Dammit, Ensign!

By Chris Rogers

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It was a cold, gray morning in Yokosuka. Ensign Timmy, then standing Officer of the Deck aboard United States Ship John S. McCain, shivered as the wind cut through his dress blues, and he once more had cause to curse the supply system that kept his ship’s requisition for new space heaters on backorder, but somehow managed to come up with napkin rings for the wardroom. In five, perhaps ten minutes, his relief would be up on deck and he could look forward to going about his usual work day, but as fate would have it, there was still one last task to be performed on the rev watch. “Captain’s comin’,” came the report from the ship’s pier sentry over the handheld radio.

Timmy took his hands out of his pockets and situated himself at the top of the brow, just inside the lifelines as he peered aft towards the gate. “Boats,” he said to Boatswain’s Mate Third Class Cavaleri, sheltered in a tiny alcove set into the superstructure behind him, “Captain’s coming. You ready?”

“Yes, sir,” Cavaleri chirped, “standing by, four bells and a stinger.”

Timmy was just about to give the signal when the Captain, not halfway up the pier, allowed his gaze to wander to the ship’s hull. His heart sank, and he cringed as the Captain made a right oblique and started inwards to the edge. Then, in a series of long, deliberate glances, the Captain took in every feature as shrewdly as one might a used car offered up at a discount by one of the many “military friendly” dealers located outside the fleet’s concentration areas: from stem to stern, from the masthead to the waterline, not one spot of rust would go unnoticed, and, as Timmy well knew, there were so many.

The Captain resumed his march along the pier, and Timmy stiffened to attention. “Good morning, sir,” he said as he snapped his morning’s salute.

The Captain set his foot down on the quarterdeck and the bell tolled, five times in all at even intervals, followed by the words, “McCain, arriving,” over the ship’s announcing system. Timmy, still with his right hand to the brim, winced.

“Dammit, Ensign!” the Captain growled without so much as returning Timmy’s salute. “It’s ding-ding, ding-ding, ‘John S. McCain, arriving,’ and then the stinger, get it? Why can’t you keep your watch in order?”

“Yes sir, no excuse sir,” came Timmy’s lame reply.

“And what about the running rust coming off the slickdeck? The whole port side looks like a bag of ass, and I for one am tired of feeling professionally embarrassed every time I walk this pier.”

“It’s been raining a lot since we pulled in, sir. We need a couple good days to strip and prime before–“

The Captain threw his hands up in mock surrender. “Well fuck me to tears, First.”

“Uh–” Timmy began.

“Uh–not!” snapped the Captain. “I don’t want problems, I want solutions. When I was second division officer on Wasp, the Boatswain had a paint plan for every in port period, no matter how brief, and every single day…” The Captain went on with his tirade, and Timmy did his best to listen attentively, as if the experiences of twenty years prior might still pertain to the circumstances he was confronted with on that particular morning. Of course his Boatswain on Wasp, a warrant officer with probably two decades of service under his belt and more to come, must have known all about painting. And he would have had all kinds of manpower at his disposal on a ship that was a carrier in all but name, manned to its full compliment. But on John S. McCain, an optimally manned destroyer assigned to the Navy’s forward-deployed naval force in Japan? Well, Timmy was sure to take note of the Captain’s vision for the painting and preservation of his ship as it was his duty to do so.

“Aye aye, sir,” Timmy said when the Captain was finally done berating him.

The Captain soon departed via the port break, and Timmy let out a beleaguered sigh. “Where the hell is Fortune?” he grumbled as he checked his watch and wondered at the status of his relief.

Then there was a voice at his back, Lieutenant Ireland: his department head, and that day’s Command Duty Officer. “What the hell was that?” Ireland demanded.

Timmy pivoted around and once more raised his hand in salute. “No excuse, sir,” he said.

Ireland, at least, returned the salute and allowed Timmy to drop his in turn. “Bull shit,” Ireland said. “This isn’t the Virginia Citadel Academy or wherever the hell you learned those stock answers of yours, I want an explanation. Why can’t you keep your watch in order?”

“I–sir–uh–” Timmy stuttered.

“Just don’t let it happen again!” Ireland snapped as he stormed after the Captain.

Timmy, for his part, took a few long breaths and turned at last to Cavaleri, the source of half his troubles. “Boats,” he said as calmly as he could manage, “did you hear what the Captain said?”

