Sweet Reason Read Online Free PDF Page B

along the way somebody has got to stand fast, somebody has got to draw a line in the dust with his big toe and say: ‘This far but no further.’ ”
    Jones sucked in his stomach, which had a tendency to spill over his web belt. “Well, gentlemen, we’re at that line, that frontier of freedom” — he nodded his head again; another important point! — “right out here on this Godforsaken stretch of ocean. And they’ve stepped over the line. Ergo, they’ve got to deal with the fightingest man-o’-war in the U.S. Navy, the Eugene F. Ebersole , eh?”
    The war council (as the skipper liked to call it) had been convened in the forward wardroom immediately after lunch.Only Wallowitch, who had retreated to his bunk after the business with the body in the water, and Moore, who had the bridge watch, were absent. The rest of the officers, self-conscious about the .45 caliber pistols dangling at their waists, had filed in, quipping but curious.
    “Is the artillery going to be uniform of the day from here on out?” asked Ralph Richardson, the Harvard Business School graduate putting in two years as supply officer.
    “The artillery, as you call it, is required for war councils and the bridge watch during general quarters,” the Captain had explained. “I want to create a reasonably warlike atmosphere on this ship.”
    Not knowing quite where to tuck the guns as they sat, the officers had taken their places around the long, felt-covered table. To emphasize the seriousness of the occasion, Angry Pettis had been posted outside the door armed with a loaded M–1 rifle.
    “Ain’t no motherfucker, black or white, goes in till the Captain he comes out,” he told True Love, the wardroom’s junior steward, an incredibly dumb but immensely innocent black whose real name was Truman Love.
    Inside the wardroom the civilian luxuries — an eighteen-inch color television, a plastic philodendron, a tape deck — had all been stored away. The décor had been stripped down to what the Captain considered the bare essentials: the gold basketball de Bovenkamp had picked up from Commander Destroyers Atlantic; a photograph of the late and posthumously decorated Lieutenant Commander Eugene F. Ebersole, the chubby skipper of an American submarine sunk, under heroic circumstances, by Japanese depth charges during World War Two; the annual Christmas card from Ebersole’s widow (long since remarried) Scotch-taped to the bulkhead; a framed, embossed edition of John Paul Jones’s code of conduct for naval officers; a model of the Eugene Ebersole in a bottle.

    “I want to commend you,” the Captain was saying, “on the good start we made this morning. Especially Mister Wallowitch, who unfortunately has taken ill.” The Captain cleared his throat. “That was heads-up shooting, I can tell you. And I’m not the only one who thinks so. As we say in the navy, now hear this.”
    Jones took a pasted-up message from his pocket and read it. “ ‘Well done, Ebersole . Your performance in the face of the enemy this ayem was in the finest traditions of the naval service. Happy to have a can-do tin can like the Ebersole aboard on Yankee Station. Endit.’ And it’s signed: ‘Rear Admiral Winthrop G. Hayden.’ ”
    The Poet and Richardson exchanged glances. The Chaplain and Lustig kept their eyes glued to the table. The junior officers around the wardroom table stared back at the Captain in embarrassed silence. Only the Executive Officer (who was beginning to catch the cues) and Ensign de Bovenkamp (an ex-college basketball star who instinctively responded to the pep-talk atmosphere) reacted the way the Captain expected his officers to react — modestly pleased at the praise, proud to be a member of the Ebersole team, smilingly anxious to get back into the thick of things.
    Captain Jones looked around the room uncertainly. “I’ve no doubt some of you are uneasy” — again he cleared his throat — “uneasy because Oriental human beings were