The Roll Call They Tried to Skip

Duane Kessler read one hundred and eighty names into that microphone and not one of them belonged to a woman.

I know because I counted. I sat at table nine of the Riverbend Hall in Marrow’s Bend, Indiana, a banquet room over the old boat works with the Ohio River sliding by brown and patient outside the windows, and I followed along in the printed program while the reunion association of the USS Chautauqua read its honored roll call. The roll call is the heart of a ship reunion. It is the part where somebody stands up and says the names of the crew, the living and the dead, and when a departed shipmate’s name is read, they ring the ship’s bell once, and the whole room goes still. It is the closest thing we have to a church service. It is the reason most of us drive hundreds of miles on bad knees and fixed incomes to sit in a rented hall and eat banquet chicken with people we have not seen in decades.

Nineteen women served aboard the Chautauqua while I was in her crew. Nineteen. I stood watch beside those women in a hundred-and-ten-degree machinery space. I ate midnight rations with them. I carried one of them to sick bay when a wave threw her down a ladder in the North Atlantic. Two of them are dead now. Vonda Ledbetter, boiler technician, gone six years from a stroke. And a young seaman from Kentucky whose name should have been read with the bell and was not.

Duane read the men alphabetically before them and the men alphabetically after them, and the bell rang for the men, and the women were just not there. Not the living ones. Not the dead ones. A hundred and eighty names, and the list stepped over us as neatly as a man stepping over a puddle.

I want to be honest about what I did next, because for about ten minutes I did nothing. I am fifty-nine years old. I have spent a lot of my life doing nothing about moments like that one, telling myself I was being polite, or professional, or realistic. I sat there with my program in my lap and my banquet chicken going cold and I told myself maybe it was a clerical thing. Maybe the association’s list came from an old sailing roster that predated us. Maybe nobody meant it.

Then dessert came out, and Duane Kessler stood back up at the podium to talk about next year’s reunion, and I looked at Colleen Marsh across the table, and Colleen looked at me, and I got up.

I did not storm the podium. I want that on the record, because of what got said later about how I “made a scene.” I waited until he stepped away from the microphone to shake somebody’s hand, and I walked up quietly in my good navy-blue dress with my little Chautauqua pin on the collar, and I said, “Duane, I think there’s a mistake in the roll call. The women aren’t on it. Vonda Ledbetter passed in 2020 and her name wasn’t read with the bell.”

Duane Kessler is seventy-two years old, a former boiler technician who has run the reunion association for eleven years like it is his own private lodge. He has a big soft face and reading glasses he wears low on his nose so he can look over the top of them at you, and he looked over the top of them at me, and he did not lower his voice at all when he said it.

“The list was for the real crew.”

He said it the way you would tell somebody the buffet line starts on the left. No heat in it. No shame either. Just a fact he had been carrying around comfortably for years and finally got to set down in front of me.

I said, “Duane, I was ship’s company for three years. I have the same DD-214 you do.”

And he smiled a little, the patient smile a man gives a woman he has already decided not to hear, and he said, “Tammy, nobody’s saying you weren’t aboard. The tender was full of all kinds of people. Cooks and yeomen and whatnot. The roll call is for the crew that ran the ship. That’s how it’s always been done and I’m not changing it because somebody’s feelings got hurt.”

My name is not Tammy. My name is Tamsin Ostrander, and from 1987 to 1990 I was a machinist’s mate aboard the destroyer tender USS Chautauqua, and I left the Navy as a petty officer second class, and on the night of March the ninth, 1989, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, I was one of the reasons that ship and everybody sleeping in her did not burn.

But Duane didn’t know that. Almost nobody in that room knew that, because the man who knew it best had been dead for two years.

What Duane also didn’t know was that the dead man was about to speak.

—

Let me back up, because you deserve to know who I am and how a fifty-nine-year-old grandmother from west of Evansville ended up standing in front of a podium in Marrow’s Bend with her hands shaking.

I grew up in a machine family. My father ran a lathe at a valve plant for thirty-one years, and before that his father fixed grain trucks, and the sound of my childhood was a compressor kicking on in a pole barn. I was the middle of three girls, the one who followed Dad out to the shop while my sisters stayed inside. By twelve I could sweat a copper joint. By sixteen I could pull the head off a small block and tell you what killed it. I loved engines the way some girls loved horses. They made sense to me. An engine never cared who you were. It only cared whether you understood it.

