From Tedium to Apathy

MISTER ROBERTS (221 pp.)--Thomas Heggen--Hough+on Mlfflin ($2.50).

This accurate and funny little book makes up for some of the Navy Public Relations products and a lot of wartime journalism which Mr. Heggen's characters would know how to describe. The subject is life aboard a Navy cargo ship, sketched in all its cursing frustration.

On the U.S.S. Reluctant the young cargo officer named Roberts was the only man aboard who still had his heart in the war. But after 2 1/2 years in the Navy, Roberts' heart was sore as a boil. Instead of getting on a can or a carrier or a battlewagon, he had been left on the Reluctant, whose regular run was "from Tedium to Apathy and back." Roberts' defense against frustration and boredom was to work as hard and think as little as possible.

The only enemy he or the crew of the ship ever saw was the captain. Though they didn't know it, they were lucky in a way to have him. He gave them a focus for their resentment. The captain's chief competition came, for a while, from a young ensign fresh from midshipman's school. This boy, the "boot ensign" who took "indoctrination" seriously, was a luckless type in the Naval Reserve. Author Heggen writes of him sympathetically:

"The officers lounged all day in the sacrosanct wardroom. They kept their hats on in the wardroom, a scandalous violation of naval etiquette. Some of them even sat with their feet on the tables. None of them seemed to do any work. . . . Coarse, extramarital exploits were discussed openly at the dinner table. Some of the officers drank. . . . With his own ears he had heard various officers speak seditiously of the ship and the Navy and, worst of all, of the captain. . . . Young Keith was hocked; he was shocked."

Specific: Jungle Juice. He reacted by trying to be an officer and a gentleman and to enforce naval regulations all by himself--an effort both preposterous and doomed. The crew began to lay for him. It took a little while before a boatswain's mate, backed by eleven years' experience in the Navy and a specific known as "jungle juice," could get Mr. Keith squared away and settled into the routine of a naval auxiliary craft.

The other episodes in Mister Roberts are just as simple--a quarrel between two roommates, the achievement of gonorrhea by a seaman at an apparently barren island--but they are told with aptitude and humor. Author Heggen, 27, who now writes for the Reader's Digest, served aboard an assault transport in the Pacific, at Guam, Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, thereby seeing somewhat more action at sea than the Reluctant saw.

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