In late May’s midmorning sun, Athena rounded Cape Henry in a sparkling heat haze that painted the beaches with a tinge of white which seemed to match the sound of crashing surf. North of Lynnhaven Roads she passed into the Chesapeake Bay. Then, running beyond Little Creek, the home port to which she would return within hours, she made for Naval Station Norfolk to take on ordnance.
Ships at this, the largest naval base in the world, tie up at fourteen major piers along which fighting vessels, with names that do not rhyme, often nest, nonetheless, two or three abreast. At evening, lights festooning the fleet shine like those of a city at Christmas. Some older sailors could remember gliding past a dozen aircraft carriers and fifty cruisers and destroyers lit up and busy, loading and unloading, fixing and welding, with sparks flying across their decks, cranes slewing, barges maneuvering and patrol boats darting.
Now far fewer ships were present, but the activity around them was ceaseless, and the streets of the base, running miles to the east, were crowded with vehicles. After they were supplied and armed at a frantic pace twenty-four hours a day, most of the ships would sally through the roads and set their courses for the Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf. Like the ground crews of fighter aircraft, the thousands of sailors on base felt a sense of urgency and responsibility that drove them to efficiencies seen only in war. Though nothing in this regard was ever spoken, across the silence between them and the sailors on board they felt a strong sense of brotherhood. As a ship left, those who stayed ashore would spare a moment from their duties to stand and salute.
When Athena found her assigned pier, the missiles, missile loaders, ordnance trucks, and cranes were waiting. In peacetime it was hardly unusual to wait a week or more to load armament, but not now.
In the Second World War, the carrier Yorktown was so badly damaged in the Battle of the Coral Sea that in normal circumstances its repair might have taken several years. But in light of the impending Battle of Midway, Admiral Nimitz ordered expedited work, which, he was told, would take ninety days. This he pared to three. With men and materiel flown to the ship as she limped home, efforts commenced at sea, and after she pulled in, the activity of the twelve hundred men assembled to receive her at Pearl Harbor began before the drydock had fully drained as they started work in water chest-high. Even Honolulu’s electricity was diverted for their use. Three days later, leaving behind exhausted but proud seamen and engineers, the Yorktown steamed toward Midway.
In that spirit, though hardly at that speed, the Harpoons, Griffins, and tons of ammunition were loaded aboard Athena. As the frames for the Harpoons and canisters for the Griffins were already affixed to the deck, most of the job was not in their physical transfer, although that had to be done cautiously and by the book, but in testing connections and filling out forms. In five hours it was done. By that time, Athena had finished bunkering fuel, and at dusk she backed from the pier, pointed her bow northward, and headed for Little Creek, the amphibious base that was home to the Patrol Coastals.
As Athena left Norfolk, the lights strung on docked ships from stern rail to island or mast and down to the bow came on in star-like catenaries. While she glided slowly and silently by, north and east of the naval base the gentler lights of houses glowed safely along the shore, reminding the sailors and the soon-to-depart contractors who had taken the ship from New Orleans that this was what they were fighting for—these soft lights, these wooden houses set back from the beach, and the families at peace within.
*
As the ordnance was loaded onto Athena, a 757 took off from the civilian airport at San Diego with a SEAL detachment aboard. The six of them sat together in the back of the plane, radiating the physical power that was the gift of continual training. Their commanding officer, a Lieutenant Commander Holworthy, was disturbed that his group comprised six rather than the nine the new Patrol Coastal Athena could accommodate. They had trained as nine, but three were detached and sent elsewhere.
Before the flight, he had taken his men to an obscure hallway in the airport and led them through an hour of calisthenics. This was the only way they could justify their long immobility on the aircraft. Were civilians to do the same, their flights too would be more comfortable, the enforced rest a welcome recovery rather than an enervating ordeal. He would lead them in more calisthenics in New York before embarking for Norfolk, this time not in the hallway but on the tarmac, where they would guard the transfer of air cargo containers that carried their weapons and equipment.
After their exercise in San Diego they had watched it load, and would watch it again in New York. Their specialized and individualized arsenal of accessories—from night vision equipment, sniper rifles, and communications, down to boots, helmets, and uniforms—was worth well over a million dollars, could be dangerous in the wrong hands, and would in its absence slow and degrade their performance were they to work with new sets of uncalibrated and non-customized tools. So at JFK they would remain next to their two airfreight containers as they exercised.
