A day on the Reagan

BY ERIC LINDBERG
DAILY SOUND STAFF WRITER

Life on the USS Ronald Reagan aircraft carrier is ordered chaos.
Thousands of uniformed men and women scurry through a mind-spinning maze of hatches and hallways.
Pilots, squadron support crew, air traffic controllers, food service workers, medical staff, electronic technicians, weapon handlers and countless others wind their way through the intricate passageways every day, making life possible in the cold-steel guts of the ship.

Jesus Madera is one of those sailors, a culinary specialist who works in the bakery. He is in the midst of a five-hour pizza-cooking frenzy when he stops to catch his breath.
“It’s very hectic,” he says. “…This is more of a special night, kind of to improve the morale.”
Starting at 0630 hours with breakfast service and not likely to end until 2130, Madera and his fellow chefs will have prepared at least 5,000 pizzas. The 19-year-old chose a life in the galley upon joining the Navy at age 18, hoping to develop cooking skills he can use once he leaves the service.
An Anaheim native, Madera plans to get an education after finishing up his duty and dreams of owning his own restaurant someday or maybe returning to the seas as a chef on a cruise ship.
Down in the enlisted mess hall, first class petty officers Robert Sale and Milt Rollison are relaxing after their dinner. Rollison, of Pennsylvania, joined the Navy in 1988 when he was 18 years old. He’s just six months from retirement. Sale, a Texan, calls him a bulldog.
As computer service technicians, the two men manage databases, back up information and help ensure the ship’s 1,500-plus computers are running smoothly.
Each day, millions of bits of information representing untold hours of work are transferred, altered, saved, and otherwise spun through the myriad cables running along every overhead beam, twisting through a cabalistic jumble of pipes and valves.
It’s their job to make sure those bits of data don’t get lost along the way, and during the past year there hasn’t been a major server crash aboard the USS Ronald Reagan.
In contrast to the racket of the kitchen and mess hall, religious program specialist David Winter is secluded in the quiet of the Café, a computer lab adjoining the chapel and chaplain’s office. While assisting with administrative work for the ship’s three chaplains, he sees stressed sailors seek counseling through the religious ministry department every day.
“You can imagine, 18- and 19-year-olds coming on here, the first time they are away from home, away from their family,” Winter says. “Maybe they’ve missed the birth of their son or daughter.”
A Navy man for 15 years, Winter has seen it all. It’s a smile, it’s a tear, it’s a car crash of a loved one back home, he says, or sometimes just the stress of a work-and-sleep lifestyle.
One sailor whose name is lost in the thundering whir of a trash compactor might be one of those who slip into the chapel for a moment of solace. He opens a plastic bag and pulls out a reeking, Frisbee-shaped disc — the end product of the growling machine. How did he get this job?
“I fell into this one, man,” he says as he pops open the loading area of the ship’s only incinerator. Nearby, burlap sacks filled with shredded metal blanket the floor. Only biodegradable products are jettisoned overboard. The rest comes to be shredded, compacted or torched.
After the roar of the waste room, the combat direction center, or CDC, is painfully quiet. It’s a slow night for radar operators Cynthia Davis and Marika Cox as the carrier churns the water off the outer coast of the Channel Islands. Without the air wing on board, they are left to track commercial airliners passing nearby, their figures barely visible in the dark, screen-lit room.
At 2200 hours, a smooth voice comes over the ship’s intercom, praying for the welfare of the sailors on board and reflecting on the lessons of another day as lights are flipped to an ephemeral red glow and the carrier seems to sway itself gently to sleep.