The Edge of Honor Read online

  Things have heated up here since you left in January.”

  He turned to the briefing easel and flipped down the first page, then proceeded to give them an update on what ships were where in the Tonkin Gulf attack-carrier formations. He reviewed the mission of the Red Crown station, which was to act as the focal point for air-control and air-defense operations for the entire Gulf area, with secondary missions of providing the air-navigation reference point for any U. S. military aircraft operating over northern Vietnam, as well as being the seagoing base for two search-and-rescue helicopters.

  Brian listened carefully. Because he was a department head, Brian was designated an evaluator in the ship’s watch bill. As evaluator, he was going to be the senior officer in tactical control of the ship’s operations when he was on watch. The evaluator was the captain’s direct representative on watch in Combat. All of the module watch supervisors in Combat reported to him for direction.

  If the ship was subjected to a surprise attack, he would have the authority to launch missiles and fire the ship’s guns at an attacker without having to wait for the captain’s permission. Brian was under no illusions that he would be qualified technically on day one as evaluator, but he also understood that his main job was to ensure that the highly trained watch standers in Combat did their job, namely, to launch the ship’s defensive systems in the critical seconds between detection of a raid and impact. He also knew that, by the end of their first forty five day stint, or line period, on the PIRAZ station, he would be expected to know a great deal more.

  The commander emphasized the importance of the ship’s mission in terms of the fact that every pilot and aircrewman who flew the Gulf of Tonkin depended on Red Crown.

  “You guys come up on the air as Red Crown, you speak with complete authority for air control, traffic control, missile defense, and search-and-rescue. You guys have done all this before, but I want to stress to you that where you’re going, there are no more drills and exercises. From here on out, it’s all for real, gents.”

  The commander paused for effect before going on.

  “I understand you’ve had your full-scale briefings from CINCPACFLEET back in Pearl. What we have to give you today is current dope.

  Lieutenant Henson over there has a detailed brief with the current overlays for the CIC folks, the buffer zones for Red China and Hainan Island, and the daily flight plans from the carriers. RMC Batter ton, next to him, needs to meet with the Comm Center people, and I need to discuss a few things with the CO and XO. Other than that, I’m done, unless there are any more general questions.”

  Before a general question-and-answer session could get going, the captain intervened by rising from his chair.

  “Commander Wingott, thank you. I’m sure there are lots of questions, but we’re limited on time here. The engineers have to get on with refueling, and the Supply folks need to get on the beach to chase some parts and top off the consumables. We’ll have the full Weps and Ops teams assembled in CIC in ten minutes for the lieutenant’s briefing. Our Radioman Chief Furman there will escort your RMC to Radio. Gents, let’s get rolling.

  Commander, let’s go up to my cabin, shall we?”

  The captain and the executive officer left the wardroom with Commander Wingott in tow. Lieutenant Commander Austin turned to Brian and Benedetti, the engineer, as the other officers milled around, refilling coffee mugs.

  “Vince, this briefing in CIC requires all three of us; it’s primarily for SWICs and the evaluators.”

  “Goddamnit, I gotta refuel, Ops,” complained Benedetti.

  Brian studied the deck while the two lieutenant commanders argued. He was a department head but not yet a lieutenant commander.

  “Then I recommend you get the refueling evolution started and come to CIC, Vince. You’ve spent minimal time in CIC during the workup and—”

  “Don’t gimme that shit, Austin,” Benedetti.

  “You got all those precious twidgets working for you in your squeaky-clean, air-conditioned CIC. I got a bunch of dope-smoking, give-a-shit no-loads to contend with in the holes. We’re lucky this boat got this far, with the people I’ve got in my main spaces. I’m the chief engineer first and an evaluator second, and since I don’t want to see a fuel spill, that means I personally oversee the refueling. You listen real good and then you can brief me on the first turnover. See ya.”

