by Leon Uris
Quinn stepped in to stop the coming apologies. “Dad, let’s start anew. Let’s just put the past behind us. I want to come home, soon as I can.”
“Do you forgive me, son?”
“Of course I do. You’re my dad.”
“Marine gunner, huh?” Dan said. “Now, you just had to go and get a higher rank than me, didn’t you?”
Quinn laughed. It hurt his scar. “Is Mom there?” “She’s right here. I’ll put her on. I love you, Quinn.” “I love you, Dad ... I love you.”
Quinn spent a restful night, the sleep of the reprieved. There had been many women since Greer, but none had put out the Olympian flame he held for her. He felt now that there could and would be life after Greer.
How well he slept after he had spoken to his mother and father! They slept well that night, too.
There was a knock on Quinn’s door.
“Come in,” he called from the easy chair.
General Keith Brickhouse, commandant of the Marines, entered.
Quinn came to his feet. The general waved him back into his seat, hung his hat and riding crop on the door peg, turned a chair around so he could lean his arms on the back.
“Army treating you okay here?”
“Everyone’s been great, sir.”
“That’s a pretty damned good job Dr. Comfort did on your head.”
“I’m lucky I still have a head.” “We need to talk a few things over. In another day you’re going to be very big news. Please speak up now, and let’s keep it informal. You’re up for a big medal. I’d say the Congressional Medal is indicated, but it’s peacetime and there’s politics. So you’ll have to settle for a Navy Cross.”
Quinn shook his head. “Sorry, sir. I cry a lot these days, more in the past week than all my life combined. I can’t accept a medal.”
“Why?” Brickhouse demanded, then added, “As if I didn’t know.”
“If you know, then don’t ask.”
“Gunner, the RAM team, to a man, wants you to wear it on behalf of all of them. The President is going to issue a special unit citation medal for the rest of the men. The raid was one of the great chapters in Marine Corps history.”
Quinn spoke nothing in return.
“You’ve a brilliant career ahead, Gunner. Before all the hoopla starts, I wanted to thank you personally. Will my smoking bother you?”
“Not at all, sir. As for my future, I’ve reached my capacity as a Marine. General, I cannot live with such violence. Funny to say after Urbakkan, but I’m not made of the stuff to take more hits like that. The cockpit was filled with brains dripping from the bulkheads and roof. Someone’s eye was pasted against a window and stared at me all the way back. And I must add, sir, I got no sweet feelings about the Iranians I killed. I must have gotten over a hundred of those poor devils in their sleep. General Brickhouse, I’m grieving far too much for Jeremiah Duncan and the others. Sorry, sorry.”
Brickhouse followed his cigarette smoke to the window, sat on the deep sill, and commented on the nasty weather of middle Europe. “We all reach a saturation point, all of us.”
“But there’s a difference. You know—and General Duncan knew—what to do with your saturation points. That’s why you’re a general.”
“You think so?”
“I know how Jeremiah Duncan was all but destroyed by Nam, but he had the guts to—to gut it out. The Corps is in my being, and I can take its spirit with me. I’m starting to get some idea where my future worth may lie,” Quinn said.
Brickhouse weighed the proposition of cajoling, arm twisting, sweetening the pot. Gunner O’Connell was one powerful man. Guts enough to cry. God, the times he’d wished he could weep. God, the times he’d turned away from his wife’s breast. Go till you fall, that’s what.
“It will be a great loss to the Corps,” the commandant said at last.
“But we have some other business on the table.”
(t7 . t>
Yes, sir.
“Everything surrounding the formation of the RAM Company and the SCARAB was secret. The raid was of extraordinary importance in proving we could retaliate virtually within hours at any point in the world. It also proved the great stamina of that aircraft. Now then, Gunner, you are aware of the nature of the raid being a military operation and not a CIA operation, which would be under the surveillance of a congressional oversight committee.”
“General Duncan trained me very carefully.”
“How so?”
