The Edge of Honor (14 page)

Although each room was equipped for two officers, the luxury came from not having a roommate. Only the captain, executive officer, and the three line department heads had their own rooms; everyone else shared.

He took a couple of minutes to wash his face, rinse out his mouth, and put on a clean uniform shirt and then made a halfhearted attempt to brush his unruly hair.

Trying to quell the vision of hell he’d just witnessed, Brian looked wildly around the stateroom and found his wife’s picture on the cubbyhole desk. Maddy. The mass of blond hair framing that exquisitely posed smile. He felt a sudden urge to open his desk and get the other pictures, Maddy on the beach, both of them at Tahoe or on the weekend to San Francisco, scenes of normalcy that might help .erase the horrifying red-on-gray images from his mind. He wondered where she was, what she was doing at this moment. There would be no mail until they were on station at Red Crown. He would get a letter off to her tonight, tell her what had happened, what he had seen in Berkeley. On second thought, maybe not.

That kind of stuff scared the wives witless. But he had to tell somebody, not so much about what he had seen but how he had reacted, the revulsion, the fear, getting sick over the side. Naval officers were supposed to be made of sterner stuff than that. But I can tell Maddy—I think.

He took a deep breath. Time to go see the captain.

He left his stateroom and walked forward into the narrow passageway between the staff office and the captain’s pantry. He knocked once on the captain’s door and stepped in. The captain’s cabin consisted of a living room and a separate bedroom and bathroom. The living room, approximately twenty feet by twenty, doubled as fthe captain’s personal office and reception room. The room was carpeted and furnished with a couch, two upholstered chairs, and a round dining table. A row of portholes stretched across the front bulkhead, which overlooked the forecastle. The pilothouse stood directly above. The exec, Austin, and Benedetti sat at the captain’s dining room table, the captain in his desk chair, his . back to the desk, while he listened on a sound-powered SS phone handset. The cabin felt cool, and the captain was wearing a tan civilian sweater over his khakis, his usual at-sea rig. The Captain said, “Very well,” and hung up the phone.

“The Da Nang helos are inbound to us right now.

? We’re to stand by Berkeley to provide a helo deck for casualty transfers. Brian, please sit down. What’s the situation over there?”

Brian took the fourth seat at the round table. “Sir, there were about a dozen men involved. From what I saw, they’re all either dead or about to be dead.”

“Jesus Christ!” exclaimed the exec. “All of ‘em?”

t “Yes, sir. I saw seven or eight body bags out on deck, I and in the wardroom—” He swallowed hard as the gory images returned. “In the wardroom, it was … it was just blood … blood everywhere. One guy was partially decapitated; another guy had no legs. And the third guy I was—he was—”

“Okay, Brian,” said the captain. “We get the picture.

Their CO told me that they took a one-hundred-thirty I millimeter round right in the middle of a damage-control team. I can believe the casualties. How much damage is there?”

“Sir, it hit in Repair Three, back by the post office and the after athwartships passageway. I didn’t go in, but the fires are apparently out. You can’t see anything from the weather decks except smoke. I would guess that the Mount Fifty-two handling room is out of commission.

The people I saw were exhausted.” And none too friendly, he thought to himself. The 1MC burst into life.

“FLIGHT QUARTERS, FLIGHT QUARTERS. ALL HANDS MAN YOUR FLIGHT-QUARTERS STA

TIONS TO RECEIVE TWO CH-FORTY-SIXES FROM DA NANG. NOW, FLIGHT QUARTERS.”

“Count,” said the captain, “go to Combat and conduct whatever boat transfers are necessary to get their casualties over here and into the helos. Use one of our P-boats if we have to; I don’t want to drag this out, and the whaleboat can’t carry that many, uh, people. Coordinate on the secure net with Berkeley. Move the ship into two hundred yards. Call me if there’s a problem.”

“Aye, Captain,” said Austin, rising from the table. He gave Brian a significant look before leaving the cabin.

With Austin’s departure, Vince Benedetti ended up sitting by himself on one side of the round table. The engineer looked exhausted. His uniform was still wrinkled and smudged with sweat stains and his face was drawn.

He stared down at the tabletop. Brian wondered what had been going on before he arrived; he had a sense that it had not been a pleasant conversation. The exec seemed to be waiting for the captain to take the lead, which he did.

