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 sunburns 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.
“The skipper of the Evans,” she said. “Kinda iffy right now. Double amp, some second-degree sunburn, still somewhat shocky. They’ve had him back to surgery and recovery twice, but now I think they’re gonna just wait and see.”
“Wow,” Sally said. “I wish I could talk to him, ask him about my guy.”
“Not tonight, Josephine,” the nurse said. “Maybe tomorrow, if he’s still with us. Ooops, there goes a bottle.”
They went back to work.
The next morning she came on at the regular time, 0700, after an uncomfortable and depressing night. She’d seen some surgeons going into Evans’s skipper’s room just before she checked out for the evening. That doesn’t look good, she’d thought. Damn. She’d cried herself to sleep for the first time in the war.
The next day’s duty roster had her assigned back to her regular ward, where she spent the morning assisting rounds, bringing charts up to date, and dealing with one young Marine who’d decided to get back up to the front line with his buddies, the major problem being that he did not have legs anymore. Three orderlies and a dose of tranquilizer solved the problem. It was hard to be gentle while doing forcible restraint. The rest of the day passed in a sorrowful haze.
The following day there was a buzz in the canteen line at breakfast. An admiral had landed the night before with some staff officers from Admiral Nimitz’s headquarters. Supposedly they were going to conduct some kind of inquiry into the Evans sinking and the battle surrounding it. They rarely saw admirals at the naval hospital, although there were also rumors that Nimitz himself was going to move his headquarters to Guam sometime early next year. The orderlies in front of her were scanning the plan of the day, a mimeographed paper put out by admin each day, laying out the day’s scheduled events.
“Can I see that when you’re done?” she asked.
They handed it back to her and waited for the line to shuffle forward. Apparently the cooks had temporarily run out of scrambled eggs.
Sally scanned the front page and then turned it over. On the back was a list of the recent admissions by name, rank, and assigned command. Toward the end of the list she saw the name Vincent, M., LCDR, USS Evans, and an asterisk, indicating a commanding officer.
“Oh, thank God!” she blurted, startling the two men in front of her. She handed one of them her tray and ran upstairs.
As she hurried down the ward aisle she saw that the door to the private room was closed. She stopped short. At this time of day, that usually meant the patient inside had died and staff was waiting for the morgue to come get the remains. Then to her vast relief the door opened and two doctors stepped out, conferring over their notes. One of them saw Sally, standing there with a hand to her mouth.
“Yes, Nurse?” he asked.
“Is he—”
“I think he’s gonna make it now,” the doctor said. Sally recognized him as one of the senior internists.
“Can I speak to him?” she asked.
“Keep it short, Sally,” the other doc said. “He’s pretty weak. You know this guy?”
She nodded, not trusting her voice anymore.
They said okay, stuffed their notes into the chart box on the door, and left. She went in.
She hardly recognized him. His face was in the peeling stage of a serious sunburn. His head had been shaved to allow his scalp to be stitched up, and his lips looked like a miniature red and black picket fence from all the cracking. The stump of his right arm was suspended in a tri-wire, and his right lower leg, or what was left of it, was elevated on some pillows. For some reason, both of his eyes were black and blue, but they were open. His left hand rested on his chest. His big academy ring was missing.
“Well, aren’t you a regular beauty,” she said.
He tried to smile, but all the cracks in his lips immediately bled. She pulled up a metal chair and sat down next to the bed. She took some tissues out of a box and dabbed his lips as gently as she could.
“I’d have been here sooner, but they told me the XO didn’t make it,” she said, no longer trying to hold back tears of relief.
He nodded but didn’t say anything. She reached across his chest and took his left hand. His chest felt bony underneath her wrist, all his ribs tangible, and his remaining hand had the strength of a damp rag.
“I am so glad to see you here,” she said. “I was—” Then she stopped.
He’d gone back to sleep. She slipped a finger under his wrist and felt the pulse. Thready, weak, but there. His breathing was okay, but just barely. She examined the stump of his right arm, made sure his eyes were still closed, and then leaned forward to take a sniff. It smelled of bandages, iodine, sulfa powder, but not of gangrene. His right leg had gone septic and had been amputated just below the knee. That dressing looked all right, too. She began to take away her right hand, but his fingers pressed against hers.
