The Corps IV - Battleground Read online

  When he reached the boy sergeant, Reeves told him there were Nips snooping around the area, and that they would, unfortunately, have to count as lost the one who landed in the trees.

  "We're Marines," the boy told him. "We don't leave our people behind."

  It never came to a test of wills; for one of the girls found Lieutenant Howard. As far as Reeves was concerned, that was fortunate. For he not only subsequently grew rather fond of the boy, Steve Koffler, but at the time Reeves was reasonably sure that Koffler would have insisted on looking for his lieutenant even to the point of turning his submachine gun on Reeves.

  Not long after that, they found they had to get rid of a Nip patrol who'd heard the Lockheed and probably seen the parachutes; and Koffler did what had to be done then with skill and courage. But the boy threw up when it was over... after he looked down at the corpse of a Japanese he'd wounded, and then, because it was necessary, killed.

  Later, when Lieutenant Howard explained the reasons for their coming to Buka, the explanation made enough sense to Reeves that he put aside his earlier fears and objections about them.

  According to Howard, Reeves's observation point was considered vital. With the three of them there, the odds that it could be kept operational were made greater.

  Meanwhile, some weeks before, a small detachment of U.S. Marines was attached to the Coastwatcher Organization. When word that Reeves's wireless was out reached Commander Feldt, Feldt decided to send two men from the Marine detachment to Buka, together with the latest model American shortwave wireless. Koffler was chosen to go because he was not only a radio operator, he was a highly skilled technician as well (he'd been an Amateur Radio Operator before the War), while Howard had once taught courses in recognition of Japanese aircraft and naval vessels. Because of that, and because Koffler couldn't tell the difference between a battleship and an intercoastal freighter, Howard was asked to join him.

  The village looked like a picture out of National Geographic magazine: A clear stream, about five feet wide and two feet deep, meandered through the center of a scattering of grass-walled huts. The village was populated with about twenty brown-skinned, flat-nosed people, most of whom had teeth died blue and then filed to a point. Cooking fires were burning here and there; chickens were running loose; and bare-breasted women were beating yamlike roots with rocks against other rocks. Most of the men and some of the women were armed with British Lee-Enfield rifles; and many carried web ammunition bandoliers.

  Sergeant Stephen M. Koffler, USMC, of East Orange, New Jersey, and Detachment A of Marine Corps Special Detachment 14, had been eating bacon and pork chops and ham and sausage for most of the eighteen years and six months of his life; but if it were in his power he would never do so again.

  He had never given pork much thought before. It had always been there in the refrigerated meat display of Cohen's EZ-Shop Supermarket on the corner of Fourth Avenue and North 18th Street, ready to be wrapped and taken to the cash register. All you had to do was pay Mrs. Cohen, who worked the register, and then take the bacon home and put it in a frying pan.

  He had spent most of the morning watching the conversion of a living, breathing, squealing, hairy, ugly pig into edible meat products; and he hadn't liked what he had seen at all.

  The pig had been brought into the village shortly after dawn by a visibly proud and triumphant Petty Officer First Class Bartholomew Charles Dunlop, Royal Australian Navy Volunteer Reserve. Petty Officer Dunlop, who was known as "Charley," was a native of the island of Buka. When he brought in the pig, he was wearing his usual uniform. That consisted of a brassard around his upper right arm, onto which was sewn the insignia of his rank, and a loin cloth. The loin cloth was something like a slit canvas skirt; and the brassard was placed just below two copper rings. His teeth were black and filed into points. And there were decorative scars on his forehead, his cheeks, and bare chest.

  Petty Officer Dunlop was carrying a 9mm Sten submachine gun, two Lee-Enfield.303 Caliber rifles, and a two-foot long machete. The rifles belonged to the other two members of the detail, who were actually carrying the pig. They were uniformed like Dunlop, except that they had no insignia brassards. Canvas webbing ammunition belts, however, were slung across their chests.

  They carried the pig, squealing in protest, on a pole run between his tied-together legs.

  "Roast pork tonight!" Petty Officer Dunlop announced triumphantly. "And would you look at the size of the bugger!"

  Petty Officer Dunlop had been educated at the Anglican Mission School on Buka, and spoke with the accent of a Yorkshireman.

  Steve Koffler had not seen many pigs, except in photographs, but the one Charley seemed so proud of didn't seem as large as the ones Steve was used to. It was about the size of a large dog.

  "It's beautiful, Charley," Steve said.

  "Where's the officers?"

  Steve shrugged and nodded vaguely toward the jungle.

  How the hell am I supposed to answer that? Out there in the bush someplace?

  "I didn't go with them," Steve said, explaining: "I've got to make the 1115 net call. They weren't sure they'd be back in time."

  "Well, we'll have a jolly little surprise for them when they do come home, won't we?"

  The women of the village, beaming, quickly appeared and watched as the pig was lowered to the ground and the pole between its legs was removed. A length of rope appeared, and this was tied to the pig's rear feet. The pig was then hauled off the ground under a large limb.

