charge of Marine Corps recruiting for “the five-state area.”
Hart had no idea what that meant.
The major said they were going both to assist the press in their coverage of the departure of Company B for active service, and to cover it for recruiting purposes as well. He had, the major said, already arranged with the mayor and other local dignitaries to be at Union Station when Company B marched up there to board the train.
Hart said nothing, because he didn’t trust himself to speak.
His immediate reaction had been that the whole public relations business was bullshit, and he didn’t have time to fool with it.
But he was a captain, and captains do what majors want.
After he had had his breakfast, he had accustomed himself to the picture-taking and the parade to the railroad station. The men seemed to like the attention, and it really didn’t do any harm.
When he came back from Kramer’s Kafeteria, he saw— because he had failed to officially “discourage” it—that the men—and three of his officers—had arrived with wives, mothers, children, cousins, and four rather spectacular girlfriends.
There were a number of things wrong with that, starting with the presence of the civilians interfering with what they had to do before they left, and that most of the wives, mothers, children, and cousins and two of the four spectacular girlfriends had wanted to meet “the skipper.”
Plus, of course, he had made Louise stay at home. And she was sure to hear that the families had been at the center. If by no other way than on the pages of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, whose photographers had shown a good deal of interest in the spectacular girlfriends.
He had finally decided to hell with it, he’d call Louise and tell her to come to the Center, and while she was at it, to get the kids out of school, and bring them, too.
“Oh, all right,” Louise said. “But I’ll have to call Teddy back and tell him not to pick us up here.”
Lieutenant Theodosus Korakulous, now Acting Chief, Homicide Bureau, had called Louise and offered to take her and the kids to Union Station.
“If you’re with me,” Teddy had told Louise, “we can get through the barriers. Traffic told me it looks like a lot of people are going to be there.”
He had not wanted to go back into the main room to try to smile confidently at one more wife/mother/spectacular girlfriend and assure her he would take good care of the Family Marine now going off to war.
He wasn’t at all sure that he could do that. He was a Marine captain, he had thought at least a dozen times that morning, but he really knew zero, zip, zilch about being a Marine Infantry company commander.
So he’d been more or less hiding in his office when Lieutenant Paul Peterson had come in to show him a story in the Post-Dispatch he “thought he’d like to see.”
THE MARINES ARE COMING!!! BUT IN TIME??
By Jeanette Priestly
Chicago Tribune War Correspondent
With the 24th Infantry Division in Korea
Taejon, Korea—July 16—(DELAYED) The Eighth United States Army provided a Jeep for this correspondent to cover the war. Two Marines, saying they needed it more than I did, stole it from me. Within hours, on the front lines of the 34th and 19th Infantry Regiments of the battered and retreating 24th Division, I was glad they had.
When Marine captain Kenneth R. McCoy and Marine Master Gunner Ernest W. Zimmerman commandeered my Jeep, they told me bluntly that this was no place for a woman, and only with great reluctance agreed to take me with them wherever they were going. Their only other option was to leave me on the side of the road. The Marine Corps code of never abandoning their dead or wounded was extended in this case to include a female war correspondent.
Where they were going was the front lines of this war, sent to see how the Eighth U.S. Army and particularly the 24th Division was handling the North Korean invasion.
The Marine Corps sent two experts to investigate. Both McCoy, a lithe, good-looking officer in his late twenties, who is known as “the Killer” in the Marine Corps, and Master Gunner Ernest W. Zimmerman, a stocky, muscular man a few years older, served with the legendary Marine Raiders in World War II.
What they—and this correspondent—saw was not encouraging. Within minutes of arriving at the command post of the 34th Infantry, we learned that in the previous 48 hours, the 21st Infantry, one of