Pacific Glory

by P. T. Deutermann

  “We’re working on that, Glory,” Marsh said. “Believe me, before this is all over, Japan will burn in hell. I promise.”

  She heaved a great sigh and turned away from him, staring once again out across the darkened harbor. He reluctantly let his arms drop. The only bright lights over there now were the temporary spotlight stands over on Ford Island, where humming strands of cable were straining to hold the battleship Oklahoma upright while they pumped her out. He remembered what he’d told Ensign Cauley.

  “Glory,” he said, “we’re in for just a couple days. How about dinner somewhere?”

  She turned to look at him. “Oh, I don’t know, Marsh. That would be too much like Annapolis. The four of us, scouting Crabtown for the cheap eats? Fish and chips at the Greek place? Home brew served in a Coke glass?”

  “That’s the past, Glory.”

  She sighed. “I’m not sure I could stand it, Marsh. No Beast, no Tommy, can’t you see?”

  “I could stand it, Glory,” he said, surprising himself.

  She blinked in surprise. “Ah,” she said.

  “I mean, look, forget it. I understand—”

  “Oh, Marsh. I’m so sorry. I’ve grown so accustomed to thinking only about myself, haven’t I. Of course, let’s go somewhere.”

  “Um.”

  She smiled, and the night briefly glowed. “I have the day off tomorrow, most of which I’ll spend sleeping in. So: tomorrow night, around six. Come in a taxi. I know a little place in Aiea.”

  * * *

  Glory Hawthorne Lewis lay in the bathtub, watching her toes and fingertips wrinkle in the cooling water. She was dreamily thinking back to those happy weekends down at the Naval Academy, where she was inevitably the star attraction of their usual foursome. Tommy Lewis, Beauty Vincent, Beast McCarty, and, of course, herself. Beast, the star athlete, big and bold, with those challenging eyes and roaming hands, flaunting his aggressive maleness with every pose. Tommy the brain, a slash, as the midshipmen called the really smart ones, and the only one in the group who could make her belly tingle with just one gentle touch. And Beauty, poor Beauty, with a face only a caricaturist could love, intensely shy because of his looks but with an almost tangible longing for her in his face whenever he thought she wasn’t looking. She was secretly glad it was Marsh Vincent who’d reappeared in her life and not Mick McCarty.

  Their dinner together had been a quiet affair, with lots of reminiscing about Annapolis while they both gamely danced around the unseen presence of Tommy’s ghost hovering out there on the verandah. She called him Marsh, not Beauty anymore, as if to emphasize the point that they were both different people now. Glory, the widow, whose daily fare was to wade through the bloody tapestry of an OR; Marsh, the executive officer, on his way west to grapple with the horrors of war at sea and generate more business for the hospital.

  It had been almost two years since the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the restaurant had been crowded with noisy white faces as the ever-growing staffs up on Makalapa Crater became increasingly confident that they were going to win this thing and punish the treacherous bastards for what they had done. She’d asked Marsh if that same sentiment prevailed in the fleet, but he’d kept his own counsel, saying only that they took it one watch at a time. She’d idly asked if he had anyone back in the States who might be a marriage prospect. His answer had stunned her.

  “I’d like to marry you,” he’d said.

  Her face flushed again as she recalled that moment. She’d thought she had the evening under control.

  “I’ve been in love with you since Crabtown,” he’d said. “I’ve just never had the courage to say that to you until now.”

  “Marsh,” she’d said, struggling with her own emotions, “I don’t know what to say.”

  “You could say yes,” he’d replied with a lopsided grin.

  Then he’d reached across the table and taken her left hand, where she still wore her Naval Academy miniature and her wedding ring. His hand had been warm, but to her, those two lumps of gold felt conspicuous.

  “Look, Glory, I know that was presumptuous. I guess war encourages direct speech. Time seems more valuable now.”

  “Does this have to do with love or something else, Marsh?” she’d finally asked.

  “What something else?”

  “Desire, Marsh. Desire. Do you really know me, or are you in love with the pretty girl you used to hang out with back at Annapolis?”

