Sentinels of Fire

FOUR

One day later, we arrived at Kerama Retto, one of several small islands off the west coast of Okinawa Shima, where the battle against the Japanese 32nd Army was in full fury. We had approached the anchorage just before dawn from the northwest, and the southeastern horizon had been filled with flashes of artillery and the explosions of battleship rounds in the low hills to the right of our approach. The allied forces had seized all Okinawa’s small offshore islands before assaulting Okinawa proper in order to protect their flanks and to set up artillery and logistics bases. The shape of Kerama Retto provided a relatively protected deep-water cove, where the Navy had anchored several repair and replenishment ships. Protected was a relative term: The Japanese had already managed to sneak a miniature submarine into the cove and torpedo an ammunition ship, and the kamikazes attacked frequently. The Ryukyu Islands were the tops of submerged sea mountains, and the drowned slopes of Kerama Retto were already littered with the debris of ships and support craft that had been towed out and scuttled because they were too heavily damaged to be repaired.

Malloy was directed to go alongside USS Piedmont, a seventeen-thousand-ton ship designed as a floating repair facility. She looked like an ocean liner, with her two stacks and long, covered galleries down each side, but she’d been painted haze gray and was sporting four five-inch single mounts, two each fore and aft. We discovered the Waltham tied up on the other side of the Piedmont. Her forward superstructure, including the bridge, mast, gun director, forward stack, and most of the CIC spaces, was a tangled jumble of blackened steel wreckage. Mount fifty-two, the second of the two gun mounts on the bow, was uprooted, with its two blackened guns pointed down at the deck below. There was a charred hole deep on her starboard side just abaft the beam, where Number Two Fire Room was located. As Malloy maneuvered to cross under the tender’s stern, we saw some of her crew out on her weather decks, mostly standing around, as if still stunned by the extent of the damage. Even while tied up to the tender, she was listing ten degrees to starboard.

I wondered how many of the ship’s officers had been lost. The captain, watching the gun boss conduct the landing maneuver from his chair, noted that neither the Union Jack nor the American flag was flying anywhere on the ship, which meant they were going to simply scrap her. “They’ll salvage whatever they can in the way of critical parts,” he said, “then tow her out of here and open all four main spaces to the sea.”

Just like that, I thought. An entire ship. I wondered who’d made that decision.

Jimmy Enright made an interesting point. “There’s a waveguide on that mast over there,” he said. “We only need about ten, fifteen feet of good metal. We need to tell the ServRon Ten people that, before they…”

“Good call, Jimmy,” the captain said. “Take that for action.”

Once the ship was moored alongside the tender, a gangway was lifted by one of her cranes down to the forward camel between the ships and then positioned on Malloy’s starboard side. Then our accommodation ladder was lowered to the camel as well. The camel, a fifty-foot-long bundle of telephone poles wrapped in old rubber tires, was tied up between the ships to prevent them from rubbing against each other. A small parade of men came down from the tender, across the planks on top of the camel, and then up the accommodation ladder to our main deck. These were the repair superintendents and the various shop planners who would meet with the ship’s department heads to determine what work would actually be done. Malloy wasn’t alongside for a normal, two-week-long repair availability, just long enough to get our radar working again and the base of the mast reinforced. That didn’t mean that Malloy’s department heads wouldn’t be trying to cadge as much other repair work on balky pumps, shorted electric motors, leaking steam valves, etc., as they could. Beyond the formal repair requests, individual sailors from Malloy’s divisions would be sent on board the tender to cumshaw whatever goodies they could from trade-minded crew members. Apparently, a brass five-inch powder case, which could be cut down on a lathe to make a fine ashtray, would “buy” the most amazing things aboard a tender.

I assembled the department heads in the wardroom for the initial meeting with the senior repair superintendent, who was known as the ship’s supe. The captain joined us once everyone was there.

“Captain Tallmadge, I’m Lieutenant Commander Weems from ServRon Ten,” the supe said. “Our orders are to get your waveguide repaired, the mast stabilized, and then to get you out of here as soon as possible and back on station. Admiral Chase wants all of that done in twenty-four hours.”

“Understood,” the captain said. “Do you have a replacement waveguide?”

“We do now,” the supe said.

“Waltham’s?”

“Yes, sir,” the supe said. “She’s been struck. We have a stripping crew on board, and it looks like there’s about thirty feet of good waveguide left. We’ll make a splice onto your system. We need to inspect the base of your mast to see how much shipfitter work needs to be done.”

“Okay,” the captain said. “Does that mean no emergent work?”

The supe smiled. “Your guys can try, Skipper. Officially, no, but…” Our department heads all knew the game, and apparently, the less said, the better.

“Then we’re done here,” the captain said. “My department heads will help your people make it all happen.”

“My shop supervisors are already on board,” the supe said. “They’re waiting outside.”

The captain nodded at the four department heads, who got up and filed out. The ship’s supe remained at the table.

“How bad was it on Waltham?” the captain asked.

“Very,” Weems said. “CO, XO, three of four department heads, nine other officers killed, and fifty-seven others missing and presumed lost. A hundred more wounded. Two kamis came at the same time. One did the front end, the other got into the after fire room. Both were carrying bombs, from the look of it. The after-fire-room hit broke main steam lines in both engine rooms. Basically, all the main-hole snipes except for One Fire Room are gone. She’s well and truly wrecked, so she’s worth more as a spare-parts locker than a fighting ship. Plus, that crew will have to be disbanded — the ones who can are all walking around in shock. There are an unknown number of bodies down in the main spaces, and they’re going to go down with her.”

“Great God,” the captain said, his face ashen. “I guess we were just lucky.”

“They told us you pulled the bomb off with a sea anchor?”

The captain told the story. Then I asked if twenty-four hours was a reasonable objective.

“You don’t want to be here any longer than necessary, XO,” Weems said. “The kamis still attack this anchorage — we’re all sitting ducks, when you think about it. All our gun mounts are manned day and night, and we’ll need you to keep your forties and at least one five-inch mount ready at all times. Besides, your damage is minor, so they want that radar fixed and then you back on station. Oh, and the commodores will expect a call.”

Commodores, plural? Weems saw my expression. “The ServRon Ten commodore, Captain McMichaels, is embarked here in Piedmont, and your own squad dog, Captain Van Arnhem, is also embarked. Our poor skipper is camping out in his sea cabin for the moment. I believe your squadron commander is going to shift his burgee to the Dixie as soon as she arrives from Pearl. In the meantime, we’ve got ourselves a great sufficiency of four-stripers.”

“Right,” the captain said. “XO, I guess we’ll need to make two calls. ServRon Ten is senior, so he’s first. Then we’ll go see Dutch Van Arnhem, my boss. He’ll understand. Mister Weems, thank you, and we’ll let you get going. Any hiccups, don’t hesitate to come straight to me or the XO here.”

“Thank you, sir. One more thing — if any of your people can spare some blood, we’re in short supply on the hospital deck. It’s a bloody mess over there on the main island. If half the stories we’re hearing are true, it’s black-flag time over there.”

Kerama Retto was about twelve miles away from Okinawa, but even now, here in the wardroom, we could all could hear the thump of bombs, the thud of artillery, and the occasional deep rumble of battleship salvos.

