The Caine Mutiny

by Herman Wouk

  “Oh, you think so? Well, frankly, so do I, but they’re still entitled to a good defense, and they can’t find themselves counsel, so-”

  “I think they’ll be acquitted. That is, sir, if there’s a halfway intelligent defense-”

  Breakstone arched his brows. “Oh, you do?”

  “Keith and Stilwell certainly will be. So will Maryk, if the case is handled with any brains. I guess I could get them off.”

  The legal officer was baffled by this arrogance, expressed in hesitant, diffident tones by the slouching lieutenant. “Please tell me how.”

  “Well, the charge is absurd, for one thing. Making a mutiny. There’s no question of force or violence or disrespect. Maryk was damned careful to stay on legal ground. He misapplied Article 184 to commit a mutinous act, but the article’s there in the books. The toughest charge that could possibly stick would be conduct to the prejudice of good order or discipline-as I say, though, it’s none of my affair-”

  The captain’s opinion of Lieutenant Greenwald took a sharp turn upward, because Greenwald’s criticism of the charge was a point he had noted himself. “Don’t forget you’re reading the board of investigation’s recommendations, Greenwald, not the formal charge. I’m drawing up the formal charge, and as a matter of fact it is conduct to prejudice. It was a one-man board, a captain from the mine force here, and I don’t think he ever saw Courts and Boards before they sent him over to the Caine. That’s the trouble around here, we’re shorthanded, and nobody who’s available knows any law. When a guy like yourself comes along, and you’re on the loose, pretty much, why, I think it’s your duty to make yourself available-” Breakstone pressed a buzzer, and lit a cigar with gestures of short temper. Lieutenant Commander Challee came to the doorway:

  “Yes, sir? Hello, Barney-”

  “Challee, your friend here seems to think the case is too easy or something. He can lick you with one hand tied behind him, only he doesn’t want to, or words to that effect-”

  “Captain Breakstone, I’m sorry I ever got involved,”‘ said Greenwald. “Jack asked me if I minded helping out on a court-he didn’t tell me any details-and I said I’d be glad to. Making out air priorities is pretty dull work. I just don’t want to defend these Caine people. Captain Queeg obviously is not crazy. The psychiatrist’s report proves it. These fools find a paragraph in Navy Regs that gives them ideas, and they gang up on a skipper who’s mean and stupid-as a lot of skippers are-and make jackasses of themselves, and put a ship out of action. I’m a damn good lawyer and a very expensive one, and I don’t see contributing my services to get them acquitted. If you’ve-”

  “You’re pretty goddamn cocksure about getting an acquittal,” said Breakstone, chewing his cigar.

  “They can be gotten off.”

  “I’d like to know how,” said Challee. “If ever I saw a plain case-”

  “Lieutenant Greenwald, nobody can compel you to defend these birds,” said the legal officer. “But you seem to be pretty red hot on principles, to hear you talk. I think you’ve talked yourself into defending Maryk. Eight officers, including four legal specialists, have ducked the case. I haven’t heard anybody except you give him a chance of getting off. The. first requirement for a good counsel is confidence in his case. I trust you believe in the principle that the worst criminal is entitled to the best defense?”

  Greenwald looked down at his fingernails, his boyish mouth loosely open, his eyes sad. “I’d be here forever on this case. Suppose I get my medical okay-”

  “There’ll be plenty of war left for polishing your medals,” said the legal officer.

  “Are you going to try all three?”

  “Maryk first. We’ll hold off on the Keith and Stilwell cases till we see what happens. That’s what I’m recommending to the admiral, anyway. He generally does what I say.”

  “When will the court-martial start?”

  Breakstone looked to his assistant, who said, “I think we can get it on in two weeks, sir, if Captain Blakely’s available to preside. He said he’d let me know this afternoon.”

  “Where’s the Caine now?” said Greenwald.

  “Drydocks, Hunters Point,” said Challee.

  “May I go out and talk to Maryk before I commit myself?”

  Breakstone nodded. “Challee, provide transportation for Lieutenant Greenwald.”

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  Greenwald rose. “I’ll go now, I guess.”

  “Jeep will be at the main entrance in ten minutes, Barney,” said Challee.

  “Okay.” The pilot put on his white peaked cap. The braid was crusty and green. He had the look of a poverty-stricken college boy, one who waited on tables and spent his money for phonograph records instead of food. He went out, his big scarred hands swinging.

  Challee said, “He’ll take the case, sir.”

  “Queer buzzard,” said the legal officer. “Looks so futile and apologetic, but he has a damn high opinion of himself.”

