RECON TEAM - X

CHAPTER ONE

        May 1942, was the darkest hour of the war in the Pacific. The allies had suffered one loss after another since the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor five months earlier.  In a series of fast attacks the Japs had captured Formosa, the Philippines, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Dutch East Indies, not to mention every island of any size in between.  The Allies were growing desperate.

       This was before the days of such special operations units as the Underwater Demolition Teams, Navy Seals, Green Berets, or Rangers.  In its infinite wisdom, the United States War Department, decided that a special experimental reconnaissance team needed to be formed to “gather intelligence, and to harass” the Japanese on the Pacific islands.  Yes, they actually used the word Aharass@ in the War Department planning documents.

       The ranks of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps were combed to find the most capable men for the dangerous job that lay ahead.  That was the beginning of super top secret “Reconnaisance Force X.”  The AX@ indicated it was an experimental unit. 

     Of course the name “Reconnaisance Team  X” was much too secret to be used, so before long an imaginative young Lieutenant in the Pentagon bastardized the word “harass,” which he pronounced as two words, Ahair@ and Aass@ and jokingly dubbed this special commando force the “Hairy Asses.”  For obvious reasons the name stuck.

      Marine Major Liam Quincy Mallory was chosen as the commanding officer of the Hairy Asses.  Mallory often said he had been in the Marines ever since Jesus Christ was a pup, and nobody ever challenged him on this claim.  His medals showed that he had participated in the Nicaraguan campaign against Sandino in 1928. He was an old-time Marine that actually believed he was bullet proof, and that an impossible task would only take him a little longer to accomplish than an easy one.  In other words, he was the perfect man to lead the Hairy Asses behind enemy lines.

     Mallory stood six foot two and weighed at least two hundred sixty pounds, although if you asked him he'd say he only weighed two hundred.  He was not fat, just big and strong.  He was an Irishman with a shock of unruly red hair that he was forever trying to tame by running his ham-sized hand over it to smooth it down.  Invariably it popped right back up again. 

     Mallory was not well educated, at least not in book learning education.  He had come up through the ranks of the Marine Corps after running away from home and joining the Corps when he was fourteen years old.  His large size made it easy for the Marine recruiter to believe he was eighteen.

     After Nicaragua he was stationed in Shanghai for many years and had learned to speak Chinese fluently.  Mallory's men never knew much about his personal life because the only time he talked about it was when he was drunk.  And like any good Irishman, Mallory got roaring drunk from time to time. The problem was that when he was really drunk he started speaking Chinese and nobody could understand him.

    He had thought about getting married once years ago, to a Chinese girl in Shanghai.  She was a pretty little thing that loved him and took care of him when he got drunk.  But he figured he was already married to the Corps and what the hell would he do with two wives?  Besides, he had always heard that if the Marine Corps wanted you to have a wife they would have issued you one.   During his many years in the Marines Mallory developed his creed as an officer. “Always take good care of your men and your rifle, because either one may save your life.”  He followed this creed faithfully.

      The War Department chose Navy Lieutenant David O'Brian as second in command of the Hairy Asses.  He was a graduate of the Naval Academy and the complete opposite of Mallory.   He stood about five foot eight on one of his tall days, and could muster up close to a hundred fifty pounds if he ate a large meal before weighing in.

      O'Brian was the scholarly type and the only reason anyone could figure why he was assigned to the Hairy Asses was that he had been captain of the swimming team at the academy. Although his name gave away that he was Irish, he didn't wear his Irishness on his sleeve like Mallory did.  It wasn't his fault that he didn't have red hair. The strange thing about him, for an Irishman anyway, was that no one had ever seen him take a drink.

      The highest ranking enlisted man in the Hairy Asses was Army Staff Sergeant Ira Clemmings.  He was a tall, lanky, raw-boned hillbilly from the hills of West Virginia.  Ira had two physical attributes that one noticed immediately.  First, he had the largest Adams Apple in the world.  With his skinny neck, it looked like he had swallowed a tennis ball and got it stuck in his throat.  Second, his large ears stuck out very far from the sides of his head.  It didn't take long before the other men started calling him “Wing Nut.”  At first he took offense to the nickname, but with time he got used to it and stopped giving people black eyes for calling him that. 

