The Intruders

15

The days at sea quickly became routine. The only variables were the weather and the flight schedule, but even so, the possible permutations of light and darkness, storms and clouds and clear sky and the places your name could appear on the flight schedule were finally exhausted. At some point you’d seen it all, done it all, and tomorrow would be a repetition of some past day. So, you suspected, would all the tomorrows to come.

Not that the pilots of the air wing flew every day, because they didn’t. The postwar budget crunch did not permit that luxury. Every third day was an off day, sprinkled with boring paperwork, tedious lectures on safety or some aspect of the carrier aviator’s craft, or — snore! — another NATOPS quiz. Unfortunately, on flying days there were not enough sorties to allow every pilot to fly one, so Jake and the rest of them took what they could get and solaced themselves with an occasional ugly remark to the schedules officer, as if that harried individual could conjure up money and flight time by snapping his fingers.

On those too-rare occasions when bombs were the main course — usually Mark 76 practice bombs, but every now and then the real thing — Jake Grafton managed to turn in respectable scores. Consequently he was a section leader now, which meant that when two A-6s were sent to some uninhabited island in the sea’s middle to fly by, avoid the birds, and take photographs, he got to lead. He led unless Colonel Haldane was flying on that launch, then he got to fly the colonel’s wing. Haldane was the skipper, even if his CEP was not as good as Jakes’s. Rank has its privileges.

Of course Doug Harrison reminded the skipper of his earlier commitment to letting the best bomber lead. Haldane’s response was to point to the score chart on the bulkhead. “When you get a better CEP than mine, son, I’ll fly your wing. By then my eyes will be so bad I’ll need someone to lead me around. Until that day…”

“Yessir,” Harrison said as his squadron mates hooted.

Jake had been spending at least half his time in the squadron maintenance department, and now the skipper made it official. Jake was to assist the maintenance officer with supply problems.

The squadron certainly had supply problems. Spare parts for the planes were almighty slow coming out of the Navy supply system. The first thing Jake did was to sit down with the book and check to see if the requisitions were correctly filled out. He found a few errors but concluded finally that the supply sergeant knew what he was doing. Then he sat down for a long talk with the sergeant.

Armed with a list of all the parts that were on back order, he went to see the ship’s aviation supply officer, a lieutenant commander in the Supply Corps, a staff corps that ranked with law and medicine. Together they went over Jake’s list, a computer printout, then sorted through the reams of printouts that cluttered up the supply office. Finally they went to the storerooms, cubbyholes all over the ship crammed with parts, and compared numbers.

When Jake went to see Colonel Haldane after three days of this, he had several answers. The erroneous requisitions were easily explained — there were actually fewer than one might expect. Yet the Marine sergeant was the odd man out with the Navy supply clerks, who were giving him no help. The system would not work if the people involved were not cooperating fully and trying to help each other.

The most serious problem, Jake told the colonel, was the shortages on the load-out manifest when the ship put to sea. Parts that should be aboard the ship weren’t. Related to this problem was the fact that the supply department had stored some of its inventory in the wrong compartments, effectively losing a substantial portion of the inventory that was aboard. This, he explained, was one reason the clerks were less than helpful with the squadron supply sergeant — they didn’t want to admit that they couldn’t find spare parts that their own records showed they had.

Lieutenant Colonel Haldane went to see CAG, the air wing commander, and together they visited the ship’s supply officer, then the executive officer. Jake didn’t attend these meetings but he read one of the messages the captain of the ship sent out about shortages in the load-out manifest. Sparks were flying somewhere. Two chief petty officers in the supply department were given orders back to the States. Soon parts began to flow more freely into the squadron’s maintenance department. One evening the supply sergeant stopped Jake in the passageway and thanked him.

It was a pleasant moment.

