Dan Heath: If you're an aviator in the Navy, you get a call sign at the beginning of your career. It's like a nickname that follows you through your service.

Captain Chris "Chowdah" Hill: It could be anything. It could be a play on your last name. It could be due to a skin defect. Sometimes it's a little bit pejorative.

Dan: That's Captain Chris "Chowdah" Hill. He's the commanding officer of an aircraft carrier, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Captain Hill: Mine was just based on a Simpsons episode where the word Chowdah came up. At that time, I had a pretty strong Boston accent, I've lost a lot of it over the years, because I grew up in Quincy, Massachusetts, which is right next to Boston.

Dan: It was either Chowdah or Duncan, I guess, was the other possibility. [chuckles]

Captain Hill: They make a list on the whiteboard, and people vote on it.

Dan: Oh, you're kidding. This is actually like a democratic process?

Captain Hill: It is, yes. Then the commanding officer can veto it if it's too nasty. I knew one guy, the back of his head had a little bald spot with curly hair, and it looked like a monkey's butt,so they called him Monkey's Butt.

Dan: [laughs]

Captain Hill: He kept that one. Eventually, he just became MB, as he became more senior.

[music]

Dan: I'm Dan Heath, and this is What It's Like to Be. In every episode, we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession. A secret service agent. A TV meteorologist. A stand-up comedian. We want to know what they do all day at work. Today, we'll ask Captain Chris "Chowdah" Hill what it's like to be an aircraft carrier commander. We'll talk about what it's like to face down Houthi rebels in the Red Sea, why landing a jet on an aircraft carrier is every bit as stressful as it sounds, and what he thinks is the hardest job on the carrier. Stay with us.

Let me start with the dumbest possible question. Why do we have aircraft carriers? What purpose do they serve?

Captain Hill: Oh, it's a great question. A lot of people in the defense industry worry about aircraft carriers because it's so expensive, and they worry about the budget. These things are behemoths. They're the most incredible feats of engineering ever created, with 5,000 people on board and the ability to deliver weapons from aircraft over land. The fact that 70% of the planet is ocean, that means we can pretty much go anywhere we want, anytime we want. The United States Navy has 11 aircraft carriers. There's always one out at sea. There's some out at sea right now. Anytime there's a conflict anywhere, the president usually asks, "Where are my carriers?" They're the first to respond.

Dan: Why carriers versus land-based bases? Why do you need to be able to launch aircraft from sea?

Captain Hill: We do have bases all over the world. Most recently, we were in the Red Sea. In order for the Air Force, which also has aircraft-- They don't fly off of ships. They fly off of land bases. They have to work with those countries to get clearance to allow them to be there. That's not the case with an aircraft carrier operating in international waters. We can go anywhere we want, and we can launch anytime we want. It's just four and a half acres of sovereign US soil anywhere on the planet. It is sovereign US soil. We fly the flag. It's a little piece of America that we can put anywhere we want.

Dan: Just give us a sense of the scale. You started with just the idea that this is a ship that can hold 5,000 people. How else can you communicate the scale of this thing to our listeners?

Captain Hill: It's obviously big. We're much bigger than battleships. We're 100,000 tons of displacement. Now, there are bigger ships out there. Some of the merchant ultra-large carriers, they're a little bit bigger than us, but in terms of warships, we're the biggest. Yes, there's 5,000 people on this thing just to keep it operating and to carry the 60 to 70 aircraft that we have on it. We actually fly more on a single day than most countries do for all their aircraft.

Dan: Whoa.

Captain Hill: The scale is absurd. We typically fly, when we're out to sea, 12 hours a day, six days a week. The seventh day is usually a maintenance day. It's also a workday, so we're constantly working. Plus, we need to have our own utilities. We have to have our own sewage, electrical experts. We're powered by two nuclear reactors. There's a little bit of redundancy there in case you lose one. That allows us to not have to refuel to operate the engines. We could just continue to sail continuously for years on end if we had to.

