Sink or Swim

by Steve Watkins

  “Sometimes there just ain’t no rules to follow,” he continued, “except the ones in Chief’s head that he decided not to share with the rest of us.”

  * * *

  And that was how it went for the next five weeks at boot camp. More middle-of-the-night orders to “Move it, move it, move it!” and not knowing where we were supposed to be moving it to until we got there. More drilling on the Grinder. More seamanship classes. More calisthenics. More marksmanship training and heavy weapons training. More swimming and lifesaving and firefighting drills with protective suits and high-pressure water guns.

  And more hanging out with Straub and Woody and Spinelli—sitting together at mess hall, trying to get assignments together. We kept an eye out for one another and made sure we were nearby to help each other out of any jams. Sometimes, though, we all managed to get in trouble together.

  There was a mock ship inside an enormous warehouse they used to teach guys which way was forward and which way was aft, what was starboard and what was port, the difference between a forecastle and a pilot house and a flying bridge and all the other parts of a ship. We got there early for the class, so the other guys and I started goofing around, pretending we were playing war on this pretend ship, making explosion noises and machine-gun sounds and just generally acting like little kids.

  But then the instructor showed up. At first he just glared at us. Then he told us we were being idiots, and did we have any idea what could actually happen to us if we weren’t vigilant when we were out on patrol?

  He rolled up his sleeve and showed us his arm—or what was left of his arm. It looked like red, raw hamburger meat. We could almost see the tendons underneath the thin flesh covering his elbow. He was missing three fingers.

  “That’s what a third-degree burn looks like,” he said. “After it’s healed. And after skin grafts and four surgeries.”

  We all got really quiet.

  “It’s from not being vigilant,” he said, his voice getting louder. “It’s from thinking this is all a big game and then all of a sudden there’s an explosion and an oil fire on your destroyer. So that’s when you find out it’s not a game. Not to you, and especially not to your best friend, whose whole body and face looks like this arm.”

  He rolled his sleeve back down. And we stopped horsing around.

  * * *

  They gave us aptitude tests to see which jobs we were best suited for in the navy, and even though Chief had already promised me assignment to a subchaser, I had to take the tests like everybody else because they needed to know what I would actually be doing on the subchaser.

  Most subchasers were this new class of smaller ships called patrol crafts that used underwater explosives like depth charges to damage or destroy U-boats—if they could catch them, which so far they hadn’t had much luck doing. Patrol craft sounded like something you’d see tourists on for sightseeing around the Outer Banks in the summers. Before the war anyway.

  Straub said he wanted to shoot big guns, and he didn’t care what kind of boat he did it on. Spinelli said he’d take a desk job, which surprised me since he was always talking about how tough everybody from Jersey was and everything. Woody said maybe he’d like to work on engines.

  The navy took down the information but didn’t make any promises.

  * * *

  On Sundays, Chief made us all go to church, which was nice because it was the one time during the whole week when we got to just sit and do nothing. About the only rule Chief had for us in church was that we had to stay awake, which wasn’t a problem for me with all the praying I was doing. But it was hard for a lot of the guys because of how tired we were and how hot it got in there with so many of us crammed together in the pews. Anybody Chief saw nodding off he made swab the barracks deck in the afternoon instead of playing football on the Grinder or seeing visitors at the reception building.

  I prayed for Danny to get better and come out of his coma and not have anything too terrible wrong with him. I prayed for Mama to not be worried about me. I prayed for Dad, who I still missed even though he passed away four years ago. That was usually when I got homesick, when I was praying for all of them, and thinking so much about home, and remembering that just a few weeks before I was like anybody else who was twelve, studying the Revolutionary War, doing sums, diagramming sentences, and playing ball. Now that seemed so far away and long ago that it was like it had all happened to a different person.

