James Salter - All That Is

“I’d love to meet your father,” Kimmel answered in seeming earnestness. “Have you told him about us?”

“Do you think I’m crazy? He’d kill me.”

“What do you mean? For what?”

“For getting pregnant.”

“You’re pregnant?” Kimmel said, alarmed.

“Who knows?”

Vicky Hollins in her silk dress, the glances clinging to her as she passed. In heels she wasn’t that short. She liked to call herself by her last name. It’s Hollins, she would announce on the phone.

They were shipping out, that was what made it all real or a form of real.

“Who knows if we’ll get back,” he said casually.

Her letters had come in the two sackfuls of mail that Bowman had brought back from Leyte. He’d been sent there by the exec to try and find the ship’s mail at the Fleet Post Office—they’d had none for ten days—and he had flown back with it, triumphant, in a TBM. Kimmel read parts of her letters aloud for the benefit, especially, of Brownell, the third man in the cabin. Brownell was intense and morally pure, with a knotted jaw that had traces of acne. Kimmel liked to bait him. He sniffed at a page of the letter. Yeah, that was her perfume, he said, he’d recognize it anywhere.

“And maybe something else,” he speculated. “I wonder. You think she might have rubbed it aginst her… Here,” he said, offering it to Brownell, “tell me what you think.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Brownell said uneasily. The knots in his jaw showed.

“Oh, sure you would, an old pussy hound like you.”

“Don’t try and involve me in your lechery,” Brownell said.

“It’s not lechery, she’s writing to me because we fell in love. It’s something beautiful and pure.”

“How would you know?”

Brownell was reading The Prophet .

“ The Prophet . What’s that?” Kimmel said. “Let me see it. What does it do, tell us what’s going to happen?”

Brownell didn’t answer.

The letters were less exciting than a page filled with feminine handwriting would suggest. Vicky was a talker and her letters were a detailed and somewhat repetitive account of her life, which consisted in part of going back to all the places she and Kimmel had been to, usually in the company of Susu, her closest friend, and also in the company of other young naval officers, but thinking always of Kimmel. The bartender remembered them, she said, a fabulous couple. Her closings were always a line from a popular song. I didn’t want to do it , she wrote.

Bowman had no girlfriend, faithful or otherwise. He’d had no experience of love but was reluctant to admit it. He simply let the subject pass when women were discussed and acted as though Kimmel’s dazzling affair was more or less familiar ground to him. His life was the ship and his duties aboard. He felt loyalty to it and to a tradition that he respected, and he felt a certain pride when the captain or exec called out, “Mr. Bowman!” He liked their reliance, offhanded though it might be, on him.

He was diligent. He had blue eyes and brown hair combed back. He’d been diligent in school. Miss Crowley had drawn him aside after class and told him he had the makings of a fine Latinist, but if she could see him now in his uniform and sea-tarnished insignia, she would have been very impressed. From the time he and Kimmel had joined the ship at Ulithi, he felt he had performed well.

How he would behave in action was weighing on his mind that morning as they stood looking out at the mysterious, foreign sea and then at the sky that was already becoming brighter. Courage and fear and how you would act under fire were not among the things you talked about. You hoped, when the time came, that you would be able to do as expected. He had faith, if not complete, in himself, then in the leadership, the seasoned names that guided the fleet. Once, in the distance he had seen, low and swift-moving, the camouflaged flagship, the New Jersey , with Halsey aboard. It was like seeing, from afar, the Emperor at Ratisbon. He felt a kind of pride, even fulfillment. It was enough.

The real danger would come from the sky, the suicide attacks, the kamikaze—the word meant “divine wind,” the heaven-sent storms that had saved Japan from the invasion fleet of Kublai Khan centuries before. This was the same intervention from on high, this time by bomb-laden planes flying directly into the enemy ships, their pilots dying in the act.

The first such attack had been in the Philippines a few months earlier. A Japanese plane dove into a heavy cruiser and exploded, killing the captain and many more. From then on the attacks multiplied. The Japanese would come in irregular groups, appearing suddenly. Men watched with almost hypnotic fascination and fear as they came straight down towards them through dense antiaircraft fire or swept in low, skimming the water. To defend Okinawa the Japanese had planned to launch the greatest kamikaze assault of all. The loss of ships would be so heavy that the invasion would be driven back and destroyed. It was not just a dream. The outcome of great battles could hinge on resolve.

Through the morning, though, there was nothing. The swells rose and slid past, some bursting white, spooling out and breaking backwards. There was a deck of clouds. Beneath, the sky was bright.

The first warning of enemy planes came in a call from the bridge, and Bowman was running to his cabin to get his life jacket when the alarm for General Quarters sounded, overwhelming everything else, and he passed Kimmel in a helmet that looked too big for him racing up the steel steps crying, “This is it! This is it!” The firing had started and every gun on the ship and on those nearby took it up. The sound was deafening. Swarms of antiaircraft fire were floating upwards amid dark puffs. On the bridge the captain was hitting the helmsman on the arm to get him to listen. Men were still getting to their stations. It was all happening at two speeds, the noise and desperate haste of action and also at a lesser speed, that of fate, with dark specks in the sky moving through the gunfire. They were distant and it seemed the firing could not reach them when suddenly something else began, within the din a single dark plane was coming down and like a blind insect, unerring, turning towards them, red insignia on its wings and a shining black cowling. Every gun on the ship was firing and the seconds were collapsing into one another. Then with a huge explosion and geyser of water the ship lurched sideways beneath their feet—the plane had hit them or just alongside. In the smoke and confusion no one knew.

“Man overboard!”

“Where?”

“Astern, sir!”

It was Kimmel who, thinking the magazine amidship had been hit, had jumped. The noise was still terrific, they were firing at everything. In the wake of the ship and trying to swim amid the great swells and pieces of wreckage, Kimmel was vanishing from sight. They could not stop or turn back for him. He would have drowned but miraculously he was seen and picked up by a destroyer that was almost immediately sunk by another kamikaze and the crew rescued by a second destroyer that, barely an hour later, was razed to the waterline. Kimmel ended up in a naval hospital. He became a kind of legend. He’d jumped off his ship by mistake and in one day had seen more action than the rest of them would see in the entire war. Afterwards, Bowman lost track of him. Several times over the years he tried to locate him in Chicago but without any luck. More than thirty ships were sunk that day. It was the greatest ordeal of the fleet during the war.

Near the same place just a few days later, the death knell of the Imperial Navy was sounded. For more than forty years, ever since their astonishing victory over the Russians at Tsushima, the Japanese had been increasing their strength. An island empire required a powerful fleet, and Japanese ships were designed to be superior. Because their crews were made up of shorter men, less space was needed between decks as well as fewer comforts, and this could allow heavier armor, bigger guns, and more speed. The greatest of these ships, invincible, with steel thicker than any in existence and design more advanced, bore the poetic name of the nation itself, Yamato . Under orders to attack the vast invasion fleet off Okinawa, it set sail along with nine accompanying ships as escort, from a port on the Inland Sea where it had lain waiting.