She left her hand right there and began to rub his forehead as gently as she could. She saw tears at the corner of his eyes, and, strangely, this made everything all right. She cried with him, soundlessly, not wanting to upset him.
When she came out a half hour later, she closed the door and then hung a MEDICAL STAFF ONLY sign on the door handle. At the other end of the ward she saw a small group of khaki-clad officers sitting next to one of the beds. She went down there to see what they were doing. The nurse in charge of the ward intercepted her.
“That’s an admiral,” she said breathlessly. “Stars and everything. The other three are all captains.”
“Wow,” Sally said. “That’s a lot of brass for this place. What’s going on?”
“Some kind of big-deal investigation. They want to talk to everybody as soon as they can. Especially the captain.”
“That’ll be a while,” Sally said. “Maybe a coupla days. He’s pretty beat up.”
“I’ll tell them that. I’d heard you lost someone on the Evans?”
“Found him,” Sally said, beaming, wiping fresh tears from her eyes. The other nurse squeezed her hand.
Over the next few days some facts of the battle began to leak out within the hospital gossip networks. The presence of the high-level team from Pearl, of course, had everyone talking. Sally thought that the rumors were pretty wild, considering that they were talking about a lone destroyer, but one of the doctors said they had other people in the hospital who’d been there on one of the escort carriers and were corroborating the rumors. The story was that they’d been attacked by Japanese battleships, that the Japs had been driven off by three or four destroyers. Everything Sally knew about actual naval warfare she’d learned at the O-club, but that didn’t seem plausible. She’d seen some American battleships in Pearl, the new ones, not the sunken ones, and they looked like they’d just run smack over any destroyer that was pestering them.
She saw Marsh at least three times a day when she could sneak away from her regular duties, which she increasingly managed with the covert cooperation of the other nurses. He was making steady but slow progress, but she still had to dab his lips with an anesthetic ointment before he could speak coherently. She did not ask about the battle, but on the third day she did tell him about the delegation from Pearl.
“Have some questions for them, too,” he said.
She blinked in surprise. “You do?”
“Like why they didn’t come looking for us. The guys saw Catalinas picking up aviators, but no one came for us.”
“My God, are you serious?”
“How many here now from Evans?”
“I think ninety-some.”
“Had more than that get off the ship,” he said.
“But where—”
“Sharks got the rest. We got to watch.”
She gasped. How could the Navy not have been looking for them?
“We’ve been putting them off,” she said, “but they really want to talk to you.”
He nodded. “I’m ready,” he whispered. “Just keep that goop handy.”
They came into his room, the three of them — a two-star aviator and two captains. Each of them was carrying a metal chair. They must have gotten used to looking at the blasted human wreckage from the battle off Samar, because none of them flinched when they saw his face. Even Sally, a wartime nurse, had flinched. Hell, he had flinched when Sally brought him a shaving mirror. He felt like he should be sporting a bell and a candle to warn people off. Between the stubble, the red sutures, raccoon eyes, and the peeling skin, he looked like a candidate for the leper colony at Molokai.
The admiral introduced himself as Bill Devereaux, deputy chief of staff for operations at the Pacific Fleet headquarters. Marsh thought he looked too young to be an admiral, but he guessed being an aviator accounted for that. The two captains were probably five years older than the admiral was. They looked like seamen.
“Captain, I’m honored to meet you,” Devereaux said.
“Why?” Marsh croaked, which took Devereaux aback for a moment.
“Well,” he said, “you and your crew drove off the Jap battle fleet at Leyte. They had the destruction of MacArthur’s whole invasion fleet in their grasp, and yet they turned around and ran.”
“We had lots of help,” Marsh said. “Planes from the jeeps. The other tin cans. Hornets’ nest around each Jap.”
“Yes, we’re finding that out,” Devereaux said. “Let me explain why we’re here and what we need from you. First let me emphasize that you talk only as long as you’re able. We’ll quit whenever you say so. Okay?”
“Yes, sir,” Marsh said. His mouth was hurting already.
The admiral explained that they had the preliminary operational reports from the task force and task group commanders and from the COs of the Taffy Three light carriers who had survived the attack. All three of Taffy Three’s destroyers who’d gone out to attack the battleships had been lost, and only one other CO had survived. Navigation, engineering, and damage control logs and records had, of course, all gone down with the ships, so for right now, the Navy was dependent upon individual testimony from survivors to reconstruct what had happened. He acknowledged that a lot of the information would be unreliable — sailors always exaggerated, and the stories got bigger the more often they told them. The horrors men had witnessed were in many cases erased in their minds by the brain’s survival mechanism.
