Pacific Glory

by P. T. Deutermann

  As the boat drifted with the eddies and currents coiling around Ford Island, she would reminisce about her life together with Tommy and the all too many what-might-have-beens. She knew it was an unhealthy exercise, but life’s prospects seemed to be flowing around her while she stood still or even slipped backward in time. Pearl Harbor had been the center of the world’s attention right after December 7, but now everyone stationed here was definitely classified as being in-the-rear-with-the-gear. The naval base was vital, but the real war was moving west and north thousands of miles away as the Allies closed in on Japan itself.

  She kept telling herself that giving up the baby was for the best, certainly for the baby, but her heart ached as if he had died at birthing. Even Hawaii, with its never-changing weather, was depressing. She hadn’t seen Marsh or Mick since New Year’s, Stembridge had gone west, as had Sally, and her dear Tommy lay moldering out in the harbor with over eleven hundred of his shipmates. Nothing in those gay weekends at Annapolis had prepared her for any of this.

  “Ready, Ensign Lewis?”

  Glory looked up from the lunch table at the new OR general supervisor, Carolyn McPeak. She was a full lieutenant in the Nurse Corps and at least forty-five years old. Positively ancient.

  “Yes, ma’am,” she said. Time to get back to work.

  She walked behind the small group of nurses headed back to the hospital, no longer interested in their gossipy chatter. Lieutenant McPeak dropped back to talk to her.

  “You seem to be in the dumps these days, Ensign Lewis. You know that’s normal, don’t you? After having a baby?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Glory said. She wasn’t sure what the lieutenant thought of her personal situation, but these days she didn’t much care.

  “Well, it is. I’ve had three kids, and each time I felt like a lost soul after the baby was born. Then one morning you wake up and feel just fine, and then it’s over.”

  “I suppose that’s true,” Glory said.

  “Suppose?”

  “If you get to keep your baby, I mean.”

  The older woman gave her a sympathetic look and then nodded. “Ah,” she said. “I hadn’t thought about that. Well, listen, you want to talk, you feel free to come see me. I know this has been very difficult for you, but, as they say, there’s a war on, and we need everybody operating at full power.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Glory said wearily, as they climbed the steps to the hospital entrance. She wondered if she would ever be at full power again. There were nights when she wished she simply wouldn’t wake up.

  * * *

  After a day of frustrating surgeries, including three consecutive deaths on the table, Glory went to dinner at the O-club. It was late, and the dining room was not very full. She sat by herself in one corner and had a salad and some rubbery baked chicken with a glass of white wine. She found herself much more interested in the wine than in the chicken. Five surgeries, three deaths, one doubtful, and one obvious success. Where oh where was Superman? she wondered. These new cutters weren’t very good at this.

  At around nine a group of staff officers from Makalapa came in, carrying drinks they’d brought from the bar. They sat not very far away and continued an animated conversation about what was going on out in the Philippines. Glory could usually tell the staff officers from the shipboard personnel. The fleet headquarters “staffies” always managed to talk about the so-called big picture, as if to make sure that any other officers in the room knew that they were exceedingly important. They’d throw last names around as if they knew all the three- and four-star admirals personally: Chester said this, and John Towers was against that. She tuned them out as she asked the waiter for another glass of wine, then changed it to coffee.

  I’ve been here too long, she thought, and not for the first time. It was plain food, much better than the soldiers out in the Philippines were getting as they slogged through jungle, heat, mud, venomous insects, and the even more venomous Japanese army. Maybe I should volunteer to go west into one of the new base hospitals, Guam maybe, where Sally was—but Stembridge was there, too, and that would make things too complicated.

  Then she heard one of the staff officers mention a ship’s name: the Evans. She refocused on what they were saying. She was pretty sure that Beauty Vincent was still the XO on the Evans.

