by Mendy Sobol
“At Annapolis, when cadets are engaged, they pin a miniature class ring on their fiancée,” Goldfarb explained, more serious now.
With his ring in place, Terhune put both arms around the girl and began kissing her. No peck on the lips, but a long, slow, real kiss.
“Is this part of the ceremony, too,” I asked, “or is Terhune making it up?”
“You bet it is!” Goldfarb answered, poking Coop in the ribs.
“We don’t have to do it if you don’t want, Mel,” Coop added quickly.
“No, I want to do the ceremony. It looks like fun.”
“I mean the kissing part.”
“Hey, Coop,” in my heeled sandals we were the same height, so I could look straight ahead into my best friend’s eyes, “if you think I’m going to get up there in front of everyone and not do the kissing part, you’re crazy.”
We split up, going to the end of the boys’ and girls’ lines. Two-by-two, couples dipped, stepped under the ring, moved class ring from ribbon to ring finger, and kissed. A photographer captured them as they came out the other side.
Sometimes it got funny. Like when one really short cadet, with a high-heeled date, couldn’t untie the knot. So standing on tiptoe, his face an inch from her chest, he bit the ribbon through, freeing the ring. Other times it was something else—like the pair who kissed so hard the whole ring shook. And when a kiss lasted longer than a few seconds, the dateless cadets standing around watching would start counting off the seconds, “...21, 22, 23....”
Then it was time for me and Coop. More confident in my sundress than when I first tried it on at Paris Faire, I leaned over the binnacle, watching Coop’s ring ripple the water.
“It’s not really from the men’s room, y’know,” Coop whispered.
Linking my arm under Coop’s, we walked together to the little pond, up the plywood ramp, and turned, facing each other beneath the giant ring. I stood quietly, watching Coop’s eyes intently focused on undoing the ribbon’s little knot, looking into mine while I took his undamaged hand, slipping the gold circle with its cut blue stone onto his ring finger. Coop slid one arm around my waist, the other across my bare shoulders, and gently moved a half step closer. Less gently, I put my arms around him, my lips on his, closing my eyes, kissing him.
After awhile I became aware of the chanting around us.
“...88, 89, 90....”
And finally, to the sound of applauding, whooping cadets, we turned from each other and faced the photographer.
The pictures were $5 each. You could order copies, have them mailed to anyone you wanted. Uncrumpling my last two five-dollar bills, I handed them to the photographer and addressed one envelope to myself at Recruit Training Command, Great Lakes, Illinois, the other in care of Blanche at the Paris Faire Department Store.
Chapter Eighteen: Melora
I thought Saturday’s graduation would bore the shit out of me. It didn’t. It was fucking epic.
Mr. Belasso turned down Coop’s invitation to the Final Parade, pointing to the lone picture hanging on the pizzeria’s whitewashed walls, saying, “I had enough of that crap in the Marines.” I asked him about the picture once, ten grimy teenagers in battle fatigues, draped in weapons and bandoliers of ammunition, standing in front of a huge pile of smoking rubble.
“Huế,” he said, as if that explained everything.
“Huh?”
“Huế,” he said again.
“What’s ‘hoo ay?’”
“You know, Vietnam, the Tet Offensive, 1968. Victor Charlie and the NVA’s surprise attacks behind our lines.”
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“Forget it—it’s not important anymore.” Then, turning to the oven, under his breath, something about, “Stupid kids. Don’t know anything. Wind up just like us.”
He did accept Coop’s graduation invitation, could hardly say no in the face of the engraved blue and gold card—“Lieutenant David Harvey Cooperman invites you to join in celebrating his graduation from John Paul Jones Academy.” So we went together, sitting in folding metal chairs on the academy’s south lawn, surrounded by family and friends of the graduating seniors.
First came the speeches. Headmaster. Class President. Valedictorian. Then the guest of honor, a former talk-radio host who’d never served a fucking minute in the military, now Florida’s junior senator, giving what sounded like a campaign speech.
“I’m so proud to be here today at this fine military institution, where outstanding young men take the first step on a journey which may end in making the ultimate sacrifice for their country....”