“Yes, sir,” Cavaleri replied.

“So you understand what you did wrong?”

“Yes sir, it should have been ding-ding, ding-ding, then McCain, then the stinger.”

“Not just ‘McCain,’ but ‘John S. McCain, arriving,'” Timmy said, belaboring the point as he hoped to leave no room for ambiguity.

“Yes, sir. I guess I was just nervous.”

“It’s alright,” Timmy said, “we’ll get through this.”

Things were looking up as Timmy turned back to the brow and saw Ensign Fortune standing ready to relieve him: truly a sight for sore eyes.

***

After two hours of broken sleep and five hours of watch standing out in the frigid cold, the first thing Timmy did was go down to berthing and change into coveralls. Then, with a full day ahead of him, he went to the deck division office and started going through the week’s planned maintenance. That’s when his Leading Chief Petty Officer, Chief Kellogg, arrived.

“Hey, Chief,” Timmy said as he rushed to swallow the last bit of the granola bar that was his breakfast.

“Morning, sir,” Chief Kellogg mumbled as he plopped down in front of the division’s only computer.

“Say, uh, Chief, I had O-O-D with Cavaleri this morning.”

Chief Kellogg’s jaw dropped. “That was Cavaleri?”

“Yep. I don’t know if he was tired or what, but I know he knows better. Could you maybe talk with him and see if something’s up?”

“Sure thing, sir.” Chief Kellogg turned back to the computer, still loading as it always took some minutes to log in.

“Oh, and Chief, there’s something else,” Timmy said. “We’ve got running rust on the port side.”

Chief Kellogg just kept staring at the monitor in reply.

“So…” Timmy continued uneasily, “we need to come up with a plan to take care of it asap. If we can get guys over the side today, that’d be ideal.”

Kellogg sighed. “Sir,” he said as he swiveled his chair to look at him square, “there’s rain forecast all week, and it’s getting to be too cold per the N-S-T-M.”

Timmy bowed his head, unable to meet Kellogg’s steady gaze. “Right,” he reluctantly began as he knew full well that the circumstances were less than ideal–he had actually read the NSTM 631: Preservation of Ships in Service, “but it’s going to rain all winter.”

Kellogg fervently nodded. “That’s right, sir. And it’s going to get colder, too. If we go out applying paint in this weather, we’re just going to have to re-work it in the spring. Stripped, primed, and painted all over again, plus those stanchions–“

“Right, but, I mean… we need to do something,” Timmy meekly replied. Of course he knew it was a bad idea to go out painting on a rainy day in winter–certainly not something he’d have come up with on his own–but the Captain had given the order, and he knew he had to own it even if it ran contrary to everything he had read and everything his Chief was telling him based off years of experience. “How about today, what if we at least–“

“Sir,” Kellogg said tersely, “I already have the division going through the sar checklist and getting ready for a walkthrough with A-T-G. It’s what we had planned.”

“Couldn’t we at least get a couple guys on it, start prepping the area?” Timmy pleaded, as if it would help for an officer to plead with a subordinate.

Kellogg came off the back of his chair and slapped an armrest. “Sir!” he snapped. He stopped and collected himself. “Sir…” he began again in a more measured tone, “even if the weather cooperates, I don’t want to go jacking the division around. We have a sar inspection coming up, we need to go through the A-S-A, and there’s not but fifteen sailors to do it all. I don’t want to piss away the time we have just to do something half-assed that’s going to have to get done again right in a couple of months.”

Timmy sighed. It was an argument he didn’t want to win. “Okay, well, how about come up with a plan we can implement on short notice? Like, if we get a few days of good weather next week?”

Kellogg pinched his lips together and his eyes narrowed into horizontal slits. Finally, with the frustration still evident in his voice, he said, “Okay, sir. I’ll have BM2 put something on paper.” Then he got up, locked out the computer, and started into the passageway. Timmy might have hoped he was going to get started on that paint plan, but he knew it was more likely that he was going to the Chief’s Mess to cool off. He often did that when Timmy tried to “own” orders that had been dropped on him unexpectedly from above.

“Fucking stupid…” Timmy muttered as he was alone again. He had half a mind to blow it off completely, but then he didn’t like the thought of that at all, particularly when the order had come direct from the Captain. So instead, he put down the maintenance plan and started off in search of Lieutenant Ireland. “Fuck, I’m tired…” he mumbled as he stumbled into a bulkhead on his way out of the office.

