Sweet Reason (13 page)

“For your information,” the Captain told the two black signalmen frozen in attention a few minutes later, “an upsidedown flag is the international symbol hoisted by a ship in distress. More recently, it has become a symbol used by a small minority of sniveling, bleeding-heart, un-American fifth columnists for a country in distress.”

Sitting at the edge of his bunk, Jones struggled to regain his composure. “This may be the work —” he began, trying to control the sudden twitching in his lower jaw. And he spat out the rest of the sentence: “— of Sweet Reason.”

“Cap’n, can me ’n’ Jefferson here say sumpin’?” Angry Pettis Foreman asked. He and Waterman had stood the four-to-eight signal watch, which made them, as the XO bluntly put it when he paraded them down to the Captain’s cabin, “prime suspects.”

Captain Jones thought of sending for Proper to conduct the investigation, then decided that they would take that as a sign of weakness. “Come ahead, son,” he said.

“Cap’n, suh,” Angry Pettis said, threading the brim of his white sailor’s hat through his fingers. “Me ’n’ Jefferson here we raised that flag, but we raised it right-side-up. I swear that we raised it right-side-up. Ain’t that the actual situation, Jefferson?”

“That’s correct, Captain,” Waterman said. “We’re not your Sweet Reason.”

Captain Jones wanted desperately to believe that they had raised it upside-down by accident. That way he wouldn’t be dealing with another Sweet Reason incident. “There are three possibilities,” he had explained to the XO before confronting the two signalmen. “Either they raised it upsidedown by accident, in which case the whole thing is simply an unfortunate mistake, or they raised it upside down on purpose, in which case one of them is Sweet Reason, or they raised it right-side-up but somebody else came along and switched it to upside-down, in which case we’re right back where we started with this Sweet Reason business.”

“There are three possibilities,” Jones told the two black signalmen. And he ticked them off on the fingers of his left hand, careful to label them “one” and “two” and “three” so the blacks could follow the complexities of the situation.

Jones paced the cabin as he spoke and came to a stop squarely in front of his barbed-wire collection. For an instant his head looked as if it had been crowned with thorns. “Well,” he said finally, “which is it?”

“Which is what, Cap’n?” Angry Pettis said blankly.

“Which is
it
— one, two or three?”

“Which was number tree again?” Angry Pettis asked, and when the Captain told him he said: “That’s it, then. Number tree, Cap’n.” To underscore the answer, Angry Pettis held up the third finger of his left hand.

Jones was about to dismiss them when he thought of something. “It was dark when you raised the flag, wasn’t it?”

“Darker than a witch’s tit, Cap’n,” agreed Angry Pettis.

The Captain’s eyes narrowed. “Then how could you be sure it was right-side-up, eh? Tell me that. How could you be sure?”

“Why Jefferson here, he held the flashlight while me, I clipped the flag to the halyard, Cap’n. I remembers them stars was up. Ain’t that so, Jefferson?”

“That’s correct, Captain,” Waterman said coldly.

Jones took a turn around the room. Then he wheeled toward the two signalmen again and tried a new tack. This time he was looking for a motive. “Do you men think the navy is an equal opportunity employer?”

“An equal what?” Angry Pettis asked.

But Waterman understood the question. “No I don’t, Captain. Most blacks in the navy end up as stewards or in the deck gang chipping and red ledding. We don’t get a chance at the technical ratings that could qualify us for good jobs when we return to civilian life.”

“But you’re not a steward — you’re a signalman,” Jones snapped.

“Sure, and when I return to civilian life I’ll try and find a job teaching semaphore to Boy Scouts!”

Jones bristled. “Now just one moment. I’m not sure I like your tone.”

At this point Angry Pettis figured it was time to get
belligerent. Cocking his head, narrowing his eyes, relaxing into a spidery, loose-jointed slouch, he laid a restraining hand on Waterman’s arm. “Cool it, baby,” he said. Then he turned toward Jones and added quietly: “I told you we raised that flag right side up, Cap’n. Now there ain’t no call for you to lean on us
jus’ cause we is black.”

Jones was instantly tentative; he began to select his words the way you choose footfalls in a mine field. “Your being colored has nothing whatsoever to do with your being under suspicion,” he said, bringing his fingernails to his teeth. “I’ve dealt fairly and plainly with members of your race my whole career. There isn’t a man aboard that doesn’t know that, eh? I’m simply trying to get the facts in the case.”

But Jones let the line of questioning drop.

Another Word from Sweet Reason

“I think it was Sweet Reason,” Captain Jones told the XO when he and Proper turned up a few minutes later.

“I know it was Sweet Reason,” the XO said, and he handed the Captain a carbon (an original and four more carbons were eventually discovered) of Sweet Reason’s latest leaflet. It had been found taped to the bronze “swift and sure” plaque in the midship’s passageway.

Comrades in arms

(“He must be a goddamn Commie, the way he keeps throwing that ‘comrades in arms’ crap up in our faces all the time,” the skipper said when he and the XO went over the leaflet again later.)

For a while this morning, thanks to me, the
Ebersole
showed her real colors — an upside-down Amerikan flag. The
Ebersole
is a ship in distress. Yesterday morning we drew our first innocent blood, sinking a junk without warning and killing who knows how many innocent men, women and children. (Even Nazi subs let their victims get into lifeboats first.) Now our great Commanding Officer, who risked this ship and the lives of all the men on board at Iskenderun (the tanker could easily have blown up when we were alongside) so he could advance his career, is ready to risk our lives again, is ready to kill again. And for what?