  After church was visiting hours, and guys who had family close by enough got to see their moms and dads and brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and cousins hauling in baskets and buckets and coolers full of food that ended up getting shared with the rest of us afterward. But while the visitors were there, those of us without any family just made do the best we could since everybody felt some kind of lonely during that time.

  We played checkers a lot, and cards. Spinelli tried to teach us chess, but Woody couldn’t follow it to save his life, and Straub thought it was stupid that the queen had all the power but the king couldn’t do much of anything except move one space at a time until he got killed.

  “I don’t see why he can’t move however he wants, and as far as he wants, and jump over anybody he wants,” Straub said. “I mean, he’s the king, all right?”

  Spinelli finally just gave up.

  When we got tired of games, we caught up on our newspaper reading, which was something I’d never done much of in my whole life, but I thought it would make me look older if I took it up now. But the news just made me so mad. How long it was taking the United States—us!—to send troops over to Europe to actually fight the Germans instead of just sending supplies to Great Britain and the USSR. I mean, that was important, too, but when were we going to go to real war with the Nazis?

  And those poor merchant marines running supplies across the Atlantic were getting sunk by the hundreds by U-boats and Nazi warships and Luftwaffe planes.

  Not to mention the Eastern Seaboard of the US, where more and more cargo ships and passenger ships were being targeted by the U-boats to disrupt the supply lines back here at home, too.

  I’d read about all that and a few times, without realizing what I was doing, I’d torn the newspaper in half, and then ripped it into smaller pieces, until Straub stopped me.

  “Easy, little buddy,” he said. “There’s others who also want to read that.”

  I couldn’t help it, though. I was always thinking about what happened to Danny and me that day, and then about Danny in the coma. It all just made me so mad I could spit.

  So that was when my friends stepped in and dragged me away to play Ping-Pong, or shoot pool, or deal up some other card game—anything to take my mind off Danny, not that I’d told them what happened. But somehow they just seemed to know.

  * * *

  On payday I cashed my check at the bank on base. I was tempted to buy some clothes since I didn’t have any except my uniforms but decided to send it all to Mama, the way I’d promised myself I would. Except for keeping enough to buy myself a candy bar, but that was all.

  I wrapped the bills up good and tight and got a big envelope at the post office to mail it to Ocracoke Island. With a letter to Mama also tucked inside.

  Dear Mama,

  I have been working like I told you but not in Morehead City. I can’t tell you where, but I don’t want you to worry. Everything is good. I have made some friends and we are always very busy and I’ve been staying out of trouble. Every Sunday I go to church and pray for you all.

  I wanted to tell her everything that had happened since I left home. It didn’t feel right to keep so much a secret from her. All my life, Mama had always known what I was up to. Living on an island, everybody knew everybody and you couldn’t get away with anything without somebody telling your parents.

  But I wasn’t on the island anymore. So I made it a short letter and promised to write her again soon and send more money when I got my next paycheck. And signed it Love, Colton.

  A lot of g
uys’ families came for graduation day from boot camp, but not mine or Woody’s or Spinelli’s. Straub’s mom and dad came, though—they lived in Ohio so it wasn’t too far for them to drive—and they adopted the rest of us for the afternoon. For once we got to sit at the long tables in the visitor center with baskets and coolers of decent drinks and chow, instead of having to wait for somebody’s leftovers on visiting day.

  Mr. and Mrs. Straub were both as big as their son, and it turned out that they were originally from Germany. Some people sitting nearby kept glancing over suspiciously when they heard the Straubs’ accents, which maybe was partly why the Straubs weren’t shy about telling us in their loud, booming German voices how much they hated Hitler, as if anybody might've had any doubts.

  “What they say about him,” Mrs. Straub said, “he is nothing but a bully all his life. Only he has his brown shirts—they do his bullying for him. And now his Nazis. He is a poison on the earth.”

  Mr. Straub agreed. He listed all the countries in Europe that Hitler had conquered, in order—a list Mrs. Straub punctuated by saying “Mein Gott!” after each one: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, Greece. But when he finished, he said, “But not Great Britain! And not America!”

