Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [71]
Charles shielded his eyes as a new Japanese searchlight stabbed the ship. He snapped another belt into place and hammered at it for a bit, then felt a strong hand on his shoulder. “Better go, Charlie. It’s all over. Finished.”
“What about you?” he asked Standish. “You going with me?”
As Charles remembered it, the portly gunny grinned. “I’d never make it,” he said. “Go, now. Swim away before you’re pulled under.”
Charles could see an orange life raft hanging over the nearly awash starboard rail, half in the water. To port, men were leaping straight down into the sea and paddling hard away from the ship and its expected undertow. In the aviation hangars aft of the quarterdeck, fires were everywhere. Acrid smoke wafted upward from Turret Two. Flames were grabbing at the base of the foremast.
When Charles looked up, Commander Maher was there, having come down from the gunnery officer’s booth in the foretop. Maher urged Sergeant Standish down, nodding to the ladder. Charles joined the plea. “Come on, Sarge,” he said. “You and me, we’ll make it.” He saw land beneath the twinkling heavenly fixture of the Southern Cross, which he had taken note of earlier—in another life, it seemed. “It isn’t very far to that island.”
But Standish couldn’t swim. He shook his head and said calmly, “Goodbye, Charlie.”
The ship shuddered again, and with that Howard Charles grabbed the rungs of the ladder and started down the foremast. He wrote:
Down I went past the bridge and the conning tower, decks strewn with bodies and crooked steel lit up like day in the searchlights. Past a groaning man with one leg torn off, the stump forming a black-red pool. Over the lifeless shapes, an arm, a hand, my shoes slipping on slime and defecation. Through smells of fried flesh and hair, like odors of animal hides scorched by branding irons.
Choking on his own vomit, he continued, “feeling direction, sensing purpose, body moving as if propelled by someone else.” The hangar fires backlit a slaughterhouse on the quarterdeck. Japanese destroyers and patrol boats were close by on all sides. “Muzzle bursts were blinking under searchlights, and out of the darkness came the red streaks arcing in across the starboard side, ripping into bodies caught on the lifelines,” Charles would write.
He had it in his mind to look for a friend, Howard Corsberg, who he knew couldn’t swim. As he was crossing the quarterdeck aft, a torpedo hit on the starboard side, sending a wave of seawater over the deck and washing Charles against the seaplane catapult tower. Hanging on to it, the hard taste of oil filling in his mouth, he thought, Is this the way it is? Is this the way you go?
The wave drained away and Charles saw an enemy ship nearby, its gun crew stitching tracers into the Houston. He felt anger rising in his belly. Then he settled into a place beyond raw emotions, a place of detachment, the self at arm’s length, as if he were floating through the ordeal. He would wonder later if it was a form of trauma, and would feel the urge to study it. He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled to the port side, where things seemed a little less dangerous. As the seaplane hangar behind him exploded and flames licked at the back of his shirt, he found another buddy in the Marine detachment, Sgt. Joe Lusk, standing there.
Lusk was leaning his tall frame against a line, smoking a cigarette. He tossed the butt overboard and asked, “You ready?” The younger Marine said he was, though the voice he heard coming out of his mouth sounded like a stranger’s. “You gotta get off here, Charlie,” Lusk said, then flung himself over the port rail, landing in the black water with a large splash. Charles followed him.
“I could feel the heat of the roaring inferno on my back as I tightened the straps of my lifejacket searching the sky for the Southern Cross,” Charles said. “I reached out and grabbed a lifeline. No matter what happened, I would