The Edge of Honor Page 12

  Shined his flashlight in the fat fuck’s face. Pupils big as pennies.

  Said he yelled at him but that Gallagher just sat down on a bale of rags and giggled like a fucking girl.

  He’s lucky Fontana didn’t kill him right then and there. I probably would have.”

  “You tell the captain this?”

  “I told the XO. You gotta understand something here.

  The Old Man, all these guys are like his kids, see? His kids don’t get high, fuck up the works. They ‘make mistakes,’ just like children. You tell him something like this, he just shakes his head, gives you that patient, ‘you’re letting me down’ smile, and says, ‘Vince, Vince, you’ve got it wrong. Must have. These men are good men. They work hard under hellish conditions in those fire rooms. Hundred-ten-degree heat down there when we’re in the tropics. Six on, six off, weeks on end. They get bone-tired. They make mistakes. We all make mistakes.”

  ” Benedetti sighed and rubbed his eyes again. “Makes you feel like you’re some kinda shitheel, and the hell of it, he doesn’t mean it that way. It’s just that he’s a nice old man, still living in the old Navy, whatever the hell that is. Believes the best of everybody. You’ll find out the first time one of your stars fucks up. He’ll give you a fatherly lecture and you’ll crawl outta that cabin ashamed of yourself for picking on his kids.”

  “He won’t admit that the ship has a drug problem?

  Hell, every ship in the fleet has a drug problem. What’s he scared of?”

  “Scared? Naw, I don’t think he lacks for courage—he used to be in the bomb squad, you know, the EOD guys, when he was a white hat. Still carries his ‘instruments’ around with him; showed us all one night how you take apart an unexploded bomb. Scared me just to listen to him.

  That’s where he got that Navy Cross—something to do with a bomb on a ship. No, it’s more a question of righteousness. If it ever penetrated that a lot of his kids were doin’ marijuana or hashish on board, off watch, on watch, hell, at GQ, I think he’d just wail and melt down like that witch in The Wizard of Oz.”

  “The XO. Tell me the XO knows the score, right?”

  “The XO? Hell yes. He nails the bastards whenever he can, but it’s all done off the books. Gets some of the bigger guys in the chiefs’ mess to have little ‘talks’ with any doper he catches or even suspects. Tries to terrorize the little shits into knocking it off. Your chief bosun is part of that scene. Terrorize me, I had to go ‘talk’ to Martinez back in after steering. But they don’t go to captain’s mast.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because—and I don’t know this; I just think this is how it is—the Old Man just won’t hear it. I think what happens is that the XO is shielding him from this shit.

  Says he’s the best CO we’re ever going to see on a ship like this. And he’s right. Usually these PIRAZ ships get up-and-coming crown princes—you know, guys on their way to flag rank. I don’t know how Captain Huntingdon got Hood, except everybody in the Navy seems to like the guy. You’ll never meet a kinder, nicer four-striper in the Navy.

  Everybody knows he’ll never make admiral— he’s too old. So this is it; this is his big command. And I gotta admit, Huntington’ll do anything for his people: go up against the Bureau, get the orders they want, give ‘em special leave—you name it. There are people in this ship who worship the Old Man. I think the XO is trying to make sure nothing happens to spoil it for him.”

  “But what’s he doing to his ship?”

  Benedetti gave him a weary smile. “Ah, well. You got a lookee-see at that today, didn’t you? What do they say in country—Sin loil Sorry about that, USS Berkeley. I

  gotta tell you, I don’t want to be in port with Berkeley for awhile.”

  “That’s what Chief Martinez said. But isn’t Hood going to get some static over what happened today?”

  “I don’t think so. You heard the Old Man. I think the basic decision to send a PIRAZ ship to the gun line is going to be questioned. That aviator admiral on Yankee Station is gonna have to put a lid on that, which means he can’t then jump in Hood’s shit. The chain of command in this war has elevated second-guessing the frontline troops to an art form.”

  Benedetti leaned back in his chair. Brian got up to check on the coffee.

  He returned with two mugs and handed Benedetti one before sitting down.

  The engineer sipped his coffee noisily for a minute before continuing.

  “There’s another reason why we have to go easy on the drugs bit. It’s the Bureau of Personnel’s little catch twenty-two.”

  “I don’t think I want to hear this.”

  “You don’t, but you should. The no-replacements catch. See, you bring a guy up on charges of drug use aboard ship, CO finds him guilty at mast, you gotta discharge his ass. Nothing wrong with that, is there? Let the dopers get back to the streets, drop acid, do speed, go find Alice in the Sky with Diamonds, and sing protest songs with the rest of the longhaired, creeping Jesus, hippy freaks. ‘Cept for one little ‘oh by the fucking way’: You don’t get a replacement for that guy you just discharged. Oh, one day you will, maybe six, seven months from now. But for right now, you drum a BT Two or an RD Three or an FT Two out the main gates, you’re one down on the watch bill, pal, which, if you haven’t noticed, is already port and starboard, six on, six off.

  They call it an unplanned loss. Now, you know every ship in PACFLEET is undermanned. In some rates, like boiler tender, we’re at like sixty percent. All of which the XO makes perfectly clear to you when you’re ready to hang one of these dopers.”

  Brian nodded his head. “I remember having to send guys from Decatur to the PACFLEET. You think Hood is undermanned, you ought to see the LANTFLEET ships.

  Some of the LANTFLEET ships don’t have enough people even to get under way.”

