THOSE FIRST DAYS OF naval training, no one, to use a landlubber phrase, could see the trees for the forest. The only impression any of us had was of a new, overwhelming environment. I don’t think any of us would have even remembered each other’s faces if we had left there after forty-eight hours. It was something like being run down by an eight-wheel truck. You may get a quick look at the front end of the truck, but you’re darned if you could ever recognize the face of the driver.
Except for a few Chiefs temporarily elevated to the level of Navy privilege and responsibility (as our new commission status was described to us), we were all erstwhile civilians who did not know enough to differentiate between “parade rest” and “at ease,” or to translate three bells into our old Eastern Standard Time, or to explain the different functions of a stream anchor and a boat anchor. For nearly all of us those first hours were like the moment after the plunge from the high board into the pool when the diver is still going down, before he can begin to open his eyes and orient himself toward the surface. Unfamiliar subjects and unfamiliar systems of behavior were being thrown at us so fast that we had no chance to bring our surroundings into focus. We were still going down, but somehow, even in that dark confusion, we managed to respond to bells, bugles, commands and orders (we had just been told the distinction), for man, like his brother, the white rat, is highly susceptible to habit-suggestion.
Among us were men who turned out to be clever, men who proved slow, men who were quick to laugh, men who were sullen, men who had been college professors in sheltered academic communities and were shy among worldly men, and men who had been whiskey salesmen and knew how to make a Pullman washroom roar with laughter. But in the haze of strangeness that enveloped us those first days, we were all indistinguishable parts of one great beast that hit the deck at reveille, performed its calisthenics, went to chow, answered muster, attended class, formed for drill, marched, studied, fed, grew weary, shed its uniform, polished its shoes, doused its face and fell into its sack at taps.
It was procedure at the school, however, for our company to be commanded by a student officer from our own ranks. As Lieutenant Murdock, the young staff officer in charge of our metamorphosis informed us of this, there was a not quite imperceptible flinching back, the faceless mass not yet ready to assume responsibility, leadership, or even individual personalities. After all, we were not men. We were zombies in khaki. It seemed an affront to our conglomerate anonymity to attempt to single one of us out.
“We’ll alternate the job of Company Commander so that as many men as possible will have an opportunity to gain the experience,” the staff officer said. “All right, now, who wants to lead off? Anybody here with previous military experience?”
There was another uneasy silence, and although all of us were staring straight ahead, we gave the impression of dropping our eyes and lowering our heads to avoid being seen.
The young staff officer gave a small smile of superiority that was meant to be sympathetic. “Come on now, don’t be shy. You’ll probably all have to do it sooner or later.”
But we were not to be coaxed out from the protective herd.
“No previous military experience at all?”
Then, in the silence, a voice from somewhere in the rear spoke up. “I’ve had previous military experience, sir.”
Irresistibly, all our heads turned. Every one of us had to mark for himself this first one to disassociate himself from the group.
“All right, eyes front,” the staff officer snapped. “You men are still at attention.” Then he turned to the man who had answered his question, and told him to come front and center.
Even in our stiffened attitudes of attention, I could feel all of us in the ranks leaning slightly forward in our eagerness to see the volunteer. A short, wiry fellow, with a face his mother must call alert but which impressed us as cocky, he stepped out smartly, executed his flank turn with clean movements and, when he had come within proper distance of the staff officer, threw him a salute with plenty of snap (we were supersensitive to things like this because we were just then learning how much more difficult proper saluting was than it looked at first glance). While he held his salute nicely until the staff officer returned it, I recognized this eager beaver as the little fellow who had the upper bunk right next to mine in the barracks.
“Your name, sir?”
“Wessel, sir.”
“How much military training have you had, Wessel?”
“Naval ROTC in high school, sir.”
Someone down the line snorted. The staff officer addressed us soberly. “I am going to appoint Mr. Wessel your first Student Commander. He will be in exactly the same authority here that I have been since you reported. You understand, men, the fact that he is a Student Officer like yourself in no way limits his authority for the period of his command. Any act of disrespect or disobedience toward him will be considered an act of insubordination under the Articles of War.” He turned to Wessel and said officially, “Mr. Wessel, assume command.”
