Where, Galloway thought, Pickering can see the pile of crushed and burned aluminum that used to be the Grumman Wildcat, his buddy, First Lieutenant Dick Stecker, dumped on landing... and almost literally broke every bone in his body.
Galloway carefully braked the aircraft to a stop, then turned it around and started to taxi back down the runway.
"You still want to turn your wings in for a rifle?" Galloway asked.
Pickering turned to look at him.
He didn't reply at first, taking so long that Galloway was suddenly worried what his answer might be.
"I was upset," Pickering said, meeting his eyes, "when I saw Stecker crash. If I can, I'd like to take back what I said then."
"Done," Galloway said, nodding his head. "It was never said."
"I did say it, Skipper," Pickering answered softly. "But I want to take it back."
"Pickering, they're short of R4D pilots. I'm an R4D IP"-an Instructor Pilot, with the authority to classify another pilot as competent to fly an R4D. "As far as I'm concerned, you're checked out in one of these. I'm sure there'd be a billet for you on Espiritu Santo."
"If that's my option, Captain," Pickering said, "then I will take the rifle. I'm a fighter pilot."
"It takes as much balls to fly this as it does a Wildcat," Galloway said.
"More. These things don't get to shoot back," Pickering said.
Galloway chuckled, then said, "Just to make sure you understand: I wasn't trying to get rid of you."
Pickering met his eyes again for a long moment.
"Thank you, Sir," he said.
[FIVE]
Corporal Robert F. Easterbrook, USMCR, was nineteen years old, five feet ten inches tall, and weighed 132 pounds (he'd weighed 146 when he came ashore on Guadalcanal two months and two days earlier). And he was pink skinned-thus perhaps understandably known to his peers as "Easterbunny." Easterbrook was sitting in the shade of the Henderson Field control tower, the Pagoda, when the weird R4D came in for a landing. It had normal landing gears, with wheels; but attached to all that was what looked like large skis. None of the other Marine and Navy R4Ds that flew into Henderson were so equipped.
"Holy shit!" he said to himself, and he thought: That damned thing is back! I've got to get pictures of that sonofabitch.
Twelve months before, Corporal Easterbrook had been a freshman at the University of Missouri, enrolled in courses known informally as "Pre-Journalism.''
It had been his intention then to work hard and attain a high enough undergraduate grade-point average to ensure his acceptance into the University of Missouri Graduate School of Journalism. Later, with a Missouri J School diploma behind him, he could get his foot on the first rung of the ladder leading to a career as a photojournalist (or at least he'd hoped so):
He would have to start out on a small weekly somewhere and work himself up to a daily paper. Later-much later-after acquiring enough experience, he might be able to find employment on a national magazine... maybe Collier's or the Saturday Evening Post, or maybe even Look. It was too much to hope that he would ever see his work in Life or Time-at least before he was old, say thirty or thirty-five. As the unquestioned best of their genre, these two magazines published only the work of the very finest photojournalists in the world.
On December 8, 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Bobby Easterbrook had gone down to the post office and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps Reserve for the Duration of the War Plus Six Months. He now regarded that as the dumbest one fucking thing he had ever done in his life,
Even though his photographic images had appeared in the past two months not only within the pages, but on the covers, of Look and Time and several dozen major newspapers, that success had not caused him to modify his belief that enlisting in The Crotch was the dumbest one fucking thing he had ever done in his life.
In fact, he'd concluded that the price of his photojournalistic success and minor fame-he'd been given credit a couple of times, USMC PHOTOGRAPH BY CPL R. F. EASTERBROOK, USMC COMBAT CORRESPONDENT-Was going to be very high. Specifically, he was going to get killed.
There was reason to support this belief. Of the seven combat correspondents who had made the invasion, two were dead and three had been badly wounded.
In June 1942, the horror of boot camp at Parris Island still a fresh and painful memory, the Easterbunny had been a clerk in a supply room at the Marine Base at Quantico, Virginia.
He'd got that job after telling a personnel clerk that he had worked for the Conner Courier. That was true. During his last two years of high school, he'd worked afternoons and as long as it took on Fridays to get the Courier out.
When he talked with the personnel clerk, he implied that he'd been a reporter/photographer for the Conner Courier. That was not exactly true. Ninety-five percent of the photographic and editorial work on the Conner Courier (weekly, circ. 11,200) was performed by the owner and his wife. But Mr. Greene had shown Bobby how to work the Courier's Speed Graphic camera, and how to develop its sheet film, and how to print from the resultant negatives.
Still, the only words he wrote that actually appeared in print were classified ads taken over the telephone, and rewrites of Miss Harriet Comb's "Social Notes." Miss Combs knew everything and everyone worth knowing in Conner County, but she had some difficulty writing any of it down for publication. Complete sentences were not one of her journalistic strengths.
The personnel corporal appeared bored hearing about the Easter-bunny's journalistic career... until it occurred to him to ask if Private Easterbrook could type. "Sure."
That pleased the corporal. The Corps did not at the moment need journalists, he told Private Easterbrook, but he would make note of that talent-a "secondary specialty"-on his records. What The Corps did need was people who could type. Private Easterbrook was given a typing test, and then a "primary specialty" classification of clerk/typist.
Becoming a clerk/typist at least got him out of being a rifleman, Private Easterbrook reasoned-his burning desire to personally avenge Pearl Harbor having diminished to the point of extinction while he was at Parris Island.
He'd been kind of looking forward to a Marine Corps career as a supply man-with a little bit of luck, maybe eventually he'd make supply sergeant-when, out of the clear blue sky, at four o'clock one afternoon, he'd been told to pack his seabag and clear the company. He was being sent overseas. It wasn't until he was en route to Wellington, N.Z., aboard a U.S. Navy Martin Mariner, a huge, four-engine seaplane headed for Pearl Harbor, that he was able to begin to sort out what was happening to him.
He learned then that the Marine Corps had formed a team of still and motion picture photographers recruited from Hollywood and the wire services. They were to cover the invasion of a yet unspecified Japanese-occupied island. Just before they were scheduled to depart for the Pacific, one of the still photographers had broken his arm. Somehow Easterbrook's name-more precisely, his "secondary specialty"-had come to the attention of those seeking an immediate replacement for the sergeant with the broken arm. And he had been ordered to San Diego.
The team was under the command of former Hollywood press agent Jake Dillon-now Major Dillon, USMCR, a pretty good guy in Easterbrook's view. Genuinely sorry that the Easterbunny was not able to take the ordinary five-day leave prior to overseas movement, Major Dillon had thrown him a bone in the form of corporal's stripes.