able to do for another three years. But with the grade of staff/sgt he could get married NCOs’ allowances, and quarters on the post. He had stopped his wild living, and spending his pay on booze and the whores and running around, and had settled down. With Linda Sue with him it was easy. She had even started them saving some money. By the end of 1941, when the sneak attack came and the war, they had saved two thousand dollars.
All of this had been directly due to Winch. Strange figured he owed him more than he could ever hope to make up to him. And if Winch wanted to be a nut and an eccentric, and do his crazy, bitchy things every now and then, Strange was not going to intervene and try to put him straight. Anyway intervening with Winch was like trying to intervene with a force of nature like a line squall. You couldn’t do it.
Between them (with a little help from some NCOs they had gotten made), they had turned Winch’s company into one of the best the Division had had. Maybe the best the Division had ever had. Strange for one at least would never forget it the rest of his whole life. Now the war was ruining it. Mangling it, tearing it to shreds. But that was what it had been designed and put together for. It couldn’t go on forever. And when he had left it, and then Winch left it, Strange was sure it had virtually ceased to exist. Their old outfit. But Strange would not forget it.
Whatever else, we were pros, Strange thought with grim satisfaction for the five-hundredth time. Whatever else they could say about us, we were professionals. He was unaware, again, that he had used the past tense.
And whatever the company was, it was crazy Mart Winch who had made it. Winch might be unorthodox, and cheat, and even be downright dishonest on occasion, in his methods. But the results he got were phenomenal, and amounted to a kind of crazy genius. Strange had to love him for that.
But if he was willing to back up Winch and make allowances for Winch, Strange also had a very special feeling about Bobby Prell.
There had been a couple of moments right after the war began in Wahoo when Strange had looked at his wife and regretted being married. Prell made him feel a little bit like that.
Strange had wanted to kick himself in the ass, for feeling that way about Linda. He had not even seen all that much of her, after the sneak attack. The company had moved out right away to defense positions. Soon after, all the wives and dependents had been sent back to the States. Twice before her ship left, he got an overnight pass from Winch to meet her in town in a hotel. Both times, with the war all around them, he had a sense of regret at having hurried into his marriage. It would have been so nice and easy and relaxed, if it had just been some hooker. Instead of all this weeping and carrying on about being parted. She had not understood why he wanted to stay, or why he felt the way he did about the company.
And Strange realized, that if he had only known this war was coming, he would not have married her in such a hurry.
It tore his heart for her to sail off home, but half of him was relieved to see her go. He felt it would be different and like the old days again, with her out of the way. But it wasn’t. The one time he had gone to the whores in town with a bunch of the guys, after things loosened up in Wahoo, he had been both bored and guilty. He no longer liked to go out on pass and get drunk with the guys. And when the outfit arrived in Guadalcanal to relieve the Marines, Strange found a new caution and new thoughtfulness in him had replaced the old desire to take risks. And he missed his wife terribly.
Not Prell, though. There had always been a streak of the heroics-lover about Prell. With his unbending West Virginia pride. Prell wasn’t a gay carefree laughing-boy type. He was dead responsible, and steady, cool, calculating. But he was vain to a fault. He took bigger risks than the motorcycle-jockey, wild-ass kind. He had done unbelievable things on the Canal. Like walking