Sawyer Connally

On February 14, 2021, I lugged two sea-bags, a camera bag, and a Pelican case off a chartered bus full of perfect strangers—though they each knew one another and had for years—up a concrete pier. The crew of the USS Carter Hall was embarking for its “COVID Cruise”; eight months, if we were lucky, at sea, with few opportunities to leave the ship—or the pier. I was boarding the ship as their photographer and journalist to document the work and lives of the crew at sea, work I’d never done on my own to that point. At the end of the routine deployment I would disembark without ceremony, never to board again.

Our leaving on Valentine’s Day was, for the vast majority, one more small reminder of the connections that would go on hold, a twinge of longing amidst the furious haste of departure. The captain made none of the usual promises (recreational tours, free days in new cities, overnight liberty), and there was a rumor going around that we wouldn’t ever get off the ship. Two women on the bus ride over said “eight months” no less than nine times, each turning the number over in their mouths like bubble gum, listing birthdays, holidays, and pre-K graduations they would miss. They were chipper nonetheless. Chipper because to start the nine months gloomy would make it all the longer—that we all knew—and chipper because they’d be back in time for Christmas; Christmas, if we were lucky.

We had no clear picture of our destination. Our tentative mission was to display presence in geopolitically contested waters and conduct training with allied partners, but where and with whom remained mostly speculation. And though this uncertainty was for us a minute addendum to our time aboard the ship, it did little to assure spouses and parents who awaited news, any news, with little patience, and stifled communication just the same. I thought that certainty would give us the ability to plan and occupy the future, to daydream in commiseration with the people who stayed behind about the date of return, the souvenirs gained along the way. Its absence forced us only to swallow apprehensions as words too often repeated, left then unsaid. We simply didn’t know.

I’d just spent the last two weeks in Restriction of Movement, ROM-ing. This was the word of the year: Sailors were ROM-ing at home, ROM-ing in the barracks, ROM-ing in the States, and in the whole world over, from Guam to Italy, Japan to Alaska. Two weeks in isolation, or sometimes with a partner to share the same stale air as you, to make sure you were absolutely free of COVID-19 before boarding the ship. For those of us who had done it repeatedly since 2020, the word was heavy, with connotations: food so bad that inspector generals were tipped off on Twitter, delivered cold to a barren barracks door, and human contact so sparse that at times the isolation was terrifying. For those ROM-ing in secluded berthings on ships, it meant no cell reception to call anyone.

The crew of the Carter Hall spent those two weeks antsy and atomized in the Norfolk Waterside Marriott, four hundred of us, meeting at first in a carpeted conference room to receive our room assignments announced over the course of seven hours. The few members of the crew that came to speak to me were curious about the stranger. A Boatswain’s Mate I would come to know as Amanda, who wore pajamas and drawled like a Texan, crunched on apple slices as she asked what I did. When I told her I was assigned as their photographer, she laughed like I’d told a joke, nodded, and told me not to get my hopes up that we’d return by the holidays: “They’re already saying we’re getting extended.”

Rumors stopped making their way to me once we were in our rooms. I ran out of wine on the second day, watched Stanley Kubrick movies (all of them), and called home to gab at my parents about anything, with little to report while looking out my floor-to-ceiling windows at a nearby parking garage. The calls grew tiring, as much for them as for me I’m sure; all I could tell them was that I was nervous, and about my scattered, feverish thoughts on 

, which neither my mother nor father had seen. Thinking of what I faced at the other side of ROM (the boarding of the ship, the estrangement from those I loved, the incredible breadth of time I would spend out to sea) doused me bodily in fear, so I pushed it down. I killed the time as best I could, agonizingly sober among the room’s silver fixtures and perfectly inoffensive modern furniture.

Carter Hall is a Dock Landing Ship by class, equipped to take on a Marine Corps complement equal in number to the sailors onboard, and meant to deliver them to shore in surge waves aboard a smaller ship stored in its belly, the well deck. The crew called it a rusty taxi cab, large and clumsy, little mind paid to its combat potential. Its mission was to bring the fight to the beach, and it had only enough defensive capability to keep antagonists away while doing so.

