The Edge of Honor Page 8

  There had been no real mail since the ship left Pearl Harbor, only a couple of gushy Hawaiian postcards. The painful awkwardness of deployment day still weighed on her mind. She should have gone. She had been the only wardroom wife less one not on the pier, a fact that was conspicuously not mentioned at the “wake” held on the evening of deployment day by the captain’s wife. She should have done what Angela Benedetti had, even if the thought of going home to Momma was untenable.

  The silence in the apartment brought to mind the image of the anguish on Brian’s face when he’d left, and her own when he had gone out the door.

  She cared deeply for him, and somehow she had managed to make him feel guilty about going off to do what successful naval officers did: go to sea.

  She had written three long, emotional letters after the ship left, trying to express how she really felt, how she wasn’t mad at him for the separation, how it was the god damned Navy and its interminable deployments, but she had torn up each of them after the captain’s wife had explained the rules about mail to those wives facing their first WESTPAC deployment. With a minimum of four weeks between dispatch of a letter and receipt of a reply, there were some things that were too sensitive to deal with in letters. There were too many opportunities for inflicting unintentional hurt and for totally missed communications.

  Beyond that, the mail pipeline itself was fragile: Letters went from San Diego to the Fleet Post Office in San Francisco, then by military cargo planes to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, and then by truck to Cubi Point in Subic Bay, and from Cubi by carrier cargo plane to the carrier on Yankee Station in the Gulf, and from the carrier to the ships by the daily logistics helicopter.

  “Everybody tries his best,” Mrs. Huntington had said.

  “But there’s a war on, you know, and letters do get lost.

  If you want to pour your heart out, do it on one of these cassette tapes. Hold on to it for a couple of days and then listen to it before you mau it. Ask yourself, what’s he supposed to do with this? It’s okay to tell him you miss him, that you’re lonely, that life’s a drag while he’s gone.

  But won’t wander into Indian territory: Don’t lay down ultimatums, don’t berate the Navy, and don’t talk about other men. Don’t say things that require a reaction, because with that much dead time, the reaction will be meaningless. They’re at sea in a war zone; they’ve got enough to worry about without your piling it on.”

  She had gone home to think, then realized that, in tearing up her first letters, she had guaranteed that Brian would not get any mail from her in Pearl or even Subic.

  She had hurriedly written what the other wives called a weekly report letter, filled with trivial news about her job, the car, the wives’ social activities, a letter deliberately devoid of real feelings. Only in closing had she said that she loved him and missed him terribly.

  The captain’s wife had also explained that wives could I not blame the Navy for the deployment without attacking j then* husbands’ careers.

  Your husbands can’t do anything about the Navy and its deployments except leave it. If you constantly complain about the Navy, you implicitly, and perhaps unintentionally, pose the question of their having to choose between you and the Navy. Don’t pose that choice unless you can stand all the possible answers.

  But during that first week after the ship had left, she j had almost convinced herself that this was the issue. j Brian was gone for the next half a year, and she was I already miserable. As much as she tried to repress the preceding hours, the earthy side of her personality that j had shown its grinning face earlier in the evening only i heightened her fear about being left alone. If tonight’s t any indication, what kind of a basket case am I going to j be seven months from now? Even as she asked herself this question, she realized that the one person who could ‘ answer it was beyond the asking, vanished down the | black hole of a WESTPAC deployment. Her husband was j now a disembodied voice, diminished to a piece of paper in her mailbox, if every element of the Navy mail system , worked right. I

  Subicbay Chief Wesley Jackson stood just inside the forward end of the mess decks, leaning against a bulkhead with his arms folded, as the crew began to file in for the evening meal. “The Sheriff,” as Hood’s chief master-at-arms was known, was a well-built forty-four-year-old black man who had been a chief gunner’s mate before converting to the master-at-arms rating three years before joining Hood. At nearly six feet tall, with a gleaming head, round face, and piercing black eyes, he presented a no nonsense, even stern, demeanor, befitting a man who had spent many years on deck with five-inch guns and rough cut gunner’s mates.

