The Lonely War (3 page)

Andrew glanced at Mitchell, searching for some kind of protection.

As crewmen rigged the hoist to haul the whaleboat aboard, Mitchell told Ogden, “Chief, issue these new men bunks and assign them to watches. I’ll interview them before lunch.”

“Aye, aye, sir. You men grab your shit and follow me.”

The chief glared at Grady and Andrew. He gestured with his head toward the bow and sauntered to the crew’s quarters under the forecastle deck. The men hoisted their gear and followed.

While Andrew balanced his seabag on his shoulder, he sneaked another glimpse at Mitchell. A shy grin lifted the ends of Andrew’s mouth. He felt a shimmer of adoration for the man without knowing precisely why. As he turned to follow his shipmates, the grin retreated and, reminding himself of survival rule number one, his body moved with a deliberate swagger.

Chapter Three

April 18, 1942—1000 hours

W
HILE
overseeing the stowing of the whaleboat, Mitchell heard a bellow reverberate from the forecastle that sounded vaguely like a wounded buffalo.

Chief Ogden popped through the open hatchway with his eyes blazing and his jaw locked, which happened, Mitchell knew, whenever he was faced with a situation that was not standard Navy protocol. A twenty-six-year chief, Ogden had served his entire career on destroyers. He was also a full-blood Shoshone. He was not the chief of his ancestral tribe but, because he was a chief petty officer, everyone aboard mockingly called him “Chief” or even “Big Chief.”

Mitchell stared at the whaleboat gliding over the rail. He held a mild disdain for Ogden’s propensity to exaggerate harmless issues into insurmountable obstacles. He hoped to avoid whatever problem had surfaced, so he let a long moment pass before he glanced back and felt himself nailed by the chief’s sanguinary gaze.

“What’s up, Chief?”

“Lieutenant, you gotta see this.”

The chief led Mitchell into the crew’s quarters, a dozen compartments under the forecastle deck that were arranged in honeycomb-like rows and connected by narrow passageways. Each compartment had bunks stacked five high on three bulkheads, and a double row of lockers covered the fourth wall.

As Mitchell entered the compartment, he sang out, “As you were,” before anyone could come to attention. The compartment reeked of sweat and moldy clothing and something else, something Mitchell felt more than smelled: hostility. The entire compartment seethed with testosterone-laced resentment. Several crewmen stood in a loose half circle, staring at Andrew Waters, who knelt on the deck with his back against his locker.

Light from a porthole, muted and steel-tinted, silvered the contents of Andrew’s seabag, which were spread over the deck: a teak statue of the Buddha seated in meditation, three orange robes, a stack of yellow silk undergarments, strings of prayer beads, an iron bell, a three-foot-long bamboo flute that was as thick and smooth as a King snake, and a stack of books, long and narrow, the likes of which Mitchell had never seen before.

Ogden rested his fists on his hips, scowling. “Where the hell is your Navy-issue gear and what the fuck is this shit?” He kicked the stack of undergarments across the deck.

“I can explain, sir,” Andrew said, gazing up at Mitchell. “There wasn’t room in my seabag for everything, so I left some things behind. I planned on buying more uniforms from the ship’s store.”

“What are these books?” Mitchell asked, after studying the religious articles for a time.

“Buddhist scriptures, sir.”

Mitchell felt the crew’s hostility level jump a dozen notches. He knelt at the edge of the pile, a few feet from Andrew. From that distance he could smell Andrew, an odor reminiscent of fresh-baked bread. The scent shielded him from the sour odor of the forecastle.

Mitchell stared at Andrew’s face. He flinched at the intensity of those eyes that gazed deeply into his own. The sunlight pouring through the porthole caused tiny golden flecks to sparkle within Andrew’s black pupils, giving off a soft, nearly imperceptible light. He inspected the face surrounding those eyes. A yellow stain clouded the flesh under the left eye, obviously from a blow a week ago. The right cheek had purple discoloration from more recent blows, and one side of his lower lip was raw and puffy, looking as if he had been smacked hard only a minute before Mitchell entered the compartment.

Mitchell was surprised that he had only now noticed this bruising. The face had a pleasing quality, delicate and finely boned.
But,
the officer thought,
this kid had been on the losing end of plenty of fights recently.

