Sentinels of Fire by P. T. Deutermann Read Free Book Online Page A

our people being asleep at the switch. The Japs are becoming desperate. They fly to Okinawa and see over a thousand ships and amphibious craft. Fifteen hundred, if we can believe our own newsreels. That’s more ships than they ever had in their navy. Today they probably have maybe a half-dozen ships of any consequence left and no fuel to run them, which is why they now have pilots willing to crash their planes into anything that’s American, haze gray, and under way.”
    He stopped for a moment and rubbed his eyes. “I’m tired,” he said. “Everyone’s tired. When we ran with the big-deck carriers and the Japs came, we were one of twenty escorts shooting their asses down. We’ve been in on landings before. We do call-for-fire missions, the Marines or the Army take care of the bloodwork ashore, and then we’re off to the next shitty little island. This distant picket duty is different. We’ve never been the targets before. It’s always been the big boys, the carriers, the battlewagons, but now the Japs have figured out that they have to get by us to even reach the juicy targets.”
    â€œPeople are scared, too,” Mario Campofino, the chief engineer, said. “It was one thing to be part of a whole fleet, but this…”
    â€œIf it’s any comfort,” the captain said, “I’m scared, too. Man’d be a fool not to be scared. But we’re the khaki—we have to set the example. It’s only human to be scared of what might happen, like the LCS disappearing like that. On the other hand, we’re not exactly helpless. We’ve got six five-inch, eight forty-millimeter, and ten twenty-millimeter barrels going for us. Our job as the wardroom is to remind the crew of that and then to do everything possible to keep our people sharp and all those guns loaded and ready to fight back. Okay?”
    There were nods all around. We recognized the pep talk for what it was, but I thought it was worth doing. I continuously tried to prop people up as I made my daily rounds, inspecting the messdecks and berthing spaces, and sometimes just talking to the men. They needed reassuring, as I did from time to time. I closeted alone with the captain at least twice daily to talk problems and solutions. I would vent my frustrations with our precarious position up here all alone, and he would tell me that we could handle it. Only lately I’d been wondering: Who reassured him? The answer was pretty simple: No one.
    The sound-powered phone under the captain’s end of the table squealed. The captain picked it up and listened, then told it okay. “The morning CAP is up,” he announced. “So now we have some top cover. Go get ’em.”
    I followed the captain back into his inport cabin just forward of the wardroom mess. The space measured nine feet wide by fifteen long, growing narrower as one faced the bow. It had its own tiny bathroom, or head, at the forward end, a desk and bureau set at the after end, and two portholes, which were currently bolted shut. There was a fake-leather couch along the inboard wall that converted into a pullout single bed. I sat on the couch; the captain took the armchair in front of his desk and let out a long sigh.
    â€œYou feeling okay, sir?” I asked.
    The captain shook his head. “Actually, no,” he said. “I’m sick about what happened to that LCS. I keep thinking we could have done something, even though I know we couldn’t. All those people, gone in a flash. And for what? Some Jap pilot dies a ‘glorious’ death, but it makes no goddamned difference at all as to how this mess is going to come out. They know it, too. They have to know it. What is the matter with those people?”
    I felt the same way. Sick was a good word for it. I wanted to recite the litany of reasons that there was nothing Malloy could have done, but the captain already knew all that. As to the Japanese,