Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [138]
Willie enjoyed and applauded the spectacle with no thought of its fatality. Under a garish pink-and-blue sunset, the bombardment was taking on the air of Mardi Gras. The green islands were blazing in wide red splotches now. Pretty crimson dotted lines of tracer bullets laced across the purple waters; the gouts of flame at the big guns’ muzzles grew brighter and yellower in the twilight, and concussions regularly shook the atmosphere, while the smell of powder hung everywhere, strangely mingled, in the puffs of the breeze, with the spicy sweetness of crushed and burning tropic foliage. Willie leaned on the bulwark of the flying bridge, his life jacket dumped at his feet, his helmet pushed back from his damp forehead; and he smoked, and whistled Cole Porter tunes, and occasionally yawned, a tired but thoroughly entertained spectator.
This cold-bloodedness, worthy of a horseman of Genghis Khan, was quite strange in a pleasant little fellow like Ensign Keith. Militarily, of course, it was an asset beyond price. Like most of the naval executioners at Kwajalein, he seemed to regard the enemy as a species of animal pest. From the grim and desperate taciturnity with which the Japanese died, they seemed on their side to believe they were contending with an invasion of large armed ants. This obliviousness on both sides to the fact that the opponents were human beings may perhaps be cited as the key to the many massacres of the Pacific war. The Kwajalein invasion, the first of these, was a grand classic of sea warfare, a lesson for the generations. There has never been a more wisely conceived and surgically executed operation. As a young man’s first taste of war, however, it was too rich, too easy, too fancy, too perfect.
Whittaker poked his head over the top of the ladder to the flying bridge, and said, “Chadan, Mistuh Keith.” Stars were already winking in the sky. Willie went below, and fell to with the other officers on an excellent steak dinner. When the table was cleared, Willie, Keefer, Maryk, and Harding remained around the green baize, drinking coffee.
“Well,” said Keefer to Maryk, lighting a cigarette, “what did you think of the performance of Old Yellowstain today?”
“Knock it off, Tom.”
“That was something, wasn’t it, turning tail before we ever got to the line of departure and leaving those poor slobs in the LVT’s to navigate for themselves?”
“Tom, you weren’t even on the bridge,” said the executive officer shortly. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I was on the flying bridge, Steve, old boy, seeing and hearing everything.”
“We dropped a marker. They knew just where they were-”
“We dropped when the cutoff bearing was out almost twenty degrees-”
“Ten degrees. The captain read fifty-four, not sixty-four-”
“Oh, you believed that?”
“-and our advance while turning carried us another six or seven hundred yards. The dye marker was probably right on.” Keefer turned on Willie suddenly. “What do you say? Did we funk off like a scared rabbit or didn’t we?”
Willie hesitated for several seconds. “Well, I wasn’t on the alidade. Urban could easily have read the bearing wrong.”
“Willie, you had the deck all day. Did you ever see Captain Queeg on the side of the bridge that was exposed to the beach?”
The question startled Willie, and in a shocking flash he realized that he never had. The shuttlings and disappearances of the commanding officer during the day had puzzled him extremely, especially since it had been Queeg’s custom in previous maneuvers to stay fixed in the wheelhouse, where he could hear the TBS and watch the helmsman. But the novelist