Wessel saluted again, very salty, and faced us solemnly. I don’t know if all of us did, but I think most of us could sense what was coming. By some law of compensation, men who are deprived of the natural means of self-expression and exchange of opinion can become so sensitized to each other that one can feel little silent waves of approval or apprehension or resentment running through an entire company. What we felt now had no approval in it. Something in the way Wessel looked, in the way he changed when he stepped forward to assume command, gave us a hint of what we were in for.
The bark of Wessel’s commands was keyed to a self-conscious stridency as he dressed us off, brought us back to attention and then put us “at ease.” Then he stepped forward and addressed us with exactly that tone of condescension that often passes for a confidential man-to-man talk from a ranking military leader to his men.
“Men,” he began, “I couldn’t help noticing a few moments ago that when I told Lieutenant Murdock I had had naval ROTC training, one of you laughed.” He paused, for emphasis, and though I think every one of us in the ranks wanted to laugh again, we all waited dumbly with poker faces. “Maybe none of you realize that if you had all been in the naval ROTC, if our country had been more fully prepared, Pearl Harbor would never have happened. So when you laugh at naval ROTC you’re casting aspersions on the Navy itself, and our flag.”
If it had been a movie, a great Old Glory in technicolor would have unfurled majestically behind Wessel at this moment. Or perhaps phantom images of Roosevelt, Marshall and King would have grouped around him. But this was just Wessel all alone, a small figure against the high walls and towers of the fort. Lieutenant Murdock was looking on, but there was no way of telling from his young, carefully indoctrinated face which side he was on. In the silence, if there is any such thing as a hate-detector, our rising resentment would have sent it on past the danger point. But Wessel was too insulated by sudden power to feel the hate waves that rose from us and curled around him.
“Now I would like to ask that man who laughed to please step forward,” he persisted.
No one moved. We all just stood there hating Wessel.
“Mr. Wessel,” Lieutenant Murdock said, “if you wish to call a man out from the ranks officially, I suggest you bring your company to attention and give him the command, one step forward, march.”
Now we knew where Lieutenant Murdock stood, and we regarded him as a human being for the first time since we had come to the fort. “Thank you, sir,” Wessel said, and saluted. He was a little flustered. He gave the command, “Attention” and about half the company snapped to attention, but those of us who remembered what we had been taught the day before, that you don’t have to respond to a command unless it is given properly, remained smugly ‘at ease.’ “Company, attention,” Wessel quickly corrected himself, and he glared at us for capitalizing on his mistake. He had not been out there in front of us more than two minutes, but that had been time enough for a declaration of war on both sides. We had sighted each other and were moving forward to engage each other, as we were learning to say.
“Now,” Wessel faced us for the showdown, “the gentleman who laughed, on his honor as a naval officer, one step forward, march.”
There was a split-second pause and then a large, red-faced easygoing fellow with quite a belly on him stepped forward. Wessel marched toward him with his back very stiff, the expression on his face a small-fry imitation of Admiral King’s. He was a full head shorter than the man he had called out, which lent a certain absurdity to the severity with which he regarded him.
“Your name?”
“Finnegan … sir.”
The way Finnegan added that dutiful monosyllable would have had to be heard to be fully appreciated. It slipped out in a kind of effeminate slur that met the official requirements of respect while at the same time oozing disrespect. Now, under the pressure of Wessel’s reign, our phalanx anonymity was giving way to individuality again. We were beginning to have our villains and our heroes and soon we would find our jesters, our drones, our worriers, our politicians, our agitators, our rebels and our Babbitts, like any other family of men. It was as if we had all been lying together in a dark box like identical matches, and now, struck against the flint of Student Commander Wessel, we flared into flames of different sizes, hues and intensity. By the end of this day, for instance, we would know that our friend Jim Finnegan was a Hiram Walker distributor for Eastern New Jersey, that he called his wife “Ginger,” that he had played second-string guard for Rutgers, that he was rather proud of his imitation of Amos and Andy, with which he had once wowed a wholesale liquor convention, and that he liked to form barracks quartets to sing old ones like “I Want a Girl Just Like the Girl Who Married Dear Old Dad.” But right now he was a one-man patrol feeling out the enemy in the first skirmish of one of those innumerable little wars that rage within larger wars that are fought within still larger wars.
