For much of the world, the American aircraft carrier has been known through a carefully curated lens: US Navy publicity films, Hollywood blockbusters, and the solemn tones of television news. These images taught us not just what a carrier looks like, but what we should feel—and fear—when one appears on the horizon. This time, however, the cameras kept rolling after the heroic image should have ended.
The USS Abraham Lincoln arrived in Thailand on September 2 after more than eight months at sea, much of it spent supporting combat operations against Iran. Its roughly 5,000 crew members finally got shore leave, with many heading to Pattaya, the beach town known for its nightlife. But by then, a different picture of the carrier had already begun to circulate.
Families of sailors had reported food shortages, broken toilets, moldy showers, and water contamination during the prolonged deployment. Photographs showed streaks of rust on the enormous hull. Then came the images from Thailand: thousands of sailors disembarking for shopping, food, and the go-go bars of Pattaya—a city whose reputation as an R&R destination was itself partly created by American servicemen during the Vietnam War.
From major newspapers to social media feeds, the world was suddenly seeing the American supercarrier almost with the naked eye. Captain America had somehow disappeared from the picture. The brighter the old image had been made to shine, the more glaring the rust now appeared.
I am not a paparazzo. Unlike some international reporters, I have no particular desire to follow American sailors into Pattaya's go-go bars to investigate what happened next. To remain euphemistically polite, readers interested in the details may consult the BBC. The sailors themselves deserve no ridicule. After so long at sea, they deserved their rest. What interests me is what had already happened to the image.
The monument and the man
Try to imagine Captain America, shield still in hand, emerging somewhat unsteadily from a Pattaya go-go bar. Americans themselves might have no difficulty accepting that even heroes are ordinary human beings who need to eat, drink, sleep, use a functioning toilet, and occasionally have a night off. But this is not the visual memory that decades of Hollywood, military publicity, and political theater taught much of the rest of the world. Captain America was supposed to arrive with his uniform immaculate, his muscles tightened, and his shield held at the proper angle.
The aircraft carrier belonged to much the same visual world. As an art historian who works with visual culture, I am interested in how remarkably consistent its images have been. Fighter jets roar from the flight deck. Sailors stand in formation. The enormous ship cuts through a perfect blue ocean while escort vessels arrange themselves around it in geometrical order. The carrier is almost always given the distance it needs. And that distance turns machinery into monument.
A submarine becomes more dangerous by disappearing. A missile can wait unseen in a silo. An aircraft carrier announces itself. It is enormous, expensive, and deliberately visible. It turns abstract military power into a physical object that can be photographed, filmed, and sent across the world. For much of the postwar era, American military superiority, political theater, television, and Hollywood reinforced one another so successfully that the supercarrier became one of the most immediately recognizable images of national power on earth. It became a kind of Mount Rushmore at sea.
And Mount Rushmore is not supposed to stumble out of a go-go bar. Monuments work best from the proper distance. Look too closely, and the image becomes less simple. This is particularly important for an aircraft carrier because it carries more than aircraft. Its appearance carries an expectation about how the person looking at it should respond. Awe is part of the machinery. So is fear.
Shortly before the USS Abraham Lincoln reached Thailand, a US Navy P-8A Poseidon flew through the Taiwan Strait. The Seventh Fleet said the transit demonstrated America's commitment to a “free and open Indo-Pacific” and repeated that the US military “flies, sails, and operates anywhere international law allows.” Operations like this are announced publicly because presence must be visible if it is to become a political signal. I understand that signal perfectly well. I simply find it increasingly difficult to feel its intended effect.
This is not because the aircraft carrier has suddenly become militarily irrelevant. The Lincoln itself has just demonstrated the opposite. It sustained months of operations at extraordinary distance, supported combat operations against Iran, and kept thousands of people and dozens of aircraft functioning through an exceptionally long deployment. As a machine of war and military organization, it remains formidable. But being formidable and looking almighty are not quite the same thing.
Even the language surrounding the ship reveals something about the grandeur attached to it. In Chinese, an aircraft carrier is hangkong mujian (航空母舰)—something like the “Mothership of Navy and Air Force,” a union of naval and air power in a single name. The English “aircraft carrier” sounds logistically uncool and almost comically mundane by comparison, especially when the words themselves are so strangely unpompous: a carrier carries things, while craft can be something made by hand. Read too literally, the mightiest warship in the world begins to sound like a mule carrying a load of little wooden birds made by a folk craftsman. Chinese has somehow given the American warship an additional layer of grandeur in translation. Yet even linguistic assistance cannot protect an image from the test of reality.
The episode in Pattaya, and the rust-streaked hull that preceded it, may not signal the end of the carrier's strategic relevance. But it does remind us that the carrier is not just a weapon—it is a symbol, and symbols depend on perception. As the US Navy faces carrier shortages in the Indo-Pacific, and as rivals like China develop new ways to counter such ships, the gap between the image and the reality may become harder to bridge. For the rest of the world, the carrier may no longer inspire the same awe it once did—but that does not make it any less powerful. It just makes it more human.
