Sweet Reason (9781590209011) Read online

  The skipper’s anger had just about worn off when Wallowitch did it again. The Ebersole had raced up to Iskenderun from Rhodes when an Italian-built Panamanian-licensed, British-insured, German-owned, American-leased tanker full of jet fuel for the U.S. Air Force base at Adana, Turkey, caught fire. The Greek-Spanish-Turkish crew had long since abandoned the burning ship when the Ebersole arrived on the scene. It was late at night and the flames from the tanker provided a beacon to Iskenderun that could be seen for thirty nautical miles.

  Soon after the Ebersole anchored in the bay the Captain assembled the officers in the wardroom to discuss the situation. Lieutenant j.g. Moore, the engineering officer, back from a longboat tour around the burning tanker, reported that the decks were red-hot in places and that she might blow up at any moment.

  Jones shivered in a spasm of indecisiveness. Chewing away at the inside of his cheek, he pored over the text of the message ordering the Ebersole to the scene, explicating it like a poem, poking in and under and around the words for some nuance that would let him know whether his superiors in Washington actually expected him to put the Ebersole alongside and fight the blaze or stand off a few miles and report on its progress. (As was usual in cases like this, the orders had been carefully worded so that the admirals could claim they meant either one.) The Captain even polled the officers, something he had never done before. Only Ensign de Bovenkamp voted for going alongside. Everyone else (except the XO, who seemed to be voting “yes” and “no” at the same time, and Lustig, who was noncommittal) came out against doing anything rash.

  “But what about this phrase ‘will render all possible assistance,’ ” the Captain said. In agony he read the message again, and then again; sometimes the emphasis seemed to fall on “all,” sometimes on “possible.” Finally he slapped his palm down on the back of his other hand as if he were tossing an invisible coin and said: “Well, hell, what’ve we got to lose, eh?”

  The decision stunned everyone except de Bovenkamp, who jumped up from the wardroom huddle with a “hot damn,” and Wallowitch, who piped up with his remark heard ’round the ship.

  “Thank God,” he mumbled, “I have but one life to give for my captain’s career!”

  Jones’s eyebrows shot up. “I heard that, Mister Wallowitch,” he shouted, wagging his finger at the Shrink. “I heard that and I won’t forget it either.”

  Wallowitch Puts a Shot Across the Skunk’s Bow

  “This is not my idea of a joke,” Captain Jones yelled after Wallowitch as he made his way, sword clanking against stanchions and bulkheads, to his main director battle station. There, his hairy legs and sword dangling from the tractor seat, Wallowitch put his eye to the director optics. Squinting into the hazy, predawn dimness, the Shrink reported that he could make out the target fairly clearly.

  “Looks like a junk to me, Larry,” he told Lustig over the sound-powered headset.

  “Wallowitch says it looks like a junk, Captain,” Lustig told Jones on the open bridge.

  “It’s kind of long for a junk,” said the Captain, peering intently at the skunk through binoculars. “And you don’t see any sails, do you? I think it might be … I bet the sonovabitch is a Commie patrol boat. What do you think, XO?”

  “Sonovabitch looks like a patrol boat to me, Captain. I think we’re in for a piece of the action, that’s what I think.”

  “Damn if you’re not right,” agreed the skipper, biting his cuticles. “She’s probably moving slow like that so we’ll think she’s some sort of junk or something. But she doesn’t fool me for an instant. Mister Lustig, put a shot across her bow, eh? If she heaves to it’ll be a junk and we’ll inspect her for contraband; if she turns tail and runs for it that’ll mean she’s a patrol boat and we’ll blow her out of the water.”

  “Good thinking, Captain,” said the XO.

  “Hey, Shrink, the Captain thinks it may be a patrol boat. He wants you to put a shot across its bow.”

  “One shot across the bow coming up,” said Wallowitch. He drew his sword and pointed it at the target as if he were about to charge.

  “Mount Fifty-one, stand by on the port barrel, I repeat, on the port barrel,” ordered Lustig.

  “Mount Fifty-one starboard barrel loaded and ready,” reported McTigue over the sound-powered phone system.

  “I SAID PORT BARREL, CHIEF.”

