The Edge of Honor (15 page)

“Yeah. Shit. I apologize, Holcomb—Brian. I put you in the same category as Austin, and you’re right, you don’t rate that. And call me Vince, for Chrissakes. You makin’ coffee?”

“It’s just started.”

Benedetti slumped farther into the chair and continued to rub his face with his hands. “What a way to start a fucking cruise.” He sighed.

“WESTPAC is supposed to be fun.”

They sat there in the semidarkness. Brian suddenly realized that he, too, was very tired. Vivid memories of standing in Combat, listening to enemy artillery shells exploding in the water and raining steel fragments against the ship’s side, the palpable anguish in Berkeley, and the carmine horrors of Berkeley’s battle-dressing station flooded his mind. Fun?

“I’ve heard some scuttlebutt,” Brian said.

“Yeah, like?”

“That we lost the load because some guy was high on dope. I’m sure you’re sick of rehashing this, but …”

Benedetti stopped rubbing his face and peered at Brian through his fingers. For an instant, Brian saw a flare of what looked like alarm in the engineer’s eyes, but then it was gone, replaced by a look of resignation.

“Well, Brian, I’ll tell you what. Officially, that’s kinda hard to say.

Especially in the good ole J. B. Hood. We were doing twenty-seven knots, which is max load for two-boiler ops. You know we got four main holes—fire room, engine room, fire room, engine room. Two propeller shafts, one from each engine room. Just like a tin can, only bigger. We were split out, each shaft being driven by its own boiler-engine room set. We lost One A boiler forward because number-one automatic-combustion-control air compressor tripped off the line in One Fire Room.

Nobody knows why. It just tripped off. Compressors do that. Main Control called for number two ACC compressor to be cross-countered to supply both fire rooms.

Should’ve been no big deal. Open two valves in Two Fire Room and you’re cross-connected. But the BT Two in Two Fire Room got the valves wrong.

He opened one valve in the cross-connect bank. The other valve he opened was the ACC system bleed-down valve. Net result was that all the control air bled to the bilges, so then we lost Two B boiler about a minute later.”

“Couldn’t they have taken the boilers in hand?” asked Brian, remembering his Destroyer School engineering course.

Benedetti snorted. “At twenty-seven knots? You gotta be kidding. The only two guys in the ship can operate a twelve-hundred-psi plant in manual at that speed are the BT chiefs, and they would have had to be on the console, hands-on, the moment it happened. Besides, it shouldn’t have been necessary. One ACC compressor can supply both fire rooms, no sweat. Long as you get the air to the ACC systems and not to the rucking bilges.”

‘ This was an E-Five? A petty officer?”

“Yeah. BT Two Dwyer Gallagher. You know him?”

“Hell, I still don’t know everybody in my own department.”

“Yeah. Well, he’s one of my B Division badasses. Red hair, red beard, red face, red motorcycle, and perpetual red ass. My senior BT chief, Tony Fontana, was down in Two Firehouse when it all went down. He got to the lower level about a minute after they pulled fires on Two B and everything went hot and dark. Said he found Gallagher with a shit-eating grin on his face, lookin’ at a feed pump. Said Gallagher was stoned out of his gourd.

Shined his flashlight in the fat fuck’s face. Pupils big as pennies.

Said he yelled at him but that Gallagher just sat down on a bale of rags and giggled like a fucking girl.

He’s lucky Fontana didn’t kill him right then and there. I probably would have.”

“You tell the captain this?”

“I told the XO. You gotta understand something here.

The Old Man, all these guys are like his kids, see? His kids don’t get high, fuck up the works. They ‘make mistakes,’ just like children. You tell him something like this, he just shakes his head, gives you that patient, ‘you’re letting me down’ smile, and says, ‘Vince, Vince, you’ve got it wrong. Must have. These men are good men. They work hard under hellish conditions in those fire rooms. Hundred-ten-degree heat down there when we’re in the tropics. Six on, six off, weeks on end. They get bone-tired. They make mistakes. We all make mistakes.”

” Benedetti sighed and rubbed his eyes again. “Makes you feel like you’re some kinda shitheel, and the hell of it, he doesn’t mean it that way. It’s just that he’s a nice old man, still living in the old Navy, whatever the hell that is. Believes the best of everybody. You’ll find out the first time one of your stars fucks up. He’ll give you a fatherly lecture and you’ll crawl outta that cabin ashamed of yourself for picking on his kids.”

“He won’t admit that the ship has a drug problem?

Hell, every ship in the fleet has a drug problem. What’s he scared of?”

