South China Sea

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At the Emergency Response Force training area at Fort Bragg, one of the recruits was puzzled when told in no uncertain terms that he had to take his dog tags off — put one around his neck, the other in his boot.

“Why my boot?’

“Because,” the sergeant said, “if we ever go into combat, you might get decapitated. Then we wouldn’t know who you are — correction, were.”

“That’s nice. Thank God we ain’t at war.”

“Sonny,” the sergeant said in his southern drawl, shaking his head, “we could be at war anytime. The new world order is disorder. Since the Berlin Wall came down, since Russia’s shake-up, we got more flashpoints poppin’ up than you can shake a stick at.”

Thousands of miles to the east, in the Pacific, west of the Marianas, the USS Enterprise was in its prelaunch mode. High up in the carrier’s island in Primary Flight Control, the yellow-jerseyed air boss issued the command for all hands on deck for an FOD, or foreign object damage, walkdown. A dropped pencil or, in the case of the female sailors aboard, something as outwardly insignificant as a bobby pin, could be sucked in and destroy a jet engine or take out the eye of a deck or air crew member.

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