Robert Heinlein's lost naval career

Performing aircraft carrier picket duty off Okinawa, CL Rochester fell victim to multiple
kamikaze attacks, the last ofwhich killed Captain Alex "Sandy" Fitch,
leaving the ship's XO--Commander Robert A. Heinlein--to lead a desperate
effort to save the ship from sinking.

Larry Niven's"The Return of William Proxmire" won the 1990 Hugo Award for Best Short Story by positing that someone traveling back in time to cure Robert Heinlein's tuberculosis before he was medically retired from the US Navy would have dramatically changed history.

For MacArthur's Luck, however, I wanted to do something different, and take a more direct look at the naval career Heinlein never got to experience. It is not difficult to imagine that, by 1945, RAH would have risen as high as Commander--but how would he have done in a crisis?

Would he have reacted like a typical Heinlein "Competent Man," and kept his head about him when all others were losing theirs? What would he have been like as an officer?

Virginia "Ginny" Gerstenfeld Heinlein, seen at left in her
WW2 WAVE uniform in an image from the Heinlein Society.

The initial vignettes about trying to save the Rochester from going down in the wake of brutal kamikaze attack are only the beginning. As we progress into Stalin's Wager, we'll discover that RAH has a lot more challenges in front of him--even though he appears to be heading away from the war.

Of course, there are consequences to Heinlein getting to have his naval career: no Science Fiction (wonder how that one will play out? And will we meet Ron Hubbard in Navy Blue as well?), no marriage to Leslyn, and no Ginny to meet in Philadelphia in the early 1940s?

No Ginny? This seemed intolerable, so I decided to fix it, and give WAVE Lieutenant Virginia Gerstenfeld her own plot arc. Of course, that becomes somewhat dangerous, given the reverence for the Heinleins as a couple in the SF community. Here it is, 1945, and Ginny has yet to meet RAH--he's half a planet away, in fact. What could possibly happen next?