Late? What does he mean, “late”? How long have I been standing there?
“It happens,” Stecker said.
[THREE]
There was no General’s Mess. Instead there was was a plank table under a canvas fly, set with three places. Each place held a china plate and a china mug (“borrowed,” Stecker was sure, from the transport), and was laid out with the flatware that came with a mess kit: a knife, a fork, and a large spoon. Stecker wondered why the mess cook hadn’t “borrowed” some better tableware. But then it occurred to him that somewhere in the hold of one of the ships that sailed off into the sunset the day after they landed there was a crate marked HQ CO OFFICER’S MESS filled with some decent plates and flatware.
He stood at the end of the table and waited for the Division Commander to arrive.
Vandegrift appeared a minute later, trailed by Brigadier General Lucky Lew Harris, who was shorter and stockier than his superior. Vandegrift was wearing utilities; Harris wore mussed and sweat-stained khakis.
Stecker came to attention.
“Good morning, Sir.”
“Good morning, Jack.”
“General,” Stecker said, nodding to Harris.
“Colonel,” Harris said.
Christ, Lew’s going over the edge, too. He called me “Colonel”; he, of all people knows better than that.
A mess cook appeared. He was trying, without much success, to look as neat and crisp as a cook-for-a-general should look. He carried a stainless-steel pitcher and a can of condensed milk. He put the pitcher and the can of condensed milk on the table. And then he opened the can by piercing the top in two places with a K-Bar knife.
“Thank you,” General Vandegrift said. “I can use some coffee.”
“Sir, I can give you powdered eggs and bacon, or corned beef.”
“Corned beef for me, please,” General Vandegrift said. He picked up the coffee pitcher and poured coffee for himself and the others.
“Please be seated, gentlemen,” the General said.
Stecker and Harris sat down. The cook looked at them. Both nodded. The General had ordered corned beef; they would have corned beef.
The General raised his eyes to the cook.
“Is there any of the Japanese orange segments?”
“Yes, Sir. I was going to bring you some, Sir.”
Vandegrift nodded.
“Thank God for the Japanese,” Vandegrift said. He turned to look at Stecker.
“I suppose if you had something unusual to report, Jack, you would have already said what it is.”
“Fairly quiet night, Sir.”
Vandegrift nodded.
“Jack, we got a radio about a week ago asking us to recommend outstanding people for promotion. Officers and enlisted. We’re going to have to staff entire divisions, and apparently someone at Eighth and I thinks the cadre should be people who have been in combat.” (Headquarters, USMC, is at Eighth and I Streets in Washington, D.C.)
“Yes, Sir. I agree. Are you asking me for recommendations, Sir?”
“I wasn’t, but go ahead.”
“Sir, I have an outstanding company commander in mind, Joe Fortin, and my G-3 sergeant is really a first-class Marine. Are you talking about direct commissions, Sir?”
“Before you leave,” Vandegrift said, not replying directly, “give those names to General Harris.”
“Aye, aye, Sir.”
“What Eighth and I wanted, Jack, was the names of field-grade officers, for promotion”-majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels- “and staff NCOs for either direct commissions or for Officer Candidate School.” (Staff NCOs were enlisted men of the three senior grades.)
“Yes, Sir.”
He already told me that. And he’s certainly not asking me to offer my opinion of field-grade officers. If I’m not the junior major on this island, I don’t know who is. What’s he leading up to?
“A couple of names came immediately to mind, and we fired off a radio,” General Vandegrift went on. “And for once Eighth and I did something in less than sixty days.”
“Yes, Sir?”
The cook arrived with a plate of corned beef hash and three coffee cups, each of which held several spoonfuls of canned orange segments, courtesy of the Imperial Japanese Army.
He served the corned beef hash, left, and returned with another plate, this one holding bread that had apparently been “toasted” in a frying pan.
“General, we don’t have any jam except plum,” the cook said, laying a plate of jam on the table.