Too old to fly

Sergeant Galladay learned to shoot a machine gun “from the rear end of a mule.” That was the old marine corps phrase to describe a gunner who learned all the tricks of his trade in the jungles and brush of “spiggoty land.”

Quite obviously such a leatherneck was not to be mentioned in the same breath with a fellow who acquired his knowledge of projectory, windage, recoil and assemblage, safe in the lecture room or gun pits of Paris Island.

The grammar-school education of Sergeant Horatio Galladay--then Private Galladay--took place in the Spanish-American War, and his textbook was a many-barreled Gatling gun he turned with a crank. Given plenty of ammunition and a large enough target, Private Galladay caused plenty of damage while he learned. His high-school course was in the Philippines, followed by a college degree of D. B. W.--Doctor of Bushwhacking.

For a diploma he received the navy cross for distinguished service, his sergeant’s chevrons and a letter from the secretary of the navy, complimenting him upon the diligence with which he had pursued his studies--and the enemy.

During that island campaign Sergeant Galladay served as the unwilling carving block for an artistically inclined Moro chieftain. His machine gun had jammed and the entire contents of his army model .38 Colt failed to stop the maddened charge of the brown man, who danced forward, his black eyes fixed gleefully on Galladay’s midriff, his bolo knife cutting anticipatory patterns in the air.

Silent as the death which he was facing, Sergeant Galladay dropped the Moro at last with a straight right to the jaw, but in the meantime the tribesman had carved his initials several times on Horatio Galladay’s anatomy. The men of Company B found him weak in his own blood but still cursing the jammed machine gun which he loved with a blaspheming love.

For fear that Sergeant Galladay might forget what he had already learned about the tricks of machine guns and to keep him abreast of the times in his fine art, a philanthropic government at Washington managed to find perennial fracases in various far-flung corners of the world where a good machine gunner was worth his weight in gold.

He chased cacos through the jungles and up the mountains of Haiti; he crooned to his gun in San Domingo, Nicaragua, China and other places not so well marked on the map. And he acquired, during this post-graduate work, a marvelous knowledge of malaria fever, native liquor and man-eating insects. In addition, during the occupation of Vera Cruz, he earned two bullet wounds through his left leg, which ached abominably in wet weather, and a flattened nose from the gentle caress of a mule’s right hind foot.

The entrance of the United States in the World War found the battle-scarred veteran eligible for a professorship in his favorite subject. Some one in Washington remembered the sergeant, thought twice of his stocky, erect figure, his legs bowed by the weight of the guns he had carried, his cold, blue eyes which had taken on the glint of the metal barrels he had squinted down so often, thought once more of all the knowledge and practical experience in that grizzled head. “Just the man to teach the fine art of machine gunnery to the marine ‘boots,’” General Somebody decided. Forthwise, Sergeant Horatio Galladay was ordered to Paris Island.

Sergeant Galladay went. But he didn’t stay. Thirty minutes after his arrival he marched up to the commanding officer’s desk and snapped to attention, his square jaw thrust forward belligerently and his eyes firing two hundred shots a minute.

“Hello, ‘Hod’!” greeted the C. O., grinning his pleasure at seeing the sergeant again. As a matter of past history, there had been a torrid day in the Philippines when Sergeant Galladay’s bullet-spitting music box had saved the C. O.’s little company from being wiped off the earth. “Hello, Sergeant Galladay!” he added more severely, for he saw trouble in the gunner’s cold eyes.

“’Lo, colonel!” grunted Galladay.

“Well, well, what’s the trouble now?” And the C. O. began to turn over the foot-high stack of paper work. “Suppose you want to go straight to France, eh? Be shooting up the German high command by to-morrow night, eh? Just like the rest of----”

“Right!” barked Sergeant Galladay.

“Listen, sergeant,” reasoned the C. O. placatingly, “we’ve got something better than that for you. Sure! We’re going to give you a commission. Yes, sir, a commission! And put you in charge of machine-gun instruction. How’s that, old-timer? A commission and----”

“Commission be damned!” burred Hod Galladay. “Begging your pardon, colonel. Look here, sir. I’ve been fooling around in these half-pint spigotty wars for twenty-five years. Now when a real war comes along you try to give me a trick commission and shelve me away ‘training boots’! Is it fair? No, it ain’t! Now get this! My hitch in this man’s service is up in six weeks. Six weeks! And if I don’t get a promise of action pronto I’ll quit. Quit cold, unless I join up with them Germans, maybe.”

The C. O. reached for his pipe and waved his hands helplessly. He sensed the utter futility of argument with the old leatherneck.

“All right, all right, you old fire-eater,” he said soothingly. “We’ll just forget that teaching detail. Name your poison. What do you want to do?”

“I want to sign up with the aviation. I hear they’re forming a marine aviation outfit. I want to fly.”

“What?” The commanding officer’s jaw dropped open, the pipe fell from his mouth. He stared at Sergeant Galladay as if the latter were an escaped lunatic.

“Good Lord, Galladay, you can’t sign up with the air service! Why, man, that’s a young fellow’s outfit--got to have a bunch of crazy kids. We’re setting the age limit at thirty and we’d rather have ’em around twenty. Say, how old are you, anyway?”

“Forty-three,” lied Sergeant Galladay manfully.

“Forty-three! Good Lord, that’s only thirteen years over the limit. Guess you better forget that fool aviation idea of yours, sergeant.”

“Quit, then!” the leatherneck said.

The commanding officer shook his head despairingly. These old-timers were damnably set in their ways. If they got an idea into their heads you couldn’t budge it--not with a three-inch field piece. The commanding officer reached for a memo pad.

“Very well then, Galladay,” he sighed. “I’ll recommend that you be attached to this new air-force group. They’ll need some one to teach machine gunnery. But get this! They’ll assign you to that job and keep you on the ground for the duration of the war. Serve you right, too.”

“Keep me on the ground?” grinned Sergeant Galladay. “Sure they will--like hell! Once I get set with that outfit I’ll be flying every ship they’ve got!” He snorted contemptuously. “Too old to fly! Say, colonel, just give you and me twenty men from the old C Company and we could swab up a whole regiment of these here young whipper-snappers they’re recruiting nowadays.”