  “He’s a good lawyer,” said the assistant. “But he won’t get Maryk off.”

  Lieutenant Greenwald was used to aircraft carriers. The Caine, resting on keelblocks in a drydock, rusty and cluttered, looked to him like a little river boat. He went down the long steep wooden gangway stretching across the gulf of the dock to the minesweeper. Amid the rubble on the main deck he noticed a jagged hole, perhaps four feet across, roped off near the after davit of the motor whaleboat. Twisted rusty cables and pipes like entrails projected around the hole. “Like to see Lieutenant Maryk,” he said to the moon-faced short sailor in whites at the gangway desk.

  “He ain’t here, sir.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I guess the Chrysanthemum, sir. Excursion boat they got rigged up for a BOQ at Pier 6.”

  “Where’s your captain?”

  “Captain White won’t be back till six o’clock, sir.”

  “Captain who? White?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Urban, sir.”

  “Oh, yes. Urban.” Greenwald inspected the sailor who was going to be a star witness for Challee. “Where’s Captain Queeg, Urban?”

  “Captain White has the ship now, sir.” A wary, sullen look clouded the signalman’s face.

  “Don’t you know where Queeg is?”

  “I don’t know nothing about Captain Queeg, sir.”

  “What’s that hole in the deck?”

  “We took a suicide in Lingayen.”

  “Anybody hurt?”

  “Nobody hurt. It bounced and fell over the side.”

  “Who was commanding the ship then? Captain White?”

  “No, sir.” Urban scowled very suspiciously, and turned to the gangway desk.

  “Well, who, then? Was Mr. Maryk still in charge?”

  Urban grunted, opened the quartermaster’s log, and made a show of scribbling in it. Greenwald turned, went up the gangway, and made his way to the Chrysanthemum.

  His first sight of Maryk astonished the lawyer. On the basis of the board of investigation’s report he had formed a clear picture of the exec: slight, thin, nervous, dark, and with the self-satisfied expression of a petty intellectual. In fact he had pictured Bill Pelham, a loud-mouthed Marxist of his college days, in a naval uniform. The husky, bullet-headed, blunt-faced officer who sat blinking amid tumbled bedclothes on the edge of his cot, rubbing his palms on his broad naked chest, dislocated Greenwald’s entire conception of the Caine affair.

  “Well, anyone they want to appoint is okay with me,” Maryk said dully. “I don’t know anybody. It doesn’t matter a whole hell of a lot, I guess. You’ll be buying yourself a lot of trouble-”

  “What are you going to plead?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why did you relieve him?”

  “I thought he was nuts.”

  “Don’t you still think so?”

  “I don’t know what I think any more.”

  “Where did you get all that dope
on paranoia you put out to the investigating officer?”

  “Read it in a book,” Maryk growled.

  “Well, pardon me, Maryk, you don’t seem to know much about it.”

  “I never claimed to. Christ, instead of asking me about the ship or the typhoon or the captain he cross-examined me for an hour about paranoia. I’m a stoop about those things and I know it. I made a jackass of myself, and I knew I would. And I will again, at the court-martial.” He glanced at Greenwald, his brows contracted in a baffled, hurt way over hollow eyes. “I’ll tell you this, the same things seem goddamn different in the middle of a typhoon when they’re happening, and six thousand miles away in the Federal Office Building when you’re talking about them-”

  The door opened and Keefer came in, spick-and-span in freshly pressed blues, his breast-pocket ribbons crowded with battle stars. The lower gold stripes on his sleeves were faded, the upper ones bright yellow. He carried a small black leather satchel. “Steve, I’m shoving off. Got time for some lunch?”

  “I don’t think so, Tom- Lieutenant Greenwald, Lieutenant Keefer, our gunnery officer- Get your plane priority okay?”

  “Yes, by dint of a great deal of charm lavished on a dried-up old pig in Transportation. I thought I might have to marry her first.”

  Maryk smiled sourly. “Well, have yourself a time.”

  The gunnery officer patted the satchel. “Recognize this?”

  “The novel?”

  “First half. I’m going to try to peddle it back East.”

  “Hope you make a million dollars, boy.”

  Keefer glanced at Greenwald, hesitated, looked back at Maryk, and said with a grin, “Well, I’m off, in a blaze of sheep dung.” The door closed.

  “Look,” said Greenwald, slouched, studying the toes of his shoes. “I’m a pretty good lawyer, as it happens.”

