The Last Ship (21 page)

I always felt us fortunate in having as our home base the small town of Husnes, situated on the west coast of Norway, set on blue waters between blue mountains inside the Hardangerfjord. (The base’s existence itself made possible by a change two years previously of a provision in that country’s constitution forbidding any stationing of foreign troops on its soil.) The Norwegians are a marvelous people, a beautiful people in both body and spirit; their women as lovely as any I have scrutinized in my many visitations of ports the world over and characterized by a knowing femininity and a self-assured inner strength (the two traits perhaps consanguineous), not to mention the unsurpassed rich cream of their flesh, their rose-tinted cheeks; their men brave, heartily forthcoming, and entirely devoid of that compulsion to prove their manhood every hour or so that afflicts lesser men. Seafaring is bred in their bones, and they have in their hearts an especial place for the seaman breed of whatever nationality or origin. From the first they took us into their lives—and their homes. To the latter they invited us at Christmastime and even made it a point to discover our indigenous holidays such as Thanksgiving and, if we happened to be in port, have us to dinner then (yes, with turkey and all the trimmings, so fine, in their desire to please us, had been their research into our native ways). In turn we quite often had Norwegians as guests in wardroom and crew’s mess, and once we delighted the whole town by turning up the identity of their great festival, Mid-Summer’s Day (or St. John’s Day), June 24, a day of very little darkness, and holding aboard ship a twenty-four-hour open-house celebration, beginning as the Norwegians do on St. John’s Eve, with pickup music provided by members of ship’s company who knew instruments, dancing on the fantail below the after missile cells, surprisingly elegant even dainty hors d’oeuvres prepared by our resourceful Chief Palatti, and even local spirits procured by us in direct violation of the Navy regulation, known infamously throughout the fleet as the Josephus Daniels Edict (he being the Secretary of the Navy who proclaimed it) and unique to the United States Navy among all navies of the world, which specifies that no alcoholic beverages shall ever be available aboard ship other than for medicinal purposes. I was prepared to use this pretext if necessary, calculating that such diversions were the best of medicine for my crew after a month of Barents duty. It was a memorable party, one of the highest spirits and camaraderie, for both the crew and our Norwegian guests. On our ship any member of her company asked to name the world’s most potent drink would instantly have responded Norwegian aquavit.

In sum the relationship with the townsfolk and these American bluejackets could not have been one of more warmth—both ways honestly given, honestly received—and between the two an amity rich and kindly reigned. So much so that three of our men—Brinton, signalman first; Hubbard, a boatswain second; and Hewlett, chief quartermaster—in time married Norwegian girls, all the ceremonies being held in the little Saint-Peter’s-of-the-Sea Lutheran church in Husnes, situated not far from the water and whose charming steeple was the last thing we saw standing out to sea and the first returning from patrol, where I stood up as best man for these of my crew who had decided on this ultimate fraternization with the Norwegians. It may seem peculiar to some but the fact was, nothing was ever said in our agreeable intercourse with the sweet people of Husnes concerning the reason for our being home-ported in their town in the first place. In point of fact this was not strange. Seamen traditionally do not engage land people in shoptalk. Another factor may have been that there seemed no reason why one would choose such a subject to talk about.

Then, after one more sojourn of pleasant liberty, just after first light we headed out to relieve the
Cantwell
and commence another routine patrol. Besides the wives, a goodly number of other townsfolk were at the pier as always to see us off, even at that early and cold hour. As the ship stood out and receded into the Hardangerfjord toward the Norwegian Sea they waved to us and we waved back across our wake, frost-white in the intense blue of those waters, in that ancient, somehow forever poignant parting, however temporary and however routine the voyage, of the sea people and the land people. Paling the last stars, winter’s dim vermilion sun was just coming up from that east where we were bound to proclaim a new day for both, to preside over another departure of a ship for the sea, and whatever surprises it may hold for those who would seek it out, and to cast into waving silhouettes the good-wishers huddled against the keen temperature on the pier. We waved back until even the silhouettes were no more and, soon turning, set a course N. by N.E. for the Barents. The date was December 3. We would be gone until after the New Year, meaning that that year we would be enjoying no Christmas festivities with our Norwegian friends. Not a hand aboard who didn’t regret that, for Norwegian Christmases may be the most joyous of all.