There was a knock on the wardroom door. The quarterdeck messenger, a deck seaman, came in, escorting a chief petty officer. “Chief Winant from the EOD to see the captain, sir,” the messenger announced.

“Sorry, Skipper,” the chief said. “I can come back if you’re in a meeting.”

“Come on in, Chief,” the captain said. “We’re just swapping scuttlebutt here. Coffee’s over there, and then come have a seat.”

The chief’s face didn’t look to be more than thirty, but his hair was entirely gray and he moved with the care of a man who does dangerous work, in his case explosive ordnance disposal. He got himself a cup, and sat down at the junior end of the wardroom table.

“I heard a pretty interesting story this morning, Skipper,” the chief said. “Something about using a sea-anchor to pull a Jap 250 off your signal bridge?”

“We did ask for EOD assist,” I said, “but apparently your team had bigger fish to fry down here.”

The chief grunted. “You might say that, XO,” he said. “Yesterday was about as bad as the day the Franklin got it, and I was onboard for that ordeal.”

Mention of the Franklin holocaust was jarring, even more so because I’d been serving in her for over eighteen months, and I’d never seen this chief’s face.

“Yeah, we heard about that one,” the captain said. “Were there really seven hundred killed?”

“They’ll be revising that number all the way home, sir,” the chief said. “We hear there are still parts of the ship they haven’t been able to get into yet. Personally, I think she’s headed for the scrapyard. Then yesterday, we went aboard the new Yorktown to defuse two five-hundred-pounders.”

“Well, that certainly qualifies as a bigger fish,” the captain said. “Our gun boss had had a class on how aircraft bombs are armed.” He went on to tell the chief how they’d “safed” the bomb before yanking it off the 03 level. The chief smiled when he heard the story about the monkey shit.

“You guys were lucky beyond belief,” he said. “Your gun boss was correct about the little propellers, but those bombs were never meant to be dropped. They were supposed to hit the ship at the same time as the kami.”

“Which means?” I asked.

“Which means those kamikaze bombs are fully armed in flight. The arming lanyard had been pulled out manually somewhere south of Kyushu. I can’t imagine why it didn’t go off, especially when you shocked it again with the sea anchor.”

That revelation produced a chilled moment of silence in the wardroom.

“But they said there was no firing pin visible on the front end,” I said.

“There isn’t one for the kami bombs. They’re fired by setback. The pin’s inside a tube. The bomb experiences a gazillion-g deceleration when it hits the side of a ship. That little pin slams forward in its tube to complete an electrical circuit, which fires the initiator, which fires the main explosive charge, all in about one heartbeat. Like I said, lucky beyond belief.”

“And if it happens again?” the captain asked.

“Believe it or not, you’d have been better off bringing it down to us,” the chief said. “One of us has to get inside the safing and arming compartment of the bomb, get by the anti-intrusion traps, find and disable the battery bus and then immobilize that pin and any backup exploders. Not for the faint of heart, gentlemen.”

“I’ll pass that on, Chief,” the captain said. “On the other hand, would you care to go back to the picket line with us?”

“The radar picket line, Captain? Begging your pardon, sir, but hell, no. That’s really dangerous duty.”

We all laughed and then set about our day. Marty will shit a brick when I tell him the truth about his great monkey-shit gambit, I thought.

I was grudgingly getting used to the tin can Navy and its propensity to wing it when something had to be done and done right now. That was a trait I’d brought to my first couple of assignments, and more than once it had put me across the breakers with my department head. In the prewar cruiser Navy, appearances were everything, and junior officer initiative not much in demand. It took me some time to conform, and I think my own upbringing had a lot to do with that. My father was one of those parents who let their kids learn the hard way if the opportunity presented itself. He was an intellectual, somewhat aloof, deeply immersed in his work, about which I had no inkling while I was growing up. My mother — very pretty, very sweet, they never saw her coming — would sit down with me to analyze what I’d done to get in so much trouble as a child, and then encourage me to do better the next time but never to quit trying out new things. Now, as a junior lieutenant commander, I was exec in a destroyer, and I knew they’d be very proud. If I lived to tell the tale.

The next morning we sailed out of the fleet anchorage at just past sunrise. The tender repair people had done an amazing job of reconstructing the ship’s radar waveguide and reinforcing the mast’s foundations. Malloy’s crew had done an equally amazing job of “midnight requisitioning” aboard the destroyer tender. As we reached the entrance to the anchorage I was surprised to see two large aircraft carriers anchored close by, one of them showing clear signs of having experienced a large fire on her port side aft. Landing craft and small boats were shuttling between a heavily laden ammunition ship and the carriers, while up on the flight decks, fighters were turning up in the still morning air. Columns of smoke in the distance indicated that another horrible day was well under way over on Okinawa Shima.

Motivated by tales of dawn kamikaze attacks on the anchored ships, the captain ordered 25 knots as soon as we cleared the anchorage and headed back northwest. We were bound to a new vacant radar picket station, forty-five miles north and west, named Three-Dog. We had gone out in a modified general quarters condition, with all guns and CIC stations manned but the ship not yet buttoned up. As Okinawa’s smoking ridges subsided beneath the southeastern horizon, the captain summoned me out to the bridge.

“Wanted to debrief you on my call with Commodore McMichaels,” he said when I came out from Combat. Captain McMichaels was a senior four-striper, called commodore because he commanded a squadron of ships, in his case, the ships of Service Squadron Ten. The service squadrons had been one of Chester Nimitz’s brilliant operational ideas: Gather together as many repair ships, ammunition ships, refrigerated food freighters, oil tankers, gasoline tankers, bulk cargo ships, fleet salvage tugs, and hospital ships, plus all the utility boats, landing craft, floating dry docks, harbor patrol craft, barges, and any other kind of floating support asset that you could find, collect them into a relatively safe anchorage, and thereby create an instant naval base. Ideally they could find an anchorage that was distant enough to be safe from Jap bombers but close enough that damaged ships could get there, one way or another, get fixed, and get back into the fight. If anyone knew what was really going on with the current campaign, in this case, Okinawa, it was the commodore of the service squadron supporting the campaign. The only fly in the ointment for the floating base at Kerama Retto was the fact that they’d failed to stay out of range of Jap bombers. On the other hand, the Navy was discovering what it was going to be like when we hit the main islands of Japan.

The captain told me that our losses were mounting, both out in the main fleet formations and, of course, on the picket line. From the carriers to the amphibious landing craft, the body count was climbing rapidly, all because of the kamikaze tactic. We’d seen that at close hand.

I asked the captain if the big bosses were mad at us for trying to help Waltham.

“I’m not sure they — and I’m talking about the flag officers at Spruance’s level — even know we exist,” the captain said. “Okinawa has turned into a meat grinder of the worst kind. The Japs know they can’t prevail, so they’re bent on killing as many Americans as they can before they themselves are all dead. He was telling me about incidents where the Japs had convinced local civilians that our soldiers were going to eat them, and then made them jump off of cliffs to avoid capture. Absolute insanity. They’re—”

At that moment one of the lookouts called in from the bridge wing that something had happened behind us. As the captain and I went out to see what he was talking about, a deep rumble overtook the ship from the direction of Kerama Retto and we saw an enormous black cloud mushrooming up over the horizon. More fiery explosions followed beneath the initial cloud, pushing whitish yellow fireballs and smoke trails in every direction. It sounded, and looked, like a volcano was erupting behind us. The entire bridge watch team and the gun crews out on deck were all staring aft.

