Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [280]
“And we’ll all be gay
When Johnny comes marching home.
Oh, when Johnny comes marching home again,
Hurrah, hurrah-”
For an instant Willie was marching up Fifth Avenue in the sunshine in an immense parade of the Navy, and crowds on the sidewalk were screaming cheers, and ticker tape was falling across his face as he marched. He saw the towers of Radio City, and the spire of Saint Patrick’s. His hair prickled on his skull, and he thanked God for having sent him to the Caine to fight in the war.
“And we’ll all be gay,
When Johnny comes marching home.”
The vision vanished, and he was staring at the battered radio on the green bulkhead. He said aloud, “Who told those sons of bitches they could fire the 20’s?” He ran topside.
The Navy’s first AlNav announcing a point system for discharge was on the Fox skeds within a week. It caused howls and curses and screams of pain throughout the minesweeper, as though the ship had been hit by a torpedo. Willie scribbled a rapid sum of his points and saw that he would be discharged, according to the AlNav, in February in 1949. The point system was weighted so as to get rid of married men and old men. There was no credit for overseas service or for combat.
He was not disturbed. The AlNav was monstrous, of course, but he was certain that it would be superseded in a couple of weeks, as soon as the wave of anguished screeching had traveled back up the chain of command and splashed over into the press. He could picture clearly what had happened. This point system had been drawn up in wartime and filed away for a remote future; and all at once it had been snatched out of the files and placed on the skeds before anyone troubled to realize its implications. Meantime the world had gone from night to day, from war to peace. Wartime thinking had become instantaneously obsolete, and the Navy was lagging a bit.
Meantime, there was the decrepit Caine to worry about. The repair program at Okinawa had halted in chaos. Multi-million-dollar refittings, night-and-day labor without regard to expense, were now things of the past, a past as remote as Gettysburg though only a week away in calendar time. The repair officer of the Pluto, a harassed little commander behind a desk piled a foot high with documents, his wrinkled face as gray as mimeograph paper, snarled at Willie, “How the hell do I know what to tell you, Keith?” (It was Willie’s fourth-visit in a week; he had been turned away by the yeoman the first three times.) “Everything is snafued from here to Washington and back. I don’t know whether the Bureau will authorize spending another forty cents on a four-piper at this point. Maybe the survey board will just decide to let the ship rot here.” He pointed at a wire basket overflowing with yellow flimsies. “See that? Everyone is a ship with troubles. Want to get on the list? You can be 107, maybe.”
“Sorry to have troubled you, sir,” Willie said. “I realize how snowed under you are-”
The perspiring commander responded at once to the friendly tone. “You don’t know the half of it. Like to help you, Keith. We all want to go home. Look, I’ll send you a couple of chief shipfitters for seventy-two hours. If between them and your crew you can fix those bloody fuel pumps you’ll have a ship to ride home in. That’s all you want, isn’t it?”
When Willie got back to the ship he called the black gang together on the forecastle. “It’s up to you,” he said. “If they decide to survey this bucket we’ll sit on the beach with the dogfaces for a year waiting our chance for a ride back. Fix the pumps and you’ve got your private limousine to take you home, maybe in a week. How about another look at the pumps?”
The pumps were repaired in two days.
An order went out to all the destroyer-minesweepers in the harbor to prepare to go to Tokyo to sweep the harbor in advance of