***

Timmy found Lieutenant Ireland in his stateroom with the door open, browsing the previous day’s message traffic for new taskers. “Hey, sir, got a minute?” Timmy asked.

Ireland slowly craned around to look at him. “No,” he said flatly. But he kept his eyes on Timmy all the same.

“I just wanted to give you a heads up: the Captain tasked me with getting guys over the side to paint today.”

“Right, I know, he told me it looks like shit. Thanks for that, by the way.”

“Uh, yes sir, but I’m not sure we’ll be able to do it today, or even this week. We’ve got a sar–“

“They’re called orders, Mister Timmy, not requests. It’s the Captain’s ship: he gets what he wants.”

“Yes, sir, but Chief–“

“Do you have a problem getting along with your Chief?”

“No, sir, but–“

“Then what’s the problem?”

“It’s supposed to rain this afternoon…”

Ireland suddenly smiled like he was talking to an idiot child. “Well,” he said sarcastically, “you’ve got all morning!”

“Yes, sir, but by the time we strip and prime– “

Ireland rapped his knuckles against the wall cabinet that doubled as his desk, no more smile. “Feel free to start doing your job at any time, Ensign, it’s not hard.”

“Aye aye, sir,” was all Timmy could say in reply as he did his best to keep his bearing. Ireland had a way of emphasizing the word Ensign as if it was an insult.

While Ireland seemed to return his attention to message traffic, Timmy backed out into the passageway. “Oh, and one more thing,” Ireland added before he could make good his escape. “Go see Nav while you’re up here. She’s got a ‘special project’ for someone just like you.”

“Roger,” Timmy halfheartedly replied.

And there was the door to the stateroom already swinging open just a few feet away. “Did I hear that right?” the ship’s navigator, Lieutenant Portilla, called from within.

“He’s all yours!” Ireland called back.

“Great!” Portilla said, a fiendish grin on her face as her head protruded into the passageway.

Timmy forced a smile. “How can I help you?” he asked with feigned eagerness.

“Captain wants a plaque for the Admiral’s visit tomorrow,” Portilla said briskly.

“Uh, okay. Doesn’t Disbo own the plaques?”

“Trouble is… we only have one left, and we need it for next week’s farewell, so we’re going to give him a photograph instead.” She proudly held up an eight-by-ten color glossy of the ship in better days, positioning her head beside it with an even more exaggerated grin.

“Okay…” Timmy said, still not quite sure what this had to do with him.

“So…” Portilla began deliberately, “I need you to get a frame.”

“By tomorrow?”

“By close of business today. Get it to the Captain before he goes home so he can sign and write something nice.”

Timmy sighed. “Yes, ma’am.” It was like he was looking through a tunnel, and the light at the end of it was Nav’s grinning visage plastered to the front end of a locomotive, as if he didn’t have enough to do already.

***

Timmy spent the rest of the morning performing a maintenance spot check that didn’t go so well, then stopped by to see how the search and rescue gear inventory was going. It was past eleven when he finally had a chance to change out of coveralls and into a uniform that he could wear off-ship. “I have permission to go ashore,” he said as he stood atop the brow and saluted Ensign Fortune.

“Go ashore,” Fortune replied, returning his salute. “So what’s for lunch?”

Timmy shrugged. “I don’t know, haven’t been.” With that, he turned to face the national ensign back aft, snapped another salute, and carried on smartly down the brow as he began his sojourn to the Navy Exchange.

Now, there was a bus–two, actually–that did a lap of the base every hour, but the bus always stopped at housing and various shore facilities along a circuitous route, so that even if one happened to arrive at the pier at just the right time, it would still be faster to simply walk to the exchange. The distance was about a mile going one way on foot, and so the whole endeavor took Timmy about an hour. By the time he returned to the ship with a frame–for which he had paid almost twenty dollars out of pocket–it was raining heavily, and so he was soaking wet as he appeared once more before Lieutenant Portilla.

Portilla looked the frame over and frowned. “A bit too fancy,” she said, echoing Timmy’s own thoughts as he’d picked it out.

“It was the cheapest one they had in stock,” he said.

Portilla rolled her eyes. “Okay,” she said as she picked up the photograph and slid it into a blue folder, “go ahead and take it to the Captain.”