I used to wonder why all of our capability, consisting of 896 Hiroshima equivalents, in the form of 56 Tomahawks, each carrying a 200-kiloton nuclear warhead, should be reserved for one target. A small part of it would have served the purpose. Or, alternatively, we could have been allocated a number of targets. Principally, I believe, the matter had to do with the all-ruling “mix” principle, in this case concentrating one ship on one target (for all I know even ourselves with some sort of backup, should anything prevent us from fulfilling our mission); a philosophy made possible by the aforementioned shortage of targets in comparison with the total capability. It had always been my judgment that in respect to that target, if it ever came to that, we would be ordered to send off but a small portion of our vertical capability, leaving us diminished scarcely at all, with the major portion of the missiles available for whatever undefined, indeed unforeseeable purpose they might be needed.

It had always been judged—a fact naturally known to the last hand aboard, reference never made to it—that once we fired our missiles, eliminated our target, our own ship was essentially not just at high risk but quite reasonably forfeit, one ship with a complement of 305 in exchange for a dozen SS-18 missile silos and parenthetically 311,656 of theirs, being considered not a bad trade-off. There was, however, one fortuitous circumstance that constituted, having launched, our chief chance of escape: the slowness of the Tomahawk itself, granting us four free hours from the time it left the ship until it hit target. And on all the high seas, than ours there was no faster ship.

The range of the Tomahawk missile was 2,500 miles. When the ice packed up in the Barents, we slid back down into the Norwegian Sea and when and if it packed up there, into the Baltic. Sometimes moving among them purely to reduce detection. Taken together with the Tomahawk range, the three bodies of water gave us a truly great amount of sea room over which to roam, immensely enhancing our own security. But whether in the Barents, Norwegian, or Baltic seas, our cruising patterns kept us at all times within a range not to exceed 1,500 miles from our city. Generally we were considerably nearer.

Moving out from the Hardangerfjord, we crossed effortlessly the Musken Strauen, possibly the most celebrated whirlpool on any of the earth’s waters, once believed to suck under every vessel within a wide radius, and giving the word “maelstrom” to the language. From there on heading north by northeast through the Norwegian Sea, hugging the coast of Norway, staying at all times eastward of the warm North Cape current, one of those enticing permutations the sea, as of a gift, is forever proffering those who venture on it, being a continuation of the Gulf Stream and which, among other bounties, keeps the port of Murmansk ice-free the year long. Within this protective flow, nearing the Barents Trough, and eastward of it entering that sea.

For eighteen years now I have been a deep-water sailor and have stood watch on every sea the planet holds and on not a few of her gulfs, bays, and estuaries. In no other body of water have I had so full a consciousness of the ship under me being locked in mortal combat with the sea. The ship riding, during the long nights of the Barents winter, down into those troughs so deep that it seemed the ravenous waters would swallow her whole and she would never arise from them, the waves striking her with vicious, hammering blows which made her hull strain and tremble, the massive seas boarding her at will and racing toward the superstructure, smashing with a fearsome roar against the pilot house, splitting to hurl in angry force down both sides of the ship port and starboard; then through the wet darkness seeing dimly from the bridge the ship’s bow ascending with infinite slowness through the raging waves before taking another plunge. This in endless succession across a dark and endless seascape.

