Chapter 7 - The Platform on Pier Twelve
The morning broke over Naval Station Norfolk with that rare, brilliant blue sky that comes after a three-day gale—clean, scrubbed of dust, with the wind out of the northwest at fifteen knots, cold enough to make the signal flags on the halyards snap like rifle shots against the aluminum masts.
Pier Twelve was three hundred yards of gray concrete bordered by black rubber fenders that groaned against the steel hulls of two guided-missile cruisers. At the far end, decorated from the bow to the stern with the full dress ship array of international signal code—red, yellow, blue, and checkered pennants fluttering in the sun—sat the USS Daniel Ruiz, DDG-128.
She was new. Her haze-gray paint had the flat, chalky texture of fresh epoxy that hadn't yet seen the salt crust of the North Atlantic. Her SPY-6 radar arrays were dark, hexagonal shields set into the deckhouse, clean as unexposed film, and her five-inch gun on the forecastle was trained fore-and-aft with a brass cover over the muzzle that gleamed like a newly minted coin.
Two thousand people sat in folding chairs on the concrete: shipyard workers from Bath, Maine, who had laid the keel; high school students from Lubbock who had never seen an ocean before yesterday; and five hundred sailors in dress blues with their flat hats square on their heads, their neckerchiefs tied with the square knots that had been inspected three times before the bus left the barracks.
I sat in the second row of the platform, four seats down from the Secretary of the Navy and six feet behind the podium where the ship’s sponsor—a tiny woman in a blue church dress with a lace collar—sat holding a silver box containing the ship’s first commissioning pennant.
My service khakis were crisp. The four pins Commander Vance had put into my hair were holding the weight off my collar, and the blue ribbon on my chest didn't move in the fifteen-knot wind because the brass backings were pressed tight against the wool felt.
Behind the security fence at the head of the pier, three hundred yards back where the civilian guests were permitted to stand if they didn't have platform credentials, I could see the blue roof of a chartered bus from the Navy League.
My father was not there.
He had called the flag office at zero-seven-hundred from his house in Virginia Beach. Commander Vance had taken the call on the speaker in the anteroom while I was drinking black coffee from a paper cup.
“Tell the Lieutenant Commander,” his voice had said, the transmission crackling with the interference from the cellular tower on Shore Drive, “that I have an appointment with the regional maintenance director regarding some private matters. I will not be able to attend the ceremony.”
“Acknowledge,” Vance had said, and she had hung up the handset without asking if there was a secondary message.
Now, as the bell on the quarterdeck struck eight times for ten-hundred, Judith Carrow stepped to the podium.
She was wearing her full dress whites, the large medals clinking softly against her left breast as she took the lectern: the Navy Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal, the Legion of Merit. The wind caught the gold lace on her sleeves, turning the four broad bands of bullion into a solid cuff of light.
“Officers and crew of the Daniel Ruiz,” the Admiral said. Her voice didn't need the public address system; she had the deep, forward placement of someone who had spent thirty years shouting over the whine of gas turbines and the roar of catapult shuttles. “Ladies and gentlemen. In nineteen-eighty-seven, when I was an ensign on a repair ship in Subic Bay, an old master chief told me that the Navy doesn't build ships out of steel. He said steel is just the container. He said the Navy is built out of the twenty minutes when an engineer has to decide whether he loves his skin more than he loves the twenty-year-old kid standing on the lower plates.”
She turned her head slightly, her gaze passing over the rows of captains and commodores, stopping directly on my face.
“On the fourth of August, twenty-twenty-one,” she said, “the Truxtun was three hundred miles from support in waters that were hostile in every way that matters to an operational commander. When the steam line parted, there were twelve different officers between the bridge and the engine room who could have hit the remote trip and let the auxiliary space flood with halon. Every single one of them had an administrative excuse to do so.”
She reached down, took a document from the folder on the lectern, and held it up in the wind.
The paper was stiff, bordered with the gold seal of the Department of the Navy.
“The Chief Engineer didn't use the remote,” the Admiral said. “She went down the hatch. She took the heat. And she stayed on the wheel until the line was shut.”
She looked back at the crew standing in three ranks along the starboard rail.
“The ship you are commissioning today carries the name of a sailor who lived because his department head knew the difference between an administrative career and command,” she said. “And as long as this pennant flies from her halyard, no sailor who wears this crest will ever have to ask what kind of courage the fleet expects of them.”
She lowered the paper, stepped two paces back from the podium, and turned to face the second row.
“Lieutenant Commander Alden,” she commanded.
The sound of my low-quarters hitting the wooden riser was like two sharp hammer strokes.
I stood at the position of attention, my hands flat against the seams of my trousers, my chin level, my eyes fixed on the horizon past the ship’s radar mast where the Atlantic opened up toward the east—cold, blue, and empty all the way to Portugal.
The Secretary of the Navy stood up beside her.
He was a civilian, a former senator from Maine who had two sons in the Marine Corps, and when he took the box from the Admiral’s flag aide, his hands were very steady.
He didn't read the whole citation. He read the last three lines—the lines that the board had written after they reviewed the metallurgical reports and the hospital records from San Antonio:
“...for extraordinary heroism in action against the hazards of the sea. By her unhesitating actions, complete disregard for her personal safety, and unyielding adherence to the highest traditions of the naval service, Lieutenant Commander Valerie Alden upheld the finest traditions of the United States Navy and reflected great credit upon herself and the Armed Forces.”
He pinned the medal above the ribbon.
The Navy Cross was heavier than the ribbon bar. The bronze cross, with the caravel sailing on an ocean of blue enamel in the center, swung against the cotton of my shirt, the weight of the metal dragging the left pocket down by an eighth of an inch.
Judith Carrow stepped forward, brought her hand to the brim of her combination cover, and held the salute for five full seconds while the band played the three ruffles and flourishes that belonged to the decoration.
The sound of the horns died in the northwest wind.
The crowd stood up.
The shipyard workers from Bath were the first to clap—rough, heavy claps from men with calluses on their thumbs who knew what five-hundred-pound steam did to steel and human meat. Then the crew on the rail took it up, five hundred sailors beating their palms against their thighs with the dry, rhythmic roar of a division clearing the deck.
May you like
I brought my hand down from my cover.
The wind caught the collar of my khaki shirt, pulling the fabric tight against the bandage on my shoulder blade, but the pain was gone. It had turned into something else: the cold, steady resistance of an old weld that had been tested to the limits of the design and had held the water out.
