Battle Cry [antikvár]

FART ONE Prologue THEY CALL ME MAC. The name's unimportant. You can best identify me by the six chevrons, three up and three down, and by that row of hashmarks. Thirty years in the United States Marine Corps. I've sailed the Cape and the Horn aboard a battlewagon with a sea so choppy the bow was awash half the time under thirty-foot waves. I've stood Legation guard in Paris and London and Prague. I know every damned port of call and call house in the Mediterranean and the world that shines beneath the Southern Cross like the nomenclature of a rifle. I've sat behind a machine gun poked through the barbed wire that encircled the International Settlement when the world was supposed to have been at peace, and I've called Jap bluffs on the Yangtze Patrol a decade before Pearl Harbor. I know the beauty of the Northern Lights that cast their eerie glow on Iceland and I know the rivers and the jungles of Central America. There are few skylines that would fool me: Sugar Loaf, Diamond Head, the Tinokiri Hills or the palms of a Caribbean hellhole. Yes, I know the slick brown hills of Korea just as the Marines knew them in 1871. Fighting in Korea is an old story for the Corps. Nothing sounds worse than an old salt blowing his bugle. Anyhow, that isn't my story. As I look back on those thirty years I think of men and of outfits. I guess I've been in fifty commands and maybe there were a hundred men I've called Skipper. But strangely, there was only one man among them who was really my skipper and only one outfit I think of as mine. Sam Huxley and the battalion he led in World War II, "Huxley's Whores." What made Huxley's Whores different? Hell, I don't know. They were the damnedest bunch of Marines I'd ever laid eyes on. They weren't Marines actually—or even men for that matter. A gang of beardless youths of eighteen, nineteen, and twenty who'd get pickled on two bottles of brew. 1