It was a fray which exacted a profound toll on ship’s company, the pitch of the ship slamming into the hollows attacking incessantly not only the vessel herself but also the men. Staying physically aboard the ship became a problem. Lines rigged fore and aft for men to hold on to and pull themselves along, work their way to their watch stations, over a route where, after each pitch the shipping seas bringing tons of water down on him in a merciless rhythm, any oncoming wave arrived fully capable of sweeping a man overboard however tenacious his grip, knowing if it happened that the ship could have no hope of stopping for him. By the time she came about in the raving violence of those waters, assuming we could ever find a lone man in them, and got to where the man appeared to have gone overboard, he would long since have been claimed by the cold, thirty seconds the average was said to be for this asphyxiation by freezing, even as the hungry sea pulled him under. Two men we lost that way. Seaman Apprentice Gibson and Signalman First Chauncey. I set out fairly long handwritten letters, one to Chauncey’s wife in Marblehead, Massachusetts, one to Gibson’s parents—the boy was but nineteen—in a small town called Buena Vista, Tennessee—trying, with what anguished feebleness I was aware even as I put the words to paper, to convey some shred of solace in the intimation that husband and son went quickly in the freezing deep.

Four hours of watch, then a collapse of one’s sore and violated body into a bunk where often one had to buckle oneself in with the straps with which every bunk on the ship was rigged for Barents duty, hoping at best for snatches of sleep. Grateful for that: There were whole nights when not a soul got a wink. And the cold! I find it difficult to convey the cold, the desperate, appalling, cruel cold, of those latitudes but fifteen degrees distant from the top of the world. Even encased thickly in the warmest clothing provided by the Navy, shielded to where through a thin slit only the eyes of a man showed and one sometimes had to ask a shipmate one knew as well as a brother to whom he was speaking . . . no clothing ever devised could hope to keep out the piercing cold, abetted as it was by the instant drenching one got on the weather decks from the unceasing seas raking the ship and accompanied ofttimes by sleetlike rain, borne on screaming winds, savage and icy north winds arriving directly from Arctic wastes, that the Barents heavens seemed so fond of contributing to our discomfort, as if the sea below it needed any help in that undertaking. On watch one was at best only uncomfortable, at worst seized in the stranglehold of a numbing misery of body and mind, a physical and mental exhaustion that left one poised on the far edge of collapse, whilst straining with all one’s will to concentrate solely on assisting the ship in her battle with the besieging sea, a battle on occasion for her very steerageway.

Thus our only enemy then: the sea, the remorseless, heartless sea. The thundering combers coming at us in a wild and senseless malevolence, in barbarous extortion, day after day—night after night would put it better in a latitude and time of year in which one seemed to exist in a world of blind blackness, the ship proceeding through black and tumultuous waters under black skies from which the very stars had fled into seemingly permanent hiding; daylight measured in four hours or three, even these generally of a weakened and wan sun which appeared on the point of extinguishing itself at any moment like a candle fluttering in one of the Force 8 or 9 gales which the sea sometimes enlisted as ally. Sea and elements then conspiring to shake the ship from keel to truck in a paroxysm of ferocity, turning her normal inner workings into an anarchic chaos—all living spaces in a wanton, heedless shambles, crew’s quarters and wardroom places of desolation; the simplest act, eating, sleeping, standing, become a tormenting problem. A sea of an unappeasable rage, intent, it seemed, on destroying everything, living and inanimate alike, it could reach, obsessively eager to take, gulp down this intruder—and during the two years of this duty, while never achieving that final triumph, inflicting on us wounds which, if not mortal, at times required considerably extensive repairs when once our thirty days were up and we charted a course for our Norwegian-port home. A list of wounds which would have included a ship’s gig smashed to kindling wood in her davits, a dismantled mast, even an anchor torn away from its housing by a sea which seemed to gobble up that object with a particular relish, as if taking a big and especially satisfying bite out of us, an anchor being so precious to a ship. Wounds, some of them, severe enough to require dry-dock time in that facility the Navy had towed all the way across the Atlantic to the town—tribute enough to the Barents—where it waited as a kind of intensive-care unit for ships back from Barents duty. The lacerating sea inflicting wounds aplenty, too, on ship’s company, a man thrown violently against a bulkhead, a simple stanchion become hazardous in those infuriate waters; cracked ribs, a smashed kneecap, huge livid bruises, the doc and the hospital corpsmen having to stand an almost continuous watch. The Barents. An avenging sea, of a monstrous fury, bent seemingly on punishing us for the very presumption of entering her domain.

