The Corps 03 - Counterattack

by W. E. B Griffin

"No. I asked for McCoy-and not only because he speaks Japanese. But I got turned down flat."

  "You know what McCoy is up to. That didn’t surprise you, did it?"

  "I guess not."

  "I know a guy-Mustang first lieutenant-named Howard. He doesn’t speak Japanese. Before the war, he was on the rifle team. He’s been seeing that the 2ndRaider Battalion got all the weapons they thought they wanted. That’s about over. Good man."

  "How come you don’t want him for your battalion?"

  "I do. I offered him a company."

  "And?"

  "He told me he wasn’t sure he could handle it. He was at Pearl on December seventh. He panicked. He found himself a hole- actually a basement arms room-and stayed there. After he saw that the arms were passed out."

  "That doesn’t sound so terrible."

  "He thinks it makes him unfit to take a command."

  "You don’t, I gather?"

  "No. And I told him so. I think he would be useful to you, Ed."

  "Would he volunteer?"

  "I don’t know. All you could do is ask him, I suppose."

  "Where would I find him?"

  "You’ll see him tomorrow. I told him to keep an eye on your people."

  "All this and the Coronado Beach Hotel, too? Or are you pulling my leg about that, too?"

  "No," Stecker chuckled. "That’s where we’re going. Truth being stranger than fiction, I’ve got the keys to the Pacific and Far Eastern Shipping Company suite there. They keep it year round for the officers of their ships who are in port."

  "How the hell did you work that?"

  "The guy that owns the company and I were in France together."

  "His name is Fleming Pickering, and he’s a captain in the Navy reserve."

  "How’d you know?"

  "He’s the man I’m to report to in Melbourne," Banning said. "I didn’t know about you and him. Or that he’d been a Marine."

  "Somehow, I don’t think you were supposed to tell me that."

  "I’m sure I wasn’t."

  "Then I won’t ask why you did. But at least that solves the problem of where you sleep while you’re out here."

  "You mean in the hotel?"

  "Sure. Why not? I’m sure Pickering would want me to give you the keys. And speaking of keys, I’m going to leave you the Ford, too."

  "I don’t understand that."

  "Well, cars are getting harder and harder to come by. They’ve stopped making them, you know, and people are buying up all the good used cars. I figure that I’ll be out here again, or my boy will, or else friends who need wheels. So why sell it? I’ve got two cars on the East Coast."

  "Jesus, Jack, I don’t know . . ."

  "I’ve already arranged to park it in the hotel garage. Just leave the keys with the manager when you’re through with it."

  "Things are going too smoothly. A lot of that, obviously, is thanks to you. But I always worry when that happens."

  "You know what the distilled essence of my Marine Corps experience is?" Stecker said.

  "No," Banning chuckled.

  "You don’t have to practice being uncomfortable; when it’s time for you to be uncomfortable, the Corps will arrange for it in spades. In the meantime, live as well as you can. I’m surprised you didn’t learn that from McCoy."

  Stecker pulled up in front of the Coronado Beach Hotel.

  "Here we are," he said. "Of course, if you’d rather, I can still drive you out to Elliott, and the Corps will give you an iron bunk and a thin mattress in a Quonset hut."

  "This will do very nicely, Major Stecker, thank you very much."

  "My pleasure, Major Banning."

  (Four)

  Headquarters Motor Pool

  2ndJoint Training Force

  Camp Elliott, California

  18 April 1942

  When First Lieutenant Joseph L. Howard, USMCR, walked up to the small shack that housed the motor pool dispatcher, he gave in to the temptation to add a little excitement to the lives of the dispatcher and the motor sergeant. Both of them, he saw, were engrossed in the San Diego Times.

  He squatted and carefully tugged loose from the ground a large weed and its dirt-encrusted root structure. Then he spun it around several times to pick up speed, and let it fly. It rose high in the air.

  "Good morning," Lieutenant Howard said loudly, marching up to the dispatch shack.

  The weed reached the apogee of its trajectory, and then began its descent.

  The motor sergeant looked up from his newspaper and got to his feet.

  "Good morning, Sir," he said, a second before the weed struck somewhere near the center of the tin roof of the dispatch shack. There was a booming noise, as if an out-of-tune bass drum had been struck.

  "Holy fucking Christ!" the motor sergeant said, "what the fuck was that?"

  "Excuse me?" Lieutenant Howard said. "Were you speaking to me, Sergeant?"

  The motor sergeant, still wholly confused, looked at Lieutenant Howard suspiciously.

  "If the chaplain," Joe Howard said, still straight-faced, "heard a fine noncommissioned officer such as yourself using such language, Sergeant, he would be very disappointed."

  The sergeant’s wits returned.

  "What the fuck did you do, Lieutenant?" he asked. "You scared the shit out of me."

  "You’re not really suggesting that an officer and gentleman, such as myself, would do anything to disturb your peace and quiet, are you, Sergeant?"

