Nouméa Field Hospital
The next day his two doctors came by again on their morning rounds. They told him that the large bandage on his head would be coming off, to be replaced with something that looked less like a half turban. They confirmed that he could get around as long as he was having no serious pain from the surgery. As they were leaving, the older doctor told Sluff that yet another captain over at SOPAC headquarters had called, inquiring if he could have visitors.
“Remember his name?” Sluff asked. “Hollis, maybe?”
“No. Brown, I think. Browning. Captain Browning. Said he was the chief of staff.”
“Can’t wait,” Sluff said. The doc caught the sarcasm.
“You want, I can turn that off with a phone call,” he said.
Sluff waved him off. “No, I’ve been expecting this. Time to get it over with.”
The bandage people showed up at 0900 to take Sluff to a room adjacent to the operating suite, where they undid the mess on his head, cleaned things up with something that felt like gasoline, and then remounted a new bandage that had to be three pounds lighter. When he looked in a mirror, he could see the glint of the steel plate on the side of his head through some of the gauze. It was much bigger than he’d anticipated—“plate” was an appropriate word. He noticed that the fuzz of hair growing back was definitely white now. If that kept up he was going to look as old as he felt.
“Can I touch it?” he asked. “The plate?”
“Yes, sir,” the corpsman replied. “It’s harder than your own skull. It’s the sutures you gotta be careful with.”
“People always said I had a hard head,” Sluff said. “Knucklehead, that was the word.”
The corpsmen grinned, and then one asked if he was really an Indian. Sluff said he was.
“Knew it,” the corpsman said. “There were a buncha guys off the destroyers that got sunk when the battleships went at it. They were talking about one skipper who dodged all those torpedoes and came back for ’em once the heavies bailed. Said he was an Indian, with the biggest—uh.”
Sluff laughed out loud. “The biggest damn nose they’d ever seen since Mount Rushmore, right?”
“Uh, yes, sir, sorry, sir, I didn’t—”
“It’s okay, corpsman,” Sluff said, with a grin. “And thanks for lightening up the bandage.”
He and his cane thumped back to his room, where he showered, now that the turban was gone, and then tried to decide what to wear for the meeting with Browning. Uniform? Or hospital gear? Then he realized his uniforms were at the bottom of Ironbottom Sound. The one he’d been wearing when Barrett capsized was surely long gone into the trash. He got out some clean cotton pajamas, a cotton robe, and then got into his hospital bed.
He touched that steel plate again. It didn’t hurt, of course, but the perimeter where they’d sewn it into his skull was really sore. He tried to examine the area of his brain underneath the plate, but felt nothing. He closed his eyes. That felt really good.
Sometime later, he woke up to a knock on his door, and then Tina came in. Her expression said: Look out for this one. Behind her, standing in the doorway like a statue, was his nemesis, the eternally choleric Captain Browning.
“Captain, you have a visitor,” Tina announced, acting as if she didn’t know him. “Is that going to be all right?”
Browning’s severe expression must have worried her, he thought. “Of course,” he said. “Why would it not be?”
Tina nodded and then backed out as Browning came in, took off his cap, and then sat down stiffly in the room’s only chair. Sluff waited for him to speak.
“Your doctors tell me that you’re making good progress,” Browning said, his tone of voice neutral. “You are fortunate to have survived, from the looks of that.”
“That was just the beginning,” Sluff said. “Have you seen Captain Hollis’s report yet?”
“Rear Admiral (select) Hollis gave me a verbal debrief, with a written report to follow,” Browning replied, correcting him. “I have some staff people trying to conform what you told him to what else we know about the engagement, which, admittedly, isn’t much. He said you think the Japs set an ambush of their own this time.”
“Entirely possible,” Sluff said. “Heavy cruisers rounding that point at thirty-six knots were certainly not in my plan.”
“Interesting choice of words, Captain,” Browning said. “My plan.”
Sluff thought he heard someone in the adjoining bathroom, making cleaning-up noises. “I went through that with Hollis,” Sluff said. “The admiral and I had talked it over and he told me to run the tactic again. The first half seemed to work—we fired torpedoes on a radar solution and things went boom in the night at the appropriate time.”
“Then the cruisers showed up.”
“Yes, they did.”
“Your original targets were a light cruiser and some destroyers, correct?”
“We never saw them, but that’s what we guessed from the radar returns.”
