Did you know helicopters can fly beneath the Golden Gate Bridge? I didn’t, until I found myself strapped into an MH-60 Seahawk swooping below the bridge and darting out to sea.

Ahead of Fleet Week in San Francisco, my colleague Jesse Rogala and I tagged along Sunday with a group of first responders for a tour of the USS Somerset, a 684-foot “amphibious transport dock” that was arriving in town for the occasion. We intercepted the ship about 12 miles west of Half Moon Bay on a morning with near-perfect visibility.

The ride from SFO, passing under the Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate, took about 20 minutes, excluding the dozen circles the pilot made while waiting to land. A pod of whales was spouting in the calm sea below us. And the vertical landing? Flawless.

Fleet Week isn’t just loud jets flying in formation, it’s also huge ships zooming around the bay. The Somerset is a floating city that can accommodate up to 1,200 sailors and Marines (although two days after leaving port in San Diego, considerably fewer were aboard). The ship will take part in at least one exercise simulating the response to an earthquake or other humanitarian disaster.

Aboard the Somerset, I expected to be barked at and handled gruffly by sailors, like the clueless nuisances I assumed we were. Instead, we were treated like honored guests, taken on a lightning-fast tour of the ship. I, a raging queerdo who has never fired a gun, found it disorienting to have been happily annexed by the military-industrial-selfie complex. But the mood was relaxed — bouyant, even. And if you think mustaches are in style back on land, wait until you see what half the U.S. Navy is sporting these days.

The Navy boys gave us a peek at the medical bay and an explanation of what happens when fires break out, as they do. We played with handheld thermal imagers. We met a firefighter whose fiance was also on board (apparently, naval couples are not uncommon, though they can’t work in the same chain of command). And in the officers’ mess, we got generous helpings of mac-and-cheese and pierogi, the latter nicely browned. 

For some crew members, Fleet Week isn’t just shore leave; it’s a homecoming. Portola Valley native Lt. Junior Grade Emilio Simbeck had been deployed to the Indo-Pacific for seven months before the brief visit home. What did the local boy love about Southeast Asia? The food, obviously, but also the fact that he got to ride an elephant. As we spoke, his family was standing at Crissy Field, greeting the Somerset — too distant to discern from the deck, but Simbeck knew they were there, cheering. “I told them I’d give them a subtle wave,” he said.

As we were hustled through the Somerset meeting the crew, I barely had time to acknowledge the memes taped to the walls, from the time-honored (“Loose lips sink ships”) to exhausted Ben Affleck sneaking a cigarette. A Navy assault vessel started to seem almost like a tech office. 

“You wanna sit in my chair and take a pic?” Captain Andrew Koy, the Somerset’s commanding officer, asked me. Hell, yeah, I did! So I slipped on my aviators and took fake command for a minute as the Boss Bitch of the Seven Seas. 

At that point, we were speeding toward the Golden Gate at about 14 knots, and the top deck was filling up with officers. On the bridge, I asked Koy who runs things while he’s asleep. He gestured to his junior officers, most in their early to mid-20s. “I give them some orders about when to call me for certain equipment- or navigation-related issues,” he added, “or if we’re in the western Pacific and [a foreign ship] wants to challenge us.”

Has that ever happened?

“Yes, it has,” he said. “Not on this ship. I’m just on my third month in command here, but I’ve had command of a destroyer before, deployed to the Middle East.”

The Somerset is named for the Pennsylvania county where United Airlines Flight 93 — bound for San Francisco — went down on Sept. 11, 2001, after passengers helped wrest control from the al-Qaida hijackers who intended to fly it into the U.S. Capitol. “Let’s roll” was the rallying cry on that terrible morning, and the phrase is posted all over the ship.

By early afternoon, the Somerset had anchored in San Francisco Bay. Along with several dozen sailors and Marines, we descended to the bowels of the ship, past a giant “Let’s roll” banner, to board a LCU, or landing craft utility, a troop and equipment transport that launched from the stern to take us to Pier 70. 

It was there that Koy passed me a “challenge coin” by way of a handshake, per military tradition. A heavy, silver-dollar-size token of symbolic membership or acknowledgment of achievement, the coin also bore the “Let’s roll” inscription, with the number 93 on the reverse. So much for feeling like a barely tolerated liability amid a crew of weary sailors! Now I was in possession of a military coin that I could apparently use for free drinks.

The lander was loaded with dun-colored Oshkoshes, the successor vehicle to Humvees, and duffel bags for eager service members heading ashore. It got us close — but not all the way — to a boat ramp near Crane Cove Park, so we waded the remaining 15 or so feet back to North America. My phone was buzzing with “You did what?” reactions from friends howling at my Instagram Stories. I kept running my thumb over the edges of the coin in my pocket. Now I just have to find a San Francisco bar where people know what these bad boys are, so I can slap it down and get a drink.