Your Name is Hawkeye
It was shortly before 4am when two Marines woke Lt. Anthony Fratello from his sleep by banging on his door in the bachelor officers’ quarters on Mare Island. “Lieutenant Fratello. Rise and shine, sir. Your presence is requested on the quarterdeck,” a loud voice from the hallway could be heard after the banging on the door ceased.
“You gotta be kidding me,” muttered Fratello to himself as he blinked his eyes and struggled to his feet. It was dark in his room except for the slight crack at the bottom of the door reflecting the light of the passageway. Again, the banging on the door repeated with three hard knocks that surely woke up any of the adjacent officers in the rooms next to his on the floor.
“Lt. Fratello, Reveille, Reveille. Time to wake up, sir,” the voice repeated. It was obvious whoever it was on the other side of the door was not mistaken nor going away. Fratello opened the door in his T-shirt and underwear. Before him were two Marines saluting him, bearing side arms, wearing MP armbands indicating they were the base’s military police.
“This better be good, boys,” Fratello said as he looked up and down the empty corridor. “What in the hell time is it?”
“Sir, your presence is requested on the quarterdeck immediately. It is just before zero four hundred hours, sir,” the corporal doing the talking replied.
“Is there an emergency or something?” asked Fratello, as there was no sight of flames or the smell of smoke.
“Sir, you need to get dressed and come with us to the quarterdeck on the double,” the Marines’ faces were expressionless. They were not going away and had obviously been sent to the correct room to rouse him.
“Give me a second to get dressed,” Fratello replied and let the door close. He had no doubt that if he had been an enlisted man, the Marines would have entered the room and watched him dress. Since he outranked them, he was afforded the brief privacy to dress himself. He turned the light on in the room and began putting his uniform on. A couple of minutes later, the Marines fell in behind him as he walked down the freshly waxed and buffed passageway and a single flight of stairs toward the entrance of his temporary quarters.
Lieutenant Fratello was greeted by an ensign posted on watch as the Officer of the Deck. He looked even younger than Fratello. The young guys always got stuck with the midnight to 0400 watch, guaranteeing little sleep. The ensign saluted him and said, “Sir, your ride is waiting out front.”
Fratello returned the salute. “My ride?”
“Yes, sir,” replied the ensign and pointed out the door.
“Request permission to go ashore,” Fratello said as he saluted the flag and the Officer of the Deck.
“Permission granted, sir.” The ensign’s eyes followed Fratello as he himself felt it was odd. The encounter was noted in the quarterdeck log book. Fratello walked out the entrance door and noticed a dark-colored Plymouth sedan with whitewall tires parked and idling. ‘US Navy Mare Island Naval Shipyard’ was painted on the door. It was a staff car. Someone higher ranking than himself was wanting to speak with him in the wee hours of the morning. As he approached the car, he noticed the rear window was ajar as a puff of smoke from a cigarette wafted into the lights above the canopy covering the entrance to the BOQ.
“Good morning, Hawkeye. You can sit in front,” a male voice directed from the rear window. Fratello opened the passenger-side door of the vehicle and looked into the back seat to see who was giving him commands. It was a white guy in a dark civilian suit wearing a hat, smoking a cigarette. He had never been called Hawkeye before, but the odds that the anonymous guy connected the dots of Fratello being from Iowa and the University of Iowa’s mascot were slim. As soon as he closed his door, the man ordered, “Carry on, driver.”
“Forgive me, sir. I was unaware I was supposed to muster this morning,” Fratello said as he strained to see who was ordering his presence in the vehicle.
“Don’t worry about it. Get used to it. We work at all hours of the night and day. Welcome to Mare Island, son. My name is Buckeye. We are going to take a little ride down the road here to the hospital. We have an office set up we are going to be working out of.”
“Yes, sir.” It was news to Fratello.
“I read your file. You played football for the Hawkeyes before the war. What position did you play?” the man asked.
“I was a receiver in forty-one before the bombing.”
“Did you get a chance to play with Kinnick?”
