One of the lectures, by an Army captain, told them what they could expect to find, in a military sense, once they got to Korea. It surprised none of them, for they had all read the newspapers.
The goddamned Army was getting the shit kicked out of it, and-what else?-had turned to the goddamn U.S. Ma-rine Crotch to save its ass.
The second lecture, by a Navy chaplain, told them what they could expect to find in Korea in a sexually-transmitted-diseases sense. It included a twenty-minute color motion picture of individuals in the terminal stages of syphilis, and of other individuals whose genitalia were covered with suppurating scabs.
At 1200 15 August 1950, Marine Corps Platoon Aug9-2 (Provisional) was fed a steak-and-eggs luncheon, causing many of its members to quip cleverly that the condemned men were getting the traditional hearty last meal.
Then they were loaded on an Army bus that took them back to the Haneda Airfield. There, they were told, they would board a Naval Air Transport Command Douglas R5D, which would depart at 1400, and after several inter-mediate stops-Osaka, Kobe, and Sasebo-would deposit them at K-l Airfield, Pusan, South Korea, where they would be met by a Marine liaison officer who would get them to the First Marine Brigade (Provisional), where Aug9-2 would be disestablished, and they would be as-signed billets in the brigade according to the needs of the brigade at the moment.
Shortly after boarding the aircraft-half of the fuselage was devoted to cargo-they were told there was an unex-pected delay in the departure time, they were going to have to wait for some big shot, and since it was going to get hot as hell in the aircraft, those who wished could get off and wait in the shade offered by a hangar.
The lieutenant (j.g.) who gave them this word also re-minded them that anyone who missed the departure of the aircraft would be subject to far more severe penalty under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, 1948, than provided for simple absence without leave. Missing this flight would be construed as absence without leave to avoid hazardous service.
All of Aug9-2 got off the airplane and sat down in the shade on the concrete before the doors of an enormous hangar.
At 1525, the big shot they were holding the flight for showed up in a two-U.S.-Army-staff-car convoy. The first of the two glistening olive-drab 1949 Chevrolet staff cars had the single-starred flag of a brigadier general flying from a short staff mounted to the fender.
An Army sergeant jumped out and opened the door. A Marine brigadier general got out, and then a Marine cap-tain, and then a Navy lieutenant. The sergeant opened the trunk, and the Navy officer took a suitcase from it.
A Marine captain-wearing, like the other Marine offi-cers, a crisply pressed uniform-got out of the second staff car and went to the trunk. Then a-Jesus H. Christ, will you look at that?-well-dressed, quite beautiful American woman got out of the car and watched the captain take a suitcase from the trunk.
She walked with him as he walked to the brigadier gen-eral. They exchanged salutes. The general shook hands with the captain and the Naval officer. The captain touched the cheek of the goddamn beautiful woman, and then she threw herself into his arms, and he held her for a moment.
Then he and the naval officer walked to the airplane and went up the ladder. The general put his arm around the beautiful woman in a fatherly, comforting manner.
The Navy officer who'd told them they could wait in the shade appeared at the door of the airplane and waved at USMC Platoon Aug9-2 (Provisional), signaling them that it was now time for them to reboard the aircraft.
They did so.
McCoy leaned across Taylor and waved at Ernie, although he was reasonably sure that she couldn't see him.
"That's tough on you, isn't it, Ken?" Taylor asked, thoughtfully. "Having her here, and you commuting to the war?"
"What about the Air Force guys?" McCoy responded. "They do it every day: `How was your day, honey?' `Oh, I bombed a couple of bridges, shot up a convoy, took a little antiaircraft in my landing gear, and had to land wheels-up. Nothing special. How about you?' `My day was just awful. Ellsworth, Junior, kicked Marybelle Smith, Colonel Smith's little girl, and you have to call Mrs. Smith and apologize. The battery's dead in the car, and the PX doesn't know when they're going to get the right one. They want you on the PTA committee, and I didn't know how to tell them no-`"
He was interrupted by the roar of the engines as the pilot set the throttles to takeoff power, but Taylor had heard enough to laugh.
The R5D began its takeoff roll.
When McCoy decided that the roar of the engine had gone down enough for Taylor to hear him, McCoy said: "All we have to worry about now is (one) whether Jennings and the other guys and the stuff from Pusan made it to Sasebo, and (two) whether we'll be allowed to take them and it with us on the destroyer. I wish the general had been able to come to Sasebo. People usually find it hard to say `no' to gener-als."
"I wonder what the hell Howe's doing for so long in Ko-rea?" Taylor asked. Howe being in Korea was the reason Pickering had to stay in Tokyo.
McCoy shrugged.
"I don't know. But whatever it is, he thinks it's impor-tant. He's a good man."
"I think Jennings will be waiting for us at Sasebo," Tay-lor said. "The Marine guy at K-l... ?"
"Captain Overton," McCoy furnished.
Taylor nodded and went on: ".., told me that a lot, prob-ably most, of the Air Force and Navy transports that land at K-l don't fuel up there. They head for Sasebo, which is both the closest field for large aircraft, and has a pretty good off-the-tanker-and-into-the-airplanes fueling setup. K-l, you saw that, doesn't. They don't even have a decent tank farm for avgas...."
"You are a fountain of information I really don't give a damn about, aren't you, Mr. Taylor?"
"You care about this, Mr. McCoy, because the aircraft that fly from K-l to Sasebo to take on fuel are very often empty. That means Jennings will be able to find space for himself, the other jarheads, the camouflage nets, the ra-tions, the medical supplies, and whatever else he stole from the Army aboard one of these empty airplanes headed for Sasebo."
"I stand corrected, sir," McCoy said.
"And I don't think Her Majesty's Navy's going to give us any trouble about taking Jennings, et cetera, aboard the Charity with us," Taylor said. "But let's say they do..."
"In which case we're fucked. The Brits are going to give us lifeboats. You can't hide a lifeboat on Tokchok-kundo.
And that means the North Koreans will learn sooner or later, probably sooner, that there're two lifeboats on Tokchok-kundo and start wondering why."
"In which case-I admit this is a desperate measure- we get General Pickering to get us an airplane to fly the stuff back to Pusan, and ship it to Tokchok-kundo on the Wind of Good Fortune."
"I thought about that. There's a few little things wrong with it. If Pickering asks for an airplane, they'll want to know what for, and this is supposed to be a secret opera-tion. And who would sail it?"
"Her. Sail her. Either of those two Koreans we had aboard is capable of sailing her to Tokchok-kundo."
"Okay. Let's say we did that, and it worked. The Wind of Good Fortune couldn't make it to Tokchok-kundo until we'd been there-which means the lifeboats would have been there, exposed to the curious eyes of every sonofabitch in the Flying Fish Channel-three or four, maybe five days-"