No Higher Honor Read Free Page B

dead-end job at the local auto dealership. Right now, I’m just a nice Christian boy who works for four bucks an hour and has no life , he told himself. But I am not going to allow myself to dry up and blow away in this little hick town in the middle of nowhere .
    A church acquaintance steered him toward the navy, but it wasn’t a quick sell. Still fresh in Preston’s mind was a recent Saturday Night Live spoof of the service’s recruiting commercials. Over footage of sailors cleaning toilets, a voice intoned, “It’s not just an adventure, it’s a job.” There was also the recruiter himself, a cigarette-stained chief petty officer who quarreled loudly with his wife while Preston took a military aptitude test in their kitchen. And there was Shelley, a young friend from church who pleaded with him to stay.
    Despite it all, Preston signed up. In November 1983 he forced back tears, boarded a Trailways bus, and headed off to San Diego. At boot camp he was morbidly cheered by the presence of some older fellows. These guys must be real losers , he thought. At least I only wasted one year of my post–high school life doing nothing. Some of these guys are almost thirty!
    In less than two years—having endured recruit training, a lonely graduation, plenty of midnight watches, and lots of toilet-cleaning duty—Fire Controlman 3rd Class Preston graduated near the top of his class in Mk 92 missile launcher school. His skill earned him a choice of assignments, and he picked a brand-new frigate that was under construction in Maine.
    Preston joined the Roberts in August 1985, driving across the country in his Toyota pickup to meet up with the rest of the frigate’s combat systems team in San Diego. The day before he checked in at the Point Loma training center, he chose the wrong second to glance at a map. His truck veered from the road and plowed into a parked car. Another sailor happened along and took the bruised and bloodied Preston to a naval hospital, where a corpsman diagnosed a separated right shoulder and put a dozen stitches in his head.
    â€œI got some extra here,” the corpsman said.
    â€œExtra what?” Preston asked.
    â€œExtra skin,” the corpsman replied. “Do you want it?”
    Preston gritted his teeth and went to class. 1
    The Point Loma ridge offered spectacular views of the harbor, the Coronado Peninsula, and the Pacific Ocean—provided, that is, you were not inside a classroom or one of the shipboard simulators. That, of course, was where Preston joined Lt. Cmdr. Glenn Palmer and thirty-nine other sailors.
    The combat information center (CIC) had long replaced the bridge as the fighting heart of a modern warship. In the darkened space just below and behind the pilothouse, the Roberts sailors would huddle over green screens, reaching out with electronic eyes to find their enemies. In battle, the captain would be in the CIC, making the decisions to fire. The center’s enlisted personnel included radar operators, who used the frigate’s three kinds of radar to find objects afloat or aloft; sonar operators, who used computers and headphones to track the invisible craft below the waves; operations specialists, who identified ships, aircraft, and missiles by their electronic emissions; and fire controlmen, who used thedata from their shipmates to guide their own ship’s guns and missiles. Together, they ran the Roberts ’s electronic and mechanical eyes, ears, and fists.
    The Point Loma course required hours of classroom study, but the lectures alternated with exciting mock battles in the simulated combat information center. Palmer’s team sank fleets of computer-generated Soviet ships, downed imaginary air wings, and shredded swarms of pretend missiles. They learned fast, and finished the six-week course with more honor graduates than any previous frigate. A chief operations specialist by the name of Monigle notched the highest