Hot Springs (Earl Swagger)

by Stephen Hunter

  Now the guns came out: the Thompsons, looking oddly incomplete without magazines, three apiece under the arms of State Troopers. Then the Brownings, so heavy that a man could carry but one. Earl recognized, by a raw cut in the foregrip wood where he’d banged it against the doorjamb, the gun he’d carried as he walked down the hall, keeping up a hail of fire, Frenchy behind him, feeding him the magazines.

  “Hate to lose that goddamn BAR,” said D.A. “That’s what keeps ’em honest.”

  “It ain’t fair,” screamed a boy, who turned out surprisingly to be Slim, the oldest and the most salty. “They can’t be asking us to continue on these raids without no fire support. That ain’t right.”

  “It ain’t right,” said D.A. “I’ll be talking hard with Becker. We’ll get this worked out.”

  “But we—”

  “It’s not—”

  “We depend on—” came a tumble of voices.

  “Shut it off!” Earl bellowed, silencing his own men and shocking the Highway Patrol officers. “Mr. D.A. said he’d work on it. Now just back off and show these boys you’re trained professionals who obey your officer.” That was his command voice, perfected over hard years on parade grounds and harder years on islands, and it silenced everyone.

  “Thanks, son,” said Colonel Jenks. “Can see you’re a man who knows his stuff. Bet I know which one you’d be.”

  “Maybe you do, Colonel,” said Earl.

  “Heard nothing but good things about the ramrod down here. They say he’s a heller.”

  “I do a job if it comes to that.”

  “Good man,” the colonel said, as if marking him for future reference.

  A sergeant came to D.A.

  “Sir, you’ll have to sign the manifest. And what about the carbine?”

  D.A. scratched his chicken-track signature on the paper and said, “What carbine?”

  “Well sir, in the original manifest you had six Thompsons, three BARs, six Winchester pumps and six M-1 carbines. But you only got five carbines.”

  “Hmmm?” said D.A. He looked over at Earl. This was a mystery, as the carbines had never been deployed, they’d simply stayed locked up down here in Texas. Earl didn’t like the carbine, because its cartridge was so light.

  “We never used the carbine,” said Earl.

  “Well sir, it says you had six, but we only rounded up five.”

  “I don’t have no idea. Any of you men recall losing a carbine?”

  “Sir, we ain’t touched the carbine since training.”

  “The carbines was never up in Hot Springs.”

  “Colonel Jenks, what do you want to do here, sir?” asked the sergeant.

  Jenks contemplated the issue for at least a tenth of a second. Then he declared, “Call it a combat loss, write it off, and forget all about it. We don’t have to make no big case out of it. It ain’t even a machine gun. Now let’s get out of here and let these men git going on their training.”

  38

  It took a day to set up through the auspices of a friend of his who was an FBI agent in Tulsa and knew who to call. Carlo ended up paying for it himself, because he knew there was no budget and that D.A. would never approve. But he had to know.

  He had never flown before. The plane was a C-47, though now, as a civilian craft, it had reverted to its prewar identity as a DC-3. It left Tulsa’s airfield at 7:30 A.M. and flew for seven hours to Pittsburgh. The seats were cramped, the windows small, the stewardess overworked. He almost threw up twice. The coffee was cold, the little sandwich stale. His knees hurt, his legs cramped. In Pittsburgh, the plane refueled, exchanged some passengers for others, and finally left an hour later. It arrived, ultimately, at National Airport just outside Washington, D.C., at around 4:00 in the afternoon.

  He took a cab to the Headquarters of the United States Marine Corps, at Arlington Annex, in Arlington, Virginia. It was a set of wooden buildings, shabby for so grand an institutional identity, behind barbed wire on a hill overlooking the capital. In the distance, a white rim of buildings and monuments could be seen, grandly suggesting the greatness of the country it symbolized, but out here, across the river, the warriors of that country made do with less. The only concession to ceremony was the presence of ramrod-stiff Marines in dress blues outside, keepers of a temple, but inside, he found no temple at all. It was merely a busy workplace of men in khaki humming with purpose. It took a bit, but finally someone directed him to the Personnel Records Branch of G1 Division, HQ USMC. A sergeant greeted him in the foyer, and he identified himself and was led in, past offices and work bays, to an inner sanctum; that is, what appeared to be miles and miles of shelves stacked with the manila envelopes that represented each of the men who’d worn the Globe and Anchor in this century. The sergeant took Carlo to a reading room, windowless and bright, where what he had requested had been put out for him.

