06.Evil.Beside.Her.2008 (8 page)

The apartment seemed empty after James left. In a strange city, her first time away from family, Linda felt afloat and isolated. For all practical purposes, she was alone. Unlike sailors working on cruisers who call home when they pull into a port, submariners remain severed from their families for the entire patrol. The only two-way communications allowed are mail drops, one two days after the ship sails and another two days before it returns. In between, wives send Family Grams, fifty-word messages that contain only happy news. “They’re read by eight officers before the guys see them,” said one navy wife. “You’re not allowed to say anything upsetting, or the guys will never get them.”

Linda had no intention of disturbing James. He had already been depressed and angry when he left. If anything, she wanted to reassure him that he had no reason to worry about her well-being while he was on patrol. “James, I love you and I’m fine,” she wrote in the letter to be delivered at the first mail drop. “Please don’t worry about me.”

The letter she received in return included a continuation of his directives from the morning they parted. “Find some way to help me out of this,” James wrote. “I’ve got to get out. If I’d known what it was like, I never would have signed up.” As always, he topped off the page with a crucifix etched in black ink.

Despite the training and testing given submariners, or “bubbleheads” as other sailors call them, living on-board a
Trident submarine with 170 men, never surfacing for months on end, is difficult to prepare for. “A lot of the guys wash out during their first or second patrol,” said one longtime Trident sailor. “They can’t take the close quarters, the lack of privacy. Some just crack like an egg from the pressure.”

To other members of the blue crew, James Bergstrom didn’t appear to be one of those who would crack. “He was always happy, kind of carefree,” said another sailor. “Nothing bothered him.”

Though that may have been the impression he gave others, inside James was seething. In many respects, the incubatorlike existence on-board brought him back to high school. If to the others he was just one of a mass of bodies, James felt like an outsider, unhappy and persecuted, the butt of jokes. “We’re hard on all the guys when they first start,” explained one crew member. “You need to know if you can count on them. If they’ll be there to back you up in a tough situation.” Yet James felt singled out. When he spent the first fifty days of the patrol in the stainless steel galley washing dishes, he found no comfort in the fact that other fledgling sailors on-board had similar duty. “I was really mad, but I didn’t want to show it,” James said later. “I had my brother to think of. He was on the
Ohio
that patrol, too, and I didn’t want to embarrass him. But I didn’t go through over a year’s training to wash dishes.”

No matter what a sailor’s duty, the months on-board can drag. The Trident, although larger than any of its U.S. ancestors and dwarfed only by the Russian submarine the
Typhoon,
is the epitome of close quarters. Men’s needs bend to the requirements of the submarine and its raison d’être: the twenty-four nuclear missiles housed vertically at the very heart of the boat. The crew sleeps sandwiched among the silos, in cramped cubbyholes, each accommodating nine men. Of course, Trident accommodations are greatly improved over earlier, smaller subs where crew members “hot-sheeted,”
shared bunks by sleeping in shifts. Still, personal possessions are relegated to a four-inch space under mattresses or in the one small drawer each sailor is assigned. During time off, many exercise by running circles around the missile compartment, skirting sharp turns and protruding equipment, where nineteen laps equals one mile. When two men meet in narrow passageways, one must step aside so the other can pass.

At the front control station the commander of the watch oversees a panel as complicated as a jumbo jet’s cockpit. Yet unlike a 747’s slick computerization, a Trident’s control panel appears crudely primitive, layered with bulky switches and chunky red lights flashing vital information. Nearby is the periscope, often the only link with the surface throughout the patrol. As an IC man, when not at work in the galley, James spent day after sunless day in a high-tech cubicle monitoring the ship’s interior telephone and alarm systems. Other sailors manned complicated systems extracting drinking water and oxygen from seawater, but the real stars of the boat were the “nukes,” the sailors who maintained the boat’s nuclear power plant, which generated enough energy to power the city of Seattle.

