The Edge of Honor (16 page)

Plus, we give the ship a bad rep by revealing publicly that we have a big drug problem, when we know it’s no bigger or smaller than any other ship in the Navy.

We do that, we fuck over our Old Man, who’s one of the last of the good guys. And we maybe fuck over our own careers, ‘cause you throw enough people out, your gear stops working, ship doesn’t look so hot.

“So … we do the smart thing—look the other way.

Judiciously, now. Some guy gets blatant, you kick his ass. But a smart guy knows who his dopers are and makes sure they’re not put in a position to do any real damage, see? Besides, most of what we do out here is command and control, like the Red Crown stuff—it’s all radarscopes and computers and radios. It’s not actually combat; it’s just stuff the twidgets do up in CIC.”

“Except for today,” interjected Brian. “That turned into combat.”

“The laissez-faire guys’d say today was a fluke. The brass would never put one of these PIRAZ ships on the gun line. And I’ll bet they never do it again, either.”

“Because of what happened to Berkeley?”

“Hell no. You’re missing the point. This is political.

It’s because of that round that went off and put some scrap metal through the CIC bulkhead, or the one that bounced off the pilothouse overhead. If we’d taken a real hit that blew up Combat, or the computer rooms, or the forty-eight radar, or the TACAN, you realize what would happen? For starters, the Long Beach couldn’t go offline.

She’d have to stay up there in the Gulf until they got another ship out here that was PIRAZ-capable. Remember, we only have five of these hummers in the whole PACFLEET. That’s two in WESTPAC to keep the Red Crown station manned up—one ship on station, the other resting up—and one in the yards at home. Then there’re two more working up on the West Coast to come back over here and relieve the two that’re deployed out here.

Navy can’t afford for anything to happen to one of these babies. So the go-along guys figure, if all we do is CIC work, what’s it matter if some of the little dears step out on deck after a midwatch for a quick toke?”

Benedetti rolled his eyes and took a deep drag on his cigarette. “Be sophisticated about it, they say. Manage it. There’s no point to this cops-and-robbers shit, because you only screw yourself if you succeed in catching your bad guy. You just cause all sorts of problems. And you know how much our superiors on the staffs love problems.”

Brian exhaled explosively. He stood up, unable just to sit there anymore.

“But that’s total bullshit,” he began.

“Yeah, buddy,” agreed Benedetti.

Brian shook his head. “The PIRAZ station is only forty, fifty miles off the North Vietnamese coast. If the North Vietnamese or the Red Chinese ever decided to attack the ships in the Gulf, their Migs could be on top in what—three minutes? And they supposedly have antiship missiles, those Styx missiles the Soviets gave them. And they have missile boats.

Shit, that close to the beach, anything could happen.”

“Yeah,” Benedetti said with a gleam in his eye. “But is any of that shit likely? We’ve had ships out here in the Gulf since ‘64, and since the original Tonkin Gulf incident, it’s never happened, has it? Everybody knows this war is a political war. Shit’s all managed in Washington and Moscow and Peking and Hanoi. Tit for fucking tat. Commies pulled the Tet offensive, we restarted the bombing in the North. The slopes make nice in Paris, we suspend the bombing in the North. Now ole Tricky Dicky announces he’s gonna wind this thing up. If that’s so, what’re we doin’ here? Is this a real war? It sure as shit is for the pilots who have to go north and do the bombing and get shot down or shot up. Their war is for fucking real.

For tin cans like Berkeley who get to run the gun line all the time in range of the coastal guns, their war is real. But the Hood, man? Shit, we do PIRAZ. We do Red Crown. We’re a TACAN out in the Gulf, a voice on the radio keeping all the support aircraft from running into one another. We provide a deck for the SAR helos when the guys who do the real war get their asses in a sling.

So, a little reefer here, a pinch of hash in your Mixture Seventy-nine there, no l? ig deal, see? This isn’t the fifties, I Like Ike, okay? Ike was square, man. These days, you gotta be cool, be with it, be hip, man, be smart. Drug problem in the Navy? You go along, keep your head down and your eyes in the boat, draw your combat pay, get ‘combat operations’ fitness reports, and you move right along. Leave the drug problem to the NIS guys.”

