Excerpt from StoryCorps interview of USS Nevada, (date redacted):
The thing we all remember is how our first go-round ended. Sinking or scrapping, unless you're one of the lucky girls who got to retire as a museum ship. Sometimes it's fast: Ari once told me that she remembered the bomb hitting and having just enough time to think 'oh son of a bitch!' then boom! it's over. Sometimes it's slow. Mine was slow.
It wasn't my worst memory, though. That was always Pearl, trying to get underway with all hell breaking loose around me, all those ships taking fire, Ari and Okie dying, and it's all I can do to just get out of the way and beach so even if those little bastards did me in I wouldn't block the inlet. It's the feeling of helplessness that keeps getting me, that not only are they attacking, they're going to get away with it and there's not a damn thing on God's earth that'll stop them. Still pisses me off some, if I'm going to be honest.
But my sinking? This weirds out a lot of my fellow ships, but it doesn't bother me that much. I was the oldest battleship still in service when the time came, and honestly I was just done. I'd served in two World Wars, been shot at by pretty much everybody on both sides, served my country as a guinea pig for their shiny new doomsday device and you know I think I'd earned my rest. I really had. It wasn't like they could put me in mothballs or give me a museum berth after Crossroads, and it was better than sitting patiently in a scrapyard waiting for them to turn me into beer cans. My war record earned me a Viking funeral and it was damned generous of the Navy Department to give me one.
Though now that I think about it, getting turned into beer cans doesn't sound too bad. "Nevada Beer." I think I might've found my career after this war's over.
Anyway.
I still dream about it. Most of my memories from the first go-round I'm my old hull, the Nevada-class battleship I was. When I dream about getting sunk I'm always in my human body. I'm just drifting on the sea, nothing but water and just in visual range are Iowa, Pasadena and Astoria. I can see Iowa clearly and she's crying, the other two aren't looking so hot either, and she's apologizing after every salvo and I just want to tell her 'it's okay, honey, it's better this way, and I'd rather have a friend and a successor send me to the Great Hereafter than some cold-eyed lunatic trying to murder me and my crew.' But I don't say that, because Iowa wouldn't understand and because it's not the right time to say that.
Instead I just laugh. I laugh and I laugh and I laugh while all hell breaks loose around me, Pearl all over again as Iowa's big shells splash all around me and the five-inchers chew away at my superstructure and I'm laughing like the Joker because they're tearing me apart but even still it's not enough to sink me. The Kido Butai came close but didn't sink me, Hitler's Atlantic Wall that was going to keep the British and the mongrels out couldn't even touch me, two A-Bombs only singed me and now the best and brightest of us couldn't finish the freaking job. It's like I'm one of those whatchacallits the twenty-first century kids are all about, the living dead. Yeah, zombies, that's what I'm thinking. I'm a zombie, too stubborn to just give up the ghost no matter how hard I get stomped on. I'm laughing, I roll over on my back and I can't stop laughing until they finally run out of shells or patience and they call in a flight of heavy torpedo bombers to finish me off. I'm laughing so hard I can't hear the torpedo, but it comes in and that's goodnight Gracie.
Not long after I got back, I tracked down Iowa. She'd been in the game since the beginning of course, she never shied away from a fight, but it took me some time to get her alone. Guilt, you know. She'd never liked using one of our own as target practice. She teared up a little, but I finally could tell her what I needed her to hear, and I think all that time in and out of mothballs gave her a little maturity, so she was finally ready to hear what I had to say. Not the most fun conversation we ever had, but by the end of it I think we understood the other's positions pretty well. We still talk every other day, gotta love phone technology these days. In fact, assuming we survive this thing we've sworn to stand up for the other if we ever get married.
The smart people say we shouldn't be able to remember stuff like this, but then the smart people say we shouldn't exist period, so to hell with them. Me? I don't know if we always felt like this, or felt anything at all, but I'm glad we do. This new go-round isn't always the smoothest thing, but I'd rather rough seas than no sea at all.