The winds blew cold on the waterfront in February, stiff and portentous. In the fervor of navigating a new ship, getting chow, and stowing my belongings in my anonymous bunk in a room of fifty, I forgot the dread I felt for our departure. As the first night onboard, still in port, came to a close, I settled into bed early and briefly cried, mourning friendships and relationships cut short in anticipation of too-long apart, and feeling more than ever how deeply I was plunged into obscurity. The world was going to continue in its busy way whether I was in it or not, and somehow I was bound to this crew by circumstance so tightly that they were the only world I had left.

The ship came to life in the morning with the call to man the sea-and-anchor detail. We were getting underway, and as I hastened around the ship with my camera, meeting the line-handlers, I put together a better picture of our voyage. We wouldn’t leave the ship again until April, two months, and at that point we’d be in Plymouth, England. A vague list of prospective stops around the Mediterranean followed, and then in June we’d transit the Suez Canal, splitting Asia and Africa like a zipper, ducking under the pharaonic Al-Salam Bridge and entering the sweltering Red Sea.

They say the hardest part of anything is the starting and the stopping. I dwelt for the weeks before on what was to come, but I worried less as I joined the action, greeting, joking, and shooting. It was novel for the crew to have a photographer, and even as they stood around in the freezing mist, they asked me for group photos and gag pictures. I met Alex, who would become a close friend, sad to leave behind his wife and toddler, and Grant, much younger and overworked, for whom the loneliness of sea life was just a segment in a long line of alienation that he bit off with dark humor.

We left the pier in one frantic hour: heavy mooring lines kadoosh-ed into the sea; three short blasts of the horn warned pleasure crafts piloted by barefoot dads that the 9,300 long-ton battleship was backing up and they should steer clear. With that, we were off: the many hands involved dispersed as they stowed their lines and retreated inside to furtively access cell reception one last time. The pilot navigated the tranquil, lapping waters of the Elizabeth River into the Chesapeake Bay, then out into the open sea.

To say that I missed anything—home, friends, family, the internet, good food—out to sea would be a lie. I fell in love with the immense routine of that life. The sense that the world continued on without me became pleasurable as I looked out over the relentless mundanity of the ocean. In the world at large there was nothing I was missing, and so many things from which I’d escaped. My new life had its variety: some days the water was a rich blue with brilliant white caps glinting in the sun; others the sea was as placid as a bulging pond, draped by a grey mist, with no disturbance anywhere but our great wake. At night the water was a sightless void, or an enchanting landscape of playful flickers, the shape of the waves defined by clear starlight and bioluminescence.

I moved through the ship’s identical compartments, up and down its jungle-gym ladderwells, with an urgent familiarity, shifting my weight as the passageways rolled from side to side. The sea was infinite in size and as private as a prison cell. It was deadly silent, yet roaring waves would spray onto the deck, smudging my lens with salt and freezing water. I dreamt again and again that the ship would rock in one direction and never cease, turning completely over, filling the berthing with rushing water. I’d wake up gasping, laughing from the icy terror. I dwelt on lines from Hart Crane that, in their stubborn obscurity, meshed onto my world day by day. Even as I struggled to discern their meaning, I fought to memorize them on quiet nights. Crane seemed to be writing the lulls and swells of the sea just as I saw, felt, and smelled it:

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides ... High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

Life itself fit into that small form: there was elation and fear, friends and rivals, trying days that didn’t let up from before sunrise to after sunset, and slow days, where the sun went high and stayed there, spent watching movies with sour candy from the ship’s store.

This simple happiness was only broken when we hit our first port. England set the standard for the deployment, and because we were forbidden from entering Plymouth, the Navy brought the bars to us. Tents vending unlimited beer and liquor run by locals were set up on the pier in one great line. Calls from loved ones flooded in, carrying good and bad news.

Relationships, tense from time apart, made the crew drink savagely to ease the discomfort of being plugged back in so suddenly. There were no sights to visit, no city to explore, and the atmosphere darkened under a cloud of menacing angst and riotous drunkenness. When we went back out to sea, it was with hangovers, headaches, and lowered eyes.