Timmy’s eyes closed with dread at the thought. “Didn’t he ask for it from you?”

Portilla shrugged. “I like to delegate.”

With a sigh, Timmy took back the whole ensemble and walked with it the short distance to the Captain’s Cabin, just around the corner. He was pleasantly surprised to see that the door was open, and for once there was no line. He stopped outside and knocked three times.

The Captain looked up from his monitor and leered at Timmy. “Do you not know when my office hours are?”

Timmy blushed as he checked his watch and realized that office hours didn’t start for another five minutes. “Oh, uh, sorry sir,” he spluttered.

The Captain just shook his head and sighed. “So what is it?” he asked as he beckoned, with a roll of the hand, for Timmy to enter.

Timmy produced the photograph from its folder and held it forth for the Captain to examine. “Nav wanted me to bring this to you, sir.”

The Captain responded with a blank stare. “And?”

“It’s for the Admiral, sir.”

The Captain pounded at his desk with both fists. “The Admiral!?” he howled.

“Uh–“

“Dammit, Ensign! I wanted a plaque. Where the hell is my plaque?”

“Nav said–“

The Captain rattled off a series of rapid fire questions, each one more ferocious than the last. “What am I even talking to you for? What’s the status of the paint plan? Why haven’t I seen a chit to work over the side? Do you even have a plan? What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Sir, it’s raining, and it’s too cold to paint,” Timmy said, too startled to hold back.

The Captain, his face glowing red, shifted in his seat, brought a hand to his forehead, and started massaging his right temple. As he seemed to ponder over a suitable response, ridges formed along his brow, broken by a deeper notch between the eyes. Then he sat upright and put his hands down on his desk, neatly folded. “You can go, Ensign,” he said, and that was all.

“Yes, sir, excuse me, sir.”

Timmy turned and started out. Not three steps into the passageway, he heard the Captain pick up his phone, whisper something into the handset, and then the mic keyed on the announcing system: “Lieutenant Ireland, Captain’s Cabin.”

Timmy just managed to slip into the wardroom as Ireland’s footsteps went slap-smacking along the passageway behind him. Sensing what was to come, in the moment of calm still left to him, he crouched down and took a granola bar out of one of the waist-high cabinets beneath the wardroom counter. He was just into his first mouthful when he felt a puff of wind at his back.

“What the hell is wrong with you, Ensign?” came Ireland’s voice as the door screeched open and shut behind him.

Timmy swallowed, set the granola down on the counter, and turned to face his inquisitor. “Nav asked me to–“

“First, how about you explain what you’re doing in the wardroom as a non-qual outside of meal times?” Ireland demanded.

Timmy’s jaw dropped, then shut, then opened again. “I–“

“You know what? Forget it: you’re only going to piss me off more. So let’s cut to why the Captain thinks my divos don’t know when his office hours are.”

“Uh, I got–I–uh…” Timmy trailed off as he strained to come up with an explanation that he knew would be unsatisfactory regardless. “No excuse, sir, I wasn’t thinking.”

Ireland’s lips curled into a snarl, and he shook his head in a look of utter disbelief. “And the paint, were you just going to just blow the Captain off on that?”

Timmy, still drenched from his foray to the exchange, replied simply, “It’s raining, sir.”

Ireland closed his eyes, and then, with head tilted back, took a deep breath. His nostrils flared, and he exhaled. “Was it raining this morning?” he asked, still with eyes shut to the overhead.

“No, sir, not yet.” Then, in the interval allowed by Ireland’s continued silence, Timmy started to add, “But we knew it was going–“

“Stop. Just stop,” Ireland said. He dropped his chin to look Timmy suddenly in the eyes, and he seemed to cut right through him with his gaze. “You didn’t even try,” he said through gritted teeth. “If the Captain says he wants it, he gets it. That’s how this works, Ensign.”

“I–” Timmy started.

“No, I’m not done,” Ireland went on impatiently. “The consequence of your failure may well be that your sailors have to work longer hours and get the ship up to standards today–I guess we’ll see: it’s the Captain’s call since you apparently can’t command your own division. And believe me, Ensign, sailors notice these things. They’re not stupid, you know? They can tell when they’re getting jacked around because a so-called leader can’t pull his head out of his ass long enough to come up with a plan, when every day seems like yet another flail-ex and they end up losing time with their families because of it. Believe me, Ensign, they notice, and they know there’s a reason for it: you, Ensign Timmy. So I’ll ask again, what–the hell–is wrong with you?”

