By early January, the First, now 70 per cent. up to division strength, was ready to start the job it had come to do. Off Guantanamo now lay four big transports and the converted destroyers Calhoun, Gregory and Lmtle. For days and nights on end the outfit practiced using small boats, getting on and off the transports.
Next job was a landing party exercise. The new combat teams (chief components: infantry and artillery) were piled on to the big transports and the attack forces (secret in arms and organization) loaded on the speedy ex-destroyers. One sunset the whole fleet sailed over the horizon. At dawn it was seizing a beach head on another Caribbean island. The. First was gone a month on its full-scale exercise. Units of the Atlantic Fleet worked with them. Admiral Ernest Joseph King looked his approval as the landing parties were called away and the bronzed, hornyhanded sea soldiers went over the side into armoured small boats. By that time the First was getting hard: men moved easily and quickly under their 40-lb. combat packs, 240 rounds of ammunition, bayoneted rifles, By the time the outfit was ready for its next dash into the Caribbean, it reached farther east, did the same job better. Back in Guantanamo it practiced with the new amphibian tank (one on hand, 200 on order), at last got time to get acquainted with itself. "Howlin' Mad," detesting the tawdry fleshpots of Guantanamo, made camp life as comfortable as possible, even let his soldiers take beer from the post exchange to their tents to make things cozy.
The winter's training had left its unmistakable mark on the men of the First, and the First had leftits mark on the camp site at Guantanamo, as Marines have long marked the remote places on the Caribbean. An American civilian plane pilot, recently crossing the water between Puerto Rice and the island of Vieques, looked for the pasture emergency field there. He had no trouble finding it. On the side of a hill his eye caught the red, white and blue of a huge stone U.S. flag alongside the globe and anchor of the Corps emblem. A legend ran across the hill in whitewashed rock; "US. Marine Corps—Semper Fidelis.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.