Now, we still need to replenish food and also fuel for the aircraft. About every seven to ten days, we'll link up with another replenishment ship from the Military Sealift Command, which we love. Going about 13 knots side to side, connecting with fuel hoses and sending over packages and pallets of food and parts, Amazon boxes because people order that stuff.

Dan: Wait, you can get Amazon packages out there?

Captain Hill: Yes, we can. It's not the same speed, let me tell you.

Dan: It's not prime one-day service?

Captain Hill: Yes. We got to the point on this last deployment where it would take about two to three weeks to get a package, which is actually pretty good considering where they had to go to deliver these things.

Dan: On a given day, if you're not in the midst of a certain confrontation, where are you going and why?

Captain Hill: One of the biggest things we offer is just deterrence. We always have one operating in the Western Pacific to reassure our allies that we're there. Japan, South Korea, Australia, and other countries, and we'll operate with them. We're just trying to prevent conflict. At the beginning of our deployment, right after Hamas, after they attacked Israel on October 7th, we were sent to the Eastern Med just to prevent other countries from doing something stupid. We know that when an aircraft carrier is in a region, we end up in the local news and local newspapers. Sometimes we'll go to the ports of these countries and all 5,000 sailors will get off and we'll contribute to the economy.

Dan: I did want to ask you about the deployment post-October 7th. Where were you when you got the call to get to the Red Sea and how long did it take to get there just to warm up?

Captain Hill: We hadn't deployed yet on October 7th after the Hamas attack. We were scheduled to deploy the following week. We had all these grand plans to do NATO engagements throughout Europe. We had like six port calls planned, which sailors loved, so they get to see the world. That all changed on October 7th. Then on October 14th, we deployed. It took us a couple weeks to get to the Eastern Mediterranean, and we linked up with the USS Gerald R. Ford, our newest aircraft carrier, to do deterrence operations in the Eastern Med. Then we got sucked into the Red Sea right after that. We were in Fifth Fleet, which is the fleet that manages the Middle East, for a solid eight and a half months.

Dan: Wow. You were fired upon during that time, right? Weren't the Houthis launching missiles and drones and other things at the ship?

Captain Hill: Yes. We really were in the Red Sea continuously for six of those nine months. The Houthis tried to attack several Navy warships, including our own, as well as civilian vessels. Every single day there was something going on, whether it was a Houthi missile or a Houthi drone, and these drones are big. Or we were striking them, some of their land targets or some of their unmanned surface vessels and that sort of thing. It was just very busy. Some people say it was the most complex US Navy operation since World War II.

Dan: When was the last time an aircraft carrier was fired upon before that deployment?

Captain Hill: I don't know. I haven't seen anything from Korean War or Vietnam, so I can't really say.

Dan: Oh, so it had been decades.

Captain Hill: It's been since World War II.

Dan: Whoa. How do you keep up your preparation, given how long it's been since you were under direct attack? Did your crew feel ready for that?

Captain Hill: Yes, they were ready. It's amazing. The average age on our ship is 22 years old, a lot of Generation Z. A lot of people like to make fun of Generation Z, and I'm like, "They're outstanding. They rose to the occasion." How we got ready for this is we do workups, which is several underway periods prior to the deployment to certify to be allowed to deploy. We practice this stuff all the time. We have been doing it for years. We've oriented our tactics over the past several decades against Russia, China, some other countries that are near-peer adversaries. We were prepared. You just never expect it to happen, but it did happen.

Dan: What were some of the weapons that were brought to bear against you during that period?

Captain Hill: There's a few types. One is an anti-ship cruise missile. These missiles fly fairly low. They're a little bit hard to detect because they're so close to the deck. Then there's ballistic missiles, which go pretty high and then come back down vertically. Those we had never seen at sea before, and our destroyers shot down a whole bunch of those. Then, of course, drones, and these are not the quadcopters you can get at Costco. They're big, bigger than an automobile, twice the size, with warheads embedded inside them so that they can put holes inside the ships.

Dan: Did you sustain damage from any of those?

Captain Hill: No, we never got hit.

