They walked forward, across the gray expanse of steel, heading for the point of the bow. Brian glanced back up at the bridge, but the green-tinted windows were bright with glare and revealed nothing. Brian realized that for the rest of the crew not directly involved in the PIRAZ operations, the forty-five-day line periods must be exceedingly boring. He mentioned this to the chief.
“Well, yeah, it is and no, it ain’t,” replied the chief.
“We get a lot of time to do this kinda chippin’ and paintin’, which is good, ‘cause we don’t got enough guys to cover all the topside spaces, a ship this size. I got gangs workin’ up here, and midships on the boats and the davits, and we do some trainin’ for unreps and stuff like that.
And then there’s helo ops, sometimes night ‘n day, like last night.
First Division guys are on the firefighting team, and we gotta man up the motor whaleboat every time they set flight quarters. Trick is to keep ‘em busy and workin’, then they ain’t got time to bitch so much.”
Brian nodded. “We get all wrapped up in Combat doing the Red Crown thing,” he said. “It’s like being in another world. And being on port and starboard, I’m pretty much reduced to watch-standing and sleeping.
Weapons Department must think I’m the missing man.”
“Well, it ain’t like being’ in Dago, but this is WESTPAC.
Mostly everybody stands watch, eats, and sleeps. The routine shit can wait.”
Coltrane and Hooper came walking by, carrying large buckets of nonskid sand from a storeroom to the boatswain locker. Brian shook his head as they passed. He remembered the first time he had seen these two, on a tour of the First Division area conducted by Jack Folsom and the chief a few days after he had reported aboard.
While they had been talking, a curious pair of sailors had emerged from the forecastle hatch, tugging and heaving a paint-stained ten-foot-long aluminum punt up the steep ladder. At the bow of the punt had been an extremely short, scrawny black-haired man of about twenty-two, with a hatchet-shaped face, a birdlike pointed nose, slightly bulging eyes, and a gap where two of his upper front teeth should have been. He had been issuing a steady stream of directions and orders in a broad Brooklyn accent to the other man, who was struggling with the heavier end of the punt.
Brian had stared in wonder at the scrofulous second sailor. He had been dressed in what looked like a selection from the engineers’ ragbag, and even the rags were disheveled. He wore baggy, torn, and paint-stained dungarees, a shirt three times too big for him, and sported a round red face right out of the comics, complete with slightly crossed eyes, a large nose, protruding ears, and a vacant smiling expression under a mop of strawberry blond hair that stuck out in all directions as he nodded agreeably in time with the smaller man’s stream of orders.
Brian had thought he looked like an animated scarecrow as the two made their way past them, hauling the punt aft to the fantail area through the weather breaks.
“What in the world was that?” Brian had asked.
The chief laughed as Jack Folsom explained. “That’s Hood’s dynamic duo,”
he said. “The side cleaners— Coltrane and Hooper. The little one’s Jimmy Hooper; he thinks he’s a wise guy. The village idiot is Seaman Apprentice Hulanny Coltrane, who’s the product of a cosmic joke gone wrong at the Navy Recruiting Command.”
Folsom went on to explain that Coltrane had been inducted at a recruiting station in northeastern Tennessee as a joke by the chief in charge at one of the rural stations, then sent on to Memphis to see what would happen. Through a series of mistakes that only a bureaucracy could cobble together, Coltrane had made it all the way to the boot camp in San Diego, where a horrified master chief had spent a day burning up the phones into the Recruiting Command trying to undo it. While he was shouting at Washington, however, Coltrane and four hundred or so of his contemporaries had been dutifully sworn into the U. S. Navy out on the parade field, making the master chief’s protestations moot.
It would not have been quite so bad if only Coltrane could speak, but, in fact, he could not. He apparently could read, at least a little, and amiably followed everyone’s orders at boot camp, to the point where even the other boots would dispatch him on amusing errands. But when spoken to, he could respond only with a series of sounds that made no sense whatsoever, a fact that had been collectively covered up by every chief at the Recruit Training Center. Coltrane had slowly became a covert project, wherein the chiefs decided to see whether they could actually get him through boot camp and out to a ship without anyone finding out.
