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By Root 1994 0

Tarrant heard: “Help me.” Dimly he saw a figure slumped in the mount’s steel trainer’s seat. He grasped the man’s shoulder in order to assess his wounds, and the shoulder and the arm, all of it, came off in his hand. A spray of warm blood splashed across his face and spread down the front of his shirt. He reacted as all medics were trained. He made a fist. He stuck it into the hole above the armpit. With the bleeding stanched, the pharmacist’s mate went to work wadding and wrapping the wound. “I dreamed about that for nights and days and years.”

Elsewhere on the ship, Leonard Roy Harmon was helping a pharmacist’s mate named Lynford Bondsteel. Harmon’s numerous small acts of duty and mercy included pulling the unconscious navigator Rae Arison out of the puddle in which he lay, saving him from an unlikely drowning. Harmon had comforted the executive officer Crouter as he lay dying in his stateroom. He took him out into the passageway and stayed by his side as he passed. Harmon was on the well deck, heading with Bondsteel to the aid station in the hangar, when a burst of tracers began snapping into the bulkheads around them. Harmon interposed, pushing Bondsteel down so hard he almost fell down a ladder as he himself was engulfed by the swarm. Tarrant would find Harmon later, unconscious with a wound in his head. He spoke to his friend, urging him to fight. “Harmon suffered for quite a while before finally letting go. It seemed to me to last forever.” Tarrant found another friend from the wardroom mess, Charles Jackson, on the deck near the officer’s galley, his abdomen opened by a blast. Herbert Madison, too, Tarrant’s partner during countless sparring matches on the quarterdeck, with a body so beautifully chiseled and heroic, was dead but without a cut on his body, slain by shock.

There were many men to tend to, of all rates and races and regions, but never did one of them say to Tarrant, “Take your hands off me. I don’t want to be saved by your kind.” Men like the Georgia boys in the Monssen who couldn’t be understood over the battle telephones, or the aggressively unsuperstitious backwoods souls on the Fletcher who had laughed at the ill omens of so many thirteens—not one of them ever called Tarrant the name that would have been routine for the times under ordinary circumstances. “They’d look at me and they’d thank me,” Tarrant said. “Some of them, while they were dying, were delirious. They called me ‘mother,’ or ‘brother,’ or something like that. They’d say, ‘Hold me mommy,’ and I’d hold them. We all bleed, we all grieve, we love, we hate, we do all the things that any other human being does. We all learned that, and it really applied, on that night.”

THE CHALLENGE FOR VESSELS in the rear of the American and Japanese lines, the last to make contact, was to make sense of the chaos that churned the seas in front of them and to do something useful in confused close combat. “I am reluctant to compare what happened next to a land battle,” wrote Julian Becton, the exec of the destroyer Aaron Ward, “yet in this case the confused drive of our ships right into the middle of the Japanese formation did somewhat resemble the charge immortalized by Tennyson. Every American ship took the bit and raced at Admiral Abe’s forces. We were in among them before they knew what was happening, firing every gun that would bear, launching torpedoes port and starboard.”

From the bridge of the Amatsukaze, just a few hundred yards away, Captain Hara saw the Yudachi ahead, guns blazing, cutting in front of the Americans and nearly colliding bow-to-bow with the Aaron Ward, which was following the Juneau, and leading the four rear destroyers. The second U.S. tin can, the Barton, had to reverse her engines to avoid colliding with the Aaron Ward from astern. Less than a minute had passed when, with the Barton lagging about a thousand yards off the Aaron Ward’s starboard quarter, two Long Lances struck the Barton, producing a monstrous explosion and an incandescent ball of fire. In the Aaron Ward, Bob Hagen had a close-up view. Commander Wylie, the