Call to Arms

by W. E. B Griffin

  “What did you do that for?”

  “I don’t want anybody to see me all over a hundred-yard target that way,” Zimmerman said, as he balled the target up in his hands.

  McCoy laughed, and then started trotting to the firing line so he would be there when the column double-timed up.

  Captain Coyte turned the company over to the gunny, and walked toward McCoy.

  McCoy saluted.

  “Good morning, sir,” he said. “I didn’t expect to see the captain out here.”

  “I’ve never seen a carbine,” Captain Coyte said. “Just include me in, Killer. It’s your show.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” McCoy said.

  “I thought I heard firing,” Captain Coyte said.

  “Yes, sir, Gunny Zimmerman and I test-fired two of them.”

  “Is that a couple of them on the table?” Coyte asked, nodding toward one of the four rough wooden tables behind the firing line. Without waiting for an answer, he walked toward the table, gesturing to the other officers to join him.

  When he got to the table, he picked up one of the carbines, looked into the open action to confirm that it was not loaded, and then released the operating rod, threw it to his shoulder, drew a bead on the one target remaining, and dry snapped it. He tried, and failed, to get the bolt to remain open, and then looked at McCoy for help.

  “There’s a little pin on the rear operating-rod lever, Captain,” McCoy explained. “Hold it back, push the pin in.”

  Captain Coyte succeeded in keeping the action open.

  “I suppose this is the wrong word to use on a weapon,” he said. “But it’s kind of cute, isn’t it?”

  “If you think of it as a replacement for the pistol, sir,” McCoy said, “it’s not bad.”

  “Accuracy?”

  “We managed to get ten shots into about eight inches at one hundred yards,” McCoy said.

  Captain Coyte’s eyebrows went up. “There are a couple of reasons that might have happened,” he said.

  “I think, from a clear bore, with maybe a hundred or two hundred rounds to smooth it up, we can tighten those groups, sir.”

  “If you could cut them in half, that would still give you four inches,” Captain Coyte said thoughtfully. “I now understand, I think, your reference to thinking of it as a replacement for the pistol.”

  “Captain, why don’t you let me put up some targets and let you and the other officers fire?” McCoy asked. “The way I had planned to run this was to have the men clean their pieces—”

  Coyte looked around. “McCoy, it’s your range, and your class,” he said. “If that could be done without fouling up your schedule…”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, then,” Captain Coyte said, “in the interest of efficiency, not because I dare think that rank has its privileges, let’s do it, Killer.”

  There was a smile in his eyes, and McCoy knew that he was mocking Colonel Carlson’s “no special privileges” philosophy. He was surprised that a captain would mock the battalion commander, but especially that he would do so for the amusement of the junior second lieutenant in his company.

  It took no more than fifteen minutes for McCoy to paste the holes in his target and then to give Captain Coyte enough quick instruction to understand what he was doing, and for Coyte to fire twenty rounds at the target.

  By the time they were finished, Baker Company’s gunny had broken the company down into four groups, and one group was gathered around each of the tables. At the first table, Zimmerman was demonstrating to a group of NCOs the disassembly technique on one of the two carbines they had cleaned with gasoline. The idea was that the NCOs would then go to the other tables and try disassembling the partially cleaned weapons themselves.

  The system McCoy had dreamed up out of his head, and then modified after suggestions from Zimmerman, seemed to be working. The bottleneck was going to be getting the carbines free of Cosmoline, but nothing could be done about that. The safety precautions were in place. There would be inspections by platoon sergeants of weapons before they were shown to the gunnys, and finally Zimmerman would inspect them himself.

  He saw that Zimmerman had also just about selected the armorer for the carbines. One of the kids. He had seen him mixing paste and pasting targets.

  McCoy glanced at the tables and the faces. They were mostly kids, he thought, some of them as young as seventeen. And some he suspected were seventeen using somebody else’s birth certificate.

  And then he did a quick double take. There was a familiar face at the next-to-the-last table. At first it seemed incredible, but then there was no question about it at all. One of the Raiders struggling to get a good look at a sergeant taking a carbine to pieces was Tommy. Thomas Michael McCoy. PFC Thomas Michael McCoy, USMC, was Second Lieutenant Kenneth J. McCoy’s little brother.

