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

"Meaning that I realized this morning that I don't have enough uniforms," he said.

Is that the truth? Or does he know he's on his way to the Pacific and doesn't want to tell me?

"That's all you have planned?" Carolyn asked.

"That's it."

"For this afternoon, or for the rest of the week?"

"For the week," Ed Banning said.

"I thought maybe you'd be going home or something," she said.

"I thought I told you," he said. "Like a lot of Marines, the Corps's home."

Carolyn looked into his eyes.

"Wait for me in the lobby," she said. "It'll take me about five minutes to tell my boss I'm going, and to get my coat."

When she went outside, he was at the bottom of the stairs, standing by one of the concrete lions that seem to be studying the traffic on Fifth Avenue passing the library. It was snowing, and there was snow on the shoulders of his overcoat and on his hat.

She went quickly down the stairs and put her hand under his arm, and then she absolutely shocked herself by blurting, "Hi, sailor, looking for a good time?"

He touched her gloved hand for a moment and smiled at her.

"Have any trouble getting the afternoon off?" he asked.

"I told my boss I was just struck with some kind of flu," Carolyn said, "that'll keep me from work for a week."

"Can you get away with it?" he asked.

"Sure," she said. "Now, aside from Brooks Brothers, what would you like to do?"

His eyebrows rose. She nudged him with her shoulder.

"Aside from that, I mean," she said.

He shrugged.

"Is there some reason you have to stay in the city?" Carolyn asked, as they started to walk across Fifth Avenue to Forty-first Street.

"No," he said. "The only thing I have to do is get on the Twentieth-Century Limited on two April at seven fifty-five in the evening. Why do you ask?"

"How do you feel about snow?" she asked.

"I hate it," he cheerfully admitted.

"How about snow outside?" Carolyn pursued. "On fields. Unmarked, except maybe by deer tracks?"

"Better," he said.

"With a fireplace inside? Glowing embers?"

"A loaf of bread, a glowing ember, and thou?"

"Beside you in the wilderness," Carolyn said. "I have a place in Bucks County. Overlooking the Delaware. An old fieldstone canal house."

"And you want to go there?"

"I want to go there with you," she said.

"Christ, and I was afraid you were trying to get rid of me," Banning said.

Carolyn squeezed his arm. She didn't trust her voice to speak.

(Four)

Battalion Arms Room 2nd Raider Battalion Camp Elliott, California 1300 Hours, 9 April 1942

There are few things that frighten the United States Marine Corps. One of them is the acronym "IG," for "Inspector General," which usually means not only the officer bearing that title but his entire staff. This ranges from senior noncommissioned officers upward, and what they do is visit a unit and compile long lists of the unit's shortcomings in all areas of military endeavor.

When a visit from the IG is scheduled, the unit to be inspected instantly begins a frenzied preparation for the inspection, so that the IG will find as little wrong as possible. The IG will find something wrong, or else the IG (including the staff) would not be doing the job properly. No IG report has ever said that the unit inspected was perfect in every detail of its organization, personnel, and equipment. The best a unit can hope for is that the shortcomings the IG will detect will be of a minor, easily correctable nature.

The fear, and the resultant near-hysteria, is compounded when the phrase "from Washington" is appended to "IG." Colonels who could with complete calm order a regimental attack across heavily mined terrain into the mouths of cannon, and master gunnery sergeants who would smilingly lead the attack with a fixed bayonet, break into cold sweats and suffer stomach distress when informed their outfit is about to be inspected by "the IG from Washington." There is a reason for this concern. An IG evaluation of "Unsatisfactory" is tantamount to the announcement before God and the Corps that they have been weighed in the balance and found not to be Good Marines.

The 2nd Raider Battalion was not immune to IG hysteria. There were several "preinspections" before the "IG from Washington's" inspection, during which the staff examined the equipment and personnel of the Raiders and searched for things the IG would likely find fault with. And there were twice as many pre-preinspections, in which platoon leaders and gunnery sergeants sought to detect faults that would likely be uncovered by the battalion brass during their preinspections.

Depending on the individual, experience with IG inspections tends to lessen the degree of hysteria. Inasmuch as Second Lieutenant Kenneth J. McCoy had gone through four annual IG inspections while an enlisted man with the 4th Marines, he had not been nearly as concerned with the preinspections-or even with the "IG from Washington" inspection itself-as had been First Lieutenant Martin Burnes (whose permanent presence, and that of his wife, aboard the Last Tune was now an accepted fact of life).

McCoy was so experienced with IG inspections, in fact, that he knew the rules of the game, and took several precautionary steps in his own area of responsibility (weaponry) to keep the IG inspectors happy. He was aware that IG inspectors would keep inspecting things until they found something wrong. So he gave them something to find.

After details of Raiders who'd been sent up from the companies to the armory had cleaned the crew-served and special (shotguns, et cetera) weapons to Gunnery Sergeant Zimmerman's highly critical satisfaction, and after they had all been laid out for the IG's inspection, Second Lieutenant McCoy and Gunnery Sergeant Zimmerman had gone through them and fucked things up a little here and there. While Zimmerman partially unfastened a sling on a Thompson, for example, McCoy would rub a finger coated with grease over the bolt of a Browning Automatic Rifle, or on the barrel of one of the Winchester Model 1897 12-gauge trench guns.

When it came, the inspection went as McCoy thought it would. The inspecting officer was a captain who took a quick look around and then turned over the actual inspection to a chief warrant officer, a tall, leathery-faced man named Ripley who looked as if he had been in the Marine Corps since the Corps had gone ashore at Tripoli. Gunnery Sergeant Zimmerman had subtly, if quickly, let Chief Warrant Officer Ripley know that Second Lieutenant McCoy had been in the heavy-weapons section of the 4th Marines in Shanghai. This had disabused Mr. Ripley of the notion that, for some inexplicable reason, the Raiders had turned their armory over to a baby-faced candy-ass second John fresh from Quantico-which is what he had thought when he first set eyes on Lieutenant McCoy.

Chief Warrant Officer Ripley then, for a couple of minutes, searched for discrepancies of the type to be expected in any repository of arms, such as dirt and fire hazards and inadequate records. Then he looked for such things as malfunctioning weapons not properly tagged, so they could be repaired. And then he detail-stripped several weapons selected at random, searching for specks of dirt or rust. Finding none, he then compiled his list of minor discrepancies: "excess lubricant on three (3) Browning Automatic Rifle bolts; improperly fastened slings on two (2) Thompson submachine guns; and grease on barrels of two (2) shotguns, trench Ml897."

By then it was evident to him that the baby-faced second john knew how to play the game. What the hell, he was an old China Marine, too.

Then he grew serious.

"Out of school, Lieutenant, where'd you and the gunny hide the junk weapons?" Ripley asked. His voice sounded like gravel.

"No junk weapons," McCoy said. "That's them."