The Edge of Honor (2 page)

And she knew the secret reason, even if Brian did not appreciate it. She harbored a deep fear of being alone.

She had never and would never tell Brian, but that was one of the reasons she had said yes when this engaging young naval officer had come barging into her life as she was finishing college and asked her to marry him. With her graduation approaching, she had looked into the future and seen that she would soon have to resume a life alone, without roommates, her school crowd, and the artificially hectic schedule of senior year. She had almost jumped into his arms when Brian had finally popped the question. He was good-looking, fun, intelligent, and established in his Navy career, and she hadn’t hesitated.

Oh, he had told her about the deployments, the prospects for separation, but in the first blush of love, romance, and the exciting discovery of how good they were for each other in bed, the very word deployment had had no meaning. And even the three months when Brian had gone to the Med had been broken up when she flew over to meet the ship in Naples for a five-day holiday.

But seven monthsseven months was the better part of a year, and the Gulf of Tonkin was not the Med.

Vietnam was an ugly, bloody, and increasingly futile war, and the nightly television news was much too full of body bags and casualty statistics to leave room for any starryeyed notions of glory. She nearly wept at the possibility of losing Brian, at the thought of losing her love and the specter of being left really alone. She squeezed that thought right out of her mind, but the fear remained.

Brian came out of the bathroom, a white towel wrapped around his waist, his hair standing up in all directions as if he had touched a live wire.

He paused in the doorway, his body silhouetted against the bathroom light. She could barely see his face. But he was looking at her, and after a long moment, he came over to the bed, sitting carefully on the edge to keep from getting the sheets wet. She tried to sit up, but her body betrayed her. He smiled at her disability.

“Well, Mrs. Holcomb, the day we’ve all been waiting for has finally arrived,” he said with a smile. A sad smile, she thought. “Are you going to change your mind and see us off?”

“I … I really don’t want to do that, Brian,” she replied. “I don’t think I could stand to see that big gray thing go down the harbor right now. We’ve been through”

“Right. Well, it’s six-thirty. If I go now, I can beat the traffic. I’ll call Jack Folsom, hitch a ride in with him. He can swing by here easily enough.”

“Brian, I’m sorry. I know”

“Hey, don’t sweat it. I understand. You should have done what Angela Benedetti does on deployment day: She leaves town for a week with the kids and comes back after the ship is long gone.”

“Yes, I should have. Except I have this little job they expect me to show up for.”

“And no kids.”

She felt herself shrinking into the covers, even as his expression changed when he realized what he had said.

“Maddy, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

“So what did you mean, Brian?” she asked in a small voice.

“I only meant that, well, if you had kids, you wouldn’t be alone when the ship left. The family would still be here. I know it’s not the same, but”

“Brian.”

“What?”

“All we’re doing is picking at each other. I hate the fact that you’re leaving, and I understand that you’re not doing this to hurt me or to leave me alone. I’m angry with it, not you. I think the best thing now is to get it done: We should both get dressed and go. The sooner you leave, the sooner you’ll be back, okay? I don’t know how else to put it, and anything we say now is going to hurt. Please.”

He nodded and got up to find his uniform. Maddy rolled over in the bed, only the top of her head showing above the covers. He dressed rapidly, made a phone call to confirm that he had a ride, and then gathered up his wallet and his rings. But no keys—today his keys stayed home. He came back into the bedroom and walked briskly over to the bed. He bent down and kissed the top of her head.

“I love you, Maddy.”

“I love you, too, Brian,” she said in a muffled voice.

And then he was gone, the front door shutting quietly.

Only then did she begin to cry in earnest.

USS JOHN BELL HOOD

The approaches to Subic Bay, Luzon, the Philippines Three weeks later, the mountains of central Luzon cut a sawtooth pattern of purple darkness against the eastern horizon as the guided-missile frigate John Bell Hood nosed her way into Subic Bay from the South China Sea. The waters of the bay were perfectly flat, a broad turquoise mirror across which the ship cut an expanding, silent wedge of wake lines. A scent of tropical greenery hung over the flat calm of the bay, interlaced with the pungent stink of burning charcoal from several huts perched on pilings along the beach. Fluttering candle pots twinkled on the water, marking the end of drift nets along the edges of the channel. Mahogany-skinned Filipino fishermen squatted impassively in their banco boats, their faces in shadow under large straw hats, watching the eight-thousand-ton warship slide silently by.

