Neptune's Inferno_ The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal - James D. Hornfischer [214]
And so the Juneau’s survivors bided their time. Addled by fatigue and exposure, some of them let go of the raft and swam below to search their ship’s passageways for something dry to eat. They quarreled and contended with sharks. One of these survivors, George Sullivan, paddled around calling out for his four brothers, long gone. The oldest and highest-ranked Sullivan must have felt he had let his little brothers down. For his other shipmates, suffering the agonies of brine-swollen tongues, sunburned shoulders, bloated limbs, delirium, and the predations of sharks, he did what he could. When George found some survivors who were unrecognizably fouled in bunker oil, he swiped the faces with gobs of toilet paper, looking for the familiar facial features of his kin beneath layers of drying fuel.
Allen Heyn, on the raft with Sullivan, fought to overcome a powerful impulse to swim to the ship that he thought he sensed hovering below. He recovered in time to save another man from this delirium. Heyn held on to him for a time, long enough for the man to give up all struggles. He was preparing to surrender the deceased man to the sea when he found himself standing athwart the fierce resolve of the Irishman from Waterloo, Iowa. “You can’t do that,” Sullivan said. “It’s against all regulations of the Navy. You can’t bury a man at sea without having official orders from some captain or somebody like that.”
These words were spoken with the unshakable certitude of a scrambled mind. Heyn was considering his argument, holding on to the corpse, half on the raft and half in the sea, when a shadow moved below the surface; the dead man lurched and one of his legs was carried away, ending the argument. George Sullivan was left on the cusp of uncharted oblivion, still calling for his brothers, his fevers and delusions a merciful sedative to grief. That night, four days after his ship had been turned to particles, he left the company of his shipmates. Stripping off his clothes, he said he was going to take a bath, then floated away, paddling to the place where another deep shadow rose, mercifully ending the nightmare.
EARLY ON THE MORNING of November 15, four transports arrived at Espiritu Santo with wounded sailors and marines from Guadalcanal. One of the transports, the President Jackson, carried seven seriously burned men from the San Francisco who did not survive the trip. Admiral Turner’s McCawley was among this newly arrived group, too. Shortly after his arrival, he sent an aide to summon the acting commander of the San Francisco. Lieutenant Commander Schonland took the Helena’s motor whaleboat to the McCawley and was met at the gangway by Turner’s flag lieutenant, who promptly told Schonland that his superior wanted to see not him, but the officer who was on the San Francisco’s bridge during the battle. The boat returned to the cruiser and came back with McCandless, who met with Turner and tendered his report.
The San Francisco continued to Nouméa, where Admiral Halsey came aboard to inspect the damage and give tribute to his men. Schonland met him at the top of the gangway. The damage-control officer must have recovered some of the pride he had lost after Kelly Turner’s rebuff when Halsey gripped him by the shoulders and said, “Men like you, Schonland, are going to win this war.”
Chick Morris, the young officer from the Helena, went into Nouméa town, “a quaint place, small and very French, but to us it was a metropolis,” he wrote. “We did the shops, where under the Cross of Lorraine, the insignia of the Free French Government, you could buy almost anything American.