“So the idea is to move quickly, take everything said as the gospel truth, and then go back to Pearl and try to put it together.”
“How did it happen?” Marsh asked.
“How did what happen?”
“Jap battleships in the amphibious objective area? And none of ours?”
“That’s the supreme question, Captain,” Devereaux said with a wry smile, “but that is handsomely above your pay grade and mine. For what it’s worth, that question is a matter of intense discussion between Admirals Nimitz and Halsey. I won’t be invited to those talks, and neither will you.”
He smiled again to make sure Marsh knew that he wasn’t admonishing him. Marsh liked the guy, actually. No stuffiness or superior airs. Sally sat on the other side of the bed, periodically dabbing the ointment on his lips with a cotton stick so he could keep talking.
“What we need to know from you, and others, is how the small forces there managed to drive off three, maybe four battleships, not to mention all those cruisers. So to start with, why don’t you tell me what happened from the very beginning, when the first reports came in that there were Jap battleships approaching Leyte Gulf.”
So he did. It took the next three days, with morning and afternoon sessions each day. Marsh was good for about an hour before his energy would run out. The first day he actually went to sleep on them in the middle of a sentence. They were patient, polite, and very thorough. He had been afraid that talking about it would bring back all the bad dreams he’d been having since being picked up, but the reverse was true. It was cathartic, even though at the time he didn’t know that word. He wept a couple of times, such as when he described his last sight of the rabbi, kneeling on the port side in waist-high water, burned blind and bleeding from both eyes, holding a dying sailor’s head above the water as long as he could. Marsh could not judge their reaction at moments like that, because he was no longer with them in that room when those memories surfaced. There were some long silences, which they respected.
One of the captains was particularly interested in his decision to turn around and go back in after the first torpedo attack. “Why didn’t y’all just git while the gittin’ was good?” he asked. He was a Southerner.
“Still had torpedoes and targets,” Marsh said.
He nodded and wrote something down in his notebook. “And why did you lay Evans alongside the Yamato?”
“Is that what she’s called? I’d never seen anything like her.”
“No one had until Halsey sank her sister ship, the Musashi, in the Sibuyan Sea.”
“Big bastard. Actually, big doesn’t describe it. But I put Evans alongside because there were two, maybe three heavy cruisers and a Kongo class shooting at us. I figured if we closed in on the big guy, they’d have to stop firing, and they did.”
“How long were you alongside?”
“A year?”
They smiled at that. Sally smiled, too, probably because Marsh was starting to show some signs of life.
“We were hurt pretty bad by then, so we could only stay in her lee while she was making a wide turn. As soon as she steadied up, she drew ahead, and then we were back in hot water, with one cruiser in particular. He’d set up to enfilade us with his eight-inch. One of the bombers from the jeeps saved us.”
“Yes, I wanted to ask directly about that,” Admiral Devereaux said. “We’ve been told by one of your chiefs that a Dauntless purposefully dived into a cruiser and blew her up.”
“Certainly what it looked like,” Marsh said. “He was smoking pretty bad, and I’m guessing the pilot was already wounded, because he was doing everything too slow.”
“Deliberate or just how it came out due to his damage?”
“Deliberate, I think. One moment he was climbing out of the AA fire, the next he rolled over like they do when they’re going to dive on something and then flew straight into that cruiser’s side. Huge explosion.”
“Could you see a bomb?”
“No, sir. None of them flying around us had bombs, or if they did, they were little-bitties. Most of them were strafing the bridge levels. Some of them couldn’t even do that, so they made fake torpedo runs, which made the Japs turn and evade.”
“Why do you think the cruiser exploded, then?” one of the captains asked.
“Couldn’t tell you, sir, but she surely did. I could see the masts tipping into each other after the blast. Had to have broken her back.”
“And you say Evans got two torpedo hits on the Yamato?”
“Such as they were, Admiral. One fish porpoised, hit the side. It did go off, but it mostly scratched the paint. The other one hit farther aft, went off high order, but didn’t seem to faze him.”