Now Wessel was firing at point-blank range. “Didn’t you understand Lieutenant Murdock when he explained that I was to receive exactly the same respect as if I were your regular Commanding Officer? If you were to laugh at a remark of your Commanding Officer, you would be guilty of insubordination and …”
“Excuse me … sir,” Finnegan interrupted. “I laughed at you before you had taken command. Lieutenant Murdock hadn’t appointed you yet.”
None of us moved or made a sound, but we all smiled. That was one time when a generality like “the company smiled” would have been absolutely accurate.
“Mr. Wessel”—Lieutenant Murdock came into it—”I would suggest you return Mr. Finnegan to his squad without further reprimand. You are absolutely right to stress military discipline, and there is certainly no place for levity here. But in this initial stage of the indoctrination course, we can be a little more lenient with newly commissioned officers than we might be later on. After all, we must remember that they have not had your advantage of previous military training.” All of us searched the proper face of the recent Annapolis graduate for some sign of sarcasm as he addressed his colleague from the naval ROTC. But we searched in vain. It was like looking for something you have dropped under the seat of your car. You are sure it must be there, but you can’t find it. “Mr. Wessel,” Lieutenant Murdock said, “I assume you are familiar with the commands and proper execution of close-order drill.”
“Yes, sir,” Wessel said emphatically.
“Then for the next forty-five minutes you will drill your men. Have them back here by 1600 and dismiss them for recreation and showers until chow call.”
Then Lieutenant Murdock was gone. We had been delivered over to Mr. Wessel.
We were on our way out to the drill field, and doing pretty well for beginners, we thought, when Wessel gave the command, “Third platoon, to the rear, harch.” The entire company, with the exception of the inevitable two or three who forgot to turn at all, reversed its course. Wessel shouted “Company, halt,” in an angry voice. “I gave you that command on purpose to see if you were on your toes,” he scolded. “I distinctly said third platoon, not company. Now let’s see you fellows get on the ball. You’re being trained for a war, not a tea party.”
It was a warm day and streaks of sweat had begun to stain our blouses. Wessel got us back in formation, turned us around and started us off again, counting cadence for us in his best military manner, “Hun, tuh, thr, fuh, heft, right …” Then, because some of us were out of step he gave the order for us all to count cadence in unison. It started somewhere in the rear squad, and spread forward, so in time with the cadence that it could hardly be distinguished. But it was there all right: “We—hate—Wes—sel—all—right …”
When Wessel finally detected this mutiny in the ranks an extra bit of color flushed his cheeks, but he fought back stubbornly. “All right, wise guys, knock it off.” Then he countered with a “Change step, harch.” We hadn’t been taught this yet, so the result was pretty much of a foul-up. We knew the only reason Wessel had given us this was to show off his military virtuosity, but another reason it made us mad was because we were just reaching that stage of indoctrination where we had begun to take pride in ourselves as a unit, enjoying the rhythm of doing things right.
“What’s the matter with you joes, two left feet?” Wessel scolded again.
This time a lean, bony-faced, red-haired squad leader spoke up. “No, sir, it was your fault, sir. You were out of step.”
We all looked at him gratefully, another individual added to our growing list. We had our villain, we had our hero, now we had our expert.
Wessel went up to him excitedly. “I was out of step? How could I be out of step? Aren’t you supposed to keep in step with my count?”
“That command can only be given when the right foot touches the ground, so you can step out on the left foot, sir.”
Wessel looked at him and frowned. He had counted on being the only drill man in the outfit. But he knew that answer was right out of the Bluejackets’ Manual. “Where did you learn that?” he asked suspiciously.
“I’ve served two hitches in the Navy,” the redhead said. This was a direct hit. “I’ve just been commissioned from Chief.”
“Then why didn’t you put your hand up when Lieutenant Murdock asked who had previous military experience?” Wessel demanded.
“Because I’ve been in the Navy long enough to learn to keep my mouth shut and never volunteer for anything, sir,” this redhead said.
