Then they were loaded on an Army bus that took them back to the Haneda Airfield. There, they were told, they would board a Naval Air Transport Command Douglas R5D, which would depart at 1400, and after several intermediate stops—Osaka, Kobe, and Sasebo—would deposit them at K-1 Airfield, Pusan, South Korea, where they would be met by a Marine liaison officer who would get them to the First Marine Brigade (Provisional), where Aug9-2 would be disestablished, and they would be assigned billets in the brigade according to the needs of the brigade at the moment.
Shortly after boarding the aircraft—half of the fuselage was devoted to cargo—they were told there was an unexpected delay in the departure time, they were going to have to wait for some big shot, and since it was going to get hot as hell in the aircraft, those who wished could get off and wait in the shade offered by a hangar.
The lieutenant (j.g.) who gave them this word also reminded them that anyone who missed the departure of the aircraft would be subject to far more severe penalty under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, 1948, than provided for simple absence without leave. Missing this flight would be construed as absence without leave to avoid hazardous service.
All of Aug9-2 got off the airplane and sat down in the shade on the concrete before the doors of an enormous hangar.
At 1525, the big shot they were holding the flight for showed up in a two-U.S.-Army-staff-car convoy. The first of the two glistening olive-drab 1949 Chevrolet staff cars had the single-starred flag of a brigadier general flying from a short staff mounted to the fender.
An Army sergeant jumped out and opened the door. A Marine brigadier general got out, and then a Marine captain, and then a Navy lieutenant. The sergeant opened the trunk, and the Navy officer took a suitcase from it.
A Marine captain—wearing, like the other Marine officers, a crisply pressed uniform—got out of the second staff car and went to the trunk. Then a—Jesus H. Christ, will you look at that?—well-dressed, quite beautiful American woman got out of the car and watched the captain take a suitcase from the trunk.
She walked with him as he walked to the brigadier general. They exchanged salutes. The general shook hands with the captain and the Naval officer. The captain touched the cheek of the goddamn beautiful woman, and then she threw herself into his arms, and he held her for a moment.
Then he and the naval officer walked to the airplane and went up the ladder. The general put his arm around the beautiful woman in a fatherly, comforting manner.
The Navy officer who’d told them they could wait in the shade appeared at the door of the airplane and waved at USMC Platoon Aug9-2 (Provisional), signaling them that it was now time for them to reboard the aircraft.
They did so.
McCoy leaned across Taylor and waved at Ernie, although he was reasonably sure that she couldn’t see him.
“That’s tough on you, isn’t it, Ken?” Taylor asked, thoughtfully. “Having her here, and you commuting to the war?”
“What about the Air Force guys?” McCoy responded. “They do it every day: ‘How was your day, honey?’ ‘Oh, I bombed a couple of bridges, shot up a convoy, took a little antiaircraft in my landing gear, and had to land wheels-up. Nothing special. How about you?’ ‘My day was just awful. Ellsworth, Junior, kicked Marybelle Smith, Colonel Smith’s little girl, and you have to call Mrs. Smith and apologize. The battery’s dead in the car, and the PX doesn’t know when they’re going to get the right one. They want you on the PTA committee, and I didn’t know how to tell them no—’ ”
He was interrupted by the roar of the engines as the pilot set the throttles to takeoff power, but Taylor had heard enough to laugh.
The R5D began its takeoff roll.
When McCoy decided that the roar of the engine had gone down enough for Taylor to hear him, McCoy said: “All we have to worry about now is (one) whether Jennings and the other guys and the stuff from Pusan made it to Sasebo, and (two) whether we’ll be allowed to take them and it with us on the destroyer. I wish the general had been able to come to Sasebo. People usually find it hard to say ‘no’ to generals. ”
“I wonder what the hell Howe’s doing for so long in Korea? ” Taylor asked. Howe being in Korea was the reason Pickering had to stay in Tokyo.
McCoy shrugged.
“I don’t know. But whatever it is, he thinks it’s important. He’s a good man.”
“I think Jennings will be waiting for us at Sasebo,” Taylor said. “The Marine guy at K-1 . . . ?”