There was no work in our town by 1985, or none that would take a girl into a machine shop, and I was not built for the bank or the beauty college. The Navy recruiter had an office in the strip mall next to the tax preparer, and he had a poster of a ship in the window, and one October afternoon I walked in mostly to get out of the rain and walked out with a stack of pamphlets and a feeling in my chest like a door opening.

My mother cried. My father did not say much for two days, and then he came out to the shop where I was hiding and stood next to me at the bench and said, “They’re going to make it hard on you.” He was not telling me not to go. He was telling me what the price of the ticket was. Then he taught me two more things about packing valves that I used for the next seven years, and in January of 1986 I got on a bus.

Boot camp was in Orlando, which is where the Navy trained its women then. Machinist’s mate school was at Great Lakes, north of Chicago, in classrooms so cold the chalk squeaked. I finished fourth in my class. I want to say that plainly, not to brag, but because everything that came after was people assuming I had been carried, and I was never once carried. Fourth in my class, and my instructor, a chief with a voice like a gravel truck, shook my hand at graduation and said, “Ostrander, you’re going to a tender. Learn everything. A tender is a floating trade school.” He was right about that, and about most things.

In the spring of 1987 I reported aboard the USS Chautauqua in Norfolk. She was a destroyer tender, a repair ship, six hundred and some feet of machine shops and foundries and pump rooms whose whole job was to pull up next to broken ships and make them whole. Tenders were the ships where women could serve at sea in those years. Combat ships were closed to us. That is just a fact of the time, not a complaint. The Navy said, you can go to sea, but only on these, and so the tenders filled up with women who wanted to go to sea, which meant the tenders got some of the stubbornest sailors in the fleet.

I will not pretend it was a welcome party. I was one of nineteen women in a crew of over a thousand. There were men aboard who taught me everything they knew with both hands open, and I can still name them, and some of their names got read at that banquet and I was glad. There were also men who left things in my rack. Who ran the pump quiz on me twice as long as on any male striker. Who called me “the experiment” when they thought I couldn’t hear, and sometimes when they knew I could.

The first month, a first class petty officer in my division looked me up and down and told me the main spaces were no place for a female and assigned me to inventory gaskets. Six hundred drawers of gaskets. I inventoried gaskets for nine days without one word of complaint, and on the tenth day the number three fire pump dropped its prime and nobody could figure out why, and I asked, politely, if I could look at it, and I found the check valve some genius had installed backward after an overhaul. I did not gloat. My father raised me better than to gloat around men holding wrenches. I just fixed it, and wiped it down, and logged it, and by that summer I was standing watch in the forward machinery room like anybody else.

And I need you to meet two people from those years, because they matter to how this story ends.

The first is Colleen Marsh, electrician’s mate, a wiry little woman from outside Chattanooga who could troubleshoot a switchboard by the smell of it. She had a laugh you could hear two decks away, and the night my grandmother died and the chaplain came and found me, it was Colleen who sat with me in the berthing compartment until three in the morning, not saying a word, just being a wall I could lean on. She retired out of the reserves years later. She is the one who talked me into going to the reunion at all. “Tamsin,” she said on the phone, “we’re getting to the age where if we don’t go see people, we go to their funerals instead.”

The second is Captain Randall Ives.

Captain Ives took command of the Chautauqua the year after I reported aboard. He was a tall, quiet man from Nebraska, a mustang, which is what the Navy calls an officer who started out enlisted, and it showed in everything he did. He knew the ship from the bilges up. He would appear in the machinery spaces at two in the morning in a set of coveralls with his name stenciled on them, no entourage, and he would drink our terrible coffee out of a real cup he kept down there, and he would ask questions like he actually wanted the answers. The first time he came through my space, I braced myself for the once-over I always got, that flick of the eyes that said, oh, one of those. It never came. He looked at my logs, asked me why the lube oil temperature on number two was running a degree and a half high, listened to my answer, nodded, and said, “Good eye, Petty Officer Ostrander.” Then he moved on.

