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forced-draft blowers in Number Two Fire Room whined contentedly. The executive officer’s stateroom was in after-officers country just forward of and almost on top of number 2B boiler, as the hot steel deck readily attested. Dressed, I stepped across the passageway to the officers’ head to pump bilges. There was no time for a shower, and besides, one of our evaporators was on the fritz, so the ship was on water-hours. Rubbing my eyes, I collected my kapok life jacket and helmet and then headed topside to the bridge to take morning stars.
    It was still dark when I stepped out onto the bridge, but I could make out the silhouettes of the bridge-watch team. I stopped for a moment to adjust my eyes and listen for any sign of problems. In happier times, the half hour before sunrise was always one of the best things about being at sea. Even in lousy weather, the first sight of the sea in the morning twilight is always a delight. Couple that with the smells of breakfast wafting up from the galley and that first cup of Navy coffee, and all the small terrors of steaming a blacked-out warship at night diminish with each passing moment of rising sunlight out on the eastern horizon.
    Not now, though, and not here, some fifty miles north of the Okinawa amphibious objective area. We were aware of an altogether different rising sun up here on the radar picket line, one that came out of the sky in the form of a bomb-laden Jap fighter or bomber, intent on killing us all. I could literally feel the tension, because everyone up on the bridge knew that twilight on the Okinawa radar picket line was no longer anyone’s friend. People were scared, and with good reason.
    The lee helmsman saw me and announced “XO’s on the bridge” to the rest of the watch standers. The officer of the deck, Lieutenant (junior grade) Tom Smithy, greeted me, as Quartermaster Second Class McCarthy handed me a ceramic mug of coffee.
    â€œMorning, XO,” Smithy said. “Steaming as before on Okinawa picket station four-Able. LCS 1022 abeam to port, three thousand yards. Comms good. No contacts, air or surface. Gun crews sleeping on station. Visibility unlimited, seas flat, wind out of the northwest at five to seven knots. Barometer is steady at thirty-point-oh-two inches. GQ at zero six forty-five, sunrise at seven fifteen.”
    â€œVery well,” I said. “Sounds like another great Navy day. I’ll be shooting stars on the port bridge wing. Remind me to get the captain up just before GQ.”
    â€œAye, aye, sir,” Smithy said and turned back to resume his scan of the horizon. It was nautical twilight, which meant that the horizon would begin to assume some definition as the ambient light slowly grew to the point where it was no longer dark but not quite daylight. It was the kind of light that was good for using a sextant—and also for a kamikaze pilot who had chosen to come in on the deck right before dawn, and that was why the ship would go to general quarters thirty minutes before the actual sunrise took place.
    I went out to the portside bridge wing, where McCarthy had set up the sextant, my notebook and chronometer, and a list of celestial azimuths. Normally there would have been a makee-learn ensign on deck, but with the exhausting watch-and-watch routine of the picket stations, six hours on, six off, the captain had decided to suspend navigation training. It wasn’t as if we didn’t know where we were—forty-nine miles north-northwest of Okinawa—but it was a cardinal rule of the wartime destroyer force that the navigation officer shot stars whenever visibility allowed. Since Jimmy Enright was also the ship’s de facto operations officer, I’d begun doing the celestial navigation a couple times a week to spell him. At least once a day, at either morning or evening nautical twilight, I shot stars and fixed the ship’s position with an accuracy that not even radar could match. It was