One day the flight schedule held a surprise. From the distant top branches of the Pentagon aviary came tasking for flights to photograph estuaries along the coast of North Vietnam. Told to stay just outside the three-mile limit, the aircrews marveled at these orders. They knew, even if the senior admirals did not, that even if the North Viets were preparing a mighty fleet to invade Hawaii and they managed to get photographs of the ships, with soldiers marching aboard carrying signs saying WAIKIKI OR BUST, the politicians in Washington would not, could not renew hostilities with the Communists in Hanoi. Still, orders were orders. In Ready Four the A-6 crews loaded 35-mm cameras with film, hung them around the BNs’ necks, and went flying.

There were no enemy warships lurking in the estuaries. Just a few fishing boats.

It was weird seeing North Vietnam again, Jake told himself as he flew along at 3,000 feet, 420 knots, dividing his attention between the coast and his electronic countermeasures — ECM— alarms as Flap Le Beau busied himself with a hand-held 35-mm camera. The gomers were perfectly capable of squirting an SA-2 antiaircraft missile out this way, even if he was over international waters. Or two or three missiles. He kept an eye on the ECM and listened carefully for the telltale sounds of radar beams painting his aircraft.

And heard nothing. Not even a search radar. The air was dead.

The land over there on his right was partially obscured by haze, which was normal for this time of year. Yet there it was in all its pristine squalor — gomer country, low, flat and half-flooded. The browns and greens and blues were washed out by the haze. The place wasn’t worth a dollar an acre, and certainly not anybody’s life. That was the irony that made it what it was, a miserable land reeking of doom and pointless death.

Looking at it from this angle four miles off the coast, from the questionable safety of a cockpit, he could feel the horror, could almost see it, as if it were as real and tangible as fog. All those shattered lives, all those terrible memories…

They had fuel enough for thirty minutes of this fast cruising, then they planned to turn away from the coast and slow down drastically to save fuel. First Lieutenant Doug Harrison was somewhere up north just now, taking a peek into Haiphong Harbor. Grafton would meet him over the ship.

They were fifteen minutes into their mission when Jake first heard it — three different notes in his ears, notes with a funny rhythm. Da-de-duh…da-de-duh…

He reached for the volume knob on the ECM panel. Yes, but now there were four notes.

“Hear that?” he asked Flap.

“Yeah. What is it?”

“Sounds like a raster scan.”

“It’s a MiG or F-4, man. Look, the AI light is illumin—”

He got no more out because Jake Grafton had rolled the plane ninety degrees left and slapped on five G’s as he punched out some chaff.

When the heading change was about ninety degrees, Jake rolled out some of the bank and relaxed the G somewhat. The coast was behind him and he was headed out to sea. The Air Intercept light remained illuminated and the tone continued in their ears, although it was back to three notes, a pause, then the three notes again.

“We’re on the edge of his scan, but he sees us all right,” Flap said.

“Hang on.”

Throttles forward to the stops, Jake lowered the left wing and pulled hard until he had turned another ninety degrees. Now he was heading north. He let the nose drop and they slanted down toward the ocean. Meanwhile Flap was craning his head to see behind. Jake was looking too, then coming back inside to scan the instruments. Outside again…too many puffy clouds. He saw nothing.

The adrenaline was really pumping now.

“See anything?” he demanded of Flap.

“You’ll be the first to hear if I do. I promise.”

Probably a Phantom, but it could be a MiG! Out over the ocean, in international waters. If it shot them down, who would know?

Or care?

Goddamn!

This A-6 was unarmed. Sidewinders could be fitted but Jake had never carried one, not even in training. This was an attack plane, not a fighter. And there was no gun. For reasons known only to God and Pentagon cost efficiency experts, the Navy had bought the A-6 without any internal guns. Against an enemy fighter it was defenseless.

The raster beat was tattooing their eardrums. Now they had a two-ring-strength strobe on the small Threat Direction Indicator — TDI. Almost directly aft.

He did another square corner, turning east again, then retarded the throttles to idle to lower the engines’ heat signature and kept the plane in a gentle descent to maintain its speed. The enemy plane extended north, then turned, not as sharply. Now it was at five o’clock behind them.

