I felt something grab at me, the pit of my stomach.
“The others . . . they don’t talk about hometowns at all. Even walk away when someone else starts it.”
Again, “What else?”
“Shanley. EW third. I’m not sure he’s going to make it. He talks about going over the side. The chaplain, the doc, myself—we’ve all talked with him.”
“I’ll talk with him.”
“Thornberg,” she said.
“Thornberg?” She was a lee helmsman, striker for quartermaster. “I haven’t noticed a thing on watch.”
“Not there. In women’s quarters. Cries a lot. She’s coming around.”
“I can see her.”
She paused but a moment. “Not necessary, I think, sir. We’re handling it.”
For some reason the last—the “we” made me look quickly at her; suppress a comment.
“Anyone else in particular?”
“Among the men?” She meant women as well.
“Among anybody, Miss Girard,” I said, a bit sharply.
She looked down at her lap, up at me. “Negative, sir. That’s it.”
I decided I might as well spring it on her. I wanted it handled.
“What’s this about you and Mr. Chatham?”
“That?” She wasn’t thrown for a moment, her voice easy, fluent, her eyes gray and cool, a glint of malice in them. “Of course, personally I sometimes get a feeling of nausea around him but that’s not it. Goes back to a time in the wardroom, some of us shooting the breeze. I mentioned that perhaps we ought to be thinking about jettisoning the missiles—that is, Tomahawk land-attack ones at least, not necessarily anything else. I said something to the effect I couldn’t possibly imagine any use we’d ever have for them now and of course they have a certain danger in themselves. He took it personally I think. Since you mention it, sir, I sometimes get the idea Mr. Chatham rather thinks he owns the missiles.”
“You were out of line, Lieutenant.” My voice was hard enough. “Not because it’s his department, although incidentally he’s the best combat systems officer I’ve ever known. But because it’s my department. Anything as important as the question of jettisoning the missiles is not a proper subject for wardroom scuttlebutt. Is that understood?”
“It’s understood, sir.”
“I’ve given him the word. I now give you the same one. I want it knocked off. Both. The thing between you. And any more talk of that kind. The captain will decide what is and what is not to be jettisoned on this ship. I should hate to have to jettison an officer or two. Do you take my meaning, Miss Girard?”
“Perfectly, sir.”
Carrot and Stick
The emotional state of the ship: It varies widely, hand to hand. And even with one individual, it may be quite different at different times. Thinking, brooding, contemplation: I sense that these grow. Only a very few cannot, at least temporarily, stand watches at all. I choose different ways of dealing with these, as I think will work or is merited. Debating first with myself whether to be tough, to charge the man with malingering; or whether to be gentle. The gentleness consists generally in talking with the man quietly for a while, then leaving him alone for a few days while waiting to see what happens. The toughness, as with Yeoman Third Logan, is to come down hard. He had complained simply that he did not feel like working, speaking of vague ills. I had before me the doc’s report. The man faced me sullen, dangerously close to surly. I looked at him and said:
“Why are you different from the rest of us? You think you’re the only one suffering?”
“I’ve got these pains, Captain,” he almost whined.
“We’ve all got pains, Logan. The doc says you’ve got the exact same pains as the rest of us. No more, no less. You should be ashamed of yourself. For God’s sake show a little spine, man.”
With Machinist’s Mate Second Jorgans, more gently, when he complained:
“But back there I have,” he said, “a wife and two kids.”
The present tense. Jorgans broke into tears, a convulsive sobbing. I stepped around him and shut my cabin door. Coming back I placed my hand on his shoulder.
“Rainey,” I said quietly—he is a signalman—“has a wife and four children. . . . He hasn’t missed a watch.”
