Trial by Fire

by P. T. Deutermann

  “Thank you, Captain,” George said. “For what it’s worth, none of us who lived through this can speak about it, either.”

  Gentry grimaced, nodded, got into the car, and said something to the driver. George saw hands rolling down all the windows as the car drove away. He watched as the red taillights dimmed and then vanished at the head of the pier. He turned to his two trusty lieutenants. “Not a word about this,” he told them.

  “Who was that, XO?”

  “I can’t tell you, but I will, when the time is right. Anybody asks, just another rubbernecker from the big staff up on the hill.”

  “He seemed pretty damned disturbed,” J.R. observed.

  “You and I,” George said, “lived through it. We might be a little bit jaded. That’s a natural reaction—see what happened to our ship and our shipmates, your brain is more than ready to just wipe all that clean. Don’t feel bad about that—your brain is simply trying to protect you. Remember that you’re both commissioned officers. You see a white-hat wandering around who looks like he’s just seen a ghost? Talk to him. Help him out. We’re all gonna have to do that from now on out.”

  “Even the captain?” Gary asked quietly.

  George prepared to rebuke him but then relented. “The captain is the sole owner of everything that happens to his ship, Lieutenant. I’m guessing his brain just might have a lot to process just now.”

  “Yes, sir,” Gary said. “Sorry, sir.”

  George studied the young officer’s face in the light from the overhead cranes. Saw lines in that face that didn’t belong there at this young age. “But, what?” he asked.

  “Nothing, sir. Sorry, I—”

  “Spit it out, Lieutenant,” George said, boring in.

  Gary just bit his lip and then shook his head, but J.R. did speak up. “The captain is talking about court-martialing everybody who wasn’t present for duty when you took that first muster,” he said. “Talking about men deserting. Abandoning their duty stations. Taking the coward’s way out and jumping down to the Santa Fe. Well, lemme say something about that, XO. I didn’t see the captain down on the messdecks when the air was giving out. I didn’t see the captain when all those guys had to jump from the flight deck down and the catwalks and what happened when the avgas river came. I never saw the captain when guys up on the flight deck were running aft into the fire, trying to lay down water so they could get pilots out of their burning planes. I saw an awful lot of Father O’Callahan, but I never once saw the captain.”

  J.R. took a deep breath, as if suddenly realizing what he’d been saying. But then he set his jaw and went on.

  “Now we’ve got this 704 Club bullshit. Seven hundred and four guys answered ‘here’ when you took that first, second, and third muster. The captain’s saying that if you didn’t answer ‘here’ after three calls, you were a deserter. I’m hearing there are eight hundred dead. He gonna call them deserters, too, XO?”

  “Okay,” George said. “Enough.”

  “No, it isn’t enough, XO,” J.R. said. “This is Goddamned wrong. Everyone knows you were the one really in command during this disaster, while the captain went to his sea cabin and cried like a fucking baby.”

  George closed his eyes and tried to keep calm. It was hard. The lieutenant was indulging in the height of insubordination. The problem was that the lieutenant was entirely right. He raised his hand. “There are things in motion to correct that situation,” he said. “But if you persist in sticking your noses into this mess before those efforts can bear fruit, you will fuck it up for everybody. Is that clear enough? I am more than aware of the injustice. But neither of you guys draw enough water to make it better. I do. End of discussion, Goddammit.”

  J.R. and Gary were visibly taken aback by George’s sudden and uncharacteristic vehemence. Then they both saluted, turned on their heels, and went trotting up the brow steps in quick time.

  George instantly felt bad. But, if the captain got wind that his exec had been to see the PacFleet Jag, he would have a pretty good excuse to proceed with his absurd claim of desertion in the face of the enemy. See? Even my XO is disloyal.

  Franklin loomed alongside, all 36,000 tons of her, scorched, battered, wrecked, and ruined, silently encased in a shroud of human loss and pain. The very air in the nearby harbor stank of the death and destruction she’d been through. He thought he could almost hear the ship asking: why did you not let me die? I could have taken the 800 with me to the bottom of the sea, miles down, where there is eternal comfort, “strong to save.” Cold comfort to be sure, but down there in the icy dark are no more vain and vengeful captains, worried about their precious careers. Only the deep and the darkness and ultimate eternal rest—an appropriate, even a well-deserved fate for both a ship of war and all the men who’d died trying to save her and their shipmates.

