Sweet Reason (5 page)

Stumbling back on board the
Ebersole
, Wallowitch was shivering and shaken. “I didn’t mean to hurt it,” he said softly. “I swear to God I didn’t mean to hurt it.” And he
vomited again and again and again until there was nothing left inside him to throw up.

The Shrink’s well of humor had run dry.

The Captain Convenes a War Council

“We all hate violence, me as much as any man in this wardroom,” Captain Jones began. Gripping the back of the chair at the head of the table with his thick fingers, rocking rhythmically on the balls of his spit-shined Adlers, the commanding officer of the
Ebersole
warmed to his subject. He was a good public speaker, casual and forceful at the same time, careful to let his normally monotone voice roam back and forth across half an octave, generous in his use of pauses.

“Reread your history books, gentlemen,” Captain Jones went on, nodding his head and raising an eyebrow to indicate he was making an important point. “Irregardless of what these effete journalists would have us believe, the essence of the American tradition is a healthy distaste for violence. But somewhere along the way somebody has got to stand fast, somebody has got to draw a line in the dust with his big toe and say: ‘This far but no further.’ ”

Jones sucked in his stomach, which had a tendency to spill over his web belt. “Well, gentlemen, we’re at that line, that frontier of freedom” — he nodded his head again; another important point! — “right out here on this Godforsaken stretch of ocean. And
they’ve
stepped over the line. Ergo, they’ve got to deal with the fightingest man-o’-war in the U.S. Navy, the
Eugene F. Ebersole
, eh?”

The war council (as the skipper liked to call it) had been convened in the forward wardroom immediately after lunch.
Only Wallowitch, who had retreated to his bunk after the business with the body in the water, and Moore, who had the bridge watch, were absent. The rest of the officers, self-conscious about the .45 caliber pistols dangling at their waists, had filed in, quipping but curious.

“Is the artillery going to be uniform of the day from here on out?” asked Ralph Richardson, the Harvard Business School graduate putting in two years as supply officer.

“The artillery, as you call it, is required for war councils and the bridge watch during general quarters,” the Captain had explained. “I want to create a reasonably warlike atmosphere on this ship.”

Not knowing quite where to tuck the guns as they sat, the officers had taken their places around the long, felt-covered table. To emphasize the seriousness of the occasion, Angry Pettis had been posted outside the door armed with a loaded M–1 rifle.

“Ain’t no motherfucker, black or white, goes in till the Captain he comes out,” he told True Love, the wardroom’s junior steward, an incredibly dumb but immensely innocent black whose real name was Truman Love.

Inside the wardroom the civilian luxuries — an eighteen-inch color television, a plastic philodendron, a tape deck — had all been stored away. The décor had been stripped down to what the Captain considered the bare essentials: the gold basketball de Bovenkamp had picked up from Commander Destroyers Atlantic; a photograph of the late and posthumously decorated Lieutenant Commander Eugene F. Ebersole, the chubby skipper of an American submarine sunk, under heroic circumstances, by Japanese depth charges during World War Two; the annual Christmas card from Ebersole’s widow (long since remarried) Scotch-taped to the bulkhead; a framed, embossed edition of John Paul Jones’s code of conduct for naval officers; a model of the
Eugene Ebersole
in a bottle.

“I want to commend you,” the Captain was saying, “on the good start we made this morning. Especially Mister Wallowitch, who unfortunately has taken ill.” The Captain cleared his throat. “That was heads-up shooting, I can tell you. And I’m not the only one who thinks so. As we say in the navy, now hear this.”

Jones took a pasted-up message from his pocket and read it. “ ‘Well done,
Ebersole
. Your performance in the face of the enemy this ayem was in the finest traditions of the naval service. Happy to have a can-do tin can like the
Ebersole
aboard on Yankee Station. Endit.’ And it’s signed: ‘Rear Admiral Winthrop G. Hayden.’ ”

The Poet and Richardson exchanged glances. The Chaplain and Lustig kept their eyes glued to the table. The junior officers around the wardroom table stared back at the Captain in embarrassed silence. Only the Executive Officer (who was beginning to catch the cues) and Ensign de Bovenkamp (an ex-college basketball star who instinctively responded to the pep-talk atmosphere) reacted the way the Captain expected his officers to react — modestly pleased at the praise, proud to be a member of the
Ebersole
team, smilingly anxious to get back into the thick of things.

Captain Jones looked around the room uncertainly. “I’ve no doubt some of you are uneasy” — again he cleared his throat — “uneasy because Oriental human beings were killed in this morning’s action.” The Captain pulled out his chair and sat down. He started to speak in what he thought was a fatherly tone — low-pitched, confidential — to indicate that he could understand weaknesses and forgive them. “I respect that. I respect the fact that you feel this way. It’s what I was talking about before — about how we all hate violence. But let’s face it, gentlemen, trite as it sounds, war is, eh, hell.” Jones said this slowly as if it were a quotable phrase. “Isn’t that right, Mister Lustig?”

