"Well, maybe to replace the pistol," Zimmerman grudgingly agreed.
"That's what it's for," McCoy said.
"Here they come," Zimmerman said, jerking his head toward the firing line.
A column of men, four abreast and fifty deep, was double-timing up the range road. They were in dungarees and wearing field gear, except for rifles and helmets. It was Company B, 2nd Ranger Battalion, which McCoy expected. But he had not expected it to be led by the company commander, or to be accompanied by its officers. He thought the Baker Company gunny would probably bring them out.
"Issue and familiarization firing of the US Carbine, Caliber.30, Ml, 16 Hours," as the training schedule called it, was really the gunny's business; but the Old Man was at the head of the column, and all the other officers except the executive officer were in the column behind him.
Zimmerman reached up, worked his fingers under the target, and jerked it free of the target cloth.
"What did you do that for?"
"I don't want anybody to see me all over a hundred-yard target that way," Zimmerman said, as he balled the target up in his hands.
McCoy laughed, and then started trotting to the firing line so he would be there when the column double-timed up.
Captain Coyte turned the company over to the gunny, and walked toward McCoy.
McCoy saluted.
"Good morning, sir," he said. "I didn't expect to see the captain out here."
"I've never seen a carbine," Captain Coyte said. "Just include me in, Killer. It's your show."
"Aye, aye, sir," McCoy said.
"I thought I heard firing," Captain Coyte said.
"Yes, sir, Gunny Zimmerman and I test-fired two of them."
"Is that a couple of them on the table?" Coyte asked, nodding toward one of the four rough wooden tables behind the firing line. Without waiting for an answer, he walked toward the table, gesturing to the other officers to join him.
When he got to the table, he picked up one of the carbines, looked into the open action to confirm that it was not loaded, and then released the operating rod, threw it to his shoulder, drew a bead on the one target remaining, and dry snapped it. He tried, and failed, to get the bolt to remain open, and then looked at McCoy for help.
"There's a little pin on the rear operating-rod lever, Captain," McCoy explained. "Hold it back, push the pin in."
Captain Coyte succeeded in keeping the action open.
"I suppose this is the wrong word to use on a weapon," he said. "But it's kind of cute, isn't it?"
"If you think of it as a replacement for the pistol, sir," McCoy said, "it's not bad."
"Accuracy?"
"We managed to get ten shots into about eight inches at one hundred yards," McCoy said.
Captain Coyte's eyebrows went up. "There are a couple of reasons that might have happened," he said.
"I think, from a clear bore, with maybe a hundred or two hundred rounds to smooth it up, we can tighten those groups, sir."
"If you could cut them in half, that would still give you four inches," Captain Coyte said thoughtfully. "I now understand, I think, your reference to thinking of it as a replacement for the pistol."
"Captain, why don't you let me put up some targets and let you and the other officers fire?" McCoy asked. "The way I had planned to run this was to have the then clean their pieces-"
Coyte looked around. "McCoy, it's your range, and your class," he said. "If that could be done without fouling up your schedule…"
"Yes, sir."
"Well, then," Captain Coyte said, "in the interest of efficiency, not because I dare think that rank has its privileges, let's do it, Killer."
There was a smile in his eyes, and McCoy knew that he was mocking Colonel Carlson's "no special privileges" philosophy. He was surprised that a captain would mock the battalion
commander, but especially that he would do so for the amusement of the junior second lieutenant in his company.
It took no more than fifteen minutes for McCoy to paste the holes in his target and then to give Captain Coyte enough quick instruction to understand what he was doing, and for Coyte to fire twenty rounds at the target.
By the time they were finished, Baker Company's gunny had broken the company down into four groups, and one group was gathered around each of the tables. At the first table, Zimmerman was demonstrating to a group of NCOs the disassembly technique on one of the two carbines they had cleaned with gasoline. The idea was that the NCOs would then go to the other tables and try disassembling the partially cleaned weapons themselves.
The system McCoy had dreamed up out of his head, and then modified after suggestions from Zimmerman, seemed to be working. The bottleneck was going to be getting the carbines free of Cosmoline, but nothing could be done about that. The safety precautions were in place. There would be inspections by platoon sergeants of weapons before they were shown to the gunnys, and finally Zimmerman would inspect them himself.
He saw that Zimmerman had also just about selected the armorer for the carbines. One of the kids. He had seen him mixing paste and pasting targets.
McCoy glanced at the tables and the faces. They were mostly kids, he thought, some of them as young as seventeen. And some he suspected were seventeen using somebody else's birth certificate.
And then he did a quick double take. There was a familiar face at the next-to-the-last table. At first it seemed incredible, but then there was no question about it at all. One of the Raiders struggling to get a good look at a sergeant taking a carbine to pieces was Tommy. Thomas Michael McCoy. PFC Thomas Michael McCoy, USMC, was Second Lieutenant Kenneth J. McCoy's little brother.
Younger brother, McCoy thought. The sonofabitch is even bigger than I remembered. And meaner looking.
"You look stunned, McCoy," Captain Coyte said. "Was my marksmanship that bad?" McCoy was startled, and it showed on his face when he looked up at Coyte.
"McCoy?"
"Sir, I just spotted my kid brother. The PFC with the broken nose, by Table Three?"
"I saw the similarity in name when he reported in," he said. "He reported in from Pearl. They must have lost his records, for he has a brand-new service record."
"They give you a new service record when they throw out a court-martial sentence, too," McCoy said.
"But we don't know that, do we, McCoy?" Coyte said. "So far as I'm concerned, so far as the Raiders are concerned, he has a clear record."
Their eyes met for a moment, and then Coyte went on, "If this is going to be a problem, McCoy, I can try to have him transferred."
"No problem, sir," McCoy said. "I can handle the sonofabitch."
"I'm sure you can, Killer," Captain Coyte said.
Chapter Sixteen
(One)
Annex #2, Staff NCO Club Camp Elliott, California 10 March 1942
Gunnery Sergeant Ernst Zimmerman, USMC, sat alone on a wooden folding chair at one of the small, four-man tables of the club. He was freshly showered and shaved, and in freshly washed dungarees. His feet were on a folding chair.
Annex #2 of the staff NCO club was a Quonset building. It was intended to provide a place for the staff noncommissioned officers-the three senior pay grades-to go for a beer when they came off duty tired, hot, and dirty. The wearing of the green uniform was prescribed for the main staff NCO club.
Annex #2 was simple, in fact crude. The bar, for instance, ran a third of the length of the building and was made of plywood. After it was built, someone had gone over the surface with a blow torch, which brought out the grain of the wood. Then it had been varnished. There were fifteen stools at the bar, and a dozen of the small tables. There was a juke box and four slot machines. Two took nickels, one took dimes, and one quarters.
Zimmerman never played the slot machines. He would play acey-deucey for money, or poker, and he had been known to bet on his own skill with the Springfield rifle, but he thought that playing the slots was stupid, fixed as they were to return to the staff NCO club twenty-five percent of the coins fed to them.