Angi flew to Hawaii with a group of the other wives to meet the boat. During their layover in Los Angeles, she bought a newspaper where for the first time, she saw a story about the events onboard the USS Alabama: the vaguest possible description of an incident at sea, the Navy’s vaguest possible confirmation of fatalities, and a boilerplate description of a ballistic missile submarine. Captain Shields was mentioned by name, his official photograph positioned over a stock photo of a submarine, a Los Angeles class submarine that Angi could tell was misidentified as a Trident. The dead men were not named, but their families had been notified, and Angi thought it probably wouldn’t be long before the world knew. While waiting to board in LA, a first: a grandmotherly passenger recognized that she was pregnant, and put her hand on Angi’s belly.
During the long flight, Angi read through the rest of the paper, including an article on page four about the cooling off of tensions between Taiwan and China. The prime minister of Taiwan had made some conciliatory remarks toward the mainland leadership, and shortly after the Chinese had made a remarkable apology and agreed to pay damages to the shipping companies and the families of the dead crewmen of Ever Able. That article finished with a series of numbers about the staggering importance of China in the world economy.
The Alabama was scheduled to go into the floating drydock in the shipyard but would pull in first to the pier at Ford Island, a tiny dot of land in the middle of Pearl Harbor. By the time they got there, the tropical sun was low. The weather was, of course, beautiful. Just off the pier was the twisted, rusty wreckage of the USS Utah, sunk on December 7, 1941. Angi was surprised to learn that in addition to the famous Arizona memorial, just on the other side of Ford Island, there were uncelebrated reminders of the Japanese sneak attack everywhere in Pearl Harbor. Ford Island, in particular, isolated from the rest of Oahu, seemed frozen in time, as if they might at any moment hear the buzz of descending Japanese Zeros. The place was so fundamentally beautiful, Angi could see how a sneak attack had succeeded. It would be easy to be lulled by a place like this, deceived into a sense that nothing could ever go wrong.
She stood waiting at the small Utah memorial with a group of four other wives, including the captain’s wife and Cindy Soldato, and read and re-read the plaque a dozen times while they waited:
NEAR THIS SPOT, AT BERTH FOX 11
ON THE MORNING OF 7 DECEMBER 1941,
THE USS UTAH WAS STRUCK ON THE PORTSIDE
WITH WHAT IS BELIEVED TO HAVE BEEN
THREE AERIAL TORPEDOES AND WAS SUNK.
SHE WAS SUBSEQUENTLY ROLLED OVER
TO CLEAR THE CHANNEL BUT WAS
LEFT ON THE BOTTOM.
At first they were the only people there. As a group, they tried to fight off the fear that the ship’s plans had been changed, perhaps they were pulling into a different berth, or directly into the drydock. None of them expected the Navy to tell them anything if such a change were ordered.
Within an hour, though, two salty looking bosun’s mates arrived on the scene, and began pulling serious looking ropes from a line locker on the pier, a sight that set Angi’s heart soaring. One of them had a black radio clipped to his belt, and Angi
listened closely to the crackling communications on it, alert for any mention that would mean anything to her; the name of the ship, Danny’s voice, anything of the kind.
She heard a whistle from sea before she saw anything.
“There they are,” said Cindy, pointing.
Angi could see them then, a single dot on the horizon that soon grew. She saw that there were tugs on either side of the submarine, their jaunty profiles contrasting with the round, black mysteriousness of the submarine’s hull.
A jeep suddenly pulled up behind them on the pier, one captain driving another captain. The driver was Mario Soldato. Angi didn’t know the other one, but she thought she might have seen him around base, at some function or another. He wore gold dolphins and a command pin. She presumed he was Shields’ relief. Or, perhaps, Soldato’s relief. While the Alabama had survived catastrophe, Angi knew that many careers would not.
“Can you see them?” said Mario.
Angi nodded and Cindy stepped to her side. They got out of the jeep and walked to the Utah memorial with them to get a better view. Both captains, Angi saw, had binoculars.
After taking a look and focusing his, Soldato handed them to Angi. “Take a look?”
She lifted them to her eyes, taking a moment to find the Alabama in the view. Danny was on the bridge.
He was serious, but happy, she could see. He was pointing toward them with a massively bandaged hand. She wondered if he’d already spotted them, and recognized her the same way she had instantly recognized him. Without lowering her binoculars, she lifted her left hand and waved.
His smile broadening, he lifted his bandaged hand and waved back.
Angi put the binoculars down. With her free hand, she verified again that in her pocket was the ultrasound photo of their unborn baby girl.