The rear door of the Buick opened.
“Will the Major please get in so the Captain will not get drowned?” a voice called.
Banning quickly stepped into the backseat and put out his hand.
“How are you, Ed?” he said. “Good to see you.”
“Take us to the hotel, Jerry,” Captain Edward Sessions, USMC, ordered, and then turned to Banning. “It’s good to see you, Sir,” he said. He was a tall, not quite handsome twenty-seven-year-old in a trench coat. A plastic rain cover was fastened over the cover of his billed cap.
“I didn’t want to get my best uniform soaked,” he went on. “There’s a good chance I will be in the very presence of the Secretary of the Navy himself.
“We will be.”
“Tonight?” Banning asked, surprised.
“Very possibly. The Colonel’s at the hotel; that’s where we’re going. He should know by the time we get there.”
“What hotel?”
“The Foster Lafayette,” Sessions said. “Your hotel, Sir. By order of General Pickering. He sent a radio from Pearl Harbor.” He made a gesture with his hand. “The car, too. He said we were to give you the keys.”
“Jesus,” Banning said.
“And this, I thought, would give you a laugh,” Sessions said, and thrust a newspaper at Banning. “There’s a light back here somewhere…. Ah, there it is.”
A pair of lights came on, providing just enough illumination to read the newspaper. It was The Washington Star.
“What am I looking at?”
Sessions pointed at a photograph of a Marine officer in dress blues. He was standing at a microphone mounted on a lectern on a stage somewhere.
There was a headline over the photograph:
PACIFIC HEROES COMPLETE WAR BOND TOUR;
‘BACK TO THE JOB WE HAVE TO DO’ SAYS
PURPLE HEART HERO OF GUADALCANAL.
“So?” Banning asked.
“Take a good look at the hero,” Session said. “Macklin! I’ll be damned.” “I thought that would amuse you,” Sessions said. “Nauseate me is the word you’re looking for,” Banning said. And then something else caught his eye.
NAVY SECRETARY KNOX ‘EXPECTS
GUADALCANAL CAN BE HELD’
By Charles E. Whaley
Washington Oct 16 – Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, at a press conference this afternoon, responded with guarded optimism to the question, by this reporter, “Can Guadalcanal be held?”
“I certainly hope so,” the Secretary said. “I expect so. I don’t want to make any predictions, but every man out there, ashore or afloat, will give a good account of himself.”
The response called to mind the classic phrase, “England expects every man to do his duty,” but could not be interpreted as more than a hope on Knox’s part.
One highly placed and knowledgeable military expert has, on condition of anonymity, told this reporter that the “odds that we can stay on Guadalcanal are no better than fifty-fifty.” He cited the great difficulty of supplying the twenty-odd thousand Marines on the island, which is not only far from U.S. Bases, but very close to Japanese bases from which air and naval attacks can be launched on both the troops and on the vessels and aircraft attempting to provide them with war materiel.
“What are you reading?”
“Some expert, who doesn’t want his name mentioned, told the Star it’s fifty-fifty whether we can stay on Guadalcanal.”
“You think he’s wrong?”
“It’s pretty bad over there, Ed,” Banning said. “I don’t even think it’s fifty-fifty. The night before we left, they were shelling Henderson Field with fourteen-inch battleship cannon. Nobody can stand up under that for long.”
“Is that what you’re going to tell Secretary Knox?”
“I’m going to tell him what Vandegrift thinks.”
“Which is?”
“That unless he gets reinforced, and unless they can somehow keep the Japs from reinforcing, we’re going to get pushed back into the sea.”
“Jesus.”
Captain Sessions unlocked the door, removed the key, and then handed it to Banning. After that, he pushed open the door and motioned him to go in.
“I realize that this isn’t what you’re accustomed to, but I understand roughing it once in a while is good for the soul.”
“I just hope there’s hot water,” Banning said, and then, suddenly formal: “Good evening, Sir.”
“Hello, Banning, how are you?” a slight, pale-skinned man in an ill-fitting suit said. He was Colonel F. L. Rickabee, of the Office of Management Analysis.
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