Behind the Lines

by W. E. B Griffin

  There had been no evidence of either kind of balloons, although Everly had come across the rusted remains of what could have been a winch for balloon cables.

  Everly, in his washed thin khakis, web pistol belt, and steel helmet, looked skeletal. Part of that, of course, was because they were on one-half rations, and everybody had lost a lot of weight. But Everly, who from time to time had been called “Slats,” was never heavy, never weighed more than 160 pounds.

  The machine guns were set up in bunkers made from sandbags, sand-filled fifty-five-gallon drums, and salvaged lumber. They would probably provide some protection against small-arms fire and even hand grenades, but Everly knew the guns weren’t going to get much protection from mortar fire or artillery.

  When the field telephone buzzed, Everly took it from its leather case and pressed the butterfly switch.

  “Sixteen,” he said.

  “Everly?” a voice Everly recognized as the company clerk’s asked.

  “year.”

  “The first wants you here. Now.”

  “On my way,” Everly said, and put the telephone back in its case.

  He had a good idea what the First Sergeant of Headquarters Company, 4th Marines, wanted with him. Because he spoke Spanish, he was in some demand as an interpreter if one of the officers had business on Bataan.

  Everly walked, stooping, across the bunker to where Corporal Max Schirmer, a short, no longer plump twenty-three-year-old, was sleeping on a bunk of two-by-fours and salvaged commo wire, and touched his arm.

  “You’ve got it,” Everly said when Schirmer opened his eyes. “They want me at the CP.”

  Schirmer nodded, then sat up and shook his head to clear it. When Everly was satisfied that Schirmer was really awake, he left the bunker and headed up the dirt path toward the Company Command Post.

  Everly had been a Marine for almost eight years. If the war hadn’t come along, he would have been discharged, at the conclusion of his second four-year hitch, on 25 May 1942. But a whole year before that, on 27 May 1941, when the 4th Marines were still in China, President Roosevelt had proclaimed “an unlimited state of national emergency,” one result of which had been the extension of all enlistments in The Marine Corps “for the duration of the emergency, plus six months.”

  But that had really not meant much to Everly. He liked The Marine Corps, and he could not imagine doing anything but being a Marine. If his enlistment hadn’t been extended, he would have shipped over, sewn a second four-years-service hash mark on the sleeves of his uniform, and gone on being a Marine.

  The only thing the date 25 May 1942 meant to Everly now was that—unless he did something about it, and soon, and the only thing he could think of doing was to desert—when it came around, and it was going to come around next month, he’d either be dead, or wishing he was dead.

  Everly was pretty sure in his mind about three things: (1) Bataan was about to fall; (2) “The Aid” was not coming, at least not in time to do any good; and because it wasn’t, (3) soon after Bataan fell, Fortress Corregidor was going to fall.

  Bataan was a peninsula on what Everly thought of as the bottom of Luzon Island. It sort of closed off Manila Bay.

  Fortress Corregidor was an island in Manila Bay two miles off the tip of Bataan, about thirty miles from the capital of the Philippines, Manila. Maps of Corregidor looked to Everly like the drawings Mr. Hawkings used to make of human sperm on the blackboard at Zanesville High School during what was called “Masculine Hygiene.”

  Everly graduated from Zanesville High School on 22 May 1934, went into The Corps two days later, and had not been back to Zanesville, or even to West Virginia, since. His father, a coal miner, died when Everly was fourteen, and his mother two years later. Since no relatives were either able or willing to take him in, the State boarded him out for two years with a “foster family.” Both the State and his “foster mother” took pains to make sure he understood he would be on his own the minute he was eighteen.

  He went to the post office in Wheeling one day in the first weeks of his senior year, intending to Join The Navy and See The World, as the recruiting posters offered. But the Navy wouldn’t have him, for reasons he no longer remembered, nor would the Army. But the Marine recruiter said he would accept his application, send it in, and see what happened.

