The Edge of Honor (10 page)

She got out of the tub, dried off, and slipped into her nightgown. She dried her hair with an electric blower, brushed her teeth, tipped the rest of the cognac into the sink, and went back through the apartment, turning off lights and checking the locks. Slipping into the queen sized bed with a sigh, Maddy turned off the bedside lamp, automatically hugging the second pillow, Brian, she thought, where the hell are you?

As she tried to squeeze out of her mind the memory of the foregoing hours, she felt more and more like an ass.

Getting married had not been a trivial proposition for her, especially given what she had been through when her father decamped. Brian had been so different from the boys she had known in Atlanta and in college up north. His love for her seemed to be pretty uncomplicated, and he was direct, fun, interested in life, serious about his career for the right reasons, and determined to do a good job at whatever he tackled, including marriage.

But the fitness reports from Decatur had been a real surprise, and the scope of his new job in Hood another one. The combination of those two things, the upcoming promotion board and her own distress at the length of the deployment, had not helped matters between them.

She stared up in the darkness, watching but not seeing the reflections of passing car headlights as they rippled across the ceiling. In retrospect, she also realized that she had not been sufficiently sensitive to how much he wanted children. She could not really put her finger on why she was hesitating, but the more he pushed, the more she had been resisting. She sensed that it was psychological and related to what had happened in her own family, but she had shied away from really trying to figure it put, hiding instead behind her stubborn streak when Brian pushed the issue. And now what? How in the hell do we resolve some of these things by mail?

There had been no real mail since the ship left Pearl Harbor, only a couple of gushy Hawaiian postcards. The painful awkwardness of deployment day still weighed on her mind. She should have gone. She had been the only wardroom wife less one not on the pier, a fact that was conspicuously not mentioned at the “wake” held on the evening of deployment day by the captain’s wife. She should have done what Angela Benedetti had, even if the thought of going home to Momma was untenable.

The silence in the apartment brought to mind the image of the anguish on Brian’s face when he’d left, and her own when he had gone out the door.

She cared deeply for him, and somehow she had managed to make him feel guilty about going off to do what successful naval officers did: go to sea.

She had written three long, emotional letters after the ship left, trying to express how she really felt, how she wasn’t mad at him for the separation, how it was the god damned Navy and its interminable deployments, but she had torn up each of them after the captain’s wife had explained the rules about mail to those wives facing their first WESTPAC deployment. With a minimum of four weeks between dispatch of a letter and receipt of a reply, there were some things that were too sensitive to deal with in letters. There were too many opportunities for inflicting unintentional hurt and for totally missed communications.

Beyond that, the mail pipeline itself was fragile: Letters went from San Diego to the Fleet Post Office in San Francisco, then by military cargo planes to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, and then by truck to Cubi Point in Subic Bay, and from Cubi by carrier cargo plane to the carrier on Yankee Station in the Gulf, and from the carrier to the ships by the daily logistics helicopter.

“Everybody tries his best,” Mrs. Huntington had said.

“But there’s a war on, you know, and letters do get lost.

If you want to pour your heart out, do it on one of these cassette tapes. Hold on to it for a couple of days and then listen to it before you mau it. Ask yourself, what’s he supposed to do with this? It’s okay to tell him you miss him, that you’re lonely, that life’s a drag while he’s gone.

But won’t wander into Indian territory: Don’t lay down ultimatums, don’t berate the Navy, and don’t talk about other men. Don’t say things that require a reaction, because with that much dead time, the reaction will be meaningless. They’re at sea in a war zone; they’ve got enough to worry about without your piling it on.”

She had gone home to think, then realized that, in tearing up her first letters, she had guaranteed that Brian would not get any mail from her in Pearl or even Subic.

She had hurriedly written what the other wives called a weekly report letter, filled with trivial news about her job, the car, the wives’ social activities, a letter deliberately devoid of real feelings. Only in closing had she said that she loved him and missed him terribly.

