Robbie Greene wasn’t scheduled to fly today, so he was in the flattop’s officer-rec room, having a cup of coffee and playing solitaire, when he heard about how the Commies in Cambodia had grabbed the Mayaguez. The rec room was windowless. It had flat fluorescent lighting, a green vinyl tile floor, gray metal furniture, and two tones of gray paint on its curved steel walls. The room was decorated with posters of sleek Navy jets like the F-4 Phantom and F-7 Corsair; and even sleeker female rock stars like Linda Ronstadt, beckoning with soulful brown eyes, and Tina Turner making love to the microphone from the movie Wood-stock. There was a bookcase that held a selection of tattered paperbacks, metal shelves stacked with the usual suburban rumpus-room assortment of board games, and a boom-box portable cassette player. There was also an ever-flickering TV mounted high up on the wall on one of those hospital-room-type swivel brackets. The carrier’s closed-circuit facility was broadcasting an old movie, Mutiny on the Bounty with Charles Laughton, which Greene thought was a weird choice for programming on a United States Navy military vessel.