Mitchell noted that Andrew appeared relaxed, as if he had expected this confrontation and it was playing out exactly as he had planned. Andrew’s self-control seemed all the more amazing given the crew’s tense confusion.

The halo of calmness surrounding Andrew touched something within Mitchell. It seemed to bear his own signature in some way, reminding him of himself, or a part of himself he had forgotten. He couldn’t help liking the look of this kid with a beaten face and mysterious eyes.

He felt some stimulus form between them, a connection that was neither friendship nor sexual, but had attributes of both. He tried to analyze this feeling, wondering if this wasn’t a moment full of significance, in the hope that some meaning of his life, some epiphany, some poetry, would come to him, but it was beyond his understanding. He simply chalked it up to his old tendency of being drawn to wounded things, like the hawk with a broken wing he’d once mended, and his three-legged dog, Smoke, who had lost his front leg in a bear trap.

Looking down so as not to stare, Mitchell caressed the uneven binding of a scripture book while admiring the rough, handmade paper. He reached further, to a stack of Western-bound books, and noted the titles—Shakespeare’s
Tragedies
,
Moby Dick
,
The Iliad
, Plato’s
Symposium
,
The Analects of Confucius
, and Yeats’s complete works. Again he felt that nameless force ripple between them.

“You read more than scriptures.” Mitchell lifted the volume of Yeats’s poems, opened the cover to the index page, and scanned the table of contents. “I haven’t read Yeats since college.” He recognized several poem titles. “I’ll have to confiscate this evidence for a few days,” he said with a smirk, “and I’ll need to sequester these other books from time to time in order to make a proper judgment.”

Andrew looked up at the other sailors before focusing on Mitchell again. “I care not what the sailors say: all those dreadful thunder-stones, all that storm that blot out the day can but show that heaven yawns.”

Mitchell glanced up, staring into those dark eyes, now so bright. His lips parted but he couldn’t speak, not quite believing he was hearing a sailor quoting Yeats.

Andrew whispered, “I bring you with reverent hands the books of my numberless dreams.”

Mitchell remembered that line from one of his most cherished Yeats poems. He shook his head. All he had ever heard spewing from the crew were strings of four-letter words, some less vulgar than others. He smiled and winked at Andrew, who offered a shy grin. That grin seemed oddly complicated, disarming, and now his entire face, like his eyes, shimmered with life. It was hard, nearly impossible, to associate this young man with all the other rough and odious sailors aboard.

Mitchell stood. “Chief, this man has every right to practice his religion,” he said. “No harm done.”

Each bystander’s mouth dropped, except Hudson’s, because he gnashed his teeth.

The chief wagged his head. “This man needs dungarees and dress whites. We can’t have him running around naked. If he threw away his old uniforms, that’s destroying government property.” Ogden spit the charge with such force that the men around him retreated a step.

Mitchell kept his cool by mentally listing the important tasks he could be doing if the chief wasn’t such a drama hound. He turned to Andrew. “The
Pilgrim
is too small to carry clothing in the ship’s store. We carry ninety-eight sailors, five officers, and precious little storage room.” He glanced sideways at Ogden. “Chief, take him ashore and have the PX issue him a full complement of gear. We’ll withhold his pay until every last pair of skivvies is paid for in full.”

Mitchell winked at Andrew again. “And make sure they issue him a Bluejacket’s Manual so he can read about the proper care of government property.”

“Aye, aye, sir!” Ogden’s smile showed a full set of pearly teeth. Hudson visibly gloated. 

Mitchell asked if there were any other issues, and the chief shook his head no.

“Suh, I was wonderin’.” Grady Washington stepped forward. “Why was we issued cots if we have these bunks?”

Laughter erupted from the men. Mitchell explained. “Sailor, this steel bucket soaks up the sun’s heat all day, and by lights-out these quarters are a hundred and ten degrees of hot, holy hell. In fair weather, the men use cots to sleep on deck. You’ll be thankful for that cot by midnight.”