  “What time do you close?” he asked.

  “Officer Henderson, we don’t close. We’re the Marine Corps. Take your time. We run a twenty-four-hour department here.”

  So Carlo, exhausted and bewildered, at last sat down alone with the ultimate clue in his quest.

  Finally, shaking slightly—the effect of the hard day’s travel, or his own apprehension?—he opened the battered file that contained the service record book of SWAGGER, EARL L., FIRST SGT., USMC (RET.).

  With the service record book, he was able to watch the man progress from lowest grade to highest, across three continents, an ocean and the mightiest war ever fought. The book was a compendium of places lost or destroyed or forgotten about, of judgments tempered and faded but always accurate, and finally of obscure institutional relics and random facts, including fingerprints taken on enlistment, civilian occupation and education, prior service, promotions and reductions—including examinations and recommendations for advancement, pay matters including travel allowances; military justice including time lost through misconduct; inventories of residual clothing and equipment; enlistment and reenlistment data with supporting medical records; foreign and sea service; commanders’ ratings on conduct and efficiency; marksmanship scores; specialist qualifications; and awards and decorations. It was in bad penmanship, in a language whose intricacies and nuances he didn’t understand. But he did start noticing things: he noticed right away, for example, a discrepancy in birth dates. Earl joined the Corps in Fort Smith, in 1930, claiming to be seventeen, but Carlo now knew he was born in 1915; he was two years underage. That spoke of a boy in a hurry to get away from what Carlo knew was the hell of his life.

  The book followed the boy from his first days as a recruit at the brutal Parris Island of 1930. Many of the scores were meaningless to Carlo, for they referred to tests he didn’t understand in a numerical progression he also didn’t understand. But he understood simple marksmanship, and noted that the boy shot expert in all weapons. PVT. SWAGGER, E.L. was then sent to Sea School, at the Norfolk Navy Yard in Virginia, and then deployed as a rifleman to the Fifth Marines in Nicaragua, working with the Nicaraguan Guardia Nacional in something called M Company, with an enthusiastic unofficial endorsement from the officer in charge, one Captain Lewis B. Puller. “PFC Swagger shows natural talent for combat operations and is particularly proficient in running a fire team of four men in jungle patrol.” Then it was two years on the old Arizona as a rifleman, later squad leader of the Marine Detachment aboard that craft whose wreckage now still oozed oil in Pearl Harbor. But rank was slow to come by in the tiny prewar Corps, even if his recommendations were uniformly excellent and each commanding officer would write, in what appeared to be an unusual number of unofficial letters of recommendation, something like, “This Marine shows leadership material and should be encouraged to apply for Officer Candidate School or even an appointment to Annapolis and a regular commission.” But Earl never went; he just sea-bagged on, finally promoted to corporal and assigned as a squad leader, then an acting platoon sergeant, with the Fourth Marines in China, from June of 1935 until June of 1939. He was in the Mari
ne Detachment at Balboa in the Panama Canal Zone as a straight-up three-striper when the war broke out.

  Carlo read it quickly, almost afraid of what he might find. But the record was uncontaminated with sin. Earl was assigned as a platoon sergeant in Company B, Third Battalion, Second Marines, where he served from February of 1942 until August of 1944. In September of 1942, he landed on Guadalcanal. That was a long and hard campaign. It won him his first Silver Star, and a recommendation for a commission (turned down). After a period of reorganization and retraining in Wellington, New Zealand, he went into it again—Tarawa. There, he was a platoon sergeant, and after the horrible fuckup at Red Beach One, where the Higgins Boats foundered on the offshore reef and he had to wade ashore with his men, taking heavy fire every step of the way, he got his most severe wound, a chest shot from a Japanese sniper on D plus two. That was followed by a four-month recuperation. Nineteen forty-four was the year of Saipan and Tinian, and two more attempts to commission him. His refusal to become an officer was beginning to irritate some, as the battalion executive officer wrote tartly: “Platoon Sergeant Swagger again shows exemplary leadership skills, but his continual refusal to accept the higher responsibility of a field commission is troublesome; he’s clearly capable of such responsibility, being not merely aggressive in battle but shrewd in organizational details; but he seems to reject the commission on some vague psychological ground, because his father was a (decorated) officer in the AEF in World War I, and he doesn’t want to be of the same ‘ilk’ as his father. He does not explain this very coherently, but the feeling is clearly deep-seated and passionately held. When the war is over, it is highly recommended that this valuable Marine be offered some kind of counseling to overcome his resentment of the officer class. Meanwhile, he performs his duties with outstanding diligence.” In November of 1943, he was promoted to gunnery sergeant and reassigned to Company A, Third Battalion, Second Marines, Second Marine Division, during retraining and reorganization at Camp Tarawa, Hawaii. He served with A/3/2 in the Saipan and the Tinian campaigns.