Sailors would follow a captain like that through a bulkhead. I would have. In a way, one night in March of 1989, I did.

—

We were mid-Atlantic, steaming east on a deployment to the Mediterranean, four days out from the Azores. I had the midwatch in the forward machinery space, which on a steam ship is its own weather system, a hundred and ten degrees of noise and mist and hot metal, everything alive, everything moving. I was twenty-two years old and I knew that space the way you know a house you grew up in. I could have walked it blind. Before the night was over, I just about had to.

With me on watch was a fireman named Cliff Yowell, nineteen years old, from a tobacco county in Kentucky, seven months in the Navy and still learning which end of a valve wrench to hold. Sweet kid. Wrote his mother twice a week. He was taking readings on the lower level and I was at the log desk when I heard it.

You have to understand that a machinery space is nothing but sound, and a watchstander’s whole education is learning which sounds belong. What I heard, under the turbine whine and the blower roar, was a hiss that did not belong. High and thin, like a snake in the grass, and before my brain finished naming it my feet were already moving, because there are only a few things that hiss like that in a steam plant and none of them are friendly.

It was a fuel oil line. A flange joint on the fuel oil service piping had let go, and it was spraying atomized fuel in a fine cone across the space, and while I stood there for a half second with my heart in my mouth, the spray found a hot steam line.

The flash was not like an explosion in a movie. It was a sound like a giant clearing his throat, and then there was a sheet of orange where the middle of my space used to be, and the fireball rolled up toward the overhead and the lights went strange and the heat hit my face from thirty feet away like an open oven door.

Fuel oil fires aboard ship are what sailors have nightmares about. Fuel keeps feeding, fire keeps growing, and a ship at sea has nowhere to run. Every sailor is a firefighter. They drill it into you until your hands know it without your head. But the drills are in daylight with instructors watching, and this was 0240 in the middle of the Atlantic, and the space was filling with black smoke faster than I could think, and somewhere on the lower level, on the far side of that fire, was a nineteen-year-old kid from Kentucky.

I did three things, and Captain Ives would later say them in an order that made them sound braver than they felt. I hit the alarm and got the word out, my voice on the circuit saying words I had said a hundred times in drills, fire, fire, fire, class Bravo fire, forward machinery space. I got to the fuel oil service pump and secured it, and then I went hand over hand along the piping to the manual cutout valve, which was upstream of the break, which meant going toward the fire, and I shut it. It was a big valve, and it was hot, and I closed it with my hands wrapped in my own jacket, and I can tell you exactly how many turns it took, because I counted them out loud in the smoke to keep myself sane. Nineteen turns.

Starving that fire of fuel is what turned it from a ship-killer into a bad night. But the thing I actually cannot forget, the thing my body still remembers at two in the morning thirty-seven years later, is the ladder down to the lower level. The smoke was banking down in a black ceiling, dropping lower every second, and I got below it on my hands and knees and I found Cliff Yowell by his coughing. He had gotten turned around in the smoke, which happens to nineteen-year-olds and forty-year-olds alike, and his eyes were streaming and blind and he had the sense to be low, and I put his hand on my belt and I said, right in his ear, so help me this is what came out, “Hold on and don’t you let go of me, or your mama will never forgive either one of us.”

We crawled out along the deck plates with my left hand on the lifeline stanchions, counting frames, and my right hand dragging both of us forward, and the fire party was coming down through the escape trunk in their gear as we came up out of it. I turned Cliff over to them and then I did not go to sick bay like I was told. I got on the number two hose team, because it was my space and my fire, and I stayed on that hose until it was out.

Forty minutes, start to finish. It felt like six years. The ship was never in the news. Nobody died. Cliff spent two days in sick bay breathing oxygen and writing his mother a letter he later told me he tore up because he did not want to scare her. Seven of us got treated for smoke inhalation and burns. The palms of my hands were bandaged for two weeks, and the scars are faint now, but if you take my hands in a certain light you can still see the lines of that valve wheel. I have never once minded them.

Captain Ives came down to the space himself the next morning while we were still tagging out the damage. He stood in the middle of the black-scorched machinery space in his coveralls, and he looked at the burned flange, and the shut cutout valve, and then he looked at me for what felt like a long time, and he said, quietly, so only I heard it, “Petty Officer Ostrander, do you understand what you did?”

