Strong to Save
August 25, 1949
In that moment before the explosion aboard the submarine USS Cochino, Thom Dwyer held his Navy-issue coffee mug in one hand and in the other, a photograph he’d received at mail call a few days prior. He sat at his station in the radio room with headphone cans over his ears, listening for Soviet telemetry transmissions, while staring at a picture of Norma and Lawrence beneath the garden arbor he’d built the summer before last. He imagined the boy falling in the grass every few steps and the way Norma clucked around behind him like a worried hen. Dwyer preferred to let him fall as a way to toughen him up. Thinking about it made him wish he’d woken up with them in Groton, Connecticut instead of somewhere off the coast of Murmansk.
The explosion in the aft battery compartment sounded like a dull thud, like nothing more than someone dropping a box of teletype paper on the deck behind Dwyer’s chair. The explosion reverberated the hull enough to spill coffee all over Dwyer’s patrol reports. In that instant, his ears popped like with a stabbing pain in each, as if a jolt of electricity surged through the wires and into the cans, down his ear canals, and fried his brain. The pain—immediate and all consuming—doubled him over. He grunted, fearing his head would explode and he’d be taken from Norma and his son. In the moment it took him to raise his hands to his head, the pain eased by half. He tugged off the cans and checked for blood coming from his inner ears. He exhaled relief at his dry fingers.
The Cochino shook from the explosion. The danger, at that depth for a Balao-class submarine, was exponential, but Dwyer was confident in the boat’s construction. Then again, there was little choice. They were submerged beyond snorkel depth in the Barents Sea with a weather forecast predicting polar storms. The Cochino measured little more than three hundred feet. Rough seas could toss her around like a hot potato.
As the boat stopped shaking, the Cochino lost engine power. Stillness crept over Dwyer. There was no vibration other than his pounding heart. The boat remained level, submerged. The other radiomen braced themselves against their consoles in anticipation of another impact. If they spoke, Dwyer didn’t hear anything.
“What the hell was that?” he yelled. He thought he yelled, didn’t hear his own words, couldn’t hear anything. His ears felt like they had cotton wads jammed in by ice picks.
The four other men in the radio room released their holds on their consoles and sprang into motion. Dwyer didn’t hear the alarm, but he felt the amplified gongs of General Quarters pulse into his ribs.
***
Norma was a fine woman. Honest and virtuous. And if Dwyer squinted, she could pass for Ava Gardner’s sister—even had a similar melody in her voice. Dwyer missed her, but his heart didn’t ache for her. She was a few years older than Dwyer and loved to dance to Tommy Dorsey music. She never kissed the backs of the letters she sent, but would start doing so if he asked, specifically. All her enthusiasm was spent on Lawrence during his every waking moment. Dwyer never protested or complained. The boy was their mutual priority.
If he were back home, he’d have had a belly full of Norma’s sausage gravy and biscuits instead of powdered eggs and overdone toast. If he were back home, he might’ve been at a ballgame. The Yankees were having a swell season. He could make the drive from Groton to the Bronx in less than three hours for weekend games. He planned to take Lawrence with him soon. He was still a little young, but DiMaggio wasn’t going to be around forever and the boy needed to see the Yankee Clipper play. Besides ballgames and training on base, Dwyer spent a lot of time in the garden, pulling carrots out of the ground with his clumsy four-year-old helper.
Norma didn’t understand why he took the time to grow produce when he had so many responsibilities on base. He’d bent down one day, grabbed a fistful of moist topsoil and held it in his palm before her. “Don’t you see?” he asked, smiling at her and cradling the clump of dirt as if it were gold. “This combined with water and sun nourishes the plants that nourish us.”
***
Dwyer, newly assigned to the Cochino, was paired to work with an even newer arrival named Red Austin. As stout and stern a man as Dwyer had ever seen, Red Austin was a real-life spy. They were assembled aboard this sub as a team. Dwyer didn’t understand Russian, but he knew it when he heard it and could make out the Cyrillic alphabet of Morse code. His job was to hit a button to record information electronically into a gray box that looked more suited to holding a woman’s hat than Soviet transmissions. Red would analyze the information in a cubicle they’d set up for him between the control room and the radio shack.