Brian was silent for a moment. “You almost make it sound pretty reasonable,” he said.

“Yeah, well, you and me, we know it’s a crock. ‘Cause eventually, some bad shit is gonna come howling out of the night and, like you said, we’ll have a space cadet on the console and we’ll get our asses waxed.

The dopers and the good guys, I can see where they’re coming from.

White hats and black hats. But the go-along, go-easy fuckers, they’re lower than whale shit in my book.”

He paused, taking a long drag on his cigarette.

“There’s another angle to this, though. You’re a department head now, in a lieutenant commander’s billet on a big-deal missile ship. The system expects you to be savvy about all this by now, see? Which means you gotta make a decision on how you’re gonna play it.”

“That’s not hard.”

“Oh, is that so? Lemme see. I’m guessing you’re in the same boat, careerwise, as I’m in. You’re being re toured in a second department head tour because the first one wasn’t all that terrific. Now, you tell me: Can you afford to be a caped crusader with that lieutenant commander promotion board coming up? You gonna do a drug sweep, go piss-test your whole department tomorrow?

You remember the old Navy staff rule, don’t you?

Maybe you don’t—you’ve never been a staff puke. It goes like this: Don’t go asking a question if you can’t stand all the possible answers.”

Brian was again silent. Benedetti finished his coffee and stubbed out his cigarette in the saucer. “Actually, you don’t wanta answer that question. It’s too easy to say what you’re going to do, Brian,” he said, getting up.

“But the first time you walk in on the one guy who can always fix the missile launcher, the primo star who keeps it up and running, and he’s got a red face and big dopey eyes and there’s reefer stink in the compartment—that’s when you’re gonna have to decide who you are and where you stand. It’s tougher than it sounds.”

“After what I saw in Berkeley’s wardroom today, it’s not tough at all.”

Benedetti stretched. “I hear you. But I think the first time you run into it, you’re gonna call the XO and Chief Jesus and not the CO and the chief master-at-arms. You gotta admit, at least your bosun’s mate, he gives you satisfaction. CO’s gonna give you a little pep talk.” He looked at his watch, shook it, and looked at it again.

“Tomorrow’s turnover day,” he said. “We become Red Crown for real. Or actually, you and Austin become Red Crown.”

“How’s that?”

“After today’s fiasco, the Old Man took me off the CIC watch bill, so you and Austin are going to do the evaluator job six on, six off for the next forty-five days. I get to spend my time in the holes holding shit together.”

He eyed Brian speculatively. “Welcome aboard, shipmate.”

“It’s a real pleasure to be here, sir,” said Brian, repeating the old formula and digesting the news that he and Austin would be on port and starboard watches for perhaps the rest of the cruise, “I think.”

Benedetti laughed, slid his mug into the pantry window, and left. Brian sat in the silent wardroom with his cold coffee, thinking about what Benedetti had told him.

He looked around the wardroom. The furnishings were much fancier than those in his last ship—upholstered armchairs and a couch and even some end tables with real lamps. The overhead was tiled in acoustic panels, giving a softer look to the room than the expanded metal usually found in destroyers. The walls were white. The only patch of white in the Berkeley’s wardroom had been the bone white pallor of the bodies on the table. He shivered as the image intruded. He sat back and closed his eyes.

His first sight of what war really looks like and he had puked like a seasick recruit. And the look on the exec’s face: What are you doing out here on the bridge, Mr. Holcomb? Did a little death scrabbling on the outside bulkheads unnerve you? Admit it, you were scared.

Okay, but anyone who wouldn’t be scared when that shit starts is a fool.

Yeah, but you’re not supposed to show it, Mr. Senior Lieutenant. No puking in front of the troops.

He suddenly wondered whether Benedetti’s frustration with his job had more to do with the drug scene and how he was being forced to play it by the go-alongto-get along people than with the normal travail of being chief engineer.

He thought again about Maddy. They would get their first logistics helo tomorrow after the turnover. He wondered whether he would get a letter.

He had sent cards from Pearl and a letter from Subic. Mail from the States took almost three weeks to get out to the ships. He relived the unreasonable feeling of guilt that settled in his guts whenever he went off to sea, a feeling amplified by the tormenting notion that perhaps the important things in life were passing him by, real life, with a family, kids, maybe. But in their many rounds on the subject before the deployment, Maddy had been adamant, in that sweet but steely voice she came up with sometimes: no kids until Daddy was going to be ashore for more than two weeks at a pop.

