Consorting with the Enemy

On 6 January 1966, beneath gray skies and a steady rain, my destroyer escort, the us Bronstein (de-1037), sortied from San Diego in company with the ships in our squadron, Desron 3, as a screen for the carrier Yorktown (cvs-10). Ours was an asw Task Group, and in a vague way we knew where we were going: to Yankee Station in the South China Sea, to the Tonkin Gulf, to the Vietnam war. What we were to do there, in the absence of threatening North Vietnamese submarines, we had no idea but knew that we would be told. And for me, at least, the experience would not be new. I’d been there before, in 1964, aboard the us Preble (dlg-15) which acted as escort for an attack carrier; at the time, as an ensign, I had spent four miserable weeks sweltering in a flak jacket, broiling in a gun director beneath a blazing sun. So I knew what to expect: extreme heat, extreme discomfort, and extreme boredom.

Aside from the missions naval aviators were flying and the action men aboard river and coastal craft were seeing, the regular navy’s participation in the war seemed largely tangential. Full-sized destroyers, ships equipped with five-inch guns and complex computers that could lay down indirect fire, were sometimes called upon to do shore bombardment; but the Bronstein, armed with three-inch guns and a line-of-sight fire-control system, would not be called upon to risk such a close approach to the beach and Viet Cong weaponry. And I knew this because, as the ship’s gunnery assistant, I’d been assigned by the captain and the weapons officer to oversee the ship’s guns, torpedoes, small arms, and fire-control system. As anticipated, through the long months of our subsequent deployment, none of us heard a single shot fired in defense and knew enough to count ourselves lucky, no matter how boring the operations were to which we were eventually assigned.

On the particular February day in question—after a grueling month spent working in Hawaiian waters, after a stormy five-day run to Midway Island to refuel, and after a bleak tempest-tossed week in the northern Pacific—we had steamed at last to within one thousand miles of Japan, where we expected to put in for a weekend’s liberty before we headed back to sea and ran toward Vietnam. Having stood the morning watch, 0800–1200, as officer of the deck and been relieved only moments before, I happened to be writing up my log entry when I became aware that the enlisted quartermaster, the boatswain’s mate of the watch, and the messenger were engaged in a whispered but intense conversation over the chart table.

“Figure it again,” the messenger urged.

“Don’t need to,” the quartermaster said emphatically. “Figured it right the first time.”

“You’re sure?” The boatswain pressed.

“I’m sure,” said the quartermaster. “On this course, at this speed, the ship’ll be tied up at the naval base in Yokosuka by 1400 on the 17th at the latest, so we ain’t got no worries about not havin’ enough party time ’cause we gonna have plenty of it.”

“You sure?” the messenger questioned again.

“I’m sure!” the quartermaster repeated. “And I’m tellin’ you, lad, that town’ll have more girls waitin’ to party with us than you could ever shake a stick at.”

The quartermaster, an old hand working on his second enlistment, had been to Yokosuka before, so he knew what was in store for the crew as well as I did; but what I knew I kept to myself, signed my log with a straight face, and went below.

To speak frankly, I was bushed and knew that I was bushed, and the fault was not with the watch that I had just stood. For reasons that could not be explained then and have never been explained since, the moment the ship left Pearl Harbor and started for Japan, a virulent epidemic of chess had broken out in the wardroom. Relieved temporarily...