Semper Fi

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Now put them together,” he ordered. He stood watching as the kids assembled rifles.

  “I don’t want anybody exchanging parts after I’m gone,” he said. “I’m trying something.”

  There was only one malfunction of the squad’s Garands the next day, a stovepipe3 he suspected was a freak. He proved this by firing three clips through the rifle as quickly as he could and without further failure to eject.

  Master Gunnery Sergeant Stecker returned from Fort Benning one of the few people in the Corps who believed the Garand was the best infantry rifle to come down the pike in a long time. He was worried then not about whether the Garand would be good for the Corps, but when—or even whether—the Corps would get it. The Army would take care of itself first, of course. The Corps would probably wind up with the Army’s worn-out Springfields rather than new Garands.

  Captain Jack NMI Stecker, USMCR, was therefore pleased when the first Garands were issued to the Corps. There were not enough of them to go around, of course, but the door was open. For the moment, unfortunately, there were only enough of them to equip a few detached units, and for instructional purposes.

  Captain Stecker read with interest the reports of scores fired with the new rifle by the students of the battalion; and he was not happy with the results from either the commissioned officers at their annual qualification at Quantico or of the kids in the Platoon Leader’s Course. He decided first to see what was wrong with the training of the Platoon Leader candidates and fix that, and then he’d see that the same fix was applied to the abbreviated training course given the officers before they fired their annual qualification.

  At 0805, which was late enough for the firing on the known distance range to be well under way, he got up from his desk and walked out of his office.

  “Come with me, son,” he said to the S-3’s jeep driver, a small, very neat PFC trying to make himself inconspicuous on a chair in the outer office.

  As he invariably did when he went for a ride in the jeep with a PFC at the wheel, he thought about how much he’d liked it better when he’d been a master gunnery sergeant with the pickup and didn’t have to sit like a statue on an uncomfortable pad in the jeep.

  In the center of the line of Known Distance Rifle Range #2 (where the Platoon Leader Candidates were firing for record), there was a small clutter of buildings surrounding the range master’s tower. Next to the buildings, several vehicles were parked with their front wheels against yellow-painted logs half-buried in the sand. There were two jeeps (one assigned to range NCO and the other to the range officer), two pickups, and a three-quarter-ton Dodge weapons carrier, which had brought the ammo from the dump. Two ambulances (new ones, built on the Dodge three-quarter-ton weapons carrier chassis) were backed up against the logs.

  Stecker told the driver to park the jeep beside the weapons carrier. When he stopped, Stecker removed his campaign hat and took from the crown a small glass bottle, which once contained Bayer Aspirin. He took from it four globs of what looked like wax at the end of short pieces of string and handed two of them to the PFC.

  “Here,” he said to the driver. “Stick these in your ears.”

  “What is it, sir?” the PFC asked doubtfully.

  “Genuine Haiti Marine earplugs,” Stecker said. “Do what I tell you.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” the PFC said, and after he watched Stecker carefully push with his index finger one of the wax globs into each ear, he somewhat uneasily put the plugs into his own ears.

  Unless someone looked very carefully at his ears (which was highly unlikely) the earplugs would go unnoticed.

  The night before, when Stecker checked the jar where he kept his earplugs, he found only one pair left, so he decided he had to make some more.

  So Captain Stecker spent an hour at his kitchen sink making six pairs of the earplugs. He knew that he would be spending several hours on the known distance range, and he had long ago learned that ear damage from the muzzle blast of rifle fire was permanent and cumulative. There were a lot of deaf gunnery sergeants in the Marine Corps as proof of that.

  From the time he had been a PFC, Stecker had understood that the Boy Scouts were right. “Be Prepared” said it all. He didn’t really need any more earplugs than the pair he had in the Bayer Aspirin bottle, not for tomorrow. But the day after tomorrow was something else. He had no spares, and therefore it was time to make some.