I ask you again, I beg you: Don’t make war on innocent men, women and children. Don’t let them make killers out of us! ! ! Let’s put a stop to murder.

Next time the pig captain of the
Ebersole
yells open fire, let him hear not the boom of cannon but the
SILENCE
of men who
REFUSE TO KILL
.

Remember, nobody can force you to pull a trigger!

The Voice of Sweet Reason

“By sweet Jesus, this time he’s gone too far,” Captain Jones said, crumpling the leaflet into a ball and flinging it into the wastebasket, a brass five-inch powder case with “DD722” engraved on it.

The reference to Iskenderun — which J. P. Jones considered, next to the action with the “patrol boat,” his finest hour — stung. “Enough of this pussyfooting around, Proper. I don’t care if you turn this ship inside out, I want Sweet Reason’s scalp and I want it before the day is out. Do you read me, Proper, before the day is out.”

The Captain was still shaking with anger after Proper left. “Except for Quinn’s finger,” Jones told the XO, “not a living soul from the
Ebersole
was scratched at Iskenderun. Risking the ship, he says. I calculated the odds. That’s my job. They ordered me to render
all
possible assistance — those
were the exact words, weren’t they, XO? —
all
possible assistance. Well, I rendered
all
possible assistance and I put the fire out.”

Jones clamped his eyes shut and lowered his voice to a tired whisper. “God, how I detest Sweet Reason,” he said.

“Leave it to Proper,” the XO said reassuringly. “He’ll bring home the bacon.”

More about the Incident at Iskenderun

With the help of a Turkish tug, the
Ebersole
had tied up alongside the burning tanker (the maneuver that cost Quinn the joint of a finger), and the crew had gone storming aboard to fight the blaze and keep it from spreading to the jet fuel bunkers. For a long while it was touch and go. Sailors had to hose down the tanker’s deck plates, which were red hot in places, so that other crewmen could get close enough to hose down the flames. Working in relays they fought the blaze, which was confined to the tanker’s engine spaces aft and the aftermost bunker, for fourteen hours. All the while the
Ebersole
’s searchlights, playing off the smoke and steam and flames and sheets of seawater and foam, gave to the scene the appearance of an erupting volcano.

In the early hours of the morning Ensign de Bovenkamp literally stumbled across the body of one of the tanker’s crewmen killed in the original explosion. Shrunken to the size of a child’s corpse by the flames, it was lying awash in oil and foam and seawater in a corner of the tanker’s main deck. Only the penis, which was erect, seemed to belong to an adult. Glancing enviously at the erect penis, de Bovenkamp took two sticks and put them on the body in the form
of a crucifix, then covered the dead man with a tarpaulin.

There was a bad moment at noon as the fire was beginning to come under control. De Bovenkamp was leading a crew into what had been the tanker’s engine room. The smoke was still so thick that it was impossible to see the deck even with powerful hand-held lanterns. De Bovenkamp took a pole and began tapping like a blind man to find out if there was any deck left to walk on. For a few feet he could hear and feel the “tap-tap” of the pole; then suddenly he was hitting out at air. The deck grating had melted completely away. Just feet ahead was a sixty-foot drop into flames and molten metal. As de Bovenkamp shouted a warning he thought he saw one of the men on the hose lunge sideways and disappear into the smoke.

When word got back to the Captain he was furious — and frightened. He might have to account for his actions if someone had been killed in fighting the fire, and the second-guessers at the Pentagon could wreck a career on the strength of a lapse like that. Jones ordered an immediate head count. Fifteen minutes later the XO returned with the grim news that there were sixteen men missing. Almost catatonic with terror, Jones sent the XO back to count heads again. This time the Executive Officer found eight sailors and Chaplain Rodgers asleep in various bottom bunks around the ship, which brought the number of missing men down to seven.

“Jesus,” said the Captain. He was in agony now, pacing the cabin and sweating even though the air-conditioning unit in the bulkhead was on full blast. “Pull everyone back from the tanker, muster them at abandon-ship stations and count again.” This time the XO came back with good news: all 255 officers and men on the
Ebersole
were present and accounted for.

No one ever did find out what de Bovenkamp had seen out of the corner of his eye.

With the fire reduced to embers, another destroyer joined
the
Ebersole
in Iskenderun and started pumping all the seawater out of the tanker that the
Ebersole
had pumped in. Amid a deluge of congratulatory telegrams, the
Ebersole
weighed anchor for the war zone. Later the crew learned that a seaman from the other destroyer had died of asphyxiation while showing a Lloyds of London man through the burnt-out fuel bunker in the tanker’s hull. The second destroyer was relieved by a Turkish salvage vessel that came down from Istanbul. Two days after that, with the salvage ship tied up precisely where the
Ebersole
had been, the tanker blew sky high. The Turkish press, which printed some remarkable action photos of the tanker in midair, reported that the explosion sank both ships and killed sixty-two men. The Turkish government explained that somebody had apparently struck a match in the wrong place and awarded twenty-seven dollars to each of the new widows.

Until Sweet Reason brought the subject up again the last word on the episode at Iskenderun had been supplied, as usual, by Wallowitch. “What the hell a twenty-two-hundred-ton destroyer crammed with ammunition was doing alongside a burning tanker full of aviation fuel I’ll never know,” he told some of the junior officers in the privacy of the after wardroom. “If she had blown when we were alongside, all the P.R. guys in the Pentagon wouldn’t have been able to put the Captain’s career, not to mention his body, back together again.”