We never entered her lightly. We came prepared, or as much so as any ship could. Above all, by the vessel we came on. No ship constructed by man, by her very lines, by her making from keel upward, sets forth better able to do battle with the deep. The destroyer! First warrior of the seas. Sometimes as she plunged headlong into those valleys so steep I could see from the bridge the gleaming crests of waves so high above me on either side as to seem to embrace the ship in a death-clasp, the sea laying as though a final siege to her, a sea gone berserk, frenzied, the ship attacked in brute force from every side so that she both rolled and pitched in a violent convulsion, and then saw, as if in surprise, her stem ride up, I had a feeling that she did so in a kind of wild and ferocious glee of her own, before plunging back eagerly for more. Absorbing the murderous battering as if she liked a good fight and desired to show the stuff she was made of. Then it was that through the brutal fatigue, the anguish of mind and body, would come what sustained me: the profound emotion, transcending, unrivaled, I felt toward that ship, a pride and something close to exaltation that it had been given me to be her captain; indivisible from it (for a ship and her company are one thing) a love discrete, idiosyncratic, perhaps known but to few men, and for all I know all of them ship’s captains, a kind of safeguarding affection, deeper by far than anything my life had found, for those 305 enduring, uncomplaining souls aboard her, not one fainthearted, whose destinies along with mine were sealed into her, with no escape hatch, no exit, dependent utterly on one another and on the ship, and whose entire care, whose very lives, had been given into my hands. In the end I came to care for no one but them, and for them a care, a concern, complete, absolute.

Then, with sheer abruptness, after long days and longer nights of fighting off the assaulting waters in a madness it seemed would go on forever, the sea took a respite and we came out of it with, through the utter physical depletion, the infinite weariness, a kind of giddy exhilaration, vertiginous, a dazed and heady sense, grimly comic in its way, not of triumph but simply of having once more come through; of still being there—all afloat! Bloodshot and sleepless, vacant eyes, unbelieving, suddenly presented with a startling sight: tranquillity, quiescence. Good and simple things. Men could sit at tables and eat a hot meal instead of standing up holding to a stanchion while trying to time bites out of a cold sandwich to the ship’s pitch. A cup of coffee would not jump from one’s grip to scald the hands. A sweetness of sustained and unbuckled sleep became possible. Then it was that the Barents chose to display in brief cunning her other side, as for our edification, a species of reward for having endured her maniacal temper; as though declaring we had passed our true candidatures for seamen, Barents men, and thus stood worthy to be briefly reprieved by the mercy of the sea. The sea settling into an unearthly calm. Seeming to sit back for a moment to regard its adversary in thoughtful admiration for the fight she had put up, or perhaps only to take her measure in preparation for a fresh onslaught. A truce. The very heavens shutting down their winds and presiding in a hush of stainless azure over a surface turned eerily placid. By day the waters held in an untrembling stillness of deepest blue, resplendent, shimmering in the pellucid crystalline light of the few hours granted the sun in those latitudes of the high north. By night, with its twenty-hour allotment, the reappearing stars looking down with a lustrous whiteness I have witnessed in no other skies on a sea of a magisterial blackness I have beheld in no other waters.

After the incontinent fury of those same waters, it was a preternatural sight, a feeling of phantasm. The only sound that of the ship moving with a gentle sibilance through the dormant waters, a cathedral of a sea, her crew themselves caught up in that devout cold-purified serenity, in those dazzling and etheric silences, so that going about the weather decks men who had had to shout to be heard against the roar of gale and wave spoke as though in whispers, stood by the lifeline to stare in mute wonder at a seascape impassive, sublime. A spooky thing, pregnant with awe, with wonder, mothering other-worldly thoughts. At such times the sea looming across its lambent motionless surface under the soundless sky as though a crossing-over place, between this world and some other world of eternity set on forever receding shores just beyond it, another world whether of heaven or Hades one presumably would never know. I take no sea lightly—no seaman of any experience does—but on the Barents I felt myself in the presence of something that stands alone among the seas of my memory, the waters of the globe, something at once godlike and terrible, equally of a malevolent ferocity and a deathly beauty, exuding some profound and fearsome mystery; something unspeakable, forbidden; her very fury, returning always after those short-lived pacific interludes, a day or a couple, dependent seemingly on her whim, appearing acts of rage for our insolence in seeking out her dark secrets, or perhaps for using her for our own purposes.

