Counterattack Page 2

  With a sinking feeling in his stomach, Joe realized that if some other Marine came to his armory and asked to check out one of the Star Gauge Springfields so he could fire it in a civilian match, there was no way he would let him do it without written permission from some officer.

  And he hadn’t been caught using a Star Gauge Springfield in a civilian match by just some officer, but by the Major General Commandant of the Marine Corps!

  On the way back to Philadelphia, Joe considered confessing his sins right off to Gunny MacFarland, but chickened out. The Gunny would really be pissed; the one thing he could not stand was stupidity. And it was also likely that the Gunny, being the Gunny, would try to accept the responsibility for his stupidity himself.

  That wouldn’t be right. Taking the Star Gauge Springfield had been his idea, Joe decided, and he would take whatever came his way because of it.

  Nothing happened on Monday. Or on Tuesday, or Wednesday. And by Thursday Joe began to think that just maybe nothing would happen. Maybe he would get away with it, even though the officer in civvies had taken down his name.

  On Friday, just before lunch, he was summoned by the Sergeant Major and told to report to the Commanding Officer.

  “Sir, PFC Howard reporting as ordered to the commanding officer!”

  “Stand at ease, Howard,” said the Commanding Officer, a paunchy, middle-aged major, and then handed him a sheet of teletype machine paper.

  Headquarters US Marine Corps Wash DC

  27 August 1937

  To: Commanding Officer

  US Marine Barracks

  US Navy Yard Phila Penna

  Info: Commanding Officer

  US Marine Corps Recruit Depot

  Parris Island SC

  1. The following is to be relayed to PFC Joseph L. Howard, and suitable notation made in his service record: “Reference your winning 1937 New Jersey State Rifle Match. Well Done. Thomas Holcomb Major General Commandant.”

  2. You are directed to issue necessary orders transferring PFC Howard to US Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island SC for duty as rifle instructor. PFC Howard is to be encouraged to try out for USMC Rifle Team.

  By direction of the Major General Commandant:

  S. T. Kralik, Lt Col USMC

  When he had graduated from Boot Camp at Parris Island, Joe Howard had devoutly hoped he would never again see the place. While he was willing to grant that he had come to Parris Island a candy-ass civilian and had left at least looking and thinking vaguely like a Marine, he had painful and bitter memories of the place and of his drill instructors.

  It was different, of course, when he went back, but he still didn’t like the place.

  He ran into one of his drill sergeants at the gas station, and was surprisingly disappointed when the sergeant told him that he didn’t remember him at all. And he was equally surprised to realize that not only did the drill sergeant not look as mean and salty as he had in his memory, but that he was in fact not nearly as sharp looking as some Marines Joe had come to know later. He was just an average Marine, doing his job.

  Howard didn’t get along too well, at least at first, with the other guys teaching basic marksmanship or the ones on the rifle team. He came to understand that was because he hadn’t followed the established route to the Weapons Committee. They were supposed to select you; he had been thrust upon them by the Major General Commandant.

  It got better after he qualified for the Marine Corps Rifle Team, and even better when he shot third overall at the National Matches at Camp Perry, Ohio, in the summer of 1938. And in September of 1938, he came out number three on the list for promotion to corporal. He had made it less than a year after shipping over, and a year before Gunny MacFarland had bullshitted him he might make it.

  Almost as soon as he’d sewed his chevrons on, he started trying to think of some way to get out of Parris Island. He applied for transfer to the 4th Marines in China, and was turned down. He could, they said, enlist for the 4th Marines the next time he shipped over, but right now the Corps wanted him at Parris Island, teaching recruits how to shoot.

  Then, out of the blue, he found himself at the U.S. Army Infantry Center at Fort Benning, Georgia. The Army Ordnance Corps had come up with a new rifle, the M-1, known as the Garand after the man who had invented it. It was self-loading, which meant that it was almost automatic. It used the forces of recoil to extract the fired cartridge from the chamber and then to load a fresh one from the magazine. The magazine held eight rounds. The Marines were invited to participate in the service test of the weapon, and they sent a provisional platoon to Fort Benning in charge of a master gunnery sergeant named Jack NMI (No Middle Initial) Stecker from the U.S. Marine Corps Schools base at Quantico.

