Sweet Reason (9781590209011)

by Robert Littell

  “Thirteen-fifteen — Christ Almighty. That doesn’t give us time to pipe chow. What’ll we do if he finds out the crew hasn’t eaten, eh?”

  As usual the XO had a scheme. “Listen, Skipper, people like that don’t do much talking to ordinary sailors. When they do they always ask them what state they’re from or what football team they root for or crap like that. And ordinary sailors know better than to do any bellyaching” — the XO chuckled at the appropriateness of the phrase — “in public. In any case, if he gets wind of it all we’ve got to do is let on the crew skipped lunch and donated the money to some war orphans. He’ll eat it up.”

  “But the men don’t pay for lunch.”

  “He won’t know that, Captain.”

  “XO, irregardless of the obstacles you think of all the angles. Remind me to polish my superlatives when I write up your fitness report.”

  Both men were all smiles.

  “Anybody else coming with him — a governor or a senator or an actor or anything like that?”

  “Haverhill says that a journalist named Kobb (with a ‘K’) is coming over too. But there’s nothing to worry about because he’s on our side. That’s what Haverhill says Filmore says. Oh, and Haverhill says he and Filmore are coming over too. Haverhill says Filmore will field anything that’s tricky and for us not to worry. He says all we have to do is put the men into clean dungarees and have them smile and everything will be four-oh. Those were his exact words — clean dungarees and smile. Sounds like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow to me, Skipper.”

  “Okay, XO, get up on the bridge and give me a course to put us astern of the carrier by thirteen-fifteen on the dot. And don’t forget about the dungarees.”

  The Executive Officer was halfway out the door when the Captain thought of something else.

  “About Proper — you’d better call him off for a while. We don’t want him underfoot at a time like this, eh?” And Jones nodded to indicate he was making an important point.

  Ohm Passes the Good Word

  His lips moving imperceptibly, Ohm scanned the slip of paper the XO had handed him.

  “Can you read my writing?” the XO asked.

  “All except this BIPs,” Ohm said. “What’s BIPs?”

  “That’s VIPs,” the XO explained patiently. “It stands for Very Important Persons.”

  “VIPs,” Ohm repeated. “VIPs.”

  Ohm pulled the microphone close to his lips and flipped on the switch. “Now relieve the watch,” he said, his stomach growling as well as his voice. “Now the twelve to sixteen is on deck.” Then Ohm started to read from the slip of paper. “Now all hands are” — break — “informed that the ship is” — break — “expecting BIPs on board this” — break — “afternoon. All hands are further” — gulp of air — “informed that they are to change into” — break — “clean dungarees, clean” — break — “workshirt and clean white hats before” — another gulp of air — “thirteen hundred hours.” Click.

  The Ebersole Plays Host to Some Very Important Personages

  The Kobb with a “K,” it turned out, was the syndicated Washington columnist Lizzy Kobb (“Kobb’s Korner”), and the first words out of her mouth as she stepped from the bo’s’n’s chair onto the Ebersole’s deck were: “Hey, sailor, where can a lady pee around here?”

  The sailor she was addressing was none other than the Executive Officer, and he was startled by the question as well as the questioner — a slightly heavy but handsome woman in her late thirties or early forties dressed in combat boots and marine fatigues clingy enough to make it apparent that she wore no bra and had reasonably solid breasts.

  “I beg your pardon,” the XO said, flustered and coloring. And for lack of anything better to do he saluted and repeated the question: “Where do you pee around here?”

  “Pee,” Lizzy Kobb explained sweetly, “as in natural bodily function.”

  Not a moment too soon Filmore, the Pentagon’s P.R. specialist, came to the rescue. Sliding off the bo’s’n’s chair right behind Lizzy Kobb, he patted her on the ass with his left hand and offered the XO his right.

  “Don’t let her intimidate you,” Filmore said. “She’s got the fastest typewriter and the dirtiest mouth in Washington, but she knows the score. Don’t you, Lizz old girl? I take it you’re the XO. You’ve got four more coming: the Congressman’s Filipino steward, a navy photographer, one of my lackeys named Haverhill and last but by no means least, the senior representative from the sovereign state of North Carolina, Everett Oakwood Partain.”

