The launch purred smoothly across the calm waters of the harbor, making for the Navy Yard pier. Their feet braced against the slow roll of the boat, two young men stood looking at the huge gray ship they had just left.

“I’m beginning to have my doubts,” Scoot Bailey said almost to himself.

“Same here,” the other replied. March Anson was shorter than his friend, but more solidly and compactly built. His gray-blue eyes were steady and cool, matching the set of his jaw, but the crinkling lines at their corners showed that this apparently serious young man spent a good deal of time smiling or laughing.

“She was a swell ship,” Scoot said sadly.

“Was!” exclaimed March. “She still is! Just because Bailey and Anson have left her, don’t you think she can carry on any longer?” A slow smile spread over his face as he turned to look at his friend. But Scoot was serious.

“Oh, sure, March,” he replied. “But she’s out of our lives now. She’s past tense for us. And—well, she’s been just about everything to us for a year now—home, mother, and sweetheart!”

“I know what you mean,” March said. “And it’s natural for us to wonder if we’ve done the right thing in being transferred. Right now we’re looking at what we’re leaving. In another ten minutes we’ll be concentrating on what we’re going to!”

Scoot Bailey turned around and sat down.

“I’m going to start right now,” he grinned. “No use getting sentimental about the old Plymouth at this point. I’m going to start thinking about the Lexington or the Shangri-La or whatever aircraft carrier I’ll be on in a few months.”

“Good idea,” March agreed, sitting beside the tall and gangling young man who now stared ahead at the Navy Yard. “But that’s one trouble right now, Scoot. Neither one of us knows exactly where he’ll be. If you knew exactly what ship you’d be attached to, you could make your thoughts more specific. When you get there, you know you’ll love her just as much as you’ve loved the Plymouth—more, in fact, because you’ll be flying at last!”

“Yes, I know, but what about you?” Scoot asked. “I still can’t figure out why you want to be a pigboat man. And what can you dream about now as you look into the future? The name of some fish, that’s all.”

“Sure, subs are named after fish,” March replied. “And they have some swell names, too—the Barracuda, the Dolphin, the Spearfish, the Amberjack!”

“Yes, they sound all right,” Scoot grinned. “But what if you’re assigned to the Cod or the Herring or the Shad? No, I can’t figure out what you see in those stuffy, cramped, oversized bathtubs!”

This light-hearted argument had been going on ever since March Anson and Scoot Bailey had been in the Navy together. Neither one minded the jibes of the other, but the dispute as to the respective merits of air and underwater craft never ended.

“Cozy and snug,” March said stoutly, “that’s what subs are! Not cramped and stuffy! Why—they’re all air-conditioned now!”

“Maybe so,” Scoot said, shaking his head, “but no air-conditioning can match the clear blue sky a couple of miles up there where I’ll be flying! Boy—what a chance! Just what I’ve always wanted!”

Their departure from the cruiser Plymouth was forgotten now as they thought of their futures. Only one aspect of that future was rarely mentioned by either of them, and they tried not to think too much about it. In their new activities they would not be together—these two who had been inseparable friends for so many long years.

They had met in the first year of high school, back in that small Ohio city which now, during war, seemed so many miles and so many years away. Scoot had lived in Hampton all his life, but March had just moved there from the farm which his mother had sold when his father died. A widow with a son only thirteen years old could not run a 160-acre farm, she had decided, not if her son was to get the education she had determined he would have.

So the farm had been sold, and Mrs. Anson and her young son had moved to the near-by city of Hampton. March started high school, and his mother went back to teaching, her profession before she married Clement Anson and settled down to farm life. The money from the farm sale was tucked away in the bank, to be forgotten until the time came for March to enter college.

March and Scoot had sat next to each other in the big assembly hall of Hampton High School on the first day. They had taken to each other at once and from that time had been the closest of friends. Some people had wondered at the deep friendship of these two who, in some ways, seemed so different. Scoot had always been a noisy and boisterous kid, eager for any activity that meant speed, excitement, and a little bit of danger. The more conservative parents shook their heads and called him a little “wild” although he never got into serious trouble.

