Sweet Reason (16 page)

“What state you-all from, son?” he would ask.

“Texas, sir.”

“Great state, Texas,” the Congressman would say, pumping the man’s hand. “Ah suspect that makes you a Dallas Cowboy fan. Great team, the Dallas Cowboys.” And on to the next man, who turned out to be Gunner’s Mate First Quinn, fresh from repairing Mount 52.

“What state you-all from, son?”

“Beg pardon, sir?” said Quinn.

“The Congressman asked what state you’re from, Quinn?” prompted Jones.

Quinn glanced uneasily at the Captain as he spoke to the Congressman. “I’m not really from any state, sir. I live on the
Ebersole
. When the ship’s in Norfolk, I’m from Virginia. When she’s in Newport, I’m from Rhode Island. When she’s in for repairs at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, I’m from New York. When she’s in —”

“But when you leave the ship, where do you go?” Partain interrupted.

“I never leave the
Ebersole
, sir — at least I haven’t up to now. I haven’t been off except for a beer or a movie in twenty-four years.”

“Cut,” Filmore ordered Yancy.

Partain stared at Quinn as if he were insane, shook his head imperceptibly and stalked off in search of another sailor to ask: “What state you-all from, son?”

“It takes all kinds,” Lizzy Kobb whispered to the XO, pressing her breasts into his arm as she leaned toward his ear.

“Can I see you a second, Captain?” Quinn asked as the skipper started down the deck after Partain. “It’s about my keys and my application for —”

“Later, Quinn,” hissed Jones,
“see
me later.” And he raced after the Congressman.

Filmore spent a good deal of time organizing the photographic end of the visit. He set up one shot of a beaming Captain Jones handing a blue “Swift and Sure” baseball cap to the Congressman under the muzzle of the five-inch gun that fired the shot that sank the enemy patrol boat. And he turned up a couple of sailors who claimed to be from North Carolina, borrowed a few medals and had the Congressman pin them on their chests. Then there was the obligatory footage of Partain, tray in hand, waiting his turn on the chow line like any other person on the ship. (“Fawh as Ah’m concerned, being a
U
-nited States congressman don’t rate me the privledge of going to the head of the line, not when the line is composed of American fightin’ men, nosirree,” Partain was quoted as saying.) Since dinner was still a long way off Filmore had to round up some off-duty sailors and stick trays in their hands to pose the scene.

“All this seems a mite tame,” Congressman Partain complained to Filmore after the chow line take. “Ah mean we don’t stand much of a chance with a chow line shot, do we? Now if’n we could mosey up to the coast and squeeze off a few pot shots at the enemy …”

“He wants to what?” Jones said when Filmore brought up the idea.

“Captain, let me fill you in on the facts of life,” Filmore said. “The Congressman isn’t here for his health. He’s committed to the military, and he wants to demonstrate to the people back home the vital role the military plays out here. But to get into the living rooms of the people back home, to get into those homes during prime time, we’ve got to get past an effete corps of impudent snobs — that small clique of eastern television executives, most of whom are against the war and suspicious of the military. These executives are like a turnstile. To get past them we’ve got to stick the right coin in. And the right coin is film footage that has action with a capital ‘A’ in it.”

“But I can’t simply haul ass and fire at the coast,” Jones said. “I have to get permission and a target assignment and coordinates and a spotter helicopter and some standby jets in case we run into counterfire and need to call in a protective reaction strike. It’s an involved production requiring a considerable amount of preparation.”

“Captain, believe me, I can arrange it — as long as I can say you’re willing.”

“Willing? Jesus Christ, I’m delighted.”

Filmore Pulls a Few Strings

“Flanks,” Whitman Filmore was fond of saying, “are every bit as crucial in public relations as they are in war.” Accordingly, the first thing he did on any operation was to protect them.

