He glanced at his watch: half past three. He looked at the sun: astern and a little to starboard. He swore in disgust. “We’re heading east,” he said, spitting out the words as if they tasted bad-and they did. “Fucking east, goddammit. We’re running away like sons of bitches.”
A petty officer hurrying by paused. He might have been thinking about chewing Dillon out. But either a look at the platoon sergeant’s stripes or a look at the other Marine with him changed the rating’s mind. All he said was, “You ain’t got the word?”
“Down there?” Dillon jerked a thumb toward the passageway from which he’d just emerged. “Shit, no, Navy. They don’t even give us the time of day down there. What is the skinny?”
“Two carriers sunk-two of ours, I mean-and the third one smashed to hell and gone. God only knows how many pilots lost.” The petty officer spoke with the somber relish contemplating a really large disaster can bring. He went on, “We hurt the Japs some-don’t know just how much. It doesn’t look like they’re chasing us. Why the hell should they, when we ain’t got any air support left? Sure as hell can’t go on without it. So we’re heading back to port, fast as we can go.”
“Oughta be zigzagging, then,” said Dillon, remembering his trip Over There as a young man. “Otherwise, we’re liable to make some Jap sub driver’s day.”
The Navy man pointed to the bridge. “You wanna go talk to the skipper? He’s just dying to hear from you, I bet.”
“We’re all liable to be dying,” Dillon said. But he took not one step in the direction the petty officer had indicated. Would a Navy officer listen to a jar-head sergeant? Fat chance. Anyhow, all the troopships should have been zigzagging, not just the B. F. Irvine.
He took another look down the deck. Along with the men at the antiaircraft guns, the ship did have sailors at the rail, some with binoculars, looking for periscopes. That was better than nothing. How much better? Time would tell.
Behind him, Dutch Wenzel started swearing with a sudden impassioned fury. “What’s eating you?” Les asked.
“If I’d known we were gonna get our butts kicked here, I would’ve let ’em make me a gunny,” Wenzel answered. “We won’t be coming back this way for a while-better believe we won’t. When we do, we’ll have some of the new fish with us, too. I could’ve got that new rocker and still had a chance to hit Hawaii.”
“Oh,” Dillon said. “Yeah. Hadn’t even thought of that.” He too contemplated rank gone glimmering. “Too late to worry about it now, and it ain’t the biggest worry we’ve got right now, either. Maybe we’ll get another crack at it once we make it back to base.” If we make it back to base, he added to himself.
Vince Monahan came up on deck. “Let’s pick up the game again. You guys have got a chunk of my money, and I aim to get it back again.”
Les said, “Just don’t shoot at the Japs with aim like that.” They went below, reclaimed their spot-no mere privates had presumed to occupy it-and got down to business. Dillon took out the cards. “My deal this time, I think.”
JOE CROSETTI AND Orson Sharp listened to the bad news coming out of the radio in their room. “The Saratoga and the Yorktown are definitely known to be lost,” Lowell Thomas said in mournful, even sepulchral, tones. “The Hornet has suffered severe damage at the hands of the Japanese, while two cruisers and a destroyer were also hit by Jap aircraft. Our own gallant fliers inflicted heavy blows on the enemy fleet. They struck at least two and maybe three Jap carriers, as well as several other enemy warships.”
That was all good, but nowhere near good enough. The American carriers should have knocked out their Japanese rivals, then gone on to gain dominance over whatever land-based planes the Japs had in Hawaii. The plan must have looked good when the American fleet set out from the West Coast. Unfortunately, the Japs had had plans of their own.
Thomas continued, “Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, who commanded the American task force, has issued the following statement: ‘Our movement toward the Hawaiian Islands has failed to gain a satisfactory position, and I have withdrawn our ships. My decision to attack at this time and in this way was based on the best information available. The Navy and the air did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.’ ”
A singing commercial extolling the virtues of shaving cream came on. Orson Sharp said, “Well, you can’t stand up and take the heat any better than that.”
“Yeah,” Joe said glumly. “I only wish he didn’t have to. What the hell went wrong?” He often felt funny about cussing around his roommate, because Sharp so scrupulously didn’t. He couldn’t help himself today. “God damn it, we were supposed to whip them.”
“I think we sold them short again,” Sharp said. “We didn’t figure they’d have the nerve to attack Hawaii at all, and then they did. And they licked us there and in the Philippines and down in the South Seas, but they had numbers and surprise on their side. We’d lick ’em if we ever got ’em even-Steven.”
“Well, sure,” Joe said. But it hadn’t turned out to be well, sure. The American carrier force and the Japanese had met on equal terms, and the Japs had come out on top. That wasn’t just shocking. It was mortifying.
Patiently, Sharp said, “Looks to me like we sent a boy to do a man’s job. We wanted to do something fast, pay the Japs back for what they did to us. And we tried it, and it didn’t work. We’ll try again-we have to try again. I just hope we do it right next time instead of fast.”
Joe eyed his roomie. “When the next war comes, you want Thomas or H. V. Kaltenborn or whoever’s in back of the microphone to go, ‘Admiral Sharp has issued the following statement,’ don’t you?”
“Not if it’s a statement explaining why what we tried didn’t work,” Sharp replied.
He didn’t make a big fuss about things. He hardly ever did. But he had his eye on one of the top prizes, sure as the devil. Joe owned no ambition higher than roaring off the deck of a carrier and mowing down Zeros one after another. The way Sharp thought about the bigger picture and how things fit together made him want to do the same.
Lowell Thomas returned. He talked about big German advances in southern Russia, and about the Afrika Korps’ push to Alamein. The next stop after that was Alexandria and the Nile. “The upcoming Fourth of July holiday,” he went on, “promises to be the most anxious for this great nation since that of 1863, when Meade’s army met Robert E. Lee’s at a little Pennsylvania town called Gettysburg.”
“Gettysburg,” Joe echoed. To all but a dying handful of graybeards, it was only a name from a history book. None of his family had been on this side of the Atlantic when men in blue and men in gray tried to kill one another with muzzle-loading muskets and cannon. The weapons, by modern standards, were laughable. The fury with which the soldiers on both sides had wielded them was anything but.
“We’ll do what we need to do,” Sharp said. “If it takes a little longer than we figured at first-then it does, that’s all. When the Federals marched down to Bull Run, they thought they’d win in a hurry, too. It didn’t work like that, but they didn’t lose, either, not in the end.”
“You’ve got a good way of looking at things, you know?” Joe said.
His roomie shrugged. “Hey, I wish we’d done it the easy way, believe me. If we have to do it the hard way, then we do, that’s all.”
Joe eyed him. “Anybody ever tell you you’re too sensible for your own good?”
“Besides you, you mean?” Sharp asked. Laughing, Joe nodded. The other cadet said, “Oh, I’ve heard it a few times. But my guess is, the people who say it aren’t sensible enough.”