"Captain Keggs, I presume?"
"Damn right!" Keggs threw a long arm around his neck. "Am I addressing Captain Keith?"
"Exec Keith. Congratulations, Ed."
When they were settled in the captain's cabin of the Moulton, drinking coffee, Keggs said, "Well, it figures, Willie. I've been at sea six months longer than you. You'll have the Caine by December." The horse face had acquired authority and poise; it was almost a stallion's face now. Keggs looked younger, Willie thought, then he had at midshipmen school three years ago, desperately poring over ordnance textbooks in the dawn. They spoke mournfully about Roland Keefer for a while. Then Keggs said, looking at Willie sidewise, "I see you're not talking about the Caine mutiny-"
"You know about it?"
"Willie, it was all over the DMS outfit. All we heard was scuttlebutt, though-nobody ever got the straight dope-is it still restricted or something?"
"Of course not." Willie told him the story. The captain of the Moulton kept shaking his head incredulously, and a couple of times he whistled.
"Maryk's the luckiest guy in the Navy, Willie. I don't know how he ever got off-"
"Well, as I say, this lawyer was sensational-"
"He must have been- Want me to tell you something? One night down in Noumea I got drunk with the exec-under the Iron Duke, this was-and he quoted Article 184 to me by heart. And he said he was just waiting for the Duke to do one really impossible thing, and he'd nail him. But he never men-tioned it to me again. You should have seen the way Sammis made him crawl, too-"
"They never do that one thing, Ed. That's the catch."
Seventeen days before the end of the war, the minesweeper Caine finally swept a mine.
They were out in the China Sea, in a double line of mine-sweepers that stretched five miles across the water. The sun was low in the east, dazzling white. Sweeping had begun at sunrise, and the ragged line of ships was advancing cautiously over the shallow green sea into the mine field. The mine popped up suddenly in the Caine's wake and wallowed low in the water, a big rusty ball knobbed with little horns. Keefer, squeaking with excitement, ordered a dye marker dropped. The signal-men ran up the warning flag hoist. Behind them a sub chaser headed for the mine and began shooting at it with machine guns. It went up with a terrific roar and whoosh, in a tower of pink-and-white spray a hundred feet high. All along the sweep formation mines began to bob up. The water was spotted everywhere with yellow-green markers. The Caine was in the second line, so the sailors began to watch the water ahead anxiously.
In less than a minute they say a mine dead ahead in a mantle of yellow water. Keefer danced three times completely around the bridge, yelling contradictory maneuvering orders, as the Caine bore down on the mine and the guns hammered away at it. They were within a hundred feet of it when it vanished, with a hellish howl and a tremendous cataract climb-ing to the sky. Then the lookouts spotted another mine ahead on the port side, and almost at the same moment the Caine cut loose two more mines. There was pure bedlam on the bridge for five minutes.
But every novelty, even a deadly novelty like minesweeping, gets its bloom rubbed off quickly and settles into a routine. By the time the Caine had swept seven mines and exploded half a dozen, it became clear even to the nervous captain that the process wasn't a hard one, nor, with luck, mortally dangerous. So he went to the other extreme, and became very debonair in his conning, and nuzzled up so close to a couple of mines in order to shoot at them that he scared Willie badly.
There was an other-worldly strangeness about that morning for Willie. He had long ago become convinced that it was part of the fate of the Caine never to sweep a mine. The irony had seemed a fitting crown for the ship's freakish career. He had studied up his minesweeping, all the same, but he had really thought the manual was just another useless book in the safe, like the Dutch and French codes. He had even begun, quite irrationally, to disbelieve in the existence of mines. All the mess of gear on the fantail, then, really served a purpose! The paravanes did dive below the level of anchored mines and kite there on an even keel; the cutting cables actually did cut the mine moorings; and the mines really were iron balls that could blow up a ship. It was one more proof-Willie was getting used to them by now, but he still felt uneasy shame when an-other cropped up-that the Navy more or less knew what it was doing.
