The Ensign Locker

A Novel

JJ Zerr

ISBN: 9781450243858

Author’s Notes

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity between the characters and any real person is coincidental and not intended by the author. Events are likewise fictitious. Ship names in the story are also contrived.

Much of this story takes place aboard USS Manfred, a US Navy destroyer. On the ship, in a sense, you cease to be a person, and you become the position you hold. You are not Lieutenant Hank Allman, the operations officer; you are the Ops O. The chief engineer is the Cheng, and the weapons department head is the Gun Boss. The navigation officer is Gator, or the Gator. Everyone aboard calls these officers by those abbreviated job titles. The department heads think of themselves that way as well. The executive officer, XO, is treated that way as well. But more than all the others, the commanding officer takes this assumption of his position into his persona. He is the CO, the Captain (even though his rank is commander), and the Skipper. I have chosen to capitalize the position names of the department heads and commanding officer to reflect this notion. It is reflective of how the others on the ship view their CO, XO, and department heads.

To those who served.

Prologue

With Camelot begun,

Half done, the decade’s been undone.

Brang, brang. Rude, harsh. A bright light shone high and to my right. Light shouldn’t come from there. Brang, brang. My heart pounded wham, wham just like the ship’s guns. Brang, brang. In the darkness, I reached up for the switch to my bunk light, couldn’t find it, and panicked. Brang, brang.

Not on the ship. Home. 

I felt for the bedside lamp and knocked it to the floor. The phone was on Teresa’s side of the bed.

“Mr. Zachery. Mr. Zachery. Are you awake, sir?”

“Sorry. Just a moment, please.”

I turned on the lamp on Teresa’s side of the bed and untangled myself from the bedclothes. In a flash, it all flooded back. The ship had come in on Saturday morning and anchored across from the seaplane ramps on the east side of the North Island Naval Air Station. Rose Herbert, a friend from our time at Purdue, met me and drove me home. In the afternoon I drove Teresa to Balboa Naval Hospital. Her doctor was going to induce labor today, Sunday, at 1300. But it was 0507. 

Teresa!

“What’s wrong? Is there something wrong with Teresa?”

“Mr. Zachery, I’m a nurse at Balboa. The doctor wanted me to call you. We need you in at the hospital right away, please. We need you to sign a surgery release form.”

“Surgery? What are you talking about? Teresa is having a baby. She isn’t having surgery.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but there isn’t time to argue this. We’re going to start prepping Mrs. Zachery for an emergency C-section very shortly. The doctor would like you to come in, as quickly as you can get here, and sign the surgery release form. So will you please come to the hospital, sir?”

I probably would have gotten dressed more quickly if I had just stood still, but I tried to pull my pants on as I moved toward the door. I tucked my shirttail in just before I got to the car. During the drive to the hospital I kept inching the speed over ninety, but I was fortunate. The highway patrol was probably doing shift change. 

When I got to the hospital I ran frantically around the hallways, trying to follow the nurses’ directions. Finally, I found Teresa. She was by herself, on her right side on a wheeled gurney with no side-rails, parked next to the wall in a hallway. Her eyes were closed. She was moaning. There was an IV needle taped to the back of her left hand. Dried white spittle coated her lips. Her face was almost as white as the pillow under her head, and her hair was a mess. It was darker than normal and in stringy tendrils, as if she had washed her hair and not dried it. There was a strange sweat smell on her. Teresa didn’t sweat. That thought scared me the most.

Holy Mary, mother of God, please don’t let the fact that I am a sinner—

“Teresa, can you hear me?”

She opened her eyes, looked up at me, and a smile flickered across her face. It went out as she moaned again. 

“Sorry,” she said.

“Mr. Zachery, you need to sign this.” A tall woman in a white uniform with lieutenant stripes on her shoulder boards held out a clipboard with a black government ballpoint pen under the clip. I hadn’t heard her come up behind us.

“It’s a surgery release form. It says you agree that Mrs. Zachery should have a C-section. Mrs. Zachery could only put an ‘X’ on the form, and the doctor wants a signature.”

I grabbed the clipboard, took the pen, and signed the form. A tear dropped onto my Jon, the fine line of black ink becoming blurry and jagged. The nurse took the clipboard, gave me a look, pulled a Kleenex out of a pocket, and blotted the wet spot. Then she turned and started to walk away.

“Lieutenant, uh, Nurse, what’s going on? What’s going to happen to Teresa?”

“I have to get this to the doctor. Someone will be out shortly,” she said over her shoulder.

The nurse disappeared through spring-loaded doors. Teresa moaned, and I put my hand on her shoulder. With all the fear coursing through me, the gesture was probably not much of a comfort. I was beginning to get angry. I didn’t know what was going on. It wasn’t clear what they were doing to help Teresa. And, where the Sam Hill was everybody?

“I’m going to find somebody, Teresa. I’ll be right back.”

I started toward the doors where the nurse had gone, when the left of the double doors swung open, and two young men in white Navy enlisted uniforms entered the hallway.

“Are you Mr. Zachery?” the second-class petty officer asked. I nodded. “Okay, sir. We have to take your wife to another building. They do all the surgeries there. You can ride with us in the ambulance.”

The two petty officers acted as if nothing extraordinary was going on. How could a person get so used to something like this? It was a short ride, a half city block at best, but there were bumps in the road, and at each one Teresa moaned and squeezed my hand with a strength that was amazing. In a way, it pleased me that she hurt my hand. Maybe that would make up for me not being there with her through the night. We stopped in front of a new building. The building we’d just left, especially on the inside, looked as if it had been on duty since the Second World War. The two petty officers pulled the gurney out of the ambulance. The wheels dropped and clicked into place, and they whisked Teresa inside. 