Jake looked aft. Clouds. Oh, sweet Jesus! Dit-da-de-duh, dit-da-de-duh, dit-da-de-duh…the sound was maddening.

He was running out of sky. Passing eleven hundred feet. The ocean was down here.

He slammed the throttles full forward. As the engines wound up he pushed the nose over to convert what altitude he had into airspeed. He bottomed out at four hundred feet on the altimeter with 500 knots on the airplane. He pulled, a nice steady four-G pull.

He was climbing vertically, straight up, when he entered the clouds. Concentrating on the gauges, trying to ignore the insane beat of the enemy radar, he kept the stick back but eased out most of the G. Still in the clouds with the nose up ten degrees, he rolled upright and continued to climb.

The sound of the enemy’s radar stopped. The MiG must have sliced off to one side or the other, be making a turn to reacquire him. But which way? He had been concentrating so hard on flying the plane that he hadn’t had time to watch the TDI.

“Right or left?” he asked Flap.

“I dunno.”

The clouds were thinning. Lots more sunlight. Then the A-6 popped out on top.

Jake looked left, Flap right.

The pilot saw him first, three or four thousand feet above, turning toward them. An F-4.

“It’s a fucking Phantom,” he roared over the ICS to Flap.

Flap spun and craned over Jake’s shoulder. Then he flopped back in his seat and held up middle fingers to the world.

Jake raised his visor and swabbed his face. Now the strobe reappeared on the TDI and the music sounded in his ears. He reached with his right hand and turned the ECM equipment off.

The plane was climbing nicely. He engaged the autopilot, then turned to watch the F-4. It tracked inbound for several seconds, then turned away while it was still a half mile or so out.

Jake took off his oxygen mask and helmet and used his sleeve to swab the perspiration from his face. He was wearing his flight gloves, so he used them to wipe his hair. The sweat made black stains on his gloves and sleeve. Then he took off one glove and used his fingers to clean the stinging, salty solution from his eyes.

“Think he did that on purpose?” Flap demanded when he had his helmet back on and could again hear the ICS.

“How would I know?”

One evening as Jake entered the stateroom, his roommate, the financier, glanced at him and groaned. “Not another haircut! For heaven’s sake, Jake, why don’t you just shave your head and be done with it?”

Grafton surveyed his locks in the mirror over the sink. “What are you quacking about? Looks okay to me.”

“Is this the third haircut this week?”

“Well, I admit, watching these Marines parade off to the barbershop on an hourly basis has had a corrosive effect on my morals. I feel like a scuz bucket if I don’t go along. What are you caterwauling about? It’s my head and it’ll all grow out, sooner or later.”

“You’re ruining my image, Grafton. Already they are giving me the evil eye. I feel like a spy in the house of love.”

“You’ve been reading Anaïs Nin, haven’t you?”

“Bartow loaned me an edition in English. Wow, you ought to read some of that stuff! Ooh la la. It’s broadening my horizons.”

“What are you working on this evening?” The Real had paper strewn all over his desk, but there wasn’t a stock market listing in sight.

McCoy frowned and flipped some of the pages upside down so that Jake couldn’t see them. Then he apparently thought better of his actions and sat back in his chair surveying Grafton. The frown faded. In a moment he grinned. “We’re going to cross the line in two days.”

The line — the equator. The task group was heading southeast, intending to sail around the island of Java and reenter the China Sea through the Sunda Strait. Of necessity the ship would cross the equator twice.

“So?”

“I’m the only officer shellback in the squadron. Everyone else is a pollywog, including you.”

A pollywog was a sailor who had never crossed the equator. A shellback was one who had previously crossed and been duly initiated into the Solemn Mysteries of the Ancient Order of Shellbacks. It was easy enough to find out who was and who wasn’t. In accordance with naval regulations, all shellbacks had the particulars of their initiation recorded in their service records — ship, date and longitude.

