The Corps II - CALL TO ARMS

by W. E. B Griffin

  "And you want to go there?"

  "I want to go there with you," she said.

  "Christ, and I was afraid you were trying to get rid of me," Banning said.

  Carolyn squeezed his arm. She didn't trust her voice to speak.

  (Four)

  Battalion Arms Room 2nd Raider Battalion Camp Elliott, California 1300 Hours, 9 April 1942

  There are few things that frighten the United States Marine Corps. One of them is the acronym "IG," for "Inspector General," which usually means not only the officer bearing that title but his entire staff. This ranges from senior noncommissioned officers upward, and what they do is visit a unit and compile long lists of the unit's shortcomings in all areas of military endeavor.

  When a visit from the IG is scheduled, the unit to be inspected instantly begins a frenzied preparation for the inspection, so that the IG will find as little wrong as possible. The IG will find something wrong, or else the IG (including the staff) would not be doing the job properly. No IG report has ever said that the unit inspected was perfect in every detail of its organization, personnel, and equipment. The best a unit can hope for is that the shortcomings the IG will detect will be of a minor, easily correctable nature.

  The fear, and the resultant near-hysteria, is compounded when the phrase "from Washington" is appended to "IG." Colonels who could with complete calm order a regimental attack across heavily mined terrain into the mouths of cannon, and master gunnery sergeants who would smilingly lead the attack with a fixed bayonet, break into cold sweats and suffer stomach distress when informed their outfit is about to be inspected by "the IG from Washington." There is a reason for this concern. An IG evaluation of "Unsatisfactory" is tantamount to the announcement before God and the Corps that they have been weighed in the balance and found not to be Good Marines.

  The 2nd Raider Battalion was not immune to IG hysteria. There were several "preinspections" before the "IG from Washington's" inspection, during which the staff examined the equipment and personnel of the Raiders and searched for things the IG would likely find fault with. And there were twice as many pre-preinspections, in which platoon leaders and gunnery sergeants sought to detect faults that would likely be uncovered by the battalion brass during their preinspections.

  Depending on the individual, experience with IG inspections tends to lessen the degree of hysteria. Inasmuch as Second Lieutenant Kenneth J. McCoy had gone through four annual IG inspections while an enlisted man with the 4th Marines, he had not been nearly as concerned with the preinspections-or even with the "IG from Washington" inspection itself-as had been First Lieutenant Martin Burnes (whose permanent presence, and that of his wife, aboard the Last Tune was now an accepted fact of life).

  McCoy was so experienced with IG inspections, in fact, that he knew the rules of the game, and took several precautionary steps in his own area of responsibility (weaponry) to keep the IG inspectors happy. He was aware that IG inspectors would keep inspecting things until they found something wrong. So he gave them something to find.

  After details of Raiders who'd been sent up from the companies to the armory had cleaned the crew-served and special (shotguns, et cetera) weapons to Gunnery Sergeant Zimmerman's highly critical satisfaction, and after they had all been laid out for the IG's inspection, Second Lieutenant McCoy and Gunnery Sergeant Zimmerman had gone through them and fucked things up a little here and there. While Zimmerman partially unfastened a sling on a Thompson, for example, McCoy would rub a finger coated with grease over the bolt of a Browning Automatic Rifle, or on the barrel of one of the Winchester Model 1897 12-gauge trench guns.

  When it came, the inspection went as McCoy thought it would. The inspecting officer was a captain who took a quick look around and then turned over the actual inspection to a chief warrant officer, a tall, leathery-faced man named Ripley who looked as if he had been in the Marine Corps since the Corps had gone ashore at Tripoli. Gunnery Sergeant Zimmerman had subtly, if quickly, let Chief Warrant Officer Ripley know that Second Lieutenant McCoy had been in the heavy-weapons section of the 4th Marines in Shanghai. This had disabused Mr. Ripley of the notion that, for some inexplicable reason, the Raiders had turned their armory over to a baby-faced candy-ass second John fresh from Quantico-which is what he had thought when he first set eyes on Lieutenant McCoy.

