by Herman Wouk
Willie took uneasy note of these peculiarities. They reminded him of incidents in novels about men on long sea voyages, and there was a not quite pleasant amusement in seeing the classic symptoms popping out in his shipmates. And then he himself was stricken. One day the thought occurred to him, as he was drinking coffee on the bridge during a watch, that it would be rather elegant to have his own monogrammed coffee mug. In itself the notion was not odd, but his response to it was. In a few minutes, a monogrammed coffee mug came to seem to him the most wonderful imaginable possession on earth. He could not pay attention to the watch for thinking of the mug. He could see it floating in the air before his eyes. When he was relieved he rushed to the shipfitter’s shack, borrowed a small file, and spent several hours gouging “WK” into a crockery cup with a jeweler’s precision and delicacy while the dinner hour passed and night fell. He filled the excavated letters with a rich blue paint, and laid the mug tenderly in his desk drawer to dry, cushioned with socks and underwear. When he was wakened at 4 A.M. to go on watch his first thought was of the mug. He took it out of the drawer and sat gloating over it like a girl over a love letter, so he was ten minutes late in relieving, and drew a snarl from the weary Keefer. The following afternoon he brought the cup up. to the bridge and casually handed it to the signalman Urban, asking him to fill it from the radar-shack Silex. The envious, admiring glances of the sailors filled Willie with pleasure.
Next morning, coming on the bridge again with his wonderful cup, Willie was enraged to see Urban drinking out of a mug monogrammed “LU,” just like his own. He took this as a personal insult. He soon saw that a rash of monogrammed mugs had broken out throughout the ship. The boatswain’s mate Winston carried one etched with an insignia in fine Old English lettering, with heraldic flourishes. Willie’s monogram was a kindergarten work compared to this, and to a dozen other sailors’ cups. He angrily threw his mug into the sea that night.
In this long nightmare time, Willie spent hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours daydreaming about May Wynn, staring at her pictures, or reading and re-reading her letters. She was his one link with what had once been his life. His civilian existence now seemed a perfumed glamorous unreality, like a Hollywood movie about high society. Reality was the rolling minesweeper, and the sea, and shabby khakis, and binoculars, and the captain’s buzzer. He wrote wildly passionate letters to the girl, and with the greatest difficulty edited out any references to marriage. It made him uneasy and guilty to send off these letters, because as time passed he suspected more and more that he was not going to marry May. If he ever came back alive he wanted peace and luxury, not a struggling inept marriage with a coarse singer. So his reason informed him; but reason had little to do with the hours of romantic fantasy with which he doped himself to beguile the tedium and deaden the pain of Queeg’s nagging. He knew his letters were queerly evasive and contradictory; but such as they were, he sent them off. In return, in the rare times when the minesweeper encountered a fleet post office, he would get batches of warm happy letters from May, which at once intoxicated and worried him. She gave herself completely to him in these letters, and followed his silent treatment of the subject of marriage. In this strange love affair on paper Willie found himself becoming more and more attached to May and at the same time increasingly aware that he was being unjust to her. But the dreamworld was too precious an anodyne to be broken up; and so he persisted in his fervid pointless love letters.
CHAPTER 25
A Medal for Roland Keefer
On October 1, with Captain Queeg still in command, the old minesweeper steamed into Ulithi Atoll, an atoll like any other atoll, a ragged ring of islands, reefs, and green water, halfway between Guam and the newly captured Palaus. As the captain was maneuvering the nose of the ship into the center of the anchoring berth, Willie, yawning on the starboard wing, felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned. Keefer, pointing off to the right, said, “Willie dear, look yonder and tell me it’s a hallucination.”
A thousand yards away an LST, painted with brown-and-green tropic camouflage, was anchored. Tied to the open ramp at the bow were three sixty-ton target sleds. Willie said sadly, “Oh, Christ, no.”
“What do you see?” said Keefer.
“Targets. That’s why we were sent down to this hole, no doubt.” The despatch ordering the Caine to proceed from Eniwetok to Ulithi alone at high speed had been the subject of extended guessing in the wardroom.