Their antennas were set to pick up high-end frequencies—the kind the Soviets used to launch missiles. It was a dream job, assisting a spook like Red in sniffing out the enemy’s secret plans to launch missiles from their base in Murmansk or from submarines of their own, just off shore. Red was the only guy Dwyer had met who was as excited by his job as Dwyer.
Most of the seventy-eight crew members aboard believed they’d left England to perform exercises with their sister boat, the USS Tusk. Dwyer was one of only three enlisted men who knew the truth about their more important mission. This was one of the first subs to undertake this kind of mission and Dwyer was thrilled about being lucky enough to be part of it.
***
After the explosion, Dwyer’s first priority was not his pain, failed hearing, or the reason for the alarm, but rather his wife and son. Norma didn’t approve of his job that took him away from her, and was adamant that he return home safely. She’d lost her first husband, Dwyer’s brother, Earl, in the war and couldn’t lose him, too. Earl had been killed in action in France and the younger Dwyer had stepped up to marry Norma when he was only seventeen. Her son needed a father. The boy was born a Dwyer and needed to be raised by one. And Thom Dwyer didn’t need to be even half the hero his brother became, he just needed to return home in one piece.
To this end, he’d convinced Norma that the Navy, in peacetime, was safer than the Army during war and had brought her to live with him in Groton, where he’d been stationed for training. She’d never been out of Alabama before. Heck, he hadn’t either until he went to boot camp in Chicago.
It wasn’t his being in the military that made Norma’s skin break out in hives—that happened when he shipped out.
***
The air in the Cochino’s main passageway hung thick and acrid as men scrambled. Without power, they had to rely on dim emergency lighting fed from a bank of batteries. Some late-shift workers jumped out of their bunks without wasting the time to put on their pants. The entire crew seemed to fill the one main passageway, tending to firefighting gear and flooding equipment. Feet moved and mouths wagged, but all was muted to Dwyer. It was like watching a silent movie. Dwyer tried to remove the cans from his ears, and gasped with the realization he already had.
Everything appeared to happen in slow motion. The smell in the air wasn’t diesel fuel burning, but rather something more biting and chemical. Something must’ve happened to one of the large battery compartments, which meant that smell in the passageways was toxic. Without fresh air, they would all be killed.
Minutes after the explosion, the planesmen blew ballast and the boat pitched beneath Dwyer’s boots. He grabbed onto a DC light stanchion to keep himself in place as the boat rose from cruising depth toward the surface. His ears usually popped with this change of depth, but nothing happened now.
Once the boat surfaced, she leveled off. A number of the crew pushed and shoved past him. Dwyer couldn’t hear what they said, but he followed the others as fast as he could down the narrow passageway like cattle fleeing slaughter. They bunched up at the ladder behind the sail. They were going topside—up on deck. Dwyer had never been out on deck while at sea. Under different circumstances he might’ve enjoyed the prospect, but now his only interest was breathing clean air. As the main hatch opened, the crew was splashed by a wave, two or three stories tall, that crashed across the deck and smacked the sailors, who had their sea legs tested in the most aggressive way possible. They filed onto the deck, trusting the black, non-skid surface to hold their steps, and faced the elements in the frigid waters just a mere hundred miles from two Soviet fleet bases. They had no choice. With the toxic gasses below, the sub could easily become an iron casket for all of them. Trapped on deck they were nothing more than ants on a log in the rapids.
The sky hung clouded, the sun unable to break through. The hazy light gave Dwyer the opportunity to see how isolated they were. Without the ability to hear, Dwyer felt even more alone. A torpedoman grabbed Dwyer’s shoulder to turn him around. The guy pointed and his mouth moved quickly, but Dwyer couldn’t read his lips. Dwyer pointed to his ears and shook his head. Tried to tell the guy that he’d lost his hearing, but the torpedoman stopped him mid-sentence, nodded and disappeared into the crowd.
