Re-Imagining Old Battles: A Sea Story 

I attended college after four years in the Navy and remember my freshman English instructor assigning an evergreen topic for the class’s first writing assignment: what I did last summer. Most of the class wrote about going to the Jersey shore or serving as a counselor at summer camp. I wrote about surviving a typhoon in the South China Sea.

Looking back, the paper was full of superlatives and purple prose and probably wasn’t worth an A. But that was a defining moment for me as I have since struggled to write about war, adventures at sea, the mendacity of the military, and the death of comrades.

The other day, my doctor was poking around my sinus cavities. To distract me, he asked what I was up to. I said I had just finished a novel, “USS Bunker Kills: A Sea Story,” based on my experiences in and around the Tonkin Gulf during Vietnam. When I came up for air, he asked me why I had waited so long after my service. I responded that to write soon after the actual event would make the narrative too literal, too factual and too muscular. By now, I was talking to myself.

I could have told my nose doctor that I tried a number of times to write a novel about my experiences aboard an ammunition ship, the runt of the Seventh Fleet litter. My ship had enough characters, wackos, and castaways to fill a volume or too. At least one of my captains had a drinking problem and gave me questionable commands when I was at the helm. And there was the matter of that pesky firebug or arsonist, if you want to be exact. So this kind of writing is not just about having a bucketful of juicy details. It doesn’t get any better than writing about a 300-pound boatswain’s mate named Cheeks, who carried most of that weight in his ass.

I’m reading George Packer’s piece in a recent New Yorker about how soldiers write their wars. Packer notes that “Soldiers who set out to write the story of their war also have to navigate a minefield of clichés; all of them more or less true but open to qualification; many sowed long before the soldiers were every deployed, because every war is like every other war. That’s one of them. War is hell is another. War begins in illusion and ends in blood and tears.” (And so on.)

Packer writes that “Vietnam gave us another kind of distancing—black humor, satire and surrealism.” In this spirit, time is probably the best distancing agent for writing about distant wars because everything has been presumably said and, anyway, who wants to beat those old dead bones again.

In some respects, a ship is the perfect setting and archetype for a novel. Movement and freedom are profoundly limited while underway. Personal, racial and sexual tensions are often inflamed when serving nine-month stints at sea. In pre-satellite times, ships got lost and confused. Dead-reckoning was considered an art and no one seemed to get the joke. Typhoons can move ships sideways. Two-thousand-pound bombs rocking and rolling in the holds is not the kind of music a sailor wants to hear.

But these are all details, stuff at the bottom of the writing desk. More important is the psychology this stuff is filtered through. I’m taking about point of view, of course. For “Bunker Kills,” I chose third-person restricted point of view so that all actions and musings would be filtered through a main character, a young, naïve, transplanted Brit new to the nation, Navy, mores, speech and customs. And to the complex racial tensions in the air at the time! Moreover, he’s something of a romantic and a fool for celestial navigation, looking for Mars, Pluto, and Saturn tendencies in his fellow crew members. This character is neither nuts nor gifted. He gets caught up in his own sea story and pays the price. The young man is not always reliable, looking for longitude markers as if they are buoys in the stream.

I couldn’t write “Bunker Kills” until I realized that the novel needed this kind of surreal, starlit filter that could accommodate a number of sea stories at once. In the practical sense, the center of shipboard life is the quartermaster’s log. It is the last word, so to speak. The voyage becomes a little more complicated when multiple logs and realities collide. In this confusion, sailors sometimes die. And officers get promoted. Everyone, even the ship, can moan about the costs of a punishing sea.

Writing about Tonkin Gulf clashes from forty years ago, a long-forgotten historical footnote, is not the stuff of novels. The geography, the seascape, and pandemonium must be internalized and become part of the psychology of the ship. It must be re-imagined and recast. The view is necessarily inward rather than outward. That’s the only way to hold the characters and actions in tension.

Wars imagined backwards will still provide the requisite blood and gore. But the battles might slow down a bit, like sailing on an ammunition ship at fifteen nautical miles an hour, allowing us more narrative time for honor, folly, and regret, but with shipboard mendacity still fully intact.

“USS Bunker Kills: A Sea Story,” slow to the war party, will be available this summer.