“I am going below to fall on my sword,” said the novelist.
The weary old Caine went back to work, hauling targets around the open sea near Ulithi for the fleet’s gunnery practice. Day after day, dawn found the ship steaming out of the channel with the sled, and dusk was usually purple over the atoll before it dropped anchor again. The effect of this on Captain Queeg was marked. In the first couple of days of target-towing he was more irascible and cantankerous than ever. The pilothouse echoed with his screeches and curses. Then he fell into a comatose condition. He turned over the conning of the ship entirely to Maryk, even to weighing anchor in the morning and steaming into the channel at night. Occasionally in fog or rain he would come to the bridge and take the conn. Otherwise he lay in his bunk, day and night, reading, or playing with a jigsaw puzzle, or staring.
Personal to Lieutenants Keefer and Keith. Greetings, sweepers. How about coming over tonight? I have the duty. Roland.
The Caine, returning to Ulithi in the sunset, received this blinker message from a carrier far up in the lagoon, one of a large number which had come in during the day and now were crowded at the north end of the anchorage, a mass of oblong shapes, black against the red sky. Willie, who had the deck, sent the boatswain’s mate to fetch Keefer. The novelist came to the bridge when the Caine’s anchor was splashing into the water. “What is that lucky clown doing on the Montauk?” Keefer said, peering through binoculars at the carriers. “Last I heard he was on the Belleau Wood.”
“When was that?” Willie said.
“I don’t know-five, six months ago. He never writes.”
“He just commutes from carrier to carrier, I guess.”
Keefer’s face twisted in a wry grin. The evening breeze stirred his lank black hair. “I could almost believe,” he said, “that BuPers is deliberately and systematically insulting me. I have put in about seventeen requests for transfer to a carrier- Well. Think we can risk a reply without bothering Queeg? The answer is no, of course, don’t bother saying it. Guess I’ll have to pay a visit to Grendel’s cave. Christ, it’s been a year since we saw Rollo last in Pearl, isn’t it?”
“I guess so. Seems longer.”
“Rather. This cruise under Queeg seems to me to be lasting about as long as the Renaissance. Well. Here’s hoping he’s not in a blood-drinking mood.”
Queeg, lying on his bunk, yawning over a wrinkled old Esquire, said, “Well now, Tom, let’s see. Seems to me you have a registered publications inventory due on 1 October. Have you turned it in?”
“No, sir. As you know we’ve been at sea every day and-”
“We haven’t been at sea at night. I daresay you’ve managed to write quite a bit of your novel lately. I’ve seen you at it almost every night-”
“Sir, I promise to do the inventory tonight when I get back, even if it means staying up all night-”
The captain shook his head. “I’ve got my methods, Tom, and they’re the result of a hell of a lot of observation of human nature. What’s more I’m a damn softhearted guy, strange as that may sound to you, and if I make one exception I’ll start making more and my whole system will fly to pieces, and whatever you may think of the way I run this ship at least it’s been run properly and I’ve made no mistakes yet. So I’m sorry and it’s nothing personal but permission is denied until such time as you turn in that inventory.”
Keefer and Willie took inventory that night, to the accompaniment of some picturesque cursing by the gunnery officer. It had been galling him for a year that Queeg had never permitted him to transfer custody of
the secret publications. In Pearl Harbor, Queeg had compelled him to take the books back from Willie, saying it would only be for a week or two, until Willie mastered the manual; but thereafter the captain had balked at allowing the transfer, month after month.
“I finally stopped trying to persuade that criminal lunatic to let me off the hook,” Keefer said between grunts, hauling armfuls of books out of the safe, “because I realized that he would never give up the luxury of those revolting interviews where he had me begging him for something. He would hold me on as custodian of the Caine if I rose to admiral, so long as he was an admiral one number higher than me. The man’s a classic psychotic. A full-dress analysis of him would supersede all the studies of the Jukes and the Kallikaks.” He went on in this vein for several hours. Willie threw in some sympathetic remarks, to hide the fact that he was meanly amused.
