as many opinions on the war as in any group of people.”
The first of the ten-part series seemed mostly free of agenda. To me it looked like a pretty fair presentation of the good, the bad and the ugly of life on board. I couldn’t be more impressed with the young people at every level of the ship’s operations.
Forbes reports the most dangerous job is fishing. The second most dangerous job, pilots and flight engineers. Put them together and what do you get? The aircraft carrier… a miracle of modern engineering, an awesome tool of warfare. A floating high school. A small city on the sea.
Check out “Carrier.” http://www.pbs.org/weta/carrier/
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