Call to Arms

by W. E. B Griffin

  He was grateful to find the open gas stations, and he filled up every time he came upon one. This was not the place to run out of gas.

  When he opened the door of the Cadillac at the hotel, he was surprised at how cold it was. This was supposed to be sunny Florida, but it was foggy and chilly, and the palm trees on the street in front of the San Carlos Hotel looked forlorn.

  The desk clerk was a surly young man in a soiled jacket and shirt who said he didn’t know nothing about no reservation. When pressed, the desk clerk did discover a note saying the manager was to be notified when a Mr. Pickering showed up.

  “I’m here,” Pick said. “You want to notify him?”

  “Don’t come in until eight-thirty, Mr. Davis don’t,” the desk clerk informed him. “Don’t none of the assistant managers come in till seven.”

  “Is there a restaurant?” Pick asked.

  “Coffee shop,” the desk clerk said, indicating the direction with a nod of his head.

  “Thank you for all your courtesy,” Pick said.

  “My pleasure,” the desk clerk said.

  Pickering crossed the lobby and pushed open the door to the coffee shop.

  It was crowded, which surprised him, for five o’clock in the morning, until he realized that nearly all the male customers were in uniform—officer’s uniforms, Marine and Navy. They are beginning their day, Pick thought, as I am ending mine.

  He found a table in a corner and sat down.

  A couple of the officers glanced at him—with, he sensed, disapproval.

  He needed a shave, he realized. But that was impossible without a room with a wash basin.

  He studied the menu until a waitress appeared, and then ordered orange juice, milk, coffee, biscuits, ham, three eggs, and home fries; and a newspaper, if she had one.

  The newspaper was delivered by a Marine captain in a crisp uniform.

  “Keep your seat, Lieutenant,” he said, as Pickering—in a Quantico Pavlovian reaction—started to stand up, “that way as few people as possible will notice a Marine officer in a mussed uniform needing a shave.”

  “I’ve been driving all night, Captain,” Pick said.

  “Then you should have cleaned up, Lieutenant, before you came in here, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes, sir. No excuse, sir,” Pickering said.

  “Reporting in, are you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then we shall probably have the opportunity to continue this embarrassing conversation in other surroundings,” the captain said. Then he walked off.

  Pickering, grossly embarrassed, stared at the tableware. As he pretended rapt fascination with the newspaper, he became aware that the people in the coffee shop were leaving. He reasoned out why: Officers gathered here for breakfast before going out to the base. The duty day was about to begin, and they were leaving.

  When his breakfast was served, he folded the newspaper. As he did that he glanced around the room. It was indeed nearly empty.

  But at a table across the room was an attractive young woman sitting alone over a cup of coffee. She was in a sweater and skirt and wore a band over her blond hair. And she was looking at him, he thought, with mingled amusement, condescension, and maybe even a little pity.

  Pick, with annoyance, turned his attention to his breakfast.

  A moment later, the blonde was standing by his table. He sensed her first, and then smelled her perfume—or her cologne, or whatever it was—a crisp, clean, feminine aroma; and then as he raised his eyes, he saw there was an engagement ring and a wedding band on her hand.

  “That was Captain Jim Carstairs,” she said, “and as a friendly word of warning, his bite is even worse than his bark.”

  Pick stood up. The blonde was gorgeous. He was standing so close to her than he could see the delicate fuzz on her cheeks and chin.

  “And you, no doubt, are Mrs. Captain Carstairs?” he said.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Just a friendly Samaritan trying to be helpful. I wouldn’t let him catch me needing a shave again.”

  “The last time he caught you needing a shave, it was rough, huh?” Pick said.

  “Go to hell,” she said. “I was trying to be helpful.”

  “And I’m very grateful,” Pick said.

  She nodded at him, smiled icily, and went back to her table.

  What the hell was that all about? Pick wondered. Obviously, she wasn’t trying to pick me up. Then what? There was the wedding ring, and she knew the salty captain with the mustache. She was probably some other officer’s wife, drunk with his exalted rank. Well, fuck her!

  He sat down again and picked up a biscuit and buttered it.

