Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [70]
Jim Gee climbed up the ladder out of the magazine, took a long drink of surprisingly cold, fresh water from a scuttlebutt that had no business working, and started wading forward through water that got deeper with every step. “We were going to go up and see if there was something that we could do to help someone because a lot of people were in trouble.”
“It looked like high noon on the boat deck,” Bill Weissinger said. He recalled watching a Japanese destroyer off the ship’s starboard beam. “I went through the steam that was pouring out of an engine room vent to the port side of the boat deck. With the bright beams of the searchlight filtering through the cloud of steam, which was drifting aft on a light breeze, the scene that met my eyes had an eerie quality about it. I had a fleeting impression that I was on a strange ship. What I was looking at was unrecognizable to me. Everything was in disarray.” Weissinger removed his shoes, laid them side by side on the deck, and jumped overboard.
Leaving the forward powder magazine and heading topside toward his abandon ship station, Otto Schwarz was knocked unconscious by a great blast. He awoke in a grayed-out landscape of smoke, unsure of where he was. Feeling his way around the bulkhead, unshirted and wearing khaki pants, he found a rifle rack and realized he was in the Marine compartment. He finally reached the quarterdeck, then ran forward to the forecastle. “When I got there it was just like the Fourth of July,” he said. “The Japanese ships were out there in a semicircle. You could see their searchlights and muzzle flashes and all.” Tracers whipping all around him, he ran to the life jacket locker but found it was on fire. He went farther forward, where other sailors were milling, unsure what to do with an abandon ship order in effect but with the ship still making way at about ten knots, to Schwarz’s eye. He was running back aft when a series of explosions buffeted him, knocking him to the deck. Looking up, he could see the night air filled with debris, metal chunks, and flotsam, burning and falling toward him, a red-hot rain of steel. Out of nowhere a sailor wearing a life jacket jumped on top of Schwarz.
People pass through our lives fleetingly, touch us once, and go. The sailor, a seaman first class named Raleigh Barrett, touched Schwarz’s life meaningfully at that moment. “All of a sudden this guy jumped on top of me, and he had a life jacket on. So he absorbed the shrapnel that was falling down that would have hit me, and I had no clothing on at all, just a pair of marine khaki pants,” Schwarz said. “So he jumps on top of me, then rolls off. I never saw him after that. He didn’t survive.”
By one o’clock in the morning, few if any of the crew remained on deck. Even the men in the forward engine room had managed to get off the ship. But the machine-gunners in the tops lived in a separate world. On the foremast machine-gun platform, Howard Charles had been so intent in guiding the snaking curve of his .50-caliber tracers into the bright searchlight beams snapping on and off around him that he was surprised to find himself contemplating an unexpected silence and a vague, ringing memory of a bugle call below. As he knelt to pull another ammo belt from the metal locker at his feet, he took stock of his surroundings. He was alone