Semper Fi

by W. E. B Griffin

  (Five)

  Headquarters, First Battalion, 4th Marines

  Shanghai, China

  12 June 1941

  The first sergeant sent a runner into town to McCoy’s apartment by rickshaw. Liberty or no liberty, the first sergeant wanted to see him right away.

  McCoy shaved and put on a fresh uniform and went to the compound.

  “I hope you’re packed, McCoy,” the first sergeant said when he walked into the company office. Then he handed him maybe twenty copies of a special order, held together with a paper clip.

  HEADQUARTERS

  4th Regiment, USMC, Shanghai, China

  10 June 1941

  Subject: Letter Orders

  To: Cpl Kenneth J. MCCOY 32875 USMC

  Hq Co, 1st Bn, 4th Marines

  1. Reference is made to cable message, Hq, USMC, Washington, D.C., subject, “McCoy, Kenneth J., Transfer Of”, dated 4 June 1941.

  2. You are detached effective this date from Hq Co 1st Bn, 4th Marines, and transferred in grade to 47th Motor Transport Platoon, USMC, U.S. Navy Yard, Philadelphia, Penna.

  3. You will depart Shanghai aboard the first available vessel in the Naval service sailing for a port in the United States. On arrival in the United States you will report to nearest USMC or U.S. Navy base or facility, who will furnish you with the necessary transportation vouchers to your final destination.

  4. You are authorized the shipment of 300 pounds of personal belongings. You are NOT authorized the shipment of household goods. You are NOT authorized delay en route leave. You will carry with you your service records, which will be sealed. Breaking the seal is forbidden.

  5. You will present these orders to the officer commanding each USMC or USN station or vessel en route. Such officers are directed to transmit by the most expeditious means to Hq, USMC, Washington, D.C., ATTN Q3-03A, the date of your arrival, the date and means of your transportation on your departure, and your estimated date of arrival at your next destination.

  BY DIRECTION:

  J. James Gerber

  Major, USMC

  Adjutant

  “What the hell is all this?”

  “I guess the Corps wants to get you out of China, Killer, before they run out of people for you to cut up or shoot,” the first sergeant said.

  “Jesus Christ,” McCoy said.

  “‘The first available vessel in the service of the U.S.’,” the first sergeant quoted, “is the Whaley1 She sails Friday morning. You will be aboard. You know the Whaley, McCoy?”

  “I know the Whaley,” McCoy said. “Fucking grease bucket.”

  “It’s going to Pearl Harbor, not the States,” the first sergeant said. “They’ll put you aboard something else at Pearl. With a little bit of luck, you could spend two, three weeks in Pearl,” the first sergeant said.

  “Top, I don’t want to go home,” McCoy said.

  The first sergeant’s reaction to that was predictable: “You don’t want to go home?”

  “You know what I mean, Top,” McCoy said. “I just shipped over to stay in China.”

  “McCoy, I don’t know how you got to be a corporal without figuring this out for yourself…I don’t know, come to think of it, how you got be a corporal, period…but this is the Marine Corps. In the Marine Corps the way it works is the Marine Corps tells you where you go, and when.”

  There really wasn’t any point in arguing with the first sergeant, and McCoy knew it, but he did so anyway, thinking that maybe he could get an extra few days, an extra two weeks.

  If he had that much time, maybe he could think of something.

  “For Christ’s sake, Top, I got stuff to sell. I’ll have to give it away if I have to get rid of everything by Friday. How about letting me miss the Whaley and catch whatever is next?”

  “Like what, for instance, do you have to get rid of cheap? I’m always on the lookout for a bargain.”

  “Come on, Top, you could fix it if you wanted to.”

  “Fuck you, McCoy,” the first sergeant said. “A little time on a tanker’ll be good for you.”

  “Can I tell Captain Banning about this?” McCoy asked.

  “You go tell him, if you think it’ll do you any good,” the first sergeant said. “And then get your ass back here and start packing. When the Gunny tells me your gear is shipshape, then maybe I’ll think about letting you go into town and see about selling your stuff.”

