Pacific Glory

by P. T. Deutermann

  So what the hell had happened?

  He decided that for as long as he was stashed here in Pearl, he’d make it his mission to find out. Somebody over there in the nurses’ quarters had to know something. In the meantime, he had to tell Sally. All things considered, he’d liked her recent surprise a lot better than the one he was going to drop on her.

  * * *

  For the next month he settled into the work of routine in the base headquarters, pushing more paper than he thought even existed. Oxerhaus had a formidable reputation in the headquarters building for an unstable temperament, but Marsh thought the fact that they were both wheelchair-bound kept his bile pointed elsewhere. He became more proficient at doing just about everything with one hand and one leg, including the basics of personal hygiene, printing legibly with his left hand, getting in and out of buildings that were never built with wheelchairs in mind, and gritting his way through the travail of a rehab program that was supposed to prepare him for the attachment of his prostheses. He never did get to go meet Admiral Nimitz, though.

  In his spare time, he obtained a copy of the HASP investigation on Glory’s disappearance and pored over their interview reports in the evenings. They’d done what looked like a thorough job, talking to everyone with whom Glory had come in contact, both on the base and even at the convent. They’d visually confirmed that her baby, who was still at the convent nursery, had not been kidnapped by his distraught mother. The conclusions section was succinct in the extreme: The case officially remained open. Given the fact that literally thousands of personnel were flowing through Hawaii on their way west, with a considerable number of them getting in some kind of shore patrol trouble downtown, “open” was tantamount to “closed.”

  Sally wrote constantly, especially after Marsh told her about Glory’s vanishing act. She was working on getting a transfer back to the hospital at Pearl so that they could be together, and he was hoping that she succeeded. On those nights when his stumps hurt and his future looked increasingly bleak, he often worried that Sally might back out of their budding romance in favor of another guy with all his pins still in place. When he listened to the other crips at the O-club, the Dear Johns were a frequent subject of conversation. At one point he talked himself into a guessing game: Was she still giving him the time of day simply out of sympathy or loyalty? Was he reading too much into their relationship, which, after all, was based more on letters than weeks of personal contact? Should he broach these thoughts in his letters to her?

  Fortunately he kept in mind that old saw from the academy’s little plebe-year book containing the so-called Laws of the Navy, and one rule in particular: They prosper who burn in the morning those letters they wrote overnight. Everything looked better against the backdrop of a Hawaiian sunrise and the first cup of Navy office coffee. Even Oxerhaus was reasonably nice for that first hour in the office until something set him off. It didn’t take much, Marsh discovered.

  One Monday the something was a report of the casualty lists from the Samar engagement. Under the Madison Bay’s embarked aviation squadron report was the name of Mick McCarty, who was now officially listed as missing in action. Marsh was taken aback when he showed the lists to Oxerhaus. He’d expected an oh-well-, too-bad reaction. Instead Oxerhaus fulminated about not getting another chance to chew Mick’s ass for something.

  “He’s listed as MIA,” Marsh reminded him. “More than one MIA has popped back up when the paperwork got straightened out.”

  “Knowing him, he’s on some island out there lollygagging with the bare-breasted natives,” Oxerhaus grumped. “Find out who the skipper was of VC-Eleven; get official confirmation that professional fuckup isn’t just laying low.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Marsh followed up on that order the next week. It turned out that the skipper of Composite Eleven was right there in Pearl, the newest orphan in the Aviation Motor Pool, awaiting orders to take what remained of his people on board a new CVE that was coming through Pearl in three weeks. Marsh invited him to come to the base headquarters building for a meeting. That afternoon, a yeoman stuck his head into his office and said there was a Commander Campofino to see him.

  “Max Campofino,” the commander said as he came through the batwing doors. Marsh recognized him as one of Navy’s better-known varsity football players back in 1932. He introduced himself, and they did the usual do-you-know drill common to Naval Academy graduates.