  Younger brother, McCoy thought. The sonofabitch is even bigger than I remembered. And meaner looking.

  “You look stunned, McCoy,” Captain Coyte said. “Was my marksmanship that bad?” McCoy was startled, and it showed on his face when he looked up at Coyte.

  “McCoy?”

  “Sir, I just spotted my kid brother. The PFC with the broken nose, by Table Three?”

  “I saw the similarity in name when he reported in,” he said. “He reported in from Pearl. They must have lost his records, for he has a brand-new service record.”

  “They give you a new service record when they throw out a court-martial sentence, too,” McCoy said.

  “But we don’t know that, do we, McCoy?” Coyte said. “So far as I’m concerned, so far as the Raiders are concerned, he has a clear record.”

  Their eyes met for a moment, and then Coyte went on, “If this is going to be a problem, McCoy, I can try to have him transferred.”

  “No problem, sir,” McCoy said. “I can handle the sonofabitch.”

  “I’m sure you can, Killer,” Captain Coyte said.

  XVI

  (One)

  Annex #2, Staff NCO Club

  Camp Elliott, California

  10 March 1942

  Gunnery Sergeant Ernst Zimmerman, USMC, sat alone on a wooden folding chair at one of the small, four-man tables of the club. He was freshly showered and shaved, and in freshly washed dungarees. His feet were on a folding chair.

  Annex #2 of the staff NCO club was a Quonset building. It was intended to provide a place for the staff noncommissioned officers—the three senior pay grades—to go for a beer when they came off duty tired, hot, and dirty. The wearing of the green uniform was prescribed for the main staff NCO club.

  Annex #2 was simple, in fact crude. The bar, for instance, ran a third of the length of the building and was made of plywood. After it was built, someone had gone over the surface with a blow torch, which brought out the grain of the wood. Then it had been varnished. There were fifteen stools at the bar, and a dozen of the small tables. There was a juke box and four slot machines. Two took nickels, one took dimes, and one quarters.

  Zimmerman never played the slot machines. He would play acey-deucey for money, or poker, and he had been known to bet on his own skill with the Springfield rifle, but he thought that playing the slots was stupid, fixed as they were to return to the staff NCO club twenty-five percent of the coins fed to them.

  And he had never been in the main staff NCO club. He thought it was stupid to get all dressed up in greens, just to sit around with a bunch of other noncoms and tell sea stories. Green uniforms had to be cleaned and pressed, and that cost money. You could get hamburgers and hot dogs and bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches and french fries at the main club, but Zimmerman thought it was stupid to buy your food when the Corps was providing three squares a day.

  If you really wanted a good meal, Zimmerman reasoned, take liberty off the base and go to some civilian restaurant and get a steak.

  There was a row of whiskey bottles behind the bar, but Zimmerman rarely had a drink. He had nothing against the hard stuff, just against buying it by the
drink at thirty cents a shot. For the price of ten drinks, you could get a bottle, and there were a lot more than ten shots in a bottle.

  Annex #2 offered a two-quart pitcher of draft beer for forty cents. They also offered little bags of Planter’s peanuts for a nickel. Zimmerman liked peanuts, but he didn’t like to pay a nickel for half a handful, so he bought them in cans in the PX for twenty-nine cents, two or three cans at a time, when he bought his weekly carton of Camel cigarettes. He kept them in his room. When he was going to Annex #2 for a pitcher of beer, he dumped half a canful of peanuts on a piece of paper, folded it up, and carried it with him. He figured that way he could eat twice as many peanuts with his beer for the same money.

  All things considered, Zimmerman was satisfied with his present assignment. He sort of missed being around a motor pool, but you couldn’t work in a motor pool if you were a gunnery sergeant, and it was nice being a gunny. He had never expected to become a gunny. Probably a staff sergeant, or maybe even a technical sergeant. But not a gunny. It was either the building of the Corps for the war, or else there had been a fuck-up at Headquarters, USMC, and some clerk was told to make him a staff sergeant and he hadn’t been paying attention and had made a gunny instead. But he wasn’t going to ask, or complain, about it. If there was a fuck-up, it would be straightened out.