  Then he changed the subject, encouraging us to eat more of these sausages he called bratworst, and this funny thing they did to cabbage that he called sauerkraut, and this heavy, sweet dessert called strudel. We got so stuffed that when Mrs. Straub launched into her I Hate Hitler rant again, all I could do was sit there and not move except to nod my head and then finally just doze off in my chair.

  Later that afternoon, after my nap, the navy had us do some marching drills on the Grinder, with all the officers and some politicians sitting on a reviewing stand for us to salute as we went past. The families huddled in the cold March wind off to the side and applauded and cheered, which made us feel like we were real navy now, ready to go off and fight the Germans and the Japanese and be heroes.

  When it was over and Chief dismissed us for the last time, he said, “Men, I know I’ve been hard on you from day one, and some of you hate me for it. As true as that may be, there will come a time when you will thank me, because as hard as you think it’s been here in boot camp, it will be a hundred times harder out there. Harder to survive the boredom of days and days at sea with nothing happening. Harder to survive conditions on the ocean so terrible you won’t think your ship—or you—can possibly survive. Harder to keep your wits about you when bombs are going off all around you, or hitting your ship. Harder to watch your shipmate perish right in front of your eyes—and know that you can’t do anything for him and that you have to keep your head on your job and in the fight.

  “The navy has prepared you the best we can up to this point. Your job from here on out is simple: to protect the United States of America, defeat Germany and Japan, and save the world.”

  He paused, then saluted and said, “Dismissed.”

  I went up to him afterward. “I, uh, just wanted to thank you, Chief,” I mumbled, still a little scared of him.

  He looked at me for a long time before he spoke.

  “Son,” he said. “It’s not too late to go home. I know I should have said something before. There’s a lot of pressure to recruit and train as many men as we can, as fast as we can, for the war effort. But, truthfully, you don’t belong here. You and I both know you’re way too young for this.”

  I didn’t know what to say, though he waited. In that moment I wanted to go home. I knew I wasn’t ready for whatever was coming next—which would take me even closer to the war, closer to getting shot at by U-boats, and farther away from my family.

  I clenched my jaw. I wasn’t going to quit, though. I just wasn’t. I couldn’t let Danny and Mama down. And with my teeth still clenched, I told him that.

  Chief took off his hat and scratched his scalp. Then he shook his head. “Just don’t go get yourself killed,” he said. “Or if you do, make sure you take a whole lot of those Germans down with you.”

  Two days later, Woody and me—now both seamen second class—were on a train for Miami, of all places, to the new Subchaser Training Center they’d just opened down there. It was the end of March, still winter on Lake Michigan, so we were ready to be in the tropics.

  Chief had come through on my request for Woody to go with me, even though I wasn’t sure why I had been asking except that Woody had begged me to.

  “He’s your headache now,” Chief had told me, shaking his head. “In a better navy he’d have already been tossed out on his butt.”

  “I’m sure he’ll do all right, Chief,” I’d replied, though I wasn’t at all sure. But like Chief said, Woody was my headache now. Once boot camp was behind us and we were rolling south on the train, he turned back into the Woody he’d been before, when I first met him on the bus five weeks earlier—talking nonstop about anything and everything back home in Kinston. I pulled my sailor cap down over my face, closed my eyes, and quit listening. Eventually, he must have run out of things to say, or maybe he fell asleep, too—probably in the middle of a sentence.

  Straub was off for artillery training at a school on the West Coast. Spinelli had gotten his request for a desk job and was shipping out for New York—so basically he was going home, or close to it. We all said we’d keep in touch. I didn’t know about them, but I meant it. I couldn’t imagine how I’d have gotten through basic training without them. Even Woody.