The minesweeping career of the Caine was destined to be brief-to that extent his instinct had been right. Willie was just beginning to enjoy the perilous game when the fuel pumps of number-one boiler collapsed, and the ship was slowed to twelve knots. This reduced the maneuverability of the long vessel below the safety point in an area of drifting mines. The OTC ordered the Caine to drop out of line and return to Okinawa. It was just before noon. An auxiliary mine- sweeper, one of the clean-up ships in the rear, steamed for-ward to close the gap, and the Caine faltered and turned away. Keggs, on the bridge of the Moulton next in line, waved good-by to Willie and sent him a blinker message: Lucky. Maybe I'll try throwing a wrench in my pumps, too. See you later.
On the way back they had the melancholy pleasure of setting off one more mine floating miles behind the sweepers. Willie was the one who spotted the grim brown ball. He watched the mine through the glasses, feeling a sort of proprietary affection for it as it resisted the hail of machine-gun bullets splattering it. Then suddenly it wasn't there, replaced in an eye blink by a column of boiling pink water; and World War II was over for the U.S.S. Caine.
Nobody knew that at the time, of course. The ship limped into Buckner Bay (as Nakagusuku Wan had been renamed), and Keefer sent a despatch to the Pluto requesting a period alongside. Next day he received an acid official letter from the tender. Owing to a rush of more urgent work, the Caine could not be accommodated alongside until late in August. Keefer was ordered to make every effort to do his own re-pairing, using material the tender would be glad to furnish.
So again the old minesweeper swung at anchor in the bay, accumulating rust and barnacles. Willie had plenty of time to worry about May, and he began to be very nervous. Six weeks had passed since he had sent off the proposal. In the interim he had written several times to his mother, and she had an-swered the letters. He comforted himself with the usual season-ings of men overseas. His letter or May's had gone astray in a Navy foul-up. A typhoon had damaged the ship carrying the mail. May wasn't in New York. Wartime postal service was erratic at best-and so forth and so forth. None of these thoughts cheered him much because he knew how fast and reliable the armed forces mail really was. Two weeks to twenty days sufficed in Okinawa for a letter and a reply. The men were writing hundreds of letters, having nothing better to do, and Willie was very familiar with the mechanics of de-livery. He grew gloomier with every day that passed. Three times he wrote passionate pleading letters and then tore them up because he felt like a fool when he read them over.
One afternoon he came into his room and saw on his desk a fat envelope addressed in a feminine handwriting-not his mother's rounded slope, May's spiky vertical hand, he thought in an electrifying instant, and fell on the letter. He tore it open frantically. It was from Lieutenant (jg) Ducely. A large folded newspaper page fell out of the envelope to the floor.
DEAR WILLIE,
I thought you and whoever's left on the old hell ship would get a bang out of the enclosed. I'm back in Public Relations--90 Church, thank God just a stone's throw from my fa-vorite bars-and this thing passed across my desk yesterday afternoon. I'm supposed to file it but I wrote for another copy, and am sending this on. I guess Old Yellowstain has been put out to pasture for good, which ought to please you. Stuber Forks, Iowa! I die laughing just saying that over and over to myself. Well, he can't run a supply depot up on a reef, anyway.
We have heard all kinds of vague stories about the great "Caine mutiny" back here. It's become a kind of legend, though nobody knows what really happened except that Maryk got acquitted. Well, wouldn't you know, with my two battle stars and actually having been on the fabulous Caine and all I am th
e grizzled sea warrior around here, and of course it just murders me, but naturally I play it big. I could have a harem of Waves, if I cared for big behinds and hairy legs, but I guess I am a little fussy. Especially as I am practically engaged. This will probably kill you. When I got back-you remember all those letters I wrote home about that girl in the New Yorker ad-well, a pal of mine in Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborne actually tracked her down for me, and she is probably the most beautiful girl in New York, Crystal Gayes (her real name is a Polish jawbreaker) a very well-known model, and a really sweet kid. I have had a lot of Stork Club duty in the past six months, and my boy, believe it or not, it beats the dear old Caine. By the way I saw your inamorata May Wynn singing at some club and she looked mighty fetching but I didn't get a chance to talk to her.
