Somewhere below the waterline, in a compartment that smells of diesel fuel and other people's sleep, there is a space exactly wide enough for one body and exactly long enough for one person who is not too tall. It is your rack. It is approximately thirty inches wide and six feet long, enclosed on three sides by steel and on the fourth by a blue curtain that is the only privacy you will have for the next seven months. It is where you sleep, where you decompress after a long watch, where you read if you can concentrate, and where you lie awake thinking about home. It is yours. You will defend it with a seriousness that outsiders find difficult to understand, because it is the only square footage in the world that belongs to you.
The Berthing Compartment
Navy ships berth their enlisted crews in compartments that hold anywhere from a dozen to several hundred people, depending on the ship's size and rate of construction. The racks are stacked three high — bottom, middle, and top — with the middle generally considered the best assignment: easier to climb into than the top, fewer people stepping over you than the bottom. Each rack has a thin mattress, a pillow, a light on a flexible arm, and a storage space underneath accessed by lifting the mattress. That storage space holds everything you own that isn't in your locker: uniform items, personal effects, things you reach for in the middle of the night.
The curtain is not soundproof. It is not lightproof. It is not capable of blocking the smell of twenty people sleeping in a space designed for twelve, or the sound of the 1MC announcing something at 0300, or the vibration of the engines, or the particular sound a ship makes when it is in heavy weather and the hull is speaking in a language you learn to understand whether you want to or not. The curtain is, nonetheless, the most important object in berthing, because closing it is the closest you can come to being alone.
The Etiquette of Berthing
Berthing has its own culture, specific to each ship and each compartment, but built on universal principles. You keep your space clean — the mess of one person in a compartment this small is everyone's mess. You are quiet when people are sleeping, which on a ship running three rotating watch sections means almost always. You do not sit on someone else's rack without permission. You do not leave your shoes in the walkway. You do not use someone else's locker or touch their curtain without a reason. These rules are not posted anywhere; they are transmitted by the social pressure of people who have to live six inches from each other for seven months and have learned what is and isn't survivable.
The senior people in a compartment have the best racks — lower, quieter, closer to the head. Junior sailors end up in the upper racks, or in compartments with less favorable locations. On submarine, the situation is more extreme: with a crew of 130 and fewer racks than that, "hot bunking" — sharing a rack between watchstanders on opposite rotations — is standard. The rack is warm when you get into it because someone else just got out. You sleep well anyway, because at sea you learn to sleep wherever and whenever the opportunity exists.
What You Keep There
The contents of a sailor's rack stowage are a kind of autobiography. There are photographs, printed and taped to the bulkhead with the same masking tape everyone uses, showing people the sailor will not see for months. There are books from the ship's library or from home, read and re-read because there is limited selection and unlimited time on the mid watch. There are snacks from the gedunk, hoarded against the hunger that comes at 0200 when the mess decks are closed. There is the letter that arrived in the last mail drop, already read twice, that will be read again. There is a uniform item that should have been turned in to the laundry last week. These things constitute a life compressed into thirty inches by six feet.
If you ever called a Navy ship home, The Ship's Store carries collections for your ship — the place where that rack was, and where those seven months happened.
What You Remember
Ask any Navy veteran about their rack and they'll tell you something specific: the particular sound of someone opening the curtain, the way the light from the passageway cut in when the person across from you got up for watch, the exact degree of warmth that made it possible to sleep in weather that would have kept you awake anywhere else. The rack is not glamorous. It is not comfortable by any civilian standard. But it is, in the strange way that deprivation and community combine in Navy life, something you miss — not the rack itself, but the life that happened around it, the compressed intimacy of living that close to people who became something more than shipmates.