Other sailors appeared to holler. Their faces tensed and their mouths moved, though Dwyer didn’t get a single word. There was nothing getting in his ears except cold air and sea water. But he watched them and did what they did, tying a six-foot length of line around his waist and lashing himself to the cable lifeline on deck with a four-inch lanyard hook.
The wind whipped from every direction. Cold bit through Dwyer’s neck and the backs of his arms. He flipped up his shirt collar and rolled down his sleeves, but that did nothing to warm him. He wished they’d had time to get their foul weather gear, or even their blue jackets. Dwyer considered himself better off than those guys who’d been rousted from their racks and came straight out in T-shirts and skivvies, some barefoot, a few with blankets wrapped around them.
Dwyer kept an eye on the hatch to see if anyone emerged with gathered up coats to distribute to everyone topside, but no one did. That was an eventuality that no one addressed in drills.
The wind and sea spray cut across the deck. It swirled and clawed at them and there was no way to buffer themselves from the polar storm. Dwyer’s lungs burned from the cold, but it was a healthier burn than the one caused by the toxic fumes below deck. He shivered. His jaw vibrated, his teeth chattered, though he couldn’t hear them.
***
Before his brother got killed, Dwyer had been a churchgoer. The two occasions he’d been since the funeral he was hungover both times. Worse than the headaches was the bitterness in his throat. Bitterness not just that his brother had been taken from him, but that a little boy’s father had been taken from him.
A buddy back home had tried to convince Dwyer that he could do other things than take responsibility that way. Dwyer saw matters differently because of something he learned from his history teacher, sophomore year. She had been a sturdy woman in her forties who wore a hat and walked to school every day. Each morning upon arriving in her classroom, she removed her hat and placed it on her chair. She then spent the entire day on her feet. One day, while studying the British monarchy, she expanded on a trait of young King Henry VIII—used the opportunity to teach her class about the rich tradition of marrying your brother’s widow. She taught them about its prevalence in the 1860s following the Civil War. That the Jews called their version Levirate marriage and had elaborate ceremonies to go through. Other foreign cultures, from the Indians to the Arabs, had their own versions, too. Then the teacher lowered her voice and looked toward the window for a moment. She held the class’s attention as she explained the Battle of Belleau Wood and how she lost her first husband that June day in 1918. She had the class on the edge of their seats as she revealed that as awful as that was for her, it was also sort of a gift. The man she’d been married to for the past twenty-five years was once her brother-in-law. She said she’d been happy and proud ever since. A couple girls in the class had cried.
For the first time ever, Dwyer had made the connection between the history book and real life.
After they buried Earl, Dwyer figured it was his turn to be part of living history. He remembered how things didn’t work out too well for old Henry Tudor, but that didn’t give Dwyer pause. He moved without hesitation, same as when he enlisted in the Navy. As if he couldn’t help himself.
Now, his responsibility was to stay alive so he could make it back home and take care of them. To prevent that little boy from losing another father and becoming the last in a long line of Dwyers at such a young age.
***
Out on the Cochino’s deck, the cold and wet rendered Dwyer’s hands numb but he managed to hold onto the lifeline cable while the deck gyrated beneath his boots. Those boots had kept his feet from numbing, and he felt the diesel engines restart through the vibrations beneath them. The familiar rumble replaced the stillness, the emptiness of being dead in the water. Engine power meant hope.
More crewmembers crowded up on deck. A number of officers huddled together on the bridge inside the sail. What little footing the crew had on deck ran slick from saltwater spray that rained down and splashed around the hull.