  In September of 1944, he was reassigned to 28th Marines in the new Fifth Marine Division, whose cadre comprised veteran NCOs from earlier Pacific battles. He was also promoted to first sergeant of Company A, First Battalion, 28th Marines. February of 1945 was Iwo Jima. The medal citation was there and Carlo imagined Earl charging up that hill in a fog of sulfur and volcanic grit and gunsmoke, destroying those machine-gun positions, finally entering that concrete bunker for a final up-close battle with the Japs. He killed forty-odd men in a minute and a half, and saved the lives of 130 Marines caught in the bunker cross fire. Amazing. The big one. But he was wounded seven times in that engagement. A severe bout of malaria, accelerated by combat fatigue, didn’t help. He was sent to a training command in San Diego in June of 1945, after release from the hospital.

  In October of 1945, he was declared unfit for further duty because of his wounds and a disability in his left wrist, which still bore several pieces of shrapnel. He was retired medically with a small pension, in addition to receiving his 52-20 severance package (twenty bucks a week for a year) from the government. In February of 1946 the paperwork on his Medal of Honor citation finally was approved, and in late July of 1946 he was given the award in a small ceremony at the White House.

  “Excuse me,” he yelled out to the sergeant, “could you explain something to me.”

  “Yes sir.” The young man ducked in.

  “When I was in the Air Corps, we called it ‘AWOL,’ absent without leave. Is there a Marine equivalent?”

  “Yes sir. We call it UA, meaning unauthorized absence.”

  “Now, this particular man, would a record of his UAs be kept here? I don’t think I saw any.”

  “Yes it would. Theoretically. The company first sergeant maintains the service record book. So how diligent the first sarge was, that would determine how diligently the records are kept. Do you have a date or anything?”

  “Yes. Third week in January, 1942.”

  The young man leaned over the service book and began to rifle through the pages.

  “Looking here, I can say definitely he was with the Second Marines at New River, North Carolina, before the Second left for the West Coast, departed for the Pacific in July from San Diego and landed on Guadalcanal in September. He was assigned to a platoon all that time. There’s no Captain’s Masts, no UAs, no disciplinary action of any sort. He was there every day.”

  “What about, you know, temporary duty? TDY we called it.”

  “In the Naval Services, it’s TAD. No, it would be unusual for a junior sergeant to go TAD at that point in his career, and this one certainly didn’t. He was too busy getting ready to kill Japs.”

  “Leave, none of that?”

  “No, sir. Not during the third week of 1942. Wasn’t much leave at all given in the Marine Corps in 1942. He was on duty, on station, doing his job.”

  Carlo felt as if an immense burden had been lifted from him. Involuntarily, his mouth curled upward into a smile, bright and wholesome. He felt himself blushing.

  “Well, listen, you’ve been a big help. I’m very appreciative.”

  “Yes sir.”

  He couldn’t stop smiling. Suddenly the world seemed beautiful. His future was mapped out: he’d return tomorrow, the team would finish up its raiding, they’d all go back to their departments, the experience would mark him as someone special, and his career would just go on and on. Not out of ambition was he pleased, but out of something else: reverence. He saw what he was doing as divinely inspired. He was doing God’s Will. It would be the Just Man who enforced both the Law and the Word, living to standards set by the Book and in the flesh by heroes like Earl Swagger; in their honor, he would live a life of exemplary conduct and—

  “Of course,” said the sergeant, “you might still want to check with the Historical Section and see what was going on in the Second Marines that week.”

