by Herman Wouk
Actually, Maryk had begun a record of the captain’s eccentricities and oppressions, labeled “Medical Log on Lieutenant Commander Queeg.” He kept it locked in his desk safe. Aware that the captain possessed a record of the combination, Maryk quietly opened the lock late one night and reset the dials. He gave a sealed envelope containing the new combination to Willie Keith with instructions to open it only in case of his own death or disappearance.
During the months that followed the log swelled to a voluminous record. By being sent to Funafuti the Caine had fallen into the clutches of the Southwest Pacific command, the Seventh Fleet, and it began a grinding, nerve-rasping tour of monotonous escort duty. These obsolete destroyer-minesweepers, bastards of the sea, attached to no permanent command, tended to become temporary serfs of any naval potentate into whose domain they steamed. It happened that the commander of the Seventh Fleet needed escorts at that time for his shuttlings of amphibious forces around the humid blue void of the South Pacific. When the convoy from Funafuti arrived at Noumea the Caine was detached and sent up to Guadalcanal with a group of LCI’s, scrubby landing craft that crawled at seven knots. After swinging to the anchor at Guadalcanal for a week it was sent back down again to Noumea, and westward to New Guinea, and back to Noumea, and up to Guadalcanal, and down to Noumea, and eastward to Funafuti for a brief glimpse of the beloved Pluto, and westward again to Guadalcanal, and south again to Noumea.
Days dissolved into weeks and weeks into months. Time seemed not to be passing at all. Life was a wheel of watches, a procession of paper work, a fever dream of glaring sun, glaring stars, glaring blue water, hot nights, hot days, rain squalls; logs to write; monthly reports to submit, monthly statements to audit, repeating so often that it seemed the months were passing as swiftly as the days, And the days as slowly as the months, and all time was running melted and shapeless like the chocolate bars in the canteen and the butter in the butter dishes.
During this captivity Captain Queeg became more irascible, secluded, and strange. When he emerged from his cabin he usually performed some minor outrage that was written down in Maryk’s log. He incarcerated sailors and put officers under hack; he cut off water, he cut off coffee, and when the movie operator neglected to send him word that a performance was starting he cut off movies for the entire crew for six months. He made endless demands for written reports and investigations. Once he kept all the officers sitting in session for forty-eight hours, trying to find out which mess boy had burned out a Silex (they never found out, and he announced a twenty-point cut in everybody’s fitness rating). He developed a settled habit of summoning officers for conferences in the middle of the night. The equilibrium of declared hostility between himself and the wardroom, established by his speech after the Stilwell court-martial, came to seem the normal way of life for the officers. They averaged four or five broken hours of sleep each night. A gray mist of fatigue settled over their minds. They were jumpy, easily moved to quarrel, and more scared and sickened, with every passing week, by the everlasting buzz of the wardroom phone and the message, “Captain wants to see you in his cabin.” And all the time Maryk doggedly kept adding to his secret log.
Early in June they were rescued from the treadmill delirium of Seventh Fleet duty. The operation order for the invasion of Saipan arrived aboard, and the Caine was assigned to the screen of the main body of attack transports. There was genuine joy among the officers and crew when the old ship set out on a high-speed run by itself through dangerous waters to join up with the attack force at Eniwetok. As between gunfire and a prolongation of the tedium, they would probably have voted twenty to one for the gunfire. It was pleasanter to be shot at than to rot.
On the first day of the invasion Maryk made one of the briefest and most important entries in his medical log: an incident involving Willie Keith.
An hour before dawn of the invasion day, with the night fading to blue and Saipan beginning to show on the horizon, a humped black shape, Willie was surprised to find himself badly scared. It humiliated him to be afraid, approaching his second combat experience, when he had been so valorously carefree the first time. His innocence was gone. The flame and noise and ruin and falling figures of Kwajalein had penetrated to his bones and viscera even while he had hummed Begin the Beguine.