“Too bad you’ll miss out on all the fun,” Jake said carelessly.

McCoy chuckled. “I ain’t gonna miss a thing, shipmate, believe you me. I’m coming to the festivities, as Davy Jones. But if you’re willing, I could use a little help.”

Jake was aghast. “Help from a lowly pollywog?”

“We’ll have to keep this under our hats. Can’t have scandalous things like this whispered around, can we? This would be help on the sly, for the greater glory of King Neptune.” He picked up the documents on his desk that he had turned over to keep Jake from seeing and passed them to his roommate.

The next two days passed quickly and pleasantly. Then the great day arrived. There was, of course, no flying scheduled. All morning people — presumably shellbacks — bustled around the ship on mysterious errands, with lots of giggling.

The pollywogs were given strict orders over the ship’s loudspeaker system. They were to go to their staterooms or berthing compartments after the noon meal and remain there until summoned into the august presence of Neptunus Rex, Ruler of the Raging Main. Actually there were over two dozen Neptunes, selected strictly on senority, i.e., the number of times they had crossed the line. Initiation ceremonies would be held simultaneously in ready rooms, berthing areas and mess decks throughout the ship, and each ceremony would be presided over by Neptunus Rex.

In his stateroom, Jake took off his uniform and pulled on a pair of civilian shorts. He donned a T-shirt and slid his feet into shower thongs. Then he settled back to wait for his summons.

It wasn’t long in coming. The telephone rang. The duty officer. “Pollywog Grafton, come to the ready room.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Jake took off his watch and dog tags. After he checked to ensure that his stateroom key was in his pocket, he went out and locked the door behind him.

The ready room was rapidly filling with his fellow wogs. Jake slipped into his regular seat. Colonel Haldane was lounging in his seat near the duty officer’s desk, chatting quietly with the executive officer. Alas, both officers were also wogs and were decked out for the festivities to come in jeans and Marine Corps green T-shirts. Standing everywhere around the bulkheads were officers from the air wing and other squadrons in uniform. Shellbacks. They immediately began to heckle the Marines, and Grafton.

“You’re in for it now, wogs…Just you wait until King Neptune arrives…You slimy wogs are in deep and serious…”

The public address system crackled to life. Ding ding, ding ding, ding ding, ding ding, ding ding. Ten bells. “Ruler of the Raging Main, arriving.”

A howl of glee arose from the onlookers, who laughed and pointed at the assembled victims, many of whom were making faces at their tormentors. Now Flap Le Beau stood in his chair, his arms folded across his chest. He was wearing a pillowcase on top of his head, held on with a band. His face was streaked with paint. As the onlookers hooted, he explained that he was an African king, ruler of the ancient kingdom of Boogalala, and he demanded deferential treatment from this Rex guy.

The shellbacks successfully shouted him down. Finally he sat, promising that he would renew his demands when the barnacled one arrived. One row behind him, Jake Grafton grinned broadly.

They didn’t have long to wait. The door was flung open and the Real McCoy stalked in. “Attention on deck,” he roared. The Marines snapped to attention like they were on parade. When everyone was erect and rigid, McCoy continued, “All hail, Nep-tunus Rex, Ruler of the Ragin’ Main.”

“Hail,” the assembled shellbacks shouted lustily.

Here they came, the royal party, led by the air wing commander, the CAG, who was decked out in a bedsheet. Behind him came Neptunus Rex, wearing a gold crown that looked suspiciously like it had been crafted of cardboard and spray painted. He wore swimming trunks and tennis shoes, but no shirt. His upper arms each bore a tattoo of a well-endowed, totally naked woman and on his chest was a screaming eagle in flight. A bedsheet cape flowed behind him. In his hand he carried a cardboard trident. As he seated himself on his throne — a chair on a platform so that everyone had a good view — Jake recognized him, as did half the men in the room. Bosun Muldowski.