The captain’s wife had also explained that wives could I not blame the Navy for the deployment without attacking j then* husbands’ careers.

Your husbands can’t do anything about the Navy and its deployments except leave it. If you constantly complain about the Navy, you implicitly, and perhaps unintentionally, pose the question of their having to choose between you and the Navy. Don’t pose that choice unless you can stand all the possible answers.

But during that first week after the ship had left, she j had almost convinced herself that this was the issue. j Brian was gone for the next half a year, and she was I already miserable. As much as she tried to repress the preceding hours, the earthy side of her personality that j had shown its grinning face earlier in the evening only i heightened her fear about being left alone. If tonight’s t any indication, what kind of a basket case am I going to j be seven months from now? Even as she asked herself this question, she realized that the one person who could ‘ answer it was beyond the asking, vanished down the | black hole of a WESTPAC deployment. Her husband was j now a disembodied voice, diminished to a piece of paper in her mailbox, if every element of the Navy mail system , worked right. I

Subicbay Chief Wesley Jackson stood just inside the forward end of the mess decks, leaning against a bulkhead with his arms folded, as the crew began to file in for the evening meal. “The Sheriff,” as Hood’s chief master-at-arms was known, was a well-built forty-four-year-old black man who had been a chief gunner’s mate before converting to the master-at-arms rating three years before joining Hood. At nearly six feet tall, with a gleaming head, round face, and piercing black eyes, he presented a no nonsense, even stern, demeanor, befitting a man who had spent many years on deck with five-inch guns and rough cut gunner’s mates.

Wesley Jackson came from Chicago and had developed many of the tough traits for which his hometown was famous. He had been distracted from the streets through the intervention of the local police Boys Club, and all through his adolescent years he’d yearned to become a cop. His father had never really been in the family picture, and his mother had simply carried on the business of raising Wesley and six more brothers and sisters.

When the money got tight, Jackson had dropped out of high school to find a job, which doomed his chances for the police force. When he turned eighteen, his former mentor in the Boys Club had steered him to the military.

His first choice was the Marines, but the Marine recruiter had been on a road trip, and the Navy chief holding down the office that day had seen his chance. Wesley never looked back, but he had still harbored the desire to be a cop during all those years as a gunner’s mate. When the Navy-wide call had been issued for volunteers to become professional MAAs, Wesley Jackson had answered. In the intervening years, he had finished his high school GED and even achieved a year’s worth of college credits during his only shore-duty tour.

Jackson was unmarried and sometimes regretted that fact, especially on those emotional days when ships came home from a long deployment.

Nothing was quite so lonely as a ship on homecoming day about an hour after the married men had left with their families. The Jackson family had been raised on an ethic of hard work, high personal standards, and a strong sense of duty. Two of his brothers had joined the Army and a third worked for Cook County, Illinois. His three sisters had married young and were still married. But when Jackson realized that the ways of the Navy were incompatible with what he knew would be his strong sense of duty to a wife and children, he had chosen to stick with the Navy.

His sisters and brothers had produced a crowd of kids, to whom he was Uncle Wesley, so there were plenty of nephews and nieces back home should he want to be around children, and Navy towns were always full of women.

In his reincarnation as an MAA, Jackson tended to take everything pretty seriously. His tailored khaki uniforms and spit-shined shoes made it clear that he believed in setting military uniform grooming standards by personal example. Because of his baldness, he looked older than he was, but he was well spoken, reserved, and watchful, and he was one of only two chief petty officers in the ship who had some college time.

As the ship’s chief master-at-arms, Jackson was responsible for enforcing regulations and maintaining good order and discipline. He supervised the MAA force, which consisted of six first class petty officers who served as masters-at-arms within their duty sections in port, in addition to their regular divisional duties. The MAA force was analogous to a part-time police force in the ship. The first class MAAs were distinguished from the rest of the crew by silver badges worn on the left breast pocket of their chambray shirts. If there was an altercation or other disruption to the day’s routine, the bridge would pass the word for the duty MAA to lay down to the compartment involved.