“His actual name is Coaltrain,” Folsom said. “Absent a father, his mother apparently named him after the most prominent feature of their lives, the coal trains that went through their trailer patch. Guy at the recruiting station heard Coaltrain and automatically put down Coltrane, like the jazzman. XO did a little checking after he came aboard last year, once he came down off the overhead.
Jesus Christ, was that an interesting day. I saw this creature on the quarterdeck and just knew he was going to become one of mine. Talk about your basic deck-force Cro-Magnon. But the word the XO got back was that, yes, the Navy had fucked up egregiously, but there was no way to undo it without embarrassing a whole lot of people. So we were stuck with him.”
“Fact is,” said the chief, “he’s perfect for side cleanin’. It’s a shit job, down there in that punt on the waterh’the with all them overboard discharges from the shatters and all that oil an’ stuff.”
“And he gives nobody trouble,” Folsom added. “You figure, a deck ape that can’t talk can’t give anybody any lip, either. It’s just that he couldn’t really function very well by himself in the division. He wanders off. Shit, we’d find him wandering all over the ship. Guys’d call us on the phone, tell us to come get our dummy. Still does it. He needed a keeper.”
“Enter Hooper, I suppose,” Brian said.
“Oh, yes indeedy, enter Hooper. Came aboard in the same batch as Coltrane. Like I said, he thinks he’s a wise guy doing a sabbatical in the Navy. Tells all these incredible stories about Guido the Gutter and Manny the Mouth, you know, goombah stuff. Perfect little con man and artful dodger, always on the make for some angle or another, has shirking down to an art form. Total pain in the ass, and headed for an admin discharge.”
“Until we stuck him with Coltrane on side cleanin’,” continued the chief. “See, in port, cause a what they gotta do, side cleaners don’t stand duty, so they get liberty every night. It’s a shitty job, but it comes with this really good deal. Hooper went right for it, until we told him he had to take care of Coltrane, make sure he got fed and cleaned himself up, keep him from wandering away, and work the sides with him.”
“Hooper fight the program?” asked Brian.
Folsom chuckled. “Yeah, he objected, but then we sent him on a tour of the fire rooms as a possible alternative, and he decided Coltrane and side cleaning was better.”
“So now he bosses poor Coltrane around, who loves it, I guess, and the two of them keep the sides cleaned.
Wow.”
“When Hooper ain’t getting’ ‘em into some kind bullshit scam or another,” the chief said. “Coltrane, he goes adrift from time to time, anytime Hooper ain’t with him.
But he’s okay, you know, harmless. Not like that fuckin’ Hooper.
Especially when he gets inta the firewater on the beach.”
Brian now watched the side cleaners disappear down the forecastle hatch, shaking his head at the sight. Martinez nodded his massive head up and down amiably, as if to say that even Coltrane and Hooper had a place.
They stood in silence for a few minutes, absorbing the horizon, the chief waiting to see what it was his department head wanted to talk about.
“Chief,” Brian said finally.
“Yeah, boss?”
“You said a while ago we needed to talk—about this drug stuff. I had a little talk with the chief engineer, and I have to tell you, I’m really not too comfo
rtable with … well, with the way we handle drug problems in this ship.”
The chief looked down at the deck but kept silent, giving Brian time to frame what he wanted to say.
“I guess what I mean is, I understand all the departments have the problem, that the dopers aren’t confined to Engineering. I also understand what happens if we bust each and every guy we find using or carrying or otherwise dirty—that we run out of bodies pretty quick.”
“Yes, sir.”
“But … well, I guess it’s what we’re doing to ‘em when we do catch ‘em. And I’ve heard that you play a big part in that. Like what happened to that guy Gallagher—his hand being broken.”
“That was an accident, way I heard it,” said the chief.
Brian looked sideways at the chief’s impassive face, wondering how far he was going to get with this. Then he looked around. The nearest people were fifty feet away.
He decided to let it all hang out.
