Call to Arms

by W. E. B Griffin

  Over lunch (preceding which she had a Manhattan to steady her nerves and keep her from throwing the ashtray across the room), she remembered what her father told her when she told him she was going to divorce Charley: “Everybody, sooner or later, stubs their toe. When that happens, the thing to do is swallow hard and go on to what happens next.”

  And so, by the time she walked back in the library, Carolyn was at peace with herself. She accepted the situation for what it was, and she was already beginning to see small shafts of sunlight breaking through the black cloud. All she had done was make a fool of herself, and thank God, no one knew about it. Except, of course, Henry the Doorman; and he was just the doorman. In her state of temporary insanity, she could have introduced Banning to her colleagues in the library. With her state of rut in high gear, it would have been clear to any of her colleagues that she had more of an interest in Major Ed Banning than as a fellow lover of books.

  And being absolutely brutally honest about it, she hadn’t come out of the encounter entirely empty-handed. Obviously, she had wanted to be taken to bed, and Ed had certainly done that with great skill and finesse. She would not need such servicing again any time soon.

  Now she would simply put Major Ed Banning out of her mind.

  And then, there he was, in the Central Reading Room. He was sitting at a table close to the counter. He quickly rose up, with a worried look on his face, when he saw her approach him.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello,” Carolyn said.

  “I thought you would be interested to know that you don’t work here,” he said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I called up and asked to speak to you—”

  “You did?”

  He’s obviously lying. After some thought, he has decided to come back for another drink at the well.

  “And a woman said there was no one here by that name,” Ed Banning said.

  “Oh, really?”

  “So I called back, thinking I would get somebody else, and I got the same woman, and she said, in righteous indignation, ‘I told you there is no Mrs. Powell on the staff.’”

  My God, he doesn’t even know my name!

  “It’s Howell,” Carolyn said. “With an ‘H.’”

  “Well, that explains that, doesn’t it?” Ed Banning said. And then he looked at her and blurted, “I was afraid that maybe you had told her to say that, that you just wished I would go away.”

  “No,” Carolyn said, very simply.

  “I got my orders,” Ed said. “That’s why I was delayed. That’s what I was trying to tell you on the telephone.”

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “The West Coast,” he said.

  “When are you going?”

  “Two April,” Ed said. “That’s a week from today.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Are you free for dinner?” Ed asked.

  “Dinner?”

  “I don’t want to intrude in your life, Carolyn,” Ed Banning said. “But I had hoped that we could spend some time together.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Dinner?” he asked again, and when there was no immediate reply, “Maybe tomorrow night?”

  My God, he’s afraid I’ll say no.

  “What are your plans for this afternoon?” Carolyn asked.

  “I have to go to Brooks Brothers,” Banning replied.

  “Brooks Brothers?” She wasn’t sure she had heard correctly.

  “When I replaced my uniforms, I didn’t buy as much for the tropics as I should have,” he said.

  “Meaning you’re headed for the tropics…the Pacific?”

  “Meaning that I realized this morning that I don’t have enough uniforms,” he said.

  Is that the truth? Or does he know he’s on his way to the Pacific and doesn’t want to tell me?

  “That’s all you have planned?” Carolyn asked.

  “That’s it.”

  “For this afternoon, or for the rest of the week?”

  “For the week,” Ed Banning said.

  “I thought maybe you’d be going home or something,” she said.

  “I thought I told you,” he said. “Like a lot of Marines, the Corps’s home.”

  Carolyn looked into his eyes.

  “Wait for me in the lobby,” she said. “It’ll take me about five minutes to tell my boss I’m going, and to get my coat.”

  When she went outside, he was at the bottom of the stairs, standing by one of the concrete lions that seem to be studying the traffic on Fifth Avenue passing the library. It was snowing, and there was snow on the shoulders of his overcoat and on his hat.

  She went quickly down the stairs and put her hand under his arm, and then she absolutely shocked herself by blurting, “Hi, sailor, looking for a good time?”

