Another Great Day at Sea : Life Aboard the USS George H. W. Bush

Can one loathe a writer just from reading his or her work? Such revulsion for another human based on mental processes and attitudes, as revealed by his or her writing, happened to me reading GREAT DAY. This is, I admit, a character flaw on my part for which I apologize, but there it is. Many people may feel the same about me and my writing. So be it.

The New Yorker excerpt, with its many technical errors and its tone-deaf and apparently willful failure to do research that would have enabled the author’s basic understanding of the subject, started me down the road to antipathy. Reading others’ reviews, especially of those not captivated by the author’s exalted reputation, confirmed the core problems. I decided not to buy the book or reward the author in any way but a friend sent a copy and I read it, reluctantly. In retrospect, I should have burned it. What were they thinking at Writers in Residence? That the author would do a good or even an adequate job? That his past reputation would serve?

The technical errors, deep and crisp and even, have been discussed by other reviewers. One oft-repeated and egregious example: the author’s “F-18” is actually an F/A-18 and the distinction is important—‘F’ designates a fighter, but the F/A-18 is both a fighter and an attack (‘A’) aircraft. Billions were spent on combining these capabilities and it takes immense training effort for pilots to handle both tasks. To mention this technical defect barely scratches the surface of the author’s ignorance and failure to master a complex technological environment.

What other reviewers failed to describe adequately, which instilled my loathing and contempt, was the writer’s style and tone. Some Englishmen (I am English) embody characteristics other Englishmen find intolerable. The author covers all the loathable bases magnificently: an arrogant, know-it-all posture in which he looks down on others from the lofty height of his intellectual superiority, his endlessly self-serving and self-referential writing, his disrespectful references to his accompanying photographer whom he terms derisively and repeatedly as “the snapper,” as if photography were some silly little hobby and the man with the silly little Box Brownie merely his servant, his sneering dismissal of a religious speaker in the ship’s chapel, his gratuitous ‘prolier than thou’ sliming of the British class system as evidenced historically in the British military, his staggeringly persnickety attitude about food (food tolerated by 5,000 others, in a warship on a nine-month, not just two-week deployment in which he was a guest) and relentless demands for a personal cabin because he cannot tolerate bunking with others, his attempts to borrow WWII Battle of Britain pilot heroism (he was born in 1958), his recounting a scene from a WWII film about a British battleship that ignores the definitive US carrier film “The Bridges at Toko-ri,” his disdainful characterization of the dedication of the commanding officer and his peers (in context, the book title comes across as ironic, even sarcastic), his failure even to acknowledge the challenge of carrier aviation (especially night traps) performed daily by young men and women pilots . . . the list of his attitudinal and literary transgressions is too long to recount here.

As for his comment about it being ‘difficult to fall overboard’ unless blown by a jet blast, Dyer should have paid attention. Loss of an unpopular, too-strict superior is Navy history and a great controller of seamen sadists who understand the very real risk and moderate their behavior (or behaviour) accordingly. But he gets so much so wrong so often, typically framed in a lame joke, that the mind reels. Stop me before I vomit.

Perhaps Dyer should have gone aboard a nuclear submarine for a 90-day combat cruise, instead of his mere 14 days aboard the George H.W. Bush. If he hated a U.S. aircraft carrier so much, and considered it so far beneath him, maybe the boomer (British or American—he wouldn’t even bother to understand the word) might have made an even longer and deeper impression (though he would never have researched the subject ahead of time and might have thought that a publisher was stroking his immeasurably huge ego). They would definitely not give him his own cabin, enabling him to escalate his endless whining about being exposed to the fellow humans he apparently despises so profoundly and whose names he can’t be bothered to record or remember. Do not overlook the fact that he was being handsomely rewarded for his ‘work’ by The New Yorker and the book’s publisher.

Dyer is considered by some to be a Very Important Contemporary British Writer (don’t believe me? ask him) so this critical review will flow off him like water off the proverbial duck’s back. He is indeed a somewhat competent writer of English. The real tragedy is that he had a fascinating opportunity to reveal the interior of one of the most interesting and important contemporary phenomena—the U.S. aircraft carrier and its unique role in world affairs—but snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by apparently not caring and taking the gig as a pleasure cruise. Dyer encountered the admiral in charge of regional strategy in the Persian Gulf but failed to interview her, an omission that underlines his fundamental indifference to the task at hand. Or perhaps his U.S. Navy hosts had come to realize that he was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time and made sure he couldn't waste her time.

If you want to read about military aviation from writers who know and care—Dyer barely touches on the flying stuff, though it’s the core mission of the modern aircraft carrier, and only talks to a few pilots of the scores aboard—try Richard Bach’s first book, Stranger to the Ground, a selfless piece of first-person revelation, or the WWII-era British book Flat Top, by J.D. Ommanney. Both reveal intimately the real worlds of flying and carrier aviation and make Dyer’s work look like the chicken-scratchings of a rank beginner.