Fratello was surprised the guy knew who Nile Kinnick even was. He obviously was a football fan. “No, sir. He had already graduated. He was an assistant coach for Coach Anderson after he finished. He was going to law school on campus. I never played with him though.”
“What a shame. He won the Heisman and ended up in the drink on a training mission,” the voice knew the tragic ending of the aspiring naval aviator.
“Yes, sir. I heard that.”
“Bob Feller came out of Iowa too,” the man stated. He was clearly from Iowa or followed baseball closely too.
“Yes, sir. Van Meter, Iowa,” replied Fratello.
“Jesus, to have that kind of arm as a high school kid.”
Fratello laughed. It was one thing to be a hometown hero. It was another thing to have people who had never been in Iowa know the prowess of the young Fratello on the mound. “It was pretty impressive.”
“Yeah, we got him too. He was on the USS Alabama for a tour in the Pacific. He just got back home not too long ago. He is back at Great Lakes now as a boot camp instructor.” The comment meant the man clearly was in the OSS without saying it. The driver was an enlisted man wearing his dress blue uniform. He smiled but intentionally tried to ignore the conversation.
“The Heater, a bootcamp instructor?” Fratello tried to imagine having Fellar as a boot camp instructor. The recruits had to be asking him for his autograph in between commands.
“Yeah, no one wanted him on the front lines, except him. There has been some heavy fighting around the Philippines and we pulled him off. Honestly, it was actually Glenn Miller’s death that was behind the decision.” He paused to exhale his cigarette smoke and cast it out the window. “That, and those Sullivan boys on the Juneau? They were all from Waterloo, Iowa, if I recall. Shit, all five of them were assigned to the same damn ship. I still don’t know what possessed a detailer to pull that kind of stunt. I can assure you that will never happen again. If Fellar would have died, the state of Iowa would have lost every famous person that ever came off the farm to serve in the war.”
Fratello raised his eyebrows. The guy had to have had a subscription to The Tribune, he thought to himself. “I almost forgot about Glenn Miller. I heard he went down in a plane crash too.”
“Yeah, the English Channel. Unfortunately, there was no Chattanooga Choo Choo crossing the channel,” replied the man in the back seat, referencing Miller’s big hit on the radio in 1941 just before the war broke out.
The car came to a stop at the front of the hospital, and the men exited the vehicle. Fratello looked at Buckeye to see if he was someone he would recognize from training. He was not. He was in his mid-thirties and of average build. There was nothing distinguishable about his look, but Fratello was confident he was an OSS officer in civilian clothes. The car took off, and the two walked into the hospital entrance. Posted at the entrance were two Marines and an Officer of the Deck on the quarterdeck, like any other Navy command. Both men saluted the flag and the Officer of the Deck, requesting permission to come aboard as if they were on a ship. Both identification cards were examined by the Officer of the Deck and returned to each man with permission granted. “We’re up on the third deck. It is a good workout if you want to take the stairs. I prefer the elevator,” said Fratello’s companion as they walked toward the empty elevator. The doors closed behind them, and the man pushed the button for the third floor. Instead, the doors reopened on the second floor. A nurse and an orderly pushed an unconscious negro on a gurney into the elevator, and suddenly the space had little room to move around. It was impossible not to notice the man was missing one of his legs, and most of his head was wrapped in bandages. Fratello felt sorry for the man. He assumed he was one of the patients the commander on the ferry mentioned. The doors opened, and Fratello and his companion squeezed out the open doors and headed down the third deck passageway until they came to a door with an opaque window labeled #319.
“That is a terrible injury. I feel so sorry for that guy,” Fratello said as the man unlocked the door with his keys.
“War is hell, Fratello,” the man said as he placed his hat on the coat rack and took off his jacket. Without waiting for a response from the young lieutenant, he continued. “Have a seat. I am Commander Anderson Harris, also known as Buckeye. You will refer to me as Buckeye in the presence of anyone else and in any message traffic. The powers that be will also refer to you as Hawkeye in reporting. Everyone copied on the message traffic knows exactly who you and I are. If we are alone, you can call me Andy, but not in front of anyone else.”
