Reluctant Warriors (22 page)

As the ship was beginning to right herself, the fourth bomb hit within a few feet
of the bridge.

One moment, Rodgers and the other bridge personnel were secure at their stations.
The next moment, he was in the water, his ears ringing and the breath knocked out
of him by the force of the explosion.

Gasping, chin-deep in seawater, he looked around. There was a huge hole in
Mackson
,
gouts of fire and oily smoke boiling out of it. All the bridge personnel, and the
debris of everything on the bridge itself, had been blown into the sea and were floating
around him. He spotted Hodges, who looked badly hurt, Cashion, and three others clinging
to wreckage near him.

Mackson
settled almost instantly and began to sink. Rodgers grabbed the nearest piece
of wreckage and floated, dazed, in the water among perhaps two hundred other men.
They watched as the destroyer went down not far
from them, in some nine hundred fathoms
of water. Several rafts were in sight, but none of the ship's whaleboats. Many of
the men were crawling aboard debris of one kind or another as they watched the Japanese
disappear to the north, looking for
Mineola
.

The breeze slackened and the sea turned relatively calm. The men were able to stick
together in small groups, but there were not places on rafts or debris for all. The
water began to blacken as thousands of gallons of Navy Standard Fuel Oil (NSFO) escaped
the ship and rose to the surface, coating the surface of the water and the men as
well.

There was little in the world as slippery and foul-smelling as NSFO. Rodgers could
hear the men swearing and spitting as it burned their eyes and got in their mouths.
He winced in sympathy. Swallowing NSFO could be fatal. Some of the unlucky men treading
water were probably getting a lethal dose of the stuff. He hung on to the debris,
keeping the upper half of his body out of the fuel. The fumes still stung his eyes
and made him cough. He looked down at his arms, peppered with tiny fragments of metal
from the explosion. His left leg hurt an awful lot too. Trying to move it only made
the pain worse.

Darkness fell within a few hours. Providentially, two-foot seas and a stiff breeze
out of the northwest dissipated much of the NSFO. Despite his pain, Rodgers began
to swim among the groups, making sure the weakest were maintaining their handholds
and being looked after.

This went on most of the very black night, through intermittent rain. When he heard
a man cry out, Rodgers would swim in that direction. When he found men in the dark—usually
fuel-stained, bloodied, or both, and always panicked—he comforted them as best he
could.

“Help is on the way, men; help will be here soon. Hold on now. Hold on. It won't
be long, not long.”

Twice, he came up to figures who turned out to be corpses: his signalman, Hodges,
and Raguzzi, both draped limply over floating debris from the bridge.

Occasionally, in the blackness, he could see nothing and had to call
out. Invariably
voices came back from the void: “Over here, sir.” It pleased Rodgers that they knew
his voice.

He rested when he could and tried to wipe oil away or move to ease the pain in his
leg. He thought of his wife, Cari Lynn. They had met at a Christmas dance at the
Academy in 1923, when he was a junior. The ballroom music played in his head. She
thought him the handsomest man she had ever seen. She was a high society type from
Silver Springs, Maryland, just outside of Washington, D.C. Her father had served
as ambassador to both Belgium and Italy. She was 97 pounds of black hair and sparkling
eyes, and had enough ambition for both of them. She saw in him the strength that
was to make him into a great officer, and had not let go of his hand all evening.
When he was a senior, once she kissed him, he knew she had fallen for him. So, they
married, and neither ever regreted it.

Even twenty years later as he lay in Bethesda Naval Hospital in bitter pain, dying
of throat cancer, a shell of his former self, she was there doting over him. She
complained a lot and made trouble for everyone, but toward the end stayed in the
room for almost ninety hours straight. Anyone whom she perceived to delay his treatment
or get in the way, whether nurse or doctor, orderly or naval personnel, or even a
congressman, rued the day they appeared in her sights! As a reporter would say of
the pair, “Together they're invincible. Separate they are not bad either.”

The sea became a little rougher. He thought of his time at Annapolis. As with men
since the beginning of time, the call of the sea had been strong in him since childhood.
It had been so for his father as well. His father had been killed at sea in 1912.
He had saved several crewmen from a fire, and he had been awarded the Navy Cross
posthumously. Rodgers had been nine at the time. Rodgers' little sister, Faye, had
been only four.

His father's distinguished service had practically guaranteed Rodgers an appointment
to Annapolis, if he decided he wanted it. While his mother must have expected it,
it had nearly broken her heart when he announced, during his junior year of high
school, that he would like to go. He had heard the sea breezes bring her sobs in
through the screens many of those summer nights in Mobile in 1921, after she thought
he was asleep. So, he had gone
reluctantly. They'd had very little money. With one
less mouth to feed, he knew his mother could get by with Faye to help her. He'd felt
powerless when his mother was forced to go to work in a bank.

