William Brinkley - The Last Ship

“Cease at once issuing paper and pens,” I said, for some reason a bit sharply, to Girard. “To anyone. For any purpose.”

“Aye, sir.”

Six spare typewriters; 192 typewriter ribbons.

“What’s the shelf life of these, would you say, Talley?”

“For a guess, sir, five years.”

Five years: I made a mental note. We had finished.

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” I said. “Talley.” And added, meaning it: “In particular, for the anticipation you’ve shown.”

“I’ll get with the projections,” the lieutenant said smartly. “More accurate ones. How long each specific item will last. Now that we’re here. You should have them by zero eight hundred tomorrow. Will that do, Captain?”

“That’ll do just fine, Lieutenant.”

“Come along, Talley. We’ve got work.”

“Aye, ma’m. That’s for sure.”

Just lately the first fringes of gray had begun to appear on the doctor’s temples, rather suddenly. He lit a cigarette.

“That’s it, Skipper,” he said, handing it over. “Complete. Not exactly Bethesda Naval. But we’re pretty well fixed.”

Now I studied the list I had told him to have ready. Penicillin. Tetracycline. Aspirin. Maybe sixty other medicines. Shots for every disease conquered by man. Typhus, tetanus, typhoid. Plague. The narcotics, resident in a combination safe I could see on the bulkhead beyond him. The sick-bay medicines suffused the air around us in an odor of antisepsis. I had shut the door.

I tipped back in my chair. “The men, Doc. Would they be okay working here? Just a professional opinion. Any medical land mines I’m missing that you picked up?”

On my instruction he had been on the island starting at first light, applying his keen eye to it.

“Too early to tell completely, of course. I’d say we could have come out on far worse places. Fresh water. Not many colds, bronchial problems, on this parallel. We’re well stocked. We’ve got enough penicillin to wipe out syphilis and clap in the Seventh Fleet. Of course we had in mind Alexandria, Port Lyautey, and bella Napoli. It’s one plague we shouldn’t have to worry about here. I should have specialized in tropical diseases. Not that the surroundings don’t look healthy enough,” he added quickly. “Nothing I saw that seemed to attack health directly—given the usual precautions. I suppose it depends on whether we’re talking long-term or short-term.”

Yes. Well, not even the doc was going to get it out of me. “It isn’t just the usual hard work,” I said. “In that sun. Stoop labor. That’s the operable phrase. You know about it?”

“Well, I’m a city boy, of course. I may have seen a farm once flying over it. But yes, I comprehend.”

“So?”

“Equator sun,” he said. “It can fry a man and bake his brains. But we can protect against that. To a degree. It’s more, well, enervation at one end of that spectrum; at the other, dizzy spells, prostration, maybe worse. Especially the shape these men are in. They’ve been on low rations too long. Go easy as you can at first, Skipper.”

I looked hard at him. “Understood, Doc.”

I looked around at the four sick-bay beds, consolingly empty, at the operating table. I looked over at the medical stores in their cabinets.

“I won’t ask a stupid question such as how long will that stuff last. Depends on sick bay traffic, of course. How is that lately?”

“It’s leveled off.”

“Leveled off?”

“To what it was before. Situation normal.”

“Real versus imaginary ailments?”

“Back to normal on that, too. More aspirin than anything.”

“No serious malingering?”

“Again just the usual. Minimal. I’d feel disappointed if I didn’t see an occasional one deciding this just isn’t the particular day he feels like working.”

I looked at him. Lieutenant Commander Samuel Cozzens, MC, USN. He was a lean and angular man, tall and floppy, his body narrow and sinewy to the point of frailty. One had the feeling that he needed to see a doctor. His head was adorned with thinning reddish hair, matched both by furry eyebrows and a benign oversized moustache, carroty growths on skin of an almost feminine whiteness, and with large eyes of a ridiculously light and childlike blue. They had always seemed to me slightly weary. Nothing in the behavior of men, they seemed to say, should be considered surprising, and therefore nothing was more a waste of time than to judge them or to be upset by their idiosyncrasies. If men were meant to be angels, they would have wings and fly about. Far from being cynical, this came out as the only sensible, even compassionate view of life, intellectually leaps beyond cynicism, which after all is such an effortless thing. I had never seen those eyes show shock or even wonder, only a kind of stolid and imperturbable appraisal. With them he could virtually look at a man and tell what was wrong with him. And of especial worth to a ship’s captain, they were peculiarly acute at knowing quickly that nothing was. The men knew they couldn’t fool him; some had to try now and then, otherwise it wouldn’t be the Navy. Johns Hopkins, residency at Columbia Presbyterian, Ochsner Clinic, board internist, research at Rockefeller University—all matters I knew from his service record. His speech was in mensural tones, tinged with wryness, a declaration that life-was above all a faintly comic thing, and was not that realization the only way to get through it? Everything about him was muted, as if to say that agitation of manner was the true enemy and that the secret to almost anything was to keep the noise down.

Though still Navy, the doctor rightly conceived it his peculiar function not to let excessive formalities stand in the way with the captain. He knew the captain wouldn’t like that. Aboard ship, two only, doctor and chaplain, are permitted a latitude of frankness not generally granted others of ship’s company.

“Aspirin will go first,” he said. “We’ve got more of it than anything but then it’s the treatment of choice, as we medical people like to say to impress the lay folks, for anything the doctors can’t figure out. We never say that part. But the fact is, aspirin is the single best medicine man ever came up with. Of course all my remarks are directed to physical ailments.”

Something picked up in me. “Physical ailments? Do we have any other kind? I’m talking of a pressing nature, of course.” We all had had the other kind short of that. I had heard him from time to time use the term “intermittent neuroses.”

He lit another cigarette. It occurred to me that the pack-a-week ration which I would announce tomorrow would hit him harder than anyone aboard. I wished I could make an exception. I could not. But I could not have anything happen to him.

“Not at present.” He waited a beat, then spoke in that measured cadence. “The fact is, I’m out of my depth here. Off soundings. I’m afraid I possess an unfortunate gap in my medical education of never having believed in much of that stuff. I’ve often wondered which, psychiatry or religion, has done more damage. Between them, they about owned it all. I was just thinking up the line. But we shouldn’t fish for trouble, should we? A medical adage.”

I looked directly at him, and heard my voice harden.

“There’s a Navy adage, too, the same: Don’t stir still waters. I like that adage, Doc, medical or naval. Shall we stick with it?”

He was suddenly Navy. “Yes, sir. I’m certainly not trying to stir anything, Skipper.”

Once on a signalman first named Chauncey, threatened with a bile peritonitis that could have killed him if not quickly acted upon, he had performed something called a bilary tract procedure. It’s a difficult enough operation, as I had learned, in the Lahey Clinic but he had done it in a Beaufort 8 gale off the Hebrides. Two of our biggest men, Preston and Brewster, had held the doc’s body steady to the deck while he slid the knife in. Chauncey had been lost since but not from that—overboard in the Barents. I spoke more softly.