“Look at all the dogfaces with Garands,” the Lieutenant said. “Boy, the Army is dumb. They don’t know the Garand is a Mickey Mouse piece of shit.”
Well, I can’t let that pass.
“Lieutenant, for your general fund of military knowledge, the Garand-”
Lieutenant Colonel Stecker stopped. The Lieutenant was smiling at him.
Hell, I know him. From where?
“Ken McCoy, Colonel,” the Lieutenant said. “They told me I could probably find you here.”
“Killer McCoy,” Stecker said, remembering. “I’ll be damned. I didn’t expect to see you here.” He put his hand out. “And I’m sorry, you don’t like to be called ‘Killer,’ do you?”
Stecker remembered the first time he met McCoy. Before the war. He was then Sergeant Major Stecker of the Marine Corps base at Quantico, Virginia. McCoy was a corporal, a China Marine just back from the 4th Marines in Shanghai. He was reporting in to the Officer Candidate School.
Almost all officer candidates were nice young men just out of college. But as a test-for which few Marines, including Sergeant Major Stecker, had high hopes-a small number of really outstanding enlisted Marines were to be given a chance for a commission. It was a bright opportunity for these young men. So Stecker was surprised, when he first met him, that McCoy was not wildly eager to become an officer and a gentleman.
Soon after that, he found out that McCoy was in OCS largely because the Assistant Chief of Staff, Intelligence, of the Marine Corps had let it be known that The Corps should put bars on McCoy’s twenty-one-year-old shoulders as soon as possible.
McCoy had an unusual flair for languages: He was fluent in several kinds of Chinese and Japanese and several European languages.
That wasn’t all he had a flair for.
While his sources didn’t have all the details, Stecker learned that McCoy was known in China as “Killer” McCoy-not for his success with the ladies, but because of two incidents where men had died. In one, three Italian Marines of the International Garrison attacked him; he killed two with his Fairbairn knife and seriously injured the third. In the second, he was in the interior of China on an intelligence-gathering mission, when “bandits” attacked his convoy (the “bandits” were actually in the employ of the Japanese secret police, the Kempe Tai). Firing Thompson submachine guns, McCoy and another Marine killed twenty-two of the “bandits.”
At Quantico, the lieutenants-to-be were trained on the Garand. When it came to Sergeant Major Stecker’s attention that Officer Candidate McCoy had not qualified when firing for record, he went down to have a look; for McCoy should have qualified. And so there had to be a reason why he didn’t. And Stecker found it: him. He was an officer who knew McCoy in China…. What was that sonofabitch’s name? Macklin. Lieutenant R. B. Macklin…. Macklin had something against Candidate McCoy; and it was more than just the generally held belief that commissioning enlisted men without college degrees would be the ruination of the officer corps.
Macklin actively disliked McCoy… more than that, he despised him. A small measure of his hostility could be gleaned at the bar of the officers’ club, where from time to time he passed the word that “Killer” McCoy was so called with good reason. He did not belong at Quantico about to be officially decreed an officer and a gentleman; he belonged in the Portsmouth Naval Prison.
Sergeant Major Stecker had no trouble finding two ex-China Marines who told him more about Lieutenant Macklin than he would like to know:
In China, in order to cover his own responsibility for a failed operation, Macklin tried to lay the blame on Corporal McCoy. The 4th Marines’ Intelligence Officer, Captain Ed Banning (Stecker remembered him as a good officer and a good Marine), investigated, found Macklin to be a liar, and wrote an efficiency report on him that would have seen him booted out of The Corps had it not been for the war. Instead, he wound up at Quantico.
… where the sonofabitch was determined to get McCoy kicked out of OCS. One of his first steps was to see that McCoy didn’t qualify on the range. And if that wasn’t enough, he was also writing McCoy up for inefficiency, for a bad attitude, and for violations of regulations he hadn’t committed.