Leon Uris (10 page)

“With a straw bottom to feed the sea horses,” Gunny said.

“How many years you got in the Corps, Gunny?”

He scratched his head and counted some on his fingers. “Twenty-six, maybe twenty-seven.”

“What about you, Toby?”

“Forty-four.”

“Count me in for forty-three,” Ben said. “What’s that come to?”

“A hundred and fourteen years,” the captain answered.

“You shipping over, Gunny?”

“Shipping out,” the Gunny corrected. “I’m looking forward to my thirty-year retirement parade.”

“You may be the first man to have the entire Marine Corps pass in review,” Ben said. The other two knew what the major was getting around to.

“You’ve sailed past more ship masts than there are men left in the Corps. Under a thousand, counting the three who mustered out last week.”

“I’m going to be seventy in a few years,” Tobias said. “I know you men think I’m loaded with rare jade, but running a Chinese military school was a form of water torture. My back has a hundred and twenty stab wounds in it, all anonymous. Thank Christ I had Matilda with me. You’ve heard the term
going native
? That’s me.”

Ben blinked in sudden realization that Tobias Storm’s mighty mustache had turned white.

“All we got left is John Philip Sousa and that Marine band in lion-tamer-red uniforms and a Marine anthem lifted from an Offenbach operetta. All we do is guard shipyards.”

As though on cue, the wind lashed in, swinging open a window, which the Gunny closed as Ben refilled his cup.

“Up in Newport in the war college, I can smell the tidings. Our military planners have set the table for the coming century and there’s no place at it for the Marine Corps,” Ben said.

“I’m ready for the farm anyhow,” the Gunny said.

“And I’m ready to become a respectable importer of yin-yang ebony tables and to introduce Washington to chopsticks and fake Ming dynasty vases,” said Storm.

“The Corps is bogged down with relics,” Ben pressed on, “a bunch of old farts hanging on to feeble ranks, getting bench sores on their asses, waiting for rigor mortis to set in. I can think of over a dozen officers I’d like to put to pasture . . . present fucking company excluded.”

“I heard you, Ben,” Storm said.

Kunkle laughed. “Remember old Captain Penrose? Hell, he was sitting in his chair dead for five days before anyone noticed it.”

“What’s the difference?” Storm said. “We can’t replace them with new people anyhow.”

“Maybe we can,” Ben said.

“Let’s have it, Major, in English,” the Gunny said.

“Commandant Ballard is a hell of an officer. He’s kept us alive, but he spends these nights counting Marines. Senator Foley, one of our own, thank God, got some pork attached to the military budget. We’re authorized now up to a strength of seventy-five officers. That’s fifteen more than we have now. A dozen retirements on top of that would open up the possibility of two dozen new young second lieutenants.”

“To what avail?” Gunny Kunkle asked. “Who wants in, anyhow? We’re already the shithole of the military.”

“You’ll only get dregs through the patronage system. Look at me, all the way up to captain in nearly a half century. Fucking good thing I gave that Chinese warlord a pair of seals.”

“Gentlemen,” Ben said, “you have just made my point.”

“Hark, there’s a raven looking in the window,” Tobias said.

“Evermore.” The Gunny burped.

“Let the man talk, Gunny, we’ve traveled far.”

Ben was out of his chair with a sudden burst of excitement. He stretched and cracked his body into alignment. “See, the problem is . . . Let me tell you what the problem is. Once we had a doctrine. We rode American vessels and kicked ass on pirates and we went on kick-ass expeditions, like yours in the Bering Sea and yours, Gunny, in Montevideo, and mine in Panama and Seoul. Now the
navy has a real fucked-up notion that they can cruise into any bay, anywhere, and the king and all his people will kneel down, shivering. One day we’re going to have to put a battalion down in some swami balmi island and swami balmi island has got a German regiment defending it, waiting for us, and the navy is going to look around and say, ‘Where the hell’s the Marines?’”

“You’re out to save the Corps, again,” Storm said. “How many times does this make?”

“It’s an ongoing process,” Ben retorted. “We’ve had no doctrine since the Civil War. We’ve never made a clear statement since the debacle at Fort Fisher.”

“I remember it well,” Storm answered.

“And I remember Sumter,” Ben said back. “Our doctrine has been sitting there, staring us in the face. When the Civil War was done, the country said, ‘War no more,’ but a generation has passed and now America wants to play with the big boys. The big boys send in big expeditions and there will be more expeditions as we plant our flag, hither and yon.”

“Sir,” Kunkle said.

“My fucking name to you is Ben, Ben-the-fucking-hillbilly.”

“Ben-the-fucking-hillbilly, you’re talking about amphibious warfare, again.”

“I’m talking about the future of warfare.”

“Let me remind you that we got the shit kicked out of us.”

“Because we had no doctrine!” Ben cried. “We’ve never been able to train men
our
way. We’ve never been able to school our own officers. Big expeditions are going to happen in this world in our times and we start right here to create a doctrine.”

“How?” the Gunny asked pointedly.

“Yeah, Ben, how can we make naval gunfire work? How do we get boats in through breakers on a rocky bottom?”

“How do we carry enough water?” Gunny asked.

“How do we get the wounded off?” Storm fired.

“How do we shoot a bull in the ass with a banjo with our piece-of-shit rifles?”

Ben took the commandant’s letter from his pocket and a pencil. On the back of the page he wrote the nonword
AMP
.

“I give up,” Storm said.

“Advanced Military Program. We quietly start our own school. Someday it might be an academy.”

“AMP,” the Gunny said, “Asshole Marines in Paradise.”

