I Pledge Allegiance (6 page)

T
he
Boston
has been around for a while. Commissioned in 1943, it served extensively in the Pacific in World War II. It received ten battle stars for the action it saw there. We don’t have any stars here yet, and I’m okay if we don’t get any. I like it quiet. And the ship, when it’s quiet, holds the most peaceful kind of quiet I have found anywhere.

I have slept all I want to sleep, and I get up to go on my walk. Once up top I find just a suggestion of daylight that won’t really be here for another hour and a half. The already saturated air is promising yet another muggy long day off the Vietnam coast. Even with the breezes we get out here some distance from the land, this can get heavy. There are some guys on this ship I have still never seen wearing a shirt, and I believe if the temperature ever dips below ninety degrees again I’m going to need a sweater.

I can only imagine how brutal it is for the guys in-country.

We are back just south of the DMZ again, supporting the ground troops who call in a request to take out a tank or a convoy or a munitions depot, and big-buddying the
Sacramento
and the rest of the Seventh Fleet.
Sacramento
was alongside us yesterday, and I suppose you could say that like a lot of big brother–little brother deals, it’s not completely even. They were restocking us with the big beefy shells we use to pound the senses out of our land targets. The support ships, battleships, are faster than the cruisers, and do a lot of the running back and forth to support us. Like sending the little kid off to get snacks while we sit with our feet up watching TV. If your idea of TV is bombardment.

We are in good company this morning. One of the fun and surprising parts about living on a warship is that every morning you wake up and the whole place could have changed, with new buildings, new neighborhoods brought in overnight. Running just ahead of us, with the same angle on the coast, is the Australian guided missile destroyer
Hobart.
I do make an effort not to get all big-kid about this stuff, but the
Hobart
is a big brute of a thing, a lot like us, and together we make a sight, like a couple of burly mean and feisty brothers who could take on the world and anybody’s navy. Right now we’re lying about a kilometer off the coast of Cua Viet, which is about as north as you can
get in South Vietnam. We float, in low light, growling softly, and I would have to say if I were the enemy, I would not be resting easily.

Also new to the neighborhood this morning are two swift boats, PCF-12 and PCF-19, which are fast becoming famous around here for completely menacing the enemy up and down the coast and deep into the rivers. They are a lot smaller than the cruisers, and faster than pretty much anything else around, so their game is mostly mayhem. The neighborhood is loaded this morning.

“Hey,” Huff calls down as I pass by beneath his turret.

He is at his battle station and smiling like a nut, so it must be time for work.

“What’s up?” I say when I climb up and take in the view from his deck.

“We’re about to rock,” he says, very excited.

“I’m happy for you.”

“Be happy for yourself and stay to watch. Get up here behind me.”

So I stay and get behind him. I work my molded wax earplugs into my ears and brace myself.

There is no bracing yourself for this.

B-boom b-boom, b-boom b-boom, b-boom b-boom,
the cannons go off in their two-at-a-time,
no-pause-for-breath assault. There is nothing on earth to compare with this sensation, especially from right behind it. The shells soar high into the air, and the explosions even one klick — that’s a kilometer — away feel like they are happening right under my feet. I can’t resist the impulse to keep looking at my feet, checking, I guess, that the ship is going to hold under me. I look back out, as the relentless pounding continues, and follow the trajectory, the beautiful perfect arc, of a shell I can focus on. When it lands, the entire sky looks like a screen that is projecting a movie of pure fire. We’ve hit a fuel depot for sure.

Shells begin coming back out our way. Booms get closer, and holes appear in the ocean, followed by eruptions of water fifty feet high. It is reminding me of Jamaica Pond and the Fourth of July. It is so similar — and also very, very different. I am as scared as I have ever been. I am as thrilled as I have ever been. Scared and thrilled are sensations I used to think I understood.

I wonder where my buddies are. I wonder, even, if we could be blowing them up ourselves. How are you supposed to be sure?

Every man on board is up and running around now. Battle stations, support stations. Rascal comes up and yanks me by the shirt.

“What you think, this is some kind of shoot ’em up game? You ain’t on Nantasket Beach today, pal. We got work to do.”

Rascal is the real electrician around here, and I am his flunky. We are required to answer every call for electrical work, and when things get hot all over the way they are now, we’re not supposed to wait for calls. We rush around from station to station making sure all the electricals are functioning — which half the time they aren’t.

“It has hit the
fan
this morning, eh, Mo?” Rascal says.

I still have my earplugs in, but everything in the world cuts through them now. Everything in this world.

“It sure has,” I say. Rascal is excited, like everybody else. The
Hobart
is firing as fast as we are. The swift boats are racing around, off in the distance now, and it appears suddenly like they are in a fight all their own. Something is hovering there, the lights appearing, cutting out, appearing again. They have aircraft of some kind engaging them, and this I have not seen before.

