The Caine Mutiny (73 page)

Keefer bent to pick up his handbag, then looked Willie straight in the eyes. His face was distorted as though by a spasm of pain. “Don’t envy me my happiness too much, Willie,” he said. “Don’t forget one thing. I jumped.”

The bell clanged. Keefer saluted, and went down the ladder.

CHAPTER 40

The Last Captain of the
Caine

Willie moved his belongings into Queeg’s room (he could think of it by no other name) and lay down on the bunk. It was an immensely queer sensation. Once, when he was sixteen, his mother had taken him to Europe; during a guided tour of the palace at Versailles, he had lingered behind the crowd of tourists in the imperial bedroom, and had leaped over the velvet rope and lain on Napoleon’s bed. He was reminded of that now as he stretched out on the bunk of Captain Queeg. He smiled at the association, but he understood it. Queeg was once for all the grand historical figure in his life. Not Hitler, not Tojo, but Queeg.

His mind was painfully divided between the thrill of command and the misery of May’s lengthening silence. He wanted so much to share this great news with her! He well knew that the
Caine
was a dirty old broken-down hulk-and that only because it was such a pitiful caricature of a ship had he been entrusted with it-and yet his blood ran quick with pride. He had risen from his fumbling, incompetent beginnings as Midshipman Keith to the command of a United States warship. Nothing could erase that fact. Luck and merit were mingled in the event, but the event stood. It would be on the records of the Navy so long as the Navy existed.

After a while he went to the desk and wrote this note to May:

MY DARLING:

Three months ago I wrote you a very long letter, and I have received no answer. I feel impossibly sheepish about repeating what I said, because I can hardly believe you didn’t receive it. If by some wild chance you didn’t
please
let me know quickly-you can send a wire to me now, I think-and I will write it again with extra flourishes. But if you got it-and I must believe you probably did-then your silence says everything that has to be said. I will still look for you when I come home. I want to see you face to face.

I am at Okinawa. Today I relieved Keefer as captain. I came through the war unscratched, and, I’m sure, a little better for having been somewhat useful for the first time in my life.

I love you-

WILLIE

Then he wrote to his mother.

Even at anchor, on an idle, forgotten old ship, Willie experienced the strange sensations of the first days of a new captain: a shrinking of his personal identity, and a stretching out of his nerve ends to all the spaces and machinery of his ship. He was less free than before. He developed the apprehensive listening ears of a young mother; the ears listened on in his sleep; he never quite slept, not the way he had before. He had the sense of having been reduced from an individual to a sort of brain of a composite animal, the crew and ship combined. The reward for these disturbing sensations came when he walked the decks. Power seemed to flow out of the plates into his body. The respectful demeanor of the officers and crew thrust him into a loneliness he had never known, but it wasn’t a frigid loneliness. Through the transparent barrier of manners came the warming unspoken word that his men liked him and believed in him.

He gave them fresh reason to do so in his first week as captain. A typhoon brushed past Okinawa one night, and Willie was on the bridge continuously for thirty hours, maneuvering finely with his engines and rudder to keep the anchor from dragging. It was a horrible night. The newcomers aboard did a lot of worrying and praying; the crewmen who had lived through December 18 were less terrified. When gray dawn broke over the heaving, white-capped harbor, it revealed a dozen ships stranded on beaches and reefs all around the bay, some high and dry, some lying on their sides in shallow water. One of the wrecks was a DMS. Of course the sight of these unhappy ships made everyone on the
Caine
feel especially snug and smug and comfortable; and Captain Keith was established as a hero.

New storm warnings kept coming in all day. More typhoons were loose in the South Pacific, and the paths of two of them indicated that they might hit Okinawa. When the waves in the harbor subsided Willie rode over to the
Moulton
in his gig. The DMS squadron, back from the Tokyo sweep, were ranged in the south anchorage. He burst in on Keggs in his cabin.

“Ed, are you ready for sea?”

“Hi, Willie! Sure- Need fuel and chow and such, but-”

“I want to get the hell out of here. MinePac doesn’t know what to do with me. He’s afraid to send me to sea because I might have another breakdown. Come on over to the
Terror
. Maybe we can talk him into letting both of us go. You can escort me.”

Keggs looked scared and perplexed. “Willie, we don’t originate sailing orders in this outfit.”

“Listen, boy, everything’s broken wide open. None of the big brass knows what to do from day to day. The war’s over. It’s all different-”

“Well, sure, but we still aren’t-”

“Ed, what can we lose? Wouldn’t you
like
to be under way for home at 0900 tomorrow?”

“Would I? Jesus-”

“Then come along.”

They tracked down the operations officer in the wardroom of the
Terror
, drinking coffee alone at the end of a long table. He greeted Willie with a friendly smile. “How’d you keep that old wreck of yours afloat in the blow, Keith? Well done. Have some coffee. You, too, Keggs.”

The two captains sat on either side of the operations officer. Willie said at once, “Sir, I want to take the
Caine
back to the States. Now. Today. I don’t want to ride out any more typhoons with the engine plant I’ve got.”

“Wait a minute, Lieutenant. Nobody asked you for suggestions about sailing orders-”

“I’m acting for the safety of my ship-”

“You’re not seaworthy-”

“I am as of the moment. My crew fixed the pumps. Sitting here through the next two typhoons isn’t going to make me any more seaworthy-”

“Well, you can always be surveyed here, you know-there’s a board on the way-”

“But I can still get her home. She has scrap value you’ll lose if you scuttle her here-”

“Well, I don’t blame you for wanting to get home. We all do. But I’m afraid-”

“Sir, how does the admiral feel about the
Giles
, laying up there on Tsuken Shima on her side? It’s not going to be any credit to MinePac to have another major vessel wrecked. The
Caine
is in no shape to stay. The safe course is to send us out of this typhoon area. I have a crew to think about.”

