Vows to the Fallen: O'Toole (The Marathon Series)

by Laswell, Larry

  Patrick swelled into his chest; he was growing up, learning to be a ground fisherman like his father and his grandpa. The line shot through his hands and slid off the woolen nippers, burning the palms of this hand. The fish line bail spun rattling on the deck. “Grandpa, I’ve got a fish. He’s getting away,” Patrick yelled.

  “Ayuh, I see that. Haul him in!”

  “I got him, but the line’s cutting my hands. I’m bleeding.”

  “That’ll toughen up your hands. Get the line back on the nippers!”

  Patrick struggled with the line until it was running across the nippers. He tried to stop the running line without success. In desperation, he wrapped the line around his hand. The line pinched his hands, and Patrick whimpered at the pain. The line stopped running, but it clamped around his hand and jerked him forward, slamming his chest into the corner edge of the belaying pin rail. He and the fish were now at a stalemate.

  “What now, grandpa?”

  “Now you got two problems,” Daeg began. “First is the fish. Second is I’m not going to help ya. It’s your fish, not mine. Land it.”

  “How?”

  “Don’t ask me, it’s not my fish. You might wrap the line around a belaying pin. Takes the load off your hands.” Daeg nodded toward the mast, and said, “The jibs are heavier than a man can lift. How do we lift the jibs?” He went back to cutting bait.

  Patrick wrapped the line around a belaying pin. With his hand free, he studied the sails, lines, and jibs of the schooner to make sense of his grandpa’s question. His eyes settled on the pulleys; the block and tackle. He pulled two belaying pins from the rail and fashioned them into a block and tackle with about two feet between them. He released the line from the pin holding the fish, his makeshift pulleys spun free of the line. He tried again, this time keeping the line closer to the center of the pins. It worked, and he pulled the fish in a few feet. He turned his head toward his grandpa; he was busy cutting bait and wasn’t watching.

  Patrick repeated the cycle again and gained a few more feet. Again and again he pulled the fish in a foot at time for what seemed hours. His arms grew sore and weak, his back hurt, and his hands and fingers ached.

  The two-man dory boats rowed back to the Marella heaped with their morning catch. All he needed to do was hold on a little while longer, and grandpa would let him break for lunch. The dory boats came alongside, pitchforks were handed over, and the dory men pitched their catch aboard before heading to the cabin for lunch.

  A dory men passed Daeg and asked, “What’re you doing, Skipper? That’s enough bait for a week.”

  “That’s an adequate morning’s catch,” Daeg said. “Go eat and get some more.”

  “Grandpa?”

  “Ayuh.”

  “What about my lunch?”

  “You got your fish in?”

  “No.”

  “You eat when your work’s done. Not before.”

  Patrick’s arms ached and his stomach growled. Still grandpa challenged him. Patrick couldn’t give up.

  Daeg continued to cut bait for several minutes. Then he said, “Being tired and hungry doesn’t change the fact your fish is still swimming. You can do it; your father did at your age. He was a man about it. You ain’t quitting because a man ain’t allowed to quit. Someday you’ll have a family to provide for, and you’ll understand. Be a man about it. Keep pulling on that line.”

  The dory men finished their lunch and rowed away again for their second trawl. With their second load aboard, the dory boats returned to pitch the cod aboard before rowing out again. With their third trawl hauled in, they rowed back with their final load of the day.

  The muscles in Patrick’s weakening hands and arms burned, his knees were rubber, and all the strength came from leaning his weight against the line. Patrick pleaded with his eyes for his grandpa’s help. To his pleading, Daeg replied, “If you want to be a man, if you want to be adequate, you have to be a ground fisherman like your father and me. Be tough. Don’t ever quit. It’s your fish. Land it yourself.”

  He kept pulling and pulling until there was a splash in the water over the side.

  Daeg moved away from the bait cutting board and said, “Don’t lose him, Patrick. I’ll get a gaff and help ya.” He bent over the side, gaffed the fish, and pulled him aboard. “That’s a whopper! That cod’s as big as you, but you got him aboard.”

