On a Navy ship, there's nowhere to run. Especially from your own crew.
The Vietnam War is over, and the USS Mackinaw is bound for a six-month Mediterranean deployment. For the more than two hundred men aboard, peacetime means long watches, rough seas, endless work, and the promise of trouble in foreign ports. For the ship's twenty-three-year-old hospital corpsman, known to everyone as Doc, it means tending to whatever-and whoever-comes through the sickbay door. There is no doctor aboard, and no escaping the men who need him.
Then, on a fogbound morning off the North Carolina coast, a sailor is reported missing. Mason Limbow, the ship's most ridiculed and isolated crewman, has been in the Atlantic for hours. By the time a rescue boat reaches him, everyone expects a body. Instead, they find Limbow alive, without a life jacket-and smiling.
How did he get into the water? And why does he seem so certain that something extraordinary has happened?
As the Mackinaw heads across the Atlantic, Doc begins to see how much danger can hide beneath the Navy's rigid routines. A brutal assault, a sailor nicknamed Baby Jesus, a volatile boiler technician with powerful connections, and Limbow's increasingly unsettling claims draw him into a tangle of secrets, intimidation, and conflicting loyalties. Doc's determination to find the truth puts him at odds with the ship's ambitious executive officer-and forces him to question how far his responsibility to the men in his care really extends.
From storm-lashed decks to the streets and harbors of Italy, Peacetime brings shipboard life into vivid focus: the gallows humor, the boredom, the unlikely friendships, the casual cruelty, and the profound loneliness of men trapped together in a floating world of their own making.
By turns funny, disturbing, and deeply compassionate, Robert Klose's novel asks what courage looks like when there is no enemy to fight, what duty means when authority fails, and whether saving a life is ever as simple as pulling someone from the sea.
