“You’re relieved,” Forte said to the duty bugler.
The other man nodded and left the pilothouse. There would be just time enough for him to go below for coffee and a cigarette. General Quarters, sounded half an hour before dawn and dusk at sea, would bring him running again to his battle station on the bridge. It was during the twilight of sunrise and sunset that the ship was most vulnerable; in that gray interval, a submerged enemy could make out a ship’s silhouette before its lookouts could detect the feathery wake of a periscope, and most ships sent to the bottom by torpedoes were lost during those two perilous periods of the day.
For the next quarter of an hour, Gwillam Forte stood at the rear of the pilot house, lulled by the hypnotic pitch of the ship, as its bow rose and fell with stately majesty, like a dowager queen acknowledging the cheers of her subjects. Like all watch-standers at sea, Forte had mastered the art of sleeping standing up, with his eyes wide open, even when the sun was high in the sky. Such sleep is neither sound nor refreshing, but so long as nobody spoke to him or made any abrupt movement within his range of vision, he could remain in this state of suspended animation indefinitely. Aside from the steady swish of the windshield wipers and the faint whistle of the wind through the rigging, no sound disturbed his semiconsciousness until he heard the door to the captain’s cabin behind him open and a mild voice say: “Good morning, gentlemen.”
“Good morning, sir,” the OOD replied for all.
“I’ll take the conn, Mr. Matthews.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” the officer of the deck replied, vacating the high chair and saluting.
“Anything to report?” The captain, a gaunt figure in his beribboned blue jacket with the four gold stripes on his cuffs, climbed into the chair and adjusted his binoculars. He slowly scanned the foamy seas.
“Nothing since I brought in the submarine fix from CincPac at 0230, sir.”
“Our position?”
“Twenty-six degrees twelve minutes north, 128 degrees thirty-eight minutes east, sir,” the OOD replied, glancing at the log. “Our course is 122 degrees, speed eleven knots, zigzag pattern x-ray. All ships on station.”
“Weather?”
“Low overcast, breaking up in the north. Wind from the north-northeast at twelve knots. Moderate seas. Forecast is for light rain before noon, sir.”
“Very well . . . Sound General Quarters.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” The OOD nodded to the boatswain’s mate, already at the squawk box. “Sound General Quarters!”
The boatswain’s pipe shrilled twice, then he cried into the microphone: “General Quarters! General Quarters! All hands man your battle stations!” He stepped back, and Gwillam Forte, his left hand depressing the microphone lever, blasted out General Quarters on his bugle.
Before the last note died in the air, the decks reverberated with the pounding of feet as the ship’s company dashed for their action stations, pulling on their clothes while scrambling up ladders and forward on the port side, down ladders and aft on the starboard side, to minimize confusion and collisions on the crowded and slippery decks of the still-blacked-out ship. Within three minutes all guns and lookout stations were manned and ready. The destroyers flanking the Texas in diamond formation would likewise now be at General Quarters, sonar operators on the alert for the sound of submarine propellers, weather-deck lookouts and others topside with their eyes probing the sullen skies for signs of enemy aircraft. Gwillam Forte, his duty done, eased back into the shadows and resumed his wakeful slumber.
It seemed to Gwillam Forte that only seconds later he heard the shout: “Aircraft off the starboard bow!”
The captain’s head snapped around.
A kamikaze had emerged from the low clouds and was boring in on the ship. It was no more than half a mile away, and the ship’s antiaircraft guns were already filling the sky with flak.
“Hard right rudder!” the captain cried instinctively. Meeting the suicide plane head-on would offer a marginally smaller target than if they turned to port, thus presenting the ship broadside. But it was instinct wasted: the kamikaze would be upon them before the ship could begin to answer the helm.
The helmsman was trying, anyway. He frantically spun the wheel all the way over and held it there with torso-twisting body English.
The kamikaze nosed down toward them in a shallow dive. Gwillam Forte watched the black cylinder as it was buffeted by the bursts of exploding shells, jostled off course but each time swerving back toward the battleship. The flames of tracer bullets tracked its passage through the sky, but incredibly, nothing touched it. The tiny winged torpedo kept coming, growing larger and blacker every moment, until Forte imagined he could see the eyes of the evil little Jap staring through the square windshield into his own, as if aiming the flying bomb straight at him, personally.
