The Commodore

by P. T. Deutermann

  Trembling?

  That was new. Probably just physical exhaustion, he thought. Except, the colors in the cabin suddenly looked—wrong. The light coming through the portholes was really dazzling, if just the least bit out of focus. He felt a burning on his right hand and realized he was spilling hot coffee on his hand. He put the cup down on a side table and took a deep breath. He could hear the buzz of conversation all around him, Halsey vigorously gesticulating as he banged on about attack, attack, attack, and the staffers, all trying to get in front of the Boss. But he could not make out their individual words. He could hear just fine, though, loud even, but could not make out a word.

  Well, Sluff thought, that was as it should be. Want to get ahead—catch the attention of the admirals. He touched the steel plate with his right hand. It felt a little wet. He withdrew his hand and looked at his fingertips.

  Red. Oh, God, he thought, what now?

  He held his fingers in front of his face for almost ten seconds and then felt a disturbance in his balance. He was listing, yes, that’s what he was doing. Listing to starboard, and now there was a low roaring noise in the cabin, the sum of all the talk. The last thing he heard, and he could indeed make these words out: “Oh, shit—the commodore.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  Nouméa Field Hospital

  “What is it with you, Harmon Wolf,” a woman’s voice said. “You like being in this hospital?”

  Sluff mumbled something and then recognized the aftereffects of general anesthesia. Again. Cotton mouth. Cold. A heaviness in his lungs. A mushy-feeling blob of bandages on the right side of his head. He opened one eye and saw a familiar face. Tina Danfield.

  “You’re still very pretty,” he said.

  She rolled her eyes but did it with a smile. “And you’re still lying here with a hole in your head. I thought we were all over that nonsense.”

  “Apparently not,” he said. He looked for some water and she handed him the familiar metal cup filled with ice shavings and a straw. “What did they do this time?”

  “New plate, some brain surgery, consisting of technical medical terms I can’t even pronounce, much less understand, and then orders for stroke medication.”

  “That’s what I had on the flagship—a stroke?”

  “They think so. You need to know that the entire surgical staff is talking about the fact that there was a dent in your original plate?”

  “Jap five-inch round went off outside the pilothouse. Lots of shrapnel. I ducked, but apparently it ricocheted off the back bulkhead and got me in the head bone. One of the talkers told me that.”

  “So the plate saved your life, is what you’re saying?”

  “Apparently,” he said, sipping some more ice-melt. “But you mentioned stroke, so it didn’t save my fabulous naval career, did it.”

  She sat down on the edge of the bed and took his hand. His was cold; hers was nice and warm. “You, sir, are all done,” she said. She reached inside her uniform pocket and produced the Navy Cross. She put it on his night table. “The pre-op people were putting your bloody uniforms into the trash until someone saw this. Apparently you went out with a bang.”

  “So to speak.”

  She grinned. “Yeah, so to speak. We all thought you’d be sent home after the last visit here, but we know what happened to that.”

  “Halsey mentioned you, when he and I talked down in the mess hall. Said it was you who told him what was going on.”

  “I may have said a few words about that ass, Browning,” she said. She hadn’t turned loose of his hand and he was glad of that.

  “Thank you,” he said. “He sent me back out and he’s pleased with the results, although if he only knew…”

  “The ‘results,’ as you call it, are the biggest news of this campaign so far,” she said. “However.”

  “Uh-oh,” he said.

  “However, since you’ve had traumatic brain injury followed by a stroke, your days as a dashing commodore are indeed over. Now—tell the truth—how do you feel about that?”

  “I feel weary,” he said. “I feel sad—I lost some ships. I lost some more ships, and a lot of men out there. I made some mistakes, which were caught and rectified, thank God, by some of my staff people, but I am definitely not the hero they’re making me out to be.”

  “And?”

  “And, I guess I’m a little relieved. I think maybe I was operating above my real abilities.”

  She smiled at that, a lovely, almost loving smile. “Nonsense,” she said. “You and your ships hurt them bad. That’s all that counts right now. Besides you getting some much-needed rest. Brain surgery is not trivial medicine, so you’re going back to sleep now.”

