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PROLOGUE
THE HEADQUARTERS OF THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF, US PACIFIC FLEET, MAKALAPA, PEARL HARBOR, TERRITORY OF HAWAII
I was staring out the window at the crowded expanse of Pearl Harbor below when the court members, three commanders and one four-striper, filed solemnly into the room. My defense counsel cleared his throat to get my attention. I turned around and walked back to the defense table. The members took their seats up on the dais with the captain in the middle. One of the commanders was a JAG officer. He sat right next to the captain, who was president of the court. The other two were line officers but neither of them was an aviator. The investigating officer, somewhat analogous to a prosecutor, was a lieutenant commander JAG officer. The clerical yeomen took their seats, but I didn’t see a court reporter. There were no spectators.
The captain banged his gavel once. “This Court will come to order,” he announced in what sounded to me like a weary voice. I thought he looked pretty old but he had a lot of ribbons on his uniform. Maybe the war had aged him, just like me.
“This court of inquiry,” the captain continued, “has been convened by the Commandant of the Fourteenth Naval District, Rear Admiral Draper, to inquire into the case of an individual claiming to be Lieutenant Robert T. Steele, formerly of the carrier squadron Bombing Six, who was recovered from the Philippine island of Talawan after being missing for almost two years. I remind members and the subject of this court that a court of inquiry is, under Naval Regulations, an investigating body—a sort of grand jury, if you will. It is only authorized to ascertain facts and report them for consideration by the convening authority. It can also offer opinions, but they must be relevant and related to one or more facts. Its proceedings can be used as evidence in any subsequent court-martial, if one is deemed appropriate. In this case we will begin by taking testimony of the individual before you who is claiming to be Lieutenant Steele.”
He turned to look directly at me. “You, sir: are you in fact claiming to be Lieutenant Robert T. Steele, USN, who was declared missing in action from USS Hornet and your bombing squadron following the sinking of the Hornet during the action off the Santa Cruz Islands, October, nineteen forty-two. Is that correct?”
I stood to respond. “Yes, sir, that’s who I am.”
The captain nodded. “So you say, sir. I must say you don’t look much like a lieutenant in the US Navy.”
I had to smile. That was the understatement of the year. I had a full beard and my hair was long enough to have been tied in a bun if I’d wished. My face and neck were nut brown, from my forehead right down to my collar line. There was a long, white scar on the right side of my head. I had wanted to wear dress khakis to the court, but since my identity was in question, they wouldn’t let me wear the uniform until the court made its findings. They’d cleaned up the Filipino native clothes I’d been wearing when they finally retrieved me from Talawan, and that’s what I was wearing today. Surrounded by all these officers in uniform, with their black ties, shoulder boards, glistening collar devices, and pressed shirts, I felt like the impostor they thought I was.
“I was on Talawan for just over twenty months after the sinking of the submarine Hagfish,” I replied. “The Japanese were searching hard for me and my gunner, so the local resistance leader advised me to have my face stained. He failed to tell me that it might be permanent. I can demonstrate, if you wish, that the rest of me is definitely white.”
The captain raised his eyebrows. “That won’t be necessary, sir. Perhaps the simplest thing to do here is for you to tell your story, right from the beginning.”
“How much time do you have, Captain?” I asked.
“Whatever it takes,” he said, getting comfortable in his chair. “From the beginning then. Where and when was that, by the way?”
“Right here, Captain,” I said. “Right here in Pearl Harbor. On one noisy December morning, back in nineteen forty-one.”
ONE
I awoke to the sounds of machinery. Ventilation fans, to be specific.
Where am I? I wondered.
I opened one eye and quickly clamped it shut. My mouth felt like it was filled with a wad of bitter cotton and I now knew how many brain cells I had because every one of them hurt. Maybe I should have used some of them last night. A tiny Greek chorus of some of the less badly dehydrated cells began a chant: You can not drink. You can not drink.
I took a deep, painful breath, still wondering: Where the hell am I?
There were other noises, now: a distant rumbling of some very large machinery, the clatter of a swab and bucket being used out in the passageway. Sound is vibration. My cells and I really didn’t need vibration just now. Like we’ve been saying since about 2200 last night, chirped the brain cells: you can not drink.
Then it came to me: passageway. I was on a ship. A very big ship. I opened that eye again and winced when I saw a bright white line stretched under the door to where I lay in bed. I sat up, carefully, and my stomach rewarded the effort with a lurch of nausea. And then I remembered the night before.
It had started innocently enough. Upon graduating from the Operational Training phase of flight training, I’d received orders to the USS Enterprise (CV-6), where I’d be assigned to the air group’s dive-bombing squadron. I debarked off the transport ship and slogged my seabag over to the base personnel office, where I got to hurry up and wait. Where’s my carrier? The Big E was at sea, somewhere, one of the clerks told me. Due back, well, sometime. I’d drawn myself up to my full height of five foot nine, okay, eight, inches and demanded more precise information. I am Ensign Robert Tennille Steele, United States naval aviator, and I need to know when and where I’m supposed to meet Enterprise.