  A third of the platoon were taken from regular Marine units; a third came right out of boot camp; and the final third were people recognized to be outstanding marksmen. Corporal Joe Howard had been assigned to this last group.

  Master Gunnery Sergeant Jack NMI Stecker had won the Medal of Honor in France in 1918, and was something of a legend in the Corps. Joe figured that probably had something to do with his being put in charge of the Fort Benning detail; it looked like a good detail, the sort of detail a man would be given who was entitled to wear the blue ribbon with the silver stars sprinkled on it.

  When Corporal Joe Howard reported to Gunny Stecker, he was surprised to see that Stecker was not wearing his Medal of Honor ribbon. The only things pinned to his blouse were his marksmanship medals. Not surprisingly, he was Expert in every small-arms weapon used by the Corps. Joe later found out, not from Stecker, that Stecker had taken High Overall at Camp Perry in 1933 and 1936; he was a world-class rifleman.

  But Master Gunnery Sergeant Stecker was more than just impressive. Best of all, he got Corporal Howard out of Parris Island. A couple of days before they left Fort Benning, Stecker called him in and asked him what he thought of the M-1 Garand.

  It was almost holy writ in the Corps that the finest, most accurate rifle ever made was the ’03 Springfield. Even among the expert riflemen who had fired the Garand at Benning, the weapon was known as a Mickey Mouse piece the Army had dreamed up; it would never come close to being as good a rifle as the ’03.

  But Joe Howard had come to believe that the Garand was a fine weapon even off the shelf, and that with some fine-tuning by an armorer it would be capable of greater accuracy than the ’03. He told Gunny Stecker just that.

  “That makes it you and me against the Marine Corps, son,” Gunny Stecker replied. “You happy at Parris Island?”

  Joe told him the truth about that, too: he didn’t like what was generally considered to be a great berth for a brand-new, very young corporal—as opposed, say, to being in a Marine detachment on a man-of-war, or in a line company in a regiment somewhere—and he had been trying to get out of it.

  “Would you be interested in coming to Quantico and working on the Garand? The basic detail would be teaching riflery to kids in the Basic Officer Course, and college kids who come for training in the summer. But when you’re not doing that, there would be time to work on the Garand.”

  “I’d love it, Gunny,” Joe replied. “But they won’t let me go from Parris Island.”

  “Why not?”

  Joe told him about his getting sent there by the Major General Commandant.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Stecker said.

  Two weeks after he reported back into Parris Island, Joe was put on orders to U.S. Marine Corps Schools, Quantico, Virginia.

  The next year was good duty. Aside from maybe once a month catching Corporal of the Guard, and maybe once every other month catching Junior Charge of Quarters at Headquarters, Marine Corps Schools, Joe Howard was subject to no other details.

  He was either teaching brand-new officers how to fire the ’03, which he liked, or running people through the Annual Rifle Firing; but that didn’t take all that much time. There was plenty of time to see what could be done with the Garand.

 
; Putting several thousand rounds through M-1s taught him what was basically wrong with the weapon, and how to fix it. The primary problem was the barrel. When it was heated up by firing, it expanded and jammed into the stock. The result was that in rapid fire the later rounds through it (the twentieth, say) would strike a couple of inches—sometimes much more—from where the first round had struck.

  The fix for that was to make the barrel free-floating. You had to carefully whittle wood away from the inside of the stock so that the barrel didn’t get bent by the stock when it heated up.

  The sights left a little to be desired, too. Joe learned to fix that by machining from scratch a new rear sight aperture, or “peep sight hole,” that was smaller than the original, and by taking a couple of thousandths of an inch off the front sight. He also did some work on the gears that moved the rear sight horizontally and vertically, smoothing them out, making them more precise. And he tinkered with the trigger group, smoothing the sear so the let-off could be better controlled, and with the action itself, smoothing it to improve functioning. In the process, he learned where and how much lubricant was required. Finally, he mated barrels which had demonstrated unusual accuracy to his specially worked-over actions and trigger groups.