  He touched her gloved hand for a moment and smiled at her.

  “Have any trouble getting the afternoon off?” he asked.

  “I told my boss I was just struck with some kind of flu,” Carolyn said, “that’ll keep me from work for a week.”

  “Can you get away with it?” he asked.

  “Sure,” she said. “Now, aside from Brooks Brothers, what would you like to do?”

  His eyebrows rose. She nudged him with her shoulder.

  “Aside from that, I mean,” she said.

  He shrugged.

  “Is there some reason you have to stay in the city?” Carolyn asked, as they started to walk across Fifth Avenue to Forty-first Street.

  “No,” he said. “The only thing I have to do is get on the Twentieth-Century Limited on two April at seven fifty-five in the evening. Why do you ask?”

  “How do you feel about snow?” she asked.

  “I hate it,” he cheerfully admitted.

  “How about snow outside?” Carolyn pursued. “On fields. Unmarked, except maybe by deer tracks?”

  “Better,” he said.

  “With a fireplace inside? Glowing embers?”

  “A loaf of bread, a glowing ember, and thou?”

  “Beside you in the wilderness,” Carolyn said. “I have a place in Bucks County. Overlooking the Delaware. An old fieldstone canal house.”

  “And you want to go there?”

  “I want to go there with you,” she said.

  “Christ, and I was afraid you were trying to get rid of me,” Banning said.

  Carolyn squeezed his arm. She didn’t trust her voice to speak.

  (Four)

  Battalion Arms Room

  2nd Raider Battalion

  Camp Elliott, California

  1300 Hours, 9 April 1942

  There are few things that frighten the United States Marine Corps. One of them is the acronymn “IG,” for “Inspector General,” which usually means not only the officer bearing that title but his entire staff. This ranges from senior noncommissioned officers upward, and what they do is visit a unit and compile long lists of the unit’s shortcomings in all areas of military endeavor.

  When a visit from the IG is scheduled, the unit to be inspected instantly begins a frenzied preparation for the inspection, so that the IG will find as little wrong as possible. The IG will find something wrong, or else the IG (including the staff) would not be doing the job properly. No IG report has ever said that the unit inspected was perfect in every detail of its organization, personnel, and equipment. The best a unit can hope for is that the shortcomings the IG will detect will be of a minor, easily correctable nature.

  The fear, and the resultant near-hysteria, is compounded when the phrase “from Washington” is appended to “IG.” Colonels who could with complete calm order a regimental attack across heavily mined terrain into the mouths of cannon, and master gunnery sergeants who would smilingly lead the attack with a fixed bayonet, break into cold sweats and suffer stomach distress when informed their outfit is about to be inspected by “the IG from Washington.” There is a reason for this concern. An IG evaluation of “Unsatisfactory” is
tantamount to the announcement before God and the Corps that they have been weighed in the balance and found not to be Good Marines.

  The 2nd Raider Battalion was not immune to IG hysteria. There were several “preinspections” before the “IG from Washington’s” inspection, during which the staff examined the equipment and personnel of the Raiders and searched for things the IG would likely find fault with. And there were twice as many pre-preinspections, in which platoon leaders and gunnery sergeants sought to detect faults that would likely be uncovered by the battalion brass during their preinspections.

  Depending on the individual, experience with IG inspections tends to lessen the degree of hysteria. Inasmuch as Second Lieutenant Kenneth J. McCoy had gone through four annual IG inspections while an enlisted man with the 4th Marines, he had not been nearly as concerned with the preinspections—or even with the “IG from Washington” inspection itself—as had been First Lieutenant Martin Burnes (whose permanent presence, and that of his wife, aboard the Last Time was now an accepted fact of life).

  McCoy was so experienced with IG inspections, in fact, that he knew the rules of the game, and took several precautionary steps in his own area of responsibility (weaponry) to keep the IG inspectors happy. He was aware that IG inspectors would keep inspecting things until they found something wrong. So he gave them something to find.

