As a young Marine, Stecker had spent long hours endlessly working his Springfield until the action was as smooth as butter. And he had learned to fire and work the bolt so fast and so smoothly that the Springfield seemed like a machine gun with a slow rate of fire.
He and the other Marines involved in the troop test had been proud of that skill. Most of them. So that the test would not be conducted by forty expert marksmen, the Corps had detailed a dozen kids fresh from Parris Island to the platoon. They weren't experts. It took years to really become an expert with a Springfield.
Stecker went to the infantry school at Benning prepared to dislike the Garand.
But that changed. For one thing, even if this came close to heresy, there was no question that the sights on the Garand were better than the sights on the Springfield. On the other hand, the trigger pull started out really godawful, must have been ten pounds when they gave him the new Garand. But he was able to fix that with a little careful stoning of the sear. And the action was stiff as hell too, but that wore itself in after a couple of hundred rounds. And it actually got pretty slick once he learned, by trial and error, just how much of the yellow lubricant to use, and where.
And then the Doggie armorer loaned him his own Garand. What the hell, even if he was a Doggie, they had things in common. The Doggie armorer was a master sergeant, the same rank as Stecker, and he'd done a hitch with the 15th "Can Do" U.S. Infantry in Tientsin, 1935-38. And they knew about rifles. Stecker and the Doggie armorer had more in common with each other than Stecker had with the kids fresh from Parris Island involved in the troop test.
So first they had a couple of beers together at the NCO Club, and then the Doggie invited him to his quarters for supper, and the next morning, the Doggie armorer handed him a Garand and told him he'd "done a little work on it." What he'd done was a really good job on the trigger, and the action was really smooth, and he'd taken chisels to the stock and cut away all the wood, so the barrel was free floating, and (he wasn't sure if Stecker would like this) he'd replaced the rear sight with one he'd rigged up with an aperture about half as big as issue.
The first time Stecker fired the Doggie's Garand-at two hundred yards-when they marked the target and hauled it up again, there was only one spotter (Bullet holes in rifle targets are marked with circular cardboard disks, white if the hole is in the black of the bull's-eye, and black for holes elsewhere on the target. A peg in the center of the disk is inserted in the bullet hole. A bullet strike is thus visible from the firing line) on it, a white one, but only one.
"Have them re-mark that goddamned target!" Stecker demanded, angry and embarrassed. He had fired two loose rounds and an eight-round clip at that target, and apparently hit it only once.
The Doggie corporal on the field phone to the pits ordered the target re-marked, and it disappeared into the pits. It came back up a minute later with just the one white spotter, and Stecker felt humiliation sweep through him. "Two and a quarter," the Doggie corporal sang out. "What the hell does that mean?" Stecker asked. There was no such terminology in the Corps.
"That means, Sarge," the corporal said tolerantly, "that you put them all into just over two inches. Not bad!"
Stecker was so pleased (and to tell the truth of it, so relieved) that he'd put ten rounds into an area smaller than a spotter-which was damned near minute of angle (One inch at 100 yards. Two inches at 200 yards, etc)-that he didn't even jump the Doggie corporal's ass for calling him "Sarge."
That would have been good shooting even with Stecker's own personal Springfield, which he privately believed was as accurate as any Springfield in the Corps.
That was when he began to change his evaluation of the Garand. Obviously, when properly tuned, the ugly sonofabitch would shoot. Which was the important thing. And being absolutely fair and objective about it, which is what he was supposed to be as the NCOIC of the Marine Troop Test, you could get back on target after the recoil faster than you could with a Springfield. Like it or not, the gas-operated mechanism of the Garand ejected a round and chambered another faster than even a master gunnery sergeant of the Marine Corps could work the bolt of a Springfield.
And there was more to think about. Not only were the Marine marksmen doing well with the Garand - the sergeants and corporals who knew something about shooting - but the kids from Parris Island, too. They didn't, he realized, have a hell of a lot to unlearn. They just took the Garand and learned how to use it.
He didn't easily give in to admitting that the Garand was actually a fine weapon, though. For instance, he surprised hell out of a squad of the kids by ordering them not to detail strip their pieces when the day's firing was over.
"Just run a couple of patches, first bore cleaner, then oil down the bore. Don't brush the bore. I want to see how much it will take to jam it."
It was three days of firing before the first Garand jammed.
That night, he ordered the squad to detail strip and clean their Garands but not to reassemble them. When all the parts were clean, he ordered the kids to put them all together in a pile on the deck of the barrack.
The kids thought he was really nuts then, and even more so when he stepped up to the pile and stirred the parts around with his toe. One of the claimed merits of the Garand was interchangeability of parts. This was a good way to find out.
"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 stovepipe (When the action fails to eject a fired cartridge case properly and jams it in place with the open end erect, it is known as a "stovepipe") 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 (A red flag waved before a target to show a complete miss).
"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.
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 decks (Sanding decks (cleaning them with sand and a brick) went back to the days of wooden-decked sailing ships. Now it was used as a punishment) 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.
W E B Griffin - Corp 01 - Semper Fi Page 29