But when the sun came up, Willie momentarily forgot his fear in enchantment at the beauty of Saipan. Terraced and gardened, it was like Japanese scenes on lacquered screens and porcelain jars; a broad island of rolling green cultivated hills dotted with rustic homes, rising out of the gray waste of the sea. A flower-scented breeze blew from it across the water. Glancing down at the dirty forecastle, where the number-one gun crew stood in a blue phalanx of ragged dungarees, life jackets, and helmets, peering at the shore, Willie felt a tiny flash of sympathy for the Japanese. He sensed what it might be like to be short and yellow-skinned and devoted to a picture-book emperor, and to face extermination by hordes of big white men swarming from everywhere in flaming machines. Although the sea and air bombardment had enlivened the island’s bucolic prettiness with patches of flame and mushrooms of dust and smoke, there was no such obliteration of the greenery here as there had been on Kwajalein. The rows of attack boats seemed to be crawling toward a recreation park instead of a murderous island fortress.
The Caine was sent to an anti-submarine patrol sector as soon as the invasion got under way, and there it steamed endlessly in a figure-eight path several thousand yards long. Twelve other ships moved in unison with it, back and forth at ten knots, in a protective fanning curtain around the transports anchored close to the beach. It seemed like a safe place, and Willie’s spirits improved as the hours passed. His morale stiffened when he observed that Queeg was really shuttling from one side of the bridge to the other so as to remain sheltered from the beach. There was no mistaking it this time, because the ship kept reversing course every few minutes; and regular as clockwork, each time it presented a new side to Saipan, Queeg would come strolling around to the seaward wing. This gave Willie a dearly cherished chance to display his contempt for the captain by doing exactly the opposite. He sensed that the sailors were noticing Queeg’s conduct; there was a lot of sly grinning and muttering. Willie ostentatiously moved to the exposed side with each turn of the ship. Queeg took no apparent notice.
Things were so quiet in the patrol sector that the captain secured the crew from battle stations at noon, and went below to his cabin. Willie was relieved of the deck. He was desperately tired, having been awake for more than thirty hours, but the captain’s edict against daytime sleeping made retirement to his bunk too risky. He knew Queeg was heavily asleep in his cabin; but there was always the chance that a call of nature would bring the captain down to the wardroom. Willie went up to the flying bridge, nestled down on the hot iron deck, and slept in the blazing sun like a cat for four hours. He went back to the wheelhouse for the afternoon watch much refreshed.
Shortly after he took over the binoculars from Keefer, a Navy Corsair came flying across the northern hills of the island toward the Caine. All at once it burst into a rosette of flame, and arced into the water with a great splash halfway between the minesweeper and another patrol vessel, the new destroyer Stanfield. Willie telephoned the captain.
“Kay, head over there at twenty knots,” was the sleepy reply. Queeg arrived on the bridge wearing khaki shorts and bedroom slippers, yawning, as the Caine and the Stanfield were closing to within a thousand yards of each other at the place of the crash. There was no remnant of the plane on the water; only a rainbow-colored film of gasoline.
“Bye-bye Corsair,” said Queeg.
“Went down like a stone,” murmured Willie. He glanced at the paunchy little captain, and felt a stir of shame. What had happened to his sense of proportion, he wondered, that a comic-opera monster like Queeg could annoy or upset him? A man had just died before his eyes. The buzzing TBS transmissions spoke of thousands more dying on the shore. He had not yet seen blood spilled on the Caine except in c
areless handling of tools. Thought Willie, “I’m in danger of becoming a self-pitying whiner after all, the scum of military life-”
Towers of white water suddenly grew out of the sea on both sides of the Stanfield. For half a second Willie was puzzled, and thought they might be a queer tropical weather trick. Then the words burst from his throat: “Captain! The Stanfield’s being straddled!”
Queeg looked at the subsiding splashes and shouted into the pilothouse. “All engines ahead full! hard right rudder!”
“There, Captain!” Willie pointed to an orange flash followed by a puff of black smoke, high on a cliff to the north. “That’s the battery, sir!” He ran out on the wing, and shouted up to the flying bridge, “Gun watch!”
Jorgensen poked his head over the bulwark. “Yes, Mr. Keith?”