I said, “I did my job, Captain.”

He said, “Yes. That is exactly what you did.” And the way he said it, it was the finest thing anybody has ever said to me.

Later, on the mess decks, in front of the crew, he pinned a Navy Achievement Medal on me and shook my burned hand as gently as if it were a bird. I still have the medal. It is in a shadow box in my hallway between my father’s union pin and a picture of my grandchildren. Most people who visit never ask about it, and I have never been much good at bringing it up.

That is the whole trouble with what I did, if you want the truth. It happened in the dark, below the waterline, and the men who saw it happen scattered to the four winds the way crews do, and the paperwork sat in a file, and the ship herself went to the scrapyard in 1996. There is no monument for a fire that did not sink a ship. There is just an old woman’s scarred hands and a captain’s memory.

And, as it turned out, one tape.

—

I left the Navy in 1992 as a petty officer second class. I had orders coming that did not fit the life I wanted, and I was engaged to a good man named Harlan Ostrander who fixed heavy equipment outside Evansville, and I made the trade thousands of sailors make, and I have never regretted it, though I have missed the sea every single day, which is a thing you cannot explain to people who have not done it. I turned wrenches at a plant for twenty-six years. Raised two kids. Buried Harlan five years ago, cancer, and my daughter Sherry lives twenty minutes from me now and calls every night at eight like a watch bell.

And every December for more than thirty years, a Christmas card came from Nebraska.

Captain Ives never forgot his crew. That is not a figure of speech. The man wrote Christmas cards to hundreds of us, every year, in a hand that got shakier each decade, and mine always had a line in it. Hope the hands are well. Kathleen sends her best. Once, the year Walt died, the card came with a phone number and three words: Call an old man. I called. We talked for an hour. He asked about my grandchildren by name.

Kathleen is his wife. Was. Is. I never know how to say that. Kathleen Ives, a retired schoolteacher with white hair she wears in a crown of braids, sharp as a tack at eighty-one. When the captain got his diagnosis, lung cancer, in 2023, it was Kathleen who wrote the letter telling his old shipmates, and it was Kathleen who sat beside him that last autumn while a young historian from a maritime museum in Virginia set up a little recorder on their kitchen table, because somebody at the museum had the good sense to collect the memories of old tender sailors before they were gone.

Four afternoons of tape. Randall Ives talking about forty years of the Navy, in a voice gone thin but still level as a bubble gauge. He died in February of 2024. I drove nine hours to the funeral. Half the old crew was there, and Duane Kessler stood at the back in a blazer with the association crest on it and gave a reading, and I remember thinking, well, whatever else Duane is, he shows up. I gave Kathleen a long hug in the receiving line and she held my hands in both of hers, my scarred hands, and she looked at them, and she looked at me, and she said something I did not understand until two years later.

She said, “He talked about you, you know. He made sure it was on the record.”

I thought she meant it kindly and vaguely, the way people talk at funerals. I said thank you and moved along and cried in my car in the parking lot for reasons that had nothing to do with the roll call of a reunion I had not yet attended.

Then this spring, Colleen called and worked on me for a month, and Sherry said, “Mom, go, I’ll drive you,” and that is how I came to be at the Riverbend Hall in Marrow’s Bend, Indiana, on a warm Saturday evening in June, at table nine, in my navy-blue dress, listening to Duane Kessler read one hundred and eighty names that did not include one woman, and then hearing him tell me, over the top of his reading glasses, in front of the podium flowers and the little ship’s bell on its stand, that the list was for the real crew.

—

Here is what you find out about yourself at fifty-nine, standing in front of a man like that. You find out the anger is not gone. You have just been keeping it below decks, in the dark, where you keep everything.

I did not yell. I heard my own voice come out flat and calm, the exact voice I used to use on the sound-powered circuit, and I said, “Duane, Vonda Ledbetter stood boiler watches on that ship for four years. She is dead. You rang that bell for every man we lost and you did not ring it for her.”

He said, and I will quote him exactly until the day I die, “I don’t expect you to understand how a crew works, Tammy. This is a night for the fellas. Nobody kept you from coming. You’re welcome to enjoy the dinner.”

