“That is no excuse,” Wessel decided. “You should have had one with you when you reported aboard here.”
We were still on land, of course, but Wessel had already caught the navy way. We half-expected him to sentence Botts to fifty lashes. He did put him on report, which meant two afternoons with the awkward squad that had to do half an hour of extra drilling during the recreation period.
“Ah doan hardly think that’s fai-er, Mr. Weasel,” Botts protested. The way he talked it was impossible to tell whether that was a sarcastic pun on Wessel’s name or just a beautiful coincidence. Probably it was just accidental, for the chances are Botts was too simple a man to invent so ingenious an insult. A day before, hearing that writing had been my civilian profession, he had said, “We got one of them fellas in my town. Sleeps all day an’ stays up all night an’ is always comin’ in for aspirin. Fella by the name o’ Fo’kner.” Anyway, whether it was dialect or inspiration, Botts’ name for our nemesis supplanted all the others. From then on I never heard him called anything else but Weasel.
Right up to the last day of his temporary command, Weasel ran us ragged. He even put me on the awkward squad for mislaying one of my textbooks. When I had to go up to him and confess my crime, he said, “What do you mean, your Watch Officers’ Guide is lost? You mean it’s adrift.” On another occasion Finnegan, who was not our neatest officer, came to muster with one shirttail not quite tucked in behind. “You’ve got an Irish pennant,” Weasel admonished him. Finnegan thought his racial stock was being insulted, but it turned out this was just navy for any loose end. Day after day, Weasel drove us crazy with that salty stuff. He caught Cosgrove saying, “I’m going upstairs,” one time and made him come to attention and repeat “I’m going topside” twenty-five times.
But Weasel’s behavior all during his command was human compared to his conduct the Saturday morning of the first captain’s inspection. The commander of the company judged most exemplary was to become Battalion Commander for the following week and Weasel coveted that post feverishly. At our own company inspection at muster, a kind of dress rehearsal, Weasel fumed and fussed over us like the Prussian drill instructor to whom he was related in spirit. He detected a speck of dirt on several white hat covers and ordered the offenders to fall out and dust them with face powder or chalk. Poor Botts, a military man by Act of Congress but not of God, had turned up with a khaki hat cover when the uniform of the day called for white. Weasel gave him a tongue-lashing that would have been worthy of Admiral Halsey. Botts was put on report, which meant he would automatically be deprived of his first week-end liberty. Botts, Wrong-foot Botts, we called him affectionately, had become a sort of company mascot and terrible threats of revenge were muttered through our ranks. Someone was promising to beat the Weasel to a pulp after the war if he had to track him down halfway around the world. Botts was swearing that if he ever got on the same vessel with Weasel he would push him overboard at night.
Before we marched over to the main drill field where the Commandant of the school and his staff officers were waiting to review us, Weasel gave us a real fighting man’s pep talk. We were going over to do or die this morning for the honor of Company A. Weasel expected every man to be on his toes. Weasel had every confidence that we would be the smartest company on the field. Napoleon before Austerlitz couldn’t have addressed his men with greater challenge.
We came up onto the main field with Weasel strutting out in front like a college-band drum major. We were a pretty smart-looking outfit at that, for a bunch of last week’s civilians. But as our turn came to turn and pass the reviewing party, we were supposed to execute a left flank so the whole company could pass in two long lines. The first two platoons did a flank turn to perfection, but the third platoon, led by Finnegan, executed a column turn instead. Even if you never knew or have forgotten your close-order drill, you can probably imagine what a blow this would be to the military career of our first Student Commander. When Company C won the accolade, Weasel looked as if he had lost the big war all by himself instead of just this little Saturday-morning one.
We never knew for sure whether or not Finnegan’s boner was an accidental or intentional thrust at Weasel’s military ambitions, but whichever it was, it settled our first Student Commander’s military star, at least there at the training school.
On Monday we had a new Student Commander, the ex-Chief, Flanders, who knew how to keep us in line without treading on our toes. By the end of that second week we were so absorbed with blinker, the names of the seven different mooring lines, the semaphore alphabet and the relative hauling power of whip-and-runner and jigger tackle, that we had neither time nor energy to hate Mr. Weasel in the manner to which he had become accustomed. By the end of the third week his name wasn’t even mentioned any more. He was around, marching in the ranks with the rest of us, hitting the deck at 0600, standing watches and attending classes, but as Commander Weasel, the scourge of the company, he wasn’t there at all. The only hangover left from our original indignation was the continuance of the silent treatment. It wasn’t an active thing any longer, just a habit we had gotten into that first week and habits are hard to break when they become imbedded in a group like ours.
Near the end of the course I was sprawled out on the bunk next to Wessel’s struggling over a navigation problem that included a double-running fix I was the last man in the class to master. Weasel was sitting on the edge of his sack and after a while he began looking over my shoulder. When he saw where I was making my mistake, he pointed it out to me. I thanked him and he moved in and worked out the rest of the problem for me. That saved me about half an hour at a time when I needed every minute I could get to cram for the final exams. Weasel knew his navigation, all right. No one else was as fast at plane recognition or receiving blinker, either. We talked a while after he brought my hypothetical ship into port. I didn’t encourage him much, but it didn’t take much. After all, man’s a social animal who can starve for conversation just as he can for bread. I felt a little sorry for Weasel now, so I threw him a few crumbs of conversation.
