But since Friday night, when they’d picked up Big Steve’s nurse and her roommate in Honolulu, there seemed to be convincing evidence that he could accomplish both.
"Ouch!" Technical Sergeant Charles M. Galloway yelped. "Jesus Christ!"
"Sorry," Ensign Mary Agnes O’Malley said contritely. "The last thing in the world I want to do is hurt it." She looked up at him and smiled. She kissed it. "All better!" she said.
She straddled him.
The door burst open.
Big Steve stood there in his skivvy shorts, a strange look on his face.
"Get the hell out of here!" Charley flared.
"Well, really! Don’t people knock where you come from, for Christ’s sake?" Mary Agnes O’Malley snapped.
"The Japs are bombing Pearl Harbor," Big Steve said. "It just come over the radio."
"I heard the engines," Charley said. "I thought it was those Air Corps B-17s."
Charley Galloway sat up, and dislodged Mary Agnes.
How the hell am I going to fly?he thought. I’ve been drinking all night.
And then he had another thought.
I’ll be a sonofabitch! I should have known that the first time I ever got to have a steady piece of ass, something would come along to fuck it up.
(Three)
Marine Airfield
Ewa, Oahu Island, Territory of Hawaii
7 December 1941
While everybody else on December 7 was running around Ewa-and for that matter, the Hawaiian Islands-like chickens with their heads cut off, Technical Sergeants Charley Galloway and Stefan "Big Steve" Oblensky had gone to Captain Leonard J. Martin, the ranking officer on the scene, and asked for permission to take a half-dozen men and try to salvage what they could from the carnage of the flight line and the mess in the hangars.
The reason they had to ask permission, rather than just doing what Captain Martin thought was the logical thing to do in the circumstances, was that some moron in CINCPAC (Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Fleet) at Pearl Harbor had issued an order that aviation units that had lost their aircraft would immediately re-form and prepare to fight as infantry.
Captain Martin had no doubt that the order applied to VMF-211. After the Japanese had bombed and strafed Ewa, VMF-211 had zero flyable aircraft. And it was possible, if not very likely, that the Japanese would invade Oahu, in which case every man who could carry a rifle would indeed be needed as an infantryman.
But it was unlikely, in Captain Martin’s judgment, that infantrymen would be needed that afternoon. In the meantime, it just made good sense to salvage anything that could be salvaged. Captain Martin had been a Marine long enough to believe that replacement aircraft and spare parts-or, for that matter, replacement mess-kit spoons-would be issued to VMF-211 only after the Navy was sure that aircraft, spare parts, and mess-kit spoons were not needed anywhere else in the Navy.
It made much more sense to have Galloway and Big Steve try to salvage what they could than to have them forming as infantry. Even if he was absolutely wrong, and Japanese infantry were suddenly to appear, there was nothing Galloway and Oblensky could be taught about infantry in the next couple of days that they already didn’t know. They were technical sergeants, the second-highest enlisted grade in the Corps, and you didn’t get to be a tech sergeant in the Corps unless you knew all about small arms and small-unit infantry tactics.
And there was a question of morale, too. Big Steve, and especially Charley Galloway, felt guilty-more than guilty, ashamed-about what had happened to VMF-211. Their guilt was unreasonable, but Martin understood their feelings. For one thing, they hadn’t been at Ewa when it happened. And by the time they got to Ewa, it was all over. Really all over; even the fires were out and the wounded evacuated.
Captain Martin knew, unofficially, where Big Steve and Galloway were when the Japanese struck. So he didn’t have much trouble reading what was behind their eyes when they finally got back to Ewa, still accompanied by their nurse "friends," and saw the destroyed aircraft and the blanket-wrapped bodies of their buddies on the stretchers.
If we had been here, we could have done something!
Captain Martin agreed with them. And, he further reasoned, they had to do something that had meaning. Practicing to repel boarders as infantrymen would be pure bullshit to good, experienced Marine tech sergeants.
So Captain Martin told them to go ahead, and to take as many men as they could reasonably use. If they ran into any static, they were to shoot the problem up to him.
What Technical Sergeants Galloway and Oblensky had not told Captain Martin was that they had already examined the carnage and decided that they could make at least one flyable F4F-4 by salvaging the necessary parts from partially destroyed aircraft and mating them with other not completely destroyed machines.
It was a practical, professional judgment. T/Sgt. Big Steve Oblensky bid been an aircraft mechanic as far back as Santo Domingo and Nicaragua, and T/Sgt. Charley Galloway had been a mechanic before he’d gone to flight school.
By sunset, Captain Martin saw that they had found tenting somewhere, erected a makeshift, reasonably lightproof work bay, and moved one of the least damaged F4F-4s into it. Over the next week they cannibalized parts from other wrecks. Then there was the sound of air compressors and the bright flame of welding torches; and finally the sound of the twelve hundred horses of a Pratt and Whitney R-1830 Twin Wasp being run up.
But Captain Martin was surprised to discover what Big Steve and Charley had salvaged. By December 15, the engine he had heard run up was attached to a patched-together but complete and flyable F4F-4 Wildcat fuselage.
"That doesn’t exist, you know," Captain Martin said. "All the aircraft on the station have been surveyed and found to be destroyed."
"I want to take it out to the Saratoga, " Charley Galloway said.
"Sara’s in ‘Dago, Galloway," Captain Martin said. "What are you talking about?"
"Sara’s in Pearl. Sometime today, she’s going to put out to reinforce Wake. Sara, and the Astoria and the Minneapolis and the San Francisco. And the 4thDefense Battalion, on board the Tangier. They’re calling it Task Force 14."
Martin hadn’t heard about that, at least in such detail, but there was no doubt that Galloway and Oblensky knew what they were talking about. Old-time sergeants had their own channels of information.
"That airplane can’t be flown until it’s been surveyed again and taken through an inspection."
"Skipper, if we did that, the Navy would take it away from us," Oblensky argued. "The squadron is down to two planes on Wake. They need that airplane."
"If Sara is sailing today, there’s just no time to get permission for something like that."
"So we do it without permission," Galloway said. "What are they going to do if I show up over her? Order me home?"
"And what if you can’t find her?"
"I’ll find her," Galloway said flatly.
"If you can’t?" Martin repeated.
"If I have to sit her down in the ocean, the squadron’s no worse off than it is now," Galloway said, with a quiet passion. "Captain, we’ve got to do something."
"I can’t give you permission to do something like that," Martin said. "Christ, I would wind up in Portsmouth. It’s crazy, and you know it."