It was a broadside all right, and Wessel didn’t have enough sense of humor to roll with it. He took it hard. All the rest of us laughed, though. The redhead had timed it beautifully. We had something there in that redhead.
“All right, knock it off, knock it off,” Wessel screamed, his voice going high in frustration. He reassembled us again, barking his commands with an extra zip to make up for that right-foot business.
So far we figured we were out to an early lead. But it wasn’t 1600 yet. By this time we were a good half-mile from the muster ground on the other side of the fort. It was time we started back. But instead of giving us an ordinary “Forward, march,” Wessel gave us a double time. Nearly all of us still had the bodies of middle-class civilians in sedentary jobs and one hundred yards of that double time was just about our speed. But when we had run two hundred yards, Wessel still gave no sign of slowing down to ordinary cadence. We were a pretty sick-looking lot by that time. Gorham, a fat boy who had been recruited from an advertising agency and who had done all of his training at Toots Shor’s bar, had to give up at the halfway mark. We didn’t look back, but we could hear what he was doing as we left him behind. “We ought to rub that little bastard’s nose in it,” someone muttered.
The rest of us managed to finish, but it was pretty bad. It reminded me of a movie about the mad Czar of Russia I had seen when I was a kid. All about how Paul the First marched his soldiers up and down all day long until some of them dropped dead. Then, for laughs, he faced a squad toward a cliff, told them to forward march and then went in to have his dinner. Two soldiers who refused to commit themselves to the ravine as per Paul’s command were shot for disobedience. That’s what I was thinking about Wessel while I was trying to catch my breath. A couple of fellows had the heaves.
Only Flanders, the redheaded ex-Chief, and Gersh, the Jewish boy who had been a Brooklyn handball champion, and one or two others I hadn’t noticed before were able to stand up without struggling for breath. We were too exhausted even to hate Wessel the way we were going to when we caught our breaths.
“Sixteen hundred to seventeen-thirty, turn to for recreation,” Wessel announced. “Company dismissed.”
“How about this for recreation?” Finnegan suggested to a couple of new friends as we headed wearily for the barracks. “Let’s throw Wessel on his back and we’ll all jump on him, in cadence, double time.” In our weakened conditions, needing a safety valve for our anger, that seemed funny enough to be worth passing on to the entire company.
We all walked back to the barracks in two’s and three’s. Only Wessel walked alone, an erect, solitary little figure, feeling the weight of his responsibilities. That evening at mess no one would pass him anything and no one would speak to him. I think, in a way, we were all glad to have Wessel there to focus our anger on. A body of men in training needs something like that to break the monotony. Tojo and Der Führer were too far away. We were all wandering around blindfold and we needed something to pin the tail on. The existence of Wessel gave all of us our first chance to express ourselves. I made up a limerick about him which won me my first recognition. Finnegan worked up an imitation that proved very popular. Flanders called him “The Admiral,” and that name pleased us for a while. Somebody else called him “Little Napoleon,” and a serious high-school teacher from Troy amended that to “Napoleon the Fourth.” Our imaginations seemed limitless, our wit endlessly resourceful where Wessel was concerned. Thanks to Wessel, we had our first sense of morale. That was the first evening that real laughter was heard in the mess hall. We began to discover that we were not just a line of mechanical men out of some blue-jacketed RUR. Each one of us had his own individual way of reacting to the tyranny of Student Commander Wessel and we were drawn toward one another in the common cause.
Wessel and I had to undress in the same narrow space between the double-decker beds. “Sure wish we had a little more room to stow our gear, mate,” he said. He talked as if he had been born in the navy. He was a salty little character, all right. I didn’t say anything. Even if I had wanted to, I was silenced by the spontaneous unwritten law. There wasn’t going to be any fraternization with the enemy.
After Wessel got undressed and came back from the head, he knelt on the stone floor against the sack under his and said his prayers. I was a little sorry to see him do this. It nicked the sharp edge of my indignation just a little bit. Not that I was sentimental about people saying their prayers. It was just that from my upper he looked awfully small and vulnerable down there. He didn’t look quite formidable enough to be worth the emotion we were all expending. But even after taps, with the lights out, the war went on. Someone, I think it was Finnegan, but it might have been another wag, Cosgrove, began giving falsetto commands in an outrageous take-off of Wessel.
