Sink or Swim

by Steve Watkins

  We kept catching fish but never enough to make our hunger really go away. Enough to keep us alive, I guess. And there was some moisture in the meat, which also helped. But we desperately needed another rain.

  We didn’t get one, though. Not for a while. After eight days we even tried peeing in the buckets—not that anybody had much pee in them. Some didn’t have any. But it was undrinkable, even with the severe thirst we all had. Worse than drinking seawater. And seawater, we’d always been told, would pretty quickly kill you if you drank it and kept drinking it.

  That didn’t stop me from thinking about it, though. Even fantasizing about it. Just a sip. What could possibly happen if I took just one little sip? Surely it would help some. Even a little relief from the terrible thirst would be something.

  A guy named Benjy beat me to it and immediately wished he hadn’t, because he gagged for a long time and threw up the bite of fish he’d just had—the only thing he would have to eat all that day. Nobody was sympathetic. Nobody said anything except to call him an idiot.

  When he stopped gagging, Benjy went after Conner, the sailor who’d called him that, the two of them sprawling over other guys, who punched them both until Chief Kerr roared at everybody to knock it off—or else he’d be throwing bodies to the sharks.

  Just to make sure, Chief climbed over to where the two men were fighting and grabbed their collars and pulled them apart.

  “This is not going to happen on my boat!” he yelled in their faces, shaking them like they were a couple of little kids. And like little kids they immediately calmed down. Neither one would look at him, or at the rest of us. Chief shoved them back to their places.

  Somebody must have bumped into him during the melee because when he stood back up to lecture us more I saw that Chief’s face was bleeding where he’d been burned. A lot.

  Benjy took off his shirt and handed it to Chief Kerr. Chief took it and just stared at the shirt for a minute. He must have felt the blood oozing down his cheek because he put his hand there and it was covered with blood when he pulled it away. He didn’t use Benjy’s shirt, though. He handed it back.

  “Put it on,” he said. “You won’t last long in this sun without it. Or tonight, either.” He shook his head. “Here’s the thing, men. We stick together, we survive this. We work together, we survive this. We take care of one another, we survive this. It’s as simple as that.”

  “Sorry, Chief,” said Benjy, putting his shirt back on.

  “Sorry, Chief,” said Conner, the sailor who’d called Benjy an idiot.

  “I don’t want to hear ‘sorry,’ ” Chief Kerr said. “I just want this to be the end of it.”

  And it was. There wasn’t any more fighting after that. Guys might say a cross word now and then to one another, but nobody wanted to get on Chief’s bad side. And probably we were all growing too weak to fight or even disagree much as well.

  * * *

  The next few days were just like the ones before—freezing nights, rough waves, sharks bumping the lifeboat, blistering days. The only happy moments were when somebody caught a fish—usually mackerel or sea bass—and we all got to eat and satisfy our water craving from the wet meat, at least a little. Once somebody caught a small shark and we tried to eat that, but it was too tough. We chewed and chewed but didn’t have any spit in our mouths to soften it up, or strength in our jaws to wear down the meat enough to even swallow it. A couple of guys tried drinking blood but that was almost impossible to get out, and it ended up making them sick.

  I could feel myself growing weaker, and sadder—about Woody and the others who died, and about the possibility that we might never be found and I might never see my mom or Danny or home again. I prayed we would be rescued, and I prayed that if we weren’t, that Mama and Danny would somehow find out what happened to me, and would know that I loved them all the way to the end.

  And then, just when we were probably all giving up hope, it rained again. Only this time it wasn’t a rough, stormy rain, but almost like a warm spring rain, though it was now late October. We filled all our buckets this time, not keeping any of them empty for bailing. We drank more than we had in two weeks, and then we filled the buckets again.

  “Maybe it’s a sign,” Benjy said. “Maybe we’ll be rescued soon.”

  “Yeah,” Conner said. “Bound to happen.”

  Since the fight, Benjy and Conner seemed to have become friends, somehow.