  Wesley Jackson came from Chicago and had developed many of the tough traits for which his hometown was famous. He had been distracted from the streets through the intervention of the local police Boys Club, and all through his adolescent years he’d yearned to become a cop. His father had never really been in the family picture, and his mother had simply carried on the business of raising Wesley and six more brothers and sisters.

  When the money got tight, Jackson had dropped out of high school to find a job, which doomed his chances for the police force. When he turned eighteen, his former mentor in the Boys Club had steered him to the military.

  His first choice was the Marines, but the Marine recruiter had been on a road trip, and the Navy chief holding down the office that day had seen his chance. Wesley never looked back, but he had still harbored the desire to be a cop during all those years as a gunner’s mate. When the Navy-wide call had been issued for volunteers to become professional MAAs, Wesley Jackson had answered. In the intervening years, he had finished his high school GED and even achieved a year’s worth of college credits during his only shore-duty tour.

  Jackson was unmarried and sometimes regretted that fact, especially on those emotional days when ships came home from a long deployment.

  Nothing was quite so lonely as a ship on homecoming day about an hour after the married men had left with their families. The Jackson family had been raised on an ethic of hard work, high personal standards, and a strong sense of duty. Two of his brothers had joined the Army and a third worked for Cook County, Illinois. His three sisters had married young and were still married. But when Jackson realized that the ways of the Navy were incompatible with what he knew would be his strong sense of duty to a wife and children, he had chosen to stick with the Navy.

  His sisters and brothers had produced a crowd of kids, to whom he was Uncle Wesley, so there were plenty of nephews and nieces back home should he want to be around children, and Navy towns were always full of women.

  In his reincarnation as an MAA, Jackson tended to take everything pretty seriously. His tailored khaki uniforms and spit-shined shoes made it clear that he believed in setting military uniform grooming standards by personal example. Because of his baldness, he looked older than he was, but he was well spoken, reserved, and watchful, and he was one of only two chief petty officers in the ship who had some college time.

  As the ship’s chief master-at-arms, Jackson was responsible for enforcing regulations and maintaining good order and discipline. He supervised the MAA force, which consisted of six first class petty officers who served as masters-at-arms within their duty sections in port, in addition to their regular divisional duties. The MAA force was analogous to a part-time police force in the ship. The first class MAAs were distinguished from the rest of the crew by silver badges worn on the left breast pocket of their chambray shirts. If there was an altercation or other disruption to the day’s routine, the bridge would pass the word for the duty MAA to lay down to the compartment involved.

  If the problem was large enough, the call would go out for all MAAs not actually on watch to visit the scene of the problem.

  Jackson wore a gold MAA badge in recognition of the fact that he performed his duties as a full-time job. He worked directly for the executive officer on the so-called executive staff, along with the chief hospital corpsman, the doc, a
nd his assistant, the baby doc, as well as the chief yeoman and chief personnelman. Jackson maintained a small office on Broadway, the Hood’s central passageway, which contained a desk, two chairs, two file cabinets, and a bulky evidence safe. Most of his time was spent supervising the pursuit of petty crimes, such as wallets being stolen, locker breakins, fistfights, curfew violations, insubordination to senior petty officers— shirking, in short, the typical problems encountered in any military organization that spent the bulk of its time training and maintaining.

  Jackson surveyed the mess decks as the men came off the chow line and settled at the tables. He was always fascinated by how they grouped: the blacks sitting separate from the whites, the engineers from the deck apes, the nonrated men from the petty officers. The younger black sailors especially interested him. For the past three years, the Navy had been making a significant and apparently sincere effort to expose and expunge racism throughout the fleet by using a variety of human-relations and leadership and management programs, of which Jackson had been a willing supporter. He was well aware that, as a result of the civil rights turmoil throughout the country, the races were deeply polarized in the Navy’s ships. Black men, especially the young nonrated black men in the crew, tended to stick together, practicing a kind of reverse segregation now that race relations were increasingly becoming a big deal. Young blacks in the Navy reflected all of the hostility and anger that characterized black-white relations in America at large, driven as much by the watershed civil rights movement as by the growing recognition that young black men were filling a disproportionate share of the body bags coming back from Vietnam. Black militancy was barely being kept in check by the restraints of military discipline, as evidenced by racial disturbances aboard several ships. Older black petty officers and chiefs, who had learned to accommodate the system, were as suspicious of the younger blacks as were their white counterparts, because they felt that the young hotheads were going to screw things up for everybody, which, in turn, further isolated the young blacks.