Somewhere over Arizona the Bloody Marys arrived. Partly to thank the SEALs for their service (something the best of them always find keenly embarrassing) the steward didn’t charge for drinks. On airplanes, Holworthy drank Bloody Marys. They had nutritional value, and vodka. Drinks in hand, blocking the way to the heads—which no one sought at the beginning of the flight anyway—the SEALs sat and stood in a group, speaking softly enough not to be overheard.
Holworthy was a sandy-haired Texan who looked like the soldier greeted by Eisenhower in the famous picture of his meeting with para-troopers before D-Day. He was unattached, impatient, and highly ambitious. As SEAL teams placed less emphasis upon rank and hierarchy than upon the inherent leadership that revealed itself in action, he felt always frustrated by detailed orders from above. “Irregular warfare must be irregular. Give us our orders,” he would say to his men to illustrate his view, “and then fuck off.”
“Where are we going now?” one of them asked, with some irritation. They were part of SEAL Team 8 at Little Creek, but had been detached to Coronado before assignment to newly bulked-up Seventh Fleet. Almost as soon as they had come to terms with this, they received word that they were headed back to Virginia.
“Does the war in the Gulf,” Holworthy answered, “give you a hint?”
“Seventh Fleet is going in as well. Why are they bouncing us around?”
“Back to PCs.”
“The PCs are all covered. There’s even an excess. Isn’t that why we were sent to Coronado in the first place?”
“It is,” Holworthy told them. “But there’s a new one.”
“A new PC?” someone asked. “You’re kidding. They’re supposed to be phased out.”
“It’s a variant, upgraded, the first and last of its class. PC Fifteen, the Athena.”
“Never heard of it.”
“They didn’t ask you. I’m told it’s bigger, more comfortable—”
“Good,” someone interrupted.
“Lots’a new stuff on it. And the CO . . . ready? Is a captain.”
“Can’t be. You can’t be a captain on a PC. It’s impossible.”
“No. It’s true.”
“What’d he do?”
“He had an argument.”
“With who?”
“The president.”
“The president of what?”
“The United States.”
“The President of the United States. That could be good, or it could be bad.”
Holworthy continued. “I asked around at Coronado. He’s supposed to be capable, sharp, and demanding, but he’s had a lot of commands, and he leaves them scratching their heads and wondering what happened to them. That’s according to the guys who were around when he was a SEA—”
“He was a SEAL?”
“Indeed he was. In the Gulf War, muppet—before you were born—he earned the Navy Cross.”
Holworthy then went over Rensselaer’s history to the extent that he knew it, and when he finished he said, “He does well and he always moves up, but he’s one of those guys who’s bound to come a cropper because he plays by his own rules. When they coincide with the Navy’s—and that’s a lot: he’s Academy—he does brilliantly. But if they don’t, it’s as if there’s no such thing as the Navy, never heard of it, or he’s founding it on the spot.”
“Kind of like guess who?” O’Connor, Holworthy’s second, added. Holworthy, a lieutenant commander in charge of only five men, and only in the informal way of a SEAL detachment, was neatly analogous to Rensselaer, whose name O’Connor had yet to learn. And like Rensselaer, Holworthy was headstrong.
“The difference,” Holworthy explained, “is that with his rank and the nature of his prior commands he’s had far less room for independence. Two days ago, I bumped into a captain I met at West in February, and asked about Rensselaer, our new CO. ‘Oh yeah,’ he said, and smiled as he shook his head back and forth. ‘You gotta understand, with Stephen, if there’s a conflict between Navy regulations and what he calls—I’m not kidding, I swear—the laws of nature and nature’s God, he’ll say kiss my ass. He gets one choice billet after another, does exceptionally well, takes it to the edge, and is elevated two seconds before it all goes south. He was an aide to the SECNAV and on the selection list for rear admiral, lower half, when, in the presence of the CNO, the SECNAV, and the National Security Advisor, he more or less politely told the president to stick it. Admirable in some respects, but not something I’d recommend.”
O’Connor dropped an ice cube he had in his mouth back into his Bloody Mary. “I just don’t get how a SEAL with the Navy Cross could become a staff weeny.”
“He’s old. Officially, in the PT manual, they call someone in his late thirties a ‘high-mileage SEAL.’ This guy’s got almost twenty years on that.”