“Fool’s paradise,” the captain amended.

“Paradise,” the Gunny said. “Isn’t that where we’re supposed to be guarding heaven’s gates?”

“Streets,” Tobias corrected, “streets.”

Ben had their heads going. He knew it. He blasted on: “How many chop suey officers did you graduate and get commissioned for the emperor?”

“Maybe a hundred in the eight years.”

“Backbone of his fucking army, isn’t it, Toby?” They listened. “We get rid of our dead wood. After an intense AMP course, we got fifteen, eighteen new officers and as many top NCOs. We teach them artillery at Meade and ship design at Annapolis and take them to Sandy Hook to learn about torpedoes and send them to me in Newport to learn naval battles. And you, Kunkle, you run them in ankle-deep sand and teach them how to piss squarely by the manual, how to saw off a man’s mangled leg in combat, and how to shoot their fucking rifles straight. For the first time in Corps history, we will train Marine officers to do Marine work.”

“AMP?” Captain Storm said.

“AMP,” the Gunny echoed.

“It’s not an academy, not even a training course. It’s just a program. We’re gaining friends in the Congress and some top officers in both branches are starting to hear us. Make this first program work and we’re in. So, take your time and think it over. Gunny, I need your answer now.”

“How long will the program last?” he asked.

“Two intense years that would take five years anywhere else.”

“My hitch is up in two years, Major. I’ll give you my all,” Kunkle promised.

Ben patted the Gunny on the back and looked to Storm. “I know you’re going to have to talk this over with Matilda.”

“Hell, we pretty much figured this out. I’m pressing seventy and we’ve got grandchildren we’d like to get to know. We’ll be in Washington?”

“Aye.”

“Well, the intrigue in Washington won’t be as bad as in the Nandong palace, and we’ve got enough Mandarin crap to furnish the White House. I can give it two years, but, Ben, are we really going to be able to change our status?”

“We’ve got to bust our ass trying. We’re down to the last nickel.”

“Have you made a roster of this first group?” the Gunny asked.

“Somewhat, but of course I’m open to any ideas.”

“We’re all still here courtesy of Paddy O’Hara. I’d like to see his son, Zachary, assigned to AMP,” the Gunny said.

“He might see that as a handout,” Storm said. “Of course I never really got to know the kid between my duty in China and the Aleutians.”

“I’ve thought about the Wart-Hog perpetuation society,” the major answered. “He’s a fine prospect, but he’s just twenty, with only two years in the Corps.”

“Not exactly,” the Gunny interrupted. “Zachary O’Hara was born into the Corps. He’s as sharp as any enlisted man we have. Besides, Paddy saved my ass twice on the battlefield, and that gives me two votes.”

“I know how close you and the sergeant major were, Gunny—more than brothers—but do we want to saddle the boy with more than he can handle?”

Storm added, “He does have his old man’s shadow hovering over him.”

Ben said, “If the first AMP is successful, maybe we can get him in the next class or the third.”

“Yeah, maybe this would bust him,” Storm agreed.

“Then I’ll take my retirement now,” Gunnery Sergeant Wally Kunkle said coldly. He was not precisely refusing an order but playing with its fringes.

“There’s more to this than meets the eye,” Tobias said when he caught his wits.

“Then, think of the other side of it,” the Gunny said. “When Paddy O’Hara’s son comes through, that really speaks of our continuity.”

“What’s behind this, Gunny?” Ben prodded.

“Sure, we all owe Paddy’s memory. But on my honor, I believe Zachary O’Hara, on his own, deserves this shot.”

“And you’d really retire otherwise?”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s blackmail.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Shit,” Ben said, then slowly held his hand out.
“Semper Fi,”
he said.

“To the Corps,” Tobias said, offering his hand.

“Semper Fi,”
the Gunny said.

•
11
•

There came a moment in the fearsome and adventurous life of Sergeant Major Paddy O’Hara when the man needed to catch his wind. From the day of his birth, life was in a hard place; in Ireland during the Great Hunger, and in Hell’s Kitchen and on bloody battlefields in the Civil War.

Of course he knew the great comfort of singing around the campfire and the bottomless loyalty of comrades as a warrior in a warrior’s place.

The rank of sergeant major was the highest enlisted rank of a given unit. There was no sergeant major of the entire Corps, but no one failed to recognize that Paddy O’Hara was the most celebrated of them all.

He served directly at the pleasure of the commandant and was stationed in the Washington barracks. Every year or so, when enough new recruits were sworn in to make up a platoon, Paddy
was dispatched to train them, and they were a hell of a lot better coming out of four months with him than they were going in.

Otherwise he was an unofficial ombudsman for the men in the ranks. In addition to visiting the installations in the East, he was a recruiter’s joy. Paddy was able to choose the pick of the litters to swear in to the Marines.

Ordinarily, a hero, even of Paddy’s stature, would eventually be mustered out, but after the Civil War, the Marines were on the brink of collapse and Paddy was too damned valuable to give up.

Then Paddy got a yen for softness in the form of a woman. With the end of his service on the horizon, he turned his attention to wooing and winning himself a wife.

The lass came in the person of Maureen Herndon, out of County Wicklow, a maid working under his sister, Brigid, in a mansion on New York’s Fifth Avenue, belonging to wealthy German-Jewish merchants.

Paddy was many years Maureen’s senior, but no measure of man could match up to him, and they wed. Paddy sought out faint memories of the rare moments of gladness he knew as a boy before the famine.

Aye, they did love each other, for sure. He softened at the sight of her, could feel his heart thump when she touched his cheek, trembled when he held her, and he even tried poetry, on occasion.