  Commander Whitman Filmore came equipped with an imposing personality and a deft touch; he was, he often told friends, a guy who could put English on anything. A bluff, heavy-boned three-striper with cheeks the color of polished apples, Filmore thought of himself as the last remaining sovereign in the world — a public relations man on assignment. In sixteen years in the navy he had never served on a ship, but he had been around the Pentagon so long he was not awed by admirals or senators, an attribute that left him a leg up in dealing with line officers of whatever rank. As for non-navy types, Filmore spent arduous hours studying their personalities and figuring out how to handle them. Lizzy’s weakness, he had long ago discovered, was that she wanted to be taken at face value; she despised anyone who tried to dig under the surface to search for the woman beneath. And so Filmore, taking her at face value, treated her as one of the boys.

  “If you have to pee, Lizz old girl, then rub your pretty legs together to keep up the circulation and hang in there. Now, XO, if you can prevail on these men here to take their eyes off Lizzy’s boobs, we can bring the rest of the contingent across and put this show on the road. What d’you say, fella, huh?” And Filmore clapped the XO on the back to establish the fact that they were, after all, on the same team. “My philosophy and my modus operandi are one and the same,” Filmore had once lectured a group of junior Pentagon P.R. staffers. “Make ’em feel like teammates and you’re bound to score.”

  Ten minutes later the senior representative from North Carolina made his entrance.

  “Hold it about two yards out,” Filmore shouted, directing the sequence from the Ebersole’s deck. “Right there. Okay, Yancy, start shooting.” With Haverhill on the sound equipment and photographer’s mate Yancy on the movie camera, Partain jiggled over on the highline. In the thirty-five-second tape that the Pentagon later distributed to the networks, the moment came across with dramatic intensity. “Somewhere off the enemy coast, Representative Partain — on a special fact-finding tour for the President — visits one of the greyhounds of the fleet,” the voice-over intoned. There, slightly out of focus behind the Congressman, was the aircraft carrier with its jets poised on the flight deck for the next strike against the enemy mainland. And in the background the audience could hear the sound of Tevepaugh’s electric guitar rippling off a cacophonous hard-rock rendition that was recognizable — but only barely — as “Dixie.”

  “On behalf of the officers and men of the Eugene F. Ebersole, welcome aboard, sir,” the XO said, saluting smartly as the bo’s’n’s chair deposited Partain on the deck.

  “Mighty fine, son, mighty fine,” replied Partain, smiling broadly and shaking every hand in sight — the camera was still grinding — as if he were priming pumps.

  “Mighty fine what?” prompted Filmore, who was off camera and knew that his voice could be edited out.

  “Mighty fine to be a-visitin’ the fightin’ men who so recently and so heroically been in the thicka action.”

  The smile on the Congressman’s face evaporated and he looked around with a skeptic’s eye. “This heah is a God-awful small vessel, Filmore. You-all sure we want to commence with this?”

  The camera was still recording the scene, but Representative Partain knew every bit as much as Filmore about editing.

  “Congressman,” said Filmore — applying English, “this ship’s been floating since nineteen forty-four, which if I recall correctly was your fourth year in the House of Rep
resentatives. I suspect it will be floating long after you’ve left too, and I don’t expect that to happen for quite a while yet.”

  “Well, Ah reckon,” chuckled Partain, pleased with the compliment. “Let’s git on with it.”

  Everett Oakwood Partain’s Curriculum Vitae

  North Carolina’s senior Democratic representative was sixty-two or sixty-three years old, he didn’t know which. His father, a small-time still operator who had worked the reaches of the Catawba near Asheville in the Great Smoky Mountains, could never remember whether Everett had been born before Lucius and after Calvin, or before Calvin and after Georgina. “Ah reckon it was ’roun’ the time that this heah Willum Bryan lost out to McKinley,” was the closest that the old man could come when his son tried to pin him down.

