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Show dolphins etched into the stone. Like most cemeteries, Rosecrans is a beautiful place. It straddles a hill overlooking San Diego bay and the Naval Submarine Base at Point Loma. Boomers, enormous nuclear submarines that have replaced the fast attack subs, move in and out of the port. In the summer, when naval vessels gather from around the world for military exercises, the entrance of the bay is littered with their broad hulls. The cemetery is a sea of white headstones, chiseled dolphin gathering in schools. The boat returned to Pearl Harbor bearing the dead weight of forty silver tuna and an eighty-pound marlin. There was little talk. While Bryan played with the marlin's fins, I worked at wiping the blood from my legs. The scales did not come off easily. On the slow ride, my dad apologized several times for catching my mom's fish. He would apologize for the next twenty years. What I never pictured as a child those early Sunday mornings, head bent in prayer beneath a bell that had been saved from the U.S.S Argonaut sunk in World War II, was that the real threat was not, as the hymn indicated, the "restless wave." It was not enemy fire, communism, the first strike, or a failure in sonar. Peril was not outside the submarine but inside it, living alongside the men like a familiar. Flavoring their coffee, lying like silt on their bed sheets, clinging to the fibers in their uniforms, running down the sides of their faces with shampoo. No amount of training could prepare them for the necessary escape. Nor did I realize then that sacrifice was not limited to only those who secured 179 |
