The Caine Mutiny

by Herman Wouk

  The jowly face had familiar, half-obliterated features. Willie studied the officer with some embarrassment and put out his hand. “That’s right,” he said, and added, with a sudden jolt of recognition, “Aren’t you Ensign Acres?”

  “Good for you. Only it’s Lieutenant jg.” Acres uttered a wheezy laugh. “They don’t always recognize me. Coffee?”

  “Yes,” he said, a few minutes later, stirring his cup, “I’ve put on at least forty pounds, I know. You do, on these damn tenders. There’s so much of everything-You look pretty good. Skinnier. Sort of older, somehow. You got a good deal?”

  “It’s all right,” Willie said. He was trying to keep himself from staring in wonder at Acres. The once stern, handsome drill officer was a fat wreck.

  “Can’t beat this deal,” said Acres. “Oh, you see these guys?” He swept a scornful thumb around at the sleepers. “Ask them, and half of them will cry that they hate this dull noncombatant life, being stuck forever in a godforsaken atoll. All they want is action, action, they say. They want to be part of this great battle, they say. When, oh when, will orders ever come, taking them to a fighting ship? ... Horse feathers. I handle the ship’s correspondence. I know who puts in transfer requests and who doesn’t. I know who kicks and screams when the possibility arises of giving ’em some temporary staff duty with a commodore on a tin can. They all love this deal. I do, and I admit it. Want a cheese sandwich? We have some terrific Roquefort.”

  “Sure.”

  The Roquefort was exquisite, and so was the fresh white bread.

  “The thing is, Keith, that all of us supine bastards are actually doing a damn good and damn necessary job. Have you tried the facilities of this ship? Destroyers beg to get a few days alongside the Pluto. We are the can-do ship. We’ve got it so well organized, and there’s so little waste motion, no steaming here and there and buttoning up for sea and going to GQ and all that combat crap that eats up honest worktime-” He took another slice of bread and lavishly smeared Roquefort cheese on it. “You married, Keith?”

  “No.”

  “I am. Got married I guess during the next class after the one you were in. You were the December ’42 bunch, weren’t you? It’s all getting hazy. Well, anyway, I met this girl, blonde, she was a secretary in the English Department at Columbia. Got married in three weeks.” Acres grinned, and sighed, and noisily sucked up his cup of coffee and poured more. “Well, you know, we instructors had a pretty good deal, Keith. What we put in for, we got. I always had figured that when my year of teaching was up I’d put in for subs. Had read up all the submarine doctrine-well. That was before I married. I studied all the ships in the fleet roster, Keith, and put in for destroyer tender. Smart. The mail comes here mighty regularly, and I live for it, Keith. Got a baby two months old I’ve never seen. Girl. ... I’m the communicator on this bucket. I should have asked you before, is there something I can do for you?”

  Acres took Willie to the communication office, a spacious room on the main deck furnished with new chairs and desks of green-enameled metal, bubbling coffee makers, and several sleek scrubbed yeomen in fresh blue dungarees. At a word from Acres the yeomen sprang up, and out of clean cabinets and flawlessly regular files they produced in a few minutes all the decodes Willie wanted, and a series of new fleet letters. Weeks of piled-up work melted away for the Caine’s communicator. He looked around at the shelves of books in alphabetical order, at the wire baskets almost clear of correspondence, at the handsome plexiglass file boards of Fox skeds and decodes, and wondered at this weird antiseptic efficiency. His gaze rested on Acres, whose belly bulged in two khaki rolls above and below his belt. The Pluto’s communicator, flipping through a sheaf of AlNavs, glanced up at Willie’s collar pin. “Is that gold or silver?”

  “Gold.”

  “Should be silver, Keith. You make jg on the new AlNav. Class of February. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks,” said Willie, shaking hands, “but my skipper still has to approve.”

  “Oh, hell, that’s automatic. Buy yourself some collar pins while you’re here. Come on, I’ll show you where. Got everything?”

  When Willie left Acres at the gangway, the communicator said, “Come on over and eat with me any time. Lunch. Dinner. We’ll shoot the breeze some more. We have strawberries and cream all the time.”

  “Sure,” Willie said. “Thanks a million.”