Somehow these altogether simplistic and direct approaches seem in the main to work. Only two men—Seaman Drexel and Cryptologic Technician Templeton—actually have I relieved, for the time being, of all watch-standing, to give them a chance to recover as from any illness, as a man is allowed to do aboard ship. One week limit on that indulgence. Then I call the man in and tell him quite sternly that he will have to shape up, that every hand must do his share. This also seems to work. So far. So far indeed the men are proving themselves intrepid, yes, gallant, in the main.
The Ship at Night
Previously most had appeared to be employing that remarkable ability of which I have spoken to put their minds on a sort of hold in respect to events and to continue their regular shipboard duties and lives, as if they had come to an agreement with themselves, a sort of solemn inner concordat, to probe into them at some unspecified future date. Now this fortification has to an increasing extent been breached by the disclosures to ship’s company of the French radioman’s report, the report from the Russian submarine commander. One senses a deep, inward contemplation. Pulsing in an unceasing torment through them this question: Are the reports to be believed? A struggle for their souls.
I have taken to prowling the ship at night, as I think through, never really stopping doing so, our choices as to course. I listen to the sea in its polyphony of voices, as if she might whisper some wondrous counsel in my ears; gaze up at the stars which guide us as if that direction might extend to other than navigational matters; as if they in their ageless wisdom might have a word of advice for a ship’s captain, perhaps a suggestion or two, based on the ancient and fond friendship between themselves and seamen. From sea and stars no answers come, other than a seeming reminder concerning on whose shoulders these matters fall.
But mostly I go to be among the men. And for them to see me, to have my accessible presence. Sailors do not approach a ship’s captain lightly—if they feel something genuinely urgent requires his attention they go through chief petty officers, through their division officers. It is my purpose by these coursings of the weather decks to convey a certain opening, enlargement, of the usual channels of command. I go for a further reason which I hardly dare admit to myself. I have never before asked myself such a thing concerning those I commanded, feeling I knew sailors, and especially that I knew, having long ago, on assuming command of this ship, made it my first order of business, those whose sworn duty it is to obey my orders; as much as I thought I understood my ship’s company, I feel increasingly uncertain of the answer to a single question: What are they thinking? What is going on inside them? It is this really that turns me to these noctivagations. I go to attempt to determine whether there be any beginning telltale, any sign, any signal, however oblique, of that most fateful of all the affairs of ships on the ocean seas and before which the strongest captain’s heart may tremble, of revolt beginning to stir in his men. Immense as are his powers, any ship’s captain yet pauses before pitting his will against an authentic rebellion, if it have any basis of validity at all, subscribed to by a large number of his men. While stubbornness may be a virtue in a commander, unreasoning obstinacy may bring the heavens crashing down, take a ship under as surely as the sea herself has done uncounted times. No good captain has any problem distinguishing between the two. He knows the fineness of the line he must trod. He cannot forget that he is alone on that ship with them, cut off from the world. Vastly outnumbered, he has only his will and the ancient law of the sea to back him up, and while it is my business to attend to the first, the latter is now peculiarly vulnerable. I go to learn.
More and more between watches, in the hours of dark, men may be seen topside, sometimes in twos or threes, more often alone, sitt
ing on the bitts or standing by the lifeline, gazing at the empty sea, staring into its immense solitude from the equal solitude of the ship moving through it, over the emptied blue plain of the Mediterranean. Wrapped in those two solitudes, ship and sea, which define our existence. Quite often, as I stand by the lifeline myself, a man will approach and stand by me and we talk. Usually about idle matters, not always. Once Bigelow, a missile technician, standing by me awhile in the darkness, then actually pulling at my sleeve, saying, “I’ve got to go home, Captain.” I put my hand over the one now gripping my arm and held it hard. “Lad, we all want to go home.” We just stood there in the dark, saying nothing. Until his low sobs stopped and I took my hand away. Sometimes I touch the dark shape of a man and move on. Other times I simply pass by, sensing that he does not wish to be disturbed. Sometimes I have a feeling when I come upon a man that he might be thinking about going over the side. Always then I stop and talk with him. Never, of course, about that. But about random things. But making it a point, too, to speak of the future, my purpose being to plant reassurance throughout the crew that there is a future—even possibly a decent future, not just one of survival, of mere existence. Nothing, as I have suggested, is more important than that the captain of a ship preserve at all times a calm presence, to the point even of serenity, and especially in the most trying of times. No matter the turmoils, even torments, that may be underway within himself: He must not fail to suppress them; they must never know it. It is the first commandment of captaincy. So much does a ship’s company take its signal, its tone, its very emotions from its captain, and often augments them: Fear in a ship’s captain can in an instant become panic in a ship’s company; alarm, terror. But so also can fortitude in him find its mirror image in his men: endurance—mental and physical—and without a word of complaint through deprivation and hardship, even horror, that would seem beyond the ability of men to bear, deeds extending to the unhesitating risk of their lives for those of their shipmates: These are almost common virtues among sailors properly led.