  “Jesus shit, Mister Lustig, the port hoist is making grinding noises, so I switched to the starboard. It don’t make no difference, does it?”

  Lustig shrugged.

  A voice came up the voice tube: “Bridge, this is Combat, target tracks dead in the water.”

  “Hey, Larry,” Wallowitch called, “I just thought of something — I don’t know how to put a shot across somebody’s bow. They don’t teach that kind of thing at gunnery school any more.”

  “Listen, Shrink, it’s a snap,” Lustig said. “The target is dead in the water, see. So all you have to do is take a range and bearing to her bow, crank in a small lead angle and shoot, got it?”

  “You mean the shot should go in front of her bow, not actually over it?” Wallowitch asked.

  “Yeah, right, in front of the bow,” Lustig said.

  “Then how come they always tell you to put a shot across her bow?”

  “Come on, Shrink, it’s only a figure of speech. Just do it, will you, before the skipper blows a gasket.”

  “Can I shoot now?” Wallowitch asked.

  “You can shoot anytime you want to,” Lustig said.

  Wallowitch put his sword down, double-checked the range and bearing to the target’s bow, cranked in a small lead angle and picked up the remote control trigger.

  On the open bridge the voice from Combat floated up the voice tube. “Bridge, it’s me again. Belay that last, huh. Someone forgot to plug in the DR bug. The target appears to be moving at, oh, say eight knots.”

  “Eight — Jesus. Hey Shrink, hold off —”

  The starboard gun in Mount 51 fired and recoiled. The brass powder case, hot enough to singe the skin off a man’s hand, kicked out onto the deck and rolled against the railing. Looking like an ad for cigarettes, a perfect sphere of orange smoke emerged from the tip of the barrel. Three thousand yards away the target sailed into the round of VT frag, flared up as if someone had ignited a book of matches and disintegrated.

  The time was exactly 0713.

  For the space of a long breath there was no sound on the Ebersole except the bow wave lapping softly against the sides of the hull. Then, as if a punch line had clicked in his brain, the Executive Officer burst into long rolls of cackling laughter. And Tevepaugh poked his head out of the pilot house to ask Lustig: “D’you think we can say we seen action now?”

  Lustig Strikes It Rich

  “That was fine shooting, my boy,” Jones said, pounding Wallowitch on the back of his tennis sweater when he emerged from the main director hatch. “Fine shooting. Think I’ll have all my officers wear sidearms to GQ from now on, eh? Creates the right kind of atmosphere, isn’t that so, XO?”

  “Good going, Wally,” the XO said, reaching down and pumping the Shrink’s hand.

  “Just call me ‘One Shot,’ ” Wallowitch said shakily.

  As the sun edged over the horizon the Ebersole took a turn around the area looking for survivors. The only thing it found was some chunks of splintered wood, a cork life jacket wrapped around an armless, headless, legless torso, and an empty cardboard box marked “U.S. Government Issue Prophylactics.”

  Jones dispatched an “action report” to Vice Admiral Haydens, the commander of the task force of which DD722 was a part, announcing that the Ebersole had been attacked by an enemy patrol boat, which was sunk in the subsequent exchange of gunfire. By breakfast time a sailor who had been a tattoo artist in civilian life was putting the notch in the pistol grip — painting the silhouette of a sinking patrol boat on the side of Mount 51. And Jones was hunched over a portable typewriter recommending himself for the silver star, the nation’s third highest
military decoration. (In the war zone the medal was handed out on a quota basis; shortly after the Ebersole arrived on Yankee Station it received a routine dispatch from Admiral Haydens soliciting recommendations from the destroyer force. Haydens was bucking to become Chief of Naval Operations and he was only too happy to give out the medals, since that made him look good.) The final version, which the XO and Lustig signed and submitted later that day, contained such phrases as “setting a resolute example of gallantry” and “conspicuous disregard for his personal safety.”

  Lustig carried the recommendation to the radio shack for transmission to the aircraft carrier. As he left Ohm buttonholed him in the passageway.

  “Congratulations,” he said, handing Lustig fifty-five one-dollar bills. “Lucky thirteen won the pool.”