  “Yeah, I know, but LANTFLEET doesn’t do shit ‘cept go to NATO cocktail parties and play boogabooga with Russian subs. Even with the involuntary transfers out here, there’re still not enough guys to go around.

  So, you shitcan a guy, you’ll feel it on the watch bill pretty quick.”

  Brian nodded. His division officers had briefed him on the manning situation on his first day. There were plenty of deck seamen, but when it came to fire-control technicians, guided-missile repair techs, and even gunner’s mates, Hood was averaging only 70 to 75 percent of complement. A drug hit would hurt Weapons Department just about as hard as it would Engineering.

  “Chief Martinez implied drugs were not confined to the Engineering Department,” he said.

  Benedetti laughed—an unpleasant sound. ” ‘Implied,” did he? You better Hong Kong fucking believe that, shipmate. Your deck, missiles, and sonar gangs are as dirty as my M, B, and Auxiliary divisions. The gunner’s mates, for some reason, won’t tolerate it. They’re all gung ho, go around acting like Marines. Weight lifters, short hair, no beards.

  You’ve seen ‘em. Good shit. Chief Vanhorn’s the good guy behind that.

  Chief Jackson, the Sheriff, he used to be a gunner’s mate. But otherwise, take a tour topside between taps and midnight, see what it smells like out there on the weather decks.”

  “Good guy? You make it sound like we have a good guys and bad guys crew, some kind of us-against-them situation here.”

  Benedetti laughed again. “I don’t believe you said that. Where you been, for Chrissakes? This is the LANTFLEET Navy talking? Man, I gotta get me some orders to LANTFLEET, I can see that. Must be nice out there in never-never land.”

  Brian frowned in sudden embarrassment. Was he being that naive? Had this drug shit been going on in Decatur during his first department head tour? Was his ignorance about what was going on below decks somehow behind those not-so-good fitness reports? Benedetti was watching him.

  “Hey, man,” Benedetti said gently, “you gotta wise up. These days, there’re three kindsa people in every ship. There’s the doper, usually an E-Five or below enlisted type, any division you want to name,
does his job but also does his dope and doesn’t see anything wrong with it.

  Knows he can get his ass kicked if he gets caught, but that’s just cops-and-robbers shit—same as being in high school. But he doesn’t see anything wrong with going up on deck at night and smoking a joint from time to time. Takes the edge off, you know? Relieves the boredom, the fatigue. Like you and me having a couple of shooters over at the club after a long day at the pier.”

  “Except he’s intoxicated aboard ship,” Brian. “Anything happens, a fire, a steam leak, you’ve got a doper responding to it.”

  “Bingo. But, see, that’s lifer talk, you’re thinking about the ship.

  Thinking about the ship, that comes with seniority, with experience, after you’ve seen a thing or two, and after you make a commitment to a Navy career.

  Then the ship becomes important. To the dopers, they’re just doing time in the Navy—beats doing time in the mud and the blood in country, right? They don’t give a rat’s ass about the ship. That’s for us khaki to worry about.”

  Benedetti sat back, sipped some more coffee, fished in his shirt pocket for a cigarette, and lighted up, blowing a cloud of smoke at the overhead.

  “Then there’re the good guys, officers, CPOs, most, not all, of the first class POs. Comes to dope on the ship, the good guys’re hell on wheels. Get a whiff of marijuana smoke, they round up the nearest master-at-arms and go chase it down, see if they can catch the little fuck. You met Chief Jackson, the Sheriff? He’s a fanatic about it, looks for dopers in every fan room. Stays up nights and patrols the decks, pops up like fuckin’ Houdini in unexpected places, trying to catch ‘em.”

  “What happens when he does?”

  “He arranges a visitation from Jesus.”

  “What!”

  Benedetti grinned. “Yeah, Louis Jesus Maria Martinez—your chief boats.” Benedetti chuckled. “First, he lays Injun shit on ‘em. You know, steps outta nowhere when the guy’s alone in a passageway, shoots him the evil eye, or gets somebody else to get the asshole on the phone, then talks scary to him. Tells him he’s got bad medicine, that the chicken guts and the bones say the guy’s gonna have bad luck real soon. Then the guy usually does have some bad luck: He falls down a ladder, trips into a bulkhead, bangs his face up somehow, breaks an arm, you know.”

  “But that’s … well, illegal.”

  “So’s doin’ dopeon one of Her Majesty’s ships of war, Brian. And if you don’t have the option of taking the guy to mast and putting his useless ass on the beach with the rest of those fucked-up civilians out there, you gotta do something, right?”

  “You said there were three kinds of people.”

  “Yeah. The third kind’s the one that pisses me off, and we got some of those up and down the chain of command.

  The third kind just sorta goes along. I think his highness, the Count of Monte Austin, is one. These are the guys who say, Look, probably thirty to forty percent of the enlisted people are doing marijuana or hashish on an occasional basis. There are officers in the wardroom who would do it, except they’re smart enough to see the consequences. Now, these people were doing it before they came into the Navy and they’re going to resume doing it when they’re out of the Navy. They don’t see that it’s a big deal. Most of them are doing it off watch, after hours. Okay, it’s illegal, it’s risky if some bad shit goes down, and it’d be better for everybody if they didn’t. But if we hassle ‘em, bust ‘em, throw ‘em out, all we do is screw ourselves, because we run out of crew pretty quick.

  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.”