  White crew members were indignant at all the noise about race and angry about having to undergo mandatory racial-sensitivity training, what they called “hug ‘em and love “em” sessions. But some were beginning to realize their discomfiture with the process stemmed in part from the fact that racism had long been institutionalized in the Navy. Jackson remembered one counselor’s remark during a racial-sensitivity session back in Dago: A white man sees six white sailors congregating on the fantail; they’re shooting the shit; six black men congregating on the fantail are undoubtedly planning a race riot. He also remembered the muttered, “Well, yeah!” reactions that had floated around the mostly white classroom. But he was becoming bitterly disappointed with many of the younger blacks, whose resentments blinded them to the opportunities being offered in the service. To his disgust, many of them used reverse segregation as some kind of statement, as if to say, Now that you want us to be part of you, up yours.

  He knew that when the hotheads congregated, the name of Chief Wesley Jackson was firmly enshrined on the Uncle Tom list, along with the ship’s black Supply officer, Raiford Hatcher, and three other chief petty officers. He tended to respond to their contempt for him by exacting even stricter standards of discipline, military appearance, and military courtesy from them than he ever applied to junior white people.

  But in truth, any individuals or groups in the ship that exhibited a defiant stance attracted Jackson’s undivided attention.

  He looked at his watch. Sea detail would go down in forty-five minutes.

  Stifling a yawn, he decided to head back to the chiefs’ mess to have supper. This looked like a perfectly normal night on the mess decks.

  Even though they were in Subic, he wasn’t expecting any trouble, since the crew was not going to be going over on liberty.

  The ship was scheduled to sail in two hours for the Gulf.

  He clenched his mouth into a flat line. The less time spent alongside the pier in places like Subic, the fewer problems for the Sheriff. He was ready to get her up to the Gulf, back out to sea, where ships and sailors belonged, by God.

  The Gulf of Tonkin j The console chairs in Combat trembled to the vibrations of Hood’s twin screws driving her along at twenty-seven knots. Brian Holcomb stood behind the weapons control [ console, dressed out for general quarters with a steel 1 helmet over his intercom headphone, an inflatable life jacket strapped around his hips, a long-sleeve khaki shirt, i and his trouser legs tucked into his socks.

  Combat was i dark, hot, and humid, with the full GQ team present and j every station and console manned up. Over his shoulder, i he could see the captain in his high-backed chair and i Austin standing behind the central command console. To I his left, in the surface module, the gunnery officer and the CIC officer leaned over the surface plotting table as I the gunfire support team set up the target coordinates and coaxed the computers below onto a smooth track.

  Brian sensed the tension in Combat as Hood plunged along in formation with two other destroyers on her first ‘ real combat mission. They had steamed out of Subic two I days ago and had begun standing Red Crown watches as they drove across the South China Sea at seventeen i knots.

  Normally, they would have made a straight shot I northwest up to the PIRAZ station to relieve the nuclear cruiser Long Beach on station.

  Instead, they had diverted to the west to rendezvous with a task unit consisting of , the guided-missile destroyer Berkeley and the all-gun i destroyer Hull. Berkeley was carrying a Destroyer Divi j sion commander, and Hood chopped to his tactical com i mand for the operation.