The tired-looking personnelman was underwhelmed. You and about a hundred other guys, Ensign, he’d said. Here’s a voucher for the base BOQ. I suggest you go there now and get a room before they’re all gone. You’ll know your ship’s back in port when you see a big crowd headed down to the Ten-Ten dock. Join them. When you get there, look up. She’s a big gray bastard, you know? Uglier’n a stump, if you ask me, not beautiful like one of our battleships. Here’s your orders packet. When you do see the carrier, grab your seabag and your orders and report to the OOD on the officers’ brow, that’s at the back end, Ensign. Next.
I’d stomped out of there with as much dignity as I could salvage, which wasn’t much. The after brow. That’s at the back end. Wiseass. I’d been at sea for two years. I damned well knew which was forward and which was aft. This was the curse of having those lonely gold bars on your shirt collar: everybody assumed you knew absolutely nothing, even though I was an academy graduate, had completed two years at sea in a cruiser, and after that, just over a year at Pensacola and other flight-training fields. In the Army they called their second lieutenants shavetails, whatever that meant. In the Navy all it took was for someone to say the word “ensign” and you were immediately lower than whale dung. It was almost like bein
g a plebe again. It reminded me of what one of the chiefs had said when I reported aboard my cruiser: the three most dangerous things in the Navy are a boatswain mate with brains, a yeoman with muscle, and an ensign with a pencil.
That evening I’d gone to the O-club to get a beer but mostly to sulk. Just before leaving San Diego at the close of advanced flight training my girlfriend back in Omaha sent me a Dear John letter. She’d understood that, as a brand-new naval officer, I wouldn’t see much of Omaha, or her, once I graduated from Annapolis. Added to that problem was the Navy’s rule that new ensigns could not marry for two years after commissioning. My application for flight training at the end of those two years was apparently the final straw. We broke off our unstated engagement, promising to remain friends and maybe try again once I completed my Navy obligation. I got more mail from my folks back in Omaha than I did from her, and the Dear Bobby wasn’t much of a surprise. I still felt like sulking.
I’d of course asked around the O-club bar if anyone knew when the Big E was coming back in. That got me several suspicious looks and headshakes, even though I was in uniform. The bartender pulled me aside and explained that the movements of important ships like the Enterprise were secret, especially with all this war talk going around. In other words, stop asking or some people in suits will show up and take your ignorant ass away in irons.
I guess I should have known that. He’d been friendly enough about it, but that was probably because I was an ensign and he felt sorry for me. He’d even topped up my beer for free when he saw how crestfallen I’d looked. Then Ensign Mick McCarthy, one of my classmates, showed up. It seems he was stationed on the battleship USS Oklahoma as 3rd Division officer. He immediately ordered me a second beer and we got caught up. Long story short, before I knew it I was pee-lastered. Mick, being Irish, was of course just getting up a head of steam. The last thing I remember about the club was that Mick ordered me a Me Tie, or something like that. Mick called it dessert. The bartender cut me off after one after I dropped the empty glass.
How or why we ended up on the battleship Oklahoma remained an annoying mystery, right up there with getting in consecutive breaths of air without hurting my lungs, or, worse, having that other eye open suddenly. Apparently the first eye had spilled the beans on how much pain that slim band of white light could inflict.
I can not drink. I must never drink.
At that moment, the ship’s announcing system switched on with a snap and a crackle. Then the Antichrist started blowing a bugle. An amplified bugle, no less, telling us that reveille was upon us. I covered my face and ears with a pillow against the hateful noise, which finally, mercifully, stopped. To be replaced with the braying of a boatswain mate who wasn’t aware there was an amplifier present. Apparently it was time for sweepers to start their brooms and give the ship a clean sweep-down, fore and aft. That was followed by detailed instructions as to where to sweep (all interior decks, ladders, and passageways) and how to sweep again: give the ship a clean sweep-down, fore and aft, with every raspy syllable drilling into my poor head. During the next thirty minutes I stumbled down to the officers’ head where I embarrassed myself, and then I slunk back to the stateroom, got my uniform back on, and then my shoes—socks were hard, shoes a bit easier.
I collapsed back into the desk chair. I needed the chair to properly hold my aching head in both hands, eyes closed again, while the entire ship was treated to even more amazing announcements: mess gear; breakfast for the crew; all hands to quarters, officers’ call, and all this on a Sunday when any civilized aviation outfit would simply have piped holiday routine and been done with it. The final insult came when some evil bastard blew a police whistle over the announcing system, meaning: attention to morning colors. I did see colors, but not of the national kind. Gawd, I was hung over.
Then a surprise. Instead of actually saying, Attention to colors, the bosun said: What?
I echoed him. What?
The bosun was still holding down the switch on his 1MC microphone when somebody near him up on the bridge yelled: Hit the deck! loud enough to make me roll out my desk chair and hit the deck. At which point said deck, that solid battleship steel deck, punched my whole body so hard it knocked the wind out of me, followed a tenth of a second later by a truly thunderous roar from somewhere way down in the guts of the ship. I felt her roll ten degrees to port and then back over to starboard, where, even scarier, she stayed. The stateroom’s built-in desk and bureau set had been dislodged by the blast and was leaning out of the bulkhead and wedged on the desk chair right over my head. I tried to disentangle myself when all the lights flickered out. Then we got hit again, somewhere farther aft. Same gut-punching, knee-banging booming explosion, followed quickly by what sounded like the ship’s antiaircraft guns beginning to hammer away topside.
