"Knowing all those languages," Jack Stecker said innocently, "I wonder if the greatest contribution he can make to the Marine Corps is in the armory of the Second Raider Battalion."
Banning looked toward Stecker and found Stecker's eyes on his. He did not reply, but he had already made up his mind that one of the first things he was going to do when he got back to Washington was try to justify getting McCoy out of the Raiders. Stecker was of course right. Second Lieutenants who spoke Japanese and two kinds of Chinese were in very short supply and should not be expended while they were trying to paddle up to some obscure Japanese-held island in a rubber boat.
He looked away from Stecker and found Ernie Sage's eyes on him. She had nice eyes, he thought. Perceptive eyes. But what he saw in them now was sad disappointment that he had not responded to Stecker. And that meant, Banning decided, that Ernie Sage knew what McCoy was doing here.
The dumb, lovesick sonofabitch told her! He knew that was expressly forbidden. He isn't even married to her, for Christ's sake!
And then he was forced to face the shameful fact that Major Edward J. Banning, that professional intelligence officer of the U.S. Marine Corps, that absolute paragon of military virtue, had only a week before shown his credentials to a civilian female for no better reason than that he wanted to look good in her eyes.
Banning decided that if McCoy had told Ernie at least some of what he was really doing with the 2nd Raider Battalion at Camp, Elliott, he had done so with a reason, and only after thinking it over. The cold truth to face was that McCoy had almost certainly had a better reason for telling Ernie than he had for showing Carolyn his credentials.
Banning spent the night aboard the Last Time; and in the morning, McCoy drove him to the airfield, where a Navy Douglas R4D was waiting to fly the "IG from Washington" team back to Washington.
As he gave McCoy his hand, there was time to tell him what he had decided.
"You've done a good job here, Ken, in a rotten situation," Banning said. "I'm going to try to talk Rickabee into getting you out of here. I'm not sure he will, but I'm going to try."
(Two)
Headquarters, 2nd Raider Battalion
Camp Elliott, California
23 April 1942
Though it appeared loose and informal-everyone sat on the ground in the shade-and Colonel Carlson pointedly did not use the official term, there was a 2nd Raider Battalion officers' call in everything but name. Colonel Carlson probably did not like the official term, McCoy thought, because there was an implied exclusion of enlisted then from an official officers' call. But with the exception of a very few enlisted then (the sergeant major; the S-3 [Plans Training] and S-4 [Supply] sergeants; two of the first sergeants; and three gunnery sergeants, including Zimmerman), everybody at the meeting was an officer, and most of the battalion officers had been summoned and were present.
A week or so before, Captain Roosevelt gave a lecture on the Rules of Land Warfare, a subject that McCoy was more than casually familiar with. Because of the situation in China at the time, there had been frequent lectures on the Rules of Land Warfare in the 4th Marines. And as he listened to Roosevelt, McCoy reflected that he had been lectured on the Rules of Land Warfare so often that he knew most of them by heart. But McCoy did learn one thing during Roosevelt's lecture: Roosevelt used two terms McCoy had never heard before. Since he did not have an appetite to stand up and confess his ignorance, McCoy wrote the terms down, intending to look them up in a dictionary.
As it happened, the dictionary did not turn out to be necessary. When he asked Ernie about it, she questioned him about what he wanted to look up, and then she explained the meaning of de facto and de jure.
And now he realized that those terms fit this case: Carlson's meeting, with everybody sitting on the ground in the shade of the battalion headquarters building, was a de facto officers' call, even if Carlson was reluctant to make it a de jure officers' call.
The first item on the agenda was significant. Carlson told his officers and senior noncoms that, as of that day, the 2nd Raider Battalion had officially completed its stateside training, and that Admiral Nimitz (Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet) had so officially informed Admiral King, and had requested transportation for the battalion to Hawaii, where they would be trained in rubber-boat techniques and in making landings from submarines.
Additionally, Carlson continued, the advance element of the "competition" (which everyone knew meant the 1st Raider Battalion) had sailed from San Diego aboard the USS Zeilin 11 April, more than likely for Samoa, although that was just a guess, and in any event should not be talked about.
Then he told them that a report from Major Sam Griffith (As a captain, Griffith had been sent with Captain Wally Greene to observe and undergo British Commando training. He was regarded within the Marine Corps as an expert on commando, or Raider, operations) had "somehow come into hand."
"Griffith thinks our organization of the 2nd Raider Battalion is the way the entire Corps should go," Carlson said, with just a hint of smugness in his dry voice. "That is to say, six line companies and a headquarters company, as opposed to the competition's four line companies, a heavy-weapons company, and a headquarters company. And he has made that a formal recommendation to the Commandant."
There was a round of applause, and Carlson grinned at his men.
"And he agrees, more or less, with our organization (Each company consisted of two rifle platoons, plus a company headquarters. Each platoon, under a lieutenant, consisted of three squads. Each squad consisted of a squad leader, and a three-man fire-team, armed with a BAR, an Ml Garand, and a Thompson submachine gun) of the companies as well," Carlson went on. "He agrees more than he disagrees."
There was another round of applause.
And then, on the subject of mortars, Carlson told them that the decision by the brass had not been made, but that he hoped it would "go our way."
There were two mortars available, a 60-mm and an 81-mm. The 81-mm was the more lethal weapon. It was capable of throwing a nearly seven-pound projectile 3,000 yards (1.7 miles). It was standard issue in the heavy-weapons company of a Marine infantry battalion. On the other hand, the 60-mm's range, with a three-pound projectile, was just about a mile.
For a number of reasons (with which McCoy, who fancied himself a decent man with either weapon, agreed completely), Carlson was opposed to the Raiders carrying the 81-mm mortar into combat. For one thing, the kind of combat the Raiders anticipated would be close range, and the 60-mm was better for that purpose. More importantly, considering that the Raiders planned to enter combat by paddling ashore in rubber boats, a ready-for-action 81-mm mortar weighed 136 pounds. It would of course be broken down for movement, but the individual components-the tube itself, and especially the base plate- were heavy as hell, and were going to be damned hard to get into and out of a rubber boat. As would the ammunition, at seven pounds per round.
It was not, furthermore, a question of choosing either the 60-mm or the 81-mm. The TOE provided for both 81-mm and 60-mm mortars in each company; and that meant that if they did things by the book and took the 81-mm too, they would have to wrestle two kinds of mortars and two kinds of ammunition into and out of the rubber boats.
But Carlson told him that he thought he had come up with a convincing argument against the Raiders following standard Marine Corps practice requiring an 81-mm mortar platoon in each company: Such a platoon would exceed the carrying capacity of the APDs (Grandly known as High Speed Transports, the APDs, which were supposed to transport Raiders on missions, were in fact modified World War I-era "four-stacker" destroyers. Two of their four boilers and their exhaust stacks had been removed, and the space reclaimed converted to primitive troop berthing. They were "high speed" only when compared to freighters and other slow-moving vessels). If the 81-mm mortar platoon went along on the APDs, it would be necessary to split the companies between several ships. That obviously was a bad idea.