March Anson, on the other hand, was quiet and serious. On the farm he had worked hard and had learned the value of hard work. In school he studied thoroughly and carefully. Even in sports he was serious, playing games as though he looked on them as work, not as pleasure.

But March and Scoot recognized in each other at once the hidden qualities that lay beneath the surface indications of their character. Scoot saw that March really enjoyed life tremendously. He just didn’t whoop and shout about it. He felt a thrill of pleasure in a tough football game played hard. He loved the talk and chatter of a gang of boys discussing the game afterward, even though he spent more time listening than talking himself. He liked the school dances, even though he was somewhat timid with girls and danced so quietly that he stood out in contrast to the majority of wildly capering youngsters.

Scoot learned to appreciate the slow smile that spread over March’s face when he was enjoying himself. When something amusing happened, he could look at March and see the twinkle in his eye that others seemed to miss.

In the same way, March saw that beneath Scoot’s noisy impulsiveness there was a great deal of calm courage, a daring that had in it nothing of foolhardiness but—on the contrary—a good deal of confidence. Scoot had a serious side that none of his friends, until March came along, had penetrated. He never seemed to study much, but his grades were always good. That was because Scoot never announced, “No, I can’t do that—I have to go home and study now.” Scoot was ready to do anything suggested by anyone, but he still managed to get his studying done, after the play was over.

By the time they graduated from high school together, Scoot and March had both changed a good deal, each one influenced by the other. At a first glance they seemed just the same as always, but March was less retiring, less timid, while Scoot did not always hide under his playful spirit his more serious interests in life.

When they went off to the state university together, they wondered how long it would last, for war was already in the air.

“It’s coming,” Scoot said, “just as sure as shootin’, war’s coming. And I’m going to be in it just about five minutes after it starts.”

“They’ve been staving it off for a long time,” March said, “and maybe they can keep it up a few years longer. But I don’t think they can ever satisfy that Hitler guy. Giving in to a pig won’t work—he’ll just keep demanding more and more! But maybe we’ll get our college education before the guns start popping!”

But the guns had started firing in Europe before their second year. When the first peacetime selective service act was passed in the United States, Scoot was very excited at being below the twenty-year age, and wanted to enlist at once. But it was March who persuaded him against it.

“We can do more good going right on getting our education until they need us,” he insisted. “Then we’ll be that much better equipped to do a good job.”

His argument prevailed over Scoot then, but the war became their favorite topic of conversation from that time on. Many others in the college were not interested. They felt that the war was thousands of miles away, that two big oceans were enough insulation to keep it away from America.

But Scoot and March felt sure it was coming. They followed the war news carefully, their hearts sinking as Hitler’s gangs overran one country after another in Europe. They spent their spare time reading books and articles about the war, the new weapons and tactics that were being used. It was then that Scoot knew that he wanted to be a flier, and then that March first developed his interest in submarines.

“This is an air war!” Scoot insisted. “It’s going to be fought and won in the air!”

“The whole thing?” March demanded. “I wouldn’t deny the importance of planes, but I’d never agree that they’ll do the whole job alone. The country without planes can’t win, I’ll say that much. But look at Germany’s U-boats! Look at the damage they’re doing! If England can’t get her supplies by sea—why, she’s sunk!”

The argument that never ended was begun right then. March and Scoot read everything they could lay their hands on about submarines and airplanes. And when the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor, Scoot wanted to get in a plane and fly by instinct out over the Pacific, to give them a taste of their own medicine. He had just decided to enlist when the Navy’s program for college students was announced—the V-12 plan which carried students through an intensive training course which resulted in commissions as Ensigns.

For March there was no doubt about what course to follow. He signed up for V-12 at once, already sure that he would be sailing in a submarine before the year was out.

