Leon Uris by O'Hara's Choice Page A

maybe we can get him in the next class or the third.”
    “Yeah, maybe this would bust him,” Storm agreed.
    “Then I’ll take my retirement now,” Gunnery Sergeant Wally Kunkle said coldly. He was not precisely refusing an order but playing with its fringes.
    “There’s more to this than meets the eye,” Tobias said when he caught his wits.
    “Then, think of the other side of it,” the Gunny said. “When Paddy O’Hara’s son comes through, that really speaks of our continuity.”
    “What’s behind this, Gunny?” Ben prodded.
    “Sure, we all owe Paddy’s memory. But on my honor, I believe Zachary O’Hara, on his own, deserves this shot.”
    “And you’d really retire otherwise?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “That’s blackmail.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “Shit,” Ben said, then slowly held his hand out. “Semper Fi,” he said.
    “To the Corps,” Tobias said, offering his hand.
    “Semper Fi,” the Gunny said.

• 11 •
PADDY O’HARA’S FINE SON
    There came a moment in the fearsome and adventurous life of Sergeant Major Paddy O’Hara when the man needed to catch his wind. From the day of his birth, life was in a hard place; in Ireland during the Great Hunger, and in Hell’s Kitchen and on bloody battlefields in the Civil War.
    Of course he knew the great comfort of singing around the campfire and the bottomless loyalty of comrades as a warrior in a warrior’s place.
    The rank of sergeant major was the highest enlisted rank of a given unit. There was no sergeant major of the entire Corps, but no one failed to recognize that Paddy O’Hara was the most celebrated of them all.
    He served directly at the pleasure of the commandant and was stationed in the Washington barracks. Every year or so, when enough new recruits were sworn in to make up a platoon, Paddywas dispatched to train them, and they were a hell of a lot better coming out of four months with him than they were going in.
    Otherwise he was an unofficial ombudsman for the men in the ranks. In addition to visiting the installations in the East, he was a recruiter’s joy. Paddy was able to choose the pick of the litters to swear in to the Marines.
    Ordinarily, a hero, even of Paddy’s stature, would eventually be mustered out, but after the Civil War, the Marines were on the brink of collapse and Paddy was too damned valuable to give up.
    Then Paddy got a yen for softness in the form of a woman. With the end of his service on the horizon, he turned his attention to wooing and winning himself a wife.
    The lass came in the person of Maureen Herndon, out of County Wicklow, a maid working under his sister, Brigid, in a mansion on New York’s Fifth Avenue, belonging to wealthy German-Jewish merchants.
    Paddy was many years Maureen’s senior, but no measure of man could match up to him, and they wed. Paddy sought out faint memories of the rare moments of gladness he knew as a boy before the famine.
    Aye, they did love each other, for sure. He softened at the sight of her, could feel his heart thump when she touched his cheek, trembled when he held her, and he even tried poetry, on occasion.
    Maureen continued to work as a household servant in Washington until she became pregnant at the end of their first year of marriage.
    Maureen had left Ireland and entered America suffering from a dormant, undetected consumption, a scourge of the Irish.
    The disease flared during her pregnancy as she drained her own strength and gave it to the child in her womb. Zachary was born in 1868. Maureen died three days after.
    When only a few weeks old, Zachary was given to his aunt Brigid to raise in New York. Paddy’s grief was worse than all hungers, all blood in all battles.
    In a gesture of eternal fidelity, the Corps sent Paddy on a good-will morale-building mission to far-flung posts and aboard vessel after vessel.
    When the man started coming out of it, he never searched for bliss again. He drank and fornicated to a degree that strangely added bravura to his legend.