U.S. military mostly out of action these days
America’s mightiest warships, including the carrier John C. Stennis, line up gray and forbidding here at the world’s largest naval base at the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. A few gate-keepers, security people, stand guard on the piers, but otherwise almost no one is visible.
It’s that way at 20 U.S. bases in this corner of Virginia, headquarters of the U.S. Atlantic fleet and home of Air Force, Army and Marine facilities where ordinarily close to 100,000 U.S. troops are on duty, rotating in and out on missions around the world, training, alert and ready for anything. These days the entire U.S. military is standing down, waiting like everyone else, from students to shopkeepers to factory and office workers, for COVID19 either to blow away or for scientists and medical people to make it curable or at least harmless.
The responses from military people you encounter in Norfolk, Virginia Beach and Newport News, all part of the Hampton Roads military community, is they’re ready to return to duty whenever summoned, that they’re told to stay away only for a week or two and all will soon be “normal.” Meanwhile, like university students and school kids, they’re free to take it easy, stay in off-base homes or in barracks on-base, do unsupervised exercises, watch TV and enjoy days off quite aside from regular leave time.
If U.S. military forces are the best in the world, as military people claim, they’re out of action in this critical enclave of military power, in hiding or retreat, a feat that no visible enemy would be able to achieve. You have to ask, what would these forces do in a shooting war, what effect would the virus have on military capabilities, how quickly could they respond knowing the disease could break out any time in the close quarters of a ship or on the ground, fighting against real enemies.
“We’d just follow orders,” a young Marine responded. “They can text us any time and tell us to report.”
No one has a definitive answer for how U.S. forces are meeting basic obligations. No one seems to know when the carrier John C. Stennis and other vessels lurking nearby will be leaving port or what will happen next in the war against an unseen enemy, but one Navy ship at the Norfolk base does have a clear mission.
That’s the hospital ship Comfort, a vision of gleaming white paint, decorated with huge splashes of red crosses, berthed in the same row with all the warships. The Comfort, you’re told, is getting ready to treat civilians as well as military people, maybe not those suffering from the coronavirus but others for whom there’s no room in hospitals overflowing with COVID-19 cases.
On Saturday, the Comfort will be leaving for
New York harbor. A converted super-tanker, with 1,000 beds and hundreds of doctors, nurses and technicians on board, the ship has facilities for just about anything, including major operations. Its sister ship, the Mercy, has already left the naval base at San Diego, the biggest base on the U.S. west coast, for duty at Los Angeles.
It’s good to know one Navy vessel at Norfolk is serving a real purpose in the midst of a strange disease that strikes without warning, arbitrarily, regardless of all precautions. As for all the other forces in this bastion of U.S military might, you wonder when thousands of sailors, soldiers, airmen and Marines will be ordered to return to duty, risking a disease potentially more deadly than America’s enemies.