I guess that was the first time anybody had talked to Weasel in the two months we had been there. We talked about Topic A, of course, what kind of orders we hoped to get when the course was finished. Each of us had been given forms to fill out that day indicating our choice of sea and shore jobs. They didn’t promise to send us where we wanted to go, of course, but the Commandant had said our preferences would be “a guide to the final decisions.” The jobs and types of vessels we listed were probably as good a guide to our characters as you could find. Flanders told us he had picked PT’s. He liked small boats and after those two hitches he wanted to be his own boss. Gersh wanted to skipper a landing craft in European waters. He wanted a personal crack at Der Führer. I hoped to be assigned to Air Intelligence, one of those fellows on the carrier who gets the fliers’ stories when they come in. Finnegan said it didn’t matter what he put down. He had things all greased before he came in to be a four-striper’s aide. Almost every job in the navy seemed to appeal to somebody—except that of Armed Guard. The Armed Guard officer was the one who commanded the navy gun crew on merchant ships. That job was on everybody’s s-list. For one thing it was the merchant ships that were still catching it heaviest that season. They seemed to be losing one or two somewhere almost every day. And then there was all that friction between the navy and the merchant marine, another one of those wars within wars. There were the usual rumors of feuding and fighting between navy guncrew commanders and the merchant skippers. Someone said an Armed Guard ensign had gone to Portsmouth for life for murdering a merchant four-striper who had made his life hell all the way to Oran. All of us thought about Armed Guard the way Russians must think of their Arctic forced labor camps.
So I told Weasel about my ambition to get on an LV or an LCV in the Atlantic (I wound up on a stinking submarine tender in the Pacific) and he told me he had put in for personnel work on a battleship. “I like that sixteen-inch armor plate
on those BB’s,” he laughed. I thought this sounded a trifle cautious for an old sea dog like Weasel but I didn’t say anything. I had already exchanged more words with Weasel than our entire company combined and I didn’t want to overdo it.
On the day before the graduation exercises our orders came through. We were in the barracks, after coming back from the classrooms where our final academic standings had been posted. Flanders, the acknowledged leader now, had placed first, the high-school mathematics teacher second and Weasel third. When we opened our orders, there were little whoops of triumph and little cries of defeat. Flanders was going to have his PT and Gersh was going to an anti-submarine school outside of Miami. I was supposed to report to the Potomac River Naval Command, apparently to write PRO stuff for the Bureau of Yards and Docks in Washington, exactly what I had hoped to avoid. Then there were the usual service foul-ups. Larrabee, a civilian radio engineer, had been short-circuited to a personnel job, and Finnegan, whose scientific knowledge did not extend beyond his ability to describe the ingredients of blended whiskey, had been assigned to a radar school at Harvard. Foster, a rich boy from the Cape who had been sailing all his life and who had joined the navy through an old-fashioned love of the sea, was assigned to an ordnance depot in Norman, Oklahoma.
But when I looked at Weasel, I saw the worst defeat of all. He was sitting on his bunk, staring at his orders. All the color had gone out of his face. I thought he was going to cry.
“What did you get, Wessel?”
He ran his hand over his forehead twice before he said it. It was hard for him to make the words come out. “Armed—Guard.”
It got around the barracks the way a thing like that would. In less than a minute, Finnegan, Cosgrove and the other leaders of the fun were crowding around him. Botts was there, too, and the others who had had to take it from him in the beginning. It was as if they had all discovered Weasel again. For two months he had been practically forgotten, but now, in these last moments before we scattered literally to the seven seas, it all came back to us again, the ordeal of that double-time run back to the fort, the needlessly intricate drills, the sweaty hours we had spent on the awkward squad, the face of the Weasel as he shouted his commands at us. …
“Armed Guard,” Finnegan said and he shook his head in mock-tragedy. “Well, good-bye, Weasel, it was nice knowing you.”
“Did you read about that merchant ship that went down in the Gulf last week?” Cosgrove asked the crowd. “Damn sharks ate the entire personnel.”
“Remember, Weasel, we expect you to live up to the highest traditions of the Navy,” Flanders said. “Keep those guns blazing until you go down into the drink.”
“Maybe you should have some last words handy,” Gersh suggested. “Something that will go down in naval history like ‘Don’t Give up the Ship or ‘We Have Not Yet Begun to Fight.’ ”
“Ah hear those dirty old merchant marine skippers eat navy ensigns for breakfast,” Botts drawled.
Weasel looked out at us from behind his white, stricken face. “Get away from me, you dirty bastards. Get away from me!”
His shame was public now. We had all seen the moisture in his eyes. By evening Finnegan was leading his quartet in one of those spontaneous little songs that sweep a barracks.
Armed Guard—Armed Guard!
Weasel takes it very hard.
He came in salty as he could be,
But when it came to going to sea—
He’d rather send you, and he’d rather send me.