Dan: Wow.

Captain Hill: None of our ships got hit, which I think is amazing. It just, again, shows the quality of our systems and the quality of the sailors that operate the systems. The Houthis made several claims, and I was able to address it a little bit on social media without addressing it directly, by showing that life was normal on the ship, with videos and the flight deck looked perfect. There were no holes in it, even though there were falsified photos put out there of holes in the middle of the flight deck. It was crazy misinformation.

Dan: How does it affect your job when you're in a crisis situation like that? What changes about the way you spend your time?

Captain Hill: I would say 90% of my time is routine business, even in combat. Part of that routine business is just managing the flight deck operations. I don't even technically manage it. I oversee it, and I have other people manage it, make sure that's going well. Then the rest is just the day-to-day management of a large ship, which is about the size of a small town, about 5,000 people, making sure that is happening.

We get complaints almost every day, and we try to address them the best we can, so that we can be responsive to the needs of the people on the ship and try, wherever possible, to improve quality of life in a place where it's really hard to have quality of life. You're in the Red Sea, the water temperature is about 90, 91 degrees as we're approaching the summertime.

Dan: Whoa, really?

Captain Hill: Yes, and we use the water for our cooling for our system. The temperatures on board were unbearable for extended periods of time, which made it difficult to sleep. There was even points where I would have our meteorologists find me a patch of cooler water in the Red Sea. We'd go to that point on an off day or a maintenance day, just so we can slightly cool the ship down. We tried everything we could.

Dan: It's pretty claustrophobic on board, isn't it? Narrow hallways, and you could go a whole day without seeing the sun, couldn't you?

Captain Hill: Yes, we have a lot of people that very rarely see the sun. For example, our reactor sailors, these are the ones-- The 480 sailors we have that work on our reactors, are down in the bowels of the ship, making sure we have propulsion and electrical power, and they're doing a great job. Sometimes we got to open up the flight deck for just to let people come up there and get a little bit of sun on their face, which improves moods, and then they get back to work.

Dan: What would you say is the hardest job on the ship?

Captain Hill: I think some of the folks that work in the reactor plant, it gets super hot down there, anywhere between 100 and 130 degrees in some spaces.

Dan: Oh my gosh.

Captain Hill: If you go in there, it's like getting smacked in the face with a wave of heat. We cycle people in and out at short intervals so they can get water and cool down and put them back in there. Similarly, for the folks that work on the flight deck, the flight deck itself heats up due to the sun. You could feel it through your boots. The temperature around the flight deck, due to the radiating heat of the metal, can also get it up to 120, 130 degrees, and they're fully clothed the whole time from head to toe, including, having masks on and goggles and gloves. We have to be super conscious about dehydration and heat stroke and those sorts of things.

Dan: I remember reading about the engineering innovations on the flight deck of a carrier, and correct me if I'm wrong, but one fact I read said, when a plane's coming in, it has to go from over 100 miles an hour to 0 in two seconds.

Captain Hill: Yes, that's right.

Dan: How do you do that? [chuckles]

Captain Hill: Using the steam from the reactors, we put the steam into these accumulators and we can release the steam to launch our catapults. That allows aircraft to launch. They go from something like 0 to 160 miles per hour in 2 to 2.5 seconds. That gets them airborne, just flight-worthy. Then we have these four giant cables that we call resting gear on the aft or the back of the ship to land aircraft with their tailhooks. The tailhook will grab it and they stop pretty quickly.

Dan: In a period like during the Red Sea conflict, how many planes were coming in and out over the course of a 24-hour period?

Captain Hill: We try to limit flight operations to 12 hours a day so that we can use the other 12 hours to make repairs because things break constantly, little pieces of components, avionics gear on aircraft, parts of my ship could break. We need time to groom the systems and get them back up for the following day. Usually, we'll launch anywhere between 80 to maybe 120 sorties of aircraft per day. We could do a lot more than that, but we're trying to sustain the aircraft and not break them too much. There's a lot of science behind it. There's a lot of science behind the supply system to fix these things. It's cosmic.