  Chief Warrant Officer Ripley then, for a couple of minutes, searched for discrepancies of the type to be expected in any repository of arms, such as dirt and fire hazards and inadequate records. Then he looked for such things as malfunctioning weapons not properly tagged, so they could be repaired. And then he detail-stripped several weapons selected at random, searching for specks of dirt or rust. Finding none, he then compiled his list of minor discrepancies: "excess lubricant on three (3) Browning Automatic Rifle bolts; improperly fastened slings on two (2) Thompson submachine guns; and grease on barrels of two (2) shotguns, trench Ml897."

  By then it was evident to him that the baby-faced second john knew how to play the game. What the hell, he was an old China Marine, too.

  Then he grew serious.

  "Out of school, Lieutenant, where'd you and the gunny hide the junk weapons?" Ripley asked. His voice sounded like gravel.

  "No junk weapons," McCoy said. "That's them."

  "The Army liked you, right, Lieutenant?" Ripley asked, dryly sarcastic. "And gave you all good stuff and none of their junk?"

  "After the third, or fourth, or fifth time we gave them their junk back," McCoy replied, "they got tired. Or maybe they ran out of junk. But these weapons are all ours, and there is no junk."

  Ripley believed him. His rule of thumb about judging officers, especially junior lieutenants, was to believe what their gunnys thought of them. And this gunny obviously thought highly of this second lieutenant.

  The inspection of the armament and armory had taken the full afternoon allotted to it on the plan of inspection, but three and a half of the four hours were spent by McCoy and Zimmerman showing the warrant officer the exotic, nonstandard weapons Colonel Carlson had obtained using his special authority to arm the Raiders as he saw fit, and then listening to the warrant officer's sea stories about what it had been like in the 4th Marines in the old days, when he'd been there in '33-35.

  Chief Warrant Officer Ripley had never before had the chance to closely examine three of the special weapons Carlson had acquired for the Raiders. One of them was the Reising caliber.45 ACP submachine gun. Invented by Eugene G. Reising, the closed-breech, 550-round-per-minute weapon had gone into production in December 1941. McCoy had learned the Army had received several hundred of them, and had told Colonel Carlson, and Carlson had promptly signed a requisition for two hundred of them.

  "If we don't like them, we can always give them back, can't we, McCoy?".

  Ripley had never even heard of the Reising before he found it in McCoy's special-weapons arms room. But he had heard a lot about the other two, though he'd never actually seen them: These were the brainchild of a Marine, Captain Melvin Johnson, USMCR, who (as a civilian) had submitted the first models to the Army Ordnance Corps in 1938.

  The Johnson rifle was a self-loading.30-06 rifle with a unique rotary ten-shot magazine and an unusual eight-radial-lug-bolt locking system. Barrels could be replaced in a matter of seconds.

  The Johnson light machine gun was a fully automatic version of the rifle, with a magazine feeding from the side; a heavier stock with a pistol grip; and a bipod attached to the barrel near the muzzle.

  Warrant Officer Ripley was fascinated with them. And after a solemn examination, he pronounced the Reising to be "a piece of shit"; the Johnson rifle to be "twice as good as that fucking Garand''; and the Johnson machine gun ' 'probably just as good as the Browning automatic rifle." Lieutenant McCoy agreed with Ripley about the Reising; and he too thought that the Johnson rifle was probably going to be a good combat weapon (because its partially empty magazine could be reloaded easily; the en bloc eight-round clip of the Garand could not be reloaded in th
e rifle); and he thought the BAR was a far better weapon man the Johnson. But he kept his opinions to himself, deciding that he was in no position to argue with a chief Warrant officer, whose judgment was certainly colored by the fact that the Johnsons were invented by a Marine.

  Second Lieutenant McCoy and Gunnery Sergeant Zimmerman were relieved, but not really surprised, when Warrant Officer Ripley showed them the clipboard on which was the pencil copy of his report. (A neatly typewritten report in many copies would be prepared later.) He had found their armory "Excellent" overall (one step down from the theoretical, never-in McCoy's experience-awarded "Superior"); and aside from "minor, readily correctable discrepancies noted hereon" there was no facet of their operation that would require a reinspection to insure that it had been corrected.

  Gunnery Sergeant Zimmerman then produced a jug he just happened to come across where someone had hidden it behind a ceiling rafter, and they had a little nip.