  “I’m actually not that sleepy,” he protested.

  She reached for something just out of his field of vision. “You’re about to be, my dear Commodore.”

  Lo and behold, she was right about that.

  The next two weeks were harder than his previous recovery. It was not that he suffered from major disabilities such as blindness or total loss of speech. There were some little things that caught him off guard—a sudden loss of balance, the inability to correctly pronounce a word even as his brain rather forcefully commanded it, dropping something from his hand for no apparent reason, and the scariest, which only happened once, was waking up in the middle of the night, lying on his back, and unable to sit up. For a moment he’d thought he was drowning. The hell of it was that he never knew when something might happen, so now he used a cane whenever he was out of bed and he kept track of places where he could sit down on sudden notice.

  Tina Danfield came around when she could, but she’d been moved up in the nursing organization to full superintendent, and business at the Nouméa field hospital was literally booming. She maintained a professional distance, and yet he was pretty sure that, under different circumstances, they would have been able to get much closer. On the other hand, didn’t every patient fall at least a little bit in love with his nurses? Still.

  One night she came to his room after the evening meal, handed him his hairbrush, and told him to sit up and make himself presentable. Before he could ask why, Admiral Halsey, now sporting four stars instead of three, steamed into the room and waggled those bushy eyebrows at him. There were three staff officers accompanying him, all captains, and all looking to Sluff like they might have been lieutenants just a day or so ago. This war was definitely moving on, and even more definitely without him.

  “Commodore Wolf,” Halsey said, “How the hell are you?”

  “Doing pretty well, thank you, Admiral, considering. Have you killed some more Japs?”

  Halsey laughed at the reference to one of his first fleet-wide orders when he took over SOPAC, which was for all hands to kill Japs, kill Japs, and kill more Japs. “You bet,” he said. “Not in as grand a style as you did, but we’ve stopped the bastards and now we’re going to start pushing them back, all the way to goddamned Tokyo. I have a job for you.”

  That took a moment to penetrate. “Yes, sir?” Sluff asked.

  “Doc say you can’t go back to sea, not after a stroke. They say anyone who has had a stroke is probably going to have another one at some point. So: I can’t have you working the Slot anymore and that’s a damned shame.”

  He paused for a moment to see how Sluff was going to take that news.

  None of his doctors had ever mentioned that once someone has a stroke, there’s a good chance he’ll have another. Leave it to Halsey to lay it out for him. “Yes, sir, I understand that.”

  “But,” Halsey continued. “I’ve talked to Chester, and told him I want a special training squadron stood up at Pearl. In the next year we’re going to see over five hundred new-construction ships heading this way. Right now they get shakedown training right after they’re built, a week of training time at Pearl, but then they come out here without knowing shit from Shinola. So: I need a battle-hardened commodore to command that training squadron. Incoming fleet units will chop to you
for two, maybe three weeks. You, and you’ll have a staff, will teach them how things are really done out here so they don’t all die on their first night out. When you think they’re ready, you send ’em out. We’ll take it from there. You up to that?”

  Sluff nodded, although with some of the things that had been happening to him, he wondered if he truly was.

  “Here’s the thing,” Halsey said. “We’ll pick your initial staff. These will be officers and chiefs like yourself, who have distinguished themselves in battle but who cannot, for whatever reason, stay in the front lines anymore. No losers, no shell-shocked men, no cowards. Men who have done what you’ve done and have no illusions about what it takes to beat the Japs. We just can’t afford to send you all the way home, although I will if you tell me you’ve run out of fighting steam. We need your experience, your savvy, your regrets, your nightmares, and your record so that all these new guys will listen to you. Please say yes.”

  “Yes,” Sluff said. “Sir.”

  Halsey beamed. “I knew it.” He turned to his staff. “Didn’t I tell you? Now: you guys get this thing organized. Get the commodore back to Pearl. Make sure the right people in Pearl are ready to set him up with facilities and whatever support he needs. He’ll need a liaison with PacFleet and DESPAC. Draft me a personal-for message that makes all of this clear to the Pearl Harbor people.”