Dan: If you have a really good day, why is that? What happened during the day?

Captain Hill: I'd say it's a day where, let's say, we're doing a major strike and we have to launch, I don't know, 20, 25 F-18s, some E-2 Hawkeyes, EA-18G Growlers. Those are our electronic attack aircraft and helicopters. We get everyone launched on time and off the deck on time, and then we have a perfect recovery where nobody bolters, bolters when the hook misses the wire and they have to go around.

Dan: Let me jump in here. As Captain Hill said, the aircraft that's coming in to land on the carrier has a hook on the back. That hook has to grab a wire that's on the deck of the aircraft carrier. If the hook misses the wire, then in a ludicrously short amount of time, the pilot has to realize that and then immediately bring their throttles up to full power to take off again. Then they circle back around to try again. Captain Hill says he's experienced this.

Captain Hill: I have been in the aircraft many times when it's bolted because I flew in the Hawkeye for 20 years, [chuckles] but I'm in the back. I hear the wave-off call. I can feel the bolter. I can actually feel the hook bounce and then skid across the flight deck. That's like a grinding sound. Then the pilots will, instinctively, through a lot of training, put those throttles back up and you can feel the kick of the power, and then pull away from the ship. I've been through that a million times. If anything, from my perspective, it's like, "I have to do this again. I just want to get on deck."

Dan: Oh, that's hilarious. It's not even stressful for you. It's just like a nuisance. It's like, "Oh, man."

Captain Hill: It's a little stressful. They measure the stress levels. There's a lot of studies on this of pilots on aircraft carriers. Their stress in combat, even if they're getting shot at, versus their stress when they're about to land on the aircraft carrier, and the stress of landing is higher than in combat.

Dan: Oh, wow. Do you miss flying?

Captain Hill: Not that much, but I will say on this last deployment, I flew just about every Friday. It was my morale thing. It was a good opportunity to get out there on the flight deck, up close with all my sailors to make sure they're doing their jobs, and then fly an actual mission. I got to fly the Hawkeye a lot, the E-2 Hawkeye, and actually direct strikes against different targets.

Dan: Wow.

Captain Hill: It was really surreal for me because that's not my main job. My main job is to run the ship. It was just surreal.

Dan: What did you learn from that?

Captain Hill: I know why old people are not allowed to fly anymore. My vision stinks. I'm wearing reading glasses even right now. I was told to direct an F-18 to strike four different drones that were on a runway, and I had to read these long coordinates. If I got one number wrong, I would screw the whole thing up. I'm a little nervous. I put on my glasses, and they slide the laptop over for me where the coordinates are on, but it's like font size one. I'm like, "Bro, you've got to back me up here so I don't say the wrong numbers. I was having a hard time reading, even with my reading glasses. Now I know why old men stop flying.

Dan: [laughs]

[music]

Dan: Hey, folks. Dan here. I don't have much for you today. All I want to tell you is you can't miss the next episode, which is with a brain surgeon. Man, this is a good one. It's one of my all-time favorites. Just to tease one part, to remove a brain tumor, this surgeon you'll hear from uses tools with his left hand and his right hand and his left foot and right foot. There's special lenses on his eyes and he's controlling a different tool with his mouth. This is a full-body experience.

You'll learn all about it next time. Mark your calendar. Tell your colleagues. Invite the neighbors over. Listen for what it's like to be a brain surgeon. Thanks for continuing to follow us, everybody. Now, let's get back to the show.

Captain Hill spends a fair amount of his day in meetings with the officers above and below him in rank. Like the head of any large organization, he's also putting out a lot of fires. When he can, he spends a lot of time thinking about ways of boosting morale.

Captain Hill: I could talk about the word morale all day here if you'd like to, but that is the thing that tips the scale in war. I have found that if you can get morale up just a little bit, maybe an inch more per person when you have 5000 people, you're going to see differences. It's going to make a difference in terms of inspections, in terms of how you perform day-to-day, how you do clean-up and cleanliness, and your ability to fight in combat. I got to see that too. It works.

