“Pick, I can easily get a field-grade BOQ. If things would be awkward at the hotel.”
“Don’t be silly. There’s plenty of room, and I think having you around will be good for both of them.”
“What the hell is McCoy going to do outside the Corps? It’s all he knows.”
Pick Pickering threw up his hands in a gesture of helplessness.
Then the two of them started to walk toward Base Ops. Lieutenant Colonel Dunn was having thoughts vis-à-vis Major Pickering he did not—could not—share with him.
I love Pick, I really do. But the cold truth is that he is a lousy field-grade officer. A superb pilot—a natural pilot— and as far as courage goes, he makes John Wayne look like a pansy.
But, my God, he’s a Marine major, and he lands at a Navy field barefooted and dressed like a Hawaiian pimp in an airplane that he once flew under the Golden Gate Bridge—I got that incredible tale from George Hart, so it’s absolutely true.
I will, therefore, not tell Major Pickering that we have an old comrade-in-arms at Camp Pendleton who just might be able to turn the G-1 around about reducing McCoy to the ranks, and failing that, will certainly make his passage through the separation process at Pendleton as painless as possible.
If I told Pick, he’d hop in a cab, go out to Pendleton, in his Hawaiian pimp’s shirt and bare feet, march into the general’s office, and begin the conversation. “Clyde, you won’t believe what a fucking dumb thing the Corps has done this time . . .”
Well, maybe it wouldn’t be that bad, but it would be outrageous and thus counterproductive, and therefore I will not tell him what I’m going to do.
Not, of course, that there’s much chance that I will be able to do anything at all.
[FOUR]
OFFICE OF THE DEPUTY COMMANDING GENERAL CAMP PENDLETON, CALIFORNIA 1520 8 JUNE 1950
Captain Arthur McGowan, USMC, aide-de-camp to the Deputy Commanding General, a tall, slim, twenty-nine-year -old, put his head inside the general’s door.
“General, Colonel Dunn’s on the horn,” he said.
“I was getting a little worried,” Brigadier General Clyde W. Dawkins, USMC, replied. He was a tall, tanned, thin, sharp-featured man who had just celebrated his fortieth birthday.
He signaled with his index finger for Captain McGowan to enter the office, close the door behind him, and listen to the conversation on the extension telephone on a coffee table.
General Dawkins waited until McGowan had the phone to his ear before he picked up his own.
“I was getting a little worried, Bill,” General Dawkins said. “Your ETA was noon. Where are you?”
“At the Coronado Beach, sir.”
“I sort of thought you would be at Miramar,” General Dawkins said.
The Miramar Naval Air Station was the other side of San Diego—about fifteen miles distant.
“Bill,” the general went on before Dunn could answer, “you’re not going to tell me Pickering’s involved in this little operation of yours?”
“No, sir. But I’m in the suite. So’s Pick. And until three minutes ago, so was Killer McCoy. And his wife.”
General Dawkins was familiar with “the suite” in the Coronado Beach Hotel. Its fifteen rooms occupied about half of the fourth floor of the beachfront hotel, and was permanently leased to the Trans-Global Airways division of the Pacific & Far East Shipping Corporation.
At one time, before World War II, it had been leased to the Pacific & Far East Shipping Corporation for the use of the masters and chief engineers of P&FE vessels, and to house important passengers of the P&FE passenger fleet.
During World War II, on a space-available basis, its rooms had been made available to Marine and Navy officers with some connection to P&FE, or the Pickering family personally. That, in turn, had evolved into “the suite” becoming the unofficial quarters of Marine aviators, especially those who had served with VMF-229 on Guadalcanal, when they were assigned to—or passing through—one or another of San Diego’s Marine and Navy installations.
General Dawkins had many fond memories of the suite, and usually the first one that came to mind was of the harem of stunningly beautiful girls at one wartime party who had gathered like moths at a candle flame around Tyrone Power and MacDonald Carey, both of whom had put their Hollywood careers on hold to serve as Marine aviators.
Sometimes he remembered the party where the star had been the actor Sterling Hayden, who’d been a Marine officer, but in the OSS, not an aviator.