“And I know Captain McCoy doesn’t like it any more than you do,” Dunn said. “You said you wanted to see me privately, McCoy?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“Why don’t we go to my cabin?” Dunn suggested. “And get out of the captain’s sea cabin?”
He gestured for McCoy to precede him into a passageway.
The Badoeng Strait—and the Sicily—on which the Marine air wing had been transported from the United States and from which the wing was now operating, were officially “escort carriers,” often called “Jeep carriers.” They were smaller than “a real carrier,” and everybody believed they were in service because they were far cheaper to operate than “real” carriers.
While they were perfectly capable of doing what they were doing now, they were smaller all over, which also meant “the creature comforts,” such as officers’ staterooms, were fewer in number and less spacious than those on a “real carrier.”
Even senior officers often had to share their staterooms with another officer. There was a cardboard sign in a slot on the door of the stateroom to which Dunn led McCoy, white letters stamped on a blue background. It read:
LT COL W. C. DUNN, USMC MAJ M. S. PICKERING, USMCR
Dunn pushed the door open and motioned for McCoy to precede him inside, then gestured for him to sit in one of the two chairs in the stateroom. He closed the door and leaned against it.
“Taking care of his gear is another little task Pick left behind for me to take care of,” Dunn said, pointing to a packed canvas bag sitting on one of the bunks.
McCoy didn’t reply.
“It has been decided that Major Pickering will become a Marine legend,” Dunn said. “An ace, a hero of Guadalcanal and other places, a reservist who rushed to the sound of the guns when they blew the trumpet, who flew the first Marine combat sortie of this war, and died nobly in the glorious traditions of the Corps while engaging a target of opportunity. The sonofabitch should have been court-martialed for disobeying a direct order, and I’m the sonofabitch who should have court-martialed him.”
McCoy looked up at him.
Tears were running unashamedly down Lieutenant Colonel Dunn’s cheeks.
“What happened?” McCoy asked.
Dunn went to the desk and took from it an envelope and handed it to McCoy. There were three eight-by-ten-inch color photographs in it. At first glance, McCoy thought they were three copies of the same photograph, but then he saw there were differences. In each, Pick, smiling broadly, was pointing up at the cockpit of his Corsair. But Pick was dressed differently in each photo. In one of the photos, he was wearing a .45 in a shoulder holster; in the others he was not. And he was wearing different flight suits. Then McCoy saw what he was pointing at.
Below the cockpit canopy track there was the legend "Major M. S. Pickering, USMCR,” and below that, nine “meat balls,” representations of the Japanese battle flag, each signifying a downed Japanese aircraft.
And then, on one photograph, below the meatballs, there was a rather clever painting of a railroad locomotive blowing up.
There were two blowing-up locomotives painted on the fuselage in the second picture, and three in the third.
“The sonofabitch told me he was going to be the first ‘locomotive ace’ in the history of Marine aviation,” Dunn said. “He even wrote a letter to the Air Force asking if they had kept a record of who had blown up how many locomotives in the Second War.”
“Jesus Christ!” McCoy said.
“He was like a fourteen-year-old with a five-inch fire-cracker on the Fourth of July after he got the first one,” Dunn said. “The first time, debris got his ADF, and there were holes all over his wings. That should have taught him something. It didn’t.”
“That’s what he was doing when he got shot down?”
“In direct disobedience of my order not to go locomotive hunting. Said direct order issued after he got his second locomotive, the debris from which took out the hydraulics to his left landing gear, which made it necessary for him to crash-land on the deck. I ordered him (a) not to go locomotive hunting—”
“You don’t consider them important targets?” McCoy asked.
“There’s plenty to shoot at out there. The idea, McCoy, is to fly over the area, and establish contact with the ground controller. He knows what needs to be hit. If he doesn’t have an immediate target you wait—they call it ‘loiter’— until he has a mission. If the controller didn’t have a mission, Pick then went locomotive-hunting.”