Close Combat

by W. E. B Griffin

  We all have to be prepared to make sacrifices for the war effort, he thought, smiling to himself. He was pleased with his wit—until it occurred to him he still might be feeling the effects from the night before of the pair of double bourbons, the bottle of wine, and the cognacs.

  After breakfast, the steward handed him a little package containing a comb; a toothbrush and toothpaste; a safety razor; shaving cream; and even a tiny bottle of Mennen after-shave. Armed with all that, he went back to the washroom and tried to repair the havoc that days of neglect had done to his appearance.

  Brushing his teeth made his mouth feel a great deal better, and a fresh shave was pleasant. But the face that looked back at him in the mirror did not show a neatly turned out Marine officer. It showed a man with bloodshot eyes—not completely due, he decided, to all the drinks he let himself have last night. His skin was an unhealthy color. And he was wearing a shirt that smelled of harsh Australian soap mixed with the chemicals of the Pearl Harbor photo lab.

  I need a shower, eight hours in a bed, and then some clean uniforms. I wonder how long it will take them in San Francisco to get me a seat on an airplane. Maybe enough time to go to an officers’ sales store and get at least a couple of new shirts. Maybe even enough to get some sleep.

  The United States Customs Service was still functioning normally, randomly looking inside bags. And the Shore Patrol was in place, maintaining high disciplinary standards among transient Navy Department personnel. There was even an SP officer, wearing the stripes of a full lieutenant along with an SP brassard and a white pistol belt.

  The Shore Patrol officer walked purposefully over to Banning.

  What is this? “Major, the shape of your uniform, and the length of your hair is a disgrace to the U.S. Naval Service generally, and The Marine Corps specifically. You will have to come with me!”

  “Major Banning?” the Lieutenant asked.

  “My name is Banning.”

  “Will you come with me, please, Sir?”

  “I’m not through Customs.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that, Sir. Would you come with me, please? Can I help you carry anything?”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the airport, Sir. There’s a plane waiting for you.”

  “I just got off an airplane!”

  “Right this way, please, Major,” the Shore Patrol lieutenant said, already starting to lead the way to a Navy gray Plymouth sedan with a chrome siren on the fender and SHORE PATROL lettered on its doors.

  The Army Air Corps major saluted as Banning got out of the Plymouth.

  “Major Banning, we’re ready anytime you are,” he said.

  “Is there a head, a men’s room, anyplace convenient?”

  “Right inside, Major, I’ll show you,” the Major said. “Major, we have a seven-place aircraft…”

  “What kind of an aircraft?”

  “A B-25, Sir. General Kellso’s personal aircraft. Would you have any objection if we took some people with us?”

  “Wouldn’t that be up to you?” Banning said. “Or General Kellso? You said it was his airplane.”

  “Right now, it’s the Secretary of the Navy’s, Major, with the mission of taking you to Washington.”

  “Load it up, Major. Where did you say the bathroom is?”

  “Right over there.”

  The rest room was chrome and tile and spotless. It even smelled clean.

  Banning entered a stall and closed the door and sat down.

  There was a copy of Life magazine in a rack on the back of the door. A picture of Admiral William D. Leahy, in whites, was on the cover.

  Banning took it from the rack.

  In the shape my digestive tract is in, I may be here all day. The human body is not designed to fly halfway around the world in airplanes.

  He started to flip through the magazine.

  There was a picture of an Army sergeant kissing his bride, a Canadian Women’s Army Corps corporal.

  There was a Westinghouse advertisement, proudly announcing that it had won an Army-Navy E for Excellence award for producing four thousand carloads of war matériels a month—enough to fill a freight train thirty-seven miles long.

  How come none of it seems to have reached Guadalcanal?

  There was a series of photographs of Army officers in an English castle. The censor had obliterated from the photographs anything that could identify the castle. The American officers all looked well fed.

  And their trousers, unlike yours, Banning, are all neatly pressed.

