W E B Griffin - Corp 07 - Behind the Lines

by Behind The Lines(Lit)

  But that didn't happen either. They had the court-martial. And he stood up at attention and heard the senior officer, a lieutenant colonel, say that the court, in closed session, two-thirds of its members concurring, had found him not guilty of all the charges and all the specifications.

  The next day the Commanding Officer of Marine Barracks, Cavite, called him in and told him that it was his experience in circumstances like this that it was best for everybody if the accused found not guilty was transferred. Then he went on and said Everly could have his choice. He could be reassigned to someplace like San Diego, in the States, or aboard a ship, or-and this is what he would recommend-to the 4th Marines in Shanghai.

  So three weeks later, Everly went aboard the USS Chaumont when she called at Cavite and rode her to Shanghai, China, where he was assigned to Headquarters Company, 4th Marines, and detailed to the motor pool.

  Within a couple of weeks, he could see that being a China Marine was going to be even better duty than Cavite. Not only that, nobody seemed to know about what he did to that mean drunk sonofabitch off the Pennsylvania, and about the court-martial. He was sure that Sergeant Zimmerman, who ran the motor pool, didn't know anything about it. And while it seemed likely that somebody-maybe his first sergeant, or his company commander, or maybe even the regimental commander-knew about it, nobody was holding it against him. He really had come here with a clean slate. That made him feel pretty good again about The Corps, and being in The Corps.

  He turned twenty-one in Shanghai and signed the papers extending his "until reaching his legal majority or unless sooner discharged" enlistment for a four-year hitch. And then, in May 1938, he shipped over for another four years.

  At the time, he thought that with a little bit of luck, he might make corporal during his second hitch. He got himself a Chinese woman, Soo Ling, and she took care of him and taught him to speak some Chinese, enough to say what he wanted to say, and to understand most of everything that was said to him. She even taught him to read and make some of the ideographs, and he took care not to get her in the family way.

  And things started to get even better, too. He sometimes thought it was a good thing that mean drunk sonofabitch had come after him with a knife. If he hadn't, he'd still be in the Cavite motor pool.

  Just about as soon as he arrived in Shanghai, he was assigned as an assis-tant truck driver on the regular supply convoys from Shanghai to Peking, where there was a detachment of Marines.

  There was at least one supply convoy a month, coinciding with the calling at Shanghai of the USS Chaumont or the USS Henderson, the Navy transports that endlessly circled the Pacific, bringing replacements and supplies and tak-ing people home. Sometimes there was more than one truck convoy a month, when freight arrived in Shanghai by Navy or civilian freighter.

  There was a driver and an assistant driver, both to share the driving and to leave a spare driver in case somebody got sick.

  And Sergeant Zimmerman drove a wrecker along. Even so, if for some reason a truck had to be left by the side of the road-even for a couple of hours, because there was no one to drive it and the wrecker already had a truck in tow-by the time they could get a driver to it, there would be nothing left but the frame, and maybe not even that. China was like that.

  They drove first to Peking and then to Tientsin, another seaport, where there was a detachment of the 4th Marines, usually stopping over there for two days, and then back to Peking, and then back to Shanghai. Some of the drivers hated getting the duty, because it took them away from the good life in Shang-hai. But some liked it, because it was a change of scenery, or women, or both.

  Usually Everly was pleased when his name came up on the roster, because it meant a change of scenery. Not women. If something came up, he wasn't going to kick it out of bed, but he thought there was not much point in chasing strange females; you never knew what you might catch, and it was expensive. He was by nature, or perhaps by training, frugal. He had no money in his pock-ets from the time he became a Ward Of The State until he got his first pay as a Marine; and that left a painful memory.

  There was always an officer in charge of the convoys, changing from con-voy to convoy, because that was the way things were in The Corps; when there were supplies involved, you had to have an officer in charge. But the officers were ordinarily wise enough to just ride along, leaving the actual running of the convoy to Sergeant Zimmerman.

  Zimmerman, who was short, stocky, and phlegmatic, had been in China for six years. He had a Chinese woman, who had borne him three children, and he fully intended to spend the rest of his time in The Corps in China, then retire there and open a bar or something.

  Zimmerman was competent and he was fair, and Everly figured him out- and how to deal with him-pretty quick: Zimmerman did what he was told without question and to the best of his ability, and he expected people who worked for him to do the same thing. When Sergeant Zimmerman told PFC Everly to do something, Everly did it, promptly, and to the best of his ability. They got along. On the convoys, they came to spend time together, since nei-ther was interested in chasing women, gambling, or getting shitfaced.

  In the spring of 1941, things changed.

  A new face appeared when the drivers and assistant drivers were gathered together for a convoy to Peking and Tientsin. Corporal Kenneth R. McCoy Everly knew him only by sight and reputation. McCoy had quite a reputation. PFC McCoy had become notorious, and in circumstances not unlike Ev-erly 's trouble with the mean drunk sonofabitch off the Pennsylvania. In McCoy's case, it was Italian Marines, four of them, who ganged up on him one night when he was on his way back to the barracks.