  He shouldn’t have yelled at his two best lieutenants. Apparently, he was more exhausted than he knew. He could just see the front entrance of the BOQ from the pier. He started walking, keeping his mind as empty as he could. At the head of the pier he decided he needed to just sit down for a few minutes. Franklin’s towering bow overhung the pier, with her huge anchor lowered to the waterline. He plopped down on a bollard and leaned back against one of the ship’s mooring lines. Halfway up the heavy lines were rat-guards, circular rounds of steel that reflected the shimmering lights from the yard cranes. Some gulls were fighting over scraps in a nearby dumpster. The flash and scratch of a welding torch punctuated the night as the shipyard worked on the hull of a heavy cruiser moored at the next pier. A 500-man personnel barge had been positioned on the other side of the pier so the Franklin’s crew could have somewhere to go to get hot showers, food, and clean bunks.

  He was worried about telling the OOD not to log Gentry’s visit. On the one hand, the captain’s orders were the captain’s orders. On the other, the fate of several hundred Franklin men hung in the balance if the captain pressed ahead with this crazy court-martial business. He knew, as the captain might just not appreciate, that the bulk of the crewmen who’d scrambled down the catwalks to safety were high-school kids, eighteen or nineteen years old. They’d watched the towering cataclysm back aft loose a murderous barrage of ordnance down the length of the flight deck and smack into their huddled ranks while they hugged the wooden flight deck. Of course they’d bailed out.

  “Commander?” a voice called. George opened his eyes. There were two shore-patrol men standing next to the bollard. “You okay, sir?”

  “No, I’m not, gentlemen,” George said. “I am officially sick at heart.”

  “You been drinkin’ maybe, Commander?” the older of the SPs asked politely.

  “Nope,” George said. “I’m the Franklin’s XO. It’s been a bitch of a day. I just needed to take a load off for a moment. I’ve got eight hundred ghosts on my shoulders.”

  The two petty officers took a step back. This wasn’t the kind of language they’d expected, but then the older of the two understood. “Sir?” he said. “We’ve got a jeep. Can we take you to the BOQ? I think you need to get some serious sleep. This ain’t no place to grab a nap, Commander.”

  George simply stared out into the night, ten thousand miles away.

  “Please, Commander? Just come with us and we’ll get you all squared away.”

  George came back to the present. “Okay, gents,” he said. “Okay. You’re right. Lead the way.”

  One of them held the right front door open for him and he hopped in. The other one drove while his helper perched on the back bumper, holding on to his white hat. The older petty officer escorted him into the BOQ lobby, where he explained to the front desk who George was. A chief petty officer took one look at George and said there was room available in the senior officers’ wing. He offered to show George the way. Five minutes later George was stretched out on a nice bed, his shoes where he’d kicked them off onto the deck, thinking about putting in a wake-up call. The captain would be back aboard promptly at 0730; it wouldn’t do for t
he exec to still be ashore when Himself arrived.

  Put in a wake-up call, a voice reminded him.

  Just a minute, he thought. I’ll get right on that.

  46

  “So,” the captain said when George finally arrived back on board at two in the afternoon of the next day. He found the captain on the bridge, in his chair, reading messages. The captain looked up and snorted. “The Late Sleeper returns. Tie one on, possibly, XO?”

  “I wish I had,” George said. “No, I went to the BOQ, lay down for just a minute, and just didn’t wake up until 1300.”

  The captain nodded, sympathetically, for a change. “Well, you didn’t miss much,” he said. “More gawking brass—the shipyard commander, NavBase commander, Supply Center commander. Apparently, there was some combat cameraman footage—in color, no less—that got back here before we did. Now everybody wants a tour, although I will say nobody seemed to want a second tour.”

