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talked to the captain after what happened today. He’s a lot more upset than he let on out on the bridge.”
    â€œHe’s been a great skipper,” Jimmy said, “but there are times I think it’s starting to get to him. We were the first ship on the scene after the Littell broke in half and went down from a two-plane kami strike. We stopped to look for survivors, and the admiral himself got on the radio and ordered us back to our assigned AA (antiaircraft) station immediately. The skipper got a personal-for blast later, pointing out that he had created a hole in the AA screen by stopping, when there was obviously nothing that could be done for Littell. I think they recovered twenty-two out of three-hundred-plus once someone did go back. He was stone-faced for three days after that.”
    I was appalled at that story, mostly because I’d never heard about the Littell. I realized now that my carrier background was showing—every destroyerman out here had heard the Littell story.
    *   *   *
    The following day I had both Chief Lamont and Chief Bobby Walker, the chief hospital corpsman, accompany me on my daily messing and berthing inspection. This was one of the exec’s principal duties, a daily inspection of all the berthing spaces, where the crew slept, and the messdecks, where the enlisted took all their meals. Each morning, after dawn GQ and morning quarters, each division assigned two men to compartment cleaning; they swept, swabbed, picked up the trash, hauled full laundry bags to the ship’s laundry, polished any brightwork, and generally cleaned up the crowded compartments. My job was to come around at ten thirty in the morning and make sure that that had all been done. Same thing for the crew’s dining area, called the messdecks, the galley, and the scullery, where trays and silverware were washed and sanitized for the next meal. Chief Lamont came along as my enforcer. If I saw problems I’d point them out to Lamont, and he would have a quiet word with the compartment cleaners as I headed for the next berthing space.
    Chief Walker, an experienced and senior chief corpsman, or medic, was universally called Doc. Some destroyers had an actual medical officer assigned, but if there was a shortage—and with the upcoming landings, there would be a shortage—the tin cans made do with senior medics like Walker. He was a taciturn individual, tall and ruggedly built, with a razor-sharp flattop haircut, who’d served with Marines during the Guadalcanal campaigns of ’forty-two and ’forty-three. He had one assistant, a hospital corpsman second class, and together they formed the medical department, based in what was known as sick bay. On my daily tours he would pay particular attention to the galley and the scullery, measuring rinse-water temperatures, taking water samples from the ship’s potable water tanks, and making sure the cooks were keeping themselves sanitary while doing food prep. He held sick call every day right after quarters to deal with runny noses, sore throats, minor injuries, and the inevitable slacker who wanted out of the morning’s upcoming evolutions, like refueling detail. He looked at the morning sick call for bad trends: A sudden uptick in sore throats, for instance, meant that the scullery water temperature wasn’t high enough.
    With the help of these two chiefs, I covered every nook and cranny in the ship during my first week and every week thereafter. I learned where the problem children lived, which compartments were the hardest to keep clean (the engineers’, whose daily association with black oil, lube oil, grease, rust, and the bilges made for a genuinely black gang), where the nonregulation coffeepots were stashed, or the laundry bags that hadn’t been taken aft, and many other things associated with packing three-hundred-plus men in spaces meant for two hundred. The daily inspections, except on