“All right, pipe down,” Wessel called.
“Pipe down,” the falsetto echoed. “Change step, harch,” a high voice mimicked.
“Come on, knock it off,” Wessel demanded.
But his military authority couldn’t do him much good in the dark. “Knock it off, girls,” a series of falsettos trilled through the barracks.
But next morning Wessel returned to the attack. At morning muster he laced into one platoon leader for not keeping his fingers together when he saluted on the “all present and accounted for.” During the morning it began to drizzle and the uniform of the day was changed to include rain covers and raincoats. When we mustered after noon chow, Wessel’s sharp eyes discovered that a small, somewhat comical ensign by the name of Botts was not wearing the plastic cover that fitted over our cloth hat covers. Botts was a pharmacist from Oxford, Mississippi, who had already come to Wessel’s attention because of an inability to keep in step that was so consistent it appeared to be congenital. Wessel bore down on him now exactly as one has read the first Napoleon did, upbraiding his man for inattention to regulations. In his slow, naive drawl, Botts explained that rain covers had sold out at the PX before he could get one.
“That is no excuse,” Wessel decided. “You should have had one with you when you reported aboard here.”
We were still on land, of course, but Wessel had already caught the navy way. We half-expected him to sentence Botts to fifty lashes. He did put him on report, which meant two afternoons with the awkward squad that had to do half an hour of extra drilling during the recreation period.
“Ah doan hardly think that’s fai-er, Mr. Weasel,” Botts protested. The way he talked it was impossible to tell whether that was a sarcastic pun on Wessel’s name or just a beautiful coincidence. Probably it was just accidental, for the chances are Botts was too simple a man to invent so ingenious an insult. A day before, hearing that writing had been my civilian profession, he had said, “We got one of them fellas in my town. Sleeps all day an’ stays up all night an’ is always comin’ in for aspirin. Fella by the name o’ Fo’kner.” Anyway, whether it was dialect or inspiration, Botts’ name for our nemesis supplanted all the others. From then on I never heard him called anything else but Weasel.
Right up to the last day of his temporary command, Weasel ran us ragged. He even put me on the awkward squad for mislaying one of my textbooks. When I had to go up to him and confess my crime, he said, “What do you mean, your Watch Officers’ Guide is lost? You mean it’s adrift.” On another occasion Finnegan, who was not our neatest officer, came to muster with one shirttail not quite tucked in behind. “You’ve got an Irish pennant,” Weasel admonished him. Finnegan thought his racial stock was being insulted, but it turned out this was just navy for any loose end. Day after day, Weasel drove us crazy with that salty stuff. He caught Cosgrove saying, “I’m going upstairs,” one time and made him come to attention and repeat “I’m going topside” twenty-five times.
But Weasel’s behavior all during his command was human compared to his conduct the Saturday morning of the first captain’s inspection. The commander of the company judged most exemplary was to become Battalion Commander for the following week and Weasel coveted that post feverishly. At our own company inspection at muster, a kind of dress rehearsal, Weasel fumed and fussed over us like the Prussian drill instructor to whom he was related in spirit. He detected a speck of dirt on several white hat covers and ordered the offenders to fall out and dust them with face powder or chalk. Poor Botts, a military man by Act of Congress but not of God, had turned up with a khaki hat cover when the uniform of the day called for white. Weasel gave him a tongue-lashing that would have been worthy of Admiral Halsey. Botts was put on report, which meant he would automatically be deprived of his first week-end liberty. Botts, Wrong-foot Botts, we called him affectionately, had become a sort of company mascot and terrible threats of revenge were muttered through our ranks. Someone was promising to beat the Weasel to a pulp after the war if he had to track him down halfway around the world. Botts was swearing that if he ever got on the same vessel with Weasel he would push him overboard at night.
Before we marched over to the main drill field where the Commandant of the school and his staff officers were waiting to review us, Weasel gave us a real fighting man’s pep talk. We were going over to do or die this morning for the honor of Company A. Weasel expected every man to be on his toes. Weasel had every confidence that we would be the smartest company on the field. Napoleon before Austerlitz couldn’t have addressed his men with greater challenge.
