06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 (7 page)

In October 1986 James Bergstrom returned to Houston with all his initial training completed. His orders: Report to the Trident submarine base in Bangor, Washington, on Thanksgiving night, Thursday, November 27. James was nervous. Linda was scared. It was one of those times when there seemed to be too much to do to ever accomplish it all by a given date. But then, you don’t keep the navy waiting.

To get ready for the move, James needed a car. He’d sold the Z28 before entering the navy. No longer feeling the need to impress anyone, he opted not to commit to another car payment, instead settling on a 1979 brown Grand Prix he paid cash for. James worried the car would never last the almost twenty-four hundred miles to Seattle, so Linda took it to a local mechanic who assured her it would make the trip. Whereas James appeared carefree, even flamboyant, about money in the past, since the marriage he seemed increasingly concerned with family finances. The Grand Prix, he reminded Linda, fit his overall strategy: to stay in the navy for four years, save as much as possible of what he made, and then return to Houston to buy a house. They would be frugal now, and it would pay off later.

As their departure approached, they filled the car with just the essentials, primarily clothes and a smattering of kitchenware, including a toaster they purchased at Sears and an iron donated by James mother. As usual, he had the Grand Prix meticulously clean, even insisting on covering
the seat with a large towel. “I don’t like to sweat on the upholstery,” he told Linda.

For their part, the Bergstroms appeared delighted that their son and his wife would soon depart for Washington. James C. constantly reminded James that his enlistment was a smart move. “You’ll be worth a lot more to a company after the navy trains you,” he said. Linda’s brother Gino voiced similar views. “This is good for James,” he told Linda. “He’ll get a better career. It’s for your future.”

Linda agreed. Naturally she felt uneasy about moving to a city where she would have no family or friends. They didn’t even know where they’d be living yet. But she was excited about the future. Leaving behind Houston, with all the painful memories it held for her, was not a difficult decision. What made it even sweeter was that James was moving up in the world and she was going with him. In the navy, a member of the submarine force, he would deserve a certain respect, and as his wife, she would have more of the good things in life. She had not been raised to expect success, but now that it appeared possible, Linda intended to eagerly pursue it.

Only Santos Martinez hung back, unsure. “You’re going to do what you’re going to do,” Santos told Linda the day before the newlyweds drove off. But there was no mistaking the misgiving in her mother’s tone. She knew Santos worried about James and his hair-trigger temper.

At first it seemed the newlyweds would have little to transport to their new home, but on the morning they departed, the Grand Prix sagged under the weight of their possessions. Its trunk, backseat, and the passenger’s seat floor all overflowed. To fit in, Linda sat crosswise, her legs scrunched up in front of her. “I began thinking James was right and I had packed too much,” she would say later, chuckling softly at the memory. “At one point I considered ditching some of the stuff on the side of the road.”

The trip took four days, and James insisted on driving all of it himself. The first leg brought them to El Paso, Texas,
the next to Los Angeles, and the third to Oregon. At seven on Thanksgiving evening they arrived at Chris and Tina Bergstrom’s homey two-bedroom apartment on the Bangor base. Both Linda and James were exhausted, but Tina had a turkey dinner with all the fixings ready, so they stayed up to talk.

Linda had met both Chris and Tina before, in Houston, when they came home on visits. Chris was taller than James and heavier, but not as good-looking, with rougher features. He was an affable man, more outgoing than James. His parents were proud that Chris had been on the inaugural crew of the U.S.S.
Ohio
. Now James would be joining him on the
Ohio
’s blue crew and they would be setting sail together. It all fit, perfectly.

As tall as Chris was, Tina was shorter than Linda, five foot with blond hair. She was trim, probably not more than a hundred pounds, and quiet, more serious than her gregarious husband. As her two young sons played on the floor, Tina cleared the table. Perhaps assuming Linda was nervous about being away from home, she smiled reassuringly. She, too, had married in Houston, then followed her husband across country when he joined the navy. “Y’all will get used to it,” she said. “Navy life is great. When the guys are away you have time for yourself, and when they come back you’re always glad they’re back.”

To Linda it sounded like heaven. There would be an apartment of her own—her very first—and little by little she and James would work to accumulate the middle-class things she’d always wanted but never had, furniture, clothes, maybe even her own car. This was the life she had always dreamed of, with a husband, eventually children, and a place of her own.

James had worried throughout the day that he wouldn’t arrive on base in time to report for duty, so immediately after dinner, Chris drove him to central command. James checked in and was ordered to report again on Monday.

