How to transport a Transformer
It is made of 60,000 tons of structural steel — with more than 1,400 miles of wires and cables. Its flight deck is 1,092 feet long, with an area of 4.5 acres; its combat load displacement is between 90,000 to 102,000 tons. It has two nuclear reactors and four steam engines, and carries 3,000 tons of weapons.
War game freaks and geeks, meet your pinup. The aircraft carrier USS George Washington which stopped by Manila this week is “the most powerful moving object on earth,” said the operations officer who rattled off the ship’s vital statistics. If you doubt that claim, consider this stat: the kitchen serves 18,000 meals a day, and the freshwater distilling plants have a daily capacity of 400,000 gallons.
In any case I believe the ops officer because he made reference to Doctor Strangelove by Stanley Kubrick. If sailors know their Kubrick, the navy must be in good shape.
The last time I saw an aircraft carrier was at the movies, in Michael Bay’s numbing Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. In that ode to metal, the late autobot Optimus Prime was transported by several helicopters and dropped onto the deck of an aircraft carrier. During Thursday’s US Embassy reception on board the USS George Washington, the question foremost in my mind was, “How many Transformers can this ship carry?”
All of them, it turns out, plus the filmmaker’s ego. The visitors were invited onto the flight deck, which is vast. To get up to the flight deck you take the elevator — the most exciting part of the tour. The elevator looks like the open “balcony” of the ship: you step on it, you hear a rumbling, then the floor rises up. The four elevators are nearly 4,000 square feet each; in contrast the stairs have very narrow treads so you have to splay your feet in ballet first position or walk on tiptoe.
There were a lot of planes on the deck — the sort that heroic movie pilots run to in slow motion. My second question would’ve been, “During training exercises, do you hear Highway to the Danger Zone from the Top Gun soundtrack in your head?” I resisted verbalizing it, reminding myself that I cannot swim. The airplanes had the names and birthplaces of pilots written on their sides — number 500 bore the name of a pilot from Cavite, the Philippines.
Incidentally, the composition of the ship’s crew lends credence to my theory of world domination which states that Filipinos, being employed in millions of households, restaurants, and ships all over the world, are colonizing the planet. Twenty-five percent of the crew are of Filipino descent or have family in the Philippines.
Unfortunately we did not tour the viewing deck, but I learned that there really is a red phone on the bridge and it is a direct line to the President of the United States. Visitors must be kept away from this phone — one of 2,000 telephones on board — lest the Oval Office be inundated with spontaneous “Barack, I love you” calls.
Speaking of world domination, the guests included two of the most famous Pinoys in the world at present: Manny Pacquiao and Charice Pempengco. While the Pinoy guests posed for photographs with the aircraft — apparently no one can resist posing in front of an airplane — the American crew posed for photographs with our boxing champ.
Pac-Man is very friendly; his personal bodyguard — a redundant concept; who’s got the killer fists anyway? — the opposite. The bodyguard was literally attached to Manny at the hip; when my friend Agnes was having her picture taken with the champ, the bodyguard moved, causing her to spill some wine on the bodyguard’s shirt. Whereupon he growled and nearly bit her head off.
You have to wonder at such tight personal security when we were inside an American aircraft carrier. Then again, perhaps the guard feared that crewmen of Mexican or British descent would attack Manny Pacquiao to avenge his thrashing of their champions. I sense a cinematic possibility: a remake of Lino Brocka’s Bona, in which Nora Aunor played a fanatically devoted alalay (personal assistant).
Charice Pempengco’s song number was not on the original program, but she offered to sing and it was too good an idea to pass up. Luckily, her manager had a “minus-one” (Charice’s recording minus the vocals).
There was no time to do a sound check, so when Charice got up to sing, the minus-one of her Whitney Houston medley from The Bodyguard sounded wobbly. But the girl did not get thrown off or have a diva tantrum, she just sang her songs. That is a professional.
A couple of hours later, we took the water taxis back to the dock behind SM Mall of Asia, where most of the 5,000 crewmen were spending their R&R. I forgot to ask my other question, “What detergent do you use to get your dress whites so white?” The main question, of course, is: Why this impressive show of military technology at this particular time? But that’s for the political columnists.
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