After a few minutes, one of the cooks, a guy named Morgan, emerged from the hatch. In the midst of the wind and spray and the pitching and rolling, he lost his footing and tap danced backward along the deck. His arms swung in circles as he tried to regain his balance. Dwyer saw him going and groaned his panic in an attempt to alert the others nearest him. One of the guys reached for Morgan, got hold of his arm, but the sea spray made it slick and Morgan reared back like a foal trying to stand on a sheet of ice until he fell overboard. With the wind and the violent waves, Dwyer doubted anyone heard Morgan’s splash. They saw him fall and perhaps they heard his cries for help. A number of guys unlashed themselves from the rail and someone, he couldn’t tell who, jumped into the icy water after Morgan. Dwyer didn’t move. He couldn’t move. His only thought was the preservation of his own life. Not for his sake, but for Norma and the boy.
The pressure in his head peaked then. No sound got in, and none of the pressure was able to get out either. Someone tossed a life preserver into the water. Somebody else threw two life jackets in an attempt to help Morgan and the guy who went into the icy drink after him.
As it had been a while since Dwyer had been to church, his mind was blank of any prayers to pray. To occupy the silence in his head, he recited the Navy hymn:
Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the Sea!
Before he got to the second verse, they heaved and tugged Morgan out of the drink and back onto the deck. The poor bastard curled himself into a ball and shivered. They snatched the other guy onto the deck, too. He did the same thing. Dwyer was no longer dry by this point, but he had not been submerged. As cold as he was, he couldn’t imagine being any colder and surviving.
Four guys carted their soaked and frozen shipmates inside—better odds to risk the toxic and combustible gasses filling the passageways than hypothermia.
Oh Christ! Whose voice the waters heard
And hushed the raging at thy word,
Who walked’st on the foaming deep,
And calm amidst its rage didst sleep;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea!
After what felt like hours, standing on the Cochino’s deck, lashed to the life rail and reciting the hymn a thousand times, one of the other guys pointed and sprung from his knees. Dwyer didn’t know what the fuss was about, but he welcomed the distraction from the pain in his head, his shivering discomfort, and the salt chafe on his face.
The guy pointing must’ve hollered something, and all the others pointed as well and waved their arms over their heads.
Dwyer had no way of knowing what was said, but that first sight of the dark silhouette of a submarine’s sail, and then its hull as it broke the surface only a few hundred yards off their port bow, lifted every cell in his body. Everyone must have felt the way he did because they all jumped and waved, grateful for their sister boat, the USS Tusk, arriving to lend assistance. Dwyer suddenly felt less alone. There was strength in numbers.
Shortly after, he noticed diesel fuel pumping out of the Cochino. At first he thought it was a leak, but then he realized the captain was working to create an oil slick in an attempt to calm the roaring waves.
Someone on the Tusk shot a line over their heads. The first attempt landed perfectly and a number of the Cochino’s crew secured the line and heaved a thicker line back across with coordinated precision despite the wind and the waves that challenged their balance. Dwyer breathed easier and felt slightly less cold.
The Tusk then sent an unmanned raft filled with two first-aid footlockers.
During this time, Dwyer felt more dull thuds beneath the soles of his boots, the vibrations working up his legs and into his throat. Another explosion, he feared.
The life raft’s return trip looked set to carry two brave souls named Shelton and Philo to the Tusk. Dwyer didn’t know why or what the plan might be, but he watched as they climbed in and the raft was lowered. He wanted to know the purpose of their efforts, but most of all, he hoped that they would make it across.
The oil did little other than to stain the water. Within seconds, the waves rose up and the raft overturned. Shelton and Philo clutched onto straps that ran across the raft’s bottom. Wind and waves pounded Philo into the Tusk’s hull. Shelton was grabbed in the crest of a wave and tossed, as if by magic, up on deck. He landed awkwardly on his shoulder and was drenched from the splash that followed, but he was alive. Philo didn’t have that kind of luck.
Guys on the Tusk pulled the line leading the raft toward them. Her crew wore foul-weather gear. Dwyer envied the warmth of such outer garments and those who wore them—all but the guys who’d jumped in to help retrieve Philo.