I will, on a tangent here, say that our namesake, Dwight D. Eisenhower, said that morale is the greatest single factor in successful war. One of my obsessions has been, how do I create morale? Now, first of all, you have to understand the definition of it. This is not happiness. Morale is deeper than that. It's sort of spiritual, it's grit, motivation, pride, spirit. One of the definitions was the spark of the divine. I don't even know what that means, but I love it. How do we create that?

One of the things, another communication tool, which is important for all leaders, is I created a command philosophy, except mine was 26 pages long, and I called it The Way of the Warrior Sailor. In there, I say that to create morale, number one is you must love and value your people. The word love is not a term that we typically use in a business or in the military, but it is a basic human need to be loved and valued. Those who don't do that need to be held accountable.Toxic leadership has got to go be eradicated. You got to go wipe it out and investigate it, punish people as you need to. Also, people need to have mission and purpose. I've read a lot of mission statements from some companies and they're pretty lame.

Dan: Amen.

Captain Hill: They're not inspiring. Mission and vision statements need to be bold and inspiring. People need to believe that they're contributing to those things.

Dan: What was yours?

Captain Hill: Ours is to launch and recover aircraft to stomp on bad guys. That's our mission.

Dan: [laughs] Wait, that's actually comprehensible in English and motivating. How did you manage to survive the wordsmithing committee?

Captain Hill: I haven't survived that yet, so we'll see how it plays out. It's a little bit not PC, I get that, but I got the term stomp on bad guys from one of the sailors. I said, "You know what? I'm going to add that." Ironically, I published that, and then we ended up doing it for real in combat. The vision is to be the best damn ship in the Navy. I'm not that creative. There's no like master list of rankings of ships, but I do believe that 2023, 2024, we proved that we were the best damn ship in the Navy, especially given the situation we were in the Red Sea and how we performed.

Dan: What's the most difficult decision you've had to make as commander of the carrier?

Captain Hill: Oh, no one's ever asked me that question before.

Dan: I imagine there's a lot of candidates for that one.

Captain Hill: One of the things that hurts me the most is, so commanding officers of ships hold a lot of authority about people's careers. If someone makes a pretty big error, a mistake, or they gun deck maintenance, it's when you fail to do maintenance, but say that you did, or they hurt another sailor, whether it's sexual harassment, sexual assault, or physical assault, any of those instances, they're going to come to me eventually in a form that we call captain's mast. It's called different things in other services.

I have to look them in the eye and tell them they did wrong, and then sometimes have to kick them out of the Navy. I will take rank from them. I will take pay from them. I'll put them on restriction where they're basically restricted to one area of the ship. They're not allowed to get off the ship. They have to wear a badge that has a letter R on it. It can be pretty embarrassing punishment, but even worse when I am basically doing the paperwork to separate them from the Navy. Sometimes I love these guys and girls, and it just hurts that I have to say, it's time to go. I just don't like firing people, but I've done it many times.

Dan: I'm curious about what is the biggest adjustment that your sailors have to make from normal life to deployment on the carrier? Where do they feel the pain?

Captain Hill: When we're at home, we get to interact with our loved ones, we have our cell phones, that connectivity is great, internet is working super fast for everybody if they have a good internet connection, and then you lose a lot of that when you're at sea. It's really hard to make that adjustment, essentially for most, working anywhere between 10 to 16-hour days every single day. If you can get into a rhythm, it works. If you're working hard, the time goes by faster.

Those who figure that out tend to say things like, "I can't believe this many months have gone by." Having the wifi was a game changer for us that we never had before. It wasn't very good. We didn't have that many antennas to service that many people, but it was good enough to maybe download a small video occasionally or to text with mom and dad back home, which is great. I was texting with my 11, 12 year old. We basically communicated via memes and funny stuff, but it felt like I was connected to her, so when I came home, it wasn't such a big adjustment.

Dan: Previously you might be out of touch with your family for the whole period, huh?

