“Vivian, I was never tough like those guys.” He was still gripping that steering wheel like it was a life preserver—like it was the only thing in the world keeping him afloat. “One day on the flight deck, one of my men—young kid from Maryland—stopped paying attention for a second. He took a step in the wrong direction, and his head got sucked right off his body, right into a plane propeller. Just pulled his head right off him, right in front of me. We weren’t even under fire—just a routine day on the deck. Now we have a headless body on the deck, and you better hurry and clean it up, because more planes are coming in, landing every two minutes. You gotta keep the flight deck clear at all times. But I just freeze. Now here comes Tom Denno, and he grabs the body by its feet and drags it away—probably the way he used to drag pig carcasses back on the farm. He doesn’t even flinch, just knows what to do. Meanwhile, I can’t even move. And then Tom’s gotta come and pull me out of the way, too, so I won’t be the next one killed. Me—an officer! Him, an enlisted kid. This was a kid who’d never been to a dentist, Vivian. How the hell did he end up as a Manhattan lawyer?”
“Are you sure it was him that you saw today?” I asked.
“It was him. He knew me. He came over and talked to me. Vivian, he’s one of the 704 Club. Jesus Christ!” Frank threw me a tortured look.
“I don’t know what that means,” I said as gently as I could.
“The men who stayed on the Franklin when we were hit that day—there were seven hundred and four of them. Captain Gehres named those guys the 704 Club. He built them up as heroes. Hell, maybe they were heroes. The Heroic Living, Gehres called them. The ones who didn’t desert the ship. They get together every year and have reunions. Relive the glories.”
“You didn’t desert the ship, Frank. Even the Navy knew that. You were blown overboard in flames.”
“Vivian, it doesn’t matter,” he said. “I was already a coward long before that.”
The panic had drained from his voice. Now he spoke with dreadful calm.
“No, you weren’t,” I said.
“It’s not an argument, Vivian. I was. We’d been under fire already for months before that day. I couldn’t handle it. I could never handle it. Guam in July of forty-four—bombing the hell out of Guam. I couldn’t imagine how there was even a single blade of grass left standing on that island when we were done with it, we rained such hell on that place. But when our troops landed at the end of July, out come all these Japanese soldiers and tanks. How did they even survive it? I can’t imagine. Our marines were brave, the Japanese soldiers were brave, but I wasn’t brave. I couldn’t bear the noise of the guns, Vivian—and they weren’t even being fired at me. That’s when I started being like this. The nerves, the shakes. The men started calling me Twitchy.”
“Shame on them,” I said.
“They were right, though. I was a pile of nerves. One day, we had a bomb fail to release from one of our planes—a hundred-pound bomb, just got jammed in the open bomb bay. The pilot radios in that he’s got a bomb stuck in the bay, and he has to land like that, can you imagine? Then, during the landing, the bomb kind of shudders lose and falls out, and now we have a hundred-pound bomb skittering across the flight deck. Your brother and some other guys just ran right at it and pushed that thing over the edge of the ship like it’s nothing—and again, I’m frozen. Can’t help, can’t act, can’t do anything.”
“It doesn’t matter, Frank.” But again, it was like he couldn’t hear me.
“Then it’s August 1944,” he went on. “We’re in the middle of a typhoon, but we’re still running sorties, landing planes even while the waves are breaking over the flight deck. And those pilots, landing on a postage stamp in the middle of the Pacific, in the teeth of the gale—they never even flinch. Here I am, my hands can’t stop shaking, and I’m not even piloting the goddamn planes, Vivian. They called our convoy ‘Murderers’ Row.’ We were supposed to be the toughest guys around. But I wasn’t tough.”