  Killing a couple of Italian Marines was a bigger deal than cutting and stomping on the hand of a Marine sergeant. And when Everly heard they were going to court-martial McCoy, he thought McCoy was almost surely going where he had almost gone, to the Portsmouth Naval Prison.

  It wasn't a question of guilt or innocence, Everly reasoned, but rather what was more important: China Marine PFCs were expendable. When one caused trouble-and creating a diplomatic incident was far worse than getting in a knife fight with a sergeant-they got rid of him as quickly as possible.

  But that didn't happen. McCoy beat the court-martial. And the next thing you knew, he was promoted to corporal and transferred out of "D" Company to work in Regimental Headquarters. McCoy had just completed his first hitch in The Corps, and people just didn't get themselves promoted to corporal after just completing their first hitch.

  The scuttlebutt went around that McCoy was really working for Captain Edward Banning, the 4th Marines' S-2 Officer, in Intelligence. The scuttlebutt was that McCoy had been in Intelligence all along.

  Making sure that it didn't look like he was putting his nose in where it didn't belong, Everly watched McCoy pretty carefully on that first run to Pe-king. He noticed a couple of things. For one thing, McCoy not only spoke Chi-nese like a Chinaman, but had a couple of Japanese military manuals in his rucksack that he obviously could read.

  By the time they made three convoy trips to Peking, it was pretty clear to Everly that the officers in charge had gotten the word to do what Sergeant Zim-merman said to do, and that Zimmerman was getting that word from Corporal McCoy.

  It was also pretty clear that what McCoy was doing on the convoys was running around spying on the Japanese, identifying units, getting their strength, seeing what kind of weapons they had, and, by spending a lot of time in whorehouses, picking up from the Chinese whores what they had heard from their Japanese customers.

  And then, after one trip to Peking, right after they got back to Shanghai, Sergeant Zimmerman and Corporal McCoy disappeared. The scuttlebutt was that they got shipped home, but nobody knew for sure what had happened.

  And then, the week after they disappeared, Captain Banning sent for Ev-erly and told him McCoy and Zimmerman had been ordered home. He also told him what McCoy had been doing for him, and that both McCoy and Zim-merman had spoken highly of him. Then he asked him if he wo
uld be inter-ested in volunteering to do the same thing.

  So Everly volunteered, guessing correctly that Banning was going to give him a lot more expense money than he was going to have to spend, and that it was a good way to make corporal ahead of time. And for a couple of months, he did just that; he made corporal, and managed to put aside nearly a thousand dollars in expense money.

  That business had ended when the decision was made to get the 4th Ma-rines and the Navy's Yangtze River Patrol out of China. Captain Banning was assigned to the Advance Party and flown out of Shanghai to the Philippines; and Everly was sent back to the motor pool.

  Just before he left, Captain Banning married his Russian girlfriend, which raised him even higher in Everly's opinion. When things got a little tough, a lot of Americans, officers and enlisted and civilians, had just cut their girl-friends-Chinese and Russian-loose to make out as best they could by them-selves. Everly couldn't leave Soo Ling to fend for herself, so he gave her all the money he had saved up since he was in China, and the money he'd made work-ing for Banning. Then he told her to check on Mrs. Banning when the Japs came, and if she needed help, to do what she could for her and then go home.

  He didn't know what happened to Soo Ling or Captain Banning's wife, either; but he did know what happened to Captain Banning, once he got to the Philippines. Just about as soon as the Marines came under fire, he was too close to an incoming round, and the concussion blinded him, and he wasn't even able to fight.

  For a while he was in the hospital, first on Luzon, then here in the Corregidor Hospital tunnel; and then they sent him and some other blind guys out on a submarine.

  And Percy Lewis Everly was promoted to sergeant and given the two-gun.30 caliber water-cooled Browning machine-gun section at Kindley Field.

  Where, he was convinced, one of several things was going to happen: Once Bataan fell, and the Japanese could bring their artillery to bear on the island, he was going to get killed by Japanese artillery. Or, in the unlikely event that didn't happen, he was going to get killed when the Japanese landed on Corregidor. Or, if he didn't get killed by Japanese artillery, or by Japanese Ma-rine infantry when they landed on Corregidor, he was going to wind up a Japa-nese prisoner.

  He had seen enough of the Japanese in China to know how they treated prisoners. You were almost better off dead than to be a prisoner of the Japs. Everly had seen with his own eyes the Japs using Chinese prisoners for bayo-net practice.

  The one thing Everly really couldn't figure out was why people-especially senior noncoms and officers-kept talking about "The Aid." "The Aid" could be any number of things-for example, a fleet of B-17 bombers suddenly appearing to bomb the Japs off Bataan and out of the Philippines. Or a fleet of Navy ships, carrying divisions of fully equipped soldiers from the States, to run the Japanese off Bataan and out of the Philippines. Or even a small convoy of transports, bringing food and medicine.

  But people kept talking about "The Aid," whatever it meant to them, as if it was really coming and would turn things around.

  That was bullshit, pure and simple. If "The Aid"-any kind of aid-was coming, General MacArthur wouldn't have run off to Australia the way he did three weeks before, on 10 March.