“But he was whatever he was and probably on the weeny track even before he got old.”
“Look,” Holworthy said, “he was kicked out. That suggests to me that he’s not really a weeny.”
“Why?”
“Because,” Holworthy answered, “think about it. The dude abides. Weenies can’t do that.”
*
Bracketing Athena at Little Creek—her home port though she would remain abroad for most of her life—were two PCs, forward and aft. Preparing to sail for the Gulf slightly in advance of Athena, they were veterans seasoned by survival. Nonetheless, their past combats and their age weighed heavily upon them. Even their names, Firebolt and Typhoon, were subsidiary to that of Athena, a beautiful, wise goddess, forever young, who could toss lightning bolts and make storms. Although warships are made to fight, they are yet feminine, buoyant, and graceful in the waves and wind.
Athena had not a postage stamp of rust. In comparison to her sisters, she was blemishless and perfect. And she was bigger. When a beautiful woman is statuesque her beauty is magnified. Katy was most times more beautiful, and certainly wiser, than the young women in their twenties whom she and Stephen might see in a restaurant or a park, and though Stephen would not have lasted more than a day with any one of them due to their natural energies and endearing inexperience, he like everyone else was immediately influenced by their presence, as Katy was, too. Once it is lost, youth swells in value in a way that the young are incapable of imagining. Athena had exactly this advantage over Firebolt and Typhoon, and had they been alive it might have been observable and unconcealable.
Although much smaller than Naval Station Norfolk, Little Creek is itself enormous, and it too was bustling: ships preparing for deployment, vehicles busy on its roads, helicopters touching down and taking off, lights blazing everywhere, young SEALs swimming miles out in the surging swell, and not just in daylight. Some of Athena’s contractors had departed at the naval base, but others were now packing up. The civilian airport was nearby, and they would catch late flights out.
The rest of the crew was on its way in from as far away as Japan. Athena’s sudden activation had caught the bureaucracy by surprise, and sailors had to be swept up from all over—some who had been in transit, some waiting to be reassigned, some who had been suspect and in limbo for minor yet unadjudicated infractions now cleared by emergency order.
Rensselaer had protested that he hadn’t time to shape his crew, and only by calling Rusty, who felt strongly for him, did he manage a little control. She had walked to the appropriate office and charmed the appropriate subordinate, who arranged to send Athena five supernumeraries so that in an effort to select the best, the captain would have five to reject.
Although Rensselaer returned to Athena every few hours to supervise the loading and stowage, he spent the two days after Athena’s evening arrival vetting the crew in an office a quarter mile from the ship. It hadn’t changed since the fifties or sixties. An overpowered window air conditioner refrigerated the room and made a hypnotic sound, the desks and chairs were wood highly polished by twenty thousand elbows and ten thousand behinds, and a green linoleum floor was so cold that feet could feel it through shoes. Bright colors outside—blue sky, blue water, and a thickly leaved tree that moved in the wind—were attenuated by blinds that hadn’t been dusted in half a century.
The crew sat on benches in the hall outside. Some slept after long flights, inevitably some of the younger ones played games on their phones, others talked or read newspapers, and one or two crazies stared at the fluorescent lights. They had come through the civilian airport or been disgorged from C-130s at the naval station airfield or NAS Oceana, and some arrived by bus from Mayport or by train from New London, etc. They stayed in a barracks with other sailors from different ships, all of whom were in the same boat. War seemed both close and distant. The closeness was due to a strong sense of unease; the distance, when the unease passed out of mind.
Officers were interviewed first. Of these, only one was extra. Rensselaer spoke first to his XO candidate, a thin, wiry, dark-haired lieutenant commander, quite a bit over six feet, with big, coal-black eyes and eyelids that were wide open, and closed only once every minute or so, not in a blink but for a couple of seconds. This, plus his muscular tension, was somewhat frightening. He was from Boston, he was Jewish, he spoke with a fairly heavy Boston accent, and he had been through NROTC at MIT, with a major in mathematics.
After naval formalities, Rensselaer said, “Have a seat.”
“Thank you, sir.” He sat, and stared.
“Um,” said Rensselaer, who rarely if ever said um, “the first thing—your name.”
“Alan.”
“Your last name. Pronunciation.”