  There were soon a half-dozen M-1s in the Arms Room just as accurate as any Star Gauge Springfield. One of these was informally reserved for Corporal Howard, and one other for Master Gunnery Sergeant Jack NMI Stecker.

  Joe Howard made a nice little piece of change that year proving to visiting riflemen during informal sessions on the range that the M-1 Garand wasn’t really the Mickey Mouse Army piece of shit everybody said it was.

  And three times Gunny Stecker had handed him money—once ninety dollars—which the Gunny said was his fair share of what he had taken away from visiting master gunnery sergeants and sergeants major who also had an unfounded faith in the all-around superiority of the Springfield, and who were foolish enough to put their money where their mouths were. A Garand fine-tuned by Corporal Joe Howard, in the hands of a marksman like Gunny Stecker, was hard to beat.

  In the late summer of 1940, after France had fallen to the Germans and Congress had authorized the first of what were to be many expansions of the Corps, there were a flock of promotions—promotions that came to many men long before they thought they had any chance of getting them. Joe Howard became a sergeant then. Six months later, a veteran ordnance sergeant assigned to the just-formed 1st Defense Battalion at the Navy Base at Pearl Harbor, Territory of Hawaii, became terminally ill. Soon afterward, someone in personnel remembered that Master Gunnery Sergeant Jack NMI Stecker at Quantico had a really bright and competent ordnance buck sergeant working for him.

  That the kid had worked for Gunny Stecker for two years, and been promoted during that time, was all-around recommendation enough; people who didn’t measure up to Gunny Stecker’s high standards didn’t get promoted, they got themselves shipped someplace else. On the same order that Headquarters U.S. Marine Corps ordered Sergeant Joseph L. Howard to the 1st Defense Battalion at Pearl, it promoted him to staff sergeant.

  When the Japanese attack began, even as he listened to the sound of exploding bombs and the roar of low-flying aircraft, it was very difficult for Joe Howard to accept that what was happening actually was happening.

  He had been conditioned to regard Pearl Harbor as America’s mighty—and impregnable—fortress in the Pacific. In his view, if war came, the Japanese would probably attack Wake Island and Guam, and some of the other islands, and maybe even (Joe thought this highly unlikely) the Philippines. But Hawaii? Never. Not with Pearl Harbor and its row of dreadnought battleships, and its cruisers and aircraft carriers. And with the Army Air Corps fighters and bombers, not to mention the Navy and Marine Corps fighters and torpedo bombers afloat and ashore.

  No goddamn way!

  If the Japs were really stupid enough to try, say, invading Guam, Pearl would be the fortress from which the mightiest naval force the world had ever known would sail (carrying a Marine landing force aboard, of course) to bloody the Japs’ noses and send the little bastards back to their rice paddies and raw fish with a lesson they wouldn’t soon forget.

  But, incredibly, when he looked out his barracks window, there was smoke rising from Battleship Row, and the sound of heavy explosions, and the same thing over at the seaplane base. And finally, when he saw a dozen Japanese aircraft in perfect formation—four three-plane vees—making low-level torpedo and strafing runs against Battleship Row, he realized that the impossible was indeed happening.

  He couldn’t do a goddamned thing to help the battleships, but he damned sure could do something at the seaplane hangars, where there were Marine-manned .50-caliber water-cooled Browning machine guns on antiaircraft mounts.

  Because access to ammunition and the fully automatic weapons was limited to commissioned officers, he wasn’t supposed to have a key to the arms locker, but he did; he was a good Marine Sergeant and knew which regulations should be violated. He went to the ammo locker and opened it up. By the time the first Marines came for ammo for the .50s, and to draw Browning Automatic Rifles and air-cooled .30-caliber Browning machine guns, and ammo for them, he was ready for them—long before the first officer showed up.

  When an officer finally came and saw that most of the weapons and ammo had already been issued, he didn’t ask any questions about how come the locker was open. Joe Howard didn’t think that he would.

  With nothing to do at the ammo locker, the officer went off to make himself useful somewhere else. That left Joe there alone with nothing to do either. After thinking about it a moment, he decided he couldn’t just sit this goddamned attack out in an ammo bunker; so he took the last BAR and eight twenty-round magazines for it and ran outside.