“Now the Congressman doesn’t want you to lay on anything special just for his sake, you understand,” Filmore radioed
the flag operations officer. “But he thought if you have something lined up for this afternoon, you might be able to let the
Ebersole
go in and do the firing, huh, so he could get a first-hand idea of what we’re up against out here. Over.”

“Roger, Filmore, I read you,” the operations officer replied. He had one of those monotonous “This is your captain speaking” voices common on commercial aircraft. “We usually shoot in the morning to keep the sun at our backs, but I’m sure something can be worked out without too much strain. Stand by, will you? Over.”

“Roger, standing by,” Filmore said.

The long, tedious process of selecting a relatively safe target so as not to endanger the Congressman’s life, working up the coordinates, getting permission from higher authority for the shoot, dispatching a helicopter to spot the fall of shots and positioning an aircraft carrier so that it could provide jet fighter cover on short notice took seven minutes.

“Like I said, Filmore, no sweat,” this-is-your-captain-speaking radioed back. “The Admiral is happy to be of service.”

Jones Puts the Show on the Road

Things moved rapidly once the target assignment came in over the teletype. As the
Ebersole
heeled over and headed toward the thick gray smudge on the horizon that was the coastline, an OH-6 “Loach” recon helicopter, its rotor blades beating the air like a panicky sparrow, hovered over the destroyer’s fantail to pick up the spotter.

“Since when do we supply the spotter?” demanded Lustig when the XO told him to assign someone to the job. Usually the helicopter pilot or one of his crewmen did the spotting.

“It was the P.R. guy’s idea,” explained the Executive Officer. “He wants some footage of the chopper lifting off one of our men. Says it will dramatize how close we are to the war. Listen, I have enough trouble as it is. Now don’t you give me a hard time.”

“Jesus fucking shit, why me?” demanded Chief McTigue, who didn’t have the slightest desire to get that close to the war.

“Because you’re the only one around here who knows how to spot the fall of shot, Chief,” Lustig explained. “Come on, don’t give me a hard time.”

And so, as Yancy’s camera took in the scene, McTigue was strapped into a canvas harness, plucked off the
Ebersole
’s fantail and cranked up through the trap door into the helicopter, which rocked off like a pendulum toward the coastline.

“What-all we gonna be shootin’ at heah, Cap’n?” Partain asked. The Congressman, Lizzy Kobb, and Filmore were standing on the signal bridge peering after the helicopter, now only a flyspeck blending into the thickening coastline.

“The target assignment, Senator —”

“He’s not a senator yet, Captain Jones,” Lizzy Kobb said drily. The Captain had stumbled across an old joke.

“Don’t wanna be either,” muttered Partain. “Only advantage is you don’t hafta mess with the voters so often. Ah’d as soon mess.” Partain hadn’t had a serious political opponent in his district since he won his first election in 1940. Nowadays, with fifty percent of the district payroll coming from military installations or civilian defense plants filling lucrative government contracts, he didn’t even bother to campaign anymore.

“I beg your pardon, Congressman. No offense intended,” said Jones.

“Don’t fret, son,” said Partain. “None taken.”

Jones began again. “The target, Congressman, is —— ——,
a small town that straddles route ten, which is one of their main thoroughfares down south. I say that so you can see how important this assignment is. According to our intelligence information, there is a truck depot at the western end of the town just beyond some thatched huts. It’s incredible, I know, but that’s how most of these Communists live, in thatched huts. Now what we’re going to do is stand off the coast about three miles and overshoot the town and then walk the spotting shots back on down till they’re smack in the middle of the depot. That way we’ll avoid the civilians — or at least most of them. When the spotter tells us we’re hitting the depot, we’ll open up with everything we have. That’s called firing for effect.”

“Will we be able to see the target, Captain?” asked Lizzy Kobb.

Jones shook his head. “—— —— is four miles inland, so we won’t be able to see or hear the shells land. That’s what the spotter’s for. He radios back when they land and tells us where they land. I’m afraid it’s all rather workaday dull, but it’s the kind of job you’ve got to tackle, glamour or no, to keep the pressure on the enemy.” Jones nodded to underscore the point.

