The Nugget Page 2

  Exhausted, I lay spread-eagled along a section of the ship’s keel and tried to regain my wits. I now knew what people experienced during a large earthquake: when the earth itself moves, your brain can’t process it. It was terrifying. Then I smelled fuel oil, lots of it, followed by a hot gust of flame as the oil ignited back down by what had been the waterline. Instinctively, I started crawling backwards to get away from those grasping flames and worse, the choking clouds of oily black smoke that threatened to displace all the breathable air. Then I heard the broken screams of those still down in the water as the flames reached them, driving them underwater and then, inevitably, back up, lungs bursting, to the surface, there to inhale superheated air, flame, and smoke.

  I wish I could say that I bravely held my ground or tried to rescue some of them, but the truth was I simply pressed my face down onto the battleship’s keel, squeezed my eyes shut in sheer terror, and tried to ignore the continuous sounds of explosions nearby, the chatter of machine guns as the Japs came back on strafing runs, and the screams of the men down in the water, which one by one subsided into a sickening silence. At some point my brain had had enough. Everything went mercifully black.

  TWO

  Someone was lifting me into an upright position and then patting my face, none too gently.

  “Sir? Sir? You wounded?”

  I opened my aching eyes. Two grimy sailors in wet, oil-soaked dungarees had ahold of me. I blinked several times and then looked over their shoulders at the spectacle of the entire Pacific Battle Fleet either aflame, upside down, or barely afloat.

  “What the hell happened?” I croaked.

  One of the sailors, a petty officer third class, stared at me with frightened eyes. “The goddamned Japs, that’s what happened,” he said. “Now: we gotta go. Are you injured?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Except for my hands,” I said. I looked around at the mountain of steel on which I was sitting. “I was inside. Jesus!”

  “Okay, sir?” the petty officer said. “C’mon, we gotta get you down into the P-boat. Then we gotta get over to mainside. We got lotsa casualties in the boat. You ready?”

  I blinked a couple of times. Ready? Ready for what? Then the pair of sailors took me by the shoulders and we all three slid down the hull of the overturned battleship to the personnel boat that was waiting for us. Barnacles ripped my khaki trousers and the backs of my legs. The personnel boat was grossly overloaded, its gunwales only inches from the oily water. Inside lay about thirty casualties in various states of crisis. A chief petty officer was standing at the conning console. He pulled a lanyard once, sounding one bell, and the boat surged up against the steel hull long enough for the two sailors to pull me into the back of the boat. Somewhere behind us, out of sight because of the steel mountain which had been Oklahoma, something blew up with a hard, ear-compressing blast. Moments later large things began to pepper the water around us. The chief pulled the boat away from the hulk of the Oklahoma and turned it towards the other side of the harbor. He looked over his shoulder at me.

  “You injured, Ensign?” he asked, his voice betraying carefully restrained fear as he struggled to maintain some form of command composure.

  “No,” I replied. “I was—”

  He cut me off. “You’re an officer. You know first aid. How’s about going forward and helping with the wounded?”

  “Certainly,” I replied and then crawled into the passenger compartment just forward of the coxswain’s console as the chief carefully turned the boat and headed for the Ten-Ten dock across from Ford Island. Two white-hats were trying to tend to the wounded with the P-boat’s tiny first-aid kit. I was shocked by the carnage: men whose every inch of visible skin was roasted black and weeping serum as they tried to breathe into seared lungs. One man right in front of me was holding up his right arm which ended just above his wrist in a bloody tourniquet composed of a broken mop handle and the sleeve from someone’s shirt. The man’s eyes were closed as he cursed the Japanese through clenched teeth. The man next to him had a gaping chest wound and was obviously dead. Another blast from the direction of Ford Island made everyone cringe, but we kept at our clearly hopeless task, trying to stop bleeding and help burn victims breathe. I joined in their frantic efforts even as I realized we weren’t going to be able to do much more than try. For a few seconds I had to close my eyes and take a deep breath. Then I shook it off and jumped back in to help.

