Brandon crossed the steel deck of the battleship to the second gun turret, with the microphone clipped to his headset and forty people watching, and bent down to the small bronze plate bolted to the steel at the height of his knee. The green had crept into the letters. He rubbed it with his thumb and read the third name aloud, and the sound of it rolled across Mobile Bay on the wind. “Yeoman Third Class Dorothy Fairchild, United States Navy Reserve.” He stood very slowly. I am Dorothy Fairchild, eighty years old, and I stood on the deck in my white blouse with three faded ribbons above the pocket, and beside me my granddaughter Ellie was clutching my arm.
In 1965, at nineteen, I enlisted in the Naval Reserve in Mobile. The battleship, which the city had saved from the scrap yard with the dimes of schoolchildren, was a rusting hulk tied to a dock, and the Navy Reserve women of the local unit volunteered to scrape and paint the second turret on weekends, because no one else would. There were seven of us. We worked for eleven months. I wore the ribbons, a Navy Reserve medal, a good conduct ribbon, and a service ribbon, for the rest of my life, on Veterans Day, and no one ever asked, and I never offered, because it did not seem like a story that anyone would care to hear in a town that had so many larger ones.
The two young sailors in dress whites, who had stood by the rail the whole time, came forward and stopped in front of me, and snapped to attention. Behind them, a very old man in a ball cap with a ship name on it began to weep without sound. Brandon lowered his hands. The microphone, still live, carried every breath he took out over the water and the crowd. “Madam,” he said, to a deck that had gone absolutely silent, “my own grandmother was a Navy Reserve yeoman. I told you that you could not wear these.”
A bronze plate bolted to a gun turret gave one church secretary the Veterans Day morning to bring a young tour guide back to the sea in Mobile.
I gave my terms with a small smile, for I have never been able to be cruel to a young man with a nice face. “Brandon, you are not in trouble, and I do not want you to be. I would like you to tell this crowd, into your microphone, who painted this turret. Seven women, in 1965. Then I would like you to add their names to your tour. I will give you all seven. Four of them are gone, but I know where the other two live, and I would like to bring them aboard next Veterans Day.”
Brandon lifted the microphone with a hand that shook. “Folks,” he said, and his voice broke on the word. “I owe this lady an apology in front of everyone. I said a thing today that I will carry with me for a long while. Her name is Dorothy Fairchild. She and six other women saved this turret in 1965 with brushes and wire wool.” He lowered the microphone and wiped his face on his forearm. “My grandmother taught me to respect the uniform. I forgot to respect the woman in it.”
But the old reflex of shame is a powerful one. Brandon, overwhelmed by forty pairs of eyes, lunged toward me, plucked the ribbon bar from my blouse with its little pin, and set off at a run across the deck toward the ship office, meaning, I believe, to put it somewhere safe and hide himself with it. He had gone five paces when the two young sailors in dress whites stepped across the passage side by side. Ellie moved in a half step behind them, and the tour group, forty of them, closed the way.
Brandon came to a stop on the hot steel with the ribbons in his fist. The sailors did not touch him. One of them, a tall boy with ears that stuck out, said, very softly, “Sir, with respect, that does not belong to you.” Brandon looked at the three faded ribbons, the bent pin. He turned and walked back across the deck to where I stood. He did not speak. He pinned the bar, carefully, back on the blouse above my pocket, straightened it, and stepped back and saluted.
The consequences were wonderful and a little teary. Brandon added the seven names of the turret painters to the tour that very afternoon, and the museum director, a rear admiral in retirement, called me the next day to invite me to the Veterans Day ceremony as the guest of honor. I went. Two of my old shipmates came too, one in a wheelchair, and we stood on the deck of Turret Two in the sun while the schoolchildren sang. Brandon read all seven names out loud, slowly, and not once did he stumble.
In the name of my husband Jack, who never served but who loved the Navy anyway, and who passed in 2017, I started the Jack Fairchild Fund. It pays for veterans ceremonies and scholarships for the children of Navy families, in Mobile, Baldwin and Escambia counties. In the first year we sent twenty one students to college and funded fourteen ceremonies. One was a girl from Daphne whose mother served on a destroyer, and who is now a midshipman at the Naval Academy.
This past Veterans Day, I stood on the deck of the battleship with Ellie beside me and the Gulf wind in my hair. Brandon gave his tour. When he came to Turret Two, he stopped, knelt, and touched the bronze plate with his hand. He read the names. At the third one, he looked up and found me in the crowd. “And she is here today,” he said into the microphone. “Dorothy Fairchild.” Forty people turned. I raised my hand. Ellie squeezed my fingers, and the sun shone on the guns.