Captain Stecker read with interest the reports of scores fired with the new rifle by the students of the battalion; and he was not happy with the results from either the commissioned officers at their annual qualification at Quantico or of the kids in the Platoon Leader's Course. He decided first to see what was wrong with the training of the Platoon Leader candidates and fix that, and then he'd see that the same fix was applied to the abbreviated training course given the officers before they fired their annual qualification.

At 0805, which was late enough for the firing on the known distance range to be well under way, he got up from his desk and walked out of his office.

"Come with me, son," he said to the S-3's jeep driver, a small, very neat PFC trying to make himself inconspicuous on a chair in the outer office.

As he invariably did when he went for a ride in the jeep with a PFC at the wheel, he thought about how much he'd liked it better when he'd been a master gunnery sergeant with the pickup and didn't have to sit like a statue on an uncomfortable pad in the jeep.

In the center of the line of Known Distance Rifle Range #2 (where the Platoon Leader Candidates were firing for record), there was a small clutter of buildings surrounding the range master's tower. Next to the buildings, several vehicles were parked with their front wheels against yellow-painted logs half-buried in the sand. There were two jeeps (one assigned to range NCO and the other to the range officer), two pickups, and a three-quarter-ton Dodge weapons carrier, which had brought the ammo from the dump. Two ambulances (new ones, built on the Dodge three-quarter-ton weapons carrier chassis) were backed up against the logs.

Stecker told the driver to park the jeep beside the weapons carrier. When he stopped, Stecker removed his campaign hat and took from the crown a small glass bottle, which once contained Bayer Aspirin. He took from it four globs of what looked like wax at the end of short pieces of string and handed two of them to the PFC.

"Here," he said to the driver. "Stick these in your ears." "What is it, sir?" the PFC asked doubtfully. "Genuine Haiti Marine earplugs," Stecker said. "Do what | I tell you."

"Aye, aye, sir," the PFC said, and after he watched Stecker carefully push with his index finger one of the wax globs into each ear, he somewhat uneasily put the plugs into his own ears.

Unless someone looked very carefully at his ears (which was highly unlikely) the earplugs would go unnoticed.

The night before, when Stecker checked the jar where he kept his earplugs, he found only one pair left, so he decided he had to make some more.

So Captain Stecker spent an hour at his kitchen sink making six pairs of the earplugs. He knew that he would be spending several hours on the known distance range, and he had long ago learned that ear damage from the muzzle blast of rifle fire was permanent and cumulative. There were a lot of deaf gunnery sergeants in the Marine Corps as proof of

that.

From the time he had been a PFC, Stecker had understood that the Boy Scouts were right. "Be Prepared" said it all. He didn't really need any more earplugs than the pair he had in the Bayer Aspirin bottle, not for tomorrow. But the day after tomorrow was something else. He had no spares, and therefore it was time to make some.

The Haiti Marine earplugs were a good deal more complicated than they looked: He first carefully cut the erasers from a dozen pencils. Then with an awl heated red on the stove, he burned a hole through the center of the eraser. He then knotted a length of strong thread through the holes of a small button, just a bit larger than the diameter of the eraser. The loose end of the thread was then fed through the hole in the

eraser.

One at a time, the dozen erasers were carefully placed in holes bored through a piece of wood. Then, in a small pot reserved for this specific purpose, he melted paraffin and beef tallow and carefully poured it into the holes in the wood. When it had time to cool, he pushed each earplug out with a pencil. While the beef tallow/paraffin mixture would remain flexible enough to seal his ear canal, it would neither run from the heat of his body, nor harden to the point where removal would be difficult.

It was a trick Captain Stecker had learned when he was a corporal in Haiti in 1922. A staff sergeant named Jim Finch had taken a shine to him, shown him how to make the plugs, and warned him that if he was going to spend any time around ranges, he had goddamned well better get in the habit of using them.

Stecker put the Bayer Aspirin bottle back in the crown of his stiff-brimmed campaign hat, and then with a quick, smooth movement to keep the bottle from falling out flipped it onto his head.

Aside from his field shoes, the campaign hat was about the only part of his enlisted man's uniforms that he had been able to use as an officer. He had to change the insignia on the campaign hat, but it hadn't been necessary to put it up for sale in the thrift shop along with just about everything else.

When he was ten feet away, the range officer spotted him and saluted, raising his arm crisply until the fingers touched the stiff brim of his campaign hat.

"Good morning, sir," he barked.

"Good morning," Stecker said.

"Is there something special, sir?" the range officer asked.

"Just checking," Stecker said. "But how are the young gentlemen doing?"

"Not bad, sir," the range officer said. "I think we have two who are going to shoot High Expert."

"And the low end?"

"I think they're all going to qualify, sir," the range officer said.

"You think, Lieutenant?" Stecker asked. Out of the corner of his eye, he had just seen Maggie's Drawers (A red flag waved before a target to show a complete miss).

"Yes, sir," the range officer said.

"Think won't cut it, Lieutenant," Stecker said. "If one of the young gentlemen fails to qualify first time out, that means his instructors haven't been doing their job."

"Aye, aye, sir," the range officer said.

"I'm going to have a look around," Stecker said. "I won't need any company, and I don't want the pit officer to know I'm here."

"Aye, aye, sir," the range officer repeated.

Stecker walked erectly to the end of the firing line. There were twenty firing points, each occupied by two platoon leader candidates, one firing and one serving as coach. For each two firing points, there was a training NCO, so-called even though most of them were PFCs and not noncommissioned officers. A half dozen NCOs, all three stripe buck sergeants, moved up and down the line keeping an eye on the training NCOs and the firers.

The firing was near the end of the prescribed course. The young gentlemen were about to fire slow fire prone at bull's-eye targets five hundred yards down range. The course of fire would be twenty shots, with sixty seconds allotted for each one. The targets would be pulled and marked after each string of ten shots.

What they were doing now was firing "sighters." They had changed range and were permitted trial shots to see how they had done changing their sights.

The target before which Maggie's Drawers had flown was down in the pits. As Stecker watched, it came up. There was a black marker high on the right side of the target outside the scoring rings.

This young gentleman, Stecker thought wryly, had probably never held a gun in his hands before he became associated with the Marine Corps. Some people learned easily, and some didn't.

"Bullshit!" the firer said when he saw the marker, more in anger than embarrassment.

"Watch your mouth, Mister!" the training NCO snapped. The firer turned his head in annoyance. And then he recognized Stecker as an officer and looked down the range again. He didn't recognize me. Except as an officer. But I recognize him. That's the China Marine with the LaSalle convertible. That's surprising. A Marine noncom ought to be at least able to get them inside the scoring rings.