With that behind them, Linda and James slept on a bed in the children’s room. Though she was exhausted, days of
bouncing cross-country in the car had left her head swimming and her bones aching, she drifted fitfully off to sleep. The next morning Linda awoke and walked outside. It had been dark when they arrived in Washington State, and now she beheld it with wonder.
What a glorious place to start a new life.

What Linda discovered outside the door on her first morning in Washington State was a land rich in natural beauty. Towering fir trees and dense forests blanketed rugged hills and filled the air with the pungent freshness of wet pine. In the distance, blue-gray mountains cast a serene presence. Kitsap Peninsula, on which Bangor Base is situated, is a hilly, forested thumb of land bordered on the west by Hood Canal and the east by the blue waters of Puget Sound and Dyes Inlet. Nine months of the year, from September to May, its spectacular scenery is concealed under a blanket of clouds and nearly constant rain. Locals, who maintain their surroundings more than make up for months of dreary skies, call the drizzle “Seattle sunshine” or “liquid sunbeams.” Once, these lands were the hunting grounds of the Suquamish Indians. Later they were claimed by Spain, Russia, England, and finally the United States.

The naval presence on the peninsula dates back to the late nineteenth century when the navy purchased 190 acres south of Bangor in Bremerton, Washington, for the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard (PSNS). The first vessel to dock there was the Civil War gunboat the U.S.S.
Nipsic
. By 1918 the shipyard covered 230 acres and in 1933 the U.S.S.
Constitution,
“Old Ironsides” from the War of 1812, moved in. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, smudge pots and smoke generators camouflaged the yard from enemy attack.

Then, in 1942, the navy founded Bangor Base farther up the coastline as a site for shipping ammunition to the Pacific theater during World War II. On the western curve of the peninsula, it served as such through the Korean and Vietnam wars, until January 1973 when the navy announced the
more than $700 million overhaul that transformed it into the home port for the first Trident submarines.

Bringing nuclear submarines so near densely populated Seattle was not without conflict. It stirred up a nest of opposition from environmentalists who protested at base gates and blocked railroad tracks carrying missile parts, but to little avail. “We’re a military-based economy,” said one longtime resident. “We couldn’t afford to turn the Tridents down.” When the U.S.S.
Ohio
was commissioned in 1981, it pulled into Bangor Base under nuclear power. Eventually seven more Tridents followed.

When Linda and James drove through the seven-thousand-acre base later that day, she was amazed. It resembled a country club more than a military establishment. Much of the property remained wilderness. Deer, bear, raccoon, and possum roamed freely. There were oyster and clam beds and lakes stocked with trout. One of the few indications it was actually a military base was dark blue signs with white-lettered acronyms marking buildings tucked along the base’s eighty-nine miles of road: TriRefFac for Trident Refitting Facilities; TTF for Trident Training Facility; SWFPAC for Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific.

A jaunty white and blue awning announced headquarters, ComSubGru (Commander Submarine Group). Nearby the commissary, barbershop, movie theater, officers’ club, library, chapel, gas station, and a gym catered not only to personnel but their families. An assignment on the Bangor Base, one of eight naval stations in the area, was held in especially high regard among Seattle’s naval community. Considered the “Cadillacs” of the submarine fleet, the Tridents were manned by sailors who’d placed in the top 5 percent of all recruits.

After touring the base, Linda and James drove through nearby towns in search of an apartment fulfilling his criteria, primarily that it be within five minutes of the subbase’s main gates to save wear and tear on his seven-year-old car. Secondly he wanted it to be furnished and inexpensive.
Linda, who dreamed of buying furniture a little at a time and decorating her own apartment, felt disappointed. “He had this plan,” she said later. “Spending money on things now just didn’t matter to James.”

After a weekend’s search, the Bergstroms settled on the community of Silverdale, just a few minutes south of the base on Dyes Inlet. When it was settled in the 1870s, residents wanted to name the town Goldendale, but came down a notch on the precious-metal scale when they discovered another Washington State town had already claimed that honor. During Prohibition, rumrunners outran revenuers by concealing easily dismantled stills in surrounding forests. As recent as the late seventies, the town had little more than one restaurant, a tavern, and a smattering of stores bordering the waterfront. But with the influx of Trident cash, it quickly mushroomed into a burgeoning community complete with national stores and restaurants, such as Pier I and Olive Garden, an enclosed shopping mall, and mile after mile of apartments, town homes, and subdivisions.