I was left standing in a hallway looking at the double doors to surgery. It felt as if I had been watching a movie playing about ten times faster than normal speed. Now, the first reel had played out. 

I pictured myself in the car. My face was illuminated by light from the instrument panel. I was scared to death for Teresa. At the hospital, there was the search for Teresa, and, finally, the ambulance ride, which had seemed ridiculously short. With each bump, Teresa moaned and crushed my hand. Then, we were in the new building, and they took Teresa through another set of double doors.

The surgery building looked considerably newer than the building we had just left, but the waiting room accommodations were not much more than an afterthought, with just a row of cushioned benches along one wall of the hallway. I sat, looked back at the closed double doors, looked at my watch, stood up, looked up and down the deserted hallway, and then sat down again. I tried to imagine the ordeal Teresa had endured while I had slept. The way she looked, obviously she had been through something massively traumatic. I didn’t feel good about letting her go through it alone, but deep inside me, I was glad I was not a woman. I didn’t know if I would have been able to handle what she had been through last night.

***  ***  ***

God, what a month! It started going bad the day I checked aboard my destroyer, USS Manfred. I didn’t even make it across the quarterdeck before it started. 4 January 1966, 0619. While the petty officer of the watch was logging me in, the officer of the deck, a hulking chief petty officer, was looking down his nose at me. I didn’t find out what that was all about for a couple of days. Then, my boss, the operations officer, turned out to be worse than my Grandpa Zachery. Grandpa said if you sleep till the rooster wakes you, it’s the same as denying God three times. The Ops O worshiped the same one-person god grandpa did: work. According to the Ops O, the only productive part of the day is 0430 to 0600.

Then, when I spent five minutes with the Executive Officer, the XO, just as I was leaving, he asked if I needed anything. I asked the XO if I could take leave the last week in January, when the ship was going to be at sea. I had intended to ask the Ops O about it, but I hadn’t had the chance yet. That got me two lectures, one from the XO and another from the Ops O, on the chain of command. The Ops O also gave me a lecture on the ship’s schedule. We were scheduled to deploy to the Vietnam combat zone in May, and each day at sea was a precious training opportunity, not to be squandered for frivolous things, like a wife having a baby. I would not be on leave when the ship went to sea.

To cap off that first day, just before I left the ship for the evening, I almost got into a fight with one of the other ensigns aboard, Ensign Edgar Chalmers. He is an Academy graduate, and he seems to think he needs a personal plebe whipping boy.

Also that first day I met Electronics Technician Chief Petty Officer Fargo. He was the E Division CPO, and I was E Division officer. But he looked at me much the same way the officer of the deck, the OOD, had. At the end of my third day aboard, I pulled Chief Fargo aside. I told him I didn’t care what he thought about me, but I wasn’t going to have him looking down his nose at me anymore. Since then, I wouldn’t say we have a good relationship, but he and I have learned how to work with each other.

Last Monday morning we went to sea. Teresa’s due date had been Wednesday, but all that had happened on Wednesday was that the ship ran into a storm and I got seasick. I had gotten seasick when I was enlisted. Back then, on my first ship, after my third bout of seasickness, my division CPO considered me to be useless. When I got to Manfred, I had hoped I’d outgrown it, but in addition to being the junior ensign aboard my ship, I had to suffer through seasickness as well. Ensigns aboard Manfred get a nickname, and mine is now Two Buckets.

I’d been embarrassed twice on the bridge. Both times I had the conn, responsibility for driving the ship, and the CO wanted the ship maneuvered in a timely manner. However, I had hesitated as I tried to figure out the right orders to give to the helmsman, and the CO had ordered the OOD to “Hop to it and to take the conn.”

The Navy’s way of teaching sometimes seemed to consist of tying concrete blocks around your waist, tossing you in the deep end, and saying “Swim, damn you.”

***  ***  ***

But we’d come back into port Saturday morning, and it looked like I would be here when Teresa had our baby. Finally, out of the whole rotten month, something was going to work out. That’s what I’d been thinking when I fell asleep last night. Now, the day we had looked forward to was here, but now there was just that set of double doors to surgery. Double doors. I was beginning to hate the darned things.

My brain was trying to pray, and I was trying to keep it from doing that. It seemed as if everything I’d prayed for this month had turned out the other way. Maybe God had given me more blessings than I was entitled to have in a lifetime, and maybe if my brain just didn’t call attention to this situation here, He wouldn’t notice, and maybe just one more blessing could slip through.

I thought about our trip across country. The highway was still two-lane Route 66 in some stretches. I could see the sun-baked desert and red mesas and the blue sky that made it feel like you could see the whole top half of the earth. In the middle of nowhere, I could see the service station. Behind a huge Whiting sign was almost a lean-to shed just big enough for a cash register and a Coke machine. Tumbleweeds piled up against the back of the shed-office, higher than the outhouse-sized structure and reaching as high as the bottom of the overly large sign. And, I could see Teresa sitting across from me, knitting needles going clickety-click. She was sitting with her legs folded up under her, like a girl scout at a campfire. I told her she should put her legs together or the baby would fall out. She had laughed and kept on knitting.

That had been just six weeks ago, and if this had happened then, if Teresa had gone into labor during the trip with nothing but a Whiting gas station for sixty miles … I had been pacing, and my knees went suddenly weak. I sat on the padded benches in the hall that passed as a waiting room and looked at the double doors to surgery.