“You ever hear such a load of crap in your life?” Mr. Belasso said, leaning toward me, whispering in a voice I was sure everyone could hear, making parents squirm uneasily around us.
When the senator finally shut up, it was time for the seniors. One-by-one, the commandant called out their names, and they crossed the little riser in front of the academy’s gray cement fountain, the same fountain where, one moonless night, civvies—or maybe it was cadets—had poured in detergent and food coloring, treating the corps the next morning to a green, foamy, shimmering mess. After crossing, each cadet saluted with his right hand, stepped forward, took his diploma from the headmaster with his left, stepped back and saluted again, applauded by his family.
When it was Coop’s turn, I clapped till my hands hurt.
The commandant worked through the senior class in alphabetical order. There was a long way to go from Coop to Terhune, Wilcox, and Zimmerman, but after Zimmerman, lots of clapping, and a few shouts and whistles, the ceremony was over except for one last detail—the Final Formation. The entire corps of cadets marched from the academy’s lawn to the west parade, the one bordered by Cyprus Avenue, Boca Grande Bay, the Gulf, the setting sun, and Piss Creek, the same spot where Goldfarb and I had carried Coop to sickbay two months before.
The cadets formed up in their usual companies, with the exception of the seniors, who gathered instead on the parade’s north side in front of sickbay and the little bridge crossing Piss Creek. For the first time since they arrived four years ago, their line was ragged, uneven. Jostling for position before their parents’ clicking cameras, they weren’t quite cadets any more, not quite civilian teenagers either. Standing in front of me, the commandant, dressed head-to-toe in starched whites stretched tight across his butt like a drumhead, and behind me the faint idle of an airport taxi, the one Coop had ordered, pulling into the academy’s circular drive.
An honor guard lowered the flag. The junior class president led the underclassmen in a final salute—“Three cheers for the graduates! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray!”
And the graduates answered—“Three cheers for those we leave behind! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray! Hip hip hooray!,” then tossing their white caps high in the air, local kids scrambling to snatch them, but not looking back, never looking back again.
Chapter Nineteen: Melora
On July 1, I said my goodbyes to Joey, Darin, and Diana, and boarded a greyhound for Pensacola. Joey called mom, let her know I was leaving. “She’ll be here,” he said at our little pizza and Pepsi farewell party. Tammy Jo never showed.
Darin was the only one who cried. “Don’t leave, Melora. Whomygonna play with?”
Mr. Belasso drove me to the bus station.
“Thanks for everything, Mr. B.”
“Just keep your head down, kid. And never volunteer.”
“Some day you’ll tell me about Huế?”
“Yeah, sure kid, sure.”
Later that night at Pensacola Naval Air Station, less than a year shy of my eighteenth birthday, I slept for the first time on something other than a fucking sofa. It was a cot like the others in my barracks, but it felt like heaven. I was out before the bugler finished taps, out the instant I closed my eyes, sleeping deeply, peacefully, dreamlessly, until reveille.
After first mess, a couple of young women petty officers loaded me and the other Flor
ida recruits in my training unit on another bus, this one a charter. Before noon I crossed the Florida border for the first time. Traveling north across Georgia, heading for Recruit Training Command in Great Lakes, Illinois, some talked and played cards, most slept or watched the countryside roll by.
At Great Lakes, I got my second haircut in less than a week. Terry at Paris Faire had taken my hair from waist to shoulder, the Navy took most of the rest. I was also back in the classroom, studying naval customs, first aid, fire fighting, water safety and survival, and shipboard and aircraft safety, learning skills I’d never use once in the next four years. From the first day, men and women trained together as they’d later serve together on ships and shore commands around the world. Lectures on the Navy’s oldest values—honor, courage, commitment—blended with newer topics—sexual harassment and equal opportunity. The only time the instructors mentioned computers was in a three-hour session on Access Law Compliance that boiled down to one simple message: never discuss anything about computers or computer programming with civilians.