  The blonde, whose name was Martha Sayre Culhane, returned to her table wondering what had come over her; wondering why she had gone over to the second lieutenant she had never seen before—much less met—in her life; wondering if she was drunk, or just crazy.

  That he was good-looking and attractive never entered her conscious mind. What had entered Martha Sayre Culhane’s conscious mind was that the second lieutenant looked very much like Greg, even walked like him. And that resemblance made her throat catch and her breathing speed up.

  Greg was—had been—First Lieutenant Gregory J. Culhane, USMC (Annapolis ’38), a tall, lanky, dark-haired young man of twenty-four. A Navy brat, he was born in the Navy hospital in Philadelphia. His father, Lieutenant (later Vice Admiral) Andrew J. Culhane, USN (Annapolis ’13), was at the time executive officer of a destroyer engaged in antisubmarine operations off the coast of Ireland. He first saw his son six months later, in December of 1917, after the War to End All Wars had been brought to a successful conclusion, and he had sailed his destroyer home to put it in long-term storage at Norfolk, Virginia.

  Admiral Culhane’s subsequent routine duty assignments sent him to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii; Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; San Diego, California; and to the Navy Yards at Brooklyn and Philadelphia.

  Two weeks after his graduation from Philadelphia’s Episcopal Academy in June of 1934, Greg Culhane, who had earned letters in track and basketball at Episcopal, traveled by train to Annapolis, Maryland, where he was sworn into the United States Navy as a midshipman.

  On his graduation from Annapolis in June 1938 (sixty-fifth in his class) he was commissioned at his request—and against the advice of his father—as second lieutenant, USMC, and posted to the Marine detachment aboard the battleship USS Pennsylvania, the flagship of the Pacific Fleet, whose home port was Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

  He immediately applied for training as a Naval aviator, which may have had something to do with his relief from the Pennsylvania four months later and his transfer to the Marine Detachment, Peking, China, for duty with troops.

  Second Lieutenant Culhane traveled from Pearl Harbor to Tientsin, China aboard the USS Chaumont, one of two Navy transports that endlessly circled the world delivering and picking up Navy and Marine personnel from all corners of the globe.

  In Peking, Greg Culhane served as a platoon leader for eighteen months, along with the additional duties customarily assigned to second lieutenants: He was mail officer; athletic officer; custodian of liquor, beer, and wine for the officer’s mess; venereal disease control officer; and he served as recorder and secretary of various boards and committees formed for any number of official and quasi-official purposes.

  In April 1939, he boarded the Chaumont again and returned to the United States via the Cavite Navy Base in the Philippines; Melbourne, Australia; Port Elizabeth, South Africa; Monrovia, Liberia; Rio de Janeiro and Recife, Brazil; and Guantanamo, Cuba.

  Second Lieutenant Greg Culhane reported to the United States Navy Air Station, Pensacola, Florida, on June 10, 1939, nine days after the date specified on his orders. His class had already begun their thirteen-month course of instruction.

  The personnel officer brought the “Culhane Case” to the attention of the deputy air station commander, Rear Admiral (lower half1) James B. Sayre, USN, for decision.

&nb
sp; When he had not shown up, the training space set aside for the young Marine officer had been filled by one of the standby applicants. There were two options, the personnel officer explained. One was to go by the book and request the Marine Corps to issue orders returning Lieutenant Culhane to the Fleet Marine Force. The second option was to keep him at Pensacola and enroll him in the next flight course, which would commence 1 September.

  “There’s a third option, Tom,” Admiral Sayre said. “For one thing, it’s not this boy’s fault that the Chaumont was, as usual, two weeks late. For another, I notice that he came here just as soon as he could after the Chaumont finally got to Norfolk; he didn’t take the leave he was authorized. And finally, he’s only nine days late. What I think is in the best interests of the Navy, as well as Lieutenant Culhane, is for me to have a word with Jim Swathley and ask him to make the extra effort to let this boy catch up with his class.”

  “I’ll be happy to talk to Captain Swathley, sir, if you’d like,” the personnel officer said.