“Shore battery bears 045 relative, distance 4000, top of the cliff! There, see that flash? Train the main battery on it!”
“Aye aye, sir! ... All guns, shore battery, 045 relative, elevation 10, distance 4000!”
The Stanfield was whirling in a tight circle through a rain of splashes, and, even as it turned, it blasted an earsplitting salvo from its five-inch guns. Willie saw the Caine’s gun crews jump to their places. The line of three-inch guns swung parallel, pointing more and more astern each second as the ship turned.
“Rudder amidships! Steady as you go!” Willie heard Queeg say. The minesweeper was now headed directly away from the shore battery, leaping through the water at twenty knots. Willie ran into the pilothouse.
“Captain, main battery manned and on target!” Queeg seemed not to hear. He stood at an open window, with a squinting smile on his face. “Captain, request permission to come broadside and fire at the shore battery! We’re on the target, sir!” The guns of the Stanfield roared two more salvos astern. Queeg paid no attention. He did not turn his head or his eyes. “Sir,” said Willie desperately, “I request permission to open fire with number-four gun! A clear shot over the stern, sir!”
Queeg said nothing. The officer of the deck ran out on the wing and saw the destroyer, a dwindling shape, fire its guns again. A thick ball of dust enveloped the place on the cliff where the battery had been. Flames darted out of the dust as the salvo struck. Again the Stanfield was straddled. It fired four rapid salvos. There were no answering shots; at least there seemed to be no more splashes rising near the destroyer. Already the Caine was too far away for Willie to be certain.
He whispered the story to Maryk after dinner. The exec grunted, and made no comment. But late that night he wrote in his log:
19 June. Saipan. I did not see this at first hand. It was reported to me by an OOD. He states that this vessel was investigating the scene of an air crash with a destroyer. The destroyer, 1000 yards on our beam, was taken under fire by a shore battery. Captain reversed course and left scene without firing a shot, though battery was well within our range and our guns were manned and ready.
The Saipan campaign was not yet over when the Caine was detached from the attack force and ordered to escort a damaged battleship to Majuro. That was the end of the minesweeper’s part in the Marianas battle. It missed the Turkey Shoot and the invasion of Guam; while these brilliant events were going forward the Caine sank back into escort duty. From Majuro it accompanied a carrier to Kwajalein, a dull, domesticated Kwajalein all knobby with Quonset huts. Blighted yellowish greenery was appearing again around the edges of the sandy air strips, and there was a continuous crawling on the beach of bulldozers and jeeps. Willie thought it curious that, with the coming of the Americans, the once-charming tropic islands had taken on the look of vacant lots in Los Angeles.
The old minesweeper went on with the carrier to Eniwetok, and was sent back to Kwajalein with some LST’s, and then to Eniwetok again with a tanker. The year rounded into August and the Caine still plied among the atolls of the Central Pacific, trapped once more in tedious shuttling, this time in the grip of Com Fifth Fleet.
The ship’s life remained a static vexatious weariness. There were no grand incidents for a while, and Maryk’s log writing dwindled. Everything was known. All personalities had been explored, and even Queeg, it seemed, had at last run through his surprises. What happened today had happened yesterday, and would happen tomorrow: heat, zigzagging, little nervous spats, paper work, watches, mechanical breakdowns, and steady scratchy nagging by the captain.
The taste of this wretched time was preserved for Willie in the score of Oklahoma! Jorgensen had picked up the album at Majuro. He played it day and night in the wardroom; and when he was not playing it the boys in the radio shack borrowed it and piped it through the loudspeakers. For the rest of his life, Willie would be unable to hear “Don’t-throw Bo-kays at me,” without being overwhelmed by a flashing impression of heat, boredom, and near-to-screaming nervous fatigue.
