The Corps II - CALL TO ARMS

by W. E. B Griffin

  He saw that Zimmerman had also just about selected the armorer for the carbines. One of the kids. He had seen him mixing paste and pasting targets.

  McCoy glanced at the tables and the faces. They were mostly kids, he thought, some of them as young as seventeen. And some he suspected were seventeen using somebody else's birth certificate.

  And then he did a quick double take. There was a familiar face at the next-to-the-last table. At first it seemed incredible, but then there was no question about it at all. One of the Raiders struggling to get a good look at a sergeant taking a carbine to pieces was Tommy. Thomas Michael McCoy. PFC Thomas Michael McCoy, USMC, was Second Lieutenant Kenneth J. McCoy's little brother.

  Younger brother, McCoy thought. The sonofabitch is even bigger than I remembered. And meaner looking.

  "You look stunned, McCoy," Captain Coyte said. "Was my marksmanship that bad?" McCoy was startled, and it showed on his face when he looked up at Coyte.

  "McCoy?"

  "Sir, I just spotted my kid brother. The PFC with the broken nose, by Table Three?"

  "I saw the similarity in name when he reported in," he said. "He reported in from Pearl. They must have lost his records, for he has a brand-new service record."

  "They give you a new service record when they throw out a court-martial sentence, too," McCoy said.

  "But we don't know that, do we, McCoy?" Coyte said. "So far as I'm concerned, so far as the Raiders are concerned, he has a clear record."

  Their eyes met for a moment, and then Coyte went on, "If this is going to be a problem, McCoy, I can try to have him transferred."

  "No problem, sir," McCoy said. "I can handle the sonofabitch."

  "I'm sure you can, Killer," Captain Coyte said.

  Chapter Sixteen

  (One)

  Annex #2, Staff NCO Club Camp Elliott, California 10 March 1942

  Gunnery Sergeant Ernst Zimmerman, USMC, sat alone on a wooden folding chair at one of the small, four-man tables of the club. He was freshly showered and shaved, and in freshly washed dungarees. His feet were on a folding chair.

  Annex #2 of the staff NCO club was a Quonset building. It was intended to provide a place for the staff noncommissioned officers-the three senior pay grades-to go for a beer when they came off duty tired, hot, and dirty. The wearing of the green uniform was prescribed for the main staff NCO club.

  Annex #2 was simple, in fact crude. The bar, for instance, ran a third of the length of the building and was made of plywood. After it was built, someone had gone over the surface with a blow torch, which brought out the grain of the wood. Then it had been varnished. There were fifteen stools at the bar, and a dozen of the small tables. There was a juke box and four slot machines. Two took nickels, one took dimes, and one quarters.

  Zimmerman never played the slot machines. He would play acey-deucey for money, or poker, and he had been known to bet on his own skill with the Springfield rifle, but he thought that playing the slots was stupid, fixed as they were to return to the staff NCO club twenty-five percent of the coins fed to them.

  And he had never been in the main staff NCO club. He thought it was stupid to get all dressed up in greens, just to sit around with a bunch of other noncoms and tell sea stories. Green uniforms had to be cleaned and pressed, and that cost money. You could get hamburgers and hot dogs and bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches and french fries at the main club, but Zimmerman thought it was stupid to buy your food when the Corps was providing three squares a day.

  If you really wanted a good meal, Zimmerman reasoned, take liberty off the base and go to some civilian restaurant and get a steak.

  There was a row of whiskey bottles behind the bar, but Zimmerman rarely had a drink. He had nothing against the hard stuff, just against buying it by the drink at thirty cents a shot. For the price of ten drinks, you could get a bottle, and there were a lot more than ten shots in a bottle.

  Annex #2 offered a two-quart pitcher of draft beer for forty cents. They also offered little bags of Planter's peanuts for a nickel. Zimmerman liked peanuts, but he didn't like to pay a nickel for half a handful, so he bought them in cans in the PX for twenty-nine cents, two or three cans at a time, when he bought his weekly carton of Camel cigarettes. He kept them in his room. When he was going to Annex #2 for a pitcher of beer, he dumped half a canful of peanuts on a piece of paper, folded it up, and carried it with him. He figured that way he could eat twice as many peanuts with his beer for the same money.