“Gentlemen,” Sally said, pointing at her watch.
“Right, of course,” the admiral said. “Thank you very much. We’ll probably be back.”
“One question for you, Admiral, when you do come back.”
“Yes?”
“Why did we have to spend three days and two nights drifting at sea before they came looking for us?”
The admiral gave Marsh a stern look, suddenly less nice guy and more admiral. Then his face softened, and he nodded. “Fair enough,” he said. “I don’t actually have the answer to that question now, Captain, but I will. Will you entertain my best guess?”
“Certainly, sir.”
“My best guess is that Admiral Sprague saw all of you disappear into the smoke screens, headed for a force of battleships and heavy cruisers, and nobody returned. I think he simply assumed no one could have survived an engagement like that.”
“Assumed,” Marsh said.
“Yes, exactly,” he said. He paused for a moment. “Assumptions in wartime,” he said. “They’ll bite you in the ass every time.”
“Every time, Admiral. I lost a lot of men out there, and the ones who did make it want to know why nobody came.”
“I understand, Captain. For starters, you can tell them the fault was all ours.”
It was a gracious reply to a question the admiral did not have to answer. Marsh had one further question.
“You’ve been calling me Captain,” he said. “I was only acting commanding officer. The real captain was killed in an accident. I—”
“Were you in command when you put your ship alongside an enemy battleship?”
Marsh took a deep breath. “Yes, sir, I guess I was.”
“Then you were the captain. Besides, there’s another reason we’re calling you Captain.”
Marsh waited.
“Someone has to be responsible for the loss of the Evans. Captain.”
“Right,” Marsh said. “Of course.”
Then Deveraux grinned. “I’m kidding. Mostly. Get well. We’ll talk some more.”
On that happy note, they left.
Marsh was exhausted. Talking was physical torture. His cracked lips stung. His missing limbs also hurt. Not the stumps but the limbs themselves. He couldn’t understand that. It hurt to breathe, and he wondered if he’d lost a lung or something. After this long session, he asked Sally for some morphine.
“Let me see what I can do,” she said. He later learned that what she brought him was a Coke laced with some codeine. “Drink this,” she said, “while they rustle up some morphine for you.”
Ten minutes later he was long gone.
The admiral and his team went on to pick on someone else. Marsh spent the next few days sweating through the hours between pain medications. The docs told him that this was a good sign, that the tissues were trying to heal. He told them to bring the tissues some morphine, they apparently had developed a taste for it in the life raft.
At night he dreamed that he could hear the shrieks of men being hit by sharks in the darkness. He recalled the excitement when the Black Cat flew close overhead, the noise of its engines hurting his head, the hoarse cries of the guys in the rafts, followed by the smoky roar of the landing craft who had come way out to sea from the beaches of Leyte to pick them up, the Sixth Army boat crews throwing up when they saw some of the wounded. He could still hear the rattle of small-arms fire as they shot at the sharks that had become their constant companions. In his dreams they became Japs, doing what they did best, reveling in death and feasting on helpless sailors.
In the days following the interviews they fed him mush. Baby food, as Sally called it. For some reason all his teeth hurt. Hell, everything hurt, even his hair. Several times he went right out of his head as passing fevers took a bite. He didn’t know how Sally managed to be with him, but she did. Other nurses came and went, but each time the door opened he’d say, “Sally?” They finally got the idea, and then all of them conspired to let her care for him. At night sometimes he would lie there in a cold sweat, breathing in and breathing out, wondering if his heart was going to stop. Each night she would slip into the room and sit down next to him and rub his arms. Then and only then would he fall asleep.
As he submerged, he thought that it might not be such a bad thing if he did die. So many of his people had been lost because of him and his “glorious” decision to turn around and go back against those big black ships. The admiral and the captains had been “honored.” Marsh wished they could have met those of his people who were now no more than tattered phantoms in the dark deeps of the Philippine Sea. The feel of her hand on his arm in the darkness was a potent barrier against his personal despair, but it didn’t assuage his growing sense of guilt.
He was convinced he had killed them, every one. One night he told Sally why he’d really turned around and gone back into the fight. He told her that he was pretty ashamed of his secret reason for making that decision. He’d killed half his crew because of an insult.
