The Steel Cocoon

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IT IS possible that the condition of war is agreeable to most men. Aside from the killing and the being killed, and the long periods of enforced idleness, almost everything about it is pleasant. It was a long time after World War II before Tyler Williams allowed himself to accept this reflection. But he discovered that when he could not sleep at night, or when he awoke in the darkness, he would take up his memories of the Navy with a secret pleasure.

It seemed to him that he could hold these memories in his hand, so to speak, as a child might hold an old-fashioned Easter egg of papier-mache, and that, if he narrowed his eyes in the darkness and looked into the small aperture in the end, he could see the complete world of his memory, all cut paper and gilt and brightness, waiting there, never changing, alive in another dimension of time.

Most especially did he possess in this private way his memories of the USS Ajax, the destroyer on which he had served in the North Atlantic and the North Sea. At such a moment the Ajax still existed, the green seas still streamed, salt-glistening, from the weather deck, as the bow climbed from a wave through into the sparkling sun. "Never go to the weather deck when the green seas run!" he would hear McNulty shout, and in the darkness his eyes would ache quickly from the remembered brilliance of those days.

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