  He crossed the nest to the Caine. As he came over the gangplank and set foot on the rusty, littered quarterdeck, he straightened like a German and threw Harding a salute which brought a smile of mournful amusement to the ensign’s face. “I report my return aboard, sir!”

  “Got the jerks, Willie? A salute like that can break your arm.”

  Willie walked forward. He smiled at the dirty, ragged Apaches of the crew, passing here and there on the deck in their accustomed tasks. Mackenzie, Jellybelly, Langhorne of the long bony jaw, Horrible with his pimples, Urban, Stilwell, Chief Budge, one after the other they went by and Willie realized that he had never had relatives or friends whom he knew as well and could estimate as clearly as any second-class seaman of the Caine. “Jellybelly,” he called, “six fat sacks of mail for us on the tender-four official, two personal-”

  “Aye aye, sir. Get ’em right away.”

  On the well deck a group of deck hands were dividing and devouring an immense round yellow cheese, plunder from the Pluto, with the shrill chattering of blue jays. Crumbs of the cheese were scattered on the deck. Willie accepted a broken, fingerprinted yellow morsel from the redheaded Jew, Kapilian, and crammed it in his mouth.

  In his room Willie stuck the lieutenant junior-grade bars into the collar of a new khaki shirt he had bought on the Pluto. He drew the green curtain, put on the shirt, and examined himself in the mirror by the dim yellow overhead light. He noted his flat stomach, his lean face, his tired, black-rimmed, dogged eyes. His lips were dragged downward and compressed.

  He shook his head. With that gesture, he gave up a plan which he had been secretly harboring for a week. There was a chaplain on the Pluto; he had passed his office; but Willie knew now that he was not going to hunt up the chaplain and tell him the story of the water famine. “You may not be much,” he said aloud to his mirror image, “but you don’t have to go weeping to anybody on the Pluto. You’re Lieutenant Keith of the Caine.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Court-Martial of Stilwell

  “Mistuh Keith, exec want to see you, sub.”

  “Okay, Rasselas.” Willie reluctantly dropped on his desk the nine mildewed letters from May that had just come in the mailbags from the Pluto, and went to the exec’s room.

  “Things are closing in, Willie.” Maryk handed him a long typed letter on Red Cross stationery. Willie read it, squatting on the coaming of the doorway. He felt sick, as though he himself were trapped. “Captain seen it?”

  Maryk nodded. “Summary court-martial for Stilwell day after tomorrow. You’re going to be the recorder.”

  “The what?”

  “Recorder.”

  “What’s that?”

  The exec shook his head and grinned. “Don’t you know any Navy regulations? Get out Courts and Boards and get hot on summary court-martials.”

  “What do you think will happen to Stilwell?”

  “Well, that’s up to Keefer, Harding, and Paynter. They’re the court.”

  “Well, then, he’ll be okay.”

  “Maybe,” Maryk said dryly.

  A couple of hours later Rasselas went searching the ship for the communicator and found him flat on his face on the flying bridge, asleep in the sun. Jellybelly’s ragged copy of Courts and Boards lay open on the deck beside him, the pages flapping in the breeze. “Suh, Mistuh Keith, suh. Cap’n wants you, suh.”

  “Oh, God. Thanks, Rasselas.”

  Queeg looked up from his jigsaw puzzle with a remarkably pleasant, youthful smile when Willie came into his cabin. It brought back forcibly to Willie how much he had liked Queeg at their first handshak
e so long, long ago.

  “Well, Mr. Keith, here’s something for you.” Queeg took several clipped sheets from an overflowing wire basket and gave them to the communicator. They were Willie’s appointment to lieutenant junior grade. Queeg stood, and offered his hand. “Congratulations, Lieutenant.”

  Willie had been comforting himself for months with a dark fantasy. He had resolved that if ever a moment came when Queeg offered to shake hands with him, he would refuse. With that one gesture he would tell the captain once for all what the world of gentlemen, in the person of Willie Keith, thought of people like Queeg. Now it had suddenly come, the chance to make the daydream real-but the sad fact is, Willie meekly took the captain’s hand and said, “Thank you, sir.”

  “Not at all, Willie. We have our little differences, naturally, but as an officer you measure up very well-very well, on the whole. Now then. All set to be recorder at the court-martial?”

