Sentinels of Fire by P. T. Deutermann

bulkhead, showing what was called the air picture. The boards had a five-foot-diameter compass rose etched into them, with concentric ten-mile range rings expanding from the center, which marked where we were. Contact information on bogeys detected by radar were passed via sound-powered phones to men standing behind the lighted boards, who then marked the range, bearing, course, speed, and altitude of all air contacts within fifty miles of the ship using yellow grease pencils. Because they stood behind the boards, they’d all had to learn to write backward, so that the officers positioned in front of the boards could interpret what they were seeing.
    Down each side of Combat were the radar operators, both air search and surface search, sitting at bulky consoles where the green video displays flickered. The entire space was kept in constant semidarkness to make it easier for the radar operators to see their displays. Standing behind the console operators were the two fighter direction officers. The Freddies were fighter pilots who were being given a break from flight duties and who’d been trained to control other fighters by radio and radar. Each morning, all the destroyers would be assigned a section or even two of CAP: carrier fighter planes sent up from the carriers steaming off Okinawa to destroy as many of the incoming Jap planes as possible before they could reach their bomb-release or suicide-dive points over the American fleet.
    I stood in the middle of the space, right next to a lighted table where the surface picture was plotted. The table, called a dead-reckoning tracer or DRT, contained a small light projector underneath its glass top. The projector was slaved to the ship’s gyro, and thus whenever the ship moved, the projector moved with it under the glass, projecting a yellow circle of light with a compass rose etched onto it. That way we saw a true picture of what the ship was doing. Plotters, men standing around the table wearing sound-powered phones, would then plot the positions of surface contacts, both friendly and enemy, onto a very thin sheet of tracing paper taped to the glass top. The result was the so-called surface picture: what we were doing, where our escorting ships were and what they were doing, and where any bad guys were within range of our guns.
    The air and surface plots meant that there were lots of men speaking quietly into sound-powered phones, both making and getting reports, but to my ears it was all just a routine hum. After three years of war, my brain had learned to tune out the routine and repetitive reporting and listen instead for the sounds of immediate danger, indicated by words such as “closing fast” or “inbound” or “multiple bogeys,” or that great catchall “oh shit.” Combat was the nerve center of the ship in terms of war-fighting. In addition to the surface and air pictures, the sonar operators had a console in one corner, meaning that all three dimensions of what we might encounter, air, surface, and underwater, were displayed in this one space.
    If Combat was the brain, then the gun directors and their associated weapons represented the fist. Malloy had three twin-barreled five-inch gun mounts, all of them controlled by a large analog computer down below the waterline in a space called Main Battery Plot. There were two gun directors, one that looked like a five-inch gun mount without any guns, mounted one level above the bridge, and a second, much smaller one, at the after end of the ship’s superstructure right behind the after stack. The forward director had its own radar, which would feed range and bearing information down to the computer, which in turn would drive the five-inch gun mounts to train and point at the computed future position of incoming targets. The after director was a one-man machine, without a radar, but it could be optically locked on to incoming targets as long as they were very close. It could