The Lonely War

by Alan Chin

  “Only a nickel?” Andrew dipped two fingers into the pocket of his dungaree pants and extracted a quarter. “Here’s two bits. Tell the discharge officer to keep the change.” He flung the coin at Hudson. It tumbled through the air, hitting the petty officer in the chest, dead center.

  Hudson clenched a hamlike fist. “Sass me again, you yellow monkey, and I’ll kick you bowlegged!”

  “Can the bickering, right now.” Lieutenant Mitchell stepped between them. “On my ship, we get along, do our jobs, and if anyone makes waves, I jump on them with both my size-twelve’s kicking. Another word out of either of you and it will cost you your next five liberties. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir,” they sang out.

  “Hudson and Stokes, wait at the whaleboat. Waters, help me get Washington on his feet.”

  Andrew knew he could safely confront Hudson with the lieutenant on hand, but even so, relief swept through his center like an ocean wave. This, he knew, was the first barrage of an ongoing battle, and once aboard ship, Mitchell wouldn’t be conveniently on the spot to protect him.

  Hudson and Stokes retrieved their gear and marched down the pier. Andrew pulled Grady to a sitting position.

  Mitchell handed Grady his canteen. “Clear your head before you try to stand, sailor.”

  Grady clambered to his feet and handed the officer his canteen. “Thank you, suh,” he drawled. “I reckon I’m fine now.”

  Andrew and Grady hoisted their gear and followed the lieutenant to the whaleboat nestled at the pier’s head. Andrew admired the boat’s functionally beautiful lines, with its broad beam and both ends sporting a sharp bow. The Navy still used these boats because they inspired confidence in a heavy sea and landing through rough surf.

  Hudson sat on a thwart near the bow with Stokes behind him. Three oarsmen manned each side; a coxswain stood at the tiller. All seven dungaree-clad crewmen glared at Andrew and Grady as they passed their seabags to an oarsman. A facade of disbelief turning to anger spread over each face.

  “What’d I tell you?” Hudson sneered.

  The redheaded coxswain spit over the gunwale.

  Grady climbed into the boat while Andrew gazed at the redhead standing at the tiller. The man’s lips seemed too small for his mouth, stretched over teeth that were somewhat pointed and bared to the gums, like a rabid dog. Andrew’s absentminded scrutiny of the stranger proved dangerous, because he suddenly realized that the redhead was staring back at him so aggressively that his intention was clearly to make an issue of the matter.

  “Look alive, Waters,” the lieutenant said.

  Andrew dropped beside the lieutenant with his right shoulder pressed to Mitchell’s left, their knees touching. They pushed off and were borne along by rowers. The boat seemed to fly over the blue-green plane. Andrew noticed the clocklike cadence of the oars, the rowers’ labored breathing, and the faint scent of the lieutenant’s sweat-moistened skin, still hovering under the pleasant aroma of talcum powder.

  They passed a line of predators at anchor—destroyers, a cruiser, a submarine—all swarming with deckhands and welders and riveters, most of whom were stripped to the waist and covered with grime.

  Andrew stared out over the bay. The morning was like true summer, with the sea smooth and bright under the sun and a slight breeze off the water to soften the heat’s edge. He glanced at the horizon. A line of dark cumulus clouds galloped toward them from the southeast.

  Mitchell shifted beside him. His eyes followed the young sailor’s gaze. “You see it?”

  Andrew no longer contemplated the oncoming squall. He felt the lieutenant next to him, heard the man’s clear voice fuse with the sound of his own shallow breathing. His pulse thumped at his temples as he turned to gaze into those jade-green eyes. His mind floundered for a heartbeat before he said, “Should hit around sundown, sir.”

  Mitchell nodded.

  Andrew’s eyes widened as they approached his new ship, and his spirits sank. She lay low in the water, the USS Pilgrim, Destroyer #119. Her twenty thousand tons of steel was shaped like a knife—her forecastle rose high above the water from bow to bridge like a sturdy handle and fell sharply away to a low main deck that ran from conning tower to stern like a thin blade. Four smokestacks sprouted from her superstructure, their gaunt columns smudged the sky with black smoke. Andrew counted two bulky gun turrets with five-inch guns perched on her forecastle, a half dozen torpedo launchers along her amidships, and two stern-mounted depth-charge racks. She’s an awesome mass of destructive power wrapped in gray steel.