  We all wanted to believe them, of course. It was just that nobody actually did. Heck, they didn’t even believe it themselves; they were just talking was all.

  The next day, Diego, who was on watch, saw something on the horizon. A speck. Everybody jostled everybody else as we all tried to get in a position to see. Chief Kerr pulled out the binoculars and studied it. Waves erased whatever it was, then revealed it again, then erased it again. Finally, he figured it out.

  “It’s the Germans,” he said, handing the binoculars to the guy beside him so he could look, too.

  “What Germans?” Diego asked.

  “The ones in the inflatable life raft,” Chief said. “The ones we let paddle away. Guess they didn’t paddle far enough. Or maybe they just managed to paddle themselves in a big circle.”

  Over the next couple of hours, the life raft slowly came closer. And as it did, I felt anger burning me up inside. These were the Germans who kept us distracted while their officers down below set explosives in their U-boat—the explosives that killed Woody. The explosives that killed half our crew.

  I wasn’t the only one getting angry.

  “We ought to kill them,” Straub said. They were the first words he’d spoken in a couple of days. “I hope the wind or waves will keep pushing them closer to us, pushing us closer to them, pushing us together so we can shoot every last one of them.”

  Chief Kerr stood up in the bow and glared at Straub. Other men were nodding at what he’d just said, and Chief glared at them, too.

  “They’re unarmed,” he said. “You all saw them when they paddled off in their inflatable. They barely had any supplies with them.”

  “What do we do, then, Chief?” Straub asked, suddenly the most talkative man on the boat. “What if they want some of our rations? Some of our water?”

  “We don’t have enough,” Diego said. “We can’t share with them. We’ll all die out here—them and us.”

  “So we shoot them and put them out of their misery,” Straub said.

  The Germans were maybe a hundred yards away now. Chief Kerr handed out weapons and ammunition to several guys—five rifles and a couple of handguns. “Just in case,” he said. “And nobody does anything unless I give the word.”

  “So what are we going to do with them, Chief?” Benjy asked. “You never said.”

  “I don’t know,” Chief Kerr said. “I don’t know. But we don’t shoot and that’s an order.”

  The Germans were maybe fifty yards away now. There were only half a dozen of them, though there’d been probably twice that many when they left the damaged U-boat and paddled away on their raft. The ocean was growing rougher, rocking us harder, but bouncing them around a lot worse.

  “Hold steady,” Chief said. “Let them draw next to us, and we’ll see what they want.”

  But Straub wasn’t going to wait. He lunged over to Conner, the man closest to him with a rifle, and grabbed it. Then he shoved past a couple of guys to the side of the boat and took aim at the Germans.

  “Straub, don’t!” I shouted. “What are you doing?”

  “Don’t touch me,” he said. “I’ll shoot their boat if anybody touches me.”

  Chief told the guys to pull back, though there wasn’t much space for us to go.

  Then he addressed Straub. “Sailor, you need to lower that weapon right now,” he barked.

  “I can’t, Chief,” he said. “They killed my friend. They killed all of our friends. This is war. Isn’t this what we’re supposed to do? Kill the enemy?”

  He was crying but kept the rifle aime
d at the Germans. They saw what he was doing and all raised their hands in surrender.

  “Shooting them won’t bring anybody back,” Chief said. “You know that. War isn’t about killing men. It’s about fighting for a cause. These men already surrendered. Don’t make yourself a murderer. That’s what they do. That’s not what we do.”

  “I don’t care,” Straub said. “I don’t care about anything.” He swayed, staggered as a wave rocked the boat, then righted himself. He kept his aim the whole time.

  “Straub.” It was me speaking, but the sound of my own voice surprised me. “Straub, it’s me,” I said. “You know Woody was my friend, too. I miss him, too. I miss all the guys, the same as you. We all do. But this isn’t the way to fix things.”

  “Then what is?” he said. “What?”