We came up onto the main field with Weasel strutting out in front like a college-band drum major. We were a pretty smart-looking outfit at that, for a bunch of last week’s civilians. But as our turn came to turn and pass the reviewing party, we were supposed to execute a left flank so the whole company could pass in two long lines. The first two platoons did a flank turn to perfection, but the third platoon, led by Finnegan, executed a column turn instead. Even if you never knew or have forgotten your close-order drill, you can probably imagine what a blow this would be to the military career of our first Student Commander. When Company C won the accolade, Weasel looked as if he had lost the big war all by himself instead of just this little Saturday-morning one.
We never knew for sure whether or not Finnegan’s boner was an accidental or intentional thrust at Weasel’s military ambitions, but whichever it was, it settled our first Student Commander’s military star, at least there at the training school.
On Monday we had a new Student Commander, the ex-Chief, Flanders, who knew how to keep us in line without treading on our toes. By the end of that second week we were so absorbed with blinker, the names of the seven different mooring lines, the semaphore alphabet and the relative hauling power of whip-and-runner and jigger tackle, that we had neither time nor energy to hate Mr. Weasel in the manner to which he had become accustomed. By the end of the third week his name wasn’t even mentioned any more. He was around, marching in the ranks with the rest of us, hitting the deck at 0600, standing watches and attending classes, but as Commander Weasel, the scourge of the company, he wasn’t there at all. The only hangover left from our original indignation was the continuance of the silent treatment. It wasn’t an active thing any longer, just a habit we had gotten into that first week and habits are hard to break when they become imbedded in a group like ours.
Near the end of the course I was sprawled out on the bunk next to Wessel’s struggling over a navigation problem that included a double-running fix I was the last man in the class to master. Weasel was sitting on the edge of his sack and after a while he began looking over my shoulder. When he saw where I was making my mistake, he pointed it out to me. I thanked him and he moved in and worked out the rest of the problem for me. That saved me about half an hour at a time when I needed every minute I could get to cram for the final exams. Weasel knew his navigation, all right. No one else was as fast at plane recognition or receiving blinker, either. We talked a while after he brought my hypothetical ship into port. I didn’t encourage him much, but it didn’t take much. After all, man’s a social animal who can starve for conversation just as he can for bread. I felt a little sorry for Weasel now, so I threw him a few crumbs of conversation.
I guess that was the first time anybody had talked to Weasel in the two months we had been there. We talked about Topic A, of course, what kind of orders we hoped to get when the course was finished. Each of us had been given forms to fill out that day indicating our choice of sea and shore jobs. They didn’t promise to send us where we wanted to go, of course, but the Commandant had said our preferences would be “a guide to the final decisions.” The jobs and types of vessels we listed were probably as good a guide to our characters as you could find. Flanders told us he had picked PT’s. He liked small boats and after those two hitches he wanted to be his own boss. Gersh wanted to skipper a landing craft in European waters. He wanted a personal crack at Der Führer. I hoped to be assigned to Air Intelligence, one of those fellows on the carrier who gets the fliers’ stories when they come in. Finnegan said it didn’t matter what he put down. He had things all greased before he came in to be a four-striper’s aide. Almost every job in the navy seemed to appeal to somebody—except that of Armed Guard. The Armed Guard officer was the one who commanded the navy gun crew on merchant ships. That job was on everybody’s s-list. For one thing it was the merchant ships that were still catching it heaviest that season. They seemed to be losing one or two somewhere almost every day. And then there was all that friction between the navy and the merchant marine, another one of those wars within wars. There were the usual rumors of feuding and fighting between navy guncrew commanders and the merchant skippers. Someone said an Armed Guard ensign had gone to Portsmouth for life for murdering a merchant four-striper who had made his life hell all the way to Oran. All of us thought about Armed Guard the way Russians must think of their Arctic forced labor camps.