“And suppose you break down in mid-ocean?”

“Send Keggs along, sir. We’re all up for decommissioning. The high-speed sweeps are finished. Anyway, I won’t break down. My crew will hold her together with chewing gum and bailing wire, I swear, so long as the bow is pointing to the States.”

Ramsbeck stirred his coffee, and regarded Willie with wry appreciation. “I’m hanged if you don’t make out a case. We’re up to our ears here, we can’t think of everything- I’ll talk to the admiral.”

Two days later, to the tremendous rejoicing of both crews, the
Caine
and the
Moulton
received orders to proceed to the Naval Supply Depot in Bayonne,
New Jersey
, via Pearl Harbor and the Panama Canal, for decommissioning.

It cost Willie Keith an unexpected pang to steam away from Okinawa. He stood on the bridge looking back at the massive island until the last green hump sank into the sea. At that moment he really sensed the end of the war. He had left his home three years ago and come half around the globe; he had pushed as far as this strange, unknown place; and now he was going back.

He couldn’t get used to steaming at night with lights showing. Every time he glanced at the
Moulton
and saw the yellow flare from the portholes, the red and green running lights, and the blazing white masthead light, he was startled. Instinctively he still observed all the blackout regulations; crushed his cigarette before emerging from his cabin, slid through the curtains of the charthouse so as not to leak any rays, and held his fingers over the lens of his flashlight. It was uncanny, too, to be on the bridge at night and not hear the gurgling pings of the sound search. The sight of all his guns untended, trained in, and covered with canvas made him uneasy. For him the sea and the Japanese had been one enemy. He had to keep reminding himself that the vast ocean did not spawn submarines of itself as it did flying fish.

He spent long night hours on the bridge when there was no need of it. The stars and the sea and the ship were slipping from his life. In a couple of years he would no longer be able to tell time to the quarter hour by the angle of the Big Dipper in the heavens. He would forget the exact number of degrees of offset that held the
Caine
on course in a cross sea. All the patterns fixed in his muscles, like the ability to find the speed indicator buttons in utter blackness, would fade. This very wheelhouse itself, familiar to him as his own body, would soon cease to exist. It was a little death toward which he was steaming.

When they tied up in Pearl Harbor, the first thing Willie did was to go to the Navy Yard’s telephone exchange and put a call through to the candy store in the Bronx. He waited for two hours, slouching on a battered couch and leafing through several tattered picture magazines (one of them had a detailed forecast of how Japan would be invaded, and predicted that the war would end in the spring of 1948). The operator beckoned him to her desk at last and told him that May Wynn was no longer at that number; and the man on the other end didn’t know where she could be reached.

“I’ll talk to him.”

The candy-store proprietor was spluttering. “You really calling from Pearl Harbor? Pearl Harbor? It isn’t a joke?”

“Look, Mr. Fine, I’m May’s old friend Willie Keith who used to call her all the time. Where is she? Where’s her family?”

“Moved away. Moved away, Mr. Keith. Don’t know where. Five-six months ago. Long time- Shaddup, you kids, I’m talking to Pearl Harbor-”

“Didn’t she leave a number?”

“No number. Nothing, Mr. Keith. Moved away.”

“Thanks. Good-by.” Willie hung up, and paid the operator eleven dollars.

Back at the ship his desk was piled with mail that had accumulated at Pearl Harbor, most of it official. He turned the envelopes over eagerly one by one, but there was nothing from May. An odd-sized bulky brown envelope from the Bureau of Personnel caught his eye and he opened it. In it was a letter and a little flat maroon box. The box contained a ribbon and a medal-the Bronze Star. The letter was a citation signed by the Secretary of the Navy, praising him for putting out the fire after the suicide attack, and concluding with the formula,
Lieutenant Keith’s heroism over and above the call of duty was in the highest traditions of the Naval Service
.

He sat and stared at the medal numbly for many minutes. He began to open the official mail. It was the usual mimeographed or printed matter for a while; then he came on a letter which was typed.

From: The Chief of Naval Personnel.

To: Lieutenant Willis Seward Keith, USNR.

Subject: Improper Performance of Duty-

Reprimand for.

Reference: (a) Court-martial Order #7-1945.

Enclosure: (A) Copy of Reference (a).

1. In accordance with reference (a) enclosed, the Bureau finds that you conduct in the matter of the irregular relief of Lieutenant Commander Philip F. Queeg USN of command of the U.S.S. CAINE on 18 December 1944 constituted improper performance of duty.

2. Your attention is directed to the comments of the convening authority, the Bureau, the Judge Advocate General, and the Secretary of the Navy. In accordance with those comments, you are reprimanded.

3. A copy of this letter will be placed in your promotion jacket.

“Well,” thought Willie in a whirl, “a medal and a reprimand. Nice morning’s haul.”

He scanned the close small type of the court-martial order. There was a page and a half of comment by Com Twelve, the convening authority. He judged that it must have been written by Breakstone and signed by the admiral. The acquittal was disapproved. Willie knew this created no danger for Maryk, because he couldn’t be tried again; but it unquestionably meant the end of his naval career.

… The medical board recommended that Lieutenant Commander Queeg be restored to duty. No evidence was found of any mental ailment. It must be concluded that the actions of the accused showed gross ignorance of medical facts, and extreme want of judgment in placing reliance on his uninformed opinions in order to commit an act with the most serious and far-reaching possibilities. ... These comments extend with pertinence if lesser force to the actions of the witness Lieutenant Keith, the officer of the deck. The testimony of Lieutenant Keith leaves no doubt that he did not comply reluctantly, but rather sided wholeheartedly with the accused in his actions.

The convening authority believes the specification proved beyond a reasonable doubt ...