  The Haiti Marine earplugs were a good deal more complicated than they looked: He first carefully cut the erasers from a dozen pencils. Then with an awl heated red on the stove, he burned a hole through the center of the eraser. He then knotted a length of strong thread through the holes of a small button, just a bit larger than the diameter of the eraser. The loose end of the thread was then fed through the hole in the eraser.

  One at a time, the dozen erasers were carefully placed in holes bored through a piece of wood. Then, in a small pot reserved for this specific purpose, he melted paraffin and beef tallow and carefully poured it into the holes in the wood. When it had time to cool, he pushed each earplug out with a pencil. While the beef tallow/paraffin mixture would remain flexible enough to seal his ear canal, it would neither run from the heat of his body, nor harden to the point where removal would be difficult.

  It was a trick Captain Stecker had learned when he was a corporal in Haiti in 1922. A staff sergeant named Jim Finch had taken a shine to him, shown him how to make the plugs, and warned him that if he was going to spend any time around ranges, he had goddamned well better get in the habit of using them.

  Stecker put the Bayer Aspirin bottle back in the crown of his stiff-brimmed campaign hat, and then with a quick, smooth movement to keep the bottle from falling out flipped it onto his head.

  Aside from his field shoes, the campaign hat was about the only part of his enlisted man’s uniforms that he had been able to use as an officer. He had to change the insignia on the campaign hat, but it hadn’t been necessary to put it up for sale in the thrift shop along with just about everything else.

  When he was ten feet away, the range officer spotted him and saluted, raising his arm crisply until the fingers touched the stiff brim of his campaign hat.

  “Good morning, sir,” he barked.

  “Good morning,” Stecker said.

  “Is there something special, sir?” the range officer asked.

  “Just checking,” Stecker said. “But how are the young gentlemen doing?”

  “Not bad, sir,” the range officer said. “I think we have two who are going to shoot High Expert.”

  “And the low end?”

  “I think they’re all going to qualify, sir,” the range officer said.

  “You think, Lieutenant?” Stecker asked. Out of the corner of his eye, he had just seen Maggie’s Drawers.4

  “Yes, sir,” the range officer said.

  “Think won’t cut it, Lieutenant,” Stecker said. “If one of the young gentlemen fails to qualify first time out, that means his instructors haven’t been doing their job.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” the range officer said.

  “I’m going to have a look around,” Stecker said. “I won’t need any company, and I don’t want the pit officer to know I’m here.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” the range officer repeated.

  Stecker walked erectly to the end of the firing line. There were twenty firing points, each occupied by two platoon leader candidates, one firing and one serving as coach. For each two firing points, there was a training NCO, so-called even though most of them were PFCs and not noncommissioned officers. A half dozen NCOs, all three stripe buck sergeants, moved up and down the line keeping an eye on the training NCOs and the firers.

  The firing was near the end of the prescribed course. The young gentlemen were about to fire slow fire prone at bull’s-eye targets five hundred yards down range. The course of fire would be twenty shots, with sixty seconds allotted for each one. The targets would be pulled and marked after each string of ten shots.

&n
bsp; What they were doing now was firing “sighters.” They had changed range and were permitted trial shots to see how they had done changing their sights.

  The target before which Maggie’s Drawers had flown was down in the pits. As Stecker watched, it came up. There was a black marker high on the right side of the target outside the scoring rings.

  This young gentleman, Stecker thought wryly, had probably never held a gun in his hands before he became associated with the Marine Corps. Some people learned easily, and some didn’t.

  “Bullshit!” the firer said when he saw the marker, more in anger than embarrassment.

  “Watch your mouth, Mister!” the training NCO snapped.

  The firer turned his head in annoyance. And then he recognized Stecker as an officer and looked down the range again.

  He didn’t recognize me. Except as an officer. But I recognize him. That’s the China Marine with the LaSalle convertible. That’s surprising. A Marine noncom ought to be at least able to get them inside the scoring rings.

