The Last Ship (8 page)

Only once on our odyssey had that rule felt serious challenge; for one terrible moment we had come to the very brink. I had stood it down by the only weapon I had. There was no assurance that that governance would not be tested again and this time more formidably. And if it came, the weapon would be no different. I had had to harden myself; the departure, loss, of over a third of ship’s company on other seas affixing that indelible imprint—that absence of pause by which ruthlessness becomes but another resource where circumstances insist. In the end there is no substitute for will: Other men may have the choice of embracing that conviction, that banal option, or not. A ship’s captain, none. For him it is immutable fact. If he loses that, he loses all: Nothing must be permitted to deny it.

I had decided on the island as a place on whose land and near waters we would seek sustenance. But reason, craftiness, said one step at a time. Beyond that manifestly my first essential cunning was to keep to myself those other intentions I had for it—and for them.

Turning slightly, I looked with purpose across the star-caught water to the dark recumbent island, which alone shared the sea with us; feeling somehow there was something of importance about it we did not know, some unrevealed essence, perhaps favorable, perhaps otherwise; knowing, whichever, we stood committed to its strangeness, its unknownness. Nothing came forth. It stayed as slumbering as the sea itself, wrapped in mystery, harboring its secrets, reluctant to part with a single one. Then something pleasant. A sibilance of wind stirred, its brief plaintive sound through the halyards like some nightly orison, and before it as quickly vanished bore to me from somewhere forward the faintest scent of one of them, a barely discernible whisper of perfume, mingling with the sea smell, even before I saw her shadowy form crossing up the ladder to the bridge. Navy directives, you must take my word, had something to say even on that matter: “in good taste.” The Navy leaves nothing to chance. The affected hands had remained in line. Even so, to this day I had not become accustomed to that shipboard trace—the last thing from being unpleasant, only always still a surprise, that one should find it here of all places, on this man-of-war; the scents of women. Probably Seaman Thornberg, quartermaster striker, on her way to relieve the dog watch—yes, we kept a helmsman on watch even at anchor, by that unforgiving sea law that decrees that a ship must be ready to act instantly at any sign of danger, and to get underway at once. The quick intake of scent must have started it: I began consciously to think back over when it had begun, as though the history of that strange thing, turning inside out as it did the very texture of ships that had held from earliest voyages on great waters, might somehow now suggest an answer; a way through the hazardous difficulty that had begun to haunt me like a dark foreboding and whose tenacity seemed but to intensify, to resist all my mental efforts to stow it away until other, presumably more urgent, matters—food, for instance—were underway.

As I have recounted, I had strongly opposed their original admission into ships, for the rather high-flown reasons given; though in a more down-to-earth seaman’s view fearful that their presence would screw up, complicate in a thousand ways, some explicitly envisioned in one’s mind, some left to suspicious imagination, the already infinitely complex and delicate job of operating such a ship as this one. Now: In my heart of hearts I suppose I still stood opposed to it. At the same time I felt practically, as a ship’s captain, that if anything they made for a better, more efficient ship; as skillful sailors as any man in the performance of their shipboard duties and, to my mind, in not a few instances superior; more—I will not say intelligent, perhaps the phrase is somewhat more fiercely dedicated to their respective jobs, ratings, skills. Some of this, I would expect, due to tougher Navy standards, first in the selection of the women it permitted to enlist, and second in those it allowed to go to sea (among those applying, in the first instance the acceptance rate was said to be one in ten, in the second one in a hundred), checked out as few sailors had ever been; some to the singleness of purpose that brought them here, and once aboard to being more determined to hack it, to prove they could do it. For whatever reasons, they performed as well as men. They brought a number of surprises. First of these was that the younger of these women sailors appeared to be distinctly more mature emotionally than men sailors of similar ages; whether this was due to the nature of women or to the mentioned Navy’s stiffer selection process for them, especially those sent to sea, I did not know. They presented fewer disciplinary problems. They carried other advantages, some of them decidedly esoteric, entirely unforeseen: one of these being—something as a seaman I found interesting as a novelty, rather charming, as a captain grimly delighted—their faculty, due to smaller physical dimensions, of getting through hatches more quickly. This is more important an asset than one might think in modern sea-battle conditions, where the ability to come swiftly to battle stations can quite conceivably make all the difference in outcome to a ship about to be attacked by today’s weaponry, an extra second enabling her to dodge an SS-N-12 Sandbox missile instead of being blown up by it.