  Pride pushed Patrick’s fatigue aside, and he smiled at his grandpa. “I did it.”

  “That you did.”

  “Are you proud of me, grandpa?”

  “A man ain’t got nobody to pat him on the back, and he still has to keep his family fed. You did your job. The fish is aboard,” he said without smiling.

  Patrick felt his chest cave into the hollowness of failure. He had done his best. It wasn’t good enough. Would he ever be adequate? An invisible wall he could neither scale nor understand separated them.

  That night at dinner, Patrick ate more than any dory man. After dinner, he fell asleep at the table. Daeg picked him up, carried him to his cabin, and tucked him into his bed.

  To the sleeping boy he said, “You’ll sleep with grandpa tonight. You take after your father. He was a good man. I’ll see to it you grow up tough like him. I’ll talk with the crew so they don’t miss ya, and I’ll be sure to tell them how my eighty-pound boy landed a sixty-pound cod by himself.”

  §

  O’Toole dug deep to find strength to keep swimming. His wall would win and his men would die at sea if he quit. His lips were dry and cracked like the sunbaked mud of a dried up lakebed. Salt water burned its way into every crack, and each movement of his lips opened more cracks.

  He set up a hypnotic cadence to his swimming, and with each stroke he said to himself, “A man ain’t allowed to quit.” He blocked out everything but his mantra and found the strength to go on. The island drew closer, but he blocked it out thinking only of his mantra. The spell broke when his hands hit sand. He staggered ashore. He fell to his knees while dragging a wounded shipmate. He crawled twenty feet up the beach and collapsed.

  He lay there for several minutes before rolling over on his back to sit up. The men were prostrate on the beach, and he couldn’t see anyone still in the ocean. After several minutes, he struggled to his feet and counted his men. There were fifty-three; the number he had started with. He fell to his knees clutching the medallion of Saint Christopher under his shirt. He said a two-word silent prayer: “Thank you.” For once he had beaten his wall.

  The world became a sheet of glimmering gray and swirled into blackness. He fell into the vortex and collapsed face down on the rocky beach.

  3

  A navy spotter plane found them the next day, and within hours a destroyer picked up the Green survivors and took them to Tulagi. Standard operating procedure was to return the survivors to Pearl and grant them thirty days’ survivor leave. An officer on Tulagi put them aboard an empty troop ship headed back to Pearl Harbor within a week.

  On the way back to Pearl, O’Toole looked forward to seeing his wife, Kate, but then the nightmares began. Emptiness, guilt, and anger came next. Emptiness because he felt alone. Guilt because he was responsible for so many deaths. Anger at God for not letting him die with his shipmates. Every day he added a note to a long letter he was writing to Kate. Each note was personal and he made no mention of the Savo Island battle. The morning they reached Pearl, O’Toole added his last note before putting the long letter in the mail.

  Dearest Kate,

  I think by now the Navy Department has notified you that the Green was sunk by enemy fire, and that I survived. I escaped uninjured except for a few cuts and bruises. Ever since my rescue I have thought about you every day, and about the thirty-day survivor leave I have coming. I want to see you so much and hold you in my arms, see your smile, and hear that silly giggle of yours, but I am afraid.

  I have always reveled in the idea we would share our lives together in good times and bad, and this is a very bad time for me. I c
an’t tell you exactly what happened, but fear I am responsible for the loss of the Green and 151 lives. The battle was hell and I watched men die in the most horrific ways. Before the battle, I could never have imagined such horror, and now this is part of me. It is an experience I thank God you were not there to share it with me. Ultimately, we will talk about this so you can understand, but right now I can’t talk to anyone about it. It hurts to think about it, and I have nightmares about it almost every night.

  If I were to come home, I wouldn’t be able to talk about it, but it is all I can think about. I fear I would shut you out, and my nightmares would scare you. You would be hurt, and that would hurt me as well. Right now, I need quiet time to sort things out and get my head straight, so I can be the husband you deserve. Maybe I am being selfish, but frankly, I don’t want you to see me like this. It would be hard on both of us.