“Scared? Naw, I don’t think he lacks for courage—he used to be in the bomb squad, you know, the EOD guys, when he was a white hat. Still carries his ‘instruments’ around with him; showed us all one night how you take apart an unexploded bomb. Scared me just to listen to him.

That’s where he got that Navy Cross—something to do with a bomb on a ship. No, it’s more a question of righteousness. If it ever penetrated that a lot of his kids were doin’ marijuana or hashish on board, off watch, on watch, hell, at GQ, I think he’d just wail and melt down like that witch in The Wizard of Oz.”

“The XO. Tell me the XO knows the score, right?”

“The XO? Hell yes. He nails the bastards whenever he can, but it’s all done off the books. Gets some of the bigger guys in the chiefs’ mess to have little ‘talks’ with any doper he catches or even suspects. Tries to terrorize the little shits into knocking it off. Your chief bosun is part of that scene. Terrorize me, I had to go ‘talk’ to Martinez back in after steering. But they don’t go to captain’s mast.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because—and I don’t know this; I just think this is how it is—the Old Man just won’t hear it. I think what happens is that the XO is shielding him from this shit.

Says he’s the best CO we’re ever going to see on a ship like this. And he’s right. Usually these PIRAZ ships get up-and-coming crown princes—you know, guys on their way to flag rank. I don’t know how Captain Huntingdon got Hood, except everybody in the Navy seems to like the guy. You’ll never meet a kinder, nicer four-striper in the Navy.

Everybody knows he’ll never make admiral— he’s too old. So this is it; this is his big command. And I gotta admit, Huntington’ll do anything for his people: go up against the Bureau, get the orders they want, give ‘em special leave—you name it. There are people in this ship who worship the Old Man. I think the XO is trying to make sure nothing happens to spoil it for him.”

“But what’s he doing to his ship?”

Benedetti gave him a weary smile. “Ah, well. You got a lookee-see at that today, didn’t you? What do they say in country—Sin loil Sorry about that, USS Berkeley. I

gotta tell you, I don’t want to be in port with Berkeley for awhile.”

“That’s what Chief Martinez said. But isn’t Hood going to get some static over what happened today?”

“I don’t think so. You heard the Old Man. I think the basic decision to send a PIRAZ ship to the gun line is going to be questioned. That aviator admiral on Yankee Station is gonna have to put a lid on that, which means he can’t then jump in Hood’s shit. The chain of command in this war has elevated second-guessing the frontline troops to an art form.”

Benedetti leaned back in his chair. Brian got up to check on the coffee.

He returned with two mugs and handed Benedetti one before sitting down.

The engineer sipped his coffee noisily for a minute before continuing.

“There’s another reason why we have to go easy on the drugs bit. It’s the Bureau of Personnel’s little catch twenty-two.”

“I don’t think I want to hear this.”

“You don’t, but you should. The no-replacements catch. See, you bring a guy up on charges of drug use aboard ship, CO finds him guilty at mast, you gotta discharge his ass. Nothing wrong with that, is there? Let the dopers get back to the streets, drop acid, do speed, go find Alice in the Sky with Diamonds, and sing protest songs with the rest of the longhaired, creeping Jesus, hippy freaks. ‘Cept for one little ‘oh by the fucking way’: You don’t get a replacement for that guy you just discharged. Oh, one day you will, maybe six, seven months from now. But for right now, you drum a BT Two or an RD Three or an FT Two out the main gates, you’re one down on the watch bill, pal, which, if you haven’t noticed, is already port and starboard, six on, six off.

They call it an unplanned loss. Now, you know every ship in PACFLEET is undermanned. In some rates, like boiler tender, we’re at like sixty percent. All of which the XO makes perfectly clear to you when you’re ready to hang one of these dopers.”

Brian nodded his head. “I remember having to send guys from Decatur to the PACFLEET. You think Hood is undermanned, you ought to see the LANTFLEET ships.

Some of the LANTFLEET ships don’t have enough people even to get under way.”

“Yeah, I know, but LANTFLEET doesn’t do shit ‘cept go to NATO cocktail parties and play boogabooga with Russian subs. Even with the involuntary transfers out here, there’re still not enough guys to go around.

So, you shitcan a guy, you’ll feel it on the watch bill pretty quick.”

Brian nodded. His division officers had briefed him on the manning situation on his first day. There were plenty of deck seamen, but when it came to fire-control technicians, guided-missile repair techs, and even gunner’s mates, Hood was averaging only 70 to 75 percent of complement. A drug hit would hurt Weapons Department just about as hard as it would Engineering.

“Chief Martinez implied drugs were not confined to the Engineering Department,” he said.

