Semper Fi

by W. E. B Griffin

“Move closer, so I can play with them,” McCoy said.

  “Why, you wicked little boy, you,” she said, but she pushed herself closer to him, so that his hands and his mouth could reach her breast.

  The “my darling” business was over, McCoy realized. First with relief, then with sadness.

  She took her nipple from his mouth a moment later and kissed him lasciviously, then moved her head down his body. She was just straddling him when there was a knock at the door.

  “Come back later,” McCoy called in Chinese.

  “It’s Lieutenant Sessions, McCoy, open the door!”

  Breathing heavily, Ellen reluctantly hauled herself off him and scurried around the room, picking up her clothing. McCoy watched her moves—lovely and graceful. She was the best-looking piece of ass he’d ever had, he had realized sometime during the last twenty-four hours. And the best.

  He wondered how she was going to handle Sessions. She was not going to be able to holler rape, which was what usually happened when an American woman got caught fucking a Marine. Not only wouldn’t she be able to get away with it (how could she explain being in his room?); but she had called him ‘my darling’ and he knew somehow that she meant it. He meant more to her than a stiff prick. She was not going to cause him any trouble, and he knew he didn’t want to cause her any.

  “Come on, Corporal, I have business with you!” Sessions called.

  McCoy waited until she’d gone into the bathroom, then pushed himself out of the bed and went to the door, pulling on his shorts en route.

  Lieutenant Sessions wore two days’ growth of beard, and his seersucker suit was badly soiled. The Japanese knew that it embarrassed Americans not to be clean-shaven, so razors were not made available. And there was evidence of an “accident” at a meal. McCoy was amused at the Japanese skill in embarrassing their unwanted guests (and so was Captain Banning), but it was apparent that Lieutenant Sessions was not.

  “Sergeant Zimmerman said he had no idea where you were,” Sessions accused as he pushed past McCoy into the room.

  McCoy didn’t reply.

  “I presume that you have reported our detention by the Japanese to Shanghai?” Sessions asked.

  “No, sir,” McCoy said.

  “Why not, Corporal?” Sessions asked angrily.

  “I thought I’d wait to see what the Japs decided to do,” McCoy said.

  “You ‘thought you’d wait’?” Sessions quoted incredulously. “Good God! And it’s pretty clear, isn’t it, how you passed your time while you were waiting? What the hell have you been doing in here, McCoy? Conducting an orgy?”

  McCoy didn’t reply.

  “A round-the-clock orgy,” Sessions went on, looking at the debris, food trays, bottles of beer, and towels on the floor. He sniffed the air. “It smells like a whorehouse in here. Is she still here, for Christ’s sake?”

  McCoy nodded.

  “Goddamn it, Corporal, in my absence you were supposed to take charge, not conduct yourself like a PFC on payday. You are prepared to offer no excuse at all for not getting in touch with Shanghai and reporting what had happened to us?”

  “I was trying not to make waves,” McCoy said.

  “And what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  The bathroom door opened and Ellen Feller came into the room. She was in her bathrobe, and her hair fanned down her shoulders.

  She looked directly at Lieutenant Sessions as she walked through the room and out the door.

  “Well, that really does it,” Sessions said coldly, almost calmly, when she had gone. “Instead of doing your duty…Jesus Christ! I’m going to have your stripes for this, McCoy. I’d like to have you court-martialed!”

  McCoy walked across the room to the chest of drawers and picked up the Leica camera.

  “Goddamnit, Corporal, don’t you turn your back on me when I’m talking to you!” Sessions said furiously.

  McCoy rewound the film, opened the camera, and slipped the film out. He held the small can of film between his thumb and index finger and turned to face Lieutenant Sessions.

  “I hope you didn’t lose your temper like that in Yenchi’eng,” McCoy said. “So far as the Japs are concerned, you lose a lot of face when you lose your temper.”

  “How dare you talk to me that way?” Sessions barked, both incredulous and furious.