Two worlds existed in parallel: the one left behind, at home, went on because it had to, and the one we had entered, sequestered and pressed into a routine resembling nothing else, took on its own proportions. At sea, home exists warmly like a glow infusing the quietest hours; the pangs of love for family visited me before bed or while I smoked under the stars. Living in every sense at the periphery, we conjured our past lives, molded them in our hearts into a soft future we knew we would one day crawl into. But when those worlds pressed up against one another prematurely, when the crew’s home lives came calling across the sea to foreign ports, it revealed how disjunctive those two worlds were, how misaligned and uncomfortable their union. In light of the other, each appeared grasping and clingy, so incompatible were the demands of workaday life stateside with the firm steel-and-salt fact of the now. Life aboard the ship was too monotonous to retell to an outsider, the humdrum of home too foreign to want to hear.

My worlds, too, collided violently after so neat a partition. Our port visits punctuated stretches of 30-odd days at sea, and in Spain, then Greece, I received news hopelessly delayed from my father: unforeseen tragedies, emergency surgeries, and struggles with addiction had swept through the lives of my friends and family—things heavier than any of us had been met with before. Both home and my ship howled like a blistering wind for my presence: there was the constant need to tell the crew’s story, to document their efforts in photographs, yet the people I loved and cherished were in dire straits. The effect was that I was split down the middle. There was no respite in the open sea, guilty as I was for wanting to leave behind the people that needed me, whose problems kept me from throwing myself into my work. I was a futile friend, son, and brother stranded thousands of miles away on a steel beach.

My friends on the ship were torn by similar situations. In port, when the bars called and the parties formed, spouses and partners were ignored. Alex’s wife was confused about exorbitant bar tabs on the credit card, and I watched as a dependable father and husband turned into a denial-fueled alcoholic, ignoring his family because he could not find the words to say to them. Among the younger sailors with whom I’d fallen in, infidelity swept in like a storm, and relationships fell, it seemed, weekly. We smuggled vodka in orange juice bottles and grew dysfunctional underway. For the first time since we left, I felt stuck.

Grant told me he saw little difference being home or out to sea. His life ran on a course he wasn’t interested in steering. Yet in the coming months, he grew to miss a life that in his resignation he denied he ever had. All of us in those months in Europe recoiled from the light of the places we’d left, and spent our nights in port, not getting in touch, but instead with sailors we saw every day. They shared our reality, they spoke the language. There was no rehash or scolding, only the drinks, the piers, and the minutiae of a community driven together by encroaching bulkheads and machine noise. At sea, there was work to do.

In May, the Taliban started a rapid offensive in Afghanistan, coinciding with the withdrawal of the US, that would lead to the collapse of the NATO-backed government by August. The Carter Hall passed through the Suez Canal into the Red Sea on June 1. In July, we transited silently through the sleepy Bab al-Mandab Strait in the dark of night, catching a hazy glimpse of the Djibouti coast in the pink dawn. By July 10, we were in the Strait of Hormuz being harassed by unrelenting fast-attack craft with daredevil pilots from the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. I headed up a team documenting their maneuvers, wielding camera lenses the size of traffic cones and handheld camcorders suited for home movies. We became aware that the reality of our situation had fundamentally changed.

Intelligence was routinely amending previous estimates on the timeline for the fall of Kabul: from six months after US withdrawal, to three, to one. By late July no estimates were needed—Kabul had fallen, and only the airport was allowed to go unsurrendered for Operation Allies Refuge. Carter Hall made a brief stop off the coast of Kuwait; the Marines disembarked, ferried on landing crafts with rigid hulls and those with massive inflatable inner-tubes and fans for propulsion. From Kuwait all 400 of them would fly to Kabul to assist in the evacuation. One would never leave; he was killed in a suicide bombing at the airport on August 26, along with 180 other people. The US would respond three days later with a drone strike on a mistaken target, killing ten more civilians.