Willie had an extra burden to carry. Once the captain’s favorite, he had suddenly become the wardroom goat. The turn seemed to come immediately after the Stanfield episode. Until then Keefer had been Queeg’s main target; but thereafter everyone noticed a marked shift of the captain’s hounding to Lieutenant Keith. One evening at dinner the novelist ceremoniously presented to Willie a large cardboard head of a goat cut from a beer advertisement. The transfer of this Caine heirloom was accompanied with great laughter, in which Willie wryly joined. The summons, “Mr. Keith, report to the captain’s cabin,” boomed over the p.a. system a couple of times each day; and seldom did Willie lie down for a few hours of sleep between watches, without being shaken awake by a mess boy and told, “Cap’n wants to talk to you, suh.”
Queeg’s complaints in these interviews were about the slowness of decoding, or the routing of mail, or the correction of publications, or a smell of coffee coming from the radio shack, or an error of a signalman in copying a message-it did not much matter what. Willie began to develop a deep, dull hate for Queeg. It was nothing like the boyish pique he had felt against Captain de Vriess. It was like the hate of a husband for a sick wife, a mature, solid hate, caused by an unbreakable tie to a loathsome person, and existing not as a self-justification, but for the rotten gleam of pleasure it gave off in the continuing gloom.
Out of this hate, Willie achieved an unbelievable thoroughness and accuracy in his work. It was his one joy to frustrate the captain by anticipating his complaints and stopping his mouth. But there was a permanent hole in his defenses: Ducely. When the captain, droning nastily in triumph, faced Willie with a mistake or an omission in his department, it nearly always traced back to the assistant communicator. Willie had tried rage, contempt, invective, pleading, and even a bitter interview in the presence of Maryk. At first Ducely, blushing and boyish, had made promises to reform. But he had remained exactly as vague and slovenly as before. In the end he had retreated into petulant assertions that he was no good, and knew it, and never would be any good, and there was nothing for Willie to do but report him to Queeg for court-martial or dismissal. Willie took a belligerent pride in never blaming his assistant to the captain, by word or hint. It gave him perverse pleasure to know that Ducely had received an excellent fitness report.
August dragged, and dragged, and expired into September, with the Caine en route from Kwajalein to Eniwetok in the company of ten green crawling LCI’s.
During the first two weeks of September an increasingly tense, restless expectation spread among the officers. It was now twelve months since Queeg had been ordered to the Caine, and they knew that few captains held their posts longer than a year. Willie took to going to the radio shack and scanning the Fox skeds as they came out of the radiomen’s typewriters, seeking the prayed-for BuPers despatch. Queeg himself showed stirrings of the same eagerness. Several times Willie found him in the shack, glancing through the skeds.
They say the watched pot never boils. It is equally true that the watched Fox sked never contains the captain’s orders. The vigil simply increased the nervous irritation in the ship, spreading down from the officers to the men. Eccentricities, those
fungi of loneliness and boredom, began to flourish rankly on the Caine. The men grew queerly shaped beards, and had their hair cut in the shapes of hearts, crosses, and stars. Paynter caught a fiddler crab on the beach at Kwajalein, a thing the size of a pie, with one huge multicolored claw. He brought it aboard, and kept it in his room, walking it every evening on the forecastle at the end of a string like a dog. He called the hideous creature Heifetz. Paynter and Keefer had a falling-out when the crab escaped, walked in on the novelist while he sat naked at his desk, composing, and nipped one of his toes with the big claw. Keefer danced shrieking into the wardroom. He attempted to exterminate Heifetz with the ship’s cutlass, and Paynter threw himself between the crab and the maddened nude Keefer. Bad blood existed between the two officers thereafter.
Ensign Ducely went queer, too, falling ragingly in love with a corset advertisement in the New Yorker. To Willie’s eye the nameless maiden in the advertisement was like a thousand other clothing models he had seen in magazines-arched brows, big eyes, angular cheeks, pouting mouth, a fetching figure, and a haughty, revolted look, as though someone had just offered her a jellyfish to hold. But Ducely swore that this was the woman he had searched for all his life. He wrote off letters to the magazine and the clothing firm asking for her name and address, and he also wrote to friends in three New York advertising agencies, begging them to track her down. If his efficiency had been around twenty-five per cent of normal before, it now dropped to zero. He languished on his bunk, sighing over the corset ad, by day and by night.