“Roger,” acknowledged Fratello to his senior officer.
“I am your superior officer and the most senior OSS representative in this hospital. There are several other OSS officers crawling all over this base and shipyard too. Some I am aware of and some not. The government has a way of siloing information in case any of us are ever captured. It is my duty to carry out my orders to the best of my ability and brief the powers that be. You have a top-secret clearance and you will be reviewing intelligence reports and carrying out missions to satisfy the objectives of the government to the best of your ability. You will report directly to me, and only me. This office here will also be yours while you are stationed here. Feel free to jazz up the place. However, do not store any classified information in here.” Buckeye paused and looked around at the empty walls and then over at the door. “I think my mom could probably kick that door in if she tried hard enough. Plus, the janitors are in every room at night emptying the trash and turning out lights that were left on.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” replied Fratello.
“You can forget calling me sir unless we are in uniform in front of other officers. It is not needed. The less these folks around here know who we are and what we are up to, the better. The duty driver in the staff car works for us. The captains in charge of the base, the shipyard, and this hospital all have been briefed about our presence here and what we will be up to. The rest have no idea we are even here.”
“What are we up to?”
“I thought you would never ask.” Buckeye hesitated and smiled at his new underling. “Are you a Christian, Hawkeye? It was not mentioned in your service record.”
“Not really,” he paused. “My dad never went to church, so I didn’t.”
“Do you believe the Bible is the word of God?”
Fratello was confused by the line of questioning. “Those other guys wrote the gospels, I think, right?”
Buckeye smiled. “That is funny. Yeah, I think a bunch of other guys wrote the gospels myself. Personally, I think it is all a bunch of bullshit. The reason I ask is some of the Christians might have some ethical issue with some of the work we are going to be conducting. I just want to know if you may have any religious beliefs that may preclude you from carrying out your missions.”
“I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” confessed Fratello.
“Good. Because the shit we are going to get involved with would make a bishop throw a rock through a stained-glass window from what I have already been privy to,” Buckeye said with a serious look in his face.
“It sounds exciting. All I have done is go from one training command to the next.” Fratello figured Buckeye already knew this.
“Exciting. That would be one way of saying it. Let me cut to the chase. The bigger operation we are involved in has been dubbed Paperclip. Last year we captured some Nazis in Italy trying to escape the war coordinated through the Vatican in Rome. They were being given new identities as priests, monks, whatever. They were then expedited via the Vatican to Genoa, Barcelona, and Lisbon to cross the ocean for Buenos Aires, Argentina, to escape for good.”
Fratello was stunned. He had never heard of the Catholic Church involved in the war. “Wow, I have never heard that one before.”
“That is because it is top secret, sailor. Now, with that being said, most of these guys we catch are officers and they know there is no turning back. If we do not shoot them, the Nazis surely will for desertion if they capture them. All of them are actually stunned their plot was foiled when we apprehend them. They either agree to cooperate or face their consequences.” Buckeye stated as he reached in his pocket for his pack of Lucky Strikes. He pulled a cigarette from the pack and lit it with a match.
Fratello shook his head. “I would kill em’ all.”
“You would be making a mistake by doing so. Some of them boys are pretty damn smart. Some of the shit these guys have already coughed up would blow your mind. And, some of those guys are going to be sent here to the San Francisco Bay and possibly housed on this base too.”
“Wow,” was all Fratello could say.
“I say this for a few reasons. First, if you look on a map of our location, you will find there are some pretty important laboratories in close proximity to where we are now. The University of California Berkeley, the radiology lab in Livermore, Oakland Naval Base, San Francisco Naval Shipyard at Hunter’s Point, just to name a few. You can also throw in some of the engineers and science folks roaming around this base and shipyard. All of these locations are easily within driving range, and all of them have some highly classified operations in the works as we speak. As the public affairs end of this operation, part of our job is going to be controlling what the public actually knows about what is going on.”