Carter Hall and her crew of sailors, however, remained at the periphery. While tragedy unfolded at the Kabul International Airport, the ship made its way down the Persian Gulf to the Khalifa Bin Salman Port in Bahrain, the towering cargo cranes secreted in a dense and humid fog. As it cleared, scorched away by midday’s breathtaking heat, Manama’s distant skyline came into view. Evacuees were to be ferried from Kabul to several regional airports, then flown again to military bases in the US and Europe where they awaited Special Immigrant Visas. At the Royal Bahraini Air Force base, Isa, on the southern tip of Bahrain, joint military leadership created a task force to process these evacuees and get them on planes to their eventual destinations. Our crew was to assist at Isa, one hour by bus from our docked ship in the north.

We heard about history as it unfolded in the form of thirteen memorialized names read over the ship’s loudspeakers. We saw on our bus rides the photos of 800 people crammed in a C-17, and videos and news stories from on-scene at the airlift. Coverage at Isa, however, was sparse. I put down the camera to work at the airfield, and the priority was to keep the operation under wraps. Our operation wanted nothing to do with the press, nor did our efforts appear there. We worked silently amid a global clamor, borne by farther tides, and in shirking my role of documentation I became more a member of the crew than ever.

The crew in this new circumstance shook off the weariness from our wasted days in Europe. The world was coming to us; it was touching down with the heavy shock of its landing gears hours by hours, and lingering clouds of dust and sand on the airfield signalled each of its new arrivals. Every evening at 6 p.m. the night shift’s bus stopped at Isa, and the day shift was taken to Manama in the same bus. We worked through the night setting up new shelters, escorting arrivals through the maze of tents, and delivering meals to the evacuees—Afghan interpreters who collaborated with the US, their families, American and European citizens, and more who fled.

The sense that had dominated the deployment to that point, that we were unmoored and wayward, adrift in a space between worlds, evaporated with the burning immediacy of our work in Bahrain. The formless, industrial backdrop of the ports we had occupied gave way to the island’s low-lying desert and an August sun that beat down in waves, lighting every surface in stark definition. The heat sapped the angst from us through our interminable sweat. When I returned from my shift each morning, I collapsed into my rack, only slightly cooler than the world outside, pleasantly exhausted. Life was no longer vague and confounding to face, unsynchronized with the rest of the world; it was a cycle of hard, material tasks with clear goals: we were playing our part in a global network shocked to life.

An intelligence agent processing the identities of those who stepped off the plane told me that many were unsure of their exact birthdays. He was wearing Oakleys, camouflage, and out-of-regulation shoes, and said “I’ve been putting in July 4th for everybody.” Children played soccer outside the tents we filled with hundreds of aluminum bed frames and Disney Princess-themed mattresses. Parents browsed through a “free store,” of sorts, replacing things left behind like phone chargers, diapers, and changes of clothes. Some nine miles away, down a dirt road, was the Tree of Life—the Shajarat-al-Hayat—living where no other tree can live.

We did not work at the scene of the airlift, nor at the eventual destinations of the evacuees, and we were not yet home. But our every motion, every screw driven into a bed frame with an Allen wrench, every meal carried into a room of exhausted people, had its purpose sewn so clearly in its conduct that our drunken passivity before that point seemed a distant memory, shared with people other than those I now worked alongside. In the evenings before our shift I would find Alex on the ship’s deck, head down, pacing and smirking on the phone with his wife. In the dire sweep of the moment, from our remote and transient post, the crew more than ever relied on their families to process the experiences from Isa. We escaped the long days there in the commiserating anecdotes of the lives that still reserved our places: of toddlers’ antics, what the dog got up to, office drama, and news of friends.

On September 8, eight days after the last US plane left Kabul, we abruptly rallied, set out to sea, and left Bahrain. By that point over 80,000 people had been evacuated from Afghanistan by the US, and a large majority would gain asylum stateside. I said goodbye to my family on Facetime as we prepared to heave in our mooring lines. They had gotten on without me over those months; life had changed for them, but they were dealing. Two weeks later the Carter Hall dropped from the mouth of the Suez Canal, plunged back into the mild Mediterranean Sea. I turned 22 as we turned our bow toward Gibraltar’s Pillars of Hercules, churning and swaying, top-heavy and clumsy, making nearly 20 knots in the dead of night.

Sawyer Connally

Sawyer Connally

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