If the problem was large enough, the call would go out for all MAAs not actually on watch to visit the scene of the problem.

Jackson wore a gold MAA badge in recognition of the fact that he performed his duties as a full-time job. He worked directly for the executive officer on the so-called executive staff, along with the chief hospital corpsman, the doc, and his assistant, the baby doc, as well as the chief yeoman and chief personnelman. Jackson maintained a small office on Broadway, the Hood’s central passageway, which contained a desk, two chairs, two file cabinets, and a bulky evidence safe. Most of his time was spent supervising the pursuit of petty crimes, such as wallets being stolen, locker breakins, fistfights, curfew violations, insubordination to senior petty officers— shirking, in short, the typical problems encountered in any military organization that spent the bulk of its time training and maintaining.

Jackson surveyed the mess decks as the men came off the chow line and settled at the tables. He was always fascinated by how they grouped: the blacks sitting separate from the whites, the engineers from the deck apes, the nonrated men from the petty officers. The younger black sailors especially interested him. For the past three years, the Navy had been making a significant and apparently sincere effort to expose and expunge racism throughout the fleet by using a variety of human-relations and leadership and management programs, of which Jackson had been a willing supporter. He was well aware that, as a result of the civil rights turmoil throughout the country, the races were deeply polarized in the Navy’s ships. Black men, especially the young nonrated black men in the crew, tended to stick together, practicing a kind of reverse segregation now that race relations were increasingly becoming a big deal. Young blacks in the Navy reflected all of the hostility and anger that characterized black-white relations in America at large, driven as much by the watershed civil rights movement as by the growing recognition that young black men were filling a disproportionate share of the body bags coming back from Vietnam. Black militancy was barely being kept in check by the restraints of military discipline, as evidenced by racial disturbances aboard several ships. Older black petty officers and chiefs, who had learned to accommodate the system, were as suspicious of the younger blacks as were their white counterparts, because they felt that the young hotheads were going to screw things up for everybody, which, in turn, further isolated the young blacks.

White crew members were indignant at all the noise about race and angry about having to undergo mandatory racial-sensitivity training, what they called “hug ‘em and love “em” sessions. But some were beginning to realize their discomfiture with the process stemmed in part from the fact that racism had long been institutionalized in the Navy. Jackson remembered one counselor’s remark during a racial-sensitivity session back in Dago: A white man sees six white sailors congregating on the fantail; they’re shooting the shit; six black men congregating on the fantail are undoubtedly planning a race riot. He also remembered the muttered, “Well, yeah!” reactions that had floated around the mostly white classroom. But he was becoming bitterly disappointed with many of the younger blacks, whose resentments blinded them to the opportunities being offered in the service. To his disgust, many of them used reverse segregation as some kind of statement, as if to say, Now that you want us to be part of you, up yours.

He knew that when the hotheads congregated, the name of Chief Wesley Jackson was firmly enshrined on the Uncle Tom list, along with the ship’s black Supply officer, Raiford Hatcher, and three other chief petty officers. He tended to respond to their contempt for him by exacting even stricter standards of discipline, military appearance, and military courtesy from them than he ever applied to junior white people.

But in truth, any individuals or groups in the ship that exhibited a defiant stance attracted Jackson’s undivided attention.

He looked at his watch. Sea detail would go down in forty-five minutes.

Stifling a yawn, he decided to head back to the chiefs’ mess to have supper. This looked like a perfectly normal night on the mess decks.

Even though they were in Subic, he wasn’t expecting any trouble, since the crew was not going to be going over on liberty.

The ship was scheduled to sail in two hours for the Gulf.

He clenched his mouth into a flat line. The less time spent alongside the pier in places like Subic, the fewer problems for the Sheriff. He was ready to get her up to the Gulf, back out to sea, where ships and sailors belonged, by God.