But everything had changed in his freshman year at the Academy. His mother married
the bank's president, which relieved Rodgers' mind no end. And he went out for football.
There, assistant coach Lieutenant Lakeland W. Wells was waiting to change his life!
Rodgers had been drawn to him immediately as a father figure.

Wells had made him into a good man, a Navy man. Wells had taught him and his teammates
the ancient “Soldier's Elegy,” which Rodgers had taken as his life's motto and thought
about every day. Its refrain came to him now as he floated in the Coral Sea, hurt
and approaching exhaustion:

Here lies the last of all my friends.
He fought by me in all the Great Wars
And against all of the mighty foes
Now unnumbered by the years.
And always was on time with people,
And lightly brought he the word of others.
All know he was not great, but of long service.
But I have not seen better and will not.
Even among the Picts his name was known as of a Chief,
And that was his fate, to die here in this dismal place
For no value, and with no calm word by a fair voice.

Wells had taught them that the soldier's life was a life of service to others, of
sacrificing and suffering without expectation of reward, to always do one's duty
and be a good lieutenant.

As the early morning hours passed, Rodgers became weaker and weaker. He could no
longer feel his injured leg, and the hours of swimming in the sea had taken their
toll. He barely made it to the next raft. It was all he could do to cling to it,
his strength gone.

Quietly, the life essence ebbed out of him. He could no longer speak
when Sam Cashion
happened upon him just before dawn. Cashion had also been swimming among the rafts
and boats most of the night.

“It's the captain, men. It's the captain!”

Hands reached out and pulled Rodgers onto the raft. Two badly hurt men gave their
places, slipped off the raft. They had heard him come and go all night. Despite having
him as their commander only seventy-two hours, they were devoted to him, a captain
who would speak to them personally.

They had known him by reputation long before. Everyone in the Navy knew of his heroism
at Pearl Harbor as the executive officer of the heavy cruiser
San Francisco
, calmly
standing on the bridge directing fire at the attacking Japanese planes, ducking as
they made their strafing runs. They had accounted for five of the twenty-four enemy
planes brought down that day. The men knew that they needed a man like him in their
country's struggle against great enemies. Here was a man who could win the Navy Cross
before war was even declared. Grips loosened, and in a few minutes they drifted away.

As dawn lightened the sky, Rodgers began to regain his senses. Sam Cashion was there
when he awoke.

“You okay, sir?” Cashion asked.

“How are the men doing?” Rodgers responded, not answering the question.

“From what little we can tell, the men are hanging on as best they can.”

“No count of the men?”

“No, we're pretty spread out.”

“Let me get back into the water,” Rodgers said.

“Sir, don't you think you should stay put?”

Rodgers slid in. Almost immediately, Cashion had to grab him. “Men, it's the captain.
Get him up!”

Again, hands reached down and pulled Rodgers back on the debris. Luckily, the sea
was still calm.

Rodgers lay limp on the raft, drifting into thoughts of his football days at
Annapolis.
“The Middies are strong up the middle,” the eastern newspapers had said. Wells and
the others had made him into a good player. At six-foot-two and 200 pounds, he had
played tackle both ways on a very good team. He and Lonnie Betcher from Saddle River,
New Jersey, had been the tackles. As a senior, only the center from Notre Dame, All-American
Benny Hyerson, who was to become a lifelong friend, had outplayed him. His roommate
and best friend, Tommy Ransom, had been the quarterback and safety.

He almost managed a smile, thinking of these things, and closed his eyes. He felt
guilty, but for the first time in his life he really could not get up. In a few more
seconds, he passed out.

By midmorning, some of the men began to see smoke to the east. Soon the silhouette
of
Clarkson
, one of the new Fletcher-class destroyers that were to prove part of
the backbone of the march to Tokyo, came into view.

Rodgers was awakened by the sound of the men whooping and hollering. He lifted his
head just long enough to see
Clarkson
's silhouette looming over them. They were saved!

As he was being hauled up to the bridge, Rodgers introduced himself to the captain
almost incoherently and gasped: “Did she get in? Did
Mineola
get in to the ‘Canal?”

“Yes, sir! She got in all right. They were attacked at dawn and the captain was killed,
but they were unloaded by then. We weren't sure what had happened to you. The current
took you quite a ways. We looked for you all night.”

Rodgers lay back on the stretcher.
Freddie
, he thought,
I'm sorry I got you killed.
If I live through this, I'll go see Angela and the boys.
He breathed a sigh of relief
that his mission had been accomplished.

“How many of my men did you get?” he rasped. His mouth still tasted like NSFO fumes.

“A hundred and ninety-four by our count, sir.”