Sentinels of Fire

SIXTEEN

When I was a little kid, my family would go down to the Mall in Washington and watch the Fourth of July fireworks from the Capitol lawn whenever we were back in town. I can remember grudgingly watching the show while waiting for the big finale, because that’s when the sky really lit up, the whole sky, bang, bang, bang, going on seemingly forever, with me cheering it all on from between my father’s knees.

Bang, bang, bang. Then voices, which I could barely hear through my sticky-feeling ears. One of my eyes didn’t seem to work. I opened the other eye and saw flashes of light, then closed it right back up again. It felt much better closed.

Bang, bang, bang. “Anyone in there?”

Opened that eye again. More flashes of light, more banging. I was flat on my back in what I immediately dubbed a captain sandwich. There were flat plates of steel beneath me and more on top, squashing my nose sideways, and so close to my one operational eye that I could see striations in the blackened paint from a long-ago paintbrush. My arms were spread out on either side, and they both, I suddenly realized, were probably broken.

More banging. I tried to respond but only croaked.

The banging stopped. Again someone called. “Say it again.”

I got out another croak, but that was all I could manage. Arms really hurting now, couldn’t feel my legs at all, other than pins and needles, which in a way was probably a good thing. The lights went from flashing this way and that to steady. I croaked again.

“We hear you,” a voice called out. “Lie still. We’re gonna get this shit off you. Just lie still.”

No problem, I thought. I couldn’t move anything except that one eyelid anyway. There was steel pressing up against my cheek so hard that I couldn’t really make my jaw move. I tried to take a deeper breath. No go. I drifted off for a while.

I woke up to more lights now, the sound of machinery, and then a crackling, buzzing sound from outside the pile. Welding? Was someone welding? I tried to move, and a wave of pain overwhelmed me. I elected to try that drifting maneuver again. When I woke up it was to the fact that some part of the pile of steel had moved, increasing the weight on my left leg to the point where I think I called out. Big mistake. I fainted again. Things were much better in the dark.

When I came to there was water flowing past my pinned body. I didn’t think we were sinking, but I couldn’t really tell. The lights were still there, and there was more machinery noise, machinery I couldn’t recognize. Then there came a veritable wave of water that swept through my little pocket, high enough to wash over my face. It felt good, tasted salty, and, fortunately, immediately subsided before it drowned me.

“You still with us?”

I still couldn’t move my jaw, so I gave it another croak.

“Awright, we’re about to lift this edge. We’re gonna take it up slow. You holler if we’re making it worse, okay?”

Double croak. O. K.

The steel moved. A crack of white light appeared in the direction of where I thought my feet were. It was just a crack, but as they lifted, it grew wider until I could see actual daylight, and then three round faces in total black silhouette peering in at me. I could move my jaw now.

“Thanks,” I said.

One of the faces disappeared, and then I heard him shouting. “The captain!” he yelled. “We found the captain. He’s alive.”

You got it, sunshine. Now get me the hell out of here.

It took another hour of painstaking lifting, rigging, hauling, and rerigging, but finally they were able to rope my feet and begin pulling me out from under what I later found out was the remains of the pilothouse. Bright sunlight greeted me, along with some gasps from the onlookers. I felt a sharp sting in my right thigh. It felt good to be free from all that metal. It was even better to see that we were still afloat, that I wasn’t imagining all this, and that we were surrounded by at least five destroyers. Well, finally, I thought. Fleet’s figured it out.

My head felt like it had changed shape, and my arms wouldn’t work at all. My left leg was one big red bruise from groin to ankle, and my ears were filled with crusted blood. Both my eyes were black, and my nose felt twice its size. I hurt in places I didn’t know I had. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, I asked myself, how’d you enjoy the play? My khakis were soaking wet, and there were a lot of people standing around in that incredibly bright sunlight staring down at me. I finally recognized Doc as he leaned over and asked where it hurt. I was able to grin back at him, if crookedly, but then my friend, that dark curtain of cool oblivion, returned. I don’t think I got to tell Doc much of anything as the shot he’d given me did its work.