The Real McCoy — Davy Jones — took his place at the podium and adjusted the microphone. He was wearing long underwear, which he and Jake had decorated with a bottle of iodine last night in a vain attempt to paint fish, octopi and other sea creatures. Alas, the outfit just looked like a bloody mess, Jake decided now. McCoy was enjoying himself immensely, and it showed on his face.

Flap Le Beau stood up again in his chair. “Hey, King! How’s it going?”

McCoy frowned, CAG frowned, Neptune frowned.

“Sit down, wog! Show some respect in the royal presence.”

“Uh, Davy, you don’t seem to understand. I’m King Flap of Boogalala. Being a king my very own self, I shouldn’t be here in the company of these slimy pollywogs. I should be up there on a throne beside ol’ Neptune discussing the many mind-boggling mysteries of the deep and how he’s making out these days with the mermaids.”

“Well pleaded, King Flap.” The onlookers seemed to disagree, and hooted their displeasure. Davy looked over at Neptune. “What say you, oh mighty windy one?”

Neptune scowled fiercely at the upstart Le Beau. “Have you wogs no respect? The dominions of the land are irrelevant here upon the briny deep, where I am sovereign. I suggest, Davy, that the loud-mouth pretender kiss the royal baby three times.”

“Wog Le Beau, you heard the royal wish. Thrice you shall kiss the royal baby. Now sit and assume a becoming humility or you will again face the awesome wrath of mighty Neptune.”

Le Beau sat. He screwed up his face and tried to cry. And almost made it. A gale of laughter swept the room.

It was good to be a part of this foolishness, Jake Grafton thought, good to have a hearty laugh with your shipmates, fellow voyagers on this journey through life. He and the Real had worked hard to get some laughs, and they succeeded. Many of the wogs were hailed individually before the royal court and their sins set forth in lurid detail. Major Allen Bartow was confronted with a book labeled, S’il Vous Plaît—really a NATOPS manual with a suitable cover — from which spilled a dozen Playmate-of-the-Month foldouts.

“Reading dirty books, slobbering over dirty pictures…shame, shame!” intoned Davy Jones, and King Neptune pronounced the sentence: three trips through the tunnel of love.

After about an hour of this nonsense the wogs were led up to the hangar deck, then across it to an aircraft elevator, which lifted the entire Ready Four pollywog/shellback mob to the flight deck. There the remainder of the initiation ceremonies, and all of Neptune’s verdicts, were carried out.

The tunnel of love was a canvas chute filled with garbage from the mess decks. All the wogs crawled through it at least once, the more spectacular sinners several times. At the exit of the tunnel were shellbacks with saltwater hoses to rinse off the garbage, but the wogs were only beginning their odyssey.

Next was the royal baby, the fattest shellback aboard, who sat on a throne without a shirt. His tummy was liberally coated with arresting gear grease. Victims were thrust forward to kiss his belly button. He enthusiastically assisted the unwilling, grabbing ears and smearing handfuls of grease in the supplicants’ hair. After kisses from every three or four victims, able assistants regreased his gut from a fifty-fìve-gallon drum that sat nearby. A messy business from any angle…

A visit to the royal dentist was next on the list. This worthy squirted a dollop of a pepper concoction into his victim’s mouths from a plastic ketchup dispenser. Expectoration usually followed immediately.

After a visit to the royal barber — more grease — and the royal gymnasium, the wogs ended their journey with a swim across royal lagoon, a canvas pool six inches deep in water. No, Jake learned as he looked at the victims splashing along, the water was only about one inch deep. It floated on at least five inches of something green, something with a terrible smell. Shellbacks arranged around the lagoon busily offered opinions about what the noisome stuff might be. The wogs slithered through this mess to the other side, where shellbacks helped them out, wiped them down, and congratulated them heartily. Without hesitation Jake flopped down and squirmed his way through the goo while his squadron-mates on the other side — the ones who had beat him over — cheered and offered impractical advice.