“Something got that ammo ship,” the captain said softly.

“Which we just passed at no more than five hundred yards,” I said. There was another, even bigger explosion, and now the entire southeastern horizon was being enveloped by smoke from the blast.

“Combat reports ETA to picket station is ten fifteen,” a talker announced.

“Not quite two hours,” I said, looking at my watch. “I think it’s time to button up and get ready for own brand of insanity.”

“Air search working?”

“Yes, sir, better than before, actually. We don’t have any CAP assigned yet, but they should be up soon, unless of course, that”—I pointed toward the continuing fountain of fire filling the sky behind us—“upsets the flight schedules.”

“God help any ships that were close to that ammo ship,” the officer of the deck said.

The captain looked at me. We both knew that every one of the small boats, lighters, and landing craft doing the shuttle work between the ammo ship and the two carriers were already part of that enormous cloud behind us. The two carriers had been parked at least a mile away from the ammo ship, but that was still within range of falling projectiles, rockets, and even bombs that had gone up in the initial explosion. The bitch-box lit up.

“Bridge, Combat, many bogeys, two niner zero, range forty-nine miles and closing.”

“Okay, XO, lock her down and load the guns.”

I went back into the CIC as the sounds of hatches slamming down rang out throughout the ship when the alarm sounded. The officer of the deck put Malloy into the familiar broad weave; we weren’t on station yet, but the air-search radar was doing what it was supposed to do, and we had already sent the warning down to the fleet formations off Okinawa and in the Kerama Retto anchorage. Two other picket ships had also detected the incoming raid, which appeared to have originated in Formosa.

I took a seat at the head of the dead-reckoning tracer table. I signaled one of the Freddies over on the air-search radar side to come over. “Still no CAP?” I asked.

“No, sir,” the jay-gee answered, “but the ready deck is launching. Some big deal happened down in the anchorage and that’s got the command net tied up.”

“You have no idea,” I said. I wondered if those two carriers were supposed to have left the anchorage already to provide air support. Then I relaxed: There were ten big-deck carriers assigned to support the Okinawa invasion.

“Bogeys dispersing,” the air-search radar reported. “Range thirty-seven miles and still inbound. Looks like some are coming for the picket line.”

“Wonderful,” I muttered. Except we weren’t yet on the picket line. We were still south of it. Maybe they’d go by us. I almost suggested to the captain that we slow down. The plotters around the DRT exchanged fearful looks. I leaned over to the bitch-box and called the bridge. “Captain, Combat. They’re definitely splitting up. Thirty-seven miles out. Looks like a couple of them are trying to get east of us. We’re going to have some business here shortly.”

For a moment, there was no reply. Then the officer of the deck acknowledged my warning, followed by something odd: “X1JV.”

I blinked. X1JV referred to the sound-powered phone circuit used usually for administrative matters — calls between offices, not tactical stations. The Malloy, like all destroyers, was equipped with several sound-powered phone circuits. The advantage of sound-powered phones was that they did not require electricity, only connectivity. If the ship lost all electrical power, sound-powered phones still worked. The circuits all had names, of course. The JC was the gunnery control circuit. The JA was the combat action circuit. The 1JV was maneuvering. The JX was for communications. The JL was for lookouts. The X1JV connected offices and central stations like the quarterdeck, the bridge, the engineering log room, and Combat.

I reached down underneath the DRT plotting table and turned the handle on a large barrel switch to X1JV. That connected the handset I held in my hands to that particular circuit. Then I selected the bridge on a second switch and cranked the handle. The officer of the deck picked up immediately.

“What?” I asked.

“Captain went below,” the OOD said.

“Are you shitting me?” I asked before I had time to think. “Head call, or what?”

The OOD blew out a long breath. “He didn’t say, XO. He just left the bridge and went down the ladder. I’m guessing he’s in his inport cabin.”

“Five, maybe six bogeys inbound,” the air-search radar operator announced. “Constant bearing, decreasing range. Director fifty-one in acquisition mode.”

I was stunned. The captain had left the bridge with a raid inbound? What in the world—

“XO, recommend coming to course zero two zero to bring all guns to bear,” the CIC watch officer said. “Range is twenty-six miles, constant bearing, target video is in and out.”

That meant the Jap planes were descending. I wondered for a brief moment how the hell the Japs knew where we were, and then remembered: They were probably homing in on Malloy’s own air-search radar beam. I hit the talk-switch on the bitch-box.

“Officer of the Deck, take Combat’s course recommendations until further notice. Increase speed to twenty-seven knots.”

“Bridge, aye!”

I then reached for the barrel switch again, turning it to the JC circuit, selected the main battery gun director station, and cranked the call handle. “Sky One,” the gun boss responded.

“Marty, we’ve got a six-pack inbound. I think they’re homing in on our air-search radar beam, so I’m gonna take the radar down and do a sidestep. The big raid’s been reported, but we have no CAP, so I’m not gonna make it easy for ’em.”

“We’re gonna hide, XO?”

“We’re gonna try. It’s visual from here out. Knock ’em dead, Marty.”

“Sky One, aye.”

I turned to the CIC watch officer. “Take down the air search. Now!”

There was a moment of hesitation, but then they jumped to it. I called the OOD on the bitch-box. “Come left, head three three zero at maximum speed. Tell main control to make no smoke.”

“Bridge, aye.”

We all felt the ship thrumming to the pulse of her twin screws. The lighting fixtures began to shake, and the deckplates in CIC were trembling as the snipes down in the engine-room holes poured it on.

Twenty-something miles, I thought. Forty thousand yards. The five-inch could begin to do effective business at eighteen thousand yards, or nine miles. The Jap planes were descending from eighteen, maybe twenty thousand feet. Now they’d lost their homer bearings. The sky outside was clear but a bit hazy. No cloud cover. We might just get away.

The wake. They’d see the wake, just like those American carrier bombers at Midway had seen that lone Jap destroyer’s wake, pointing directly at the carrier formation they’d been so desperately looking for.

“Bridge, Combat. Slow to fifteen knots,” I ordered. “Broad weave around base course three three zero.”

“Bridge, aye,” the OOD responded.

I desperately wanted to go out to the bridge so I could see what was developing, but my GQ station was officially in Combat, the nerve center. This was where I belonged. In a few minutes, the lookouts would see the incoming Japs visually, and then it would turn into a gunnery exercise. Five-inch, forties, twenties, and nothing for the command to do but watch.

Well, not quite. When the kamikaze was finally visible to the naked eye, the ship had to be maneuvered. You never pointed the long axis at the kami — that gave him three hundred and fifty feet of ship to hit. You turned, presenting the side — that gave him thirty-six feet to hit and all the gun barrels to greet him. Then you’d twist and turn as the pilots tried to line up a better attack position.

I found myself biting my lip as the noise level went up in Combat. Search sector orders were going out to the lookouts: Split the search. High and low. That’s the way the Japs would attack.

The gun teams knew their business. They also knew what would happen if they got it wrong. By this stage of the war, Malloy was a well-oiled machine — But the captain was a damned important part of that machine, and he was … where?