“Captain Overton,” McCoy furnished.
Taylor nodded and went on: “. . . told me that a lot, probably most, of the Air Force and Navy transports that land at K-1 don’t fuel up there. They head for Sasebo, which is both the closest field for large aircraft, and has a pretty good off-the-tanker-and-into-the-airplanes fueling setup. K-1, you saw that, doesn’t. They don’t even have a decent tank farm for avgas. . . .”
“You are a fountain of information I really don’t give a damn about, aren’t you, Mr. Taylor?”
“You care about this, Mr. McCoy, because the aircraft that fly from K-1 to Sasebo to take on fuel are very often empty. That means Jennings will be able to find space for himself, the other jarheads, the camouflage nets, the rations, the medical supplies, and whatever else he stole from the Army aboard one of these empty airplanes headed for Sasebo.”
“I stand corrected, sir,” McCoy said.
“And I don’t think Her Majesty’s Navy’s going to give us any trouble about taking Jennings, et cetera, aboard the Charity with us,” Taylor said. “But let’s say they do. . .”
“In which case we’re fucked. The Brits are going to give us lifeboats. You can’t hide a lifeboat on Tokchok-kundo.
And that means the North Koreans will learn sooner or later, probably sooner, that there’re two lifeboats on Tokchok-kundo and start wondering why.”
“In which case—I admit this is a desperate measure— we get General Pickering to get us an airplane to fly the stuff back to Pusan, and ship it to Tokchok-kundo on the Wind of Good Fortune.”
“I thought about that. There’s a few little things wrong with it. If Pickering asks for an airplane, they’ll want to know what for, and this is supposed to be a secret operation. And who would sail it?”
“Her. Sail her. Either of those two Koreans we had aboard is capable of sailing her to Tokchok-kundo.”
“Okay. Let’s say we did that, and it worked. The Wind of Good Fortune couldn’t make it to Tokchok-kundo until we’d been there—which means the lifeboats would have been there, exposed to the curious eyes of every sonofabitch in the Flying Fish Channel—three or four, maybe five days—”
“Hi,” someone said. “I’m Howard Dunwood.”
McCoy turned and found himself looking at the smiling face of one of the Marine officers he’d seen waiting in the shade of the hangar at Haneda.
Three weeks before, Howard Dunwood had had a reserved parking spot for his top-of-the-line DeSoto automobile— identified as being reserved for “Salesman of the Month”— at Mike O’Brien’s DeSoto-Plymouth in East Orange, New Jersey.
He had been just about to leave the dealership for an early-afternoon drink at the Brick Church Lounge & Grill—he was actually outside the showroom, about to get in his car—when there came a person-to-person long-distance telephone call for him.
A week after that, Captain Howard Dunwood, USMCR, had reported to the Replacement Battalion (Provisional) at Camp Joseph J. Pendleton, California. On 9 August, Dunwood had been given command of USMC Platoon Aug9-2.
High above the Pacific Ocean seventy-four hours later, as Trans-Global Airways Flight 1440 was nearing the end of its journey to Tokyo, Captain Dunwood had had the foresight aboard to slip into his utilities jacket pockets eight miniature bottles of Jack Daniels’ sour mash whiskey.
You never know, he had reasoned, when a little belt would be nice.
He had consumed four of the miniatures at Camp Drake, two of them in the darkened auditorium during the motion pi
cture portion of the chaplain’s presentation. He had consumed two on the bus to Haneda, and the last two while in the shade of the hangar, waiting for the big shots to come so they could take off.
What the hell, the veteran of four World War II amphibious invasions—including Tawara and Iwo Jima—had reasoned, why not? I suspect they’re going to be shooting at me in Korea, and you don’t want to be half-shitfaced when people are shooting at you.
There were, of course, no refreshments of any kind aboard NATS Flight 2022, except for a water Thermos mounted on the wall. But there was an illuminated FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign, and when, several minutes into the flight, he had seen the light go off, Captain Howard C. Dunwood, USMCR, the commanding officer of USMC Platoon Aug9-2 (Provisional), had unfastened his seat belt and walked down the short aisle to the seats in which the two candy-asses in their neatly pressed uniforms were sitting.