“He schooled me on the political ramifications of the military in a democracy. He drilled it into me that the Corps does not drop their pants and bend over before the other services or Congress. Democracy’s daisy chain, he called it.”
“You’ve heard of Senator Sol Lightner of North Carolina?”
“Mr. Powerhouse, undefeatable. Heads the intelligence oversight and is the hit man on armed services. Not friendly to the Corps,” Quinn replied.
“That’s him. He’s been in the Senate over twenty years. Well, he’s on the way to Frankfurt with one of his dobermans. Senator Sol is pissed off that he wasn’t advised of the raid in advance. Our position—the President’s, that is—is that it was not only a strictly military affair, but that the need for security overpowered the need to share. The inference is that the senator’s office leaks copiously.”
“But, General,” Quinn interrupted, “the President didn’t ask me if it was okay. He said raid; so we raided.”
Brickhouse smiled. “Just giving you the gist. What the senator is going to try to hit us with is twofold. One, the raid smacks of a massacre. It was overkill. Second, there’s a big no-no. Autopsies performed on our five dead show them all to be riddled with shrapnel from an American cluster bomb.”
“What the hell were we supposed to do, sir? Sit down and hammer out the rules of engagement with the Iranians?”
“Senator Lightner has the magic buzz word to create a media feeding frenzy, namely, our men were killed by friendly fire! TV goes ape shit interviewing the weeping loved ones of the deceased. The print people will unlimber their big verbs on the “We didn’t play fair’ theme by using cluster bombs, and the Marine Corps is going to get busted for our blood lust.”
“What the hell’s this all about?”
“It has its origins with the American people, who want to wage war without casualties. When the words friendly fire emblazon the headlines, half-truths will tarnish one of the great moments in our military history. But we had to advertise to the terrorists that we will hit them again and again.”
“The truth is, sir, our people were killed by one of our cluster bombs.
That’s the truth.”
“We are not playing semperfi and buddy-buddy, Gunner. Remember that your hero, Jeremiah Duncan, as well as myself, has had to feed the Congress a little.”
Quinn wobbled to his feet. His head throbbed now. Horseshit! The Corps comes first. He tilted his carafe of water, spilling it, missing the glass.
“You’re telling me to lie, sir?”
“Oh, hell, no. Just be creative with the truth. We weren’t raised that way, but our countrymen expect us to be saints, to be sparkly clean and pure. All the shit you had to go through to train and carry out a raid against terrorism. Now you’ve still got to justify it. And the press can be as bloodthirsty as the enemy. From what Jeremiah told me about you, you’ll know how to handle it.”
Keith Brickhouse troweled on the mortar of honor and duty and set the bricks of responsibility on his shoulders. Quinn had a sense of capability, a calm feeling of his own capacity.
Although Quinn wanted to walk to the conference room, Mandy would not let him. She wheeled him in. It was not only the wound, but he had expended blood and stamina unconditionally, and his entire body needed revitalizing. The flight from Urbakkan had demanded his final ounce of strength. He had borrowed too much strength from his own willpower, and it had debilitated him with recurring migraines.
The commandant and Senator Sol Lightner came in
and took seats at the conference table. The committee lawyer looked up from the table, half rose, and nodded.
Quinn detected an adversarial relationship at once. V. VINCENT ZAC CO his card read: SPECIAL COUNSEL. The card was undersized but expensive, as was Vincent himself. Formfitting suit, Hoover collar, and the big mustache that small men of the world wear to send a message of their macho. The handshake told Quinn that the counsel had not made his way up through hard labor.
Senator Lightner was honored, honored, honored. He purred on, “We ought to have this little visit before the President’s news conference tomorrow to see if we are all on the same page. I think informality is the order of the day. Now, you do understand, Gunner, that hearings are a usual way of life in the Congress, and you might be asked the same questions later, under oath.”
Jesus, Quinn thought, the last clone of Senator Claghorn on Fibber McGee and Molly, or was it Fred Alien*? A senator’s senator, with honey-drawn banter. Hearings that ensure legislators a role in the separation of powers.
