Then he rose and walked to his bookshelf. Next to his current copy of the
Uniform Code of Military Justice and The Manual of Courts Martial was
a much older book better known by its informal title, "Rocks and Shoals."
It was the old reference book of regulations whose ancestry went back to
the 18th century, and which had been replaced by the UCMJ soon after
World War II. Wegener's copy was an antique. He'd found it gathering
dust in a cardboard box fifteen years before at an old boat station on the
California coast. This one had been published in 1879, when the rules
had been very different. It had been a safer world then, the captain told
himself. It wasn't hard to understand why. All you had to do was read
what the rules had once been.
Rocks and Shoals was
relevant
expensive
outdated
misunderstood