Thus, there at the top of the world, we crossed and recrossed the cold sea on a course intentionally every-varying. Just waiting, I would think later. To be summoned only if someone far away, by some species of reasoning not to be shared with us, for whatever cause, real or imagined, got it in his head to summon us. Never, save for some occasional oblique allusion, quickly set aside, unpursued, this not being our province, really discussing why we were doing this; besides, a more useless topic of conversation, leading nowhere, being hardly conceivable. Just waiting, going back and forth as though we would do so forever, doing what fate in her unfathomable ways had decreed we should do, if one believes in that manner. Not truly believing we would ever be doing anything else. Had I been asked about the chances, I could scarcely have answered. Or rather, I would say the answer would have varied immensely, and even from moment to moment, the odds swinging more widely than on any wager one could ever imagine placing. Depending, I suppose, on what came over the radio bands bringing news of the goings-on in what was forever to us not just the outside world, but a world so distant, so foreign, and ourselves so severed, deracinated, from it, so on our own, in our coursings over those dark waters, it was as though we were hearing news from another sphere, seeming, much of it, to consist of the incomprehensible, the irrational, acts performed by a species hardly known to much less the same as ourselves; we not unlike men with noses pressed against the glass gazing into some luxurious restaurant at opulent diners, yet not with envy of them but more of astonishment, of wonder, at a life of such strange ease. Yet it was from these sumptuous-living souls that the summons, if ever it came at all, would issue.

The odds depending on the outside news accorded us—and perhaps also on our inner state, our emotions and our fatigues at any given time, our ups and our downs, for these, too, swung widely as the range of a magnetic compass and seemingly as out of our control; whether we felt high or low from the hard lonely fight with the sea. Not even knowing whether the high represented a devout hope never to be called upon to do it and the low a tiny, secret, utterly private desire that we would get to do it, if for no other reason than to bring reprieve from the terrible monotony—this not being the horror it might appear, since men stretched far enough in monotony, at least of sailors I believe firmly this to be true, are like men stretched far enough in hunger, in that just as in the second case they are capable of doing anything to allay it, in the first they can suffer momentary flashes of a desire to have that malady relieved, and by almost anything, so intense as to appear, indeed be, almost deranged—or whether that it was just the reverse, that that represented the high and the other the low. Perhaps even that changed about on the barometer of our emotions and our fatigues. And finally, as their captain to me the most solemnly unspeakable of all, I once or twice went so far in my meditations in that loneliest of seas as to speculate, in regarding the men under me—to wonder if I sensed distantly even the seed of such a thing—whether there existed at times a whisper of a wish, deep in those fathomages of men’s souls where inadmissible secrets, the most shielded of longings, are kept under the strongest of locks, never to be let out, even to one’s shipmates, to do it simply so that all our work and all our hardship would not have been wasted, would not have been in vain. Such, however quickly dismissed as themselves aberrant, were thoughts that only the long and claustral nights going endlessly back and forth on those dark waters could fetch up from the cognate darkness of the soul. I found then and find now none of this particularly strange, nor I think would anyone who has spent much time at sea in circumstances inherent of potential enemy conflict. Ourselves on a duty so profoundly lonely, so utterly isolated as to make us feel at times, not in hallucination but quite literally, alone on the planet, that other world so far away as to be hardly existent. Surely it was for this same reason that we felt more unseverably bound to one another than is usual even on a good ship. Bound to each other and to no one else.