  A deeply spiritual young man, Andrew was about to board a ship whose sole purpose was to destroy human life. He felt his testicles draw close to his body as the Pilgrim grew large before him. He silently told himself that even on this death machine, he must stay true to his pacifist principles.

  The whaleboat came to rest alongside a limp chain ladder hanging from the Pilgrim’s quarterdeck. Mitchell scurried aboard, saluted the colors, and turned to supervise the gear being hoisted over the railing. A gaggle of sailors flocked to the afterdeck, all leaning over the railing cables to get a glimpse of the new men. A few catcalls cut the morning air, but most of the men simply glared down at Andrew.

  He stood in the whaleboat with his legs spread for balance, his head rising above and falling below the level of the Pilgrim’s main deck. He hesitated, studying the torpedo launchers along the amidships, before climbing the ladder with the awkwardness of a landsman. Here, then, was a final moment of perception before his surrender: the deadly gray hulk, the crew’s defiant stares, the dark line of clouds advancing on him, and Mitchell’s jade-colored eyes beckoning him aboard.

  He stepped on deck by a deliberate act of will (it felt deliberate, although he was too numb to form thoughts), surrendering to his fate.

  For a moment, still, nothing seemed different. It felt like another failure, as if he could still jump overboard, swim to shore, and all would be set right. But a brutish sailor wearing oily dungarees charged along the narrow deck, deliberately slamming into him with a beefy shoulder. Andrew stumbled over a tangled nest of air hoses, landing hard on his butt. The sailor snarled, “Stay the fuck out of my way, Jap-boy!”

  Andrew’s stomach folded in on itself as he realized this crew was roughly the same as the one on his last ship. He could feel their apprehension. He knew that he, and even Grady for that matter, would never be accepted. They were already marked as outsiders and that’s where they’d stay.

  He inspected each face that leered at him, one by one, without directly staring at them. No one seemed dangerously hostile, which lowered his anxiety a notch, but at the same time he knew there would always be the truculent stares and off-color remarks. Every hour of every day would be a trial, as it was on his last ship, the Indianapolis. With the realization of what was in store, his spirits sank to a new low, settling near the murky rock bottom of his soul.

  He pulled himself to his feet and studied his surroundings. Chaos—hoses snaked between piles of machine parts, power tools, oily rags, and scraps of rusted steel. Shirtless men with grease-stained bodies chipped at rust while welders used acetylene torches to mend bulkhead seams. The repeating thunderclap of metal striking metal reverberated belowdecks.

  He stepped over a pile of debris to stand next to his seabag. A brass plaque on the bulkhead informed him that this ship was named after Chester H. Pilgrim, a battleship commander who had died in the North Atlantic during the First World War.

  Chief Henry Swiftcreek Ogden marched up and scrutinized the four newcomers. His stout body had an imposing posture. Two scars cut across his cheek. Cobweblike lines etched his iodine-colored face from hairline to Adam’s apple, covering everything except his stony eyes. He made a sound, more of a grunt than a word, but it carried a truculent undertone that conveyed an unmistakable disapproval.

  Andrew glanced at Mitchell, searching for some kind of protection.

  As crewmen rigged the hoist to haul the whaleboat aboard, Mitchell told Ogden, “
Chief, issue these new men bunks and assign them to watches. I’ll interview them before lunch.”

  “Aye, aye, sir. You men grab your shit and follow me.”

  The chief glared at Grady and Andrew. He gestured with his head toward the bow and sauntered to the crew’s quarters under the forecastle deck. The men hoisted their gear and followed.

  While Andrew balanced his seabag on his shoulder, he sneaked another glimpse at Mitchell. A shy grin lifted the ends of Andrew’s mouth. He felt a shimmer of adoration for the man without knowing precisely why. As he turned to follow his shipmates, the grin retreated and, reminding himself of survival rule number one, his body moved with a deliberate swagger.

  Chapter Three

  April 18, 1942—1000 hours

  WHILE overseeing the stowing of the whaleboat, Mitchell heard a bellow reverberate from the forecastle that sounded vaguely like a wounded buffalo.