  There was an advertisement from Budweiser, announcing what they were doing for the war effort—from baby foods to peanut butter to flashlights, carpet, and twine. Beer wasn’t mentioned.

  There was a series of photographs recording Wendell Willkie’s travels to Egypt. He was described as the “leader of President Roosevelt’s Friendly Opposition.”

  Another series of photographs showed the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown’s final moments in the Battle of Midway. Another showed the Army Air Corps in the Aleutian Islands. Another, a nice-looking woman named Love, who was married to an Air Corps light colonel. She was about to head up an organization of women pilots who would ferry airplanes from the factories. Another, a huge new British four-engine bomber called the Lancaster; the monster could carry eight tons of bombs.

  I’ll bet not one of them ever gets sent to New Guinea or the Solomons. Or at least not until after the Japanese have reoccupied Guadalcanal and captured all of New Guinea.

  What really caught his attention was the Armour & Company full-page advertisement, showing in color what the “typical” soldier, sailor, and Marine was being fed this week: roast chicken, frankfurters, barbecued spareribs, baked corned beef, Swiss steak, baked fish, and roast beef. Servicemen could have second helpings of anything on the menus, it claimed.

  Jesus H. Christ! If there’d been ten pounds of roast chicken or roast beef on Guadalcanal, the war against the Japs would have been called off while the Marines fought over it.

  Surprising him, his bowels moved. He put Life back in the rack on the door, looked again at Admiral Leahy’s photograph, and had one final unkind thought: The Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief needs a haircut himself; it’s hanging over his collar in the back. And I have seen better pressed white uniforms on ensigns.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” Banning said as he washed his hands and saw the Air Corps Major’s reflection in the mirror over the sink.

  “It’s your airplane, Major,” the Air Corps Major said. “Take your time.”

  [TWO]

  Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff G-1

  Headquarters, United States Marine Corps

  Eighth and I Streets, NW

  Washington, D.C.

  0825 Hours 16 October 1942

  Colonel David M. Wilson, USMC, Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff G-1 for Officer Personnel, had no idea what Brigadier General J. J. Stewart, USMC, Director, Public Affairs Office, Headquarters USMC, had in mind vis-à-vis First Lieutenant R. B. Macklin, USMC, but he suspected he wasn’t going to like it.

  General Stewart had requested an appointment with the Assistant Chief of Staff, Personnel, himself, but the General had regrettably been unable to fit him into his busy schedule.

  “You deal with him, Dave. Find out who this Lieutenant Macklin is, and see what Stewart thinks we should do for him. I’ll back you up whatever you decide. Just keep him away from me.”

  Colonel Wilson was a good Marine officer. Even when given an order he’d rather not receive, he said, “Aye, aye, Sir,” and carried it out to the best of his ability.

  He obtained Lieutenant Macklin’s service record and studied it carefully. What he saw failed to impress him. Macklin was a career Marine out of Annapolis. Though Colonel Wilson was himself an Annapolis graduate, he was prepared to admit—if not proclaim—that Annapolis had delivered its fair share of mediocre to poor people into the officer corps.

  He quickly came to the conclusion
that Macklin was one of these.

  Macklin had been with the 4th Marines in Shanghai before the war. He came out of that assignment with a truly devastating efficiency report.

  One entry caught Wilson’s particular notice: “Lieutenant Macklin,” it said, was “prone to submit official reports that not only omitted pertinent facts that might tend to reflect adversely upon himself, but to present other material clearly designed to magnify his own contributions to the accomplishment of an assigned mission.”

  In other words, he was a liar.

  Even worse: “Lieutenant Macklin,” the report went on to say, “could not be honestly recommended for the command of a company or larger tactical unit.”

  Politely calling him a liar would have kept him from getting a command anyway, but his rating officer apparently wanted to drive a wooden stake through his heart by spelling it out.

  And that could not be passed off as simply bad blood between Macklin and his rating officer. For the reviewing officer clearly agreed with the rating officer: “The undersigned concurs in this evaluation of this officer.” And it wasn’t just any reviewing officer, either. It was Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller, then a major, now a lieutenant colonel on Guadalcanal.