More phone-talkers were making reports, sounding like altar boys at the beginning of Mass. I could hear the big gun director overhead turning on its roller path as the pointer searched through his optics for incoming black dots in the sky.

What should I do—right now, what should I do? Go find the captain, roust him out of wherever he was hiding, if that’s indeed what he was doing? I could hardly believe that was what was happening, but …

The JC talker was tugging on my sleeve. Something about asking for the air-search radar to come back up. “Make it so,” I responded, almost reflexively. The gun director’s radar needed a cue from the larger, search radar as to where to look. My gambit to remove the beacon of their search beam hadn’t worked.

Mistake. I could almost hear my mother saying, Let’s see what went wrong here, shall we? Not now, Mom. It had left us blind at a critical moment. The captain would have vetoed that. “Yes, bring it back up.”

A voice in my head was telling me what to do: Go fight the ship. Get your ass out to the bridge wing and join the anxious eyes scouring the late-morning sky. When it finally started, there would be decisions to make: Which way to turn to unmask all the guns and minimize the kamis target? What speed? If we took a hit, then someone had to direct the damage control effort while the surviving gunners continued the air-defense fight.

I could hear the tone of the talkers’ voices rising. They were getting scared.

Get out there.

Then I heard director fifty-one stop turning. They were locking onto a target. The kamikazes were here. The forward gun mounts let go with the first salvos.

Get out there, now.

“I’m going to the bridge,” I told the CIC watch officer. “Tell CTF 58 we’re under attack.”

“XO,” he said, “where’s the—” His voice was drowned out by another four-gun salvo from the forward five-inch mounts. I didn’t wait to answer him. Besides, I didn’t know the answer.

I went through the door between the charthouse and the actual bridge just as mount fifty-three joined in to deliver a six-gun salvo. All the bridge portholes had been locked in the up position to prevent glass splinters, so I caught the full force of the blasts. The breeze streaming over the bow was blowing gun smoke and bits of paper wadding through the portholes. Startled, I inhaled a lungful of sulfurous fumes and choked on it. I ordered the OOD to come back up to 27 knots in a somewhat strangled voice.

The forward mounts were firing to starboard, so I headed for the starboard bridge wing, where the officer of the deck, two lookouts, and two phone-talkers were already standing, all looking up into a metallic sky as the first black puffs of the timed fuzes began to blossom. I grabbed the captain’s binoculars on the way out and started looking for the kami, but he was still too far away. Another salvo let fly, even louder now that I was out there on the fully exposed bridge wing. Mount fifty-three, back on the fantail, was also firing, but to port.

Port? Christ Almighty — were there two of them?

Finally I spotted the black dot out there, maybe seven miles, slanting down out of the haze, embraced by a sudden succession of black puffs and then suddenly erupting into a gasoline fireball. I stared at the doomed plane as it came on, the ack-ack knocking pieces off it even as it assumed an even steeper dive angle, too steep, much too steep. He was going in, the pilot probably dead, and then he did, a sudden sheet of white water followed by the depth-charge-like underwater blast of his impact-fuzed bomb.

I ran back through the pilothouse and out to the port bridge wing as the forward five-inch mounts swung 180 degrees in unison to pick up the second kami. At that moment the forties joined the fight. I couldn’t see the black dot, but I could see where all the tracer fire was going, rising into an arc of phosphorous lines and converging in a second cloud of ack-ack explosions.

Then I saw it: more than a dot now, God help us — stubby wings and that ominous black cigar shape under its belly, much closer than the first one, close enough for the twenties to get into it. Their massed fire created what looked like a veritable highway of tracer fire rising gracefully toward the target and then arcing back down again, because this bastard was coming in on the deck. Half the forty-millimeter stuff was going into the water now, and some of the five-inch shells could be seen smacking the sea and then ricocheting wildly back into the air before exploding.

The kami was into eight thousand yards, and the gun barrels up and down the length of Malloy’s port side were lying flat, their rate of fire if anything increasing the closer the kami got, each gun blast flattening the wake along Malloy’s port side to a bright yellow sheen. There was nothing more to be done, no maneuvers, speed changes, gun assignments — it was him or us now. I watched in horrified fascination as the Jap suicider got bigger and bigger, seemingly coming right for me up there on the bridge, and then a wing went spiraling away in black fragments and the kami flipped several times before the remaining wing touched the surface and it went in, no farther than half a mile away.

“Right standard rudder,” the OOD yelled, and the ship heeled to port into a ninety-degree turn to our right. I looked to see why the turn was being made, and then the forward five-inch started firing again, this time slewing over the port bow but at a higher elevation now. A third kami was coming, this one clearly a medium bomber, with twin engines. I could see it without the binocs, but it didn’t seem to be coming in all that fast, not like those modified Zeros had been moments ago.

“Baka, baka!” someone shouted, just as a yellow flare ignited momentarily under the bomber and something dropped away. It was a baka bomb, a long, torpedo-shaped cylinder filled with high explosive: stubby wings, three rocket engines in the back, and a lone pilot strapped into a tiny cockpit in the middle. When the Zeros came in, even in a power dive, they came at just under 400 knots. This thing came screaming down at 600 knots, which was technically beyond the computing ability of the Mark 1-Able gun computer down in Main Battery Plot. All the gunners could do was to point the guns down the bearing of the baka, which never changed since it intended to hit the ship, and then enter drop-spots to try to force the outgoing five-inch projectiles into the flying bomb’s glide path.

The bomber was turning away, headed back to Formosa to load up another one, when out of nowhere a Navy Corsair appeared behind it and shot it out of the sky in another gasoline fireball. There was nothing, however, the Corsair could do about the baka, which slashed through Malloy’s forward stack so fast that its fuzing mechanism didn’t even feel it. The baka hit the water out on Malloy’s starboard side, which the bomb did feel. There was an enormous blast, strong enough to whipsaw the foremast and knock most of the bridge team off their feet. I grabbed the portside captain’s chair, which swiveled out of my grasp and dumped me on the deck with the rest of them. I could feel the ship’s hull vibrating along her entire length from that blast.

When I regained my feet I sensed that the ship was slowing down. Orders were being transmitted over both the bitch-box and the sound-powered phones, but I couldn’t hear a thing after all that gunfire. As I looked aft, I saw an enormous cloud of oily black smoke billowing from amidships, laced with bright white steam, obscuring the entire after part of the ship. I’d thought the damned thing had just hit the stack. Then I realized what was happening. The boilers down below used the smokestack for two things: to exhaust the gases of combustion and to draw down fresh combustion air for the burners. With half the stack gone, the boilers were being starved for air, hence all that smoke.

“Ten knots,” I ordered. “Slow back down so they can get those boilers off the line.”

The OOD nodded and gave the orders to reduce speed. I looked back at that black cloud behind the bridge. It was boiling aft like some kind of incubus. The topside gun crews couldn’t remain on station immersed in all that heavy smoke. I reached for the bitch-box.

“Combat, Bridge. Give me a course to put the relative wind on the port beam. We’re coming to ten knots. Any more Japs?”

“Combat, aye. Wait one.” Then, “No active contacts at this time.”

“Main Control, Bridge. Cross-connect the main plant once you get One Firehouse secured.”

“Main, aye. Almost there, Cap’n.”

I blinked. Captain? Then I understood. Only the captain used the bridge bitch-box during general quarters.

