06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 (10 page)

“This is not my fault,” she protested. “This is all in your mind.”

Soon she was afraid to say any more. “I never saw James like that before. He was so angry, the veins in his neck and arms were throbbing, and his eyes, his eyes were popping
out at me,” she said later. “He looked like an angry dog. Like a Doberman pinscher.”

As always, later that night he apologized.

Weeks and months passed, and on June 9, 1987, the gold crew returned from their patrol on the
Ohio
. Once the boat pulled into Bangor Base, James appeared under increasing pressure. He’d go days at a time as the old James: gentle and caring. Then he’d be on edge, agitated by even the smallest things. To calm him, Linda tried to do everything he suggested. Instead of working out on the base, she joined a women-only gym, Living Well Ladies, in a storefront not far from their apartment. At aerobics class one day, a woman whose husband was on the
Ohio
’s gold crew casually mentioned, “Bet you were sorry to see the ship come into port. That means your husband will be sailing soon.”

Linda didn’t answer. Unlike her sadness the first time James pulled out of port, this time she wasn’t entirely sure how she felt. If pressed, she would have had to admit she was anxious to see James go, so she could try to decipher the reasons everything was going so wrong. She couldn’t help thinking that he seemed increasingly irrational.

Like the afternoon the phone rang while he was on base. When Linda answered, James roared at her, “Come down here. I can’t make it. I can’t do this. Chris won’t be there this time. I’ll be all alone.”

When she arrived on base, he jumped in the car and ordered, “I know this is crazy, but let’s just pack up and take off for Canada. They’ll never find us.”

Linda let him drone on about how they could escape, leaving no trace, as she drove home. He had thought it all through, how they could start a new identity across the border. She said nothing until she pulled up in the apartment parking lot. “No, James. We aren’t running away,” she told him firmly. “I’m not going to spend my life on the run.”

James said he understood, but the subject of fleeing came up continually after that afternoon. Always James would be
angry. “If you loved me, you’d do it,” he’d demand, much as he had two years earlier to convince her to marry him.

One night during a particularly heated argument, James slammed her against the apartment wall. Linda, reeling under the blow, fell onto the bed. James left her there, crying. Afraid at what he might do next, she waited, sobbing, for some sign from him, some indication the violence was over. Before long, she heard a strange moaning in the living room, a mournful wail almost like that of an injured animal. When she peeked around the corner, Linda saw her husband, his hands covering his face in despair, crying. It sent a shudder through her.

Minutes later, James ambled back into the bedroom, acting as if nothing particularly surprising had happened. As always, he apologized, blaming his actions on the stress he was under. “It’s not that bad,” he said, wiping away Linda’s tears. “Why are you crying? Stop it.”

As she quieted her sobs he assured her, “It’s just the navy. Everything will be all right when I can get out of the navy.”

On Tuesday, July 7, Linda drove James to the
Ohio
. They held hands in the car and she hugged him and kissed him good-bye at the gate. “You’ll be all right,” she assured him. “Just hang in there.”

James looked fine, smiling, as if nothing in the world bothered him.

On the drive home from the base, Linda went over the last few weeks again and again in her mind. “I figured he was right. James had never acted like that before. It had to be just the navy and all the pressure he was under. I was angry at his brother and his parents for forcing him to sign up,” she said. “And I decided he was right. Once sea duty was over, he’d be fine.”

Later that morning Linda’s landlord knocked on the door.

“Are you all right?” Sally Rogers asked, her voice filled with concern. “I heard you two fighting the last few days and I could barely sleep wondering if you were still alive.”

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Linda assured her. “We’ve just been under a lot of pressure with James leaving. He’s gone now. It’ll give us a little time to cool off.”

“Well, if you’re sure,” Rogers replied, uncertain.

“I’m sure,” Linda said. “But thanks for asking.”

Still, later that afternoon in her own apartment, Rogers couldn’t help reflecting on the sounds she had heard emanating through the thin apartment walls. After years of living beside all kinds of people, she was used to loud arguments, but this was something else. The moaning and the screaming. When she saw James Bergstrom coming and going around the apartment complex, he looked like such a shy, pleasant, even timid man. It was hard to imagine he was the one wailing into the night. “I could only come up with one way to describe what I was hearing,” Sally said later. “It sounded not human.”

