Chapter 108
LAURA AND I GOT THROUGH the afternoon, and by the time we’d showered and dressed and walked down to the hotel’s veranda for cocktails, we were all right.
It was a lovely evening. The weather was perfect, and everyone looked so nice—all the men in their mess dress uniforms and the women in their floor-length gowns. A waiter offered me a glass of prosecco, and I was having such a good time, I barely noticed I’d finished it.
“Pace yourself,” warned Bev. “It’s a long night.”
She was right. Once we went into the ballroom, we had to sit through the presentation of the colors, various welcoming remarks, and a benediction, which Father Guglielmo had been brought all the way from La Maddalena to give.
I was expecting the basics: “Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty, through Christ our Lord. Amen.” But he went on forever, and I found myself praying not for God’s gifts but that the priest would sit down.
Dinner was served, and I had my eye on the cake at the back of the room. “That’s your reward,” said Laura. “For getting through this next part.”
The Tolling of the Boats was a long ceremony in which the XO read the names of seventy-two submarines lost at sea, or on “eternal patrol,” as the navy liked to say. After each name was read, Teddy Wozniak rang a brass bell that had been placed on a small table at the front of the room.
The whole thing was very solemn, and we were meant to keep our heads bowed in prayer, but at one point when I glanced around the room, I caught Angela Bornemann looking right at me.
After we’d made eye contact, I expected her to give me a grin or a small wave to make things less weird, but she didn’t move a muscle.
We were only eight subs in by the time we made it to World War II, and then we were in the Pacific amphitheater for what felt like forever.
Until that moment, I don’t think I’d been fully aware of the risks that came with being a submariner.
I mean, yes, I knew that subs could sink, but this script the XO was reading from was like a laundry list of what could go wrong on a sub.
Groundings, surface attacks, mine explosions, battery explosions, rammings, depth-charge attacks, the list went on and on.
And it felt like rarely, if ever, did the crew make it out alive.
“The U.S.S. Tullibee,” said the XO. “Lost with seventy-nine men on 26 March 1944, north of the Palau Islands, in Micronesia. Sunk by her own torpedo. One man survived and was taken prisoner.”
Wozniak rang the bell, and I leaned over to ask Laura how it was even possible to sink your own sub with a torpedo.
Finally, the XO got to the last submarine on the list. The U.S.S. Scorpion, which had been lost with all hands—ninety-nine men—on May 22, 1968, possibly due to the detonation of one of its own torpedoes, four hundred miles southwest of the Azores.
Nineteen sixty-eight was recent history.
I had been a junior in high school. Obsessed with David Cassidy and the Monkees and whether Buck Dorchester was going to tell the kids at school that I’d let him finger me when we’d gone to see Night of the Living Dead at the American.
Most of the guys on the Scorpion—not the officers, but the sailors—were probably only a couple of years older than I was, and now they were sitting in a trench at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
It was too horrible to think about, at least for long.
“Finally,” said the XO, “we remember those brave submariners who died in the line of duty but whose boats were not lost.” One last bell tolled, and all was silent, everyone in the room waiting for a signal that it was time to party.