Counterattack

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Sergeant,” he said, “if anyone was to hear what I am about to say, I would deny it.”

  “Sir?” Howard asked, confused.

  “There are ways to handle difficult situations,” Commander Nettleton said. “But destroying your records is not one of them. Now, what did you have, and when did you have it?”

  “Sir, if you mean syphilis or the clap, I never did.”

  Nettleton fixed Howard with an icy glare.

  You dumb sonofabitch, I just told you I’d fix it!

  “Never?”

  “No, Sir,” Howard replied, both confused and righteously indignant.

  I’ll be damned, I think he’s telling the truth!

  “Then how do you explain the absence of the results of your Wassermann test in this otherwise complete stack of reports?”

  Staff Sergeant Howard did not reply.

  “Well?”

  “Sir, I don’t know what—what did you say, Wasser Test?—is.”

  “Wassermann,” Doctor Nettleton corrected him idly. “It’s an integral part of your physical.”

  “Sir, I don’t know. I went everywhere they sent me.”

  Commander Nettleton looked at him intently, and decided he didn’t really know if he was looking at Innocence Personified or a skilled liar.

  He reached for the telephone, found the number he was looking for on a typewritten sheet of paper under the glass on his desk, and dialed it quickly.

  “Venereal, Lieutenant Gower.”

  “This is Commander Nettleton, Gower. How are you?”

  “No complaints, Sir. How about you?”

  “You don’t want to hear them, Lieutenant. I need a favor. How are you fixed for favors?”

  “If I’ve got it, Commander, you’ve got it.”

  “You got somebody around there who can draw blood for a Wassermann for me? And then do it in a hurry?”

  “Yes, Sir. I’ll take it to the lab myself. They owe me a couple of favors up there.”

  “It has to be official. I need the form and an MD to sign off on it.”

  “No problem.”

  “I’m sending a Staff Sergeant Howard to see you. Make him wait. If it comes back negative, send him and the report back to me. If it’s positive, put him in a bathrobe and find something unpleasant for him to do. Call me and I’ll see that he’s admitted.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir,” Lieutenant Gower said.

  “Appreciate it, Gower,” Commander Nettleton said, hung up, and turned to Staff Sergeant Howard. “You heard that, Sergeant. The Venereal Disease Ward is on the third floor. Report to Lieutenant Gower.”

  “Aye, aye, Sir,” Staff Sergeant Howard said.

  Like Commander Nettleton, Lieutenant Gower was a career naval officer, with nearly as much commissioned service as he had. She had entered the Naval Service immediately upon graduation from Nursing School, and, in the fourteen years since, had served at naval hospitals in Philadelphia; Cavite (in the Philippines); Pearl Harbor; and San Diego. She had just learned that she was to be promoted to lieutenant commander, Nurse Corps, USN.

  While on the one hand Lieutenant Hazel Gower did not consider herself above the mundane routine of the VD ward, of which she was Nurse-in-Charge, on the other hand, Rank Did Have Its Privileges.

  She rapped on the plate-glass window surrounding the Nurses’ Station with her Saint Anthony’s High School graduation ring, and caught the attention of Ensign Barbara T. Cotter, NC, USNR. Ensign Cotter had just reported aboard, fresh from the Nurses’ Orientation Course at Philadelphia.

  Lieutenant Gower gestured to Ensign Cotter to come into the nurses’ station.

  “Yes?” Ensign Cotter asked.

  “The way we do that in the Navy, Miss Cotter,” Lieutenant Gower said, “is ‘Yes, Ma’am?’”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Ensign Cotter said, her face tightening.

  “This is not the University of Pennsylvania, you know.”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Ensign Cotter said, just a little bitchily.

  That remark made reference to Ensign Cotter’s nursing education. Ensign Cotter, unlike most of her peers, had a college degree. She had graduated with a bachelor of science degree in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, and had earned, from the same institution, the right to append “RN” to her name. She’d been trained as a psychiatric nurse. And she had been lied to by the recruiter, who told her the Navy really had need of her special skills. In fact, the Navy used medical doctors with psychiatric training and large male medical corpsmen to deal with its mentally ill.