“Fantastic, I thought I was going to be writing stories for the Stars and Stripes.” Fratello was excited he was actually going to see some action.
“That is actually not impossible. It is just a propaganda piece to keep the troops motivated. We pump the good news and mitigate, or sequester, the bad. Keeping our troops’ spirits up has been a vital component of public affairs. It is about to get a lot more sticky here in the coming weeks.” Buckeye blew a couple of smoke rings and looked back at Fratello. “Albert Einstein’s letter to President Roosevelt before the war was correct. We think the Germans are trying to make, or have made, an atomic bomb.”
“Oh, my goodness.” Fratello was stunned. The thought of an atomic bomb going off in America was something that never occurred to him. He wasn’t really sure what damage it would do, but just the thought of it felt terrifying.
Buckeye nodded and continued. “We haven’t found any proof of it yet. However, we are creating our own atomic bomb out in the desert. If it works, it will be capable of destroying Tokyo or Berlin in a single blast. The USS Indianapolis is a cruiser laid up right now right down there in the dry docks on the shipyard half of this island. She is actually less than a mile from where we are sitting right now. She is being refitted to transport it across the Pacific to be dropped by a B-29 on the Japs.”
Fratello was stunned. Never in his life did he imagine such classified information would be shared with him. “Holy smokes.”
“That is just part of it too. Additionally, this operation has spawned questions about intelligence in general. In short, the smarter our military is, the better chances we have of winning. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. You were in college when the war broke out, and like most of the young officers, you were accelerated through college at the behest of the US government via the V-12 program. The enlisted men were given the Army’s general classification test. I believe it was one of the best decisions our government has made in this war. It put men in ratings that best suited them in the Army or Navy. Better yet, most of the idiots were not selected. However, there were bunches of guys that were illiterate that were accepted because they knew how to weld, drive a truck, or shoot a gun straight. Some were too stupid to even do that.”
Fratello snickered, “Too stupid to shoot a gun or drive a truck? That is pretty stupid.”
“Indeed it is. Of the men who have been arrested, deserted, kicked out, or queer? The majority were some of the dumbest allowed in the ranks. Our suspicion is these are also the most vulnerable people to blackmail and espionage. Are you familiar with the Port Chicago blast?”
Fratello nodded his head, remembering the conversations with the cab driver and the commander on the ferry. “Yes, I have heard about it. Sounds like a terrible tragedy.”
Buckeye exhaled and extinguished his cigarette in an ashtray on the desk. “Indeed it was. It was also caused by some of the dumbest goddamn negroes in the Navy? Those sons of bitches were down there getting drunk, smoking weed, and screwing hookers in the barracks when they weren’t loading bombs. Three hundred of em’ dead and another three hundred, like the one in the elevator, were badly wounded. It is the biggest black eye in the war effort since Pearl Harbor. It was a huge damn explosion felt across the entire San Francisco Bay, and now everyone wants answers they are just not going to get.”
“Because it makes the Navy look bad?” Fratello asked the obvious.
Buckeye sighed and rubbed his chin. “That is one way of saying it. The Navy has done everything possible to fuck this up. The problem is the white officers that were in charge of them knew exactly what was going on and didn’t do a damn thing about it. We also rounded up the survivors to have them help with cleaning up afterwards too. Most of them wanted nothing to do with it and refused to do their jobs unless changes to regulations were made. The Navy refused to buckle and charged most of them with mutiny. Now the NAACP is involved.”
Fratello had never heard of the acronym. “What is that?”
Buckeye leaned back in his chair and interlocked his fingers across his belly. “This would be where President Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor, is stirring the turd. It is an organization representing negroes. It is her pet project and she wants segregation to stop. He doesn’t think it is such a good idea. It is going through the courts right now, but the negroes are looking at ten to fifteen years of hard labor each over the stunt. There are over two hundred of them packed in the brig on this shipyard right now.”
Fratello wasn’t sure if he should feel bad for the negroes or confident justice was being served. “What happened to the white guys?”
