“The Marines sure as hell don’t bother,” Mick said. “So where will you take me? Back to the ’Canal?”
“I guess we can,” the exec said. “Or you can come with us to Darwin.”
Mick grinned. “Gosh, XO, I’d have to think about that. Darwin, Australia, or Guadalcanal. That’s a real tough one.”
“Right,” the XO said. “Let’s find you a rack.”
SIX
USS Evans was one of the new Fletcher-class destroyers, twenty-two hundred tons full load, sixty thousand steam turbine horsepower turning twin screws, five single five-inch gun mounts, and two quintuple torpedo tube mounts. The ship’s complement was about three hundred twenty souls. Marsh was executive officer and therefore second in command, otherwise known, and universally addressed, as XO. After commissioning, shakedown, and some three months of accelerated tactical training at Guantánamo, Evans slipped through the Panama Canal and transited to Pearl Harbor in the late summer of 1943 as one of twelve escorting destroyers for an aircraft carrier, the new USS Lexington.
Before leaving Pearl, Marsh had gone around to the barracks and looked up a few of the enlisted petty officers who’d made it off Winston. Commander Wilson had suggested he do that when he gave him his new orders. Find some Winston guys to take with you to your new ship, he told Marsh. They’ll be a big help in a precommissioning crew. Marsh had talked to Machinist Mate Marty Gorman, five petty officers from the gunnery department, and Lieutenant (Junior Grade) John Hennessy, who’d been in the navigation department. They were all as eager to get out of Pearl as he was, so Commander Wilson made the arrangements.
The word in the Pacific Fleet was that Guadalcanal had been pretty much secured and that there were operations being planned to move American forces up the Central Pacific island chains, starting with the northern Solomons. That said, nobody at the deckplate level felt the war was even close to going decisively America’s way, especially when Evans crawled through the minefields outside the channel, entered Pearl Harbor, and steamed by the melancholy wrecks of the battleships Arizona, Oklahoma, and, behind Ford Island, Utah.
“Damn, XO, what is that smell?” one of the ensigns asked.
“It’s exactly what you think it is, Mister Cauley,” Marsh said.
They were standing out on the port bridge wing, and the smell in question was a combination of bunker oil, bottom mud, and burned electrical insulation, overlaid with a sickening thread of decaying human flesh. Arizona was right where she’d died that awful morning, her head bowed down and every visible inch of steel still above water burned black and even white in some spots. Oklahoma, which had turned turtle after being torpedoed at her moorings, had been righted and pushed up against the shore at Ford Island and was now streaming harbor water from her many cofferdams as pumps down below labored day and night to get her truly afloat.
“I thought,” Ensign Cauley said, “I mean, didn’t they get, uh, the bodies out? After it was all over?”
Marsh thought Ensign Cauley was amazingly innocent, even for an ensign, USNR, with ninety days of Officer Candidate School and a whole six months of naval service under his belt. The captain glanced over at Marsh from his bridge chair and rolled his eyes.
“There’s reportedly over a thousand men still inside Arizona,” Marsh told him, “and they’re never coming out. They just got Oklahoma right side up a few months ago. Some of the human remains coming off Oklahoma are coming through those pumps, okay?”
Cauley swallowed at that lovely image and went back to rubbernecking as they closed in on the destroyer piers. It had been a year and a half since the attack, but there were still signs aplenty of the devastation. Some of the other stricken battleships had already been refloated. Repaired well enough to go back to the mainland, they were in navy yards on the West Coast being refurbished for further service. Looking at Oklahoma, though, Marsh found it hard to believe that any of those battered leviathans would ever raise steam again. They’d heard the Navy was going to leave Arizona and Utah where they lay.
