As I mentioned recently, the Ronald Reagan strike group is surge deploying in the very near future - heading out to cover what would have been the Stennis CSG’s Western Pacific commitment while that strike group joins Eisenhower’s in the roiling waters of Arabia. I got to see a number of old friends last week brief my boss on the ship and airwing’s readiness to get underway - to “surge” deploy, having returned from a previous deployment last summer.

They were publicly upbeat and even enthusiastic about what must have been for at least some of them bitterly unwelcome news just a few weeks ago - this is the nature of things, orders being orders after all, and misery being optional. If they were privately feeling sorry for themselves - their disrupted home lives, discarded plans, any uncertainty about the scope and scale of the task before them - you could not tell it from the faces of their leadership. It will be important for those leaders to convey that same enthusiasm and purpose to the younger people who have not yet fully embraced the third element of the sea service’s core value set: Commitment. Important, but routine - this is what leaders do. There is a war on, after all, and although their job in WESTPAC will not take them to the combat zone, it will help to stabilize a critical policy flank even as additional combat power joins the kinetic fray. We take these things for granted, but no other nation in the world can commit three carrier strike groups half-way around the world and leave so very much capacity in reserve - friends take notice and are reassured, as do those who weigh the calculus of enmity. There is honor in such service.

In a strange way, I rather envy them, the sailors aboard Reagan.

Oh, I know this is an easy thing to say: We all tend to idealize past hardships. In our middle age we tend look back with nostalgically upon the days of our carefree youth, recalling a kind of happy innocence but not remembering the burning need to be free of parental constraint, the agonies of adolescent relationships, the toxically combining uncertainties of self-identification, worth and potential. I have spent many, many days at sea in the course of my service and many times promised myself to remember the bad along with the good, to write a letter to myself about the pains of separation from those you love for months on end, the austerity of day-to-day existence, the grinding burden of doing a very great number of exceptionally difficult things to a routinely uncompromising standard of excellence.

But the same “boundedness” that a life at sea entails and which so sharply constrains the sailor’s freedom of movement can also embrace him in its clarity of vision. In both the literal and metaphorical senses it is true that you can see further at sea than you can ashore. The details of life spring out more vividly once free of men and their cities, machines, dirt and pollution.

Each deployment has a beginning and an end, and every day that passes is one day less until you stand re-united with those you love best. Each day brings with it a focus and unity of effort - different for each person, but nevertheless sharply defined. Some will cook and clean, some must run the plant, some will navigate and some will steer, some will develop plans and others will execute them. Some will even get to fly fighters from a carrier flight deck.

And in the midst of all of the noise and confusion and the great moving limbs of impersonal, powerful machinery there is the constant need to remain aware and awake so that one may remain alive: There are many ways to be killed or maimed on a warship at sea, it is no place for the unwise or the unwary and these things too tend to focus the imagination. Much of what is done at sea requires courage, both moral and physical and there is something quietly joyous in knowing that one has been both tested and is therefore trusted, and a quiet joy too in being surrounded by others who have overcome their own fears. It does not always feel that way ashore.

Very soon now the last mooring line will come over aboard USS Ronald Reagan, the bosun’s mate of the watch will sound one prolonged blast of the ship’s whistle and sailors fore and aft will shift colors, lowering the jack forward and the national ensign aft, only to raise the latter again on the main mast. Tugs will flail and thrash alongside, turning her into the channel where, once pointed towards safe waters she will make her own purposeful way out to sea, chasing the setting sun.

On the tip of the bow as the ship gains way, her prow brusquely shouldering aside the waves, a man will be standing alone with his thoughts as he stares into a suddenly revealed horizon. The sea breeze will be in his face, the wind will flap at his trousers and tussle his hair as he contemplates the enormity of God’s creation in that endlessly retreating line. This will also give him the time to reflect upon the infinitely small piece of that creation which he himself represents - a useful exercise in humility.

He will know exactly who he is, up there on the bow, where he fits into the grand scheme and what it is that he ought to be doing. And even as the day fades he knows that this thing he is embarked upon will have a beginning, a middle and an end. Uncertainties will fall away even as the land falls behind. And eventually, having seen what he came to see, he will go below - there will be much work for him to do.

I have been that man before, had his clarity and sense of purpose. There are times when I miss it.