  "No, Sir, I’m sure the Lieutenant wouldn’t do nothing like that," the motor sergeant said, "but I used to know a wiseass armorer corporal at Quantico who had a sick sense of humor."

  Howard laughed. "Les, you looked like you were coming out of your skin."

  "You shouldn’t do things like that to an old man like me."

  "I’m trying to keep you young, Les."

  "Christ, you got a letter," the motor sergeant said.

  "Huh?"

  "Mail clerk brought it over," the motor sergeant said. "He called over here yesterday, looking for you. Said the letter had been there three days. I told him you would be here this morning. Wait till I get it."

  He rooted in a drawer and came out with a small envelope and handed it to Howard. There was no stamp on the envelope, just a signature. As a member of the armed forces of the United States serving overseas, the sender was given the franking privilege.

  Howard’s heart jumped when he saw the return address. He tore the envelope open and resisted the temptation to sniff the stationery; he thought he detected a faint odor of perfume.

  He was afraid to read the letter. He hadn’t heard from Barbara since she’d sailed, and was beginning to wonder if he ever would. His fear grew when he saw how short the letter was, and how it began:

  Special Naval Medical Unit

  Fleet Post Office 8203

  San Francisco, California

  My Dearest Joe,

  Well, here I am. I can’t tell you where.

  We have been told that, because we are officers and can be trusted not to write home things that would interest the enemy, our mail will not be censored. It will be, however, subject to "random scrutiny." What that means, I think, is that the senior nurses here will open outgoing letters they think will be interesting, in terms of intimacy. Consequently, I will not write the things I would like to write. I don’t consider what we have to be a spectator sport, and I don’t want a bunch of dried-up old maids giggling over my correspondence.

  On the way over here, I had a lot of time to think about us, and you are constantly in my thoughts here "somewhere in the South Pacific." There is not much for us to do, except prepare for what we all know is going to happen.

  I have carefully considered what happened between us, and I’ve given a lot of thought to our different backgrounds. I am fully aware that the both of us behaved very foolishly, and that any marriage counselor worthy of hanging out his shingle would have to conclude that the odds against us getting married in the first place, much less making
a success of it, are very long indeed.

  Having said that, I have concluded that meeting you was the best thing that’s happened to me in my life. Until you, I really had no idea what being a woman really meant. I will not be alive until I feel your arms around me again.

  I love you. Today. Tomorrow. Forever.

  May God protect you, Barbara

  PS: Picture enclosed, so you don’t forget what I look like.

  Joe Howard had trouble focusing his eyes on Barbara’s picture; they seemed to be full of tears.

  He put the letter back into its envelope and carefully put it into his pocket.

  "Thanks very much, Les," he said.

  "Ah, hell, Lieutenant," the motor sergeant said. Then he raised his voice, and the tenor changed. "Well, get off your ass, asshole," he said to the dispatcher, "and go get the Lieutenant’s truck."

  (Five)

  Headquarters Special Detachment 14

  Camp Elliott, California

  18 April 1942

  The Quonset hut was so called because it had been invented at the Quonset Point Naval Station. It was originally envisioned as an easy-to-erect shelter-sort of a portable warehouse-not as barracks. The huts were built out of curved sheets of corrugated steel, which formed the sides and roof in a half-circle. And there was a wooden floor, the framework of which visibly traced its design to forklift pallets.

  When they were to be transported, the curved sheets of corrugated steel could be nestled together. Then they, and the framework which supported them, could be steel-banded together on top of the plywood floor and its underpinning. So packed, they took up little cubic footage, and could be erected quickly at their destination by unskilled labor using simple tools.

  Quonset huts had sprouted like mushrooms over the rolling hills of Camp Elliott. Many of these had been put to use as barracks in lieu of tents, "until adequate barracks could be erected."

  Major Edward J. Banning followed Major Jack NMI Stecker up to one of them and stepped through the door behind him in time to hear someone call "Ten-hut."

  The hut was furnished with two folding metal chairs, two small folding wooden tables, on one of which sat a U.S. Army field desk, and a telephone. There were eight Marines in the forty-foot-long room. They were now all standing erect, at attention; but most of them, obviously, had a moment earlier been sprawled on mattresses on the floor. Their duffel bags, some of them open, were scattered around the floor. Their stacked ‘03 Springfield rifles were at the far end of the room.

  Banning wondered idly why Jack Stecker didn’t put them at rest, and then he belatedly realized that Jack was deferring to him, as the commanding officer.

  "At ease," Banning said. He smiled. "My name is Banning. I have the honor to command this splendid, if brand-new, military organization."

  There were a couple of chuckles, but most of them looked at him warily. That was understandable. Reporting aboard an ordinary rifle company was bad enough. The unknown is always frightening; and you naturally wonder what the new company commander and first sergeant will be like, how you will be treated, where you will be going, and what you will be doing. Reporting in here posed all those questions, plus those raised by the words "classified"; "involving extraordinary hazards"; and "the risk of loss of life will be high."

