Marcia Talley - This Enemy Town

On the phone, she’d sounded worried, but when I pressed her for details, she put me off, saying it wasn’t a good time. Privacy, I knew, was a rare commodity in Bancroft Hall, where everyone had one, sometimes two, roommates, doors were rarely locked, and first classmen-“firsties”-could walk in on you, unannounced, at any time.

I was early. Emma hadn’t arrived, so I bought a Tropicana grapefruit drink from the cashier at the counter and settled into an upholstered chair to wait.

The room was magnificent-like Cinderella’s ballroom-with enormous windows that stretched all the way to the ceiling some thirty feet over my head, highly polished wooden floors, and a Romeo and Juliet-style balcony that overlooked the terrace below. As long, I swear, as a football field, the room had doorways at each end that linked it to classrooms in Maury and Sampson to the north and south, respectively.

Midshipmen were sprawled, some of them sound asleep, on sofas and chairs that had been arranged in conversational groupings about the room. Several mids were seated at tables, talking in low voices over open textbooks, and if the mid clicking his way from website to website on his laptop at the next table was any indication, computer services had thoughtfully provided wireless computer access to users of the room.

I checked the clock that hung over the doorway leading to Maury. It was two-forty. Emma was late. It wasn’t like her. I had just tossed my empty Tropicana bottle into the recycling bin labeled “glass” when she breezed in, full of apologies and out of breath, her books and uniform cap tucked under one arm.

“Want anything to drink?” I asked. “My treat.”

Emma shook her head. “No thanks. I brought my own.” She produced a can of Sprite from under her cap.

“Cookies? Chips?”

She grinned and patted her thigh. “Uh-uh. Gotta watch out for that Severn River hip disease.” The midshipmen diet was calorie-rich, to support their active regime. It proved particularly hard on the women.

“Like you need to worry,” I teased, envying Emma’s solid but trim figure. “Any particular place you want to sit?”

Emma glanced around, then gestured with her soda can to a pair of chairs set at precise right angles to one another on the fringed edge of a Bokhara carpet. “How ’bout over there,” she suggested. “More out of the way, and nobody’ll bother us.”

“I was glad to see you last night,” I told her as we settled comfortably into the plump leather cushions. “When we didn’t hear from you in September…” I shrugged. “Well, after our heart-to-heart last spring, I assumed you’d decided not to come back to the Academy.”

Emma popped the top of her Sprite and took a long swig. Without her stage makeup, without makeup of any kind, in fact, Emma was a beautiful young woman. She was blessed with clear, almost translucent skin and rosy cheeks, a look that millions of women aspired to but no regimen but diet, exercise, and… well, youth could even begin to duplicate. Her dark hair was cut in a neat bob, curling gently under at each ear, well off her collar, as required by Navy regulations; a swoop of bangs was caught to one side and secured at her temple with a plain silver barrette.

“I thought about it all summer,” she said, “while I was on cruise.” She gazed at me with serious green eyes flecked with amber, inherited, no doubt, from her father, an Irish Catholic from Boston. But their almond shape, and her blue-black hair, came directly from her mother, a native of Taiwan.

“Tell me about your summer,” I urged, steering the conversation gently in another, less land-mine-strewn direction.

That seemed the right tack. Emma’s frown vanished and she launched cheerfully into an account of her summer training. “For most of June, I was on the USS Bonhomme Richard, an amphibious assault ship,” she said.

Despite Paul working for the Navy for years, I’d never thought much about ships. I must have looked puzzled, because she hurried to elaborate. “It looks like an aircraft carrier,” she explained, “with a flat deck for the planes, but it’s much smaller. I was one of a thousand crew members, but if we needed to, like helping with the war in Iraq or something, we could have taken on as many as sixteen hundred troops.”

I’m not particularly good with figures, but even I could do the math for that. “That’s twenty-six hundred people, give or take. That’s huge!”

“Bigger than my hometown,” she joked. “But an aircraft carrier is almost twice as big. Take the Nimitz, for example. It carries six thousand people, is approximately eleven hundred feet long by two hundred fifty feet wide and is taller than an eighteen-story building. The Bonhomme Richard is just 844 by one hundred six. Quite a difference.”

My synapses were firing on all cylinders as I struggled to put those statistics into context. I thought about Connie’s sailboat, the only boat I’d ever sailed on. It was a mere thirty-seven feet long and probably as wide as the average Volkswagen Beetle measured bumper to bumper.

“Holy cow,” I said at last.

Emma reached for her notebook and extracted a postcard from between the pages. “Here’s a picture of her,” she said, handing the postcard to me across the table.

The USS Bonhomme Richard, LHD6 , had a nickname, I learned: the Revolutionary Gator. And Emma was right; it did resemble an aircraft carrier, with airplanes lashed, like children’s toys, to the deck. Unlike an aircraft carrier, though, amphibious vessels could drive home, straight into the gaping black hole in the vessel’s stern. “A ship like that,” I said, handing the postcard back, “you must have been rocking and rolling. I’d have been barfing nonstop.”

“It wasn’t so bad,” she said. “They keep you pretty busy, so you don’t have time to think about getting sick. The Navy assigns us to petty officers-they call them running mates-and we follow our running mates around, learning the enlisted side of things.” She leaned forward, resting her elbows comfortably on her knees. “Most of our training comes from books, so it’s great to see what really goes on. I can tell you one thing.” She gestured with her soda can. “You haven’t lived until you’ve spent a couple of weeks following a petty officer around. Those people really work hard. ”

“I guess they want you to walk in enlisted shoes, see what it’s like before they make you an officer and put you in charge.”

She nodded. “Next summer, part two. We’ll shadow officers.” She tipped up her soda can and finished it off.

“Where did you sail?” I asked.

“From Hawaii to San Diego. And in a way,” she continued, rolling the empty can back and forth between her palms, “being on that ship really cinched it for me. You know I’ve never wanted to do anything but fly helicopters. The Bonhomme Richard carries forty-six Sea Knight helicopters, some ASWs and six Harrier attack planes. It made my heart sing just to stand on deck and look at them. And when they practiced night takeoff and landings…” Her eyes took on a faraway look and I could tell she was standing again on that pitching deck with wind from the prop wash tearing at her hair. “When push came to shove, there really was no choice. I had to come back.”

For a midshipman, the summer between youngster and second class year was fish-or-cut-bait time. It was the last chance a midshipman had to tell the Navy, “No thanks, not for me,” without incurring a five-year military obligation, or more. Once a midshipman started his second class, or junior, year, he owed the Navy (and the taxpayers) big-time. Emma was now committed to the Navy. The ships and the choppers had apparently changed her mind.