So I told Weasel about my ambition to get on an LV or an LCV in the Atlantic (I wound up on a stinking submarine tender in the Pacific) and he told me he had put in for personnel work on a battleship. “I like that sixteen-inch armor plate on those BB’s,” he laughed. I thought this sounded a trifle cautious for an old sea dog like Weasel but I didn’t say anything. I had already exchanged more words with Weasel than our entire company combined and I didn’t want to overdo it.
On the day before the graduation exercises our orders came through. We were in the barracks, after coming back from the classrooms where our final academic standings had been posted. Flanders, the acknowledged leader now, had placed first, the high-school mathematics teacher second and Weasel third. When we opened our orders, there were little whoops of triumph and little cries of defeat. Flanders was going to have his PT and Gersh was going to an anti-submarine school outside of Miami. I was supposed to report to the Potomac River Naval Command, apparently to write PRO stuff for the Bureau of Yards and Docks in Washington, exactly what I had hoped to avoid. Then there were the usual service foul-ups. Larrabee, a civilian radio engineer, had been short-circuited to a personnel job, and Finnegan, whose scientific knowledge did not extend beyond his ability to describe the ingredients of blended whiskey, had been assigned to a radar school at Harvard. Foster, a rich boy from the Cape who had been sailing all his life and who had joined the navy through an old-fashioned love of the sea, was assigned to an ordnance depot in Norman, Oklahoma.
But when I looked at Weasel, I saw the worst defeat of all. He was sitting on his bunk, staring at his orders. All the color had gone out of his face. I thought he was going to cry.
“What did you get, Wessel?”
He ran his hand over his forehead twice before he said it. It was hard for him to make the words come out. “Armed—Guard.”
It got around the barracks the way a thing like that would. In less than a minute, Finnegan, Cosgrove and the other leaders of the fun were crowding around him. Botts was there, too, and the others who had had to take it from him in the beginning. It was as if they had all discovered Weasel again. For two months he had been practically forgotten, but now, in these last moments before we scattered literally to the seven seas, it all came back to us again, the ordeal of that double-time run back to the fort, the needlessly intricate drills, the sweaty hours we had spent on the awkward squad, the face of the Weasel as he shouted his commands at us. …
“Armed Guard,” Finnegan said and he shook his head in mock-tragedy. “Well, good-bye, Weasel, it was nice knowing you.”
“Did you read about that merchant ship that went down in the Gulf last week?” Cosgrove asked the crowd. “Damn sharks ate the entire personnel.”
“Remember, Weasel, we expect you to live up to the highest traditions of the Navy,” Flanders said. “Keep those guns blazing until you go down into the drink.”
“Maybe you should have some last words handy,” Gersh suggested. “Something that will go down in naval history like ‘Don’t Give up the Ship or ‘We Have Not Yet Begun to Fight.’ ”
“Ah hear those dirty old merchant marine skippers eat navy ensigns for breakfast,” Botts drawled.
Weasel looked out at us from behind his white, stricken face. “Get away from me, you dirty bastards. Get away from me!”
His shame was public now. We had all seen the moisture in his eyes. By evening Finnegan was leading his quartet in one of those spontaneous little songs that sweep a barracks.
Armed Guard—Armed Guard!
Weasel takes it very hard.
He came in salty as he could be,
But when it came to going to sea—
He’d rather send you, and he’d rather send me.
The taunts continued after taps again. A bass voice in the darkness offering “Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep” or Finnegan coming up with “To Commander Weasel, the Navy Cross—posthumous” was all the stimulus we needed for prolonged laughter. But no imperious commands to “knock it off” came from Weasel’s sack now. I could see him lying on his back, mute and miserable. It almost seemed as if you could smell the fear oozing out of him as from an infected wound. Once I thought I heard a muffled sob, but I couldn’t say for sure.
I didn’t think anything more about Weasel until three or four months later when I went up to the BuPers office in the Navy Building to see what I could do about getting out of that PRO job. There he was, at a desk near the railing. When he saw me he smiled and came right over and wanted to shake hands. He was looking a lot happier than when I had seen him last.
“Hello there, mate.” He smiled invitingly. “How’s the navy treating you?”
“Four oh,” I said, shoveling it back to him. “How long you been up here?”
“I got myself yanked out of that Armed Guard school after five days. I knew a three-striper from home up here.”
