"Load it up, Major. Where did you say the bathroom is?"
"Right over there."
The rest room was chrome and tile and spotless. It even smelled clean.
Banning entered a stall and closed the door and sat down.
There was a copy of Life magazine in a rack on the back of the door. A picture of Admiral William D. Leahy, in whites, was on the cover.
Banning took it from the rack.
In the shape my digestive tract is in, I may be here all day. The human body is not designed to fly halfway around the world in airplanes.
He started to flip through the magazine.
There was a picture of an Army sergeant kissing his bride, a Canadian Women's Army Corps corporal.
There was a Westinghouse advertisement, proudly announcing that it had won an Army-Navy E for Excellence award for producing four thousand carloads of war materials a month-enough to fill a freight train thirty-seven miles long.
How come none of it seems to have reached Guadalcanal?
There was a series of photographs of Army officers in an English castle. The censor had obliterated from the photographs anything that could identify the castle. The American officers all looked well fed.
And their trousers, unlike yours, Banning, are all neatly pressed.
There was an advertisement from Budweiser, announcing what they were doing for the war effort-from baby foods to peanut butter to flashlights, carpet, and twine. Beer wasn't mentioned.
There was a series of photographs recording Wendell Willkie's travels to Egypt. He was described as the "leader of President Roosevelt's Friendly Opposition."
Another series of photographs showed the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown's final moments in the Battle of Midway. Another showed the Army Air Corps in the Aleutian Islands. Another, a nice-looking woman named Love, who was married to an Air Corps light colonel. She was about to head up an organization of women pilots who would ferry airplanes from the factories. Another, a huge new British four-engine bomber called the Lancaster; the monster could carry eight tons of bombs.
I'll bet not one of them ever gets sent to New Guinea or the Solomons. Or at least not until after the Japanese have reoccupied Guadalcanal and captured all of New Guinea.
What really caught his attention was the Armour and Company full-page advertisement, showing in color what the "typical" soldier, sailor, and Marine was being fed this week: roast chicken, frankfurters, barbecued spareribs, baked corned beef, Swiss steak, baked fish, and roast beef. Servicemen could have second helpings of anything on the menus, it claimed.
Jesus H. Christ! If there 'd been ten pounds of roast chicken or roast beef on Guadalcanal, the war against the Japs would have been called off while the Marines fought over it.
Surprising him, his bowels moved. He put Life back in the rack on the door, looked again at Admiral Leahy's photograph, and had one final unkind thought: The Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief needs a haircut himself; it's hanging over his collar in the back. And I have seen better pressed white uniforms on ensigns.
"Sorry to keep you waiting," Banning said as he washed his hands and saw the Air Corps Major's reflection in the mirror over the sink.
"It's your airplane, Major," the Air Corps Major said. "Take your time."
[TWO]
Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff G-l
Headquarters, United States Marine Corps
Eighth and I Streets, NW
Washington, D.C.
0825 Hours 16 October 1942
Colonel David M. Wilson, USMC, Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff G-l for Officer Personnel, had no idea what Brigadier General J. J. Stewart, USMC, Director, Public Affairs Office, Headquarters USMC, had in mind vis-a-vis First Lieutenant R, B. Macklin, USMC, but he suspected he wasn't going to like it.
General Stewart had requested an appointment with the Assistant Chief of Staff, Personnel, himself, but the General had regrettably been unable to fit him into his busy schedule.
"You deal with him, Dave. Find out who this Lieutenant Macklin is, and see what Stewart thinks we should do for him. I'll back you up whatever you decide. Just keep him away from me."
Colonel Wilson was a good Marine officer. Even when given an order he'd rather not receive, he said, "Aye, aye, Sir," and carried it out to the best of his ability.
He obtained Lieutenant Macklin's service record and studied it carefully. What he saw failed to impress him. Macklin was a career Marine out of Annapolis. Though Colonel Wilson was himself an Annapolis graduate, he was prepared to admit-if not proclaim-that Annapolis had delivered its fair share of mediocre to poor people into the officer corps.
He quickly came to the conclusion that Macklin was one of these.
Macklin had been with the 4th Marines in Shanghai before the war. He came out of that assignment with a truly devastating efficiency report.
One entry caught Wilson's particular notice: "Lieutenant Macklin," it said, was "prone to submit official reports that not only omitted pertinent facts that might tend to reflect adversely upon himself, but to present other material clearly designed to magnify his own contributions to the accomplishment of an assigned mission."
In other words, he was a liar.
Even worse: "Lieutenant Macklin," the report went on to say, "could not be honestly recommended for the command of a company or larger tactical unit."
Politely calling him a liar would have kept him from getting a command anyway, but his rating officer apparently wanted to drive a wooden stake through his heart by spelling it out.
And that could not be passed off as simply bad blood between Macklin and his rating officer. For the reviewing officer clearly agreed with the rating officer: "The undersigned concurs in this evaluation of this officer." And it wasn't just any reviewing officer, either. It was Lewis B. "Chesty" Puller, then a major, now a lieutenant colonel on Guadalcanal.
Colonel Wilson had served several times with Chesty Puller and held him in the highest possible regard.
After Macklin came home from Shanghai, The Corps sent him to Quantico, as a training officer at the Officer Candidate School. He got out of that by volunteering to become a parachutist.
It was Colonel Wilson's considered (if more or less private) opinion that Marine parachutists ranked high on the list of The Corps' really dumb mistakes in recent years. While there might well be some merit to "The Theory of Vertical Envelopment" (as the Army called it), it made no sense at all to apply that theory to The Marine Corps.
For one thing, nothing he'd seen suggested that parachute operations would have any application at all in the war The Marine Corps was going to have to fight in the Pacific. A minimum of 120 R4D aircraft would be required to drop a single battalion of troops. In Colonel Wilson's opinion, it would be a long time before The Corps would get that many R4Ds at all, much less that many for a single battalion. In his view, it was a bit more likely that he himself would be lifted bodily into heaven to sit at the right hand of God.
For another, Colonel Wilson (along with a number of other thoughtful senior Marine officers) had serious philosophical questions about the formation of Marine parachutists: Since The Corps itself was already an elite organization, creating a parachutist elite within the elite was just short of madness.