Neil looked at the sunken face of his friend and saw no sense of triumph.
“We… ah… we’ve won?” Neil asked, feeling feeble and foolish.
“If we’ve won, it’s the way the Morison has won…” He looked dismally around the room.
For a third time Neil walked over to look out the shattered porthole. Outside he saw the Coast Guard launch begin its turn to sweep back out the channel in its systematic patrolling of the inlet.
“I’ve been ordered to report for duty,” he announced with his back still to Greg.
“Here?” Greg asked, astounded.
“No. To report somewhere. All men are supposed to report.”
“How’d you happen to end up here?”
Turning around to face him Neil gave a brief account of his voyage on Vagabond.
“And you’re all leaving her for here?” Greg asked in a low, sad voice.
Neil shrugged. “The law—” he began.
“Neil, I told you,” Greg said, leaning painfully back in his chair and almost glaring at Neil. “This has become a war of individual initiative and…”—he grimaced and groaned once—“and the enemy,” he continued, “the sole enemy… is death.”
“And the U.S. Navy?” Neil asked softly.
Greg slumped forward again.
“Wrong war,” he replied in a low voice.
After Neil had left Captain Bonnville, he searched out the infirmary and drug dispensary. There he found a sailor kneeling in front of two open drawers and a clutter of bottles and little cardboard cartons strewn around him on the floor. When the sailor looked up at him, Neil saw that he was stoned. He was probably searching for some sort of dope—morphine or codeine or barbituates, judging from the dull look in his eyes. Slowly a look of bewilderment made its way onto the young sailor’s round face as Neil stood stiffly over him, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt.
“All right, sailor,” Neil said firmly. “I don’t have to ask what you’re doing here, but I want you to find me any antibiotics that are still around.”
The small, weary-looking young man, his face pale and his eyes bloodshot, hesitated, still in confusion.
“I’m Captain Loken, sailor,” Neil barked in the traditional manner. “And I gave you an order.”
“Aye… aye, sir,” the sailor finally replied, wobbling to his feet. “Uh… antibiotics don’t work against radiation sickness.”
“I know.”
“Nothing works.”
“I know. Find them.”
The man stared around the room and then walked over to the opposite wall and began going through drawers. Neil came up beside him and began searching also. Eventually he found two vials containing liquid penicillin and a bottle labeled Tetracyclin with a hundred capsules. He located two syringes in a glass cabinet. The sailor was now staring dreamily into an empty drawer.
“Is there still morphine available, sailor?” Neil asked loudly.
The man lazily shook his head and smiled. Neil made a further search for pain-killers, found a small amount of codeine, and left.
He decided that since weapons had been officially removed from the Morison, his only hope was to search the petty officers’ quarters. There he encountered, in the four separate staterooms, one corpse, two dying men, and two men listening lugubriously to a newscast. He asked them about weapons, but they stared back at him as if he were mad, or they were stoned. In the last stateroom, empty of its occupants, he discovered in a bureau drawer a nine-millimeter pistol—the official Navy sidearm—and a half-full box of ammunition. From this same room he also stole a bottle of aspirin, matches, razor blades, suntan lotion, and a small cache of cocaine. When he found himself tempted to steal Kleenex, he felt he was becoming a kleptomaniac and hastily left.
Later, as he was leaving the dockyard, Neil ran into the petty officer who had originally heard his story.
“Well, Mr. Loken, are you going to join us?” he asked.
Neil hesitated only a moment. “It doesn’t look that way,” he replied. “It appears I’ve been given… an independent command.”
And he left.
At ten p.m. that evening, after he had filled out forms, had been given a perfunctory physical exam by a corpsman, and been issued a uniform, Jim and other recruits of the last three days were rounded up and marched to the Rialto movie theater. There about one hundred and fifty new soldiers, some without uniforms, stood at attention between the rows of seats, most of them sweating profusely in the stuffy theater, no longer cooled by air conditioning. Jim stood at the right rear, uncomfortable, resentful, curious. For fifteen minutes the men were kept standing like this. Finally a major marched out onto the stage in front of them.
“At ease, men,” he shouted down at them, and a great groan broke from the group as the soldiers relaxed, many of them collapsing into their seats. The relaxed hubbub lasted for less than five seconds.
“Atten-shun!” the major unexpectedly bellowed.
Surprised and confused, the men struggled back up to attention, a few, not hearing the new command, having to be urged up by those around them.
“At ease, men,” the major shouted at them after less than twenty seconds.
This time the relaxation was much less pronounced; most of the men remained standing, looking at the major suspiciously, not talking among themselves this time as they had before. Jim himself stood exactly as he had been when he was supposedly standing at attention, staring up at the major with resentment. About twenty seconds passed this time, then thirty, and a few of the men began to whisper to each other, one or two to sit down.
“Atten-shun!” the major bellowed a third time, and again the men responded, many sullenly, until the noncoms spread out around the auditorium began to enforce the major’s command.
“All right!” the major shouted, pacing off to the left of the platform, his compact body moving with suppressed power, his dark face and neatly trimmed mustache accentuating his smartness and correctness compared to the ragtag bunch of men in front of him. He glared down at his audience.
“You’ve just demonstrated the single most important attribute of a soldier: obedience. I don’t give a fuck if you don’t know your right foot from your left foot, an antitank gun from a .22, or a platoon from a spittoon, but if you know how to obey, you’ll make one hell of a soldier.”
He paused and paced back over to the center of the stage.
“In this war, especially with the losses we’ve already sustained here on the mainland, it’s absolutely necessary that everyone pull together, that we all work to get the country back on its feet again. And the only way that can happen is for the President to point, the officers to lead, and the rest of you to fall into line…”
The major wiped sweat from his brow, but his bushy eyebrows and trim mustache still kept glistening under the row of bright lights.
“The Russians haven’t landed yet,” he went on in a loud voice that seemed just on the verge of cracking from the effort. “We hope they never will, but there are already enemies loose in this country, and it’s our job to stop them. The enemy is anyone who thinks they know better than the President, anyone who selfishly puts his own interests above those of the whole nation. It’s the Army’s job to keep our country functioning, keep the food, medical, and military supplies flowing. Your officers will determine how this can best be done, and then you and they will do it.
“And I don’t want any of you assholes to try thinking you know better than your officers. There’s only one right way to do things in the Army, and that’s the way you’re ordered to do them… And don’t you forget it…”