Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

A Zero buzzed low over the two of them. The pilot could have shot them up if he wanted to, either because he thought they had something to do with the torpedoed freighters or simply for the hell of it. But he didn’t. He just kept going. Oscar breathed a sigh of relief. He and Charlie kept going, too, though much more slowly, on toward Honolulu.

PLATOON SERGEANT LESTER DILLON looked around with a distinctly jaundiced eye. “Well, here I am at this goddamn Camp Pendleton place, and I didn’t make gunny to get here,” he said.

Dutch Wenzel nodded gloomily. “Me, too, and I got the same beef. You know what happened, Les? We got screwed, and we didn’t even get kissed.”

“Damn straight we didn’t,” Dillon said. “ ’Course, the whole Navy got screwed. Wasn’t just us.”

A second look around the enormous new Marine base did little to improve it in his eyes. Camp Elliott had been crowded as a sack full of cats, no doubt about it. But Camp Elliott had been right down in San Diego, not far from the ballpark, not far from the movie theaters, not far from the ginmills, not far from the whorehouses. Once you got off the base, you could have yourself a good time.

“What are we going to do for fun around here?” Les asked mournfully.

“Beats me,” Dutch said. “Got a butt on you? I’m out of White Owls.”

“Sure.” Dillon handed him the pack, then stuck a Camel in his own mouth. Tobacco smoke soothed, but not enough. The powers that be had carved Camp Pendleton out of the northwesternmost part of San Diego County. Another name for what they’d carved it out of was the middle of nowhere. San Clemente lay a little way up the coast, Oceanside a little way down the coast. Neither could have held more than a couple of thousand people; both were towns where they rolled up the sidewalks at six o’ clock. After blowing a sorrowful smoke ring, Dillon asked, “How many divisions of Marines they gonna put in here?”

“Who you think I am, FDR?” Dutch said. “They don’t tell me shit like that any more’n they tell you.” Having established his lack of credentials, he got down to seriously guessing: “Sure looks like it’s big enough for three easy, don’t it?”

Les nodded. “About what I was thinking.” He tried to imagine somewhere between forty and fifty thousand horny young men with greenbacks burning a hole in their pocket descending on San Clemente and Oceanside. The picture refused to form. There was a limerick about a little green lizard that bust. That was what would happen to those quiet seaside towns. He laughed, not that the locals would think it was funny. “The Japs invaded Hawaii, and now we’ve invaded California.”

“Heh,” Wenzel said. “Well, if the guys who grow flowers and the little old ladies with the blue hair don’t like us, tough beans. Let ’em go clean out those slanty-eyed bastards by themselves.”

A flying boat sailed past, out over the Pacific. Les Dillon took a long look to make sure it was an American flying boat. The Japs had paid the West Coast a few unwelcome calls. But he recognized the silhouette. Nothing to get excited about… this time.

“This whole campaign is a bastard,” he said, grinding out his cigarette under the heel of his boot.

“How come? Just ’cause we’ve gotta go a couple thousand miles before we can get hold of Hirohito’s finest?” Dutch said.

“Good start,” Les agreed. “But even getting there isn’t enough. We’ve got to find some kind of way to beat down their air power. Otherwise, we’re screwed again. We can’t even land if we don’t-or I wouldn’t want to try it if they’ve got planes and we don’t.”

“Fuck, neither would I,” Wenzel agreed. “That’d be a mess, wouldn’t it? They’d make waddayacallit-sukiyaki-out of us.”

“Yeah.” Dillon watched a car roll south down Pacific Coast Highway. Idly, he wondered who had the clout to get gasoline. The highway was pretty quiet these days. He looked past it to the beach and the ocean. “How many times you figure we’re gonna invade this goddamn place?”

“Till we get it right,” his buddy answered, which drew a grunt and a laugh and a nod from Dillon. Wenzel added, “Thing is, when we do it for real, we only get the one chance.”

That wasn’t strictly true. If a U.S. landing on Oahu failed, the Americans could always lick their wounds and try again. The country could, yeah. But the Marines who got ashore in that failed effort would never try anything again afterwards. Les didn’t want to think such gloomy thoughts. To keep from thinking them, he said, “Let’s go over to the NCOs’ club and have a beer.”

“Twist my arm.” Dutch Wenzel held it out. Les gave it a yank. Dutch writhed in wrestling-ring agony.

“Son of a bitch-you talked me into it.”

All the buildings here had the sharp-edged look of brand new construction. Most of them still had the fresh, almost foresty smell of wood newly exposed to the air, too. Not the NCOs’ club, not any more. It smelled the way it was supposed to: of beer and whiskey and sweat and, mostly, of tobacco. Cigarette smoke predominated, but pipes and cigars had their places, too. The blue haze in the air was also comforting and infinitely familiar.

Noncoms sat at the bar and at tables and talked about the things that had been on noncoms’ minds since the days of Julius Caesar, if not since those of Sennacherib: how their families were doing, where they were going next and how tough it was likely to be, what idiots the brass were (those last two not entirely unrelated), and how new recruits were obviously the missing link between apes and men that Darwin had sought in vain.

A gunny whose fruit salad went all the way back to the blue, yellow, and green ribbon commemorating the Mexican campaign and the occupation of Veracruz was expatiating on the latter topic. “Sweet Jesus Christ, boots nowadays don’t know enough to grab their ass with both hands,” he said, gesturing with a highball glass in which ice cubes clinked. “I swear to God, the Army wouldn’t want some of these pissweeds. And we’re supposed to turn ’em into Marines ?”

He didn’t bother keeping his voice low. Heads bobbed up and down all over the club, Les’ among them. Nobody except another gunnery sergeant of equally exalted status could have presumed to disagree with him. Dillon, who came close both in rank and in years, wouldn’t have thought of it for a moment. As far as he was concerned, the gunny was only speaking gospel truth.

But another veteran noncom said, “Gonna need to put a lot of Marines on the beach if we’re gonna do the job. Up to us to make these damnfool boots into the kind of Marines they need to be.”

“Some of them won’t make the grade, though,” said the gunny who’d been around since dirt. “Some of them can’t make the grade.”

“We’ll run them off. There won’t be that many,” the other man said. “The rest’ll do the job. Even as is, we’re gonna have the damn Army landing right behind us, or maybe even with us.”

Everyone bristled at that, though it was too likely to be true. From what Les had heard, the Japs had four or five divisions in Hawaii. Defenders needed fewer men than invaders. He’d seen that for himself when he bumped up against the krauts in the Great War. There just wouldn’t be enough Marines to go around.

“So much for Germany first,” he said.

“Yeah, well, I don’t care what FDR says-I think the Japs screwed that one the first time they bombed San Francisco.”

Les was inclined to agree with him. By the nods and the grim silence that followed, so was everybody else in the NCOs’ club. No matter what the President might want, it was personal now between the USA and Japan. Hitting Hawaii was one thing, and bad enough. But killing people on the mainland-no overseas enemy had done that since the War of 1812. Everybody was hot and bothered about it. Not even a President as powerful as Franklin Delano Roosevelt could afford to ignore 130,000,000 Americans screaming their heads off.