You’re welcome to enjoy the dinner. Nineteen women. Three years of my life below his waterline. A medal in a shadow box. You’re welcome to enjoy the dinner.

The tables closest to the podium had gone quiet. Most of the room hadn’t noticed a thing, forks still going, somebody laughing by the bar. Colleen was on her feet at table nine. I felt about eight feet tall and about one inch, both at once, and I felt my eyes go hot, and I would rather have gone back into that burning machinery space than let Duane Kessler watch me cry, and I truly did not know what I was going to do next.

Then, behind me, a chair scraped, and a voice said, “Duane, before you sit down.”

Kathleen Ives was standing at the head table. Widow of the captain, guest of honor, invited every year to give two minutes of gracious remarks about her husband, which she had been scheduled to do after dessert. She had a laptop bag over her shoulder and her chin up like a woman walking into a school board meeting she had been preparing for all her life.

“You’ve been asking me for two years to share some of Randall’s interview tapes with the association,” she said. Her voice carried. Schoolteacher. “For the newsletter. I brought one. I’d like to play it now, since we’re talking about the crew.”

Duane, God help him, smiled and waved his hand, because all he heard was that the captain’s widow wanted to play a nice recording of the beloved captain, and what could be better for Duane Kessler’s reunion than that. He even helped the kid from the AV table plug the cable in. I will always remember that he helped.

The screen behind the podium lit up. There was no video, just a photograph Kathleen had scanned to go with the audio: the Chautauqua at anchor, gray and enormous and homely and beautiful. And then the speakers crackled and a voice I had not heard in two years filled the Riverbend Hall, thin and level and unmistakable, and every conversation in that room died mid-word, because half the men in that room would have followed that voice through a bulkhead too.

The historian on the tape asks, “Captain, in thirty-four years, was there a single moment at sea you’d call your worst?”

And Randall Ives says, “That’s easy. Middle of the Atlantic, March of ’89, about two-forty in the morning. Fuel oil fire in the forward machinery space.”

I felt Colleen’s hand close around my arm. I had not heard her cross the room.

The captain’s voice went on, unhurried, laying it out the way he laid out everything, and the room sat frozen over its cold coffee and listened to their dead captain describe a hissing flange, a sheet of flame, black smoke banking down in a space full of his sailors. “A fuel fire feeds itself,” he said on the tape. “You do not put it out. You starve it, and to starve it, somebody has to get to the cutout, and the cutout was on the fire side. Every second that valve stayed open, we were losing the space, and if we lost the space, I do not know that I keep the ship.”

The historian asks, “Who closed it?”

There is a pause on that tape. If you ever hear it, you will hear him take a breath, an old man’s breath, careful with what little air the cancer had left him.

“A machinist’s mate second class,” he says. “Twenty-two years old. Got the alarm out, secured the pump, went toward the fire with no gear, and cranked that valve down with her bare hands wrapped in her jacket. Burned her palms doing it. Then she went below the smoke and brought out a fireman who’d have died where he stood, and then she refused medical and fought the fire until it was out. I put a medal on her on the mess decks and it was the proudest I ever was in a uniform, pinning it.”

And then, in front of one hundred and ninety people at the Riverbend Hall in Marrow’s Bend, Indiana, my dead captain said my name.

“Her name is Tamsin Ostrander. Petty Officer Ostrander, from Indiana. And I will tell you something else, since you have me on the record.” His voice did not get louder, but it got flatter, and every old sailor in that room knew that flatness and sat up straight without meaning to. “There were people then, and there are people now, who like to say the women on the tenders were not real crew. I had nineteen women aboard the Chautauqua. The night my ship tried to burn, the sailor who kept her off the bottom was one of them. So if you ever hear a man say the women weren’t real crew, son, you may tell him her captain said different. And you may tell him her captain said he’d take one of her over ten of him.”

The tape hissed for a second, and the historian started his next question, and Kathleen Ives reached over and stopped the playback, and the Riverbend Hall was as silent as a hall full of two hundred people has ever been.