Mitchell pointed to Andrew’s pile on the deck. “Chief, see that this is squared away.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

A
NDREW
knew that, for any other crewmember, loss of pay meant deprivation of barrooms, brothels, and restaurants on their nights of liberty. The punishment inflicted on him would be devastating to any one of them, but the only things that made an impression on him were those secret winks that Mitchell had shared with him, and, of course, the officer’s unexpected kindness. For the first time since joining the Navy, Andrew had been studied and found acceptable.

Watching the lieutenant’s fingers stroke the book covers made Andrew feel as if his own face were being caressed. The words “has every right” and “no harm done” rang throughout his consciousness and made his head tingle. And Mitchell was taking something of Andrew’s that was so ingrained and loved by Andrew that it felt as if the officer were taking a sliver of his soul.

Andrew held himself utterly still, feeling the warmth radiating inside his chest. He had only truly loved two people in his life—Master Jung-Wei, the old monk who had run the boarding school in Saigon, and Clifford Baldrich, his boyhood companion—but he felt something like love blossoming again.
If this is indeed love
, he thought,
it has happened unexpectedly, like a flash of lightning from a bright, blue sky.
And for the first time, his love was intensified by the repeating note of sexual longing running through the joyful composition playing in his heart.

He resisted it, telling himself that it was impossible, that regardless of Mitchell’s understated sexiness and the man’s kindness, he couldn’t possibly love this man he had seen for the first time only an hour ago. But there was no denying the warmth in his chest. What else could it possibly be? What other feeling could crush him so utterly, so beautifully?

He was smitten, and as he surrendered to it, his entire being transformed: loneliness, fear, loss, all vanished, soaring off into a void. He pictured himself, face nuzzled against that sunburnt cheek, kissing the neck that smelled of sweat and talcum, the officer’s torso pressed against his belly, grinding.

These images made it clear he could no longer ignore or deny his homosexuality. Accepting his nature brought no shame or regret. He simply embraced his warm adoration for Mitchell that, for the moment at least, had chased away his overwhelming isolation.

D
URING
the time spent ashore at the PX and later on a tour of the ship with the other new men, Andrew hardly heard a word Chief Ogden said. He floated in a cloud of Lieutenant Mitchell.

Ogden guided them through officers’ country, which was the superstructure between the forecastle and the quarterdeck that included the communications shack, the navigation bridge, the fire control station, and the officers’ living quarters. While walking through the navigation bridge, the others stared down onto the forecastle deck, eyeing the two five-inch gun turrets with their twenty-foot barrels pointing out to sea, but Andrew saw only Mitchell, who leaned over the chart table, scribbling on a notepad.

Andrew inched toward the officer, close enough to once again catch a whiff of sweat-moistened skin lingering under the pleasant odor of talcum powder. His head spun from a rush of emotion jolting up his spine. He wanted more than anything to caress that sunburnt cheek. His hand drifted toward Mitchell, but he stopped himself and quickly turned to face the others.

Andrew realized that for him to feel complete, he must somehow make the officer return his love. He was aware, of course, that he couldn’t seduce Mitchell, and that the officer would never feel the sexual longing that he felt. But he had experienced an intense connection when they were staring, eye to eye, in the forecastle, and he was confident that Mitchell had felt it too. He vowed to somehow make this officer care for him.
That will be enough,
he thought. He would allow himself to love this man entirely, if only the officer returned some measure of affection.

He was playing with fire, he knew. Buddhist teachings state that the flame of human suffering always begins with the spark of desire; his desire for Mitchell would eventually build into a blaze of anguish. But he was willing to accept that future pain so he could momentarily enjoy this delicious rush of love and longing.

The main problem with his quest, he realized, was the difficulty in creating an intimate friendship with an officer. The Navy maintains a barrier between the ranks of commissioned officers and enlisted men that is more formidable than tempered steel. To the enlisted man, officers are the unquestionable authority aboard ship and must be obeyed even to the death. In order to keep personal feelings from affecting the officer while giving a difficult order to a crewmember, or a crewmember’s personal feelings from getting in the way of following such an order, strict limits were placed on exchanges between ranks in order to keep those personal feeling from developing in the first place. Exchanges between officers and enlisted men were limited to the business and functioning of the ship. Personal banter of any kind was taboo. This device operated constantly, on ship or ashore, in battle and out.