  He had liked being a gunny in the 1st Separate Battalion at Quantico. He had liked it better before they had transferred the company from Quantico to the 2nd Separate Battalion out here, and he had been a little worried when they had renamed the outfit the 2nd Raider Battalion.

  It was supposed to be all volunteer. That wasn’t so. Nobody had asked him when they’d transferred him from the motor pool at Parris Island whether he wanted to volunteer, and nobody had said anything about volunteering for anything since he’d been out here, either.

  They were running the asses off the volunteers, a lot of time at night; but since he had been working for McCoy, he had been relieved from all other duties. That didn’t mean it wasn’t hard work, but the work McCoy had him doing made more sense than what everybody else was doing, especially the running around in the dark and the “close personal combat” training.

  He didn’t say anything about it, of course, but there was a lot of bullshit in the Raider training. They all thought they were going to be John Wayne, once they got to the Pacific, cutting Japanese throats. They seemed to have the idea that the Japs were obligingly going to stand still and raise their chins so they could get their throats cut.

  Zimmerman knew that aside from McCoy, and maybe Colonel Carlson, he was one of the few people who had even seen a Japanese soldier up close. And the ones he had seen looked like pretty good soldiers to him. Some of the Japs he had seen were as big and heavy as he was. Most of the Raiders, especially the kids (which meant most of the Raiders; Zimmerman had heard that eighty-two percent of the enlisted men were under twenty years old), had the idea that Japs were buck-teethed midgets who wore thick glasses.

  Colonel Carlson was trying to make them understand that wasn’t so, that the Japs were tough, smart, and well trained. But the kids thought he was just saying that to key them up. They wouldn’t change their minds until some Jap started to stick one of those long Jap bayonets in them.

  There were some things the Raiders were doing that made sense to Zimmerman. Everybody was getting, or was supposed to get, a .45 in addition to whatever weapon he would be issued. In the Old Corps, that didn’t happen. Only people in crew-served weapons, plus some senior noncoms, and officers, got .45s. Most people couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with a pistol, but still it made sense to give people one in case something went wrong with their basic weapon.

  Except, Zimmerman thought, that the Raiders were going apeshit over Thompsons and carbines, trying to get them issued instead of what they should have, these new eight-shot self-loading .30–06 Garands.

  In all his time in the Corps, Zimmerman had known only two people who could handle a Thompson properly. Major Chesty Puller, who was a short, stocky, muscular sonofabitch (in Zimmerman’s mind, Puller, not Gunnery Sergeant Lou Diamond, was the Perfect Marine) and could handle the recoil with brute strength; and McCoy. McCoy, compared to Puller, was a little fucker, but he had learned how to control the recoil of a Thompson by controlling the trigger. He got off two-round bursts that went where he pointed them, and he could get off so many two-and three-round bursts that he could empty the magazine, even a fifty-round magazine, just about as fast as Major Puller, who just pulled the trigger and held it back and used muscles to keep ten-, fifteen-, even twenty-round bursts where he wanted them to go.

  Aside from McCoy and Puller and, he now remembered, a gunnery sergeant with the Peking Horse Marines, everybody else he had ever seen trying to deliver accurate rapid fire from a Thompson had wound up shooting at the horizon. Or the moon.

  But it was classy, salty, to have a Thompson, and everybody was breaking their ass to get one. In the Old Corps, you took what the book said, period. But Colonel Carlson, McCoy had told him, had been given permission to arm the Raiders just about any way he wanted to. If a Raider, officer or enlisted, could come up with almost any half-assed reason why he should have a Thompson, more often than not, they let him have one.

  Zimmerman had personally stripped down and inspected ninety-six of the fuckers—half of them brand new, and half of them worn-out junk—that they’d got from the Army and that McCoy had sent him after.

  But most of the officers loved the Thompsons. Though if they couldn’t talk themselves into one of those, they wanted carbines. Maybe there was something to what McCoy had said, that the carbine was intended to replace the pistol. But he was about the only one that ever said that. Everybody else wanted it because they thought it would be a lot easier to haul around than a Springfield or a Garand.