  He turned to Sluff. “Thank you for doing this. It will make a big difference. Anything you want to tell me?”

  Sluff wanted to tell him that what had happened that “glorious” night had been pure chaos, that he’d screwed things up only to be saved by his subordinates, that maybe his initial plan was good but his own execution had been flawed and that von Moltke had been absolutely right. He glanced over Halsey’s shoulder and saw Tina, standing in the doorway. She silently shook her head.

  “Thank you for letting me stay in the fight,” Sluff said. “I’ll do my best.”

  “Never doubted that, young man,” Halsey said. He turned to his staff. “Where next?”

  And then they were all gone in a whirl of moving khaki. Tina came back into the room. “Right answer,” she said.

  “I wanted to tell him the truth,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “He knows the truth. When Juneau was lost I talked to everyone and anyone who would listen to me, trying to make sense of that. How could that happen? So many lost, when the ship went down in front of an entire task force? Why didn’t they go back? What had happened the night before that left our ship broken almost in two? Everybody I talked to said the same thing—you don’t understand. When the big guns get going, it’s pandemonium. Chaos. Surprise after surprise, for both sides. Good luck, bad luck, whatever—no one’s in control! Those big ships spit their various forms of fire at each other and men die. The next morning the admirals tote up the score and then lie about what happened so that the Japs can’t know how bad they hurt us, while the survivors come here, so shocked and burned and broken they can’t even speak of it. Until they do, good Christ.”

  He realized she was weeping. “Hey,” he said. “Come here. I’m sorry I brought it up. Come here.”

  She stood three feet from his bed and shook her head. “No,” she said. “If I let you comfort me I will just—dissolve. I’m needed here. I desperately need to be needed, do you understand? You go be strong. Go do this job, keep the new people safe so that they survive their first night out. After that, it’s on them. I’ve got to go.”

  “Please don’t,” he said. “I’ve upset you. I—”

  She paused in the doorway. “I have to go,” she said. “Mostly because I cannot stay. I like you, Harmon Wolf, but I am barely holding it together. I see too much, I hear too much. I simply can’t—”

  Then she was gone.

  He lay back in the bed with a sigh and watched the sunset paint the back wall of his room in amazing colors. Damn, he thought. I took her for granted. That calm, brave, all-the-way-to-Tokyo façade, and, yet, underneath all that, she was still grieving. Her husband, his ship, all the wardroom officers they’d both known, reduced to chum by a Jap submarine as Juneau crawled back toward Nouméa with a broken back.

  And all I can think about is me, he realized. He tried to imagine what his uncle, the Mide, would have said if he’d watched all that. Shit-fire, man, you can do better than that.

  One day later the SOPAC machinery had him discharged and on a flight back to Pearl. He kept the cane.

  FORTY

  Pearl Harbor

  “Mornin’, Commodore,” Mose said. “Got us some fresh hot cin-min rolls and some a that Kona coffee this mornin’, yes we do.”

  Sluff was up, dressed, and sitting at his small desk reading the morning message traffic that had been delivered earlier that morning. He was one of four captains living in a spacious white house at the edge of the Makalapa crater, but he was the only one who had a steward assigned. The house, one of eight laid out in a row of senior officers’ quarters, was set up as a BOQ. There were four bedrooms and two baths upstairs, a kitchen, a dining room, and a living room downstairs, with a small bedroom behind the kitchen for a steward. The other three captains all worked up the hill at Nimitz’s headquarters in various staff positions. Sluff was the only one who had what was technically a seagoing command. From the front porch there was an expansive view of Pearl Harbor below. On the street behind the row of BOQ houses were the much bigger flag quarters for Nimitz and his senior aides.

  “Mose, thank you very much,” Sluff said. “Put it all right there. Everyone else already gone to work?”

  “Yes, suh, they have,” Mose said. “That Cap’n Weaver, now, he gets on outa here at five thirty, every mornin’, no matter what. He must be real important.”