  Captain Banning waved him into his inner office as soon as he saw him coming through the door.

  “I guess you’ve just got the word from your first sergeant?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Before you start wasting your breath, McCoy, let me tell you that not only is the colonel overjoyed at your departure, but he has told me to make sure, personally, that you get on the Whaley.”

  “I’m on his shit list, am I?”

  “Let us say that you have been the subject of considerable cable traffic between here and Headquarters, Marine Corps, following the shootout at the O.K. Corral. If you plan to make a career of the Marine Corps, Killer, you’re going to have to restrain your urge to cut people up and shoot them.”

  “That’s unfair, Captain,” McCoy said.

  “Yeah,” Captain Banning said. “I know it is, McCoy. You didn’t start that fight, and according to Sessions, you handled yourself damned well once it started. For what it’s worth, I argued with the colonel until he told me to shut my face. But he’s still getting crap from the Italians, and the Consul General’s been all over his ass about you. I was there when he asked whether you were just a homicidal maniac, or whether you were trying to start World War II all by yourself.”

  “So for doing what I was told to do, keep Sessions and Macklin alive, I get my ass shipped home in disgrace.”

  “That’s about the sum of it,” Banning said. “But you don’t have everything straight. First of all, the colonel’s not shipping you home in disgrace or otherwise. I think underneath, he sort of admires you. You were ordered home by the Corps. I suspect that the Consul General had something to do with it—raised hell about you through the State Department, or something like that—but the colonel didn’t do it. And you’re not going home in disgrace. Not only do you get to keep your stripes, but your company commander is going to give you an efficiency report that makes you sound like Lou Diamond, Jr.2 I know, because I wrote it.”

  McCoy was obviously puzzled by that, and it showed on his face.

  “It doesn’t say anything about your working for me, McCoy,” Banning said. “You understand that you can’t talk to anybody, in or out of the Corps, about that?”

  “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “But it should impress the hell out of your new commanding officer,” Banning said.

  “I’m going to a truck company,” McCoy said. “A goddamned truck company. I’m a machine-gunner.”

  “I’m going home in a couple of months myself,” Banning said. “You keep your nose clean in the truck company, and when I get settled, I’ll see what I can do for you. Either working for me, or doing something else interesting. Or, if you really want to, getting you back in a heavy-weapons company.”

  “Thank you,” McCoy said.

  “What are you going to do about the stuff in the apartment?”

  “As soon as my Gunny decides my gear is shipshape, the first sergeant said I could go into town.”

  “I’ll call your first sergeant and tell him I’m sending you into town,” Banning said. “Take whatever time you need to do what you have to do. And then go back to your company. I want to put you aboard the Whaley first thing Friday morning. If you’re not on her, McCoy, the colonel will have my ass.”

  “I’ll be aboard her, sir,” McCoy said.

  VI

  (One)

  U.S. Marine Corps Base

  San Diego, California

  9 July 1941

  The U.S.S. Charles E. Whaley was as miserable a pile of rust and rivets as McCoy expected it would be. Since she was no
t a man-of-war, there was no Marine detachment aboard, which translated to mean that he had hardly anybody to talk to. Sailors don’t like Marines anyway, and there were six pigboat swab jockeys from SUBFORCHINA being shipped to Pearl Harbor, and they really hated China Marines. The only swabbie who gave him the time of day was a bald, hairy machinist’s mate second class who quickly let him know that he didn’t mind spending a lot of time at sea far from women.

  Reeking of diesel fuel, riding light in the water, the Whaley took seventeen days to make Pearl Harbor—swaying and pitching even in calm seas.

  There was plenty of time to think things over and conclude that he’d been handed the shitty end of the stick. Again. Like always.

  Starting with Ellen Goddamn-the-Bitch Feller.

  And getting sent home from China was also getting the shitty end of the stick, too. Christ, he’d practically given away the furniture in the apartment. And despite the efficiency report that was supposed to make him sound like Lou Diamond, even a bunch of dumb fuckers in a fucking truck company would smell a rat about somebody who was sent home from China just after he shipped over for the 4th Marines and got promoted.