  Angry Pettis Spots a White Radish in the Water

  Moments before the bo’s’n’s mate piped lunch, while the ship’s yeoman was running off a special edition of the Ebersole Eagle with the text of Admiral Haydens’ congratulatory telegram in it, Angry Pettis spotted a huge white radish floating past the ship.

  “Hey Mista Moore,” he yelled to the Officer of the Deck, “lookee here — there’s a white radish in the water. Let’s pick it up and put it on the menu.”

  It wasn’t a radish but a dead body floating face down, bloated and chalk white from being in the water.

  “Put the longboat in and see if it’s Oriental or Caucasian,” Jones ordered when Moore called down with word of what they had found. “If it’s Oriental, log it and leave it; if it’s Caucasian, retrieve it.”

  “Longboat away,” Ohm growled into the public address system. Wallowitch, who was the longboat officer, took his place in the bow and directed the helmsman toward the body.

  “We’ll have to turn it face up,” Wallowitch said when they got there. “Pass me the boat hook.”

  The Shrink reached down with the boat hook and tried to flip the body over, but the dull brass point of the hook punctured the carcass and tore it open like soggy tissue paper. Wallowitch turned his head away and vomited. The sailors in the longboat finally managed to wedge the body against the side and turn it over, but they couldn’t tell if it was Caucasian or Oriental because it had no face.

  Stumbling back on board the Ebersole, Wallowitch was shivering and shaken. “I didn’t mean to hurt it,” he said softly. “I swear to God I didn’t mean to hurt it.” And he vomited again and again and again until there was nothing left inside him to throw up.

  The Shrink’s well of humor had run dry.

  The Captain Convenes a War Council

  “We all hate violence, me as much as any man in this wardroom,” Captain Jones began. Gripping the back of the chair at the head of the table with his thick fingers, rocking rhythmically on the balls of his spit-shined Adlers, the commanding officer of the Ebersole warmed to his subject. He was a good public speaker, casual and forceful at the same time, careful to let his normally monotone voice roam back and forth across half an octave, generous in his use of pauses.

  “Reread your history books, gentlemen,” Captain Jones went on, nodding his head and raising an eyebrow to indicate he was making an important point. “Irregardless of what these effete journalists would have us believe, the essence of the American tradition is a healthy distaste for violence. But somewhere along the way somebody has got to stand fast, somebody has got to draw a line in the dust with his big toe and say: ‘This far but no further.’ ”

  Jones sucked in his stomach, which had a tendency to spill over his web belt. “Well, gentlemen, we’re at that line, that frontier of freedom” — he nodded his head again; another important point! — “right out here on this Godforsaken stretch of ocean. And they’ve stepped over the line. Ergo, they’ve got to deal with the fightingest man-o’-war in the U.S. Navy, the Eugene F. Ebersole, eh?”

  The war council (as the skipper liked to call it) had been convened in the forward wardroom immediately after lunch. Only Wallowitch, who had retreated to his bunk after the business with the body in the water, and Moore, who had the bridge watch, were absent. The rest of the officers, self-conscious about the .45 caliber pistols dangling at their waists, had filed in, quipping but curious.

  “Is the artillery going to be uniform of the day from here on out?” asked Ralph Richardson, the Harvard Business School graduate putting in two years as supply officer.

  “The artillery, as you call it, is required for war councils and the bridge watch during general quarters,” the Captain had explained. “I want to create a reasonably warlike atmosphere on this ship.”

  Not knowing quite where to tuck the guns as they sat, the officers had taken their places around the long, felt-covered table. To emphasize the seriousness of the occasion, Angry Pettis had been posted outside the door armed with a loaded M–1 rifle.

  “Ain’t no motherfucker, black or white, goes in till the Captain he comes out,” he told True Love, the wardroom’s junior steward, an incredibly dumb but immensely innocent black whose real name was Truman Love.

  Inside the wardroom the civilian luxuries — an eighteen-inch color television, a plastic philodendron, a tape deck — had all been stored away. The décor had been stripped down to what the Captain considered the bare essentials: the gold basketball de Bovenkamp had picked up from Commander Destroyers Atlantic; a photograph of the late and posthumously decorated Lieutenant Commander Eugene F. Ebersole, the chubby skipper of an American submarine sunk, under heroic circumstances, by Japanese depth charges during World War Two; the annual Christmas card from Ebersole’s widow (long since remarried) Scotch-taped to the bulkhead; a framed, embossed edition of John Paul Jones’s code of conduct for naval officers; a model of the Eugene Ebersole in a bottle.