  After details of Raiders who’d been sent up from the companies to the armory had cleaned the crew-served and special (shotguns, et cetera) weapons to Gunnery Sergeant Zimmerman’s highly critical satisfaction, and after they had all been laid out for the IG’s inspection, Second Lieutenant McCoy and Gunnery Sergeant Zimmerman had gone through them and fucked things up a little here and there. While Zimmerman partially unfastened a sling on a Thompson, for example, McCoy would rub a finger coated with grease over the bolt of a Browning Automatic Rifle, or on the barrel of one of the Winchester Model 1897 12-gauge trench guns.

  When it came, the inspection went as McCoy thought it would. The inspecting officer was a captain who took a quick look around and then turned over the actual inspection to a chief warrant officer, a tall, leathery-faced man named Ripley who looked as if he had been in the Marine Corps since the Corps had gone ashore at Tripoli. Gunnery Sergeant Zimmerman had subtly, if quickly, let Chief Warrant Officer Ripley know that Second Lieutenant McCoy had been in the heavy-weapons section of the 4th Marines in Shanghai. This had disabused Mr. Ripley of the notion that, for some inexplicable reason, the Raiders had turned their armory over to a baby-faced candy-ass second john fresh from Quantico—which is what he had thought when he first set eyes on Lieutenant McCoy.

  Chief Warrant Officer Ripley then, for a couple of minutes, searched for discrepancies of the type to be expected in any repository of arms, such as dirt and fire hazards and inadequate records. Then he looked for such things as malfunctioning weapons not properly tagged, so they could be repaired. And then he detail-stripped several weapons selected at random, searching for specks of dirt or rust. Finding none, he then compiled his list of minor discrepancies: “excess lubricant on three (3) Browning Automatic Rifle bolts; improperly fastened slings on two (2) Thompson submachine guns; and grease on barrels of two (2) shotguns, trench M1897.”

  By then it was evident to him that the baby-faced second john knew how to play the game. What the hell, he was an old China Marine, too.

  Then he grew serious.

  “Out of school, Lieutenant, where’d you and the gunny hide the junk weapons?” Ripley asked. His voice sounded like gravel.

  “No junk weapons,” McCoy said. “That’s them.”

  “The Army liked you, right, Lieutenant?” Ripley asked, dryly sarcastic. “And gave you all good stuff and none of their junk?”

  “After the third, or fourth, or fifth time we gave them their junk back,” McCoy replied, “they got tired. Or maybe they ran out of junk. But these weapons are all ours, and there is no junk.”

  Ripley believed him. His rule of thumb about judging officers, especially junior lieutenants, was to believe what their gunnys thought of them. And this gunny obviously thought highly of this second lieutenant.

  The inspection of the armament and armory had taken the full afternoon allotted to it on the plan of inspection, but three and a half of the four hours were spent by McCoy and Zimmerman showing the warrant officer the exotic, nonstandard weapons Colonel Carlson had obtained using his special authority to arm the Raiders as he saw fit, and then listening to the warrant officer’s sea stories about what it had been like in the 4th Marines in the old days, when he’d been there in ’33–35.

  Chief Warrant Officer Ripley had never before had the chance to closely examine three of the special weapons Carlson had acquired for the Raiders. One of them was the Reising caliber .45 ACP submachine gun. Invented by Eugene G. Reising, the closed-breech, 550-round-per-minute weapon had gone into production in December 1941. McCoy had learned the Army had received several hundred of them, and had told Colonel Carlson, and Carlson had promptly signed a requisition for two hundred of them.

  “If we don’t like them, we can always give them back, can’t we, McCoy?”

  Ripley had never even heard of the Reising before he found it in McCoy’s special-weapons arms room. But he had heard a lot about the other two, though he’d never actually seen them: These were the brainchild of a Marine, Captain Melvin Johnson, USMCR, who (as a civilian) had submitted the first models to the Army Ordnance Corps in 1938.

  The Johnson rifle was a self-loading .30-06 rifle with a unique rotary ten-shot magazine and an unusual eight-radial-lug-bolt locking system. Barrels could be replaced in a matter of seconds.