  “All right then, Tom, you talk to him. Tell him that’s my suggestion.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  Admiral Sayre had not considered it necessary to tell the personnel officer that he had been a year behind Greg Culhane’s father at the academy, nor that in 1919–20 (before he had volunteered for aviation) he had served under Admiral Culhane with a tin-can squadron.

  But as soon as the personnel officer had left his office, he had asked his chief yeoman to get Mrs. Sayre on the line, and when she came to the phone, he told her that Andy Culhane’s boy had just reported aboard, and from the picture in his service jacket as well as from the efficiency reports in the record, Greg Culhane was a fine young Marine officer.

  “I wonder why he went in the Marines?” Jeanne Sayre said absently, and then without waiting for a reply, she asked, “I wonder if Martha remembers him? They were just little tykes the last time…Well, we’ll just have to have him to dinner. I’ll write Margaret Culhane and tell her we’re keeping an eye on him.”

  The engagement of Martha Ellen Sayre, the only daughter of Rear Admiral and Mrs. James B. Sayre, USN, to First Lieutenant Gregory J. Culhane, USMC, elder son of Vice Admiral and Mrs. Andrew J. Culhane, USN, was announced at the traditional Admiral’s New Year’s Day Reception.

  It was a triple celebration, Admiral Sayre announced jovially at midnight when he was getting just a little flushed in the face: It was the new year, 1941, and that was always a good excuse for a party; he had finally managed to unload his daughter, who was getting to be at twenty-one a little long in the tooth; and her intended, even if he was a Marine, could now afford to support her, because as of midnight he had been made a first lieutenant.

  Greg and Martha Culhane were married in an Episcopal service at the station chapel at Pensacola on July 1, 1941, the day after he was graduated as a Naval aviator. It was a major social event for the air station, and indeed for the Navy. Seventeen flag and general officers of the Navy and Marine Corps (and of course their ladies) were in the chapel for the ceremony. And twelve of Greg’s buddies (nine Marines and three swabbies) from flight school, in crisp whites, held swords aloft over the couple as they left the chapel.

  Despite secret plans (carefully leaked to the enemy) that the young couple would spend their wedding night in Gainesville, they actually went no farther than a suite in Pensacola’s San Carlos Hotel. And the next morning, they drove down the Florida peninsula to Opa-locka, where Greg had been ordered for final training as a fighter pilot.

  That lasted about two months. They had a small suite in the Hollywood Beach Hotel, which was now a quasi-official officers’ hotel. Martha spent her days playing tennis and golf and swimming, and Greg spent his learning the peculiarities of the Grumman F4F-3 fighter.

  In September, Greg was ordered to San Diego on orders to join Marine Fighter Squadron VMF-211. Martha drove to the West Coast with him, and she stayed until he boarded ship for Pearl Harbor. Then she left their car in storage there and returned to Florida by train. She didn’t want a fight with her parents about driving all the way across the country by herself, and besides, it would be nice to have the Chevrolet Super Deluxe coupe there when Greg came back to San Diego.

  Greg flew his brand-new Grumman F4F-3 Wildcat off the Enterprise to Wake Island on December 3, 1941. He wrote her that night, quickly, because he had to make sure the letter left aboard a Pan American China Clipper. Among other things, he told her that Wake had been unprepared for them, and that Marine and civilian bulldozer operators were working from first light until after dark to make revetments.

  Greg also wrote that he loved her and would write again just as soon as he had the chance.

  The next news she had about Greg was a letter to her father from Commander Winfield Scott Cunningham, the senior Naval officer on Wake Island. Cunningham had once worked for Admiral Sayre at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

  Commander Cunningham wrote his old commanding officer that as soon as word of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had reached Wake Island, he had ordered Major Paul Putnam, VMF-211’s commanding officer, to lead a flight of four F4F-3s on a scouting mission for Japanese naval forces. The remaining eight fighter planes and the squadron itself prepared for combat.

  This had posed some problems, he continued; there was more to that job than simply filling the aircraft fuel tanks and loading ammunition for the guns. Aviation fuel, presently in large tanks, had to be put into fifty-five-gallon drums and the drums dispersed. And much of the .50-caliber machine-gun ammunition had to be linked, that is to say removed from its shipping containers and fitted with metal links to make belts of ammunition.