  And the new assignment stank, too. A goddamned truck company at the Navy yard in Philly. Philly was the last fucking place he wanted to go. It was too close to Norristown, and he never wanted to go there again, period. And there was no question in his mind that he was going to walk into this fucking truck company in Philly and immediately be on everybody’s shit list. There weren’t that many corporal’s billets in a Motor Transport platoon, and sure as Christ made little apples, the people in Philly had planned to give this billet to some deserving asshole of a PFC with hash marks1 halfway to his elbow.

  McCoy had been in the Corps long enough to know that Stateside Marines didn’t like China Marines2 and here would be a China Marine, a corporal three months into his second hitch, showing up to fuck good ol’ PFC Whatsisname out of his promotion.

  When the U.S.S. Charles E. Whaley finally tied up at Pearl Harbor, there was a Master at Arms and two Shore Patrol guys waiting for him at the foot of the gangplank. He wasn’t under arrest or anything, the Master at Arms told him (although he really should write him up for his illegal, embroidered to the sleeves chevrons). It was just that The U.S.S. Fenton was about to sail for Diego, and they didn’t want him to miss it.

  The U.S.S. Fenton turned out to be an old four-stacker destroyer that was tied up the other side of Pearl. Ten minutes after he was shown his bunk in the fo’c’sle, a loudspeaker six inches from where he was supposed to sleep came to life:

  “Now Hear This, Now Hear This, Off-Duty Watch Stand to in Undress Whites to Man The Rail.”

  That fucking loudspeaker went off on the average of once every ten minutes all the way across the Pacific to Diego.

  The only kind thing McCoy could think of to say about the U.S.S. Fenton, DD133, was that it made San Diego six days out of Pearl. She was carrying a rear admiral who didn’t like to fly and knew that with his flag aboard nobody was going to ask questions about fuel consumed making twenty-two knots. It must have been great on the bridge, turning the tin can into a speedboat. But where he was, McCoy thought, he had trouble staying in his bunk. And his body was bruised black in half a dozen places from bumping into bulkheads and ladder rails when he misjudged where the tin can was going to bounce.

  But Diego was next, and he would soon be on land again, and there was no reason he couldn’t get a nice berth on the train from San Diego to Philly. The Corps probably wouldn’t pay for it, but he could do that himself. In his money belt he had a little over three hundred dollars in cash: the hundred he’d started with, plus the hundred ninety he’d won—ten and twenty dollars at a time—from the pigboat sailors on the Charles E. Whaley and the ten he’d won in the only game there had been on the tin can.

  Plus an ornately engraved “Officer’s Guaranteed Checque” on Barclays Bank, Ltd., Shanghai, for $5,102.40. That came from the last crazy thing that had happened in Shanghai. When he’d gone to the apartment to sell his stuff, the “General” said he’d make it easy for him. He’d take everything off his hands for five hundred dollars American. McCoy had jumped at that. Then the General pushed a deck of cards at him and demanded, “Double or nothing.”

  McCoy cut the deck for the jack of clubs to the General’s eight of hearts.

  “Once more,” the General demanded.

  “Just so long as it’s once more.” McCoy said. “I’m not going to keep cutting the deck until you win and quit.”

  He got a dirty look for that.

  “Once more,” the General said. “That’s it.”

  McCoy cut the five of clubs. The General smiled, showing his gold teeth…until he cut the three of hearts.

  But he paid up, even though he had to go to the bank to get that kind of cash.

  McCoy added the General’s two thousand American to the money already in Barclays Bank and then asked for a cashier’s check for the whole thing. After a moment they understood that what he wanted was what they called an “officer’s checque.”

  He made them make it payable in dollars. The Limeys were in a war, and he didn’t want to take the chance that they’d tell him to wait for his money until the war was over when he went to cash it.

  He could goddamned well afford a Pullman berth from California to Philly, even if they would’t give him credit for the government rail voucher and he had to pay for the whole damned thing himself.

