Standing the Watch is an autobiographical reflection on one of the most ordinary—and essential—parts of serving aboard a United States Navy ship: showing up when it is your turn to stand watch.
During my two deployments aboard the USS Ronald Reagan, the ship never truly stopped.
 
Twenty-four hours a day, sailors were awake somewhere aboard that carrier. While some slept in their racks, others worked. Watches changed hands. Machinery continued running. Aircraft operations continued. The ship kept moving through the ocean.
 
Someone always had to be awake.
 
Standing the Watch is about those hours that rarely become the photographs people associate with military service.
 
It is about getting up when your body wants another hour of sleep. Walking through steel passageways while much of the ship is resting. Relieving another sailor who is just as tired as you are. Taking responsibility for your watch and remaining there until someone arrives to relieve you.
 
There is no audience.
There is no applause.
 
Most of those hours will never appear in a history book.
But they are part of service.
 
The song also remembers those quiet moments at sea when darkness slowly gives way to morning. After hours of standing watch, a thin line of light can begin appearing across the horizon. For a few moments, there is simply the ocean, the ship, and another sunrise thousands of miles from home.
 
Then your relief arrives.
You pass along what matters.
And somewhere else aboard the ship, another sailor takes the watch.
 
Standing the Watch honors that continuous rhythm of responsibility—the countless ordinary hours performed by sailors whose work allowed everyone else aboard to keep doing theirs.
 
Across two deployments, sometimes that sailor was me.
 
No applause.
No audience.

No one needed to see.
 
I stood the watch because somebody had to be there.