A week after Ernie Sage had seen Second Lieutenant McCoy sitting on the penthouse railing of her parents’ Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park, his feet dangling over the side, she had told her mother that she had met the man whose babies she wanted to bear and intended to marry him just as soon as she could get him to the altar, or some judge’s chambers, whichever came first.
Pick, and Pick’s father, thought that was a splendid idea. Everybody else, including Lieutenant McCoy, had thought it was insanity, that their marriage just wouldn’t—couldn’t—work.
But Ernie had known it was love, and could not be dissuaded, even though Ken had firmly declined the offer of her hand in wedded bliss. She had followed him around, proudly calling herself a camp follower, whenever and wherever he was in the United States during World War II.
She had written him every day, and when, toward the end of the war, he’d come home from a clandestine operation in the Gobi Desert a major on Presidential orders to attend the Army’s Command and General Staff college, he was denied his final argument against their marriage—the very good chance that he either would not come home at all, or come home in a basket—she’d finally got him to the altar.
With conditions. He was a Marine, and wanted to stay a Marine. He would not take an entry-level executive training position with American Personal Pharmaceuticals—or with the Pacific & Far East Shipping Corporation—and she would not press him to do so. And they would live on his Marine pay, period.
There had been good times and bad in their marriage, but it had worked. The good times had included their year with the Army at C&GSC at Fort Leavenworth and a year at Quantico, which was close to Washington, so Ernie had a chance to see a lot of her parents. The Quantico assignment had ended when he had been reduced to captain, not because he’d done anything wrong, but because the Corps had shrunk and didn’t need as many officers.
The Corps had a—maybe unwritten—policy that if you were reduced in grade, you were transferred, and that had seen them sent to Japan, where he had been a junior intelligence officer on the staff of the Commander, Naval Element, Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers.
There, after a year or so, things had really gone wrong. He had come across what he believed to be compelling evidence that the North Koreans were going to invade the south. He’d worked long and hard to put it down on paper, and then turned it in to the Commander, Naval Element, Supreme Headquarters.
First, he got a “well done.”
Then the Commander, Naval Element, Supreme Headquarters, called him back in and said, in effect, (1) “McCoy, you have never written an intelligence analysis of any kind regarding North Korean intentions, and certainly not one that had concluded ‘war is inevitable,’ ” and (2) “Start packing. The Marine Corps has no further need of your services as a commissioned officer, and you will be separated from the Naval Service 1 July 1950. It will be determined later at what enlisted grade you may reenlist in the service if you desire to do so.”
So far as Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers, was concerned, McCoy’s “war is coming” analysis no longer existed. Worse, it never had. All copies, McCoy was informed, had been destroyed.
McCoy found out why:
Major General Charles A. Willoughby, the Supreme Commander’s intelligence officer, had just informed General MacArthur that there was absolutely no indication that the North Koreans had hostile intentions, and in any event their armed forces were incapable of doing anything more than causing mischief along the 38th Parallel. He did not want his judgment questioned by a lowly Marine captain.
When he had told Ernie he was getting the boot, Ernie had told him she wouldn’t mind being a sergeant’s wife.
He had realized then that it was his turn to make a few sacrifices.
What the hell, I might even like selling toothpaste and deodorant for American Personal Pharmaceuticals.
Once he had made that decision, there was one more decision to make, a big one. The Commander, Naval Element, Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers, was wrong. All of the copies of McCoy’s analysis had not been destroyed. He had his own copy of his analysis, his last draft before he had typed the whole thing over again before turning it in. He could not bring himself to either forget it or burn it.