III. Will There Always Be A Marine Corps?

When your phone rings and you pick it up and someone says: You don't know me, but you become wide awake instantly.

You know one immutable truth: someone is about to do something FOR you or TO you.

Being alert, intelligent and conditioned by the constant bombardment of telemarketers, I said, after a perceptible delay, Yes?

My name is Pat Scannon and my hobby is Scuba diving.

Again, I said: Yes, I tried for a neutral tone not cordial, but not unfriendly.

You probably know that the greatest Scuba diving waters in the world are in the Palau Islands? His tone told me it was a question.

Yes. My curiosity was aroused. My fancy was tickled.

Someone told me that you are the Historian of VMF 114.

Again, the tone told me it was a question.

I hoped my tone would be cautious: Well there were several of our pilots who could read and write. I'm not sure anyone ever gave me that title officially.

Pat's voice told me that was close enough.

In my diving, I began to encounter Corsair aircraft. Some had a white speed ring on the cowling some were in the water, some were in the jungle. My hobby includes underwater photography. I have several excellent pictures of these planes.

The white speed rings belong to our squadron. I was fairly sure he was not going to try to sell me pictures. He went on:

I understand your squadron is having their annual reunion this year in Orange County. If you'd like, I could bring some interesting slides and share what I'm doing with you fellows.

Time to hedge. I said Well, there are not too many of us left. We have not had funds to provide a program.

Pat laughed. Oh, I would not charge you. And, I'm happy to pay my own expenses. I live in San Francisco.

Maybe it was Pat's voice. It was warm, friendly and, yes, honest-sounding. I hoped my old squadron mates would forgive me if this should turn out to be some dull and boring diving fanatic with a dull and boring slide show.

One or two of those squadron mates old and impatient, as I occasionally am, were not above silently exiting from the room darkened for the slide show.

I had visions of Pat, at the conclusion of the slides, saying: Well, what do you think? and turning on the lights to reveal an empty room.

There was no reason to worry. At the proper time, I introduced Pat to my friends. He made his presentation in his usual understated and modest manner. During the presentation, which lasted about half and hour, there was not a sound. When he finished, there was no applause. It would have been like applauding in church. It was also love-at-first-sight.

Pat Scannon realized very quickly when his search for downed planes resulted in unsolved puzzles being solved in furnishing closure for us who had seen comrades disappear without a trace in the return of remains to families who relief and gratitude were boundless, that he was on to something.

A Marine Corps Evaluation Team had discovered our skipper, Major Robert F. (Cowboy) stout's Corsair after the war. Deep in the jungle, it somehow was then lost again. And, again, Pat found it and saw that the Graves Registration folks arranged for the remains to be returned to the United States. Cowboy's dear friend, Col. Jack Conger, escorted his remains to the Wyoming home of his parents for proper honors and interment beside the grave of their younger son, who was killed in a Corsair crash while he, too, was in training to be a Marine pilot.

After his brother's crash, Cowboy observed laconically that Flying is sometimes a dangerous business. His eyes were wet.

Pat Scannon has not missed our reunion since. Well, he had to be there: We've adopted him he is an honorary member of VMF 114. He is also a skydiver, a private pilot, and a member of the famous Explorer's Club. He retired from private medical practice as an internist to become the Chief Medical Officer of a successful medical research company named XOMA. I have said several times that I believe he will discover the cure for cancer, or qt the very least, the common cold. He is too dedicated and too intelligent for it to turn out otherwise.

Pat has become our good friend. Mary Alice and me. I'm certain all our pilots feel that way about him. So do the pilots of VMF 121 and VMF 122, both of whom served with 114 on Peleliu.

A little over one year ago, Pat invited Mary Alice, my wife, and me to make a trip to the Palau Islands with him. We considered the invitation a great honor. There was a question about my age. Not from Pat..from me. When you are on the other side of 80, not everyone is interested in your company. Pat seemed to like my book: Friends, Dear Friends, and Heroes. He sent copies to many of his friends.

Last year VMF 114 held their reunion at Lake Bimidji, MN. Pat was there with part of his production crew: Dan O'Brien, stunt man, production manager, and videographer, Jennifer Powers, vital to production and long time member of the tam. Interviews with the pilots as a group and individually, were taped. We talked about this next trip.