Scoot could not make up his mind for a few days. When he had thought of flying, he had always thought of the Army Air Forces. But the Navy had fliers, too. Eventually it was his burning hatred of the Japs that decided him.

“There’s a lot of water between us and them,” he said. “The Navy will have the biggest job in knocking them over—and aircraft carriers will be the answer! Navy it is for me, too!”

So March Anson and Scoot Bailey had joined the Navy. Gone were all thoughts of football, baseball, dances, and parties. And suddenly there seemed to be little difference between the two. Both were now serious, hard-working, for in the Navy’s program there was room for little but serious, hard work. Together they crammed into their heads more mathematics than they had thought of studying in a whole college course. Navigation, engineering, English, Navy custom and tradition—all were crammed into them with an intensity of which they had never thought themselves capable.

Both had put in early their requests for assignment to submarines and to air service. And, though they knew that the Navy tried to place men where they wanted to go, they realized that the Navy’s needs would come first rather than their wishes. So they were disappointed, though not surprised, when both requests were turned down. The submarine school at New London, even though greatly expanded, was full to overflowing. And the applicants for Naval Aviation exceeded by ten times the number that could be accepted.

New warships were coming off the ways in shipyards all over the country, and men were needed to man them. So, after some further specialized training—Scoot in engineering and March in navigation—they found themselves assigned to the new cruiser Plymouth which had been rushed to completion four months ahead of schedule.

On their shakedown cruise they had been too interested in their new life—the huge ship and the men they worked with—to feel disappointment over missing out on their chosen fields. They knew they were already a part of the war, and the job they were doing was important. As Ensigns, they were two very junior officers on the ship almost as large as their home town, but they had their jobs, and they learned more about them and about all ships every day.

The Navy lost no time, after ship and crew were deemed fit and ready for action, in getting them to the Pacific where the losses suffered at Pearl Harbor had put the United States at a great, though temporary, disadvantage. By the time they had made the long trip down the eastern coast, through the Panama Canal, and across almost half the Pacific to Pearl Harbor, Scoot and March felt like veterans. The Executive Officer of the Plymouth, Commander Seaton, had taken a liking to them because of their application to their jobs and their desire to learn all they could. He saw to it that they got varied experiences, shifting to different jobs carried out by junior officers from time to time.

In company with a battleship, two light cruisers, and twelve destroyers, they left Pearl Harbor as a task force heading for action in the southwest Pacific. And action was not long in coming.

In the Coral Sea, the small task force ran into a Jap convoy, heavily screened by warships, trying to sneak an end run around the corner of Australia. Two U.S. aircraft carriers had gone out to break up the convoy, but they were so outnumbered by the enemy that they were in a bad way when the Plymouth’s force arrived on the scene under full steam. The Japs were taken by surprise, lost their tight organization, and fled north, leaving behind three troopships and four destroyers heading for the bottom.

Scoot had been joyful at his first battle experience, but was angry that he had not been on the guns.

“Just when the fighting starts I have to be down in the engine room,” he moaned. “Didn’t even see anything, let alone take a shot at those dirty Nips!”

“Well, I saw plenty,” March replied, “but navigation officers don’t get a chance at much shooting, either!”

Scoot, by dint of much pleading and arguing, got Commander Seaton to transfer him to gunnery, but then eight weeks went by without a sight of a Jap. The first shots Scoot fired were into shore installations of the Japs at Munda airfield in the Solomons, after the Marines had consolidated their hold on Guadalcanal and had decided to move forward to another island.