“Movius, the way it looks. Mo-vee–us, as in the German, not the French.” He pronounced the French exaggeratedly, drawing it out—“Moe-vieu-ze.”
“Next question.”
“Sir.”
“You were the XO on the Augusta, and the captain transferred you out. Why? Your record has no explanation and you weren’t due.”
“The captain and I had a disagreement about the manner in which he treated a female ensign: staring, suggestive comments, calling her to his cabin at late hours to ‘pick up papers.’”
“She couldn’t handle it herself?”
“She could, and did. She was fully capable. She had it under control.”
“So why did you . . . ?”
“All I did was tell him that if he persisted I would throw him overboard. And I meant it.”
“He didn’t bring you up on charges?”
“No, sir.”
“Do you always speak to your superiors that way?”
“No, sir. Never. Except that once.”
“I’m astounded that he didn’t take action. What he did was wrong, but. . . . ”
“He recognized that I had a special responsibility in regard to the ensign.”
“Which was?”
“She’s my sister.”
“Got it.” Rensselaer scanned the folder and turned a few pages, saying only, “Very impressive.”
“Thank you sir.”
“Tell me, if you had been in command of the boat that the Iranians captured in the Gulf a few years ago, how would you have handled it?”
“It wouldn’t have been captured, sir.”
“No? Even though the Iranian boat was faster and more heavily armed?”
“No.”
“What would you have done?”
“I would have tried to outrun them.”
“And if, with their superior guns with greater range, they had fired upon you?”
“I would have come about and closed range at high speed so that we could fire back.”
“Even if you and your crew were grievously injured or killed?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why?”
Movius leaned forward as if facing an enemy, his eyes now protectively in a slight squint, his jaw firmed. “I would not surrender a United States ship, sir, period.”
“You would fight?”
“Of course I would.”
“The chief will show you to your quarters.”
*
Rensselaer scanned the names on the list of candidates and glanced at their folders. To his surprise and delight, a dozen had once served on PCs. They had volunteered from the fleet and shore duty, he would find out, because they had a bent for deprivation and action. He knew also that the prospect of wide responsibility must have drawn them as well. On a PC, everyone had multiple jobs and was continuously learning and cross-training. This led to a feeling of autonomy and satisfaction (absent in the specializations on larger ships), something he planned to intensify to an unprecedented degree.
Among other things, he was going to make some of the crew auxiliaries to the half dozen SEALs Athena would take on from SEAL Team 8. The SEALs wouldn’t like it at first, but he would challenge them to bring the selectees as close to their high standards as possible, and then, seeing it as a challenge, the SEALs probably would get to like it. Had Rensselaer not been a SEAL himself, he might not have known this.
He wanted as big a land force as he could muster, because he projected that it would be sent ashore to destroy shore-based anti-ship and anti-aircraft-missile sites, and bases for Iranian small boat swarms. There would be little downtime on Athena, and not just for the SEALs. Thanks to two treadmills, everyone on board would run six miles every day other than in combat. Thanks to swim calls when possible, everyone would swim a mile as often as could be arranged. And thanks to the SEALs, the crew, even the chiefs, who were older, would be pushed to their calisthenics and close-quarter-combat limits. Free time, he thought as he scanned the list, would be appreciated mainly as a chance to sleep.
Who was on the list? As on every American warship and in every combat unit, the names meant a great deal and they meant nothing, for although these names had originated all over the world they were now American, as unified as if in France they had all been Pierre or, in Norway, Sven. The list comprised those not already aboard, not including the SEALs, who would come as a unit: Armentrout, Di Loreto, Martin, Speight, Velez, Pisecki, Williams, Harding, Holt, Rodriguez, Washington, Via, Rosen, Lanham, Movius, Pinafore, Josephson, and Rensselaer.
The first one he called was Di Loreto, not only because Di Loreto’s hometown was Ossining, New York, on the widest bay of the Hudson, the river that was roughly the north–south spine of Rensselaer’s own world, but because of Di Loreto’s previous occupation in the Navy.
“What did you do in the eight years between Ossining High School and your enlistment?” Rensselaer asked, looking up from Di Loreto’s record.
“I worked in my family’s gas station, sir.”
“I know that. It’s here. But what did you do? Did you just pump gas and clean windshields?”