  “You have to be goddamned good to get me out of this.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because as far as the thing will ever get in the Federal Office Building, I’m guilty. For all I know I’m guilty any way you look at it. Give a lamebrain enough time and he’ll foul himself up-”

  “I’m hungry,” said the lawyer. “Where can we get some chow and talk about it?”

  “There’s a cafeteria over at Pier 8--”

  “Come along.”

  Maryk looked at the lawyer and shrugged. “Okay,” he said, reaching for blue trousers crumpled at the foot of the bed.

  “If you’re going to plead guilty,” said Greenwald-his voice was pitched high over the clatter of cutlery and tin trays, and the gabble of hundreds of Navy Yard workers feeding themselves amid steamy odors of tomato soup, cabbage, and human being-“then the whole thing becomes a formality. Even in that case the idea is not just to stand up and say ‘Guilty’ in open court. You bargain with Challee. It’s a queer case, and a messy one, and for the sake of a sure score Challee might go easy-”

  The exec listlessly forked scrambled eggs into his mouth and took a swallow of coffee. “I’m no good at that bargaining-”

  “Well, of course, your counsel does that for you-”

  “Look, Greenwald, I may be guilty by the book but I don’t feel like pleading guilty. Christ, I wasn’t trying to take over the ship, I was trying to save it. If I was wrong about Queeg being nuts, well, that’s one thing, but I was trying to do what I thought was right-”

  Greenwald nodded, lolling his tongue on his lower lip. “No criminal intent.”

  “That’s it. No criminal intent.”

  “Well, don’t plead guilty then. Make them work to hang it on you- What did your friend Keefer think of Captain Queeg?”

  The exec’s eyes shifted in a narrow surly side glance. “Look, it’s all my responsibility-that’s the way it’s got to be-”

  “Did Keefer think Queeg was a paranoiac, too?”

  “I don’t know what he thought. Leave him out of it.”

  Greenwald played with his nails. “He looks like a guy I once knew in school. Fellow name of Pelham.”

  The exec’s face was sullen and bitter, his gaze far away. He drank off his coffee. “Pretty lousy joe they serve here.”

  “See here, Maryk, I’m willing to be your defense counsel, if you want me.”

  Maryk nodded, and looked into the lawyer’s eyes, his frown fading into timid gratitude. “Well, okay, thanks. I need somebody-”

  “Don’t you want to know my qualifications?”

  “I guess they’re okay or the legal office wouldn’t have sent you around-”

  “Well, listen anyway. I am a red-hot lawyer in civilian life. I was making twenty thousand a year when I was only out of school four years.” Greenwald’s boyish face took on a peculiar inner smile, a mere glow around the eyes; he held his head bashfully sidewise, looking at a spoon with which he traced rings in a slop of coffee on the table. “Not only that, my third year out of school I pried a hundred thousand dollars out of the government for some Cherokees who’d been cheated out of their land forty years ago.”

  “Jesus. Maybe you can get me off,” said the exec, staring at Greenwald skeptically.

  “I better tell you one more thing. I’d rather be prosecuting you than defending you. I don’t know yet just how guilty you are. But you’re either a mutineer or one of the dumbest goofs in the whole Navy. There’s no third possibility.” Maryk blinked in astonishment. “If you’re going to give me all the dope, say so, and we’ll work out your defense. If you’re going to stay clammed up because you’re so proud and noble and hurt, say so, and I’ll go on back to town.”

  “What do you want to know?” the exec said after a pause filled with cafeteria noise.

  “All about you, and Keefer, and Keith, and everything else that explains how you pulled your dumb stunt-”

  “Sure, you call it dumb,” exclaimed Maryk. “Everyone does, now that we’re all alive to talk about it. If Queeg and me and the whole ship were at the bottom of the sea-I guess the only way I could have been proved right was if I hadn’t relieved Queeg and the ship had capsized, as it damn near did. Three cans went down in that typhoon, you know-”

  “Sure. About forty of them stayed afloat, though, without the exec relieving the skipper.”

  Maryk looked extremely surprised. He took out a cigar, and regarded it thoughtfully as he stripped off the crinkling cellophane.

  He really was surprised. Greenwald had jarred him into uncovering his secret self-justifying thought, a comfort he had proudly, silently applied to his feelings throughout the official ordeal he was undergoing. The lawyer’s sarcastic twist of viewpoint had never occurred to the exec, preoccupied as he was with his own misunderstood heroism and the treachery of Keefer, and the evil fate closing in on him. “Where are you from?” he said.

  Greenwald showed no surprise at the irrelevancy. “Albuquerque.”