      Wing Nut was, in spite his backwoods appearance and the hillbilly way he had of expressing himself, an electronics genius.  Given a short piece of wire, a couple of tubes, and some pliers, he could build a working radio in no time at all.  As the Hairy Asses were to find out later on, Wing Nut was also a damn good shot with a rifle.  It was hard to take years of squirrel hunting out of a man no matter how much electronics training you put in him.

      The farm boy of the group was Navy Petty Officer Second Class Bob Simmons.  He had grown up on a farm in Kansas, and when he turned eighteen he joined the Navy to see the world. Years of lifting bales of hay had developed Bob's biceps' muscles to the size of most men's thighs.  He was easily the strongest of the group.  He could also walk farther than anyone had ever seen without getting tired.  His hair was almost white, like the color of straw on a hot July day in Kansas.  This led to him being called “Wheathead.”  Before being assigned to the Hairy Asses, Bob had served as a signalman on a destroyer, and was something of an expert at Morse code and semaphore.

     The only Mexican in the group was Carlos De La Cruz from near Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  His family had left Texas shortly after the Alamo fell and headed east.  They settled in a small town on a bayou near Baton Rouge.  Carlos was an army Corporal whose specialty was small arms. There wasn't a rifle, pistol, or machine gun made anywhere in the world that Carlos couldn't take apart and put back together with his eyes closed.

      Before joining the army during a burst of patriotic fervor shortly after Pearl Harbor, Carlos had earned a meager living hunting alligators in the bayous.  When the army gave him free leather boots and a rifle that shot straight he knew he had found a home.   Carlos was as even tempered and gentle a guy as you could find.  He got along well with everybody.  He was short and stocky, and in fact nobody was sure if it was his physical appearance, or his gentle character that earned him the nickname “Oso.” It means “Bear” in Spanish, but in Carlos' case it really meant “Teddy Bear.”

      But the Teddy Bear could fight like a grizzly when he had to.  As the only Mexican living among Cajuns, Carlos had proved many times in bayou barroom “discussions@ that he could handle himself as well as anybody with a knife or broken beer bottle.

      The demolition expert of the Hairy Asses was Private Charles Fine.  He was twenty-seven, and graduated from the Colorado School of Mines before joining the Marines to help rid the world of the Yellow Scourge.

     While in high school Fine had taken a special interest in the darker side of chemistry, which led to his blowing up the school science lab his senior year.  His father had always hoped that Charles would follow in his footsteps and become a banker, but he finally decided that anyone with such a proclivity for explosives ought to study the subject deeper, so he sent him to the Colorado School of Mining to further hone his natural skills.

      Fine took his studies seriously and could now make a powerful explosive out of the most mundane of materials one might find in the cabinet under the sink in most homes. He joined the Marines right after graduation, eager to blow up something the enemy had built.  As soon as the Marine Corps found out about his special skills they sent him to demolition school, and upon graduation advanced him to Corporal, and assigned him to Commando Force X.

      The strange look in his eyes when he talked about explosives had earned him the name “Spooky,” among his fellow Hairy Asses.  Half the group believed he was really crazy, and the other half hadn't made up their minds yet.  Fine, rather than offended by his strange nickname, took pride it.

      The seventh member of this elite group of fighters was Navy Third Class Petty Officer Jacques Mahaluna Kahumakahali.  One couldn't determine Mahaluna's ancestry by his appearance, but according to him he was half Maori, half French, and half Chinese.  The dark color of his skin made one suspect that the Maori half was bigger than the other two halves put together.   The prominent gold tooth shining in the front of his mouth earned him the nickname “Goldie.”  Besides, nobody could pronounce his real name.

      Goldie was originally from New Zealand and had worked as a deck hand on a tramp steamer until it stopped in Hawaii for fuel.  He decided that in case of an attack by Japanese aircraft it would be more fun to be on a ship with large guns rather than an unarmed freighter, so he jumped ship in Honolulu and enlisted in the U.S. Navy.

      He was a Third Class Gunner's Mate, and Goldie loved big guns.  He had served on a destroyer as Gun Captain on a five-inch gun mount, and had tried to get transferred to a battleship where he could get his hands on the really big sixteen-inch cannons.  However, someone in the War Department decided that Goldie would make a good commando, so he was transferred to the Hairy Asses instead.

      Goldie was about six feet tall and weighed two hundred pounds.  He was extremely strong, and his dark brooding eyes sometimes gave one the impression that maybe there was another half to his ancestry that he didn't mention B half bull!  Most sailors got tattoos while ashore in Hawaii, but in Goldie=s case it wasn=t necessary.  His entire torso was already covered with strange swirls, circles, and dots of dark ink, Maori style.  As soon as you saw him you knew Goldie was somebody you wanted on your side in a fight.

