
Posted : Monday Jun 16, 2008 7:17:30 EDT
Damage Controlman 3rd Class Jack O’Hara is a bumbler. On his first sea tour aboard the carrier George Washington, O’Hara is seasick, gets lost, gets chewed out for showing up late to his work center, kills his shins on the knee-knockers, and, when he runs to the wrong space during a general quarters drill, a supervisor tells him he’s just been "killed." He has to play a corpse for the rest of the evolution.
But O’Hara isn’t just any novice sailor on his first deployment. He’s the Navy’s fictional ambassador to the people of Japan, starring in a Japanese-style comic book, known as "manga," designed to introduce the nuclear-powered George Washington to an uneasy nation that until now has hosted only conventionally powered carriers.