  A woman produced a large, china bowl and carefully placed it under the pig's head. It looked to Steve like one of those things people put under their beds before there was inside plumbing.

  Then with one swift swipe of his machete, Charley cut the pig's throat. The squealing stopped, and arterial blood began to gush from the pig's throat as the pig jerked in its death spasms.

  It was only with a massive effort that Steve managed not to throw up. He had to tell himself again and again that he could not humiliate himself, the Marine Corps, and the white race by tossing his cookies.

  The butchering process was performed by the women (hunting was a male responsibility; everything else was women's business). It was worse than even the throat-cutting. Intestines (steaming, despite the heat) spilled from the carcass. The hide was peeled off. The carcass was cut into pieces.

  And at one point Steve realized with something close to horror that one particularly obscene-looking hunk of sickly white stuff was what he knew as bacon.

  Next fires were built; then large steel pots full of water were either suspended over them or set right onto the coals. In one of them, eventually, they dropped the pig's head. Once the water started boiling, the head turned over and over.

  By the time the officers returned, just before 1100, the butchering was just about finished. The bacon and hams (they were too scrawny to be real hams, Steve thought, but that's what they were) had been suspended over a smokey fire; and the rest of the meat was either being slowly broiled over coals or boiled and rendered. Nothing, Steve saw, was going to be wasted.

  Both Reeves and Howard looked exhausted when they arrived. Without a word, Howard dropped his web belt and his Thompson by the creek; and fully clothed, except for his boondockers, he lowered himself into it, carefully holding his splinted arm out of the water. Reeves ordered tea for himself and slumped onto the ground, resting his back against a tree.

  They had nothing to report about their patrol-a case of no news being good news: They'd detected no signs of the Japanese looking for them.

  Steve took his wristwatch from his pocket, and then from the condom where he stored it. There were two watches in the village, his and Lieutenant Howard's. Since there was no chance of getting replacements, and since there were two times each day that were critical-1115 and 2045-it was crucial that the watches be protected.

  The dial read 1059. If he was lucky, the watch was accurate within five minutes. He went in search of Petty Officer Second Class Ian Bruce. He fou
nd him in the grass commo shack, already in place on the generator, his skirt spread wide (it wasn't hard to tell that he was a man), ready to start pumping the bicycle-like pedals of the device that provided power for the Hallicrafters shortwave transceiver.

  The watch hands now indicated 1102. Steve made a wind-it-up motion with his hand. Ian started pumping the pedals. In a moment, the needles on the Hallicrafter came to life. It was now 1103.

  Fuck it, close enough.

  Steve put his fingers on the telegraph key.

  FRD1.FRD6.FRD 1.FRD6.FRD1.FRD6.

  Royal Australian Navy Coastwatcher Radio, this is Detachment A, Special Marine Detachment 14.

  Today, for a change, there was an immediate response:

  FRD6.FRD1.GA.

  Detachment A, this is Coastwatcher Radio, Townesville, Australia, responding to your call. Go ahead.

  FRD1.FRD6.NTATT.

  Coastwatcher Radio, this is Detachment A. No traffic for you at this time.

  FRD6.FRD1.NTATT.FRD1 CLR.

  Detachment A, this is Coastwatcher Radio. No traffic for you at this time. Coastwatcher Radio Clear.

  "Fuck!" Sergeant Koffler said, and signaled for Ian Bruce to stop pedaling. He had hoped-he always hoped-that there would be some kind of message. And he was always disappointed when there was not.

  He got to his feet and walked out of the hut. Lieutenant Reeves was nowhere in sight, and Lieutenant Howard was asleep on the bank of the stream. There was no point in waking him up; there had been no traffic.

  He walked to one of the charcoal fires. The pig's ribs were getting done. They looked like spareribs now, Steve thought, not like parts of a dead animal.

  And they smelled good. His mouth actually salivated.

  He wondered how much salt from their short-and dwindling-supply Lieutenant Reeves would permit them to use to season the spareribs.

  Chapter Five

  (One)

  THE CLUB CAR "CURTIS SANDROCK"

  THE PENNSYLVANIA RAILROAD "CONGRESSIONAL

  LIMITED"

  16 JUNE 1942

  Sergeant John Marston Moore, USMCR, had been in his chair less than half an hour when he had occasion to dwell on the question of saltpeter.

  It had been commonly accepted by his peers at Parris Island that the Corps liberally dosed the boots' chow with the stuff. The action was deemed necessary by the Corps, the reasoning went, in order to suppress the sexual drives of the boots, who were by definition perfectly healthy young men who would have absolutely no chance during the period of their training to satisfy their sexual hungers.

  Save of course by committing what his father called the sin of onanism, and what was known commonly in the Corps as Beating Your Meat, or Pounding Your Pud-a behavior that was high on the long list of acts one must not be caught doing by one's Drill Instructor... considerations of finding someplace to do it aside.

  John Moore now realized that all he knew about saltpeter was what he had heard at Parris Island. That is to say, he had no certain knowledge whether such a substance really existed; or if it did exist, whether it did indeed suppress sexual desires, once ingested; or whether the Corps really fed it to their boots.