  “Lieutenant, as I see it, you have two choices,” McCoy said. “You can make a by-the-book report of what happened: That against my advice, you went to Yenchi’eng and got yourself caught, and that when you came back here, you found out that I hadn’t even reported that the Japs had you…”

  “‘Had completely abandoned your obvious obligations’ would be a better way to put it,” Sessions interrupted.

  “And had ‘completely abandoned my obvious obligations’” McCoy parroted.

  “That’s Silent Insolence2 on top of everything else!” Sessions snapped.

  “And that you found Mrs. Feller in my room,” McCoy said.

  “What the hell were you thinking about in that connection?” Sessions fumed. “Good God, man, her husband is a missionary!”

  “Who will say that his wife was in here reading the Bible to me,” McCoy said calmly. “He’s a faggot.”

  Surprise flashed over Sessions’s face.

  “She is a married woman, and you damned well knew she was,” Sessions said, somewhat lamely. This confrontation was not going at all the way he had expected it would.

  “The other choice you and Lieutenant Macklin have,” McCoy said, “is to report that you have proof the Japs don’t have any German PAK38 50-mm cannons, at least not in the 11th Division.”

  That caught Sessions by surprise.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked. “What proof?”

  “If they had German cannon, they would have turned in their Model 94s,” McCoy said. “They didn’t.” He held up the can of film. “I took these at first light yesterday morning,” he said. “I was lucky: The Japs were up before daylight lining them up and taking the covers off. Probably weekly maintenance, something like that.”

  It took Sessions a moment to frame his thoughts.

  “So you went yourself. And of course didn’t get caught. That was very resourceful of you, McCoy,” he said.

  McCoy shrugged.

  “How the hell did you do it?” Sessions asked.

  “The German’s got a truck,” he said.

  “German? Oh, you mean the man who owns the hotel?”

  McCoy nodded.

  “You just borrowed his truck and drove into Yenchi’eng, that’s it?”

  “Not exactly,” McCoy said. “I went into Yenchi’eng last night. On a bicycle. I told the boy who drives the German’s truck there was a hundred yuan in it for him if he picked me up at a certain place on the road at half-past six yesterday morning.”

  “And then he just brought you back?”

  “No, we had to go into town first. He picks up stuff—vegetables mostly, sometimes a pig and chickens. I had to go in with him.”

  “How did you keep from being seen?”

  “I didn’t,” McCoy said. “When I’m around the Japs, I play like I’m an Italian.”

  “How do you do that? Do you speak Italian?”

  McCoy nodded.

  “Christ, you’re amazing, McCoy!” Sessions said.

  “It was stupid, me going in there like that,” McCoy said. “I should have known better.”

  “Why did you go?” Sessions asked.

  “You acted like it was important,” McCoy said. “Anyway, it’s done. And if you were to tell Captain Banning that you and Macklin and the Reverend were making a diversion, that you knew I was going to Yenchi’eng, I wouldn’t say anything,” McCoy said.

  “You’re not, I hope, suggesting, McCoy, that I submit a patently dishonest report,” Sessions said.

  “Rule one, doing what we’re doing,” McCoy said, “is don’t make waves. Either with the Corps or with the people you’re watching. You tell
them what really happened, you’re going to look like a…”

  The next word in that sentence was clearly going be “horse’s ass,” Sessions thought. He stopped himself just in time from saying, “How dare you talk to me that way?”

  A small voice in the back of his skull told him quietly but surely that he had indeed made a horse’s ass of himself already—in China ten days and already grabbed by the Japanese doing something he had been told not to do, and digging himself in still deeper every time he opened his mouth.

  He had been a Marine eleven years. Never before had an enlisted man—not even a Master Gunnery Sergeant when he had been a wet-behind-the-ears shavetail—talked to him the way this twenty-one-year-old corporal was talking to him now.

  And the small voice in the back of his skull told him McCoy was not insolent. Inferiors are insolent to superiors. McCoy was tolerantly contemptuous, as superiors are to inferiors. And the painful truth seemed to be that he had given him every right to do so.

