W Griffin - The Corps I - Semper Fi

"Then I guess we don't have a deal," Dickie Golden said.

"I guess not," McCoy said. "You want to give me my $300 back?"

"I guess I could ask my partner," Dickie Golden said. "I don't think he'll go along with this, but I'd like to see you in the LaSalle, and I could ask him. If I can catch him at home…"

If you've got a partner, at home or anywhere else, I'll kiss your ass at high noon at Broad and Market.

"Why don't you ask him?" McCoy said.

Dickie Golden was gone twenty minutes. When he came back, he had a whole new set of papers all made out.

"My partner says $525 is as low as we can go," Dickie Golden said. "That's less than wholesale."

McCoy read the finance agreement with interest. Then he handed Dickie Golden $225.

"Deal," he said.

"What's this?" Golden said, looking at the money but not picking it up.

"I already gave you $300," McCoy said. "That's the other $225."

"No, this deal was to finance the car and for you to buy your insurance through us."

"What do you want me to do, call a cop? It's against the law in Pennsylvania to take kickbacks from finance companies and insurance companies."

"What are you, some kind of wise guy?"

"You just write on there, paid in full in cash," McCoy said. "Or we call the cops."

"Give me those papers back and get your ass off my lot!"

"I'll walk just as far as the pay-phone booth down the block," McCoy said. "With the papers."

"I ought to kick your ass!" Dickie Golden said, but when McCoy handed him the papers, he wrote "paid in full" on the Conditions of Sale.

McCoy was pleased with himself when he drove the LaSalle off the lot and onto North Broad Street. Not only was the LaSalle a nice car, but he had just screwed a used-car dealer. McCoy hated used-car dealers: Patrick J. McCoy of Norris-town, Pennsylvania, Past Grand Exalted Commander of the Knights of Columbus, Good ol' Pat, everybody's pal at the bar of the 12th Street Bar Grill, Corporal Kenneth J. "Killer" McCoy's father, was a used-car dealer.

(Two)

The next morning was a Saturday, but there was no reveille bugle, at least not one the enlisted members of the Philadelphia Detachment of the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence had to pay any attention to. Reveille sounded and ten minutes later first call; and the truck drivers and mechanics of the 47th Motor Transport Platoon went down and out on the street and lined up for roll call.

But the seven enlisted men in the three rooms on the attic floor set aside for the "Special Detachment" didn't even get out of bed until the bugler sounded mess call. In addition to McCoy, there were two gunnery sergeants, a staff sergeant, and three PFCs. The PFCs were clerks. The staff sergeant worked for Captain Sessions. McCoy didn't know where the gunnery sergeants worked. The only time one of the gunnery sergeants spoke to him since he reported in was when one of them told him he didn't have to stand any formations, but that he had to be in the red-brick office building every morning at oh-eight-hundred.

What happened there was that from the very first day they sat him down in an upholstered chair he suspected had been stolen from a Day Room and talked to him about what he knew about the Imperial Japanese Army in China.

There were usually three of them: Captain Sessions, another captain, and two lieutenants. The other captain was pretty old-and an old Marine-because the first thing he asked McCoy was whether he had known Major Lewis B. "Chesty" Puller in Shanghai.

"He commanded the Second Battalion, sir," McCoy said. "I knew who he was."

Puller was a real hard ass. Fair, but a hard-ass. He acted as if he thought the Second Battalion was going to war the next day and trained them that way.

"He's pretty good with a Thompson himself," the old captain said. "I thought maybe you two had got together and compared techniques."

Aside from recognizing it as a reference to the incident at the ferry, McCoy didn't know what the old captain was driving at.

"No, sir," he said.

Sometimes it was all the officers at once, sometimes it was a couple of them, and sometimes it was just one of the young lieutenants by himself. Always there was one of the PFCs to take care of changing the tubular records on a Dictaphone.

However many of them there were, the interrogation went generally the same every day.

They came with folders, notebooks, and pencils. And they had thumbtacked maps of Kiangsu, Shantung, Honan, and Hopeh provinces to a cork board. The locations of Japanese units were marked on each map. The wall beside the cork board was painted white, and they used that as a screen for a slide projector. Sometimes there were photographs, including some he took himself. Some of these were blowups, and some had been converted to slides.

And they asked question after question about the Japanese forces. McCoy was surprised at how wrong their information was about the Jap order of battle. And he could tell they didn't like some of his answers about the Japanese. It was as if they hoped he was going to tell them the Japs were nothing but a bunch of fuck-ups who had done so well against the Chinese because the Chinese were fucked up even worse.

But he told them what he knew and what he thought: The Chinese were not lousy soldiers, but they just didn't give a damn because they knew they were getting screwed by their officers, who would sell the day's ration if they could find a buyer. The Jap officers, on the other hand, were generally honest. Mean as hell, they thought nothing of belting the enlisted men-sergeants, too-in the mouth. But they didn't sell the troops' rations, and the rest of the Jap system seemed to work well. If a Jap soldier was told to do something, he did it, period.

One of the young lieutenants had studied Japanese in college. When he was alone with McCoy, he spoke a few words of Japanese to him. He didn't speak it all that well, but he spoke better Japanese than the old captain (who had done eight years, 1927-1935, with the 4th Marines in Shanghai) spoke Chinese.

McCoy learned (they didn't tell him, but he learned) that none of the young lieutenants was a regular. They had all come into the Corps right after college. McCoy wondered what the hell they were doing sitting around asking an enlisted man questions. As young lieutenants without any experience, they should instead have been out with troops in the field.

Once, a couple of civilians, an old one and a young one, dropped in while he was standing in a skivvy shirt by a map of Honan Province (the room was right under the roof and was hot as hell). When they entered the room, McCoy stopped talking, not knowing who they were.

"Don't let me interrupt," the older civilian said.

"Carry on, McCoy," the old captain ordered. So he carried on.

That was the day he was straightening them out about how good the Japanese soldiers were, and he went on with that. From time to time the old civilian would snort, as if he didn't think McCoy knew what the hell he was talking about, but McCoy decided to let the old guy fuck himself. The civilians stuck around until he was finished. When they were gone, McCoy asked who they were. For some reason, the officers thought that was funny. They laughed at him, and he never got an answer.

McCoy had no idea how long the "interviews" were going to go on. At first, he'd hoped they would go on forever. But by the end of the second week, he knew he was just about talked-out. If there was something he knew about China they hadn't gotten out of him, he couldn't think of what it was.

When first call blew that Saturday morning, he got out of bed and took a shower. Standing under the shower, shaving, reminded him of China and made him a little homesick for it. The only time in China he'd had to shave himself was when he was on a convoy. The rest of the time there'd been Chinese boys to do it for him.