  He watched as McCoy single-loaded another round.

  At least he knows enough not to mess with the sights, Stecker thought. That was probably a flier.

  He watched as McCoy slapped the stock of the Garand into the socket of his arm and wiggled his feet to get in the correct position. And he thought he could detect the expelling of half a breath just before the Garand went off again.

  The target dropped from sight. When it appeared again, there was another black marker, this time low and left—in other words on the opposite side of the target from the last spotter disk.

  “Oh, bullshit!” McCoy said, furious.

  His coach, another young gentleman, jabbed him with his elbow to remind him that he was being watched by an officer.

  Stecker gave in to the impulse. He reached out and kicked the sole of the coach’s boot. When the coach looked up at him in surprise, he gestured for him to get up.

  Stecker lay down beside McCoy.

  When McCoy looked at him, there was recognition in his eyes.

  “All sorts of people get to be officers these days,” Stecker said softly. “What seems to be your trouble?”

  “Beats the shit out of me,” McCoy said, still so angry—and perhaps surprised to see Stecker—that it was a moment before he appended, “Sir.”

  Stecker reached up and tried to wiggle the rear sight. Sometimes they came loose. But not there. And neither was the front sight when he tried it.

  “Try it again,” Stecker ordered, turning and holding his hand out for another loose round.

  When McCoy reached for it, Stecker saw his hands. They were unhealthy white, and covered with open blisters.

  “What did you do to your hands?”

  “I’ve sanded a couple of decks5 lately, Captain,” McCoy said.

  Stecker wondered what McCoy had done to deserve punishment. The boy probably had an automatic mouth.

  Stecker watched carefully as McCoy fired another round. There was nothing in his firing technique that he could fault. And while they were waiting for the target to be marked, he saw that McCoy had wads of chewed-up paper in his ears. It wasn’t as good as Haiti earplugs, but it was a hell of a lot better than nothing. And it reminded Stecker that this boy had been around a rifle range enough to know what he was doing. There was no explanation for his shooting all over the target, much less missing it completely, except that there was something really wrong with the rifle.

  When the target appeared, the marker was black, just outside the bull’s-eye.

  “That’s a little better,” Stecker said.

  “I should have split the peg with that one,” McCoy said, furiously.

  By that he meant that he was confident of his shot, knew where it had gone.

  That’s either bravado, or he means it. And there’s only one way to find out.

  “Get out of your sling,” Stecker ordered. “And hand me the rifle.”

  As McCoy pulled the leather sling off his arm, Stecker turned to the training NCO and signaled that he wanted a clip of ammunition. When McCoy handed him the Garand, Stecker put the strap on his own arm and squirmed into the correct position.

  “Call my shot,” he said to McCoy. “I’m going to take out your two-hundred-yard target number.”

  McCoy looked at him in surprise. So there would be no confusion about which was the correct target, there were markers at each distance with four-inch-high numbers painted on short, flat pieces of wood. They were not designed as targets.

  Stecker himself wondered why he was going to fire at the target number, then realized that he thought somebody might be fucking around with McCoy’s target in the pits. If that was the case, which now seemed likely, he would have the ass of the pit officer.

  You just don’t fuck around in the pits. The Marine Corps does not think rifle marksmanship is an area for practical jokes.

  Stecker lined up his sights and squeezed one off.

  “You took a chip out of the upper-right corner, Captain,” McCoy reported.

  Maggie’s Drawers flew in front of McCoy’s target.

  Stecker fired again.

  “You blew it away, Captain,” McCoy reported.

  Stecker snapped the safety in front of the trigger guard on, then slipped out of the sling.

  “The piece is loaded,” he said. “Be careful. Have a shot at the target marker. Number eighteen.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” McCoy said.

  The target number disappeared with McCoy’s first shot.

  “Nineteen,” Stecker ordered.

  McCoy fired again. Half of the target number disappeared when the bullet split it.

