Too Absent Herald

CONFIDENTIAL

Page 227

DECK LOG–REMARKS SHEET

United States Ship SCRIMMAGE (AM-297)

Monday, 13 November, 1944

00 – 04 Steaming on base course 114 deg (T) and (PSC), all engines ahead two-thirds speed, proceeding from Leyte Island, Philippines, to Manus Island, Admiralty Group, in compliance with Commander Task Group 78.2 verbal orders. In company with and acting as picket escort for TransDiv 22. No further remarks.

(signed)
Grant H. Wilson,
Lt. (jg), USNR.

04 -08 Steaming as before. 0627 Sunrise, lighted ship. 0739 Sighted enemy aircraft; opened fire. 0740 ceased firing, having expended four rounds 40 mm AA ammunition. 0742 sounded general quarters. No further remarks.

(signed)
Robert E. Skinner,
Boatswain, USN.

The earth is round. People have conventions. We float above the roundness of the earth and make some small rules to fit straight lines onto curved surfaces we can’t quite hold onto. A ship is a straight line. So is time, to the Navy, anyway.

The United States Ship Scrimmage, Admirable Class #297, was a minesweeper. I suppose that in wartime, nothing afloat painted haze gray could be called peaceful, not without doing violence to language. I suppose that a ship whose job is to clear the sea of death so that Marines can get ashore to death, different but just as hideous, cannot claim pacific purpose. AM-297 was a warship just as surely as was BB-39, but if my grandfather is to be in the awful universe of war, it does no great violence to his gentleness that his job is destroying mines.

He likes the story of November 13, 1944. It was also November 12, 1944, back in Omaha, where Grandma was giving birth to my father. The earth is round. We haven’t the rules to fit our straight lines into it, so I do not wonder that we haven’t got them to fit the spaces in our hearts. How is it that a man is not with his wife as his second son is born, but rather stands helmeted upon the steel deck in the climbing tropical sun, watching four rounds trace upward into the sky towards the heart of another man? Later the humor of it: getting the letter from home: length and weight, date and time, do some figuring, consult the logbook, and there it is…a little anti-aircraft fireworks display to celebrate the new baby. And pleasure, I think, that the rounds missed: no death in the celebration of new life.

And now? I’ve got some fraying plumb-line and a rusty t-square. I poke around feebly in the round spaces with a sharp but short and flimsy pointer, unable to reach the spots I really want to. Compass and clock are marginally better tools, closer to the roundness around us: we won that war, Grandpa came home. Some arcs we can cut off without killing the world outright. But my binnacle has been ripped out. I can’t ask the questions I want to–that calculus does not exist. I have phantom pains in round places I cannot ever reach. I don’t know how to let go of an anger I have never really held onto. Most of all, I am tired of metaphors. I am disgusted by coincidence, since after that first joyful one, they all seem to be terrible. I miss you, Dad. Nearness is everything. Nearness, and a few round, warm words.

For Loren Asahel Gammon, Jr., November 1944 – August 1984