  “When can we leave?” George asked, fixing himself a cup of coffee from the chart table. Both his and the captain’s in-port cabins remained untenable after the interior fires, so the captain had been camping out in his sea cabin and George had taken over the navigator’s office.

  “Day after tomorrow,” the captain said. “The shipyard has sent a clutch of surveyors on board to prepare the Brooklyn Navy Yard for what’s coming. According to the shipyard commander, the Navy is going to repair Franklin and put her back in service, just to poke a finger in the Japs’ eye, I suspect. Where are you with drawing up the charges and specs for all those yellowbellies?”

  “The ship’s office is wrecked,” George said. “I’ve been concentrating on getting an accurate tally of who stayed, who left, who was forced to jump, and who died or just disappeared. That’s taking longer than I anticipated.”

  The captain gave him a suspicious look. “Well, lemme help you along,” he said. “Focus on all those men who were waiting for us when we pulled back into Pearl, especially the men coming off the Santa Fe. Yes, she did come back with the group after all. Our escorting tin cans picked up mostly men trying to escape what was going on back aft, so they really had no choice. Focus on the Santa Fe lists. That’ll flush the bad actors out.”

  “And the charge is desertion in the face of the enemy?”

  “Goddamned right,” the captain said. “Officers, chiefs, especially, but white-hats as well.”

  “I’m hearing that all those men you refused to take back aboard are already on their way to new-construction assignments,” George said. “Rumor is there’s a new carrier coming down the ways every other month.”

  The captain shrugged. “If a precommissioning CO is willing to accept a man under suspicion of desertion, then let him. At some point, the JAGs will show up and ask for Seaman so-and-so. It may end up being a slow process, but those prosecutors will show up, eventually. And I will not let this matter rest, got it?”

  “Yessir,” George said. “I’ll get back on it. I’ve got the chief engineer honcho-ing the refurbishment of enough berthing and messing spaces for the transit crew.”

  “You mean the Seven Oh Four?”

  “I guess I do, Captain.”

  “You’re one of us, XO. You never even thought about going over to the Santa Fe. You never suggested that I abandon ship, even if the admiral did. So, you are, by God, one of us. The rest of them be damned.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “And don’t oversleep again,” the captain said. “Talk about setting a bad example. I want a briefing from department heads on readiness for sea by noon tomorrow.”

  The sound of four bells came over the 1MC, followed by the announcement of yet another command title.

  “More tourists,” the captain grumbled. “I will say, they’re all pretty complimentary. I’ll take care of them. You get us ready for the trip back to the Brooklyn Yards.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” George said, again, with as neutral an expression as he could muster.

  “Attaboy,” the captain said. “Now: where are my Marines, Goddammit? Orderlies!”

  47

  Gary and J.R. were hanging out up on the open-air forecastle, where the deck paint had been freshly restored to cover up what the anchor chain had done to the normally spotless deck during the tow. The forecastle was, strangely enough, a favorite hangout for main-hole snipes after hours. Fresh air, the shade of the flight deck overhang, rarely any officers, and room to stretch out and enjoy a cigarette.

  Gary was a bit bleary-eyed, having been up most of the night flushing the carrier’s feedwater system in preparation for the long voyage back to New York City and the Brooklyn Navy Yard. They’d kept one boiler on the line to maintain what the snipes called the Hotel Load, while subsequently dumping the other seven boilers and refilling them with certified feedwater from trucks on the pier. They’d done the same thing with the feed bottoms, the tanks which held all the reserve feedwater. After all the explosions, fires, and electrical transients, the quality of the ship’s feedwater had been increasingly questionable. The ship had apparently used up just about all of the base’s feedwater supplies.

  J.R. was still smarting from the exec’s behavior the night before. He’d told the cheng what had happened, but the chief snipe had been less than sympathetic.

  “Look,” he’d said. “You know and I know the XO doesn’t support this court-martial stuff. But—he’s second-in-command, not first. He’s duty bound to uphold the captain’s policies or go look for another job. If I know our XO, he’s most likely working back channel to undo that bullshit. So, mind your Ps and Qs and trust in the XO’s judgment.”

  “Good advice,” Gary had observed when J.R. went and bitched to him. “When the elephants begin to dance, mousies like us get the hell out of the way. Damn, but I need a drink.”