  “Do you think you can hit what’s left?” Stecker asked.

  He saw Maggie’s Drawers being waved furiously in front of the target.

  McCoy fired again, and the narrow half remaining of the target number disappeared.

  “At targets of opportunity, fire at will,” Stecker ordered. softly.

  McCoy fired the remaining two rounds in the eight-round en bloc clip at other target numbers. He did not miss.

  “Insure that your weapon is empty, and leave the firing line, bringing your weapon with you,” Stecker said calmly, reciting the prescribed litany.

  By the time they were both on their feet, the range officer and the range NCO were standing beside the training NCO. Having witnessed not only a captain blowing away the target numbers, but apparently encouraging a trainee to do likewise, they were more than a little uneasy.

  “This young man has a faulty weapon,” Captain Stecker announced. “I think he should be given the opportunity to refire for record.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” the range officer said.

  The range sergeant took the Garand from McCoy and started to examine it.

  “Don’t you think I know a faulty weapon when I see one, Gunny?” Captain Stecker asked.

  “Yes, sir, no offense, sir.”

  “I realize that tomorrow is the first day of Thanksgiving liberty,” Captain Stecker said, “but as we want to give this young man every opportunity to make a decent score, I think we should have the pit officer back, too. Who is he?”

  Stecker had decided that the pit officer, whoever he might be, would never forget that Marines don’t fuck around the pits after he had spent the first day of Thanksgiving liberty personally hauling, marking, and pasting targets for a Platoon Leader Candidate. That made more sense than in writing him an official letter of reprimand, or even turning him in to the battalion commander.

  “Lieutenant Macklin, sir,” the range officer said.

  “I don’t think I know him,” Stecker said.

  “He’s the mess officer, Sir. He volunteered to help out in the pits,” the range officer said.

  And then Stecker saw understanding and then bitterness in McCoy’s eyes.

  “Do you know Lieutenant Macklin, McCoy?” Stecker asked.

  “Yes, sir, I know him.”

  Stecker made a come-on motion of his hands.
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  “We were in the Fourth Marines together, sir,” McCoy said.

  “I see,” Stecker said. I’ll find out what the hell that is all about. “I think you can get on with the firing, Lieutenant.” Stecker said.

  “Aye, aye, sir,” the lieutenant said. And then when Stecker was obviously going to walk away, he called attention and saluted.

  Stecker went back to his jeep and was driven off.

  Since there was no point in his firing anymore with a faulty weapon, Platoon Leader Candidate McCoy and Platoon Leader Candidate Pickering were put to work policing brass from the firing line until that relay had finished. Then Platoon Leader Candidate McCoy served as coach for Platoon Leader Candidate Pickering while he fired for record. Platoon Leader Candidate Pickering qualified as “Expert.”

  (Two)

  After leaving McCoy, Captain Stecker went to Battalion Headquarters, where he examined the personal record jacket of First Lieutenant John R. Macklin, USMC. The personnel sergeant was a little uneasy about that—personal records were supposed to be personal—but he wouldn’t have dreamed of telling Master Gunnery Sergeant Stecker to mind his own business, and Gunny Stecker was now wearing the silver railroad tracks of a captain.

  Then Captain Stecker got back in the jeep and had himself carried to the Platoon Leader Course orderly room.

  Word had already gotten back that Captain Stecker had been out on the range, and that he had ordered the re-firing for record of one of the candidates. And that the pit officer be in the pits when he did so. The sergeant-major had been sort of a pal before Stecker took a commission, and he knew there was more to it than he had been told.

  He came to his feet and stood at attention when Stecker walked in.

  “Good morning, sir,” he said.

  “As you were,” Stecker said.

  “How may I help the captain, sir?” the sergeant-major said.

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a cup of coffee, Sergeant-Major?”

  “Yes, sir,” the sergeant-major said.

  “And if you have a minute, Sergeant-Major, I’d like a word with you in private.”