  And then there were the knives. Every sonofabitch and his brother in the Raiders was running around with a knife, like they were all Daniel Boones and they were going to go out and scalp the Japs, for Christ sake.

  McCoy was the only Marine Zimmerman ever knew who had ever used a knife on anybody. There had been some guys in Shanghai who’d gotten into it with the Italian Marines during the riots with Springfield bayonets, but that was different. Bayonets weren’t sharp, and they had been used almost like clubs, or maybe small, dull swords. And so far as Zimmerman remembered hearing, none of those Italian Marines had died.

  Two of the four Italian Marines who had jumped McCoy in Shanghai had died. McCoy had opened them up with his Fairbairn, which was a knife invented by a Limey captain on the Shanghai Municipal Police. It was a sort of dagger, razor sharp on both edges, and built so that the point wouldn’t snap off if it hit a bone. McCoy’s wasn’t a real Fairbairn, but a smaller copy of one run up by some Chinese out of an old car spring. It was about two-thirds as long as the real one. The real Fairbairn was too big to hide inside your sleeve above your wrist and below your elbow; McCoy’s Baby Fairbairn was.

  McCoy was now carrying his Fairbairn. When Zimmerman had asked him why, McCoy had first said, “Because Carlson told me to.” And then he jumped all over his ass, saying he had a big mouth and that he should have kept it shut about what happened in Shanghai. Zimmerman had told him, truthfully, that he hadn’t said a goddamned word about that, but he wasn’t sure McCoy believed him.

  Well, everybody in the goddamned Raiders knew about it now, and was calling him “Killer,” the officers to his face, and the others behind his back. Until they stopped it, a lot of the kids were even trying to go around with their knives strapped to their wrists. That didn’t work, but they thought it was salty as hell.

  All this salty knife and submachine-gun bullshit was fine in training, Zimmerman thought; but if the Raiders ever got to do what everybody thought they were going to do—sneak ashore in little rubber boats from destroyers-converted-to-transports onto some Jap-held island and start, like John Wayne and Alan Ladd in some bullshit movie, to cut throats and shoot up the place—th
ey were going to find out it was a hell of a lot different from what they thought.

  Only once in his life had Gunnery Sergeant Ernst Zimmerman found himself in a situation where armed men were really trying to kill him. Forty or fifty Chinese “bandits,” who were working for the Japs, had ambushed him and a Marine officer named Sessions when they had become separated from the rest of a motor supply convoy.

  He hadn’t shit his pants or tried to hide or run or anything like that. He’d just stood there with a .45 in a hip holster and just absolutely forgot he had a weapon, until McCoy had come charging up like the goddamned cavalry taking Chinese down with a Thompson. Even then he hadn’t done anything. McCoy had had to scream at him, “Shoot, for Christ’s sake!” before he took the .45 out and started to use it to save his own ass.

  Zimmerman didn’t think that would happen again—after he had “woken up,” he had done what had to be done—but he wondered how these Raiders who were swaggering around Camp Elliott with their knives and carbines and Thompsons were going to react when they found themselves facing some Jap who was as big as they were, and who wasn’t wearing thick glasses and didn’t have buck teeth and was about to shoot them or run them through with a bayonet.

  Baker Company’s gunnery sergeant, Danny Esposito, appeared at the table with a pitcher of beer in one hand and a mug in the other. He was a large, heavy, leather-skinned man of thirty (either a Spaniard or an Italian, Zimmerman wasn’t sure which), and he was wearing greens.

  “You saving this table?” he asked.

  “Sit down,” Zimmerman said.

  “You ready?” Gunnery Sergeant Esposito asked, holding his pitcher of beer over Zimmerman’s mug.

  “Why not?”

  Esposito topped off Zimmerman’s mug, and then sat down. Zimmerman pushed the piece of waxed paper with the peanuts over to him. Esposito scooped some up, tossed them in his mouth, and nodded his thanks.

  “Scuttlebutt says that if somebody’s got a worn-out Thompson and wants one of the new ones,” Gunnery Sergeant Esposito said, “you’re the man to see.”