  Brian watched as the engineer, a rumpled, balding figure whose uniform smelled perpetually of fuel oil, stomped out of the wardroom, followed by his main propulsion assistant and the Boilers Division officer.

  Austin shook his head.

  “You and I will both pay a price for that attitude, I’m afraid,” he said, picking up his hat. “The three of us are supposed to be in three watch sections, six on, twelve off. But what really happens is that the engineer is so weak in the combat systems area that if anything happens, either you or I get called up to Combat. Or the captain takes him off the watch bill when things go wrong down below. As Vince well knows.

  Come on.”

  They left the wardroom and began to climb the steep interior ladders to CIC.

  “What’s the special brief Commander Wingott’s giving the CO and XO?”

  Brian asked as he followed Austin up the ladder.

  “Probably special rules of engagement stuff, the ‘Personal —For Commanding Officers’ message file from CTF Seventy-seven and COMSEVENTHFLEET, any unwritten personnel policies regarding drug abuse, liberty incidents, or any other problem-related policies like that,”

  said Austin over his shoulder. “Be patient. After a while, the word always trickles down to the evaluators.”

  Brian knew all about being patient. He was one of those rare birds, a native of Washington, D. C. His father had been a professional mechanical engineer in the Navy Department’s Bureau of Ships, and his mother was also a civil servant, a chemist who worked for the Department of the Interior. His parents had met during the Great Depression at a scientific symposium in Washington, then married in 1937. Brian had come along in 1939, a few months before war broke out in Europe. The Holcomb family had lived in the Chevy Chase area for as long as Brian could remember, on a quiet side street off Military Road. No brothers or sisters followed, a fact that Brian came to regret in late childhood, without really knowing why.

  He had attended the local Catholic elementary school up on the boundary between Maryland and the District, in deference to his mother’s Catholic upbringing.

  It was a choice his father supported because it was the best school around; William Falwell Holcomb took no interest in organized religion.

  Brian had been imbued early on with the importance of academic achievement by the attitude of his technically educated parents, aided and abetted by the occasional application of a ruler to the back of his hands by Sister Paul Marie. He Was less of a brilliant academic superstar than he was a patient, hardworking slogger, and by the time he hit high school, he was gravitating closer and closer to the top of his class each year. He became a junior varsity and then a varsity trackman, excelling in long-distance endurance running. He was popular with his classmates, both boys and girls, and well liked for his easygoing and sincerely friendly way with people.

  His parents assumed, and therefore so did he, that he would follow in their footsteps in one of the hard sciences or engineering disciplines when he went off to college, although it was an open secret in the family that money for college would be hard to come by. But one weekend, his father had taken him down to Annapolis to see the Naval Academy, having found out that Navy Department civilians could also apply for Academy appointments.

  Brian had been dutifully impressed, but he did not become really infected with the Academy bug until another side trip with his father, this to the Naval Weapons Station in Dahlgren, Virginia, where he sat enthralled one afternoon as he watched the test-firing of sixteen inch naval guns. Two years later, on a hot and steamy July day in Annapolis, he found himself being sworn in by the Naval Acade
my superintendent in the expansive brick courtyard of Bancroft Hall, along with about a thousand other new plebes.

  His parents were both delighted and very proud. Not only was it an achievement to be selected, appointed, examined, and then accepted but it was also a free education, leading to a bachelor’s degree in naval and marine engineering. The entire cost to his parents had been the three-hundred-dollar admission fee, which paid for his initial issue of midshipman uniforms. After a summer of physical training, rifle pits, drill fields, sailing, and small-boat seamanship, Brian was delighted with Annapolis—until plebe year descended with a roar as the remaining three thousand upperclassmen returned to the Yard.

