The Colonel questioned him even more intensively about his knowledge of what the Marine Corps called "Transport." Apparently satisfied with the answers, he told Jim he had been looking for someone with his qualifications, and as of that moment he could consider himself assigned to the G-4 Section as an Assistant Transportation Officer.
Jim's protests that he was trained as an infantry platoon leader were met with the observation that in the Colonel's experience good Marine officers went where they were sent and did what they were told to do, without com-plaint.
The year between Jim's call to active duty and Pearl Harbor went quickly, and he took a certain satisfaction from his work. He was more than a little surprised to learn how much truck operators serving the Marines had been able to get away with before he laid his expert eye on the invoices they had ten-dered.
He received during that year three letters of commendation for his official file and a wholly unexpected promotion to captain.
The attack on Pearl Harbor surprised him, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, he did not think the Japanese had the technical capability to strike with such strength at such a great distance. For another, though a surprise attack on the United States was possible, in his view, he thought it would probably come on the Panama Canal, either from the Germans in the Atlantic or the Japanese in the Pacific, or conceivably both.
On 8 December, he applied for transfer to duty with troops. His letter came back within a week, denied. He applied again thereafter on a monthly basis, and on a monthly basis his request was denied. In April 1942, he was promoted major. The ceremony was held in the office of the Commanding General. After offering his congratulations, he said he hoped it would mean the end of the monthly requests for transfer.
In May 1942, a memorandum from Headquarters USMC crossed Major Brownlee's desk. Applications were being solicited from officers for a non-specified duty of an intelligence nature. Preference would be given to those with fluency in one or more foreign languages, and/or who had spent time out-side the continental United States.
He submitted his application and promptly forgot about it, sure that it would suffer the same fate as his requests for transfer to duty with troops.
Two weeks later, his orders came through. He was transferred to some-thing called the Office of Strategic Services and ordered to report within forty-eight hours to the National Institute of Health Building in Washington, D.C.
There he was interviewed by another board of officers. This one consisted of three men in civilian clothing; two of them spoke Spanish. At the conclusion of the interview, one of the Spanish speakers shook his hand, offered his name, and said, "Please give my best regards to your brother. But don't tell him where, or under what circumstances, we bumped into each other."
That same afternoon, Jim Brownlee was transported in a Buick station wagon to the former Congressional Country Club to begin training.
The training was difficult, but not nearly so difficult for Major Brownlee as it was for some of his fellow trainees who had entered the OSS directly from civilian life-he had taken pains to keep himself in shape at Quantico and thereafter. Two fellow trainees had never held a weapon in their hands before coming to the Country Club.
As the training proceeded, he began to wonder where he would be as-signed. He gradually came to the conclusion that because of his fluency in Spanish, it would either be in Spain or somewhere in South America. In Spain, the policy of the United States Government was to keep Generalissimo Franco, known as "El Caudillo," neutral. If South America, he rather suspected he would be in Argentina, where the military-dominated government was in ev-erything but name an ally of the Germans. It was common knowledge around the Country Club that both the OSS and the FBI were deeply involved in Ar-gentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay.
There was a decent library at the Country Club, and Jim Brownlee spent many of his evenings trying to learn as much as he could about the history and politics of South America. He felt he would be given an assignment shortly after he completed the training and then got past the Final Board.
That didn't happen. Despite his "Agent, awaiting assignment" status, no assignment was forthcoming. What did happen was that someone in the office realized that he was the senior Marine officer present at the Country Club, and consequently, that administrative responsibility for all Marine Corps personnel assigned to the OSS was logically his.
At first, in what he believed was the interim between the completion of his training and his assignment, he didn't mind at all. For one thing, it gave him something to do, and he rather liked guiding fellow Marines through the rocks and shoals of Country Club training.
But then he began to worry if the same sort of thing that happened to him at Quantico was happening to him at the Country Club. Good administrators were hard to find. And more and more Marines had been accepted by the OSS.
The last thing in the world he wanted was to be sort of a Marine Mother Hen. He wanted to get out on assignment and do something more concrete against the enemy than shepherd other Marines through training. He was no closer now to being what he thought of privately as a "fighting Marine" than he had been at Quantico.
This awareness was made even more painful with the arrival at the Coun-try Club of First Lieutenant Robert B. Macklin, USMC. Macklin was not only a rather handsome man, but his uniform-and his person-were adorned with the symbols of what Jim Brownlee wanted rather desperately to be, a Fighting Marine. Macklin wore the ring of the United States Naval Academy at An-napolis. Colored ribbons on the breast of his well-fitting uniform indicated that he had seen service in the Pacific, and that he had twice been wounded. His face was scarred from one wound; and his slight limp, which he tried but failed to hide, suggested that the wound that caused it had been more severe than the one on his face.
He wore the wings of a parachutist. And when asked, he revealed that he had been wounded with the USMC 2nd Parachute Battalion storming the beach at Gavutu during the invasion of Guadalcanal. Brownlee had heard that the Marine paratroopers at Gavutu were literally decimated-one out of ten Paramarines were killed or wounded.
"I really have only one question, Lieutenant," Brownlee said. "With all the service you've seen, I should have thought by now that you would be at least a captain."
"The Major will note," Macklin replied, demonstrating impeccable mili-tary courtesy, "that my service records have been misplaced."
"Yes, of course," Brownlee said. "I'm sure they'll turn up."
Lieutenant Robert B. Macklin devoutly hoped they would not. He was de-lighted when a master gunner in Officer Personnel at Eighth and "I" informed him that his records were missing but they were going to send him to the OSS anyway, and "hope they turn up."
With a little bit of luck, they wouldn't ever turn up, which meant The Corps would have to "reconstruct" a new set. With just a little more luck, the "reconstructed" records would not contain a copy of the devastating Officer's Efficiency Report he had received from Captain Edward Banning, the S-2 of the 4th Marines in Shanghai.
Lieutenant Macklin had given that efficiency report, and its potential ef-fect on his career, a good deal of thought. Now that he had time to consider it, he was no longer surprised that Captain Edward J. Banning wrote all those despicable-and untrue-things about him. Under the circumstances, Macklin now realized, it was perfectly understandable that he did.