by James Philip
“Thank you, sir.”
“The Air Force is taking down all the bridges on all the roads out of Milwaukee,” Grabowski explained, taking the younger, much larger man by the arm and drawing him over to the map table. “The Corps of Engineers is blowing all the bridges this side of Waukesha.”
“There must still be thousands of refugees on the roads between Milwaukee and here, sir?”
“Yes,” Grabowski acknowledged tersely. “We believe the enemy is throwing out flying columns along every available road and track. At one level his tactics are infantile, amateurish, scattering his fighting power around like confetti. On another level, it’s exactly what we don’t want him to do. We want him to concentrate his forces and attack us so that we can destroy his fighting mass. What we do not want him to do – not least because we don’t have a feel for his real combat strength – is to get us chasing shadows in the countryside, splitting up our own forces.”
Schwarzkopf’s brow had furrowed.
If the battlefield had been the deserts of the Middle East rather than the hilly farmlands and woods of Wisconsin; he would have started making comparisons employed by Lawrence of Arabia during the Arab uprising against the Ottoman Turks by now. That was what this was; a massive regional insurgency using space and maneuver to challenge what, on the face of it, ought to have been impossible odds. Except, that was, that the forces in and around Madison amounted to no more than an under-strength infantry division rather than any kind of army, and the insurgents were potentially tens of thousands strong, sated and resupplied by the riches of a large, previously undamaged city, having plundered its food stores, fuel and munitions depots and recruited an unknowable number of new recruits.
Schwarzkopf gazed at the map.
There were two battalions of paratroopers, two battalions of Marines, Grabowski’s Wisconsin Guardsmen, twenty or thirty APCs and about a dozen mobile howitzers in positions on the eastern bank of the Yahara River.
Although new defensive positions were being hurriedly prepared to block the junctions of Interstate 90 coming up from the south, Interstate 94 from the east, and Route 151 coming down from the north-east, the logical key lines of advance on Madison, but...
To the young officer’s West Point trained eye most of the State Capital’s defenders were dug in on the wrong side of the four lakes of the Yahara River; Lake Mendota, Lake Monona, Lake Waubesa and Lake Kegonsa.
What if the enemy bypassed Madison?
The State Capital lay between and around the two northern lakes, Mendota and Monona, with the key roads passing to its east but the enemy’s movement was not dependent – as would any regular army be dependent - on the main routes; the rebels could take the back roads, tracks, paths through the hills and woods, passing virtually invisibly through this country. The enemy’s lack of heavy equipment was not a weakness, it was his biggest advantage; always assuming somebody was pulling the rebels’ strings. Schwarzkopf now took this as a given although he was unsure how far up his own chain of command that realization had travelled. Before he had brought Company ‘A’ east from Minneapolis there had been a lot of ill-informed, speculative talk – gossip really - about a ‘popular insurgency’ in Chicago, campaigns of widespread civil disobedience, of whole Midwestern towns refusing to co-operate with the military; but no rational discussion about how exactly a so-called ‘popular’, or spontaneous ‘resistance movement’ had managed to thwart the US military and in places drive it back in near rout. The rebellion ought to have been crushed at birth, long before it had a chance to become a magnet for anybody, anywhere in the US who had a grudge against the Federal Government or who felt moved to inflict his – or her - particular madcap religious or political convictions on fellow Americans.
Chillingly, the nightmare which had convulsed Washington DC in December seemed to have been resurrected – ten times bigger and meaner - on the western shores of Lake Michigan. The survivors and refugees choking the roads into Madison spoke of a brutal, unreasoning religious fanaticism, of a nihilistic unstoppable horde that gloried in the destruction of everything it touched; with its foot soldiers marching toward Armageddon in the sure and certain knowledge that the end of days was nigh...
He was dog tired.
I’m over-thinking this!
The young officer’s commanding officer could see that Schwarzkopf was practically out on his feet. Harvey Grabowski had been running a hardware store in Minneapolis when the World went mad on the night of 27th October 1962. However, what with one thing and another he had spent half his adult life in the Army and although he had not admitted it to his wife, he had missed military life so bad it had hurt. It had been his call to promote Schwarzkopf to major and give him Company ‘A’, the Brigade’s mechanized spearhead.
It had hardly been a tough call.
Schwarzkopf was head and shoulders – both in height and ability – the best young officer in the 32nd Infantry, and any fool could see it without having to wait for the man’s service ‘jacket’ to catch up with him.
Born Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf in Trenton, New Jersey, his father was a German-American graduate of the West Point class of 1917, and his mother a distant relation of Thomas Jefferson who hailed from West Virginia. Norman Schwarzkopf senior had joined the New York Police Department after World War I where, in 1932 he was chief investigator in the Lindbergh baby abduction case. The father was an interesting man in his own right. In the 1930s the New York detective had reinvented himself as the narrator of the ‘Gang Busters’ radio show before rejoining the Army in 1940. It was hardly surprising that the son was in the thrall of the father and had yearned, from an early age to follow him into uniform.