The carrier had gone into the shipyard piers to have aircraft hoisted aboard. Her escort destroyers had been ordered to tie up at the destroyer piers complex in the East Loch. Ensign Lee, the assistant gunnery officer, had the conn, and the navigation officer, Lieutenant Hennessy, had the deck. The captain was watching intently, ready to take control of the landing in case the junior officer did something remarkably dumb. As everyone knew, ensigns did that often. The rest of the crew manned their special sea and anchor detail stations for entering port, with first and second divisions topside fore and aft, ready to handle mooring lines, and Fox division waiting amidships to run out fenders. The engineers, universally called snipes, were on station down below in the firerooms and engine rooms. The navigation department was manning up the pilothouse, the Combat Information Center, and the signal bridge.
Marsh’s job, as the executive officer, was to make sure that everyone was on station and ready to do whatever needed doing to bring the ship alongside another destroyer already moored at the piers without breaking anything. He normally stayed up around the bridge area while the captain and whichever junior officers had the deck and the conn actually maneuvered the ship into the designated berth. Once the ship was pointed fair at the berth, there was nothing more for him to do. He would spend the next few hours ensuring that fuel, provisions, mail, cargo, repair parts, new personnel, ammunition, and visiting staff officers all got aboard in good order.
Marsh’s day finally slowed down to a gentle chaotic rumble at around five, so he and the captain headed for the officers’ club. Everyone except the duty section personnel went ashore for some much-needed liberty time. Captain Warren was a three-striper, or full commander. He’d been chief engineer on an antiaircraft light cruiser, and command of Evans was his reward for keeping that ship afloat after one of the many savage naval gunfights in the Solomon Islands campaign. He and Marsh had some dreadful experiences in common, so as CO/XO partnerships went, theirs was pretty good. Marsh was young to be an XO, and the captain already had taught him much.
The destroyer squadron commander, a youngish-looking four-striper, was holding court at the main bar with his skippers. The captain dutifully joined the commodore, while Marsh joined up with a bar stool and a much-needed Scotch. The first one was perfect; the second even better. A man wearing slacks and one of those riotous Hawaiian shirts sat down next to him. He introduced himself as Dr. Ernie King and then ordered bourbon.
“What ship?” he asked. Apparently it was obvious that Marsh was a fleet officer. He told him he was XO in Evans.
“That’s a tin can?”
“Right. We’re in the Lexington task group.”
“Yeah, I saw her pull in today. She’s bigger than the last Lexington. You guys do the exciting stuff.”
Still mindful of the Winston’s sinking, Marsh told him that exciting was overrated. King laughed.
Marsh asked if King was attached to the naval hospital. He was. He inquired if he knew of a nurse named Glory Lewis, or possibly Hawthorne. King looked at Marsh with sudden interest.
“Lady Everest? Hell, yes, I know her. I’m a surgeon, and she’s one of the team leaders in our ORs.”
“Lady Everest?”
“Can’t be climbed,” he said with a comic, leering grin, “but, boy, we all wish differently. You actually know her?”
Marsh gave him a very brief history of his acquaintance with Glory. King nodded somberly when Marsh mentioned her connection to the Arizona.
“You know,” he said, “I think that’s what makes her so desirable, besides the obvious female attributes, I mean. She’s almost ethereal. Withdrawn, quiet, a little bit sad. All you want to do is hold her.”
“All?”
He grinned again, as if some kind of machismo demanded it, but then his expression changed.
“Truth is,” he said, “There are lots of pretty nurses, but Glory Lewis is in a class by herself. She’s so goddamned beautiful, and yet she’s not in the l
east ‘available.’ I saw her at the base chapel last Sunday. Dressed in these somber clothes she wears when not in her hospital gear. Her face framed in this gauzy black go-to-Mass veil. Heart-stopping; that’s the only term I can come up with. Goya would have been dying to paint her. She’s as distant as the morning star. Every man in the chapel was looking at her, and she was completely oblivious.”
“Her husband was my roommate at Annapolis,” Marsh told him. “He was quite a guy.”
“Had to have been,” he said, lifting a finger to order another bourbon. “She’s the best OR supe we have over there, too. All business, all the time. No joking around, no bullshit, no mistakes. But even when she’s covered up in a full mask, all the cutters have to be careful not to look at her. She’s that distracting.”
“Well I remember,” Marsh said.
“You’re in port—why don’t you call her? Go see her.”
