Flap Le Beau stood up again in his chair. “Hey, King! How’s it going?”
McCoy frowned, CAG frowned, Neptune frowned.
“Sit down, wog! Show some respect in the royal presence.”
“Uh, Davy, you don’t seem to understand. I’m King Flap of Boogalala. Being a king my very own self, I shouldn’t be here in the company of these slimy pollywogs. I should be up there on a throne beside ol’ Neptune discussing the many mind-boggling mysteries of the deep and how he’s making out these days with the mermaids.”
“Well pleaded, King Flap.” The onlookers seemed to disagree, and hooted their displeasure. Davy looked over at Neptune. “What say you, oh mighty windy one?”
Neptune scowled fiercely at the upstart Le Beau. “Have you wogs no respect? The dominions of the land are irrelevant here upon the briny deep, where I am sovereign. I suggest, Davy, that the loud-mouth pretender kiss the royal baby three times.”
“Wog Le Beau, you heard the royal wish. Thrice you shall kiss the royal baby. Now sit and assume a becoming humility or you will again face the awesome wrath of mighty Neptune.”
Le Beau sat. He screwed up his face and tried to cry. And almost made it. A gale of laughter swept the room.
It was good to be a part of this foolishness, Jake Grafton thought, good to have a hearty laugh with your shipmates, fellow voyagers on this journey through life. He and the Real had worked hard to get some laughs, and they succeeded. Many of the wogs were hailed individually before the royal court and their sins set forth in lurid detail. Major Allen Bartow was confronted with a book labeled, S’il Vous Plaît—really a NATOPS manual with a suitable cover — from which spilled a dozen Playmate-of-the-Month foldouts.
“Reading dirty books, slobbering over dirty pictures…shame, shame!” intoned Davy Jones, and King Neptune pronounced the sentence: three trips through the tunnel of love.
After about an hour of this nonsense the wogs were led up to the hangar deck, then across it to an aircraft elevator, which lifted the entire Ready Four pollywog/shellback mob to the flight deck. There the remainder of the initiation ceremonies, and all of Neptune’s verdicts, were carried out.
The tunnel of love was a canvas chute filled with garbage from the mess decks. All the wogs crawled through it at least once, the more spectacular sinners several times. At the exit of the tunnel were shellbacks with saltwater hoses to rinse off the garbage, but the wogs were only beginning their odyssey.
Next was the royal baby, the fattest shellback aboard, who sat on a throne without a shirt. His tummy was liberally coated with arresting gear grease. Victims were thrust forward to kiss his belly button. He enthusiastically assisted the unwilling, grabbing ears and smearing handfuls of grease in the supplicants’ hair. After kisses from every three or four victims, able assistants regreased his gut from a fifty-fìve-gallon drum that sat nearby. A messy business from any angle…
A visit to the royal dentist was next on the list. This worthy squirted a dollop of a pepper concoction into his victim’s mouths from a plastic ketchup dispenser. Expectoration usually followed immediately.
After a visit to the royal barber — more grease — and the royal gymnasium, the wogs ended their journey with a swim across royal lagoon, a canvas pool six inches deep in water. No, Jake learned as he looked at the victims splashing along, the water was only about one inch deep. It floated on at least five inches of something green, something with a terrible smell. Shellbacks arranged around the lagoon busily offered opinions about what the noisome stuff might be. The wogs slithered through this mess to the other side, where shellbacks helped them out, wiped them down, and congratulated them heartily. Without hesitation Jake flopped down and squirmed his way through the goo while his squadron-mates on the other side — the ones who had beat him over — cheered and offered impractical advice.
Jake joined Flap Le Beau on the fantail, where they stood watching the proceedings and comparing experiences as they wiped away the worst of the grease with paper towels.
The ship wasn’t moving, Jake noticed. She lay dead in the water on a placid, gently heaving sea. Around her at distances ranging from one to three miles her escorts were similarly still. All the ships were conducting crossing-the-line initiation ceremonies. Painted ships upon a painted ocean, Jake thought.