  Chief Ogden popped through the open hatchway with his eyes blazing and his jaw locked, which happened, Mitchell knew, whenever he was faced with a situation that was not standard Navy protocol. A twenty-six-year chief, Ogden had served his entire career on destroyers. He was also a full-blood Shoshone. He was not the chief of his ancestral tribe but, because he was a chief petty officer, everyone aboard mockingly called him “Chief” or even “Big Chief.”

  Mitchell stared at the whaleboat gliding over the rail. He held a mild disdain for Ogden’s propensity to exaggerate harmless issues into insurmountable obstacles. He hoped to avoid whatever problem had surfaced, so he let a long moment pass before he glanced back and felt himself nailed by the chief’s sanguinary gaze.

  “What’s up, Chief?”

  “Lieutenant, you gotta see this.”

  The chief led Mitchell into the crew’s quarters, a dozen compartments under the forecastle deck that were arranged in honeycomb-like rows and connected by narrow passageways. Each compartment had bunks stacked five high on three bulkheads, and a double row of lockers covered the fourth wall.

  As Mitchell entered the compartment, he sang out, “As you were,” before anyone could come to attention. The compartment reeked of sweat and moldy clothing and something else, something Mitchell felt more than smelled: hostility. The entire compartment seethed with testosterone-laced resentment. Several crewmen stood in a loose half circle, staring at Andrew Waters, who knelt on the deck with his back against his locker.

  Light from a porthole, muted and steel-tinted, silvered the contents of Andrew’s seabag, which were spread over the deck: a teak statue of the Buddha seated in meditation, three orange robes, a stack of yellow silk undergarments, strings of prayer beads, an iron bell, a three-foot-long bamboo flute that was as thick and smooth as a King snake, and a stack of books, long and narrow, the likes of which Mitchell had never seen before.

  Ogden rested his fists on his hips, scowling. “Where the hell is your Navy-issue gear and what the fuck is this shit?” He kicked the stack of undergarments across the deck.

  “I can explain, sir,” Andrew said, gazing up at Mitchell. “There wasn’t room in my seabag for everything, so I left some things behind. I planned on buying more uniforms from the ship’s store.”

  “What are these books?” Mitchell asked, after studying the religious articles for a time.

  “Buddhist scriptures, sir.”

  Mitchell felt the crew’s hostility level jump a dozen notches. He knelt at the edge of the pile, a few feet from Andrew. From that distance he could smell Andrew, an odor reminiscent of fresh-baked bread. The scent shielded him from the sour odor of the forecastle.

  Mitchell stared at Andrew’s face. He flinched at the intensity of those eyes that gazed deeply into his own. The sunlight pouring through the porthole caused tiny golden flecks to sparkle within Andrew’s black pupils, giving off a soft, nearly imperceptible light. He inspected the face surrounding those eyes. A yellow stain clouded the flesh under the left eye, obviously from a blow a week ago. The right cheek had purple discoloration from more recent blows, and one side of his lower lip was raw and puffy, looking as if he had been smacked hard only a minute before Mitchell entered the compartment.

  Mitchell was surprised that he had only now noticed this bruising. The face had a pleasing quality, delicate and finely boned. But, the officer thought, this kid had been on the losing end of plenty of fights recently.

  Mitchell noted that Andrew appeared relaxed, as if he had expected this confrontation and it was playing out exactly as he had planned. Andrew’s self-control seemed all the more amazing given the crew’s tense confusion.

  The halo of calmness surrounding Andrew touched something within Mitchell. It seemed to bear his own signature in some way, reminding him of himself, or a part of himself he had forgotten. He couldn’t help liking the look of this kid with a beaten face and mysterious eyes.

  He felt some stimulus form between them, a connection that was neither friendship nor sexual, but had attributes of both. He tried to analyze this feeling, wondering if this wasn’t a moment full of significance, in the hope that some meaning of his life, some epiphany, some poetry, would come to him, but it was beyond his understanding. He simply chalked it up to his old tendency of being drawn to wounded things, like the hawk with a broken wing he’d once mended, and his three-legged dog, Smoke, who had lost his front leg in a bear trap.