He squatted in the aisle, smiled, and put out his hand.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m Howard Dunwood.”
“How are you?” McCoy said.
“You don’t look like you’re going to Korea.”
“No, we’re not,” McCoy said.
“I sort of didn’t think so,” Dunwood said. “No weapons, and the wrong kind of uniform.”
McCoy didn’t reply.
“Stationed in Japan, are you? I couldn’t help but notice the lady. Your wife, was she? Maybe the general’s daughter? ”
“What’s on your mind, Captain?” McCoy asked.
“I’m just a little curious about you,” Dunwood said. “We’re both Marine officers, right?”
“Okay, we’re both Marine officers.”
“Well, I was just wondering what the hell you’re doing in Japan that’s so important they hold up a plane taking Marines to Korea for more than an hour to wait for you.”
“Captain, you’ve had a couple of drinks,” McCoy said. “Why don’t you go back to your seat and sleep them off before you get to Korea?”
“And why should I do that, you candy-ass sonofabitch?” And then Captain Dunwood yelped in pain, and exclaimed, “Goddamn you!”
Taylor, who had been studiously ignoring the exchange between the two Marine officers—by looking out the window, from which he could see Mount Fuji—now snapped his head toward the aisle, and saw that McCoy had grabbed the index finger of the captain who had been squatting in the aisle looking for a fight, moved it behind his back, and forced him from his squatting position to his knees.
“Okay. I’m a candy-ass and you’re drunk,” McCoy said. “Agreed?”
“Fuck you, candy-ass!”
Captain Dunwood then yelped in pain again, almost a shriek.
“Agreed?” McCoy asked.
“Agreed, Okay. Agreed. Let go of my finger!”
Two other officers of Aug9-2 came down the aisle.
“What the hell?” one of them—a large lieutenant, who looked like a football tackle—asked.
McCoy let go of Dunwood’s finger. Dunwood looked at the finger McCoy had held, then moved it, then yelped, not so loud this time, in pain.
“Take the captain back to his seat and make sure he stays there,” McCoy ordered.
“What the hell happened?”
“Nothing happened. Just put him back in his seat before something does.”
“Well, Okay,” the large lieutenant answered, a little reluctantly.
“ ‘Well, Okay’? Is that the way you acknowledge an order? ” McCoy snapped.
“No, sir. Aye, aye, sir.”
The two lieutenants helped Dunwood to his feet—he was still staring at his hand in disbelief—and started him down the aisle.
“Jesus Christ,” Taylor asked. “What the hell was that all about?”
“Nobody likes a candy-ass,” McCoy said. “And you and I, to a bunch of Marines headed for Korea, look like candy-asses. ”
“Did you really break his finger?”
“I started to disjoint it,” McCoy said, matter-of-factly. “It’ll probably go back in by itself. If it doesn’t, any corps-man can put it back in place.”
“Jesus,” Taylor said, chuckling.
“We were talking about how to hide the lifeboats, I think,” McCoy said.
[TWO]
U.S. NAVY BASE SASEBO SASEBO, KYUSHU, JAPAN 1740 15 AUGUST 1950
Lieutenant Commander Darwin Jones-Fortin, RN, who was well over six feet tall, obviously weighed no more than 145 pounds, and was wearing a white open-collared shirt, white shorts, and white knee-high stockings, was standing outside the passenger terminal when McCoy and Taylor came down the ladder.
“I think that’s our captain,” Taylor said softly, as he started down the stairs.
“Let’s hope my friend doesn’t see him,” McCoy said.
“If he’s commanding a destroyer, he’s no candy-ass,” Taylor said.
“Appearances are often deceiving,” McCoy said. “Didn’t you ever hear that?”
When he saw Taylor and McCoy come down the ladder, Captain Darwin-Jones walked toward them from the passenger terminal and met them halfway.
“I suspect you two gentlemen are my supercargo,” he said. “My name is Jones-Fortin.”
“My name is Taylor, Captain,” Taylor said, returning the salute and putting out his hand. “And this is Captain McCoy. ”
“Delighted to meet you both,” Jones-Fortin said. “Captain, there’s a Marine sergeant in there . . .”
