Red Ice

He hiccuped loudly and something white and round popped from his mouth. As he wiped the front of his face with a towel, the object bounced to the floor. He closed his mouth and with a hiccup another white object became visible. He wiped his mouth again.

“Wass going on?” Alvarez said with a befuddled look. The husky Cuban picked up the white object and examined it hesitantly. You had to be very careful these days. Alvarez was the group’s skeptic.

Soon the passageway was awash with bouncing white objects.

“I told you not to eat those Ping-Pong balls so close to a launch,” Wickersham said reprovingly as he flexed his neck from side to side. “You know this always happens when you mix paddles and Ping-Pong balls at supper. The paddles get frisky and start serving the balls out. I wish you’d stick to pachinko. At least the balls stay in the machine.”

“Aw, perdition (hic). Cut me some slack, Wick.” He made a moue. “Don’t start with me. You know how I get. Ain’t some of these fellas got enough to think about?”

Gurung, with as much dignity as he could muster, rushed down the ladder to the head again.

I was in a deep depression. It was always the same dark, irritable depression that accompanied me into action. This black mood was upholstered in equal parts of self-doubt and dark recrimination. Was all this the result of my personal madness or was it simply vanity?

This was the deep, very private gloom reserved for leaders. It was the special reserve of those madmen who went out looking for trouble, those idiots who designed nearly attainable missions and executed them themselves. Only a few military leaders experienced this special torment. Others were passively drawn into battle, responding to directives and reacting to threats. Not you. In special operations, the initiative, the organizing, and the execution were often all rolled into one. You sought out trouble spots, generated your own proposals for authorization, and bore the heavy burden of the power of life and death alone.

The mood came before every evolution where I might lose a man. It was like this before every night parachute jump, before every night ship attack, before open boat passages, before assaults up a sheer rock cliff, before every hazardous engagement.

I kneaded my right shoulder. It was throbbing again.

What made me so foolhardy? Who was I to think I could pull this off? Very likely we would all be dead by this time next week.

It was always eerie to be able to see the future in such stark alternatives and be able to set your watch by them. In a week we would all be alive or we would all be dead. Would my name be the last name cursed on one of my own men’s lips? With black humor I wondered if perhaps I had been selected to rid the world of its dangerous, violent, overeager people. People who loved rough sports, danger, and a bizarre camaraderie.

As always, I would persevere and see it through. I was driven to make sense out of nonsense. I was haunted by the need to see that good men were not wasted on mediocre causes and enterprises. I burned with the desire to forcibly turn past experiences in personal pain, discomfort, and courage into something worthy of the price. I would take every ordeal, humiliation, and hardship that we had suffered collectively to end up where we now crouched, and make it worth something. Let something else take that away from us. I would not turn back. They wouldn’t.

Nearly all of us were veterans. Each of us had been badly battered and in the end had become associated with a failed undertaking. We would not accept that assessment as a final score. We would take these failures, but only as setbacks on the way to some larger justifying victory. Someday, perhaps.

I understood all this, as I always had, but I still invariably plunged into black depression. For I had forced the issue, and brought everyone to the test, and after tonight not one of our lives would ever be the same.

Then Dravit beaned me with a Ping-Pong ball.

Once we surfaced, the hatch was tossed open, and men and equipment spewed onto the exposed deck. Whitecaps smashed across the sub’s flatback bow, leaving the deck wet and icy slick. The quarter moon shed just enough light to give the quick-frozen icicles on the cigarette-deck railing a crystalline sparkle. The breeze did not feel unusually cold at first, but you soon knew where you had exposed skin.