The Corps II - CALL TO ARMS

by W. E. B Griffin

  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 then 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 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 understand 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?"

  "I'm always willing to do what I can to help out a fellow hotelier," Pickering said. "That sounds fine."

  They ceremoniously shook hands.

  The good- looking blonde who had come to Pickering's table with the unsolicited Good Samaritan warning about Captain Carstairs stood up and walked out of the coffee shop. She had nice legs, and her skirt revealed much of the shape of her derriere. Pickering thought of himself, by and large, as a derriere man. This was one of the nicer derrieres he'd come across lately, and he gave it the careful study an object of beauty clearly deserved. Pity the owner was impressed with her role as an officer's wife.

  And then he became aware that Gayfer was watching him stare.

  "Some things do tend to catch one's eye, don't they?" Pick said.

  There was not the understanding smile on Gayfer's face that he expected.

  "I saw the wedding ring," Pick said. "No offense intended. Just a statement of appreciation."

  "She's a widow," Gayfer said.

  Pickering's eyebrows rose in question.

  "Her name is Martha Culhane," Gayfer said. "Martha Sayre Culhane."

  "Is that name supposed to mean something to me?" Pickering asked.

  "Her father is Admiral Sayre," Gayfer said. "He's the number-three man at the Naval air station. Her husband is… was… a Marine pilot. He was killed at Wake Island."

  "Oh, God!" Pickering said softly.

  "She's not the only service wife around here to suddenly find herself a widow," Gayfer said. "This is a Navy town. But when she went home to her family, it was back into admiral's quarters on the base. I think that made it tougher for her. If she was back in Cedar Rapids or someplace, she wouldn't be surrounded by uniforms."

  "What was she doing here this time of morning?"

  "She hangs around the Marine fliers. The ones who were friends of her
husband. They sort of take care of her."

  Pickering would have liked an explanation of "hangs around" and "take care of her," but he suppressed the urge to ask for one.

  No wonder, he thought, that she looked at me with such amused contempt.

  "When you're through, I'll show you the suite," Gayfer said.

  "I'm through," Pickering said, and stood up.

  "Where's your car?" Gayfer asked as they entered the lobby.

  The widow was standing, sidewards to him, by a stack of newspapers on the marble desk. Nice legs, Pickering thought idly, again, and then he saw how her skirt was drawn tight against her stomach, and his mind's eye was suddenly filled with a surprisingly clear image of her naked belly.

  Goddamn you.' You sonofabitch! She's a widow, for Christ's sake. Her husband was shot down!

  "Out in front," he replied to Gayfer.

  "The Cadillac with the California plates?"

  Pickering nodded.

  "Give me the keys," Gayfer said, and Pickering handed them to him.

  There was a new clerk behind the desk. Gayfer walked over to him, gave him the keys, told him to have the bellman bring the bags in the Cadillac convertible outside up to the penthouse, and then to put the Cadillac in the parking lot.

  The widow (Martha Sayre Culhane, Pickering remembered), who couldn't help but overhear what Gayfer said, looked at Pickering with unabashed curiosity.

  Gayfer, smiling, led Pickering to the elevator. When Pickering turned and faced front, Martha Sayre Culhane was still looking at him.

  (Three)

  Second Lieutenant Malcolm Pickering, USMCR, had learned from Second Lieutenant Kenneth J. McCoy, USMCR, a number of things about the United States Marine Corps that were not taught in the Platoon Leader's Course at United States Marine Corps' Schools, Quantico.

  One of them was that a commissioned officer of the United States Marine Corps was not required to use rail tickets issued to move officially from one place to another. Such rail tickets, Pickering had learned from McCoy, were issued for the officer's convenience.

  "There's two ways to do it, Pick," McCoy had explained. "The best way, if you know they're going to issue orders, is to request TPA-Travel by Private Auto-first. If they give you that, they also give you duty time to make the trip… four, five hundred miles a day. Three days, in other words, to get from Washington to Pensacola. Then they pay you so much a mile.

  "But even if you don't have TPA on your orders, you can take your car. You don't get any extra travel time, all you get is what it would have taken you to make the trip by train. But when you get there, you can turn in your ticket, and tell them you traveled TPA, and they'll still pay you by the mile."

  There was more: "The duty day runs from oh-oh-oh-one to twenty-four hundred."

  That had required explanation, and McCoy had furnished it.

  "Whether it's one minute after midnight in the morning when you leave, or half-past eleven that night, that's one day. And whether you report in after midnight or twenty-three-and-a-half hours later, so far as the Corps is concerned, it's the same day. So the trick is to leave just after midnight, and report in just before midnight."

  And there had been a final sage word of advice from McCoy: "And never report in early. You report in early, they'll find something for you to do between the time you reported in and when they expected you. Something nobody else wants to do, like counting spoons, or inspecting grease pits."

  Second Lieutenant Pickering's orders, transferring him from U.S. Marine Barracks, Washington, D.C., to Navy Air Station, Pensacola, Florida, for the purpose of undergoing training as a Naval aviator, had given him a ten-day delay en route leave, plus the necessary time to make the journey by rail. The schedule for rail travel called for a forty-nine-hour journey. Since forty-nine hours was one hour more than two days, he had three full days to make the rail trip.

  He had flown from his Authorized Leave Destination-in other words, New York City-to Atlanta, and then driven through the night to Pensacola. He had two days of travel time left when he got to Pensacola; and taking McCoy's advice as the Gospel, he had no intention of reporting in early and finding himself counting spoons or inspecting grease pits.