  “Pretty amazing stuff,” one four-striper was saying. “Picture it: Jap battleships and heavy cruisers showing up out of nowhere in the Leyte AOA. Halsey’s Iowa class are off chasing empty Jap carriers above northern Luzon, and Jesse Oldendorf’s antiques are still down in Surigao Strait. Ziggy Sprague is going out of his mind, so he sends these three tin cans to go after the Japs all by themselves. Talk about David and Goliath—one of the BBs apparently was Yamato, the biggest battlewagon ever built, with eighteen-inch guns.”

  “Eighteen-inch?!” a commander exclaimed. “Jesus. How long did they last?”

  “Not very,” the captain said. “All three were lost with all hands. The jeeps lost most of their planes. But the amazing thing? Right in the middle of it, the Japs turned away. They’d already sunk a couple Jeep carriers and all the poor bastard destroyers, so there was nothing between the amphib force and a massacre except some planes from the jeeps. Ziggy couldn’t believe it when the Japs turned away and ran back for San Bernardino Strait.”

  “Which jeeps were lost?”

  “Madison Bay, Gambier Bay, and possibly one more. The details are still filtering in. After Surigao Strait, we thought they’d all withdrawn or been sunk, but apparently this one Jap admiral didn’t get the word and kept coming. Shame about the tin cans, though. Can you imagine—seeing Jap battleships on the horizon and turning toward them? Man!”

  Three tables away, Glory sat there in shock.

  Evans? Lost with all hands?

  That certainly would make sense, she thought. A destroyer going up against a battleship? She’d seen the new Iowa-class battleships in Pearl Harbor after the attack, and they were enormous. Why would any destroyer captain do that? What kind of admiral would order such a thing? And where were the aircraft carriers? Halsey had, what—twenty aircraft carriers? Thirty? How could this have happened?

  She realized she was holding her coffee cup in midair. She put it down gently as she absorbed the terrible knowledge. The other name she’d recognized was Madison Bay. She was pretty sure that was Mick’s ship. She tried to imagine one of those slow, flat-topped ugly ducklings, merchant ships disguised as aircraft carriers, trying to get away from Japanese battleships. Kaiser Coffins, their crews called them. Any planes that did get off would have had nowhere to land when they ran out of fuel. It would have been a slaughter.

  No, it had been a slaughter.

  Lost with all hands? The way these officers were talking, they hadn’t even bothered to go out to look for survivors.

  “Will that be all, miss?” the waiter asked. Startled, she nodded numbly and handed him her chit book. He tore out two coupons and handed it back to her. She sat there, trying to absorb the enormity of what she’d just overheard. The staff officers had moved on to even weightier matters, like their next assignments.

  “They’re all gone,” she said softly.

  The waiter turned around. “What, miss?”

  She shook her head and tried to hold back the tears.

  Tommy. Beast. Beauty.

  All gone. Her whole world, all gone.

  Her child, too, gone.

  She felt as if the world were falling in on her. She could barely breathe. Her cheeks were hot, and her ears were humming. She’d suddenly become a ghost, walking, talking, working, but devoid of any human extension.

  All gone.

  Where? Out there in the vast western Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles away and probably miles deep, too. Where thousands of Americans had already gone, never to come back, drowned in the sea or buried in shallow graves on no-name atolls. Or, worst of all, simply “missing.”

  Sally and Superman were the only people she knew still alive
out there, and they were so far away that only mail could reach them.

  A decision coalesced in her mind.

  Enough of this, she thought. Everyone’s gone. I might as well be gone, too.

  She gathered up her purse and her nurse officer’s cap. She got up and walked past the table of staff officers, aware that they were staring at her covertly. She even thought she heard one of them give a low whistle. She kept going, her back rigid as she tried to control her emotions.

  Talking casually about ships being lost with all hands while leering at her body. Incredible. Here they were, safe and sound in the gentlemanly ambience of the officers’ club, anticipating a cognac and a cigar, while out there, way out there, whole ships were being eaten alive by monstrous Japanese battleships. She wanted to whirl and scream at them, but instead, she just fled.

