Reporter's Notebook

Swag cruise

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Got a little time before the next event this afternoon. Maybe you can take a spin through the show floor, see what the reps are setting out. Bigger room this year. Louder in here. Sounds like a casino with no one-armed bandits; a distant roar of voices is swallowed up by the thick carpet.

There’s a giant white gun; BAE Systems’ full-scale 57mm deck gun fielded aboard the Coast Guard cutter Bertholf and the Navy’s littoral combat ships. There’s a Mk 48 Advanced Capability torpedo at the Raytheon booth. There’s the 30mm gun carried aboard the San Antonio-class gators. There’s a dummy wearing body armor. There’s another one. There’s brightly lit conference room built inside an enormous sign for Otto Melara; it looks like a place for staff meetings aboard a spaceship. Lockheed Martin is doling out popcorn; those sly devils, you can smell it from across the room. There’s an enormous lighted General Dynamics illustration of DDG 1000; the caption reads: “Zumwalt: Absolutely real.”

Two million years of evolution should force your eyes to make contact with the other humans behind the display counters; etiquette dictates you should smile, introduce yourself, get the pitch. But there’s a stronger impulse at work here: tchotchkes. This is a swag cruise.

Too many plastic pens with logos. And the triangular pens in the velvet bags aren’t fooling you. Too many lanyards. Thousands of gray Raytheon tubes with posters of all the ships in the Navy. What am I going to do with a Bath Iron Works sticky-note pad? Take it anyway. Ooh, a Boeing can coolie – yes, please! What is this orange plastic thing with a logo for Naval Sea Systems Command? No idea. Better take two. A poster showing every ship in Military Sealift Command? I’m all about it. A plastic spray bottle of Northrop Grumman hand cleanser? Ehhh, gimme one. NECC’s comic books are all gone. Brochures, magazines, fliers. This is interesting, can you tell me more about this program? Oh, the guy who knows about that isn’t here. The guy who knows about things is never here.

Pad, pad pad. Huh, U.S. Maritime Administration, all the way back in the corner. All right. This bag is getting heavy.