With a last glance at the sea and the sky and the merry group still cavorting on the flight deck, he headed below for the showers.
“Getting shot down was a real bad scene,” Flap Le Beau told Jake. They were on a surface surveillance mission along the southern coast of Java, photographing ships. To their right was the mountainous island with its summits wreathed in clouds, to the left was the endless blue water. They had just descended to 500 feet to snap three or four shots of a small coaster bucking the swells westward and were back at 3,000 feet, cruising at 300 knots. The conversation had drifted to Vietnam.
Perhaps it was inevitable, since both men had been shot down in that war, but neither liked to talk about their experiences, so the subject rarely came up. If it did, it was in an oblique reference. Somehow today, in a cockpit in a tropic sky, the subject seemed safe.
“It was just another mission, another day at the office, and the gomers got the lead right and let us have it. I hadn’t even seen flak that morning until we collected a packet. Goose was killed instantly — one round blew his head clean off, the left engine was hit, the left wing caught fire. All in about the time it takes to snap your fingers.”
“What were you doing?”
“Dive-bombing, near the Laotian border. We were the second plane in a two-plane formation, working with a Nail FAC.” A FAC was a forward air controller, who flew a small propeller-driven plane.
“We were on our second run. Oh, I know, we shouldn’t have been making more than one, but the FAC hadn’t seen any shit in the air and everything was cool during our first run. Then whap! They shot us into dog meat going down the chute. I grabbed the stick, pickled the bombs and pulled out, but the left engine was doing weird things and the wing was burning like a blowtorch and Goose was smeared all over everything, including me. Wind howling through the cockpit — all the glass on his side was smashed out. Real bad scene. So I steered it away from the target a little and watched the wing burn and told Goose good-bye, then I boogied.”
“How long did you wait before you ejected?”
“Seemed like an hour or so, but our flight leader told me later it was about a minute. All the time he was screaming for me to eject because he could see the fire. But we were at about six thousand feet at that point and I wanted a little distance from the gomers and I wanted the plane slowed down so I wouldn’t get tore up going out. There was so much noise I never heard anything on the radio.”
Jake remembered his own ejection, at night, over Laos. Just thinking about it brought back the sweats. He didn’t say anything.
“When I got on the ground,” Flap continued, “I got out my little radio and started talking. Now I’d checked the battery in that jewel before we took off, but I could barely hear the FAC. I found a place to settle in where I could keep an eye on the chute. Then the rescue turned to shit. The gomers were squirting flak everywhere and it was late in the afternoon and darkness was coming. What I didn’t know until way afterward was that the guy flying the rescue chopper got a case of cold feet and decided his engine wasn’t right or something. Anyway, he never came. It got dark and started raining and I decided I was on my own.”
“So how’d you feel?”
“Well, I felt real bad about Goose. He was a good guy, y’know? Tough getting it like that.”
“I mean how did you feel?”
“Like I had never left Marine recon. At least my jungle rot wasn’t itching. That was something. I skinned out of all that survival gear and kept only what I needed and decided to set up an ambush. What I really wanted was a rifle. All I had was the forty-five. And my knife.”
“Didn’t you think they might catch you?”
�
��No way, man. I knew they wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Not unless they shot me or something. I was on the ground for two weeks and had people walk by within six feet of me and they never saw me.”
“So what did you do?”
“Do? Well, I found a guy who had a rifle and took it, and his food. Ball of rice, with a lot of sand mixed in. You sort of have to develop a taste for it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Checked in on the emergency freq about once a day, when the gomers weren’t close. Didn’t want to overwork the batteries in that radio. But they never heard me. A patrol found me on the fourteenth day. It was a good thing, because my jungle rot was starting to itch by then. You can never really cure that shit, you know.”
“So how many gomers did you kill?”
“A dozen that I know about.”
“Know about?”