Linda’s prediction that the patrol would give her and James time to put things in order never materialized. Days after the boat set sail, the phone rang in her apartment. It was the wife of the
Ohio
’s COB (the chief of the boat), Sandy Sirles. Her husband was the highest-ranking enlisted man on board the
Ohio,
and Linda knew immediately something must be wrong. “Linda, I’d like you to come over for a visit,” she said. “We need to talk.”

When she arrived at the COB’s home, the other woman invited her in. “The thing is,” said Sandy, a petite, polite woman with long, dark hair, motioning for Linda to sit beside her on the couch, “I’ve just received a letter from my husband, and it seems James is having a hard time. As a matter of fact, he’s acting rather childishly. We need your help to get him through the patrol.”

She then explained to Linda that almost immediately after the boat pulled out, James began insisting he be returned to shore, claiming that because of their volatile last weeks, he feared Linda would leave him while he was at sea. “We’d like you to send James a Family Gram,” Sirles went on to say. “Something cheerful to let him know you’ll be all right.”

“Sure,” Linda agreed. “I’ll do it today.” Still she left the COB’s home feeling exhausted and confused.
Why is James doing this?
she wondered.
What’s wrong?

Linda never imagined things could go far enough for the COB’s wife to be involved. She was worried about James. She was also concerned about herself. She had grown to love navy life, the friends she’d made, her new home. James was jeopardizing all of it. If this didn’t work out, they’d end up back in Houston with little hope of ever getting ahead and making something of their lives. She drove back to the apartment to get one of the eight Family Grams she’d been issued for this patrol. It had room for just the briefest message. She sat down at the kitchen table and wrote:

She drove back to the base, where she slipped her note through the slit in the silver mailbox marked with the
Ohio
’s designation.

Then she went home. Just moments after she walked in the door, the phone rang. This time it was Penny calling to invite her to her apartment “just to talk.” Eager not to be alone, Linda got back in the car and drove over.

Linda sat at the kitchen table in Penny’s bright apartment drinking a Coke and trying to make sense of it all. “Why is James doing this?” Linda asked her friend.

Penny shrugged, then went on to explain that she already knew something of James Bergstrom’s problems. In the mail drop she’d received that morning, her husband had written asking her to check up on Linda. “Your husband mentioned that we’re friends, and the COB suggested James might be more at ease if I promised to keep tabs on you,” Penny said,
laughing. “I figured we’d be together anyway, so what the heck.”

Linda shook her head.
What’s going on?
she wondered. “James was upset about sailing, that’s all,” she assured her friend. “The fight was just because he was so stressed out about going out to sea. I don’t understand what he’s doing.”

Penny looked sympathetic. “None of the guys like to go out to sea. Would you?” she asked. “Seventy-two days underwater? I’m sure James was just overreacting to the pressure.”

“I really want this to work out for James and me. I don’t want to end up back in Houston,” Linda concluded.

Determined to make the best of the situation, Penny said, “Let’s forget about all this. Your husband tells my husband that you like to play tennis. I can’t say I know a damn thing about it, but I’ve got a racket and I’ll give it a try.”

From that point on, Penny and Linda were together almost daily. They played tennis on the courts in Penny’s complex or went to wives’ club functions. Often they became a foursome, with Gayle and Diane. At one get-together, a garden party, everyone wore formals. Just for fun, Gayle came in her wedding dress. Late at night the four friends ordered pizza and talked, sometimes about how wonderful it would be when they all had children. When Linda said her period was late, they all smiled expectantly. But inside, Linda was sure a pregnancy now would be far from wise. When she began menstruating a month after James left for sea, she sighed with relief.

“I just wasn’t sure yet,” she later said. “Things were too unsettled. I figured everything with James was going to be all right, that we were just going through a rough spot. But I didn’t want to add any more pressure.”

One afternoon, Diane started a conversation about all the sailors who had “cracked” while at sea. “One even shot his wife and himself when he was on shore duty,” she added. Penny noticed Linda flinch and sensed how uncomfortable the conversation must be making her. Though they never
discussed it, Penny understood Linda worried constantly about James and how the patrol was unfolding.

