“Yes sir!” came the stout reply from the twenty-some men in the room.
“Oh!” he added as an afterthought, “and don’t try to confuse him with none of that Eastender gash! He is also a linguist with about thousand languages in his noggin, and he just got back from Bosnia, serving alongside a bunch of hooligans from 3 SAS. You won’t get nothin’ by him!” He paused melodramatically, raised his eyebrows, and shouted, “Understood again?”
“Yes sir!” came the second stout reply, this time with a few grins.
“Good! Now get your arses over here and be sociable!”
The first man to approach Gunnery Sergeant Johnson was a tall, athletically trim man of about thirty, with sergeant’s stripes on his epaulets. He reached out his hand and spoke in a comfortable public-school accent. “Well, your experience with the SAS should certainly reduce the language barrier for us all. Last Yank we had in our midst spent the whole time scratching his head and saying ‘What the hell?’ every time we asked him a question. I’m Sergeant Barclay. You can call me Bill.”
“Great to meet you, Bill,” Marcus replied with a friendly smile. The others all streamed toward him with mostly warm and friendly handshakes and welcomes.
After brief introductions, CSGT Smoot called out, “All right, you lot! It’s closing time for duty! First round is on the new guy!”
Everyone smiled largely and clapped Marcus on the shoulders as they filed out the door into the hallway.
“Uh, was this something I was supposed to know about?” Johnson asked the colour sergeant.
“I dunno if you should’ve, but you do now. Tradition, you know!” He nudged the gunny in the ribs and said, “Best way to get to know these blokes is to take them to a pub and get pissed with them. In the morning at PT, everyone will have groggy, yet fond, memories of how great a mate you are, and all will be well.”
“I see,” Marcus answered. “The problem is, I haven’t had a chance to get any cash yet.”
“Not a problem there, mate!” The large Scot smiled. “The lovely Miss Alison at the Red Dog will more than willingly let you start a tab. Don’t worry — it won’t put you too far behind. Just a single round of ale is all you’re expected to cover. If they really want to get minged, they’ll have to pay for their own hangover.”
The Red Dog Public House, two blocks west of the main gate of the Plymouth Royal Navy Base, was a regular hangout for Royal Marines both current and former. Anyone was welcome, even civilians — as long, that is, as they said nothing derogatory or defaming about the Royal Marines and could tolerate the loud, crude humor of a hundred or more commandos whose spirits soared on beer and whisky.
A single round of drinks for the boys meant that Marcus bought the promised one pint of ale for everyone in the company who showed up that night — which, as it turned out, was all of the one hundred and twenty men of Mike Company, 43 Commando. At a cost of two British pounds a pint, $3.35 American, the tab grew considerable quite fast.
Near midnight, the company filed out, except for Johnson, Sergeant Barclay, and Colour Sergeant Smoot. The three of them sat at a table in the back of the pub and chatted over the vast commonalities they shared. Barclay, a single man who enlisted in the RMC the same year Marcus had in the USMC, had been in Norway at the same time as Marcus in the late eighties, and although they had never met while there, they did both know many of the same people and places.
Colour Sergeant Smoot, whose rank was the English equivalent of Johnson’s gunnery sergeant stripes, had served as a troop leader during Desert Storm and afterwards had been through the USMC Scout Sniper School at Quantico Marine Corps Base in Virginia, USA, a course Marcus had taught shortly before his deployment to Bosnia the previous year.
Smoot was thirty-eight years old and divorced with eighteen-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, who were just starting their first year of university studies. He had been in the Corps for twenty years already and was up for regimental sergeant major in the next selection phase. It was a promotion he half-hoped not to get, fearing it would only serve to give his ex-wife more money to waste on her boyfriends.
“She was a bit of a tart to begin with,” he said. “I should’ve seen it. I mean, she slept with me the very night we met. I got her preggers within the first month we were dating, and we were wed a week later, me on a Marine 1st Class bankroll. We were always broke and I was always gone off on this or that duty. Every time I was home, it was as if I was a nuisance, like I was interrupting something. It was fifteen years of pure marital hell with her. I do love my kids, though, and they love me — at least, they act like it. My son says he wants to be a Naval officer. Can you believe that? The son of a Marine sergeant, becoming a bloody admiral!”
Barclay smiled at his superior and said, “Well, Colours, thanks for the lesson. Watching you these past five years has blessed me with the foresight to not even try. I love‘em and leave‘em as needed, but always use protection…that’s the key, you see…leave no trace.” He grinned mischievously. “Didn’t they teach you that in sniper school?”
All three men laughed aloud and sipped their large, foam-topped glasses of thick, black Guinness.
“What about you, Marcus?” Smoot asked. “Any love life?”
“Almost, once.” His smile faded briefly, but he covered his immediate tension by taking another swig of his beer. When he put it down, there was a smile on his face again. “She said it was her or the Corps, and well…here I am.”
“Oorah!” Barclay replied. “That’s the way! Here’s to Marcus. Semper Fidelis .”
Allison, the pub proprietor, walked across the mostly empty room to their table. “Well, Gunnery Sergeant Johnson,” she said with a stern look on her face, “it looks like you have quite a bill to take care of. How do you plan to pay, love?”
Allison was tall, nearly six feet. A slender athletic build accentuated her height. She had a narrow face that ended in a pointed nose and chin. Tight, small bundles of wrinkles graced the corners of her eyes. Her long, nut-brown hair was pulled back into a thickly woven braid that ran to below her shoulder blades.
Allison’s age was hard to tell. The life of a barmaid often ripened a person prematurely. Marcus’s best guess was that she was somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five. Whatever her age, she filled her blue jeans and T-shirt out very well, displaying the body of a woman who had taken fitness seriously since she was young. There were no rings on any of her long, slim fingers, which extended from smooth hands that seemed well cared-for.
Her lips were full, even youthful-looking. There were few lines or wrinkles at their edges. This led Marcus to believe that although the smell of tobacco smoke hung in the air of the pub, she was not a smoker herself. She probably inhaled enough smoke in her job every night to get a more-than-ample nicotine fix.
“Do you take VISA?” Marcus asked as he reached for his wallet.
She raised an eyebrow. A frown pulled down the edges of her lips. After a second of silence, she broke into a smile, which quickly grew into a laugh as she put a hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t you worry about it none, love — I was only playing with you. I heard you’d be here for a while yet, so I’ll just keep your tab running as long as you need. These jacks like to bully a fella into buying all their beer so they can save their shillings for their girlfriends.”