  A month later, there was a letter with a bus ticket and meal vouchers. He went back to Wheeling and took a physical examination and filled out some more forms; and two weeks after that, there was another letter, this one from Headquarters, U.S. Marine Corps in Washington, D.C., telling him he had been accepted for enlistment, and that since he was a minor, he would have to have his parents’ permission to enlist, form enclosed, signature to be notarized.

  He got his “foster father” to sign it and mailed it off. But it came back saying that since Everly was a Ward Of The State Of West Virginia, it would have to be signed by the Responsible Official. That turned out to be the Judge of Probate. The Judge signed the form and told him he thought he was doing the smart thing, shook his hand, and wished him good luck.

  Everly left Zanesville the morning after the day he graduated, took the bus to Washington, D.C., was given another physical at the Washington Navy Yard, and was sworn into The Corps that afternoon.

  He went through boot camp, and then they loaded him aboard the USS Chaumont and sent him to the Marine Barracks, U.S. Navy Base Cavite, outside Manila. That was good duty. The Corps put him to work in the motor pool, where he was supposed to be supervising the Filipino mechanics. But since the Filipinos knew a hell of a lot more about automobile mechanics than he did, what really happened was that they taught him, rather than the other way around.

  He also got himself a girl, a short, sort of plump, dark-skinned seventeen-year-old named Estellita, which meant “Little Star” or something like that. Estellita had been raised as a Catholic. Every week she went to confession, because what they were doing—not being married—was a sin, and then to Mass, and then came home and got in bed with him again.

  Everly was very careful not to get her in the family way. He had only been an orphan two years before coming into The Corps, but that had been enough to convince him that making a baby that was going to be an orphan because you weren’t going to marry the mother would be a lousy thing to do to anybody.

  Between Estellita and the little brown brothers in the motor pool, it wasn’t long before he was speaking pretty good Spanish. And then he got promoted to private first class, and he considered that things were better for him in The Corps and in the Philippines than they had ever been so far in his life.

  Then he got in a fight in the Good Times bar with a sergeant from the Marine Detachment on the battleship USS Pennsylvania when she came into Cavite. The sonofabitch was a mean drunk. And when Everly knocked him on his ass the first time he put his hand on Estellita’s breast and wouldn’t stop, he came back at Everly with a knife, one of those kind that flick open when you press a button. And when the fight was over, both of them were cut, and the sergeant had a broken nose and a busted-up hand, where Everly had stomped on it.

  Everly knew the fight wasn’t his fault, but he also knew that he was a PFC, and the mean sonofabitch was a sergeant. When they put him before a General Court-martial charged with attempted murder and assault with a deadly weapon upon the person of a superior noncommissioned officer, Everly decided that the other shoe had dropped, the good times were over, and he was going to spend the next ten or fifteen years in the Portsmouth Naval Prison.

  But that didn’t happen either. They had the court-martial. And he stood up at attention and heard the senior officer, a lieutenant colonel, say that the court, in closed session, two-thirds of its members concurring, had found him not guilty of all the charges and all the specifications.

  The next day the Commanding Officer of Marine Barracks, Cavite, called him in and told him that it was his experience in circumstances like this that it was best for everybody if the accused found not guilty was tra
nsferred. Then he went on and said Everly could have his choice. He could be reassigned to someplace like San Diego, in the States, or aboard a ship, or—and this is what he would recommend—to the 4th Marines in Shanghai.

  So three weeks later, Everly went aboard the USS Chaumont when she called at Cavite and rode her to Shanghai, China, where he was assigned to Headquarters Company, 4th Marines, and detailed to the motor pool.

  Within a couple of weeks, he could see that being a China Marine was going to be even better duty than Cavite. Not only that, nobody seemed to know about what he did to that mean drunk sonofabitch off the Pennsylvania, and about the court-martial. He was sure that Sergeant Zimmerman, who ran the motor pool, didn’t know anything about it. And while it seemed likely that somebody—maybe his first sergeant, or his company commander, or maybe even the regimental commander—knew about it, nobody was holding it against him. He really had come here with a clean slate. That made him feel pretty good again about The Corps, and being in The Corps.