I’m running up the ladder toward the control room, right behind Rascal. I’m watching everything, ducking from everything, not looking where I’m going. I smash my shin as I stumble on the steel rungs. I scream as my shin feels like shattering glass. But I keep running.

“Vera is frozen, man.”

“What?” I say. Now I’m trying to run and watch the action and duck and rub my shin, all at the same time. It would be a good time to be an octopus.

“Vera, man. Rivera. He froze. Wouldn’t answer the bell. Stayed in his rack. Nobody could move him. He’s gonna get some serious grief coming his way when this is over.”

One of the early lessons you learn in this operation is, you have to answer the bell. You have to, have to, have to answer the bell. Unless you’re already dead. Then you’re allowed to be a little bit late, but then, still, dead, answer the bell. You do not let your mates down, no matter what. Vera’s main job is just domestic stuff, kitchen and laundry and such. But like everybody, he has duties in battle as well. He’s a sailor, a soldier, a warrior. No excuses.

We are just to the top deck, nearing the control room, when it all changes again. For the first time, I feel bullets.

You feel them. Whether they hit you or not, you feel them. Like evil, large, lethal mosquitoes, you feel them buzzing all over, and it doesn’t matter how hard the surface is, you
hit
the deck.

“Holy smokes,” Rascal says as he launches himself at the deck.

I throw myself down with all the force of one of the rockets. I smash both elbows, and they feel the same metallic zing as my shin.

There are more aircraft now, and it is
us
under attack. There are small explosions, and I cannot believe I now think of these as small.

But I do. Because off in the distance I hear a mother of an explosion.

Smoke, big smoke, is puffing up off the
Hobart.

Rascal and I scramble our way into the control room. The Officer of the Deck is hollering into the radio, and his assistant is relaying orders to all the different battle stations. The big guns continue to pummel the land targets, but the furious action has turned to the antiaircraft guns.

“American!” the OOD shouts.

“Negative!” I hear the response come back. “There is no American aircraft activity in the area. Deploy antiaircraft fire. Fire!”

“Fire!” the OOD shouts.

“Fire!” his man shouts into his microphone.

And they fire. It is now official and total mayhem. There is firefighting of all manner, in all directions. The antiaircraft guns are blasting away at several times the rate of the cannons, following the aircraft across the sky.

The OOD continues with headquarters. “Have we got confirmation?”

“Negative. There is no American activity within that sector. All activity has been suspended in order to isolate the problem. There is no, repeat,
no
friendly activity in the area.”

I almost laugh. This is the truest thing I’ve heard anyone say since I joined the Navy.

There is no friendly activity in the area.

As those words come out, there are two almighty explosions. The first is off in the distance, but there’s no doubt something severe has happened.

The second is closer to home.

The entire ship shudders, then tilts, and everyone is thrown to the deck. I can see smoke rolling up over the glass where the OOD had been surveying the action. He scrambles back to his feet, shouting into the phone, “Sir, we have been hit. We have identified, in the darkness, one hovering aircraft, rotating blade, gunship. And two jets, possibly F-104, F-2. We’ve been struck by rocket fire.”

We hear the distinctive sound of jet engines shrinking into the distance. Our guns continue firing for a while, while smoke and fire lap up from a section at the front of the ship. I get up to the window in time to see a shocking sight. PCF-19 goes down so quickly, there’s
a splash, a plume of water at the end of it like off the tail of a diving whale. Whoever it was, they just sent one of our swift boats swiftly to the bottom of the South China Sea.

The
Hobart
has taken a hit like ours. The sun is coming up now over a scene of carnage. All guns cease, and it’s as if we are all punch-drunk, standing, uncomprehending.

We’ve taken a beating.

I thought the American military never, ever lost. That’s what I was taught my whole life. That’s what I believed, right up ’til this minute.

“What are you two doing here?” the OOD screams at me and Rascal, finally noticing us.

Startled, Rascal regroups. “Electricians, sir. Here to check all is functioning. Properly.”

“All is functioning properly here! I suggest you go and check the functionality down
there.”
He points in the direction of flames toward the bow of the ship.

We scramble.

F
ragments recovered from the rocket attacks on the ships indicated these were friendly fire attacks. Nobody has been able to put two plus two plus two together to find out who was there firing at us and why it happened.

Two Australian seamen from HMAS
Hobart
were killed. Seven more wounded.

Five American seamen from the swift boat PCF-19 died. Two were injured.

We got off easy. Nobody got killed, injuries were not even worth mentioning. Or at least by military standards they were not worth mentioning.

So why am I shaking so much?

Every time I think I have the experience to make some sense of all this, I am shocked all over again. I thought I knew war and shooting and danger and adventure, but no, I didn’t, and I don’t. See, there is a big fat difference between being taught to shoot at targets in training and doing the real thing in action. There
is a difference between being told about injury and death and fear and all the well-known nonsense of battle, and feeling it.

And more to the point, there is a whopping great difference between dishing all this stuff out and being on the receiving end of it. Sounds like simple common sense, right?

Then why are even my eyelids trembling, not even blinking, but dried and petrified like they will never close again?

I know why. Because the war, the power of it, the wicked reality of the death-and-dismemberment aspect, are coming my way now.

And what do we get for our troubles? We get a vacation. We get to go home. USS
Boston
is taking me to the port of Boston just when I need it most. I could kiss them both.

We are to lick our wounds, repair our holes (just a scratch, everybody keeps saying, just a scratch). Our “holes” are a fairly mangled bridge area, a radar tower compromised to the point of dysfunction, and a lot of twisted and burned structural material across the ship’s once handsome nose. While we get all that cosmetic upgrading, we will also receive a refit. We are to go from “Guided Missile Heavy Cruiser” to “Heavy Cruiser, Attack.”

It seemed like we were already a heavy cruiser, and attack was our specialty. But what do I know?

What it means, really, is that our Terrier missiles are being decommissioned. It is all moving so fast. The Terriers, those impressive, hot killer rockets that first caught my attention at the aft end of the ship, have gone from latest thing to yesterday’s news before our very eyes. The Navy has decided technology has passed the Terriers by and they are now obsolete. To me they look just as murderous and handsome as they did yesterday.

I know it’s stupid, but I’m going to miss them.

I’m standing, like I did on the trip over, in the middle of the night as we steam through the endless open sea. It’s breezy and warm and you can definitely tell the difference sailing home west as opposed to sailing to war east.

Or it could just be the smell of home.

There is no one around as I look up admiring the Terriers.

Then there’s someone.

“Why don’t you never sleep, man?”

I nearly fling myself overboard with fright. It’s Vera, and it’s one of the few times I’ve seen him out and about without an officer right on his back shouting and bullying him into it. He’s one of those people, Vera, who
makes you know how sad he is just by walking by. Not that he’s a drag or anything, because really he never has a bad word for anybody, and if any one of us, anyone who is not a superior officer, asks for anything, he’s right there with whatever. He’s just … you know that look a person gets when they’re really sick but they don’t know what they’ve got? Vera wears that look all the time.

“I sleep,” I say, exaggerating only a little. Truth is, I sleep a little bit less every week as time goes by.

“Not much,” he says. “I know. You don’t think I know?”

Somehow, you gotta know he knows.

“I worry,” I say.

“Everybody worries,” he says.

Probably he worries even more than I do. He got himself in a lot of trouble by not showing up for the war the night we got hit. He got punishments, but not as much as he could have. Skipping the actual battle parts of a war is about the most serious thing you can do in the service, but because the officer in charge either knew just what he was doing or knew nothing at all, Vera was punished with restriction to quarters. That’s like sentencing a glutton to pizza and ice cream. But he got some leniency because it turned out he got sick and that’s why he missed the big game. Lucky for him, right?
By the time they came to mop the floor with his butt, there was a lot more mopping to do, since he had decorated the whole House with vomit.

We all did the natural thing and mocked the guy mercilessly. We even braved the stench as Vera was forced to sponge down the walls until he puked even more and could not keep up with his own production.

He kept scrubbing until he passed out, with his mates’ laughter still ringing in his ears.

Turns out the whole sickness thing was job related.

Seven Hands Vaughn told me later. Vera drank himself some bleach.

“You’d be a little nuts not to worry,” I say.

“What do you worry about? Aside from the obvious stuff like getting blown up and drowning and all.”

“My pals,” I say, because even though this might seem quick to be answering so truly to somebody, Vera feels like a guy I could be friends with. Like if he wasn’t so miserable he’d be great company, if that makes any sense. “I came over with three friends, and they are out there someplace, in-country. One guy, Rudi, got drafted into the Marines. And we kind of had a pledge, if one guy was drafted — especially if it was Rudi — we were all joining. I kind of feel like, from the ship, it’s my job to look out for them.”

I shrug, the way you do when your words come out and they float there stupid on the breeze and you’re not sure they mean anything to anybody else.

Vera gives me a solidarity shrug.

I go on. “I imagine that when we fire our guns, we’re shooting down the guys who’re about to shoot down my guys. And I hope that we’re not actually shooting down my guys along with them.”

“The ol’ friendly fire,” Vera says with a snarly smile.

“The ol’ friendly fire,” I say.

We walk past the tall Terrier missiles, still pointed and baring their teeth in the direction of the Vietcong. We walk to the very back of the ship, to the rail above the churning water behind us.

