The Best of Me - Nicholas Sparks [72]
At the enlistment office, they had this recruiting poster on the wall. For the Navy. Man the Guns, it said. It showed a shirtless seaman loading a shell, and something about it just spoke to me. I can do that, I thought to myself, so I walked over to the Navy desk, not the Army’s, and signed up right there. When I got home, Clara cried for hours. Then she made me promise to come back to her. And I promised her I would.
I went through basic training and ordinance school. Then, in November 1943, I got posted to the USS Johnston, a destroyer out in the Pacific. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that being in the Navy was less dangerous than being in the Army or the marines. Or less terrifying. You’re at the mercy of the ship, not your own wits, because if the ship went down, you died. If you went overboard, you died, because none of the convoys would risk stopping to rescue you. You can’t run, you can’t hide, and the idea that you have no control at all just gets into your head and it sticks there. In my time in the Navy, I was never so scared in my life. Bombs and smoke everywhere, fires on the deck. Meanwhile, the guns are booming and the noise is like nothing you’ve ever heard. Thunder times ten, maybe, but that doesn’t describe it. In the big battles, Japanese Zeros strafed the deck continually, the shots ricocheting all over the place. While this is going on, you’re supposed to keep doing your job, like nothing unusual is happening.
In October 1944, we were cruising near Samar, getting ready to help lead the invasion of the Philippines. We had thirteen ships in our group, which sounds like a lot, but aside from the carrier, it was mainly destroyers and escorts, so we didn’t have much firepower. And then, on the horizon, we saw what seemed like the entire Japanese fleet coming toward us. Four battleships, eight cruisers, eleven destroyers, hell-bent on sending us to the bottom of the sea. I heard later that someone said we were like David against Goliath, except we didn’t even have a slingshot. And that’s about right. Our guns couldn’t even reach them when they opened fire. So what do we do? Knowing we didn’t stand a chance? We engaged. The Battle of Leyte Gulf, they call it now. Went straight for them. We were the first ship to start firing, the first to launch smoke and torpedoes, and we took on both a cruiser and a battleship. Did a lot of damage, too. But because we were out front, we were the first to go dead in the water. A pair of enemy cruisers closed in and began firing, and then we went down. There were 327 men on board, and 186 men, some of them close friends, died that day. I was one of the 141 that made it out alive.
I’ll bet you’re wondering why I’m telling you this—you’re probably thinking I’m drifting again—so I might as well get to it. On the raft, with this big battle raging all around us, I realized that I wasn’t afraid anymore. All of a sudden, I knew I’d be okay because I knew that Clara and I weren’t done yet, and this feeling of peace just came over me. You can call it shell shock if you want, but I know what I know, and right there, under an exploding sky filled with gun smoke, I remembered our anniversary from a couple of years ago and I started singing “For Me and My Gal,” just like Clara and I did on the car ride home from Raleigh. Just boomed it out at the top of my lungs, like I didn’t have a care in the world, because I knew that somehow Clara could hear me, and she’d understand that there was no reason to worry. I’d made her a promise, you see. And nothing, not even going down in the Pacific, was enough to stop me from keeping it.
Crazy, I know. But like I said, I got rescued. I got reassigned to a crew ship and hauled marines to Iwo Jima the next spring. Next thing I knew, the war was over and I was home. I didn’t talk about the war when I got back. I couldn’t. Not a single word. It was just too painful and Clara understood that, so little