Free The Last Ship by William Brinkley Page B

high-flown reasons given; though in a more down-to-earth seaman’s view fearful that their presence would screw up, complicate in a thousand ways, some explicitly envisioned in one’s mind, some left to suspicious imagination, the already infinitely complex and delicate job of operating such a ship as this one. Now: In my heart of hearts I suppose I still stood opposed to it. At the same time I felt practically, as a ship’s captain, that if anything they made for a better, more efficient ship; as skillful sailors as any man in the performance of their shipboard duties and, to my mind, in not a few instances superior; more—I will not say intelligent, perhaps the phrase is somewhat more fiercely dedicated to their respective jobs, ratings, skills. Some of this, I would expect, due to tougher Navy standards, first in the selection of the women it permitted to enlist, and second in those it allowed to go to sea (among those applying, in the first instance the acceptance rate was said to be one in ten, in the second one in a hundred), checked out as few sailors had ever been; some to the singleness of purpose that brought them here, and once aboard to being more determined to hack it, to prove they could do it. For whatever reasons, they performed as well as men. They brought a number of surprises. First of these was that the younger of these women sailors appeared to be distinctly more mature emotionally than men sailors of similar ages; whether this was due to the nature of women or to the mentioned Navy’s stiffer selection process for them, especially those sent to sea, I did not know. They presented fewer disciplinary problems. They carried other advantages, some of them decidedly esoteric, entirely unforeseen: one of these being—something as a seaman I found interesting as a novelty, rather charming, as a captain grimly delighted—their faculty, due to smaller physical dimensions, of getting through hatches more quickly. This is more important an asset than one might think in modern sea-battle conditions, where the ability to come swiftly to battle stations can quite conceivably make all the difference in outcome to a ship about to be attacked by today’s weaponry, an extra second enabling her to dodge an SS-N-12 Sandbox missile instead of being blown up by it.
    In practice, for a given task I soon ceased to be concerned, or even aware, whether it was a man sailor or a woman sailor doing something I wanted done. They were alike in executing their jobs. Of the other ways in which they were not at all alike, the Navy—which is the least naive of establishments—had naturally been cognizant when it sent the women forth and in its ineffable wisdom promulgated a veritable typhoon of directives dealing with the correct behavior between these two kinds of sailors and further enjoining ship’s captains, under severe penalties, to make certain of such conduct and giving them extraordinary powers to punish infractions. One specific Navy directive, NAVOP 87/249, read, and I quote verbatim now, “Women will not be addressed, either in general, or specifically, as ‘broads,’ ‘fillies,’ ‘dolls,’ ‘girl,’ or like phrases.” (At the time I wondered what the “like phrases” were that the Navy didn’t specify.) Fat chance of any of my men trying on for size any of those terms, considering the breed of women we had received on board, these being spirited to the last woman. They had not got here by being patsies. They got here because they were smart, because they could cope—and, yes, because they were, or had the makings of, first-class seamen.
    Another directive dealt with the sternness of retribution should any “molesting” occur of such sailors. I had not heard that fine old word in that context since my early youth—it was either my mother or my father, I cannot remember which so that perhaps it was both, in separate sessions, to make certain beyond all doubt in a matter of such gravity that Thomas