  Campofino confirmed that Mick had gone up with two nuggets, who’d quickly used up all their ammo, such as it was. Mick had detached them to fly to the Army airfield on Leyte to rearm. The last they saw of him, he was headed back to harass the Japs.

  “Harass?”

  “You gotta understand, Marsh, we were goin’ up there with fifty-cals, trench-busters, eggs and potatoes. None of the ordnance Mother Madison was carrying would do much against a battleship, and, believe me, we had zero time to upload what they did carry. There were Jap cruisers punchin’ holes right through her as we launched.”

  “And Mick never came back?”

  “Nope. I landed on one of the Taffy One jeeps, rearmed, went back out, and then it was all over. Japs turned tail for Bernardino Strait. I spent the next five days trying to gather in all my chickens. Fifteen guys made it off the ship. I got nine back.”

  “Did all the squadrons experience such losses?”

  “More than we would have expected, but, again, you gotta remember, we had lots of nuggets, guys who’d never been up against much more than Jap snipers in trees. A heavy cruiser throwin’ directed ack-ack is something else again, especially when some of the guys were making fake bombing runs with empty racks. It was more than surreal. You should have seen it.”

  “Actually, I did,” Marsh said.

  “Yeah? You were there? At Leyte?” Then he registered that Marsh was in a chair.

  “That’s how I ended up short a wing and a wheel,” Marsh said. “I was skipper of Evans.”

  “Holy shit, really? You were there.”

  “And then we weren’t,” Marsh said with a grin. “Pissing off a pair of battleships will do that.”

  Max sat back in his chair. “God damn,” he said. “We heard about the tin cans getting between the jeeps and the Japs, and how none of ’em came back. One of our guys told of seeing a tin can almost alongside one of the Jap heavies, blasting away while that big bastard tried to get away from him. Said they were pointing main battery at the destroyer, but she was too close.”

  “That was us,” Marsh said. “I put us alongside because then the cruisers couldn’t fire at us without hitting their flagship. That was the theory, at least. Didn’t last long, but we were pretty much done by then anyway.”

  Max nodded, but his eyes were far away, remembering the chaos of that morning. Marsh recognized that look.

  “Tell me something,” Marsh said. “I saw a Dauntless crash into a heavy cruiser, just before the Kongo put us down for the count. Hit her amidships, and then there was a really big blast. Any chance that could have been Mick?”

  “I heard that story,” Max said. “That one of our planes did a suicide attack. I didn’t believe it, mostly because I can’t imagine doing such a thing. If I could fly it, I could ditch it.”

  “Maybe he couldn’t,” Marsh said. “I only had a few seconds to see it, but he didn’t seem to be flying very well, like maybe he was wounded.”

  “Plane smoking? On fire?”

  Marsh closed his eyes, trying to recapture the image. “No, he wasn’t on fire, but there were streams of smoke,” he said. “He was sluggish, like he was really working to get that plane to maneuver. Like everything was taking too long.”

  “Sounds like a guy who looked down after getting hit and found his guts in his lap. They say that when it’s really, really bad, the body doesn’t feel it for a minute or two. But the brain knows.”

  “I wonder,” Marsh said.

  “Coulda been,” Max said. “Sounds like something Mick might do, if he thought h
e was gonna buy the farm. Funny thing is, the Japs did just that the very next day. Some Jap pilot came in on the St. Lo and blew her in half in what everybody who saw it agreed had to be a deliberate suicide attack. The difference is that he apparently came out intending to do that, based on the scuttlebutt. He didn’t make any other bombing or torpedo runs, just appeared out of nowhere, nosed over, and took himself and his bomb through the flight deck and into the hangar bay. Big ball of fire, and she was gone.”

  Marsh nodded absently. Now it was his turn to be back there, watching fourteen-inch shells come through the tin-clad sides of the bridge to impale his watch standers on the edges of the hole.

  “Marsh?”

  He snapped back. “Sorry,” he said. “Sometimes…”

  “I understand. Truth is, I didn’t know that any of the tin can guys made it back. Word was they all went to Davy Jones.”

  “A reasonable assumption,” Marsh said. “At times I was more than ready.”