In fact, Linda spoke about her husband as reluctantly as one might a particularly troublesome child. All three of the friends had noticed that whenever the conversation turned to spouses, she almost always remained silent. Though she revealed little, their perception was that something was terribly wrong. Wrong enough that once when Linda was not with the group, Gayle asked the others if they thought James battered Linda. “It’s the way she never talks about him,” she said. “It’s like there’s something there.”

Penny said only that she would not be surprised to find out that was true.

The week before the
Ohio
was scheduled to return, the four women took a trip together, one last fling before the
Ohio
pulled into port. That morning they drove around the sound and then headed toward Mount Rainier National Park. It was one of those clear blue days so rare in the Pacific Northwest, and the mountain, majestically streaked with snow and ice, was visible miles before they arrived in the park. While they traversed the winding mountain roads, Linda gulped it all in, the clear sky, the imposing fir trees, the massive rock formations, and the spectacular rivers and waterfalls. Before they left the park, they pulled off the road for a panoramic view of the mountain surrounded by wildflowers. In the cool breeze, Linda breathed in the crisp air and the smell of a fleeting summer day.

Still, shadows of her malaise lingered. A few nights later, the four friends were gathered as usual at Penny’s house, wolfing down a large pizza with extra cheese and sausage. Penny told stories about her childhood and they laughed uproariously, their mood heightened by the fact that in only two more days, the
Ohio
would pull into home port with their husbands on-board. At one point, Penny looked over and realized that though the others tittered with excitement, Linda sat quietly beside her, a wide but empty smile plastered on her face. “You worried?” she whispered.

“Maybe just a little.” Linda grimaced. “I just don’t know what to expect. But somehow, I’m going to make it all work out.”

Linda never could have anticipated what happened the following morning, Wednesday, September 16, 1987, a full day before the
Ohio
was scheduled to dock. The apartment, to her chagrin, was a mess. She’d spent so much time at Penny’s, her own place looked as disheveled as a parade route after the final float and the crowd had passed. Clothes lay where she’d undressed, and absolutely, everything needed a good scrubbing. Dark, thick hair piled atop her head, in an old pair of shorts and an oversized T-shirt, she was on her hands and knees scouring the bathroom floor when suddenly she instinctively knew she wasn’t alone. She turned slowly toward the patio door and saw the figure of a man silhouetted in the bright afternoon sun. He stared at her, watching. Linda squinted and looked again. The man looked vaguely familiar but frightening.
Who is it?
she wondered.

“James,” she suddenly whispered. Standing outside the door as if in a trance was her own husband. She hadn’t even recognized him. “My God, it’s James.”

Once Linda coaxed James inside, she led him to the couch and sat beside him. “What are you doing here?” she asked softly. “I was planning to meet the ship tomorrow.”

James didn’t answer, just stared straight ahead. Linda looked at him closely and realized that what made him look so different was his eyes; they were distant, as if he peered through a haze.

“What’s going on?” she demanded.

“I can’t take it anymore,” James answered, flatly. “I can’t go back. It’s too hard.”

That was all James would say. For fifteen minutes, Linda sat beside him talking, trying to eke out even minimal information about what had happened. Her husband’s lips
remained still until he finally turned to her and whispered in a hoarse, quiet voice, “I’m supposed to go to the doctor. I can’t drive. You’ll have to take me.”

In the car, James stared silently out the window at Silverdale—the place they’d lived for nearly a year—as if he recollected little of it.

“Talk to me,” Linda pleaded. “This isn’t like you, James. What happened?”

There was only silence.

Linda drove James to the naval hospital a few miles south of the base where he’d been ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. She still had no idea what could have happened to throw him into such a zombielike state when they pulled up in front of the hospital, an imposing cement and glass structure virtually hidden amongst the forest. Inside, they were directed to the seventh-floor psychiatric unit, where Linda waited in a hallway while James went into an examining room. An hour later, he emerged and walked toward her. “We can leave now,” he said. There was no explanation; no doctor approached her.

