The Edge of Honor (6 page)

They had brought along a couple of beach-bar debutantes, one of whom had produced some grass and started passing the stuff around. Rocky, a reformed smoker, had declined until Rackman pulled him aside and told him that he had something very important to talk to him about, but only if Rocky would first do a joint with him.

Intrigued, Rocky had tried the marijuana. He coughed a lot but found it to be a pleasant-enough buzz if you could get by the awful smell. Then Rackman had revealed his shipboard avocation and offered to let Rocky take over the business. Rackman would show him the ropes for a month or so before he transferred off and would then become Rocky’s main supplier ashore. Rocky, flying low on the effects of several beers and the joint, had begun laughing hysterically, until Rackman described the profit structure, the secure nature of the distribution system aboard ship, and revealed that he had squirreled away over $150,000 in tax-free money during the three years he had been in business in Hood. Rocky had stopped laughing. Rackman had told him to think it over, and Rocky had.

Rocky was thirty-three, unmarried, had twelve years in on his twenty, and would be eligible for the chief’s exam in two more years. He had been born and raised in Seattle, the second son of a career fireman whose attachment to rye whiskey had killed him in a car wreck one night as he drove home from his neighborhood bar.

His mother had carried on, helped out financially by the generosity of her husband s fellow firefighters, raising three large boys in a small house on the north side of the city. Rocky had gone into the Navy after high school, as there had been no possibility of going to college, given the financial situation at home. His older brother, John, had become a fireman. His younger brother, Timmie, had drifted into the growing ranks of professional hippies, war protestors, and dropouts populating greater Seattle toward the end of the sixties.

Being a high school graduate, Rocky had qualified for radar A-school after boot camp. He had no idea what a radarman was when he signed up, but he had been told that you stood your watches in cool air-conditioned spaces, sitting in chairs instead of standing on your feet all day, and that there was proficiency pay for those who made rate, all of which seemed to him to beat hell out of being a boiler tender or a deck ape.

He had progressed through a series of seagoing billets to E-6, or petty officer first class, by being good at his job and exceptionally accommodating when it came to pleasing officers and chiefs. To Rocky, the Navy was an extremely simple and even generous proposition: They clearly told you the rules, they trained you exhaustively in your rating, they encouraged you and even helped you to make rate, they gave you a change of scenery every three years or so, and they let you out after twenty years, with a paycheck for life. From what Rocky could see, the only way you could screw it all up was to piss off an officer or a chief.

Being a survivor at heart and an extremely practical man, Rocky had made it a point not only to get along with officers and chiefs but to become something of an expert at it. He took special pains to turn himself out in immaculate uniforms, paying for custom-fitted shirts and trousers. He kept his shoes shined, his hair cut, his demeanor sincere, and his performance of duty scrupulously professional. When he realized that not very many of his enlisted peers had figured out the system, he knew he was onto a good thing. He was treated with respect by his superiors and also by the other sailors, even the give a-shit brigade, because as long as Rocky played the game, the rest of them could goof off, serve their time, and get out. Even after all these years, Rocky thought of it all as a big con, but, having adapted beautifully to the system, he was completely secure in the Navy. He was unconcerned about his future, which the Navy would take care of, and casually ignorant about what was happening in the outside world.

He was by no means a saint; you could not get to E-6 in the Navy or any of the services without being able to play the enlisted game as well as he played the officer’s game. As a divisional leading petty officer, he could read through a junior enlisted man’s scam in a flash and knew by heart the standard liturgy of enlisted excuses, the “my car, it,”

“my kids, they,”

“my wife, she” stories by which the white hats worked the system for a little slack. He had worked his own share of scams and deals over the years, but always within the system and always under the protection of the chiefs. As far as the officers were concerned, Rocky was comfortably in the groove, a solid citizen aboard ship, a dependable petty officer who never gave anybody any trouble. He was, in every sense of the term, a certified lifer.