“Most of them have all been discharged already to cover it up. When the remaining negroes in this hospital are healed up enough, they are going to be dishonorably discharged too.”
Fratello understood the government was between a rock and a hard place by a creation of its own making. “I don’t even know what to say. What do you think?”
Buckeye just smirked. “What do I think? It doesn’t matter what I think. I follow orders like everyone else. I can tell you the problem the Navy has already is beyond Port Chicago. It is beyond the Army too. Segregation has been a failure, and few at the top want to admit it because President Roosevelt supports it, and he is the Commander in Chief. It is keeping the negroes down. Not all the negroes are dumb niggers. The initial aptitude testing proved it. There are already a few negro doctors, lawyers, and college professors. There are also negro officers leading their own units in this war. We now have a squadron of negro fighter pilots flying over Europe as we speak. They’re doing a fine job too,” replied Buckeye.
“Seriously? Pilots?” Fratello couldn’t believe what he just heard. When he thought of pilots, he always thought of Kinnick, a white guy.
“That is a fact. It is a pretty impressive accomplishment by all measures. They are out of Alabama. They are flying the latest P-51’s too.”
“Wow, that is just crazy.”
Buckeye continued, “It is about intelligence, not the color of your skin. It is almost unfair to measure those negro boys against the white boys on a one-to-one basis. When slavery ended after the Civil War, it depended on how the plantation owners had previously treated their slaves. Most of them were treated poorly and wanted nothing to do with white people. They were free, but they had no money, no education, no land, and no skills other than picking cotton. They wanted to live their lives their own way and left the plantations. I can understand that. We should have put them back on ships and sent them back to Africa like President Lincoln wanted because, honestly, they are not doing well as dumb and lazy niggers in America.”
Fratello had never heard such a story in any history class or read in books about the Civil War. “President Lincoln wanted to send the slaves back to Africa?”
“That is a fact. We probably should have too. On the other hand, some of those plantation owners tried to treat their slaves with some decency. After the Civil War, they began to pay them a wage, and some even offered them a piece of land they could work. Those men took a different attitude toward work. They chose brides, the families went to church, they created their own schools, and many of them learned to read, write, and do arithmetic themselves. It was mostly the children of these negroes who left the South to come up North looking for work. Most of them found jobs in factories in Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, and Detroit. We know this from comparing their service records to the results of their initial aptitude testing.”
It made sense to Fratello. The only organization big enough in scope to measure entire populations would be the government itself. “Do you think segregation in the Navy is a mistake?”
Buckeye surprisingly shook his head. “Right now, no. We honestly did not know how they would perform. Many of them had no schooling and were barely smart enough to feed and dress themselves when they were called up to serve. The Army and Navy were the first jobs many of them had ever had. They needed to be trained at the speed of war. They had to be tested in jobs that didn’t require a lot of intelligence first. For the most part, they take pride in their work and are proud to serve their country. Most of their lives are better off in uniform than they were as civilians, at least that is the message we want delivered to America.”
“Is that why the Port Chicago blast is so controversial?" asked Fratello.
“That is exactly why it is controversial. It is easy to point the finger at stupidity. Would the results have been any different if we took the dumbest white boys in the Navy and put them all down there in Port Chicago doing the same job?” Buckeye asked the question the Navy refused to.
“I don’t know.”
Buckeye realized his young officer was as green as the cornfields he came from. “How about your fellow Iowan, Kinnick? He may have had engine trouble. Or, he may have just been a stupid white boy too dumb to land the damn thing on a carrier in training.”
Fratello thought about it for a moment, then responded, trying to defend the late Hawkeye hero: “I doubt that. Kinnick was going to law school when the war broke out.”
“That may be true. Did he get into law school at the alma mater because he won the Heisman or was he smart? You don’t have to be real smart to play football.” Buckeye mentioned what everyone already knew about football players: size and speed meant more than brains on the gridiron.
“No, not really. I know Iowa has had a few negroes play on the team before.”