It was afternoon when the morphine began to wear off and I came back to the world of the mostly conscious. I could tell that the ship was moving, and pretty well, too. There was a strong smell of stack gas everywhere. That was when I realized I was out on a weather deck and not in my cabin. I discovered Marty sitting next to me, sound asleep. I hoped. His khakis weren’t wet, but they were wrinkled as if he’d been swimming for a while. Doc appeared.

“How you feeling, sir?” he asked.

“Shot at and missed, shit at and hit,” I said, quoting the old CPO expression.

He nodded. “Want more dope?”

“Can I have some water instead?”

His assistant handed him a coffee mug with water in it. I drank it down too fast, choked a little, and wished I hadn’t done that. My ribs all complained at once when I coughed.

“Now you want some more dope?” Doc asked, after seeing the expression on my face.

“First tell me what happened.”

A man began calling out in pain somewhere nearby. I realized I was one of about a dozen men laid out on mattresses on the main deck, forward.

“I got him,” Marty said.

Doc nodded, got up, and hurried over to a man who was very, very badly burned. Doc already had a morphine vial out.

“We made it, I take it,” I said.

“Yes, sir,” Marty said, “we did, thanks to you. There’s nothing left of the deckhouse except the front windscreen of the bridge. Forward of that, we’ve still got mount fifty-two and that quad-forty kluge. Aft of that, however, we’re ready to install a flight deck. Everything’s smashed, burned, or gone over the side. We think we took four kamis, but the last one had a crowd-pleaser slung on his belly.”

“Casualties?”

“You’re looking at them, Captain,” he said. “Thirteen. That’s all — thirteen. It’s goddamn amazing, is what it is. Main plant is in pretty good shape, although we’re hand-steering, and the stacks are a problem. We’re headed south to KR and the tender. We have Waddell—she’s a Gearing class — for an escort, and there’s five more tin cans up on the picket line.”

I couldn’t see the extent of the damage because we were all laid out on the forecastle, just under mount fifty-two’s barbette. Behind the gun mount was the facade of the bridge, standing there like one of those ruined monastery churches in England. Behind that, where there should have been the director barbette, the mast, and number one stack, there was only blue sky.

“So it worked,” I said, realizing now that I was very tired and probably about to go back under.

“It absolutely worked,” he said. “I didn’t want to do it. Just seemed wrong, against all naval tradition, but you were right. Worked like a charm, and there’s three hundred or so guys want to thank you for it.”

“You were still up there on Sky One when that last one hit,” I said. “How—?”

“I did the most perfect swan dive I ever made, right off the port side. I was underwater when that big one went off, and I felt it, too, but the gators had my ass drying off in a small boat within five minutes.”

“Where’s Lamont?” I asked.

“Right over here, Skipper,” Lamont called out. He was lying in a Stokes litter, legs bandaged and splinted up to his belt. “I hit the deck, but then it hit me back.”

“Hoboken,” I muttered. He must have heard me.

“What can I say, Captain. Gotta be born somewhere.”

Good, I thought. Lamont was okay. I was still alive. Malloy was still alive. Good. I’d meant to say that out loud, but apparently it was naptime in the city again.

The next morning I awoke in what I recognized as Commodore Van Arnhem’s cabin on the tender. I was in a real bed with real linens. Sunlight streamed through several portholes, which still had their glass. I looked around and wondered why they’d put me here. There was a picture of someone I assumed was the commodore’s wife on his desk, a very handsome lady wearing what looked like a costume from a Civil War drama. Behind her stood a younger woman who was a real beauty. His daughter, perhaps? Weren’t there two?

I missed the guy, even though our acquaintance had been all too brief. I still had his rings and that lock of hair back in my safe, assuming my cabin was intact. I wondered if I’d have the nerve to go through with what I told Doc I was going to do when this was all over.

