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From: denbeste@spdcc.com (Steven Den Beste)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Carrier crews and the light of day
Message-ID: <1991Feb18.054408.11593@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 18 Feb 91 05:44:08 GMT
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From: denbeste@spdcc.com (Steven Den Beste)

OK, folks, I'm a bit of a lightweight, so don't snicker too loudly if I get
a lot of the terminology wrong.

Last fall some time there was a TV documentary talking about "our brave
service-people and how they live" while waiting for the shooting to start,
and they profiled several specific service-folks at ranks ranging from the
captain of a carrier right down to a junior electrician on that same carrier.

A carrier is a humongous hunk of metal, and those of us who've never been on one
tend to think of the flight deck and the hanger deck and the tower and forget
all the rest of it. On the documentary what they said was that most of the
people assigned to a carrier literally go weeks between times of seeing the sky.
Apparently those allowed to go up top are by far the exception, not the rule.

My question: How true is that for a battleship? What proportion of the crew
go below and STAY below for weeks at a time, and never even get near a
porthole?