I have no idea how long I sat there before I heard a bump at the double doors to surgery. A nurse was backing out of the door pulling a small aluminum-wheeled cart behind her. She was still in scrubs, but without the mask or the hat, and she had a raincoat over the surgery uniform. The cart had a clear plastic basket on top, and there was a baby in the basket. Halfway to me, and just at the door to ambulance entrance, she stopped the cart.

“Congratulations, Mr. Zachery,” the redheaded nurse was smiling. “Would you like to say hello to your daughter?”

I jumped up and started toward her. “How’s my wife?”

The manufactured smile blinked off. “They are finishing up after the delivery.”

“But is she okay?”

“I’m sorry, sir. You have to wait for the doctor. I need to get your daughter in the ambulance and up to the other building.” She started moving toward the door.

“Wait.” 

I looked at the tiny doll. She was wearing a little pink cap. Her eyes were closed.  The lips were so distinctly and perfectly formed. They are like Teresa’s. There was something of Teresa’s father in the tiny face. And then the nurse wheeled her away.

Through the glass doors, I saw the ambulance pull away and take our daughter to the main hospital building. Why wouldn’t she tell me about Teresa? She acted funny when I asked. I looked back at the double doors to surgery. Teresa is dead. And I have a daughter. What do I do now? Teresa would know; I don’t. I don’t remember going back to the bench, but I guess I did. That’s where I was when the doctor came through the center of the double doors. I sprang up off the bench and met him in front of the ambulance entrance doors.

The doctor was a little taller than me, probably in his thirties. He had a fair complexion and reddish tinged brown hair. His mask was down around his neck. I looked to see if there was blood on his scrubs.

“Mr. Zachery, your wife is okay. She has had a tough time of it, though. She went into labor last night, but she was too small to deliver your nine-pound daughter. When we gave her the spinal—that’s the preferred anesthesia—it didn’t take with her, so we had to give her a general. She will be in recovery for a couple of hours. Then you’ll be able to see her.”

“Oh Lord, Doc.” 

My knees got weak, but then a lightning bolt of anger exploded in my brain.  

The doctor reached out for my arm. “You okay, Mr. Zachery?”

I took a step back, and I waved his hand away. “I was worried. When the nurse wouldn’t tell me, I thought …” I couldn’t even say the words.

“Sorry, but we have to do business this way. Your wife will be fine.” 

Water had leaked out of my right eye. I looked at my hands. They were clenched into fists. When I unclenched them, all my anger, energy, and strength flooded down out of my brain, down through my trunk, through my legs, and out through the soles of my shoes and into the tile floor. I reached up and wiped the water from under my eye with the back of my index finger.

“Mr. Zachery, perhaps the best thing for you to do is to go home and clean yourself up a bit. It will take a couple of hours before she comes out of recovery.  You don’t want to scare your wife when you see her, do you?”

I hadn’t thought about how I must look. Teresa could sleep all night and get up with her hair all in place. Me, Teresa says I get bed head by putting the pillowcase on the pillow. I shook my head, and the doctor turned and started back toward surgery.

“Doc, wait.” But the doors had closed behind him. I wished I had thanked him. I’d been too angry, though. I had been angry that they hadn’t called when Teresa had gone into labor, angry that I’d found her alone in the hallway, angry that no one would tell me what was going on, angry that it didn’t seem as if anyone were helping her. I had wanted to hit someone. For a moment, I’d wanted to hit that doctor.

***  ***  ***

I didn’t go back to the apartment; I went out to the ship to see the Ops O. I was sure he’d let me take leave after what had just happened. I was wrong. He started asking questions, and after I fumbled with an answer, he’d make a statement.

“When are visiting hours?”

“Well, uh, two to four and seven to nine.”

“Coupla’ hours a day. When will she come home?”

“Monday, a week from tomorrow, sir.”

“So she isn’t coming home from the hospital till after we get back in. What are you going to be able to do for her?”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“So pretty much nothing.”

He fixed me with his black eyes. “We have this week at sea; then you are going to be gone for almost eight weeks of school. After you are done with school, you will only have two more weeks with us at sea before we deploy in May. Or, perhaps you learned everything you need to know last week?”

His questions seemed reasonable, but my answers sounded stupid and foolish, even to me. Last week, I wasn’t sure I’d learned anything last week. It seemed as if all I had done was to expose how much I didn’t know. I was embarrassed and sweating, and I turned the doorknob to let myself out of his room.

“Jon.”

I stopped with one foot in the passageway outside his room, but I didn’t turn around.

“You can ask the XO if you want.”

“There’s stuff I have to do. I’ll be back before taps.” I pulled the door closed behind me.

“Jon,” the Ops O said, but I didn’t stop. I had to move. I had to get away from him.

***  ***  ***

I went back to the apartment, keeping to the speed limit plus five. After cleaning up and getting dressed, Rose Herbert and I drove to the hospital for afternoon visiting hours. Rose had called and Teresa was supposed to be in her room by then. As we left Chula Vista, I told Rose that I had tried to get leave but that my boss had turned me down. Rose had been my bridge partner quite often at Purdue, and we got along pretty well. But her husband, Fred, a classmate of mine from Purdue, said once that Rose had had a sympathectomy.

“Zachery, you’re the nicest guy I know.” She glanced at me quickly; then she turned back to the road. “Not too dumb. Halfway good looking. But you piss all that away when you whine.” Sometimes with Rose, looking out the window was better than conversation.

We were in the flat stretch of I-5 and National City and the Mile of Cars was off to the right.