  “I want to commend you,” the Captain was saying, “on the good start we made this morning. Especially Mister Wallowitch, who unfortunately has taken ill.” The Captain cleared his throat. “That was heads-up shooting, I can tell you. And I’m not the only one who thinks so. As we say in the navy, now hear this.”

  Jones took a pasted-up message from his pocket and read it. “ ‘Well done, Ebersole. Your performance in the face of the enemy this ayem was in the finest traditions of the naval service. Happy to have a can-do tin can like the Ebersole aboard on Yankee Station. Endit.’ And it’s signed: ‘Rear Admiral Winthrop G. Hayden.’ ”

  The Poet and Richardson exchanged glances. The Chaplain and Lustig kept their eyes glued to the table. The junior officers around the wardroom table stared back at the Captain in embarrassed silence. Only the Executive Officer (who was beginning to catch the cues) and Ensign de Bovenkamp (an ex-college basketball star who instinctively responded to the pep-talk atmosphere) reacted the way the Captain expected his officers to react — modestly pleased at the praise, proud to be a member of the Ebersole team, smilingly anxious to get back into the thick of things.

  Captain Jones looked around the room uncertainly. “I’ve no doubt some of you are uneasy” — again he cleared his throat — “uneasy because Oriental human beings were killed in this morning’s action.” The Captain pulled out his chair and sat down. He started to speak in what he thought was a fatherly tone — low-pitched, confidential — to indicate that he could understand weaknesses and forgive them. “I respect that. I respect the fact that you feel this way. It’s what I was talking about before — about how we all hate violence. But let’s face it, gentlemen, trite as it sounds, war is, eh, hell.” Jones said this slowly as if it were a quotable phrase. “Isn’t that right, Mister Lustig?”

  Lustig’s eyes were fixed on the Captain, but his mind was wandering. “Could you repeat the question, sir?”

  “I asked you, ‘Isn’t war hell?’ ” Jones was clearly annoyed.

  “Yes sir, it definitely is,” Lustig responded gamely. “Anybody who’s ever been in one knows that much.”

  (“War isn’t hell, at least not for us it isn’t, Skipper,” Lustig heard himself say when he went over the scene later that day.
“If war isn’t hell, then what the hell is it?” bullied the Captain, furious at being crossed in public. To which Lustig replied with supreme confidence: “War isn’t hell — it’s a career opportunity.”)

  “Most of you young men in this wardroom,” the Captain was saying, “most of the men on this ship are too young to know much about World War Two, or even the Korean War. I didn’t hate the Japs. I didn’t hate the North Koreans. I don’t hate the Slopes or the Chinks, or even the Ruskies for that matter. But I fight the enemies of my country.”

  “In other words, my country right or wrong,” interrupted the Poet, trying hard to keep the irony out of his voice.

  “That’s it!” exclaimed the XO, nodding vigorously. “That’s it exactly. Corny as it sounds, that’s the heart of the matter, isn’t it, Captain? My country, right or wrong.”

  “Somebody has to be my country right or wrong,” the skipper said. He wasn’t quite certain whose side the Poet was on.

  A Word from Sweet Reason

  Jones paused to collect his thoughts. “About these leaflets,” he said finally. Every officer around the table leaned forward.

  Using both palms the Captain flattened the paper (which had been rolled up in his napkin ring and served with breakfast by True Love that morning) on the table. Every time he took his palm off the leaflet it snapped back like a window shade. He weighted the ends with a salt and pepper shaker, a sugar bowl and a “Swift and Sure” ashtray.

  Four copies of the leaflet had turned up so far. Besides the one served up to the Captain at breakfast, a second had been found tacked to the mess deck bulletin board, a third was discovered taped to the wardroom photograph of Eugene F. Ebersole (“Sacrilege,” fumed the XO as he ripped it off) and a fourth was located (by then the hunt was on) taped to the pay telephone in the midship’s passageway.