There was a soft knock, and a Negro steward stuck his head around the edge of the door. When he saw that I was awake, he disappeared and then returned with a tray of coffee and a fat-pill. I realized I was really hungry. I sat up and gasped. “Shouldn’t have done that,” I mumbled as my eyes rolled backward and I passed out again. Never got the fat-pill, either.

There was a doctor beside me when I came back to consciousness; the steward was long gone, but the coffee tray was still there. Better yet, so was the fat-pill.

“There you are,” the doctor said.

“Have to stop doing that,” I said.

“You have to learn to move really slow,” he said. “You have no single serious injury, but your whole body was compressed under several thousand pounds of steel, from what your exec tells me. Slow, careful movements, with deep breathing before you move. Got it?”

I nodded, which made my jaw hurt.

He poured some coffee. “Two sugars, they told me.”

I smiled. “Where’s my ship?”

“Right alongside,” he said. “There’s a four-striper from Halsey’s staff waiting to talk to you. You up to it?”

“Am I up to it?”

“Slow, deliberate movements, deep breathing before you do anything,” he repeated. “I don’t see why not. You’ve got some painkillers in you, for which you should be duly grateful. Let’s get you semivertical.”

That took five minutes of slow, deliberate movements and more deep breathing than I’d done in years. Every muscle in my body had something to say about it, none of it very nice. I finally got some coffee in me, along with a few bites — make that heavy gumming — of that fat-pill. Their baker was decidedly better than our Mooky. Then the fleet staff captain came in, followed by Jimmy and Marty.

“Captain Miles,” he said, coming forward to shake hands. “I’m Captain Bill Waring, assistant fleet operations. We’re very glad to see you’re still with us, especially after I saw your ship.”

I loved that royal “we” the fleet staff people liked to use. They were all sharing in the power and the glory of Admiral Bull Halsey when they used that “we.”

“I’m very lucky to be here,” I said. “Forgive me if I’m a little slow. The doctor said that slow, in my case, is good.”

“Quite understand, Captain,” he said. He was tall, hawk-faced, and probably thirty pounds under his peacetime weight. There were dark circles under his bright blue eyes, indicative of twenty-hour days on whatever battleship Halsey was currently riding. He was, nonetheless, much aware of his importance.

“As I said,” he continued, “I’ve seen your ship. The official report is one four-engined bomber, who missed, and four kamis who did not miss, and thirteen total casualties on board. I would really like to know how you managed that, sir.”

His calling the most junior commander in the fleet “sir” was the same kind of address British commanders used when talking to their subordinates. You, sir, come here, sir. How dare you, sir. You insolent dog, sir.

Well, maybe that was overstating it a little. I was predisposed to dislike the fleet staff because they had left us in an impossible situation on the picket line, and I really wanted to divert the conversation for a moment to describe Westfall’s demise. Well, why don’t you? I asked myself. It’s the perfect lead-in to what you had your people do, right?

“Captain?” he asked.

“I apologize,” I said. “I’ve had rather a bad night.”

“I can come back, Captain,” he said immediately. “I fully—”

“No,” I said. “Let’s get this done while it’s fresh in mind. Jimmy, Marty, back me up here if I forget anything important, okay?”

They both nodded, and then I told Captain Waring the story of Westfall and how we’d prepared to prevent suffering the same fate. If I left out something important, Jimmy and Marty jumped in with salient details. It took a half hour, and when I was done, I was exhausted. To his credit, Waring saw that.

“Thank you, Captain,” he said. “That’s pretty amazing.”

“I have a question for you, Captain Waring,” I said. Jimmy knew what was coming and assumed a blank expression.

“Yes?”

“Why the fuck did Halsey, who came out here with seventy-seven destroyers, leave us up there with just two?”

Waring was clearly thunderstruck. Nobody, but nobody, questioned Bull Halsey’s decisions on anything at all.

