O'hara's Choice - Leon Uris [79]
“Yeah, he got up off all fours with a club in his hand looking for a fight. And each century, man improved his capacity for slaughter. Anyhow, show up at my cottage for chow this evening.”
“Aye, aye, sir, thank you, sir.”
“And get your ass circulating around Newport. Take a little liberty. This shit will always be waiting for you when you get back. Newport is where good guys go to die.”
During colonial times, Newport had been a major commercial center along with Boston and New York, its wharves filled with ships and its town hall buzzing with the new ideas of democracy.
Before the Revolution, British warships patrolled Narragansett Bay, collecting the king’s royalties and impressing merchant crewmen.
Militia forts defended the coastal towns as best they could, but were scarcely able to stand up to the firepower of a flotilla of British barkentines.
Narragansett Bay was so choked that the Rhode Island Colony commissioned a “navy” of two vessels, which sailed forth to badger the British.
One of these vessels, the Providence, would later become the flagship of John Paul Jones and land marines to combat for the first time. It was the Rhode Island delegation to the Continental Congress that proposed the formation of a single navy to protect all the colonies.
Newport paid the price during the War of Independence. Her docks, dry docks, and warehouses were completely wasted and she ceased to be a commercial destination.
After the war, after a time, Newport returned to life, but the basic character of the place had been changed forever. Wealthy Southerners deserted their scorching plantations in the summer and made an exodus to the town. Then they came from everywhere in the country—the grand new entrepreneurial tycoons, the captains of industry, and the wealthy of all stripes flocked to Newport, established palatial summer homes, and converted the town to a center of culture and a showplace of rank, flying the colors of privilege from their yacht clubs.
The influx of wealth required a large pool of servants and a middle class of merchants and craftsmen as a support system.
An enclave of former slaves found the atmosphere less threatening than the South.
After the Civil War, recreation and vacations for ordinary people became part of a better way of life.
Advancements in electricity led to amusement parks and fun palaces.
Newport arrived, somewhat decently balanced between Vivaldi from the mansions and rinky-dink jazz on Moonlight Bay.
The United States Navy never grew tired of its love affair with Narragansett Bay. During the Civil War, when the Naval Academy was forced to relocate from Annapolis, it settled in Newport for the duration. There was always a sprightly naval presence in the town, from sailor boys to high-ranking staff officers.
Coaster’s Island, a hundred-acre affair, was connected to the town by a pair of short causeways. It held a drab, massive Victorian public building that had housed the Rhode Island poorhouse and insane asylum.
In the early 1880s, the navy took over Coaster’s and remodeled the main structures, converting it into the world’s first naval war college.
Major Benjamin Malachi Boone had been the lone Marine on permanent assignment. Despite his humbled branch of the services, Major Boone was accorded the special respect due an eccentric one-armed maverick genius who had led the charge at Chapultepec.
Ben carved out his space in the attic, which no one else wanted, then seriously pursued his collection of documents on amphibious warfare. He badgered ship’s captains, seagoing Marines, U.S. consulates, and whomever to send him material, which he got translated by twisting the arms of college language professors.
Ben was a brilliant curiosity, constantly in demand to give lectures, back and forth to Washington for consultations, able to afford less and less time for mining his amphibious pile.
The Corps, always squeezed