From the beginning, James Bergstrom’s adaption to submarine life was fraught with discontent. He viewed the twelve-hours-on/twelve-hours-off schedule, seven days a week, as too arduous. The ship’s captain was a taskmaster, known by navy men, even outside the sub service, as demanding. On James’s first voyage he lived up to his reputation, ordering drill after drill, in which the crew practiced emergency procedures. In between, James, as a rookie, studied for his examinations, the tests that would qualify him to move forever out of the galley and into the IC room. Three levels of superiors would administer the oral exams during his second patrol, throwing out hypothetical situations and demanding to know how he would respond and why, during a given situation. “The thing is, the navy is an all volunteer
force, and you have to volunteer a second time if you want to be on a sub,” says one Trident crew member. “The men should know what they’re getting into.”

At home, Linda made adjustments of her own. Though she initially hoped she and Tina Bergstrom would become close friends, that failed to materialize. Tina, although pleasant, seemed disinterested in any real relationship with Linda. After all, Tina had lived on the base for years and already had a circle of friends, many of whom, like herself, had small children. In the beginning, Linda went to church at the chapel on base each Sunday morning and then dropped in at Tina’s house on the way home, but before long she visited less often. Finally she stopped altogether.

Initially Linda had planned to find a job to fill the lonely months when James was at sea, but he had argued against it, insisting he wanted her available to spend time with him between patrols. To Linda, who was anxious to accumulate the things she’d always dreamed she would one day have—good clothes and furniture, a car—her husband’s decision seemed arbitrary and unreasonable, but she reluctantly agreed. James Bergstrom had made her happy and moved her away from a life that had always disappointed her. She was determined to do the same for him. If he wanted her home, she’d find a way to fill the empty days.

At the base gym, Linda discovered just the place to whittle away lazy afternoons. She worked out with weights and jogged the track, or just sat contentedly in the sauna. “It was fun,” she said. “There were people around to talk to and it made me feel good about myself.”

One day on the track, Linda walked a cool-down round when a sailor slowed from running laps and approached her. “What’s your name?” he asked.

“Linda Bergstrom,” she answered.

“Chris’s wife?”

“No, James Bergstrom’s wife,” she clarified. “He’s on his first patrol on the
Ohio
.”

“Yeah, he took my bunk on the ship,” the sailor said. “I just left the
Ohio.
”

They were soon walking the track together, talking. The sailor’s tale sparked Linda’s interest when he revealed he’d been dismissed from the ship before his scheduled tenure expired. Linda wanted to know how.

The story the sailor told that afternoon concerned a night on the
Ohio
when the boat patrolled somewhere in the Pacific. “I had this kind of out-of-body experience,” he maintained. “I can’t explain it, other than that I was kind of floating off above the water. While it was happening, I saw this other ship, off in the distance. When it was over and I told the others, they checked the radar and there was a ship there. It really shook the crew up.”

“How can James get out?” Linda asked.

“It’s really not that hard. They dump you if they think anything’s wrong with you,” he said. “Tell your husband to plead insanity. They’ll drop him in a heartbeat.”

Before she left the gym that day, Linda wrote down the sailor’s phone number. When she got home, she posted it on the kitchen bulletin board.
It’ll be here when James gets home,
she thought, believing she might have just fulfilled her assignment.

To meet others in her situation, Linda joined the Blue Crew Wives’ Club, and became a regular at potluck dinners and get-togethers. When the wives put together a fashion show, the woman who coordinated it asked Linda to model lingerie. Thanks to her regular afternoons at the base gym, she was in terrific shape, thin and firm. Though some of the other wives had photos taken of themselves modeling for the club scrapbook, Linda declined. She knew James would disapprove. But she did mention the affair and her part in it to James in a letter she wrote to include in the mail drop the men would receive a few days before the ship pulled into port.

Yet two months after the
Ohio
sailed, she still had few close friends, until one particular potluck near the end of the
patrol when Penny Jacobs approached Linda and introduced herself. “I noticed Linda standing off, kind of alone,” Penny explained later. “I’d been there, the new recruit’s wife at the party. So I felt sorry for her. I knew how it felt being the new person.” Linda and Penny became fast friends. As quiet as Linda was, Penny was outgoing and fun-loving. She had a hearty laugh that matched her ample figure, and whenever she smiled, her blue eyes squinted merrily under a fringe of short brown hair.