  He turned twenty-one in Shanghai and signed the papers extending his “until reaching his legal majority or unless sooner discharged” enlistment for a four-year hitch. And then, in May 1938, he shipped over for another four years.

  At the time, he thought that with a little bit of luck, he might make corporal during his second hitch. He got himself a Chinese woman, Soo Ling, and she took care of him and taught him to speak some Chinese, enough to say what he wanted to say, and to understand most of everything that was said to him. She even taught him to read and make some of the ideographs, and he took care not to get her in the family way.

  And things started to get even better, too. He sometimes thought it was a good thing that mean drunk sonofabitch had come after him with a knife. If he hadn’t, he’d still be in the Cavite motor pool.

  Just about as soon as he arrived in Shanghai, he was assigned as an assistant truck driver on the regular supply convoys from Shanghai to Peking, where there was a detachment of Marines.

  There was at least one supply convoy a month, coinciding with the calling at Shanghai of the USS Chaumont or the USS Henderson, the Navy transports that endlessly circled the Pacific, bringing replacements and supplies and taking people home. Sometimes there was more than one truck convoy a month, when freight arrived in Shanghai by Navy or civilian freighter.

  There was a driver and an assistant driver, both to share the driving and to leave a spare driver in case somebody got sick.

  And Sergeant Zimmerman drove a wrecker along. Even so, if for some reason a truck had to be left by the side of the road—even for a couple of hours, because there was no one to drive it and the wrecker already had a truck in tow—by the time they could get a driver to it, there would be nothing left but the frame, and maybe not even that. China was like that.

  They drove first to Peking and then to Tientsin, another seaport, where there was a detachment of the 4th Marines, usually stopping over there for two days, and then back to Peking, and then back to Shanghai. Some of the drivers hated getting the duty, because it took them away from the good life in Shanghai. But some liked it, because it was a change of scenery, or women, or both.

  Usually Everly was pleased when his name came up on the roster, because it meant a change of scenery. Not women. If something came up, he wasn’t going to kick it out of bed, but he thought there was not much point in chasing strange females; you never knew what you might catch, and it was expensive. He was by nature, or perhaps by training, frugal. He had no money in his pockets from the time he became a Ward Of The State until he got his first pay as a Marine; and that left a painful memory.

  There was always an officer in charge of the convoys, changing from convoy to convoy, because that was the way things were in The Corps; when there were supplies involved, you had to have an officer in charge. But the officers were ordinarily wise enough to just ride along, leaving the actual running of the convoy to Sergeant Zimmerman,

  Zimmerman, who was short, stocky, and phlegmatic, had been in China for six years. He had a Chinese woman, who had borne him three children, and he fully intended to spend the rest of his time in The Corps in China, then retire there and open a bar or something.

  Zimmerman was competent and he was fair, and Everly figured him out—and how to deal with him—pretty quick: Zimmerman did what he was told without question and to the best of his ability, and he expected people who worked for him to do the same thing. When Sergeant Zimmerman told PFC Everly to do something, Everly did it, promptly, and to the best of his ability. They got along. On the convoys, they came to spend time together, since neither was interested in chasing women, gambling, or getting shitfaced.

  In the spring of 1941, things changed.

  A new face appeared when the drivers and assistant drivers were gathered together for a convoy to Peking and Tientsin. Corporal Kenneth R. McCoy. Everly knew him only by sight and reputation. McCoy had quite a reputation.

  PFC McCoy had become notorious, and in circumstances not unlike Everly’s trouble with the mean drunk sonofabitch off the Pennsylvania. In McCoy’s case, it was Italian Marines, four of them, who ganged up on him one night when he was on his way back to the barracks.

  Killing a couple of Italian Marines was a bigger deal than cutting and stomping on the hand of a Marine sergeant. And when Everly heard they were going to court-martial McCoy, he thought McCoy was almost surely going where he had almost gone, to the Portsmouth Naval Prison.

