United States Navy

The United States Navy appears in the novel through two sharply different perspectives: the institutional handling of wounded servicemen and the personal history later recast as classroom entertainment. Its wartime role connects the injuries that shape Jenny Fields’s nursing work and Technical Sergeant Garp’s life with the limited, self-promoting history Stewart Percy teaches at Steering School.

Wartime casualties and nursing

When war begins, Boston Mercy Hospital’s intensive-care ward receives patients from service hospitals. Jenny Fields sees elderly and civilian patients there, but most of the cases are soldiers, whose injuries are consequences of war rather than ordinary accidents. She develops her own categories for the wounded, including the Externals, men burned aboard ships, in aircraft, or on the ground. The hospital’s clinical classifications make the consequences of military service legible to Jenny even as the variety of injuries resists a single account.

The Navy’s transport of wounded servicemen becomes a public controversy. A Boston newspaper editorial alleges that the U.S. Navy brings men home only when they come from wealthy and influential families. A senator answers that even an orphan among the severely wounded would be sent back to America. Officials then look for an orphan who can serve as proof of that claim, and find Technical Sergeant Garp, himself an orphan and gravely impaired. The episode makes his homecoming part of a political demonstration, rather than simply a private act of care.

Technical Sergeant Garp’s return

Technical Sergeant Garp is brought to Boston after being injured in the war. He has extensive brain damage, limited speech, and injuries from a fire aboard the transport ship; the novel also leaves open the possibility that fragments lodged in his head may cause further deterioration. In Boston Mercy’s ward, Jenny has difficulty placing him in her categories: he is an Absentee, and his burns also make him an External. His condition joins the institutional account of wartime casualties to the intimate history of Jenny’s care and his son’s birth.

The public story of his return is strikingly at odds with his dependence on others. Garp cannot complain to the press, and the photographs taken of him show him smiling. The contrast exposes how easily a severely wounded person can be turned into evidence for an official claim while his own experience remains beyond the public narrative.

The Navy in Stewart Percy’s classroom

Years later, Stewart Percy makes his wartime service the subject of the only course he teaches at Steering School. Called “My Part of the Pacific,” it focuses on the two naval battles in which Percy says he personally fought. For fifteen years, the course has no textbooks: Percy relies on his lectures and a collection of blurred slides made from old black-and-white photographs. The history is therefore presented through one man’s recollections and personal images, not through a wider account of naval operations.

The slide collection also includes Percy’s shore leave in Hawaii, where he met and married his wife, Midge Percy. He repeatedly clarifies that she was visiting rather than a native of Hawaii, while showing slide after slide of her hair. The classroom anecdote makes the course’s limits part of its character: a claim to teach naval history gives way to Percy’s fixation on his own small portion of it.

Narrative significance

The Navy’s presence links national institutions to individual lives without making those scales equivalent. The senator’s use of Technical Sergeant Garp as a public example sits beside Jenny’s close attention to his condition; Percy’s course, in turn, reduces naval history to the two battles he witnessed and the memories he chooses to display. Across these episodes, the novel contrasts the public uses of military service with the particular, continuing consequences borne by wounded people and those who care for them.