"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.
He was not a fan of that other elite-within-the-elite, either: the Marine Raiders. But the parachutists and the Raiders were horses of different colors. For one thing, the order to form the Raiders came directly from President Roosevelt himself; and there was nothing anyone in The Corps could do about it, not even the Commandant. ,
And for another, so far the Raiders had done well. They'd staged a successful raid on Makin Island, and they'd done a splendid job on Guadalcanal.
Viewed coldly and professionally, the parachutists' record was not nearly as impressive: After their very expensive training, there were no aircraft available to transport them (surprising Colonel Wilson not at all), and so they were committed as infantry to the Guadalcanal operation, charged with making an amphibious assault on a tiny island called Gavutu. They fought courageously, if not very efficiently; and the island fell. Later, Wilson heard credible scuttlebutt that their fire discipline was practically nonexistent. And the numbers seemed to confirm this: The parachute battalion was literally decimated in the first twenty-four hours. And after the invasion, they continued to suffer disproportionate losses.
Macklin was with the parachutists in the invasion of Gavutu; but he went in as a supernumerary. Which meant that he was a spare officer; he'd be given a job only after an officer commanding a platoon, or whatever, was killed or wounded.
Macklin never reached the beach. He managed to get himself shot in the calf and face and was evacuated.
Colonel Wilson had been a Marine a long time. He'd been in France in the First War, and he'd passed the "peacetime years" in the Banana Wars in Latin America. He had enough experience with weaponry fired in anger to know that getting shot only meant that you were unlucky; there was no valor or heroism connected with it.
According to his service record, Macklin was in the Army General Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, recovering from his wounds, when he was sent to the States to participate in a war bonds tour of the West Coast. That was where he was now.
Colonel Wilson thought he remembered something about that last business. And a moment later a few details came up from the recesses of his mind: In a move that at the time didn't have Colonel Wilson's full and wholehearted approval, the Assistant Commandant of The Marine Corps arranged to have an ex-4th Marines sergeant commissioned as a major, for duty with Public Affairs. The Assistant Commandant's reasoning was that The Corps was going to need some good publicity, and that the way to do it was to bring in a professional. The man he was thinking of was then Vice President, Publicity, of Metro-Magnum Studios, Hollywood, California (who just happened to earn more money than the Commandant or, for that matter, than the President of the United States). And wasn't it fortuitous that he'd been a China Marine, and-Once a Marine, Always a Marine-was willing to come back into The Corps?
Major Jake Dillon, Colonel Wilson was willing to admit, did not turn out to be the unmitigated disaster he feared. He'd led a crew of photographers and writers in the first wave of the invasion of Tulagi, for instance, and there was no question that they'd done their job well.
Dillon was responsible for having Lieutenant Macklin sent home from Australia for the war bond tour.