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

"I'll be damned!" Howard said, outraged.

He's really angry. Why am I surprised? Before Cutesy-poo came along, he never did anything dishonorable.

"So the boy was upset, obviously," Barbara said. "He's really very sweet. He's on a home leave before going overseas, and he couldn't even go home."

"That's absolutely despicable!"

"So I felt sorry for him. And had dinner with him. And took him to the movies."

"Where was the boy staying?"

"Bill got him a room in the Union League."

"And that's where you heard about this?"

"Yes. I met Bill on Broad Street. He was with the boy. And he insisted I have a drink with them..."

"In his cups again, I suppose?"

"Don't be too hard on Bill, Howard. It was a terribly hard thing for him to have to do."

"I've always liked Bill Marston. He just can't handle the sauce, that's all."

He's not at all suspicious. He wants to believe what I'm telling him. He's a fool. Obviously. Otherwise Cutesy-poo couldn't have got her claws into him the way she did.

"Where's the boy now?"

"On his way to the Pacific. That's what I was really doing in New Jersey today, Howard. Putting him on the plane. Bill couldn't get off..."

"That was very kind of you, Barbara."

"He had nobody, Howard. I have never felt more sorry for anyone in my life."

"I should have known it was something like this. I'm sorry, Barbara."

"It's all right."

He smiled at her.

"I'm sorry things... didn't work out between you and Louise."

"And I would expect you to say something like that," he said. "It could have been worse. I could have actually married her."

"And it's really all over?"

"It's really all over."

"So what are you going to do?"

He looked at his watch and drained his glass.

"I don't really know. Except that right now, I'm going to leave here and see if I can catch the 9:28 to Swarthmore," he said.

"You'll never make the 9:28," Barbara said.

"There's another train at 10:45."

"You left some things here. Shirts and underwear. Why don't you stay here?"

"Barbara-"

"What?"

"That's very decent of you."

"Don't be silly."

"But where would I sleep? There's only one bed in this place."

"I know you don't think I'm very smart, Howard, but I really can count," Barbara said.

(Five)

THE ANDREW FOSTER HOTEL

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

22 JUNE 1942

The tall, long-legged blonde shifted on the seat of the station wagon so that she was facing the driver. Her fingers gently touched the beard just showing on his upper jaw, and then moved to trace his ear. When he jumped involuntarily, she laughed softly.

"I learned that from my husband," Mrs. Caroline Ward McNamara, of Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, said to Captain Charles M. Galloway, USMCR, whose home of record was c/o Headquarters, USMC, Washington, D.C.

Mrs. McNamara was wearing a pleated plaid skirt, a sweater, a string of pearls, and little makeup, all of which tended to make her look younger than her thirty-three years. Captain Galloway, who was wearing a fur-collared horsehair leather jacket, known to the Supply Department of the U.S. Navy as "Jacket, Fliers, Intermediate Type Gl," over a tie-less khaki shirt, was twenty-five. He was a tanned, well-built, pleasant-looking young man who wore his light brown hair just long enough to part.

The jacket was not new. It was comfortably worn in; the knit cuff on the left sleeve was starting to fray; and here and there were small dark spots where oil or A VGAS had dripped on it. Sewn to the breast of the jacket was a leather badge bearing the gold-stamped impression of Naval Aviator's Wings and the words CAPT C M GALLOWAY, USMCR. The leather patch was new, almost brand-new. The patch had replaced one that had identical wings but had designated the wearer as T/SGT C M GALLOWAY, USMC.

Captain Galloway had been an officer and a gentleman for just over a month. Before that, since shortly after his twenty-first birthday, in fact, he had been an Enlisted Naval Aviation Pilot (all Marine fliers are Naval Aviators), commonly called a "Flying Sergeant." He had been a Marine since he was seventeen.

"You learned that from your husband?" Charley Galloway asked, turning to Caroline McNamara. "How to play with his ear, or how to bullshit your way into a hotel?" The hotel they had in mind was the Andrew Foster, one of San Francisco's finest, and therefore also probably already stuffed to the brim with people who had thought to make reservations.

Her fingers stopped tracing his ear.

"Well, fuck you," Caroline said, very deliberately.

"Oh, Christ," he said, sounding genuinely contrite. "Sorry."

In Caroline's mind, Charley's language was too loaded with vulgarisms. A dirty mouth was certainly understandable, she knew, considering his background. But for his own good, now that he was an officer, he should clean it up. Since he did not like to hear her use bad language (except in bed, which was something else), she had settled on doing that as the means to shame him into polishing his own manners.

Every time he said something like "bullshit," she came back with "fuck." He really hated that; and so words like bullshit and asshole were coming out far less often now than they did not quite four months before, when they first met.

At that time Caroline had been divorced for not quite five months. It was far from a glorious marriage, of course; but it ended more or less satisfactorily, as far as she was concerned.... In other words, she came out of it, as she put it, "with all four feet and the tail," meaning that she got the house in Jenkintown, the cars, and almost all of the bastard's money. Her prosperous stockbroker husband had an understandable reluctance to reveal in court that the person he'd been having an affair with also wore pants and shaved.

During the divorce process, she had scrupulously followed her lawyer's advice to do nothing "indiscreet," correctly interpreting that to mean she should keep her legs crossed.

When she met Charley Galloway, then Technical Sergeant Galloway, she had been chaste for more than eighteen months.

He had flown into Willow Grove Naval Air Station, outside Philadelphia, in a Marine version of the Douglas DC-3 transport, acting as both pilot-in-command and instructor pilot to two young Marine aviator lieutenants, one of whom, Lieutenant Jim Ward, was her nephew.

Jim had called from the airport, and Caroline had driven out to Willow Grove to fetch him and the others home. The moment she saw Charley Galloway, she knew he might be just the man to break her long period of celibacy. After all, she would probably never see him again.

Until she met him, she had come to believe-after all manner of sobering, painful experience-that the real love of her life was a delightful, wholly improbable fantasy. But what happened between them, the very first time, told her that that very delightful and improbable fantasy had landed six hours before at Jenkintown.

It wasn't long after that before she started worshiping him.

Jimmy Ward worshiped him, too, which had been at first rather difficult to understand. Enlisted men are supposed to worship officers, not the other way around. But when she asked him about it, Jimmy explained that Charley probably would have been an officer-he had all the qualifications- if it hadn't been for what he'd done a few days after Pearl Harbor.

He and another sergeant had put together a fighter plane from parts of others destroyed by the Japanese. Charley had then flown it out to the aircraft carrier Saratoga, then en route to reinforce Wake Island. Half of Charley's squadron was on Wake Island. Charley was riding, so to speak, to the sound of the guns.

The reinforcement convoy was ordered back to Pearl Harbor. And so an act that was to Jimmy's mind heroic-dedication worthy of portrayal on the silver screen by Alan Ladd and Ronald Reagan-became quite the opposite. An enlisted man had made flyable an airplane commissioned officers, in their wisdom, had concluded was beyond repair. He had then had the unbridled gall, against regulations and policy, to decide all by himself to take the airplane off to war.