The Texas began to answer the helm. Its bow swung slowly toward starboard, an inch at a time. The kamikaze altered course and kept coming. It was now only a little higher than the main truck, and so close they could make out the red meatball and Japanese script on the nose of the aircraft. The antiaircraft was coming closer too, the gunfire from other warships crisscrossing through the Texas’s rigging. Forte felt sudden panic. If the Jap didn’t hit them, stray gunfire would surely do so.
“Clear the bridge!” the captain shouted, his voice barely audible above the din of exploding short-fused shells. The kamikaze was now headed directly, unwaveringly toward them. It couldn’t miss. Gwillam Forte dashed for the starboard ladder leading down and aft to the main deck. From the corner of his eye he saw the captain gripping the arms of his chair, bracing himself for the impact. Forte leapt through the doorway, reaching for the ladder rails.
What happened next he could never quite recall. He could remember looking straight at the kamikaze plane and seeing a bright red flash. That would have been the five-inch shell from one of the destroyers, a piece of its shrapnel apparently striking the control surfaces and causing the pilot to lose control. The suicide plane disappeared from Forte’s line of vision, as if it had been wiped from a slate. Though he didn’t know it, the craft had winged over and slammed into the sea.
A blinding flash was followed by a huge detonation that rocked the ship, buckling splinter shield around the main-deck 20-mm gun mounts, and raining shrapnel off the ship’s armor plate. Gwillam Forte was blown back against the side of the pilot house like a dry leaf in a winter’s gale. He passed out.
When he came to, he was lying alone on the steel deck behind a ready box. His mind was still filled with the vision of that huge black bomb homing on him. He tried to rise, desperate to find cover. But in that brief moment of unconsciousness, the deck had become so slippery he couldn’t gain his footing. In his disordered mind all he could think of was that an oil line had been severed, spilling its contents all over the deck. But then, he reminded himself, there wasn’t any oil line way up there. Ball bearings, he thought muzzily as he again tried to get to his feet. That must be it- ball bearings from . . . from . . . somewhere.
He put out his hand to try once more. Then he understood: he had no hand, only a mangled stump that spurted blood with each beat of a weakening heart. He stared at it dumbly. There was no pain, only an overpowering languor. He wanted to cradle his head in his arms, stretch out in the warm sun on clean white sands, and sleep forever.
Just before he lapsed again into unconsciousness, he heard from far away the captain’s voice. He was yelling, “Corpsman! Corpsman!” He had never heard the old man sound so upset.
He was wondering why as the rising sun was swallowed up in a slowly descending curtain of blood, and he remembered no more.
1946-1951
It was a strange fellowship, that which developed between Gwillam Forte and Otis Creech, for they were as unlike as any two patients in the veterans hospital. Forte was barely seventeen, a triple amputee, morose, uncommunicative, and white. Otis Creech was fifty-five, a giant of a man with seam-straining muscles, full of laughter, and black. Odd as the relationship seemed, their fellow patients would have been even more surprised to discover that its basis was mutual envy.
Creech was an old-timer. He had been in and out of veteran’s hospitals since World War I, when he had been wounded by shrapnel in the Battle of Belleau Wood and, lying helpless in the mud, nearly smothered in a wave of phosgene gas. Saved by counterattacking Marines and a shift in the wind, he lost a leg above the knee and the use of his right lung. A determined and proud man, he refused to become a charge of the U.S. government. Once fitted with a wooden leg, and having adjusted to a diminished vitality and range of activity, he limped out of the hospital to begin civilian life as an apprentice auto mechanic. In time, he became expert. But time also worked against him, for the strain of breathing on one lung ravaged his heart, and with increasing frequency he had to return for hospitalization. On the eve of World War II he found himself permanently confined in the veterans hospital in Houston, living on pills and potions, waking nights to the throb of a heart that beat with wild and disturbing rhythms, like a jungle drum.