Seapersons the Last Ship

By Donald Morrison

The missiles have flown, the earth's depopulated land masses are glowing like one big Chernobyl, and the 305 hands aboard the U.S.S. Nathan James, a destroyer that has survived the holocaust, find themselves alone in the vasty deep. But wait. Lurking beneath the waves is a Soviet nuclear submarine that has also escaped harm. Will the two vessels 1) blast each other with their remaining missiles, 2) join forces to begin civilization anew or 3) spend 600- odd pages stalking each other while they try to decide?

Answer: none of the above, mercifully. William Brinkley, an ex-Navy man who made gentle fun of that service in Don't Go Near the Water, his popular 1956 novel (remember Glenn Ford in the movie?), is serious on this voyage. Instead of another hardware-heavy Tom Clancy naval thriller like The Hunt for Red October, Brinkley's tale has humanity, thoughtfulness and one inspired complication: women. On the Nathan James, not surprisingly nowadays in this man's Navy, 32 crew members are female. Sexual tension and just plain tension mount as the ship, food and fuel dwindling, scours the globe for a habitable place to settle down and, if the women are willing, raise some families.

Ah, the women. Having resisted the Navy policy change that put them on board, the ship's narrator-captain treats them fairly, admires their sailorly skills and forgets to his peril that they are, after all, women. An austere career man identified only as Tom or the Captain, he leads the mixed crew bravely through mutiny, internecine murder and nuclear winter, until at last he confronts the cunning of Lieut. Girard, the ship's ranking female. "She carried that greatest of all handicaps that may befall a woman," Tom laments before falling for her. "She was simply too bright for most men of this world."

The Last Ship is not just a gender-war memoir but an informative travelogue of the destroyer's globe-girdling last voyage, a catalog of naval weaponry and fittings, and a lengthy speculation on the future of man- and womankind. "God is going to give us a second chance?" the Captain wonders as he and his shipmates continue the human habit of baffling and betraying one another. Good question. A scientist might quibble with Brinkley's assumption that sailors would be the likeliest survivors of the next war. But since the species, male and female alike, crawled out of the sea to begin with, it seems only fitting that it make its last stand there as well.