Suddenly I got myself clear of the chair and the trash can. As I tried to scramble to my feet I realized I was wrong about that: the chair and the trash can had gotten clear of me, rolling across the stateroom deck all by themselves, along with all the other loose gear. The ship was now listing by at least fifteen degrees, maybe even more. My hangover evaporated, extinguished by adrenaline.
Gotta get out of here, I thought. Then came a third hit, this one definitely underwater, the sound muffled but the impact no less mortal. I could literally hear and see the bulkheads and the door frame deform under the impact. I crawled to my feet, felt for the stateroom door, and tried to get it open. No dice: it was wedged shut. I kicked and pulled at it in the darkness until it gave way, wrenched it open, and saw light: battle lanterns were glimmering all along the passageway, their smoky yellow beams revealing at least a foot of water rushing down the passageway.
Water. Running down the passageway? No. No. No!
The deck was now tilting over even more, piling that water up against the outboard bulkhead as I scrambled down the passageway toward a watertight hatch visible about 40 feet aft. Where was everybody? The main steel girders of the ship were groaning now, accompanied by a thousand cracking and pinging noises as rivets were pushed out of the metal like cold bullets. There were no more guns banging topside but still lots of explosions, some close, some distant now, as if our unseen attackers had tired of Oklahoma, and little wonder. I finally reached the watertight door which someone had dogged down, but only partially. By then I was almost walking on the bulkhead as the ship’s list had increased to over thirty degrees. Despite the warm harbor water swirling past my knees, I felt a cold chill: the Oklahoma was going to capsize. She was going to turn turtle and go completely upside down.
I grabbed the hatch-operating handle and twisted it upwards as hard as I could. I couldn’t budge the damned thing. The water was piling up on my side of the hatch and for the first time I thought I was going to drown here. I hit that operating handle again but with no better results. I saw a fire extinguisher mounted on the dry-side bulkhead. I grabbed it and used it as a hammer, striking upwards on the handle. I thought I could hear panicked shouting in the next compartment. Then the top of the extinguisher snapped off and the stink of acid foam filled the flooding passageway. I recoiled from the acrid cloud, tripped, and went underwater for a moment. I bobbed back up, eyes stinging, fighting a rising panic.
Suddenly the handle moved, and then swung all the way up. The hatch popped open, knocking me once again back into the passageway. Somebody grabbed my shirt and hauled me through the hatch into a companionway, the place where a double ladder from the next deck up reached down to the deck I was on. The two ladders were covered in dungaree-clad sailors, some only partially clad, all trying to fit through the two hatches up above at the same time. My rescuer dropped me into two feet of water on the dangerously sloping deck. I was about to say something when a blast of boiler steam began roaring up the stack, which must have been right behind the companionway. The noise drowned out all the shouting around the ladder. The crowd streaming up the ladder thinned out, as if encouraged by that tremendous roar of escaping high-pressure steam.
/> One of the last men on the ladder saw me just sitting there. He yelled something at me, but all I could hear was the thunder of escaping main steam. He gestured at me with both hands: C’mon, Ensign. C’mon. Then he was gone, disappearing up the ladder into a sudden waterfall that began to come back down the ladder.
That finally registered.
I bolted for the empty ladder and went up like a striped-assed ape, taking every third rung, steel treads skinning my shins as if to say: Faster, faster! She’s going. And she was going. She was beginning that final ponderous roll. I caught a slim glimpse of daylight over on the high side and lunged for it even as a huge cascade of water came through a main deck hatch. I don’t know how I got through that but I did. I slid down the hull, bumped off the armor belt, and dropped into the harbor, joining a swarm of men who were frantically trying to get away from the capsizing giant.
Why get away? Weren’t we safe now? Then I remembered: if she went all the way down, sank out of sight, she’d suck anybody in the water nearby down with her. I struck out in the away direction, vaguely aware that there were fires everywhere along battleship row accompanied by the drone of unfamiliar aircraft engines. A titanic explosion erupted somewhere down the Ford Island waterfront, closer to the inner harbor. It was so big it punched my eardrums. By then most of us realized we weren’t getting anywhere as Oklahoma’s massive 26,000-ton hull displaced an equal amount of harbor water when she capsized. All of that water was now flowing back towards the upside-down ship. It swept us up onto the barnacle-covered hull and then dragged us back down in a succession of waves. On the next surge those who could tried to scramble up the hull itself, grabbing rivet heads, ridges of armor plate, and even protruding barnacles, which were sharp as knives. I was so frightened that I don’t remember clambering all the way to the keel but I did, my bare hands stinging from a thousand cuts. Somewhere back aft a mighty geyser of air and water was shooting a hundred feet into the air from one of the torpedo holes as the ship flooded. There’d been about thirty of us who’d gotten out, but I was the only one who’d made it to the keel.
The Nugget Page 1