Buckeye concurred, “You will be seeing a lot more of that. They are damn good at sports. Ask Hitler what he thinks about Jesse Owens and Joe Louis now.”
Fratello laughed. “That was great. I remember that in high school.”
“It is the same with music,” said Buckeye as he pretended there was a piano in front of him. “Can you play an instrument?”
Fratello frowned and replied, “No, not at all.”
“Me neither. Somehow the negroes have the gift in spades. Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Dizzy Gillespie? There are a bunch of them who are incredibly talented. Intelligence comes in a variety of forms. Music is one of them. But you can’t win a war fighting with a trumpet.”
Fratello imagined a platoon of men trying to fight with musical instruments. “No, I suppose not. So, where do we come in all of this?”
“That is a good question, Hawkeye. You’re a smart young man. The OSS does a good job of recruiting. The truth is the person at the top of our list is not even on this base or in the military for that matter. He owns a newspaper here in the Bay Area, The Barnacle,” Buckeye said with a look of disgust in his face.
Fratello perked up. “I was just reading that on the ferry ride here.”
“I am sure you did. Half of goddamn San Francisco reads that lunatic’s newspaper.” Buckeye reached for another cigarette and lit it with a match. “He has himself one hell of a staff of writers with some amazing goddamn contacts throughout the entire country too.”
“Who is he?”
“Arthur Smythe III. He was an only child to a lumber baron who started The Barnacle after the first war. He was a devout Christian and republican. He died a few years back and junior inherited everything. Unfortunately, for the readers and dad’s old friends, he’s a liberal democrat and a queer cock sucker. Surprise. He has accomplished little more than inherit his father’s fortune and turn the newspapers upside down. Turns out the readership has quadrupled since he took over.”
“His father has to be rolling over in his grave,” Fratello said as he imagined himself or his brothers trying to explain to their father they wanted to have sex with other men.
“If you want the truth. He is a multi-millionaire that has connections in Washington, D.C., Sacramento, and Los Angeles. If they are not directly on the payroll, they are turning a blind eye to his business acumen for nice payoffs.” Buckeye took a puff on his smoke and continued his train of thought, “Here in the Bay Area, it is safe to assume most of the unions have his stooges planted in them. The guys working on the yards and the piers are being spoon-fed cocaine, cannabis, opium, bootleg liquor, and pornography by a host of his goddamn goons rolling around like they’re the next Al Capone. Rumor has it he was the one behind springing Capone himself from Alcatraz years ago.”
Fratello thought of his father at the mention of Capone. He wondered if Buckeye knew about his father’s past with the gangster. He offered nothing. If Buckeye asked, he would tell him. He himself had never known the guy. “Oh, my goodness. That sounds like a Hollywood movie.”
Buckeye did not inquire about Capone and The Geek but continued on with his description of Arthur Smythe III. “That would be one way of saying it. The pornography he publishes and distributes across America is about half the size of his newspaper subscribers. Thousands of his smutty magazines have been intercepted at post offices. The government has tried a few times to charge him, but his cadre of attorneys have successfully argued he is technically not breaking the law because the ‘models’ are all adults and paid performers no different than a burlesque show. He then funded the successful campaigns of the congressional members’ opponents in the following elections while publishing smear campaigns in his newspaper intimidating anyone thinking of charging him.”
“He gets away with that?”
“Congressional members need paychecks too, Hawkeye.”
“You would think someone in the government would shoot him if they want to get rid of him.”
Buckeye shook his head. He was clearly frustrated by Smythe and his organization. “It is impossible to pin him to any of the crime. He has cutouts and fall guys along the entire trail. His goons would be willing to do a few years in the pen for him, and a few already have. None of them will talk. He has a chauffeur and armed bodyguards with him constantly. They are posted up at his headquarters and they have their own quarters within his mansion across the bay in Sausalito. He is a world class pain in the ass.”
“That must be nice,” Fratello replied as he thought of living a life of luxury above the law. That was how Capone operated for years before he was taken down.