Dwyer watched the rescue and forgot about the cold as he focused on the retrieval from the sea. The ordeal simultaneously gave him hope and made him realize how doomed they all might be. The waves slapped the hull violently and broke topside, beating them savagely. The two subs could collide and crack open like eggs and sink to the bottom at any second.
As the guys on the Tusk worked to rescue Philo, a wave mammoth enough to fill Dwyer’s peripheral vision reared up and made the Tusk look like a toy. The wave crashed down, bent life rail stanchions, swept some crewmembers off the Tusk’s deck and scattered the others like coffee grounds in a kitchen sink.
Dwyer was doomed to watch this too—the events were still a silent movie. More men dove into the water to save those who could be saved. A couple of guys floated face-down in the swells, their lifeless corpses bobbing on the surface, necks broken by the impact of vicious waves. Cochino sailors hustled and rigged lines to hang overboard in case anyone in the water could grab them. Dwyer hugged his arms harder to himself.
A number of sailors from the Tusk dove in to rescue their shipmates. The rest watched the action so intently that somehow one of the crewmembers flung overboard the Tusk wound up floating past unnoticed around the starboard side. The body was inverted somehow, his boots bobbing at the surface. Dwyer could only imagine that he’d been swept under by the current and traversed the Cochino’s hull and that he couldn’t be alive after having been submerged so long. But Dwyer couldn’t be sure.
Without hearing and no audible words of his own, Dwyer was left to smack the backs of the sailors nearest to him and point at his discovery. None of the others seemed interested in diverting their attention from the rescue taking place between the surfaced subs.
Dwyer didn’t know these guys. These guys weren’t family. And he certainly never had any interaction with anyone on the Tusk, least of all this guy floating along the starboard side. Dwyer’s mind flashed to his wife and the boy. They waved at him, smiles on their faces. Then he saw his brother, Earl, on a beach. He had no smile, but rather a death mask. And he was alone. Dwyer filled his head again with the Navy hymn to push out those images. Nothing could distract him from the sailor in the water that no one else offered to help. Dwyer, fingers numb and stiff with cold, worked the clasp on the lanyard hook and unclipped himself from the life rail. His heartbeat felt like a monkey wrench banging a cast iron tub. He turned and dove into the icy Barents Sea after the guy.
The frigid water seemed to burn the flesh between his legs. His genitalia retreated into his pelvis. He gasped in the pockets of air between the whitecaps pounding all around him and swam on.
The sailor he’d gone in to save had drifted farther away than Dwyer realized. He’d always been a good swimmer, but being cold and unprepared to swim such a distance, he cramped under the right half of his ribcage. It made moving difficult. He couldn’t swing his strong arm enough to gain any purchase in the water. His arms and legs felt the way they did when he had influenza back in high school—they ached and felt weak. All movement hurt. Every time he reached for the guy, a swell washed him farther out of Dwyer’s reach.
Dwyer kicked his legs and pawed the water. He rallied his energy and finally got to him. The best he could tell, one of the waves righted him, but he was unconscious. Dwyer wrapped his legs around the guy’s torso, but they were heavy with his boots. His first attempt failed. A wave wiped out his second attempt, crashing on top of their heads causing him to lose his grip. He swam in a burst of urgency and reached the guy again, swung his legs in place and backstroked toward the Cochino, slapping the water with his free hand.
He’d been in the water for minutes that seemed like hours. His fingers were too numb to feel a pulse on the guy he hugged to his chest. He swam as close to the Cochino as he could and tried to make noise. His breath came out shallow. He recited the Navy hymn while he banged on the hull with wet thuds of his numb hands. Each smack of his fist reverberated into his shoulder and he didn’t know if it made enough noise.
Water this cold would make a man pass out before it struck him dead. He’d learned that in survival at sea training. That was about all he remembered. Dwyer’s limbs felt dead and he thought he’d sink. He thought of home, then. He wanted to be there to dance in the kitchen while Tommy Dorsey played on the Victrola in the living room. He worried that Lawrence might never get to see DiMaggio play at The Stadium. And who would teach him to fish? To plant carrots? How to catch and throw a ball? Norma would be well within her rights to court a third potential husband, but he wouldn’t be a Dwyer.
