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The flooding was serious, but it would have doubtlessly been fatal to the flagship had Abe’s battleships used armor-piercing ordnance instead of high-explosive and incendiary rounds meant for bombardment. If this was a gift to the San Francisco as far as her hull integrity went, it extracted a steep cost in casualties topside. Eugene Tarrant, the captain’s cook, was a standby fuze setter on one of the five-inch gun mounts. He was also detailed, as many in S Division were, to assist the ship’s two doctors and four pharmacist’s mates in tending to the wounded. Early in the battle, the call went over the loudspeakers for all medics to report to the well deck on the double. Their workload did not relent.

Assigned to work with a pharmacist’s mate, Tarrant treated and bandaged those he could, gave morphine to those who needed it, and put tags on the rest. If someone needed a tourniquet, or an emergency procedure that was painful or invasive, it was Tarrant who held him down and tried to settle him while the pharmacist’s mate went to work. He quickly ran out of syrettes, so he started taking them from fallen officers, each of whom carried six on his belt. When Tarrant ran low again, he started splitting them two ways, then three. He wondered if the lower dosages did any good.

Tarrant helped lead a fire hose around turret three into the burning aircraft hangar, set afire by enemy gunfire. The planes had been catapulted away, but plenty of flammable things remained: fabric parts, textiles, gasoline, and stored aerial depth charges. A pile of kapok life jackets was burning fiercely. When that fire was suppressed, the remains of one of the ship’s floatplane pilots were found underneath. He had died where he tried to hide. A first-class boatswain’s mate, Reinhardt J. Keppler from Wapato, Washington, fought the fires in the hangar and elsewhere and ministered to the injured despite his own severe wounds. They were mortal. Before he finally collapsed from blood loss, he saved several others from the same fate.

Leonard Roy Harmon, a mess attendant first class, was a genial kind of guy, big, tall, and, according to Tarrant, fun to be around. Hailing from Cuero, Texas, he was clean-cut and very country. He didn’t drink and didn’t smoke and was awkward on the dance floor. He had a girl back home whom he planned to marry. Until then, he bided his time in the fleet and made friends where he could find them—among the cooks and mess attendants. “We were the only game in town,” Tarrant said. “If we didn’t get along together, we were in terrible shape. All we had was each other. We went ashore together, went to dances, picked out our girls.”

Tarrant and Harmon were called topside, given stretchers, or “metal baskets” as Tarrant called them, and assigned to help the pharmacist’s mates locate and rescue wounded from lower decks. The work would have been strenuous even if the ship hadn’t been maneuvering under heavy fire. Ladders were blown away throughout the ship, hatches jammed, and the threat of shrapnel, fire, and flood all-encompassing. Moving up and down from below to the boat deck, and then carrying the wounded back to fantail, was exhausting, even for a muscular sailor.

Tarrant had never felt closely attached to the ship. He was willful and not shy about meeting the gaze of those who had been raised not to like him. Even if the shipboard culture hadn’t been one of exclusion, it was usually hard for a man who had his own mind to feel part of the team. But now, moving around the ship tending to the San Francisco’s wounded, Tarrant found the alienation washing away. His ship dying. Everyone at risk. Common cause under a buffeting of explosions. A burning in the shoulder and legs, the clatter of a metal stretcher going up a ladder. Blood on his sleeves. The sound of a shipmate’s moaning.

“You move like you’re moving in a dream,” he said. “You’re trained to do this. And you reach a point where you’re going like a robot.” In the dark, on the quarterdeck, near the ruins of an antiaircraft mount