That would have been good shooting even with Stecker's own personal Springfield, which he privately believed was as accurate as any Springfield in the Corps.
That was when he began to change his evaluation of the Garand. Obviously, when properly tuned, the ugly sonofabitch would shoot. Which was the important thing. And being absolutely fair and objective about it, which is what he was supposed to be as the NCOIC of the Marine Troop Test, you could get back on target after the recoil faster than you could with a Springfield. Like it or not, the gas-operated mechanism of the Garand ejected a round and chambered another faster than even a master gunnery sergeant of the Marine Corps could work the bolt of a Springfield.
And there was more to think about. Not only were the Marine marksmen doing well with the Garand - the sergeants and corporals who knew something about shooting - but the kids from Parris Island, too. They didn't, he realized, have a hell of a lot to unlearn. They just took the Garand and learned how to use it.
He didn't easily give in to admitting that the Garand was actually a fine weapon, though. For instance, he surprised hell out of a squad of the kids by ordering them not to detail strip their pieces when the day's firing was over.
"Just run a couple of patches, first bore cleaner, then oil down the bore. Don't brush the bore. I want to see how much it will take to jam it."
It was three days of firing before the first Garand jammed.
That night, he ordered the squad to detail strip and clean their Garands but not to reassemble them. When all the parts were clean, he ordered the kids to put them all together in a pile on the deck of the barrack.
The kids thought he was really nuts then, and even more so when he stepped up to the pile and stirred the parts around with his toe. One of the claimed merits of the Garand was interchangeability of parts. This was a good way to find out.
"Now put them together," he ordered. He stood watching as the kids assembled rifles.
"I don't want anybody exchanging parts after I'm gone," he said. "I'm trying something."
There was only one malfunction of the squad's Garands the next day, a stovepipe (When the action fails to eject a fired cartridge case properly and jams it in place with the open end erect, it is known as a "stovepipe") he suspected was a freak. He proved this by firing three clips through the rifle as quickly as he could and without further failure to eject.
Master Gunnery Sergeant Stecker returned from Fort Benning one of the few people in the Corps who believed the Garand was the best infantry rifle to come down the pike in a long time. He was worried then not about whether the Garand would be good for the Corps, but when-or even whether- the Corps would get it. The Army would take care of itself first, of course. The Corps would probably wind up with the Army's worn-out Springfields rather than new Garands.
Captain Jack NMI Stecker, USMCR, was therefore pleased when the first Garands were issued to the Corps. There were not enough of them to go around, of course, but the door was open. For the moment, unfortunately, there were only enough of them to equip a few detached units, and for instructional purposes.
Captain Stecker read with interest the reports of scores fired with the new rifle by the students of the battalion; and he was not happy with the results from either the commissioned officers at their annual qualification at Quantico or of the kids in the Platoon Leader's Course. He decided first to see what was wrong with the training of the Platoon Leader candidates and fix that, and then he'd see that the same fix was applied to the abbreviated training course given the officers before they fired their annual qualification.
At 0805, which was late enough for the firing on the known distance range to be well under way, he got up from his desk and walked out of his office.
"Come with me, son," he said to the S-3's jeep driver, a small, very neat PFC trying to make himself inconspicuous on a chair in the outer office.
As he invariably did when he went for a ride in the jeep with a PFC at the wheel, he thought about how much he'd liked it better when he'd been a master gunnery sergeant with the pickup and didn't have to sit like a statue on an uncomfortable pad in the jeep.
In the center of the line of Known Distance Rifle Range #2 (where the Platoon Leader Candidates were firing for record), there was a small clutter of buildings surrounding the range master's tower. Next to the buildings, several vehicles were parked with their front wheels against yellow-painted logs half-buried in the sand. There were two jeeps (one assigned to range NCO and the other to the range officer), two pickups, and a three-quarter-ton Dodge weapons carrier, which had brought the ammo from the dump. Two ambulances (new ones, built on the Dodge three-quarter-ton weapons carrier chassis) were backed up against the logs.
Stecker told the driver to park the jeep beside the weapons carrier. When he stopped, Stecker removed his campaign hat and took from the crown a small glass bottle, which once contained Bayer Aspirin. He took from it four globs of what looked like wax at the end of short pieces of string and handed two of them to the PFC.
"Here," he said to the driver. "Stick these in your ears." "What is it, sir?" the PFC asked doubtfully. "Genuine Haiti Marine earplugs," Stecker said. "Do what | I tell you."
"Aye, aye, sir," the PFC said, and after he watched Stecker carefully push with his index finger one of the wax globs into each ear, he somewhat uneasily put the plugs into his own ears.
Unless someone looked very carefully at his ears (which was highly unlikely) the earplugs would go unnoticed.
The night before, when Stecker checked the jar where he kept his earplugs, he found only one pair left, so he decided he had to make some more.
So Captain Stecker spent an hour at his kitchen sink making six pairs of the earplugs. He knew that he would be spending several hours on the known distance range, and he had long ago learned that ear damage from the muzzle blast of rifle fire was permanent and cumulative. There were a lot of deaf gunnery sergeants in the Marine Corps as proof of
that.
From the time he had been a PFC, Stecker had understood that the Boy Scouts were right. "Be Prepared" said it all. He didn't really need any more earplugs than the pair he had in the Bayer Aspirin bottle, not for tomorrow. But the day after tomorrow was something else. He had no spares, and therefore it was time to make some.
The Haiti Marine earplugs were a good deal more complicated than they looked: He first carefully cut the erasers from a dozen pencils. Then with an awl heated red on the stove, he burned a hole through the center of the eraser. He then knotted a length of strong thread through the holes of a small button, just a bit larger than the diameter of the eraser. The loose end of the thread was then fed through the hole in the
eraser.
One at a time, the dozen erasers were carefully placed in holes bored through a piece of wood. Then, in a small pot reserved for this specific purpose, he melted paraffin and beef tallow and carefully poured it into the holes in the wood. When it had time to cool, he pushed each earplug out with a pencil. While the beef tallow/paraffin mixture would remain flexible enough to seal his ear canal, it would neither run from the heat of his body, nor harden to the point where removal would be difficult.
It was a trick Captain Stecker had learned when he was a corporal in Haiti in 1922. A staff sergeant named Jim Finch had taken a shine to him, shown him how to make the plugs, and warned him that if he was going to spend any time around ranges, he had goddamned well better get in the habit of using them.
Stecker put the Bayer Aspirin bottle back in the crown of his stiff-brimmed campaign hat, and then with a quick, smooth movement to keep the bottle from falling out flipped it onto his head.
Aside from his field shoes, the campaign hat was about the only part of his enlisted man's uniforms that he had been able to use as an officer. He had to change the insignia on the campaign hat, but it hadn't been necessary to put it up for sale in the thrift shop along with just about everything else.