Sweet Reason (8 page)

The
Ebersole
was an ancient mariner living on borrowed time and endless ingenuity. She was so old that Otto Rummler, the former German U-boat skipper who had sunk 200,000 tons of allied shipping in his day, was amazed she could still get from one place to another. “Mein gott,” he told Captain Jones at dinner one night, “no offenze intended but I sink zere is more vasser inside ze
Ebersole
zen outzide, ya.”

The
Ebersole
, DD722 in navy parlance, was named after Eugene F. Ebersole, an unremarkable ensign who graduated three hundred and forty-eighth in his class of 362 from the Naval Academy and went on to win the Congressional Medal of Honor by mistake. While commander of the U.S.S.
Snakefish
in waters off the Japanese mainland toward the end of the war, he fired a spread of torpedoes at a hulk on the horizon (which turned out to be smog) and then sent his famous transmission: “My fish frying fascists.” The
Japanese homed in on the radio transmission and blew the
Snakefish
to the surface with depth charges, at which point Ebersole radioed: “I shall surrender.” In Washington, a bright PR-minded admiral inserted the word “never” and sent the message off to the newspapers. The submarine was lost with all hands, but its young commander became an overnight hero. When the government came to naming the next destroyer that slid down the Staten Island ways, it decided to honor the late Eugene F. Ebersole.

Originally the
Ebersole
had been one of fifty-eight Allen M. Sumner class destroyers completed at the high tide of the Second World War. By the mid-1960s, sixteen of the original fifty-eight were still operational — fifteen of them as reserve training ships that stuck close to home ports spoon-feeding weekend warriors who were accumulating pension credits. Only the
Ebersole
still sailed with the fleet, a nostalgic piece of gray flotsam chugging along behind the atomic destroyers and supercarriers.

The
Ebersole
would never have ended up in the combat zone except for the fortunes of war and the slip of a pen. When the President ordered the air force to bomb the enemy, the navy — anxious to get into the act — promptly dispatched a squadron of destroyers from the Mediterranean to beef up the fleet on Yankee Station. The
Ebersole
, finally about to be assigned to the reserve training program, was ordered to fill the breach in the Mediterranean. A few months later two destroyers patrolling Yankee Station collided in a thick fog, forcing one of them to limp back to the states for structural repairs. In the Pentagon, a senior admiral who had quietly been relieved of his command at sea when it was discovered he regularly entertained teenage whores on his flagship, scanned the list of available replacements. Spotting an “E” for “engineering excellence” next to the
Ebersole
(put there by a careless
yeoman who thought he was writing in the DD732 column) the Admiral ordered DD722 to the war zone.

Captain J. P. Horatio Jones’s Curriculum Vitae

For Captain Jones, the assignment to join the fleet off the enemy coast came with a small unspoken postscript that said: “This is your Golden Opportunity.” At forty-seven Jones was an old skipper by destroyer standards, older than all but a handful of the other three stripers on the navy promotion lists, and precariously near the end of a plainly mediocre career. He had been passed over for promotion to the fourth stripe twice already; one more time and he would be on his way out of the service, headed for retirement in some colony of ex-sailors who cluttered their cottages with bottled ships and prints of British frigates under full sail.

Jones had started out in the navy as a seventeen-year-old seaman deuce, a wise-assed kid with a fair amount of drive and a flair for exaggeration. Putting both of these qualities to work, he had won a commission and threaded his way through the bureaucratic thicket of the postwar navy, not as rapidly as his contemporaries, but always in the nick of time. Jones was never what the selection boards thought of as a “comer”; he was more of a plodder, winning promotions and assignments by standing in line and waiting his turn. The navy carefully handed out a certain number of promotions to people like Jones so that the others like him would not lose heart and quit, leaving the navy with a plentiful supply of leaders but no followers.

Vietnam could change all that. A flashy performance, a
stroke of luck, even a well-turned phrase (something alliterative like “Sighted Sub Sunk Same”) that caught the eye of a headline writer could propel him to the front of the line. For J. P. Horatio Jones (the J.P. stood for Jerry Pierce, but Jones stuck to the initials on the outside chance someone would think it stood for John Paul; the Horatio was his father’s idea of a joke), war could mean a fourth stripe or even the scrambled eggs of an admiral on his cap.

A great deal, of course, depended on the
Ebersole
and the way it performed. Jones had reported aboard the
Ebersole
, his first command at sea and his first destroyer assignment, with something of a romantic’s notion of a destroyer as a swift, sure greyhound of the sea plunging recklessly into the waves at thirty-one knots toward harm’s way. Long after he discovered that the
Ebersole
was neither swift nor sure, Jones had been careful to present himself to his superiors as a can-do, “E”-eager captain. To this end he never washed his dirty linen in public. Since he had taken command there had been no courts-martial (all punishment was meted out at captain’s mast), no reports of racial friction on the ship, no indication that the sailors were smoking pot. (Once, during a fleet exercise off Norfolk, the Captain made a surprise visit to the Combat Information Center, a darkened compartment below the bridge level that houses the radar repeaters. As he crossed the threshold, Jones caught a whiff of the unmistakable odor of pot — and ignored it. But he was careful never to make surprise visits to any compartments after that. And since he never smelled pot again, he felt justified in assuming that there was none on board his ship.)