Rose and Fred came from the coal country of West Virginia. Fred had a troubled youth, and at age seventeen a judge offered him the choice of the military service or jail. Fred chose the Navy. Rose started hitchhiking to follow Fred to San Diego where he was going to boot camp. She got a ride all the way to Phoenix with a Mayflower van, and thumbed the rest of the way. A Mexican gardener with a beat-up, twenty-year-old pick-up found her asleep on the sand next to a trash barrel on Silver Strand Beach. He was stopping to check the trash barrels on his way back to Tijuana from Coronado. Rose stayed with his family for a week.

Rose is five feet, two inches tall and 105 pounds, but you do not want her to hear you call a Mexican a beaner, a greaser, or a wetback.

Rose got a letter to Fred when he was five weeks into the nine-week boot camp program. With the help of a chaplain, Fred got a credit union loan and Rose was able to set herself up in a cheap apartment. After Fred completed boot camp, he married Rose. Fred had some Navy schools to attend, and then at his first duty station, Rose went to nursing school. She and Teresa met at the hospital in Lafayette, Indiana, while Fred and I were attending Purdue. Soft, light, bright Teresa and hard, heavy, cloudy Rose became the best of friends.

In the afternoon sun, Balboa Hospital stood on the heights in front of us. Pink stucco. Who would paint a Navy hospital pink? Did they have guys from the brig paint it, and the brig guys decided to play a joke? I humphed.

“What?” Rose asked.

I thought about not saying anything, but then went ahead. “I don’t know whether to be angry at the hospital or grateful that they saved Teresa’s life.”

“Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for our idiot, and please keep me from turning this into the hour of his death. Amen. What the hell do you expect, Jon? It’s a hospital. Everybody who works up there is just like you and me. Overworked, underpaid, and nobody appreciates a goddamned thing we do. They have shitty bosses, and the most pleasant thing they do all day is empty a bedpan.

“Teresa went into labor not too long after visiting hours last night. A Saturday. The nurses weren’t going to call the doctor until she was dilated a certain amount. They got stuff to do besides watching Teresa. They had two other births during the night. So finally somebody went to check on her, realized what was going on, said ‘Holy shit,’ and then things start happening.

“That hospital you just snorted at may not have done everything perfectly. But they sure as hell did a lot better than close enough for government work, which is what the rest of the Navy considers outstanding performance.”

“I think they should have called me sooner.”

Rose sighed. “Let’s just hope your daughter inherited her mother’s brains.”

***  ***  ***

Even as an ensign, you can be the senior guy sometimes. I was senior on the boat from Fleet Landing, so I got to disembark first.

As I stepped onto the quarterdeck and saluted the OOD, the petty officer of the watch pulled the microphone to the ship’s announcing system, the 1MC, from the holder on the bulkhead. “Taps, taps. Lights out. All hands turn into your bunks. The smoking lamp is out in all berthing spaces. Now taps.”

“Mr. Z, got a minute?” Chief Petitte was the OOD and he motioned to me to follow him to the starboard side.

Once we were clear of the quarterdeck, the chief turned. “Understand your wife had a tough time of it this morning, Mr. Z. Is she okay?”

He sounded genuinely concerned. “Yes, Chief. But she did have a rough night and rough morning. When I got to the hospital this morning, the way she looked, it scared the crap out of me.” Once my mouth got going, I felt as if it wanted to take off and do a massive verbal dump on the chief. But this was the first civil word I’d heard from Chief Petitte, or any of the chiefs for that matter. Besides, a big confessional just didn’t seem like the right thing to do. “The doctors and nurses at Balboa, they got her taken care of. She is tired from the whole ordeal, but she was doing pretty well when I said goodbye to her at 2100. Sure glad we got back into port so I could see her with the baby.”

“Glad it worked out, and congrats, Mr. Papa.”

“Seems like you wait for it forever, but when it gets here, it still takes awhile to get used to that notion, being a daddy, I mean.”

“Glad Mrs. Z. is okay.”

“Thanks, Chief. Thanks very much.”

As I started up the port side, the boat revved into a full-throated, bubbly grumble, pulled away from the side of the ship, and headed back toward the lights of San Diego.

I passed through the wardroom, walked by the XO’s closed door, and descended the ladder to the second deck. It was pitch black inside the ensign locker. I left the door open so that I got a little illumination from the red light in the passageway, and I inched forward until I came to my bunk and turned the bunk light on.

Just inside the door, there was a two-bunk stack to either side. The two top bunks were occupied. Ensign Dennis Macklin, nicknamed Cowboy, was in the bunk to starboard. Ensign William Stewart, called Dormant because he seemed to sleep a lot, was in the top portside bunk. Dormant was making the phwoo sound he makes when he exhales. Ensign Carl Lehr was in the bunk under Dormant. Carl is the senior ensign and as such is called the Bull Ensign, but he also has a nickname. His nickname was Almost, for almost normal. The other ensign, Edgar Chalmers, wasn’t back yet, and didn’t have to be until 0400. So I thought he might not show up until then.

Just forward of the stacked bunks was a grey metal chassis with drawers and a fold-down lid to make a desk. Edgar, by the way, was called Admiral Ensign. He was the only Academy graduate in the locker, and seemed to be bucking to make admiral from the moment he checked aboard. His father was a retired admiral.

Just forward of the grey chassis was a row of five, three-feet high aluminum lockers. My bunk was above the lockers.

There are two rules in the ensign locker: the junior guy doesn’t use the fold-down desk, and everybody is in his bunk as much as possible to make room for people to move. I wasn’t feeling too concerned with Navy rules at the moment, and besides, everyone was asleep. After grabbing my stationary box from the angle iron next to my bunk, I folded down the lid to make the desk.