“You’re obviously distressed,” he said finally. “You’ve been through a harrowing experience. You—”

“Fuck that,” I said. “I want an answer. All those dead on Daniels and Westfall deserve an answer. All those dead on Billingham deserve an answer. Dutch Van Arnhem deserves an answer. You have over a dozen big-deck carriers, another two dozen light carriers, hundreds upon hundreds of aircraft, dozens of cruisers, destroyers, battleships, for Chrissake, and you left us to die up there? Why? To give you fifteen minutes of early warning? What the fuck, Captain? Are William F. Halsey and that huge staff of his so very, very precious?”

Jimmy Enright was giving me a look that said, Please, please, stop, but I didn’t care anymore. Malloy was wrecked. They’d probably tow her out off KR and open the seacocks, as they had done with too many Okinawa picket line destroyers. Small boys, the fleet people called us. Battleship admirals puffing out their bemedalled chests and trumpeting severely consequential orders: Small boys, harrumph, form on me. I knew I was a one-off, as the British term went. A young, nondestroyerman lieutenant commander sent from a carrier, for Chrissakes, to be exec in a destroyer, who had then become captain thanks to the Japs and a decided lack of volunteers out there in the Big Blue Fleet.

Captain Waring stood up and gave me a look that said my career no longer existed. “When you are feeling better, Captain, there will be a board of inquiry to determine how your ship was so badly damaged after you abandoned all your guns. Good day, gentlemen.” He left the cabin. I looked at Jimmy and Marty.

“Screw ’em if they can’t take a joke, right?” I asked, quoting the commodore. Then I went back to sleep.

The next two days produced a feverish delirium for which I was not, thankfully, present. I was vaguely aware of white coats and sharp things sticking in my arms. On the third day the fever broke, and I was able to both eat and drink something. My body felt like I’d been steamrollered, which the doctor said was pretty much what had happened. Jimmy and Marty came in and gave me a sitrep on the ship. Since the hull was intact and the engineering plant functional, the tender’s shipfitters were going to erect a temporary pilothouse and two stacks, again, and then send us back to Pearl. After that, BuShips — the Bureau of Ships — would make the ultimate decision to either scrap her or rebuild. Then they had to leave because one of the battlewagons was going to come alongside the tender for some urgent repairs, and the three destroyers moored to her other side had to be ready to adjust mooring lines when the sixty-thousand-ton behemoth actually approached. That was something I’d like to watch, I thought before I drifted off again.

That afternoon, at around 1500, two corpsmen who I decided were secret Jap sympathizers forced me to get up and then helped me to get a bath, a shave, a change of hospital gowns, and even a bathrobe. I was given a sumptuous meal of Cream of Wheat and canned peaches. I was really hungry but found I could get only about half of the gloppy mess down before my stomach said, Enough, awreddy. My two torturers told me that was good enough and ordered me not to puke. Then they left.

As I finished the banquet, the light streaming in from the starboard portholes darkened perceptibly as something very large and dark gray slid alongside the tender to the accompaniment of much police-whistle blowing and lots of shouting from linehandlers. I actually felt the tender move forward and then back about fifty feet. Then a stentorian voice came over somebody’s topside 1MC speakers, “Moored, shift colors.” An hour and a half later, there was a knock on my cabin door and in came a commander in the cleanest and starchiest work khakis I’d ever seen.

“Afternoon, Captain,” he said brightly. “Are you up for a visitor?” Not waiting for my reply, he stepped back, and in walked Admiral William F. Halsey Jr. himself. I blinked a couple of times and then wondered if I was supposed to stand up. Halsey came toward me making a gesture that said, Stay where you are.

He looks so old, I thought. He was old, by naval officer standards, somewhere in his early sixties by then, visibly worn down by years of fleet command and his own bête noire, shingles. His face was set in a permanent scowl, even when he smiled, or tried to. He and Spruance had been alternating command of the U.S. Pacific Fleet. When Halsey had it, it was called the Third Fleet. When Spruance took it, it was the Fifth Fleet. I’d often wondered if the Japs really thought there were two fleets.

The aide pulled up a straight-backed chair, and Halsey took a seat next to my bed. He put his left hand out, and the aide handed him something. Halsey then opened the box and pinned a Navy Cross on my bathrobe and then shook my hand. I hadn’t seen a photographer slip into the room, but I did see that flash. Halsey’s famous scowl twisted sideways.