Above all Jones went to almost any lengths to make sure that the
Ebersole
met its operating obligations, even when the equipment necessary to meet those obligations wasn’t working. The
Ebersole
“vectored” aircraft in search patterns while the air search radar was under repair (the Captain
simply sent the planes out, counted to fifty and brought them back in again). In tandem with another destroyer, DD722 hunted target submarines off the Guantanamo, Cuba, naval base while the sonar was under repair (Jones took the other destroyer’s sonar contact, offset it a hundred yards and attacked the spot). She even got Electronic Counter Measure fixes on “enemy” surface ships while the ECM equipment was under repair (for this one the Captain had sneaked a look at the target ship’s operating orders and knew where it was supposed to be).

There were other little tricks of the trade that Jones had picked up from ambitious skippers during his naval career. The
Ebersole
, for instance, always underestimated the number and assortment of spare parts it had on board so it could get more
before
it had a need for them. At sea, Jones lied again when asked what he had on board so he wouldn’t have to share his spares with other destroyers that hadn’t laid in a stockpile.

From Captain Jones’s point of view, all of these efforts had paid off in an assignment to Yankee Station. “Proceeding at thirty-one knots,” he radioed his superiors — in an echo of Arleigh Burke’s famous up-and-at-’em cable announcing that his outnumbered, outgunned destroyers were racing to engage the Japanese battle fleet. The
Ebersole
rounded the Cape of Good Hope on two boilers (the other two were “down” for repairs) and made its radarless way (the antenna bearings had burned out) through the Indian Ocean to join Task Force 77 on Yankee Station. On arrival, the
Ebersole
refueled underway from the U.S.S.
Taluga
(which had a sign on the hull saying “We give green stamps”) and filled the munitions bins from the U.S.S.
Virgo
(which had a banner stretched across the superstructure proclaiming: “Welcome to the frontier of freedom”). Then Jones locked himself in his cabin for two hours trying to compose a suitable message to Admiral Haydens announcing
that the
Ebersole
stood ready to go to war. What he finally came up with was: “A hundred percent fuel, a hundred percent ammunition, a hundred percent eager to do what ship was built for and we were trained for — join battle and vanquish enemies of freedom and justice wherever they are. J. P. Horatio Jones, Commander, U.S.N.”

The first day on Yankee Station had gone unexpectedly well. Patrolling off the coast in the predawn darkness, the
Ebersole
had — according to Jones’s action report — been “attacked by a North Vietnamese patrol craft, which was sunk in the subsequent exchange of gunfire.” Later the
Ebersole
made a good stab at saving the downed pilot. Now if Jones could chalk up a few more successes his career would be assured. But everything depended on keeping the
Ebersole
on the firing line.

Jones Lays Down the Law

“Our country is depending on us to keep the
Ebersole
on the firing line, gentlemen,” Jones was saying to the department heads assembled in his cabin. “And that brings me right back to Sweet Reason again.” The Captain sat with his legs spread wide, leaning forward with his forearms resting on his thighs. “It’s one thing to have had equipment inoperative up to now; this is an old ship and on an old ship, no matter how many man-hours of preventive maintenance you put in, things break down. But from here on out, gentlemen” — Jones’s eyebrows shot up — “we have to be alert to the possibility that one or two misguided sailors may respond to Sweet Reason’s call to sabotage, eh? That’s why I called you together this afternoon. Henceforth, I want a full report from the department heads, in
writing, on every piece of equipment that breaks down. I want to know if the breakdown was suspicious, if anything has been tampered with, et cetera, et cetera. And I want the crew to know we’re checking; that way anybody tempted to follow Sweet Reason’s advice and tinker with a piece of equipment will think twice. Do I make myself clear, gentlemen?”

“Question, Captain?” said Lustig.

“Shoot.” Jones was all business.

“When is this effective? I mean, if I have something out at noon today, do you want a report on it?”

“Let’s say that anything not listed on last night’s eight o’clock report falls under this new order. Okay?”

Lustig looked sheepish. “Well, sir, I guess I’d better let you know about Mount Fifty-two then.”

“Mount Fifty-two? What’s the matter with Mount Fifty-two, eh?”

“It’s just out, sir,” Lustig said.

“Out how?” the Captain wanted to know. “What’s the matter with it?”

“The mount captain isn’t sure, Captain.”

“What are the symptoms, Mister Lustig?” Jones was trying to be patient.

“Well, actually, I’m not quite certain, Captain. At this stage all I can say for sure is that the mount is not working.”

“Who’s the mount captain?” asked Jones, exasperated.

“Keys Quinn, sir, Gunner’s mate first. He’s the one that’s been on the
Ebersole
since she was commissioned, so there’s no question of sabotage.”

“Get him up here, Mister Lustig. This is a good opportunity for me to show you gentlemen how I want these investigations conducted.”

“Now?” asked Lustig, the eyes in his round face widening.

“Now.”

Keys Quinn on the Carpet