Well, Willie, I hope you've forgiven me for all the times I threw you. I am not made of your stern stuff. I never told you how terrifically I admired you for standing up under Old Yel-lowstain's persecution, though I know most of it was my fault. I am just a grasshopper, I guess, but you, my boy, are a cross between John Paul Jones and a Christian martyr.
Well, if you ever get home, look me up in the phone book. My mother is Agnes B. Ducely. Best regards to the boys, and stay away from those Kamikazes.
Sincerely,
ALFRED
P. S. Note that O.Y. is still lieutenant commander. His AlNav came out in March, so I guess he was passed over, and that is curtains, of course. Hooray.
Willie picked up the newspaper sheet. It was the front page of the Stuber Forks, Iowa, Journal. A feature story at the bottom was ringed with red crayon. There was a two-column picture of Queeg, sitting at a desk, pretending to be writing with a pencil, and looking into the camera with a sly half-smile. Willie felt a qualm of shock and disgust, seeing the face.
BATTLE-SCARRED PACIFIC VETERAN
NEW EXEC OF LOCAL NAVY DEPOT
The story, written in the stiff wordy prose of a high-school theme, made much of Queeg's exploits on the Caine. There was no mention of the mutiny or the court-martial. Willie stared at Queeg's face for a long time, then crumpled the sheet, went into the wardroom, and tossed it through the scuttle into the sea. At once he regretted it; he knew he should have shown it to Keefer. He was upset by the reminder of old horrors, and by the brief mention of May, and most of all by bitter envy of Ducely. He knew that this was a foolish feeling. He wouldn't have traded places with Ducely; but he had the feeling anyway, nasty and strong.
When the news of the atom bomb came through, and then hard upon it the announcement that Russia had declared war on Japan, a complete change took place in the officers and the men of the Caine. There were holiday faces on the decks and in the passageways. The talk was of peacetime plans, of marrying, of going to school, of setting up in business. There were die-hards in the crew who maintained that it was all propaganda, but they were cried down. Every day the admirals sent out stern warnings that the war was still on; they made no impression.
Like the others, Willie began to calculate his chances for getting out of the Navy; but about the decks he kept a stiff face, and pushed the ship's routine along against the current of merry relaxation among the crew. It annoyed and amused him at once to see the new officers clustering like bugs around the wardroom radio, exclaiming impatiently at the delay in an-nouncing Japan's surrender. The more recently aboard, it seemed, the louder they complained. The ship's doctor in par-ticular (the Caine had a doctor at last, a June arrival) announced at frequent intervals his entire disgust with the gov-ernment and the Navy, and expressed his belief that Japan had surrendered a week ago, and the whole thing was being kept secret while laws were hastily drawn up to keep the reserves in service for another couple of years.
On the evening of August 10, a more than ordinarily silly movie was being shown on the forecastle. Willie sat through a reel of it, and then went below. He was on his bunk in his room; reading Bleak House, when he heard the jazz music on the radio break off sharply. "We interrupt this program to bring you an important news bulletin-" He leaped to the deck and scampered to the wardroom. It was the surrender announcement: just a couple of sentences, and then the music resumed.
"Thank Christ," Willie thought, in tremendous exaltation, "I made it. I came out alive."
There was no noise topside. He wondered whether anybody else on the ship had heard it. He went to the scuttle and peered out at the moonlit harbor and the dark bluish mass of Okinawa. Then he thought, "Keefer will take her to the bone-yard. I will never be the captain of a United States warship. I missed."