Jones-Fortin nodded toward the terminal building.
“. . . who asked if I was from Charity. I thought it a bit odd.”
“Captain McCoy and I were just discussing the best way to bring this up to you, Captain,” Taylor said.
“Let me make a stab in the dark,” Jones-Fortin said. “You would like to bring him and that mountain of whatever that is”—he nodded his head toward a stack of crates and a camouflage net sitting next to the small passenger terminal—“wherever you’re going.”
McCoy smiled.
“You don’t know where we’re going, Captain?” he asked.
“I was under the impression that it was a military secret, ” Jones-Fortin said.
“Yes, we really would, sir,” Taylor said. “Will that be possible?”
“I’ve had a chance to think about that,” Jones-Fortin said. “I believe it falls within my orders from Admiral Matthews to make Charity as useful as possible.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Taylor said. “That’s a large weight off our shoulders.”
“I made discreet inquiries,” Jones-Fortin said. “There are apparently three Marines in addition to the one I spoke with.”
“Let me see what’s going on, sir,” McCoy said, and started toward the terminal.
As he did, Technical Sergeant J. M. Jennings, USMC, came out and saluted.
“Well, I see you made it here,” McCoy said.
“It was easy, Captain,” Jennings replied. “There’s a lot of transports leaving K-1 empty that come here. . .”
“I know,” McCoy said, smiling. “How’d you know about the Charity?”
“I went out to the wharfs,” Jennings said. “And there was this Limey destroyer, and swabbies lashing a couple of lifeboats to her.”
“You are a clever man, Sergeant Jennings,” McCoy said. “And where’re the other guys?”
“In the Metropole Hotel, sir. I thought it better to get them off the base.”
“How’d you know about the hotel?”
“I was here before, sir, in ’48. I was the gunny of the Marines on board the Midway.”
“Okay. Come with me, I’ll introduce you to the captain of the Charity. And don’t use the word ‘Limey.’ ”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Ah, yes,” Lieutenant Commander Jones-Fortin said, “the Hotel Metropole. If I may make a suggestion, gentlemen?”
“Of course, sir,” Taylor said.
“Your people here were kind enough to provide me with a lorry. A weapons carrier, I believe you call them?”
“
Yes, sir.”
“I propose that we load your matériel onto the lorry. I think it will hold it all. Then we will drop you gentlemen and the sergeant off at the Metropole. Then I will have the matériel loaded aboard Charity. When it is dark, I will have you picked up at the Metropole. I would be pleased if you were to join me for dinner at the Officers’ Club, and after that, we can board Charity.”
“That’s fine, Captain, except that we insist you be our guest at dinner,” Taylor said.
“We can argue that later,” Jones-Fortin said. “Shall we deal with whatever it is?”
[THREE]
There was a neatly lettered sign mounted on the wall next to the reception desk in the Hotel Metropole.
IMPORTANT NOTICE !!!
ALL LADIES USED IN THE HOTEL
MUST BE
PROVIDED BY THE MANAGEMENT!!!
NO EXCEPTIONS
THANK YOU.
THE MANAGEMENT
Technical Sergeant J. M. Jennings, USMC, opened the door to Room 215 and bellowed, “Ah-ten-hut on deck!” just before Captain McCoy and Lieutenant Taylor marched in.
There is something essentially ludicrous in the sight of three naked men standing rigidly at attention, especially when two of the three have naked Japanese women hanging from their necks, and Captain McCoy was not able to resist the temptation to smile.
“As you were,” he managed to say, which caused the two Marines with the ladies dangling from their necks to disengage themselves and all three Marines to quickly attempt to cover their genital areas with their hands.
Captain McCoy found it necessary to cough; Lieutenant Taylor found it necessary to turn and look through the door.
“Lieutenant Taylor and I are pleased to see that you’ve taken advantage of your spare time to sample the cultural delights of Sasebo,” McCoy said. “But all good things must come to an end.”
The three Marines looked at him, stone-faced.
"Shortly after dark, a weapons carrier will be here to take—”
Under Fire Page 59