My classmates bitched when they learned I’d been excused from all physical fitness requirements, bitched some more when, six weeks into the eight-week training program, a duty officer handed me orders transferring me to Pensacola to begin “technical instruction.” I hadn’t made any friends in my training unit, but I didn’t give a fuck, because I knew I’d never see any of them again.
At my last Great Lakes mail call, the company clerk called my name. I was surprised to hear it, surprised to open the envelope addressed in my own handwriting and see the picture of a uniformed, slightly dazed looking boy, his bandaged hand resting on the hip of his beautiful date, a girl who looked like someone I’d seen before in another lifetime.
Everyone who joins the Navy dreams of cruising around the world on mighty fighting ships. But I wasn’t interested in sailing them or firing their guns. My dreams were about creating the computers and programs commanding the ships—their engines, navigation systems, and weapons.
I thought I’d get to live those dreams when I arrived at Pensacola with orders immediately tasking me to Computer Ops. But soon the excitement of working with our brand new IPI 3000s—machines that made the academy’s IPI 700 look like a slide rule—gave way to the reality of using them only for payroll, procurement, and inventory. I got as creative as I could, at first reconfiguring and streamlining programs, later rewriting them from scratch.
My superiors were surprisingly open to new ideas, adopting most of my suggestions, recommending me for promotions and pay raises. But by the halfway mark in my four-year enlistment, I’d gone as far as I could go. I knew there was more important work happening somewhere in the Navy. My best guess was the Pentagon. In Military Net communiqués, I saw hints of computers far more powerful than the ones used at Pensacola. My section chief, a skinny old submariner named Kavaney, who looked like he’d spent too many years on the dry side of a thin steel hull millimeters away from hundreds of atmospheres of pressure, swore he’d used navigation and missile targeting programs that made Pensacola’s best work read like Dick and Jane. And while John Rusk—newly promoted to captain—kept his word about getting me into computers and out of St. Francis, I never imagined spending my whole enlistment in fucking Florida.
Pensacola wasn’t all bad. On leave I could bus to St. Francis, visit Joey, Diana, and their new addition, Damian, and keep my promise to Darin that, “I’ll always come home to play with you.” On liberty, I could walk to Pensacola’s beaches, whose waters weren’t as warm as St. Francis Key, but were still the Gulf.
I also picked up a new skill. For a while I dated a guy named Wind. He owned Windance Tattoos, a Pensacola parlor catering to women bluejackets. He asked me out in the middle of tattooing a breaking wave on my ankle, and thinking it would be a bad time to learn how he handled rejection, I said okay. He turned out to be a good enough boyfriend and began teaching me his trade.
My Navy pay was enough to support me, send a check for a few bucks each month to Joey, and put a little away for a rainy day. Tammy Jo was still shacked up with the professor—a record-setting relationship for her—and that was a good thing, because she wasn’t asking me for money. As my tattooing skills improved I spent some savings on my own kit, and Wind started letting me cover for him at the parlor. He’d never been very talkative, but as more and more customers requested me, he stopped talking altogether. That’s when I packed my kit and went back to spending free time doing the things I’d done before I met him—hanging out at the beach and busing down to St. Francis. Wind never called to find out what happened, so I guess breaking up was okay with him, too. I did get some free ink out of the deal, including what turned out to be Wind’s farewell present, his masterpiece—an orange and black Gulf of Mexico devil ray on my arm with its tail curving up my shoulder.
By the end of my third year, I’d about had it. I was making more money than I ever dreamed possible, but my work was going nowhere. Whenever I complained to Chief Kavaney, he’d shrug and say, “Take it up with the old man.”
The “old man” was our C.O., Lieutenant Brent Bosworth, who at twenty-four was less than half Kavaney’s age. A reluctant Annapolis grad who’d been appointed to the Naval Academy despite suffering from extreme nearsightedness—Bosworth’s great-great-grandfather served with Farragut at Mobile Bay, and every Bosworth since had been a Navy man—the young lieutenant mostly stayed behind the closed door of his office, constructing computer simulations of Civil War battles. Every time I complained, he’d squint at me, eyes swimming behind his giant Coke-bottle lenses, saying, “You’re the best programmer I’ve got, Kennedy. I’ll put you in for another promotion.” Then turning to the infantry marching across his monitor, waving me closer, he’d proudly shout, “Hey, check it out—I finished programming Pickett’s Charge!”