  Ford Island across the harbor had disappeared behind towering clouds of black smoke by the time we reached the shipyard. Two destroyers that had been in dry dock just forward of one of the battleships were blackened wrecks. There were dozens of ambulances, utility trucks, and even private vehicles swarming around the base of the pier. Another P-boat was unloading wounded ahead of us, so the chief throttled back and waited. Soon there were two more boats behind us, and more coming out from under the smoke cloud covering the harbor. When we finally nudged our way to the landing, a gray-faced nurse met us and did a quick, visual triage. She noticed me as I was holding up a sailor whose back was probably broken.

  “You injured, Ensign?” she called down to the boat, staring at the blood all over my khaki uniform.

  I shook my head. I’d tried to answer her but my mouth was too dry.

  “Okay,” she said. “You can help me. Everybody’s going to the triage station, right over there. The docs decide who’s going to the hospital, and who isn’t. Any more able-bodied in this boat?”

  Four sets of bloody hands rose.

  “Organize it, Ensign,” she told me and strode back to the main triage station.

  I did. As soon as all the passengers had been lifted by hospitalmen to the pier and onto stretchers, the chief backed the P-boat away from the landing and headed back out into the harbor. I saw to it that the stretcher cases were attended to, and that the dead were moved away from the survivors. I could hear sirens going all over the shipyard. There were many fires blazing on this side of the harbor as well. The first thing every wounded man wanted was water, which was in short supply in the noisy chaos around me. I, myself, was desperately thirsty. Then one of the base fire trucks showed up, covered in soot and with bullet holes in the cab doors. Three firemen got out and rigged a 2.5-inch hose down to the triage station. One of the firemen cracked open the nozzle, allowing all the triage medical personnel to wash their hands and faces for the first time. The cries for water from the dozens of stretcher cases became louder.

  I noticed a trash skip nearby that had a case of empty Coke bottles in it. I gathered up six of them, got in line for the nozzle, rinsed them out, and then filled all six. I went back to the ever-growing triage line and began offering sips of water to as many of the wounded as possible. I’d gone through five of the six bottles when a nurse yelled at me to knock it off, pointing out that the water could kill patients with abdominal wounds. There was an audible groan from the crowd of wounded, but I did as I was told. Ensigns did not argue with Navy nurses.

  I drank the last bottle myself and then sat down on one of the bollards lining the big Ten-Ten dry dock. Across the shattered harbor there were huge oil fires and even bigger clouds of intensely black smoke flickering with boiling red flames. The tops of some of the stricken battleships would be visible for a few moments before being enveloped again, swallowed up by their own funeral pyres. I looked for the Oklahoma but was unable to make her out, only then remembering she’d capsized. There was now an even longer line of boats waiting at the landing. The air along the waterfront stank of burnt oil and blood.

  I decided to get out of there. I’d survived. I’d helped, as best I could, and I’d been yelled at anyway. Now it was time to find my seabag and the Big E.

  THREE

  The next morning there were seven other newly minted pilots in the dining room of the bachelor officers’ quarters, which had escaped damage in the Japanese attack. One of them told me he’d heard Enterprise was due in port that afternoon to refuel, rearm, and then get back out to sea. I finished my
breakfast and went back to my room. I’d slept poorly Sunday night, getting up twice to take a shower, as if that would cleanse my shocked brain from the things I’d seen that day. I finished packing my seabag and made sure my orders packet was in good order, and then lay back down on the single bed.

  I wasn’t exactly proud of myself. Getting drunk Saturday night. Waking up in a “borrowed” stateroom with a sick hangover. Then the attack. Instead of running topside to find a machine gun to man, I’d bolted like any other rat escaping a sinking ship. I could have gone back down to the waterline and helped some of those guys get out of the water before all that ignited. Instead, well. Shit.

  People talking in the hallway outside woke me up. I looked at my watch but then remembered I no longer had one. I peered out the window and saw that it was late afternoon. I jumped up, grabbed my seabag and orders packet, and went downstairs to check out. I waited out front for a shuttle bus that made a circuit of the base once an hour. The air outside was even worse than on Sunday; it reminded me of the smell coming from the rendering plants out in the Omaha stockyards. There didn’t seem to be as much smoke over the harbor, but that only made the scope of the destruction even clearer. I was glad when the gray-painted school bus showed up and I could get aboard and avert my eyes.