  “Pretty doesn’t do you justice, Glory,” he’d said.

  “I suppose so, Marsh. That’s also why I know all about desire. Men see me, they desire me. That’s been true ever since I was sixteen. Now that I’m thirty-three, my looks color every interaction I have with a man. Doctors, orderlies, patients, strangers in the O-club, even passing sailors on the base.”

  “So you wish, what—that, just once, men would appreciate you for the woman you are?” he’d asked with a straight face.

  She’d laughed out loud at that hackneyed line, and he’d grinned back at her.

  “I know, I know,” she’d said. “The lady doth protest too much. Look, I loved our time together back at Annapolis. I was the center of the universe every time I went down there for a weekend, and what woman doesn’t like that? I fell in love with Tommy because, well, because I did. But I also loved my good times with Beauty and the Beast.”

  “You’re telling me my image of you now is simply something I’ve created in my own mind?”

  “Of course you have, Marsh. It’s what people do. All of us. You were the shy one. You were a man who’d never muster the courage to say what you just said. And me? I was a giddy prom queen with an admiring court of three dashing midshipmen. Now you’re the second in command of a destroyer, and I’m a war widow. Neither one of us is the same person.”

  “Okay,” he’d said. “I’ll grant you all that. So let’s start over. My name’s Marsh Vincent. I went to the Naval Academy. I’ve heard you did, too, in a manner of speaking.”

  She’d looked at him and sighed. “Aren’t you forgetting someone?”

  “Tommy?”

  “Yes, Marsh. Tommy. The man I married.”

  He’d let go of her hand and looked away for a moment, then picked up his drink before speaking.

  “Glory, that’s not Tommy down there in the Arizona. Tommy’s gone to wherever the good ones go after they die. You and I are still present for duty, at least for now.”

  “My head knows that, Marsh. My heart’s not so sure. Next you’re going to tell me that I have to get on with my life, that I can’t linger in widow’s weeds forever.”

  “Something like that, Glory. It’s not like you can go join Tommy.”

  “Would if I could, Marsh.”

  He’d smiled at that and decided to fold his tents. “Me, too,” he’d said. “I really admired Tommy. Mr. Straight Arrow. Literally born to succeed, and he had the good grace to always be surprised when he did.”

  She remembered that he’d said that without the slightest hint of sarcasm. Apparently she wasn’t the only one who missed Tommy Lewis. Beast had once described Tommy as a prince. When she asked what that meant, Beast had explained that some men were just more valuable than others. Tommy, who’d sailed through the academics, was the first to help his struggling classmates get ready for their exams, and he could do it without ever making another midshipman feel beholden to him. Smart, good-looking, genuinely friendly and kind. Even back then, everyone knew that Tommy was special.

  “Goddamned war,” Marsh had said. “When this is over, I’m finished with the Navy, assuming I make it through.”

  “What else would you do?”

  “I have no idea,” he’d said. “Law maybe, like my dad. But certainly no more of this. I’ve come to dread being on the sea.”

  “You’ll probably feel differently once you get your own command. That can’t be too far away.”

  He’d laughed. “The closer I get, the more scary command looks,” he’d said. “You have all those lives ri
ght in your hands. I don’t think I’m strong enough. I know I’m not experienced enough.”

  She’d made the obligatory protestations, and then they’d gone on to talk about naval careers, other people they knew. She remembered feeling relief that the matter of his proposal had been put back in its box. They’d both been pretending: she that she hadn’t flatly said no, and he that he had even asked the question.

  She pulled the plug with her toes and got out to dry off. She held Marsh in great affection, but he would never stir the spark in her that Tommy had. She had agreed to write him, mostly because he so badly needed someone to talk to. He thought he was in love with her, but she knew better, even if he didn’t.

  The bathroom door opened, and Sally came in, wrapped in a towel.

  “Save me some hot water?” she asked brightly. “So how was your big dinner date with that commander? He’s cute.”

  “Hardly a date, Sal,” Glory said. “Just old friends. And he’s a lieutenant commander.”