  • • •

  After a night in a motel comprising three hours of desperately dead sleep and three hours of fitful turning, Carlo took the cab back to the Arlington Annex to find the G3 (Operations) Division of HQ USMC. Operations was in another of the shambling wooden buildings that were the center of the Marine empire. The building showed hard use: it needed paint and air-conditioning and a general sprucing up; or it needed tearing down.

  He walked in, introduced himself and showed his badge, and was accorded a professional respect he somehow felt he had yet to earn. The FBI connection worked here too, and he went without trouble to the second floor, to the Historical Section. In here, a narrative of the Second World War was being officially compiled by a number of civilians and Marine retirees. He was eventually turned over to a man in civilian clothes who was missing an arm, referred to by everyone as Captain Stanton.

  “What I need,” he explained, “is the regimental record—I guess it would be a logbook or something—of the Second Marines, during the third week of January in 1942. Specifically, Company B, Third Battalion.”

  “They were mostly still stateside then,” said Captain Stanton. “Probably still at New River. Sometime in there they would have moved to the West Coast. They didn’t deploy until July for the ’Canal.

  “I understand that, sir. I just have to see what was going on in the regiment that particular week. That company, that battalion if possible.”

  “Okay,” said the captain. He retreated to the stacks, while Carlo waited, his suit rumpled, feeling sweaty and somehow uncomfortable. The office smelled of cigarette smoke and dead heroes. In stalls men consulted volumes, maps, made phone calls and took notes. Light streamed through the sunny windows, illuminating clouds of smoke and dust; the atmosphere seemed alive with particles and gases. Was this all that was left of all those young men who’d gone ashore on the beachheads of the Pacific, so many of them dying virgins, shot down in warm water or in cloying sand, never having felt the caress of a woman or the joy of watching a son take a first step? Now, they were here: in
a large government-green office, full of old journals and files in cabinets and maps, where their sacrifice and heroism was reduced to words to be published in dusty volumes that nobody would ever read. Wake-IslandManilaGuadalcanalBetioSaipanGilbertsMarianas-TarawaIwoOkinawa. It all came to this, the lighting of cigarettes, the rumpling of paper, the tapping of the typewriters, the scratching, so dry, of pen on paper. There should be a Marine in dress blues, playing taps endlessly to salute the boys of the broken palms and blazing sunsets and long gray ships and jungles and coral reefs and volcanic ash. This room housed it all, and somehow there should be more, but this is all there was. It was another reliquary of the bones of martyrs, some of them so young they didn’t know what the word martyr meant.

  “Henderson? You okay?”

  He looked up to see Captain Stanton, holding a thick volume under his one good hand.

  “Yeah, sorry.”

  “You were sort of talking to yourself.”

  “I’m sorry. They deserve so much more than this room.”

  “Yes, they do. That’s why we have to get it all written down, so that it’ll be recorded forever. Anyhow, here’s the logbook of the Second Marines, January through April, 1942.”

  Together, they paged through it, finding old orders, directives from command and staff meetings, training schedules, disciplinary records, and a narrative of day-by-day operations. It was the collective diary of thousands of men preparing for a desperate, endless war at the end of the world.

  “15 Jan 41: 2nd Marines receives deployment orders from HQ-USMC for Camp Pendleton, California, prior to shipment overseas in Pacific Battle Zone. Operations ordered to commence planning of the redeployment.”

  Then, for the week of January 17 through January 24, “Elements of 2nd Marines in transit to West Coast”; it continued until early February.

  “They were on the move for three weeks?” asked Carlo.

  “Son, a Marine reågiment is part of a division, which is a formidable amount of men. We’re talking about a headquarters element, three infantry regiments of about 3,100 men each, an artillery regiment, an engineer regiment, a tank battalion, a special weapons battalion, a service battalion, a medical battalion and an amphibious tractor battalion. They were understrength, of course, but a division carried a paper strength of 19,514 men. So we’re talking about a unit that’s folded into a larger unit of at least twelve to thirteen thousand men. Plus all the vehicles and equipment, including the guns. It all has to work together. It’s no small thing.”