Translation into ghetto-ese/ebonics......."they be big".
Being on a ship like that, it was easy to take for granted how big those things are. I stopped thinking about it, but I remember coming back on a liberty launch once and having to go all the way around it. I remember thinking “Holy crap. This thing is frikking big.”
I had a dream one night the ship got sunk. I was treading water at night, in the water with a lot of other bobbing heads, and the ship was going down. I was directly astern of her.
As I watched, the ship started to go down by the stern, and the bow begin to rise into the night sky. Higher and higher it went, blotting out the stars, and I could faintly see the hull number painted on the bow portion of the flight deck.
When the ship was nearly vertical, the bow looked like it was five hundred feet in the air, then slowly and ponderously, gaining speed, began to fall backwards right on top of me.
I woke up, it scared the crap out of me. In retrospect, I know a ship wouldn’t go down like that, tipping over on top of me in the water. Having thought and read about it a good deal since then, I feel pretty confident even if she did go down by the stern, a large vessel like that would never get vertical in that fashion, much less tip the other way.
Anyway, a bit off topic, but I can say, in my heart (because of that nightmare) I almost DO grasp the concept of just how big they really are. Even though it was only a dream, I sure felt the immensity of the vessel in a visceral way you can’t get by walking around on her or seeing her tied p somewhere.