“Nonsense,” she’d said. “The Japs killed them. You said it yourself: You had torpedoes left. You just did your duty. They sent you and those other ships out there to break up their attack, and it worked, didn’t it?”
His heart was not so sure.
When the doctors came in on morning rounds one day, there was a new face in the group. Dr. Stembridge, now Captain Stembridge, CO of the hospital. Marsh recognized him from the New Year’s party, when Glory had paraded herself in front of him with Beast. He remembered the shocked look on Stembridge’s face that night and thinking, I know just how you feel, pal.
“Good morning, Captain,” Stembridge said brightly. “Ready to get up and move around?”
“Absolutely not,” Marsh said.
“Super,” Stembridge replied, ignoring Marsh’s reply. “It’s time, you know. You’re going to get bedsores just vegetating like that. Need to get your muscles working again, get vertical, maybe even get some fresh air.”
Marsh looked at him as if he were nuts. His arm stump still leaked, and he hadn’t even been able to see what horrors were going on with his leg. He looked at his regular docs for moral support.
“We, ah, need the room,” one of them said quietly.
“Oh,” Marsh said. “That’s more like it. But how?”
As if on cue, one of the nurses rolled in a wheelchair. It took ten minutes to get him into it. Marsh didn’t help much by fainting in the middle of the evolution. Stembridge, however, was nothing if not determined, and when Marsh came to he found out that wheelchairs have both seat belts and chest straps. He felt like a jellyfish in that chair and was nauseous the moment the nurse started pushing him out of the room and into the ward. Then he heard voices.
“Hey,” someone called out. “It’s the skipper.”
The nurse slowed his procession between the rows of beds, and for the first time since coming into the hospital, Marsh started thinking about someone other than his piteous self. Still fighting nausea, he greeted the guys, trying not to stare at their bandages, eye patches, burns glistening with ointment, plastered fractures suspended in various slings of torture, or the uneven shapes of legs and arms hidden beneath blankets. They in turn were not so circumspect as they stared at his own amputations, and then some of them began to applaud his appearance.
As guilty as he had been feeling about them, they seemed glad to see him and almost eager to remember the pasting they’d given that Jap battlewagon and the way their guns had blown all the glass out of the giant’s bridge windows, or knocked his scout planes out of the hangar and into the fiery sea.
For the first time Marsh felt the gulf between captain and crew to be filled with something besides official decorum. In their young eyes, and with carefully filtered hindsight, they’d whupped the bastards, and Marsh had led them to it and through it. Marsh knew better, having been out of his head for the three days in the water. They weren’t having it — the captain was back. They were a crew again, albeit one without a ship anymore. Details.
That was when he finally realized that it was time to pull himself together and get back to work. He needed to know who’d made it and who had not. There were condolence letters to be written, medal citations and commendations to be crafted. He needed to reconstitute his chain of command, however slender it might turn out to be. He found himself grinning as he realized what he really needed: He needed an XO.
All of that occupied the next three weeks. The hospital people were extremely helpful, given the fact that every day more wounded were being flown in. Most of the Evans survivors were moved to satellite wards to make room for the never-ending river of broken bodies. Marsh saw less of Sally because she was main hospital staff and he was no longer physically there. She got over to their building as much as she could, but there were days when he didn’t see her at all, and he missed her smiling face. Wisely, he told her that every time he saw her.
Seeing Stembridge had surfaced memories of Glory, and one night he gathered up the courage to ask Sally what she’d heard from Pearl, carefully not mentioning Glory by name.
“Not a thing, actually,” she said, not fooled for a moment. “We exchanged some letters early on when I came out here, but then we sort of lost touch. You know how it is, new assignment here, one emergency after another. We all just put our heads down and hit the deck running. I haven’t even been able to keep up with my regular pen pals. You’re looking so much better these days.”
Marsh understood all that while at the same time wondering if she wasn’t being a tiny bit evasive, as if maybe she and Glory had had a spat before she left for Guam. He could still remember the expression on Sally’s face when Glory had stood up in all her drunken splendor. It had not been one of admiration. God only knew what expression had been on his face seeing Glory half naked, but for weeks afterward, he realized that his romantic image of Glory Hawthorne had been badly damaged that night.
Had Sally just changed the subject?
