“I don’t think . . . Jesus Christ, I hope not. I’m wholly unqualified to run the CIA.”
“As I remember it, I thought you were wholly unqualified to be the First Division G-2. And you proved me dead wrong.”
Pickering didn’t reply.
“Of course, that was when I thought you were a sailor,” Cates went on, smiling. “Before Jack NMI Stecker . . . I remember this clearly; we were in General Vandegrift’s conference tent, and I had just referred to you as ‘that sailor G-2 of ours,’ or perhaps that ‘swabbie G-2’ when Jack stood up, and ‘Begging the colonel’s pardon, when you and I were at Belleau Wood, so was Pickering. He was a Marine then, and he’s a Marine now.’ ”
Pickering met Cates’s eyes for a moment, then said, firmly, “I’m unqualified to run the CIA, period.”
“How about to be a new broom in the Pacific, sweeping out the incompetents we apparently have there?”
“That, either,” Pickering said.
Cates went off on another tangent.
“Let me tell you what shape the Corps is in,” he said. “I was going over the numbers before you came in.” He got off the couch and went and sat behind his desk, and began to read from a folder on his desk.
“Total regular establishment strength, as of today, 74,279 officers and men . . .”
“That’s all?” Pickering blurted.
“Broken down into 40,364 officers and men in the operating forces,” Cates read on, “24,452 in the support forces, and 3,871 in other duties . . . embassy guards, afloat, that sort of thing.”
“My God, I had no idea how much the Corps had been cut back,” Pickering said.
“In Fleet Marine Force, Pacific—in Camp Pendleton, mostly—we have 7,779 officers and men in the First Marine Division—”
“Only seven thousand men in the First Marine Division ?” Pickering asked, incredulously.
“The First Marine Division (Reinforced),” Cates confirmed, a tone of sarcasm in his voice. “You’re used to a war-strength division, Flem, of 1,079 officers and 20,131 men.”
Pickering shook his head in disbelief.
“In addition to the First Marine Division, we have 3,733 officers and men in the First Marine Aircraft Wing. That’s roughly half the men called for in peacetime. A wartime wing calls for about 12,000 men.”
“My God!”
“Roughly, the regular Marine Corps is about one-third of the Marine Corps,” Cates went on. “There are 128,959 officers and men in the reserve components. There’s some 39,867 people in the organized reserves, ground and air, and another 90,444 in what we call ‘the volunteer reserve’—individual reservists, in other words; we don’t like to think of them as ‘unorganized.’ ”
“Pick, my son, is in the organized reserve.”
“I know,” Cates said. “I saw his name in the paper a couple of weeks ago, when he set the San Francisco-to-Tokyo speed record, and I was curious enough to check.”
“I was on the plane,” Pickering said.
“He ever discuss with you why he’s in the reserve?” Cates asked.
“I don’t think you’ll like the answer,” Pickering said.
“Go ahead.”
“He said all he has to do is show up at El Toro and the benevolent Marine Corps gives him expensive toys to play with,” Pickering said. “He really loves flying the Corsair.”
Cates chuckled. “I suspect that motivates many of the aviation reservists,” he said. “We don’t have recruiting problems with the organized aviation reserve; and it’s at ninety-four percent of its authorized strength. The ground elements—despite a good deal of recruiting effort—are at seventy-seven percent. Buzzing Camp Pendleton at four hundred knots in a Corsair is a lot more fun on a weekend than crawling through it on your stomach.”
“And is the reserve going to be mobilized?” Pickering asked.
Cates nodded. “I would be very surprised if that doesn’t happen. That was my motive for filling you in with all this data.”
“Sir?”
“Sometime in the next few days, or weeks, someone at the upper echelons of government is going to say, ‘Call in the Marines.’ That’s our job, of course, and we’ll go. But someone in the upper echelons of government should be aware that there are not that many Marines available to go. I suspect you’ll be in a position to make that point, Flem, and I think it should be made.”
“General, I really have no idea what I’ll be doing at the CIA.”
“Nevertheless, I think it’s in the interests of the Corps to make sure you’re prepared for whatever that turns out to be.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Pickering said.
“Ed Banning worked for you all through the war, didn’t he?”
“Yes, he did.”
“When I had the 4th Marines in Shanghai, until May 1940,