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

Banning nodded.

"But if you want, I can ask him," Stecker said. "Discreetly, of course. I'm going to see him tomorrow at eleven hundred."

"No, this is it," Banning said. "I'm flying back to Washington at oh-nine-hundred. To report to the Commandant as soon as I get there."

"I really wish I could be more helpful," Stecker said.

"You've been very helpful," Banning said.

"So what happens to McCoy?" Stecker said.

"It would raise questions if he were suddenly relieved from the Raiders," Banning said.

"So who really pays for this idiocy is a nice young kid-a fine young officer," Stecker said bitterly. "Lesterby gets to draw his pension, and Wesley, too, and McCoy gets his ass blown away playing commando on some unimportant little island in the South Pacific."

"I thought you were all for Carlson and his Raiders," Banning said, surprised.

"I think the whole idea of Raiders is stupid from start to finish," Stecker said. "You didn't ask me that."

The smell of charring beef began to float up to the flying bridge.

Stecker sniffed. "Are we about finished?" he asked. "Oddly enough, after this conversation of ours, I still have an appetite."

Banning set his beer bottle down and stood up. "Thank you, Jack," he said.

When they went into the main cabin, they saw that the women had changed. Ernie Sage was now wearing a pale yellow cotton dress, which she wore with a single strand of pearls that Banning knew were real, and had cost what a Marine second lieutenant made in three months.

The table had been very elegantly set in the main lounge of the Last Tune. There was gold-rimmed bone china, crystal glasses, and heavy sterling. There were two bottles of wine on the table, and a reserve supply, plus a bottle of brandy, on a sideboard.

Banning reflected that Ernie Sage seemed to have grasped what was expected of the wife of a junior officer when entertaining in their quarters a field-grade officer. Except she wasn't married to Killer McCoy, and this yacht was not exactly what came to mind when you thought of the quarters of a second lieutenant living off the post. McCoy seemed to have read his mind. In Chinese, he asked, softly, "It's a long way from that one-room apartment of mine over the whorehouse in Shanghai, isn't it?"

Banning laughed. McCoy started to pour the wine. He did it naturally, Banning thought. He was perfectly at ease with it, and even with this elaborate arrangement of crystal, china, and silver. He wondered if McCoy himself knew how much he had changed since Shanghai.

"You know, I knew that Ken spoke Chinese-" Marty Burnes gushed.

"Two kinds, plus Japanese, and God only knows what else," Banning interrupted.

"But I didn't really believe it until I heard the two of you talking," Burnes concluded.

"The day I met him," Ernie said, "he took me to a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown in New York City. And spoke Chinese to them. I was awed."

"Knowing all those languages," Jack Stecker said innocently, "I wonder if the greatest contribution he can make to the Marine Corps is in the armory of the Second Raider Battalion."

Banning looked toward Stecker and found Stecker's eyes on his. He did not reply, but he had already made up his mind that one of the first things he was going to do when he got back to Washington was try to justify getting McCoy out of the Raiders. Stecker was of course right. Second Lieutenants who spoke Japanese and two kinds of Chinese were in very short supply and should not be expended while they were trying to paddle up to some obscure Japanese-held island in a rubber boat.

He looked away from Stecker and found Ernie Sage's eyes on him. She had nice eyes, he thought. Perceptive eyes. But what he saw in them now was sad disappointment that he had not responded to Stecker. And that meant, Banning decided, that Ernie Sage knew what McCoy was doing here.

The dumb, lovesick sonofabitch told her! He knew that was expressly forbidden. He isn't even married to her, for Christ's sake!

And then he was forced to face the shameful fact that Major Edward J. Banning, that professional intelligence officer of the U.S. Marine Corps, that absolute paragon of military virtue, had only a week before shown his credentials to a civilian female for no better reason than that he wanted to look good in her eyes.

Banning decided that if McCoy had told Ernie at least some of what he was really doing with the 2nd Raider Battalion at Camp, Elliott, he had done so with a reason, and only after thinking it over. The cold truth to face was that McCoy had almost certainly had a better reason for telling Ernie than he had for showing Carolyn his credentials.

Banning spent the night aboard the Last Time; and in the morning, McCoy drove him to the airfield, where a Navy Douglas R4D was waiting to fly the "IG from Washington" team back to Washington.

As he gave McCoy his hand, there was time to tell him what he had decided.

"You've done a good job here, Ken, in a rotten situation," Banning said. "I'm going to try to talk Rickabee into getting you out of here. I'm not sure he will, but I'm going to try."

(Two)

Headquarters, 2nd Raider Battalion

Camp Elliott, California

23 April 1942

Though it appeared loose and informal-everyone sat on the ground in the shade-and Colonel Carlson pointedly did not use the official term, there was a 2nd Raider Battalion officers' call in everything but name. Colonel Carlson probably did not like the official term, McCoy thought, because there was an implied exclusion of enlisted then from an official officers' call. But with the exception of a very few enlisted then (the sergeant major; the S-3 [Plans Training] and S-4 [Supply] sergeants; two of the first sergeants; and three gunnery sergeants, including Zimmerman), everybody at the meeting was an officer, and most of the battalion officers had been summoned and were present.

A week or so before, Captain Roosevelt gave a lecture on the Rules of Land Warfare, a subject that McCoy was more than casually familiar with. Because of the situation in China at the time, there had been frequent lectures on the Rules of Land Warfare in the 4th Marines. And as he listened to Roosevelt, McCoy reflected that he had been lectured on the Rules of Land Warfare so often that he knew most of them by heart. But McCoy did learn one thing during Roosevelt's lecture: Roosevelt used two terms McCoy had never heard before. Since he did not have an appetite to stand up and confess his ignorance, McCoy wrote the terms down, intending to look them up in a dictionary.

As it happened, the dictionary did not turn out to be necessary. When he asked Ernie about it, she questioned him about what he wanted to look up, and then she explained the meaning of de facto and de jure.

And now he realized that those terms fit this case: Carlson's meeting, with everybody sitting on the ground in the shade of the battalion headquarters building, was a de facto officers' call, even if Carlson was reluctant to make it a de jure officers' call.

The first item on the agenda was significant. Carlson told his officers and senior noncoms that, as of that day, the 2nd Raider Battalion had officially completed its stateside training, and that Admiral Nimitz (Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet) had so officially informed Admiral King, and had requested transportation for the battalion to Hawaii, where they would be trained in rubber-boat techniques and in making landings from submarines.

Additionally, Carlson continued, the advance element of the "competition" (which everyone knew meant the 1st Raider Battalion) had sailed from San Diego aboard the USS Zeilin 11 April, more than likely for Samoa, although that was just a guess, and in any event should not be talked about.

Then he told them that a report from Major Sam Griffith (As a captain, Griffith had been sent with Captain Wally Greene to observe and undergo British Commando training. He was regarded within the Marine Corps as an expert on commando, or Raider, operations) had "somehow come into hand."