He exhaled deeply then, and it seemed tension and fear left his body. He was still cold beyond anything he’d ever experienced, and more of his body was going numb every minute. He no longer felt his feet and his hands were useless. As bad off as he may have been, this Tusk sailor he kept hold of needed medical attention even worse. Dwyer could’ve let him go and tried to swim around to the port side where everyone aboard both subs could see him. The guy was too heavy to bring along. But Dwyer held on because he could only hope that someone had been there on that beach in France to do the same for his brother.
If this killed him, Dwyer wouldn’t be a hero like Earl. Not only did he fail to save this guy, but he’d killed himself in the process, and this wasn’t even in wartime. It wouldn’t be combat that killed Dwyer, but rather weather. He found no honor in that. He had long imagined that he’d die of old age with Norma and Lawrence by his side, but now it would be with this likely-dead sailor he didn’t even know in his arms instead. He’d be sinking to the bottom of the sea with this stranger and, for a moment, he felt a sense of calm about that. The sober ones in church would pray for his soul, he was sure. He thought of his old high school history teacher and the similar situations they shared with their spouses. She’d been proud. He assumed Lawrence might grow to be proud, too, and that was enough for him, in that moment.
The cold worked into his brain and made thinking hard. Slow. He didn’t know what to do anymore but keep kicking and keep his arm around the guy. His limbs were nearly dead. He had to check to make sure the guy was still there. Hang in there, Earl, he said. He couldn’t hear his own words, but he knew they were there. He lifted his voice again, with all the air he had in him. He couldn’t tell what it sounded like, but he replicated the sound over and over, as long and as hard each time as his tired lungs allowed. He tried to whistle, but his cracked lips were covered in hoar frost.
***
He pushed off with his feet to get some distance between him and the boat so he’d be easier to spot if someone came looking.
He must’ve made some sort of noise loud enough to draw attention aboard the Cochino because one of his shipmates tossed a life ring toward him. The throw was short and the flotation device landed a few yards in front of him. Instead of waiting for a retry, he swam as hard as he could manage with numb feet and the other sailor in tow.
He waved his free arm and smacked the water around him until he caught up with the life ring and looped his arm through. He cherished its buoyancy and trusted it to keep their heads above water. The progress they made was slow, but he felt the line tugging, taut, dragging them through the water, closer and closer to the Cochino.
Once alongside the hull, someone tossed a line that he secured around the guy’s torso and guided him best he could as they pulled him up. They pulled Dwyer up next with the life ring around his aching ribs. He hit the deck in the fetal position feeling grateful to be out of the water, but so locked in a blinding, frozen kind of pain that he couldn’t move.
Someone fireman-carried him to the bridge. His aching abdomen bounced into a shoulder with every ladder step, but he was out of the elements. He tried to ask about his brother, but if anyone answered, their replies went unheard.
Doc Eason had them lay Dwyer on a narrow shelf along the bridge’s bulkhead. The captain took off his coat and draped it over Dwyer. He didn’t feel worthy of this great man’s coat, but he didn’t argue. All sensation was frozen out of him. Even his eyes lost ability to focus and he still couldn’t hear. He feared he was dead and that they’d pull the coat over his face. His thoughts went to Norma and Lawrence. He couldn’t hear what the captain or anyone else around him said, but the voices of Norma and Lawrence came through loud and clear. “Keep the coat,” they shouted. “Get warm. Get warm. Get warm!”
They placed the captain’s jacket with the collar snugly under his chin, and Doc Eason shined a light into his eyes, one at a time. His whole body vibrated from cold and shock. Doc Eason pulled off Dwyer’s boots and wrapped his feet in gauze bandages. The captain patted Dwyer’s shoulder and said something. His mouth formed what could’ve been “Dwyer” or “dying.” There was no way to know.