  By 1700 I was down on the pier watching a gaggle of tugboats push the USS Enterprise into her berth. Her gray paint had a dark cast to it, as if in deference to what had happened only yesterday. The closer she came to the pier, the bigger she got: almost 26,000 tons, just over 800 feet long, and with 2,200 officers and men onboard. She carried ninety aircraft of different types and had three elevators and two catapults. She could run 32 knots at full power and her sides bristled with antiaircraft guns. That wall of steel alongside the pier made the sound of her starboard side ventilation exhaust ducts reverberate against the pier buildings. I could see several khaki-clad figures with one lone white pith helmet of the harbor pilot standing among them way up on the structure called the island amidships. I had to back away from the pier’s edge as a harbor crane came down the waterfront, clanging its warning bells. It was bringing the first of two brows to the after elevator sponson. It looked like there were a couple hundred men on the pier waiting to get aboard. Working parties had already begun to wrangle the heavy black fuel hoses to the pier’s edge in preparation for refueling.

  It was another hour before I approached the aftermost brow and started climbing. The brow next to that one was already filled with a steady flow of repair parts, replacement equipment, and white-hats with seabags balanced on their shoulders. Up forward on the pier there was another concentration of working parties, cranes, and even a steel conveyor belt structure that was carrying what looked like bombs up to the forward sponson. The ship’s aviation crane was also in action, lifting the fuselages of planes from flatcars on the pier up to the hangar deck. When I reached the sponson deck, which was a platform that extended out over the ship’s side beneath the actual flight deck, I saluted in the direction of where the national ensign ought to be, out of sight because of the overhanging flight deck. I presented my orders packet to the officer of the deck.

  “Ensign Steele reporting for duty, sir,” I announced to the harried-looking lieutenant who had the misfortune of being the OOD on the day of arrival in port.

  “Which squadron?” the OOD asked, noticing the gold wings on my uniform shirt.

  “Bombing Six,” I said, wincing as a blast of steam came out of the main stack way up above the sponson. To my embarrassment, no one else seemed to even notice it.

  “Messenger!” the OOD called, and a young sailor in dungarees and a white hat trotted over. “Take the ensign to Bombing Six’s ready room.” He turned back to me. “Welcome aboard,” he said, mechanically, looking over my shoulder. “Next.”

  The messenger grabbed my seabag and led me up into the hangar bay from the sponson and into a world of barely controlled pandemonium. The hangar bay was a cavernous room beneath the flight deck where planes were stowed, maintained, fueled, repaired, and then sent up on one of three large elevator platforms to the flight deck. The hangar bay was a place of non-stop noise populated by hundreds of men working on planes or moving them around the bay to make room for new arrivals. Two of the ship’s elevator doors were open to provide some fresh air and sunlight, but the atmosphere was still filled with welders’ smoke, oil fumes, and the clatter of machinery. Some of the squadron ready rooms were on the deck right beneath the flight deck, so we had to go into a ladder companionway on one side of the hangar bay and climb three more sets of ladders. We finally reached an athwartships passageway and then turned left down a centerline passageway, where we had to step over heavy steel frame risers, fondly known as knee-knockers, every ten feet.

  The Bombing Six ready room was arranged like a small movie theater, with rows of seats facing a stage area. The back of the stage was covered in heavy, fireproof curtains because the ship was in port. I knew that there were large area maps mounted behind those curtains, and I could hear men talking and working back there. The ready room was empty except for a harassed-looking chief petty officer, a yeoman second class, and a lieutenant commander with dark circles under his eyes. He was dressed in working khakis—long-sleeve shirt, black tie, khaki trousers, and brown shoes. The chief looked up when the quarterdeck messenger dropped my seabag and then backed out into the passageway.

  “Nugget alert,” he growled, causing the officer and the yeoman to look my way.

  “Ensign Bobby Steele, reporting for duty, sir,” I announced, hopefully, stepping forward with my orders packet. The yeoman took the brown envelope while the lieutenant commander gave me a handshake and a quick once-over. Something large clattered on the flight deck above, causing me to jump.