  Max nodded and stood up. “I’ll ask around, see if anybody actually saw that guy dive in on purpose. Right now, it’s rumor, but I’ll shake some rumor trees, see what I can find out.”

  “One last question: Did Mick have something painted on the side of his plane? Something white?”

  “Yeah, he did. He said he was naval aviation’s version of the Lone Ranger, so he had one’a the shirts paint a white horse on the fuselage. Why?”

  “The guy who flew into the Jap cruiser had something white, besides the star, on his side. I couldn’t see what it was, other than it was white.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned. Maybe you just answered your own question, and some of mine, too.”

  “Would you check anyway?” Marsh asked. “I’m hoping I’m wrong.”

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  “I’d appreciate it,” Marsh said and offered his left hand.

  “You’re class of ’thirty-two and a commander already? Somebody thinks highly of you.”

  “I’m not sure why,” Marsh said. “I keep waiting for a summons to a court of some kind. The funny thing is, Evans wasn’t even my ship, really—I was just the acting CO until a new skipper got out there.”

  “Class act,” Max said. “Honored to meet you, Skipper.”

  * * *

  That evening Marsh wheeled himself out to the Hospital Point seawall from his BOQ room. It was another depressingly perfect Hawaiian sunset. He saw some nurses out behind the quarters but decided he wanted to be alone this evening. He went to the channel seawall at the end of the street where the nurses’ quarters were located and set the brakes on the chair. There were more lights on in Pearl Harbor these days, reflecting the fact that the Allies were now bringing the war to the doorstep of the Japanese Home Islands. Streetlights were back on over on Ford Island, and the major base buildings were no longer blacked out. It was all very different from those dark days of early 1942 when he’d come through on Winston and everybody was searching the skies for round two and the beaches for signs of the expected invasion. He automatically looked for the Arizona, but now she lay invisible in the sparkling harbor waters, with only the top of one barbette and two lonely buoys marking her resting place.

  He’d received a letter today from Sally saying that she was wrangling a leave back here to Pearl and still working on a permanent transfer. He’d not been surprised how happy that news had made him. He missed her very much and was finally accepting the fact that they’d managed to fall in love. That didn’t dampen his determination to find out what had happened to Glory Lewis, but he knew he would have to tread carefully to make sure Sally didn’t misinterpret that determination. He’d already made inquiries at the Hickam air base, reviewing passenger manifests for her name. He’d actually gone downtown to HASP headquarters to talk to their detectives. It wasn’t that they didn’t care—they did. Absent any evidence of foul play or knowledge of anyone who might have wanted to hurt her or abduct her, they simply had nothing to go on. She was there one day, gone the next. Many of the possibilities Marsh had been checking were already documented in their records of the case.

  The lead detective was a local, as people born and raised on the island were called by the occupying military people. He was a giant Samoan who looked like Marsh’s idea of a Japanese sumo wrestler. They’d had to put two desks together for him to be able to put both arms on the top. He’d introduced himself as George Kamehaohno; he told Marsh to call him Kam.

  “Me, I’m thinkin’ she’s in the water,” he said, closing the record binder. The word “water” came out as “wadduh.” “People disappear like that here on the island, no jealous husband or boyfriend, no big money trouble? Usually the sea has ’em.”

  “But why no body?” Marsh asked and then remembered the obvious answer. Sharks. He didn’t even have to say it. He nodded, having answered his own question.

  “You gonna keep lookin’?” Kam asked.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Go talk to alla those women at the hospital, then. Women know things. Sometimes they know things they don’t know they know. And they’re all Navy people. Maybe don’t wanna talk to the HASP, see?”

  “Good idea,” Marsh said and went back to the base.