The next morning, he had a visitor: Chief Marty Gorman. He was virtually unscratched, looking healthier than anyone out in the wards. His Irish good luck charms were still working. He told Marsh that his raft had become separated from the rest of the cluster and that he’d been in transit from one ship to the next, trying to get back to Guam to rejoin the crew. It had been a struggle because he was not injured, and no one went to Guam unless he was hospital bound.
“You indulged in some serious sweet-talking, I’m guessing,” Marsh told him.
“I surely did, Cap’n,” he said. “A little bribery, the promise of unnatural acts to come, the occasional sideways step at muster. I’ve had experience, you’ll recall.”
“Haven’t we all, Marty,” Marsh said. “It’s been a long, wet road since that night in Winston.”
“Wet being the operative word there, Skipper. I’ve taken to introducing myself as Chief Jonah.”
“That’s my line,” Marsh said. “Except I’m waiting for the Court of Inquiry to decide on my punishment for losing yet another ship.”
Gorman laughed. “I’m hearing that admirals will be talking to other admirals about all that,” he said. “Us chickens just happened to be on the wrong ships at the wrong time.”
“What else you hearing?”
“That there’s a commander wandering the halls here, looking for his crew.”
“Benson? He’s here? He kept coming?”
“I am told that command of a destroyer being the Holy Grail for you officers, he did indeed keep coming, and now is ready to meet you.”
Marsh felt a pang of disappointment. Of course he was. He had a future to attend to. Marsh did not. The chief saw his face.
“He looks like a good guy,” he said. “Not a screamer like that Hughes fella, God rest his soul. May I bring him in, Captain?”
Marsh nodded wordlessly. He’d forgotten all about the new, real replacement for Commander Hughes.
Gorman brought in Commander L. J. Benson, prospective commanding officer of USS Evans, or former prospective commanding officer of the former USS Evans. Marsh offered his functioning left hand to Benson’s proffered right hand, and they both grinned at the awkwardness. He was tall, over six feet, and extremely thin, unlike many of the staffies Marsh had seen around Pearl. He had blond, graying hair, piercing blue eyes, and a genuine smile. Marsh sensed that Chief Gorman was right: The crew would like this guy. He already did.
Chief Gorman excused himself. “Still learning how to do all this,” Marsh said. “Sorry about losing your ship, Commander.”
“It’s Larry, and if half the stories I’ve been hearing about that are true, I’m honored to meet you. You getting fixed up?”
“They’re talking prostheses, but for that I have to go back to Pearl. Don’t know when or how that’s all going to work. I’m surprised they didn’t turn you around.”
“Me, too,” Benson said, dropping into a metal chair that was too small for his lanky frame, “but then I got new orders. In Bureau-speak, I’m supposed to take inventory of the surviving crew members, separate the long-term disability cases from the guys who can come back to duty, and then take them back to Boston as the nucleus crew for the new USS Evans. There’s a fresh-caught lieutenant commander already back at the shipyard standing up the rest of the precom crew.”
Marsh nodded. He’d been expecting something like this. “They broke up the crew in Winston when she went down,” he said. “I wasn’t sure what they’d do with my guys. Your guys, I guess.”
“The theory is if they can salt the greenies with some veterans, the postconstruction workup goes twice as fast, and the ship gets into service that much sooner. I’m going to need your input on this little project. Who the experienced guys are, who if anyone should not be part of a precommissioning crew, like that.”
Marsh realized that Benson was already speaking like a commanding officer. “A lot of the experienced guys went to Davy Jones,” he said.
“I understand,” Benson replied. “That must be painful for you.”
Marsh sighed. “There are times I’m sick at heart for what happened. Then I get out in the ward with the crew, and they make it better. Don’t need an XO, do you?”
He smiled. “I wish I could,” he said, “but your Navy career is over. You know that, don’t you?”
“I hadn’t considered it that way,” Marsh said, a little surprised by Benson’s bluntness. “Avoiding the obvious, I guess. One leg, one arm. One claw, one peg leg pretty soon. I guess that would scare the shit out of a bunch of boot recruits.”
Benson laughed. “Yes, I think it would. On the other hand, no one would screw around with the XO, would they?”
“Everybody who survived and who isn’t still hard-down is out in this ward,” Marsh said. “Let’s go meet them, tell ’em what’s going on, and then we can get started.” He paused. “They’re all going to want to go, you know.”
