Sailors Delight

PART I

Chapter 1:  Land Ho!

A salty breeze fluttered their black neckerchiefs.  It ruffled their pant legs and threatened to blow the white hats off their heads.  The sun rose and burned the mist off the surface of the sea—revealing the jagged contours of Diamond Head Crater on the horizon.

Sailors hooted at the sight of land.

They stood in a ceremonial formation, spread out in single file along the ship’s rails—a custom when entering Pearl Harbor.

“Land ho,” Christopher Marlow whispered.

The men to his right and left, he’d never seen before, their skin white from working below.  They’d not seen the sun since leaving San Francisco eight weeks earlier.

But Christopher worked on the flight deck every day.  His face and shoulders tanned to a leather-brown while washing aircraft in the sun.  His fingertips still tingled from handling steel tie-down chains in subzero winds on the Bering Sea.  At twenty, Christopher had been a deckhand aboard the Enterprise for three years.  And he’d been carrying chains, drums of aircraft cleaner, dragging fuel hoses and electrical power cords across the flat black steel as it pitched and rolled on oceans around the world.  All that and strong-backing bombs under jet wings had roughened his hands, broadened his shoulders.

Christopher’s polished shoes, his white jumper and a Dixie cup hat crimped over his freshly trimmed crew cut made him look squared away, but the truth was he felt like shit.  Doctors had been jerking him around.  He thought about the times he’d sat on an examination table at sick call with a corpsman looking at him with disinterest.  Christopher pointing to his tan muscular chest, near his heart, saying, “I finished the vial of pills you guys gave me last time but it still hurts, right here.”

They never looked him in the eyes; just held a pen in one hand and his medical record in the other, invented a new way to write the same diagnosis:  “Changed patient’s meds, ordered back to work on full duty.”  They scribbled nonsense hieroglyphics and moved on to the next ill sailor in the long line at sick call.  And Chris added another vial of antacids, muscle relaxers or painkillers to the pharmaceutical collection in his locker.

He took a deep breath of fresh sea air and the tension eased as he spied the green mountains looming over the white hotels on Waikiki.

*   *   *

Seagulls rode the breeze, flapping their wings, swooping and cawing.  Beams of sunlight penetrated the dark green depths, slanting through kelp and seaweed.  A steady hush from the ship’s keel crushing water, pushing it aside as it cut like a knife through the breakers close to land.  And then white sand surfacing through the dark green and now transparent blue water.  Land!  He’d not seen it in eight weeks.  Vibrant green palm trees—so green they burned a sailor’s retinas—leaned lazily in the Pacific Ocean breeze.  All the sailors standing along the edge of the flight deck blinked at the brightness, and on the black backs of their eyelids they saw green ghosts shaped like palm fronds.

And now a stiff breeze came across the deck and dozens of white hats took flight to leeward.  Many men put their hands on their heads and felt their hair.  Surprised looks appeared on their faces as their hats twirled and spun on the breeze and fell eighty feet to the water where the mighty ship plowed them under its frothy white spume.

“Attench hut!” a voice snapped from the deckedge loudspeakers.  A line of marines standing on the bow and sailors along the ship’s rails snapped to attention.  Tugboats came alongside.  On the water’s surface, cement memorials like floating tombstones appeared.  Chris read the old battleship names painted in neat navy blue letters, USS California, USS Tennessee, USS West Virginia, USS Maryland, USS Oklahoma, and USS Nevada.  These marked the ships sunk on Battleship Row when the Japanese attacked Pearl back in December of 1941.