  “He seems to think so, Mose,” Sluff said, dryly. “Let me know when my car shows up.”

  “Yessuh, will do. I’m goan get us some fresh fish for supper tonight. You will be comin’ back this evenin’?”

  “I will, Mose,” Sluff said. “The Lord willing and the creeks don’t rise.”

  Mose grinned. “Ain’t no creeks on this island, boss,” he said. “So you be here.”

  After Mose left he sampled the coffee and one of the fat pills. He wasn’t sure where Mose was getting this stuff but he wasn’t going to ask any questions, either. He looked out the window, which gave him a view of the harbor some three hundred feet below the Makalapa quarters area and about a crow-fly mile away. It was January, which was to say that the days were a few degrees cooler than, say, July, but not by much. The weather never changed here, and he missed the roll of the four seasons. It would have been a spectacular view except for the blackened battleship wrecks over on Ford Island.

  Gonna be here for dinner? Well, that depends, Mose, he thought. It’s kind of one day at a time with this head bone of mine. Never know when it’s going to fall apart and put me on the ground. Or in it.

  He’d had some episodes since coming back to Pearl, but nothing too alarming. He’d been given an enthusiastic if almost embarrassing welcome when he’d arrived at Pearl, including a five-minute office call on Nimitz himself. The admiral exuded his usual quiet charm and encouraged Sluff to get his new training squadron up and running as soon as possible, because the crews coming from the East Coast were seriously green. He’d also given Sluff the name of a captain on his staff who would be available when Sluff ran into any bureaucratic problems.

  “When, not if,” Nimitz had said. “It’s not a case of obstinacy in the face of change, but rather that the demands on every resource here are overwhelming and getting bigger every day.”

  “We’ll make do, Admiral,” Sluff had replied. “We didn’t have all that much out around Savo, either.”

  He finished his breakfast, got his cane and specially modified brass hat, and went out to the front porch to wait for his staff car. He worked a seven-day, ten-hour schedule, much like everyone else assigned to the Pacific Fleet’s main base. No more hazy, lazy Sundays with just a scant duty section up
and about, not after December 7, afloat or ashore. Even though a year had passed since that disaster, the smell of death and oil was always tainting the otherwise lovely tropical breeze, and the fourteen-inch guns, dismounted from some of the sunken battlewagons and then embedded up on the cliffs above Waikiki, were kept loaded.

  His car drove up and the driver, a pretty young Wave named Sally Simpson, jumped out and ran around to the curb to open the right rear door. Sluff smiled at the sight, as he did every morning.

  “Morning, Commodore,” she chirped as she saluted.

  He returned the salute and the greeting. Then they were off to the boat landing, where he would take a launch out to Ford Island and his sumptuous headquarters in a steel Quonset hut, bristling with aerials and altogether too close to the drowned nightmare that was Arizona, where over one thousand men lay irretrievable in her burned, armored bowels. His staff was, in his opinion, absolutely first-rate, all battle-scarred veterans of Ironbottom Sound. Officers, chiefs, and some senior enlisted, sent to him with two objectives: to pass on the lessons learned under fire against the Japs, and to have some time to heal, if possible, before going back out to rejoin the coming offensives up the Solomons chain. The thump of canes and crutches added a certain dignity to the schoolhouse atmosphere.

  Sluff knew he would not be going back, but when he sat down in the evening with the skippers and execs of the new ships coming through the squadron after they’d spent the day being put through their paces by his veterans, they paid attention. That steel plate in his head, the unruly mop of bright white hair, the Navy Cross, Purple Heart, and other decorations, and the word in the Fleet about the Indian fella who’d destroyed an entire Jap squadron all helped, but he made sure they understood that he was no water-walker, and that what they would be facing could only be characterized as chaos. The ships would stay in the special training squadron for two weeks, and occasionally, three, and then head west, to be replaced by even more new faces and freshly painted ships. He was a commodore again, but his “squadron” featured an ever-changing sea of new faces. Not too different when he was out there, when he thought about it, but for much better reasons.