“I was hoping they would,” Benson said.
He helped Marsh climb into his chariot and then wheeled him out into the ward. Their joint appearance got everyone’s attention, and Marsh gave them the skinny. He could see them sizing up the new guy, who was sizing them up right back. When he’d finished, Marsh nodded at Commander Benson to see if he had anything to say. He did.
“Gents,” he said, “the Japs killed the Evans, but there’s a brand-new one almost finished up in Beantown, and I’m going to be the captain. I’m hoping to take many of you back there with me. I need experienced hands who can teach all the boots what to do and how to act, me included. You’ve been through things I’ve only read about, but I’ll do my best to keep you safe while we go out there and kill more Japs. How’s that sound?”
There was a quiet but sincere rumble of approval from the guys. His guys now, Marsh reminded himself. Then Commander Benson turned around, put on his gold-braided cap, drew himself to attention, and saluted Marsh in his wheelchair.
“Captain Vincent, I’m ready to relieve you, sir.”
Marsh was stunned. It was truly a class act. He tried to stand, but he couldn’t. He tried to return Benson’s salute, but as he raised his stump he realized he couldn’t do that, either. Ordinarily the departing CO would make a short speech to thank his crew for their service. Marsh could not find the words for a speech, so he just looked around at all his people, mouthed the words “thank you” several times, and then spoke aloud the words expected of him to Commander Benson: “I stand relieved, sir.”
All he could do then was sit in his chair and try to keep the tears back. The crew clapping and cheering like a bunch of high schoolers from their beds didn’t help.
The moment Sally saw the Guam-to-Pearl med flight patient manifest with Marsh’s name on it, she knew she’d have to sit down and finally tell him about Glory’s pregnancy. She had ducked his oblique questions about Glory, how she was doing, do you ever hear from her, should I write her a letter, and she was pretty sure Marsh had picked up on her evasions. Almost like an old married couple, she thought wistfully.
They’d become so much closer through their letters, which had been necessarily cryptic about operational matters as the censors demanded. Technically neither of them could talk about what they were doing or where Marsh was, so the only subjects left were personal — feelings, likes, dislikes, plans for the future. Now that they were here, together, those spidery lines on crinkly airmail paper were coming to life. Sally had been much freer with such sentiments than Marsh, but over time she’d gotten him to open up, with the result being that they’d drawn together, as friendship morphed into something else, something more substantial. Her being able to care for him directly when he and the remains of his crew hit Guam had only reinforced their bond — but how strong a bond? she wondered. Telling him about Glory might be the first real test.
She went to see him one evening and wheeled him out onto one of the ward’s porches to watch the sunset. Most of the hospital buildings were up on Agana Heights, overlooking the harbors and facing generally north and west, as if to remind the patients of where their duty still lay.
“Got something to tell you,” she said, even then not sure of how to say all this.
He looked over at her with interest. “That sounds a little ominous,” he said.
“Serious, not ominous,” she replied. “It concerns Glory Lewis.”
He sat up in the chair and immediately winced as his phantom lower leg yelled at him. “Is she okay?”
Sally nodded and then told him the story. As she’d expected, he was stunned. She understood, however reluctantly, that an unreasonably idealized image was dissolving with every word she spoke.
“You asked about her the other day, and I avoided your question,” she said. “I apologize for that, but since you’re going back to Pearl in two days, I thought you should know.”
He took her hand. “Don’t apologize. I fully understand. Do we know, um—”
“She never so much as said,” Sally replied. “All she told me was that she knew who the father was and that that was all anyone else needed to know.”
“Wow,” he said after a minute’s reflection. “How did the hospital staff people treat her?” he asked. “A commissioned officer, an unwed mother, an unknown daddy — I can just hear the alley cats singing.”
“There was some of that,” Sally said, “but most of the nurses who’d been there for a while treated her with sympathy and, as her term approached, with care. An armchair at meetings instead of one of those folding metal chairs. Subtle changes in her work assignments that didn’t involve heavy lifting. One of the OR supes gave her a wedding ring, so that the men out in the wards didn’t crack wise. She wore it, too.”
“The doctors?”
“They were too busy to be catty. Stembridge was knocked for a loop, as you might imagine, but the hospital CO was very supportive and told her that she could even have the baby at the hospital.”
