I just saw the first episode of Carrier, a documentary series that looks at life on the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier. I was struck by how mundane most of the work is aboard the carrier: wiping windows, cooking food, wheeling around pallets. Except that the windows are at the top of a control tower, the food amounts to ten crates of chicken a day, and the pallets hold high-explosive weaponry. There are 5,000 people who make up the "city" of the carrier, and most of them aren’t zipping around in multimillion dollar jets, yet they work 16-hour shifts to keep the planes flying.

Most of the people who serve on the carrier are people from middle -class, lower middle-class, or poor families — as an officer points out, the graduates of Exeter Academy tend to have better options. These men and women tend to be in their late teens or early twenties, and so life on the carrier is akin to high school: with gossiping, hooking up, illicit booze, and occasional temper tantrums. But the appeal of carrier life also comes across clearly in the camaraderie among the crew and the opportunities that the military provides for discipline, responsibility, and a decent career. That’s what draws two women profiled in the documentary: one the daughter of a "pimp" and drug addict and the other who has lived all her life in a small town of only 3,000 people. In America, the WPA has been replaced by the military, a government-funded jobs program that both political parties support and that works for many young men and women, provided they don’t get killed.

This jobs program is all about waging war, which brings both a sense of urgency and importance and some moral qualms to the equation. A woman whose job is to load ordnance on fighter planes thinks about the fact that the bombs kill people, but she points out that her role is a small one and she’s just doing what people tell her. (It’s amazing how little the rank and file know about what the overall mission is.) A pilot says that no one who pulls a trigger can not think about whether this war is worth it. What comes across in the documentary is the crew’s range of political beliefs, which aren’t necessarily in lockstep with those of their president or superiors. It’s another way that this remarkable series pulls apart the civilian world’s myths about the military and helps us understand the men and women who choose to serve.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen