Voyage to Somewhere (6 page)

“I'm having one myself,” the Chief said. “I sort of hoped the wife would have it before I left, but I guess it'll be a couple of days yet. I hope there'll be mail waiting for us in Honolulu.”

“There's bound to be,” Boats said, and I heard him scratching a match. There was a little silence.

“Say, Boats,” the Chief said, “you hear lots about this business of having children. Did your wife have a very hard time of it?”

“No,” Boats said, “she had it pretty easy.”

“I guess it isn't as bad as they say,” the Chief answered. “My wife didn't seem worried about it. The doctor said there was nothing to worry about at all.”

They walked away, and a moment later I heard the Chief shouting on deck, “Come on, you deck apes, let's get this mess cleaned up. Where was you brought up, in a barn?”

The quartermaster, a dark, handsome youth whose brooding face sometimes lit up in a surprising smile, talked less than the others. Even when he was off watch he stayed on the bridge poring over the charts and practicing on a small signal light.

“Say, Flags,” I heard one of the seamen say to him once, “are you married?”

There was a long pause, and the sound of some books being put away.

“Well, I was,” I heard the quartermaster say. “I don't know whether I will be when I get back or not. Me and the wife was having some trouble.”

White and some of the other seamen, I learned, had been married just before they left the States. It seemed incongruous to think of White as a married man. He carried with him, however, a photograph of his wife, and often he showed it to the others.

“This is my wife,” I heard him say once after chow on the mess deck. “Anybody want to see a picture of my wife?”

There were polite exclamations, and then I heard several voices say, “Here's a picture of mine.”

As watch by watch the first week slipped by, the men resumed their ceaseless task of letter writing, and the mailbox outside the wardroom door began to fill up again. Foreseeing a bumper crop of letters, Mr. Warren, Mr. Crane and I set about our censoring early. After breakfast one morning, four days before we expected to arrive in Honolulu, we took the mailbox off the bulkhead and emptied it on the wardroom table. Each of us took a third of the letters and started to read them. The men, after all, were faced with the same old problems, and the letters were all strangely alike. The same phrases were expressed in letter after letter until, no matter what their individual content, they became monotonous and lost meaning.

“My Darling Wife, I miss you so much. Don't worry about me, though, everything is going fine.”

“Good night, Darling. Probably it won't be so very long before I see you again.”

Most of the letters said these things in an infinite number of ways, and the whole stack of letters gave the impression of variations on a melody. A few of the letters stood out, however, as individuals. The tall gunner's mate wrote many pages in a close, fine handwriting.

“Dear Doris,” he wrote, “I wish I could be there for the spring planting. I think you were wise to wait before setting out the tomato plants. I saw by the paper that you had a late frost, and when I saw that, I was proud that you had waited.”

The letters that the men wrote to their mothers and wives were much different from those others wrote to their girls. Most of the letters to girls were writen in a humorous vein.

Wortly, the coxswain, wrote: “Hello, there, do you mind if I come in? Well, how's old Sally today? I bet she looks just as pretty as ever. Sure would like to be there to see her! Bet there are plenty of other men around, though. Ha, ha. Well, Sally, your old sailor boy is out on the deep blue sea.”

There were very few passages in the letters that had to be censored. Most of the men were not interested in writing about military subjects. Sometimes a clumsy attempt at telling our destination had to be extracted. “We're going to an unnamed place where there are plenty of hula girls. You've probably heard lots of songs written about this place; lots of bands specialize in them,” one boy wrote, and just to be sure he added, “In this place where we're going I hear they play the guitar different than they do out West.” Another seaman tried the familiar joke, “I can't tell you where we're going. Aloha. Jack.”

A few of the letters had to be censored because of the clause that “nothing prejudical to the morale or reputation of the armed services” could be mailed. One seaman had unwisely written: “Boy, do I hate this God damn outfit! What a ship! You could stand on the bow and spit over the stern. Ninety percent of the crew have never seen water before and I wish I had never seen it, either.”

White wrote his wife a long letter about the escaping of the drum of steel cable. “Betsy darling,” he wrote. “We had a terrible thing happen the other night, but I wasn't as scared as I thought I'd be.”

The letters differed a good deal in the neatness of writing, the spelling, and punctuation, and it was difficult not to make note of the amount of education the various men displayed. One seaman second class by the name of Wenton wrote in a beautiful, neat hand that looked almost like engraving. There were no mistakes in his letters, and as we needed a yeoman striker, I resolved to keep him in mind. Another seaman by the name of Whysowitz wrote letters that were almost completely illegible. Security forbade our passing letters we couldn't read, but it was obvious that if we rejected Whysowitz's letter he probably could not write a much better one, and would be condemned to silence for the rest of the war. Mr. Crane and I puzzled over the maze of scrawled misspelling for the better part of half an hour, and finally passed it.

“Hell,” Mr. Crane finally said, “if that boy is trying to tell anything to the enemy they'll be just as confused as we are.”

Two of the letters had in their context material that somewhat disturbed me. One was a long, badly written letter from a seaman named Wrigly. It was written to a woman and it was so filled with obscenity and downright lewdness that it was painful to read. Censorship forbade this sort of thing, and it was easy to just drop it in the box of rejects, but it was a temptation to me to call Wrigly in and give him a good talking to. After reflecting upon the subject a moment, however, I decided that that would be a misuse of authority, and I contented myself with enclosing a slip in the letter that read: “Not passed because of obscenity. Further infraction of censorship regulations will result in disciplinary action.”

The other letter that I found disturbing was from a radioman by the name of Whitfield. His letter was simply a collection of ingenuous lies.

“Dear Mother,” he wrote. “We have been at sea only about a week, but we have already been attacked twice. The first time it was a submarine, and she sure was a big one. We dropped depth charges on it and seemed to blow up the whole ocean. Blood and oil came to the surface, so I guess we got her. The second attack was from a dive bomber. It strafed our decks and killed a couple of our men, but I opened up on a machine gun and shot it down. Well, that's all for now, Mother. I've got to go and stand by the guns again.”

I picked up a slip of paper and wrote, “Rejected because of …” There I paused, because it was difficult to give an official reason for rejecting such a letter. Certainly it was disclosing no military information. Finally I wrote, “It is suggested that letters be written to cause a minimum of worry to the families of military personnel.”

CHAPTER NINE

T
WO DAYS
before we arrived at Honolulu the crew perked up. It was as though when they left San Pedro that they had thought they were merely heading out into the vast unknown, and now it came to them as somewhat of a surprise that they were actually going to arrive somewhere. The last two days of the voyage were calm, and I think the men were further surprised that life at sea could be quite pleasant.

The ocean spread out around us as harmless and as blue as a mountain lake. Instead of being bounded by mountains, however, it so blended with and mirrored the pastel blue of the sky that it seemed to have no boundary, and gave an impression of almost astral space. As we sailed southward the sun took the cold sting from the air and beat pleasantly upon our shoulders. Many of the men took their dress whites from their seabags and hung them up to air on deck.

More and more I was asked if the ship would get mail in Honolulu. The men showed no interest in the Hawaiian Islands as other than a place where they could get mail. The government-issued travel leaflets describing the islands and the customs of the natives went unopened. The men had far more of a sense of going away from something than going toward anything. The mail was the only thing that interested them, and in their anticipation of that they were really more looking over their shoulders than ahead. A dozen times a watch I heard the question, “Sir, do you think we'll get mail in Honolulu?” In desperation I finally put a sign on the bulletin board that read: “It is expected that mail will await this unit at her next port of call.”

The day before we arrived in Honolulu another question was continually asked: “Sir, when will we get in?” As navigator I felt my reputation depended on giving them a reasonably accurate time of arrival. According to my calculations we would raise Oahu Island at about noon of June 4, but the night of June 3 I began to get a little jittery about it. For the first time in my life I had no one aboard to check my calculations. Mr. Warren and Mr. Crane were just beginning to use a sextant, and their results were so often contradictory that I had to go entirely according to my own observations. My uneasiness increased when I awoke on the dawn of the fourth to find the sky too overcast for star sights. Returning as stoically as possible to my cabin, I lay there imagining the most terrible events. I imagined arriving at what I should calculate to be the position of the island of Oahu, and finding no land there—only the limitless ocean. I imagined finally making a landfall on an island, only to find it was the wrong island, one without any habitation at all. When the sun came out and was visible as a dim blur behind the haze, I was on deck taking sights as fast as I could plot them. To my delight the haze cleared away and by ten o'clock the sky was as blue as the ocean beneath.

At eleven I sent a lookout to the masthead. All hands off watch crowded onto the forecastle deck and craned their necks forward for land. After twelve days at sea it appeared as though land would be something completely out of the ordinary. At eleven-thirty the masthead lookout shouted, and in my excitement I clambered up the mast myself to verify his judgment.

Lying very low on the horizon, hardly different in substance from a shadow, was a tiny gray blur. As I strained my eyes I could follow it a little to the left and a little to the right; it seemed to waver as I stared at it. It was land, however, not a cloud; there was no doubt about it.

A few minutes later off the port bow we could see a long low point of land, and gradually the two islands, Oahu and Molokai, sprang up around us. I took a few bearings to verify our position, and with a great sense of satisfaction sat down on my stool on the bridge and smoked a pipe.

Now that my own anxiety was gone I could look around me and appreciate the crew. The man at the wheel stood confidently and, looking astern, I could see our wake streching straight as a railroad track behind us. The men on deck somehow looked like sailors. Their faces had neither a look of worry nor of irresponsible gaiety. As I watched them, the Chief started them to rousting out the mooring lines, and they moved quickly, as though they knew what they were doing. It was no longer necessary for the Chief to shout at them; I hardly heard his voice at all.

As I sat there I heard Mr. Rudd come puffing up the companionway behind me. He stood beside me and rested his elbow on the rail. For a moment he surveyed the land that was building up around us, and by the way he blinked I knew that he had just come out of the engine room.

“Well,” he said, “I see you found the place.”

“Yes,” I said, “it's here, all right.”

Mr. Rudd picked a piece of waste from his rear trouser pocket and wiped his hands on it reflectively.

“We've come a long way,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, “a long way. What do you think of your men below?”

Mr. Rudd said, “They're a funny bunch. If I can get them to thinking about anything else but letters home and if I can get them to forget their bellies, I guess they'll be all right. Most of them have got their sea legs already, and a couple of them seem to know their business pretty well. The last two days I've only gone down to the engine room a couple of times a watch to look around, and they seem to be handling things all right by themselves, but sometimes when I hear them carrying on about letters and whatnot, I get the idea that they're really not here at all. If they all divorced their wives and deserted their mothers we might make sailors out of them.”

“I'm afraid only Regulars could qualify under that clause,” I said.

“Well,” Mr. Rudd retorted, “you can't be a sailor and a decent man at the same time. When I go to sea give me someone with tattooed arms and a foul mouth. Give me a shipmate that has to be bailed out of jail when it's time to go to sea.”

“Do you mean that?” I asked.

“Of course not.”

I turned and looked at him. “What do you mean?” I said. “I'll put you on the spot and be serious.”

Mr. Rudd thought a moment and puffed at his cigar.

He replied, “What I just said has a certain amount of truth. For a short voyage all you care about a man is that he knows his business, and you don't want to take time to teach him. For a long voyage, I don't know …” He paused and looked up at me. “This is liable to be a mighty long voyage, you know,” he said. “We've gone a long way, but this is just the beginning.”