  When Ensign Cotter reported aboard Naval Hospital, San Diego, the Chief of Nursing Services told her that since they had no need for a female psychiatric nurse, she wondered how she would feel about working in obstetrics. An unpleasant scene followed, during which it was pointed out to Ensign Cotter that she was now in the Navy, and that the Navy decided where its people could make the greatest contribution. Following that, Lieutenant Gower in Venereal received a telephone call from the Chief of Nursing Services, a longtime friend, telling her she was getting a new ensign who was an uppity little bitch who thought her college degree made her better than other people. The little bitch needed to be put in her place.

  “There’s a syphilitic Marine sergeant on his way up here,” Lieutenant Gower said to Ensign Cotter. “Draw some blood for a Wassermann.”

  “He’s not on the ward?”

  “I’m getting tired of telling you this, Cotter. When you speak to a superior female officer, you use ‘ma’am.’”

  Ensign Cotter exhaled audibly.

  “He’s not on the ward, Ma’am?”

  “No.”

  “Then how, Ma’am, do we know he’s syphilitic?”

  “The Wassermann will tell us that, won’t it, Miss Cotter?”

  “Only if he is syphilitic, Ma’am,” Ensign Cotter said.

  “Commander Nettleton wouldn’t have sent him up here unless he was,” Lieutenant Gower flared. And then she remembered that Nettleton had said to send the sergeant back if the Wassermann was negative. She was going to look like a horse’s ass in front of this uppity little bitch if it did come back negative.

  “Just do what you’re ordered to do, Miss Cotter,” she said icily.

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  Barbara Cotter saw Staff Sergeant Joseph L. Howard the moment she walked out of the glass-walled nurses’ station, and she reacted to him precisely the same way most other men and women did when they first saw him. God, that fellow looks like what a Marine should look like!

  “Excuse me, Ma’am,” Joe Howard said, “I’m looking for Lieutenant Gower.”

  “You’re here for a Wassermann, Sergeant?” Barbara asked, telling herself that she had sounded professionally distant.

  This beautiful man has syphilis?

  “Yes, Ma’am. I was told to report to Lieutenant Gower.”

  “I’ll take care of you, Sergeant. Come with me, please.”

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  She led him to an examination room.

  “Take off your jacket, please, and roll up your shirt sleeve.”

  When he took his uniform jacket off, Barbara saw that his shirt was tailored; it fit his body like a thin glove, which allowed her to clearly make out the firm muscles of his chest and upper arms inside it.

  What’s going on with me? He’s not only an enlisted man—and there is a regulation against involvement between officers and enlisted men—but he’s syphilitic!

  She wrapped a length of red rubber tubing around his upper arm, drew it tight, and told him to pump his hand open and closed. He winced when she slipped the needle into his vein.

  “Have you had any symptoms?” she heard herself asking, as his blood began to fill the chamber.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Lesions…sores? Anything like that.”

  “No, Ma’am.”

  “Then what makes you think you’ve contracted…?”

  “I don’t think I’ve contracted anyth
ing,” Joe Howard said, unable to take his eyes from Ensign Cotter’s white brassiere, which had come into view when she had leaned over his arm to stick him with the needle.

  “Then why are we giving you a Wassermann?” Barbara blurted, looking up at him and noticing that he quickly averted his eyes. God, he’s been looking down my dress! “You know what a Wassermann is for, don’t you?”

  “For syphilis,” he said. “I just figured that out.”

  “Why has somebody ordered the test?” she asked. “If you don’t think you’ve—”

  “They put me in for a commission,” Joe said. “Some asshole—oh, shit! Sorry, Ma’am.”

  He’s going to be an officer? Is that what he means?

  “Some asshole what, Sergeant?” Barbara said.

  “Somebody forgot to send me for the test,” Joe said. “And now that Commander…he thinks I’ve got it.”

  “And you don’t?”

  “I know I don’t,” Joe said.

