William Brinkley: The Last Ship

The Navy was by no means unaware of this circumstance. It did all, it seems to me, that it could do about it. Before being chosen for command, a captain of such a ship was put through a prolonged and cunning series of tests, not a few brutalizing in character, far beyond in their thoroughness those traditionally rigorous ones given prior to the same assignment to the identical ship conventionally armed, involving, I suppose, every means of prediction as to behavior of a given human being known to modern psychological and psychiatric science. All of it cloaked in every secrecy. Even the existence of the tests and their nature were matters of top-secret classification, even their location (the center happened to be situated in one of those not infrequent naval oddities, landlocked Kansas). It was a procedure of weeks, carried out by teams of ingenious and merciless examiners; examiners not there to determine one’s qualifications for sea command—the Navy had already done that—but something quite different and infinitely more difficult of ascertainment.

I can remember feeling a sense of total mental and moral nakedness that I have not experienced before or since, a period associated in my memory with an unalloyed torment, a devastation of the spirit, which I do not enjoy recalling even today, the examiners at times appearing to me as medieval demons whose purpose was to break me. Yet the crucible, in my view, was entirely necessary: an attempt to determine the possession in a single human being of two qualities on the face of it so utterly oppositive in nature as to be on the order of demanding of a man that he be both an atheist and believe absolutely in the existence of a Divine being. In this case, involving the extermination of a million souls, that he would (1) not conceivably of his own volition, having become momentarily crazed, send off the missile that would accomplish that deed and (2) not for a moment hesitate to do so if thus ordered. So far as one could tell a number of such creatures were found—myself among them; though no way ever of testing the matter to a certainty beforehand. The failure rate was high. I have had close friends, actual classmates of mine, men I knew with great intimacy from Annapolis days, who appeared to me the soul of dependability and calm, who were turned down for command of a nuclear-armed ship, no reason of course ever being given, who would have been considered eminently qualified for the captaincy of a vessel not so armed, as evidenced by the fact that they were normally then given such commands. At the end of it I can remember scarcely caring whether I was one of the chosen or not: and yet came that leap of pure joy in me when such became the case. The truth was, I wanted it dearly. Why is a mystery even to myself.

There follows the story of my ship, the Nathan James, DDG (guided missile destroyer) 80. I sometimes have wondered, as perhaps did every soul of the 282 men and twenty-three officers in ship’s company, as to the extent to which what happened was affected by the fact that thirty-two of these—six officers, twenty-six enlisted—were women. What the difference might have been had they not been present and aboard.

The island lay alone in the sea, moored in tranquil waters of turquoise, embraced in a radiant stillness, trees rising from it beyond the sienna beaches, and no sign whatever of life.

“Right standard rudder,” I said.

“Right standard rudder, aye, sir,” the helmsman repeated.

I could feel the ship swerve under me, elegantly responsive. “Steady on course two two five.”

“Steady on course two two five, aye, sir… Checking two two eight magnetic.”

The words needed little more than whispers in the undivided quiescence that reigned everywhere. I stepped out on the starboard bridge wing, the ship brought now line abreast to the land. Not a breath of wind stirred the morning. The last stars paled in the sky, the silent waters stretched away in a vast mirror, glittering in the oncoming sunlight, bringing with it the softened sky of low latitudes, sea and sky so deliquescing into one that I would have had difficulty taking a sextant bearing, making a horizon. I brought my binoculars up and slowly glassed the one object that broke the endless blue. It stood flat on a bearing N.E. to S.W., then rose sharply to a curious, shelflike protuberance before falling off again to the sea. The island was perhaps a dozen miles in length. The far side of the island was shrouded in low flocculent clouds, opaque cumulus, so that I could not make its breadth. I brought the binoculars down, returned to the pilot house, looked at the Fathometer, and gave the command to the lee helm.

“All engines stop.”

“All engines stop, aye, sir.” I heard the clank of the engine-order telegraph, then a slight shudder through the ship. Then she lay still in the water.

“You may resume the conn, Mr. Thurlow,” I said to my navigator. “Let go the anchor.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

I stepped back to the wing and looked over into the blue-green water, luminescent with sunlight. Then the anchor hit it in an explosion of turbulence. I could hear the long-drawn rumbling of the chain through the hawsepipe as the great cast-iron thing descended. Presently the ship gave another shudder, then settled, as the anchor payed out. I stepped back into the pilot house.

“Ship anchored, sir,” Thurlow reported. “Seventy fathoms on deck.”

“Mr. Woodward,” I said to the JOOD. “Take the conn. Mr. Thurlow. Will you please prepare a landing party. Yourself. Chief Delaney. Silva, Preston. Eight hands, marksmen. And myself. Number Two boat—Meyer, Barker. Bring a shovel. An ax. We’ve got a couple of machetes?”

“Aye, sir. A couple.”

“Officers to carry side arms. All others to sling carbines. Except Delaney and Travis.”

“When will we be shoving off, Captain?”

“Immediately. Look alive, Mr. Thurlow.”

“Yes, sir.”

He disappeared with a quickstep out the pilot house. I glanced once more at the island; from the ocean rising, it looked like an emerald of unimagined beauty, worn as an adornment by the sea simply to relieve its vastness, its impossible loneliness. I went below to my cabin and strapped on the web belt and the service .45 and joined the others at the accommodation ladder. On the hushed water the boat bobbed hardly at all below us. The men descended. Then the chief. Then Thurlow. Then myself. We came over the mile of lagoon, the boat’s engine sounding shamelessly loud in the great stillness, and slid gently onto the sand. We debarked in reverse order, myself first. The Navy: officers last into the boat, first out, and by order of rank. We stood on the sand, feeling the immense strangeness of earth under our feet, saying not a word, regarding the island with the careful, suspicious appraisal one gives a stranger, credentials unknown, with whom one is required to have dealings. I looked at my watch. 0745.

“Mr. Thurlow. Single-file, couple paces apart. Steady as you go, men. Look about. Chief. Come along with me, if you will.”

Chief Gunner’s Mate Amos Delaney had grown up on a Missouri farm and had known farming as a first love, the sea as a second. I think perhaps he loved both farm and sea in equal measure, as a man might reasonably two women, differing in aspect rather than degree, both of high charms. He played the fiddle, quite well, and on good evenings, with the ship running a gentle sea, the men liked to gather round him on the fantail and listen to the old songs. If the sea was calm enough I could hear the music faintly from the bridge, and sometimes the low lilt of sailor voices drifting out over the water, telling of hills and loves far away.