  He had been informed—and had pretended to understand—that he would have to learn to expect the unexpected. And he hadn’t. Because he was a thirty-two-year-old officer, he had presumed that he knew more than a twenty-one-year-old enlisted man.

  If he followed the book—the code of conduct expected of an officer and a gentleman, especially one who wore an Annapolis ring—he would immediately grab a telephone and formally report to Captain Banning that—against McCoy’s advice—he had taken the Reverend Feller and Lieutenant Macklin to Yenchi’eng, been detained by the Japanese, had a pot of some greasy rice substance dumped in his lap, and then had returned to find that not only was Corporal McCoy fornicating with the missionary’s wife (conduct prejudicial to good military order and discipline) but was silently insolent to boot. And that he just incidentally happened to have a roll of 35-mm film of the 11th Japanese Division’s artillery park.

  “I need a bath, a shave, and a clean uniform, Corporal,” Lieutenant Sessions said. “We’ll settle this later.”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “I’d like to get started again first thing in the morning,” Sessions went on. “Will there be any problems about that?”

  “No, sir,” McCoy said. “Now that you’re back, we can move anytime you want to.”

  Sessions realized he was still making an ass of himself and that he had to do something about it.

  “What I intend to do when we get somewhere with secure communications, Corporal McCoy,” he said, “is advise Captain Banning that I went to Yenchi’eng against your advice and was detained by the Japanese. I will tell him of your commendable initiative in getting the film of the Japanese artillery park. I can see no point in discussing your personal life. I would be grateful, when you make your own report, if you would go easy on how I stormed in here and showed my ass.”

  “I hadn’t planned to say anything about that, sir,” McCoy said.

  “And I’m sure,” Sessions said, searching for some clever way to phrase it, “that…you will not permit your romantic affairs to in any way cast a shadow on the Corps’ well-known reputation for chastity outside marriage.”

  “No, sir,” McCoy said, chuckling. “I’ll be very careful about that, sir.” And then he added: “I’d be grateful if you didn’t tell Lieutenant Macklin about Mrs. Feller.”

  Sessions nodded. “Thank you, McCoy,” he said, then turned and walked out of the room.

  V

  (One)

  The Hotel am See

  Chiehshom, China

  2215 Hours 18 May 1941

  McCoy could not sleep. The smell of Ellen was inescapably on the sheets. And her image was no less indelibly printed on his mind.

  Earlier, he found himself next to her at dinner. The moment he sat down, her knee moved against his.

  There wasn’t anything particularly sexy about her touch, and she didn’t try to feel him up under the table—or he her—or anything like that. She just wanted to touch him. She didn’t say two words to him either, except “please pass the salt.” But she didn’t take her knee away once.

  All too soon, the Reverend Feller announced, “Well, we have a long day ahead of us.” Ellen rose after him and followed him out…leaving McCoy with a terrible feeling of loss.

  Later, McCoy and Zimmerman went to the European servants’ quarters to make sure none of the drivers had shacked up in town. Afterward, Zimmerman asked matter-of-factly, “Sessions find out you’re fucking the missionary lady?”

  He had not been “fucking the missionary lady.” It had started out that way, but it wasn’t that way now. McCoy couldn’t bring himself to admit he was in love, but it was more than an unexpected piece of ass, more than “fucking the missionary lady.” And she had called him “my darling,” and had meant it. And he had meant it, too, when she made him say it back.

  “Yeah,” McCoy said.

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “What’s he going to do about it?”

  “He’s not going to do anything about it,” McCoy said. “He’s all right.”

  “You’re lucky,” Zimmerman said. “If that bastard Macklin finds out, McCoy, you’re going to find yourself up on charges.”

  “One good way for him to find out, Ernie, is for you to keep talking about it.”

  “You better watch your ass, McCoy,” Zimmerman said.

  “Yeah,” McCoy said. “I will.”

  Jesus Christ, what a fucking mess!

  He turned the light back on and reached for the crossword puzzles from the Shanghai Post. He did three of them before he fell asleep sitting up. Then, carefully, so as not to rouse himself fully, he turned the light off, slipped under the sheet, and felt himself drifting off again.