Dearest Teresa,

When I first went into the Navy, I wrote to you every night because it was a way to try to hang onto you. I was afraid I would lose you, that you wouldn’t wait for me, that I’d get a Dear John letter like everybody else seemed to get. But tonight, I need to write to you. I NEED to, or I know I won’t sleep, and tomorrow my heart will still be filled with all the stuff boiling around inside.

First, I am so glad you met Rose Herbert at Purdue and that she is such a good friend. She probably saved my life, or at least my sanity, today. And even though the XO’s wife said that she and the whole Manfred wives’ group were going to make sure you are taken care, and even though your mother is flying out on Wednesday, Rose is the one making me feel like I can leave you and go to sea tomorrow.

Sitting here in the ensign locker, Cowboy and Almost sleeping quietly, Dormant making his phwoo sound, me at the desk in a little hole of light in the dark, and writing to you, it’s like you and I are the only two people in the whole world who are awake.

I don’t like the falling asleep descriptive. For me, it is like that sometimes. Just before sleep happens, I jerk awake with the sensation that I have been falling. Except that it doesn’t feel like falling into sleep, it’s like I just stopped myself from falling off the earth. Writing to Teresa at the end of a day is kind of like that. During a day like today, all kinds of anguished things get packed into my brain, or my soul maybe. Today, after I left the Ops O’s room, it was as if I went on autopilot. I got the things done that needed doing, with Rose’s help, but in a sense I was just hanging on, too. Hanging on until I could sit down and write to her. It started when I wrote Dearest Teresa. It was like looking at a pile of sand ten feet high, and all that sand was anguished, mixed-up thoughts roiling in my head and my belly and leaving a sour taste in my mouth, just like when I got seasick. But once I wrote Dearest Teresa, one grain of the sand pile turned into a grain of peace and calm. As words drained out of my ballpoint onto the page, neighboring grains became infused with the feeling that perhaps it would be okay. If I wrote enough, it would be okay.

After we’d been married the summer before my junior year at Purdue, I didn’t write to her every day, as I had before. I did write her a poem on the first of each month, and on special occasions. She seemed to like the poems I wrote for her, though, so I started on one to include in the letter that would go out in the mail in the morning. The strongest feeling in my head was the fear I’d felt at finding Teresa in the hallway, and later when I was sure she had died, and that I had a baby daughter to raise by myself. Teresa would want a poem about our baby, but I wasn’t going to be able to write that kind of poem without getting the fear of life without her out of the way first. I wouldn’t send it to her, but I had to write it.

I looked around. They were all sleeping. The drone of the ventilation blowers was backdrop to Dormant’s phwoo.

I was working on a poem about looking Teresa’s death in the eye this morning, when the door to the ensign locker pulled open, and Edgar Chalmers stood there in shadow. I couldn’t see his face.

“Well, look here. Ensign Two Buckets.” He took a step inside the room and closed the door. “Our very own power-puking, pussy-whipped, pornographic poet.”

My first day aboard, Edgar found me at the desk working on a poem. In the poem, a very pregnant Teresa was kneeling and saying her morning prayers and thanking God for our baby. Teresa had not been able to get pregnant our first two years together.

Now I was back to the beginning of the month and Edgar found me writing a poem to Teresa again. Edgar reached out, grabbed my letter, and crumpled it in his fist, took a step back, and held the letter above his head. He was six feet tall. I exploded off the chair and raised my left hand like I was going after the letter.

“Pissant …”

I hit him in the belly with a right. He bent over and backed against the door. His feet slid out from under him, and he sat on the floor, hard. He was gasping for breath; then he turned to the side and puked between the end of his bunk and the bulkhead. Then he coughed furiously. He must have aspirated some of the vomit.

“Jees sus Chee rice tin hey yull.” Even when he was excited, Cowboy never stampeded his words. Always, his words kind of loped out as if to the cadence of a peaceful campfire song.

Edgar was gasping and coughing, and Carl Lehr, Almost, bent over him.

“Carl,” I said, “we have to get him up. He’s drowning in his puke.”

I’d heard Teresa and Rose talk about drunken accident victims doing that.

There wasn’t room in the locker for me to help Carl, but he managed to pull Edgar to his feet. Edgar seemed to be getting a bit of air, along with the other stuff, into his lungs. His coughing was just about to the level of having a cold.

The smell was awful. My stomach lurched a couple of times. I didn’t know what he’d had to eat, but there was plenty of whiskey smell mingled with the other. But I managed to keep swallowing the coffee in my stomach back down. That was all I’d had all day, but I’d had a lot of it.

“Goddamned vulture ate a putrefied skunk and shat on our floor.”

Carl said, “Go back to sleep, Cowboy. Two Buckets and I will take care of it.”

“Cain’t sleep in this stink. Dormant and me, we’ll start here, y’all get Admiral Ensign squared away.”

Cowboy rolled out of his bunk. “C’mon, Dormant, my man.”

“Doesn’t bother me.” Dormant rolled onto his side facing the bulkhead and turned out his bunk light.

“Ah yes hole,” Cowboy said as he followed us out the door to get some cleaning supplies from the locker next to the head.

***  ***  ***

At 0155, I clicked off my bunk light. The hum of the fans and Dormant’s phwoo were in my ears. Unpleasant disinfectant smell crawled up into my nose, but at least it didn’t trip a Pavlovian vomit trigger.

I had tried to recapture the absence of anguish that I’d been building when Admiral Ensign came in the room, but I kept wishing I had hit him in the face. I kept wishing my knuckles were scraped, cut, and bleeding.