  “Don’t mattah none,” the Congressman always told reporters. “Ah had horse sense afore Ah was knee-high and that’s all that counts in mah cornah of God’s green earth.”

  Partain, who had gone on record recommending the use of nuclear weapons to end the war, was one of the best friends the military services had on Capitol Hill. He was, accordingly, wined and dined and toasted and chauffered around in air force jets and army limousines and navy yachts; in the course of three decades in Washington, he had developed backslapping relationships with practically every flag rank officer in the Pentagon. Yet during all those years nobody ever quite figured out what made Everett Oakwood Partain run. “Ah had to hustle to stay alive when Ah was a mite,” he once explained. “Why do Ah keep a-hustlin’? Ah guess you-all could chalk it up to force-a habit.”

  He believed in God and country and free enterprise, that much was clear, but there was considerable controversy over what order he put them in. He grew up with the notion that competition was a law of nature, and meandered through adulthood more concerned with the pecking order than the social order. “If’n theah was no peckin’ ordah,” he told a local chamber of commerce group, “everybody and his uncle would be a-pushin’ and a-shovin’ ’roun’ the barnyard. Now in some cornahs of the world that theah goes undah the name of chaos.”

  Economically, Partain leaned toward the belief that the United States was a meritocracy in which success was determined by strength of character and hard work. When pressed, he allowed as how the basic unit of American life wasn’t so much the family as the factory, as how the essential institution of American life wasn’t so much marriage as the marketplace. To critics who argued that the marketplace was no longer relevant because the country had turned into an uncontrollable corporate state, Partain replied: “Bull.”

  Above all Everett Oakwood Partain was a firm believer in America, a bouillabaisse whose ingredients he identified as “radio evangelists shoutin’ ‘Glory be to Jay-sus’ and Rural Free Delivery and plain folk rockin’ on the front porch and dollah watahmellons and bullfrogs and collards and ‘C’ for colored after names in the phone book.”

  Filmore Asks the Captain for a Favor

  With Captain Jones, the XO, Lizzy Kobb and Filmore in tow and Yancy’s camera grinding away, Partain started out with a turn around the main deck, chatting amicably with the sailors, including the black ones, he passed along the way.

  “What state you-all from, son?” he would ask.

  “Texas, sir.”

  “Great state, Texas,” the Congressman would say, pumping the man’s hand. “Ah suspect that makes you a Dallas Cowboy fan. Great team, the Dallas Cowboys.” And on to the next man, who turned out to be Gunner’s Mate First Quinn, fresh from repairing Mount 52.

  “What state you-all from, son?”

  “Beg pardon, sir?” said Quinn.

  “The Congressman asked what state you’re from, Quinn?” prompted Jones.

  Quinn glanced uneasily at the Captain as he spoke to the Congressman. “I’m not really from any state, sir. I live on the Ebersole. When the ship’s in Norfolk, I’m from Virginia. When she’s in Newport, I’m from Rhode Island. When she’s in for repairs at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, I’m from New York. When she’s in —”

  “But when you leave the ship, where do you go?” Partain interrupted.

  “I never leave the Ebersole, sir — at least I haven’t up to now. I haven’t been off except for a beer or a movie in twenty-four years.”

  “Cut,” Filmore ordered Yancy.

  Partain stared at Quinn as if he were insane, shook his head imperceptibly and stalked off in search of another sailor to ask: “What state you-all from, son?”

  “It takes all kinds,” Lizzy Kobb whispered to the XO, pressing her breasts into his arm as she leaned toward his ear.

  “Can I see you a second, Captain?” Quinn asked as the skipper started down the deck after Partain. “It’s about my keys and my application for —”

  “Later, Quinn,” hissed Jones, “see me later.” And he raced after the Congressman.

  Filmore spent a good deal of time organizing the photographic end of the visit. He set up one shot of a beaming Captain Jones handing a blue “Swift and Sure” baseball cap to the Congressman under the muzzle of the five-inch gun that fired the shot that sank the enemy patrol boat. And he turned up a couple of sailors who claimed to be from North Carolina, borrowed a few medals and had the Congressman pin them on their chests. Then there was the obligatory footage of Partain, tray in hand, waiting his turn on the chow line like any other person on the ship. (“Fawh as Ah’m concerned, being a U-nited States congressman don’t rate me the privledge of going to the head of the line, not when the line is composed of American fightin’ men, nosirree,” Partain was quoted as saying.) Since dinner was still a long way off Filmore had to round up some off-duty sailors and stick trays in their hands to pose the scene.

