"One airman told me this morning, 'Hey, COB! We gotta invite Captain Magruder. He's the best officer on the boat!'"
Tombstone smiled. "I'm flattered."
"Between you and me, CAG, morale on the Jeff just struck bottom. This business with having women on board, well, it's got the whole crew pretty damned tight. Especially since the word is we're likely to see combat soon.
Now, this shindig this afternoon'll be strictly contra-regs, but I can't see that it'll hurt anything. And having some of the officers there'll let the guys know the brass hasn't just decided to torpedo them."
"I can't get away right this moment, COB." He waved at the paper protruding from the platen of the IBM Selectric resting on his desk. "I have these quarterly personnel evaluations to finish, my XO's on CAP, and the skipper'll keelhaul me if they're not on Commander Parker's desk this afternoon. But save me some cake. I'll come down the second I'm free."
Weston grinned back. "That'd be fine, sir. Thanks." He reached for the door, then hesitated. "Oh… just one thing. I'm afraid this here do will not be squared away on the Papa Charlie front. Do you take my meaning?"
"Perfectly. I'll be down… oh, make it fifteen-thirty."
"Good enough, sir. See you there."
He left.
Tombstone stared after him for several long moments, and wondered how it had come to this. "Not squared away on the Papa Charlie front" meant not PC, not "politically correct." No women. And there was a damned good reason for that.
Sometime during the night, the Jefferson, continuing on course toward the northeast, had crossed the Arctic Circle. The fact had been duly recorded in the ship's logs, of course, and announced over the carrier's closed-circuit television, but not officially celebrated as time-honored custom demanded.
Tombstone was well aware that there'd been grumbling all day, and that morale, within the air wing and the ship's company both, had plummeted.
The immediate cause of the gloom, it appeared, was the peremptory official cancellation of the initiation ceremony to the ancient and honorable Noble Order of Blue Noses.
Long seafaring tradition had established and perpetuated certain shipboard ceremonies. Most famous, of course, was the Order of Neptune, conferred on officers and sailors alike the first time they crossed the equator. There were other fraternities, less well known to landlubbers: the Domain of the Golden Dragon for crossing the 180th meridian; the prestigious Order of the Golden Shellback for crossing the equator at the 180th meridian.
And there was the fraternal Order of the Blue Nose for men crossing the Arctic Circle for the first time.
That was the problem. Men crossing the Arctic Circle. The attendant ceremonies consisted of some fairly grotesque hazing of the "cherries" being initiated, usually on the flight deck with all free hands in attendance.
Tombstone well remembered his own initiation. He'd seen frat parties that were worse… but a gathering of several hundred men, shivering in their skivvies and with their noses painted blue, kneeling one by one before the Chief of the Boat in his guise as King Neptune as they swore to do various improbable and usually obscene tasks, then bobbing for green apples in tubs of ice water and blue-colored whipped cream, was not exactly a ceremony Navy women could be expected to attend.
At least that was the thinking back in the Pentagon, where the CNO himself had issued an order suspending all such festivities aboard ships with mixed crews.
It wouldn't do, Tombstone thought glumly to himself, to let the women see how men really acted while they were at sea. It might shatter their illusions… or worse, confirm them.
And women sure as hell couldn't be expected to strip to their underwear, promise the COB to perform anatomically improbable acts, or bob for apples at the center of a screaming, chanting mob of half-dressed men, not with the current hypersensitivity to sexual harassment pervading the service. There'd been serious discussion in Washington, he knew, about holding some kind of alternate ceremony that included men and women, with no hazing of the cherries and no indecent exposure, but in some ways that would have been worse than cancelling the thing completely. While silly, the ceremony served a serious purpose, binding the men together, old hands and nuggets, in a fraternity of the sea older than the navy in which they served. To substitute some watered-down congratulations-and-welcome-to-the-club clap-trap would only insult the guys who'd already been through it, and render the whole concept meaningless.
So the ceremony was officially proscribed… and yet inevitably, some of the men, at least, were going ahead with the initiations anyway. By tradition, the ship's captain ― and by extension, a carrier's CAG ― usually pretended ignorance of any Domain of Neptune proceedings. Aboard Jefferson, the pretended secrecy had just become a bit more true-to-life; the people involved in this could technically be brought up on court-martial charges. In theory, the gathering on the 01 deck could constitute a mutiny.
But they wanted him to attend, and he'd be damned if he'd let them down, even if it meant he got tailhooked for it.
Tail-hooked. The expression had become widespread in the Navy after the notorious Tail-hook scandal of 1991, when Navy aviators just home after Desert Storm had gone ballistic at the Tail-hook Convention in Las Vegas. The partying that year had been… spirited. Some of the women present ― including several Navy officers ― had been made to run a gauntlet in which they'd been groped, fondled, and undressed. Such goings-on had typified other Tail-hook Conventions, but somehow, this one had gotten out of hand.
The charges of sexual harassment and threatened lawsuits had rocked the entire Navy establishment. Several careers had been wrecked in the scandal's aftermath, promotions for hundreds of junior officers had been held up just on the possibility that they'd been involved, and the rounds of male-female sensitivity training for all hands had begun in deadly earnest. The term "tailhooked" had quickly come to mean any potential scandal or hassle involving women and the Navy.
Tombstone couldn't escape one glaring contradiction, though. If he winked at breaking Navy regs here, even condoned it with his presence, how could he object to sexual activity in defiance of those same regulations?
The initiations were being held to bolster sagging morale. Which would hurt worse, sex aboard ship, or draconian regulations forbidding sex aboard ship?
There was no easy answer. "Women and salt water don't mix" ran the ancient maritime saw, and Tombstone was beginning to agree, Papa Charlie or no Papa Charlie.
He returned to his typewriter, read what he'd already written to remind himself of his place, then continued typing.
The COB was right. Having the ceremony, even if it was against regs, would do the ship's company a hell of a lot of good.
"God damn it, Marge, watch where you're putting your feet!"
PH2 Margolis clutched at a metal joist, then reached inside for a water pipe, his head and shoulders already through the hole created by removing one of the soundproofing tiles in the overhead. "Hey, man, get outa my face! I'm no damned acrobat! Gimme a leg up."
He felt Kirkpatrick's hand steadying his left foot as he boosted himself off the top step of the ladder. His head came up, whacking into the pipe and eliciting a muffled curse.
"You okay up there?" Kirkpatrick asked.
"Yeah, yeah." Margolis flattened himself out, looking around the narrow crawl space. There wasn't much room here, and most of that was taken up with wiring and the water pipes feeding the shower. But there was room enough, and the boards they'd already shoved up there took his weight without knocking the insulation tiles out.
Looking down through the opening in the tiles, he could see Kirkpatrick's anxious face, looking up at him from the top of the ladder. Like Margolis, he was clad in dungarees. On the tile deck below, a mop and a large bucket filled with dirty water rested by the lockers and benches outside the showers.