Once they’d agreed on the town, James maintained their best choice was a small complex called Silverdale Apartments, tucked on a hill next to a strip shopping center and behind the Ryder Truck rental outlet, just a block from the waterfront. Rather than apartments, the tiny complex looked like a seedy motel. The units were inexpensive; in fact, the cheapest in the area, just $245 for a one-bedroom complete with rudimentary and battered furnishings. James’s brother, Chris, had lived there when he first came to the base, and it was convenient, well within James’s five-minute limit.

The complex wasn’t what Linda had envisioned as their first home. “We can do better than this,” she argued. “James, why don’t we get something a little nicer, buy our own furniture, not this junk.”

James, however, would hear nothing of it. “This is where we’re living,” he decreed. “It’s close and it’s cheap and we’ll be able to save our money.”

Sally and Bill Rogers had managed the Silverdale Apart
ments for nearly three years when the Bergstroms approached them about renting an apartment. They’d had all kinds of tenants, including a few who had been in and out of trouble. “Since the apartments were so cheap, we tended to get a lot of transients,” said Sally later. “We got so leery of people, we kept a police scanner in our apartment. When anyone asked about it, we told them that we had family in the sheriff’s department. It was a little thing, but we thought it might make them think twice about moving in if they were the type that caused trouble.”

When Linda and James showed up on Monday, December 1, 1986, to sign a lease on unit number nine, the second-floor apartment directly next to the one the Rogers occupied, they appeared no different from other navy couples who had come and gone. “They were clean-cut—but then, most of the navy families are,” said Sally. “The only thing I remember is that the husband seemed shy. Linda did all the talking. In fact, James was bashful to the point of blushing when I talked to him. So shy, he couldn’t even look me in the eye.”

Linda’s initial disappointment over the apartment disappeared quickly. She discovered too much to do in Washington, too many places to go to spend her time fretting. James was right, she decided. Where they lived didn’t matter. Rather, it mattered only that they had begun an adventure together. For the first time, she’d escaped Houston and the clouds of her past. Her new husband had given her a wondrous gift, a new life, and she wanted more than anything to seize the opportunity.

These were busy days for both of them. James worked at the base each morning, helping to ready the
Ohio
for its upcoming patrol. Linda settled in, buying pillows, knickknacks, small things to personalize their apartment with its supplied furniture—a timeworn couch, bed, and tables that appeared to have withstood the abuse of a decade of tenants. Although James had stingily insisted on their rather dilapidated housing, in every other way he continued to be generous, almost to a fault. In fact, he rarely paid attention to how Linda spent their money, allowing her to control all the household funds. James already made considerably more money than he had at Devoe & Raynolds. As his rank increased, so would his salary, plus extra pay whenever he sailed.
This is just the beginning,
Linda thought.
Pretty soon we’ll have a house of our own and everything I’ve ever dreamed of.

Afternoons were reserved to spend together. Usually
Linda and James played tennis a block away at courts on the hill behind the high school. Although thin, James played well, his body deceptively strong, agile, and quick; his aim accurate. Linda felt triumphant every time she successfully returned the ball. Though she was no match for him, James remained patient, giving pointers and occasionally stopping to illustrate in slow motion how to approach the ball.

At home, two or three times a day, James called her into the bedroom. “Let’s do it,” he’d say playfully. Always, as in Houston, he climbed on top of her and “it” rarely lasted more than a few minutes. To Linda’s relief, James had not asked to tie her up since the night in Houston. Despite his unimaginative lovemaking, he was openly affectionate, insisting that they nestle together in bed, her left arm across his chest and her left leg atop his thigh. They slept entwined in each other’s arms.

Linda was painfully aware time for such togetherness dwindled. The U.S.S.
Ohio
’s scheduled departure loomed, just two weeks away, on December 19. As a member of the blue crew, James would be on-board for his first patrol—seventy-two days at sea, entirely underwater.

This would be a typical patrol for a Trident submarine. Their mandate, in fact, was to stay at sea for vast periods of time, undetected. Manned by two alternating crews—the blue and the gold—the subs spent an average of 60 percent of the time on patrol, rotating seventy days at sea with twenty-five in port. “We’re the fence around the U.S.,” said one Trident chief. “The subs are meant to be out there at all times, a deadly deterrent.”