I did not see Duane’s face right away, because I could not see much of anything right away. Colleen tells me I stood at parade rest without noticing I was doing it. What I remember is the sound the room made when it came back to life, which was not applause, not at first. It was chairs. Chairs scraping back all over that hall, dozens of them, a rolling wooden thunder of old men standing up, and then it was applause, and then somebody rang the ship’s bell, one clean stroke, and I came apart. Quietly. The way I do everything.

An old master chief named Stu Prentiss, who I had not seen since 1990, came across that room with his cane and stood in front of me and did not say one word. He just took my right hand, turned it palm up, looked at the faint lines that valve wheel left there thirty-seven years ago, and then closed both his hands around it and stood there with his jaw working.

Cliff Yowell was not in the room that night. He lives in Tennessee now, four grandkids, still writes letters. When Colleen called him the next morning and told him what happened, he was quiet a moment, and then he said, “Read her the message I send every year.” He sends me a card every March ninth. It says the same six words every year. Still holding on. Tell your mama.

—

You want to know what happened to Duane.

Nothing happened to Duane that any court would recognize, and everything happened to Duane that matters in a small association of old sailors. He stood next to the podium through all of it holding his index cards, and I watched the understanding come to his face in stages, like water finding its level. It was his AV cable. He had helped plug it in.

He tried, briefly, to make it small. He came over while the room was still on its feet and said something about how of course no offense was ever intended and the roll call was a clerical tradition and he would look into amending the list. And it might have gone that way, softened and studied and shuffled off into a committee, except Kathleen Ives walked over with the laptop still under her arm and said, in her schoolteacher voice, perfectly kind and about ten degrees below zero, “Duane, Randall left four afternoons of tape. Would you like to hear his opinion of the association’s list, or shall we save that for the business meeting?”

There is, apparently, more tape. I have not heard it. Kathleen says I can hear it whenever I want, and one of these days, when I am feeling steady, I will drive out to Nebraska and sit at her kitchen table and listen to all four afternoons of it, start to finish, with the coffee going cold, and I expect it will be the best worst day of my year.

At the business meeting the next morning, over coffee and sweet rolls in the same hall with the chairs stacked, the association voted to amend the honored roll call to include every sailor who ever served aboard, by name, no exceptions, no asterisks. The vote was not close. Duane voted for it too, at the end, with his big soft face gray as dishwater, and I want to tell you that I felt sorry for him, but my mother taught me not to lie in print. What I felt was nineteen turns of a valve finally cranked all the way shut.

He resigned as association president before Labor Day. The newsletter said it was his health.

Colleen Marsh is the president of the USS Chautauqua reunion association now. First woman to hold the job. Her first official act was to mail every one of the surviving women a letter of apology on association letterhead, and her second was to call me and say, “You’re reading the roll next year, shipmate. Both lists. All the names.”

So next June, in a banquet hall above the Ohio River, I will stand up at that podium in my navy-blue dress, and I will read one hundred and ninety-nine names, the men and the women, the living and the dead, and when I get to Vonda Ledbetter, boiler technician, I will ring that little bell myself, one clean stroke, and let it hum out over the room the way a struck bell does, the way the truth does, longer than anybody expects, until even the people who were not listening have to hear it.

The night of the banquet, after everything, Sherry drove me back to the motel along the river road with the windows down. She kept glancing over at me at the stop signs. Finally she said, “Mom. The engine fire. The medal. Why didn’t you ever tell us it like THAT?”

And I looked at my hands in the dashboard light, the faint old lines across both palms, and I told her the truth.

“Because I did my job, honey. It took the captain to make it a story.”

He made sure it was on the record. That is what Kathleen tried to tell me at the funeral, standing there holding my scarred hands in the receiving line, and I was too heartbroken to hear it. Randall Ives knew exactly what he was doing at that kitchen table with the little recorder running and the cancer taking his air. He was a mustang and a tender sailor and he knew better than anyone that ships get scrapped and files get lost and men like Duane Kessler write the lists. So he spent some of the last breath he had putting nineteen women back on the roll, and then he trusted Kathleen to know the right room to play it in.

My father told me they were going to make it hard on me, and they did, some of them, for years, and one of them did it one last time over banquet chicken when I was fifty-nine years old.

But my captain got the last word. In a hall by the river, in a voice from the other side, with the bell waiting on its stand.

All the names. No exceptions.

That’s the real crew.