  All things considered, Zimmerman was satisfied with his present assignment. He sort of missed being around a motor pool, but you couldn't work in a motor pool if you were a gunnery sergeant, and it was nice being a gunny. He had never expected to become a gunny. Probably a staff sergeant, or maybe even a technical sergeant. But not a gunny. It was either the building of the Corps for the war, or else mere had been a fuck-up at Headquarters, USMC, and some clerk was told to make him a staff sergeant and he hadn't been paying attention and had made a gunny instead. But he wasn't going to ask, or complain, about it. If there was a fuck-up, it would be straightened out.

  He had liked being a gunny in the 1st Separate Battalion at Quantico. He had liked it better before they had transferred the company from Quantico to the 2nd Separate Battalion out here, and he had been a little worried when they had renamed the outfit the 2nd Raider Battalion.

  It was supposed to be all volunteer. That wasn't so. Nobody had asked him when they'd transferred him from the motor pool at Parris Island whether he wanted to volunteer, and nobody had said anything about volunteering for anything since he'd been out here, either.

  They were running the asses off the volunteers, a lot of time at night; but since he had been working for McCoy, he had been relieved from all other duties. That didn't mean it wasn't hard work, but the work McCoy had him doing made more sense than what everybody else was doing, especially the running around in the dark and the "close personal combat" training.

  He didn't say anything about it, of course, but there was a lot of bullshit in the Raider training. They all thought they were going to be John Wayne, once they got to the Pacific, cutting Japanese throats. They seemed to have the idea that the Japs were obligingly going to stand still and raise their chins so they could get their throats cut.

  Zimmerman knew that aside from McCoy, and maybe Colonel Carlson, he was one of the few people who had even seen a Japanese soldier up close. And the ones he had seen looked like pretty good soldiers to him. Some of the Japs he had seen were as big and heavy as he was. Most of the Raiders, especially the kids (which meant most of the Raiders; Zimmerman had heard that eighty-two percent of the enlisted then were under twenty years old), had the idea that Japs were buck-teethed midgets who wore thick glasses.

  Colonel Carlson was trying to make them understand that wasn't so, that the Japs were tough, smart, and well trained. But the kids thought he was just saying that to key them up. They wouldn't change their minds until some Jap started to stick one of those long Jap bayonets in them.

  There were some things the Raiders were doing that made sense to Zimmerman. Everybody was getting, or was supposed to get, a.45 in addition to whatever weapon he would be issued. In the Old Corps, that didn't happen. Only people in crew-served weapons, plus some senior noncoms, and officers, got.45s. Most people couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with a pistol, but still it made sense to give people one in case something went wrong with their basic weapon.

  Except, Zimmerman thought, that the Raiders were going apeshit over Thompsons and carbines, trying to get them issued instead of what they should have, these new eight-shot self-loading.30-06 Garands.

  In all his time in the Corps, Zimmerman had known only two people who could handle a Thompson properly. Major Chesty Puller, who was a short, stocky, muscular sonofabitch (in Zimmerman's mind, Puller, not Gunnery Sergeant Lou Diamond, was the Perfect Marine) and could handle the recoil with brute strength; and McCoy. McCoy, compared to Puller, was a little fucker, but he had lear
ned how to control the recoil of a Thompson by controlling the trigger. He got off two-round bursts that went where he pointed them, and he could get off so many two- and three-round bursts that he could empty the magazine, even a fifty-round magazine, just about as fast as Major Puller, who just pulled the trigger and held it back and used muscles to keep ten-, fifteen-, even twenty-round bursts where he wanted them to go.

  Aside from McCoy and Puller and, he now remembered, a gunnery sergeant with the Peking Horse Marines, everybody else he had ever seen trying to deliver accurate rapid fire from a Thompson had wound up shooting at the horizon. Or the moon.

  But it was classy, salty, to have a Thompson, and everybody was breaking their ass to get one. In the Old Corps, you took what the book said, period. But Colonel Carlson, McCoy had told him, had been given permission to arm the Raiders just about any way he wanted to. If a Raider, officer or enlisted, could come up with almost any half-assed reason why he should have a Thompson, more often than not, they let him have one.

  Zimmerman had personally stripped down and inspected ninety-six of the fuckers-half of them brand new, and half of them worn-out junk-that they'd got from the Army and that McCoy had sent him after.