  * * *

  Mano showed up at his usual time, a little after ten thirty. Glory was waiting for him, two cartons of cigarettes in hand this time, her whole hoard. The night was dark because of a waning moon and a high overcast. Glory stepped into the little boat and sat down, smiled at her boatman, and put the two cartons of cigarettes on the midships thwart. He dutifully picked them up and put them behind his seat, near the engine, bobbing his head in thanks.

  “Missy okay?” he called from the back of the boat.

  “Missy’s just fine, Mano,” she said. “Let’s go see the big black ship.”

  “Okay, missy,” he said, in the familiar formula. “We go.”

  The engine was a single-cylinder putt-putt number. From the smell of the exhaust it was running on something truly obnoxious, such as used fish-fry oil. Mano used his usual indirect approach, going across the harbor toward the west side of Ford Island before making a gentle turn to head for Battleship Row. She could just barely see the white concrete moorings in the dim light, two by two, protruding along the edge of Ford Island, each with its own clutch of sleeping pelicans.

  Glory could hear her heart beating, almost in time with the rackety little engine. She felt the slippery wooden sides of the boat as she gripped with white-knuckled hands.

  All gone. Everyone dear to her, or close to her, or both, permanently extinguished by this eternal war. They hadn’t even let her name her baby.

  Gone. Now that would be an appropriate name, she thought: Baby Boy Gone.

  Mano slowed the little engine to a bare crawl as they came abreast of the rusted buoy marking Arizona’s submerged port bow.

  “Closer,” she told Mano in a firm voice.

  “Oh, no can do, missy,” he said. “Navy say, no touch.”

  “No, Mano,” she said. “Navy say, no take. Closer okay.”

  “Oh, missy,” Mano said. “Mano get in trouble, Mano touch ghost ship. Ghost ship big kapu.”

  “The ghosts are all inside, big steel ship,” she said. “Ghosts can’t swim.”

  “No?”

  “No, ghosts can’t swim. I’ll show you.”

  With the little boat barely gliding ahead, she put her hand in the water on the port side and began to gently back-paddle. They went past the rusted round barbette of a turret. She flattened her hand deeper, forcing the boat’s bow to the left and right over the middle section of the ship, which was perhaps three feet under the surface.

  “See, Mano? No ghosts. Just the big black ship.”

  “Oh, missy,” Mano complained, anxiously searching the seawall for Ford Island sentries.

  “Mano,” she said. “The cigarettes—look, they’re getting wet.”

  Mano turned on his thwart to see what she was talking about. When he looked back, Glory was standing up in the boat. Before he could open his mouth to protest, she stepped out of the boat and into the water, directly over that big black hole in the middle of the hulk, and quickly went out of sight.

  Mano gasped but then had to lean right quickly to keep the little boat from capsizing. Even so, a small wave of oily harbor water slopped over the port gunwale and nearly swamped the boat. He grabbed the dipper and frantically started bailing. Then he remembered the crazy haole woman. He looked around, but she was nowhere to be seen.

  He peered over the side and thought he saw a pale, fluttering thing deep down in that big square hole.

  Ghost! Coming for him.

  Even with the boat partially flooded, he turned the throttle hard and got out of there.

  “Goddamned stupid haole woman,” he muttered. “They never listen, these white people. Don’t believe in ghosts. Don’t they ever look in a mirror?”

  He looked back in the direction of the Arizona, the big kapu. He shivered in the warm, wet air and made a beeline for the back of the Pearl lagoon as fast as he could make the little engine go, resolved to tell no one about what had just happened. Big kapu alla way around.

  Stupid damned haole.

  SEVENTEEN

  Sally sat by the bedside of a badly burned sailor, writing a letter to his wife for him. The man had been blinded by a flare-back while he was lighting off a boiler. His face was burned dark red, and his eyes were padded with ointment-soaked gauze circles. Both his hands were lumps of gauze.

