Private Hart had dropped his knife.
"Pick it up, college boy, and really try to kill me!" Hart picked up the knife. He crouched and spread his arms, then advanced on Corporal Warren.
Warren smiled.
Private Hart threw the trench knife from his right hand to his left. When Corporal Warren's eyes followed, for a split second, the passage of the knife, Private Hart kicked Corporal Warren in the groin.
As Warren's eyes, now registering shock, returned to him, Hart took one step toward him, grabbed his right arm, twisted it, flipped Warren over his extended right leg, and followed him to the ground as he fell. He placed his knee between Warren's wrist and elbow and tensed his muscles to break the arm.
He felt a hard blow in the back, between the shoulder blades, and felt himself flying through the air.
What the hell?
His face slid a foot through the dirt and pebbles. The breath was knocked out of him.
He heard the crunch of boots on the dirt and a pair of highly shined service shoes and the cuff of sharply creased khaki pants appeared in his view.
"On your feet!"
He recognized the voice of the drill sergeant before he saw his face.
Shit, he saw what happened. He kicked me.
Private Hart, breathing hard, came to attention.
"Look at me," the drill instructor said evenly.
He was a leathery-faced, leanly built staff sergeant in his early thirties. His eyes were gray and cold.
"Try me, tough guy," the drill instructor said, and Hart felt a jabbing at his stomach. He looked down and saw that he was being offered a trench knife, butt first. The sheath had been removed.
He looked into the drill instructor's face again.
He looks, Hart thought, more contemptuous than angry.
"Go on, tough guy, take it," the drill instructor said, and jabbed Hart in the stomach again with the butt of the trench knife.
Hart shook his head and blurted what came into his mind: "I don't have anything against you." The drill instructor's eyes examined him with renewed interest.
"Meaning you think you could hurt me?"
Again, Hart blurted what came into his mind: "I don't know. But I've got no reason to cut you."
There was a moment's silence.
"'Ten'hut!" the-drill instructor barked. "Fow-wud, Harch!
Double-time, Harch!" Hart's compliance was Pavlovian. He started double-timing across the parade ground. After a moment, he became aware that the drill instructor was double-timing a step or two behind him, just within his peripheral vision.
He came to the end of the parade ground, then crossed a narrow macadam road and moved between two barracks buildings.
"Column left, Harch!" the drill instructor ordered when they reached the far end of the long frame building. "Detail, halt!" Hart stopped and stood at attention. The drill instructor stepped in front of him.
What the fuck do I do now? Let him beat me up?
"Who taught you to fight?" the drill instructor demanded, and then, without waiting for a reply, "What did you do before you came in The Corps?"
"I was a cop"
"A cop?"
"A detective," Hart said.
"Where?"
"Saint Louis."
"Were you really going to break his arm?"
"He's a vicious, sadistic sonofabitch," Hart heard himself say. "Yeah, I was going to break his arm. Nobody calls me a motherfucker."
"He's on his way out of here," the drill instructor said.
"Before the war, there's no way an asshole like Warren would have made corporal, much less been assigned here. But he is here, and you just made him-made a DI-look like an asshole in front of the platoon. Maybe I should have let you break his arm we could have said it was an accident." Jesus Christ, he's talking to me like a human being.
"I'll fix it with the Captain somehow," the drill sergeant said, obviously thinking out loud. "If I can get you transferred to another platoon, can you keep your mouth shut about what happened?" He looked intently at Hart, as if finally making up his mind.
Hart nodded.
"Thank you," he said.
"Stick your thanks up your ass. I'm not doing this because I like you.
I'm doing it because it's the best thing for The Corps."
(Two)
ROYAL AUSTRALIAN NAVY COASTWATCHER ESTABLISHMENT
TOWNSVILLE, QUEENSLAND
30 AUGUST 1942 The letters USMC were stenciled on both sides of the hood of the gray 1941 Studebaker President, and a stenciled Marine Corps globe and anchor insignia were on each rear door.
The driver was a Marine, a tall, muscular man in his early thirties. He wore a green fore-and-aft cap adorned with the Marine insignia and the golden oak leaf of a major. Otherwise, he was substantially out of uniform. Instead of the forest green tunic prescribed for officers during the winter months in Australia, he wore a baggy, off-white, rough woolen thigh-length jacket that was equipped with a hood and was fastened with wooden pegs inserted through rope loops. The letters RAN, for Royal Australian Navy, were stenciled on the chest.
The passenger, a lean, sharp-featured man of about the same age, wore an identical duffel coat and a Royal Australian Navy officer's brimmed cap, the gold (actually brass) braid of which was both frayed and green with tarnish. There was no visible means to determine his rank.
Lieutenant Commander Eric Feldt, RAN, Commanding Officer of the Royal Australian Navy Coastwatcher Establishment, turned to Major Edward J. Banning, USMC, Commanding Officer of USMC Special Detachment 14, gestured out the window, and inquired, "Is that for you?" Banning, who had heard the engines, leaned forward to look out the window, and saw what he expected to see. A United States Army Air Corps C-47 had begun its approach to the landing field.
"I don't expect anyone," Banning said.
"But we couldn't expect the Asshole to let us know he was coming, could we?" Under practically any other circumstances, Major Ed Banning's sense of military propriety would have been deeply offended to hear a brother officer call another officer an anal orifice. And he would have been especially offended when the insult came from a foreigner, and the officer and gentleman so crudely characterized was a full colonel of the U.S. Marine Corps.
But at the moment, Major Banning was not at all offended. For one thing, he had a profound professional admiration and a good deal of personal affection for Commander Feldt. And for another, so far as Banning was concerned, Feldt's vulgar characterization fit to a T Colonel Lewis R. Mitchell, USMC, Special Liaison Officer between the Commander in Chief Pacific Ocean Areas (CINCPAC-Admiral Chester W. Nimitz) and the Supreme Commander, Southwest Pacific (SWPOA-General Douglas MacArthur).
Banning knew far more about Colonel Lewis R. Mitchell than Mitchell would have dreamed possible, including the fact that Mitchell had been given his present assignment in the belief that he could do less damage to the war effort there than he had been causing as one of a half dozen colonels assigned to the Personnel Division at Headquarters, USMC.
"You really think it's Mitchell?"
"Who else would it be? That's a sodding Dakota, not a puddle-jumper. If it were your Nip, he'd be in a puddlejumper." The "your Nip" reference was to First Lieutenant Hon Song Do, Signal Corps, U.S. Army.