I clicked my bunk light back on, plugged Chopin’s nocturnes into my cassette player, put my earphones on, and punched play. I don’t know what Fred intended for his music. Maybe the low frequency tones were supposed to be a backdrop for the tippy-toe-dance high frequency tinkles. For me, though, the rhythm of the low notes moved in and took over. I ran my hand down the center of my belly, tracing a line like Teresa’s C-section scar. I clicked the light off again, and I reached my hand out, like Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, reaching out a finger to God to get the spark of life. I was reaching out to Teresa, and to our daughter, Jennifer. I wanted her little hand to take my Peter Pointer, just like she had this evening.

And then, I didn’t want to hit anybody, or anything, anymore.

I
Nam

But where’s the foxhole deep enough

Where a sailor cares to park his duff?

1.

Sunday, 29 May 1966. Last night in Subic Bay

Dearest Teresa,

I have a hole where my belly is supposed to be. It has been such a wonderful thing to be in port, and get all your letters. Now we are looking at perhaps ten days before we get mail again, and that just crushes my heart.

Everybody else is kind of excited about us being in the combat zone just after midnight Tuesday, but I can’t help it. I hate the thought of no letters from you, again, for a long time. I don’t think I could get along without writing to you each night, and even though that means the world to me, and it anchors me, if I can use sailor terminology, after a week of no mail from you, I kind of feel like my letters are just going into a black hole.

At least tonight, there is nothing scheduled, and I can just write to you. Every night this week, there has been something: wetting-down party, dinners at the O Club, division beach parties. I’ve had enough mandatory fun. Mail goes out at midnight, and tonight, I want to do nothing but write to you. I may even have to use two envelopes. Our postal clerk, PC3 Smeltzer, says I will save a lot of money on stamps when postage is free in the combat zone. So there’s something to look forward to.

What I really look forward to, though, is three and a half years from now. I will walk away from Manfred for the last time, and you and I and Jennifer will head off to a NORMAL life. Normal job, nice house, Jennifer will maybe have a brother or a sister, and I’ll be able to reach out my hand each night, and find your hip, not the angle iron next to my bunk.

When the press started talking about Camelot during the early part of the JFK regime it about made me puke, partly, I guess, because I am not a democrat, but it was such trashy-flashy, shallow hype. Now, what I want for us does seem like Camelot to me, and I don’t think we need a castle for it to be Came …

The door to the Ensign Locker pulled open, and Lieutenant (junior grade) Peter Feldman came in.

“Two Buckets, chiefs challenged us to a softball game. Come on.”

“I haven’t played ball for years, Peter. I’ll pass.”

“C’mon. It’ll be fun.”

“I’ve had fun every night this week. I don’t want to have any more fun.”

Peter is six feet, five inches tall. He walks around the ship hunched over all the time, and he wears a kind of apologetic look on his face from stepping on peoples’ feet so often. Actually, Peter is responsible for the start of the ensign nickname tradition on Manfred. When Peter checked aboard as a new ensign, Andrew Dunston had been the bull, the senior ensign. After he saw Peter’s huge shoes on the deck of the ensign locker, Andrew did a drawing of the ship’s starboard whaleboat davit, except, in the drawing, there was no whaleboat in the davit. Instead there was a shoe with a gun mount on the toe. Peter had been called Gun Boats when he’d been an ensign.

“Zachery, you little shit, climb down outa’ that bunk, or I’ll drag ya. You’re playin’ softball.”

When Peter brings his 225 pounds into an erect posture, and when he scowls, he doesn’t look like someone to take lightly, especially for a little … a little guy like me: five feet, seven inches.

I sighed, put my letter-writing materials on the angle iron next to my bunk, and said, “Aw crap, Peter.”

Peter pointed a finger at me. “Unt, you vill haf fun. Ensigns who do not haf fun, vill be shot.”

When my feet hit the deck, I said, “I don’t want …”

Peter waggled his finger in my face. “Quarterdeck. Five minutes.”

As he closed the door, I pulled my khaki trousers off. As I got a pair of blue jeans out, a little puddle of anger started glowing red at the top, rear part of my brain. I had run twice today, and all my sweat socks were still soggy. Great!

***  ***  ***

The Skipper gave the chiefs the option of batting or taking the field first. Senior Chief Fire Control Technician Bechtold said they’d bat first. I think the chiefs thought they might not ever have to take the field, at least that’s how I interpreted their smug looks.

The XO was umpiring from behind the pitcher’s mound. Tom Snyder, the communications officer, and the next most un-athletic officer after the XO, was pitching. Peter Feldman was the first baseman, assigned there on the rationale that first basemen are tall.

The chief’s first batter was Boiler Tender Chief Petty Officer Petitte. He was six feet, two inches and weighed about 250 pounds of very solid beef. Each day, he spent a lot of time in the ventilation fan room where the chiefs lifted weights. I was catching and hadn’t noticed it before, but on the back of his shaved head were three discolorations, just like the holes in a bowling ball. I imagined he probably caught a bit of crap from the other chiefs—although, on second thought, maybe they didn’t give him crap.

The chiefs were all on their feet in front of their dugout along the third base side, and they were making a lot of noise even before the first pitch. After Tom Snyder bounced the first two pitches well in front of home plate, the noise level ratcheted up several tens of decibels.

I looked over at them. The chiefs were hooting and a couple of them were jumping around like kids or monkeys. I thought they were pretty immature. Maturity comes with the package of being an officer and a gentleman; still, I hoped Tom would get the next pitch all the way to the plate, to quiet those juveniles.

