CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I WAS NOW A DEFENSE-ESTABLISHMENT beltway insider riding a desk. Long meetings and discussions in the morning with the Joint Chiefs or the president’s advisors, a quick lunch, then more conferences with National Security or the CIA and the other intelligence services. It reminded me of my early hectic days with Doug Fane on the West Coast—except with Fane we were as often out with the teams somewhere in the world as stuck in an office. There was no such relief in Washington, D.C., where everything, it seemed, was paperwork and bullshit.

Fane had retired from the navy two years earlier, before Cuba and all that. He telephoned me the day he left. “Bone, I still say you’re a candy ass. By the way, do you know where I can find a new wife?”

“You can have my ex-wife.”

“Elinor? She’s gone?”

“I might have had something, but I guess I kicked it around and lost it.”

“Ex-wives come with the territory.”

I hadn’t seen Elinor since she and the kids left me for California. Divorce papers came in the mail in August 1961 while I was deeply involved in getting the SEALs going. I couldn’t show up for the hearing, so the court awarded her a generous portion of my income and future pension and everything else we owned. Which wasn’t much, actually. Most Navy men gathered less moss than a rolling stone.

I didn’t begrudge her; what she received from me would support Linda Jean, Bill Jr., and little Jana Lee. I signed the papers, put them back in the mail, and then went out and got drunk with a Navy wife I met at the Officers Club at Little Creek.

Lonely wives were a fixture around most Navy shore bases. Mary was thirty-three years old, tall, attractive, and lonely because her naval aviator husband spent more time on deployment than he did at home. While he was off flying, his wife stayed home and tested her own wings.

She and I had a lot in common. Misery loves company and all that. My wife left me because of the Navy; Mary was ready to leave her husband because of the Navy. She was an unconfessed alcoholic; I was on the verge of becoming a heavy drinker, not to the point that it affected my life and career, but I could still toss ’em down. We were both drifting in our personal lives, flotsam passing in the night that got hung up on the same snag.

One evening we were together in a Virginia Beach night club when her husband walked in on us. I heard Mary gasp above the sounds of Elvis on the jukebox, the clinking of glasses, and the melodious flirting mixture of male and female voices. I followed the direction of her gaze and saw the tall man in a flight jacket standing in the doorway looking over the crowd.

“Oh, my God!” Mary cried in a muffled voice. “Bill wasn’t supposed to be back tonight.”

That was another thing we had in common: her husband was also named Bill. He spotted us and, wearing a stricken look, walked slowly over to our table. He stood silently looking down on his errant wife and me. Poor bastard. None of the three of us spoke. We tried not to look at each other for what seemed about ten years.

“You’re welcome to the lush,” the other Bill said to me and walked away.

I resisted the urge to jump up and shout after him, “But I don’t want the lush!” Instead, I just sat there feeling about as low-down as a man could get.

I felt responsible for breaking up Mary’s marriage. Maybe that and rebound was the reason I married her. I tried to talk her out of it, give her a way out. I tried to talk myself out of it.

“Look, girl. I’m not much of a catch. Shore duty won’t last and I’ll be deploying again.”

“What’s with you men and the sea?” she said. “It’s like you all keep trying to escape from the land.”

Mary was pretty, but not very smart. I always figured she would have been a good and faithful wife if she had found herself some ordinary nine-to-five Joe with a new car and a little house in the suburbs. Certainly, she should never have ended up with another sailor who couldn’t stand the thought of barnacles on his hull.

She and her preteen daughter moved into my apartment with me in D.C. I figured she’d be straying again as soon as I left the Pentagon and went back to the fleet. In the meantime, I tried to settle in and make a proper husband and military paper-pushing bureaucrat.

Out at SEAL Team Two, Lieutenant John Callahan took over as the new skipper. Limited Duty Officers like Roy Boehm were generally not eligible for most command slots. I explained it to Roy, who accepted it willingly and returned happily to his old position in operations. He was, after all, unpolished and two-fisted, more at home in a sleazy waterfront bar than in an officer’s stateroom. He kissed no ass in kicking ass. He was never going to make captain or admiral anyhow.

The day Callahan showed up to take over, Roy gave him a briefing on the team’s status.

“I’m damned glad the ball is in your court now,” he concluded.

At the Pentagon, the unresolved “Cuba problem,” as it was being called, was not going away and showed every sign of escalating into something unintended. I had worked with a number of the Quarters Eye bunch during the lead-up to the Bay of Pigs—Richard Bissell, E. Howard Hunt, David Atlee Phillips, and Ted Shackley. It was difficult to keep up with who’s who in the CIA, as they were a secretive organization. I sometimes met one or the other of them over a drink to discuss growing concerns in the Caribbean over Nikita Khrushchev’s ICBMs.

“If Americans knew what was about to happen down there,” Shackley remarked, “they’d crawl into their cellars and not come up again until after the fallout cleared.”