  But most of the officers loved the Thompsons. Though if they couldn't talk themselves into one of those, they wanted carbines. Maybe there was something to what McCoy had said, that the carbine was intended to replace the pistol. But he was about the only one that ever said that. Everybody else wanted it because they thought it would be a lot easier to haul around than a Springfield or a Garand.

  And then there were the knives. Every sonofabitch and his brother in the Raiders was running around with a knife, like they were all Daniel Boones and they were going to go out and scalp the Japs, for Christ sake.

  McCoy was the only Marine Zimmerman ever knew who had ever used a knife on anybody. There had been some guys in Shanghai who'd gotten into it with the Italian Marines during the riots with Springfield bayonets, but that was different. Bayonets weren't sharp, and they had been used almost like clubs, or maybe small, dull swords. And so far as Zimmerman remembered hearing, none of those Italian Marines had died.

  Two of the four Italian Marines who had jumped McCoy in Shanghai had died. McCoy had opened them up with his Fairbairn, which was a knife invented by a Limey captain on the Shanghai Municipal Police. It was a sort of dagger, razor sharp on bow edges, and built so that the point wouldn't snap off if it hit a bone. McCoy's wasn't a real Fairbairn, but a smaller copy of one run up by some Chinese out of an old car spring. It was about two-thirds as long as the real one. The real Fairbairn was too big to hide inside your sleeve above your wrist and below your elbow; McCoy's Baby Fairbairn was.

  McCoy was now carrying his Fairbairn. When Zimmerman had asked him why, McCoy had first said, "Because Carlson told me to." And then he jumped all over his ass, saying he had a big mouth and that he should have kept it shut about what happened in Shanghai. Zimmerman had told him, truthfully, that he hadn't said a goddamned word about that, but he wasn't sure McCoy believed him.

  Well, everybody in the goddamned Raiders knew about it now, and was calling him "Killer," the officers to his face, and the others behind his back. Until they stopped it, a lot of the kids were even trying to go around with their knives strapped to their wrists. That didn't work, but they thought it was salty as hell.

  All this salty knife and submachine-gun bullshit was fine in training, Zimmerman thought; but if the Raiders ever got to do what everybody thought they were going to do-sneak ashore in little rubber boats from destroyers-converted-to-transports onto some Jap-held island and start, like John Wayne and Alan Ladd in some bullshit movie, to cut throats and shoot up the place-they were going to find out it was a hell of a lot different from what they thought.

  Only once in his life had Gunnery Sergeant Ernst Zimmerman found himself in a situation where armed then were really trying to kill him. Forty or fifty Chinese "bandits," who were working for the Japs, had ambushed him and a Marine officer named Sessions when they had become separated from the rest of a motor supply convoy.

  He hadn't shit his pants or tried to hide or run or anything like that. He'd just stood there with a.45 in a hip holster and just absolutely forgot he had a weapon, until McCoy had come charging up like the goddamned cavalry taking Chinese down with a Thompson. Even then he hadn't done anything. McCoy had had to scream at him, "Shoot, for Christ's sake!" before he took the.45 out and started to use it to save his own ass.

  Zimmerman didn't think that would happen again-after he had "woken up," he had done what had to be done-but he wondered how these Raiders who were swaggering around Camp Elliott with their knives and carbines and Thompsons were going to react when they found themselves facing some Jap who was as big as they were, and who wasn't wearing thick glasses and didn't have buck teeth and was about to shoot them or run them through with a bayonet.

  Baker Company's gunnery sergeant, Danny Esposito, appeared at the table with a pitcher of beer in one hand and a mug in the other. He was a large, heavy, leather-skinned man of thirty (either a Spaniard or an Italian, Zimmerman wasn't sure which), and he was wearing greens.

  "You saving this table?" he asked.

  "Sit down," Zimmerman said.

  "You ready?" Gunnery Sergeant Esposito asked, holding his pitcher of beer over Zimmerman's mug.

  "Why not?"

  Esposito topped off Zimmerman's mug, and then sat down. Zimmerman pushed the piece of waxed paper with the peanuts over to him. Esposito scooped some up, tossed them in his mouth, and nodded his thanks.