When the sixties, with the Kennedy assassinations, the civil rights upheavals and killings, the burgeoning Vietnam War protest movements, the advent of rock and roll, free love, and the drug culture, began to roll over America like a wave train of social tsunamis, Rocky had done what most military career people did: ignored it all.

He had been content to go to sea, go on deployments, and serve his time on twenty. But by 1967, when Rack man first made his pitch, even Rocky’s secure little world in the Navy had begun to wobble just a little bit.

He had set up a bachelor pad over in Ocean Beach when he made E-6, and it wasn’t long before all the antiwar, antimilitary, antigovernment, and antiestablishment noise began to get in his face. And then there was the money angle: With Johnson’s Great Society programs and the Vietnam War inflating the economy, budget capped Navy pay began to lose its historically secure buying power. Even Rocky, who was no economist, had become acutely aware that the twice-monthly paycheck was covering less and less ground, and he paid attention when he heard the chiefs grumbling as they began to realize how little that pension check was going to cover when they hit their twenty. Rocky had never looked that far ahead, being satisfied to nod agreeably when the older hands talked about hitting that magic twenty-year gate, rolling out, and living on their retired pay. As life began to turn on its ear out there in the world, Rocky had begun to nurture some doubts as to the system’s intentions and ability to take care of him, which lent Rackman’s proposition an immediate appeal, especially the money.

But it had been more difficult to deal with the ethical and moral complications. He had been raised in a family that put a high value on having a solid job, turning in solid performance in return for solid benefits and security, and doing something with the flavor of public service to it.

After twelve years in the Navy, Rocky was no longer bemused by any maudlin concepts of patriotism, but he also knew full well that going into the drug business would be a major insult to a value system that had served him well so far.

Like most of his other career decisions, though, it came down to a matter of practicality. He had long since adopted the typical enlisted view of drugs on board ship: As long as people were discreet, doing an occasional joint or pipe of hash to take the edge off all the boredom, then there was nothing seriously wrong with it, other than the penalties for getting caught. His attitude was reinforced by the seemingly casual attitude held by the command in Hood, which, unlike his last ship, did not operate a high profile antidrug-use program. A couple of the chiefs were known to kick some ass if somebody was flagrant about what he was doing, but the key seemed to be discretion. As Rackman had put it, the command did not seem to be after him personally or his operation, and he had given Rocky the impression that the Old Man actually did not believe there were drugs in his ship. Just to be sure, though, Rackman took great pains not to attract attention to himself by flashing a lot of money or living visibly beyond his means, and the operation ran itself.

But for Rocky, it was a girl named Lucy who opened his eyes to what was happening in America. He had met Lucy at one of those all-weekend beach parties that bloomed out on Ocean Beach when the coastal weather cooperated. He had been soaking up rays and nursing a six-pack with three other first class petty officers from the ship when this vision had come ambling down the beach: long, stringy beach blond hair, clingy bathing suit, legs up to h’yar, as the song went, enormous eyes, and a lopsided, lazy smile on her face that told every man who stared that she could read his mind and was not offended.

Rocky had held up a cold beer and she had put the rudder over and joined him on his beach blanket.

Lucy came from a well-to-do middle-class family in San Mateo who thought she was productively enrolled as an English major at UCSD. At the end of her first semester in Southern California, Lucy had aligned her orbit with the appropriate celestial spheres and declared her personal emancipation from all recognized conventions, especially those of the people who were paying her tuition. She focused single-mindedly on the task of expanding the horizons of her personal experience, adopting the rule that one should rule absolutely nothing out of the spectrum of personal experience, including this thoroughly square sailor with the pleasant manner and the dynamite black beard.

Over the next few weeks that the ship was in port, Rocky became something of a project for her as she turned him on and tuned him in to the dizzying kaleidoscope of Southern California freedom, which included the uninhibited questioning of all existing value systems, decrying the Vietnam War, despising LBJ, embracing a host of ill-defined isms, indulging in mind-expanding substances, and screwing his brains out anytime he was in the mood and sometimes when he wasn’t. Rocky was mostly in it for the great sex, but he could not help but be affected by the views of Lucy and her friends.

