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The burning enemy ships looked to him like “the most dramatic Hollywood reproductions.… I saw two that worked about like this: 1) pitch darkness, 2) stream of tracers from our ships, 3) series of flashes where hits were scored, silhouetting of ships by star shells, 4) tremendous fires and explosions, 5) ship folds in two, 6) ship sinks. All in all, a much better performance than Hollywood’s very best.”

This was pure burning savagery, a Marine Corps attitude, the spirit of Colonel Chesty Puller brought to sea. Now staccato, parsed with short pauses, then overlapping and simultaneous and cacophonous, like the mistimed pistons of a gigantic combustion engine, the continuous cycling output of cruiser gunfire gave no break to the eardrums. Any sailor sprinting past a turret was likely to get his ears deafened or his hide scorched.

Four minutes after the Boise opened fire, the ship had put out three hundred rounds from her main battery. Out in the dark to starboard, Moran could make out a trunked forward stack and a latticed tripod mainmast close to the after stack, the architecture of a cruiser. This ship was ready for action and returned fire. There came the whistling of “overs” as the Boise was straddled fiercely. Reports of the death of the Imperial fleet would be greatly exaggerated that night. More Japanese destroyers were reported sunk in official U.S. records than Admiral Goto actually commanded. But there was no questioning the vector of the outcome. The throw-weight of Scott’s line was beginning to tell. At least three enemy ships were burning in the Boise’s immediate vicinity.

The Aoba was hit no fewer than twenty-four times in the battle’s first twenty minutes, knocking out two main turrets, her main gun director, several searchlight platforms, her catapults, and several boiler rooms. Her foremast toppled down and demolished a starboard antiaircraft mount. The flagship veered out to starboard, signaling earnestly, “I AM AOBA,” as if her assailants were friendly. In the early going, it seemed Goto was unaware that the ships he was closing with were hostile. The Japanese commander’s final thoughts as American projectiles shattered his world, claiming the lives of seventy-nine men, including his own, were apparently that a Japanese force, his own reinforcement group, was firing on him. As his ship absorbed the blows of the U.S. cruisers, he shouted in frustration, “Bakayaro!”—idiots! Captain Yonejiro Hisamune ordered a smoke screen, and the Aoba vanished from view.

In those same tumultuous minutes, Norman Scott was seized by a corresponding fear: that the ships he was hitting were his own. The admiral was apoplectic as he climbed the ladder from the San Francisco’s flag bridge to the main bridge. He shouted an order that astonished everyone.

“Cease firing, all ships.”

Scott was gone as quickly as he had come, as the cease-fire order was relayed to the task force. It no doubt came as a relief to men on both sides when the firing slackened, but the Boise among others never relented, even as Scott repeatedly ordered Moran to check fire. Captain McMorris kept firing, too. He raised the microphone to his mouth and addressed the whole crew with the order he gave his gunners. “Rapid fire, continuous …” Then, in apology, he leaned over the rail of the bridge wing and added, “Begging your pardon, Admiral.” McMorris knew well who and what he was shooting at. Ceasing fire preemptively could get men killed.

As Tobin, the destroyer commander, radioed Scott, saying, “We are on your starboard hand now, going up ahead,” the firing continued, all the while Scott futilely repeating the cease-fire order on the TBS. Buck fever was rife, and spreading. “It took some time to stop our fire,” Scott wrote. “In fact it never did completely stop.”

The strains on discipline reached down to the enlisted ranks. A gun captain in the Farenholt by the name of Wiggens couldn’t bring himself to obey the order, even when his own captain, Lieutenant Commander Eugene T. Seaward, repeated