Why a poem keeps them goin’ in the US Navy

It’s U.S. Navy tradition that the first entry of the new year in ship logbooks be written in verse.

Some sailors angle for the job as a chance to inject a bit of personality – even poetic depth – into a format that otherwise discourages it; others try to avoid such a mission. 

To delight readers in rhyme is no easy task – particularly given that deck logs are also legal documents. By Defense Department mandate, they must convey less-than-lyrical details about things like commanders on duty and the status of ship systems.

An additional hurdle: Warrior-produced poetry has recently acquired a few powerful detractors. When a Navy ship hosted a spoken-word event last year, some U.S. lawmakers decried the practice as too “woke.”

“We’ve got people doing poems on aircraft carriers over the loudspeaker,” Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama said on Fox News in September. “It is absolutely insane the direction we’re headed in our military.”

Yet poetry has a storied history in the armed forces, military leaders are quick to point out. Lawmakers worrying about poetry detracting from battle skills are perhaps “just ill-informed,” says Samuel Cox, director of the Naval History and Heritage Command, which hosts an annual competition for the best New Year’s deck log poem.

U.S. forces remain “ready to go to war if they have to. But the objective is to deter it.” In the course of doing this, service members voluntarily endure “considerable sacrifice in time away from home,” Mr. Cox says. Poetry is one way “to try and relieve the sadness, if you will, of separation.” 

It’s also a potential morale-builder, he adds. “The more good people you retain because they like being on ships – they like being at sea despite the hardships – that’s what our nation needs.”

And sometimes poetry has been a way to process tragic losses. “In Flanders Fields” was written by a soldier to commemorate a battleground where a million comrades in arms were wounded and killed. Another World War I poet, Lt. Wilfred Owen, produced powerful verse while fighting on the front lines. Before he died in battle he considered:

The pity of war, the pity war distilled.
Now men will go content with what we spoiled.

“They are incredibly moving and speak, in many cases, to the cost and sacrifice of war,” says Mr. Cox, a retired rear admiral.

From mischievous to Odysseus 

The winners of the Navy’s New Year’s deck log competition tend to summarize events of the year with a soupçon of levity.

Alexis Van Pool, the history and heritage command’s deck log program coordinator, recalls a funny favorite from a 2021 submission: “They thought 2019 had been a crazy year, but 2020 said ‘Hold my beer.’” 

Ms. Van Pool’s grandfathers both served as sailors in the Pacific during World War II, and reading their ships’ old deck logs gives her an “enormous” feeling of connection to them, she says. 

Such a sense of heritage is what Lt. Artem Sherbinin drew upon when he composed his New Year’s Day deck log for the U.S.S. Bunker Hill, the winner of last year’s contest. 

There were no takers until Lieutenant Sherbinin, the ship’s navigator, jumped in. He aimed high. “The story of Odysseus is one giant log of a long journey, you could argue,” he says.

As he dug in, Lieutenant Sherbinin perused a bunch of old deck logs, including from ships in the Gulf of Tonkin during the Vietnam War. “They talk about the surreal feeling of being in and around Vietnam while watching the great political turmoil of 1968 and domestic unrest” unfold in America.

Lieutenant Sherbinin could identify with this, he says, having been at sea during the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020, when George Floyd was killed and protesters took to the streets.

As he dug into his own deck log poem, the “massive changes” then taking place in America were “sort of top of the mind.”

Lieutenant Sherbinin also drew on the legacy of his ship, which was soon to be decommissioned, to share it, he imagined, with future sailors:

In ’91 she was still young

Tomahawks into Saddam’s Iraq she flung.
Then in ’06 with years of salt coating her steel
Bunker Hill received new aegis upon her keel.
For the next ten years she was at sea.
The place a sailor ought to be
From San Diego to around the Horn
Her spy-1 radars tracked everything airborne.
Then in ’20 she faced new enemies big and small
The Covid virus and not one port call.
Through ’21 in Pacific water she remained
Keeping Chinese warships contained.

The history and heritage command particularly liked this poem “because we got to know not just the voice of the sailor, but the whole history of the ship,” Ms. Van Pool says.

After Lieutenant Sherbinin’s victory came notes of congratulation, including from navigators on the U.S.S. Bunker Hill in the 1980s as well as from Navy sailors from other ships back to the 1950s.

They bonded over shared experience. “I could tell them, ‘Yeah, I’d just gotten off watch and had to sit at my desk for three hours instead of catching those hours of sleep.’ And they can relate.”

Navy tradition, he adds, “builds that connection across generations of mariners.”