  “I don’t know,” I said softly. “But those guys over there, those German sailors. You know you could have been one of them. If your parents hadn’t left Germany, hadn’t come to America, and if you had been born there instead of born here, you could have been one of them. You wouldn’t have been a Nazi—I know you wouldn’t—but it’s gotta be the same there as it is here. You have to follow your orders. Those guys over there that you want to shoot—they were following their orders. They didn’t have a choice.”

  I paused. “If it had been you, you wouldn’t have had a choice. So if you shoot them, it would kind of be like shooting yourself, too. Or any one of us.”

  Straub was crying so hard now that he probably couldn’t see anything on the Germans’ lifeboat. He lowered the rifle. Somebody grabbed it out of his hands. His legs gave out and he sagged back down into the boat and it was over.

  * * *

  We ended up giving the Germans some of our water and some of our fish. Speaking through one of the Germans who knew a little English—his name was Franz—Chief Kerr managed to get across that they could either stay tied up to us and be taken prisoner when and if we were ever rescued, or they could go back out on their own.

  Franz rubbed a hand over his blond crew cut, looked around at the rest of his crew, and said they would stay and be our prisoners. He said they hadn’t had any water in three days and hadn’t eaten in more than a week.

  Chief ordered a couple of the crew to tie their raft to our boat—with about twenty yards between the two boats. He gave them fishing line and a bucket and one of our tarps. “We’ll share what we can after this,” he said through the translator.

  An hour later, after everything calmed down, Chief Kerr made his way over to where Straub and I were. Straub hadn’t said anything since giving up the gun. I had my hand on his shoulder to let him know I was there, and that I was his friend no matter what. Crouching next to us, Chief looked hard at Straub until Straub lifted his head.

  “Son, what you did was wrong,” he said. “An order is an order, and it’s your job, your duty, to follow orders. I don’t care how bad you’re hurt, or how bad you miss your friend, or what those Germans did to us. I don’t care about none of that. You understand?”

  “Yes, Chief,” Straub whispered.

  “We all feel the same way. You weren’t the only one that wanted to shoot those Germans. But it’s not who we are and it’s not what we do. It’s not the American way. Simple as that.”

  This time Straub struggled to sit up so he could look at Chief Kerr the way he was supposed to when a petty officer gave an order to a seaman second class.

  “I understand, Chief,” he said. “And I’m sorry.”

  Chief Kerr put his hand on Straub’s other shoulder and squeezed it gently, the way my dad used to do when he was still with us, when I messed up and Dad needed to set me straight about something.

  “Nothing more we need to say about this, then,” Chief said. “There’s not going to be a report on it. What happens out here in this lifeboat—it stays out here and that’s the end of it. I just need you to be strong and be the best sailor you can be until we get rescued. Can I count on you for that?”

  “Yes, Chief,” Straub said.

  After Chief Kerr left, Straub whispered to me, “I don’t know what came over me, Danny. I just don’t. Except I couldn’t stop thinking about Woody down there in the engine room, our brave pal Woody. And the ways he might have died down there. And all the stuff we went through together, you and me and him. And what a good guy he was.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s the same for me. It’s the same for all of us. I don’t blame you for what you did. Or what you almost did. Nobody does.”

  Straub nodded. Then he said, “I hate this war.”

  I almost said “We all do,” but I didn’t need to. He knew.

  * * *

  Two days later, a navy destroyer spotted us. It was our same convoy, returning to America, so we’d managed to keep close enough to the shipping lane after all. They said they hadn’t been able to search for us when our ship sank because while we were fighting one U-boat, there were half a dozen other coordinated U-boat attacks all along the flanks of the convoy. All the PCs and corvettes, and the destroyer, had been busy fighting off the rest of the wolf pack. The battle had gone on for hours, the convoy continuing forward the whole time.

  The good news was they had been able to protect most of the cargo ships and deliver them safely to England to support the war effort.

  The other good news was they had a surgeon on board the destroyer, and he would be able to operate on my leg.