Timmy stood mute as he wasn’t sure if it was his turn yet to speak.

“Well?” Ireland demanded.

Timmy started scratching nervously at the back of his neck and, with head down, took a long breath of his own. “Well, sir,” he began, “I guess I’m just having a hard time sleeping lately. I found out my college roommate died in Afghanistan a couple days ago. He was Army, and it was his first deployment. I guess, well, I guess I’m just having a hard time processing it.”

Ireland shook his head again, albeit more somberly and less dismissively than before. “That’s the line of work we’re in,” he said almost sympathetically. “Any one of us might be called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice. If we ever go into harm’s way ourselves, we’re going to have to face the possibility that not all of us will be coming home. We aim to put warheads on foreheads, and sometimes the enemy aims to hit back.”

Timmy nodded slightly. “Yes, sir,” he rasped, “but, I mean… they called it a non-combat related incident. I heard from some classmates it might have been suicide. And, well, I mean… it’s been a while since we last talked. Everything he put online made it seem like he was doing fine, but I never really reached out. I knew it had to be rough, his first deployment, but, I mean, I didn’t–“

“Ensign, look,” Ireland said abruptly, no more sympathy in his voice or his countenance, “if you’re having trouble dealing, stop by Fleet and Family Support on your way out one of these days. Until then, it’s suck it up, buttercup: you have a duty to your sailors, and they will pay the price if you fail, get it?”

Timmy slowly nodded, and he kept on nodding until he realized he was alone, one hand still resting on the counter. He picked up his half-eaten granola bar, but as he examined it, he had this strange feeling in his stomach, like a tingling sensation, and he realized that his face was tingling too, and so were his hands. It was so… he didn’t know how to describe it, but it was like his whole body had fallen asleep. The thought of food, of that dry granola bar going into his mouth, made him nauseous, and so he decided he wasn’t that hungry anymore.

No matter, he thought, there’s work to be done. So he threw the granola into the trash and put a hand on the metal door knob to go. Strange… it felt like leather. Then he touched his hands to his face and the feeling was stranger still: he didn’t feel anything. He stopped and steadied himself on the counter–the whole room was spinning now–and he doubled over. Better. He wrapped his arms around himself and drove his hands beneath his arm pits to stop the tingling, but nothing changed. He decided that maybe he just needed a moment to himself–damn the paint plan–and so instead, as all good non-quals do, he decided to study.

Timmy turned to another cabinet, got down on his knees, and drew out the communal SWO gouge binder. Ideally, he would have studied on a computer with up to date references, but then he didn’t have access to a computer–let alone a computer with the necessary classification level–and so the binder was the best he could do. As to where he was supposed to go and read the binder, he obviously couldn’t do it in the wardroom–Lieutenant Ireland had made that abundantly clear–so he decided to take it down to overflow berthing, where he and half a dozen other ensigns shared space with fifty junior sailors in lieu of staterooms. There was a lounge with chairs down there, but, then again, those weren’t for him any more than the wardroom: the lounge was for sailors only, and the wardroom was for warfare-qualified officers only. As a so-called “non-qual,” then, he would have to do his studying on the cold deck with the binder in his lap. His back would probably be sore after being hunched over reading for an hour, but with any luck he’d have his shit together by then and he’d finally be able to muster up the nerve to order his division out into the rain to slap down some haze gray paint: once for dust, twice for rust, and three times to keep it together.

“Keep it together… keep it together…” Timmy muttered to himself as he staggered out with the gouge binder clutched tightly to his chest. He just had to swallow it up and own it.

In the narrow passageway, with the Captain’s Cabin out in front of him and the wardroom at his back, he stopped suddenly as he blinked once and everything–everything–flashed to gray. The deck, the bulkhead, the overhead, his uniform, even his hands: all of it, gray. He held forth the binder, gray, and opened it to a page somewhere in the middle. This page, too, was gray, and so was every other page he turned to. It was like a haze formed in his mind and permeated to everything around him until he was awash in a sea of gray. Then, as the encroaching haze thickened to an impenetrable mass, and he lost all reckoning of time and place, he let go of the binder and sank. Down, down, down: down into the depths, with nothing left to cling to.

End