“I imagine when we’re firing our guns,” Vera says, staring way, way off over the water, “that we’re shooting my dad, over and over again. I worry that we keep missing him.”

I face straight out to sea, just the way he does. But my eyes dart in my skull, side-to-side-to-side, pinball-like. I think he senses my discomfort and my need for a bit of explanation.

“He’s a big man in the Marine Corps, my father. A colonel.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, wow. He wanted me to join the Marines. I wanted no part of the Marines, or this stinking war at all. But my family … we’re a big family, family is everything to us. And we go back, in the military. Uncles, cousins, everybody. Even the girls. Couldn’t look nobody in the eyes ever again if I tried to stay out of it. Big shame.”

“So you joined the Navy,” I say helpfully. “Cool.”

“Yeah, cool. Very impressed, my dad. The Nancy Navy, he called it. The Floating Fairies.”

“Ouch.”

“Ouch,” he says, finding a new lower level of sad that I didn’t think would be possible. “He called me Vera way before you guys did.”

The way the water kicks up in our wake, it reminds me of films I used to see, of women water-skiing in fancy ridiculous Hollywood musicals. And then I’m thinking of World War II films, with PT boats cutting up the waters and sinking German U-boats and everybody being comrades in arms and knowing which side of everything was the right side and being sure to be on that side. Everybody always had great teeth in all those films. Vera has great teeth, and I’m forcing myself to think these things, because, I realize, I don’t think I want to think about what Vera wants me to think about.

“I was a great shot,” he says after apparently too much of all that Hollywood. “In basic training. Every type of gun they let me shoot — rifle, the cannons, antiaircraft, whatever they gave me — I could shoot the eyebrows off a fly a mile away. Must be in the blood, the Rivera genes.”

“That’s great,” I say.

“Yeah, great. And I swore I was gonna come over here and shoot my father’s eyes out. I was gonna make sure I knew where he was all the time and I was gonna shoot that way. Problem is, I think I said so out loud a few times.”

“That explains the laundry duty.”

“I believe my dad was scared of me, so he fixed things.”

“Is that likely?”

“Likely? Did you know before you got here that they were actually gonna make us sing ‘Anchors Aweigh’?”

“No, sir,” I say, shaking my head vigorously and laughing. “I thought it was a joke song, from cartoons or something.”

“Exactly. Now guess what. I can’t stop. The song, it spins in my head night and day and day and night and I can’t stop it. It plays at the same time with the Marines’ hymn, ‘From the Halls of Montezuma’ — and I mean AT THE SAME TIME, with the words twisting and
snaking in and all over each other. I’m not kidding you, man. It doesn’t ever stop.”

He turns and locks my eyes with his, right up scary close.

“My dad used to come in my room and sing that song in my ear while I was sleeping. Night after night. To make me into what he wanted me to be. And not what he didn’t want me to be, you know what I mean? I would wake up, all sweating, that song in my head, but nobody there. I could smell him, though. Just me, there, alone, shaking, with his scent and his song, but no Dad. I
knew,
from his smell, he was there just a minute ago. Scent of Dad, but no Dad.”

I get more of a chill now than from anything I have seen or heard yet in this war.

“That’s … ah. Wow, man. No offense, but I don’t think I’d give you a gun, either. I think the Navy’s probably right about that at least.”

Another first: Vera laughs. That’s a relief. It feels like something is opening, so I step on in. “Why are you talking to me now so much, Vera? After all the not talking you’ve done all this time? “

His tensed-up features melt some to a real, soft, and hopeful smile. He looks like a kid.

“‘Cause I been watching you, Mo. You’re a good one. You’re the real thing, aren’t ya? And I need a friend.”

It seems like a simple enough thing. It seems like the kind of thing that would happen to a person lots of times over the course of a life. But I cannot think of one time, even as a little boy, when somebody came right out and asked me if I would be their friend.

And here and now, in war and all. In the middle of the night and all. Facing off the stern of a great warship, the wind at our backs, the smell of the sea all around, the roll of the deck beneath our feet. It seems like the easiest answer in the world. Why not?

I try the easy way first, the
man
way.

“We’re all your friends, Vera,” I say. “All the guys.”

He shakes his head. The smile remains.

“I mean a real friend. I don’t think I have ever, once, had a real, true friend. And everyone should have one real, true friend before he dies, don’t you think?”

It seems, again, like the simplest answer. Doesn’t it seem like the simplest answer? I give him the simplest answer.

Because I’m his friend.

“Yes,” I say. “Of course.”

But maybe if I was a better friend, I would have listened more closely, and I would have
heard.

He’s too quick for my mind to even contemplate his mind.

With the strength and speed and skill of a gymnast, and still with that angel’s smile on his face, he is off.

He grabs the rail, flips over, and dismounts, throwing himself out and into the white and wild churning water below.

My new friend flies.