Jake joined Flap Le Beau on the fantail, where they stood watching the proceedings and comparing experiences as they wiped away the worst of the grease with paper towels.

The ship wasn’t moving, Jake noticed. She lay dead in the water on a placid, gently heaving sea. Around her at distances ranging from one to three miles her escorts were similarly still. All the ships were conducting crossing-the-line initiation ceremonies. Painted ships upon a painted ocean, Jake thought.

With a last glance at the sea and the sky and the merry group still cavorting on the flight deck, he headed below for the showers.

“Getting shot down was a real bad scene,” Flap Le Beau told Jake. They were on a surface surveillance mission along the southern coast of Java, photographing ships. To their right was the mountainous island with its summits wreathed in clouds, to the left was the endless blue water. They had just descended to 500 feet to snap three or four shots of a small coaster bucking the swells westward and were back at 3,000 feet, cruising at 300 knots. The conversation had drifted to Vietnam.

Perhaps it was inevitable, since both men had been shot down in that war, but neither liked to talk about their experiences, so the subject rarely came up. If it did, it was in an oblique reference. Somehow today, in a cockpit in a tropic sky, the subject seemed safe.

“It was just another mission, another day at the office, and the gomers got the lead right and let us have it. I hadn’t even seen flak that morning until we collected a packet. Goose was killed instantly — one round blew his head clean off, the left engine was hit, the left wing caught fire. All in about the time it takes to snap your fingers.”

“What were you doing?”

“Dive-bombing, near the Laotian border. We were the second plane in a two-plane formation, working with a Nail FAC.” A FAC was a forward air controller, who flew a small propeller-driven plane.

“We were on our second run. Oh, I know, we shouldn’t have been making more than one, but the FAC hadn’t seen any shit in the air and everything was cool during our first run. Then whap! They shot us into dog meat going down the chute. I grabbed the stick, pickled the bombs and pulled out, but the left engine was doing weird things and the wing was burning like a blowtorch and Goose was smeared all over everything, including me. Wind howling through the cockpit — all the glass on his side was smashed out. Real bad scene. So I steered it away from the target a little and watched the wing burn and told Goose good-bye, then I boogied.”

“How long did you wait before you ejected?”

“Seemed like an hour or so, but our flight leader told me later it was about a minute. All the time he was screaming for me to eject because he could see the fire. But we were at about six thousand feet at that point and I wanted a little distance from the gomers and I wanted the plane slowed down so I wouldn’t get tore up going out. There was so much noise I never heard anything on the radio.”

Jake remembered his own ejection, at night, over Laos. Just thinking about it brought back the sweats. He didn’t say anything.

“When I got on the ground,” Flap continued, “I got out my little radio and started talking. Now I’d checked the battery in that jewel before we took off, but I could barely hear the FAC. I found a place to settle in where I could keep an eye on the chute. Then the rescue turned to shit. The gomers were squirting flak everywhere and it was late in the afternoon and darkness was coming. What I didn’t know until way afterward was that the guy flying the rescue chopper got a case of cold feet and decided his engine wasn’t right or something. Anyway, he never came. It got dark and started raining and I decided I was on my own.”

“So how’d you feel?”

“Well, I felt real bad about Goose. He was a good guy, y’know? Tough getting it like that.”

“I mean how did you feel?”

“Like I had never left Marine recon. At least my jungle rot wasn’t itching. That was something. I skinned out of all that survival gear and kept only what I needed and decided to set up an ambush. What I really wanted was a rifle. All I had was the forty-five. And my knife.”

“Didn’t you think they might catch you?”

“No way, man. I knew they wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Not unless they shot me or something. I was on the ground for two weeks and had people walk by within six feet of me and they never saw me.”

“So what did you do?”

“Do? Well, I found a guy who had a rifle and took it, and his food. Ball of rice, with a lot of sand mixed in. You sort of have to develop a taste for it.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Checked in on the emergency freq about once a day, when the gomers weren’t close. Didn’t want to overwork the batteries in that radio. But they never heard me. A patrol found me on the fourteenth day. It was a good thing, because my jungle rot was starting to itch by then. You can never really cure that shit, you know.”

