Free The Glory by Herman Wouk Page B

and the guys who weren’t injured came and joined us. Strangely, it was uproarious.
     Everybody making jokes, insulting each other, even horseplay. Sheer joy of being alive and together again, we all felt it.
     Also shutting out our sadness about all the guys we lost. Anyway, it was something. The captain wasn’t there. He’s out of
     the hospital, but in terrible mental shape. So am I, Abba.
    Do we even need a navy? It’s a marginal branch at best, isn’t it? That sense of being inferior, not crucial to Israel’s survival
     like the tanks and the air, pervades the service. Slack, slack, slack! Slackness caused the sinking of my ship. Where we were
     steaming, the attack was no surprise. We should have been ready with countermeasures, but that’s not the worst of it. In the
     Beersheba hospital ward where they first took us, General Gavish, Commander South, came and asked the captain why he was sailing
     within missile range, when Southern Command had hard intelligence
that the Egyptians were preparing to fire missiles
.
    The captain got so agitated they had to move him to a private room. Abba, that intelligence never reached the
Eilat
! My God, if we’d been warned, we could have been patrolling thirty miles out, far beyond missile range, and still performed
     our mission. The captain was always uneasy about our patrol sector so close in, but those were our orders. The other day at
     a promotion party for some officer the captain had a few glasses of wine, and he started yelling at the top brass, calling
     them idiots and murderers. He had to be restrained and taken home. I don’t blame him one bit. My blood still boils when I
     think about all this. Whichever shlepper received the intelligence at headquarters probably tossed the despatch in his routine
     out-basket. Missiles, shmissiles! The inquiry is still going on, but they’ll never pin down the guy who should hang. Not in
     this navy.
    What’s an Israeli navy for, anyway, Abba? We fight short land wars. All we really need is a coast guard to nab smugglers and
     sink terrorist craft. This shlepper navy is never going to match the Soviet Union in missile warfare, and no matter what Arab
     presses the buttons, the Russians are our enemy at sea. I’m ready to go into tanks, paratroops, even special services if my
     back will hold up. Amos Pasternak came in today, and we talked a lot about this. Amos says the tanks are Israel’s backbone.
     They’re your branch, and I’m just fed up with the navy. It’s a blind alley. Maybe the white dress uniform got to me. Maybe
     you shouldn’t have named me Noah! Anyway, I’ll welcome your advice about what to do and where to turn. I’m at a dead end,
     and very depressed, as you may gather.
    Love to all,
    Noah
    R ock-and-roll music bedevilled Zev Barak as he was trying to reply to this letter, for Nakhama allowed the girls to play records
     “low” while doing homework. A vague term, that “low,” subject to very different constructions by the opposing parties, thought
     Barak — much like the words in the new UN peace resolution, under urgent grinding debate ever since the
Eilat
incident and the fiery artillery reprisal.
    … no argument, Noah, about your bitterness over the intelligence failure. It happens in the army too, God knows. You’ve learned
     in a tragic way that sea warfare has evolved to a new form. For Israel, no more large targets: destroyers, frigates, they’re
     finished. But those Styxes were launched by boats tied up in port. Stable platforms. If fired from a tossing deck, who knows?
     Still, we must assume the worst. Russian-made boats of Arab navies, probably partly manned by Soviet technicians, will either
     dominate our coasts, or we must have a navy that can outfight them —
    Barak’s pen halted, and he ate pistachio nuts from a bowl by his armchair. Was he taking the right tone now, after crumpling
     into the wastebasket two starts which had tried paternal comfort and reassurance? But