  The Johnson light machine gun was a fully automatic version of the rifle, with a magazine feeding from the side; a heavier stock with a pistol grip; and a bipod attached to the barrel near the muzzle.

  Warrant Officer Ripley was fascinated with them. And after a solemn examination, he pronounced the Reising to be “a piece of shit”; the Johnson rifle to be “twice as good as that fucking Garand”; and the Johnson machine gun “probably just as good as the Browning automatic rifle.” Lieutenant McCoy agreed with Ripley about the Reising; and he too thought that the Johnson rifle was probably going to be a good combat weapon (because its partially empty magazine could be reloaded easily; the en bloc eight-round clip of the Garand could not be reloaded in the rifle); and he thought the BAR was a far better weapon than the Johnson. But he kept his opinions to himself, deciding that he was in no position to argue with a chief Warrant officer, whose judgment was certainly colored by the fact that the Johnsons were invented by a Marine.

  Second Lieutenant McCoy and Gunnery Sergeant Zimmerman were relieved, but not really surprised, when Warrant Officer Ripley showed them the clipboard on which was the pencil copy of his report. (A neatly typewritten report in many copies would be prepared later.) He had found their armory “Excellent” overall (one step down from the theoretical, never—in McCoy’s experience—awarded “Superior”); and aside from “minor, readily correctable discrepancies noted hereon” there was no facet of their operation that would require a reinspection to insure that it had been corrected.

  Gunnery Sergeant Zimmerman then produced a jug he just happened to come across where someone had hidden it behind a ceiling rafter, and they had a little nip.

  “The brass’ll keep at it for a while,” Ripley said. “Between us China Marines, most of ’em got a real hard-on for Carlson. What the fuck is that all about?”

  “I think it’s because he got out of the Corps and then came back in,” McCoy said. “And then got promoted.”

  “Carlson got out of the Corps?” Ripley said, obviously surprised. “I didn’t know that. How come?”

  McCoy shrugged his shoulders.

  “I was with him in Nicaragua when he got the Navy Cross,” Ripley said with a touch of pride in his voice. “The last I heard, he had the Marine detachment at Warm Springs. What’d he do, piss off the President?”

&
nbsp; “I don’t think so,” McCoy said. “Otherwise the President’s son wouldn’t be the exec.”

  “No shit?” Chief Warrant Officer Ripley said. “That tall drink of water is really the President’s son? I thought they were pulling my chain.”

  “That’s him,” McCoy said.

  “I’ll be goddamned,” Ripley said.

  “Is the brass going to fuck with your report? So they can stick it in Carlson?” McCoy asked.

  “I call things like I see them,” Ripley said indignantly. “You guys are more shipshape than most. And nobody fucks with my reports. Shit!”

  “Well, this isn’t the first time I heard that they’re trying to stick it to Carlson,” McCoy said. “And there are some real sonsofbitches around.”

  “When they handed me this shitty assignment—I’d rather be with the First Division; hell, I’d rather be here—the Commandant himself told me if anybody tried to lay any crap on me, I was to come to him personal.”

  XIX

  (One)

  Aboard the Yacht Last Time

  San Diego Yacht Club

  1900 Hours, 9 April 1942

  Major Edward J. Banning, Captain Jack NMI Stecker, and Lieutenants McCoy and Burnes were sitting on teak-and-canvas deck chairs with their feet on the polished mahogany rail at the deck. Music and the smell of something frying came up from the portholes of the galley.

  “You look deep in thought, Jack,” Banning said.

  “You really want to know what I’m thinking?” Stecker replied. “That there are two kinds of Marines. There is the one kind, the ordinary kind, the Campbell’s Baked Beans with Ham Fat kind; and then there’s the steak kind. That one”—he pointed at McCoy—“is the steak kind. I don’t know how they do it, but they always wind up living better than other people.”

  He smiled at McCoy. “No criticism, McCoy. I’m jealous. Christ, this is real nice.”