W.E.B. Griffin - The Corps 03 - Counterattack

Banning looked between the two of them, but said nothing.

"What worries me about this is why Joe wants to go," Feldt said. He looked directly at Howard. "Why do you want to do this?"

"I don’t want to do it," Howard said after a moment. "I think somebody has to do it. Of the people available to us, I seem to have the best qualifications."

"Are you married? Children?" Feldt asked.

"I have a ... fianc?e," Joe said. It was, he realized, the first time he had ever used the word.

"The decision, of course, is Major Banning’s," Commander Feldt said formally.

Banning met Howard’s eyes for a moment.

"I think it might be better if Joe and I went to Melbourne," Banning said finally, evenly. "I don’t know, but maybe Joe and Koffler will need some equipment I don’t know about. If there is, it would more likely be available in Melbourne to a major than to a lieutenant."

"Your other ranks seem to do remarkably well getting things from depots," Feldt said. "But of course you’re right. I’ll arrange with Deane to have you two flown down there in the morning."

He reached for the Scotch bottle and topped off everyone’s glass.

"And of course, Melbourne’s the best place to get the shots."

"Shots?"

"Immunizations."

"The Marine Corps has given me shots against every disease known to Western man," Howard said.

"I don’t really think, Joe, that your medical people have a hell of a lot of experience with the sort of thing you’re going to find on Buka," Feldt said. "And since Major Banning and I have decided to indulge you in this little escapade, it behooves you to take your shots like a good little boy."

"Aye, aye, Sir," Howard said.

"Cheers," Feldt said, raising his glass.

(Six)

Two Creeks Station

Wagga Wagga, New South Wales

6 June 1942

It had been called a memorial service, but what it really had been, Daphne Farnsworth realized, was a regular funeral missing only the body. There had even been an empty, flag-covered casket in the aisle of St. Paul’s Church. The Reverend Mr. Bartholomew Frederick, his World War I Australian-New Zealand Army Corps ribbons pinned to his vestments, had delivered a eulogy that had been at least as much a recitation of the virtues of Australian military prowess and courage generally as it had been a recounting of the virtues of the late Sergeant John Andrew Farnsworth.

And before and after, before even she had gotten home, the neighbors had gone through the ritual of visiting the bereaved. In the event, Daphne Farnsworth only barely counted as one of the bereaved. The visitors had "called on" John’s parents at the big house, instead of at John’s and her house. Their house had been more or less closed up, of course, and his parents’ house was larger; but she suspected that the roasts and the casseroles and the clove-studded hams and potato salad would have been delivered to the big house even if she hadn’t joined the Navy.

She was both shamed and confused by her reaction to the offerings of sympathy. They annoyed her. And she resented all the people, too. She was either being a genuine bitch, she decided, or-as she had heard at least a half-dozen people whisper softly to her in-laws-she was still in shock and had not really accepted her loss. That would come later.

She had been annoyed at that, too. They didn’t know what the hell they were talking: about. She had accepted her loss. She knew that John was never coming back, even, for Christ’s sake, in a casket when the war was over. She knew, with a horrible empty feeling in her heart and belly, that she would never again feel John’s muscular arms around her, or have him inside her.

She was angry with him, too-the decisive proof that she was a cold-hearted bitch. He didn’t have to go. He had gotten himself killed over there for the sole reason that he had wanted to go over there, answering some obscene and ludicrous male hunger to go off and kill something . . . without considering at all the price she was going to have to pay.

And their childlessness-a question John had decided for all time by enlisting and getting himself killed-had been a subject of some conversation by those who had come to call to express their sympathy. The males, gathered in the sitting room, drinking, and the women in the kitchen, fussing with all the food, seemed to be divided more or less equally into two groups: those who thought it a pity there wasn’t a baby, preferably a male baby, to carry on the name; and those who considered it a manifestation of God’s wise compassion that he had not left poor Daphne with a fatherless child to add to her burden.

Daphne had started drinking early in the morning, when she awoke in their bed and cried with the knowledge that John would never again share it with her. She had tossed down a shot of straight gin before she’d left their bed for her bath.

And she’d had another little taste just before they’d gotten in the cars to go to St. Paul’s for the service. And she had had three since they had returned from church, timing them carefully. John had once told her that if you took only one drink an hour, you could never get drunk; the body burned off spirits at the rate of a drink an hour. She believed that.

As if she needed another one! There was one more proof that she was a bitch, because she knew that what she really wanted to do was get really drunk. She had been really drunk only three times in her life, the last time the day after she had returned here after watching John’s ship move away from the pier in Melbourne.

She could not do that today, of course. It would disgrace her-not that that seemed important. But it would hurt her family, especially her mother and John’s mother, if she let the side down by doing something like that, when she was expected to be the grieving, virtuous young widow.

She left the crowd of people in the big house to walk to her own house. She did that because she had to visit the loo, and there was actually a line before the loo in the big house.

She just happened to notice the car coming across the bridge over the Murrumbidgee River. It made the sharp right onto their property.

Still somebody else coming? Ireally don’t want one more expression of sympathy, one more man to tell me, "Steady on, girl, " or one more woman to tell me, "The Lord works in mysterious ways. You must now put your trust in the Lord."

There’s no one behind the wheel.

Of course not. It’s an American car, a Studebaker like the Americans at The Elms have.

What is an American car doing coming here?

Oh, my God, it’s him. It can’t be. But it is.

What in the name of God is Steve Koffler doing here?

She cut across the field and got to the Studebaker a moment after Steve Koffler had parked it at the end of a long row of cars, got out, and opened the rear door.

The first thought she had was unkind. When she saw his glistening paratrooper boots, sharply creased trousers, and the tightly woven fabric of his tunic and compared it with the rough, blanketlike material John’s uniform had been cut from, and his rough, hobnailed boots, she was annoyed: Bloody American Marines, they all look like officers.

He got whatever he was looking for from the backseat of the Studebaker, then stood erect and turned around and saw her.

"Hello," he said, startled, and somewhat shy.

"What are you doing here?"

"Lieutenant Donnelly told me about your husband," Steve said, holding out what he had taken from the backseat: a bouquet of flowers, a tissue-wrapped square box, and a brown sack, obviously containing a bottle.

"What are you doing here?" Daphne repeated.

"I didn’t know what you’re supposed to do in Australia," he said, "to show you’re sorry."

"What is all that?"