  * * *

  The problem wasn’t that the nurses had been unwilling to talk to the HASP. The real problem was that none of them assigned there now knew Glory all that well. Most of the first wave of nurses had been shipped out to the western Pacific. Even so, he took to wheeling himself along the channel seawall in the evening with a glass of Scotch planted in a makeshift cup holder taped to his wheelchair. There were usually nurses out there every evening enjoying the breeze and getting the smell of a day’s bloody work in the hospital out of their hair. They all looked so very young, even though he was perhaps not much more than twelve years their senior—in age. Most of them immediately retreated behind wide-eyed yes-sirs and no-sirs once they found out he was a commander. Whatever their experience in nursing, they were all ensigns, and full commanders were really important people. If they only knew, Marsh thought.

  They’d heard about Glory’s disappearance, and a very few knew about the pregnancy. None of them had any ideas on what might have happened, but the unspoken consensus was, surprisingly, that it had something to do with her having been an unwed mother. Marsh had to restrain himself from asking if they’d ever seen her wearing a scarlet letter on her uniform. He’d chat with them for a little while, enveloped in clouds of cigarette smoke, and then wheel himself down to the point to think about both Glory and Sally.

  One night a voice interrupted his reverie. “Boat ride? Boss wanna boat ride?”

  Marsh couldn’t find the source of the voice until a head popped up over the lip of the seawall. “Boat ride?” the man asked again, and then he saw the wheelchair. “Oh—oh, sorry, no can do, bro.”

  The man was a local, dressed in a faded Hawaiian shirt and khaki shorts. His boat looked like an overgrown sampan, complete with a badly rusted engine clamped to the transom.

  “Boat ride?” Marsh said. “Where to?”

  “Harbor side,” he said. “Very pretty. Go see lotsa stuff. Five dollah, or you gimme cigarettes.” Then he frowned, staring at the wheelchair again. “You can walk? Stand up to get in?”

  “Afraid not,” Marsh said. “Can’t swim so good, either. The Navy lets you do this?”

  He shrugged. “Navy fellas no care, long as we stay away from big kapu ship.”

  Kapu. That was the only Hawaiian word Marsh knew besides aloha. Americans would have said taboo. He had to be talking about the Arizona. Marsh asked him why that wreck was kapu.

  “Ghosts,” he said. “Lotsa gottem ghosts. You go too close, they get you, pull you down inside. You die then. Big kapu.”

  “That makes sense,” Marsh said, fully believing that the wreck would be haunted, what with over a thousand still inside her.

  “Well, I wish I could go with you,” he said, “but…” He pointed at his leg and a half and shrugged.


  “You got cigarette?” the boatman asked.

  Marsh had been carrying cigarettes to use as an icebreaker when he rolled up, since most of the nurses smoked. He gave one to the boatman and lit it for him. The man smelled faintly of fish and charcoal. He thanked Marsh and sat back down in his little boat. “I go get Navy nurse,” he said. “They like go boat ride. Lotsa Navy people go boat ride. See the lights?”

  Marsh looked out over the harbor, and in fact he could see the dim stern lights on some small boats.

  “The nurses are back over there,” Marsh said, pointing over his shoulder at the seawall area behind the quarters. “They’ve got cigarettes, too.”

  A question occurred to him as the little man began to push the boat away from the seawall. “You say lots of nurses go boat ride with you?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “We go ’em alla time. Alla Navy ladies wanna see da big kapu, but we no go dere. We go see da oddah one, backside Ford Island. Dey call it Oo-tah. No kapu dere. Not like Ah-zona. One Aiea guy, he go Ah-zona one night? Said crazy haole woman make him go. Plenty ghost come for him, but he get away. Next day, da guy? He break both da legs. Ah-zona big kapu. Bad kapu.”

  He waved and backed the boat around the corner of the seawall and went down to see if he could scare up some able-bodied passengers. Marsh finished his Scotch and started back to the BOQ. Halfway there, he stopped.

  Crazy haole woman made him go? To the Arizona?

  He wheeled the chair around to go see if he could find the boatman, but it was now full dark. He wanted the name of “da guy” who took a crazy white woman out to the Arizona. He didn’t want to think about what might have happened out there, but a little voice in his head told him he’d maybe solved the mystery. Especially when the boatman had called the woman crazy.