  It was possible, of course.

  There was the question of homosexuality, for instance. He had heard that because of the absence of women, a lot of the men in prisons turned queer.... There was a large number of other things Parris Island and prison had in common, too. The Corps could certainly not afford to have its boots turn to each other for sexual gratification. Several times the pertinent passages from The Articles for the Governance of the Naval Service, known as "Rocks and Shoals," had been read out loud to them. These described the penalties for taking the penis of another male into one's mouth and/or anus. In the eyes of the Corps, this was a crime ranking close to desertion in the face of the enemy and striking a superior officer or non-commissioned officer.

  And if one was to judge from the training time allocated to inspiring talks from Navy Chaplains and incredibly graphic motion pictures taken in Venereal Disease wards, the Corps had a deep interest in even the heterosexual activities of its men. After they were freed from Parris Island, the Corps did not want them to rush to the nearest brothel and/or to consort with what it called "Easy Women." Easy women were defined as those who would infect Marines with syphilis, gonorrhea, and other social diseases, thereby rendering them unfit for combat service.

  The conclusions Sergeant Moore reached as he accepted a second rye and ginger ale from the club car steward was that (a) it was likely that the Corps had been feeding him saltpeter at Parris Island; (b) that it had worked, because he could not now recall any feelings of sexual deprivation while he was there; and (c) that once one was taken off saltpeter, one's normal sexual drives and hungers returned within a day.

  With a vengeance, he thought, as he tried to fold his leg over the first erection he'd had in weeks. It seemed to have a mind of its own, determined to make his trousers look like an eight-man squad tent, canvas tautly stretched from a stout center pole.

  The source of his sexual arousal, he was quite sure, was not what the Corps would think of as an Easy Woman. In the training films, Easy Women had without exception earned the cheering approval of the boots with their tight sweaters, short skirts, heavily applied lipstick, and lewdly inviting mascaraed eyes. Most of them had cigarettes hanging from their mouths, and one hand attached to a bottle of beer.

  This woman demonstrated none of these characteristics. She wore very little makeup. She held her cigarette in what Sergeant Moore thought was a charming and exquisitely feminine manner. She wore a blouse buttoned to her neck, a suit, and a hat with a half-veil. She was old-at least thirty, John judged, maybe even thirty-five-but he charitably judged that her hair, neatly done up in sort of a knot at the back of her bead, was prematurely gray.

  And the final proof that she was a lady and not an Easy Woman came during the one time she raised her eyes from The Saturday Evening Post to look at him. It was clear from her facial expression that he was of absolutely no interest to her at all.

  But despite all this, he found her exciting and desirable. This struck him with particular urgency after she stood to take off her suit jacket: The light then was such that her torso was silhouetted by the sun; the absolutely magnificent shape of her breasts had, for ten seconds or so, been his to marvel at.

  And when she sat down and crossed her legs, there was a flash of thigh and slip, of lace and soft white flesh; and instantly, in his mind's eye, she was as naked as the lady in the club soda ad, sitting on a rock by a mountain lake.

  At that instant the sexual depressant effects of saltpeter were flushed from his system as if they were never there, and Old Faithful popped to a position of attention that met every standard of the Guide Book for Marines for stiffness and immobility.

  Had the opportunity presented itself, Sergeant John Marston Moore, USMCR, would cheerfully have gone with her then... even if the price was the loss of all his money, contraction of syphilis, gonorrhea, all other social diseases, and any chances he had after the war to meet Miss Right and have a family of his own.

  He tried, very hard, not to let her know he was watching her. This involved adjusting his head so that he could see her reflection in a mirror on the club car wall. Despite his care, she did catch him looking at her once; in a flash, he desperately spun around in his chair.

  A little later, he managed to catch another reflection of her in the glass of his window, but that was nowhere near as satisfactory as the mirror reflection.

  Between Baltimore and Philadelphia, she spoke to him. Her voice was as deep, soft, throaty, and sensual as he knew it would be.

  "Excuse me," she said, waving The Saturday Evening Post at him. "I'm through with this. Would you like it?"

  "No!" he said abruptly, with all the fervor the Good Marine had shown in the training film when the Easy Woman offered him a cigarette laced with some kind of narcotic. "It'll make you feel real good," she'd told
him breathily.

  "Sorry," the woman said, taken aback.

  You're a fucking asshole, Moore, J. Out of your cotton-picking fucking mind!

  "I don't read much," he heard himself say.

  The absolutely beautiful woman smiled at him uneasily.

  "Excuse me," Sergeant John Marston Moore, USMCR, said. They he got up and walked to the vestibule of the car, where he banged his forehead on the window, and where he stayed until the train pulled into the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia.

  The woman got off the train there. Fortunately, Moore decided, she didn't see him hiding in the vestibule corner. He exhaled audibly with relief. And then, for one last look at the beautiful older woman as she marched down the platform and out of his life forever, he stuck his head out the door.

  She was standing right there, as the porter transferred her luggage into the custody of a Red Cap.