Next morning Keefer brought the inventory to the captain’s cabin, and handed it to Queeg with a shamefaced smile. “Permission to use the gig to visit the Montauk, Captain?”
“Permission granted. Thank you, Tom,” said the captain, flipping the pages of the report. “Enjoy yourself.”
“Willie Keith would like to come along, sir.”
Queeg frowned. “Why doesn’t he ask permission himself? ... Well, I’m just as glad not to have to look at his stupid face. He can pick up some of these AlPacs and AlComs that he’s always behind on, while he’s at it.”
When Keefer came out on the well deck Willie was waiting for him, looking drooped despite fresh khakis and a gleaming shoeshine. “Tom, the carriers are under way-”
“Oh, Christ, no-”
“A couple of them are in the channel already. Montauk’s chain is straight up and down.”
“Let’s see.” The novelist ran up the bridge ladder. He stood by the bulwark, staring grimly northward. Four carriers were steaming toward the Caine.
Willie said, “Maybe they’re just going to the south anchorage.” Keefer did not answer.
Towering high over their heads, the leading carrier drew abreast of the Caine, a moving mountain of gray-painted iron, no more than a hundred yards away. The minesweeper rocked in the wash. “Let’s go up on the flying bridge,” Keefer said.
It was only eight o’clock, but the sun was already hot on the unprotected flying bridge. Keefer squinted at the carriers, seven of them now, moving slowly over the glittering water. The Montauk was sixth in line. Down-channel, the leading carrier swung ponderously to port and headed out toward the open sea. “Wrong way for the south anchorage,” Keefer said bitterly.
“They didn’t stay long,” Willie said. He felt apologetic, as though in some way Keefer’s disappointment was his fault. The two officers watched the vast procession for a while in silence.
“This must be the Philippines,” Keefer said, gnawing at his lower lip. “Preliminary strike. Or maybe they’re rendezvousing with the transports. This is it, Willie. The push.”
“Well, Tom, I’m just as glad to stay here and tow targets. I’m like Roosevelt. I hate war.”
Two more carriers went slowly past. The Caine rolled and pitched, straining at its anchor chain. “All I’ve ever wanted since this war began,” murmured the novelist, looking up at the airplanes clustered on the stern of the Arnold Bay, “is to serve on a carrier.” Another carrier slipped by, and another.
“I think I see him,” said Willie. “Look there, in that gun tub, the twin-forty on the hangar deck, just aft of the hawse. There, that’s him. He’s waving a megaphone.”
Keefer nodded. He pulled a green megaphone from a bracket in the bulwark, and flourished it over his head. As the Montauk approached, Willie had a clear look at Roland Keefer through binoculars. His old roommate, wearing a purple baseball cap, had the same good-humored grin, but his face was much leaner. He resembled his brother more. It might almost have been the novelist in the gun tub.
Roland bawled something through his megaphone, but it was muffed by the sucking, washing noises of the water between the ships. “Repeat-repeat,” yelled Keefer. He put the megaphone to his ear. Roland was now directly opposite, about twenty feet above them, recognizable without binoculars. As he slipped past he shouted again. A few words came across, “... luck ... next time for sure ... Shinola ... ’By, Tom...”
The novelist roared, “Good luck, Roland. You’ll tell me all about the war next time.”
They could see Roland laugh and nod. He was far ahead of them in a moment. He called back once more, but nothing was distinguishable except the word “... brother ...”
Willie and Keefer stood watching the purple dot of the baseball cap as the Montauk swung into Mugai Channel, increased speed, and headed out to sea.
The people in the United States knew more about the great Battle of Leyte Gulf when it happened than the sailors who fought it, and much more, of course, than the men of the Caine becalmed in Ulithi. On the old minesweeper the development of the battle trickled through slowly in terse coded despatches, mostly damage reports, fogged with unfamiliar names-Surigao, San Bernardino, Samar. Willie was decoding one of these on the morning of October 26, when he struck the name Montauk. He worked on for a while, his face grave, and then brought the unfinished message to Keefer’s room. The novelist sat at his cluttered desk, striking out a paragraph on a yellow manuscript sheet with thick red crayon lines. “Hi, Willie. How’s our side doing?”