Brian Holcomb stood in the very eyes of the ship, alongside the ship’s outsized chief boatswain, BMC Louis Jesus Maria Martinez. Brian, whose Weapons Department was responsible for all topside spaces, had decided earlier to take a turn about the weather decks when sea detail had been called, to see that his department was ready to enter port. The chief, alerted immediately by his omnipresent crew of deckhands, had intercepted his department head halfway down the port side, looming out of the shadows of the boat decks with a mug of black coffee in each hand and a rumbling

“Morning, boss.” Brian was still getting used to the sheer size of the boatswain, whose massive bulk and obsidian-eyed Apache features set him apart from the other chief petty officers. It was commonly thought that his two middle names reflected his mother’s first words on seeing her baby, more than any expression of religious piety.

Of the four divisions in his Weapons Department, Brian held a natural affinity for First, or Deck, Division, having been a Deck Division officer in his first ship almost seven years ago. He had taken an instant liking to Chief Martinez and often found himself seeking out the chief boatswain when he would take a break from his departmental paperwork. At sea or in port, Chief Martinez could usually be found topside, prowling the decks where First Division was responsible for the preservation and maintenance of all deck gear, topside decks and bulkheads, boats, and all of the underway replenishment equipment. Salt air and salt water mounted a continuous chemical attack on all things metal, and Brian knew firsthand that First Division was hard pressed to keep the ship from rusting away beneath their feet. And because First Division was where a man landed if he could not cut it in one of the other divisions aboard ship, the chief boatswain was equally hard-pressed to keep his ragged band of deck apes, as the men in First Division were called, on the job.

Now Brian accepted a mug of coffee and the two began a walking tour, heading aft down the port side, passing the twin three-inch gun mount, the helicopter flight deck, and then dropping down a steep ladder to the fantail to check on the layout of the mooring lines, which were faked out in elliptical figure eights near the base of the five-inch gun mount. They turned and headed forward, going up the starboard side, climbing back up to the flight deck, walking underneath the starboard side three-incher, past the boat decks, through the forward weather breaks, and out onto the sheer expanse of the forecastle deck, where the steel ramp of the missile house rose out of the deck to point at the twin-armed guided-missile launcher. Then they moved forward through the small crowd of line handlers, stepping carefully across the clean sweep of slick gray steel to the anchor windlass and the capstan, from which bulky ribbons of black anchor chain stretched to the hawse pipes, to stand in the forwardmost point of the steeply overhanging bow. The sound of the cutwater below rose in a clean hiss on the morning air.

Everywhere along the way, Brian noted that the chief had something to say to the small knots of Deck Division personnel as they laid out mooring lines, clamped down the salt-covered decks with swabs and steaming buckets of fresh hot water, polished the brass turnbuckles on the lifelines, and coiled up heaving lines in preparation for going alongside the pier. To Brian, the chief’s instructions sounded like a continuous rumble of grunts and growls interspersed with nicknames like “Sloopy,”

“Injun,” and

“Cooter.” Several men were apparently related, all being called “dickhead.” While impressed with all the activity, he was also aware that it seemed to peak as the mammoth chief approached and then to subside in his generous wake, with the subsidence accompanied by sly smirks and an aura of insolence among the deck ratings. He mentioned this to the chief as they approached the breaks.

“Ain’t like it usta be, boss,” said the chief, shaking his head. “Guys’n Deck Division, they usta take some pride in getting’ up before everybody else, getting’ the decks clamped down and the brightwork shinin’. They usta go down to the mess decks and dump on ‘em puffy-eyed twidgets standin’ in the mess line. Usta was, nobody got up earlier’n a bosun mate ‘cept the night baker, and that pogue been up all night, anyways.

These little shits, they’s all sneakin’ around doin’ small-shit crime, fuckin’ off when they supposed to be workin’, doin’ dope onna weather decks at night, sleepin’ on watch on after lookout, breakin’ inta guys lockers’n stealin’ each others’ wallets’n stuff. We got a coupla good guys in this gang, but now it’s mostly a lotta assholes Navy used to jist shitcan. Ask me, it’s all that longhair shit gpin’ on on the outside, that fuckin’ noise they call music, all that hippie faggot protest shit, guys burnin’ their draft cards’n stuff. Ever since that Tet thing last year in Nam, country’s gone to shit.”