Soon Linda became part of a foursome with Penny and two of her closest friends, Gayle Thomas and Diane Siler. All of the women had husbands on the
Ohio
’s blue crew and all liked having fun. If Penny was the bawdy one, Diane was the religious one, a born-again Christian who attended services at a local church. Gayle was heavyset, bubbly and fun to be with. “You need a support team when your husbands are out to sea for months on end,” said Penny. “We were that for each other.”

The night before the
Ohio’s
return, Linda and her new friends met at Penny’s apartment for pizza. The others laughed when they saw how their friend had decorated her apartment for the next day’s excitement. There were crepe paper streamers and welcome-home banners draped from the walls. Two big round red balloons with a banana poking out from between them dangled from the bedroom ceiling. Penny’s guests grinned up at the whimsical symbol like schoolgirls in an arcade. “It’s my welcome-home-now-let’s-do-it message,” Penny chuckled. Since Penny’s husband had been out to sea before, she took Linda aside and assured her, “When they come home, it’s like a honeymoon all over again. They can’t wait to get their hands on you. You really appreciate each other.”

A rivalry escalated between the friends as they tantalized each other with their plans for the next day.

“I’m going to get him home and keep him locked in this bedroom for a week,” Penny laughed. “You’ll see.”

“Well, I’m going to get things going even before we reach the house,” said Diane. “I’m going to that base with nothin’ on under my coat. Wait and see.”

There was a sense of competition between the wives, and soon they all joined in the fun, daring each other to wear nothing at all or something silky and sensual under their coats. Linda took it all in stride. James’s months at sea had built up her appetite for his return, and one of the letters she’d included in mail drop said, “I can’t wait for you to get home.”

She was more than a little disappointed when the letter she received from James was less joyful, bordering on the morose. In it he complained endlessly about injustices he’d endured on-board. “I hope you’ve got some information for me when we pull in,” he said in closing. On the top of each page, as always, he marked a black crucifix directly in the center.

Unaware of the uncertainties facing Linda, before the friends left Penny’s that night, they made a pact: They’d be on the Delta Pier the following day to greet their husbands and they would all have a surprise for them—since it was February 15 and cold, they would need coats, but underneath they would wear only the skimpiest lingerie or nothing at all. Linda laughed. The idea seemed so daring. She couldn’t help thinking about how surprised and pleased James would be.

The next morning, Linda woke up early and bought her own decorations for their small apartment. Like Penny, she hung crepe paper and colored a banner with markers, “Welcome Home James.” Instead of a banana and balloons, Linda drew signs—“Oh, James, don’t stop” and “1-Way No Fun”—to hang in the bedroom. Then she slipped on her winter coat over a burgundy silk and lace teddy. “I was so excited,” she said later. “It’s like, He’s coming home!”

Linda met her friends at the parking lot to the lower base gates and caught one of the white buses that transported
the families to the Delta Pier, where the
Ohio
docked. On the bus, everyone talked and laughed, giddy with expectation. Everyone except Linda, who sat quietly, her fingers secretly crossed in her coat pockets. She’d spent much of the morning praying James was as excited as she about his homecoming and that things weren’t as bad as his letter indicated.

As the bus pulled up to the pier, Linda searched excitedly for James’s face in the crush. She felt certain from his letter that he would be among the first off. As she suspected, he emerged from the bowels of the submarine well ahead of the rest of the crew. Running toward her on the pier, he grabbed her in his arms, but instead of the joyful reunion she had imagined, James clutched her elbow and whispered angrily into her ear, “This is all bullshit,” clipping each word off in disgust. “Have I got things to tell you.”

Surrounded by families hugging and kissing, Linda whispered, “I can’t wait to get you home. You know what I’m wearing under this coat? Lingerie. Nothing but lingerie.”

Instead of breaking his anger, James pulled her farther from the crowd. “What the hell did you do that for? And what the hell were you doing modeling lingerie? What’s come over you?”