But hope didn’t cut it for Tom’s third pitch, though it did carry the ball to right in front of home plate. We didn’t have a mask for the catcher, so I was standing comfortably behind the chief. When I saw that the pitch was going to be short again, I took a step forward. But the chief cut loose with a mighty golf swing, and the bat touched my left shoulder at the end of the backswing.

The ball dribbled just to the left of the pitcher’s mound. Tom Snyder stood on the mound with his hand in his glove, and he seemed to be trying to decide if it was okay for him to leave his appointed place of duty. The chief started thundering toward first base as the Skipper charged from his shortstop position, barehanded the ball, and fired underhanded to Peter Feldman. Peter was standing with both feet on top of first base, and he caught the ball, mainly because the Skipper’s throw hit his glove. Then Peter turned to face home, kind of hunched over like a linebacker in a pre-snap position.

I was running with the chief to back up the play, and I glanced at the XO to see why he hadn’t called him out. The XO was just staring at the scene playing out, as if mesmerized by it.

Chief Petitte plowed into Peter, and it was very much like Charley Brown. Ball, cap, glove, and sunglasses went flying, and Peter wound up on his back looking up at the sky, with his head and shoulders in fair territory, but his huge tennis shoes well into foul.

Chief Petitte was swinging his right arm like a windmill, trying to get his considerable momentum vectored toward second. I got to the ball just before the right fielder, Lieutenant (junior grade) Don Minton, waved him off, grabbed the ball, and fired a strike to the Skipper’s glove, which was about five inches above second. Chief Petitte dropped into a slide, and I winced because he was wearing cut-off blue jeans. The XO was looking at Peter Townsend. Chief Petitte stood up and started looking at the huge raspberry on his right leg.

“You were out. You agree, Chief?” the Skipper asked.

“Out,” Chief Petitte said as he started walking toward the dugout. He acted as if the raspberry wasn’t even an inconvenience.

Our hospital corpsman, HM1 Darby, was trotting down the first baseline with a little black bag in his hand. Carl Lehr, the second baseman, was helping Peter to his feet.

“Hang on there, Mr. Feldman. Stay down.”

Carl started walking back toward home plate with me to get a Coke. There were enough people around Peter. The Skipper walked to the pitcher’s mound, and he called Senior Chief Bechtold for a conference.

“So, Carl,” I said. “All the heavies have talked about since I checked aboard is that everything we do has to be aimed at getting us ready for the combat zone. How is this helping?”

“Builds esprit,” Carl said. “You know? All for one and one for all. Everybody knows that softball does exactly that.”

I looked at Carl, and he laughed and went to get his Coke. Carl was serious almost all the time. But I guess even Carl could only be serious almost all the time.

HM1 Darby pronounced Peter Feldman okay. The Skipper said that Peter would sit out a couple of innings, and he also announced a new rule: no sliding if you are wearing short pants. Tom Snyder was moved to first base, the XO picked up pitcher duties, and ET2 Dawkins, from my division, was shanghaied from the bleachers to be the umpire.

RDC Wicker, radar-man chief petty officer, was the second batter. The XO got his second pitch over the plate, all the way, without bouncing it. The RDC bunted, on purpose, and started for first. This time, Tom Snyder charged the ball, barehanded it, wheeled, and threw to Carl Lehr, who was running to cover the base.

Carl tried to stop on the field side of the base—I was sure he was remembering the collision—but he stepped on Tom’s beer bottle, which was propped on the field side of the bag. Carl’s feet shot out from under him, and he landed on his back on top of first base. The ball had sailed over him and was rolling just outside the foul line.

RDC Wicker jumped over Carl, skidded to a stop, came back, placed a foot on his chest, and took off for second. Chief Wicker runs pretty fast, and he saw that both Don Minton and I were still running for the ball as he neared second. He rounded the bag as Don got the ball, got himself oriented, and fired a rope to the third baseman, Lieutenant (junior grade) Charley Hanson. The ball bounced once, Charley caught it, and tagged out the sliding and long blue jeans clad Chief Wicker. ET2 Dawkins, a professional in all aspects of his life, was watching the play; he called the RDC out with an appropriate accompanying thumb gesture.

HM1 Darby helped Carl up, and Carl took a couple of steps. He gave a thumbs-up to Darby, and Darby gave a thumbs-up signal to the Skipper. Apparently, this was a non-verbal equivalent for the official Navy medical condition of okay. At this rate, the game could take all night, and I’d never get my letter done. The Skipper announced another rule: no beer bottles on the field.

The chief’s third batter was my division chief, ETC Fargo. He popped the ball straight up, and I tracked it up to the ionosphere, danced around a little to stay under it, followed it back down, and caught it. A one, two, three inning.

When I came to bat, the bases were loaded and there were two outs.

“Ensign Two Buckets can’t hit. He’s a boar tit.” The call came from the chief’s dugout. First Class Petty Officer Gunner’s Mate McGilfrey was leaning on the back of the dugout on his elbows, and there was a row of empty brown San Miguel bottles next to his left elbow. “Just put it in there. The boar tit’ll strike out.”

I started sweating and looked at McGilfrey. “Strike him out, chief. He can’t hit.”

Senior Chief Bechtold was playing third for the chiefs, and he walked over to the dugout and talked with McGilfrey, but I couldn’t hear what he said.

When I’d been an enlisted sailor, boar tit is what my first chief used to call me. I’d gotten seasick each of the first three times we’d gone to sea, that’s when he gave me my first Navy nickname. After that, he assigned me to a continuous string of no-load jobs. I wondered if it could be a coincidence that McGilfrey had used that term.

