Griffin W.E.B. - The Corps 09 - Under Fire

There is something essentially ludicrous in the sight of three naked men standing rigidly at attention, especially when two of the three have naked Japanese women hang-ing from their necks, and Captain McCoy was not able to resist the temptation to smile.

"As you were," he managed to say, which caused the two Marines with the ladies dangling from their necks to disen-gage themselves and all three Marines to quickly attempt to cover their genital areas with their hands.

Captain McCoy found it necessary to cough; Lieutenant Taylor found it necessary to turn and look through the door.

"Lieutenant Taylor and I are pleased to see that you've taken advantage of your spare time to sample the cultural delights of Sasebo," McCoy said. "But all good things must come to an end."

The three Marines looked at him, stone-faced.

"Shortly after dark, a weapons carrier will be here to take-"

"I like the Marine," one of the ladies said to one of her sisters, speaking, of course, in Japanese.

"Thank you very much," McCoy replied, in Japanese. "And I like you, too, but I am a married man."

All three ladies tittered behind their hands.

"So what?" the first lady asked.

"My wife is much stronger and larger than I am, and when she is angry she beats me severely," McCoy said.

All three ladies tittered delightedly again, and Taylor laughed. The three Marines looked baffled and very curi-ous.

"... as I was saying before the lady asked me if all Marines have dongs the size of their little fingers, or whether you three were just shortchanged-"

"She didn't ask that," one of the Marines challenged, se-riously. "Did she, sir?"

"You don't think I made that up, do you, Sergeant?"

After a long moment, the sergeant said, "No, sir, I guess not."

He looked at his lady, then dropped his eyes to his geni-tals.

"As I was saying," McCoy went on, "a weapons carrier will be here shortly after dark to take us where we are go-ing. I don't think the chow there will be as good as the chow Sergeant Jennings tells me you can get here. Your choice. But you're finished with the booze, and in an hour, you will be all dressed and sober and with all the bills paid. Are there any questions?"

All three said, "No, sir."

"You have anything, Mr. Taylor?"

"I think you covered everything," Taylor said.

"Sergeant Jennings?"

"No, sir."

"In that case, men, carry on," McCoy said. "I will see you in an hour."

He did an about-face and marched out of the room, with Taylor and Jennings marching after him.

[FOUR]

ABOARD HMS CHARITT

33 DEGREES 10 MINUTES NORTH LATITUDE,

129 DEGREES 63 MINUTES EAST LONGITUDE

(THE EAST CHINA SEA)

0635 16 AUGUST 1950

Lieutenant Commander Darwin Jones-Fortin, RN, saw the face of Lieutenant David R. Taylor, USNR, peering through the round window in the interior bulkhead. He waved at him, then pointed first at the door in the bulk-head-Taylor nodded his understanding-and then at the sailor standing behind the helmsman, indicating that he should go to the door and help undog it.

Undogged and unlatched, the heavy steel door swung open as Charity buried her bow in the sea, and it was all the sailor could do to hold it. Taylor came onto the bridge and leaned against the bulkhead, then was followed by McCoy.

"Permission to come on the bridge, sir?" Taylor called out. "Permission granted," Jones-Fortin said. "Both of you." Taylor waited until the moment was right, then came quickly across the deck to where Jones-Fortin sat in his cap-tain's chair. McCoy followed him. The ship moved, and Mc-Coy half slid, half fell across the deck, ending up crashing into Taylor.

"Smooth as a millpond, what?" Jones-Fortin said. "Seri-ously, is this weather going to be a problem? I'm afraid we're in for a bit of it. Possibly, very possibly, worse than what we're getting now."

"Are we?" Taylor said.

"And Charity is of course a destroyer," Jones-Fortin added. "She doesn't ride as well as the Queen Mary, or, come to think of it, better than any other man-of-war that comes to mind."

"Try a destroyer escort sometime, Captain," Taylor said. "Or even better, an LST. Although calling an LST a man-of-war is stretching the term considerably."

"Is that the voice of experience speaking?"

"I had a DE during the war," Taylor said. "And LSTs since."

"I was the first lieutenant on a DE some time ago. I've always thought the RN assigned to DEs people they hoped would get washed over the side. I've never been aboard an LST in weather."

`Truth being stranger than fiction, when I was sailing LSTs through these waters after the war*" Taylor said, "I used to think back fondly on the smooth sailing characteris-tics in rough seas of the Joseph J. Isaacs, DE-403. In weather like this, the movement of an LST has to be experi-enced to be believed."

"I wonder how my men took to waking up in a storm like this," McCoy said. "They were still feeling pretty good when we came aboard."

"Didn't someone once say, `the wages of sin are death'?" Jones-Fortin said. "I suspect that a number of my crew are in the same shape." McCoy chuckled.

"But I'm afraid, McCoy," Jones-Fortin went on, "that I have to correct you. This isn't the storm. This is what they call `the edges' of the storm. The storm itself is farther north, coming down from China into the Yellow Sea."

"Right on our course to Inchon, right?" Taylor said.

"I'm afraid so," Jones-Fortin said. "There's an overlay of the latest weather projection on the chart. Perhaps you'd like to have a look. We have a decision to make." He indicated the chart room, aft of the wheel.

"Thank you, sir," Taylor said, and went for a look.

"Did you see what I saw?" Jones-Fortin asked when Taylor returned.

"I think so, sir," Taylor said, and turned to McCoy: "Ken, the way the storm is moving-and as the captain said, it's a bad one-I don't think we can put the boats over the side tomorrow morning. And maybe not even the morning after that."

"You mean it would be risky, or we just can't do it?"

"Tomorrow, we just can't do it. Period. The morning af-ter that, maybe, with more of a chance of something going wrong than I like."

"So what do we do?" McCoy asked.

"That's up to Captain Jones-Fortin," Taylor said.

"It's a bit over six hundred miles," Jones-Fortin said. "I think Charity can make fifteen knots, even through the storm. A little less when it gets as bad as I suspect it's going to get, a bit more when there are periods of relative calm. That would put us off the Flying Fish Channel lighthouse in forty hours-sometime before midnight on 18 August. As Mr. Taylor saw, the storm will still be in the area at that time. Whether or not it will have subsided enough for us to safely put the boats over the side-or for you to be able to safely make Tokchok-kundo in them-by 0300 of the nineteenth is something we won't know until then."

"And if it doesn't clear, sir, then what?" McCoy asked.

"Then we shall have to spend the daylight hours of the nineteenth steaming in wide circles offshore. Or, for that matter, we could steam farther south, to the northern edge of the storm, and follow its movement southward and see where we are, and when."

"You mean we would move at the speed of the storm, sir?" McCoy asked.

"It's moving now," Taylor said, "somewhere between fifteen and twenty miles an hour."

"As we followed it, we'd be out of it?" McCoy asked.

"That would depend, Ken," Taylor said, tolerantly, as if explaining something to a backward child, "on how close we were to it as we followed it."

"I will, of course, defer to the judgment of Captain Jones-Fortin," McCoy said. "And even to yours, Mr. Tay-lor. But if there were some way we could get out of the storm, that would be this landlubber's choice."