  “Well, sir, I’ve been boning up on this Courts and Boards-seems I’m a combination prosecutor and legal adviser-”

  “Yes, well, don’t let all that legal gobbledygook throw you. I’ve been a recorder five, six times and the last thing I know anything about-or want to know anything about-is law. The important thing is to have a yeoman who’s on the ball and gets the whole thing typed up right, according to the form in the book. Porteous knows his stuff, so you’ll be okay. Just bear down on him and make sure he dots the i’s and crosses the t’s. Stilwell’s going to get a bad-conduct discharge and I want to be damn sure it sticks.”

  Willie blurted in plain puzzlement, “How do you know what he’s going to get, sir?”

  “Hell, he’s guilty, isn’t he? A fraud like that calls for the stiffest sentence a summary court can give, which is a BCD.”

  “Sir, it’s just that-well, it sure looks as though Stilwell is guilty-but-to prove it legally may be a little tougher than-”

  “Prove it, hell! Here’s his confession.” Queeg snatched a typewritten sheet from the wire basket and tossed it on the desk in front of Willie. “There’s a way of doing these things. The court-martial is a formality, that’s all. How the hell could four ignoramuses like you and Keefer and those two others try a not-guilty plea? You’d make a million mistakes. You take that confession now.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” Willie folded the paper away carefully.

  “Now if there are any questions, any points that you and Porteous can’t figure out between you, why, remember to bring the record up here to me. I don’t want the big boys to throw it out on some goddamn technical point. I want this thing to stick, do you understand?”

  Willie took the confession to his room and read it. At first he was sure that Stilwell was lost. Then he opened Courts and Boards to the section on confessions, and studied it carefully, underlining several sentences. He sent for Stilwell. In a few minutes the sailor appeared in the doorway. He wore painfully clean dungarees, and wrung a new white hat in his hands. “You want me, Mr. Keith?”

  “Come in. Draw the curtain. ... Sit down on that bunk.” The sailor closed the curtain, and stood with his back to it. “Pretty sad business, Stilwell.”

  “I know, sir. I’ll take what’s coming to me. Whatever it is, it was worth it. If that’s all-”

  “Why did you confess?”

  “Hell, the captain had me cold, sir, with that Red Cross letter.”

  “Oh, he showed that to you?”

  “He says, ‘Take your choice. A clean breast of it, and a summary court on the ship, or try to bluff through, and get yourself a general court back in the States, and probably ten years.’ What would you do, sir?”

  “Stilwell, what has the captain got against you?”

  “Holy Christ! You tell me, sir.”

  Lieutenant Keith pulled forward the open copy of Courts and Boards on the desk. He read the section on confessions aloud to the sailor. At first Stilwell’s face lit with desperate hope, but the liveliness quickly went out of his face. “What’s the use, sir? It’s too late now. I didn’t know about that book.”

  Lighting a cigarette, Willie leaned back in his chair and stared at the overhead, smoking in silence for a minute. “Stilwell, if you quote me to the captain as saying this, I’ll call you a liar. But if you’ll call on me to bear you out from the book, I will. Do you see the difference? I want to tell you two things to think about overnight.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “First, if you repudiate that confession it can’t possibly be used against you in court. That, I swear. Second-and don’t ever tell the captain I said this-if you plead not guilty I think it’s almost impossible for a summary court-martial on this ship to convict you.”

  “Sir, that Red Cross letter-”

  “It doesn’t prove anything. Your brother sent that wire. It’s up to the court to prove that you instigated him. Without your testimony-and they can’t make you testify against yourself-how can they possibly prove it? Where’s your brother? Where’s any record of a conversation between you?”

  Stilwell looked at him suspiciously. “Why would you rather have me plead not guilty?”

  “Look, I don’t give a damn what you plead! My duty as recorder is to point out to you in my dumb way what the best legal course for you seems to me to be. Don’t take my word. Go ask a chaplain, or the legal officer on the Pluto. Ask them about Courts and Boards yourself. Section 174.”

  The sailor repeated mechanically, “Courts and Boards 174-174-174. Okay, sir. Thanks, sir.” He went out. Willie fought down his irritation. It was only natural, he reasoned, that in the nostrils of the crew all the officers were acquiring the odor of Queeg.

  Stilwell was back next morning with a stiff new copy of Courts and Boards under his arm. “Mr. Keith, you’re right. I’m gonna plead not guilty.”