Willie handed him the message. Keefer said quickly, “Montauk?”
“Fourth paragraph.”
The gunnery officer shook his head over the message, and glanced up at Willie with sickly embarrassment. He handed back the despatch, shrugged, and laughed a little. “My brother, being the lucky clown he is, came through okay, don’t worry, Willie. Probably earned himself a Congressional Medal of Honor. He’s indestructible.”
“I hope he’s all right-”
“Did he ever tell you about the auto accident he was in, in prep school, when four kids got killed and he came out with a sprained ankle? People run to patterns. He has a lucky life.”
“Well, Tom, we ought to know for sure in a couple of days. They’ll be in here-”
“A suicide plane, Christ, they really bought it-” Willie said, “How’s your novel coming?”
The gunnery officer laid his hand protectingly on the manuscript. “So-so. Old Yellowstain has really slowed the progress of American literature. I’ve done less in a year than in two months under De Vriess.”
“When do I get to read some of it?”
“Pretty soon,” said Keefer vaguely, as he had said a dozen times before.
Two days later, toward evening, Keefer was drinking coffee in the wardroom, when the phone buzzed. “This is Willie, Tom. I’m on the bridge. Montauk is standing in.”
“Coming right up. How does she look?”
“Banged up.”
Keefer came to the bridge with a despatch blank initialed by Queeg. “Get one of your boys to send this, Willie. It’s okay.”
Engstrand flashed the Montauk as it turned into the anchorage. The signal light on the carrier’s buckled, blackened bridge gleamed in reply: Boat will come to Caine when we anchor. Keefer spelled the Morse aloud. He turned to Willie and said irritably, “What the hell kind of answer is that?”
“Tom, they’re all fouled up over there. Don’t worry-”
“I’m not worried. It’s just a damn lamebrained answer.” When they saw a motor whaleboat put out from the carrier and head toward their berth the officers went down to the main deck and stood by the sea ladder. “There he is, in the stern sheets,” said Keefer, looking at the boat through glasses. “Lost his admiral’s cap, that’s all.” He handed Willie the binoculars. “That’s him, isn’t it?”
Willie answered, “Sure looks like him, Tom.” The officer in the boat did not resemble Roland at all. He was slight and slope-shouldered, and Willie thought he had a mustache.
In a minute or so Keefer said, “That isn’t Roland.” Harding, the OOD, joined them. The three officers s
tood in silence as the Montauk’s boat drew alongside. A young, scared-looking ensign with a blond mustache and thin childish lips came up the ladder. His left hand was wrapped in a heavy bandage stained yellow. He introduced himself as Ensign Whitely. “What’s the story on my brother?” said the novelist.
“Oh. You’re Lieutenant Keefer?” said the ensign. “Well, sir.” He looked at the others, and back at Keefer. “Sir, I’m sorry to be the one who tells you. Your brother died of burns yesterday. We buried him at sea.”
Keefer nodded, his face calm and apparently half smiling. “Come on below, Mr. Whitely, and tell us about it. Keith here is an old friend of Rollo’s.”
In the wardroom he insisted on pouring the coffee for all three of them, though Willie tried to take the pot from him.
“Well, I’ll tell you this, Mr. Keefer, your brother saved the, Montauk,” Whitely began, after a nervous gulp of half the cup of coffee. “He’ll get the Navy Cross. His name’s already gone in. I realize that doesn’t mean much-I mean, to you and your family, compared to-but anyway, it’s a sure thing, and he deserved it-”
“It’ll mean a very great deal to my dad,” said Keefer in a tired tone. “What happened?”
Ensign Whitely began to tell of the surprise encounter of Admiral Sprague’s escort-carrier force with the main battle line of the Japanese Navy off Samar, in a chaos of rain squalls and smoke screens. His picture of the action was fragmentary and confused. He became more coherent in describing the damage to the Montauk.