Home Sweet Home

Tomorrow, USS Stump will return to her homeport of Norfolk, Virginia after 177 days away, sailing in South American waters, running counter-drug operations (see the July 2003 article) and exercising with third world navies who barely deserve our notice.

While a deployment is part of a larger cycle of training and operations, a deployment itself has a life cycle all its own.

First, of course, is the anticipation leading up to the departure. The knowledge that sailors and their loved ones will be separated for the next six months can be depressing. There is no more somber group of people than sailors who have just left their homeport. The passageways and workcenters are full of people, but they're silent, keeping their thoughts to themselves for the time being.

Eventually, usually a week or two into the cruise, the days become routine, and what was dreaded becomes commonplace. The days flow together, monotony of exercises, drills and daily routine broken by the occasional (in the case of the Stump, the rare) port visit. This part of the cruise lasts until hump day, and even then persists until there's about a month left.

After hump day, though, we start to look forward to going home. About a month out, talk starts of where we'll eat the first night, or maybe even lunch, the movies and music we've missed, and how nice it will be to spend the night somewhere that we don't have to get up the next morning and prove that we're alive to someone who is also just proving that he's alive.

With about a week left, people on board start to lose sleep, the anticipation (and the libido) building up. Personally, I've never been one to lose sleep over much of anything, which, if you ask my wife, is proof that I don't care about much of anything.

This is my sixth cruise in nine years of sea duty, more than anyone I've talked to aboard this ship in fewer years than a lot of sailors senior to me. This crew is smart, efficient and has remarkably high morale considering the pointless nature of this cruise. Stump and her crew performed marvelously, mostly without expecting any kind of reward past our paychecks (and that's pretty much all most of us are getting by the way).

Things have changed over the fifteen years of my naval career, and mostly not for the better. The cycle of the deployment itself hasn't changed at all, but somehow, it used to be more rewarding, both personally and professionally.

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