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

"I'm surprised," Jack said.

"Surprised? We went to get laid; we got laid."

"I mean, in good hotels," Stecker said. "Does that make me seem naive?"

"My grandfather once said," Pick said, "not to me, of course, but I heard about it, that the only thing he had against a paying guest coupling with an elephant in his room was that it was sometimes hard to clean the carpet."

"What did that little joke of yours cost you?" Stecker asked.

"Nothing. I tried to pay her-we danced, remember?-but she said no. She said I should think of it as her contribution to the war effort."

"Jesus Christ, Pickering, you're amazing."

"Yeah, I am," Pickering said, and there was something rueful in his tone of voice that made Dick Stecker look at him.

"Now what's wrong?'

"Well, I went to get laid. And I got laid. Getting it to stand up took all the skill at the command of the hooker, which I must say was most imaginative and thorough. And when it was

over, I felt like a piece of dog shit. How could 1 be unfaithful to good old Whatshername?"

"Oh Jesus, Pick, I'm sorry," Stecker said.

"What the fuck am I going to do, Dick?" Pick asked plaintively.

Stecker said the only thing he could think of. "Hang in there, buddy," he said. "Just hang in there."

(One)

The New York Public Library

1215 Hours, 25 March 1942

Carolyn Spencer Howell was thirty-two years old. She was tall, chic, and much better dressed than most of the other librarians in the Central Reading Room of the New York Public Library on Forty-second Street, and she wore her black hair parted in the middle, and long enough to reach her shoulder blades. She had begun-not without feeling a little foolish and wondering what her real motives were-what she thought of as her special "research project" four days before.

Although one saw more and more then in uniform on the streets these days, one did not encounter many in the library, except in the lobby waiting out the rain. But there was one who was spending-considerable time in the Central Reading Room, and Carolyn Spencer Howell found him very interesting. She had no way of knowing, of course, how long he had been coming into the Central Reading Room before she noticed him; but since she had noticed him ten days earlier, he had come in every day.

He was a Marine, and an officer. She knew that much about the military services. Marines wore a fouled anchor superimposed on a representation of the world as their branch-of-service insignia. Officers wore pins representing their rank on the epaulets of their tunics and overcoats, and in the case of this man, on his collar points. Carolyn had to go to the Britannica to find out that a golden oak leaf was the insignia of a major.

From the time she had first noticed him, the Marine major had followed the same schedule. He arrived a few minutes after nine in the morning and went to the periodicals, where he read that day's New York Tunes, and then the most recent copies available of the Baltimore Sun and the San Diego Union Leader. He could have just been killing time, which of itself would be interesting, but he seemed to be looking for something particular in the newspapers.

When he came into the library every day, the Marine major had with him an obviously new leather briefcase, in which he carried two large green fabric-bound looseleaf notebooks, a supply of pencils, two fountain pens, cigarettes, and a Zippo lighter and a can of lighter fluid. She had once watched while he refilled his lighter. It was unusual to carry a supply of lighter fluid around with you, but it seemed to make sense if you thought about it.

He would make notes in one of the two notebooks, writing in pencil in one of them and in ink in the other. When he had finished reading the newspapers, he would come to the counter-sometimes to Carolyn Spencer Howell, and sometimes to one of the other girls-and fill out the little chits necessary to call up material from the stacks.

The first words he ever said to Carolyn Spencer Howell were "Would it be possible to get the New York Times from November fifteenth, nineteen forty-one, through, say, December thirty-first?"

"Of course," she said, "but it would make quite an armful. How about four days at a time? Starting with November fifteenth, nineteen forty-one?"

"That would be fine," the major said. "Thank you very much."

He had a nice, deep, masculine voice, she thought, and spoke with a regional accent that told her only that he was not a New Yorker. And there was something a little unhealthy about him, she thought. He didn't look quite as robust and outdoorsy as she expected a Marine major to look.

On the plus side, he had nice, warm, experienced eyes.

The second time he spoke to her, the major asked if by any chance the library had copies of the Shanghai Post.

"Well, yes, of course," she said. "Up to when the war started, of course."

"Could I have them from November first, nineteen forty-one… up to the last?"

"Certainly."

While he was reading the Shanghai Post, Carolyn noticed something strange. The major was just sort of staring off into space. There was a strange, profoundly sad look on his face. And in his eyes.

Some of the other requests he made of Carolyn Spencer Howell were of a military or politico-military nature. For instance, she got for him the text of the Geneva Conventions on Warfare, and several volumes on stateless persons. He was especially interested in Nansen passports. (In 1920, the League of Nations authorized an identity/travel document to be issued to displaced persons, in particular Russians who did not wish to return to what had become the Soviet Union. It came to be called the "Nansen passport" after Fridtjof Nansen, League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugee Affairs.)

Most of his requests concerned the Japanese, which was understandable, but what in the world was a major of Marines doing spending all day, every day, in the public library? Didn't the military services have more information on the enemy than a public library could provide?

An even more disturbing thought came to Carolyn Spencer Howell. Was he really a Marine officer? Or some character who had simply elected to put on a service uniform? This was New York City, and anything was possible in New York, even in the main reading room of the public library. This unpleasant thought was fertilized when Carolyn realized that the major's uniforms were brand new. There was even a little tag that he had apparently missed stitched below one of the pockets on one of his blouses.

Yet he wore decorations, or at least the little colored ribbons that represented decorations, on the breast of his uniform. And for some reason she came to believe that these were the real thing-which made him the real thing. Finding out what they represented became important to Carolyn. She thought of it as her "research project."

He had four ribbons. And when he came to the counter, she looked at them carefully and later made notes describing their colors. She checked her notes for accuracy when she had reason to walk through the reading room.

One had a narrow white stripe at each end, then two broader red stripes, and a medium-sized blue stripe in the middle. Next to it was one that was all purple, except for narrow white stripes at each end. And there was a little gold pin on this one, an oak leaf maybe. Another one was all yellow, with two narrow red-white-and-blue bands through it. And there was another yellow one, this one with two white-red-white bands and a blue-white-red band. This one had a star on it.

Carolyn was, after all, a librarian; she was trained to do research. Thus it wasn't hard to find out what the ribbons represented. The one that sat on top of the other three was the Bronze Star Medal, awarded for valor in action. The purple one was the Purple Heart, awarded for wounds received in action. The little pin (officially, according to United States Navy Medals and Decorations, Navy Department, Washington D.C., January 1942, 21 pp., unbound, an oak leaf cluster) signified the second award. Or, in other words, it said he had been wounded twice. The mostly yellow one with the star on it was awarded for service in the Asiatic-Pacific Theater of Operations; the star meant participation in a campaign. The other mostly yellow one was the American Defense Medal, whatever that meant.