Bentz Plagemann - The Steel Cocoon

Again Williams could not answer.

"Go to the office," Bullitt said. "Tell Doctor Brainard that I'm ready ..."

And then, siren screaming, the ambulance came. Its driver, a hospital corpsman, came on board with a stretcher, and he and Williams lifted Bullitt into it, in the hammock strait jacket, and carried their burden, the monstrous papoose, across the gangway.

A chief pharmacist's mate stood waiting at the rear of the ambulance, beside the open door. He was an old Navy hand, healthy and relaxed, with a bland, sun-bronzed face; a stable, unemotional man, but when he saw the figure on the stretcher he started, and came forward. "My God, it's Bullitt," he said. "Put him down, boys."

They lowered the stretcher to the ground, and the chief knelt beside him. "Alex," he said, putting one hand on the canvas covering Bullitt's shoulder, "it's Dick. Dick Macy. What the hell have they done to you, boy?"

Bullitt stared up at him with vacant, senseless eyes. "They won't give me my orders," he said. "Go to the office. Tell Doctor Brainard I'm ready, but they won't give me my orders."

"It's Dick Macy, Alex," Chief Macy said. "Pull yourself together." He gave the bound shoulder a little shake. "Don't you remember old Dick, boy?"

Bullitt stared up at him and an expression of anger came over his tormented face. His eyes blazed again, and he struggled to rise. "I tell you, they can't get away with it," he said. "Go get Doctor Brainard! Tell him that one of them has burned my orders!"

"Easy, boy." Chief Macy said, holding him back. "Easy does it, boy." He stood up, and nodded his head, and Williams and the ambulance driver raised the stretcher, with Bullitt shouting again, and slid it into the ambulance.

When they had closed the door, and the driver had gone around to the front. Chief Macy took out a package of cigarettes. He offered one to Williams and took one for himself, and lighted a match for both. He shook his head. "It gets some," he said. "The life, you know. And to think," he went on, shaking his head again, "that at one time they said he was the finest medical chief in the Navy. It's a good thing that old Brainard isn't here to see him now,"

"Where is he?" Williams asked, holding his cigarette to his lips with a trembling hand.

"Why, he's dead, boy," Chief Macy said, with surprise, as if he should have known. "He was killed beside me, when a shell hit our station. I went with him, you know, instead of—" and he stopped and nodded his head toward the closed ambulance. Then he began to shake his head again. "Doc Brainard used to say that the hardest thing he ever did in his life was take Bullitt's name off that draft. I still remember the way he looked the day he sat at his desk and did it. 'Macy,' he said. 'Some men never grow up. This is where we have to separate the men from the boys.'"

Chief Macy flicked his cigarette to the ground and trod on it, deliberately, mechanically. He turned away with a slight gesture of his shoulders, of dismissal or acceptance. "Well, it gets some," he said, swinging up into the ambulance.

Williams went back on board when the ambulance had gone, and McNulty found him on the fantail, leaning against the racked depth charges in the shadows, so that no one would see him when he cried.

"Come on, Doc," McNulty said, putting his heavy, friendly hand on his shoulder. "We got to face up to it, Doc. It's done. We can't undo it. We got to face up to it."

Williams did not turn. It was years since he had cried, and he couldn't stop now until the crying had finished itself.

McNulty's hand was still on Williams' shoulder. "I could hate you for it, Doc," he said. "You wouldn't listen to me when I knew you were wrong, but you did what you thought you had to do, and I guess you can't ask more of a man than that. So I can't hate you. Doc. We're in this together, and we got to see it through. We got to win this damn war."

Williams still wept. He could see in his mind's eye the face of Stud Clancy, illumined with the wonder of dying, and he could see the haunted, broken face of Chief Bullitt, and he wondered if the time would ever come when, behind his closed eyes, he would be able to see anything else at all.

Chapter 11

Williams went to the cabinet where he had stored the box of religious articles, and Doctor Claremont examined the rosaries and prayer books with surprise. "But how do we go about it?" he asked.

"I can go to Red Sullivan," Williams said. "I don't think there is anything about a destroyer that he doesn't know something about."

Doctor Claremont replaced the religious articles in the box. "I will leave it all up to you two," he said.

Williams went on with the work he had been doing: sewing the last of his new rating badges on the sleeve of a white jumper. For, in the end, it had been Williams himself who was assigned to take over in Chief Bullitt's place. They had reached the bottom of the barrel, indeed. At this point in the war there were simply not enough chiefs to go around.

In keeping with his new position, Williams had been advanced to pharmacist's mate first class. In all probability he wasn't equal to his job, but this troubled him no longer. The explosion on deck had been the dreaded test for him; he had discovered in that moment, when he took in the scene, that a part of his mind had mercifully and automatically shut itself away, as if a switch had been pulled, and he had been conscious only of the need for action, as he had always hoped and prayed he might be.

They had sent him an assistant, too. He was just a boy, Fred Barton, fresh from Hospital Corps School, with a month or so of experience in a hospital ward. McNulty had brought Barton to him on the dock in Norfolk; he had said, "Here's your boy. Doc," and for a moment Williams couldn't respond because he was so forcibly reminded of that day when he himself had been brought to Bullitt on the same dock. Fred Barton had swung his sea bag down from his shoulder. He had a cigar held firmly, preposterously in the corner of his boy's mouth, and he removed this and smiled and held out his hand, a confident boy, too young, too untried to be fearful or reflective about his duties. And Williams smiled too, and took the offered hand. So now he had his boy. They would have him be a sailor, whether he wanted to or not.

There was an adequate new cook in the galley, and two young seamen had been sent from the Naval Operating Base to replace Clancy and Harris. But of the whole lot of replacements, Captain Thompson had drawn the best: Peter Griswold, his new first lieutenant, was a proud, strong young man, who held his head as Captain Thompson did, and who had even been the boxer of his class at Annapolis, just as the captain had been in his day. In his satisfaction and pleasure with his new officer, Captain Thompson even had Stewart Brown restored to his old position of messenger and captain's boy —the new Stewart Brown, who finally understood what this honor meant.