Marsh told him he wouldn’t know how. He didn’t want to point out that on the scale of handsome he still rated a distinctly negative number. Just like in the courage department, he reminded himself.
“Oh, hell, that’s no problem. Call the hospital. Ask for the staff duty officer. Tell her you’re trying to contact Ensign Lewis. They’ll get ahold of her for you.”
“She’s an ensign?”
“They’re all ensigns, except for one old bat who’s in charge of all the Navy nurses. She’s a jay-gee. I’m a commander. Whoopee. The rank means nothing—it’s just a way to keep the girls in officers’ country, if you know what I mean.”
“What’s that number?” Marsh asked.
* * *
An hour later he was walking down the palm-lined street on Hospital Point where all the nurses’ quarters were. The buildings were old verandah-style, two-story houses that had been converted to dormitory residences for the medical staff. The staff duty officer had taken his message, called back a few minutes later, and told him that Ensign Lewis was in surgery but would be able to meet him at 1800. As he drew near the quarters he saw a large hole in the street. He immediately assumed it was a bomb crater but then realized it was simply evidence of the eternal battle between the diggers and the fillers at the Naval Base Public Works Department. Some things never changed.
As he came up the walk to the house, a pretty, sweet-faced young woman smiled at him from one of the deck chairs. She was wearing what he later learned was called a muumuu, a full-length, flowing, flower-printed and tentlike garment.
“Hi, there,” she said. “Who are you?”
Marsh told her his name and said he was there to see Ensign Lewis. Since he was in khakis, he didn’t have to tell her his rank. She introduced herself as Sally Adkins and said she’d go get Glory. She was back in a minute and said that Glory would be right along.
“Where you from?” she asked. “And are you a commander or something?”
Marsh sat down next to her in a wicker chair. “I’m a fresh-caught lieutenant commander,” he told her. “I’m the exec in a destroyer with the Lexington group. She’s called the Evans.”
“Wow,” she said, and he was surprised to see that she was truly impressed. Up close she appeared to be in her late twenties, with gorgeous blue eyes. “What’s ‘fresh-caught’ mean?”
“Recently promoted,” he said. “I’m originally from San Diego, California. How about you?”
“I’m from St. Louis, but I’ve been to San Diego. I did my Navy nurse training there.”
“These days, if you’re in the Navy, you’ve been to San Diego.”
“You’re wearing one of those big rings—did you go to Annapolis, too?”
“I did, but it seems a very long time ago.”
“Gosh,” she said. “We don’t see many Annapolis men, at least not upright and walking around, I mean. Let’s see, if you went to Annapolis, you must have had one of those funny nicknames they give each other—what was yours?”
“Beauty,” said a hauntingly familiar voice behind him. “Hello, Marsh.”
He turned around, stood up, and forced himself to speak. “Glory,” he said. “I’m so very sorry about Tommy.”
It wasn’t the way he’d planned to start the conversation, but the sadness framing her face positively demanded it.
“Thank you, Marsh,” she said, glancing reflexively across the nearby harbor at that blackened pile of steel jutting out of the water next to Ford Island. “It was a terrible waste. Let’s go for a walk. I’ve been inhaling disinfectant all day. I desperately need some fresh air.”
“Nice to meet you, Commander,” Sally called as they started down the front steps. “Come see us again.”
Marsh said he would, and then they went down the stairs.
“Sally’s such a dear,” Glory said. “The men love it when she comes on the ward, and she’s been especially nice to me. We actually share a room here in the nurses’ quarters.”
“I’d lost track of you and Tommy after the academy,” he said. Many if not most wives and families had remained stateside when the Pacific battle fleet moved to the advance base in the Hawaiian territories. “How long had you been in Pearl?”
“Since the fleet came out from California,” she said. “There was a naval hospital right here, so I decided to come along. What with the war in Europe going so badly, we’d talked about my going back stateside, but … we just put it off.”
“Family?” he asked. “Kids?”