“Yeah. I kept busy building booby traps and such. With a little luck the traps got a few more of ’em. In a way, it sort of made up for losing Goose. Not really, I guess. But it helped.”
“Uh-huh.”
“A fucked-up war, that’s what it was. A hell of a mess.”
“Yeah,” Jake said, and checked the fuel and the clock on the instrument panel. “I think we’re going to have to turn around.”
“Okay,” Flap Le Beau said. “Boy, it sure is pretty out here today.”
“There’s a decision point for every career officer,” Lieutenant Colonel Haldane said, “one day when you wake up and decide that you want to make a contribution. And for pilots, that doesn’t mean driving an airplane through the sky every day.”
He and Jake were sitting in the ready room. Jake had the duty and sat at the duty desk and Haldane was in his chair just behind it. There was only one other officer in the room, doing paperwork near the mailboxes. Haldane’s voice was low so that only Jake could hear it.
“True, some officers merely decide to stay until retirement, and I suppose that’s okay. We need those people too. But the people we want are those who dedicate themselves to making the service better, to being leaders, people who try to grow personally and professionally every day. Those folks are few and far between but we need them desperately.”
Jake merely nodded. Haldane had read the latest classified messages and handed the board back to Jake just before he began this monologue. Apparently Jake’s letter of resignation was on his mind, although he hadn’t mentioned it.
Haldane went on, almost thinking out loud: “In every war America fought before Vietnam, the people who led the military to victory were never the people in charge when the shooting started. U. S. Grant and William T. Sherman weren’t even in the army when the Civil War started. Phil Sheridan was a captain. Eisenhower and George Patton were colonels at the start of World War II, Halsey and Nimitz were captains. Curious, don’t you think?”
Before Jake could reply, he continued, “In peacetime the top jobs go to politicians, men who can stroke the civilians and oil the wheels of the bureaucracy. During a war the system works the way it is supposed to — men who can lead other men in combat are pulled to the top and given command. In Vietnam this natural selection process was stymied by the politicians. It was a political war all the way and the last thing they wanted was to relinquish the controls to war fighters. So we lost. And you know something funny? We could afford to lose because we didn’t have anything important at stake in the first place.
“Someday America is going to get into a fight it has to win. I don’t know when it will come or who the fight will be with. That war may come next year, or twenty years from now, or fifty. Or a hundred. But it will come. It always has in the past and evolution doesn’t seem to be improving the human species anywhere near fast enough.
“The question is, who will be in the military when that war comes? Will the officer corps be full of glorified clerks, efficiency experts and computer operators putting in their time to earn a comfortable retirement? Or will there be some military leaders in that mix, men who can lead other men to victory, men like Grant, Patton, Halsey?”
Haldane rose from his chair and adjusted his trousers. “Interesting question, isn’t it, Mr. Grafton?”
“Yessir.”
“The quality of the people in uniform — such a little thing. And that may make all the difference.”
Haldane turned and walked out. The officer doing paperwork had already left. Jake pulled out the top drawer of the desk and propped his feet up on it.
That Haldane — a romantic. Blood, thunder, destiny…If he thought that kind of talk cut any ice anymore he was deluding himself. Not in this post-Vietnam era. Not with the draft dodgers who didn’t want to go and not with the veterans who weren’t so quick.
Jake Grafton snorted. He had had his fill of this holy military crap! His turn expired when this boat got back to the States in February. Then somebody else could do it.
And if the United States goes down the slop chute someday because no one wants to fight for it, so be it. No doubt the Americans alive then will get precisely what they deserve, ounce for ounce and measure for measure.
What was that quote about the mills of the gods? They grind slowly?
16
Singapore lies at the southern end of the Malay peninsula, a degree and a half north of the equator. This city is the maritime crossroads of the earth. Ships from Europe by way of Suez and the Red Sea, India, Pakistan, Africa and the Middle East transit the Strait of Malacca and call here before entering the South China Sea. Ships from America, Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea and the Soviet Far East call here on their way east. The city-state is close enough to the Sunda Strait that it makes a natural port call for ships from the Orient bound for South Africa or South America via the Cape of Good Hope.