A military band blared from the radio, When Johnny Comes Marching Home. A single green star shell suddenly burst over Okinawa and floated slowly down near the moon. Then, all at once, an unbelievably brilliant cascade of lights and fireworks began rising from the island: a million crimson streams of tracers, countless blue and white searchlights fanning franti-cally back and forth, red flares, green flares, white flares, star shells, a Fourth of July display many miles long of ammu-nition suddenly sprayed to the starry black heavens in a thank--prayer for peace. And a masculine chorus boomed from the radio,
"When Johnny comes marching home again,
Hurrah, hurrah,
We'll give him a hearty welcome then,
Hurrah, hurrah-"
Now the deck overhead began to thunder with the dancing and jumping of the sailors. And still the bursts of color rose from Okinawa in million-dollar streams, a glory of triumphant waste, and the rattle and roar of the guns came rolling over the water, and the ships in the harbor began firing, too, and then Willie heard the Caine's 20-millimeters rattling as they had rattled at the Kamikaze, making the bulkheads shudder.
"And we'll all be gay
When Johnny comes marching home.
Oh, when Johnny comes marching home again,
Hurrah, hurrah-"
For an instant Willie was marching up Fifth Avenue in the sunshine in an immense parade of the Navy, and crowds on the sidewalk were screaming cheers, and ticker tape was falling across his face as he marched. He saw the towers of Radio City, and the spire of Saint Patrick's. His hair prickled on his skull, and he thanked God for having sent him to the Caine to fight in the war.
"And we'll all be gay,
When Johnny comes marching home."
The vision vanished, and he was staring at the battered radio on the green bulkhead. He said aloud, "Who told those sons of bitches they could fire the 20's?" He ran topside.
The Navy's first AlNav announcing a point system for dis-charge was on the Fox skeds within a week. It caused howls and curses and screams of pain throughout the minesweeper, as though the ship had been hit by a torpedo. Willie scribbled a rapid sum of his points and saw that he would be discharged, according to the AlNav, in February in 1949. The point system was weighted so as to get rid of married men and old men. There was no credit for overseas service or for combat.
He was not disturbed. The AlNav was monstrous, of course, but he was certain that it would be superseded in a couple of weeks, as soon as the wave of anguished screeching had traveled back up the chain of command and splashed over into the press. He could picture clearly what had happened. This point system had been drawn up in wartime and filed away for a remote future; and all at once it had been snatched out of the files and placed on the skeds before anyone troubled to realize its implications. Meantime the world had gone from night to day, from war to peace. Wartime thinking had become in-stantaneously obsolete, and the Navy was lagging a bit.
Meantime, there was the decrepit Caine to worry about. The repair program at Okinawa had halted in chaos. Multi-million-dollar refittings, night-and-day labor without regard to expense, were now things of the past, a past as remote as Gettysburg though only a week away in calendar time. The repair officer of the Pluto, a harassed little commander behind a desk piled a foot high with documents, his wrinkled face as gray as mimeograph paper, snarled at Willie, "How the hell do I know what to tell you, Keith?" (It was Will
ie's fourth-visit in a week; he had been turned away by the yeoman the first three times.) "Everything is snafued from here to Washington and back. I don't know whether the Bureau will authorize spend-ing another forty cents on a four-piper at this point. Maybe the survey board will just decide to let the ship rot here." He pointed at a wire basket overflowing with yellow flimsies. "See that? Everyone is a ship with troubles. Want to get on the list? You can be 107, maybe."
"Sorry to have troubled you, sir," Willie said. "I realize how snowed under you are-"
The perspiring commander responded at once to the friendly tone. "You don't know the half of it. Like to help you, Keith. We all want to go home. Look, I'll send you a couple of chief shipfitters for seventy-two hours. If between them and your crew you can fix those bloody fuel pumps you'll have a ship to ride home in. That's all you want, isn't it?"
When Willie got back to the ship he called the black gang together on the forecastle. "It's up to you," he said. "If they decide to survey this bucket we'll sit on the beach with the dogfaces for a year waiting our chance for a ride back. Fix the pumps and you've got your private limousine to take you home, maybe in a week. How about another look at the pumps?"
Herman Wouk - The Caine Mutiny Page 67