  “All this seems a mite tame,” Congressman Partain complained to Filmore after the chow line take. “Ah mean we don’t stand much of a chance with a chow line shot, do we? Now if’n we could mosey up to the coast and squeeze off a few pot shots at the enemy …”

  “He wants to what?” Jones said when Filmore brought up the idea.

  “Captain, let me fill you in on the facts of life,” Filmore said. “The Congressman isn’t here for his health. He’s committed to the military, and he wants to demonstrate to the people back home the vital role the military plays out here. But to get into the living rooms of the people back home, to get into those homes during prime time, we’ve got to get past an effete corps of impudent snobs — that small clique of eastern television executives, most of whom are against the war and suspicious of the military. These executives are like a turnstile. To get past them we’ve got to stick the right coin in. And the right coin is film footage that has action with a capital ‘A’ in it.”

  “But I can’t simply haul ass and fire at the coast,” Jones said. “I have to get permission and a target assignment and coordinates and a spotter helicopter and some standby jets in case we run into counterfire and need to call in a protective reaction strike. It’s an involved production requiring a considerable amount of preparation.”

  “Captain, believe me, I can arrange it — as long as I can say you’re willing.”

  “Willing? Jesus Christ, I’m delighted.”

  Filmore Pulls a Few Strings

  “Flanks,” Whitman Filmore was fond of saying, “are every bit as crucial in public relations as they are in war.” Accordingly, the first thing he did on any operation was to protect them.

  “Now the Congressman doesn’t want you to lay on anything special just for his sake, you understand,” Filmore radioed the flag operations officer. “But he thought if you have something lined up for this afternoon, you might be able to let the Ebersole go in and do the firing, huh, so he could get a first-hand idea of what we’re up against out here. Over.”

  “Roger, Filmore, I read you,” the operations officer replied. He had one of those monotonous “This is your captain speaking” voices common on commercial aircraft. “We usually shoot in the morning to keep the sun at our backs, but I’m sure something can be worked out
without too much strain. Stand by, will you? Over.”

  “Roger, standing by,” Filmore said.

  The long, tedious process of selecting a relatively safe target so as not to endanger the Congressman’s life, working up the coordinates, getting permission from higher authority for the shoot, dispatching a helicopter to spot the fall of shots and positioning an aircraft carrier so that it could provide jet fighter cover on short notice took seven minutes.

  “Like I said, Filmore, no sweat,” this-is-your-captain-speaking radioed back. “The Admiral is happy to be of service.”

  Jones Puts the Show on the Road

  Things moved rapidly once the target assignment came in over the teletype. As the Ebersole heeled over and headed toward the thick gray smudge on the horizon that was the coastline, an OH-6 “Loach” recon helicopter, its rotor blades beating the air like a panicky sparrow, hovered over the destroyer’s fantail to pick up the spotter.

  “Since when do we supply the spotter?” demanded Lustig when the XO told him to assign someone to the job. Usually the helicopter pilot or one of his crewmen did the spotting.

  “It was the P.R. guy’s idea,” explained the Executive Officer. “He wants some footage of the chopper lifting off one of our men. Says it will dramatize how close we are to the war. Listen, I have enough trouble as it is. Now don’t you give me a hard time.”

  “Jesus fucking shit, why me?” demanded Chief McTigue, who didn’t have the slightest desire to get that close to the war.

  “Because you’re the only one around here who knows how to spot the fall of shot, Chief,” Lustig explained. “Come on, don’t give me a hard time.”

  And so, as Yancy’s camera took in the scene, McTigue was strapped into a canvas harness, plucked off the Ebersole’s fantail and cranked up through the trap door into the helicopter, which rocked off like a pendulum toward the coastline.