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

"The Commandant will see you now, sir," the master gun-nery sergeant said to Fleming Pickering, as he walked to the double doors of the Commandant's office. He knocked, but didn't wait for a reply before opening the door. "Mr. Pickering, sir."

The Commandant was standing just inside his office.

"That's General Pickering, Gunny," General Clifton Cates said, in a soft southern accent. "You might want to make a note of that."

Cates was a tall, sharply featured man with an aristo-cratic air about him.

"Come on in, Flem," Cates went on. "It's good to see you."

"Thank you for seeing me without an appointment," Pickering said, as he took Cates's extended hand. He chuckled. "I was trying to decide whether or not to salute."

"Not indoors, Flem, or while in civilian attire," Cates said, smiling.

"I went to the officers' sales store at Marine Barracks yesterday, to buy uniforms," Pickering said. "No ID card; they wouldn't sell them to me."

Cates chuckled.

"I think the captain there thought he was dealing with a crazy old coot who thought he was a Marine general," Pickering went on. "Later, I realized he was right."

Cates laughed, then stepped around Pickering and opened his office door.

"Gunny," he ordered. "General Pickering's going to need an ID card, and while I think of it, a physical. Set it up to get him an ID card right away, and then call Bethesda and make an immediate appointment for the physical." He paused. "But only after you get us some coffee."

He closed the door, waved Pickering to a red leather couch, and sat down beside him.

"Frankly, I sort of hoped I would hear from you, Flem," Cates said. "Can you tell me what's going on? Right now, I'm just a Marine officer who's obeying his orders and not asking questions about them."

"I hardly know where to start, sir," Pickering said. "This is probably the best place."

Pickering opened his briefcase, took from it a manila en-velope, and handed it to Cates.

Cates opened the envelope and started to read. His eye-brows went up and he pursed his lips.

A staff sergeant came into the office carrying a tray with two china mugs of coffee, placed it on the coffee table by the couch, and then left.

"Where'd this come from?" Cates asked, not lifting his eyes from the assessment.

"It was written by a Marine officer then on the staff of Naval Element, SCAP, in Tokyo," Pickering said.

"McCoy, right?" Cates asked. "What do they call him? `Killer'?"

"Yes, sir."

"I have been advised by Clyde Dawkins-you remem-ber him from Guadalcanal? He had Marine Air Group 21."

"Yes, sir. My son was in VMF-229 in MAG-21."

"Clyde's now Deputy CG at Pendleton. He sent me a TWX saying McCoy left Miramar at 0800 this morning in an Air Force two-seater fighter for here."

"Yes, sir. I had a telephone call from Mrs. McCoy telling me that."

"Now that I think of it, you were supposed to get a copy of the TWX," Cates said, then went off at a tangent: "This thing isn't signed?"

"The original was signed and submitted to MacArthur's G-2, who ordered it destroyed," Pickering said. "The Pres-ident doesn't want that to get out."

"Then why did you tell me?"

"I thought you should know, sir."

Cates considered that, nodded, and said, "Thank you. That detail will go no further."

"Thank you, sir," Pickering said.

"But I'd like to have this."

"I thought you should have it, sir. That's why I asked to see you," Pickering said, then went on: "What happened was that I was in Tokyo, went to see McCoy, and he gave me that assessment. And told me he was being involuntar-ily released from active duty. When I got back to the States, I went to see Admiral Hillenkoetter at the CIA, and gave it to him."

"Things are beginning to make sense," Cates said.

"Apparently, after the North Koreans came across the 38th parallel, Hillenkoetter told the President about the as-sessment. The President called me, and asked me to come here. I got here on the twenty-sixth. The President came to Senator Fowler's apartment for breakfast, got Fowler's as-surance that the... rejection of the early warning would not get into the press, and then ordered me to active duty."

"Why?"

"I'm not sure," Pickering said. "Possibly to make sure I keep my mouth shut."

"There has to be more to it than that," Cates said. "Out of school, there is some dissatisfaction with Hillenkoetter's CIA. And you were a deputy director of the OSS, weren't you?"

"I don't think... Jesus Christ, I hope not. I'm wholly unqualified to run the CIA."

"As I remember it, I thought you were wholly unquali-fied to be the First Division G-2. And you proved me dead wrong."

Pickering didn't reply.

"Of course, that was when I thought you were a sailor," Cates went on, smiling. "Before Jack NMI Stecker... I re-member this clearly; we were in General Vandegrift's con-ference tent, and I had just referred to you as `that sailor G-2 of ours,' or perhaps that `swabbie G-2' when Jack stood up, and `Begging the colonel's pardon, when you and I were at Belleau Wood, so was Pickering. He was a Marine then, and he's a Marine now.'"

Pickering met Cates's eyes for a moment, then said, firmly, "I'm unqualified to run the CIA, period."

"How about to be a new broom in the Pacific, sweeping out the incompetents we apparently have there?"

"That, either," Pickering said.

Cates went off on another tangent. "Let me tell you what shape the Corps is in," he said. "I was going over the numbers before you came in." He got off the couch and went and sat behind his desk, and began to read from a folder on his desk.

"Total regular establishment strength, as of today, 74,279 officers and men..." "That's all?" Pickering blurted.

"Broken down into 40,364 officers and men in the oper-ating forces," Cates read on, "24,452 in the support forces, and 3,871 in other duties... embassy guards, afloat, that sort of thing."

"My God, I had no idea how much the Corps had been cut back," Pickering said.

"In Fleet Marine Force, Pacific-in Camp Pendleton, mostly-we have 7,779 officers and men in the First Ma-rine Division-"

"Only seven thousand men in the First Marine Divi-sion?" Pickering asked, incredulously.

"The First Marine Division (Reinforced)," Cates con-firmed, a tone of sarcasm in his voice. "You're used to a war-strength division, Flem, of 1,079 officers and 20,131 men."

Pickering shook his head in disbelief.

"In addition to the First Marine Division, we have 3,733 officers and men in the First Marine Aircraft Wing. That's roughly half the men called for in peacetime. A wartime wing calls for about 12,000 men."

"My God!"

"Roughly, the regular Marine Corps is about one-third of the Marine Corps," Cates went on. "There are 128,959 officers and men in the reserve components. There's some 39,867 people in the organized reserves, ground and air, and another 90,444 in what we call `the volunteer re-serve'-individual reservists, in other words; we don't like to think of them as `unorganized.'"

"Pick, my son, is in the organized reserve."

"I know," Cates said. "I saw his name in the paper a cou-ple of weeks ago, when he set the San Francisco-to-Tokyo speed record, and I was curious enough to check."

"I was on the plane," Pickering said.

"He ever discuss with you why he's in the reserve?" Cates asked.

"I don't think you'll like the answer," Pickering said.

"Go ahead."

"He said all he has to do is show up at El Toro and the benevolent Marine Corps gives him expensive toys to play with," Pickering said. "He really loves flying the Corsair."

Cates chuckled. "I suspect mat motivates many of the aviation reservists," he said. "We don't have recruiting problems with the organized aviation reserve; and it's at ninety-four percent of its authorized strength. The ground elements-despite a good deal of recruiting effort-are at seventy-seven percent. Buzzing Camp Pendleton at four hundred knots in a Corsair is a lot more fun on a weekend than crawling through it on your stomach."