“Oh no, sir. People pump their own gas these days, except in New Jersey, Connecticut, and, I think, Oregon, although maybe not even there anymore. I’ve been in California for a while. I don’t really know.”
“And why not in New Jersey, or wherever?”
“Unions, I guess. They say because it’s dangerous. Idiots.”
“So what did you do?”
“I was a mechanic, sir. I started when I was, like, five. We fixed every kind of car. You know, one of those kind of shops, because the dealers are a rip-off.”
“Every kind?”
“Every kind. Even when you could only get the manuals in German. We did engine rebuilds, trannies, electronics.”
“So you had to teach yourself how many different makes and models?”
“A hundred?”
“And you could do it?”
“Yes sir.”
“After you enlisted, you ended up with the naval Marine Mammal Program. How is that?”
“First as a mechanic, sir. Nobody makes the kind of equipment we use—used. Even if an order went through, the Pentagon might take two years to make it and it would cost a hundred thousand dollars. I could usually do it in two weeks for a coupla thousand.”
“So you were essentially a fabricator.”
“Yeah, until I got Lucy, my dolphin. She’s in the Pacific now.” Here Di Loreto showed emotion. “They’re so smart, sir. They have feelings, and loyalty. After her time was up and we took her into the open sea a thousand miles southwest, she came back to Point Loma. She’d swim back and forth, squeaking a distress sound. She was angry and sad. You can tell that. I had to stay concealed, because she wouldn’t have understood if she’d seen that I was still there. I’m telling you, I cried. They’re a lot like us, you know.”
“You trained her?”
“Yes sir.”
“To do what?”
“I was in MK6, sentries. She would attach a magnetic device onto a hostile swimmer’s air tanks. A buoy would pop up on the line to the surface. We made it so the magnet was so powerful that even if the swimmer took off his tank he wouldn’t be strong enough to pry it off, even with a tool. Without his tank he’d have to surface. With it, we would know where he was even if submerged. The sea lions were even more amazing. I made stuff for them, but I didn’t train them. They could sneak up on the swimmers and handcuff a buoy to their leg or arm. I helped build that, and maintain the stock.”
“That’s extraordinary.”
“It is, sir. Underwater autonomous vehicles are never going to be half as good. It’s a beautiful thing, to watch a dolphin help you—with all her heart.”
“You can fix things.”
“I can, sir.”
“And you’re a boatswain’s mate as well, used to small boats.”
“Yes, sir. That’s all we had. Every day.”
“You’re hired.”
*
Then a slight young man came in, as happy as a golden retriever and as innocent. His name was Pinafore.
“Sit down, Her Majesty’s Ship.”
“Sir?”
“Gilbert and Sullivan.”
Pinafore looked behind him, as if to see them standing there. “I don’t understand, sir.”
“You’ve never heard of Gilbert and Sullivan?”
“No, sir. Who are they?”
“An English operetta composer and lyricist.”
“Oh.”
“‘I am the very model of a modern major general,’” Rensselaer said, hoping to jar Pinafore’s memory.
But Pinafore stared at Rensselaer uncomprehendingly. It was clear that he thought Rensselaer might be insane.
“Okay, Pinafore. What do you like about the Navy?”
“I love being at sea, sir, and being responsible for my job.”
“Gunner’s mate.”
“Yes, sir. What I do makes me happy when I do it well, and I always try to do that.”
“Fair enough,” Rensselaer told him. “I couldn’t ask for more.”
Next up was a sailor named Via. To Rensselaer, he didn’t look quite right. Something about him was feral, and he made no connection, not even looking Rensselaer in the eye.
“You were last on the Vinson.”
“Yes sir.”
“You volunteered for this.”
“I did, sir.”
“What did you do on the Vinson?”
“Airedale, sir.”
“That’s not what it says here.”
“I was about to strike.”
“Okay, but you didn’t.”
“No sir. If I’d stayed, I would have.”
“So why here?”
“I want to kill Iranians, sir.” He thought this would be appreciated.
“Do you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why?”
“We’re at war with them, sir, and, you know what they did.”
“I know very well what they did, but I’m afraid I can’t use you.”
“Sir?”
“Pack up. Find something else.”
“Why?”
“Seaman Via, we may be called upon to kill the enemy, and that we will do, but I don’t want anyone on my crew who wants to do so. I’ve been around such people and they’ve never failed to fuck up. If you want to kill, it means you’re flat, something’s missing. I want people with depth. If you want to kill, you’re likely to make the wrong judgment. Think about that.”