“Well, Chief, way heard it, Gallagher hid out in Two Fire room until the engineer finally threw him out of there, and then he had his accident. And the way I hear that it goes down is that a certain large CPO, namely you, with maybe some help from the Sheriff and a couple of other CPOs, get the nod from the XO to administer some fairly direct justice to any shitbird who gets cocky about using drugs.”p>
The chief remained silent, his black eyes seemingly fixed on the horizon. Brian had to turn his head up to see the chief’s face. A lone seagull glided by, headed aft to search the wake for treasures from the garbage chute.
“Now, I’m not asking you to confirm or deny any of this. And please believe me when I say I can see the justice of it, especially when our hands are somewhat tied by the system. I think a guy who uses drugs aboard ship, or booze for that matter, puts all of his shipmates in danger, not to mention the ship. I’d hate to think of what might happen if the North Vietnamese ever tried us on and some people up in Combat were spaced-out when they came at us. But that’s not what’s bugging me.”
The chief said nothing. Brian, still wondering whether he was making a mistake, continued anyway.
“My problem is twofold: First, when we catch a guy doing the crime, and we aren’t handling the case regulation Navy. We, or you, kick his ass instead, and by doing so, we put ourselves in jeopardy. I mean, we both know it’s illegal for an officer or a CPO to beat up someone junior to him. In other words, we’re getting down on the level of the bad guy by answering a crime with a crime.”
The chief nodded slowly, still not looking at Brian. An air-driven needle gun began to rattle and buzz behind them.
“The second problem I have with it is that I’m not sure we keep the guy from doing dope again, because all we’ve done is to reinforce what he already knew: You get caught, you’re gonna pay for it. Now I’ll admit, this guy, this snipe, Gallagher, was pretty blatant about it. The ship’s at GQ, and he’s flyin’ in the purple haze. So now he’s had his little ‘accident.’ Is he going to stop doing dope? It seems to me that he’s gonna be a lot more careful about when and where he smokes his next joint.
And maybe from now on, it’ll only be after the midwatch, when he’s got six hours of rack time before his next watch. But if that’s true, the next time GQ goes, say, maybe when the guy’s off watch, we can still get Gallagher the space cadet again when the action goes down.
You see what I’m saying?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So, you want to know, what’s my fix. Well, my fix is you bring ‘em to captain’s mast, throw the book at ‘em, and give them a BCD or one of these new ‘other than honorable’ discharges, and then you throw the bastards out. Yes, it might get shorthanded around here, but at least then you know that the guys who’ve left aren’t gonna show up drugged on duty when you call away GQ in the middle of the night.”
The chief stared down at his boots for a moment. He finished his coffee, crumpled the paper cup into a tight little ball, and pitched it over the side. He turned to put his back to the lifelines and looked sideways and down at Brian.
“No you don’t, Mr. Holcomb.”
“Don’t what, Chief?”
“You don’t know nothin’ about the guys you ain’t caught yet, ‘cept’n you ain’t caught ‘em yet. This engineer, this Gallagher wipe? I’ll tell you what I know about his young ass: I know he knows, we catch him again, he’s gonna get his back broke. He’s gonna have trainin’ wheels for legs and go around in fuckin’ diapers the resta his life. The only hard thing ‘neath his belt he’ll ever know about’ll be the fuckin’ wheelchair they roll his ass around in, sittin’ in a pile his own shit. I see Gallagher every fuckin’ day. Go outta my way to see him, I hafta. I look at him, he gets reminded. An’ the guy who Gallagher buys from, or usta buy from, he goes around to see his old customer, Gallagher, and Gallagher, he gets this white-eye sorta look about him, says, ‘No more, man, no thank you very fuckin’ much. See, I done got me some religion.’ That’s what I know about Gallagher, ‘cause we had this little talk, me’n him. An’ I ain’t worried about doin’ crime, ‘cause the dopers, they started it, see? They don’t do no dope, I don’t hafta stomp their nuts.”
“So you’re telling me that everybody who’s been caught and, uh, talked to is now a born-again Christian?”
The chief grinned. “I don’t know about no Christians, boss. Me, I’m just a three-quarter-breed Injun, remember?
A Christian was something my people staked out over an anthill with a little honey in their eyes and ears.”
He grinned again, as if momentarily relishing a memory.