      There wasn't a single American military unit during World War Two that didn't have an Italian in it.  Joseph Francis Fanucci from Brooklyn, New York, was the Hairy Asses' token Italian. Before Pearl Harbor, Joe had worked as a garbage collector for the city.  Lifting those heavy garbage cans to dump their contents in the truck had given him the arms of a Hercules.

      Like most Italians, Joe came from a large family.  He had one relative or another working in every department of the New York City government.  He had one brother in the Police Department, another in the Public Works Department, two uncles that worked as inspectors in the Building Code Department, and several relatives in the city's Administration Department.  Joe even claimed that La Guardia had been a distant cousin of his.  Joe was probably the best connected Italian in New York outside of the Mafiosi. 

      The day after Pearl Harbor Joe joined the Army.  He wasn't going to let “any goddamned Japs bomb his country and get away with it!”  In boot camp Joe discovered that he was a natural marksman.  On the rifle range he scored the highest number of perfect bull's-eyes that had ever been seen at Camp David, and he was just as good with a pistol. 

     When he finished boot camp they had offered to place him on the Army Match Shooting Team, but he told them to Astuff their team where the sun don't shine! @  He had joined the Army to kill Japs, not to shoot at paper targets.  Someone in the Pentagon figured that anyone with that much natural shooting talent and stubborn aggressiveness belonged in some kind of special unit, so Private Joe Fanucci was assigned to Commando Force X.

      The Hairy Asses' compliment was held at eight, under the theory that the Japanese could more easily discover a larger group.  Their primary mission was not to engage the enemy, but to gather intelligence about what the Japanese were doing on the many islands they had invaded.  The secondary mission was to sabotage enemy installations, if, and only if, they could do so without being detected.  Nobody ever explained to them how they could blow up enemy installations without someone noticing, but that was Washington for you.

      By the end of July 1942, the entire team of Hairy Asses had been assembled in San Diego, and sent to Camp Pendleton Marine Base for advanced commando training.  As so often happens in the military, nobody at Camp Pendleton knew they were coming or what they were supposed to train them to do.  Like any good marine, Major Mallory took charge of the situation and Aliberated@ two large tents and a brand new jeep.

      The Hairy Asses set up their two-tent camp in the San Gabriel Mountains at the far northeast corner of the large base.  Mallory figured that nobody would find them there.  A little white paint was all that was required to change the serial number on the jeep and make it officially theirs. 

      The next four days were spent traveling about the base in the jeep Aliberating@ the other supplies they needed. Several dozen cases of K-rations, three Thompson submachine guns, two Browning automatic rifles, six Garand M1 rifles, twenty cases of ammunition and ten cases of beer later, they were ready to start their training.

     When Mallory determined that everything was ready to begin their training he called all the men together for a pep talk. 

     AMen, I am Major Mallory.  I see that some of you come from the Army and the Navy.  Forget the Army and the Navy, from now on you are all Marines.  We only have a short time for training so let=s get busy.@   That was the extent of his pep talk. 

      Their training schedule for the next four weeks was not complicated.  Every day was spent at target practice with the weapons, hiking up and down hills, hand-to-hand combat, running up and down hills, camouflage techniques, crawling up and down hills, and of course marching.  All of these skills were practiced while carrying eighty-five pound packs on their backs.

      Their night training schedule was somewhat easier.  At sunset every day they would all pile into the jeep and head for the ocean.  After a short five-mile hike on the sandy beach and a five-mile swim back, the Hairy Asses were permitted to return to their camp.  By then they were so tired that they dropped into a dead sleep almost before they hit their cots.  Mallory, who did everything his men did during training, usually put on civilian clothes and headed into the town of Oceanside for a night on the town.

      During the month they were at Camp Pendleton Mallory was only arrested six times by Military Police and twice by the Oceanside Police.  He never could get used to the fact that, unlike China, people in California got real upset about fighting and wrecking bars.  Luckily it was wartime and once the police found out he was a Marine major, and he volunteered to pay for the damages he caused, he was released.

      After a month of training Mallory decided that his men were about as ready as they ever would be to face whatever lay ahead.  He put on his best uniform and took the jeep to base headquarters where he informed the commanding general that his men had completed their commando training.