The big battle had come almost ten months after they had shipped aboard the Plymouth, up in the Bismarck Sea northeast of New Guinea. Finally finding the sizable Jap force for which he had been looking, Admiral Caldwell, in charge of the U.S. force, had steamed right into the middle of the bevy of Jap ships and opened fire with everything he had. For seven hours, mostly at night, the battle had raged. Jap planes were attacking overhead, at least until U.S. planes drove them off at dawn. The firing on all sides was so deafening that no one could hear even Scoot’s whoops of glee and happiness. When three of his gun crew went down under a hail of flying fragments from a shell that landed on the Plymouth’s deck not fifty feet away, Scoot carried on with the few that were left, but the rate of fire was cut. So he rounded up a cook and a messboy and turned them into expert gunners in five minutes and knocked three Jap planes out of the sky with his improvised gun crew in ten minutes.

Meanwhile, March had not been idle. The shell whose fragments had laid low part of Scoot’s crew had landed squarely on one of the 12-inch gun turrets forward. March was the first man into the smoking and wrecked turret, pulling out the wounded and dead who were there. At any moment the ammunition below might have exploded—for no one knew if the shell had penetrated that far—but March had no thought of such a thing. Three of the men he lugged from the turret were still alive, though closer to death than March had ever seen anyone. Later, the medical officer told March those three had lived only because they got medical attention so fast.

When it was all over, and half the Jap force lay at the bottom of the sea while the rest ran for cover, pursued by American planes, the men on the Plymouth wearily surveyed the damage done to their ship. It was plenty, but a month in port would fix her up again. As they headed slowly for Pearl Harbor for repairs, Scoot and March got the big surprise of their lives. They had no thought of making heroes of themselves, and they never could figure out how, in the heat of battle, any officer could have seen just what they did.

Yet when the citations came along, Scoot and March both found themselves on the list commended for conspicuous gallantry in action.

“My golly, we didn’t do anything,” Scoot had objected, even though he was beaming all over with pleasure. “Everybody else did the same kind of thing. All the crew were fighting just as hard as we were!”

“Yes, but they didn’t all keep their heads under fire and show the spontaneously clear thinking that you two did,” Commander Seaton said to them in a friendly talk later. “That’s what counts—that’s what makes leaders of men. And the Navy needs leaders these days. By the way, the Skipper asked me if there was anything special we could do for you two—anything you wanted especially. I told him that you, Scoot, had wanted to be a Navy flier and that March had wanted to be a submariner. If you still feel that way, the Skipper’ll recommend your transfer to those branches.”

March and Scoot were dumbfounded! And it had not been an easy thing to decide, though a few months before they would not have hesitated for an instant. Scoot still wanted to fly. March still wanted to go into the pigboats. But they had lived on the Plymouth, gone through battle with her, and they didn’t like the idea of leaving her now.

It was March who made up his mind first. “I’m going to ask for the transfer,” he said. “I hate to leave this ship and the men on it and the action I know she’ll be seeing. After a battle or two you don’t feel like going back to school again. You want to go on to more battles. But I love the idea of submarines so much that I know I’d be a better man in a pigboat than I can ever be on a surface ship. So I’ll take a few months out, learn what I have to learn, and come back to this part of the world and really send some of those Jap ships to the bottom.”

“Guess you’re right,” Scoot agreed. “It won’t be long!”

So they had said farewell to the Plymouth sadly as they stepped into the launch taking them ashore. And they had stood looking at the great gray ship as the little boat moved toward the Navy Yard pier.

But now their eyes were set forward. They had a long way to travel to get home, a lot of hard work and studying to do before they could accomplish what they wanted.

They stepped from the launch and stood on the pier. For a last moment they looked out at the Plymouth once more.

“So long, old gal,” Scoot said. “You’ll be getting your face lifted here at Pearl Harbor and you’ll be back in the thick of it soon. Maybe I’ll see you out there—when I’m up in the blue sky flying my Grumman Wildcat.”

“Yes, and some time when I’m submerged and hear the throb of a cruiser’s engines,” March added, “I’ll stick up the periscope for a peek, wondering whether that ship is friend or foe. And it’ll turn out to be my old friend, my old sweetheart, the Plymouth.”

Together, the two young men turned and walked toward their new lives.