Captain Hill: Yes, before the wifi, we did have email, but I would say that half the sailors don't have regular access to it because we just don't have that enough space to put that many computers, and plus it's expensive. Then before that, when I first joined back in the mid-'90s, we were just starting to get computers that had email, but you were still writing letters. You had to label each letter, this is my first, this is my second, or third letter because sometimes in the shipping, they would get mixed up. You would lose context in the letters and it would take a good three weeks to a month to get a letter from overseas.

The wifi again was awesome. Plus the wifi allowed some of us to do social media to support the Navy. I was getting DMs, I guess is what you call them, from a lot of moms and dads and spouses who wanted to see their spouse or children in a picture, which makes sense. For those who have children, you get the newsletter from the school, you're always looking for the picture of your own son or daughter in there.

Dan: That is so funny that the parents would have the nerve to do that. I know they do that to principals of the world around, but I would've thought with the captain of a carrier, [chuckles] they might've had a little more reluctance.

Captain Hill: Oh, dude, I was getting crushed-

Dan: [laughs]

Captain Hill: -with requests from family members, and I loved them. It made me realize, from a recruiting perspective, that parents play a role in recruiting and they also play a role in retention. If you're having a bad day, who do you talk to? Sometimes you talk to your buddy. Sometimes you just want to talk to mom and dad, and they're the ones that are going to say, "You know what, you're doing a good job. You hang in there. We love you. We're so proud of you." They're actually doing my job for me, so I want that connectivity back home. It's amazing how it works.

Dan: Captain Hill, we always end our episodes with a lightning round of questions. Here we go. What is a word or phrase that only someone from your profession would be likely to know and what does it mean?

Captain Hill: Midrats.

Dan: Midrats.

Captain Hill: Yes, it's the fourth meal of the day. Yes, there's four, usually around midnight, and really good food is served then and most people love midrats. I think the term goes back to early 1900s, like 1902. It's a Navy-only thing.

Dan: Is it short for something?

Captain Hill: Oh, sorry, yes. Midnight rations.

Dan: Oh, okay. Because you're on 24 hours, yes?

Captain Hill: Yes.

Dan: Got it. What is the most insulting thing you could say about an aircraft carrier commander's work?

Captain Hill: I would say to call me as an NFO, a non-flying officer, or to call me a surface warfare officer, which means I don't fly anymore. That would be insulting to me.

Dan: What is a tool specific to your profession that you really like using?

Captain Hill: It'd be the 1MC, the ship's intercom that reaches all 5,000 people, including in the berthings where people sleep.

Dan: This, we should imagine it's like school where there's a speaker in every room in the building and the principal can come over. It's that sort of thing?

Captain Hill: Yes, that's exactly right.

Dan: Would you be using that every day?

Captain Hill: Pretty much every day, I'm using it. It also gets used for other things like general announcements or drills. This is a drill, this is a drill. General quarters, general quarters, and then all hands man in their battle seat, and blah, blah, blah. Big announcements for the whole crew.

Dan: What phrase or sentence strikes fear in the heart of an aircraft carrier commander?

Captain Hill: Actual casualty, actual casualty on the 1MC. It's usually you're doing a drill or something else and they call out actual casualties. Something real just broke or someone just got seriously injured.

Dan: When was the last time you had to say or hear that phrase?

Captain Hill: It happened a few times on deployment. The injuries ended up not being significant, but we responded as if it were-- I will say one of the great things about that deployment is we had no serious injuries for anybody, and that's actually unusual for a small town of 5,000 people working in the environment that we did, especially in combat every single day for six months. It's a small miracle.

Dan: I'm really curious your answer on this one. What's a sound specific to your profession that you're likely to hear?

Captain Hill: This is a funny one. When the captain of a ship gets on the ship or leaves, they are referred to as the name of the ship. I am called Dwight D. Eisenhower. They'll say, "Dwight D. Eisenhower arriving," that's me.

Dan: Oh, wow.