“So how many gomers did you kill?”

“A dozen that I know about.”

“Know about?”

“Yeah. I kept busy building booby traps and such. With a little luck the traps got a few more of ’em. In a way, it sort of made up for losing Goose. Not really, I guess. But it helped.”

“Uh-huh.”

“A fucked-up war, that’s what it was. A hell of a mess.”

“Yeah,” Jake said, and checked the fuel and the clock on the instrument panel. “I think we’re going to have to turn around.”

“Okay,” Flap Le Beau said. “Boy, it sure is pretty out here today.”

“There’s a decision point for every career officer,” Lieutenant Colonel Haldane said, “one day when you wake up and decide that you want to make a contribution. And for pilots, that doesn’t mean driving an airplane through the sky every day.”

He and Jake were sitting in the ready room. Jake had the duty and sat at the duty desk and Haldane was in his chair just behind it. There was only one other officer in the room, doing paperwork near the mailboxes. Haldane’s voice was low so that only Jake could hear it.

“True, some officers merely decide to stay until retirement, and I suppose that’s okay. We need those people too. But the people we want are those who dedicate themselves to making the service better, to being leaders, people who try to grow personally and professionally every day. Those folks are few and far between but we need them desperately.”

Jake merely nodded. Haldane had read the latest classified messages and handed the board back to Jake just before he began this monologue. Apparently Jake’s letter of resignation was on his mind, although he hadn’t mentioned it.

Haldane went on, almost thinking out loud: “In every war America fought before Vietnam, the people who led the military to victory were never the people in charge when the shooting started. U. S. Grant and William T. Sherman weren’t even in the army when the Civil War started. Phil Sheridan was a captain. Eisenhower and George Patton were colonels at the start of World War II, Halsey and Nimitz were captains. Curious, don’t you think?”

Before Jake could reply, he continued, “In peacetime the top jobs go to politicians, men who can stroke the civilians and oil the wheels of the bureaucracy. During a war the system works the way it is supposed to — men who can lead other men in combat are pulled to the top and given command. In Vietnam this natural selection process was stymied by the politicians. It was a political war all the way and the last thing they wanted was to relinquish the controls to war fighters. So we lost. And you know something funny? We could afford to lose because we didn’t have anything important at stake in the first place.

“Someday America is going to get into a fight it has to win. I don’t know when it will come or who the fight will be with. That war may come next year, or twenty years from now, or fifty. Or a hundred. But it will come. It always has in the past and evolution doesn’t seem to be improving the human species anywhere near fast enough.

“The question is, who will be in the military when that war comes? Will the officer corps be full of glorified clerks, efficiency experts and computer operators putting in their time to earn a comfortable retirement? Or will there be some military leaders in that mix, men who can lead other men to victory, men like Grant, Patton, Halsey?”

Haldane rose from his chair and adjusted his trousers. “Interesting question, isn’t it, Mr. Grafton?”

“Yessir.”

“The quality of the people in uniform — such a little thing. And that may make all the difference.”

Haldane turned and walked out. The officer doing paperwork had already left. Jake pulled out the top drawer of the desk and propped his feet up on it.

That Haldane — a romantic. Blood, thunder, destiny…If he thought that kind of talk cut any ice anymore he was deluding himself. Not in this post-Vietnam era. Not with the draft dodgers who didn’t want to go and not with the veterans who weren’t so quick.

Jake Grafton snorted. He had had his fill of this holy military crap! His turn expired when this boat got back to the States in February. Then somebody else could do it.

And if the United States goes down the slop chute someday because no one wants to fight for it, so be it. No doubt the Americans alive then will get precisely what they deserve, ounce for ounce and measure for measure.

What was that quote about the mills of the gods? They grind slowly?