Iowa
She was a young pony of a girl, the sailor’s dungarees, sailor’s hat seeming but to accentuate the fresh radiance of her mind and body, a naturalness, a spontaneity about her that echoed within oneself. She could have been my daughter; nineteen. The fact that at that age she had already made signalman third vouched for her brightness. I remembered her once telling me with mock solemnity as of a great distinction that she was from Odebolt, Iowa, “the popcorn capital of the world.”
“Isn’t it a pretty night, Captain?”
“Yes, Bixby. A lovely night.”
High and glittering stood the stars guiding us eastward. Swarming in the heavens they looked down on a sea untroubled to the far horizon, the fullness of moon, riding a cloudless sky, joining them to light the waters and fashion a wide and radiant stream of white which followed us with mathematical precision; the dazzling stillness in command everywhere save for that steady low-pitched duet, the whisper of the sea, the heartbeat of the ship. We stood by the lifeline.
“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “It’s the moonlight. I always figured you should never waste a full moon on sleep.”
I felt my own silence would best encourage the softness, tenderness of that voice. Her eyes traced a pattern from the zenith to the waters stretching endlessly away.
“I can’t make up my mind whether it looks prettier over the sea or over wheat fields. A full moon.” She paused as before a difficult choice; looked across to the beam horizon. “The way that path of light follows us. We move and it doesn’t. I can never get over that. You don’t get that in the wheat fields. Naturally, because you’re not moving yourself. Mostly you’re on a porch.”
“Wheat fields? I thought it was corn, Bixby. In the song. Tall corn.”
She laughed a little, a girlish laugh that fell like a small jewel into the quiet of the night. “Well, sir, we had that, too. But in our family, our farm, it was mostly wheat. Iowa.”
She said the word as if to herself, somehow the three tiny syllables, the single word, full of the deepest meaning. I looked across the shimmering seascape, the very stars above seeming to hover attendant, eavesdropping on our conversation. Only at sea, the horizons unblocked by ridges of land, can the stars be seen in all their teeming multitudes, all their glory. Lately it seemed I had begun to hear increasing talk of a certain pattern; nothing of any directness, but a passing reference, the name of a state dropped into a conversation, of a town, of the many states and towns from which ship’s company came; the names of home, their immense variety spanning augustness, pride, charm, and even comedy to form a mighty nomenclature, full of every meaning, everything held dear; almost, too, this stabbing into one, twisting like a knife, as if they stood there across the seas as untouched and beckoning as ever. As I pondered my decision, it seemed almost that they were being invoked like some ominous litany, swelling and merciless, that had begun to repeat itself over and over in my ears, rising at times to something like throbbing. The word “Iowa” fell into the silence and seemed to hover there for a moment, as if asserting its claim and its strength, before she went on. I almost feared the question, and from a signalman third, but if it had been on her mind to ask she turned away from it, with a relief so considerable on my part as itself to disturb me. I was aware somehow of the flurry of curls on the nape of her neck under her sailor’s hat, the peacefulness of her youthful figure: the peace of the night seeming to envelop us, make whispers of our voices.