  What I am leading up to is, I am going to stay in Pearl for my survivor leave in the hope it will give me time to sort things out. Once I do, I promise we will talk so you can understand.

  He had 151 letters to write to mothers and wives. That was the least he could do for the families; it would be his penance, and it would give him something to do while he tried to figure out what happened. He had been on the right track by squaring away the watch, but he had fallen short again. There was always one more thing to do to be adequate, and no matter how hard he tried, he never saw it in time. He was angry God had inflicted him with such blindness.

  He stayed at the bachelor officers’ quarters at Pearl Harbor and spent his days at the personnel office tracking down the home addresses of his dead shipmates. Each letter he wrote was different, but the process was the same. The men deserved better than this, and he cursed himself for not knowing each man better so he could write a decently personalized letter. It was the least he could do for the men and their families.

  In his small room at the BOQ, O’Toole sat in a wooden chair at the small writing desk. His back was to the window, the bed, and a reading chair. He stared at the blank page, praying for inspiration. He dated the letter and began,

  Dear Mrs. Culver,

  I was the gunnery officer and a shipmate of your son, Mike, aboard the Green. I

  Words eluded him. Nothing ever sounded right. He buried his head in his hands and asked himself why he had survived and they had died. He had hoped writing the letters would help him deal with his demons, but they made it worse. Each letter reminded him he was the bridge officer. He had fallen short again; their blood was on his hands.

  With each letter, his resolve never to let something like this happen again grew stronger. The senseless loss of life on the Green left him struggling for answers. Beyond the black void of his wall lay his answers. What should he have done? What should he do? What must he do on his next ship to make sure lives are not wasted? His performance on the Green was not adequate; men died. Wearing the uniform of an admiral was his life’s dream. Achieving the dream would make his grandfather proud, but he worried his dream had died aboard the Green because inadequate men don’t make admiral. He would figure it out; he had to. Lives depended on it.

  Fatigue and a sense of hopelessness swept over him, and the hour was late. Perhaps the words would come to him in the morning. He pushed the letter away and climbed into bed. Thoughts of the Green, of Kate, and home kept him awake. After an hour, he fell into a fitful sleep.

  He entered the wheelhouse and stumbled. His knee landed on the chest of a headless body. Captain Levitte’s blood covered O’Toole’s arms and chest. His stomach wrenched. He bolted from the wheelhouse, down the ladders to the main deck. The blood-red night sky glowed over him and turned the sea a reddish brown. He dodged the fusillade of gunfire, jumped over bodies, and clambered down the hatch to the forward boiler room. There he found Fireman Culver tending the boiler baffles on the upper level.

  Culver, in his sweat-drenched T-shirt, sneered at O’Toole with cold, flat eyes. His lip curled, and he turned away from O’Toole.

  “I’m sorry, Culver. There wasn’t anything I could do. You have to believe me, I’m sorry.”

  Culver turned his back to O’Toole. The boiler room exploded, filling with scalding steam. Culver’s skin turned white as his body cooked. O’Toole reached out to put his hand on Culver’s shoulder. Culver jerked away in protest, and his skin sloughed off in O’Toole’s hand.

  “I’m sorry!” O’Toole screamed.

  His heart pounded, and he sat there several seconds fighting to regain normal breathing before getting out of bed. He headed for the bathroom and toweled the sweat from his face and hair. Instead of going back to bed, he sat in the reading chair and stared at the wall. He feared the night as much as he feared letter writing during the day. He wondered when the dreams would stop.

  He remained there until the darkness yielded to dawn and the sun burned around the edges of the blinds. A knock at the door broke the spell.

  “Just a minute,” O’Toole said while he hopped to the door, putting on his trousers.

  “Yes?”

  A second-class petty officer in tropical whites came to attention and saluted. “Sir, the Savo Island Battle Board of Inquiry understands that you are on leave but requests your presence to testify at 1100 hours today.”

