W.e.b. Griffin - The Corps II - CALL TO ARMS

Banning had thought this through, too, very carefully, going over it again and again in his mind. If he actually had to do the thing, he had to do it right. That meant very quickly pulling the pistol out from under the jacket and placing the muzzle into his mouth, so that even if someone on the conning tower bridge did happen to be looking in his direction, they wouldn't have time to stop him. He thought that even if someone did happen to be looking at him when he took the Colt out, they would be so astonished that there would be a couple of seconds' delay before they would try to take it away from him. A couple of seconds would be all he needed.

That was presuming there was a cartridge in the chamber when he pulled the trigger. If the firing pin flew forward into an empty chamber, there would be no time to take the pistol out of his mouth and work the action again. If it didn't fire the first time, that would be it. They would take the pistol away from him with whatever force was necessary, and they'd never take their eyes off him until they docked at Pearl. After that he would be turned over to the then in white coats from the psychiatric ward at the Naval hospital.

There weren't that many ways to end your life aboard a submarine at sea. You couldn't just jump over the side, for example. The bulkheads on the conning tower were almost shoulder high and would be difficult to climb over even if you could see. And even if he managed to jump off the conning tower without being stopped, then what? He would probably break his leg on the fall to the deck, or else knock himself out. The best he could hope for in that circumstance would be to be able to scurry across the deck like a crippled crab and bounce off the hull into the sea, then try to swim away from the hull before the suction of the propellers sucked him down to where the blades could slice him up.

It would also be a dirty trick on Red MacGregor to blow his brains all over his cabin. Or to do it in the head where, every time one of the Pickerel's crew took a leak, he would remind himself that this was where that poor, blind jarhead captain blew his brains out.

The place to do it was on the conning tower. His brains would be blown off the conning tower, and there would only be a little blood on the conning-tower deck when the body fell, easily washed away.

After Banning did it, the captain would be called to the bridge. He would probably be thoroughly pissed at the officer of the deck for not seeing what the poor, crazy, blind jarhead captain had been up to, and for not stopping it. But once that passed, MacGregor would start to think clearly, like the good commander he was. There would be no point in getting the crew upset. Then someone would be sent below for a mattress cover and some line, and something heavy (probably a couple of shells for the five-inch cannon), and the body would be tied into the mattress cover with the shells, and then lowered to the deck.

MacGregor would probably even go so far as ordering a flag placed over the mattress cover (it would be tied to the deck so it wouldn't be lost). And more than likely, he would read the Episcopal service for the burial of the dead at sea.

And then he would order the Pickerel submerged.

There would be a note in the log, Captain Edward J. Banning, VSMC, buried at sea 0500, 14 January 1942, and the coordinates.

There was a school of thought, of course, that felt that suicide was the coward's way out of a tough situation. Banning had spent much time pondering that line of reasoning, and he had come to the conclusion that in his case, it just didn't wash.

The main pain in the ass for him in being blind had not turned out to be the inconvenience. The inconveniences-the difficulties of just living without sight: spilling food all over his chin, not knowing if he had been able to properly wipe his ass, the constant bumping painfully into things-he could probably get used to, in time.

What was wrong with being blind was that it gave you so much time to think. That was really driving him crazy.

Thinking about Ludmilla, for instance.

Ludmilla, "Milla," was the only woman he had ever loved in his life. And he had left her on the wharf in Shanghai when he'd been flown to Cavite with the advance party of the 4th Marines. The Japs were in Shanghai now, and it was entirely possible that Milla had already done to herself what he was going to do if it was black when he took the bandages off.

He knew that she had thought about it. Once in bed, she had told him that she had been close to it before she met him, that she just didn't think she had it in her to become a whore, and that death wasn't all that frightening to her. Certainly, she would have thought of that again when the Japanese drove down the Bund. There weren't very many options open to a White Russian woman in Shanghai besides turning herself into a whore for some Japanese officer. Milla still thought seriously about such things as honor and pride and shame, and she was very likely to have concluded that death was far preferable to the dishonor of being a Japanese whore.

And Milla had been around the block. She'd already gone through one revolution, and what she had told him about what she had experienced in St. Petersburg-the complete breakdown of society as she had known it-couldn't have been much different from what the breakdown of society in Shanghai must have been once the Japanese had come in.

Milla was practical. She would have understood that the chances of her ever again getting to be with her husband of eighteen hours-her American, Marine officer husband, gone off to fight what looked to be a losing war-were practically nil.

And she would have concluded that the eleven good months that they had had together before they had made it legal had been a brief happy interval in a miserable, frightening life.

And she didn't know, of course, that he was blind.

"The trauma to your optical nerves, Captain, is one of those things, I'm afraid, we don't know a hell of a lot about. Obviously, the trauma was of such severity to cause loss of sight, but on the other hand, it isn't as if anything in there had been severed or destroyed, in which case there would be no hope. I really can't offer an opinion whether your impaired condition will in time pass, or whether the damage is permanent. We just don't have the experience in this area. I would not be surprised, either way. In any event, we should have some indication in two or three weeks."

If the sonofabitch thought there was any real chance the "impaired condition" would "in time pass," they would not have sent him out on the Pickerel. The 4th Marines had been given the responsibility for defending Fortress Corregidor. They needed the regimental intelligence officer, presuming of course that he could see.

He had been sent out, with the colonel's permission, on the Pickerel. Q.E.D.

Banning knew what would come next. They would get him stateside, most likely to the Naval hospital at San Diego. And there they would do whatever was humanly possible for him.

Following which he would be handed a white cane, his retirement orders, and a one-hundred-percent disability pension. They would then turn him over to the Veterans Administration until he learned how to maneuver with the white cane, or maybe with a seeing-eye dog.

He could handle that, too, if he didn't have all this time to think about Milla and wonder what she was doing.

The final conclusion he had drawn was that he could live without Milla, or the Corps, or his sight; but he could not give up all three at once.

If he could see when he went to the conning tower and took the bandage off, then there was something. He wouldn't be with the regiment, but he would be what he had trained all of his adult life to be, a serving Marine officer in a war. Which meant he could do something about Milla, too-though he had no idea how.