I opened it up, prying the door with some force to break the rusty hinges. Inside were my old uniforms in total disarray and covered with oil. Letters from my wife in a box were covered with mold, and the ink no longer was legible from being submerged in salt water for so long. My rank insignia, medals, the last trophy I had won in the ship’s shooting team, and most of the very few trinkets we were allowed to bring aboard ship were right where I had left them, except they had been carelessly flipped over, then flipped back.
I spent the better part of an hour going through my old things, trying to find something to salvage, but there was nothing that was worth anything to me except for the medals and the trophy. Most of the contents were barely recognizable, let alone usable. On cue, the chief produced a bag from his tool box to put my effects in and asked if there was anything else I wanted to see while I was there.
“Yes there is, chief. I need to go to the armory.”
And so we wound our way through the darkened passages of the dead ship up and down several decks in a way I wouldn’t have gone before. The chief explained that, due to the damage to the ship, several passageways were no longer accessible the way they used to be. Some of the bulkheads and hatches were moved to facilitate the installation of the patches that were keeping the ship afloat, particularly on the port side.
I couldn’t help but think of the attack, when I made my run down the port side of the ship, ordering as many of the crew as I could to abandon ship.
On the way, we passed the turret where Ensign Flaherty was last seen by Lieutenant Lewis. I stopped briefly to look in but did not enter it.
Eventually we arrived in the armory. The heavy security door had been removed and was nowhere to be found. Back in the aft part of the room, I found what I was looking for: another small locker used for storing the officer’s sidearms. Captain Bode didn’t allow me to carry my sidearm in those days, and I had no reason to. We were at peace. The sidearm I currently carried was a replacement issued to me after the attack. With patience and practice, I had fine tuned it to shoot nearly as well as the one I was currently looking for.
The chief had a little more trouble with the door to this locker than he did with my own locker, but soon enough, we were inside. The handguns inside had all been spilled off of their racks when the ship rolled over and were in a pile in the bottom of the locker. I kept mine separate in its own box, which I found after a brief search. I wiped the nameplate off with the sleeve of my coveralls and read “LCDR Jacob Williams.”
“Lieutenant commander to captain in this time? That’s a pretty good advancement, sir,” the chief said. I just simply nodded in reply and opened the box.
I knew from the condition of the other guns in the locker what I would find. My prize-winning Colt forty-five had rusted solid. Only the pearl grips remained intact, and with a little bit of effort, they began to shine through the grime. My name, which had been engraved in the slide, along with the designs that had surrounded it, had all but rusted off.
Susan had been so very furious when she found out how much money I had spent having this gun engraved like that. And parts of it were even plated with gold. I’d spent nearly a whole paycheck as a lieutenant junior grade on it, even during the great depression. She didn’t talk to me for nearly a week.
But then I sat there in the darkness under a flashlight held by the chief, turning it over and over in my hand while it cast an eerie shadow on the floor. I was thinking of my wife and kids at home, of the way this ship used to be, and her crew members, both dead and alive. When was the last time I walked with Susan in the park where I asked her to marry me? When was the last time I rocked one of my children to sleep? When was the last time I actually enjoyed a sunset from the deck of a ship at sea? When was the last time I actually enjoyed just being an officer in the navy?
As my attention finally turned back to the Oklahoma, I realized everything there was a mere shadow of what it used to be, almost as if stuck passing half of the way between existence in this world into some sort of ghostly nonexistence. And the shadows of the way the ship currently was began to grow in my mind, while the images in my mind of what the Oklahoma used to be dimmed and became engulfed totally by the shadows and were no more.
The ghosts of the crew had left.
I put my rusted gun in the bag provided by the chief, breathed a heavy sigh, and said to him “Let’s go.” We worked our way upwards until we came out of a hatch on the main deck, very near where I was when Chief Fitzgerald got killed. When I reached the top deck, I stood there and paused for awhile, looking back and forth across the deck, feeling somehow dazed and empty.
“What are you looking for, captain?” the chief suddenly asked.
“What am I looking for?” I said out loud, having been startled by the suddenness of his question. “What do you mean?”
“What are you looking for, captain?” he repeated, looking straight back at me.
A little bit startled again by the unexpectedness of the question, plus feeling a very deep stinging sensation stirring in my soul from the question, I replied, “Why do you ask, chief?”
“Well, I’ve seen hundreds of crewmembers from the Oklahoma come back to this ship, and with an almost desperate expression, look around here for something, but none of them ever leave with anything more than what you have in that bag. And yet somehow, after telling me their story, they seem to feel better. It kind of makes me wonder if what you really came here looking for isn’t here on the Oklahoma but instead has been following you all along.”
“Explain yourself, chief,” I said, losing a little patience with him. In those days it was rare, if not outright unacceptable, for an enlisted man to question any officer in this fashion, let alone a captain. Yet, there was something about him; I found I could not resist this old sailor’s questioning. And the question itself seemed to be burning deep within me.
“Well, captain, you had to know what the oil and warm salt water would do to this ship and all of its contents. And you also had to have known there is nothing here of any tangible value to anyone anymore. There is nothing here on board except large piles of junk, and even the ship itself is nothing but scrap metal. So there is no sensible reason why you should have come back here, and yet, here you are, sir. Like so many of your shipmates before you.”
I gave the chief a long, questioning look.
Unflinching, he continued, “There is no more explanation for it, sir. Except to ask you, what are you looking for, captain?”
I had plenty of duties as the skipper of the Buffalo, which were no doubt falling behind as I spent more time there. But somehow, standing there between the third and fourth turret of the Oklahoma, I felt I had to tell the chief about the attack. I went through the whole thing, exactly as I remembered, and told him every little detail. As I told him, we walked again through the same parts of the ship I had gone through during the attack. I held nothing back from the time of the meeting in the wardroom until I stepped off the ship into the harbor and showed him exactly where everything happened, including where and how Joe Fitzgerald died.
Then I told him everything about being in the water and getting picked up by the boat while the attack still raged on around us. I also told him about the dispensary and the wounded coming in, the bomb in the courtyard, and the pretty nurse who was kind enough to put my stitches back in. And then there was the heroic run the Nevada made, and failed at, and the plight of the crew of the California as she sank, still tied to her berth and engulfed in burning fuel oil from the other battleships in the row.