“I thought you’d be a thousand miles out to sea by this time,” I said, thinking of the time he had made me say adrift when my Watch Officers’ Guide was lost.
“Well, a man might as well go where he can do the most good,” he said. “After all, I was a CPA for six years. Paper work is my job. I can probably do more for the war effort right here than on a stinking merchant ship.”
“And live longer too,” I agreed.
“The Navy doesn’t need any heroes,” Weasel said. “It needs men who can do their jobs where they’re best suited.”
I looked at the papers on his desk. They seemed to be requests from officers for transfers from their present stations. They’d come to someone like Weasel for processing.
“I suppose you get quite a few requests for transfer from Armed Guard,” I said.
“Anything I can do for you, just say the word,” Weasel answered. “I got a pretty good in with the Old Man here. Might be able to expedite something for you.”
“Weasel,” I said, “the only expediting I’d like to see is your transference to a fighting ship that’s going into action. I’m not like you, Weasel,” I said. “I hate war. And one of the things I hate most about it is you and your kind of expediting.”
There. I had said it. It is vitamin pills for the soul to make a speech like that. Weasel turned a little pale—but not as pale as he had turned when he got those original orders to Armed Guard—and went over to his desk and sat down with his papers.
I didn’t see him again until after VJ Day, when I was back from the Pacific and had gone up to the Bureau of Supplies and Accounts to get my pay accounts straightened out. There was Weasel, at another desk. He was a Lieutenant Commander now, and his left side was covered with ribbons, the Victory, the American Theater, the Asiatic Theater, the Navy Commendation, and two different kinds for marksmanship.
He came over when he saw me and greeted me like an old shipmate. And of course he offered to expedite the endorsing of my orders and the back per-diem pay that was due me. There was quite a line in front of me and I was all hopped up inside to see the wife and kids for the first time in two years so I stifled what was left of my character after twenty months on that damned tender, behind the battle lines but under direct fire from mosquitoes, heat and boredom.
While we were waiting for the girl to bring my checks up, Weasel told me a little about his war. He had been up in the Aleutians, after the Japs had been driven off, and out to Pearl after the war had moved on and he had spent four months in Rio, for some reason. “Boy, the muchachas down there!” he said with a touch of the continental he had acquired on his travels. The captain in charge of the office here was going to set up a private investment house in New York after his discharge and Weasel was going along as his assistant. It had been a pretty good war for Weasel all right.
It was almost three years before I bumped into Weasel again. It’s seeing him again that has brought this whole thing back to me. I was down in Washington on a writing assignment the other day and I decided to drop in and say hello to Flanders whom I had seen a good deal of in the Pacific and who had stayed with the Navy on a regular commission. So I was on my way up the main stairs of the Navy Building when Weasel was coming down. He was in a plain gray business suit and did not look much like the Captain Bligh of the training school or the be-ribboned expediter of the Battle of Washington. The only way you could have spotted him for an ex-military man was from the miniature commendation ribbon in his buttonhole.
“Hello, mate,” he said. “You here for the same reason I am?”
“I don’t know—what are you here for?”
“I’m going back to active duty. I’ll be a three-striper this time, boy.”
Then he looked at me gravely and I saw the face I had first seen on the drill field of the training school, the little Napoleon, the leader of men, the man of action.
“Looks like we’re getting ready for another one.” He pressed his lips together into a hard line. “We’ve got to build the biggest, strongest navy in the world. I think every one of us navy veterans ought to come back in and start pulling his weight in the boat.”
“Weasel,” I said, “I guess the difference between you and me is that you’re just a natural-born military man.”
I could see him back in that training school, double-timing another batch of flabby civilians.
“But you’ve got to be patriotic,” he said, a little on the defensive.
“Sure, patriotic,” I said. But how could I tell him all the different colors and flavors and subtle variations of patriotism—all the way from shameless self-aggrandizement through the normal sense of self-protection to messianic self-sacrifice? How do you say those things to a little man like Weasel, ready with warlike exhortations and drill-instructor discipline to fight the war from desk to desk and from shore station to shore station, to the last rubber stamp, to the final endorsement?