“Bridge, Combat. Come to zero niner zero for wind abeam.”

I looked over at the OOD, but he was already giving the orders. The ship turned, and the cloud of poisonous, oil-laden smoke began to veer off to the starboard side of the ship. That’s when I got a look at the forward stack. The baka had hit it almost in the middle. The top half was suspended by a thin hinge of wrecked metal, hanging off the back of the stump. The oily black smoke was coming up through the uptakes, and there were occasional flashes of red fire as some of the oil aerosol embedded in the smoke met fresh air topside and ignited. That was the danger, I remembered. Get enough oxygen down into that remaining uptake space and the entire cloud would ignite in a real crowd-pleaser.

“Main Control, Bridge,” I called on the bitch-box. “Once you get those boilers secured, keep the blowers going. Don’t let that smoke accumulate in the uptakes.”

“Main, aye,” a voice answered, sounding just a wee bit annoyed, as in, don’t tell us our business. I grinned. I recognized the voice of the chief machinist’s mate. The snipes were a proud bunch.

I looked for my battle talker. The captain’s battle talker, Chief Smith, looked back at me, waiting for orders. Well, I wasn’t the captain, but for right now, I’d have to do. “All stations report damage and readiness,” I ordered. Chief Smith repeated that and then began to announce the answers as each battle station reported back.

The smoke cloud suddenly turned to gray and then began to diminish. The Corsair who’d shot down the launching bomber came by at bridge level and waggled his wings. I gave him a thumbs-up from the bridge wing as he flew past. The fighter lofted back up into the air, did a beautifully precise four-point victory roll, and disappeared into the haze.

Jimmy Enright came out of Combat. “Radars confirm they hold no more bogeys. Okinawa AOA reports a big raid in progress, but the picket stations are clear, for the moment, anyway.”

“There’ll be stragglers,” I said. “When they get done down there, whoever’s left will come here.”

“Let’s hope the sumbitches stay down there and do their jobs, then,” Jimmy grumbled. “They’re supposed to go to Okinawa and die for the emperor, not annoy the picket line.” He lowered his voice. “Where’s the skipper, XO?”

“Gonna go find out, Jimmy. In the meantime, once the snipes get the main plant cross-connected, go back up to twenty knots and execute a random weave to station. Tell the gun stations to police their brass and get ready for round two in about thirty minutes. Remain at GQ.”

“Aye, sir,” Jimmy said and gathered in his phone-talkers. A loud screeching noise came from behind the bridge as the top half of the shattered forward stack broke off and rolled across the 01 level and down onto the main deck, smashing the lifelines flat and scattering some rubbernecking sailors, and then went over the side. As I was leaving the bridge I thought I heard one of the younger quartermasters, who looked to be at least fourteen, say very quietly, “Bye-bye.”

When I got down to the inport cabin, I hesitated. What the hell was I going to say? How was I going to explain my assuming commandlike authority, if not command itself? More importantly, what was I going to find? Without the first clue, I knocked twice and pushed the door open. The cabin was empty.

It took me fifteen minutes to catch up with the captain, who was by then all the way back on the fantail, talking to the crew of mount fifty-three. The gunners had been taking advantage of the lull to get out of their hot, smoky gun mount, breathe some fresh air, and relax for a few minutes. The junior seamen were corralling the brass powder cases that littered the fantail area. The gunner’s mates were collected around the captain, and all of them were smoking, which was not allowed at GQ. The fact that the captain was also puffing away was apparently being taken for an exception. What harm could it do, I thought, as I walked over. There he was, doing a Henry V pep talk before Agincourt.

“XO,” the captain said, as if we were meeting at a cocktail party. “I take it we’re in the clear for the moment?”

Fully aware that every crewman within range was listening, I had to consider my words. “There’s a big raid over the Okinawa anchorage right now,” I said. “We may get stragglers, we may not. CAP’s up, radar’s up, so with any luck, we’re probably safe for the next half hour or so.”

“Wonderful,” the captain said, taking a last drag on his cancer stick and then pitching it over the side. The sailors standing around were all trying to discretely palm their ciggybutts now that the exec was standing there. “I take it we’re cross-connected,” the captain said. “Can One Firehouse still operate?”

“We’re still looking at that,” I said. “The forced-draft blowers weren’t damaged, but the uptakes are a whole lot shorter than they used to be. That was a baka. Fortunately, it went a bit high.”

“Great,” the captain said. “Our luck holds. Malloy is a lucky ship, isn’t she.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. The ship heeled as the OOD kept her twisting and turning. I looked around the horizon, which was indistinguishable from the metallic gray sea. “If I may have a word…?”

“Keep your eyes peeled, boys,” the captain said to the group of sailors around us. “This is when they come out of nowhere.”

Then we headed forward, up the starboard side. When we got to the place where the forward stack had taken out the lifelines, we found two shipfitters kneeling on the deck, already welding in new lifeline stanchions. The captain went about ten feet forward of where the welders were scratching their arcs, well away from straining ears.

“You did well, XO,” he said. “And how do I know? Because we’re still here.”

Enough of this play-acting, I thought. “What’s going on, Captain?” I asked.

“Beats me, XO,” the captain said. “But I’m damned glad you’re here.”

“But, sir—”

“But me no buts, XO. Which were you more scared of: the Japs, or screwing up?”

I didn’t answer immediately. The captain had a point: My main concern had been not to make a fatal mistake.

“Thought so,” the captain said. “Look, you did very well. I was listening on the JA, the 1JV. You did everything right.”

“No, I didn’t,” I said. “I downed the air-search radar because I thought the bastards were homing in on it. That left us blind until the last minute. That—”

“And that might have worked,” the captain interrupted. “But I think they’re bringing a radar-equipped bomber with them, a multiengine job that hangs back and gives them vectors. Kinda like our Freddies: They’re being radar-directed. When you think about it, though, this is a visual game, at least when you get down to the short strokes. Someone sees the kami, cues Sky One onto it, and then you start shooting. Once the forties and the twenties can see where the five-inch are shooting, they get into it. Weight of lead, XO; weight of lead. That’s all we got.”

“You weren’t on the bridge, sir,” I said. There, I thought, I said it.

“No, I was not.”

“What the hell, Captain?” I asked, softly. “We need you up there. We all need you up there.”

The captain’s eyes lost focus for a moment. I let out a long breath. A sudden blast of low-pressure steam erupted from the truncated forward stack, startling both of us, but then it quickly subsided. A fine, warm mist settled on us as the steam condensed in the early afternoon air. Then we heard director fifty-one’s amplidynes propel the director off to the port quarter, where its radar array went into a tight sector search.

“Back to work, XO,” the captain said. “You’re doing fine.”

“Multiple bogeys, low and fast, inbound from astern,” came over the 1MC loudspeakers. “Reman all battle stations. Check setting of Condition Zebra. Make manned-and-ready reports to the bridge.”

We were standing next to a ladder that went from the main deck up to the midships torpedo deck, from which another ladder led up to the bridge. The captain pointed to the ladder. “I’m going to take one more turn about deck,” he said. “You go to the bridge and take charge.”

I was totally baffled, but ten years of instinctive discipline took over. Go to the bridge and take charge. Aye, aye, sir.