  “Wanna hit the O’Club tonight?” J.R. asked. “I think it’s within walking distance.”

  “Can’t,” Gary said. “We’re under way tomorrow morning. Gotta light off three boilers tonight and have ’em on the line by morning. Besides, if I hit the bottle now, they’ll never find me.”

  J.R. grinned. Everything seemed so anticlimactic after the horror of the attack and its aftermath. Surreal, that’s the word I’m looking for, he thought. We’re all pretending we’re ops-normal, and yet almost a thousand guys died and another thousand have been dispersed into the fleet of new construction. The ship’s a ghost town; hundreds of feet of empty, scorched passageways, no planes, no aviators, no air group. The flight deck had been roped off to prevent people from falling through to the hangar deck. The main engineering spaces were manned, but everything between the main holes and the flight deck was damned near empty. The captain was up on the bridge at the front of the island, giving orders and criticizing everybody; the snipes were down below making steam and keeping their heads down. In between, the few enlisted people he was encountering were sitting numbly at their workstations with 1,000-yard stares. The graceful palms and the gentle night breezes around the harbor seemed almost to taunt them.

  The captain had announced that the remaining crew would spend the transit cleaning the ship. Most of the moveable wreckage had already gone overboard between Ulithi and Pearl; now they were going after the smaller bits. Unfortunately, that often involved prying open small storerooms or workshops down on the second deck and finding something horrible. The captain had also ordered Engineering to rig up steam-lances once they left Pearl to deal with the problem of vestigial human remains on the hangar and gallery decks.

  And the XO? He was rumored to be up in his temporary cabin in the island, working up court-martial papers involving men who he was pretty sure were still alive—but not certain. Surreal. Yup. That was the word. He looked over at his buddy. Gary was leaning against a set of bitts, sound asleep. He still had ahold of his coffee mug, which was now dangling from his finger, dripping cold coffee on his badly wrinkled khaki trousers. The sound-powered phone station on the after bulkhead squeaked. J.R. got up and answered it.

&nb
sp; “Mister Peck up there?” a voice asked. “Tell him we’re ready to bring three-able in on main and auxiliary.”

  “Will do,” J.R. said, with a tired sigh.

  48

  The following morning, George stepped out onto the pier-side bridgewing. There was a lot of last-minute activity down on the pier as some stragglers reported aboard and the last of the stores were being loaded. The weather was gorgeous, as always. George wondered if people who lived here ever got tired of the eternally perfect temperatures. He was a four-seasons man, and he thought being stationed out here would be pretty confining after a while. There were six Corsairs tied down in two ranks on the front end of the flight deck, catching a free ride back to a Stateside rework facility. It was strangely comforting to see aircraft again, even if every one of them was out of commission for one reason or another. Two of them didn’t even have propellers. A team of shipyard personnel were sightseeing on the flight deck. They’d been put aboard to begin the tedious process of planning and estimating for Franklin’s repairs.

  He looked at his watch. They were supposed to get under way in one hour, but the captain was still ashore, having been summoned up to Makalapa for a last-minute call on Deputy CinCPacFleet, Vice Admiral Towers. Otherwise they were ready to go. The main plant had four boilers on the line and the harbor tugs were beginning to nose alongside to take up their stations. Once the captain returned, they’d single up all mooring lines. Ordinarily there’d be hundreds of sailors out on the flight deck or lining the catwalks. Up above them radar antennas would be turning and there’d be the clamor of aircraft-handling machinery coming up from the hangar bays. Not today, he thought; not ever again was probably more like it. He couldn’t conceive of the Navy trying to put this ship back together, even if it was just to spite the Japs. She’d have to be rebuilt from the second deck on up. All of the messing and berthing and office spaces on the second deck would have to be rebuilt. The entire hangar deck, including parts of the armored deck, would have to be replaced. The gallery deck. The flight deck. The elevators, the arresting gear, PriFly, the five-inch guns, the secondary guns. How could that be worth the money? Surely it would be cheaper to just scrap her and build a brand-new one instead.