To get me off his back, Bosworth recommended me for officer’s training, but Chief Kavaney scuttled the paperwork. “You’ll never make ensign,” he laughed. “You like workin’ for a living.” Besides, he knew I wanted to write programs, not supervise programmers. So with only a year left in my enlistment, it looked like I was stuck being an electronic bookkeeper.
Coop stayed in touch, writing or calling every month. Life at Tulane was good. He majored in engineering because it was the only subject where students and professors could at least talk about computers. Coop earned extra money waiting tables at the French Market, and his dad still grudgingly paid room, board, and tuition. He never saw his parents, both now remarried, spending time with newer, younger families. Most amazingly, Coop had a girlfriend.
“She’s just like you Mel, only good looking.”
“Maybe,” I said, “but I’ve got better taste in men.”
Writing to Captain Rusk was Coop’s idea. I’d been on the phone with him for over an hour, bitching about my work, when he said, “What about that guy who got you enlisted in the first place? Why don’t you get his help?”
“The Navy doesn’t work that way, Coop. Rusk’s in the Pentagon, and I can’t go over my C.O.’s head.”
“What’ve you got to lose,” Coop said, “your good conduct ribbon?”
Coop’s argument made sense. So I sat down that night and wrote to Captain Rusk, asking for help. When a month passed with no reply, I figured he never got the letter or simply ignored it. Then one day Kavaney sauntered up to my workstation with a glazed look in his eyes, saying, “Pentagon brass waiting to see you at the old man’s. Snap to!”
Hurrying off to Bosworth’s office, figuring this was some kind of joke, I walked through his open door, not bothering to knock, because no one ever did. There stood Bosworth, squirming like a walking catfish in a hot cast-iron skillet. And sitting across from him, tall, handsome, relaxed—Captain Rusk. For a moment I stood there taking in the eagle sewn on his desert-tan flight suit before pulling myself together, coming to attention. Lieutenant Bosworth started saying something, but Rusk silenced him with a casual wave.
“Petty Of
ficer Kennedy,” he said evenly, “every bit as imbued with military decorum as I remember. You may stand at ease. Lieutenant Bosworth, I’ll be borrowing Miss Kennedy for the next forty-eight hours—that is if she’s not too indispensable to your operation?”
“No, sir. I mean yes, sir. I mean....” Bosworth, a man overboard, eyes swimming back and forth between me and Rusk, suddenly regained focus. “I mean, aye aye, Captain!”
Smothering a smile, Rusk looked quickly out the office’s one small window as though observing the row of F-14 fighter jets parked alongside the station’s taxiway.
“That will be all, Lieutenant,” he said.
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” And with that, Bosworth snapped to attention and marched right out of his own office. From where I stood, I could see a battle raging on his monitor. Captain Rusk was looking at it, too.
“First Manassas?” he said.
“I believe so, sir.”
“It’s good to see you again, Miss Kennedy.”
“It’s good to see you, sir.”
“Would you like to take a little trip with me?”
“You’re the Captain.”
Rusk’s face broke into a big smile. “You’ve got ten minutes to pack, Miss Kennedy. And keep it light—there’s not much room in a Tomcat.”
“I’ll be ready in five, Captain.”
On the runway sat a shiny, blue F-14 Tomcat with a ground crew chief barking refueling and maintenance orders at his men, saluting sharply as we approached.
“She’s all ready, Captain.”
“Thanks, Chief. Will you help Miss Kennedy into a pressure suit while I do my walk around?” Like most aviators, Rusk always made his own final check of an aircraft he was piloting.
“Aye aye, sir!”
Once you’re in the Navy—and it doesn’t matter whether you’re a peon or an admiral, a submarine driver, latrine swabber, or computer jockey—there are things you hope you’ll get to do that may never have crossed your mind in civilian life. Number one on that list has got to be climbing into the cockpit of a high-performance jet fighter.