  Barbara pulled the needle from his vein, dabbed at the puncture with an alcohol swab, and told him to bend his arm.

  “Well, we’ll soon know for sure, won’t we?” she said.

  It will come back negative, she thought. I know it will come back negative. Up yours, Lieutenant Gower, Ma’am!

  (Six)

  Officers’ Sales Store

  U.S. Naval Base

  San Diego, California

  1100 Hours 3 February 1942

  To Joe Howard, the Officers’ Sales Store looked like a cross between a supply room and a civilian clothing store. There were glass-topped counters, and shelves loaded with shirts and skivvies, and racks containing jackets and trousers. There were even mannequins showing what the well-dressed Naval or Marine Corps officer should wear. Even two mannequins of Navy nurses, one wearing blues and the other summer whites.

  He had a semi-erotic thought: Here there were no female mannequins in underwear, as there were in civilian department stores. That was just as well; those always made him feel a little uncomfortable. It didn’t take him long to guess why that thought popped into his mind: the nurse at the hospital yesterday. It would be a long time before the image of her brassiere and the soft, swelling flesh above it faded from his mind.

  Jesus, she was a looker!

  “Can I help you, Sergeant?”

  It was a plump and middle-aged Storekeeper First Class, obviously the man in charge. He looked ridiculous in his bell-bottomed pants and blouse, Joe thought. The Navy’s enlisted men’s uniform was worn by everybody but chief petty officers. It didn’t look bad on young guys. But on middle-aged guys like this one, with a paunch and damned little hair, it looked silly.

  “I need some uniforms,” Joe said, and handed the Storekeeper First a copy of his brand-new orders.

  Paragraph One said that Staff Sergeant Joseph L. Howard, USMC, was honorably discharged from the Naval Service for the convenience of the government.

  Paragraph Two said that First Lieutenant Joseph L. Howard, USMCR, was ordered to active duty, for the duration of the war plus six months, with duty station 2nd Joint Training Command, San Diego, Cal.

  “Well, you came to the right place,” the Storekeeper First said. “It’s going to cost you.”

  “I figured,” Joe said.

  He had a lot of money in his pocket, so it didn’t matter. They had brought his pay up to date for his discharge. And they had returned to him the savings money they had been taking out of his pay every month; the government had been paying him three percent on it. He had been saving money since he’d come in the Corps, redepositing it when he shipped over. Now it had all been returned to him. Officers were expected to manage their own money, not have their hands held by the Corps to encourage them to put a little aside.

  There was even more. He had been paid for his unused accrued leave, and for what it would have cost him to go to his Home of Record. And Captain Stecker had told him that when he drew his first pay as an officer, he would be paid for what it took to come from Birmingham out here. And finally, there was a one-time payment of three hundred dollars for uniforms.

  The Storekeeper First was far more helpful than Joe had expected him to be. And in a remarkably short time, one of the glass counters was stacked high with the uniforms Joe would need as an officer.

  The three-hundred-dollar uniform allowance didn’t come close to covering the cost of the uniforms. The officer’s brimmed cap alone, for example, with just one cover—and he needed four more covers—came to $19.65. The covers were expensive, because Marine officers’ covers—unlike Army and Navy officers’ covers—had woven loops sewn to their tops. These were now purely decorative, but they went back to the days of sailing ships, Joe remembered hearing somewhere. Marine sharpshooters in the rigging could distinguish their officers on deck below because of woven line loops sewn on top of their caps.

  Aside from the Sam Browne leather belt ($24.35), there wasn’t much outward difference between officers’ and enlisted men’s greens. Officers’ trousers had hip pockets, and enlisted men’s trousers did not. The quality of the material was better.

  The only alteration Joe required was the hemming of the trousers. The chubby little Storekeeper First said he would have a seamstress hem one pair immediately, and Joe could pick up the rest the next afternoon. Joe suspected he was getting a little better service than most people. The Storekeeper First was probably one of the enlisted men who was pleased when a peer became an officer. A lot of people resented Mustangs.