Captain Hill: On the Abraham Lincoln, so that CEO is called Abraham Lincoln. That's cool if you think [laughs] about it. Or George Washington arriving, George Washington departing.

Dan: That could really go to your head after a while, I would think.

Captain Hill: It could, I guess. [chuckles]

Dan: This is kind of a shift, but what's the most beautiful thing you've ever seen from the ship?

Captain Hill: I like it. Leadership is working when things happen on their own and they meet your expectations, and you might not even have given the expectations. Here's an example. I had been telling the crew for months in the Red Sea that our job there was to save lives. It's hard to say that and not actually see the lives that you save. We're on a ship. When are we going to see these people? We were saving lives all the time.

One time there was a ship called the Motor Vessel Tutor that was in the southern Red Sea. They got struck by an unmanned surface vessel in the stern. It killed one of their mariners, and I think there were 25 on there, and so one was dead. The ship was sinking, and they put out a call for help, and all these other ships from other countries, not necessarily friendly to us, just drove right past and didn't even respond on the radio.

Dan: Wow.

Captain Hill: One of our ships, USS Philippine Sea, which was our cruiser from the strike group, they responded. They sent their helo over. They risked their lives because there were missiles and drones flying in that area throughout that whole time. By slowing down, you put yourself at risk, but they did it. As the ship was sinking, the helicopters pulling people off that ship, put them on to the USS Philippine Sea, and saved those 24 people. They ended up coming to my ship as a holding point. The overall goal was to get them back to Bahrain and ultimately back to the Philippines.

There's a huge diplomatic effort going on for clearances on that respect. My job was just to hang on to them, and I told my guys, I said, "Just make sure they're taken care of," and I gave no other direction. I figured after a couple hours that they were on board that I should check on them, make sure my sailors didn't zip tie them and treat them like detainees. I go down to the passageway to where we're keeping them in this classroom, and I could hear singing in a foreign language. I'm like, "What the hell is this?"

It turns out they were singing in Tagalog because one of my sailors who could speak Tagalog, parents were from the Philippines, reached out to her Filipino American network on the ship from all the other squadrons and different departments. Thirty of them gathered down there to make those mariners feel like they were at home. They gave them Eisenhower-

Dan: Oh, wow.

Captain Hill: -ball caps. We had a whole meal set up for them with buffet lunch. My cooks put that whole thing together, gave them some free food. Even our Catholic chaplain showed up because he was originally from the Philippines. Everyone was smiling, even though they just lost one of their shipmates. I have never been so proud of my entire life of my sailors and how they responded. I literally did nothing. I just watched and saw the magic happen.

[music]

Dan: Captain Chris "Chowdah" Hill is commanding officer of the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower. Its home port is in Norfolk, Virginia. I have to admit, Captain Hill broke my stereotype of a military leader. Here's a guy who manages a floating city with an arsenal of aircraft and powerful weapons featuring some of the most amazing engineering anywhere on the planet, all fueled, by the way, by a nuclear reactor with a backup reactor in case the first one fails.

In those marginal moments when he has a little bit of time to spend as he wants to spend it, he's thinking about morale. Not because he's a people pleaser or something, but because he thinks morale gives his ship an edge. As he said, morale is not the same thing as happiness. You don't boost morale by coddling people. Make no mistake, an aircraft carrier is still a command and control institution. Morale is about pride and a sense of purpose and being respected and challenged and feeling like somebody gives a wit about you. That's a hard thing to do when you've got 5,000 people to look after. You can't possibly do it solo.

You've got to make it part of the culture through the only tools you've got. Messages, meetings, and recognition. Supervising systems and routines, maximizing flight deck efficiency, communicating constantly, adjudicating personnel problems, and trying to motivate 5,000 sailors to push a little harder. Folks, that's what it's like to be an aircraft carrier commander. A shout-out to recent Apple podcast reviewers, Trail Lust, Amy V. Chicago, Holly J. N., and M. Rolano, and Spotify reviewers, Wadley and Veronica. Thank you all. This episode was produced by Matt Purdy. I'm Dan Heath. See you next time.