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“I lied to him: ‘You’re too young and too healthy. Here, let me give you a shot in the arm so you’ll go to sleep.’ At first he wouldn’t let me but with the help of a couple of men we peeled some shirt off his arm. Jabbing the morphine needle in his arm was like jabbing a board. There was no skin—just muscle—and none of the morphine went in. It just oozed back out. I tried three times with the same result. A stretcher finally arrived and we got Posh on with quite a bit of trouble. He was in agony. They carried him off to the mess hall where a temporary sick bay had been set up.” Among the casualties was the ship’s executive officer, Commander Mark H. Crouter, who had both of his legs seriously burned up to the knees. The young kid, Posh, didn’t make it.

In the carnage that took place on Callaghan’s flagship, twenty-two men died, and twenty-two more were wounded. The casualties were taken to the transport President Jackson. Commander Crouter remained aboard. He insisted it was his duty to stay and coach the newly elevated exec, Commander Joseph C. Hubbard, and to make himself useful to another recent newcomer to the ship, Captain Young. Though Young had received a Medal of Honor for his heroism while commanding the repair ship Vestal at Pearl Harbor on December 7, the San Francisco was his first major combat ship. He needed the experienced guidance of his executive officer. Crouter was escorted to his cabin to recuperate while Hubbard replaced him as exec and Lieutenant Commander Herbert E. Schonland, the assistant first lieutenant, replaced Hubbard as the damage-control officer.

As terrible as the afternoon was for the San Francisco, it was a fine one for the task force as a whole. The air attack had cost Turner’s transports just a few hours of unloading time. As soon as the surviving planes disappeared, the transports returned to the anchorage and resumed debarking troops of the U.S. Army’s 182nd Infantry Regiment till sunset.

A submarine contact, pursued vigorously but inconclusively by Callaghan’s destroyers, caused a ruckus before dark. At six fifteen, Turner ordered his transports to depart for Espiritu Santo with five destroyers. Callaghan and Scott steamed in the opposite direction, passing through Sealark Channel and assembling for a sweep of Savo Sound. A SOPAC staff historian of the campaign would impose a master plan on these movements, suggesting that Callaghan was moving to fight “a delaying action so that Admiral Kinkaid’s battleship-carrier force could intercept the anticipated landing forces believed to be enroute.” But there is no evidence of such a design. In that moment Kelly Turner knew nothing of the movements of Task Force 16. For all he was concerned, the entire might of the South Pacific force sailed with Callaghan, and it would be they who determined his fate.

* * *

TASK GROUP 67.4 went to general quarters at 8 p.m. The sea rolled easily under a ten-knot southeasterly wind. The moon had set, leaving the squadron in the dark. The destroyer Cushing led the way, leading the van with the Laffey, Sterett, and O’Bannon. They were followed by the Atlanta (the flagship of the idle Norman Scott), the San Francisco (Callaghan’s flagship), the Portland, the Helena, the Juneau, and the rear quartet of destroyers. Hot soup and coffee were served to the crews at their stations as the six-mile-long column entered Sealark Channel.

As the column passed through the channel, sailors on the Atlanta noticed an unsettling omen, the appearance of the electrical phenomenon known as St. Elmo’s fire. The mysterious incandescence, manifesting itself in their rigging, was widely thought to be a sign of trouble, its reputation well established in literature a century before. In Moby-Dick, when the Pequod was touched by these coronal discharges, Ishmael called it “God’s burning finger laid on the ship.” As he described it, “All the yard-arms were tipped with a pallid fire; and touched at each tri-pointed lightning-rod-end with three tapering white