Ian Slater - WW III

“Whose ass?” someone put in.

For the first time the DI did not bawl out at the goofing off. It was as close as a DI would come to showing affection. “Thel-man, zero three zero zero — MAGTAF.” The DI ticked him off the list. “Do I train ‘em or what?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Webster, one eight zero zero. Engineers — means you might be fixing toilets.”

There was silence, the DI’s clipboard in front now that he’d finished reading off the whole platoon. “All right now, here’s the score. You made it through boot camp. You’re marines. Don’t ever forget it. Wherever you go, you’ll be marines. Marines don’t give ground — they take it. I’m not gonna shit you— right now the gooks and the Russians have got us by the balls, our backs to the sea. I don’t know whether you’ll be going in, but you’re all going to end up in it somewhere. Korea or Europe—’less some dumb bastard pushes the button, which so far hasn’t been the case and which I personally don’t think they will — anyway, not so long as they haven’t blown their wad in conventional arms and got nothing left to throw at us. But wherever you go, you’ve got one big thing in your favor. You believe in what you’re fighting for. When they get tough, and they will, your belief in your country, in the Corps, is an extra shot up the spout. Good luck, God bless.”

On the final night, after the graduation, packing his kit for Camp Lejeune, David Brentwood was feeling down. Thelman’s stepmother had attended the graduation parade, but neither of David’s parents could make it. There’d been multiple bomb scares at JFK and La Guardia, and by the time the passing review rolled around, John and Catherine Brentwood were still on the ground in New York. It was one of the great disappointments of David’s life. He was quite surprised at how disappointing. No mail from Melissa either, but then, mail right across the country seemed to be in a shambles these days — more bomb threats and one big explosion in Chicago’s central post office, killing three inside workers and scores of others. They’d said it was sabotage. As David took Melissa’s photo down from the “hog” board in the barracks room and Thelman took down his girl, he asked Brentwood whether he believed all that crap the DI had said “ ‘bout us having an extra shot in the spout. I figure the Russians tell their guys the same thing.”

“Probably,” said David.

“Yeah, well,” said Thelman, “any Russian gets on my two hundred line, I’ll blow his head off.”

David said nothing. He was still thinking about his parents not being there to see him graduate. He knew it wasn’t their fault and they’d had a bad time of it just trying to cope with Ray, his Mom wanting to go over to California every time he had an operation. It became too expensive, and anyway, she’d promised Ray she wouldn’t come see him until he felt ready. Truth was, Ray was getting on David’s nerves a bit.

David didn’t want to admit it, but damn it, the only praise he’d received from anyone in the past ten weeks was during the days when the platoon had gone out for qualification to try for the requisite 190 out of 250 on the firing range. It was the one time when the DI stood back and a coach was assigned to every two recruits. Some were more sarcastic than the DIs, and a few, like the one that David and Devane got, Sergeant Osborne, really cared about the young recruits under them.

Osborne spoke quietly, and rather than push them, he led them into doing a good job. He even spent time with them on the Smith & Wesson.45 side arm practice, usually dismissed as “fun” or “fuckin’ useless for marines” except, the DI said, “if you let a fucking Gorby get that close to you — then you don’t deserve a side arm. Use your hands. Stiff arm with the left and grab the private’s privates.” But in an age besotted by automatic wonders, Osborne’s approach imbued them with a respect for the old-fashioned.45 side arm. He himself approached the weapon with the respect of a novice taking his first communion.

“Can be used for good or evil, boys,” he said. “No matter what the damned liberals say, Commies can come and take you away in the middle of the night. In this country you have to have a warrant. That’s a big difference. That’s a difference worth dying for.” What made him give them that little speech, neither Brentwood nor Devane had any idea — maybe he’d overheard Thelman’s cynicism on the night of the full moon. He was a little odd, they said, but whatever, he did teach them how to fire the.45: breathe in, hold, “No, no, son… squeeze, don’t jerk it. I’ve seen guys qualified with the M-16 couldn’t hit a DI’s butt with a.45 jammed up him. Way I figure it, there’s gonna be a lot of use for these little babies. You take good care of ‘em, hear?”

David had worked hard for Osborne because the man not only genuinely cared about what he was doing but reveled in their success. “Way to go, Private,” he called out to Brentwood when he made qualification with the.45. “Out fucking standing!”

As the 747 banked in preparation for landing at Camp Lejeune, both marines proudly wearing their marksman’s badges on their tunics, Thelman was thinking about Osborne and his love affair with the.45. “Why we going to need pistols?”

“I don’t know,” said Brentwood, looking down at the brownish-green scrub that was the training area for the marine air-ground task force. “But I’ve got a feeling we’re going to find out real soon. Lejeune’s pretty tough. Probably give us a can of beans, one mag each for the.45, and see how we do.”

“One can of beans?” laughed Thelman. “Man, I’m way ahead of you on this one. They don’t give you nothin’ in this outfit, is what I hear. They send you out and you have to live off the land for five days.”

“What the hell’s the use of that?” asked Brentwood. “We aren’t supposed to be runnin’ from anybody. Marines take, ground. Right?”

“It’s called tactical retreat. They drop you in a zone. Before your supplies are unloaded from the chopper, it’s all blown to hell. Then you gotta make do — live off the land till they can send a whirlybird in for you.”

As the 747 descended, they could see marines taking off in harness from the parachute towers, small khaki figures beneath them shaking their fists and seeming to be in apoplexy. DIs.

“Jesus,” said Brentwood, “I should have gone for deferment. Latrines.”

“Nah,” said Thelman. “You’re a mover, Stumble-ass. First time I saw you crash that bus step, I said to myself, ‘Now, there’s a mover.’ “

“Shut your face.”

NKA’s fourth divisional HQ was now situated in the shell-pocked Catholic church in what had been the bustling city of Uijongbu. The smell of the American and South Korean rout was heavy in the rain-slashed air, hulks of three-ton trucks and tanks still burning, but barely, as if even the fires were exhausted. Fresh motorized columns of NKA troops, stony-eyed but flushed with victory, wove through the wreckage of the U.S. Eleventh Corps’s fighting retreat. The bodies of American and South Korean soldiers lay strewn about beneath the gunmetal monsoon sky. The heavy cloud cover was continuing to make it difficult, despite infrared look-down/shoot-down scopes, for the few American pilots flying out of Pusan’s sabotaged and pot-holed airstrips to distinguish friend from foe beneath them— especially given the NKA’s cannibalization of U.S. trucks and jeeps.

From his crowded cell in the partially destroyed school opposite the church, Major Tae could see over fifty M-60 Pattons that had been knocked out by wire-guided tank missiles, the wires now strewn across the roadways like so many abandoned fishing lines.