  "The brass'll keep at it for a while," Ripley said. "Between us China Marines, most of 'em got a real hard-on for Carlson. What the fuck is that all about?"

  "I think it's because he got out of the Corps and then came back in," McCoy said. "And then got promoted."

  "Carlson got out of the Corps?" Ripley said, obviously surprised. "I didn't know that. How come?"

  McCoy shrugged his shoulders.

  "I was with him in Nicaragua when he got the Navy Cross," Ripley said with a touch of pride in his voice. "The last I heard, he had the Marine detachment at Warm Springs. What'd he do, piss off the President?"

  "I don't think so," McCoy said. "Otherwise the President's son wouldn't be the exec."

  "No shit?" Chief Warrant Officer Ripley said. "That tall drink of water is really the President's son? I thought they were pulling my chain."

  "That's him," McCoy said.

  "I'll be goddamned," Ripley said.

  "Is the brass going to fuck with your report? So they can stick it in Carlson?" McCoy asked.

  "I call things like I see them," Ripley said indignantly. "You guys are more shipshape than most. And nobody fucks with my reports. Shit!"

  "Well, this isn't the first time I heard that they're trying to stick it to Carlson," McCoy said. "And there are some real sonsofbitches around."

  "When they handed me this shitty assignment-I'd rather be with the First Division; hell, I'd rather be here-the Commandant himself told me if anybody tried to lay any crap on me, I was to come to him personal."

  Chapter Nineteen

  (One)

  Aboard the Yacht Last Time San Diego Yacht Club 1900 Hours, 9 April 1942

  Major Edward J. Banning, Captain Jack NMI Stacker, and Lieutenants McCoy and Burnes were sitting on teak-and-canvas deck chairs with their feet on the polished mahogany rail at the deck. Music and the smell of something frying came up from the portholes of the galley.

  "You look deep in thought, Jack," Banning said.

  "You really want to know what I'm thinking?" Stecker replied. "That there are two kinds of Marines. There is the one kind, the ordinary kind, the Campbell's Baked Beans with Ham Fat kind; and then there's the steak kind. That one"-he pointed at McCoy-"is the steak kind. I don't know how they do it, but they always wind up living better than other people."

  He smiled at McCoy. "No criticism, McCoy. I'm jealous. Christ, this is real nice."

  Banning chuckled. "I know what you mean, Jack," he said. "When all the other PFCs in the Fourth were playing acey-deucey for dimes with each other in the barracks, McCoy was playing poker for big money in the Cathay Mansions Hotel with an ex-Czarist Russian general, and he was living in a whorehouse the General owned."

  "Jesus!" McCoy said. "Be quiet, Ernie'll hear you."

  Stecker and Banning laughed.

  "I didn't know you knew about that," McCoy said to Banning.

  "I know a good deal about you that you don't know I know," Banning said, a little smugly.

  "The first time I saw him, he was a corporal; but he was driving that big LaSalle," Stecker said, pointing down the wharf. "I was a technical sergeant before I drove anything fancier than a used Model A Ford."

  "This seems to have developed a leak, Ken," Banning said, examining his bottle of Schlitz. "It's all gone."

  "I'll get you another, sir," First Lieutenant Martin J. Burnes, USMCR, said quickly, taking the bottle from Banning's hand and scurrying down the ladder to the aft cockpit.

  "There's another proof of your theory, Jack," Banning said. "When I was a second lieutenant, I did the running and fetching for first lieutenants."

  Stecker chuckled.

  "He's all right, Major," McCoy said. "Eager as hell. Gung ho!"

  Marty Burnes returned almost immediately with four bottles of Schlitz.

  "Here you are, sir," he said, respectfully, handing one of the bottles to Banning, and then passing the others around.

  "Burnes," Jack Stecker said, "McCoy just accused you of being 'gung ho!' I keep hearing that phrase around here. What's that all about?"

  "You never heard it in China?" Banning asked, and then before Stecker could reply, he went on. "Oh, that's right. You had your family with you. No sleeping dictionary. You weren't really a China Marine men, were you, Jack? No speakee Chinaman."

  McCoy snorted.

  "It's a Chinese phrase, sir," Burnes said, almost eagerly. "It means 'all pull together.'"

  "What's that got to do with the Raiders?" Stecker pursued.

