Bentz Plagemann - The Steel Cocoon

and pails would send the young victim running, to nurse his grievance, and his hatred for Bullitt, alone. "Homesick," Bullitt would say. "Sympathy would only make it worse."

And when they had all gone, the real pleasure of the day began for Chief Bullitt, behind the closed door. There was the daily form to be made out, the beautiful official report, on which all the ills that flesh is heir to were set down with a number which corresponded to a diagnosis in the Diagnostic Nomenclature of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. Every complaint, no matter how nebulous, had to be fitted in somehow. And when the form was complete, neat and shipshape, Williams was sent off with it for Doctor Claremont's signature. Doctor Claremont, brooding alone in the wardroom, would examine the report in silence. He rarely spoke to Williams during this daily exchange. He was courteous and non-military, but completely indifferent to Williams as a person, as he was to everyone else about him.

Afterward,' Williams would take the signed form to Captain Thompson's cabin. The captain had it on his desk then, the relentless statement of the crew's condition. Did a man say he felt too ill to stand watch? Look for his name on the list. It would be there if he had been able to produce a temperature of one hundred or more. Ninety-nine point five would not do. Let him be silent and stand watch until next sick call, at noon, or at eight in the evening.

"After more than nineteen years in the Navy," Bullitt said to Williams, "just when I'm about ready to go home covered with glory, what happens? They give me a war, and they give me you to work with! If we had a soda fountain on board you might be of some use turning out banana splits. But in the sick bay! Get your book down," he would say. "Break out the scales. It may kill you, or it may kill me, but I'll teach you what I can."

Rule: Normal blood clots in three to five minutes. Arterial blood is bright red; venous, dark.

"And if a shell hits the deck, and a man lies there torn apart, what will you do, swoon? Or have the vapors?"

Rule: Do not cease artificial respiration for at least two hours.

"Would you believe it, sometimes we get so far out to sea we can't even call an ambulance!"

Shortly before lunch Chief Bullitt would leave the sick bay to go back to the chief's quarters, worn out, as he said, by the effort of trying to pull Williams up by his bootstraps. Williams would be relieved to see him go, but he told himself, as he had told himself over and over again in the Navy, that the issues at stake were too large to allow for any personal feelings. Someday, God willing, the war would be over, and if he was alive he would go home again. Meanwhile he must try hard to do his chosen job in the best way he could.

When he was quite certain that Bullitt had gone, Williams would open the top half of the sick-bay door to the more cheerful world outside. On the deck the work went ahead loudly and with good humor. The sun shone. The smell of good, strong coffee filled the ship, coming from open hatches which led to the engine rooms below, coming from the gun mounts, and even from the boatswain's locker. And the ship moved forward through the sea, sighing, rising and falling gently from side to side with a kind of ancient majesty, as if it had a soul and a character and instincts of its own.

A pharmacist's mate is a sailor to his shipmates only by courtesy. He is not required to know anything about knots or lines or navigation; he does not have to swab decks or chip paint. In time of war he is not even required to stand watch. These regulations set Williams apart from the others whether he liked it or not. In the Navy hospitals and dispensaries where he had been on duty before, he had not felt set apart: he had swabbed latrines and carried bedpans along with everyone else. But it was a very different thing now to be a lone pharmacist's mate among sailors on a destroyer.

The ship's company of the Ajax had been salted by the Bureau of Personnel with old hands. About one third of the crew were men who had survived Pearl Harbor, Guadalcanal or the lava Sea; men like Radioman Kerensky, Boatswain's Mate McNulty, Chief Wins-low, Lieutenant Palazzo. Many of them were even legally men, having successfully passed the age of twenty-one; Boats McNulty himself was all of twenty-three. These were magnificent figures indeed, men of expansive humor and appetites, capable of great, warm condescension for younger men of their own sort who had come into the Navy as they had, on the deck. Tyler Williams was so unsuccessful a sailor that he could not even think of the Ajax as "she." To him the Ajax was a boat, and he was a working passenger, tolerated, without proprietary rights. But from the open door of the sick bay, as the ship sailed on toward the Bay of Argentia, off Newfoundland, to the first practice rendezvous in its shakedown cruise, he watched with growing curiosity and wonder the relationships of the other men.

Every old hand on the Ajax had his "boy." It was a satisfying relationship to the man and to the boy —the sort of relationship men fall into when their lives are lived apart from women. It must not be assumed that there was anything unnatural in it. It was merely a normal expression of the need of all men for love of one another. Strong men have a need to love, protect and guide someone younger or more vulnerable than themselves, just as younger men need a guide and a model for their behavior. Simple, uncomplicated men found it much easier to give and receive this rough affection than did less spontaneous men, such as Tyler Williams.

Even Captain Thompson had his boy, a young towheaded seaman named Stewart Brown. At eighteen Brown was so clean, so healthy, so vital that sometimes in the early morning it was rather difficult for any older man to look at him.

Captain Thompson was essentially an uncomplicated man. He was a powerfully built, sturdy man, who had been the best boxer in his class at Annapolis. He had a pretty young wife ashore; her smiling picture stood in his cabin above his desk. He had two small daughters but no son. The members of the crew watched silently and with some concern when at sea his affection turned toward Brown.

It was Brown who stood messenger watch when the captain was on the bridge. In idle moments they talked together, the captain passing on to Brown the lore of the sea which is best passed on in this way. It was a satisfaction to see the look of quiet and amused affection that lighted the captain's eyes when Brown was on hand.

But the crew feared that Brown did not appreciate the subtleties of the relationship. In his pride at having been singled out, he might go too far to demonstrate his privilege, and, while the captain was amused by his impertinence and by the casual way he sometimes addressed him, he would be amused only to a certain point. The crew wanted Brown to rise to the captain's regard and appreciate its value. They could not and would not spell it out for him, but, if he failed, the whole ship would be poorer for his failure.

In the meantime, in those early days in 1942, Williams watched other, more successful relationships being established.

The strongest man of the crew was Boatswain's Mate First Class James McNulty. He had been born in city slums; he grew up in the gutter, a good street fighter, a rebel. But hke all men he longed for order and purpose in his life, and when he found it in the Navy his devotion to that life was complete.

Although he was only twenty-three years old, McNulty had been in the Navy almost six years. He was absolutely immaculate in his personal habits. His fitted dungarees were tailored for him in a shop in Norfolk, and, like his blue work shirts, they had been faded by salt spray and softened by repeated washing to a --">