decided that he would rather explain to an investigating board how come he had shot some scumbag with a .45 rather than the prescribed .38 Special than have a police department formal funeral ceremony and his picture hung on the wall in the lobby of police headquarters.
As it turned out, he had been a captain five months before he had to use the .45, and by then, of course, it was his business what he carried.
He put all of his civilian clothing on hangers and hung them, and the shoulder holster, in the left locker, then took a fresh Marine Corps khaki uniform from the dry cleaner’s bag. He laid the shirt on his desk and pinned the insignia on carefully. His ribbons included the Bronze Star medal with V-device, and a cluster, indicating he had been decorated twice. He also had the Purple Heart medal, which signified he had been wounded. And he had, souvenirs of Parris Island, silver medals indicating he had shot Expert with the M-1 Garand Rifle, the U.S. Carbine Caliber .30, the M-1911A1 pistol, the Browning Automatic Rifle, and the Thompson machine gun.
He put on the fresh uniform and examined himself in the mirror mounted on the door of the left locker.
He looked, he thought, like a squared-away Marine captain, who had seen his share of war, and was perfectly qualified to be what he was, commanding officer of B Company, 55th Marines, USMC Reserve.
That was pretty far from the truth, he thought. Baker Company was an infantry company. Every Marine in Baker Company, from the newest seventeen-year-olds who had not even yet gone through boot camp at Parris Island through the non-coms, most of whom were really good Marines, many combat tested, to the other four officers, two of whom had seen combat, was absolutely delighted that the old man, the skipper, the company commander was a World War II veteran tested—and wounded, and decorated for valor—in combat.
The problem with that was that he wasn’t an experienced, combat-tested, infantry officer. The first—and only—infantry unit in which he had ever served was Company B, 55th Marines, USMC Reserve. The only Table of Organization (TO&E) unit in which Captain Hart had ever served was USMC Special Detachment 16.
USMC Special Detachment 16 had been formed with the mission of supporting the Australian Coastwatchers, men left behind when the Japanese occupied islands in the Solomons, who at great risk to their lives had kept tabs on Japanese units and movements. He had been assigned to Detachment 16 because command of it had been given to Brigadier General Fleming Pickering, and then Sergeant Hart had been Pickering’s bodyguard.
He’d won the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart fair and square with Detachment 16, going ashore on Japanese-held Buka Island, but that had been his last combat. Immediately after returning from Buka, he had been given a commission as a second lieutenant—not because he had done anything outstanding as a sergeant, but because his being an officer was more convenient for General Pickering.
The convenience had nothing to do with General Pickering’s personal comfort, but rather with giving Hart access to one of the two most closely held secrets of World War II, MAGIC—the other was the development of the atomic bomb. Cryptographers in the United States and Hawaii had cracked many—by no means all—of the codes of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy. Second Lieutenant Hart’s name had appeared on a one-page typewritten list of those who held a MAGIC clearance.
The list was headed by the name of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, followed by those of General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, and worked its way down through the ranks past Brigadier General Pickering—who reported directly to Roosevelt—to those of the junior officers who had broken the code, and those—like Hart—who handled the actual decryption of MAGIC messages in Washington, Hawaii, and Brisbane.
Generals and admirals did not themselves sit down at the MAGIC machines and punch its typewriter-like keys. Second Lieutenant Hart, and a dozen others like him, did.
And, in a very real sense, Hart’s MAGIC clearance had been his passport out of the fighting war. No one with a MAGIC clearance could be placed in any risk at all of being captured.
And then, in early February 1943, President Roosevelt had named General Pickering OSS Deputy Director for the Pacific. All of the members of USMC Special Detachment 16 had been “detached from USMC to duty with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), effective 8 August 1943” and that