Mary Alice and I had just finished helping our daughter through law school and cash reserves were just a bit low. MA had been exploring flying Space Available Space A, for short. We exchanged information with friends who had tried it. We decided to give it a try. When Mary Alice married me, I realized she was fearless I just had not realized HOW fearless.

Space A is one of those unforeseen boons that happily occur for retired military occasionally. It works for people who are patient, imperturbable and who have cash to pay their way back home, should they be stranded in some Godforsaken place.

To give you the short version, we boarded a C-5 in San Antonio. It is the biggest airplane I have ever seen. It does the magic kneeling bit for loading and can accommodate two standard Greyhound buses end on end. Above all the cargo space are 75 airline-type seats for Space A travelers.

We flew nonstop to Guam where we spent the night in a two-bedroom house that was part of Air Force housing. The next day, we cabbed to the civilian airport for our commercial airline trip (via Micronesian Air) to Koror, capitol city of the Palau Islands.

Upon landing at Koror, the capital, we were met by Pat Scannon and his all-star band of adventurers. Let me introduce you: Dan O'Brien, producer and videographer, (real job: Hollywood Stunt Man) the minute I laid eyes on him, I realized I had seen him many times, often in James Bond films, it's just that he wasn't identified by name, but the face is unforgettable. His eternal smile seems tattooed and his mood always matches it. Next, Clem Major: about 6'2" muscular and slender, very handsome with neat facial hair in a sort of van Dyke, has a gleam in his eye that tells you how very much he enjoys life, he is also an accomplished cameraman, has hundreds of sky-dives to his credit as well as scubas. William Belcher is a federal employee whose responsibilities include graves registration, proper handling of recovered remains, and much else. His graduate degree is in forensic anthropology. He seems most competent and very professional. He is also very funny the source of much laughter. Robert Evans, a free-lance writer will tell you quickly and up front that he is not British, he is Welsh. His work you may find in the New Yorker or National Geographic. He hopes this trek may be lucrative for him. He works just as hard as the other volunteers do on the team. He is a cancer survivor who obviously makes the most of each experience and each day.

The next man is a captain for Northwestern Air, a former navy pilot named Flip Calmed. Flip is lighthearted in an intense way, very well-read, an overachiever, most capable in many directions. He is a dedicated skydiver, veteran of many, many jumps. Behind his broad smile and devil-may-care fa'ade, he takes life very seriously and is affected (like Pat) about the ramifications of the work the group does.

The last woman, capitalize that: WOMAN. Her name is Al Shall. My wife says she is 43. I replied that she is the most attractive 43 I have ever seen. She is about 5'5" with a figure any 18 year old girl would die for. Eighteen year old boys too.

Her hair seemed always wet, she was the first diver in the water and often the last out. She never wore make up of any kind. She is mega- and multi-talented: she is also a skydiver avid, of course. She is a Captain with Federal Express. She and her husband (also a FedEx Captain) live on acreage near Memphis. They are currently restoring a twin-engine Cessna and another plane, a single-engine classic. She invited us to their annual fly-in which sounds about as exciting as the Calgary Stampede.

She would have made every feminist proud as she consistently found more airplane parts and other relics on the dives than her male counterparts. The first day on the dive boat, I announced to all hands that I truly appreciated their concern for me because of my antiquity that I would do my best to be of no trouble, BUT that, in case that I should be stricken by some unforeseen physical event, every man was to stay in his assigned position and ANY kind of CPR was to be administered only by Val.

Then I began work on what kind of answer I could give to St. Peter when he questioned the smile on my face as I neared the Golden Gate.

I had planned to write an article that might be of interest to Leatherneck, or even National Geographic. We had hardly gotten home when Flip favored all of us with an e-mail which was a masterpiece a recap of our adventures on this episode of Pat Scannon's ongoing saga of P-MAN segments.

The man not only is an accomplished pilot, military and well as commercial, who had made hundreds of skydives, thousands of scuba dives, he is a hypnotic conversationalist, and now on top of all that, he turns out to be q truly inspirational writer even in the abbreviated and sometimes cryptic form e-mail seems to take.

My article, it would seem, might serve its best purpose to quote and comment on Flip's genius with the world's newest form of communication. Here's an ample sample of his work.

[Not included; from all of our views, Bill did write about his feelings, and better than any of us could Pat Scannon]

The End