The USS Nimitz pulled into San Diego this past Sunday — one last stop before she heads north to Bremerton, Washington, to wrap up her final deployment. Early next year, she’ll depart for good, beginning the long walk toward decommissioning. After fifty years, the old warhorse is easing into the barn.
I spent time aboard Nimitz in the ’90s, notebook and camera in hand, trying not to get spun around on a ship built by someone who must’ve thought ladders were a personality test. She took me to sea a couple of times. I stood on Vultures Row at oh-dark-thirty watching night launches of F-14s that rattled my bones. I’m pretty sure my eardrums filed for early retirement that night.
But the moment that still stays with me didn’t happen on the flight deck. It happened in the dark — the kind of dark only a carrier at sea can make.
One night, a public affairs officer led me up to the admiral’s bridge — the flag bridge — to show me what the world looks like from the Navy’s version of Mount Olympus. It was pitch black. No glow. No chatter. No lights. Just the hum of a ship pushing through a night big enough to swallow continents.
The PAO slipped away, leaving me alone with the sound of machinery.
Then a voice, young and steady, cut through the dark:
“Welcome to the Flag Bridge, sir.”
I couldn’t see his face — a sailor, maybe 20 years old, standing his watch.
We talked.
He told me he was from East L.A. “East Los” and had been in the Navy for two years.
I asked why he joined. He told me his choices back home were either pumping gas or joining a gang. School hadn’t gone well. His Navy recruiter basically adopted him academically, sitting with him week after week until he passed the entrance exam.
That’s not something you get in a glossy recruiting ad. That’s the real Navy — the one that picks up kids the rest of the country never bothered to notice and gives them a way out.
So I asked him what he’d learned in the Navy.
He took a breath and said quietly:
“I learned I’m good at math.”
A simple line, but it hit with the weight of truth. A kid who thought he wasn’t good at anything, discovering he had a mind sharp enough to keep pace with nuclear machinery.
What are you going to do when you get out? I asked.
“I want to be a teacher,” he said.
Math?
A pause in the blackness.
“No… music.”
Then, after a beat:
“That’s math, too.”
That’s the heartbeat of a ship like Nimitz. Not the steel. Not the jets. Not the admirals. It’s the blue-shirts — the kids — learning who they are in the middle of a black ocean.
For 50 years, Nimitz trained them, carried them, fed them, rattled them, and sent them home changed. She’s sailed through Cold War brinkmanship, Gulf shootouts, and every flavor of “crisis response” Washington could dream up. But her real legacy isn’t in tonnage or sorties. It’s in the sailors who figured out they were capable of more than anyone ever told them.
Now she’s on her last tour through San Diego, the city that watched her come and go for decades. Soon she’ll head to Bremerton, and the long process of easing a giant into retirement will begin.
Fair winds, Nimitz. You served half a century doing what you do best.
And to the kid from East L.A. on the flag bridge — I hope you made it to that classroom. The Navy taught you math. The music was already in you.