“There you were,” he said, his voice gravelly, “all ready to chew my ass, and now look. I pin a medal on you and you don’t know what to do.”

I nodded. I did not know what to do. Halsey was apparently used to that. I was aware that there seemed to be a lot of people in the passageway just outside the cabin door. A five-star admiral does draw a crowd, I thought.

“That is for the way you saved your crew up there on the picket line that I’m not supposed to care about,” he said. “Captain Waring came back and told me what you’d done, and said. Then I got a look at Malloy before I came to see you. Thirteen wounded, no dead, that’s goddamned amazing, Captain.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said. “There’s no other way to deal with a line attack like that, except get your people out of harm’s way.”

“And you had everyone lay below to second-deck spaces?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Except yourself, I’m told.”

I shrugged and winced. A mistake, my aching body told me. “It was too far to go,” I said. “Besides, I wanted to see if it worked. The fourth one did the most damage. Some of them come with bombs, you know.”

“Yes, I do know,” he said. “That’s why Missouri’s in here, to get a gun mount taken off. A kamikaze got through and smashed one all to hell. Captain Waring said you wondered why we left you guys so exposed up there.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “Tethered to one spot like that, no mutual support from the other picket stations, we’re sitting ducks. Once the Japs figured out the line attack, we became dead ducks.”

Halsey nodded. “Here are the facts of life, young man,” he said gently. “Carriers will bring the war to the Japanese homeland. Carriers and long-range bombers. Destroyers will not bring the war to Japan. We’re about to take Okinawa. This will be the last island campaign before the really big one. Three airfields, that’s all we want here, and they’re not for the bombers — they’re for the fighters who will escort the bombers. Fighters are like destroyers: fast, useful, but they will not bring the war to the Japanese home islands — the bombers will. The picket line gives us fifteen minutes more warning than we can get on our own. In fifteen minutes, we can double the number of fleet CAP in the air, but only if the fighters are already up on the flight deck, armed, fueled, and ready. The fifteen minutes we get from you guys is the difference between a sky full of defensive CAP and a sea full of burning carriers.”

“Yes, sir, we understand that, but you have so many destroyers — if we had ten tin cans up there instead of just five, we’d lose a lot fewer ships.”

“You just proved that statement is no longer true, Captain. The line attack. Your exec diagrammed it out for me and my staff down in the wardroom an hour ago. It’s unstoppable, isn’t it. You said so yourself.”

I nodded.

“Then I have to keep as many tin cans with my carriers as I can, in ever more crowded concentric rings. We are in as much danger from collision as we are from kamikazes these days, but we have to cut that line of kamis down to just one before they get to a carrier. You see, you’re just finding out about the line attack. We’ve been dealing with it for weeks.”

I blinked again. That was news.

“Now, some more facts of life: Destroyers are there to protect the rest of the fleet. Necessarily, that means you’re out there on point, as the Army guys like to say. You are always going to be exposed. Some of you protect us with guns, others with long-range radar. It simply makes more sense to expend a few destroyers up on the picket line in order to save one — even one—carrier from having to go back to Pearl for repairs. Malloy was your first tin can assignment, wasn’t she? I think they told me that when I signed your promotion papers.”

“Yes, sir. I’d been in—”

“Carriers, right? Bet you weren’t too concerned about destroyers back then, were you, other than to make sure you had ’em all around you.”

He had me there. I’d never given them a second thought. Halsey was grinning.

“Dutch Van Arnhem commended you in a message before he died,” Halsey said. “Makee-learn XO suddenly thrust into command and doing stuff no one else had done up there and staying alive. Funny what dire straits can evoke in the way of improvisation.”

He stood up. “Congratulations on that medal. You earned it. Get well and then come with us to Japan. Malloy’s going to limp home. You’re going to command the next tin can that needs a skipper. And don’t ever criticize me again, or I’ll bite you.”

Another grin to show me all those teeth, and then he was gone.