  Colonel Wilson had served several times with Chesty Puller and held him in the highest possible regard.

  After Macklin came home from Shanghai, The Corps sent him to Quantico, as a training officer at the Officer Candidate School. He got out of that by volunteering to become a parachutist.

  It was Colonel Wilson’s considered (if more or less private) opinion that Marine parachutists ranked high on the list of The Corps’ really dumb mistakes in recent years. While there might well be some merit to “The Theory of Vertical Envelopment” (as the Army called it), it made no sense at all to apply that theory to The Marine Corps.

  For one thing, nothing he’d seen suggested that parachute operations would have any application at all in the war The Marine Corps was going to have to fight in the Pacific. A minimum of 120 R4D aircraft would be required to drop a single battalion of troops. In Colonel Wilson’s opinion, it would be a long time before The Corps would get that many R4Ds at all, much less that many for a single battalion. In his view, it was a bit more likely that he himself would be lifted bodily into heaven to sit at the right hand of God.

  For another, Colonel Wilson (along with a number of other thoughtful senior Marine officers) had serious philosophical questions about the formation of Marine parachutists: Since The Corps itself was already an elite organization, creating a parachutist elite within the elite was just short of madness.

  He was not a fan of that other elite-within-the-elite, either: the Marine Raiders. But the parachutists and the Raiders were horses of different colors. For one thing, the order to form the Raiders came directly from President Roosevelt himself; and there was nothing anyone in The Corps could do about it, not even the Commandant.

  And for another, so far the Raiders had done well. They’d staged a successful raid on Makin Island, and they’d done a splendid job on Guadalcanal.

  Viewed coldly and professionally, the parachutists’ record was not nearly as impressive: After their very expensive training, there were no aircraft available to transport them (surprising Colonel Wilson not at all), and so they were committed as infantry to the Guadalcanal operation, charged with making an amphibious assault on a tiny island called Gavutu. They fought courageously, if not very efficiently; and the island fell. Later, Wilson heard credible scuttlebutt that their fire discipline was practically nonexistent. And the numbers seemed to confirm this: The parachute battalion was literally decimated in the first twenty-four hours. And after the invasion, they continued to suffer disproportionate losses.

  Macklin was with the parachutists in the invasion of Gavutu; but he went in as a supernumerary. Which meant that he was a spare officer; he’d be given a job only after an officer commanding a platoon, or whatever, was killed or wounded.

  Macklin never reached the beach. He managed to get himself shot in the calf and face and was evacuated.

  Colonel Wilson had been a Marine a long time. He’d been in France in the First War, and he’d passed the “peacetime years” in the Banana Wars in Latin America. He had enough experience with weaponry fired in anger to know that getting shot only meant that you were unlucky; there was no valor or heroism connected with it.

  According to his service record, Macklin was in the Army General Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, recovering from his wounds, when he was sent to the States to participate in a war bonds tour of the West Coast. That was where he was now.

  Colonel Wilson thought he remembered something about that last business. And a moment later a few details came up from the recesses of his mind: In a move that at the time didn’t have Colonel Wilson’s full and wholehearted approval, the Assistant Commandant of The Marine Corps arranged to have an ex-4th Marines sergeant commissioned as a major, for duty with Public Affairs. The Assistant Commandant’s reasoning was that The Corps was going to need some good publicity, and that the way to do it was to bring in a professional. The man he was thinking of was then Vice President, Publicity, of Metro-Magnum Studios, Hollywood, California (who just happened to earn more money than the Commandant or, for that matter, than the President of the United States). And wasn’t it fortuitous that he’d been a China Marine, and—Once a Marine, Always a Marine—was willing to come back into The Corps?

  Major Jake Dillon, Colonel Wilson was willing to admit, did not turn out to be the unmitigated disaster he feared. He’d led a crew of photographers and writers in the first wave of the invasion of Tulagi, for instance, and there was no question that they’d done their job well.

