their destination was the U.S. Navy Base, Sasebo, Japan.
This caused Captain Dunwood to think that at Sasebo, his company would be brought back up to strength—Baker was down to 101 men and three officers, including Captain Dunwood—and that they would probably be participating in the supposedly secret invasion of some port—Inchon, he had heard—up the Korean peninsula.
He was very curious, however, about why—literally on the pier at Pusan, about to board one of the attack transports—Baker Company had been separated from the battalion and ordered aboard the LST.
It was only scuttlebutt, of course, but the word on the pier had been that the attack transports were headed for Yokohama, near Tokyo. If that was so, why was Baker Company going to Sasebo?
Captain Dunwood had unpleasant memories of Sasebo. It was at Sasebo that that candy-ass “Marine” captain who had done the job on his finger had debarked from the aircraft in his splendidly tailored uniform.
Lieutenant McNear couldn’t even hazard a guess about why Baker Company was going by itself on LST-450— which could have easily transported, for the relatively short voyage, four times that many men—or what would happen to them in Sasebo. His own orders were to remain in Sasebo until further orders; he had expected to be ordered right back to Pusan.
On docking at Sasebo, Baker Company was marched into an aircraft hangar that had been hastily converted to a temporary barracks by the installation of long rows of folding canvas cots, a row of toilets, and a row of showerheads.
The enlisted Marines were stripped, showered, and then given a rudimentary physical examination—which included a “short-arm inspection” to detect gonorrhea, which showed, in Captain Dunwood’s judgment, that the Navy had no fucking idea what was going on in Korea—and then were issued three sets of underwear and stockings and two sets of new utilities. Privates through corporal were then given a partial pay of twenty dollars, sergeants and up of thirty, and officers of fifty.
Baker Company was then informed that, due to the special circumstances, the Officer Commanding Sasebo Naval Base had waived the standing uniform regulations, and they would be permitted to have liberty in Sasebo from 1700 until 2330.
A Navy chaplain and a Navy surgeon then spoke almost emotionally about the dangers to body and soul the Marines would encounter in Sasebo, unless they remembered their mothers and other female loved ones who were waiting for them at home and trusted them to behave like the Christian—or Jewish, as the case might be—gentlemen they were supposed to be.
This was followed by a twenty-minute color motion picture of individuals in the terminal stages of syphilis, and of other individuals whose genitalia were covered with suppurating scabs. Captain Dunwood had seen the film before, at Camp Drake, when he had first arrived in Japan, and at Camp Pendleton, California, when he reported on active duty.
Then a bus appeared to take whichever of the Marines desired to avail themselves of a little local culture to town.
Captain Dunwood then debated whether it would be wiser to take dinner in the mess, which had a section for officers, but no intoxicants, or in the Officers’ Club, which did. If he went to the O Club, and had a couple of drinks, and that candy-ass sonofabitch who’d done the job on his finger was there, he was likely to get himself in trouble.
A couple of drinks and the sudden insight—If I do knock out some of the bastard’s teeth, which he deserves, the fucking finger’s still not right, what are they going to do to me, send me to Korea?—saw Captain Dunwood take both his dinner and breakfast the next morning in the Officers’ Club.
He did not see the candy-ass sonofabitch during either meal, and couldn’t decide whether that was a good thing or not.
At 0800 their first morning ashore at Sasebo, two Marine officers, a major and a lieutenant, and a technical sergeant, came into the “temporary barracks,” ordered guards posted at all doors, set up a blackboard and a tripod, and announced they were from the G-3 section of what was now the First Marine Division, and that they were here to brief Baker Company on its very special role in the first amphibious invasion by the United States Marine Corps since World War II.
Using maps—and the surprisingly skillful technical sergeant, who drew on the blackboard whatever needed to be illustrated—it was explained to the men and officers of Baker Company that to reach the landing beaches at Inchon, the