He’d bunked with the navigator, Wayne Newell, an NROTC graduate from the West Coast whom he’d known vaguely at nuclear power school. Steel remembered how different the Academy graduates initially found the NROTC types. Ben had always been a good athlete at Annapolis, and he and many of his friends remained frustrated jocks the first few years out of school. It was an Academy disease. The college-trained officers joined in, but their spirit wasn’t the same. The touch-football games weren’t as competitive with the non-Academy officers, nor was the basketball. They hadn’t been instilled with four years of intramurals and simply didn’t take such things as seriously.
On the other hand, Newell had been a company commander at Berkeley and was one of those who became dead serious about that. He wore his uniforms like a second skin. His neat appearance seemed chiseled from granite. Ben Steel’s rough-hewn John Wayne countenance had been a little too raw for that; in that regard, he was the antithesis of the Academy-groomed officer.
Newell had been forgotten after nuclear power school, except for the times Steel had noticed his orders in the Navy Times. Then their paths crossed on Stonewall Jackson. The bunk in Newell’s stateroom had just been vacated. Steel moved in, and they’d gradually grown on each other. It had been a polite relationship during their first patrol, with casual conversations during those few cherished spare moments when they were crowded in the tiny space together. It began with reminiscences of their midshipmen days and comparisons of the differences — Annapolis versus radical California campus — and Steel could laugh now when he realized how stuffy he and his Academy friends had been, about those “outsiders.”
It was their wives who had established a closer relationship. Judy Bennett, as the captain’s wife, hosted monthly teas for the wardroom wives, and the two junior women gravitated to each other naturally. Unlike so many of the others — Navy-oriented women who had met their husbands at Academy dances and married them as fresh-caught ensigns — neither Connie Steel nor Myra Newell were able to identify with the Navy at first. Since neither one had ever spoken that insider’s language, they found pleasure in their own unfamiliarity with this new environment.
Myra Newell had met her husband-to-be at Berkeley. Answering the age-old question of how they’d met each other the first time grew funnier over the years. NROTC was not popular on that campus. The midshipmen drilled on the practice fields because the athletes found them more acceptable than the liberal element that controlled much of the rest of the campus.
Myra was a part-time secretary in the athletic department, working her way through the university. She was the brightest student who had graduated from her tiny northern California high school and the first to be accepted at Berkeley. But she had never had a social life in her hometown because she’d been helping to support her family since the age of fourteen. When the quiet girl with the conservative upbringing appeared in Berkeley, she realized immediately that there was no way she could survive in the free-swinging atmosphere of her more liberal peers. The decision to accept a job in the athletic department was a logical one for her. It was even more natural to be fascinated with the men in the handsome uniforms who were drilling nearby.
Wayne Newell had seen the girl before. She was cute, and she was one of the only females who bothered to watch his company drill, at least without carrying a sign demanding that the military get off campus. The maneuvers he ordered were simple — the company marched to the left, to the right, to the rear — and before she was quite aware of how it had happened, he had brought them to a halt and he was standing beside her.
“How would you like to be the color girl at our ball?” He gave orders for right face, at ease, and called out to his company, “How about it? Does she fit the description?”
They cheered.
She turned a deep shade of red.
“Then it’s settled. You’ve been honored. What do you say?”
She looked up at him for the first time. “I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life.”
But she went to the ball — and fell in love with Wayne Newell.
It was the kind of story that Connie Steel loved. It was out of the storybooks, a true romance, and so different from the others that followed a predictable path either after graduation or shortly after the intense concentration on winning the submariners’ dolphins.
Ben Steel had met Connie the night the officers from his first boat were celebrating his new dolphins at the officers’ club. She was with a shore-based officer who’d become hopelessly drunk, and she was calling a taxi when Ben overheard her on the phone. “Please.” His hand covered the mouthpiece. “Cancel it. If I don’t have a date to take home, there’s no way I can leave this party early, and my friends are going to get me very drunk.”
“What’s the party for, Lieutenant?” She held the phone tightly, suspicious, lonely, and unsure of her answer.
“New dolphins … special honor, special party.”
“Who’s won the dolphins?” For some reason which she later realized was absolutely irrational, she trusted the submariners much more than the men ashore. Somehow they gave the impression of being a lot more serious. She later learned that ended with working hours.
Steel brightened. “Me.” He pointed to the shiny gold dolphins on his chest. “And it would really mean everything to me if you accepted, I hate hangovers … and I really would like to meet you. Honestly, my intentions are honorable … at least they are now.” He grinned, taking his hand off the mouthpiece.
“Cancel the taxi,” she murmured into the phone. “All right,” she said, placing it back on the hook and nodding in the direction of the private room where the party was going on, “but I insist on a formal introduction before I go into that madhouse with you.” She held out her hand. “I’m Connie.”
It wasn’t quite as romantic as the Newells’ introduction — maybe the movies had overdone that approach — but it was different. The two women became fast friends as soon as Stonewall Jackson left on the next patrol. Two months at sea was an eternity for a wife on shore.
The Newells and the Steels remained friends for their entire tour, the men more so because they worked together and it was convenient, the women because they too often shared a unique loneliness. It was a relationship that was pleasant while they were all together, but there was nothing to bind it permanently when they left for new commands. Connie wrote to Myra often that first year, and was disappointed when the responses grew more rare, until Ben assured her that it was more likely Wayne Newell’s attitude. Both men instinctively understood that Newell had little interest in maintaining relationships. He was friendly enough, respected others for their capabilities, and returned favors, but his job was his life. He preferred to maintain a polite distance. Eventually Connie understood, just as she gradually accepted other oddities concerning the Navy and its people.
Over the years, the two women remained casual friends-by-mail, until their husbands ended up commanding attack submarines homeported at Pearl Harbor. They found the ten years hadn’t hurt the enjoyment they found in each other’s company when Manchester and Pasadena were at sea.
The relationship that was to last from the days on Stonewall Jackson was between Ben Steel and his commanding officer, Mark Bennett. It was nurtured by the women because their husbands’ respect for each other sustained itself through the years. It grew until the younger man commanded Manchester and was chosen by his mentor, who had become the most senior submariner in the Navy, to battle an unknown enemy.