Up I went. As I climbed the steel steps that familiar feeling of mortal apprehension churned my stomach.

Which was I more scared of: the Japs, or screwing something up so bad we lost the ship?

Both, I decided — and whatever had begun to derange our skipper’s mind.

“Bridge, Combat. We’ve lost ’em. Last skin painted at thirty-three miles, bearing two six five true. Estimating four bogeys, but there’s weather out there.”

“Bridge, aye,” I responded. “Watch your surface-search radar, and be alert for a pincer.”

“Combat, aye.”

It was time to maneuver. “Officer of the deck, come to zero zero zero, speed fifteen. Forward lookouts scan from the bow to the port beam; after lookouts from the port beam to the stern. We’re looking for low-fliers.”

The OOD started barking orders to the helm and lee helm. I went out onto the port bridge wing and joined the small crowd with binoculars glued to their eyes. A pincer was the worst case: The Jap formation would split up about twenty miles out, with two planes turning south and two north. After five minutes they’d all turn inbound on Malloy. We’d have to split the gun batteries, which would cut the effective fire on any one plane in half.

“Sky One, Bridge,” I called.

“Sky One,” Marty answered.

“How much of that new VT frag we have out there in the mounts?”

“We’ve got about a hundred rounds in each mount, XO,” Marty said. “Got some from the tender. After that, it’s gonna be Able-Able common, mechanical time-fuzed.”

“Okay, that’s good,” I said. “We may have to split out the battery if they divide into two packs.”

“Got it,” Marty said. “Remember to turn back east again if it looks like a pincer.”

“Right,” I said. Leave it to Marty to remind me that our current course would present the long axis of the ship to both sections of kamis. That would definitely not do. Then I noticed the ship was boring a straight line through the sea.

“Broad weave, if you please. Base course still north.”

Then we waited, everyone staring into the bright haze, each man executing the standard AA search with his binoculars: look right, go up, look left, go up, look right, go up, look left, go up, then go down, look right, go down, look left …

The radar bedspring array on director fifty-one was doing the same thing in short, jerky movements, while down in Main Battery Plot two fire-control technicians were staring at separate oscilloscopes, where a fuzz of green spikes glimmered across the round screens, looking like a freshly mowed lawn. If the radar found something, a spike would rise up out of the grass, as it was called, and they’d lock onto it. The big amplidyne motors that trained and elevated the boxy director whined and keened in response to the operator’s hands on joysticks inside the director. It was an annoying noise. Everyone was waiting for the lock-on.

“Captain’s in Main Control,” the 1JV talker announced to no one in particular. The officers on the bridge glanced at one another. So that’s where he was. Okay: The main plant was operating in a reduced capability mode. Otherwise we’d be making 25 knots or more.

Everyone heard director fifty-one stop searching. The amplidynes went from loud, complaining noises to very small movements. I looked up above the bridge. The director was pointed due west.

Good: no pincer.

The two forward five-inch guns swung out to port, their twin barrels trembling as the computer down in Plot sent minute train and elevation angles to their amplidynes. I was frustrated by the limited range of the five-inch guns. I had served on a light cruiser designed for antiaircraft work, but her guns were six-inch, which could reach out to almost thirteen miles. It didn’t sound like much of a difference, but it was.

I jumped when the five-inchers went to work. Everyone did. The sound hurt my ears, and another cloud of sulfurous smoke enveloped the bridge. I still couldn’t see anything out there in the haze, but the miracle of radar was working for us. I could feel the ship quiver as all three mounts, fore and aft, got into it, hurling fifty-four-pound projectiles out to where the Japs were ducking and weaving a hundred feet above the sea surface, coming in at 350 knots, each with a five-hundred-pound bomb slung under its belly and each one intent on driving himself, his plane, all its remaining aviation gasoline, and that hair-triggered bomb into our guts.

I tried to think of what else I should be doing as the guns hammered my ears. We were properly positioned to bring all guns to bear, so no more maneuvering. The ship was buttoned up. With only two boilers available we were going almost as fast as we could go. The gunnery department was fully engaged, with ranges, bearings, and angles of elevation passing through all those sound-powered phone circuits. The five-inch gun mount crews were turning and burning, serving the six barrels in a sweaty cycle: dropping the breechblocks, ejecting the still smoking powder can, ramming a new round, ramming a new powder can, raising the breechblock, and closing the ready circuit key.

B-blam.

Do it all again. Wait for the hiss of gas-ejection air. Drop the breechblock. Both gun crews racing each other, sweating hands on each side, humping the big shells out of the hoists and into the hungry, smoking maws of the guns, punch the hydraulic rammer, extract it, put the powder can in, ram again, extract, raise the block, squeeze the ready key.

B-blam.

There, I thought. The variable-time shells were finding something to detonate on. Black puffs, low down on the water. One. Five. Many. Then the black dot, bucking and weaving through the whirlwind of fiery steel fragments, getting lower and lower as some terrified nineteen-year-old Jap fixated on the American destroyer, muttering fervent prayers to his ancestors, and then joining them as a five-inch shell came through the canopy to vaporize him and his plane.

One down.

Then two down, both creating large gasoline fireballs splattering across the sea as the five-inchers kept it going until someone down in Plot released the master firing key.

There was a moment of silence.

Where were the other two? These guys hadn’t even made it into forty-millimeter range. Something’s not right here.

Then the midships forties burst into action, but on the starboard side.

Pincer! God damn them.

Director fifty-one slewed frantically all the way around to starboard, and all three five-inch mounts followed it in big, lurching jumps, but there was no lock-on, and no more time, either. I sprinted through the pilothouse out to the starboard bridge wing in time to see two more Zeros flying no more than twenty feet off the deck, coming in from the east, with bright flashes blinking at us from the twenty-millimeter cannons under their noses. They were too close for the five-inch to engage, so the forties and the twenties took up the slack, streaming several lines of white-hot steel that arced out over the water, higher than the incoming planes, but then settling back into their faces. I felt rather than heard the Japs’ twenty-millimeter rounds hitting the forward superstructure. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the lookout next to me fly backward and thump off the bulkhead, leaving a red spray as he slid down to the deck.

The Japs were close, very close, and the lines of tracers from our twenties were converging now, blasting pieces off the planes. The five-inch guns remained pointed at the enemy, but the Japs were so close that the five-inch shells wouldn’t have had time to arm. Something stung my right leg just below the knee, and then the single porthole of the captain’s sea cabin exploded in a shower of glass right behind me. The two planes were close together now, as if racing, both trailing streams of white gasoline vapor and engine oil smoke, no more than a thousand yards, when Malloy’s twenties found that five-hundred-pound bomb underneath the left Zero. It exploded with a yellow-white flash, shredding the plane and upsetting his wingman, causing the second Zero to drag a wingtip into the sea and then disintegrate into a million pieces, half of which ended up clattering all over the decks and bulkheads of Malloy. Its bomb skipped twice on the water and, as I took a huge breath, flew sideways over where the forward stack would have been and out into the sea on the other side, where it went off with a thunderous blast two hundred yards away.

