The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [132]
Throughout, he felt the hot breathing presence of history's proposition for a reporter, any true chronicler. The question is brought by Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, high priestess of knowledge, as she steps from the tall grove on Olympus with each hand cupped to you. In one is the grant of a long uninflected life, peace without pause to be looked back on. In the other lies the chance, issued only once per lifetime, to witness Waterloo from a spot within range of the guns. And in your most honest self, which would you choose? The oncoming shadow of the sea battle, not to mention the less-than-divine hand of Tepee Weepy, had done the choosing for him this time, in the shutdown of air traffic to the Philippines. Which hand of fate he would have chosen for himself, he was not perfectly sure. He prowled among the chatter of the teletypes vitally aware of having been spared one more time and conscientiously restless with not being out there when history pivoted on an obscure archipelago. In his reporter's vigil there was not even anyone to talk this over with, Cass back on track on the Edmonton run, Jake among the igloos, Jones scrambling to handle the office by himself. Alone with his insistent sense of something granted and something held back, he haunted the wire machines and drank coffee and waited for the next turn of the war.
It came on the fifth and last day of the Leyte Gulf battle, as the American victory became undeniable. With its fleet cut to pieces, the Japanese high command unveiled a fresh weapon. This lethal new contrivance would be launched more than three thousand times in the remaining months of the war, leaving carnage of an unprecedented kind when it struck, and even when it missed, it distributed terror into all who were anywhere in its way. It was called kamikaze—"divine wind," which in this instance meant fury aimed from heaven, consisting as it did of a sacrificial airplane with a bomb strapped under each wing and a pilot with glazed acceptance of a last mission. Its method was a suicide dive onto whatever American vessel it could find.
Slick with sweat from the heat and tension of that Pacific noon, the officer of the watch stood clutching the railing on the wing of the McCorkle's bridge, transfixed by the sight of the escort carrier St. Lo blowing up repeatedly in the near distance. His rational side of mind knew that each thunderous explosion was another of the Lo's bomb and torpedo storage compartments going up, but the spectacle of blast after equally fiery blast erupting through the flight deck was beyond reckoning. In equal disbelief, the executive officer next to him cursed methodically while trying to figure out how the Japs had unobtrusively struck a ship in the middle of a victorious fleet; no sonar trace of a submarine had been reported. The gunnery officer now yelled out from the bridge something about a plane, although the destroyer lookouts had not spotted any aircraft overhead before the carrier began blasting apart, and the exec hustled back inside, leaving the watch officer alone in his spellbound state. None of the past hundred and some hours were supposed to go anything like this; the Cork's role at Leyte was to have been grandly ceremonial, delivering MacArthur into the bay for the historic moment of his promised return to the Philippines.