Manga CVN73 USS George Washington

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19MB manga, ~200pg; free official English version on .mil is dead and not in the IA so I got a torrent off of BakaBT.

This is notable as one of few manga released by the US government; in this case, released in 2008 as a goodwill/PR exercise for the titular aircraft carrier. I was more interested in the biracial main character, Jack O'Hara, and how the authors would deal with the sexual & national politics. The plot is simple: a young Japanese-American navy sailor shows up for his first cruise on an aircraft carrier to Japan, where he encounters some of the idiosyncrasies of carriers (narrow ... corridors, stairs everywhere, hotbunking) as he learns to handle damage control, puts out a fire during a drill, saves a crewmate from walking into a propeller on the flight deck, enjoys a big party on the flight deck, makes a few friends, and eventually meets his grandparents in Japan who, naturally, welcome him wholeheartedly. It's sort of a didactic primer on life on an aircraft carrier with a bit of slice-of-life flavor to it, done in a very '80s manga style. The controversies over nuclear power, American military actions, and the fallout from big military bases (such as crime or intermarriage) in Japan are all essentially elided (unsurprisingly). What's left is not bad, but harmless and fairly boring. Middle-schoolers might like it, but I think most people or kids interested in aircraft carriers would learn much more from one of those big fold-out schematic books. There's not much reason for anyone to read this.