“No,” she said with a wan smile. “Tommy’d been considering going engineering duty officer. He said he wanted to wait until then, when he’d be working in a shipyard and be home every night. But, again, with all the war talk…”
Marsh nodded. Another of his classmates had become tired of eternal sea duty and made the transfer from the line to EDO, as it was called. Now that the country was at war, he was stuck in a naval shipyard, while his line-officer classmates were getting promoted and going to interesting and exciting places. Like Savo, for instance.
“And you, Marsh? Married yet? Family?”
“Me? Married?”
“Well, yes—why not?”
“Look at me, Glory—I haven’t improved much in the looks department since the boat school. Most guys aren’t even willing to introduce me to their sisters, even the homely, one-legged ones.”
She laughed, although he suspected she might have been just going through the motions when she’d asked the question.
“We had Amish nearby when I was growing up,” she said. “They admired plain people.”
“Plain? Listen, kids still ask me if I live under a bridge with the rest of the trolls. That’s when they’ve run out of rocks.”
“Do our classmates still call you Beauty?”
“When I see one,” he said. “Right now my name seems to be XO.”
“XO,” she said. “That’s pretty good, Marsh, at just eleven years. As a battleship man, Tommy told me that it’d be fifteen years at least to exec, and twenty or more to command.”
“That’s all changing pretty fast,” he said, as they reached the tip of Hospital Point. The buoys out in the entrance channel were flashing on low power, with their seaward-facing lenses reduced to small vertical slits. He told her about his experiences in Winston and that he’d actually been at the hospital last August. She chided him for not calling her, but he reminded her that he hadn’t known she was in Pearl. That wasn’t quite true, of course, not after seeing her at the O-club, but the truth was he’d been reluctant to renew their acquaintance so soon after Tommy’s death.
“Were you admitted?”
“No, I wasn’t that badly hurt. If you could maintain vertical, they wouldn’t let you in.”
“August 1942,” she said. “Savo. I remember that. The burns cases were the worst. We lost most of them, I’m afraid. Although I might be wrong—by then my days had become such a blur.”
“I can’t imagine.”
“Yes, you can,” she said. “Especially if you were in Winston. All those poor cruiser men were in a state of ambulatory s
hock. Talking, walking, but not looking at you. Still out there, on the sea, or in it, I guess.”
“Yes, indeed,” he said, remembering all too well. Jack’s eyeless head popping up in the sea beside him. He banished the image. “You have no—”
“Don’t I?” she said softly.
He had to think about that for a moment. “If you don’t mind my asking, Glory,” he said, “where were you? On that day?”
“Right where we’re standing, Marsh.”
Dolt, he thought. “You watched? You saw?”
“Oh, God, yes. The Jap planes came right overhead, on the way out of Pearl. Some of them shot up the hospital, just for fun, I guess. And of course I knew where the Arizona was berthed. I’d been out aboard the Friday before, for dinner in the wardroom. I saw her go, Marsh. I saw that blast of fire and smoke come straight up the stack.”
“Good Lord,” Marsh whispered.
“I knew, Marsh. Jesus Christ, I knew!”
She swayed for a moment, and he held her shoulders then while she wept silently. She kept murmuring it: I knew, I knew, I knew.
“It’s passing strange,” he said, the scent of her hair in his face. How many times had he dreamed of holding Glory Hawthorne, but not in these sad circumstances. “When the second torpedo hit Winston, I knew we were done. She trembled after the first hit, kind of like an overstressed guitar string. But after the second hit? She turned sodden, like a bag of wet laundry, as if she didn’t care anymore. Her plates groaned, and then they started breaking, big hull sections snapping like glass, rivets pinging in the dark down below. She made this terrible groaning sound as she gave in to the sea. Like you, I knew.”
She composed herself and pulled away, but not too far. “I feel so, what’s the word?”
“Guilty?”
She looked at him with those shining eyes. “Yes! Guilty. There I was, standing on the seawall, and there went Tommy with the rest of the engineering department, up the stack of the Arizona, just little specks of carbon in a boiling black and red cloud. On a Sunday! God damn them, Marsh. God damn them!”
Pacific Glory Page 11