Lightner returned to his seat, lit a cigarillo, and nodded to Zacco,
whose papers were rustling in anticipation. Zacco cleared his throat
repetitively, tuning up. He oozed out a question or two to give a false impression of gentleness and feigned innocence.
Quinn’s guard went on alert.
Vincent led Quinn through his acquaintance and relationship with the late Major General Duncan, his joining the RAM unit, and an “understanding” of Quinn’s role in the raid.
Quinn explained that there were separate entities within the company:
namely, the fighting section, the front cabin men and command, and the aircraft itself. Quinn’s job had been to coordinate the three and oversee the training schedules. In addition, Quinn had worked on the logistics of possible future targets. Quinn had also had his voice in all meetings and a hand on every piece of equipment that flowed to the Marines and had been tested for the SCARAB.
“In actual fact,” Zacco said, “you were not only second in command, but the general’s complete staff.”
“In a manner of speaking,” Quinn answered. “This was his manner of operation, to travel light. Likewise, every man in the unit had a second, third, and fourth skill. Everyone knew how to handle every weapon we carried, and so forth.”
“But a drop in rank straight down from major general to Marine gunner? No disrespect, but shouldn’t there have been a stronger chain of command? Perhaps a colonel directly under Duncan?”
“Well, unfortunately,” Quinn said, “the man who could answer that is no longer here. However, and fortunately, it worked so well that we were right.”
Brickhouse allowed a meager smile to form up.
“”Kiss,” General Duncan would say.”
“”Kiss,” indeed!” Brickhouse retorted.
“It stands for, Keep It Simple, Stupid,” Quinn retorted.
The corners of Brickhouse’s lips smiled higher.
“I know you are hesitant to give an opinion, but wouldn’t you agree that Duncan was a maverick and played a maverick’s game?” Zacco asked.
“I’ll give you my opinion,” Quinn replied. “In my opinion,
Jeremiah Duncan was the greatest Marine I ever met.”
“And men tended to follow him blindly.” That was V. Vincent Zacco’s first mouse turd, Quinn thought as he stared at the counsel’s beaver-squirrel-rat glint. “Let me take that a bit further. Didn’t he have the officers’ helmets wired so he could move you around like robots?”
Quinn laughed out loud. “Duncan made suggestions. The man on the scene made the decision. Our network gave us unity. We moved like a chorus line. Blindly? Hell, this was one of the best trained and informed group of men in any of the services. As far as the missing colonel in the chain of command was concerned, we obviously didn’t need him.”
Lightner’s cigarillo ash grew longer on his frozen face. Zacco switched quickly to the savagery and overkill of the raid.
“The facts on the ground were clear,” Quinn said. “We were compelled to fight in a walled-in, tight area. Our first strike was not only to take as many of them out as possible, but to inflict confusion. We weren’t high on enemy blood, sir. We just didn’t want anyone to get a lucky shot at the SCARAB.”
“So,” Zacco shot back quickly, “many Iranians came out to the middle of the courtyard and tried to surrender.”
“Yes, but maybe you’d like to tell me what we were supposed to do with prisoners.”
“So you massacred them!”
“Not exactly, sir. We were ordered to shoot over their heads and drive them away from the plane, then keep them pinned down.”
Christ! Quinn thought, how could Duncan have made decisions knowing he’d be grilled by Congress later on.
Sol Lightner’s ever kindly Kris Kringle expression was tainted by his wart hog eyes above his hanging jowls.
Zacco then attacked the speed at which the raid was put together. Was it not a sloppy affair, throwing in men not trained properly for the particular mission?
“The very cornerstone of the unit was advance preparation and development of a line of skills. This was guaranteed by drill after drill after drill. Duncan and his pilots checked out the SCARAB for nearly two hours every time it was flown. The systems were pushed every which way in training. The great strength of the SCARAB herself has been proved by her murderous flight to and from the target.”