  When the Storekeeper First helped Joe into his blouse, expertly buttoning the epaulet over the crosspiece of the Sam Browne belt, the reason why he was being so obliging came out.

  “I can offer you a little something for your enlisted stuff,” he said. “Not much, because it’s nowhere near new, but as much as you’d get hocking it off the base.”

  Joe had not considered getting rid of his old uniforms; still, all of them were in a duffel bag in the trunk of Captain Stecker’s Ford, which he had borrowed.

  “Make me an offer,” he said. “I’ve got a duffel bag full.”

  “Here?”

  “Outside. In the trunk of a car.”

  “Let’s go look at it, maybe we can do a little business.”

  “I’m not sure I’m allowed to wear this yet,” Joe said, staring at the image of First Lieutenant Joseph Howard, USMCR, in a three-way mirror. He found what he saw very pleasing—yet unreal enough to make him feel uncomfortable.

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t get sworn in until half past two.”

  “You’re supposed to get sworn in in uniform,” the Storekeeper First said, “Officer’s uniform. Nobody’s going to say anything.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “You aren’t the first Mustang to come through here.”

  “OK,” Joe said. “When they throw me in the brig, I can quote you, right?”

  “Absolutely,” the Storekeeper First said. “Pay for this, and then we’ll go see what you’ve got in the car.”

  The price the Storekeeper First offered for all of Joe’s enlisted men’s uniforms was insulting. He was being raped, but he could think of nothing to do about it. He could, of course, tell him to go fuck himself, in which case when he returned to The Officers’ Sales Store for the rest of his new uniforms tomorrow, they wouldn’t be ready. Or worse.

  He managed to get the total price up to $52.50, but beyond that the Storekeeper First not only wouldn’t budge, he showed signs of getting nasty.

  “Sold to the man in the bell-bottom pants,” Joe said, forcing a smile.

  “A pleasure doing business with you, Lieutenant,” the Storekeeper First said as he hoisted Joe’s duffel bag onto his shoulder.

  “Don’t forget my fifty-two-fifty,” Joe said.

  “I’ll have it for you tomorrow.”

  “You can have the stuff tomorrow, then,” Joe said.

  “You don’t trust me?”

  “Not as far as I could throw you,” Joe said. “I sho
w up there tomorrow and you’re not there, then what would I do?”

  The Storekeeper First heaved the duffel bag back into the trunk, and then shrugged. He dipped his hand behind the thirteen-button fly of his bell-bottoms and came out with two twenties and a ten.

  “That’s all I got,” he said. “I’ll have to owe you the two-fifty.”

  “Either look in your sock or somewhere, or put two of the wool shirts back.”

  The Storekeeper First looked carefully at Howard, then shrugged and dipped into his thirteen-button fly again. He came out with a wad of singles and counted off three of them. Joe put them in his pocket and gave the man two quarters in change. They exchanged dry little smiles, and the Storekeeper First, grunting, hoisted the duffel bag to his shoulder again and marched off.

  That fat old sonofabitch has got a nice little racket going, he thought. He paid me less than half of what that stuff is worth in any hockshop. And there’s probably one or two guys like me going through there every day. Christ, not only Marines! The Navy must be commissioning Mustangs too.

  “I’ll be a sonofabitch,” he said aloud, more out of admiration than anger, as he considered that the Storekeeper First must be taking in probably as much as a hundred fifty dollars a day.

  “I’m almost afraid to ask what all that was about,” a voice, a female voice, said behind him. Surprised, he turned quickly to see who it was. It was an officer, a female officer, a Navy nurse, and specifically the one who had drawn his blood for the Wassermann test the day before.

  Joe saluted crisply, without thinking about it, a Pavlovian reflex: an officer had spoken to him; therefore he saluted.

  “I think I was supposed to do that,” the nurse said. She was carrying a paper sack from the Commissary.

  “Excuse me?” Joe said.

  “Those are silver bars you’re wearing? Mine, you’ll notice, are gold. I think I was supposed to salute first.”