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

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 Ev-erly '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 Pe-king. He noticed a couple of things. For one thing, McCoy not only spoke Chi-nese 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 Zim-merman 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 whorehouses, 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 Ev-erly 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 Zim-merman had spoken highly of him. Then he asked him if he would be inter-ested 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 the 4th Ma-rines 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 girl-friends-Chinese and Russian-loose to make out as best they could by them-selves. 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 work-ing 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 Ma-rine infantry when they landed on Corregidor, he was going to wind up a Japa-nese prisoner.

He had seen enough of the Japanese in China to know how they treated prisoners. You were almost better off dead than to be a prisoner of the Japs. Everly had seen with his own eyes the Japs using Chinese prisoners for bayo-net practice.

The one thing Everly really couldn't figure out was why people-especially senior noncoms and officers-kept talking about "The Aid." "The Aid" could be any number of things-for example, a fleet of B-17 bombers suddenly appearing to bomb the Japs off Bataan and out of the Philippines. Or a fleet of Navy ships, carrying divisions of fully equipped soldiers from the States, to run the Japanese off Bataan and out of the Philippines. Or even a small convoy of transports, bringing food and medicine.

But people kept talking about "The Aid," whatever it meant to them, as if it was really coming and would turn things around.

That was bullshit, pure and simple. If "The Aid"-any kind of aid-was coming, General MacArthur wouldn't have run off to Australia the way he did three weeks before, on 10 March.

Only two things were going to happen to the men in the Philippines, Ma-rines, soldiers, or sailors. They were going to get killed, or they were going to get captured. And getting captured was likely to be as bad as getting killed. Everly had seen people starve to death in China, too, and he didn't think he wanted to die that way, either.

There was one other alternative: take off now, get the hell away from Cor-regidor and Bataan and Luzon, make your way to one of the other islands, maybe Mindanao, and take off for the hills.

That would be desertion in the face of the enemy, and the punishment for that was death or such other punishment as a court-martial may direct. There had been lectures about that.

The lectures had convinced Everly that he wasn't the only one thinking about avoiding certain death or capture; that people had probably already taken off to do just that. Otherwise, there wouldn't have been the lectures telling them it was not only stupid, but punishable by death or such other punishment as a court-martial may direct.

Everly had learned as a kid, even before he became a Ward Of The State, that the way to really get your teeth kicked in was to hope for something you really wanted. You usually didn't get what you really wanted.

So he didn't let himself think that maybe the reason the first sergeant had sent for him was so that he could serve as interpreter for some officer going off Corregidor onto Bataan. If it turned out to be for some other reason, it would be a real kick in the face.