Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer [11]
Prominent among those virtues was his fastball. A dominating right-hander, Wisecup had taken his New Orleans Jesuit Blue Jays to an American Legion regional title and had played in the minor leagues before enlisting in the Corps and finding himself hotly recruited to play for the Marines’ Mare Island squad. The commander there was a colonel named Thompson. A devout baseball fan, he took a liking to Wisecup—or at least to his right arm. He had seen what it could do to the Army and semipro teams that challenged the Marines for supremacy on the base. That fondness paid dividends for Wisecup when he got into a boozy fistfight with another Marine who happened to work as a guard at the base prison, famously known as “84” after its building number. Wisecup took the guy apart.
The next day Colonel Thompson hauled in the private, heard his story, and passed along some dire news: “You know, they want your blood at ‘84,’ John.” Wisecup said that he suspected as much. “If I give you a general court-martial,” the colonel said, “you’re going to do your time right over there. You know what’s going to happen?” Again Wisecup said he knew. The colonel offered him a way out. The USS Chaumont was in port. The 8,300-ton Hog Island Type B transport had won fame as the ship that had first landed Marines in Shanghai in 1927. It was a coveted billet for anyone looking to join the fabled Fourth Marines on Asia Station. The colonel told Wisecup the Chaumont was at the pier and that if he was smart he’d go along with a new assignment. “Go pack your gear and get aboard,” Thompson said. In pulling that string for his ace, the colonel gave him a free ticket not only out of the doghouse but to glory road.
Wisecup boarded the Chaumont—and blew the opportunity on his very first liberty. Overstaying his leave, he returned to the ship and was given an immediate deck court-martial. Tried and found guilty, he got ten days of bread and water and a stiff boot out of the China Marines. Halfway through his sentence, another ship moored alongside, and Wisecup was ordered to transfer to her and finish serving his sentence there. The other ship was the USS Houston.
Wisecup was not meant to be a China Marine. But he was clearly meant to stand out on the Houston. When the troublemaker hauled his seabag up the gangway, he saluted the officer of the deck and announced, “Sir, Private Wisecup, reporting for duty. Where’s the brig?” Wisecup did his time and managed to stay out of the lockup thereafter. He adapted to a world of regimentation and polished pride. Captain Rooks’s Marines were not allowed topside except in full dress, shoes polished and shirts triple-creased. Forced to vent his insuppressible rages privately, Wisecup maintained a serviceable reputation, though in time his steel locker door was permanently bowed in.
The tradition of the seagoing Marine dated to the Revolutionary War, when Marines shot muskets from a man-of-war’s fighting tops. It spoke to the depth of the leadership tradition that grew from the Houston’s heady early days, and of the talents of 1st Lt. Frank E. Gallagher, Gunnery Sgt. Walter Standish, and 1st Sgt. Harley H. Dupler of the Houston’s detachment in particular, that a man such as John Wisecup was put in a position to make something of himself. It was true of all the crew to one degree or another, such was the contrast between life on board ship and the deprivation of the times. A sailor named James W. Huffman left his faltering family farm in the San Joaquin Valley, California,