“What I think, sir, is that in war you need people like me.”
“No. Bloodlust doesn’t win battles.”
“Then what does?”
“Intelligence, ingenuity, courage, daring. Bloodlust is for criminals, not for soldiers, sailors, or Marines. Red dyes are the first to fade. Dismissed.”
“Dismissed?” Via shot back, impudently.
“That’s right,” Rensselaer answered. “Hit the road.”
If Via could have killed Rensselaer, he would have killed him then and there, and he showed it. But he couldn’t—not just because of the law, but because Rensselaer was not so easy to kill.
*
Last up were the SEALs, six at once, high-testosterone. SEALs seemed permanently to have the air either of men who were still in battle or have just come out of it. They combined confidence bearing upon arrogance with wariness bearing upon paranoia. Extreme fitness, relentless training, and the knowledge that one can far transcend assumed limits are perhaps what make for their peculiarity.
Their dense musculature renders them one and a half times as heavy as they appear to be, they’re only sort of in the Navy, they expect deference, they get it, they keep to themselves, and, as they are used to autonomy, they want their received orders to focus on the objective rather than the means.
Despite what they had heard, they were immediately comfortable with Rensselaer, because he had been and in some ways would always be one of them. Thus they had nothing to hold over him so as to establish their independence. At Little Creek they had been informed that in the Gulf War he had knocked out four missile-launching sites, that he had evaded capture for a week as an entire Iraqi company pursued him, that he had finally run out of ammunition and been taken, imprisoned, and tortured. And that then he escaped. Now he was a captain, although his assignment to such a small ship was hard to assimilate even in view of the scuttlebutt that in the Oval Office he had told the president where to get off. Which, of course, he hadn’t.
Like Movius, the XO, Holworthy was a lieutenant commander. He led his five men into Rensselaer’s temporary office and exchanged formalities. As there was only one visitor’s chair and none of the SEALs would take it, only Rensselaer seated himself, relaxedly and unselfconsciously.
“You’re the only organic unit I have,” Rensselaer said, “and I’m grateful that you came that way. It’ll do a lot in terms of stabilizing and breaking-in a new ship. I know you know your jobs, and I’ll interfere as little as possible. We haven’t gotten our orders yet, but you can probably guess their nature. In regard to that, I’m going to ask you to do something which hasn’t normally been done, at least not in modern times.”
They perked up, raising their already straight backs. “Sir?” Holworthy asked.
“In the time it takes to get wherever we’re going, I want you to train as best you can a dozen men—whom I will pick but you can reject. Bring them up physically, in tactics, weapon handling, and CQC, so they can function ashore to supplement you.”
Holworthy protested. “Sir, you know it takes years.”
“Of course I know. I spent those years. But I also know two things. The most important lesson you learn in those years is that you can do what no one—including yourself—expects you can do. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that I’ve just challenged you. Are you going to take the challenge or not?”
“Take it,” Holworthy said. He couldn’t have said anything else, as Rensselaer had known.
“Very well,” he answered, addressing all the SEALs. “Make ready.”
As they left, Rensselaer heard one say, “At least on a PC there’s no sled.” He was referring to the SDVs (SEAL delivery vehicles), upon which SEALs in scuba gear would ride submerged through dark, freezingly cold water sometimes for ten hours at a time. It was not a popular activity, but they could do it, and sometimes they did.
*
When the weapons, yet more ammunition, stores, and personal effects had been assimilated, berths had been assigned and claimed, watches established, checklists completed, systems vetted, decks scrubbed, stations established, the P.O.D. (plan of the day) posted, and after the crew had been given the last chance to contact families before embarkation, the ship was ready to come alive and sail to war.
Rensselaer had neither to strain nor to pretend sympathy with those, of whom there were many, with aching hearts. When leaving women and children behind, going to war seems only hollow, foolish, and dangerous. One’s doubt and betrayal are physically felt in the perfect cross of sadness and fear. Having just spoken to Katy, the last thing he wanted was to lead his men into battle, or even to leave shore. He had told her that he loved her, and she had done the same. This was enough. Perhaps that which these men felt so strongly as to have to will themselves through their normal routines was a balance for the ennui and nihilism of those for whom life is meaningless. Rensselaer thought that if all such people had to bid goodbye to ones they loved—that is if they were in fact brave and fortunate enough to love—as they went off to war, ennui would disappear and irony, as it was stripped of its pretense of wisdom, would lose its touch. All he could think of was Katy.