“Leave the damn beer, and you better be on the ship when I get back.” Senior Chief Bechtold was pointing at McGilfrey as he walked away.

The senior chief walked toward me. “I apologize for him, Mr. Z. He just can’t hold his San Magoo.”

I nodded, and he trotted back to his position. “Let’s play ball,” he called.

I looked at McGilfrey walking away, and I thought about my chief, ETC Irons. I wiped the sweat off my hands, picked up a little dust, rubbed my hands together, and took the bat in my hands. I’d picked the biggest and heaviest one in the bag, and it felt good in my hands.

The first pitch was just inside, but I thought I could handle it, and I connected with it solidly and launched a towering fly that went well beyond the three feet high fence around the outfield; but it was foul by a fair amount.

Just after I launched the foul, it got quiet for a long moment; then the catcher, Chief Wicker, asked, “You weren’t aiming for McGilfrey, were you Mr. Z?” At the same time, the noise from the field and the bleachers turned back on.

“No, Chief, if I’d been aiming for him, I wouldn’t have missed by that much.”

I took the next pitch, which was outside. The third pitch was just off the plate, outside again, and I stepped into it and smacked another long, high drive that landed well beyond the fence in right field, and the officers were up 4 to 0.

The rest of the game settled into what I considered to be a pretty decent sandlot game. The chiefs won 11 to 9.

***  ***  ***

At 2215, Lieutenant Hank Allman knocked on the Skipper’s door. The CO pulled the door open and waved him in.

“You and Cowboy have a good time in Manila?” the CO asked.

The Ops O sat next to the XO on the fold-up bed sofa. “Yes, sir. Real nice hotel, and we took in a good bit of the town between Saturday and today.”

The Skipper nodded. “Okay. Tomorrow the commodore shows up at 0500. So, XO, please have the stewards clean my room up for him, just like he was going to stay with us. I’ll be out of here at 0400.”

The XO made a note in his pocket-sized, green notebook, which the sailors called a wheel book.

“Navigation brief at 0430 so we can get that done before the commodore shows up. Then, once we are past Cubi Point, I guess I’ll see if I can entertain the commodore until we highline him back. That’s set for 1030.”

“I didn’t know the commodore was riding us out. When did that come up, Skipper?” the Ops O asked.

“The commodore’s chief of staff called me yesterday afternoon and told me,” the XO said.

“Do I need to do anything, like briefs on our preps for gunfire support missions and for when we get to North SAR?”

The Skipper shook his head. “No, Ops O. Commodore’s chief of staff told the XO it was material readiness he was interested in looking at.”

“Doesn’t the commodore know we spent the whole week getting the ship in shape? We chipped and painted top to waterline and wrung out the weapons and electronic systems. Does he want to know about all the training we got done in port?”

“According to the chief of staff, the commodore wants to make sure we don’t use being in the combat zone as an excuse to let the material condition slide. He wants to look at deck and engineering divisions,” said the XO.

“Appearance and propulsion. Sometimes I wish my surface Navy …” The Ops O hissed and shook his head.

The Skipper smiled. “Feel better, Hank.”

The Ops O got a sheepish look on his face and sat back on the sofa.

“Skipper,” the XO said, “just met with the Gun Boss and Cheng. Weapons department is fully ready to go to sea and to enter the combat zone. The only issue is the DASH helicopter, but the DASH guys may be ready to try a turn-up on one of the helos in a day or two. Engineering, according to Cheng, is 100 percent. How about operations, Hank?”

“We’re 100 percent, too, XO. Last thing was the electronic warning receiver, and I just talked with ETC Fargo. The system is working thanks to some help the chief got from the repair ship. Oh, and the ETC said the chiefs whipped the officers in softball this evening, but he said it was a hell of a game. Said the officer’s team would have been embarrassed bad if Ensign Zachery hadn’t been on the team. Zachery?”

The CO inclined his head and shrugged. “For a little shit, he’s a regular hitting machine. He drove in six of our nine runs, and the last inning, we had a man on base when we made the last out. If Jon had come up again, I would have put money on him.”

The XO said, “More amazing to me, though, was the top of the last inning. Chief Petitte is on third, and the batter flies out to center. Andrew catches the ball and fires to Jon, who is catching. Jon stands there with Petitte bearing down on him like a locomotive with a full heada’ steam. He grabs Andrew’s throw just in time to put the tag on the Chief, then goes flying back, kind of tumbles asshole over teakettle, but winds up on his feet still holding the ball. Then he goes over to the chief and asks him if he’s okay. Chief thinks he’s making fun of him, but Jon says, no, he was just hoping he hadn’t hurt the chief’s skinned up leg. Then Petitte reached out one his big paws and tousled Jon’s hair. I couldn’t believe he got up at all after the chief hit him.”

“Jon Zachery, Ensign Two Buckets? I’m having a hard time picturing what you just told me.”

“It happened, Ops O,” the CO said. “I talked to him afterwards. He said he got his strength working hay bales starting just after seventh grade. He said he played sandlot ball where he grew up, and he played in high school. Said he learned to kind of give way when he was going to be hit by a big guy.”

“Petitte was the third out, and as we walked back to the dugout,” the XO said, “I asked Jon if he was okay. He looked at me and said, ‘If I get to bat again, I will be. It’s my turn to hit something.’”

The Skipper smiled with one side of his mouth. “One other thing happened, Ops O, just before Jon batted the first time. GM1 McGilfrey was behind the chief’”