  Plebe year had changed Brian in ways he was still discovering, years later. The Naval Academy’s plebe year was designed to teach some harsh lessons about personal accountability, strict adherence to the truth and the facts of a situation, and the concepts of loyalty to a classmate and his class. It was an entire year of the plebes against the entire world, and the front gates along Maryland Avenue offered exit for anyone who could not or would not conform. Brian, who up to this point had been a bright, happy-go-lucky, “get through life with a minimum of fuss” young man and accustomed to success, suddenly had to work very hard to stay even with the demands of plebe year. The first-year hazing, amplified by an intensely difficult academic curriculum, had shaken his confidence in himself and his choice of a college. His remaining three years were spent showing himself more than anyone else that he could cut the mustard and maybe even succeed. He had been determined to show these people that they not only wouldn’t get to him but that maybe he was going to get to them, even as nearly a third of his entering class had dropped by the wayside by the end of the second year. Brian studied hard and aimed at high grades after he realized that the seniors wearing stripes were also the seniors who wore the stars of academic achievement on their shirt collars. He graduated in the top 10 percent of his class, intensely proud that he had beaten the system, grown up physically and mentally, and attained a certain veneer of toughness and purpose not necessarily characteristic of a brand-new college graduate. In later years, he would sheepishly admit that the system had taken the defeat gracefully.

  By the time he had reached Hood, those same values instilled with such thoroughness at the Academy had produced a seasoned lieutenant who still tended to take things seriously, to assume that everyone else did, too, and that the people he worked for and with had the same sense of dedication to duty that he did. But the assignment to Hood, accompanied by his detailer’s warnings about where his career stood, had raised the first real doubts Brian had experienced professionally. He was still not quite sure why his CO in Decatur had dinged him, but was beginning to think that he might have more to learn about the real nature of people than he had managed to learn so far. Up to this point, he had assumed that you did your job and did it well and that’s all it took to get to the top. And if others couldn’t cut it—why, they fell by the wayside, just as they had at Annapolis. Except by 1969, letting people fall by the wayside was no longer, if it ever had been, a viable option in the real fleet, beset as it was with declining enlistments and declining support in American society for the traditional values of the armed forces, as the unpopularity of the Vietnam War ensured that military people were no longer unquestioningly admired. Fleet commanding officers seemed to expect that successful officers would be able to make even the indifferent sailors produce, and Brian was beginning to realize that he had been slow to pick up on this expectation. He recognized that his assignment to Hood was going to be a test of sorts, to see whether he could cope with the changing circumstances of being a fleet officer as well as he had coped with the academic rigors of the Academy and various Navy schools.

  And then there was Maddy. The memory of their dismal parting was now locked up in a psychological black box somewhere in the magazines of his heart, secure, but to be opened with great care. The exec in Decatur had given him a gentle warning about the career damage a discontented wife could do, especially if she looked like Maddy. What to do about Maddy?

  Sounded like one of the new hippie folk songs. He loved her dearly, but as lieutenant commander approached, he was beginning to wonder whether they were headed for one of those “career or wife” choices—a choice he feared that Maddy might make for him.

  Now Brian and Austin climbed the two levels to the 03 level and went into the CIC through the front vestibule between the CIC and the expansive pilothouse. Brian had been standing watches as evaluator in CIC for several weeks during the ship’s workup in home waters and transit to WESTPAC, but he was still getting used to its size and complexity. Combat, as it was called, extended the full sixty-foot width of the ship and almost eighty feet back from the bridge. Combat was divided into functional areas called modules, where command and control functions were concentrated around their respective computer complexes.

  There were modules for surface operations, weapons control, electronic warfare, antisubmarine warfare, air detection and tracking, and the central command station, display and decision. The modules were interconnected on a local-area computer network called the naval tactical data system, which linked the ship’s sensors and weapons systems in a large computer complex one deck below CIC. The system also communicated with other similarly equipped ships over a radio data link, like several spiders with connecting webs, all poised off the coast of Vietnam.