Quinn had warded off every attack with the ease of a fencing master.
“Shouldn’t we take a little break?” the senator said, knowing his doberman had worked the questioning in to the critical areas, ones that Quinn could not talk around.
“I’d like to continue,” Quinn pressed, “as long as I feel okay.”
He felt that even in his state he had more stamina than the lawyer, who was near yelping in frustration.
“I take it that you and General Duncan were quite friendly.”
“We worked very closely. A lot of formality was dropped. However, our relationship was by the book.”
“You visited his home often?”
“General Duncan’s office traveled with him, in his head, in his briefcase, in the trunk of his car. The office was open for business twenty-four hours a day. He called, I came.”
“And you had dinner together?”
“He fed his dogs as well.”
“At the table?”
“What the hell has this got to do with the raid on Urbakkan?”
“I’m coming to that,” Zacco rumbled, sensing his first taste of blood. “You saw movies together, shot a round of golf with him now and then?”
“May I intercede?” Brickhouse interceded. “General Duncan found Quinn O’Connell to be the best young prospect for a high command that he had ever seen. I’d say, with the amount of responsibility Jeremiah laid on, probably they were closer as friends—and don’t forget, in this kind of unit, the very fine line between officer and enlisted man often blurs.”
“I am suggesting,” Zacco said, “you two were close enough that if you survived him, which you have, you’d do anything to protect his record.”
Quinn saw foul men and their foul tactics. He could do little but glare as he watched Senator Lightner cock his head waiting for his attack dog to strike.
“You wouldn’t lie for General Duncan,” Zacco said, “or cover up out of your deep respect and personal friendship?”
Quinn felt his hands grip the arms of his chair, and he started to rise. Sit down! he ordered himself, sit fucking down, Quinn!
“Like flying to Vegas in a government helicopter to keep a hot date?”
“That is most disgusting,” Brickhouse exclaimed. “Don’t answer it, Gunner.”
“Now, gentlemen,” cooed Lightner, “I do believe it is within counsel’s
purview to establish that if, in Duncan’s position of unlimited power
without accountability, he might have crossed the line and taken
ad
vantage—“
“Of what?” Quinn snapped. “Taxpayers’ dollars? It’s clear what you two are trying to do. I don’t know how low you plan to take this, but I don’t rat on a fellow Marine on matters that are none of your fucking business.”
They had him.
“I’ve only a few more questions,” Zacco said eagerly. “These homemade cluster bombs. You helped Duncan concoct them?”
“We worked with the finest munitions and ordnance people in the country. The weight of the men, the weight of the bombs, the titanium wings, were all factored in to make the plane lighter.”
“This was not a safe bomb,” Zacco accused.
“It was as safe as we could make it. We tested over a hundred of them successfully.”
“But it was not a safe bomb because it exploded at the wrong time and killed five Marine officers. Gunner, they were killed by an American cluster bomb, were they not?”
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“And you were wounded by the same bomb.”
“Yes.”
“Friendly fire,” the counselor snapped.
Hang on, Quinn, he compelled himself. Look at him in his rat’s eyes.
But stay calm, bubba. Quinn shrugged. “That’s a stupid expression. It’s the biggest oxymoron in the language. There is no such thing as friendly fire—safe bombs.”
“It is a term commonly used to denote death at the hands of one’s own people.”
“The bomb was my responsibility,” Quinn said. “I will take the blame.”
The ash fell from Senator Lightner’s cigarillo.
Zacco looked confused. “Would you care to explain that?” he mumbled.
“Sure. From the design to the installation to the firing, it was my baby. I checked the bomb racks at the Tikkah Air Base. They appeared secure. That was proved by the wild flight to Urbakkan. We flew at various altitudes, and the plane was nearly shaken to pieces. No bombs went off. If one had exploded, it would have been the end game You see, Mr. Zacco, you work with your people and your equipment to the best of your human capability, and then you have to trust. The Marine Corps is built on trust.”