  “Hah,” Sally replied, sitting on the edge of the tub to start the water. “I saw the way that poor guy looked at you, and you haven’t had dinner out with anyone since I’ve known you.”

  That was true, Glory thought, but she didn’t want to pursue this line of conversation. Sally draped her towel over the rack and stepped into the oversized ceramic tub. Glory did a quick appraisal. Not bad, she thought. Maybe a little too full in the hips, but she was such a sweetheart, lively, a ready smile, those startling baby blues, and a pretty face. She’d make some lucky guy a great catch.

  Like Marsh, perhaps?

  “Hey, Sal?” she said. “I need a favor.”

  * * *

  Sally Adkins wrote her first letter that very night to the nice commander with the improbable farm-boy face, excuse me, lieutenant commander, she thought, giggling. She wondered if he’d be disappointed, hearing from her and not from her gorgeous roommate. Sally was used to writing letters. The senior nurse at the hospital, Lieutenant McHale, had quietly suggested to all the nurses that they adopt some of their patients as pen pals, especially the ones headed back to war. Mail is what they live for out there, she’d told them. They had to use that crinkly white airmail paper and envelopes, and every letter supposedly had to be cleared by the hospital censor, a rule honored more in the breach than in fact. Sally had five pen pals, all Marines, and she had become highly proficient in dashing off a one- or two-page letter filled with trivial news from the home front.

  She did realize that she’d been more than a little smitten by Lieutenant Commander Vincent. He was a senior officer, and yet he’d been polite, kind, and easy to talk to, at least until Glory Lewis had appeared. Then she might as well have vanished from her chair. She chided herself for the petulant thought. Every woman might as well vanish once Glory came into a room, because men could simply not take their eyes off her. The fact that she was not in the least bit approachable in the romantic sense seemed only to double her allure. No wonder Mr. Vincent, who’d apparently known her for years, was still carrying that torch. There’d be no way Sally could compete with Glory Lewis for any man’s attention.

  Unless.

  She thought about it, and the idea took her breath away.

  Suppose she did write Mr. Vincent but signed the letters as Glory Lewis? Or maybe just G. L.?

  He would be ecstatic, of course, and she? She could indulge her imagination in ways not possible with the ordinary pen pal letters. It might lead to real love letters. She’d always wanted to receive love letters, and to respond in kind. What harm could it do, at least for a while?

  Wait: Suppose he came back to Pearl—ships often did. He would then approach Glory thinking she loved him as much as he loved her, and Glory would be caught flat-footed. She’d find out what Sally had been doing, and then there would be hell to pay. And Mr. Vincent? He’d be crushed when he found it had all been a deception.

  She shook her head. No. That would be mean.

  Well, what if she wrote him letters and didn’t sign them at all? Or perhaps signed them as “secret admirer”? They weren’t supposed to put their full names on the envelopes anyway, just initials and their room numbers at the nurses’ quarters. The mail clerk came through the building once a day, dropping letters on one of the bunks in the individual rooms. If she did that, the return address would be S. A, Room 232, Nurses’ Quarters, c/o Fleet Post Office, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Glory wouldn’t open a letter addressed like that—she’d assume it was for Sally.

  Would he figure it out? Would he even remember her? Signing her real name might inspire a “ho-hum, that’s nice” reaction, but a secret admirer? That would make it more interesting, and maybe, just maybe, she could get him to look at her instead of pining away for the unattainable Lady Everest.

  Why not?

  Dear Mr. Vincent, she began.

  SEVEN

  The Evans left Pearl a day earlier than scheduled. That kind of surprise creates a painfully hectic day for the XO as he tries to compress all the things that were going to be finished up into one day instead of two. The first four destroyers cleared the minefields set up around the entrance to Pearl Harbor and assumed their screening stations. They were followed by the carrier and the rest of the screening ships. Evans came out tail-end Charlie and had to bend on some knots to catch up with the formation. Once the carriers got out of port, they tended to run fast, as that was one of the better ways to frustrate lurking submarines. Evans strained into her assigned station two hours later and was then able to slow down to a brisk twenty knots. As usual, Marsh had no idea where the formation was headed, other than west, always west. What they were going to do when they got there was still a secret; the top brass did not share grand strategy with lowly destroyers.