  "Scuttlebutt says that if somebody's got a worn-out Thompson and wants one of the new ones," Gunnery Sergeant Esposito said, "you're the man to see."

  "You want a Thompson?" Zimmerman asked evenly.

  "One of my lieutenants," Esposito said. "I put a hundred rounds through a Garand, and I sort of like it. It ain't no Springfield, of course, but I'm getting two-, two-and-a-half-inch groups."

  "The Garand is a pretty good weapon," Zimmerman said. "People don't like it 'cause it's new, that's all."

  "What about the Thompson? Can you help me out?"

  "I'll see what I can do," Zimmerman said. "That why you come looking for me?"

  "What makes you think I come looking for you?"

  "You're all dressed up," Zimmerman said.

  Esposito shrugged and drained his beer mug and refilled it before he replied.

  "I was hoping maybe I'd run into you, Zimmerman," he confessed.

  "You did," Zimmerman said.

  "Out of school?" Esposito asked.

  Zimmerman nodded.

  "You're pretty tight with Lieutenant McCoy," Esposito said.

  "We was in the Fourth Marines together," Zimmerman said.

  "He's all right."

  "Scuttlebutt says he had you to dinner," Esposito said. "On some yacht, where he's shacked up."

  "That's what the scuttlebutt says?" Zimmerman replied.

  "What do you know about his brother?"

  "Not much," Zimmerman asked.

  "I got an old pal at the Diego brig," Esposito said.

  "What'd he do?" Zimmerman said.

  "I said 'at,' not 'in,'" Esposito said, before he realized that Zimmerman was pulling his leg. "Shit, Zimmerman!"

  "What about your pal at the brig?"

  "He says McCoy-PFC McCoy was in there," Esposito said. "You know anything about that?"

  Zimmerman shook his head. "No."

  "He was supposed to be on his way to Portsmouth to do five-to-ten for belting an officer."

  "That's what you heard, huh?" Zimmerman said.

  "I also found out when he reported in here, he had just had full issue of new uniforms, and he's got a brand-new service record."

  "What does that mean?"

  "It means I got the straight poop from my friend at the brig," Esposito said. "If they vacate a general court-martial sentence and turn somebody loose, they give him a new service record. And since general
prisoners don't have uniforms, except for dungarees with a 'P' painted on them, they give them a new issue."

  "If I was you, Esposito," Zimmerman said, "I wouldn't be running off at the mouth about this."

  "Because of Lieutenant McCoy, you mean?"

  "Because if the Corps gave him a new service record, it means the Corps wants him to have a clean slate. Don't go turning over some rock."

  "How would your friend Lieutenant McCoy react if I kicked the shit out of his little brother?"

  "Why would you want to do that?" Zimmerman asked.

  "For one thing, he's a wisenheimer," Esposito said. "For another, he thinks he's a real tough guy. He beat the shit out of two of my kids. No reason, either, that I can get out of anybody, except that he wanted to show people how tough he is. And he's running off at the mouth, too. About his brother, I mean. What's with the shack job on the yacht? Is that true? And while I'm asking questions, what's the real poop about Lieutenant McCoy?"

  Zimmerman lit a Camel with his Zippo, and then took a deep pull at his beer mug.

  "What do you mean, real poop?"

  "He really kill a bunch of Italian Marines with that little knife of his?"

  "Two Italians," Zimmerman said. "He killed two Italians. Stories get bigger and better every time they get told."

  "You was there?"

  "I was there," Zimmerman said.

  "Mean little fucker, isn't he?" Gunnery Sergeant Esposito said, approvingly. "I heard fifteen, twenty Italians. I knew that was bullshit."

  "It was twenty Chinamen," Zimmerman said. "Not Italians, Chinamen."

  "No shit?"

  "Okay, we're out of school, right?" Zimmerman said. He waited for Esposito to nod his agreement and then went on. "McCoy and I were buddies in the Fourth. We had a pretty good rice bowl going. We ran truck supply convoys from Shanghai to Peking. We got pretty close. One time the convoy got ambushed. Chinese bandits, supposed to be. Actually the Japs were behind it. McCoy killed a bunch of them-twenty, anyway, maybe more-with a Thompson." "No shit?" Esposito said, much impressed. "You don't want to get him mad at you, Esposito," Zimmerman said. "You was asking about the boat-"