  And there wasn’t much he could do to put their minds at rest. This was one of those (in Banning’s judgment, rare) situations where the necessity for secrecy was quite clear. It was even possible that the Japanese didn’t know of the very existence of the Coastwatchers. Sometimes, not often, the Japanese were quite stupid about things like that; this might be one of them. If the Japanese did not yet know about the Coastwatchers, then every effort, clearly, should be made to keep them from finding out, as long as possible. They inevitably would, of course. When that happened, the less they learned the better.

  All I can do is try to get these people to trust me. I can’t even tell them where we’re going, much less what we’re going to be doing, until we’re on the ship. Or maybe not even then. Not until we get to Australia. If we go over there on a troopship, I can’t afford to have everybody else on the ship talking, and talk they would, about that strange little detachment with the strange mission.

  Banning had long ago learned that enlisted Marines trust their officers on a few occasions only: first, when the officer knows more about what’s expected of them than they do; second, when he will not ask them to do something he will not do himself; and, third, perhaps most important, when he is genuinely concerned with their welfare.

  There were two staff sergeants, five buck sergeants, and a corporal. Banning went to each man in turn and shook his hand. He asked each man his name, what he had been doing up to now in the Corps, and where he was from.

  "Who’s senior?" Banning asked, after he’d met them all.

  One of the staff sergeants took a step forward.

  "Richardson, right?"

  "Yes, Sir."

  "Well, for the time being, Sergeant, you’ll act as First Sergeant. Your first orders are to get some bunks and bedding to go with those mattresses."

  Staff Sergeant Richardson looked uncomfortable.

  "Problem with that, Sergeant?"

  "Sir, the warehouse is a hell of a ways from here, and we don’t have any motor transport."

  "You seem to have managed to draw mattresses and get them here without transport," Banning said.

  That made Sergeant Richardson look even more uncomfortable. Banning glanced at Major Stecker, whose eyes looked mischievous again. And then Banning understood: somewhere on the post, much closer than the issue point for bedding, another Marine Corps unit was dealing with the problem of eight missing mattresses.

  That was clearly theft, or at least unauthorized diversion of government property-in either case a manifestation of a lack of discipline. On the other hand, getting mattresses to sleep on when the Corps didn’t provide any could be considered a manifestation of initiative, which was a desirable military quality.

  "Well, I’ll look into the problem of transportation, Sergeant. What I would like to do, right now, is have a look at everybody’s service record, and then I’d like to talk to you one at a time."

  "Yes, Sir," Staff Sergeant Richardson said, visibly relieved that the subject of the source of the mattresses seemed to have been passed over.

  "Sergeant, has Lieutenant Howard been over here today?" Jack Stecker asked.

  "Yes, Sir. He was here about oh-six-hundred to make sure we were going to get breakfast. He said he would be back"-he raised his wrist to look at his watch-"about now, Sir. He said he would be back before you got here, Sir."

  As if on cue, there came the sound of tires crunching and an engine dying. A moment later, Lieutenant Joe Howard came through the door.

  "Good morning, Sir," he said to Stecker. "Sorry to be late. I had a little trouble getting wheels from the motor officer."

  "Major Banning," Stecker said. "This is Lieutenant Joe Howard."

  "How do you do, Sir?" Howard said.

  Banning liked what he saw. Like others before him, he thought that Joe Howard looked like everything a clean-cut, red-blooded, physically fit young Marine officer should look like. And then he remembered what Jack Stecker had said about Howard having found, and stayed in, a safe hole during the attack at Pearl Harbor.

  I’m in no position to be self-righteous about that. When the Jap barrages began, I would have swapped my soul for a safe hole to hide in.

  "I’m happy to meet you, Howard," Banning said, putting out his hand and raising his voice just enough to make sure everyone in the hut heard him. "Major Stecker speaks very highly of you. I’ve known him a long time, and he doesn’t often do that."

  Lieutenant Howard looked as uncomfortable as Staff Sergeant Richardson had a moment before.

  "I’ve got to get out of here," Stecker said. "I can’t miss that plane. Howard can drive me."

  He put out his hand to Banning. "Good luck, Ed. Send a postcard."

>   "Take care of yourself," Banning said. "Say hello to Elly."

  "I will," Stecker said, and then turned to the men watching curiously. "Listen up," he said. "You guys have fallen in the you-know-what and come up smelling like roses. Major Banning is one hell of Marine. He probably wouldn’t tell you, so I will: He’s already been in this war, wounded and evacuated from the 4thMarines in the Philippines. Before that, he was with the 4thMarines in China. When he tells you something, it’s not coming out of a book, it’s from experience. So pay attention and do what he says, and you’ll probably come out of what you’re going to do alive. Good luck. Semper Fi."