In practice, for a given task I soon ceased to be concerned, or even aware, whether it was a man sailor or a woman sailor doing something I wanted done. They were alike in executing their jobs. Of the other ways in which they were not at all alike, the Navy—which is the least naive of establishments—had naturally been cognizant when it sent the women forth and in its ineffable wisdom promulgated a veritable typhoon of directives dealing with the correct behavior between these two kinds of sailors and further enjoining ship’s captains, under severe penalties, to make certain of such conduct and giving them extraordinary powers to punish infractions. One specific Navy directive, NAVOP 87/249, read, and I quote verbatim now, “Women will not be addressed, either in general, or specifically, as ‘broads,’ ‘fillies,’ ‘dolls,’ ‘girl,’ or like phrases.” (At the time I wondered what the “like phrases” were that the Navy didn’t specify.) Fat chance of any of my men trying on for size any of those terms, considering the breed of women we had received on board, these being spirited to the last woman. They had not got here by being patsies. They got here because they were smart, because they could cope—and, yes, because they were, or had the makings of, first-class seamen.

Another directive dealt with the sternness of retribution should any “molesting” occur of such sailors. I had not heard that fine old word in that context since my early youth—it was either my mother or my father, I cannot remember which so that perhaps it was both, in separate sessions, to make certain beyond all doubt in a matter of such gravity that Thomas got the point and no mistake, who at the proper age meticulously instructed me that this was something that no boy ever did to any girl—and “molesting” became a court-martial offense (as it would have been for me in the form of a razor strop or worse). CNO directives flowed like the repeated tides of the sea, and were interesting studies in meticulous, to-the-point wording—the Navy has always been uncommonly gifted in the scrupulousness, the precision, of language, necessarily so considering that a misunderstood or ill-expressed command can bring instant disaster to a ship—impossible of any but the most exact interpretation, and yet withal with a certain intuitive delicacy. This one: “Overt displays of affection are out of line and will not be tolerated.” That one: “Men and women on board ship are considered to be on duty at all times. Conduct is expected to meet traditional standards of decorum.” (In other words, any sailor would instantly and correctly interpret, nothing funny off watch or on liberty either.)

But I do not think it was for the reason of this accumulation of threats dispatched over the frequencies to all fleets that the thing worked. Rather I believe it was the fact that the men and women themselves knew almost primally—as if the sea herself had spoken to them and told them in her stern no-nonsense tones, stronger than bookfuls of
Navy Regulations,
Navy directives, that it had to be so—the absolute, nonnegotiable imperativeness of this code and of rigorously abiding by it if the ship were not to be torn apart, something no true sailor wants, abhors above all else. Who chooses to upset the house where he lives and make it unlivable— especially if there is no way for him to exit it? In any event we had no difficulties in our normal operations. No sailor called a fellow sailor a doll or a filly and certainly none ventured anything, not on my ship, that could remotely be characterized as “molesting.”

Sailors are correctly viewed by landsmen as human beings with tendencies to “let go” ashore. The reason they are such on the beach is that they are the exact opposite aboard ship. Shipboard they desire equanimity, discipline, even a certain rigidity, for the simple reason that they know as a first principle of life at sea that their welfare, even their survival, counts on the sure presence of these qualities, these rituals, throughout a ship’s decks. The Navy could do what it wished (though goaded and compelled to it, and against its desires I shall always believe), introduce whatever new, strange, even bizarre ingredients it liked, and the sailors were not about to throw away the elements essential to their well-being and to the very functioning of the ship on which they to a man depended. The women became sailors, too, holding the same verities; sometimes, I had on occasion felt, holding them even more so. Furthermore, it was accomplished with a swiftness that to a landsman would not have seemed possible. Perhaps most important of all, the women became with the men what the latter were already with one another: shipmates.