Benedetti laughed—an unpleasant sound. ” ‘Implied,” did he? You better Hong Kong fucking believe that, shipmate. Your deck, missiles, and sonar gangs are as dirty as my M, B, and Auxiliary divisions. The gunner’s mates, for some reason, won’t tolerate it. They’re all gung ho, go around acting like Marines. Weight lifters, short hair, no beards.

You’ve seen ‘em. Good shit. Chief Vanhorn’s the good guy behind that.

Chief Jackson, the Sheriff, he used to be a gunner’s mate. But otherwise, take a tour topside between taps and midnight, see what it smells like out there on the weather decks.”

“Good guy? You make it sound like we have a good guys and bad guys crew, some kind of us-against-them situation here.”

Benedetti laughed again. “I don’t believe you said that. Where you been, for Chrissakes? This is the LANTFLEET Navy talking? Man, I gotta get me some orders to LANTFLEET, I can see that. Must be nice out there in never-never land.”

Brian frowned in sudden embarrassment. Was he being that naive? Had this drug shit been going on in Decatur during his first department head tour? Was his ignorance about what was going on below decks somehow behind those not-so-good fitness reports? Benedetti was watching him.

“Hey, man,” Benedetti said gently, “you gotta wise up. These days, there’re three kindsa people in every ship. There’s the doper, usually an E-Five or below enlisted type, any division you want to name, does his job but also does his dope and doesn’t see anything wrong with it.

Knows he can get his ass kicked if he gets caught, but that’s just cops-and-robbers shit—same as being in high school. But he doesn’t see anything wrong with going up on deck at night and smoking a joint from time to time. Takes the edge off, you know? Relieves the boredom, the fatigue. Like you and me having a couple of shooters over at the club after a long day at the pier.”

“Except he’s intoxicated aboard ship,” Brian. “Anything happens, a fire, a steam leak, you’ve got a doper responding to it.”

“Bingo. But, see, that’s lifer talk, you’re thinking about the ship.

Thinking about the ship, that comes with seniority, with experience, after you’ve seen a thing or two, and after you make a commitment to a Navy career.

Then the ship becomes important. To the dopers, they’re just doing time in the Navy—beats doing time in the mud and the blood in country, right? They don’t give a rat’s ass about the ship. That’s for us khaki to worry about.”

Benedetti sat back, sipped some more coffee, fished in his shirt pocket for a cigarette, and lighted up, blowing a cloud of smoke at the overhead.

“Then there’re the good guys, officers, CPOs, most, not all, of the first class POs. Comes to dope on the ship, the good guys’re hell on wheels. Get a whiff of marijuana smoke, they round up the nearest master-at-arms and go chase it down, see if they can catch the little fuck. You met Chief Jackson, the Sheriff? He’s a fanatic about it, looks for dopers in every fan room. Stays up nights and patrols the decks, pops up like fuckin’ Houdini in unexpected places, trying to catch ‘em.”

“What happens when he does?”

“He arranges a visitation from Jesus.”

“What!”

Benedetti grinned. “Yeah, Louis Jesus Maria Martinez—your chief boats.” Benedetti chuckled. “First, he lays Injun shit on ‘em. You know, steps outta nowhere when the guy’s alone in a passageway, shoots him the evil eye, or gets somebody else to get the asshole on the phone, then talks scary to him. Tells him he’s got bad medicine, that the chicken guts and the bones say the guy’s gonna have bad luck real soon. Then the guy usually does have some bad luck: He falls down a ladder, trips into a bulkhead, bangs his face up somehow, breaks an arm, you know.”

“But that’s … well, illegal.”

“So’s doin’ dopeon one of Her Majesty’s ships of war, Brian. And if you don’t have the option of taking the guy to mast and putting his useless ass on the beach with the rest of those fucked-up civilians out there, you gotta do something, right?”

“You said there were three kinds of people.”

“Yeah. The third kind’s the one that pisses me off, and we got some of those up and down the chain of command.

The third kind just sorta goes along. I think his highness, the Count of Monte Austin, is one. These are the guys who say, Look, probably thirty to forty percent of the enlisted people are doing marijuana or hashish on an occasional basis. There are officers in the wardroom who would do it, except they’re smart enough to see the consequences. Now, these people were doing it before they came into the Navy and they’re going to resume doing it when they’re out of the Navy. They don’t see that it’s a big deal. Most of them are doing it off watch, after hours. Okay, it’s illegal, it’s risky if some bad shit goes down, and it’d be better for everybody if they didn’t. But if we hassle ‘em, bust ‘em, throw ‘em out, all we do is screw ourselves, because we run out of crew pretty quick.