Sweet Reason Read Free

was a long silence as the two men sucked in turn on the cigarette and held the smoke in for as long as they could.
    “What would you do if you were out, Angry?” asked Jefferson Waterman, a southern black who had been drafted into the navy by an all-white draft board midway through his senior year at a southern Negro college. “I’ll tell you what you’d do. You’d be so shit-scared you’d duck right back in — especially when they lay that thick wad of re-up money on the table.”
    “Fuck the bread, this time I gonna keep my black ass out, you see.” Angry Pettis dragged on the cigarette, held his breath and exhaled. When Waterman didn’t say anything, he started to get belligerent. “You don’t believe me, man? I want oh-you-tee out. I’m not sure I wanna even live in the U.S. of A. when I get outa this navy, man. When I say out, I mean far out. Maybe I’ll even try me another country.”
    Waterman thought about that for a moment. “Somebody once told me there are only two countries no matter which country you’re in. There is city country and there is country country.”
    “If’n that’s so,” laughed Angry Pettis, “the po -litical pricks put them borders in all the wrong places, man.”
    A V-wedge of Phantom jets, their twin tail pipes spoutingorange flames, roared low overhead. The sound hammered against the bridge like a thunder clap. The planes were headed for a predawn strike on the mainland, flying at masthead level to keep under the enemy radar screen.
    “MOTHERFUCKERS,” screamed Angry Pettis — but his voice was lost in the storm of sound.
    “Sons of bitches,” yelled Jefferson Waterman.
    “Bastards,” muttered Ensign Joyce, the Ebersole ’s tall, thin, hollow-eyed communications officer. Joyce had earned a degree in English Literature at Princeton and had set his sights on graduate school. Then, to everyone’s amazement, he had joined the navy (going through Officer Candidate School at Newport) to get off what he called “the academic treadmill.” In his spare time he wrote poems that he kept pressed, like forgotten flowers, between the pages of The Complete Works of William Blake . Aboard the Ebersole , Joyce was universally known as the Poet. It was a nickname that gave him more pleasure than pain.
    “Why bastards?” Lustig asked his junior officer of the deck. “They’re doing what they’re ordered, same as us.”
    “Jesus, Larry,” Joyce said, “that’s almost a political remark. You really want to open that bag?”
    Lustig laughed. “You know the drill, kid — an officer can talk about anything on a man-o’-war except religion, sex or politics.”
    “Which is why the only thing anybody talks about anymore is how True Love clogs the XO’s urinal all the time.”
    “Which is why,” agreed Lustig. “What time does reveille go today?”
    The Poet took a folded plan of the day out of his pocket. “Reveille’s at o-six-thirty, star time is o-seven-o-one, sunup is o-seven-sixteen. I heard all the shore fire assignments out here are at sunup. Is that true?”
    “Most of ’em, yeah. It puts the sun behind us shining right into their eyes that way,” Lustig explained. “Makes ithard on their gunners if they want to counter fire.”
    “That’s the way the Japs used to attack during World War Two — out of the rising sun,” Joyce said, remembering the comic books with the Japanese Zeros silhouetted against a yellow ball. “Funny how we’re brought up to think it’s treacherous to attack out of the rising sun when all the time it’s just good tactics.”
    “I guess,” Lustig said noncommittally. The longer he was on the Ebersole the more noncommittal he seemed to become. It was his protective coloring. A graduate of the Kings Point Merchant Marine Academy, Lustig had only recently decided to make a career out of the regular navy rather than switch to the merchant navy when his three-year hitch was up. He could make more money on merchantmen, true. But