***
They woke him, still on that shelf on the bridge, and all he wanted was to go back to sleep. Not only did his eyes feel like broken glass with them open, but being asleep had made him forget how cold he was. Someone tugged him upright and it hurt to stand. His boots were gone and his feet were wrapped in bandages. It had turned dark. The overcast sky blocked out the moon. The only illumination was a couple topside lights on the decks of both subs that shined like far away stars. The two subs were parallel and at the whims of the agitated sea.
They made him walk. He kept all his weight on his heels, as that reduced the pain as he walked, but that wasn’t the case when he climbed down the ladder to the main deck. He tried to explain that he didn’t have boots, but they rushed him down the ladder, which put tremendous pressure on the balls of his feet. This shot pain up his legs and into the backs of his eye sockets. He didn’t think he could continue, but if he didn’t keep climbing down another sailor’s boots would have ground his fingers into the iron rungs. He climbed down as fast as he could manage.
On deck again, he looked for his spot at the life rail. Someone pushed him forward to where a folding wooden gangplank had been dropped in place connecting the Cochino and the Tusk. The plank couldn’t have been more than twenty feet or so—a long way to walk over the unpredictable waters, but so short that the two subs could collide and kill them all.
Some of his shipmates had already crossed and stood on the Tusk’s deck, waving him over. Someone behind him pushed. Without a sense of hearing, he could only imagine there were shouts of “Hurry” and “Go” to coincide with their frantic waving. The plank rose and fell as if it breathed. Dwyer stepped out slowly. The pain was too great to walk heel-to-toe. He peg-legged it on his heels with balance enough to make it the whole way across despite the wind and sea spray making him raise his shoulder to protect his face.
As soon as he made it across, someone wrapped him in a blanket. It must’ve helped a little, but he could’ve used ten more. Another Cochino sailor sprinted across the plank and bumped into him, and then another. Then a rolling swell took the Cochino up and away from view. The gangplank went with her, but after that wave subsided and the Tusk altered course, the two subs sat parallel again and the crew reconnected the gangplank. A couple more sailors sprinted across. Dwyer realized then that they were abandoning ship. Someone led him into the Tusk and down a ladder to sickbay, where a corpsman took special interest in his bandaged feet.
***
The next thing Dwyer knew, he woke up in a Norwegian hospital. He still couldn’t hear very well, so one of the nurses wrote on a sheet of paper that all but one of the Cochino’s crew made it over to the Tusk. By all accounts, the Cochino sank moments after the captain was the last man to abandon ship and the sea ripped apart the gangplank. The Tusk sailed both crews safely to port.
Dwyer never asked the sailor’s name. If anyone told him, he didn’t hear. He assumed the guy was one of the six Tusk crewmen who perished, but he didn’t know which one. He believed it was none of them—he liked to think it was Earl he’d saved from making the journey upstairs all by his lonesome.
***
The hospital kept Dwyer for six weeks, his legs in traction and teams of doctors coming in to check his feet and ears. They speculated the surge had burst his eardrums, but they had no explanation for the lack of enduring pain or bleeding and reluctantly cleared him to take a surface ship back to the states.
***
A few years later, the three of them went to The Stadium in the Bronx on a hot August day to watch the Yankees play the Tigers. Dwyer didn’t get around swiftly, not with the limp he’d developed since losing four toes in the Barents Sea, so Norma walked ahead of him and Lawrence walked a few steps ahead of her. His son was nine now and knew right where they were going. They sat in the same section every time they went. When Dwyer caught up, he handed the boy the program and a pencil from his breast pocket so he could keep score.
With a flurry of polished hand movements, Lawrence used sign language to ask his father if they could get peanuts.
Dwyer signed back, “Of course. It’s not a ballgame unless we eat peanuts.”
Norma signed, “Use your best penmanship when you write-in the lineups.”
Lawrence opened the scorecard and wrote in the third-spot in the batting order; his idol, the new centerfielder, Mickey Mantle.
As they stood for the national anthem, Dwyer utilized the silence to recite the Navy hymn in his head.