Jesus H. Christ! If there ‘d been ten pounds of roast chicken or roast beef on Guadalcanal, the war against the Japs would have been called off while the Marines fought over it.
Surprising him, his bowels moved. He put Life back in the rack on the door, looked again at Admiral Leahy’s photograph, and had one final unkind thought: The Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief needs a haircut himself; it’s hanging over his collar in the back. And I have seen better pressed white uniforms on ensigns.
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Banning said as he washed his hands and saw the Air Corps Major’s reflection in the mirror over the sink.
“It’s your airplane, Major,” the Air Corps Major said. “Take your time.”
[TWO]
Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff G-l
Headquarters, United States Marine Corps
Eighth and I Streets, NW
Washington, D.C.
0825 Hours 16 October 1942
Colonel David M. Wilson, USMC, Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff G-l for Officer Personnel, had no idea what Brigadier General J. J. Stewart, USMC, Director, Public Affairs Office, Headquarters USMC, had in mind vis-a-vis First Lieutenant R, B. Macklin, USMC, but he suspected he wasn’t going to like it.
General Stewart had requested an appointment with the Assistant Chief of Staff, Personnel, himself, but the General had regrettably been unable to fit him into his busy schedule.
“You deal with him, Dave. Find out who this Lieutenant Macklin is, and see what Stewart thinks we should do for him. I’ll back you up whatever you decide. Just keep him away from me.”
Colonel Wilson was a good Marine officer. Even when given an order he’d rather not receive, he said, “Aye, aye, Sir,” and carried it out to the best of his ability.
He obtained Lieutenant Macklin’s service record and studied it carefully. What he saw failed to impress him. Macklin was a career Marine out of Annapolis. Though Colonel Wilson was himself an Annapolis graduate, he was prepared to admit-if not proclaim-that Annapolis had delivered its fair share of mediocre to poor people into the officer corps.
He quickly came to the conclusion that Macklin was one of these.
Macklin had been with the 4th Marines in Shanghai before the war. He came out of that assignment with a truly devastating efficiency report.
One entry caught Wilson’s particular notice: “Lieutenant Macklin,” it said, was “prone to submit official reports that not only omitted pertinent facts that might tend to reflect adversely upon himself, but to present other material clearly designed to magnify his own contributions to the accomplishment of an assigned mission.”
In other words, he was a liar.
Even worse: “Lieutenant Macklin,” the report went on to say, “could not be honestly recommended for the command of a company or larger tactical unit.”
Politely calling him a liar would have kept him from getting a command anyway, but his rating officer apparently wanted to drive a wooden stake through his heart by spelling it out.
And that could not be passed off as simply bad blood between Macklin and his rating officer. For the reviewing officer clearly agreed with the rating officer: “The undersigned concurs in this evaluation of this officer.” And it wasn’t just any reviewing officer, either. It was Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller, then a major, now a lieutenant colonel on Guadalcanal.
Colonel Wilson had served several times with Chesty Puller and held him in the highest possible regard.
After Macklin came home from Shanghai, The Corps sent him to Quantico, as a training officer at the Officer Candidate School. He got out of that by volunteering to become a parachutist.
It was Colonel Wilson’s considered (if more or less private) opinion that Marine parachutists ranked high on the list of The Corps’ really dumb mistakes in recent years. While there might well be some merit to “The Theory of Vertical Envelopment” (as the Army called it), it made no sense at all to apply that theory to The Marine Corps.
For one thing, nothing he’d seen suggested that parachute operations would have any application at all in the war The Marine Corps was going to have to fight in the Pacific. A minimum of 120 R4D aircraft would be required to drop a single battalion of troops. In Colonel Wilson’s opinion, it would be a long time before The Corps would get that many R4Ds at all, much less that many for a single battalion. In his view, it was a bit more likely that he himself would be lifted bodily into heaven to sit at the right hand of God.