All the guns ceased firing, but my ears still rang with the hammering of the forties and twenties closest to the bridge. Behind us, off the starboard quarter, a patch of avgas was burning brightly on the sea. I turned to go back into the pilothouse but stopped short at a scene of significant carnage. There were twenty-millimeter cannon holes everywhere. All the watchstanders seemed to be down on the deck, which was carpeted with blood and shards of glass. Anyone not wounded or dead was attending to his shipmates. Two phone-talkers had been pretty much torn to pieces by the hail of shells, and Ensign Gall, the junior officer of the deck, was slumped under the captain’s chair with a fist-sized hole in his throat and an expression of total surprise still on his face. The chart table on the back bulkhead of the pilothouse was smoldering, with whitish smoke streaming out from the drawers where the charts were kept. The helmsman was still at his station behind the wheel, but he was holding his steel helmet in both hands and gawking at the bright shiny furrow carved by a twenty-millimeter projectile across the top of his helmet. The lee helmsman was down on the deck with the bosun’s mate of the watch, tending to another phone-talker, who was crying hysterically because his right leg was hanging by a flap of skin at a ninety-degree angle from his knee.

The chief hospital corpsman, Chief Bobby Walker, came out into the pilothouse from the passageway that led back to Combat. His uniform was already blood-spattered, and he was carrying an armload of battle dressings. His feet went out from under him as he stepped out onto the bloody steel deck, but one of the quartermasters caught him just in time. The chief immediately began the process of triage, ordering the able to start handing out and applying bandages to the not-so-able.

Jimmy Enright came out of Combat, trailing a sound-powered phone-set wire. He, too, had blood spatters on his khakis. He stopped short when he saw the pilothouse, which was beginning to resemble an abattoir, with the chief corpsman shouting orders and bloody bandages flying everywhere. Then Jimmy saw me, still standing in the starboard hatchway.

“We couldn’t raise the bridge talker,” he said, his voice sounding higher than usual. “You need to get that bandaged, XO.”

“What?” I replied and then looked down at my leg. My right trouser leg was black with blood, and my right shoe squelched when I moved. I bent down and raised the pant leg to reveal a large gash on the right upper side of my calf. I remembered the sting. Now, suddenly, it hurt like hell.

“Damn,” I said. “Well, scratch, right?”

Jimmy grunted, but he knew what I meant: Compared to the bloody mess all around us, my wound was manageable. “Still,” he said, grabbing a battle dressing from the pile on the deck. “Put your leg up here.”

Chief Walker came over, watched Jimmy’s clumsy attempts to fit the bandage to the wound, swore, and shouldered him aside. I waited stoically while the dressing was applied, along with a healthy dusting of sulfa powder. Then I realized that Chief Walker had probably been all over the ship, looking for wounded crewmen.

“How many?” I asked.

“One radioman dead, along with some of the radios. Rest of the ship is okay, as far as I know. My striker’s out checking. Between the bridge and Combat we’re looking at a dozen or so. This is the worst.” He stood up, examined his handiwork, and nodded.

“Doc,” I said quietly. “Seen the skipper?”

The chief, whose face looked weary well beyond his age, glanced up at me. Then he looked around the pilothouse, saw no captain, and shook his head. Two men on the other side of the pilothouse called urgently for the chief. The man they were tending was convulsing, his feet pounding out a mortal tattoo on the deck. The chief let out a sigh and went back to work.

Jimmy stared at the bloody scene on the bridge.

“We done with bogeys?” I asked.

“Nothing on the radar when I came out,” he said. “We’ve got two dead and seven wounded in Combat, two bad, the rest manageable. That bastard shredded us pretty good. One of the Freddies is down, but amazingly, the radar consoles are okay.”

“You should have seen that five-hundred-pounder flying over the forward stack, or what’s left of it,” I said. “I about crapped my trou.” I hesitated. “Jimmy, I don’t know where the captain is.”

I hadn’t meant to say that. It just popped out. On the other hand, Jimmy Enright was the senior department head. It was only fair to make sure that he knew what was going on. The man who’d been convulsing suddenly went rigid, blew a bloody bubble from his mouth, and then relaxed with a gurgling sigh. One of the men tending him swore.

Jimmy looked out the front windows. “Should we slow down now, maybe?” he asked.

“Go back into Combat and get me a radar fix on Okinawa; see how close we are to our assigned station. I’ve got to…”

Jimmy nodded. “Right. Go find him. Something’s really wrong.”

“Yeah,” I said. “God damn it. The crew talking yet?”

“No, sir,” he said. “They’re all too scared. It was like being in the fish barrel in there, when that guy strafed us. Nowhere to go. Shit flying everywhere. Guys screaming, even when they hadn’t been hit. Now that I think of it, the ones who were hit didn’t make a sound.”

Jimmy went back into Combat.

“Officer of the Deck,” I called. “Secure from GQ. Set Condition Two. Get damage reports from DC central. Slow to ten knots. Broad weave. Get a DC party up here to clean up the bridge. Get lookouts back on station. There’s still two hours of daylight left.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” a shaken Jerry Morrison replied. I turned to the helmsman. “All engines ahead two-thirds, turns for ten knots. Helmsman?”

The kid with the creased helmet gaped at me. He was trying not to look at all the blood and gore on the deck.

“Put that damned thing down and get on the helm. Broad weave. Now!”

“Broad weave, aye, sir,” the kid said. “But, sir? Jesus!”

“Jesus, aye,” I said, “but we’re still here, and so are the goddamned Japs. Broad weave, and you’ve got the lee helm, too, until someone relieves you.”

I left the bridge and went down into the interior of the ship. The effects of the strafing were everywhere. Holes in bulkheads. Light fixtures dangling over mounds of broken Plexiglas. A fire extinguisher had been punctured, blowing white powder everywhere. A scuttlebutt, Navy slang for drinking fountain, was leaking all over the deck from a single round. There were men moving through the passageways now that general quarters had been secured. Many of them looked stunned. You should have seen that five-hundred-pounder, I thought as I headed aft. Shafts of white sunlight streamed incongruously through the outer bulkheads.

I checked the messdecks, after-officers country, and the chiefs’ mess and then went out onto the main deck aft, greeting frightened sailors, pretending everything was okay, almost pulling it off until they got a look at my right leg. The bandage was holding just fine, but the lower part of my khaki trousers was pretty well soaked. I found myself trying not to limp.

As I told people they were going to be all right, my mind was fixated. Where was the captain? In his cabin, maybe? I went back inside the deckhouse. Groups of men were still hurrying through the passageways and moving along the main deck, bound on repairs and cleanup. The after repair party was restowing their damage control locker. The ship was down to 10 knots, barely moving over the slate gray sea, heeling from time to time as the helmsman spun the wheel this way and that, executing that random broad weave to keep from being a sitting duck.

“XO,” a voice called as I passed the scullery. It was the supply officer, Peter Fontana. The supply officer was known universally as the Chop because of the porkchop-shaped insignia on his left collar.

“Chop, can you feed us?” I asked.

“Absolutely, XO,” he said. “Got the cooks and messcooks turning to. Beef stew and rice. Say the word and we’ll open the line. We’re done for the day, I hope?”

“I hope to God we are,” I said. “But we’ll hold chow until after sunset GQ. I’ll call you.”

“XO?”

“What, Chop?”

The supply officer looked both ways to make sure none of the troops were listening. “The captain? He’s down on the forward reefer flats. He’s just sitting down there. One of the mess-cranks saw him and came to tell me. XO, what the—”

“I don’t know, Chop,” I said. “Something’s happened.”