“No kidding. Let’s just say part of our mission here is to facilitate what the government wants and to keep that son of a bitch from learning anything more than his goons can dig up on their own. He already knows there are negroes here in the hospital. There was no hiding it. Everyone in the Bay Area heard the explosion thought the Japs were invading. There are also only so many hospitals in the area. There is, however, not to be a peep about anything regarding the Indianapolis or the bomb printed, period. These are shoot-to-kill orders too, Hawkeye. We got guys down on the pier dressed up as yard birds and the telephone switchboard on this base was tapped long ago. All of the mail sent from this shipyard is opened at the post office, read and resealed before it is even sent,” confirmed Buckeye.
“So what are we going to do?”
Buckeye smiled and said, “Great question. We are going to do some testing, actually. Apparently, our boys in Italy came across a Nazi doctor who told them the Nazis are working with a miracle drug out of Switzerland. They said it allows them to talk to god himself.”
Fratello was confused. He furled his brow. He wasn’t sure what he had just heard. “Talking to god? People can talk to god?”
“I don’t know what to say at this point other than we captured a Nazi officer trying to escape that was the link between the Nazis and the laboratory in Switzerland that created it. The funny thing is, it is completely legal. This laboratory was sending boxes of it across the world to hospitals, universities, and insane asylums trying to get feedback on its efficacy. The Nazis then got a hold of a bunch of it, and we just don’t know how they used it. If they were feeding it to their troops, we definitely want to know that. The guy we captured took off running from his command before any of the results came in. At least that is what he told us when interrogated. What we suspect is that it may have been given to some of these scientists as a way to improve their intelligence.”
Fratello could not believe what he had just heard. Intelligence had been reduced to a pill. “That has to be the craziest thing I have ever heard.”
“Yeah, I thought so too. That is until I heard we are going to be getting some ourselves. We are going to be testing it on some of the folks on this base.” Buckeye smiled.
“What?” Fratello started laughing.
“That is correct. There were about fifty inmates in the brig here on this shipyard before the explosion. Most of them are white boys that are more trouble for the Navy than they are worth. Instead of bringing them to a court-martial and kicking their asses out, we are going to use them as guinea pigs. There is going to be testing across America with various people from different backgrounds. Here, on the shipyard, we are going to start with these idiots that were removed from the brig and placed on indefinite separation duty. They have their own secured quarters over by the BOQ and believe their new course of instruction is designed to get them to lead productive civilian lives even though their military career was a flop. Their identification cards are stamped with a coded number so we can track them going on and off the base. What we really want to know is if the drug works. Do these guys become smarter and start making better decisions? If it makes stupid guys smarter, does it make the intelligent guys super intelligent?”
Fratello was stunned by Buckeye’s words. “Wow, that is just crazy. If they can leave the base, why don’t they just keep running?”
“They are only given a few bucks a week. Enough to get drunk on. Chesty’s is the enlisted club on base. Most of them hang out there because the beer is cheaper than off the base. They also have to check on and off the base if they leave. It is written down in the command’s logbook every single time they depart or arrive. They know if they are not back within four hours, an all-points bulletin will be shared with the local police and sheriff’s offices. If they try to escape, or fail to complete the course, they will be headed to court-martial and facing 10–15 years of hard labor, no questions asked.”Buckeye answered and extinguished his cigarette.
“What is the curriculum for the course?”
“We haven’t finished creating it yet. We will run them through a battery of tests when we get the drugs. But we are trying to win a war here. If the stuff works, it could bring the war to an end even faster. What we don’t need is our pecker-puffing publisher to blow our cover just because he wants to sell more newspapers. He pays handsome finder’s fees for stories too. There are no reporters allowed on this base. The cabbies know it is up to them to determine that before they even get near the base. They are only allowed to drive from the main gate to the BOQ or BEQ and nowhere else. If they are found to have chauffeured a reporter on this base, their cab will be confiscated and their driver’s license revoked. Those Marines down there on the quarterdeck have the authority to detain anyone they suspect is a mole until we can prove otherwise. If they try to escape, they will be shot on sight.”