“Well, seein’ those gray barrels a-pointin’ at the shore and a-shootin’ will be excitin’ enough for me.”

The coastline loomed larger now and features began to stand out in the landscape — a two-story blockhouse on top of a rise, a pale-green swamp at the edge of the sea, a solitary white cloud hovering like the top of a mushroom over a mangled tree.

“Perhaps the Captain here can give us an idea of the technical end of the shoot,” said Filmore. “For example, who gets the information the spotter sends back? And who actually pulls the trigger?”

“We’ll hear the spotter’s voice coming over a speaker on the bridge, of course,” Captain Jones explained. “But essentially
his information is for Main Plot. The firing is done in Main Plot —”

“Don’t the people in the gun mounts pull the trigger?” asked Lizzy Kobb. “I always thought the people at the guns pulled the trigger.”

“They can, Miss Kobb, but in this instance they don’t. Generally speaking, when we see what we’re shooting at — such as the Commie patrol boat yesterday morning — we get the range and bearing to the target from the director which is right over your heads, right up there. And the director officer, that’s our Mister Wallowitch, pulls the trigger which fires all six of our five-inch guns at once in salvo. But when we don’t see the target — which is the case this afternoon — the range and bearing to the target are taken initially from a navigational chart and fed into the computer in Main Plot, which then keeps the guns pointing at the target as we move through the water. On the order to commence fire, the Main Plot officer — in this case a young seaman — pulls a remote control trigger firing the spotting rounds. When the spotting rounds are on target we open up in salvo. That’s roughly how we operate.”

“Ah see,” said Partain.

“Uh huh,” said Filmore.

“We’re getting close to the coast, Captain,” said Lizzy Kobb. “What’s next on the agenda?”

“My navigator, who is also my Executive Officer, will advise me to come right to a course paralleling the shore. He’s probably already taken the initial range and bearing to the target from the navigation chart and sent it down to Main Plot. When we come right and steady on the new course, we’ll load the guns. My gunnery officer — Mister Lustig there, the one with the headset — will tell me when the mounts are ready to shoot. And I’ll order them to commence fire.”

“Captain, this may sound insanely naive, but how do guns shoot?” asked Lizzy Kobb.

“I’m not sure I understand?” said Jones. “They shoot when someone pulls the trigger.”

“No, no. What I mean is what actually happens when you pull a trigger? What makes the bullet go all that way and explode when it gets there?”

“Captain, sir,” the XO called, sticking his head out of the pilot house. “About four minutes.” He winked at Lizzy Kobb and she winked back.

“Right, XO. Just have the helmsman come around when you’re ready, eh?”

Jones squinted at the coastline. “What makes guns shoot? Ever use a pressure cooker, Miss Kobb?”

“Are you kidding? There were always stories in the newspapers about the damn things exploding.”

“Yes, that’s it exactly. Our guns are something like pressure cookers. We put a twenty-four-pound powder case in the barrel of each gun behind the projectile, or bullet, if you will. Then we detonate the powder case with a 440-volt electric spark. The guncotton and gunpowder in the powder case disintegrate, generating a large volume of hot gas in a confined space. The gas has no place to go but straight out the barrel, and so that’s where it goes — pushing the fifty-four-pound projectile ahead of it. Something like when the pressure built up in your pressure cooker — remember, a lot of gas in a confined space — and shot off that weighted gadget on the cover into someone’s face. If we want to we can lob one of these five-inch projectiles nine and a half miles, though for accuracy’s sake we like to keep the ranges down to around eight or even less. Now when the projectile reaches the target it can detonate on contact, or it can be detonated by a preset fuse in its nose. Either way the projectile explodes — again, disintegration and hot gases pushing off, this time in
all directions — showering a considerable area with shrapnel. Not very complicated, eh? Even a child can grasp the fundamentals.”