  * * *

  I fell asleep on the long train ride down to Miami, and when I did I dreamed about me and Danny. Not the day of the U-boat, but another day, not long after Dad died, when we went riding on our beach ponies, splashing in and out of the surf, kicking up so much sand it felt like rain falling, only the sun was full and hot and bright overhead and everything looked silver. In my dream we were still riding and Danny was still beside me on his pony and we weren’t sad about Dad because his dying wasn’t real, and it seemed like we could go on like that forever—two kids running wild and free on Ocracoke Island.

  It got hotter and hotter the farther south we went, and by the time we got to Miami, it was hard to remember how cold it had been in Illinois just two days before. We wouldn’t be wearing our peacoats down here, that was for sure.

  A navy truck took us to our quarters, and we couldn’t believe it when we got there. It was this famous, giant hotel on Biscayne Boulevard called the Everglades, only they had emptied the tourists out of it so they could house all of us sailors and officers coming into town for subchaser school.

  “I ain’t never seen anything this big or this fancy,” Woody marveled. I was thinking the same thing but didn’t want to say it out loud.

  All the fanciness ended inside, though. They had pulled up carpet and taken pictures and anything else of any value off the walls, so the Everglades was just a stripped-down version of what it used to be. Woody and I shared a room that had cots instead of beds, but we didn’t mind, because at least we didn’t have to sleep in hard bunks the way we had at Great Lakes.

  The mess hall was in the Everglades dining room, which was enormous, but like the rest of the hotel no longer anything fancy. Same old navy chow. Cooks threw big portions of everything on our trays, all pretty much running together, and if there was dessert, they plopped that down on top of the meat and potatoes and peas. Ice cream started melting right away so we had to eat that first, of course.

  “I don’t know why I never thought of doing it this way all along,” Woody said, ice cream dribbling down his chin until I shoved a napkin at him. “Don’t save the best for last. Save it for first.”

  “Then you wouldn’t exactly be saving it,” I said.

  Woody just shrugged. Then he insisted that we toast our first meal in Miami by clinking spoons full of melted ice cream.

  * * *

  The commanding officer of the Subchaser Training Center was Lieutenant Commander Eugene McDaniel. They herded all of us into a g
iant room at the training center after dinner for what was supposed to be orientation but was, instead, just him—a small, skinny guy with thinning hair and wire-rimmed glasses. He looked really mad, and it turned out he was.

  “I do not want to be here,” he began. “I want to be absolutely clear about that. I am only here because I was so ordered. I would rather be at sea fighting those Nazi beasts. Make no mistake about it. They must be hunted down and they must be destroyed. You will be the ones to do that, and if you’re not committed to the cause, then I want you transferred out of this command immediately. When I came here the navy sent me six officers. I sent three of them back because they did not have sufficient training, experience, or, frankly, the guts and determination to get the job done. You may have heard that a civilian merchant unloaded his produce on a navy pier, and that I had it tossed. That story is true. That was my dock, strictly to be used for training. There’s a war going on, and I do not have time or patience for anybody or anything that gets in the way of our winning it.”

  A guy elbowed me in the ribs. “Sounds like it’s true, what they say about him.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Looks like a professor but fights like a pirate.”

  Lieutenant Commander McDaniel continued, his voice getting even sharper. “I have seen the fury of the Nazi submarine onslaught from firsthand encounters with their U-boats. They are highly trained, they are stealthy, and they are murderous. They are going after our cargo ships and fully intend to cripple our war effort. Without supplies, our allies cannot defend themselves. Without the weapons we supply, without the oil and food and other material support we ship to them, the war against the Nazis will be lost. Without supplies for ourselves, we cannot defeat anybody.

  “Right now, the Nazis are winning. If their rate of success sinking our supply ships in the North Atlantic continues, by this summer we will have lost hundreds of ships and thousands of men aboard those ships. These are men who are risking, and losing, their lives for the Allied cause. We will not allow this to continue. You will take the training you receive here and you will then take the fight to the Nazis—and you and I will defeat them.”