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

Maybe he could get a leave, or at least a weekend liberty, while he was going to school at Lakehurst. Or when he graduated. If he graduated. He wasn’t holding his breath. For one thing, the sergeant major on Mainside at Parris Island, where he’d been transferred after graduating from Boot Camp, had really been pissed at him. They had gone through the records looking for people with drafting experience, and they’d found him and transferred him to Mainside to execute architectural drawings for new barracks. He hadn’t joined the Corps to be a draftsman. If he’d wanted to be a draftsman, he would have stayed with the Public Service Corporation of New Jersey, where he had been a draftsman trainee in the Bus and Trolley Division.

There’d been an interesting notice on the bulletin board. Regulations said you had to read the bulletin board at least twice a day, so it wasn’t his fault he’d seen the notice. The notice had said that volunteers were being accepted for parachute duty. And that those volunteers who successfully completed the course of instruction at Lakehurst would receive an extra fifty dollars a month in pay. That was a lot of money. As a PFC, his total pay was forty-one dollars a month, thirty-six dollars plus five dollars for having qualified as Expert on the firing range with the Springfield.

So he had applied, which immediately pissed off the Sergeant Major, who needed a draftsman. "Let some other asshole jump out of goddamned airplanes," the Sergeant Major yelled at him. The Sergeant Major was so pissed and he made so much noise that one of the officers came out to see what was going on.

"Well, you’ll have to let him apply, Sergeant Major," the officer said, "if he wants to. Put on his application we need him here, but let him apply."

Stephen Koffler felt sure that was the last he would ever hear of parachute school, but three days later the Sergeant Major called him into his office to tell him to pack his fucking gear and get his ass on the train, and he personally hoped Koffler would break his fucking neck the first time he jumped.

He never even left Pennsylvania Station when he got off the Sea Coast Limited at Newark. He just went downstairs from the tracks to ask Information about when the New Jersey Central train left for Lakehurst. They told him it would be another two and a half hours. While he was waiting, he got asked three times for his orders, twice by sailors wearing Shore Patrol brassards, and once even by fucking doggie MPs. Steve Koffler was already Marine enough to be convinced that the goddamned Army had no right to let their goddamned MPs ask a Marine anything.

When he got to Lakehurst, a truck carried him out to the Naval Air Station. And then the Charge of Quarters, a lean and mean-looking sergeant, told him where he could find a bunk, but that he’d have to do without a mattress cover, a pillow, and sheets because the supply room was locked up. He might even have to wait until after New Year’s.

In the morning, he had a brief encounter with the First Sergeant, who was lanky and mean-looking like the Charge of Quarters, just older. The First Sergeant said that he really hadn’t expected him, and that he thought the new class would trickle in over the next couple of days, but now that he had reported in, he should get his gear shipshape and be ready to stand guard mount at 1600.

Koffler spent the day getting ready for guard, pressing his green blouse and trousers and a khaki shirt and necktie, which he now knew was not a necktie but a "field scarf." He restored the spit-shine on his better pair (of two pairs) of field shoes, and cleaned and lightly oiled his 1903 Springfield .30-06 rifle.

It had been pretty goddamned cold, walking up and down alongside the dirigible hangar, but there was hot coffee in the guardhouse when you’d done your two hours; and the Sergeant of the Guard had even come out twice with a thermos of coffee and fried-egg sandwiches, an act that really surprised Koffler, based on his previous experience with both sergeants and guard duty at Parris Island.

After the guard that was just relieved marched back to the guardhouse and turned in their ammunition, every round carefully counted and accounted for, Steve Koffler took a chance and asked the Sergeant of the Guard a question. He seemed like a pretty nice guy.

"What happens now? I mean, what am I supposed to do?"

"If I was you, kid, I’d make myself scarce around the billet. There’s always some sonofabitch looking for a work detail."

"You mean we’re not restricted to the barracks?"

"No. Why should you be? You just get out of Parris Island?"

"Yeah."

"It shows," the Sergeant said.

"Where should I go to get away from the barracks?"

"You can go anyplace you can afford to go. It’s about an hour on the train to New York City, but you better be loaded, you want to go there."

"How about Newark?"

"Why the hell would you want to go to Newark?"

"I live just outside, a town called East Orange."

"You just came off Boot Camp leave, right?"

"No."

"What do you mean, ‘No’?"

"I mean I didn’t get any leave. When we graduated, they sent me to Mainside, and then they sent me here."

"No shit? You’re supposed to get a leave, ten days at least."

"Well, I didn’t get one."

"I find out you’ve been shitting me, kid," the Sergeant said, "I’ll have your ass."

Then he picked up the telephone.

"I hope you’re really hung over, you old sonofabitch," he said to whoever answered the phone.

There was a reply, and the Sergeant laughed.

"Hey, I just been talking to one of the kids who’s reporting in. I don’t know what happened, but they didn’t give him a leave out of Parris Island. He lives in Newark, or near it. Would it be OK with you if I told the CQ to give him a seventy-two-hour pass?"

There was a pause.

"He already pulled guard. We just got off."

Something else was said that Koffler couldn’t hear.

"OK, Top, thanks," the Sergeant of the Guard said, and hung up. "He was in a good mood. You get an extended seventy-two-hour pass."

"I don’t know what that means," Steve Koffler confessed.

"Well, you get one pass that runs from 1700 today until 1700 Sunday. That’s seventy-two hours. Then you tear that one up and throw it away, and go on the second one, which lasts until 0500 Monday. The First Sergeant says that nothing’s going on around here until then, anyway."

"Jesus Christ!"

"Now for Christsake, don’t do nothing like getting shitfaced and arrested."

"I won’t."

An hour later, PFC Stephen Koffler passed through the Marine guard at the gate and started walking toward the Lakehurst train station. He hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards when a Chrysler convertible pulled to the side of the road ahead of him, and the door swung open. The driver was a naval officer, a young one.

"I’m going into New York City if that would be any help, son," he said.

On the way to Newark, where the officer went out of his way to drive him into the city and drop him off at Pennsylvania Station, he told Koffler that he was a navigator on one of the blimps and had spent New Year’s Eve freezing his tail ten miles off the Jersey coast, down by Cape May, at the mouth of the Delaware River.

Steve told him he had just arrived to go to the parachute school. And the officer replied that Steve had more balls than he did. There was no way anybody could get him to jump out of an airplane unless it was gloriously in flames.

Steve caught the Bloomfield Avenue trolley in the basement of Penn Station and rode it up to the Park Avenue stop by Branch Brook Park in Newark. Then he got off, walked up to street level, and caught the Number 21 Park Avenue bus and took it twenty blocks west across the city line into East Orange. He got off" at Nineteenth Street, right across from his apartment building.