“But these guys I talk to, they believe. Me, Jackson, and, yeah, some a the other guys in the goat locker, we make sure they believe. Your way, well, it just won’t work, not hi this ship. ‘Cause a two things.”
“But my way gets rid of the dopers, gets ‘em off the ship.”
“And then we jist get some more. Yeah, it takes a little while, but then the Bureau, they send replacements, and you jist end up with more dopers, only now you don’t know who they are. You gotta find the little fucks all over again. Look, these fuckin’ kids nowadays, they do dope like you’n me did cigarettes and beer after school, we wuz growin’ up. I mean, what kid likes ta smoke, huh?
And beer, beer don’t taste no good till you get a taste for the alky in it. You and me, we did it ‘cause it wasn’t legal, ‘cause it was ba-a-a-d, an all the teachers and your momma and poppa said it was ba-a-a-d. Nowadays, beer and cigarettes, that’s pussy stuff. That’s what the fuckin’ girls do, when they ain’t paradin’ their little asses in them miniskirts and then getting’ all pissed-off, some guy sees then-Skivvies. Guys, nowadays, they go get some dope.
Whadda they know: Guy’s onna TV sayin’ it’s no different from cigarettes or booze, the longhair rock’n’roll millionaires doirt’ it on stage, the college kids all doin’ it, it’s all jist some chemical shit, so why not do it? See, it jist cops and robbers; they don’t see nothin’ bad in it.”
He stared over at two men who had stopped working, precipitating instant industry.
“That’s the first thing. So our way, we find out who the dopers are and we squeeze ‘em a little. They keep it up, we squeeze ‘em some more, only harder. Shit, I tell ‘em, I let ‘em hear me sayin’ it, guy can fall over the side real easy, he ain’t careful, an’ it’s a bitch to swim with broke arms. They get the fuckin’ message. Our way, we know what’s what and who’s who. And we hafta do it this way, ‘cause a the second thing.”
“Which is?”
“Which is, this command ain’t gonna let you bring a buncha guys up to mast and run up a buncha admin discharges. Makes the ship look bad, makes the command look bad.”
“Yeah, I know, and we end up standing watches port and report.”
“Yeah, but that ain’t it; the main bang is that the word gets around, Hood’s got a real bad drug problem, they’ll yank this CO off a here, send in some hotshot whose sweat pumps are runnin’ on max, and life in the ole Hood
-mam turns to shit.”
Brian thought about that for a moment. “Okay, I can see that, but it seems to me like we’re betting on the come here, big time. Long as nothing happens, no big deal in the middle of the night, no sneak attack, no local Pearl Harbors, we might pull it off, keep a lid on it.
Seems to me the captain ought to be thinking about the chances he’s taking.”
The chief shook his head. “I ain’t gonna argue that, Mr. Holcomb. Yer talkin’ the way it oughta be done, regular Navy, like the regs say. But me, the resta the chiefs, we been going’ to sea long enough to know that you take the captains as they come. You gotta make do with what you get, and we got an Old Man now who don’t bust chops, who don’t dump on the crew with a buncha mickey mouse. Hell, he’s an old guy, served in Korea, okay? Wears a Navy Cross for saving a ship when he deep-sixed some kinda bomb or something’. Way I hear it, he don’t even believe this dope shit’s really going’ on.
Yeah, maybe he don’t wanna know; maybe he’s got other reasons. But that’s what we got. And we got an XO who wants maybe to do it the right way, maybe not, but you know how it is, it ain’t his ship. So we all do the best we can. You think you can go in, siddown with this Old Man, make him see what’s going’ on, shit, you go do it. Chiefs’d love it.”
“You think that would do some good, Chief?”
“No, sir.”
“Terrific.”
It was Brian’s turn to stare silently over the lifelines.
He felt that the chief’s logic was simplistic but probably realistic.
The subtleties of what was legal and illegal and all the theories on what constituted professional good order and discipline were irrelevant to the likes of Chief Martinez. Brian understood that military discipline ultimately depended on the willingness of subordinates, from admirals to seamen recruits, to be disciplined in the first place. The drug culture disavowed that notion.
The Edge of Honor Page 21