Collectively, they showed him that there was not only a whole new world out there but that it was altogether different from his world, and, even more disturbing, they actively disliked what he did for a living and even what he was. And there were lots of them, as even a cursory glance at the television revealed.

When Lucy finally slipped down the ecliptic in search of new galaxies and experiences, Rocky was a changed man. Lucy’s breathtaking interpretations of what it meant to be a child of the sixties had shattered his complacent notions about the value of conformity, playing by the rules, and unquestioning cooperation with the system. By even his own admission, his successful career as an enlisted man in the Navy had been vividly exposed as a pawn’s game. While he had not bought into the whole scene, especially all the isms, and while he often wondered who was paying the rent for all these free spirits, if these were the people he was in the Navy to protect and defend and they thought that drugs were just one part of the process of personal enlightenment, not in themselves evil and wrong, then maybe Rackman’s deal wasn’t such a bad thing. Somebody would supply the ship: Why not him, especially when the whole deal was being handed to him on a silver platter? He had experienced a sudden ambition to do better, much better, than continuing with his complacent drift toward the holy grail of twenty. Rackman’s offer suddenly looked tailor-made.

Rackman had explained that being the main man required intelligence, a great deal of acting ability, and effective cover—the very reasons, he said, he had picked Rocky. Rocky was obviously intelligent enough to get to first class in a highly technical rating, and it was equally obvious that he was a consummate actor: All the officers thought Rocky was a model petty officer. Plus, Rocky had damn-near-perfect cover: He was a member of the

“K*t

master-at-arms force, which would give him an inside look at any program the command put in motion to quash drug use aboard the ship.

Rackman had explained that the distribution system was already in place.

Rocky would deal with only one man, a black electrician’s mate first class who went by the name of Bullet. It was well known among the crew that Bullet was the acknowledged, if unofficial, leader of the younger, more radicalized blacks in Hood. Bullet ran a network he called his “associates.” A doper interested in scoring a little relaxation would strike up a casual conversation with one of the associates about his needs and desires and the associate would speculate on where something might be found after a certain time had passed.

The doper would then speculate about where a small wad of cash might be found and would then go off to wait a while before going exploring.

Rackman did not know and didn’t want to know precisely who Bullet’s associates were, other than to assume that all them were black. His righteous brothers, Bullet called them, just like the hit rock band.

Rocky could see that Bullet’s use of ancient racial fears as a tactic against infiltration or potential snitches was brilliant, especially since almost all of his customers were white.

Continuing aft, Rocky smiled again at his sweet deal.

Crewmen passing him in the passageway saw the smile and figured Rocky was thinking about his many women.

San Diego

“Tizzy, this is crazy!” Maddy Holcomb held on to what was left of her hairdo with her left hand while gripping the door-side armrest with her right. Tizzy Hudson just laughed and steered the convertible down the ramp from Highway 5 to the Rpsecrans exit at a speed that had Maddy pressing her right foot into the floorboards.

“Maddy, relax, for crying out loud,” said Tizzy, turning onto Rosecrans with only passing deference to the stop sign at the bottom of the ramp.

“Just because MCRD’s a meat market doesn’t mean you have to take one home with you. It’s perfectly okay just to go and watch. It’s even funny.”

“But we’re married, Tizzy. Tiz-zy!” Maddy squeaked as Tizzy cut off a bus trying to pull away from the curb.

“So’re half the women there, honey buns,” shouted Tizzy over the wind.

“I’ve been a good little nun for a whole month, and now I need to get out and rock and roll, just a little bit. MCRD’s perfect; you can find whatever you need there—a little or a lot. Like I said earlier, lots of people go there just to enjoy the show. Especially the Marines. Or better yet, the Marine aviators. They’re so full of themselves, it’s kind of fun to pretend to take them seriously, like they were humans or something. You know, ‘Oooh, you fly a Phantoml How totally groo-oovy!”