W.E.B. Griffin: THE CORPS VI - CLOSE COMBAT

"Holy shit!" he said to himself, and he thought: That damned thing is back! I've got to get pictures of that sonofabitch.

Twelve months before, Corporal Easterbrook had been a freshman at the University of Missouri, enrolled in courses known informally as "Pre-Journalism.''

It had been his intention then to work hard and attain a high enough undergraduate grade-point average to ensure his acceptance into the University of Missouri Graduate School of Journalism. Later, with a Missouri J School diploma behind him, he could get his foot on the first rung of the ladder leading to a career as a photojournalist (or at least he'd hoped so):

He would have to start out on a small weekly somewhere and work himself up to a daily paper. Later-much later-after acquiring enough experience, he might be able to find employment on a national magazine... maybe Collier's or the Saturday Evening Post, or maybe even Look. It was too much to hope that he would ever see his work in Life or Time-at least before he was old, say thirty or thirty-five. As the unquestioned best of their genre, these two magazines published only the work of the very finest photojournalists in the world.

On December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Bobby Easterbrook had gone down to the post office and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps Reserve for the Duration of the War Plus Six Months. He now regarded that as the dumbest one fucking thing he had ever done in his life,

Even though his photographic images had appeared in the past two months not only within the pages, but on the covers, of Look and Time and several dozen major newspapers, that success had not caused him to modify his belief that enlisting in The Crotch was the dumbest one fucking thing he had ever done in his life.

In fact, he'd concluded that the price of his photojournalistic success and minor fame-he'd been given credit a couple of times, USMC PHOTOGRAPH BY CPL R. F. EASTERBROOK, USMC COMBAT CORRESPONDENT-Was going to be very high. Specifically, he was going to get killed.

There was reason to support this belief. Of the seven combat correspondents who had made the invasion, two were dead and three had been badly wounded.

In June 1942, the horror of boot camp at Parris Island still a fresh and painful memory, the Easterbunny had been a clerk in a supply room at the Marine Base at Quantico, Virginia.

He'd got that job after telling a personnel clerk that he had worked for the Conner Courier. That was true. During his last two years of high school, he'd worked afternoons and as long as it took on Fridays to get the Courier out.

When he talked with the personnel clerk, he implied that he'd been a reporter/photographer for the Conner Courier. That was not exactly true. Ninety-five percent of the photographic and editorial work on the Conner Courier (weekly, circ. 11,200) was performed by the owner and his wife. But Mr. Greene had shown Bobby how to work the Courier's Speed Graphic camera, and how to develop its sheet film, and how to print from the resultant negatives.

Still, the only words he wrote that actually appeared in print were classified ads taken over the telephone, and rewrites of Miss Harriet Comb's "Social Notes." Miss Combs knew everything and everyone worth knowing in Conner County, but she had some difficulty writing any of it down for publication. Complete sentences were not one of her journalistic strengths.

The personnel corporal appeared bored hearing about the Easter-bunny's journalistic career... until it occurred to him to ask if Private Easterbrook could type. "Sure."

That pleased the corporal. The Corps did not at the moment need journalists, he told Private Easterbrook, but he would make note of that talent-a "secondary specialty"-on his records. What The Corps did need was people who could type. Private Easterbrook was given a typing test, and then a "primary specialty" classification of clerk/typist.

Becoming a clerk/typist at least got him out of being a rifleman, Private Easterbrook reasoned-his burning desire to personally avenge Pearl Harbor having diminished to the point of extinction while he was at Parris Island.

He'd been kind of looking forward to a Marine Corps career as a supply man-with a little bit of luck, maybe eventually he'd make supply sergeant-when, out of the clear blue sky, at four o'clock one afternoon, he'd been told to pack his seabag and clear the company. He was being sent overseas. It wasn't until he was en route to Wellington, N.Z., aboard a U.S. Navy Martin Mariner, a huge, four-engine seaplane headed for Pearl Harbor, that he was able to begin to sort out what was happening to him.

He learned then that the Marine Corps had formed a team of still and motion picture photographers recruited from Hollywood and the wire services. They were to cover the invasion of a yet unspecified Japanese-occupied island. Just before they were scheduled to depart for the Pacific, one of the still photographers had broken his arm. Somehow Easterbrook's name-more precisely, his "secondary specialty"-had come to the attention of those seeking an immediate replacement for the sergeant with the broken arm. And he had been ordered to San Diego.

The team was under the command of former Hollywood press agent Jake Dillon-now Major Dillon, USMCR, a pretty good guy in Easterbrook's view. Genuinely sorry that the Easterbunny was not able to take the ordinary five-day leave prior to overseas movement, Major Dillon had thrown him a bone in the form of corporal's stripes.

Aboard the attack transport, the eight-man team (nine, counting Major Dillon) learned the names of the islands they were invading: Guadalcanal, Tulagi, and Gavutu, in the Solomons. No one else had ever heard of them before, either.

Major Dillon and Staff Sergeant Marv Kaplan, a Hollywood cinematographer Dillon had recruited, went in with the 1st Raider Battalion, in the first wave of landing craft to attack Tulagi. At about the same time, Corporal Easterbrook landed with the 1st Marine Parachute Battalion on Gavutu, two miles away.

The Marine parachutists didn't come in by air. They landed from the sea and fought as infantry, suffering ten percent casualties. After Gavutu was secured, the Easterbunny went to Tulagi. There Major Dillon handed him Staff Sergeant Kaplan's EyeMo 16mm motion picture camera and announced tersely that Kaplan had been evacuated after taking two rounds in his legs, and that Easterbrook was now a Still and Motion Picture Combat Correspondent.

He also relieved Easterbrook of the film he had shot on Gavutu. One of the pictures he took there-of a Marine paratrooper firing a Browning Automatic Rifle with blood running down his chest-was published nationwide.

Three days later, he crossed the channel with Dillon to Lunga Point on Guadalcanal, where the bulk of the First Marines had landed. There they learned that one of the two officers and two of the six enlisted combat correspondents had been wounded.

Shortly afterward, Dillon left Guadalcanal to personally carry the exposed still and motion film to Washington. Easterbrook hadn't heard news of him since then, though there was some scuttlebutt that he'd been seen on the island a couple of days ago. But the Easterbunny discredited that. If Dillon was on Guadalcanal again, he certainly would have made an effort to see who was left of the original team. That meant Lieutenant Graves, Technical Sergeant Petersen, and Corporal Easterbrook. In the two months since the invasion, everybody else had been killed or seriously wounded.

Looking at those numbers, Bobby Easterbrook had concluded a month or so ago that it was clearly not a question of if he would get hit, but when, and how seriously. He had further concluded that when he did get hit, he'd probably be hit bad. Although it had been close more times than he liked to remember, so far he hadn't been scratched. The odds would certainly catch up with him.