W.E.B. Griffin: The Corps VII - Behind the Lines

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, out-side 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 any-body.

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, Ev-erly 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 transferred. 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 assis-tant 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 tak-ing 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 Shang-hai. 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 pock-ets 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 con-voy 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 nei-ther was interested in chasing women, gambling, or getting shitfaced.