  He went to bed in the penthouse suite of the San Carlos and slept through the day, rising in time for the cocktail hour. He had a couple of drinks at the bar, then dinner, and then a couple of more drinks. He looked for, but did not see, the Widow Culhane, and told himself this was idle curiosity, nothing more.

  Suspecting that if he stayed in the bar, he would get tanked up, which would not be a smart thing for a just-reporting-in second lieutenant to do, he left the bar and wandered around downtown Pensacola.

  It was, as Chester Gayfer had told him, a Navy town. Every third male on the streets was in Navy blue. There were fewer Marines, though, and most of them seemed to be officers. There were more service people on the streets of Pensacola, Pickering decided as he saluted for the twentieth or thirtieth time, than there were in Washington.

  He went into the Bijou Theatre, taking advantage of the price reduction for servicemen, and watched Ronald Reagan playing a Naval aviator in a movie called Dive Bomber. He was fascinated with the airplanes, and with the notion-truth being stranger than fiction-that he might soon be flying an airplane himself.

  When the movie was over (he had walked in in the middle) and the lights went up, he kept his seat and stayed for the Bugs Bunny cartoon and The March of Time, much of which was given over to footage of the "Arsenal of Democracy" gearing up its war production.

  When Dive Bomber started up again, he walked out of the theater and back to the San Carlos Hotel bar.

  This time the Widow Culhane (Martha Sayre Culhane, her full name came to him) was there, in the center of a group of Marine officers and their wives and girl friends. All wore the gold wings of Navy aviators. Among them was Captain Mustache Carstairs, the one who had objected to his unshaven chin and mussed uniform the day before.

  As Pickering had his drinks, both of them looked at him, the Marine captain with what Pick thought was a professional curiosity ("Has that slovenly disgrace to the Marine Corps finally taken a shave?") and Martha Sayre Culhane with a look he could not interpret.

  Pick had two drinks, and then left. He went to the penthouse suite and took off his uniform, everything but his shorts, and sat on the patio looking up at the stars and smoking a cigar until he felt himself growing sleepy. Then he went to bed.

  Chapter Six

  (One)

  420 Lexington Avenue

  New York City

  1135 Hours, 8 January 1942

  When her telephone rang, Miss Ernestine Sage was sitting pushed back in her chair with her hands-their fingers intertwined-on top of her head, looking at the preliminary artwork for a Mint-Fresh Tooth Paste advertisement, which would eventually appear in Life, The Saturday Evening Post, and sixteen other magazines; and on several thousand billboards across the nation.

  The preliminary artwork showed a good-looking, wholesome blonde with marvelous teeth saying something. A balloon was drawn on the preliminary drawing. When Miss Sage decided exactly what Miss Mint-Fresh was going to say (and after that had been approved by her senior copywriter, her assistant account executive; her vice president and account executive; the vice president, creative; and, of course, the client) it would be put inside the balloon.

  Right now the balloon was empty. The preliminary artwork gave the impression, Miss Sage had just been thinking, that someone had just whispered an obscenity in Miss Mint-Fresh's ear, and Miss Mint-Fresh had been rendered speechless.

  Miss Ernestine Sage took one hand from the top of her head and reached for the telephone.

  "Mint- Fresh," she said to the telephone. "Ernie Sage."

  "Hello, honey," her caller said. "I'm glad I caught you."

  "Hello, Daddy," Ernie Sage said. She had been expecting the call. She had, in fact, expected it yesterday.

  She spun in her chair so that she could re
st her feet on the windowsill. The window in Miss Ernestine Sage's closet-sized office at J. Walter Thompson Advertising, Inc. offered a splendid view of the roof of a smaller building next door, and then of the windows of the building next to that.

  Miss Sage was a copywriter, which was a rank in the J. Walter Thompson hierarchy as well as a description of her function. In the Creative Division, the low man on the corporate totem pole was a "trainee." Next above that came "editorial assistant," then "juniorcopywriter." Above "copywriter" came "senior copywriter." Beyond that, one who kept one's nose to the grindstone could expect to move upward over the years to "assistant account executive" and "account executive" and possibly even into the "vice president and account executive" and plain "vice president" categories.

  It had taken Miss Sage about three weeks to figure out that JWT, as it was known to the advertising cognoscenti, passed out titles in one or both of two ways. The first was in lieu of a substantial increase in salary, and the other was with an eye on JWT's clients. Just as JWT sold a myriad of products to the public by extolling their virtues, so it sold itself to its clients with manifestations of the degree of importance in which it held them.

  A very important client, "a multimillion biller," for example, such as American Personal Pharmaceutical, Inc., who the previous year had spent "12.3 mil" in bringing its array of products before the American public, had one JWT vice president, four JWT vice presidents and account executives, eight JWT account executives, and God only knew how many JWT assistant account executives and senior copywriters devoting their full attention to American Personal Pharmaceutical's products.

  Miss Sage was in the "Mint-Fresh" shop. Mint-Fresh was the third best-selling of American Personal Pharmaceutical's family of five products intended to brighten America's (and for that matter, the world's) teeth.

  Miss Sage was one of three copywriters reporting to a senior copywriter, who reported to the Mint-Fresh account executive, who reported to the vice president and account executive, APP Dental Products. There were three other vice presidents and account executives, one for APP Cosmetic Products (shampoos, acne medicines, hair tonics, et cetera); one for APP Health Products (cold remedies, cough syrups, et cetera); and one for APP Personal Products (originally nostrums for feminine complaints, but now-after APP had acquired controlling interest in the companies involved in their manufacture-including three brands of sanitary napkins and eleven brands of rubber prophylactics).