Gulf Troops Usher In New Year

Aboard the aircraft carrier, 'Carl Vinson,' the year is changing from '98 to '99, but the mission remains the same: to keep Saddam Hussein bottled up in Baghdad and to enforce Iraq's no-fly zone. CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin reports.

Lt. Jon Shoemaker has been there and done that.

"We're still doing the same job that we were doing then and we were doing that before that," he says.

This is Shoemaker's last mission of 1998. This time, he's not headed over Iraq, so he doesn't have to worry about being shot down.

But the deadly ballet of launching jets at sea is always dangerous , with no room for a misunderstood hand signal -- precious little margin for error by a crew whose average age is just nineteen.

When darkness falls, the work does not end.

It may be the final hours of 1998, but missiles still have to be made ready for the next time the Vinson sends fighters over Iraq.

Ask a lonely lookout what his New Year's resolution is, and it's about family.

"To try to see them more when I'm home." says Petty Officer Robert Miles.

Ask a pilot, and you get much the same.

"My New Year's resolution is to stop spending so much time at sea, get back home again with my wife and back happy again away from all this Gulf stuff." says Lt. Rich McMurray.

But everybody at the New Year's celebration table knows this "Gulf stuff" isn't going away anytime soon.

But things do get a little different at New Year's. This is, after all, a ship filled with teenagers.

Although there's no booze and no Times Square dropping ball, it is a New Year's like nowhere else.

And on the morning after, there are no hangovers -- just the start of another year of keeping Saddam in Baghdad.