Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [15]
“What the hell was it doing out there?” bellowed Acres.
“It flew out,” said Willie.
The blood rushed into Acres’ face as though he had been called a dirty name. “Flew out? See here, you-”
“While I was assembling my gun. It got away,” Willie added in hurried, plaintive tones.
Acres looked around at the roommates. Keggs’s shuddering fear, Willie’s fright, Keefer’s rigid attention were genuine. Two months ago he had himself been a midshipman. “You should each get fifteen demerits,” he growled, by way of descending from his rage. “I have my eye on you- Carry on.” He stalked out.
“Do you suppose,” Willie said in the numb pause that followed, “that some higher power doesn’t want me in the Navy? I seem to be the Jonah in this room.”
“Forget it, fella. You just getting the hard luck out of your system,” Keefer said.
They studied fiercely as Bilging Day drew nearer. A nice balance of forces became evident in Room 1013. Keggs was strong on the paper work of navigation and engineering. His plotting charts and sketches of boilers were handsome art, and he lent his talents to the others readily. He was slow to grasp facts and theories, so he set his alarm clock two hours before reveille to give himself extra study time. His face elongated daily, and his melancholy eyes burned in deepening sockets like dim candles, but he never failed a quiz.
Keefer failed often. He calculated averages to a hair and managed to stay above the estimated expulsion level in all courses. His strong point was military wisdom. Willie never could decide whether this gift was natural or acquired, but Keefer, with the body and air of a sloven, was the most polished seaman in the school. He kept himself, his bed, and his books with the neatness of a cat. On parade his fresh-looking uniform, glittering shoes, and erect bearing quickly caught the eye of the executive officer. He was ordained a battalion commander.
Willie Keith became the oracle of the tenth floor in matters of naval ordnance. Actually he was a blockhead on the subject. Reputations are made queerly and swiftly in wartime. It happened that in the first week a terrible examination was scheduled in Ordnance, with the announced purpose of causing weaklings to go down. Everybody crammed feverishly, of course. Willie was as earnest as the rest, but one page of the book, composed in the worst Navy jargon, baffled him; a description of a thing called a Frictionless Bearing. Keefer and Keggs had given it up. Willie read the page over seventeen times, then twice more aloud, and was on the point of quitting when he noticed that whole sentences had become embedded in his memory. He worked another half hour and memorized the entire page, word for word. The chief essay question on the examination, as luck would have it, was Explain the Frictionless Bearing. Willie happily disgorged the words, which meant no more to him than a Hindu chant. When the results of the test were announced he stood first in the school. “Apprentice Seaman Keith,” shouted Ensign Acres, squinting in the sunlight at noon assembly, “is officially commended for a brilliant Ordnance paper. He was the only man in the school to give an intelligent explanation of the Frictionless Bearing.”
With a reputation to uphold, and dozens of questions to answer in every study period, Willie thereafter drove himself to a meaningless verbal mastery of all the details of naval cannons.
This lesson in Navy pedagogy was driven home shortly before Bilging Day. One night Willie came upon the following statement in his tattered green-bound manual, Submarine Doctrine, 1935: “Submarines, because of their small cruising range, are chiefly suitable for coastal defense.” At that time Nazis were torpedoing several American ships each week around Cape Hatteras, four thousand miles from Germany’s coast. Willie pointed this out with chuckles to his