Rather than rehash the story of how I woke up on the morning of 9/11 to a couple of cryptic phone calls and what I thought was a bad sci-fi B movie (because I was in Hawaii and we are 5 hours behind the East Coast in the fall), I'd like to tell you about what I was doing precisely one year later. Before I do that, though, I have to explain the concept of the Battle Ensign. Folks who are vaguely familiar with the Navy in general might associate the term Ensign with an O-1. That would be correct... but since nothing in the military can be simple, the Ensign is actually the term for the flag flown on a naval warship that denotes the nationality of said ship. (The lowest ranking officer typically bore the responsibility for the Ensign, thus the rank.) A Battle Ensign is an extremely large Ensign, flown when entering battle for the purposes of clear identification. (Have you ever tried reading a flag hoist? I have. It's a lot harder than it sounds.)
These days, the Navigator is typically the junior officer that maintains the Ensigns (the flags, not the junior officers). Being on a destroyer, the Nav and I had a bit of a love hate relationship going, as we were both quite aggressive and being ranked against each other for promotion purposes but still worked together pretty well most of the time. When 9/11 happened, we knew we were the next Carrier Battle Group scheduled to deploy. It was a tough year. We didn't know when the call would come, but we wanted to be ready to go... and that meant going through maintenance and training several times over in about half the time.
Shortly before finally deploying, we got a new Commanding Officer, who requested we hoist the Battle Ensign. He declared it was insufficiently small and told the Nav to order a new one. We were confused by the request, and the Nav ordered one slightly larger, which was technically made for larger ships but wouldn't foul our dual mast. Nope, still not big enough. So, the Nav ordered the largest Ensign in the supply system. I can only assume this thing was designed for aircraft carriers because the only place we could fold this thing was out on the helo deck. We giggled at how ridiculous the Ensign was when it showed up. He didn't even have a place to put it. We did the math and figured out that we wouldn't be able to rotate certain RADAR antennas if that thing was flying because it was so huge, it would get caught.
SO anyway, we finally left homeport in August 2002. On September 11, 2002, we steaming through the Indian Ocean, scheduled to "inchop" or report for duty to the 5th Fleet Commander, who has cognizance over the Gulf and surrounding areas. The CO ordered us to hoist the Battle Ensign. And so there we were, remembering the USS Cole and the World Trade Center attacks, knowing we were heading to the Gulf to get ready to start another war. It was totally surreal. And the Ensign was just utterly ridiculous. We did secure antennas and watched the winds carefully to make sure we didn't wreck our gear. The Navigator and I giggled,
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