“Okay, gentlemen. Brian, to bring you up to speed: We’ve sent out our after-action report. We had to explain what happened to the engineering plant and why we went DIW in the middle of a fire mission. It would have been embarrassing enough if we’d been the only ones to take fire, but the Berkeley casualties make the whole incident very serious. There are those who are going to blame us for the fact that Berkeley took that hit, since the destroyers were basically home free until they had to reverse course to lay down a smoke screen. The exec feels that the only thing going for us politically is that there are bound to be questions as to why a PIRAZ ship was put on the Sea Dragon gun line in the first place. My guess—or rather, my hope—is that our bosses will not want to answer that question, so they’ll play down the incident. You’re the only Hood officer who’s been on board Berkeley. Are they mad at us?”

“Yes, sir, they are, or at least the junior people are. I didn’t see the exec or the CO.”

“I can well imagine.” Brian thought he saw Benedetti flinch, but the engineer continued to stare down at the deck, as if this conversation did not apply to him.

The captain continued. “Although they could have been hit at any time during that kind of mission, we were the obvious target, with all that smoke and being dead in the water. Berkeley was just unlucky enough to have to retrace her track. You read the Sea Dragon op order: It was pretty clear about never retracing your track, because the NVA is usually set up on where you’ve just been. Berkeley should have veered in toward the coast when she came about. But I guess that’s hindsight.”

“That’s probably not something we should say in a message, Captain,”

observed the exec.

“I quite agree, XO. But I think it’s something that the squad dog will comment on, which might get us off the hot seat. The important thing now is that we do this helo evolution and then get up to Red Crown station.

The systems have all come back on the line, thank God.

Brian, your gun mount did well. Fifty-six rounds. That’s a record for Mount Fifty-one.”

Brian was embarrassed to be praised when his brother department head was indisputably up to his neck in deep trouble. He was not sure that this was the moment, but he plunged ahead.

“To tell the truth, I was worried about the mount, Captain,” he admitted. “My guys didn’t think it would do the hundred and fifty rounds without a breakdown.

I’d like to ask that we shoot it more often once we get on Red Crown station. The chiefs think a couple of daily rounds might up its reliability.”

Benedetti flashed Brian a brief but grateful look before fixing his eyes on the deck again. Brian could just as well have pocketed the captain’s compliment and distanced himself from the trouble Benedetti faced. The captain was nodding.

“What that will probably do is break it, Brian. But I agree. Give me a plan for a daily or at least a weekly test firing, although you’ll find that, with helo ops, it will be hard to schedule. And we’ll both have to put up with a lot of grief from the Count.”

“I’ll help with that problem,” said the exec.

“Okay. Brian, that’s all I have for you right now.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” said Brian, standing. Benedetti seemed to shrink as Brian picked up his cap and left the cabin. He exhaled heavily when he got back to his stateroom, then shivered at the thought of being in the chief engineer’s shoes just now. While using the head, he heard a knock on the stateroom door. He zipped up and answered.

“Come in.”

Chief Boatswain Martinez stepped through the stateroom door, his huge bulk seeming to fill the stateroom.

“Boss, the chiefs were wonderin’ how bad the Berkeley got zapped; there’s all kindsa rumors going’ around.”

Brian described the Berkeley’s damage and casualties.

Martinez shook his head.

“Hope those fuckers aren’t in Subic when we get there. They’re gonna have a hate-on for the
. B. Hood for sure.”p>

“They’re already pretty pissed, Chief. I thought I was going to get to walk the plank over there. I don’t think anybody in that repair party survived the hit. Most of them are in bags, and the three I saw …

well, you wouldn’t believe it.”

“Yeah, I would. I was in the riverboats in country for a year. I seen some shit there, make you puke.”

“I did puke.”

“Oh. Yeah, well, I puked sometimes myself. Nothin’ to be ashamed of. We ride around out here in these ships, three squares, a hot flop, and clean Skivvies and we don’t have no idea of the shit’s going’ on in country.”

“Now we do. Now I do, anyway. Shook my young ass up, Bosun’s Mate, and that’s no lie.”

“Yes, sir. I hear you. Mr. Austin, he says we need to launch the P-boat to bring the body bags over. I better get down to the boat decks; it’s a little choppy out there for a P-boat.”