  The CIC, normally kept darkened to enhance the scopes, was brighter than usual. The blue-filtered overhead fluorescents were on, bathing the entire room in blue light to provide maximum contrast to the amber colored radarscopes on the consoles. Brian noticed that the lighting did interesting things to people’s faces. Austin, with his long, thin face, prominently bridged nose, hooded eyes, and heavy-lidded, haughty expression, looked like a vampire prince from a thirties movie. Brian could now see why Austin’s nickname was “the Count.”

  Brian smiled as he recalled hearing a sly remark in the wardroom that the word count could have one vowel or two, depending on whether or not Austin was present.

  Austin went directly to the display and decision module, or D and D. He wasted no time with formalities. The entire CIC team, some sixty officers, chiefs, and enlisted men, was assembled in and around the display and decision module. Austin stood with his back to the central command console.

  “Gentlemen, please be quiet and pay attention. This is Lieutenant Henson from the CTF Seventy-seven staff detachment at Cubi. He has the preturnover package.

  Warrant Officer Barry, Lieutenant Henson has the PIRAZ overlays and the buffer-zone patches for the NTDS op program. I want them installed today and used for all future training sessions, which, by the way, commence at ten hundred today with watch section one.”

  There were some groans and moans among the crowd.

  “We gonna be able to go over to the Exchange?” asked a voice from the back.

  “That’s negative. The only people going ashore are Supply types, and only for urgently required repair parts.

  We get underway at eighteen hundred. This is not, I repeat, not a liberty visit. That comes after the first line period. I’m having Warrant Officer Barry bring up Link Eleven with the ships in the Gulf this morning, with us radio-silent in receive mode. The XO intends that we’ll do a standard Hood turnover, which means we’re going to be in the link, with the Gulf picture fully soaked in, from the time we leave Subic. We’re not coming up there like some East Coast makee-learn and taking three days to turn over with Long Beach. We’ll do the turnover in about three hours, or as long as it takes to do the cross deck transfers with the helos. And that means we start the watches and we practice internally for the next two days. This should not be news, people.”

  Austin’s announcement was met by a stony silence from the CIC team. The officers stared down at their shoes, the chiefs smoked cigarettes and looked bored, and the enlisted men exchanged expressions of resignation, disinterest, or open hostility. What a happy c
rew, thought Brian. The ship’s announcing system, called universally the 1MC, blared out the news that the smoking lamp was out throughout the ship while taking on fuel.

  There was a quiet shuffle as cigarettes were squashed out in the butt cans all over Combat.

  “Okay,” Austin continued. “Lieutenant Henson has some general stuff for all hands, and then he needs to sit down individually with the AICs, the track supes, and AC net operators.”

  “And your GLO,” said Henson, speaking for the first time. He was a short, spindly officer with glasses, who looked to Brian like an intelligence officer.

  “The gunnery liaison officer? What’s that about?” asked Austin, frowning.

  “Commander Wingott is briefing your CO right now, Commander. Once that’s done, we can talk about it some more. I’ll see the GLO last.”

  “Well, well, well,” mused Austin. “All right, let’s get to it.”

  The crowd began to break up into their functional groups, migrating back to their modules. Austin turned to Brian.

  “Lieutenant Holcomb, I recommend you listen in to each of the briefings that Lieutenant Henson is going to give. You won’t necessarily understand all of it, but this is the good stuff, and it’s better information than we received at Pearl Harbor.”

  “Okay,” said Brian. He resented Austin’s constant supercilious references to his new-guy status. But he also recognized that, compared with Austin, he was ignorant.

  There was a lot of insider knowledge in the Red Crown game.

  Two hours later, the exec pushed through the door, looking for Austin.

  Brian watched from his seat on a stool next to the air controllers’ consoles as Commander Mains spoke urgently to the Operations officer. He saw Austin’s face register surprise.

  “You’ve got to be kidding! NGFS? With Hoodl”

  “You got it, sunshine,”

  said the exec. “And I’ll bet you haven’t drilled on that since San Clemente.”