  "Cooperate, sir, for the common good. Do something that has to be done, even if it's not your responsibility."

  "Give me a for-example," Banning asked, politely.

  "Oh, for example, sir," Burnes said, "suppose an officer is walking around the area, and he sees that a garbage can is knocked over. Instead of finding somebody, an enlisted man, to set it up, he would do it himself. Because it should be set straight, sir, for the common good of the unit."

  Banning looked at McCoy and saw that his eyes were smiling.

  Burnes sensed that the example he had given was not a very good one. "You can explain it better than I can, Ken," Burnes said. "You tell the major."

  "First of all," McCoy said, in Cantonese, "it doesn't mean 'all pull together.' It means something like 'strive for harmony.' And while it strikes me, and probably strikes you, as the night soil of a very large and well-fed male ox, you can see from this child that the children have adopted it as holy writ. What's wrong with it?"

  Burnes's eyes widened, first at the flow of Chinese, and then as Major Banning choked on his beer. He went to Banning and vigorously pounded his back until Banning waved him off.

  "You all right, sir?" Burnes asked, genuinely concerned.

  "I'm fine," Banning said. "It went down the wrong pipe."

  "Well, Burnes," Stecker said. "We know who had those dictionaries, don't we? Nobody likes a wiseass second lieutenant, McCoy."

  Ernie Sage came onto the forward deck skillfully balancing a tray in her hands. The tray held two plates of hors d'ouevres, one with bacon-wrapped chicken livers, the other with boiled shrimp and a bowl of cocktail sauce. She was wearing a T-shirt and shorts. The front of her T-shirt was emblazoned with a large, red Marine Corps insignia.

  "Steak," Stecker said. "See my point?"

  Ernie smiled nervously, wondering if that meant disapproval of the T-shirt.

  Banning laughed.

  "I'm not so sure all these hors d'ouevres are a good idea," Ernie said. "The steaks are enormous. Ken ran into some China Marine he knew working in the commissary."

  Stecker laughed out loud in delight, and Banning shook his head.

  Ernie smiled with relief; they did not disapprove of her shorts and T-shirt. But now that she thought about it, she did. It was a dumb idea, something she had done in hurt and anger. Her mother had called the day before, and they had gotten into it. The conversation had started out politely enough, but that hadn't lasted long. And her mother had played her ace: "I just hope you know how you're hurting your father's feelings, how it hurts h
im to have his friends seeing his daughter acting like… like nothing more than a camp follower."

  "Nice to talk to you, Mother," Ernie said. "Call again sometime next year," and then she'd hung up.

  But it had hurt, and she'd cried a little, and then she'd stopped that nonsense. But then she had been downtown, and she'd seen a half dozen real camp followers, the girls who- either professionally or otherwise-plied their trade in San Diego bars patronized by Marines. They had been wearing Marine Corps T-shirts, and Ernie had wondered if she was really like them, and then she'd decided it didn't matter whether she was or not, her mother thought she was.

  And she'd gone into a store and bought the T-shirt.

  "I'm glad that the steaks are enormous,, because so is my appetite," Banning said.

  "Good," she said, smiling.

  "Ernie, take these two with you, will you please?" Banning said. "I've got to have a quiet word with Jack Stecker."

  When McCoy and Burnes had followed Ernie off the deck, Banning nodded after them.

  "Very nice," he said.

  "The hors d'ouevres, or McCoy's lady friend?" Stecker asked.

  "Both," Banning said, "but especially her. She's all right, Jack."

  "Yes, she is," Stecker said.

  "I understand you've been greasing Evans Carlson's ways," Banning said.

  "Oh, so that's what this all about," Stecker said.

  Banning didn't reply directly.

  "See a lot of him, do you?"

  "Every other day," Stecker said.

  "I've got a couple of questions I'd like to ask," Banning said.

  "Let me save you some time, Major," Stecker said. "No, I don't think he's either crazy or a Communist."

  "Why did you say that, Jack?" Banning asked.

  "Isn't that what you wanted me to say? That he is? So they can relieve him and put these Raider battalions out of business?"

  "No," Banning said. "As a matter of fact, it's not. I have it on the highest authority-relayed from General Holcomb himself-that Carlson is none of the unpleasant things he's being accused of."