  Dillon was responsible for having Lieutenant Macklin sent home from Australia for the war bond tour.

  Why did Dillon do that? Colonel Wilson wondered.

  And then some other strange facts surfaced out of his memory: Dillon was somehow involved with the Office of Management Analysis. Colonel Wilson was not very familiar with that organization. But he knew it had nothing to do with Management Analysis, that it was directly under the Commandant, and that you were not supposed to ask questions about it, or about what it did.

  It didn’t take a lot of brains to see what it did do.

  The Office of Management Analysis, anyhow, had a new commander, another commissioned civilian, Brigadier General Fleming Pickering. Pickering was put in over Lieutenant Colonel F. L. Rickabee, whose Marine career had been almost entirely in intelligence. And it was said that Pickering reported directly to the Secretary of the Navy. Or, depending on which scuttlebutt you heard, to Admiral Leahy, the President’s Chief of Staff.

  There was surprisingly little scuttlebutt about what Dillon was doing for the Office of Management Analysis.

  Meanwhile, Colonel Wilson ran into newly promoted Colonel Rickabee at the Army-Navy Country Club, but carefully tactful questioning about his job and his new boss produced only the information that General Pickering shouldn’t really be described as a commissioned civilian. He’d earned the Distinguished Service Cross as a Marine corporal in France about the time Sergeant (now Lieutenant Colonel) Jack (NMI) Stecker had won his Medal of Honor.

  At precisely 0830, the intercom box on Colonel Wilson’s desk announced the arrival of Brigadier General J. J. Stewart.

  “Ask the General to come in, please,” Colonel Wilson said, as he slid the Service Record of First Lieutenant R. B. Macklin into a desk drawer and stood up.

  He crossed the room and was almost at the door when General Stewart walked in.

  “Good morning, General,” he said. “May I offer the General the General’s regrets for not being able to be here. A previously scheduled conference at which his presence was mandatory…”

  “Please tell the General that I understand,” General Stewart said. “There are simply not enough hours in the day, are there?”

  “No, Sir. There don’t seem to be. May I offer the General some coffee? A p
iece of pastry?”

  “Very kind. Coffee. Black. Belay the pastry.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir,” Colonel Wilson said, then stepped to the door and told his sergeant to bring black coffee.

  General Stewart arranged himself comfortably on a couch against the wall.

  “How may I be of service, General?”

  “I’ve got sort of an unusual personnel request, Colonel,” General Stewart said. “I am certainly the last one to try to tell you how I think you should run your shop, or effect personnel allocation decisions, but this is a really unusual circumstance….”

  “If the General will give me some specifics, I assure you we’ll do our very best to accommodate you.”

  “The officer in question is a young lieutenant named Macklin, Colonel. He was wounded with the first wave landing at Gavutu.”

  I wonder who shot him. Our side or theirs?

  “Yes, Sir?”

  “Parachutist,” General Stewart said. “He was evacuated to Australia. Fortunately, his wound—wounds, there were two—were not serious. He was selected—”

  General Stewart interrupted himself as the coffee was delivered.

  “The General was saying?”

  “Oh, yes. Are you familiar, by any chance, with the name—or, for that matter, with the man—Major Homer C. Dillon?”

  “By reputation, Sir. I’ve never actually…”

  “Interesting man, Colonel. He was Vice President of Metro-Magnum Studios in Hollywood. I don’t like to think of the pay cut he took to come back in The Corps. Anyway, Major Dillon was in Australia, in the hospital, and met Lieutenant Macklin. It didn’t take him long to have him shipped home to participate in the war bond tour on the West Coast.”

  “I see.”

  “It was a splendid choice. Lieutenant Macklin is a splendid-looking officer. Looks like a recruiting poster. First-class public speaker. Makes The Corps look good, really good, if you understand me.”

  There is no reason, I suppose, why a lying asshole has to look like a lying asshole.

  “I take your point, Sir.”