  “Oh? Who convinced you?”

  The sailor said eagerly, “Well, see, Engstrand, he’s got a cousin on the Bolger, second can outboard. This cousin, he’s big buddies with the first-class yeoman on the ship. Well, this yeoman, he’s a fat Irish guy, bald, maybe forty years old. In civilian life he’s a politician, they say. Only reason he ain’t an officer, he never went to college. Well, he sold me this book. He says it ain’t nothing secret, anybody can buy it off the government for a couple of bucks. Is that right?”

  Willie hesitated, and turned to the title page of his copy. At the bottom, in small print, was a legend he had not noticed before: For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington 25, D.C. “That’s right, Stilwell.” His tone contained a touch of his own surprise. He had assumed, for no good reason, that the book was restricted.

  “Well, Jesus, I don’t know why every sailor in this goddamn outfit don’t own one!” said the gunner’s mate. “I been up all night reading it. I never knew I had all them rights. Well, anyway, sir, this Callaghan, this yeoman, he said I sure as hell ought to plead not guilty. He says I’m a cinch to get acquitted.”

  “He’s not an officer, so you can probably believe him.”

  “That’s how I figure it, sir,” the sailor said with perfect seriousness.

  “Okay, Stilwell- Well. This brings up a lot of problems. You have to have counsel, and I have to prepare exhibits, and dig up witnesses, and in general the whole thing turns into a trial, just like in the movies-”

  “You think I’m doing the right thing, don’t you, sir?”

  “I’d rather not see you get convicted, naturally, if there’s a way out. I think I’d better talk to the captain right away. You wait here.”

  Stilwell clutched the brown book tightly in both hands, and ran his tongue over his lips. “Ah-aye aye, sir.”

  Willie hesitated outside Queeg’s door for a couple of minutes, rehearsing answers to hypothetical shrieks and snarls of the captain. He knocked. “Come in!”

  It was dark in the cabin. The black-out curtain hung over the porthole. Dimly, Willie could see the bulge of the captain’s form in the bunk. “Who is it and what do you want?” said a voice muff
led by a pillow.

  “Sir, it’s Keith. It’s about the court-martial. Stilwell wants to plead not guilty.”

  The captain reached a curved talon out from under the pillow and snapped on the bed lamp. He sat up, squinting, and scratching his naked chest. “What’s all this? Not guilty, hey? Just a born troublemaker, that man! Well, we’ll fix him. What time is it?”

  “Eleven, sir.”

  Queeg rolled out of the bunk, and began splashing water on his face at the basin. “How about his confession? How in hell can he plead not guilty after confessing, hey? Did you ask him that?”

  “He’s going to repudiate his confession, sir.”

  “Oh, he is, hey? That’s what he thinks- Pass me that tube of toothpaste, Willie.”

  The young lieutenant waited until the captain’s mouth was full of foam. Then he said cautiously, “He seems to have been getting some legal advice from a very savvy yeoman on another ship in the nest, sir. He’s got himself a copy of Courts and Boards-”

  “I’ll Courts and Boards him,” mumbled the captain around his toothbrush.

  “He says there’s no evidence that he sent any fraudulent wire, and the confession, he says, he dictated under duress, and it doesn’t mean anything.”

  The captain blew out a mouthful of water explosively. “Duress! What duress?”

  “He claims you said something about a general court-martial-”

  “For plain, wrongheaded, inside-out stupidity you can’t beat an enlisted man who suddenly gets hold of a goddamn book of regulations! Duress! I was offering him a way out of a general court-martial. I could probably get a reprimand for such undercover clemency. And that little sneak calls it duress! ... Give me a towel.”

  Queeg mopped his face and hands. “Kay,” he said, tossing the towel aside and picking a shirt off the back of his chair, “where is our poor little mistreated innocent?”

  “In my room, sir. He just told me-”

  “Send him up here.”

  Stilwell was in the captain’s cabin for an hour. Willie lurked on the well deck, perspiring in the vertical bluish glare of the noon sun, watching the captain’s door. At last the gunner’s mate came out. In one hand he carried his Courts and Boards, in the other a sheet of white paper. His face was lead-colored, and trickling with sweat. Willie ran up to him. “What’s the dope, Stilwell?”