  “Oh. I thought maybe you were from New York-though you don’t talk much like a New Yorker, at that-”

  “Well, I’m a Jew, if that’s what you mean,” the pilot said, with a little grin at his shoes.

  Maryk laughed, and said, “I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Let’s go over to the Chrysanthemum.”

  They sat on a leather couch in the lounge of the excursion boat, and for an hour Maryk told the story of how he had become convinced that Queeg was crazy. He ran out of words at last and sat silent, staring out of the window at the clanking yard, bristling with cranes, funnels, and masts. The lawyer lit, a cigar which the exec had given him, and puffed at it awkwardly, blinking. After a while he said, “Did you ever read your friend Keefer’s novel?”

  Maryk looked at him with the empty puzzlement of a man wakened from sleep. “He never shows it to anybody. It must be long as hell. He’s always kept it in that black satchel.”

  “Probably a masterpiece.”

  “Well, Tom’s smart, no getting away from that-”

  “I’d like to read it. I’m sure that it exposes this war in all its grim futility and waste, an
d shows up the military men for the stupid, Fascist-minded sadists they are. Bitching up all the campaigns and throwing away the lives of fatalistic, humorous, lovable citizen-soldiers. Lots of sex scenes where the prose becomes rhythmic and beautiful while the girl gets her pants pulled down.” Greenwald saw Maryk’s mystified suspicious smile, and shrugged. “Well, I can tell, because war novels are coming out already and the war is still on. I read ’em all. I like novels where the author proves how terrible military guys are, and how superior sensitive civilians are. I know they’re true to life because I’m a sensitive civilian myself.” He puffed at the cigar, made a mouth of distaste, and threw it into a brass jar half full of sand. “How can you smoke those things? ... Well, I’ll tell you, Maryk. Your sensitive novelist friend is the villain of this foul-up, all right, but it doesn’t do us any good-”

  “I want him left out of it,” said Maryk doggedly.

  “He’s got to be. If I can help it he’ll never be put on the stand. What you did, you did. Actually it’s better that you did it out of your own mistaken but noble judgment than that you took the psychiatric opinions of a sensitive novelist as straight dope. The fact that he’s running for cover now-well, he warned you on the New Jersey, didn’t he? He had all the insight of a sensitive novelist. Sounding off about Old Yellowstain-wonderful name, by the way-behind his back was one thing, but he knew damn well when it came to a showdown what the outcome would be.”

  “After everything I told you,” said Maryk, with childish appeal, “you don’t think Queeg was nuts?”

  “No.”

  “Then I get hung,” said Maryk shakily.

  “Not necessarily. Tell me one more thing. How did it happen that they let you take the ship on to Lingayen Gulf?” Maryk wet his lips and looked away. “Is that important?”

  “I don’t know until you tell me.”

  “Well, it was goddamn strange.” The exec took another cigar from his breast pocket. “See, after the typhoon when we got back to Ulithi we were in pretty good shape. Boat stove in and a couple of paravanes gone and some topside stuff buckled and smashed. But we were operational. We could still sweep.” Greenwald held out a flaming match, and the exec puffed the cigar aglow. “Thanks- When we came in I reported right away to the beach there, to the commodore, I think he was ComServRon Five, and told him what had happened. Well, he got all excited and got Queeg on the beach that morning, and had the head doctor go over him. Well, the upshot of the doctor’s examination-he was an old fat four-striper with a real rummy nose-the doctor said he didn’t think Queeg was crazy at all. Said he seemed to be an intelligent normal officer, maybe a little fatigued. But he wouldn’t give Queeg clearance to go back on duty. Said he was no psychiatrist and Queeg had been four years at sea and the best thing was to fly him back to the States for a psychiatric checkup. Commodore was sore as hell at me. He had me in the office when the doctor made his report. He said the admiral had been building a fire under him for more sweepers for Lingayen because so many had been knocked out in the typhoon, and he’d be goddamned if he was going to pull the Caine out of the line-up. So after a lot of talk back and forth he got Queeg into the office, too, and he gave Queeg a big pitch about how bad the admiral needed sweepers. And he asked Queeg whether he thought I could take the Caine to Lingayen. He asked him to think of the good of the Navy and not his personal feelings, and he said he was sure I’d get everything that was coming to me after Lingayen. Well, Queeg really surprised me. He was calm and quiet. He said I’d been his exec for eleven months and after that much training he thought he had trained me up for ship handling even though I had a disloyal and mutinous character. He recommended that I take the ship to Lingayen. That’s how it happened.”