When the subs were first included in the navy’s budget in 1974, the Cold War was frigid and the Tridents were viewed as a more flexible and effective mode of self-defense than that of land-based nuclear missiles. It took seven years, two years longer than originally projected, and $1.2 billion (40 percent over budget) before the
Ohio
was commissioned.
Time
magazine dubbed the sub’s construction “a seven-year ordeal of mismanagement.” But when finally deployed, it
became the centerpiece of the navy’s submarine fleet, quieter and more deadly than its aging ancestors, the
Polaris
and
Poseidon
submarines.

Massive and black, like a giant probe, the
Ohio
went through refit on the base’s Delta Pier. Only one quarter of the sub’s deadly bulk cleared the water line, making it appear deceptively small. Those who had been on-board knew that from the top of its ominous steel sail it descended seven stories and weighed twice the tonnage of any other U.S. submarine. The exceptional deterrent value of the 560-foot subs came from their powerful payloads. Each carried the destructive capability of all the armaments expended during World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam combined, twenty-four nuclear missiles capable of striking up to eight targets apiece, more than forty-six hundred miles away. “From Seattle Harbor we could hit Havana,” boasted one Trident sailor. “And pick out our target in the city.”

If more than two months undersea had once sounded romantic or exciting to James, as the blue crew’s departure date approached, he became increasingly anxious. Days passed, each progressively more difficult. “He’d come home upset from the base, complaining that this wasn’t going to be what he thought,” Linda said later. “He was constantly angry, blaming his parents for forcing him to sign up.”

“Remember the day I called you from the recruiters?” James taunted Linda. “Why didn’t you tell me not to enlist?”

“We weren’t married,” Linda answered. “I told you to do what you wanted. I had no right to make your mind up for you.”

The navy, it soon became obvious, had unknowingly resurrected James Bergstrom’s old insecurities. As he had throughout his school years, he interpreted every perceived slight as an unjust personal attack. Although all new crew members toiled at menial tasks during their first two patrols—until they passed all tests and qualified on the subs—James felt singled out. One day, irate that he’d been delegated
to wash dishes in the boat’s galley, James came home demanding they find a lawyer to get him out of the navy. Linda picked one out of the yellow pages and called, but the attorney she consulted offered little hope. “He said the only way out was death, sickness, court-martial, or a dishonorable discharge,” she relayed to James.

Furious, James picked up a glass and smashed it against the wall. “All right, I’ll go out on that damned boat,” he said, glaring at Linda. “But you make sure you find a way out for me. Find something, anything.”

That night, in what would become a pattern of anger and apology, James begged her forgiveness. “I’m sorry. It’s just the pressure, the stress; this isn’t what I thought it would be,” he explained.

Linda disregarded her new husband’s moodiness as merely anxiety over his looming first voyage. “I figured he’d get out there, find out it wasn’t so bad, and come back okay,” she said later.

After all, for much of the day he was still the old James. In fact, he’d become even more protective of her than he had been before the marriage, so much so that she bridled under his ever-growing list of rules. He chastised her for the most innocent activity that he argued exposed her to jeopardy, like going to the post office to pick up mail or the grocery store to shop. “You just don’t know who’s out there, looking,” he argued, demanding she wait until he returned home from the base so they could go together.

Every news story on the television or the radio in which a woman was victimized became fodder for his argument. She later regretted telling him about a stranger who walked up to the sliding glass door on their apartment balcony one afternoon and knocked. When Linda slid it open, a scruffy young peddler laughed, “Ho, ho, ho, I’m Santa Claus,” as he pulled bottles of cleaning fluid from a bag and attempted to lure her downstairs where he said he had more to show her.

“My husband’s in the shower,” Linda said, although James was actually at work on the base. “He’ll get really mad.”

The peddler left.

When James heard the story, it, too, became evidence of how much she needed his protection. “Never let anyone inside,” he ordered. “Don’t even answer the door.”

From that day on, James went everywhere with her, to the mall, to the Laundromat. “You can’t trust anyone, Linda,” he told her. “Not anyone.”

As the boat’s departure date drew near, Linda and James bought a Christmas tree and set it up in a corner of their small living room. On their last night together, they opened gifts. James presented Linda with a microwave oven for their tiny kitchen. She gave him a Walkman tape player to take on-board the ship. That night in bed, Linda couldn’t sleep, although she felt her husband’s soft, regular breathing beneath her. She wanted to be awake for their final hours together before James would have to leave.

The next morning, Linda stood at the gates to the lower base with the other wives and cried as she and James said good-bye. “I just don’t want you to go,” she told him. “I’ll miss you.”

“Just find somebody to help me get out of this,” James ordered, as he walked away. “That’s your job while I’m gone. I want out.”