  McCoy had taken boot camp at Parris Island, and he’d shipped to China out of Mare Island, in San Francisco. So this was his first time in Diego. His initial impression of the place—or anyway of the part that he saw, which was the Marine Corps Recruit Depot—was that it was a hell of a lot nicer-looking, at least, than Parris Island, although he supposed that that didn’t make a hell of lot of difference to boots. They probably had the same kind of semiliterate, sadistic assholes for DIs here that they did at Parris Island.

  There was a bullshit legend in the Corps that after you finished boot camp, you would understand why the DIs treated you like they did, how it had been necessary to make a Marine out of you, and how you’d now respect them for it. As he watched a Diego DI jab his elbow in the gut of some kid who wasn’t standing tall enough, or who had dared to look directly at the DI, or some other chickenshit offense, McCoy remembered his own Parris Island DI.

  If I ever see Corporal Ellwood Doudt, that vicious shit-kicking hillbilly again, he thought, I’ll make him eat his teeth, even if I have to go after him with a two-by-four.

  McCoy found the Post Transportation Office without trouble in a Spanish-looking building with a tile roof. He set his seabags down and presented his orders to a sergeant behind a metal-grilled window, like a teller’s station in a bank.

  “You need a partial pay, Corporal?” the sergeant asked.

  “Let it ride on the books,” McCoy said. “I was a little lucky on the ship.”

  “Your luck just ran out,” the sergeant said. “I hate to do this to you, Corporal, but you report to the brig sergeant.”

  “What?”

  “They’ll explain it over there,” the sergeant said. “I just do what I’m told.”

  “All I want from you is a rail voucher to Philadelphia,” McCoy said.

  “You would have been smarter to pay your own way and put in for it when you got there. But you didn’t. You came here, and my orders are to send the next three corporals who come in here over to the brig. There’s a shipment of prisoners headed for Portsmouth. The guard detail needs a sergeant and three corporals. Now that you’re here, they can go.”

  “Give me a break. Forget I came in.”

  “I can’t,” the sergeant said. “I got to send a TWX to Washington saying you’re in the States. You read the orders.”

  The brig sergeant was a forty-year-old gunnery sergeant, a wiry, tight-lipped man with five hash marks and a face so badly scarred that McCoy wondered how the hell he managed to shave.

  �
�What did you do, Corporal, fuck up in China?” he said, when McCoy gave him his orders.

  “Not as far as I know, Gunny,” McCoy said. “I’m being transferred in grade.”

  “Well, we got sixteen sailors headed for Portsmouth,” he said. “Mostly repeat ship-jumpers, one deserter, one assault upon a commissioned officer, one thief, and three fags. You, plus a second lieutenant, a staff sergeant, and two other corporals are going to take them there. And all the time you thought the Corps didn’t love you, right?”

  “There’s no way I can get out of this?”

  “You’re fucked, Corporal,” the Gunny said. “You just lucked out.”

  In addition to the other corporals, the sergeant, and the lieutenant, the guard detail consisted of seven privates and PFCs. The other corporals and the sergeant were at least ten years older than McCoy. The lieutenant was McCoy’s age, a muscular, crew-cut, tanned man who—to prove his own importance, McCoy thought—went right after McCoy.

  “You’re a little young to be a corporal, aren’t you? Have you had any experience with a detail like this?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You’ve qualified with the shotgun?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “What’s your skill?”

  “Motor transport, sir.”

  “They must be pretty generous with motor transport promotions in China,” the lieutenant said.

  “I guess so, sir.”

  “Frankly, I’d hoped to have a more experienced noncom,” the lieutenant said. “One at least who has qualified with the shotgun.”

  “I’m an Expert with the Springfield and the .45, sir. I think I can handle a shotgun.”

  “You can’t handle a shotgun, Corporal, until you’re qualified with the shotgun,” the lieutenant said, as if explaining something to a backward and unpleasant child. “I’ll have the gunnery sergeant arrange for you to be qualified.”