  When he felt her mouth on him, he thought he was having a wet dream—and that surprised him, considering all the fucking they had done. And then he realized that he wasn’t dreaming.

  “I thought that might wake you up, my darling,” Ellen Feller said softly.

  “What about your husband?”

  “What about him? As you so obscenely put it,” she said, “fuck him.”

  “You mean he knows?”

  “I mean he sleeps in a separate bed, and when I left him, he was asleep.”

  “I had a hard time getting to sleep,” McCoy said, “thinking about you.”

  “I’m glad,” she said. She moved up next to him and put her face in his neck. “I would have come sooner,” she said, “but he insisted on talking.”

  “About what?”

  “That his being detained by the Japanese was a good thing, that it will probably make it easier to get the crates on the ship. Without having them inspected, I mean.”

  The thought saddened him. In nine days she would leave, and that would be the last he would ever see of her.

  “You’d better set your alarm clock,” she said practically. “I don’t want to fall asleep in here.”

  He set the alarm clock, but it was unnecessary. They were wide awake at half-past four. Neither of them had slept for more than twenty minutes all through the night.

  (Two)

  Huimin, Shantung Province

  27 May 1941

  It took them another nine days to reach Huimin, nine days without an opportunity for McCoy and Ellen to be together.

  The days on the way to Huimin were pretty much alike. They would start out early and drive slowly and steadily until they found a place where they could buy lunch. Failing that they stopped by the side of the road and picnicked on rice balls, egg rolls, and fried chicken from the hoods and running boards of the trucks and cars.

  The road meandered around endless rice paddies. The inclines and declines were shallow, but the curves were often sharp, thus making more than twenty miles an hour impossible. Sometimes there was nothing at all on the road to the horizon, and sometimes the road was packed with Chinese, walking alone or with their families or behind ox-drawn carts.

  The Chinese were usually deaf to the sound of a horn. So when the
road was narrow, as it most often was, it was necessary to crawl along in low gear until the road widened enough to let them pass the oxcarts. But sometimes at the blast of the horn, the slowly plodding pedestrians would jump to the side of the road and glower as the convoy passed.

  When they had to picnic by the side of the road, McCoy tried to stop when there was no one else on the road. But most of the time, in spite of McCoy’s intentions, they were surrounded by hordes of Chinese within five minutes. Some stared in frank curiosity, and others begged for the scraps.

  Or for rides. And that was impossible, of course. If they allowed Chinese in the backs of the trucks, the beds would be stripped bare within a mile.

  At Ssuyango, T’anch’eng, and Weifang, McCoy spent the hours of darkness trying to find out whether various Japanese units had indeed received German field artillery pieces. And at T’anch’eng, he somewhat reluctantly took Lieutenant Sessions with him.

  Sessions skillfully sandbagged him into that. He came to McCoy’s room after supper, while McCoy was dressing: black cotton peasant shirt, trousers, and rubber shoes, and a black handkerchief over his head. It was less a disguise than a solution to the problem of crawling through feces-fertilized rice paddies. A complete suit cost less than a dollar. He wore one and carried two more tightly rolled and tied with string that he looped and fastened around his neck.

  When he came out of a rice paddy smelling like the bottom of a latrine pit, he would strip and put on a fresh costume. It didn’t help much, but it was better than running around soaked in shit.

  During the stopover at Ssuyango, McCoy made a deal with a merchant: five gallons of gasoline for eight sets of cotton jackets and trousers. When Sessions came to his room at T’anch’eng, he still had three left, not counting the one he was wearing.

  Sessions was politely curious about exactly what McCoy intended to do, and McCoy told him. It wasn’t that much of a big deal. All he was going to do was make his way down the dikes between the rice paddies until he was close to the Japanese compound. Then he would slip into the water and make his way close enough to the compound to photograph the artillery park and motor pool. Then he would make his way out of the rice paddie, change clothes, and come back.