And yet, when he began to speak, it was as if another person had arisen within him. He was like a ship pulling away from a city, leaving behind what had seemed so all-encompassing as to dwarf the vessel, which, magically, as it gained distance began to seem larger than the receding city itself, and then to become the whole world.
A June storm that, like Athena herself, had come up from the Gulf, had hit Norfolk. So a tent appeared at the wharf, close to the ship. Large enough to hold the entire crew and the naval officials seeing them off, it was white, with transparent plastic panels as skirts, and butter-colored, varnished poles. Wind-lashed rain blew open the flaps and skirts uncontrollably and, crossing from one side of the tent to the other, wet the sailors as if they had been on an open deck in squall.
After the base chaplains said their blessings and the commanders said their piece, it was the captain’s turn to speak. He dared not do so with a heavy heart. The first days at sea would shift the polarities of his men, and his job was to begin this even before they boarded. He started in medias res, his approach surprising to his listeners.
“I have always believed,” he said, as rain drilled upon the tent and the wind tried to lift it, “that women bear the greatest burden of war. It is they who must wait, they who are deprived of action, they who must have the patience of not knowing, they who hold the family together alone, they who may lose and yet must continue, they who, like Athena, have a tranquil wisdom that puts ours to shame. Throughout history, we have made the world, but we made it for them. For, unlike us, they have the gift of receiving it. The woman I love puts it this way: she says I’m like the cat that drops a bird at the feet of its owner. And that’s her.”
They laughed.
“It’s true. When I was young, when I played sports or sailed on the Hudson, I always imagined that somewhere in the air a particular girl was watching. I wanted to meet her expectations, to be worthy of her. Countless hours were spent in striving for her approval and shaping my life, for her.
“This is what you know—even should you not know that you know it—and what you feel when you part from them and you question what seems so much like a betrayal. Is it really for them, for women, and children, that I fight? On balance, will they be better off? Or have I been swept up by the part of me that would go to sea and debark on an enemy’s shore to seek and find combat? Is it that same self that also builds, farms, invents, and loves?
“You may not say it out loud or think it, but your soul is divided as it seeks both the comfort of the hearth, the primacy of love; and the compulsion to see beyond the horizon, the impulse to draw the sword. In quiet times you may feel longing and regret, but I hope to make your days so full and your sleep so deep that you’ll have little or no time to ache for home. If you stow your love in the deepest, safest place you can find, you’ll keep it alive, you’ll elevate the chances that you’ll live, and a long deployment will pass swiftly.
“I’ll expect of you perhaps more than any commanding officer you’ve ever had. And everything that you deliver—and deliver it you will—will be not only for your country and our mission, but for yourselves: to keep you lean, honorable, alert, and alive. Who wouldn’t want that?
“You’ll leave part of yourselves behind, and as the coast recedes and the ship powers ahead without cease in every kind of sea, you’ll exit the present and enter that timeless realm which binds together all men at war from every age. Though it’s neither glorious nor always terrible, in it you’ll be awake to life. What you feel, what you apprehend, the visions that will appear, the fusing of past and present, the transformation of your soul into that of the universal soldier—whom you will come to know, for you are he, and he is you—will mystify and remain for the rest of your life. You won’t be able to explain what happened to you, and you won’t dare say what you suspect. But here, in this lashing rain, with the sea we are about to cross lapping at the wharf as if to call us away, I’ll say it for you. You will have been to another world, a world in which the presence and prospect of death gives to life an intensity and illumination you’ll never again see. Be grateful for what is to come, and fight as you have never fought before—to live, and to prevail.”
The crew received this in silence. Not a sound for about a minute. Then the soaking-wet band began the Navy Hymn, and as it played Rensselaer said, without bravado, and almost sadly—but strongly—“Crew of the Athena, bring the ship alive.”
They rose, and in tight, successive ranks, ran to the ship, up the brow, and to their stations. Athena came alive. That was how it was done, always with speed. Perhaps it was to give the men the momentum that enabled them to leave behind everything they would fight for, and everything they loved.