  Looking down so as not to stare, Mitchell caressed the uneven binding of a scripture book while admiring the rough, handmade paper. He reached further, to a stack of Western-bound books, and noted the titles—Shakespeare’s Tragedies, Moby Dick, The Iliad, Plato’s Symposium, The Analects of Confucius, and Yeats’s complete works. Again he felt that nameless force ripple between them.

  “You read more than scriptures.” Mitchell lifted the volume of Yeats’s poems, opened the cover to the index page, and scanned the table of contents. “I haven’t read Yeats since college.” He recognized several poem titles. “I’ll have to confiscate this evidence for a few days,” he said with a smirk, “and I’ll need to sequester these other books from time to time in order to make a proper judgment.”

  Andrew looked up at the other sailors before focusing on Mitchell again. “I care not what the sailors say: all those dreadful thunder-stones, all that storm that blot out the day can but show that heaven yawns.”

  Mitchell glanced up, staring into those dark eyes, now so bright. His lips parted but he couldn’t speak, not quite believing he was hearing a sailor quoting Yeats.

  Andrew whispered, “I bring you with reverent hands the books of my numberless dreams.”

  Mitchell remembered that line from one of his most cherished Yeats poems. He shook his head. All he had ever heard spewing from the crew were strings of four-letter words, some less vulgar than others. He smiled and winked at Andrew, who offered a shy grin. That grin seemed oddly complicated, disarming, and now his entire face, like his eyes, shimmered with life. It was hard, nearly impossible, to associate this young man with all the other rough and odious sailors aboard.

  Mitchell stood. “Chief, this man has every right to practice his religion,” he said. “No harm done.”

  Each bystander’s mouth dropped, except Hudson’s, because he gnashed his teeth.

  The chief wagged his head. “This man needs dungarees and dress whites. We can’t have him running around naked. If he threw away his old uniforms, that’s destroying government property.” Ogden spit the charge with such force that the men around him retreated a step.

  Mitchell kept his cool by mentally listing the important tasks he could be doing if the chief wasn’t such a drama hound. He turned to Andrew. “The Pilgrim is too small to carry clothing in the ship’s store. We carry ninety-eight sailors, five officers, and precious little storage room.” He glanced sideways at Ogden. “Chief, take him ashore and have the PX issue him a full complement of gear. We’ll withhold his pay until every last pair of skivvies is paid for in full.”

  Mitchell winked at Andrew again. “And make sure they issue him a
Bluejacket’s Manual so he can read about the proper care of government property.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!” Ogden’s smile showed a full set of pearly teeth. Hudson visibly gloated.

  Mitchell asked if there were any other issues, and the chief shook his head no.

  “Suh, I was wonderin’.” Grady Washington stepped forward. “Why was we issued cots if we have these bunks?”

  Laughter erupted from the men. Mitchell explained. “Sailor, this steel bucket soaks up the sun’s heat all day, and by lights-out these quarters are a hundred and ten degrees of hot, holy hell. In fair weather, the men use cots to sleep on deck. You’ll be thankful for that cot by midnight.”

  Mitchell pointed to Andrew’s pile on the deck. “Chief, see that this is squared away.”

  “Aye, aye, sir!”

  ANDREW knew that, for any other crewmember, loss of pay meant deprivation of barrooms, brothels, and restaurants on their nights of liberty. The punishment inflicted on him would be devastating to any one of them, but the only things that made an impression on him were those secret winks that Mitchell had shared with him, and, of course, the officer’s unexpected kindness. For the first time since joining the Navy, Andrew had been studied and found acceptable.

  Watching the lieutenant’s fingers stroke the book covers made Andrew feel as if his own face were being caressed. The words “has every right” and “no harm done” rang throughout his consciousness and made his head tingle. And Mitchell was taking something of Andrew’s that was so ingrained and loved by Andrew that it felt as if the officer were taking a sliver of his soul.

  Andrew held himself utterly still, feeling the warmth radiating inside his chest. He had only truly loved two people in his life—Master Jung-Wei, the old monk who had run the boarding school in Saigon, and Clifford Baldrich, his boyhood companion—but he felt something like love blossoming again. If this is indeed love, he thought, it has happened unexpectedly, like a flash of lightning from a bright, blue sky. And for the first time, his love was intensified by the repeating note of sexual longing running through the joyful composition playing in his heart.