  It wasn’t a question of guilt or innocence, Everly reasoned, but rather what was more important: China Marine PFCs were expendable. When one caused trouble—and creating a diplomatic incident was far worse than getting in a knife fight with a sergeant—they got rid of him as quickly as possible.

  But that didn’t happen. McCoy beat the court-martial. And the next thing you knew, he was promoted to corporal and transferred out of “D” Company to work in Regimental Headquarters. McCoy had just completed his first hitch in The Corps, and people just didn’t get themselves promoted to corporal after just completing their first hitch.

  The scuttlebutt went around that McCoy was really working for Captain Edward Banning, the 4th Marines’ S-2 Officer, in Intelligence. The scuttlebutt was that McCoy had been in Intelligence all along.

  Making sure that it didn’t look like he was putting his nose in where it didn’t belong, Everly watched McCoy pretty carefully on that first run to Peking. He noticed a couple of things. For one thing, McCoy not only spoke Chinese like a Chinaman, but had a couple of Japanese military manuals in his rucksack that he obviously could read.

  By the time they made three convoy trips to Peking, it was pretty clear to Everly that the officers in charge had gotten the word to do what Sergeant Zimmerman said to do, and that Zimmerman was getting that word from Corporal McCoy.

  It was also pretty clear that what McCoy was doing on the convoys was running around spying on the Japanese, identifying units, getting their strength, seeing what kind of weapons they had, and, by spending a lot of time in whore-houses, picking up from the Chinese whores what they had heard from their Japanese customers.

  And then, after one trip to Peking, right after they got back to Shanghai, Sergeant Zimmerman and Corporal McCoy disappeared. The scuttlebutt was that they got shipped home, but nobody knew for sure what had happened.

  And then, the week after they disappeared, Captain Banning sent for Everly and told him McCoy and Zimmerman had been ordered home. He also told him what McCoy had been doing for him, and that both McCoy and Zimmerman had spoken highly of him. Then he asked him if he would be interested in volunteering to do the same thing.

  So Everly volunteered, guessing correctly that Banning was going to give him a lot more expense money than he was going to have to spend, and that it was a good way to make corporal ahead of time. And for a couple of months, he did just that; he made corporal, and managed to put aside nearly a thousand dollars in expense money.

  That business had ended when the decision was made to get th
e 4th Marines and the Navy’s Yangtze River Patrol out of China. Captain Banning was assigned to the Advance Party and flown out of Shanghai to the Philippines; and Everly was sent back to the motor pool.

  Just before he left, Captain Banning married his Russian girlfriend, which raised him even higher in Everly’s opinion. When things got a little tough, a lot of Americans, officers and enlisted and civilians, had just cut their girlfriends—Chinese and Russian—loose to make out as best they could by themselves. Everly couldn’t leave Soo Ling to fend for herself, so he gave her all the money he had saved up since he was in China, and the money he’d made working for Banning. Then he told her to check on Mrs. Banning when the Japs came, and if she needed help, to do what she could for her and then go home.

  He didn’t know what happened to Soo Ling or Captain Banning’s wife, either; but he did know what happened to Captain Banning, once he got to the Philippines. Just about as soon as the Marines came under fire, he was too close to an incoming round, and the concussion blinded him, and he wasn’t even able to fight.

  For a while he was in the hospital, first on Luzon, then here in the Corregidor Hospital tunnel; and then they sent him and some other blind guys out on a submarine.

  And Percy Lewis Everly was promoted to sergeant and given the two-gun .30 caliber water-cooled Browning machine-gun section at Kindley Field.

  Where, he was convinced, one of several things was going to happen: Once Bataan fell, and the Japanese could bring their artillery to bear on the island, he was going to get killed by Japanese artillery. Or, in the unlikely event that didn’t happen, he was going to get killed when the Japanese landed on Corregidor. Or, if he didn’t get killed by Japanese artillery, or by Japanese Marine infantry when they landed on Corregidor, he was going to wind up a Japanese prisoner.