“He’s such a great guy,” Peter said. “Gives a shit, you know? Gives a shit for his people, not his career. Please, tell me he hasn’t—”

I raised my hand. “Keep this to yourself, Peter. Give me the reefer deck keys and I’ll go get him. Meanwhile, I’ve changed my mind. Be ready to open the mess line in about thirty minutes. It’s been a long, sad day, and we’re going to be burying people tonight.”

I went forward to the main ladder hatchway leading down to the second deck, where the ship’s refrigerated storerooms, known as the reefer decks, were. I didn’t know what to think. Here we were, alone on the Okinawa radar picket line, shot up enough to scare the shit out of the crew and down to 10 knots. The main steam plant was still cross-connected until the snipes could figure out how to restore the boilers in the forward fire room with only half a stack. And the captain? Had the captain gone Section Eight?

I unlocked the hatch leading into the reefer deck compartment. I swore mentally when I realized that the mess cook had locked the captain inside the compartment, but he was just obeying standing orders. Need to find out who that is, have a word with him, I thought.

The lights were still on, and the captain was sitting on a lone folding chair parked in front of one of the freezers. He smiled vacantly when he saw me.

“Captain,” I began, but then I stopped, not knowing what to say.

“I’m okay, XO,” the captain said. “It’s nice down here. Quiet. Cool. I told that young man to lock the door behind me. Told him I was conducting an experiment. You know, rumor control.”

There were two refrigerant compressors at the forward end of the reefer compartment. One was on the line, the other in standby. I sat down on the standby’s motor. “Sir,” I said. “You’ve gotta tell me. What’s going on?”

“Oh, it’s pretty simple, XO,” the captain said. “I’ve lost my nerve. When that GQ alarm sounds, I want to run. That’s kinda hard when we’re at sea, so I go find somewhere else, somewhere besides the bridge, and I hide. This last attack, I sat down here in the dark and shook like a leaf. Almost pissed myself. Closed my eyes, gritted my teeth, and I think I actually whimpered. How’d it go, by the way? Thought I heard some incoming…?”

How did it go? I tried to control my expression. I gave him a rundown of the afternoon’s action. The captain winced when he heard the casualty numbers. Then he nodded, went silent, and stared off into space.

I didn’t know what to say next.

“I’m not crazy, you know,” the captain said. “I know what’s happening. I’m just paralyzed. I think you’ll have to relieve me, and notify CTF 58.”

“I do not want to relieve you, sir,” I said. “You’re the captain. You know more than the rest of the wardroom put together. I think maybe you just need a rest. I’ll get Doc to give you something. We’ll cover for you, a day, maybe two, and then you’ll be okay. We need you.”

“Have you asked to come off station to get down to the hospital ship?”

“No, sir. They don’t have any more destroyers who can come up here. We’re going to bury our dead and treat the wounded. That’s all we can do right now.”

“Ask them to send an LCS, or something like that, up with a medical officer and some supplies. They can do that.”

I almost groaned. Of course, that was the thing to do. It hadn’t even crossed my mind. There was so much I didn’t know.

“I’ll officiate tonight,” the captain said. “Darkness is our friend. I can do that. I know I can do that. But when the sun comes up, XO, you’re gonna own it. Understood?”

I had no answer for that except “Yes, sir.” The captain got up, dusted off his trousers, and then saw my bloody pant leg. He blinked. “You didn’t tell me—”

“A gouge, that’s all,” I said. “I was lucky. Hurts more than I expected, but it’s no big deal, not compared…”

The captain nodded. “I was at Savo Island in Quincy,” he said, almost whispering. “A complete slaughter. I still have nightmares. Then Juneau. Did you know I was one of ten survivors, out of a crew of seven hundred? We took a Long Lance during that night fight, crawled out with the San Francisco the next morning. We were making twelve knots with a broken keel.”

He stopped for breath. I held my silence. He wasn’t here. He was back at Guadalcanal.

“A Jap sub found us. Two cripples. We were down by the bow, but we were making it. Took one torpedo hit, and goddamn me if it wasn’t right where the first one got us, only this time the forward magazines let go. I woke up in the water, with maybe a hundred other guys. They finally found us, too many days later. We were down to ten.”

“Ten?”

“Yup. They haven’t published that number, have they? No, they haven’t. November 1942. I should have gone home after that. Gone back to the Eastern Shore and farmed some chickens. Dug myself a Victory Garden, but no, I asked to stay. Now look at me. I should have turned myself in six months ago, but I remember thinking, this shit isn’t over, and I’m not any worse for wear. Went on to XO in a tin can, chasing bird farms with Halsey and Spruance, then got command of Malloy. Going from island to island, doing shore-bomb, rescue-plane guard, odd jobs. One more island, one more landing: How tough could it be? Then these kamis … It’s just too much, XO. Too much. You’re gonna have to take it. I’m done. Just didn’t realize it until now.”

“We’ll figure something out, Captain,” I said. “In the meantime, I need you to take a turn about deck, with me. People need to see you. Then we’ll get the doc in.”

“Sure, I can do that,” he said, “but how long until sunset?”

The two of us walked the topside decks of the ship for the next forty minutes, seeing and being seen by all the people who were picking up the pieces on the weather decks. The captain did well. Once out in the sunlight, he straightened up and became himself again, greeting many of the crewmen by name while I trailed along. Chief Lamont caught up with us after about five minutes as word got around that the CO was topside. How he heard remained a mystery, but it was one of his skills.

Doc Walker found us on the 01 level amidships and told the captain they were ready on the fantail. Ready for what, I wondered. We walked aft, and went down to the main deck, through the K-gun depth-charge racks, past the quarterdeck, and out onto the fantail. There, laid out in two rows, were our dead. Their remains were in black rubber body bags, and there were six lying out there in the sunlight. Two sailors in dungarees, white duty belts, white leggings, and white hats were standing watch over them, each with an M-1 rifle resting incongruously on his shoulder. As I stood there, Doc took the captain to each one of them, unzipped the bag so the man’s face was visible, and then told the captain who the man was, where he was from, and what he was “famous” for within his division. Then they’d move on to the next one.

I later found out that this was where the captain gathered personal details that he would later connect to when he wrote the letters of condolence to their families.

“We’ll do it together this time,” he said to me quietly as we walked away. “It’s your job to draft the letters, and then mine to personalize them. Not fun.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say to that. That night, right after sundown but while there was still some daylight, we buried our shipmates who’d been killed in the strafing attack. We hadn’t assembled the whole crew for the burial ceremony because there were still contacts being reported around Okinawa, but everyone from the after gun batteries stood in respectful attendance, just beside their guns. The captain and I had changed into choker whites; he read the prescribed words and the psalm. The honor guard, three sailors, also in their dress whites, fired a three-gun rifle salute, and then the bodies were consigned, one by one, to the deep. Our honor guard folded the flags, which would be boxed up later and sent home to families, along with the letter of condolence and personal effects. Throughout, Captain Tallmadge had conducted himself with grace, dignity, authority, and absolutely no sign of the mental state he’d revealed earlier.

If he can manage that, I thought, with all the emotion entailed in sliding someone you knew into the deeps of the Pacific Ocean, then we can overcome this problem. I just have to figure out how.