“But instead of executing what one of your people called your Comanche circle, you turned away from them and headed west. Put another way, you broke off the action and tried to escape.”
“Not exactly,” Sluff said, realizing now where Browning was going with this. “As I explained to Captain Hollis, we were between a rock and a hard place once the additional cruisers arrived and their scout plane started dropping flares. We couldn’t go north or south without becoming a Long Lance sandwich, so I elected to run the squadron right at the more dangerous enemy, the heavy cruisers. They could of course fire torpedoes, but their destroyers couldn’t without hitting their own ships.”
“And yet, in the end, they sank four of the tin cans in this fight and Providence.”
“Providence gave herself away before she was supposed to. She wasn’t supposed to start shooting when she did, but because she did, the Jap heavies saw her.”
“We only have your word for that, seeing that Admiral Tyree did not survive the engagement.”
“What’s your point, Captain?” Sluff asked with a sigh.
“My point is that there are people at headquarters who are saying you ran, just like you ran when the shooting started the night of the battleship action.”
“Then how did that Jap admiral get killed?”
Browning’s face reddened. “How do you know about that?”
“Captain Hollis told me.”
“Rear Admiral (select) Hollis was speaking out of school, then,” Browning said. “That is very sensitive intelligence information.”
“We weren’t running from the enemy, Captain Browning. We were running at him. And not just my flagship, but all of my destroyers. If we were running away, we’d have turned southwest and gone dark. As it was, we drove right at them, shooting the whole time. We were just no match for twenty-odd eight-inch guns. Our five-inch couldn’t penetrate their armor, but it could wreck their topside superstructure. Our torpedoes bounced off; theirs didn’t. By the way, I would like to meet some of these ‘people at headquarters.’ People who weren’t there.”
“That is out of the question. You are the senior surviving officer. Your actions are the focus of our inquiries.”
“Inquiries, Captain? Getting a court of inquiry together?”
“What do you think?” Browning snapped. “A light cruiser, four destroyers sunk in return for one Jap cruiser damaged and a destroyer sunk, a second one damaged? While you conveniently went over the side in the middle of it?”
Sluff could barely contain his anger now. “Went over the side? Like I slid out a diving board and executed a perfect swan dive? You are a piece of work, are you not, Browning. You and your ‘people’ over at headquarters. Well, bring on your court. I can’t wait.”
“You will wait, and right here, too. Hollis hasn’t turned in his report yet and Admiral Halsey’s not back from Pearl. You need to understand something, Captain: You’re not in charge of anything right now, if you ever were.”
“Oh, go away,” Sluff said. “I’m not afraid of you. I’ve seen and done things which would make a guy like you piss his pants. How much combat have you seen from the O-club here in Nouméa? I see now why Hollis made flag and you didn’t.”
Browning’s face settled into a cold mask. He stood up and put on his brass hat. “You have no idea of who you’re fooling with,” he hissed. “We will destroy you.”
Sluff smiled. “You can destroy my career, maybe,” he said. “But not me. By the way, here’s something to think about: When Barrett got blown in half, Providence was still shooting. That means Admiral Tyree was still the boss. Seems to me you’re going after the wrong guy. Now get the hell out of my room.”
Browning stared at him for a few seconds and then left, slamming the door after him. Sluff lay back in his bed and let out a long breath. Hollis had been right. Browning was out to get him. Not enough to have Japs trying to kill you; now he had an admiral’s staff after him as well.
His last jab had been an interesting technicality, but with Admiral Tyree asleep in the deep, no one would be wanting to file charges of incompetence against his ghost. In fact, another admiral who’d led his cruiser force to destruction had made the same maneuvering choice Sluff had made, and he’d been awarded the Medal of Honor. The truth was that he’d convinced his boss to run the same tactic he’d used too many times before and it had backfired. Who owns that, he asked himself. Go look in the mirror.
Listen to me, he thought, as he lay back into the pillows. Is everything really all about me? Is my so-called career that important? How about the men who died because of the orders I gave, on the fly, without a whole lot of thinking time. Didn’t they count?
Then something occurred to him: There might be some survivors of that fight right here in the Nouméa hospital complex. Maybe he should emulate Halsey and go see them, tell them he was sorry for what happened. Quit worrying about Browning and his minions plotting to hang some dead albatross around his neck. What did Bob Frey use to say? “Screw ’em if they can’t take a joke”?