The taunts continued after taps again. A bass voice in the darkness offering “Rocked in the Cradle of the Deep” or Finnegan coming up with “To Commander Weasel, the Navy Cross—posthumous” was all the stimulus we needed for prolonged laughter. But no imperious commands to “knock it off” came from Weasel’s sack now. I could see him lying on his back, mute and miserable. It almost seemed as if you could smell the fear oozing out of him as from an infected wound. Once I thought I heard a muffled sob, but I couldn’t say for sure.
I didn’t think anything more about Weasel until three or four months later when I went up to the BuPers office in the Navy Building to see what I could do about getting out of that PRO job. There he was, at a desk near the railing. When he saw me he smiled and came right over and wanted to shake hands. He was looking a lot happier than when I had seen him last.
“Hello there, mate.” He smiled invitingly. “How’s the navy treating you?”
“Four oh,” I said, shoveling it back to him. “How long you been up here?”
“I got myself yanked out of that Armed Guard school after five days. I knew a three-striper from home up here.”
“I thought you’d be a thousand miles out to sea by this time,” I said, thinking of the time he had made me say adrift when my Watch Officers’ Guide was lost.
“Well, a man might as well go where he can do the most good,” he said. “After all, I was a CPA for six years. Paper work is my job. I can probably do more for the war effort right here than on a stinking merchant ship.”
“And live longer too,” I agreed.
“The Navy doesn’t need any heroes,” Weasel said. “It needs men who can do their jobs where they’re best suited.”
I looked at the papers on his desk. They seemed to be requests from officers for transfers from their present stations. They’d come to someone like Weasel for processing.
“I suppose you get quite a few requests for transfer from Armed Guard,” I said.
“Anything I can do for you, just say the word,” Weasel answered. “I got a pretty good in with the Old Man here. Might be able to expedite something for you.”
“Weasel,” I said, “the only expediting I’d like to see is your transference to a fighting ship that’s going into action. I’m not like you, Weasel,” I said. “I hate war. And one of the things I hate most about it is you and your kind of expediting.”
There. I had said it. It is vitamin pills for the soul to make a speech like that. Weasel turned a little pale—but not as pale as he had turned when he got those original orders to Armed Guard—and went over to his desk and sat down with his papers.
I didn’t see him again until after VJ Day, when I was back from the Pacific and had gone up to the Bureau of Supplies and Accounts to get my pay accounts straightened out. There was Weasel, at another desk. He was a Lieutenant Commander now, and his left side was covered with ribbons, the Victory, the American Theater, the Asiatic Theater, the Navy Commendation, and two different kinds for marksmanship.
He came over when he saw me and greeted me like an old shipmate. And of course he offered to expedite the endorsing of my orders and the back per-diem pay that was due me. There was quite a line in front of me and I was all hopped up inside to see the wife and kids for the first time in two years so I stifled what was left of my character after twenty months on that damned tender, behind the battle lines but under direct fire from mosquitoes, heat and boredom.
While we were waiting for the girl to bring my checks up, Weasel told me a little about his war. He had been up in the Aleutians, after the Japs had been driven off, and out to Pearl after the war had moved on and he had spent four months in Rio, for some reason. “Boy, the muchachas down there!” he said with a touch of the continental he had acquired on his travels. The captain in charge of the office here was going to set up a private investment house in New York after his discharge and Weasel was going along as his assistant. It had been a pretty good war for Weasel all right.
It was almost three years before I bumped into Weasel again. It’s seeing him again that has brought this whole thing back to me. I was down in Washington on a writing assignment the other day and I decided to drop in and say hello to Flanders whom I had seen a good deal of in the Pacific and who had stayed with the Navy on a regular commission. So I was on my way up the main stairs of the Navy Building when Weasel was coming down. He was in a plain gray business suit and did not look much like the Captain Bligh of the training school or the be-rib
boned expediter of the Battle of Washington. The only way you could have spotted him for an ex-military man was from the miniature commendation ribbon in his buttonhole.
“Hello, mate,” he said. “You here for the same reason I am?”
“I don’t know—what are you here for?”
“I’m going back to active duty. I’ll be a three-striper this time, boy.”
Then he looked at me gravely and I saw the face I had first seen on the drill field of the training school, the little Napoleon, the leader of men, the man of action.
“Looks like we’re getting ready for another one.” He pressed his lips together into a hard line. “We’ve got to build the biggest, strongest navy in the world. I think every one of us navy veterans ought to come back in and start pulling his weight in the boat.”
“Weasel,” I said, “I guess the difference between you and me is that you’re just a natural-born military man.”
I could see him back in that training school, double-timing another batch of flabby civilians.
“But you’ve got to be patriotic,” he said, a little on the defensive.
“Sure, patriotic,” I said. But how could I tell him all the different colors and flavors and subtle variations of patriotism—all the way from shameless self-aggrandizement through the normal sense of self-protection to messianic self-sacrifice? How do you say those things to a little man like Weasel, ready with warlike exhortations and drill-instructor discipline to fight the war from desk to desk and from shore station to shore station, to the last rubber stamp, to the final endorsement?