Between 1946 and 1951 Schwarzkopf senior had been posted in succession to Tehran, Geneva, Italy, Frankfurt and Berlin, and back again to Iran. As a boy young Norman had attended the Community High School in Tehran, the International School in Geneva, and the American High School in Frankfurt before graduating top of his class from the Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania. Unusually for a US Army officer he was a member of Mensa - the largest and oldest high IQ society – his IQ having been tested at 168.
Although Harvey Grabowski did not think his best company commander was quite the certifiable genius that that sort of IQ score supposedly denoted, he had absolutely no doubt that Schwarzkopf was by far and away the sharpest intellectual knife in the brigade’s draw.
At West Point Schwarzkopf had passed out 43rd in the 1956 class of four hundred and eighty students, graduating with a Bachelor of Engineering degree. While at West Point he had led the Chapel choir, wrestled, played football and acquired the – typically unimaginative because in some things the Army was timeless - nickname ‘Schwarzie’. According to his tutors at West Point the student Schwarzkopf had acquired a deep respect for the generalship of, among others Civil War heroes Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Patton’s hard-driving point man Creighton Abrams.
Schwarzkopf had enjoyed one of those busy, planned junior career paths that told old hands like Grabowski that he was somebody who had been marked out for future high command in the six years leading up to the October War. Commissioned into the infantry he spent six months at the Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, earning his Parachutist Badge ahead of joining the 187th Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky; promoted first lieutenant in 1958 by the following year he was a platoon commander in Germany in the 6th Infantry Division, and in July 1960 he was appointed aide-de-camp to Brigadier Charles Johnson, the commander of the US Berlin Brigade based in West Berlin. He had made captain in July 1961, where back at Fort Benning he had earned his Master Parachutist Badge prior to being enrolled, in 1962 in a Master of Science course in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Yes, he was a coming man.
Officers like Schwarzkopf held the future in their hands.
Albeit a different future to the one they
were facing now.
“Get your head down, son,” Grabowski chuckled, patting the younger man’s arm.
Dismissed, Schwarzkopf went to check that his men were settling back into camp life and to ascertain the status of his wounded. Then he trudged back to the abandoned schoolhouse where he had left most of his earthly belongings – changes of uniform and skivvies, hardly any personal items – before he took Company ‘A’ up country a week ago. Stripping off his filthy, sweat-encrusted clothes he showered.
Afterwards, he was so tired that he was very nearly in a dream, pulled on a t-shirt and pants, toppled onto his field cot and slept.
Chapter 9
Sunday 7th June 1964
McDermott’s Open, Cherry Hill, New Jersey
The newly married couple had moved into the house next to the Merchantville Country Club three weeks ago. The place was far too big for the two of them but it had a well-appointed reception room on the ground floor for meetings, and if the Brenckmann-Betancourts ever got around to it a not so small ‘banqueting hall’ in which to entertain guests. Upstairs there were two fully equipped bathrooms and five spacious bedrooms, three of which were still mothballed.
On the map Cherry Hill, situated seven or eight miles south east of Philadelphia on the New Jersey bank of the Delaware River was an ideal base for two ambitious young professionals on the Federal payroll. In fact it was way too far out, often it took as long as two hours to get through all the road blocks and security checkpoints on the routes approaching the bridges over the river, invasive military electronic countermeasures interfered with TV and radio reception, and made the telephone system crackle and hiss like a damp log on a hot fire.
Ironically, had Dan had the time Cherry Hill was precisely the sort of old American settlement that he would have enjoyed exploring and researching. The proto-historian in him was tantalized by the knowledge that Quaker followers of William Penn had peacefully founded the community in a place they had called Colestown – now a local cemetery – alongside the native Lenni-Lenape tribe in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Colestown had eventually become the Delaware Township in 1844, and had in more modern times been incorporated into the Cherry Hill amalgamation of half-a-dozen other historic villages. Cherry Hill’s pre-1945 war population of around five thousand had doubled by 1950 and topped thirty thousand by 1960 as it suffered the fate of so many small suburbs of great, expanding cities. Nowadays, the nine-hole Merchantville Country Club and its surrounding grand houses, like McDermott’s Open, had long since become islands of old-fashioned decadence in an ever expanding urban sprawl.
McDermott’s Open – a mansion by any other name – was the father of the bride’s wedding present to the happy couple. It dated to the twenties when a minor steel mogul had decided to honor the most favorite son of the Merchantville Country Club; one John J. McDermott, the first native-born golfer to win the US Open.
It transpired that unknowingly, Daniel Brenckmann had married a frustrated ‘golf nut’. It seemed that one of the reasons Gretchen had not taken him very seriously until history decreed that they spent the night of the October War together – actually, there had been a host of other reasons she had not taken him seriously but they had got over those in the intervening months – was that he had never shown the remotest interest in golf.