  All hands had then gone to work, officers and enlisted men alike, bulldozing revetments and taxiways; filling sandbags; pumping fuel; and working the .50-caliber linking machines.

  At 0900, Putnam’s four-plane patrol returned to Wake for refueling. At about 0940, immediately after the tanks of their Grumman Wildcats had been topped off, Commander Cunningham wrote, Putnam and three others took off again, taking up a course to the north and climbing to twelve thousand feet, as high as they could fly without using oxygen.

  At 1158, First Lieutenant Wallace Lewis, USMC, an experienced antiaircraft artilleryman whom Major James P. S. Devereux, the senior Marine on Wake Island, had placed in charge of antiaircraft defenses, spotted a twelve-plane V of aircraft approaching Wake Island from the north at no more than two thousand feet.

  The three-inch antiaircraft cannon, and the dozen .50-caliber Browning machine guns on Wake, brought the attacking formation under fire.

  The pilots of the eight Grumman F4F-3 Wildcats ran for their aircraft as crew chiefs started the engines.

  There were now thirty-six Japanese aircraft, three twelve-plane Vs, in sight. One-hundred-pound bombs fell from the leading V, but instead of turning away from the target once their bomb load had been released, which was the American practice, the Japanese aircraft continued on course, and began to strafe the airfield with their 20-mm machine cannon.

  The projectiles were mixed explosive and incendiary. One of them, Commander Cunningham wrote Admiral Sayre, had struck Lieutenant Gregory J. Culhane, USMC, in the back of the head as he ran toward his Grumman F4F-3 Wildcat. It exploded on impact.

  “I’m not even sure, Admiral,” Commander Cunningham concluded, “if there will be an an opportunity to get this letter out. They’re supposed to be sending a Catalina in here, and we are supposed to be reinforced by a task force from Pearl, but in view of the overall situation, I’m not sure that either will be possible.

  “Please offer my condolences to Martha and Mrs. Sayre.”

  (Two)

  Pickering had just about finished with the paper when a man came into the coffee shop, looked around, and then walked to his table.

  “Lieutenant Pickering?”

  Pickering looked up and nodded. The man was plump and neatly dressed in a well-cut suit. He looked to be in his early thirties.

  “I unde
rstand you’re an innkeeper yourself,” the man said.

  Pickering nodded.

  “Then you’ll understand that no matter how hard you try, sometimes the wrong guy gets behind the desk,” the man said. He put out his hand. “I’m Chester Gayfer, the assistant manager. Much too late, let me welcome you to the San Carlos. May I join you?”

  Pickering waved him into a chair. A waitress appeared with a cup of coffee.

  “Put all this on my chit, Gladys,” Gayfer said, and then looked at Pickering and smiled. “Unless you’d rather have a basket of fruit?”

  “Breakfast is fine,” Pickering said. “Unnecessary, but fine.”

  “We didn’t expect you until later today,” Gayfer said.

  “I drove straight through,” Pickering said.

  “I think you may be able to solve one of our problems for us,” Gayfer said. “If we extended a very generous innkeeper’s discount, would you be interested in a penthouse suite? A large bedroom, a small bedroom, a sitting room, and a tile patio covered with an awning? There’s even a butler’s pantry.”

  “It’s a little more than I had in mind,” Pickering said.

  “We have trouble renting something like that during the week,” Gayfer said. “On weekends, however, it’s in great demand by your brother officers at the air station. Two of them rent it. Eight, sometimes more, of their pals seem to extend their visits overnight. And they have an unfortunate tendency to practice their bombing—”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Among other youthful exuberances, your brother officers amuse themselves by filling balloon-type objects with water,” Gayfer said, “which they then, cheerfully shouting ‘bombs away,’ drop on their friends as they pass on the sidewalk below.”

  Pickering chuckled.

  “The management has authorized me to say that if the San Carlos could recoup just a little more by the week than it now gets for Friday and Saturday night,” Gayfer said, “it would be delighted to offer the penthouse suite on a weekly basis. How does that sound to you?”