  Only two things were going to happen to the men in the Philippines, Ma-rines, soldiers, or sailors. They were going to get killed, or they were going to get captured. And getting captured was likely to be as bad as getting killed. Everly had seen people starve to death in China, too, and he didn't think he wanted to die that way, either.

  There was one other alternative: take off now, get the hell away from Cor-regidor and Bataan and Luzon, make your way to one of the other islands, maybe Mindanao, and take off for the hills.

  That would be desertion in the face of the enemy, and the punishment for that was death or such other punishment as a court-martial may direct. There had been lectures about that.

  The lectures had convinced Everly that he wasn't the only one thinking about avoiding certain death or capture; that people had probably already taken off to do just that. Otherwise, there wouldn't have been the lectures telling them it was not only stupid, but punishable by death or such other punishment as a court-martial may direct.

  Everly had learned as a kid, even before he became a Ward Of The State, that the way to really get your teeth kicked in was to hope for something you really wanted. You usually didn't get what you really wanted.

  So he didn't let himself think that maybe the reason the first sergeant had sent for him was so that he could serve as interpreter for some officer going off Corregidor onto Bataan. If it turned out to be for some other reason, it would be a real kick in the face.

  An officer in the company CP was standing there, a young, skinny first lieutenant with a steel pot on his head, a web belt with a pistol holster hanging from it around his waist, and a Thompson.45 ACP submachine gun slung from his shoulder.

  "This is Sergeant Everly, Lieutenant," the first sergeant said.

  "Major Paulson tells me you speak pretty good Spanish, Sergeant," the Lieutenant said.

  Who the hell is Major Paulson? Oh, the little guy with the bad rash, running sores all over him. With pilot's wings. We spent two days last week on Bataan looking for parts for some kind of generator. We didn't find any; I could have told him we wouldn't before we left The Rock.

  "Yes, Sir."

  "We really need those generator parts you and Major Paulson were look-ing for," the Lieutenant said. "Do you feel up to having another look?"

  "Aye, aye, Sir."

  "My name is Weston, Sergeant," the Lieutenant said, putting out his hand.

  "Yes, Sir," Everly said, shaking it.

  "You need anything to take with you?"

  "No, Sir," Everly said.

  He had with him all he would need. He had his Springfield Model 1903.30-06 Caliber rifle, with six extra five-round stripper clips; his Model 1911 Al.45 ACP Caliber Colt pistol, and an extra magazine with seven car-tridges; two canteens of water; his compass; his first-aid pack; and a small rucksack slung over his shoulder which held two shorts, two skivvy shirts, two pairs of socks, a shirt and a pair of pants, a razor with three decent blades and one brand-new blade, two packages of Chesterfield cigarettes, and a Zippo lighter that wouldn't work until he could find a gas tank to dip it into for fuel.

  And the click-open knife the sergeant from the Pennsylvania had tried to kill him with. At the court-martial, the sergeant testified that the knife intro-duced into evidence didn't belong to him, that Everly had come after him with it. When Everly was acquitted, the knife was "returned" to him. The first thing he wanted to do was throw it away; but then he decided maybe he could sell it to someone for a couple of bucks-it was a high-quality knife. But then he realized that he didn't want to sell it, either. So he just kept it hidden in his footlocker in rolled-up skivvy shirts. Later, when he was work-ing for Captain Banning, he started carrying it with him in his pocket, or slipped into the top of his boondockers. He never used it, not even to clean his fingernails, but he kept it sharpened. And every once in a while, he oiled it and made sure that when he slid the button, it flipped open, the way it was supposed to.

  "Then why don't we get started?" Lieutenant Weston said.

  "Aye, aye, Sir."

  The first sergeant didn't say a word; he just looked at Everly.

  That old bastard is too smart to believe in The Aid, Everly thought. He knows everybody on The Rock is fucked. And he knows men, and he knows me. Which means he knows I wouldn't be carrying my rucksack unless I was think-ing about not coming back. What does that make me in his eyes? A fucking coward and disgrace to The Marine Corps? Or a lucky bastard who's being given the chance to do something he wishes he could do himself?

  Everly nodded at the first sergeant.

  "Take care of yourself, Everly," the first sergeant said.

  Everly nodded again, and then followed Lieutenant Weston out of the CP.

  Chapter Three

  [ONE]

 
Mariveles-Morong Highway, Luzon

  Commonwealth of the Philippines

  1425 Hours 1 April 1942

  No vehicles were available for assignment to a lowly lieutenant and his ser-geant at the motor pool at Mariveles, at the tip of the Bataan Peninsula.

  "You'll have to hitchhike," the Army captain in charge said. "But that's not as bad as it sounds. There's a lot of traffic. Where are you headed?"

  "Orion," Lieutenant Weston said. Orion was one of four small towns on the Manila Bay side of the Bataan Peninsula.

  "When you leave the compound, turn right," the Captain said. "It's about thirty-five miles. What do you expect to find in Orion?"

  "Generator parts."

  "Good luck," the Captain said, his tone clearly saying that two Marines had little chance of finding anything in Orion.