  “Very well. Tell them I will be there.”

  He didn’t know what to expect. It seemed to him the war would have changed the navy, but the Green had continued to operate based on lax peacetime standards. Were they looking for scapegoats? Was he a target?

  §

  Admiral Garrett sat in the back of the classroom-sized hearing room built in the Hawaiian style. Floor-to-ceiling windows lined one wall, flooding the room with sunlight, and two overhead ceiling fans stirred the fresh air into a gentle breeze. Although done with his work for the board of inquiry, he noticed O’Toole’s name on the schedule. He had taught strategy and doctrine at Annapolis, and knew Midshipman O’Toole as a firebrand contained only by military discipline. Only one midshipman possessed the courage to challenge him, and it was O’Toole. He decided to stay and find out how Midshipman O’Toole had turned out.

  Seated at the head table, two captains flanked Admiral Conners, the senior board officer. A stenographer and a yeoman occupied a side table. Garrett nodded when O’Toole entered and walked to the table facing the board. O’Toole smiled and nodded back.

  “Lieutenant, I understand we are interrupting your leave. We appreciate your forbearance. Please have a seat,” Admiral Conners said. “I take it you and Admiral Garrett are acquainted?”

  “Yes, sir, he was one of my instructors at the academy.”

  “Admiral Garrett is lending his tactical expertise to our inquiry and is not officially part of the board,” Conners said before introducing the other board members.

  After introductions, Conners began, “Lieutenant O’Toole, this is a formal board of inquiry into the battle fought in the vicinity of Savo Island on the morning of August ninth. We have read your action report, and need clarification on some points. We are interested in understanding what happened and what we can do better in the future. This is not a legal proceeding; however, any statement you make may lead us to file charges against you or others. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Garrett took O’Toole’s measure. He had matured. His confident bearing and outward calm filled the room, and had O’Toole been older one would have assumed he was the one in charge before thinking to check insignia.

  “First,” said Conners, “we need to commend you on your actions organizing the survivors after the Green sank. The survivors we spoke with had high praise for your leadership. Many of them said they would have died without you. They all cited an incident with Seaman Harbrew, who had given up. They said what you did took balls, and after you took him to task everyone was afraid to stop swimming. You served your men well.” Conners paused and smiled. “Chief Zeis’ comments were on point. He respects you a great deal.”

  “Thank you, s
ir. The respect is mutual.”

  The first few boilerplate question regarded weather, visibility, and his duties aboard ship.

  “You were the officer of the deck at the time of the attack, correct?” the admiral asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What was your readiness condition when you took the watch?”

  “Condition III, sir, but there is more to it than that.”

  “Such as?”

  “Permission to speak freely, sir?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “When I took the watch, the gunnery crews were asleep, and bridge crew was half asleep. Lookouts had their back to the sea and the helmsman was talking to someone on the port bridge wing.”

  “We are aware of that. Your quartermaster testified you took immediate corrective action.”

  O’Toole’s face softened for a second.

  “You knew of the report of a superior Japanese force headed toward Guadalcanal?” asked Conners.

  “Yes, sir. I read the spotting report before taking the watch.”

  “Yet you stayed at Condition III?”

  “Yes, sir. The night orders clearly stated we were to stay at Condition III, regular wartime steaming. I called the captain to the bridge and explained that the Jap’s position would be near the northern defense line around Guadalcanal. He said to remain at Condition III.”

  “You heard aircraft overhead?”

  “Several times, sir.”

  “Why didn’t you go to general quarters?”

  “Again, captain’s orders. I spoke to him about the aircraft as well.”

  “Did you make any other recommendations to the captain?”

  “Yes sir, I requested that we commence zigzagging, but he said he didn’t want to waste the fuel.”

  “Where were you when the engagement began?”

  “On the flying bridge, talking with the captain.”

  “Can you walk us through what happened from the first shot until you abandoned ship?”