  | Brian had studied up on the Sea Dragon operations for ‘ the past two nights while standing his training watches as evaluator in Combat. The CTF 77 periodically sent groups of destroyers up off the North Vietnamese coast i to conduct shore-bombardment operations against concentrations of the North Vietnamese army whenever they gathered within naval gunfire range above the so-called demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Vietnam. The ships would typically rendezvous in darkness well offshore, form a column, and then race in at twenty-seven knots, usually just at sunrise, turn parallel to the target area along the coast, and open fire with their long-range five-inch guns at preplanned targets that lay within eight to ten miles of the coast. The attacks were not necessarily as accurate as sending in carrier bombers, but there was the decided advantage of not having to risk airplanes or pilots flying into heavily defended troop concentrations. The destroyers would usually fire two hundred rounds each and then turn out to sea before the North Vietnamese coastal-defense artillery batteries could find the range and hit back. During his prebrief, Austin had made it clear that Hood, a PIRAZ-capable ship packed full of sensitive electronics systems, would normally never be risked in this kind of operation. The two destroyers carried five guns between them, but only three of these were operational, due to equipment problems on both ships. CTF 77 had decided to send Hood, with her one gun, to augment the task unit.

  The mission put Brian and his Weapons Department directly in the spotlight. He had met with his gunnery team the night before down in Main Battery Plot, the gunfire computer room two decks below the waterline.

  The gunnery officer, Ens. John Mccarthy, and the first lieutenant, Ens.

  Jack Folsom, had been joined by the chief gunner’s mate, Max Carpenter, and the gunfire control chief, Marty Vanhorn, in the cramped quarters of the gun system computer room. It was the first time that Brian had met with the gunnery team for anything but an exercise.

  “Okay, guys,” he began. “This is a little out of the ordinary for Hood, but we do carry that five-inch fifty four back aft, and the bosses wanted us to go kill a Commie for Mommy.”

  “Suits the shit outta me,” said Vanhorn, a leathery individual who wore his hair in a waxed flattop and who was reportedly a genius at repairing the ship’s MK 68 gunfire control system.

  “How many rounds?” asked Chief Carpenter.

  “They want a hundred an
d fifty from us,” answered Ensign Mccarthy. John Mccarthy was known as

  “Pretty Boy” in keeping with the Navy’s tradition of sometimes bestowing nicknames that were precisely inappropriate.

  Mccarthy personified the word homely, if not downright coyote ugly, but Brian had found him to be a reliable officer who did a conscientious job with a minimum of noise.

  Ensign Folsom, the first lieutenant, and technically Chief Martinez’s boss, had come aboard the same week as Brian. He had been an offensive tackle on the Penn State football team. He was almost as big as the chief, and between the two of them, Brian expected little trouble out of First Division. Folsom whistled at the number of rounds required.

  “That gun good for a hundred fifty rounds without busting something?”

  Brian asked Mccarthy.

  “I actually kinda doubt it,” intervened Chief Carpenter.

  “You know how it is, boss,” he said. “We fire that thing maybe six, ten times a year, twenty rounds a pop, for exercises. This here ship, the action’s in CIC with the Red Crown stuff. These five-inch fifty-fours, you gotta shoot ‘em all the time if you want ‘em to stay up. And even then, they break. Look at Berkeley and Hull: They do nothing but shoot, and they got only three outta five guns up and running.”

  Brian had stared hard at the chief. He did not like what he was hearing.

  This was going to be the ship’s first mission in WESTPAC, and it was going to be a Weapons Department show. The chief’s frank admission that the gun might not be up to shooting a continuous stream of 150 rounds without having a mechanical failure was disturbing, but even more disturbing was the realization that the chief was probably right. Chief Carpenter had begun to squirm a little under Brian’s look. Ensign Mccarthy was staring hard at the deck. Chief Vanhorn came to their rescue.

  “Mr. Holcomb, you come from the tin-can Navy. You know that’s straight skinny. We’re all the time asking to shoot Mount Fifty-one and even the three-inchers. But Mr. Austin, he doesn’t wanta hear that shit. The Ops chiefs have told us that Austin’s convinced the shock from the gun raises hell with his electronic systems, like the forty radar or the NTDS. You’ve felt it—that gun being ‘ all the way back on the fantail does put a whip in Hood’s tailbone. So he talks to the Old Man, and the Old Man, he puts us off. For Hood, PIRAZ is where it’s at, not gun shoots.”