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

Lieutenant Kocharski ended the conversation on that particular note-to protect young Sergeant Galloway from Ensign O’Malley. Ensign O’Malley was not a bright-eyed innocent. She had entered the Navy late, at thirty-three, rather than right out of nursing school, which was usually the case. Florence, naturally curious, had in time wormed her history out of her.

Before she joined the Navy, Ensign Mary Agnes O’Malley had been a nun, a nursing sister of the Sisters of Mercy. She had become a postulant in the order at sixteen. And she had served faithfully and well for many years after that. First she became a registered nurse, and later she qualified as both an operating-room nurse and a nurse anesthesiologist. Later still, she was seduced by a married anesthesiologist, an M.D., while taking an advanced course at Massachusetts General Hospital.

She didn’t blame the doctor, Mary Agnes told Florence. She had not been wearing her Sisters of Mercy habit at Mass General, and she had not told the doctor, ever, that she was a nun.

But once she had tasted the forbidden fruit, she realized that she could no longer adhere to a vow of chastity, and petitioned the Vatican for release from her vows.

The Navy was then actively recruiting nurses, and she was highly qualified, so she signed on.

In the four months she had known her, Flo had come to understand that beneath Mary Agnes O’Malley’s demure and modest facade, there lurked a predator with the morals of an alley cat. Mary Agnes frankly admitted, in confidence, that she was making up for lost time.

So when Big Steve came to her about Charley Galloway, Flo Kocharski felt a certain uneasiness about turning Mary Agnes loose on him. Charley was a really nice kid. On the other hand, if he hadn’t leaned on Stefan to get himself fixed up as the price of borrowing his car, she wouldn’t have had to.

What neither Flo nor Big Steve knew, or even remotely suspected, was that Charley Galloway was far less experienced in relations between the sexes than anyone who knew him would have suspected. During their first night together in the cabin, Mary Alice quickly and delightfully learned that Charley was the antithesis of jaded. Yet not even she suspected that the first time in his twenty-five years Charley had spent the whole night with a woman was that very same night.

Charley’s sexual drives-and sometimes he thought he was cursed with an overgenerous issue of them-were flagrantly heterosexual. Neither was he troubled with any religious or moral restraints. His fantasies were about equally divided between the normal-meeting a well-stacked nymphomaniac whose father owned a liquor store-and meeting a nice, respectable girl and getting married.

He had encountered neither in his eight years in the Corps.

And there was something else: he didn’t want to fuck up. The price would be too high. The most important thing in the world, during his first few years in the Corps, had been to work his way up to the point where the Corps would send him to Pensacola and teach him how to fly.

Catching a dose of the clap, or maybe just getting hauled in by the military police in one of their random raids on a whorehouse, would have kept him from getting promoted and getting sent to flight school. And once he’d made staff sergeant and won a berth at Pensacola and then his wings, just about the same restrictions had applied.

Naval Aviation Pilots were noncommissioned officers, in other words, enlisted men. Since Aviation was set up with a general understanding that pilots would be commissioned officers and gentlemen, the Marine Corps had never really figured out how to deal with noncom fliers.

Enlisted pilots had crept into the system back in the 1920s. The three originals had been aircraft mechanics who had learned how to fly on the job during the Marine intervention in Santo Domingo. The criterion for selection of pilots then, as Charley had heard it, and as he believed, was "anyone who was demonstrably unlikely to crash a nonreplaceable airplane."

The Marine commander in Santo Domingo had looked at his brand-new, fresh-from-flight-school commissioned pilots and then at his experienced sergeants, and had decided that the very, very nonreplaceable airplanes at his disposal were better off being flown by the sergeants, whether they were officially rated or not.

The second reason for the existence of "flying sergeants" was money. In the years between the wars, Congress had been parsimonious toward the armed services, and especially toward the Corps. Officer manning levels were cast in concrete. This meant that every enlisted Naval Aviation Pilot freed up an officer billet for use elsewhere. And, of course, flying sergeants were paid less than officers.

Charley Galloway had started out as an aviation mechanic, right out of Parris Island, when he was seventeen. Three years later, a space for an NAP had unexpectedly opened at Pensacola, and he was the only qualified body around to fill it. On the other hand, he was an enlisted man. Most Naval Aviators (Marine pilots were all Naval Aviators) were commissioned officers and gentlemen, and many of them were graduates of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis.

There was an enormous social chasm between commissioned officers and gentlemen and noncommissioned officers, who were, under law, men, and not gentlemen. There was also resentment from the other direction toward flying sergeants from sergeants who didn’t fly and who thus didn’t get extra pay for what looked to them like a cushy berth.

Charley Galloway soon learned that about the only people who didn’t think Naval Aviation Pilots were an all-around pain in the ass were fellow pilots, who judged NAPs by their flying ability. As a rule of thumb, NAPs were, if anything, slightly more proficient than their commissioned counterparts. In the first place, most of them were older and more experienced than Charley. And most of them had large blocks of bootleg time before they went to Pensacola to learn how to fly officially.

Charley had developed a good relationship with the pilots of VMF-211 (Marine Fighter Squadron 211), based on his reputation both as a pilot and a responsible noncom. That would go down the toilet in an instant if he came down with a dose of the clap, or got caught visiting a whorehouse or screwing somebody’s willing wife. They would take his wings away and he wouldn’t fly anymore. It looked to him like a choice between flying and fucking, and flying won hands down.

But since Friday night, when they’d picked up Big Steve’s nurse and her roommate in Honolulu, there seemed to be convincing evidence that he could accomplish both.

"Ouch!" Technical Sergeant Charles M. Galloway yelped. "Jesus Christ!"

"Sorry," Ensign Mary Agnes O’Malley said contritely. "The last thing in the world I want to do is hurt it." She looked up at him and smiled. She kissed it. "All better!" she said.

She straddled him.

The door burst open.

Big Steve stood there in his skivvy shorts, a strange look on his face.

"Get the hell out of here!" Charley flared.

"Well, really! Don’t people knock where you come from, for Christ’s sake?" Mary Agnes O’Malley snapped.

"The Japs are bombing Pearl Harbor," Big Steve said. "It just come over the radio."

"I heard the engines," Charley said. "I thought it was those Air Corps B-17s."

Charley Galloway sat up, and dislodged Mary Agnes.

How the hell am I going to fly?he thought. I’ve been drinking all night.

And then he had another thought.

I’ll be a sonofabitch! I should have known that the first time I ever got to have a steady piece of ass, something would come along to fuck it up.

(Three)

Marine Airfield

Ewa, Oahu Island, Territory of Hawaii

7 December 1941

While everybody else on December 7 was running around Ewa-and for that matter, the Hawaiian Islands-like chickens with their heads cut off, Technical Sergeants Charley Galloway and Stefan "Big Steve" Oblensky had gone to Captain Leonard J. Martin, the ranking officer on the scene, and asked for permission to take a half-dozen men and try to salvage what they could from the carnage of the flight line and the mess in the hangars.