  “Don’t tell her I’m blind,” he said through crusty lips. “She might Dear-John me if she finds out. ”

  “Well, based on your chart, that blindness may only be temporary,” Sally lied. The chart did in fact say that, although she knew his chances of regaining his sight were slim, given the third-degree burns on the rest of his face.

  “Yeah, they told me that, but, man, when I blink under these bandages? All I see is that fire.”

  “Ensign Adkins?”

  Sally looked up and saw the orderly standing at the entrance to the barrackslike ward. She raised her hand.

  “Admissions needs help with a big intake,” he said.

  “Okay, be right there.”

  Sally had been out in Guam for six months, and the “intakes” were getting more frequent now that the invasion of the Philippines was fully under way. This was one of two wards under her direct supervision, and both were nearly full. The Pacific aeromedical evacuation operation was getting bigger by the day as new and improved planes were added to the system. Guam was considered 99 percent secure now, with only an occasional rumble of artillery or crack of small-arms fire drifting down to the base from the northern heights. Dr. Stembridge, who was now the CO of the hospital, told them the troops were just mopping up a few Jap stragglers.

  She finished the letter, signed it for the sailor, and promised to mail it that very day. Then she went down to the admissions and triage area, dropping the letter off at the censor’s office.

  “Who are they?” was always the first question any of the staff asked. The hospital people often knew more about what was happening to fleet units than many of the staffies back in Pearl.

  “A tin can called the Evans,” one of the triage docs told her. “Went down somewhere in the Philippines. These guys are all that’s left, and there aren’t that many of them. Ship sank, and then they spent the next two days and nights adrift with the sharks.”

  “Oh, no!” Sally cried, her hand going to her mouth. Sharks scared her to death. But had he said Evans?

  “You know someone?”

  “Yes, yes, the exec.”

  The doctor looked at the flight manifest. “I’m sorry, Sally. The CO’s listed, but not the XO.”

  Sally bit her lower lip as tears formed in her eyes. “Damn, damn, damn!” she said. “We’d been—pen pals.”

  “Yeah, well, shit. Sorry again. But right now, grab your chart pad, please. We need to get them sorted out.”

  She went to work, trying to hold back her tears and not succeeding very well. She’d had such dreams for their future that she felt as if she’d lost her spouse.

  The survivors, some ninety-six men, were laid out on olive drab canvas stretchers down both sides of the admissions hallway. One triage team went down one side while Sally and her doc went down the other. Injuries ranged from dehydration, exhaustion, and serious su
nburns to thermal burns, broken limbs, amputations, and shrapnel wounds. Two men had died en route, and their remains had been sent to the morgue. The surgical suite orderlies had gurneys standing by to take the most urgent cases in right away. Sally ended up escorting one of those, holding his IV bottle while the gurney was pushed into an elevator. The man was semiconscious and mumbling something about a battleship. Much of his right hip had been savaged by a shark, and the bandages had been on far too long, based on what she could smell. The orderly, recognizing the dreaded gangrene, was wrinkling his nose and shaking his head as they went up.

  The rest of her day consisted of being one of five nurses completing the admissions, starting charts, and reassuring the men she could talk to that everything was going to be okay. One of the younger sailors told her that Evans had torpedoed three battleships before one of them finally put her down. He said it had been a hellacious fight and that the Jap shells that went right through the ship were big as refrigerators. Sally kept up a brave face, but her heart remained heavy. Her letters back and forth with Marsh had been increasingly intimate, especially after the lovely time they’d had at Pearl after the New Year’s party. She had begun to dream about their getting married after the war, even while being very aware of the fragility of such dreams. Destroyers, as he had told her often, went in harm’s way, on purpose. She’d thought he was being just a bit melodramatic, but not anymore.

  Her shift ended at 1800. She went down to the hospital canteen for something to eat and then returned to the wards to help the oncoming shift with all the new patients. While she was working she noticed that one of the four private rooms, down at the end of the ward, was occupied. She asked the nurse next to her who was in there.