At home that night, James sat transfixed on the couch. He stared blankly at the television, as if its images hollowly reflected off his eyes. As he peered at the screen, Linda watched James, studying him with such concentration, the ringing of the phone jarred her back to reality.

“Aren’t you coming over? Diane and Gayle are already here,” Penny asked.

Linda could hear her friends laughing and celebrating in the background. She cupped her hand over the phone and whispered, “I can’t. James is home.”

“Is he all right?”

“It’s really bad,” she said. “But he won’t tell me what’s wrong.”

Linda hung up the phone feeling disappointed and alone. Her friends were so excited about their husbands’ return. She knew it was selfish to think of herself when James was
so troubled, but she longed to feel as they did, without the continual pain that haunted her. As that night lingered on, James never made a move toward her, said little if anything. She couldn’t help thinking it was like he was barely there.
He’s like a ghost
.

The silence continued like a presence between them, until the following afternoon when James, sitting timidly in a chair, finally blurted out, “I really thought I would kill myself.” Kneading his hands and staring downward at the apartment’s worn beige tile floor, his eyes rimmed in tears, he talked in disconnected and fitful terms about his second voyage.

Linda finally pieced together a terrifying chain of events. In James’s words, it sounded as if he had suffered a breakdown or a deep depression. The sub had been a pressure cooker for him, his mind continually drifting back to Linda and arguments they’d had, blowing them up until they loomed insurmountable. “I was sure you’d be gone, that you’d leave me,” he said. “It was all I could think of.” Shaking and crying, he sought out Jim Sirles, the ship’s COB, and asked to be taken back to port. Sirles, an intensely businesslike man, listened to James ramble on about his fears, then assured the young sailor his wife, Sandy, would look in on Linda. “She’ll be all right, James,” he said. “She’ll be waiting for you on the pier when the boat pulls in.”

In the following weeks, Sirles occasionally sought out Bergstrom for a “climate check,” a few minutes to ask how things were going. James always smiled pleasantly at him and assured Sirles he was fine. Sirles would later say he worried about his young recruit, but not overly so. It wasn’t unusual for sailors facing months at sea to have doubts about their ability to handle the confinement. When there were problems at home, the situation became only more complicated.

But halfway through the patrol, Sirles heard through the sub’s grapevine that Bergstrom had taken a turn for the worse, that he had a knife hidden under his mattress and that
others had heard him threatening to use it on himself. Sirles went to Bergstrom’s bunk and confiscated a small paring knife James had apparently lifted during galley duty, then took his charge to sick bay. They talked for an hour, James crying that the submarine corps just wasn’t for him. He couldn’t take the confinement, being so far from home, and so far from Linda, for long periods of time. As before, Sirles managed to calm James down and convince him to hang in through the last month of the patrol. “But I was worried,” said Sirles later. “I didn’t know what Bergstrom might do.”

Besides Sirles, the only one Bergstrom confided in on the
Ohio
was the chief petty officer in charge of the IC unit, Steve Swartz, a lanky, somewhat balding man who had the manner of a concerned neighbor. It was Swartz’s job to take care of his men, to make sure their personal problems never interfered with their duties. Swartz, too, worried that Bergstrom might wash out of the corps.

Whatever was going on inside James Bergstrom’s head, to those not in immediate contact with him, he maintained a cool and jovial exterior, just as he had throughout his painful school years. “Everybody on the boat seems to settle into a particular role,” Sirles would later explain. “James was this boyish, quiet guy. The guys liked to kid him because he’d blush and get embarrassed. Some of them used to call him ‘Wild Man,’ not meaning any harm, but just out of fun.”

In fact, Bergstrom camouflaged his feelings so well that outside his division, few knew he was undergoing any kind of crisis. One longtime submariner, Telford Weister, helped James study for his qualifying exams during that patrol, and he remembers little of the chaos the others describe. “James seemed fine. He was studying hard and always appeared to be okay,” Weister said later. “In fact, one thing I remember about Bergstrom is the way he was always smiling. He had this sappy grin.” James did hold it together well enough to take his oral exams and pass, qualifying as an IC, interior communications, man during the patrol.