All of this had been in the beginning. And it had worked and held fast. And now? Well, so far, so good. Nothing had happened—with that one exception, that derangement. Until now; until this present moment, up to and including it.

Before heading for my cabin and sleep I looked a final time at the heavens, as a sailor will before turning in. This time I sought out the Cross, standing in white majesty in the heavens. In the south, shimmering against the black sky, stood the Magellanic Clouds, stood constellations unknown to dwellers in the Northern Hemisphere. It was while looking at them that the thought—surely a random synchronism—occurred; seized me by the throat, as it were.

I thought that I knew men. Or at least men who go to sea. I knew seamen and their ways; a knowledge including, I believed, a reasonably indulgent appreciation of the weaknesses of men. No, I was not so modest but to feel that I had acquired this rather punctilious insight in considerable degree, than which nothing stood me better. But perhaps from being from an early age a sailor—an entire child of the sea, whose ways I had engaged to learn as fully as might be possible, an undertaking demanding an unconditional devotion of a nature little short of the monastic—I was remarkably untutored in women: they seemed to me to carry a secret code I was without either talent or experience to decipher, as labyrinthine as the mysteries of the sea. One cannot devote one’s life to penetrating two of the great mysteries, one needs all of a lifetime to make a breach into one . . . Just because I had spent virtually my entire adult life at sea, I had known few women at all. If the word “known” be enlarged to mean the inner workings of another human being, the inner life, one could come very close to saying I had known none whatsoever. For all purposes I knew nothing about women.

Somewhere up above, in the vicinity of the bridge, I heard the quick, distant sound of girlish laughter. One hundred and fifty-two men, twenty-seven women, I thought. In the heavy heat of the equatorial night I felt a chill pass through me. I went on up to my cabin to seek sleep.

 *  *  * 

Standing orders for any deck watch aboard a U.S. Navy ship of the line are to awaken the captain if anything “unusual” occurs, the interpretation of that word being left to the officer of the deck and its latitude, in all my naval experience, being long and wide, but in practice generally interpreted on the side of caution. Any OOD would much rather face the irritation of an awakened captain, unpleasant as that might be, when the object floating two points off the starboard bow in the near distance turns out to be a bundle of used beer cans, than to face a court-martial if it should turn out to be a floating mine. To the general standing orders inherent on any ship I had added a particular one of my own. I was to be awakened if any signal, of whatever nature, even a presumed or possible one, were raised by the twenty-four-hour watch, with continuous transmission by us, I had established in the radio shack. I felt as if the great ape himself had seized me and my eyes came open. In the gleam of the flashlight I recognized the boatswain of the watch.

“I’m awake, Preston,” I said. “You may stop shaking me. What time is it?”

The big boatswain’s mate unhanded me. Preston, given his size and his hands, was one of the more aggressive waker-uppers.

“Sorry, Captain.” The beam moved to my own cabin clock. “Zero two forty-four, sir.”

“What is it, Boats?”

“Ears thinks she’s raised something, sir.”

I was instantly all awake, faculties in full gear.

“I’ll be right down.”

Preston was gone and I slid trousers over my skivvies, shoes over my feet, shirt around me, all more or less in one long habitual movement, popped out of my cabin, and swung down two ladders to the radio shack. An aura of another world here; through it came the sound of Ears tapping out something in Morse code. I put on the spare earphones and listened to the continuous-wave signal.

The crew called her Ears because Radioman Second Class Amy Walcott had the best pair aboard; a special gift, incalculably valuable to any ship, hearing sounds that others did not. I leaned over her and waited until she had finished her keying. Something faint as the last fading echo off a canyon wall seemed to come through my earphones. She promptly keyed back. We waited again. Then an even fainter sound in return. She keyed back. Silence. Keyed again. Silence. Ten minutes of keying and only silence rolling back to us through the night. We removed our earphones. To better conform with these she kept her hair knotted back, moored by a sailmaker’s splice, serving to emphasize the fragile girlish structure of her face.