He knew that his tour in Hood would cap off the longest stint of sea duty in a typical career. The first eight to nine years for a surface ship officer were traditionally spent on sea duty, or in schools preparing for sea duty.

Maddy had had a brief taste of Navy life when they were married three months into his tour in Decatur. Two months after their wedding, the ship had gone to the Mediterranean for a six-month deployment, abbreviated for Brian when orders for postgraduate school came. But the months of separation had taken a toll on their young marriage. If the tour in Decatur had not been followed by two years in Monterey at the Navy Postgraduate school, he might have lost her. Brian knew Maddy feared abandonment more than anything else. Now he was deployed again, this time for seven months. If they could only get by this hump, and if he made lieutenant commander, he would go ashore for a two-to three-year shore-duty tour before coming back to sea as an exec in a destroyer— assuming Maddy would wait. Her first letter would reveal a lot.

He heard the stewards stirring in the wardroom pantry and looked at his watch. Almost time for midrats. Austin wanted him in Combat by 0500 to help with the turnover evolution. He got up, pushed his mug into the pantry window, and headed up to his stateroom.

Chief Jackson peered down into the shiny hatch coaming of Number Two Fire Room. A stainless-steel ladder went straight down for four rungs, then bent to the left at an angle, disappearing into the jungle of machinery and steam lines on the upper level of the after fire room. A small hurricane of air from the ship’s interior rushed by his head into the fire room. Jackson had a secret fear of heights, and the vertiginous view from the top of the ladder, accentuated by that awkward bend, gave him pause. He took, a deep breath and climbed over the coaming, turned around, and went down the ladder backward.

He knew that the snipes prided themselves on going down the other way, facing into the fire room, the ladder rungs at their heels. He had also seen one BT carried out of this very fire room with his leg broken backward from a fall on the ladder, so he chose the “twidget style,” as the snipes called it. A twidget was anybody who wasn’t an engineer, and therefore, according to the snipes, not a real man.

He was already perspiring by the time he reached the upper level of the fire room. The nominal temperature on the upper level was 110 degrees, despite the efforts of the eighteen-inch-diameter exhaust vents roaring in the overhead of the space. The ladder landed on a steel-grid catwalk that extended between the two main propulsion steam boilers and gave access to main feed pumps and other auxiliary machinery arranged around the boilers.

The upper level was unmanned, as the control consoles, the firing alley, and the relatively cooler air was down on the lower level, closer to the bilges. The lighting in the space shined yellow due to the steam-tight shields on the bulbs; the space stank of fuel oil, hot salt water, steam, and old asbestos lagging. Jackson’s objective was the tool crib and BT2 Gallagher, who was rumored to be hiding out there. He walked across the catwalk to the next ladder, careful not to touch any hot metal, and, turning around once again, went down the ladder to the lower level.

This ladder gave onto the firing alley, a space about ten feet wide between the burner fronts of the two boilers. It was called the firing alley because the burners that supplied fuel oil to the two 1,200-psi steam boilers were loaded and serviced from this area. At the other end of the alley was the control console, where a boiler tender first class leaned nonchalantly on a battered three-legged stool and watched his dials. Two other men in oil-stained dungarees sat sweating on the step up from the alley to the console platform, directly under an air-supply vent.

Because the supply vents terminated on the lower level, the temperature here was a slightly more humane 100 degrees. The machinery noise was terrific as the muted roar of the firebox in the one boiler on the line combined with the turbine whines from main feed pumps, fuel-oil service pumps, the combustion-control compressor, the air vents, all of it amplified by being confined in the steel compartment of the fire room, which was beneath the waterline. The three engineers wore spring-clip hearing protectors, and Jackson wished he had plugged his ears before he’d come down here. After his many years around the guns, he could not afford much more hearing loss.

The engineers, all white, looked at him with blank expressions as he walked over to the console flat. If there was any division in the ship that was a hard-core bastion of racist whites, it was B Division.

“I’m looking for BT Two Gallagher,” Jackson shouted to the first class.