  Straub stayed by my side when they carried me down below. “Don’t worry, Danny,” he said. “I’ll be right here with you. I’ll make sure they take good care of you and you make it home okay.”

  It was the end of October when we finally made it back to the US. They transferred me to a hospital in New York City, which seemed more like a giant warehouse, with rows of white beds that stretched out as far as I could see. There weren’t any curtains or anything for privacy, but there also weren’t very many guys in there. It was pretty lonely. I asked one nurse why there were so many beds for so few people. She paused for a minute, and then said, “We’re not supposed to say, but what they told us was that once we start fighting the Germans over there—in Europe or Africa or France—we’re going to need every one of these beds for the casualties they ship back home, and a whole lot more, too.”

  The rumor was that it would happen any day now—the invasion force finally going over from America to join up with the British and attack the Germans and the Italians somewhere on the other side of the Atlantic.

  The thought of this whole warehouse hospital full of casualties made my heart sink. We’d been waiting what felt like forever for the invasion force to be called up, but now that I’d been in battles with the U-boats, and seen what I’d seen, and lost my friends, I couldn’t get excited about more war, no matter what we were fighting it for. I knew it had to be done, but I just felt sad. Day after day in the hospital. Sad and growing sadder.

  A week after I got there, a couple of navy officers came to see me, each formally shaking my hand as they introduced themselves. I thought they were there to give me a medal or something, but that wasn’t it at all.

  “Colton Graham?” the shorter one, Lieutenant Frost, asked.

  Panic bloomed in my gut. “No, sir. It’s Danny Graham.”

  “No, it isn’t,” said the tall officer, Lieutenant Ryals. “We know who you are.”

  “We’ve been in contact with your mother,” said Lieutenant Frost. “Your brother is Danny Graham, and he’s at home under her care.”

  I knew there wasn’t any use in pretending, and I realized I didn’t care. More than that, I was actually glad they knew. I wanted to go home.

  “Did she say how he’s doing?” I asked.

  “Your brother, Danny?” Lieutenant Frost asked. He actually smiled. “You’ll be happy to know he’s doing pretty good, according to your mom. He came out of his coma, and he’s walking and talking. Moving slow. That’s about all we know. Sounds like he might be okay, but you’re in a lot of trouble.”

&n
bsp; Now I was nervous. I swallowed hard. “What kind of trouble?”

  Lieutenant Ryals answered. “The kind of trouble you get into with your mother when you run away from home and join the navy when you’re thirteen.”

  Lieutenant Frost added, “In other words, not so much in trouble with the navy as in trouble with your mom. As far as the navy is concerned, a mistake was made. A mistake was discovered. And with you being sent home, a mistake will be corrected.”

  * * *

  Straub showed up the next day to visit me. I was in physical therapy, trudging up and down a hallway with a walker to build up strength in my hurt leg. The wound had mostly healed, but the doctors said there was a lot of damage to muscles and nerves, and a lot of scar tissue. All I knew was it was hard to stand up for very long and hard to walk without something to hang on to. And they wanted me to be able to walk, or at least sort of walk, before they officially discharged me from the navy.

  “Don’t you look like an old man!” Straub said when he saw me.

  I had to laugh, because I felt like an old man instead of thirteen and a half.

  “At least they let you wear pajama pants and not just that gown that you tie in back but your butt sticks out,” he said.

  “Lucky me,” I said.

  “You mean lucky us,” Straub said, shuffling beside me as I kept trudging along that hallway. The sooner I finished the physical therapy, the sooner they’d let me crawl back into my bed.

  Straub spent the next half hour filling me in on how everybody was doing, or everybody he’d kept in touch with. They’d divided up what was left of our crew onto several different PCs that had also lost crew members protecting cargo ships on other convoys. Straub and Chief Kerr were assigned to the same ship, and they were heading down to Norfolk, Virginia, in a couple of days. It was gloomy outside the hospital windows, though that could have been all the dirt and grime caked on the glass.