He carried the helmet outside, tossed the water away, and returned to his bedside table. He reached inside for a towel, then wiped the vestiges of the shaving cream from his face.
His morning toilette completed, he picked up a U.S. Rifle, Caliber.30-06, M1 that was beside his bed (one of the few M1s on Guadalcanal). It had a leather strap, and the strap had two spare eight-round clips attached to it.
The M1 rifle (called the Garand, after its inventor) was viewed by most Marines as a Mickey Mouse piece of shit, inferior in every way to the U.S. Rifle, Caliber. 30-06, M1903 (called the Springfield, after the U.S. Army Arsenal where it was manufactured). Every Marine had been trained with a Springfield at either Parris Island or San Diego.
Major Stecker disagreed. In his professional judgment, the Garand was the finest military rifle yet developed.
Before the war, as Sergeant Major Stecker, he participated in the testing of the weapon at the Army’s Infantry Center at Fort Benning, Georgia. And he concluded then that if he ever had to go to war again, he would arm himself with the Garand. Not only was it at least as accurate as the Springfield, but it was self-loading. You could fire the eight cartridges in its en bloc clip as fast as you could pull the trigger. And then, when the clip was empty, the weapon automatically ejected it and left the action open for the rapid insertion of a fresh one. The Marine Corps’ beloved Springfield required the manipulation of its bolt after each shot, and its magazine held only five cartridges.
Although there were in those days fewer than two hundred Garands in Marine Corps stocks, it had not been difficult for the sergeant major of the U.S. Marine Corps Schools at Quantico, Virginia, to arrange to have one assigned to him. For one thing, he was the power behind the U.S. Marine Corps Rifle Team, and for another, sergeants major of the pre-war Marine Corps generally got whatever they thought they needed, no questions asked.
When Sergeant Major Stecker was called to active duty as a Captain, USMC Reserve, he briefly considered turning the Garand in…. He decided against it. If he turned the Garand in, he reasoned, it would almost certainly spend the war in a rifle rack at Quantico. If he kept it, the odds were that it would be put to its intended use-bringing accurate fire to bear upon the enemy.
By the time the 1st Marine Division reached the South Pacific, Jack (NMI) Stecker was a major…. He had in no way changed his opinion about the Garand rifle-far to the contrary. Although there were few in the 1st Marines who felt safe teasing Major Stecker about anything, three or four brave souls felt bold enough to tease him about his rifle. The last man to do it was Brigadier General Lewis T. Harris, the Assistant Division Commander. They were then on the transport en route to Guadalcanal.
General Harris was a second lieutenant in France in 1917 at the time Sergeant Stecker, then nineteen, earned the Medal of Honor. And they had remained friends since. General Harris, for instance, was the man who talked Stecker into accepting a reserve commission in the first place. And it was Harris who later arranged his promotion to major and his being given command of Second of the Fifth-against a good deal of pressure from the regular officer corps, who believed that while there was a place for commissioned ex-enlisted men in the wartime Corps, it was not in positions of command.
On the transport, General Harris looked at Stecker and observed solemnly: “I’m willing to close my eyes to officers who prefer to carry a rifle in addition to the prescribed arm,” which was the.45 Colt pistol, “but I’m having trouble overlooking an officer who arms himself with a Mickey Mouse piece that will probably fall apart the first time it’s fired.”
Stecker raised his eyes to meet the General’s. “May the Major respectfully suggest that the General go fuck himself?”
They were alone in the General’s cabin, and they went back together a long way. The General laughed and offered Stecker another sample of what the bottle’s label described as prescription mouthwash.