Orion lies on his side, lounging along the southwest horizon. Polaris sparks so brightly in the center of the sky you figure they've put in a new bulb. The arc of the Milky Way spills toward me, stretching from beyond the pole.

I've seen lots of stars, lots of night skies, but, except maybe somewhere north of Banff at the divide in the Canadian Rockies, there's nothing quite like this. Looking up from here, even though we're not much more than fifty feet above sea level, is like an astronaut's view, and being as fucking high as I am, it's a lot like a space walk.

Though it feels like I'm simply drifting through the universe below me I know that two gigantic turbines are pushing us through the twenty-nine degree water at twenty-five knots. So we're moving purposely though going nowhere. Traveling in a large ellipse northwest of Murmansk monitoring the movements of a navy that is no longer really our enemy but surely is not quite friend yet. Of course even if they were friends we'd still be spying on them. We spy on everyone.

An eight hour double-watch behind me, Billy Mac's sick with something and there are only a couple of us considered wizards of identification, especially aircraft identification, and even though it's been more than three years since some moron on the Vincennes mistook an Iranian Airbus A300 for an F14, the whole Navy is pretty sticky about keeping a close eye on this stuff.

Now I say that mistaking a huge commercial airliner for a fighter jet is so close to impossible considering the tools we've got that I assume they meant to shoot it down to screw with Iran, but then I'm known to be a total nut in general and a particular weirdo when it comes to politics, so when I say that, they just smile. The only time what I have to say isn't laughed at is when I say that's a civilian Tu-154 leaving Murmansk and not an Il-78 tanker or a Tu-160 bomber, because, I just know and they're not always sure. Still, I point out, even they know it's not a Mig-29.

Whatever. Four hours of the blue lights and the flashing radars and the vibrating images of all those computer screens down in the Fire Control Room and I'm fried. Twice that and sanity is left in the dust. So I do a half dozen hits with the bong made out of the shell casing - very military indeed - and float through the helicopter hangar and out onto the deck and off into space. The E6 watching me knows I'm high, doesn't trust me, but doesn't mess with me either. I have my value on board and I'll never get above the basic E3 I am now so I'm no real threat to anything. He's watching though. He wants to make sure I don't get joined by too many other slackers. He's still pissed about all the reports he had to write the time we scored acid in Amsterdam and set off the anti-radar chaff cannons in the English Channel so we could shine the spotlights on all those sparkly aluminum ribbons floating in the night air. That was one great show. We didn't really consider that when you do that, every radar on every Navy ship around the world suddenly thinks another, actually larger ship has suddenly appeared next to the USS Victor Henry twenty miles northeast of Normandy and communications networks light up globally. My defense the next day that we'd simply proved the system worked, that if the French had fired an Exocet missile at us it would have gone for the chaff cloud instead of our ship, didn't play well among either NCOs or officers.

But it doesn't matter. This cruise will last another six months. One rumor is we'll actually get to New York for Fleet Week. Another is that we'll get stuck doing the Great Lakes recruiting cruise. Everybody votes for New York. If we do the Great Lakes we'll need to be in uniform and relatively under control all the time. No one really wants that except maybe the guys from Chicago and Milwaukee.

I wander forward and finally lie down on the chilled steel deck beneath the missile launcher. I think that if I was smarter, if I was sharper, if anyone could imagine me as "Officer-material" I could have learned to fly those planes instead of IDing them from a cramped work station on a 450 foot frigate. I could have been exploding off the catapults on a carrier instead of blowing aluminum dust in the air. I could be flying toward those stars in fact instead of in dream.

I could dwell on that a long time. I could lie here in regret and frustration until, and yes, this would happen here in the Barents Sea, I froze to death like Jack Nicholson at the end of The Shining. The stars though. The stars are too beautiful. They remind me that it's really all OK. The Milky Way spills toward me offering a future, and I scramble back to my feet and head below to hunt for food.

Ira Socol ©