A God in Ruins - Leon Uris [51]
“All right, enough, Darnell. We have been patient. What are you trying to say?” Thornton demanded.
Darnell leaned over the table, and tears welled and perspiration dripped. “Thornton! For God’s sake! These pissy-ass movies and that pissy-ass television eat up more material in one day than was written by all the English authors during the entire Victorian era. Pucky is only trying to hold back an avalanche of ignorance.”
“All right,” Thornton said softly. “I want you to listen to something, and you tell me.”
He put a disk into the Bulldog’s CD-ROM and punched the required keys. In a few seconds music came over the speakers. It was sweet, melodic, dancy and teasy. It was pure Mozart.
Thornton changed the setting to what was obviously Beethoven. Pucky was caught up in trying to identify the symphony. It occurred to her that somehow, some unplayed and unpublished Mozart and Beethoven had been discovered. My God, it was world-shattering.
“That’s the future of music,” Thornton said. “It is already the future of writing, as you have just documented so well, Darnell. The Bulldog was programmed to log fifty hours of each composer, then compose something new using the composer’s structure.”
“The computer composed that!” Darnell cried.
“That’s the future. Want to see some non-paintings by Rembrandt or some non-statues by Michelangelo or maybe read a little non-Hemingway? Alas, the Bulldog is a little weak on Hemingway.”
Pucky looked around the office until she spotted the Ming vase she had bought at auction, snatched it from its stand, marched to his desk, lifted it over her head, and flung it into the monitor of the Bulldog.
Chapter 14
MARINE CORPS AIR BASE, EL TORO,
CALIFORNIA—LATE 1970s
Throughout the history of the republic, military mavericks have popped up, some with innovations that changed the nature of war. After World War I, an Army Air Force general, Billy Mitchell, demonstrated the impossible, that airplanes could sink a battleship.
The Navy’s most renowned off-horse appeared in the form of Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear submarine, who gave nightmares to his superiors and Congress.
Marine Major General Jeremiah Duncan was a lesser maverick, but a maverick nonetheless. By the time of the Great Depression the American military had fallen into a pathetic state. There was congressional pressure to disband the Marine Corps or reduce it to giving concerts on the Capitol steps and serving as embassy guards.
It was incumbent upon a group of Marine officers, including Duncan, to reinvent the mission of the Corps and thereby save it from extinction.
Their thesis was simple but unique. In future wars, global in nature, tactics had to be developed to land men from the sea against fortified land positions.
The major test in World War I had taken place against the Turkish peninsula at Gallipoli. British naval gunfire bashed the Turkish forts and emplacements for weeks prior to a landing by Anzac, British, and French forces. The Allied troops were cut to pieces, and ultimately the campaign ended in a disaster that resulted in Winston Churchill’s removal from the Admiralty.
Away from probing eyes on the island of Vieques, off the east coast of Puerto Rico, the Marines went about developing the tactics that would become a key to victory in future wars. Naval gunfire was moved in close