see how men really acted while they were at sea. It might shatter their
illusions … or worse, confirm them.
And women sure as hell couldn’t be expected to strip to their underwear,
promise the COB to perform anatomically improbable acts, or bob for
apples at the center of a screaming, chanting mob of half-dressed men,
not with the current hypersensitivity to sexual harassment pervading the
service. There’d been serious discussion in Washington, he knew, about
holding some kind of alternate ceremony that included men and women,
with no hazing of the cherries and no indecent exposure, but in some
ways that would have been worse than cancelling the thing completely.
While silly, the ceremony served a serious purpose, binding the men
together, old hands and nuggets, in a fraternity of the sea older than
the navy in which they served. To substitute some watered-down
congratulations-and-welcome-to-the-club clap-trap would only insult the
guys who’d already been through it, and render the whole concept
meaningless.
So the ceremony was officially proscribed … and yet inevitably, some
of the men, at least, were going ahead with the initiations anyway. By
tradition, the ship’s captain–and by extension, a carrier’s
CAG–usually pretended ignorance of any Domain of Neptune proceedings.
Aboard Jefferson, the pretended secrecy had just become a bit more
true-to-life; the people involved in this could technically be brought
up on court-martial charges. In theory, the gathering on the 01 deck
could constitute a mutiny.
But they wanted him to attend, and he’d be damned if he’d let them down,
even if it meant he got tailhooked for it.
Tail-hooked. The expression had become widespread in the Navy after the
notorious Tail-hook scandal of 1991, when Navy aviators just home after
Desert Storm had gone ballistic at the Tail-hook Convention in Las
Vegas. The partying that year had been … spirited. Some of the
women present–including several Navy officers–had been made to run a
gauntlet in which they’d been groped, fondled, and undressed. Such
goings-on had typified other Tail-hook Conventions, but somehow, this
one had gotten out of hand.
The charges of sexual harassment and threatened lawsuits had rocked the
entire Navy establishment. Several careers had been wrecked in the
scandal’s aftermath, promotions for hundreds of junior officers had been
held up just on the possibility that they’d been involved, and the
rounds of male-female sensitivity training for all hands had begun in
deadly earnest. The term “tailhooked” had quickly come to mean any
potential scandal or hassle involving women and the Navy.
Tombstone couldn’t escape one glaring contradiction, though. If he
winked at breaking Navy regs here, even condoned it with his presence,
how could he object to sexual activity in defiance of those same
regulations?
The initiations were being held to bolster sagging morale. Which would
hurt worse, sex aboard ship, or draconian regulations forbidding sex
aboard ship?
There was no easy answer. “Women and salt water don’t mix” ran the
ancient maritime saw, and Tombstone was beginning to agree, Papa Charlie
or no Papa Charlie.
He returned to his typewriter, read what he’d already written to remind
himself of his place, then continued typing.
The COB was right. Having the ceremony, even if it was against regs,
would do the ship’s company a hell of a lot of good.
1745 hours
Aviators’ shower head, 0-2 deck forward
U.S.S. Thomas jefferson
“God damn it, Marge, watch where you’re putting your feet!”
PH2 Margolis clutched at a metal joist, then reached inside for a water
pipe, his head and shoulders already through the hole created by
removing one of the soundproofing tiles in the overhead. “Hey, man, get
outa my face! I’m no damned acrobat! Gimme a leg up.”
He felt Kirkpatrick’s hand steadying his left foot as he boosted himself
off the top step of the ladder. His head came up, whacking into the
pipe and eliciting a muffled curse.
“You okay up there?” Kirkpatrick asked.
“Yeah, yeah.” Margolis flattened himself out, looking around the narrow
crawl space. There wasn’t much room here, and most of that was taken up
with wiring and the water pipes feeding the shower. But there was room
enough, and the boards they’d already shoved up there took his weight