Lustig’s eyes were fixed on the Captain, but his mind was
wandering. “Could you repeat the question, sir?”

“I asked you, ‘Isn’t war hell?’ ” Jones was clearly annoyed.

“Yes sir, it definitely is,” Lustig responded gamely. “Anybody who’s ever been in one knows that much.”

(“War isn’t hell, at least not for us it isn’t, Skipper,” Lustig heard himself say when he went over the scene later that day. “If war isn’t hell, then what the hell is it?” bullied the Captain, furious at being crossed in public. To which Lustig replied with supreme confidence: “War isn’t hell — it’s a career opportunity.”)

“Most of you young men in this wardroom,” the Captain was saying, “most of the men on this ship are too young to know much about World War Two, or even the Korean War. I didn’t hate the Japs. I didn’t hate the North Koreans. I don’t hate the Slopes or the Chinks, or even the Ruskies for that matter. But I fight the enemies of my country.”

“In other words, my country right or wrong,” interrupted the Poet, trying hard to keep the irony out of his voice.

“That’s it!” exclaimed the XO, nodding vigorously. “That’s it exactly. Corny as it sounds, that’s the heart of the matter, isn’t it, Captain? My country, right
or
wrong.”

“Somebody has to be my country right or wrong,” the skipper said. He wasn’t quite certain whose side the Poet was on.

A Word from Sweet Reason

Jones paused to collect his thoughts. “About these leaflets,” he said finally. Every officer around the table leaned forward.

Using both palms the Captain flattened the paper (which had been rolled up in his napkin ring and served with breakfast
by True Love that morning) on the table. Every time he took his palm off the leaflet it snapped back like a window shade. He weighted the ends with a salt and pepper shaker, a sugar bowl and a “Swift and Sure” ashtray.

Four copies of the leaflet had turned up so far. Besides the one served up to the Captain at breakfast, a second had been found tacked to the mess deck bulletin board, a third was discovered taped to the wardroom photograph of Eugene F. Ebersole (“Sacrilege,” fumed the XO as he ripped it off) and a fourth was located (by then the hunt was on) taped to the pay telephone in the midship’s passageway.

The leaflet, single-spaced and indented, began:

Comrades in arms

(“We used to use ‘comrades in arms’ all the time during the war,” Jones had mused when he and the XO first discussed the leaflet that morning. “I guess the boys in the Kremlin ruined that.”)

Today the officers and enlisted men on the
Ebersole
, which for all practical purposes is a segregated ship, will be ordered, by our racist Pig captain whose hobby is collecting concentration camp barbed wire, to kill innocent men, women and children, kill them just as surely as if some Pig sadist Nazi put a rifle to their heads and spattered their brains in the mud.
DON’T LET THEM MAKE KILLERS OUT OF US
! ! ! ! Don’t make war on innocent men, women and children.

For 20 years Amerika has been acting as if peace is a Communist plot. Let peace start today on the
Ebersole
when the guns go silent. You can do your part by letting the equipment break down. If the
Ebersole
can’t get there, if the guns won’t work, they can’t make
US KILL
.

Remember: Nobody can force you to pull a trigger!

The Voice of Sweet Reason

“About these leaflets,” the Captain was saying. He changed pace now, speaking quietly and quickly, using the earnest tones of a man who has been wronged, squeezing all the sincerity he could into the space between words. “I want to make one thing perfectly clear. I strongly resent the suggestion that I personally harbor any racist feelings, or that I preside over a segregated ship. I’ve been in this man’s navy since before some of you were born, serving both as an enlisted man and an officer, and I have never treated a colored sailor any differently than I treat white sailors, never, absolutely never. As for the
Ebersole
being a segregated ship; since that fuss on the mess deck in Norfolk, a few of our colored crewmen have chosen —
of their own free will and volition, mind you
— to congregate on one side of the mess deck. But to suggest that this constitutes segregation, well —”

Jones flung his arms wide in the air, as if to say that the charge was so ridiculous it needed no further rebuttal.

More about the “Fuss” on the Mess Deck

The “fuss” on the mess deck had taken place while the ship was tied up to a pier at the Norfolk destroyer base. After the evening meal, with Jones and the XO and most of the officers off drinking at the Officers’ Club, Ohm had flipped on the mess deck’s black and white television set to
The Beverly Hillbillies
. Angry Pettis had insisted on watching a special starring James Brown, Soul Brother Number One. There was some preliminary name calling. In an instant the disagreement had erupted into a rip-roaring bar brawl, with sailors pouring into the mess deck from surrounding compartments and fists and coffee mugs flying in all directions.

Despite a considerable amount of screaming, Lustig (who was in charge while the Captain was off the ship) had been unable to bring the battle to a standstill. It was de Bovenkamp who solved the immediate problem by commandeering the color television from the first-class lounge and installing it on the other side of the mess deck. With that the two camps, glancing over their shoulders sullenly, had settled down to watch their respective programs. The next morning at breakfast the blacks on board all took seats on the James Brown side of the mess deck, while the whites filed in on
The Beverly Hillbillies’
side.