“But,” she said with girlish firmness, “I think I’ve decided it looks prettier over the sea.” The brief, young laugh again. “I guess it’s a good thing I went in the Navy. I was going to be a veterinarian. Is it true that the earth is two-thirds ocean?”
“A bit more, I think. Seven-tenths.”
“Seven-tenths sea!” She paused a beat, her voice quizzical, gentle as a note of music. “There must have been a reason for that. By God—or whoever,” she added, seeming not to want to sound particularly religious.
“I think someone wrote long ago that the reason had to be that God—or whoever—had a preference for sailors. Probably a sailor wrote that.”
I could sense the smile. Mixed with the salt-air smell of the sea was the elusive scent of her perfume, her femininity, where she stood beside me, motionless in the moonlight. We fell into a silence, listening to the reiterant wash of the sea, shipmates. At one point I thought she looked up high on the mainmast at our communications antennas. She may have been looking only at stars.
After a bit, she said quietly, “Good night, Captain.” She turned to go below to women’s quarters.
“Good night, Bixby.”
The Navy, or the Iowa farm, or both, had given a girl now called Bixby—not Alice—something. I lingered under the stars; something unaccountable and strong I felt, communicated without speech from her to myself: There was something indomitable in her. A special gentleness seemed to come through—and a good toughness. Sometimes the comfort, the reassurance, went the other way. She was with the ship. And yet: Iowa.
Moses
Under Arabian stars, their silhouettes heavily lighted, we stood along the starboard lifeline studying the dunes, spectral and undulating, foreboding, magisterial, across the few miles of resting sea. We had been running a parallel course. With me a seaman apprentice, James Hurley, a striker for coxswain, being brought along by Preston. He is from a small town called Dundee, Florida. He started telling me about the citrus groves. Then:
“It looks very bare over there, doesn’t it, sir?”
“It should. It’s all desert.”
“I wonder what the desert’s like. Just sand, I guess.”
“They say it can be very beautiful, too.”
“Didn’t someone cross the desert following the star to see the baby Jesus when he was born?”
“I think so. I’m not sure about the desert part. But yes, I believe so.”
The low, short laugh. “On a camel, of course.”
/> We waited, watching sea and desert beyond go by; the sea seeming a familiar friend; the desert strange and phantasmal, somehow menacing, as though watching us with suspicion across the water; sea and desert yet combining to form an engulfing solitude, lessened a bit, I felt, by our sharing of it. We had stood for so long in the luminescent stillness of the night, in a kind of voiceless communion.
“Also there was something about Moses.”
“Moses?”
“Wandering in the desert. Forty years if I remember.”
Something in the voice made me turn sharply toward him. Then I dismissed it. Too alert for signs.
“Yes. That part I know,” I said. “I think the Ten Commandments came along not much after that.”
Sweetness
In the afternoon it had rained but now the rain had gone, leaving behind a low mist lying over the sea. He had just come off the first watch and must have seen me standing there in the dark. He joined me and we stood awhile, mostly silent, as much so as the night itself, a mute sea, the air drugged into utter windlessness; now and then a word or two.
Lieutenant Thurlow, the navigator, would have won any contest we should have had aboard having to do with being a dedicated “womanizer,” a fact established conclusively years back on visits to various port cities on two continents. It was beyond me how he had ever ended up in the Navy. Some latent intense love of the science of navigation, I felt, in a pure sense; finding himself most happy doing things connected with navigation, when not doing things connected with women. The first must have won out over the second in a close contest. Ship life certainly gave him all the opportunity to drench himself in the former, though limiting the latter to those shore excursions. We both looked up. A few stars had broken through the cover.
“Sometimes I’m sorry things like loran even came along,” he said. “Any idiot can do it. Rather glad it’s gone now. Star-shooting, dead reckoning—more fun. And serves the purpose.”
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