had blared “Pilots, man your aircraft” while he was still looking at the aerials—but that didn’t justify his subsequent behavior. Which, on sober analysis, had been both unprofessional and devious.
On that first mission, right after seeing the aerials, he had diverted from the mission plan, dropped down to the ground, and flown over the wreckage of Pick’s Corsair. He knew where that was, but he didn’t know where the muddy rice paddy was. The only thing McGrory had said was that it was “near” where Pickering had gone down, and he hadn’t asked “how near?” or “in which direction?”
He thought that he could possibly find it because it was a muddy—as opposed to water-filled—rice paddy, and there probably wouldn’t be too many of those.
There were. The bombing, and probably artillery as well, had ruptured the dirt walls of more than a dozen paddies near the wreckage of Pick’s Corsair and let the water escape. And during his one pass at 200 knots—he could not fly over the area more than once—it had been impossible to look for “PP” and an arrow in all of them.
He hadn’t found the one he was looking for, but he had seen Korean farmers hard at work restoring the mud walls of several of the paddies.
When he overflew the location the next day, now armed by Chief Young with a more precise location of what he had come to think of as “Pick’s rice paddy,” he found proof of the industry of Korean paddy rice farmers, even in the middle of war: there was water in all the paddy fields. The bastards must have worked all night!
The only proof that someone had stamped out “PP” and an arrow was in the aerial photos.
The Marines have a long-standing tradition of not leaving their dead and wounded on a battlefield. It is almost holy writ.
There were several problems with that near-sacred tradition in this circumstance.
The first was that Dunn didn’t know that Major Malcolm S. Pickering, USMCR, had done the stamping.
And even if he had, the odds were that he had done so immediately after getting shot down. In the opinion of an expert in the field of operations behind the enemy’s lines—Captain Kenneth R. McCoy—the odds were that Pick was now either a prisoner, or the North Koreans had shot him. It was unlikely that he was hiding out in the area, waiting to be rescued. For one thing, there didn’t seem to be any place for him to hide.
If he took the photographs to General Cushman, he was sure that Cushman—probably after asking some very pointed questions about why Dunn hadn’t brought the photographs to him immediately, and not taken two days to do it, obviously lowering the chances of a successful rescue— would order an immediate rescue attempt.
Dunn doubted that Cushman would risk sending one of the four Sikorsky helicopters to look for Major Malcolm S. Pickering. There were only four of them—not enough— and when they weren’t flying General Craig around the battlefield, they were transporting wounded Marines to medical facilities.
Pick Pickering would not want to be responsible for putting helicopters—and their pilots—at risk looking for him when they could be more gainfully employed carrying some shot-up Marine, who otherwise might die, to a hospital.
That left the Piper Cubs. There were more of those, but not enough, either. Dunn couldn’t fly helicopters, but he could fly a Cub. He was also a lieutenant colonel, and he knew that General Cushman was going to decide that while there were a number of lieutenants and captains who could fly Cubs, there were very few lieutenant colonels around commanding fighter squadrons. Dunn knew he would not be allowed to go looking for Pick in a Cub. General Cushman would look askance at him for even asking if he could.
But the lieutenants and the captains would go flying low behind enemy lines, because the Corps didn’t leave its dead and wounded on the battlefield. And very likely, at least one of them would get shot down.
It had to be considered, too, that Major Malcolm S. Pickering, USMCR, would not be where he was—if indeed he was there—if he hadn’t been trying to be the First Locomotive-Busting Ace in the history of Marine aviation.
And Brigadier General Fleming Pickering, USMCR, had to be considered, too. Dunn really admired General Pickering and thought he knew him well enough to know that he had accepted the loss of his son and gone on doing his duty. Pick’s father would be the