  A Ford ton-and-a-half truck came racing up with a buck sergeant driving and a PFC in the cab beside him.

  “Have you got any belted fifty?” the buck sergeant demanded. “I can’t get in our goddamned locker!”

  “Come on!” Joe said, turning back toward the locker to show him where it was.

  And then he looked over his shoulder to see if the sergeant was following him.

  The sergeant was still sitting behind the wheel, but the top of his head was gone, and the windshield and the inside of the truck were smeared with a mass of blood and brain tissue.

  Staff Sergeant Howard threw up.

  Then he ran to the truck, grabbed the handle, pulled the door open, and dragged the buck sergeant’s body out onto the ground. Blood spurted from somewhere and soaked Joe Howard’s T-shirt and trousers.

  After that he looked into the truck cab. The PFC was slumped in the seat, his head wedged back against the cushion, his eyes wide open but unseeing, his chest ripped open, blood streaming from the wound.

  Joe Howard leaned against the truck fender and threw up again and again, until there was nothing in his stomach and all that came was a foul green bile.

  And then he went back into the arms locker and huddled behind the counter, shaking, curled up, with his arms around his knees. He stayed there for he didn’t know how long, except that when he finally came out, the attack was over, and the Ford ton-and-a-half had somehow caught on fire and burned, and the PFC inside was nothing but a charred lump of dead meat.

  (Two)

  Oahu Island, Territory of Hawaii

  0845 Hours 7 December 1941

  Technical Sergeant Charles M. Galloway, USMC, a good-looking, slim, deeply tanned, and brown-haired young man of twenty-five, lay naked on his back, his head propped up with pillows, in a somewhat battered but sturdy and comfortable bed in one of the two bedrooms of a hunting lodge in the mountains.

  He had a Chesterfield cigarette in one hand. The other hand was wrapped around a large glass of pineapple juice, liberally laced with Gordon’s London Dry Gin.

  Ensign Mary Agnes O’Malley, Nurse Corps, USN, a slim, five-foot-four-inch, red-haired, pert-breasted woman, similarly undressed, knelt on the bed, about to begin
another game of what she called “ice cream cone.” This involved the dribbling of creme de cacao on certain portions of the body, and then removing it with the tongue. Until the previous day, Charley Galloway had never heard of—or even, in his sometimes wild fantasies, thought about—the kind of thing she was doing; but he was learning to like it.

  The other bedroom of the hunting lodge, which was actually a simple, tin-roofed frame cabin, was occupied by Technical Sergeant Stefan “Big Steve” Oblensky, USMC, and Lieutenant Florence Kocharski, Nurse Corps, USN.

  Big Steve, who was Polish and in his forties, was a great bull of a man. But Lieutenant Kocharski was big enough to be a match for him, which is to say that she was Valkyrie-like, in her late thirties, and also Polish. Several months before, she’d been attracted to Big Steve when she’d met him at the Naval Hospital at Pearl Harbor. He’d come in for his annual physical examination, and the examination had kind of expanded and become more physical.

  And vice versa. So strongly that the two of them had chosen to ignore the cultural and, more important, the legal prohibition against socialization between commissioned and enlisted members of the Naval Service.

  Florence Kocharski was a full lieutenant, about to make lieutenant commander; Big Steve expected to make master sergeant any day. Both of them had been around the service long enough to know about keeping indiscretions a hundred miles from the flagpole. A hundred miles was an impossibility on Oahu, but a hunting cabin in the hills was a reasonable approximation. (It was owned by an old pal of Big Steve’s who had retired and gone to work for Dole.)

  But to get to the cabin required an automobile. Lieutenant Florence Kocharski didn’t have one, and Big Steve Oblensky was six months away from getting his driver’s license back, after having been caught driving drunk. But not to worry: T/Sgt. Charley Galloway had a lovingly maintained yellow 1933 Ford V-8 convertible. Big Steve had been able to borrow Charley’s car without any trouble the first time. He and Charley both knew that Big Steve would return the favor somewhere down the pike.