Although it is one of the world’s great seaports, Singapore doesn’t have a harbor. The open roadstead is always crammed with ships riding their anchors, except on those rare occasions when a typhoon threatens. There are few piers large enough for an oceangoing vessel, so the majority of the cargo being off-or on-loaded in Singapore travels to and from the ships in lighters. The squadrons of these busy little boats weaving their way through the anchored ships from the four corners of the earth and all the places in between make Singapore unique.
As befits a great seaport, the city is a racial melting pot. The human stew is composed mostly of Malay, Chinese, Thai, Hindu, Moslem, and Filipino, with some Japanese added for seasoning, but there are whites there too. British, primarily, because Singapore was one of those outposts of empire upon which the sun never set, but also people from most of the countries of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and, inevitably, America.
Visitors who have always considered their place, their nation, as the zenith of civilization here receive a shock. Vibrant, cosmopolitan Singapore is a major vortex, one of those rare places where the major strains of the human experience come crashing together and swirl madly around until something new is created.
To the delight of visiting American sailors, the British still had a military base there, Changi, and shared it with those stout lads from Down Under, the Australians, who naturally came supplied with Down Under lassies. Australian women were the glory of Singapore. These tall, lithe creatures with tanned, muscular legs and striking white teeth that were forever being displayed in dazzling smiles somehow completed the picture, made it whole. You ran into them at Raffles, the old hotel downtown with ceiling fans and rattan chairs and doddery old gentlemen in white suits sipping gin. You ran into them in the lobbies and restaurants of the new western hotels and in the bazaars and emporiums. You saw them strolling the boulevards and haggling with small Chinese women in baggy trousers for sapphires and opals. You saw them everywhere, young, tan, enjoying life, the center of attention wherever they were. It helped that their colorful tropical frocks contrasted so vividly with the drab trousers and white shirts that seemed to be the Singaporean national costume. They were like songbirds surrounded by sparrows.
“If Qantas didn’t bring them he
re, the United Nations should supply them as a gesture of good will to all human kind.”
Flap Le Beau stated this conclusion positively to Jake Grafton and the Real McCoy as they stood outside Raffles Hotel surveying the human parade on the sidewalk.
“I think I’m in love,” the Real McCoy told his companions. “I want one of those for my very own.”
The three of them had ridden the liberty boat two miles across the anchorage an hour ago. They had walked for an hour, taking it all in and had developed a terrible thirst. Just now they were contemplating going into Raffles to see if their need could be quenched somewhat.
“After forty-five days at sea, everything female looks mighty good to me,” Flap Le Beau said, then smiled broadly at an elderly British lady coming out of the hotel. She nodded graciously in reply and seated herself in a waiting taxi.
“Well, gentlemen,” Jake Grafton said, and turned to face the white antique structure, “shall we?”
“Let’s.”
The temperature inside was at least ten degrees cooler. The dark interior and the ceiling fans apparently had a lot to do with that, but the very Britishness of the place undoubtedly helped. The heat and humidity could stay outside — it wouldn’t dare intrude.
The American aviators went to the bar and ordered — of all things — Singapore slings. The waiter, a Chinese, didn’t bat an eye. He nodded and moved on. He had long ago come to terms with the curious taste in liquor that seemed to afflict most Americans.
“You sort of expect to see Humphrey Bogart or Sidney Greenstreet sitting around under a potted palm,” the Real commented as he tilted his chair back and crossed his legs.
Jake Grafton sipped his drink in silence. Forty-five days at sea riding the catapults, night rendezvouses above the clouds, instrument approaches to the ball, mid-rats sliders, ready room high jinks, lying in his bunk while the ship moved ever so gently in the sea as he listened to the creaks and groans…then to be baptized with a total immersion in this. Cultural shock didn’t begin to describe it. The sights and sounds and smells of Singapore were sensory overload for a young man from a floating monastery.
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