  Evans’s tactical world centered on protecting the aircraft carrier from air and sub attack while the carrier flung out planes who did their work miles away, hundreds of miles away sometimes. Periodically the captain would get a special message laying out the objective for upcoming air strikes, and he would share these with the officers. Otherwise, though, the rest of the crew were operationally in the dark when it came to the big picture. Marsh didn’t mind: The secrecy reduced his worry horizon to the actual horizon; there were usually problems enough in that confined space to occupy his entire day.

  The ship secured from special sea detail and set the regular underway three-section watch, which meant that the deck watch officers would stand bridge watches of four hours on, eight off for as long as Evans was motoring from point A to B. Once in the objective combat zone, they would tighten that up to port and starboard watches, six on, six off, which gave the ship half the crew on station throughout the ship, on the bridge, in engineering, and all the gun stations, ready to fight. The downside was that people were usually exhausted after a few weeks of port and starboard, as Marsh well remembered from his Winston days.

  The ship had been in its screening station for an hour when the sonar control room called up to the bridge to report a sonar contact. Marsh was going through some admin messages with the captain on the bridge when the report came up over the captain’s intercom, affectionately known as the bitch-box. The captain looked at Marsh, sighed, and shook his head. Apparently every time a formation came out of Pearl, one of the screening destroyers inevitably got a sonar contact. It almost always turned out to be a false contact, but the entire destroyer screen had to react anyway when the ship in contact sent out the initial report. All destroyers had to set general quarters for the hour or so it took to decide that the contact was a whale or other marine life. It was especially annoying when the ship reporting the contact happened to be a “new guy” to the Pacific Fleet, as the Evans was, fresh off the East Coast and new construction to boot.

  “We’re going to get razzed about this,” the captain said, as he reached for the talk-between-ships radio handset and nodded to the officer of the deck to sound general quarters.

  “Probably,” Marsh said, “but we have to go take a look.”<
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  Evans left her assigned station and turned toward the bearing of the sonar contact, which was north of the formation track. The carrier, hearing Evans’s report, automatically increased speed to thirty knots and got the hell out of the area, beginning a broad zigzag pattern to foil any long-range torpedo shots. The destroyer squadron commodore, well aware of the false-contact reputation of the waters around Pearl, detached one other ship, USS Hodson, from the screen while the rest of the formation went galloping over the horizon with the bird farm. Marsh went down to the Combat Information Center—the CIC, known as Combat on the intercom circuits. One of the first things he had to do was to ensure that there were no American submarine submerged transit lanes nearby. He checked the chart and found that there were none.

  “All stations reporting manned and ready for GQ,” the OOD reported. “Material condition Zebra is set throughout the ship.”

  “Very well,” the captain said. “Arm the depth charges for one hundred fifty feet.”

  In the CIC, two officers began the tedious process of establishing the plotted track of the contact. Any contact was presumed to be a Japanese submarine until it was proved otherwise. Sound-powered phone talkers connected to the sonar control room muttered constantly to the plotters as the operators down below fed bearing and range data to Combat. Back on the fantail, the depth charge gunners were taking the safety locks off the five-hundred-pound depth charges. The five-inch gun crews were ramming shells into the breeches of the gun mounts. Anyone topside with binoculars was looking for signs of a periscope.

  The captain, who was senior to the skipper of the Hodson, assumed local tactical command and put the other ship on the fence, as it was called. This meant that she steamed in a big circle around the ship in contact. The tactic called for the ship in contact to cue the ship on the fence with ranges and bearings until that ship, too, established sonar contact. Once both ships held contact, one would drive down the bearing and right over the top of the sonar contact, releasing her depth charges. The ship dropping the charges would, of course, go “deaf” as soon as she passed overhead, because the sonar could not hear anything through the ship’s own propellers. The attacking ship would then go out onto the fence and reestablish contact, after which the second ship would then drive in and make an attack. The maneuver would be repeated until something happened.