W.E.B. Griffin - The Corps IV - Battleground

The butchering process was performed by the women (hunting was a male responsibility; everything else was women's business). It was worse than even the throat-cutting. Intestines (steaming, despite the heat) spilled from the carcass. The hide was peeled off. The carcass was cut into pieces.

And at one point Steve realized with something close to horror that one particularly obscene-looking hunk of sickly white stuff was what he knew as bacon.

Next fires were built; then large steel pots full of water were either suspended over them or set right onto the coals. In one of them, eventually, they dropped the pig's head. Once the water started boiling, the head turned over and over.

By the time the officers returned, just before 1100, the butchering was just about finished. The bacon and hams (they were too scrawny to be real hams, Steve thought, but that's what they were) had been suspended over a smokey fire; and the rest of the meat was either being slowly broiled over coals or boiled and rendered. Nothing, Steve saw, was going to be wasted.

Both Reeves and Howard looked exhausted when they arrived. Without a word, Howard dropped his web belt and his Thompson by the creek; and fully clothed, except for his boondockers, he lowered himself into it, carefully holding his splinted arm out of the water. Reeves ordered tea for himself and slumped onto the ground, resting his back against a tree.

They had nothing to report about their patrol-a case of no news being good news: They'd detected no signs of the Japanese looking for them.

Steve took his wristwatch from his pocket, and then from the condom where he stored it. There were two watches in the village, his and Lieutenant Howard's. Since there was no chance of getting replacements, and since there were two times each day that were critical-1115 and 2045-it was crucial that the watches be protected.

The dial read 1059. If he was lucky, the watch was accurate within five minutes. He went in search of Petty Officer Second Class Ian Bruce. He found him in the grass commo shack, already in place on the generator, his skirt spread wide (it wasn't hard to tell that he was a man), ready to start pumping the bicycle-like pedals of the device that provided power for the Hallicrafters shortwave transceiver.

The watch hands now indicated 1102. Steve made a wind-it-up motion with his hand. Ian started pumping the pedals. In a moment, the needles on the Hallicrafter came to life. It was now 1103.

Fuck it, close enough.

Steve put his fingers on the telegraph key.

FRD1.FRD6.FRD 1.FRD6.FRD1.FRD6.

Royal Australian Navy Coastwatcher Radio, this is Detachment A, Special Marine Detachment 14.

Today, for a change, there was an immediate response:

FRD6.FRD1.GA.

Detachment A, this is Coastwatcher Radio, Townesville, Australia, responding to your call. Go ahead.

FRD1.FRD6.NTATT.

Coastwatcher Radio, this is Detachment A. No traffic for you at this time.

FRD6.FRD1.NTATT.FRD1 CLR.

Detachment A, this is Coastwatcher Radio. No traffic for you at this time. Coastwatcher Radio Clear.

"Fuck!" Sergeant Koffler said, and signaled for Ian Bruce to stop pedaling. He had hoped-he always hoped-that there would be some kind of message. And he was always disappointed when there was not.

He got to his feet and walked out of the hut. Lieutenant Reeves was nowhere in sight, and Lieutenant Howard was asleep on the bank of the stream. There was no point in waking him up; there had been no traffic.

He walked to one of the charcoal fires. The pig's ribs were getting done. They looked like spareribs now, Steve thought, not like parts of a dead animal.

And they smelled good. His mouth actually salivated.

He wondered how much salt from their short-and dwindling-supply Lieutenant Reeves would permit them to use to season the spareribs.

Chapter Five

(One)

THE CLUB CAR "CURTIS SANDROCK"

THE PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD "CONGRESSIONAL

LIMITED"

16 JUNE 1942

Sergeant John Marston Moore, USMCR, had been in his chair less than half an hour when he had occasion to dwell on the question of saltpeter.

It had been commonly accepted by his peers at Parris Island that the Corps liberally dosed the boots' chow with the stuff. The action was deemed necessary by the Corps, the reasoning went, in order to suppress the sexual drives of the boots, who were by definition perfectly healthy young men who would have absolutely no chance during the period of their training to satisfy their sexual hungers.

Save of course by committing what his father called the sin of onanism, and what was known commonly in the Corps as Beating Your Meat, or Pounding Your Pud-a behavior that was high on the long list of acts one must not be caught doing by one's Drill Instructor... considerations of finding someplace to do it aside.

John Moore now realized that all he knew about saltpeter was what he had heard at Parris Island. That is to say, he had no certain knowledge whether such a substance really existed; or if it did exist, whether it did indeed suppress sexual desires, once ingested; or whether the Corps really fed it to their boots.

It was possible, of course.

There was the question of homosexuality, for instance. He had heard that because of the absence of women, a lot of the men in prisons turned queer.... There was a large number of other things Parris Island and prison had in common, too. The Corps could certainly not afford to have its boots turn to each other for sexual gratification. Several times the pertinent passages from The Articles for the Governance of the Naval Service, known as "Rocks and Shoals," had been read out loud to them. These described the penalties for taking the penis of another male into one's mouth and/or anus. In the eyes of the Corps, this was a crime ranking close to desertion in the face of the enemy and striking a superior officer or non-commissioned officer.

And if one was to judge from the training time allocated to inspiring talks from Navy Chaplains and incredibly graphic motion pictures taken in Venereal Disease wards, the Corps had a deep interest in even the heterosexual activities of its men. After they were freed from Parris Island, the Corps did not want them to rush to the nearest brothel and/or to consort with what it called "Easy Women." Easy women were defined as those who would infect Marines with syphilis, gonorrhea, and other social diseases, thereby rendering them unfit for combat service.

The conclusions Sergeant Moore reached as he accepted a second rye and ginger ale from the club car steward was that (a) it was likely that the Corps had been feeding him saltpeter at Parris Island; (b) that it had worked, because he could not now recall any feelings of sexual deprivation while he was there; and (c) that once one was taken off saltpeter, one's normal sexual drives and hungers returned within a day.

With a vengeance, he thought, as he tried to fold his leg over the first erection he'd had in weeks. It seemed to have a mind of its own, determined to make his trousers look like an eight-man squad tent, canvas tautly stretched from a stout center pole.

The source of his sexual arousal, he was quite sure, was not what the Corps would think of as an Easy Woman. In the training films, Easy Women had without exception earned the cheering approval of the boots with their tight sweaters, short skirts, heavily applied lipstick, and lewdly inviting mascaraed eyes. Most of them had cigarettes hanging from their mouths, and one hand attached to a bottle of beer.

This woman demonstrated none of these characteristics. She wore very little makeup. She held her cigarette in what Sergeant Moore thought was a charming and exquisitely feminine manner. She wore a blouse buttoned to her neck, a suit, and a hat with a half-veil. She was old-at least thirty, John judged, maybe even thirty-five-but he charitably judged that her hair, neatly done up in sort of a knot at the back of her bead, was prematurely gray.