“Yeah, but we have to use it. Captain wants to make the transfer as quickly as possible for the sake of the people in Berkeley.”

“Yes, sir, I hear that.”

“Chief?” Brian’s voice was tight and his eyes suddenly felt wet.

“They’re going to have to use a fire hose to wash down the wardroom in the Berkeley.”

Martinez looked at him for a minute and then down at the deck. “Yeah,”

he said. “People jist don’t know.” He looked back up at Brian. “It’s gonna be okay, Lieutenant.

We jist gotta get this boat transfer done, and then we’ll get back to Red Crown, where we belong. The Hood, she shouldn’ta been doin’ this shit.”

“We’re a god damned warship,” Brian protested.

“We’ve got a five-inch gun. Why shouldn’t we be doing this? We’re supposed to be able to do any combat mission—”

“Yes, sir, but we got some things going’ on here. We get some time, we gotta talk.”

Brian stared at him. Things? “You mean drugs, don’t you? Let me guess, some snipes were high and that’s why we dropped the load.”

“That’s what I’m hearin’. But it ain’t jist snipes who’ve into the dope.

We got it in Weapons Department, and so do the Ops people.”

“Well, we need to kick some ass and shitcan some dopers, then.”

The chief studied the deck, twisting his CPO hat around and around in his massive paws. “There’s more to it than that, boss,” he said. “Look, I gotta git back to the boat decks.”

“Okay, but I want to know what’s going on. Every ship in the Navy has a drug problem of some kind, but we’re not supposed to pussyfoot around with it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“OK, Chief. But later, hear?”

“You got it, boss.”

\

After two hours of observing the Red Crown watch setup in Combat, Brian went down to the wardroom to get some decent coffee. The ship was headed north into the Gulf, its somber casualty-transfer duty completed just before sundown. Two Marine CH-46 helicopters had clattered out of the afternoon sky from Da Nang to remove Berkeley’s dead. The captain had ordered a ten-man honor guard mustered on the flight deck when the bodies had begun to arrive by boat. Brian, watching from the after gun director platform, had needed to turn away from the sight of the lumpy rubber bags lined up in still rows on the edge of the flight deck, watched over by the file of Hood sailors, looking awkward in dress whites, leggings, and guard belts.

As he stepped into the wardroom vestibule’s passageway, he felt a humid current of night air streaming in through the darken-ship curtains to the boiler room below.

Someone had locked back the starboard-side hatch leading out to the weather breaks. The pungent smell of the sea air was a pleasant contrast to the air-conditioned cigarette smoke of Combat.

He entered the wardroom in red-lighted semidarkness.

The evening movie had finished an hour ago, leaving residual smells of popcorn and cigarette smoke. In another hour, the midwatch people would stagger in for a cup of soup and a sandwich before taking the midnight to-four watches throughout the ship. The wardroom was kept red-lighted at night to preserve the deck watch standers’ night vision. He peered into the stainless-steel coffeepots and found one empty and the other busily making asphalt. He rinsed out the empty one and fired up the coffeemaker, only then discovering that he was not alone.

The chief engineer slumped in an upholstered chair in the far corner of the wardroom, his legs straight out before him, his oil-stained khaki trousers hiked up over steel-toed safety shoes, and a battered J. B.

Hood ball cap shoved to the back of his head. He had deep shadows under his eyes and a pallor of exhaustion on his face. He saw Brian looking at him.

“What’re you looking at, Holcomb?” he asked in a tired voice. “Come to get your licks in, too?”

Brian banged the steel coffeepot onto the heating element.

“I don’t rate that, Mr. Benedetti.”

“Yeah? You got to walk outta there today. You didn’t have to stay there and explain how come we lost the load in the middle of a live fire mission. It wasn’t your department that caused the tin cans to turn around, run back through a red zone, and get clobbered. You didn’t—ah, fuck it …”

Brian walked over to the corner of the wardroom and sat down on the couch across from the engineer. He looked at Benedetti.

“Well, that’s all true,” he said. “But I’m not part of some crowd in the colosseum holding out a thumbs down, either. I may be just a lieutenant and you’re a lieutenant commander, but I’m a department head in this ship just like you are. I’m a shipmate, Mr. Benedetti, not your enemy.”

The engineer looked at him for a long moment, rubbed his eyes, and then nodded his head.