“Did she?”
“No, she went into a convent downtown in Honolulu for the last four weeks. I thought it was almost medieval, but she was healthy, strong, well nourished, and in the hands of a dozen or so midwives. It was probably a safer place than the hospital.”
“And then?”
“The nuns took over. The baby was a boy, and she says they’ll have no problems placing him, although I wondered about that, in Hawaii and in wartime. A haole boy? Another mouth to feed?”
“A boy,” Marsh said wonderingly. “Wow.”
She examined the expression on his face. He looked like a brand-new father himself. “Marsh Vincent,” she said. “Is there something you haven’t told me?”
He gaped at her and then turned red in the face. “Good Lord, no,” he said. “I mean, all those years I used to dream about her and what it would be like if we got married. Then Tommy’s face would intrude, and I’d kick myself for being silly. So: You have heard from her?”
“No, actually,” Sally said, trying to keep a pang of disappointment from showing in her voice. The love of his dreams still wielded her powers. “The last I heard she was back at work and everything was fine. I left for Guam before she delivered, but the girls back in Pearl wrote. Have you heard from Mick McCarty, by the way?”
He shook his head. “He was on one of the jeep carriers, the Madison Bay. She was sunk that day off Samar, but I’ve heard they got all their planes off before she went down. The sky was full of planes from all over, so I’m guessing they found other decks. There were twelve more escort carriers farther out to sea, so there were places for the orphans to go.”
“So he’s still down in the Philippines somewhere?”
“I suppose so,” he said. “There’s so much scuttlebutt floating around here, who knows. Anyway, I guess it’s no longer my concern.”
“What? What are you saying?”
“I’m all done, Sally, dear,” he said, squeezing her hand. “I’ll be medically retired as soon as someone gets around to declaring me ‘healed.’ One-armed, one-legged lieutenant commanders are not in high demand.”
“Gosh,” she said. “I never thought of that.”
“Me, neither,” he said. “I was looking for orders. Now I’ve got to figure out where to go and what to do.”
“I can’t believe they’ll just, what’s the word, discard you like that. The Navy’s been your whole adult life.”
“I can’t complain,” he said. “I’d rather be a discard growing a victory garden somewhere than a drifting cloud of shark poop.”
“Marsh!” she scolded.
“Those are the choices, my dear, when you lose a sea-fight.” He took a deep breath. “Every time I feel sorry for myself, I think of the guys who’re still out there. They may park me on a shore staff somewhere in Pearl. God knows there are plenty of staffs back there. How long will you be assigned here?”
She shrugged. “For the duration, I guess, or until we build another hospital even closer to the action.”
“So,” he said. “Back to letters again, hunh?”
“If you’d like,” she said, looking away.
“If I’d like?” he said. “Where’d that come from?”
“You’re going back to Pearl, back to her,” she blurted.
He let go of her hand and sank back into the wheelchair.
“Back to her,” he said quietly. “Oh, my, Sally. You’ve got that all wrong. I’ll admit to having been besotted with Glory Lewis for many years, but that was all in my head. She made that very clear, even when I said some really juvenile things to her after Tommy was killed. I’ll even bet it was Glory who suggested that you and I start up a correspondence.”
She colored when he said that, then nodded.
“See? I’ve been a bachelor for a long time. Glory was a placeholder, a beautiful woman I could dream about, but I think that even before December seventh, I knew it was just that — a pipe dream, and a safe one to boot. There’s probably a dozen men out there who’ve had the same dream, and they — we, I guess — all secretly knew it was just a figment of our imaginations. There are some teeth behind that gorgeous facade, too. Remember what she did to poor Stembridge?”
“I do,” she said. “So where does all this leave us?”
“Right where we left off on New Year’s Day of 1944,” he said. “We court, that’s all. By mail if we have to, but you’re in my heart, Ensign, and that’s no pipe dream. Although you may prefer a guy with all his parts.”
She whirled on him and then saw that shy grin. “You better not turn into some kind of whiner,” she said. “I’m bigger than you are now, and I’ll hide your wooden leg if you’re not good.”
“What wooden leg?” he asked.
“The one I’m going to beat you with, Marshall Vincent.”
“Can we hold hands until then?” he asked.
“I’ll think about it,” she said, as they reached for each other in the twilight.