Brian nodded. “I’ve noticed that some of the enlisted in this ship are—I don’t know—kind of hostile,” he said.

“Even the younger petty officers seem to be sporting a bad attitude, especially toward officers. I’m talking about E-Fives, and even some E-Sixes. You guys in the chiefs’ locker seeing the same thing?”

The chief stopped as they approached the forecastle breaks, a tunnel-like space leading from the main deck to the foredeck of the ship.

“Yes’n no, Mr. Holcomb. Any white hat knows he gives a chief some lip, it’s gonna grow on him—you know what I’m sayin’? They gonna have a little accident, trip over a knee-knocker, maybe bump into a stanchion.

But this here crew, I dunno. I hear some stories—main-hole snipes doin’ dope on watch, somma the first class doin’ a little loan-sharkin’ and card-sharkin’, some kinda drug gang that’s movin’ all the shit on board—I dunno if it’s just the
. B. Hood or it’s the whole damn Navy.”p>

Brian slammed the heavy steel door behind them as they stepped out onto the forecastle.

“I’m just not used to seeing this stuff in the destroyer force,” he said.

“Yeah, well, the Hood, she’s bigger’n a tin can but smaller’n a cruiser.

We got, what, almost five hunnert some guys here. If ten percent’re serious assholes, that’s fifty serious assholes, see?”

As they walked forward up the forecastle, the ship swung around the northwest side of Grande Island. Brian smiled mentally but kept his face impassive. The chief’s words reminded him of the game the Navy played with Congress on the Hood class of ship. Hood was officially classified as a guided-missile frigate, or DLG. After the Korean War, Congress, in one of its periodic antimilitary moods, declared that it would not authorize any more large ships such as cruisers or battleships, on the grounds that the Navy wanted only big ships to carry around admirals and their staffs. The Navy had obligingly requested no more cruisers, choosing instead to produce an entire class of eight-thousand-ton guided-missile “frigates,” a classification normally given to a much smaller ship.

As Hood steadied up in the turn, they could see a small forest of black lattice masts of other Seventh Fleet warships etched against the metallic bulk of the go downs behind the piers. A blue-white blaze of sodium-vapor lights lining the piers became visible through the trees of Grande Island, where shattered Japanese coastal guns lay rusting on the humid margins of the jungle. Ahead on the port bow, two Navy harbor tugs lingered off to one side of the ship’s track, emitting intermittent puffs of diesel exhaust punctuated by a swirl of green water under their broad sterns and the whoosh of the air clutch as they maintained position out of the way of the approaching ship. On one tug, the figure of the harbor pilot was visible, standing casually out on a pilothouse fender, waiting to come alongside and board.

“Well, there she is, Weps boss, number one ichiban liberty port in the whole fuckin’ world,” said the chief.

“If half the stories are true, it must be something indeed,” replied Brian.

“Somethin’ don’t half cut it,” replied the chief. “Yer a LANTFLEET sailor. No offense, sir, but there ain’t nothing’ on the LANTFLEET side like Subic. Wasn’t fer ports like Subic and Olongapoo and Kaohsiung, us PACFLEET guys wouldn’t even come to this here war in Nam. Here in Olongapoo, you kin do anythin’, buy anythin’, and sell anythin’ you want, and I mean any thin’. There, you smell it, boss?”

Brian nodded silently as the amalgamated odors of jungle rot, fuel oil, diesel exhaust, old hemp, creosoted pilings, cheap perfume, and raw sewage rolled out, overpowering the pristine dawn air.

“Yea-a-ah-h!” The chief sniffed, and finished off his coffee. “Shame we ain’t gonna stay in for liberty this time.”

“BSF, Chief. Brief stop for fuel and the Task Force Seventy-seven briefings. Then back under way at eighteen hundred and up to the Gulf to relieve Long Beach. But I understand we come back here after the first line period.”

“Sure as hell hope so,” said the chief fervently. Then he turned around and roared to the forecastle crew at large, “Hey, dickhead, we’re outa goddamn coffee up here!”

Two sailors in ratty-looking dungarees sprang forward from the capstan to retrieve their empty mugs.