  “You’ll get used to that, Mister Steele,” the lieutenant commander said, quietly. “I’m Wade McClusky, CAG. Welcome aboard. You were here when the Japs attacked?”

  “Yes, sir. Actually, I was aboard the Oklahoma. Barely got off before she turned turtle.”

  McClusky gave me another, more appraising look. “That must have been bad,” he said.

  I blinked as I recalled the scenes of bloody horror I’d experienced the day before. I felt tears in my eyes, which surprised me and embarrassed me at the same time. I tried to think of something to say, but McClusky waved me off.

  “We’re all sick about it,” he said. “The only good news is that when it comes time to get even with the yellow bastards, we’re going to be at the point of the spear. Yeoman Sykes will get you signed in. Tell me: did you get the training program that covered all the carrier aircraft types, or did you specialize early?”

  “I was in the last one-year course, sir,” I said. “I have five hundred fifty flight hours all in, with a final operational training tour for the SBD, dash two.”

  “Okay, good. We’ll need to get you qualified on this deck as soon as possible. You fancy yourself a good stick back at field carrier landing school?”

  “Well, yes, sir, I did. But somebody told me a real carrier moves around a little bit more than the FCLP did.” I put on my sincerest straight face. “Is that true, sir?”

  “It just might be, Ensign,” McClusky said, eyeing the chief and the yeoman, who now seemed to be struggling to contain themselves. Then the CAG realized I was fooling with him.

  “Aw, shit,” he said with a grin. “Goddamned ensigns.” Then his face sobered. “But I’m serious about your deck quals. We’re gonna be going out soon and Bombing Six will be fifty percent nuggets.”

  That news surprised me. I’d assumed I’d be the only nugget in the squadron. “I’ll do my best, sir,” I said.

  “And you’ll do it in at least two types of aircraft, Mister Steele. I’m a fighter guy, myself, but once we go after the Japs everybody may need to swap aircraft types once we start taking losses, so stay flexible.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” I said, automatically, and then followed the yeoman down to the squadron office. On the way
, as we descended ladders and made our way through what seemed to be yet another labyrinth of cold steel passageways, Yeoman Sykes gave me some friendly advice.

  “Commander McClusky is the carrier air group commander, in case you didn’t catch it,” he said. “He’s the CAG: runs the whole show—the torpedo guys, the fighter guys, the dive bombers and the scout bombers. He is everybody’s senior officer and a great guy to boot. He laughed when you joked with him, but don’t try that with our CO or XO. They take themselves a whole lot more seriously than the CAG does.”

  “Got it,” I said. “And thanks for the tip.”

  The yeoman stopped in front of the Bombing Six squadron office. He turned to face me. “You mean that?” he asked.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “I may be a nugget, but I’m not stupid.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” the yeoman said, wonderingly, as if he couldn’t imagine such a thing.

  That evening I managed to find my way to the main officers’ wardroom after getting lost three times. Enterprise was big, really big, and getting lost was not hard to do. Nothing like my first ship after graduation, the light cruiser Helena. Any academy grad wanting to go aviation had to spend his first two years of commissioned service at sea in a “real” ship, as the cruiser-destroyer set called them. Carriers, and, indeed, the whole idea that naval aviation would amount to anything, were dismissed as a pipe dream by the big-ship, big-gun clique: bunch of hotshots zooming around, bragging about their wings of gold as if they could make a difference in a real shooting war.

  I had the sense that the Pearl Harbor disaster had put a massive hole in that construct. Six Japanese carriers had slogged their way through the far north Pacific in December, under weather conditions which any experienced Pacific Ocean mariner knew were simply atrocious. We would later learn that they’d left a cargo ship anchored back in Japan, stuffed with actual radio transmitters taken from the carriers, manned by radiomen from the carriers, themselves. As the Jap fleet left for Hawaii, Admiral Yamamoto told them to talk, but sparingly, as if they were afraid of being intercepted. Then they were to go silent. Then one of them was to transmit, but quit in mid-transmission, as if they’d been yelled at. Then they all went silent again, and while the American radio direction-finding nets were still going nuts trying to figure it all out, the six radio-silent carriers appeared out of the squalls and the December fog above Midway Island to launch a massive strike.