In her teenage years Gretchen had spent her summers sailing in small boats, or riding out, and every other spare minute of the whole year whacking a golf ball around the New England countryside. The most recent version of her post-Battle of Washington ‘to do list’ was: one, get better (a work in progress); two, get married (achieved); three, resume her career and make up for lost time as soon as possible (again, a work in progress); and four, get back out on the golf course and regain her pre-injury handicap (which was next on the agenda and likely to be a real tester since she had been playing of a startlingly low handicap of two before the Cuban Missiles Crisis went wrong).
More than once Dan had caught his beloved gazing out of the window at the nearby sixth fairway. Gretchen’s injuries had mostly healed over but she was still unsteady on her feet some days, her movements stiff, sometimes excruciatingly painful and her right shoulder still refused to co-operate when she attempted to swing a golf club.
John J. McDermott was one of Gretchen’s heroes.
‘He’s still the youngest man to ever win the US open,’ she had informed Dan, scandalized that he could be so ignorant. ‘When he won in 1911 he was just nineteen. He won again in 1912. That year he was the first man to post a below par score in the Open!’
Being married to the beautiful, fascinating force of nature that was Gretchen Louisa Brenckmann nee Betancourt was an exhilarating rollercoaster ride, and something told her husband of barely a month that the ride was not about to slow down any time soon.
He had left his wife sleeping – she had not got back from DC until two that morning – while he went downstairs to the palatial kitchen to rustle up fresh coffee and toast. Returning upstairs he discovered his wife wide awake and hungrily digesting the inner pages of last night’s edition of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, the temporary capital’s largest daily circulation paper.
Gretchen lowered the Bulletin momentarily to flash a smile at her husband.
“Coffee!” She murmured approvingly as he carefully placed the bed tray, with its supporting legs, across her lap. She briefly discarded the paper and offered her left cheek for a pecking kiss. “The bombing of the British Embassy sounds awful?” She observed rhetorically. “Somebody ought to be fired. The rest of the diplomatic community must think we are all perfect barbarians!”
Dan was not about to disagree with his wife.
He groaned.
“Oh, I meant to bring this morning’s Inquirer upstairs,” he apologized.
Gretchen giggled.
Dan tingled all over; God in Heaven that giggle always hit the spot.
“I’ll read it later,” she declared huskily. “After I’ve had my breakfast and you’ve had your wicked way with me!”
This latter was an unhurried, gently greedy thing notwithstanding the repeated loud ringing of the bedside telephone. After the third unwanted interruption Gretchen ordered a halt be called so that Dan could disconnect ‘the bloody thing’. They had had to start all over again from the beginning and blissfully, that took forever.
“For all you know that could have been the Vice President’s people ringing you?” Dan offered, plugging the bedside handset back into the wall socket. His father-in-law had had the house equipped with all ‘mod cons’. The plastic plate by the leg of the bed tidied away the room end of telephone cables strung all over the house and shrieked modernity at him, as did the appliance-filled kitchen and ‘utilities room’ downstairs, this latter being essentially a ‘wash room’ incorporating big washing machines and hot air ‘tumble’ dryers which vented steam and condensation to the outside world via a tangle of pipes and ducts. To his mind the whole house was hugely ‘over the top’ and must have cost Gretchen’s father a prince’s ransom. Not that money was any object to a man like Claude Betancourt.
“No, LBJ won’t come anywhere near me or father unless he wants something really badly,” Gretchen retorted mildly, lazily. She was lying on her right side in the tangled sheets, her bare, bullet-scarred back pale in the half-light of the room with the drapes closed.
Dan stared thoughtfully at the bullet wounds, the scar tissue still mottled and pink where surgeons had had to open her back to extract the two rounds. His wife’s scars had already become a part of her, a thing she treated as badges of honor and which reminded him every day how desperately close he had come to losing the love of his life last December.
When he had finally discovered her in one of the crowded emergency care wards at Bethesda she was comatose and nobody knew if she would live or die. Later nobody had known whether she would be blind or paralyzed or both; at every step he had feared the worst and to see her now so full of life, so happy and so
profoundly herself very nearly convinced him that there had to be a loving merciful God overseeing them both.
Gretchen rolled onto her back, her lips twisting with a spasm of discomfort.
“Nothing,” she muttered instantly. “It’s just my back reminding me that a part of the State Department Building fell on it, sweetheart.”
McDermott’s Open came with a full time housekeeper, a severe middle-aged African American matron, a cook who was married to Gretchen’s driver – also a full-time Betancourt family retainer – and two gardener-handymen. Miscellaneous cleaners came in daily during the week and when required at the weekend. Dan had still not found out who wrote their pay cheques; the sudden opulence of his married lifestyle jarred against the careful waste not want not ethos of his upbringing. Likewise, the very idea of having ‘servants’. It was water off a duck’s back to Gretchen, or so he had assumed thus far.
“I know you hate this place,” his wife said without warning.
“No, well, not exactly...”
“You hate it, sweetheart,” Gretchen decided. “Admit it.”
The man shrugged helplessly.
“You father’s been very good to me,” he countered, ‘it’s not so much that I hate this place. I mean, it’s what most people dream of, but I don’t feel it’s our home. We haven’t done anything to earn this,” he waved airily. “Perhaps, one day we will. But...”
Gretchen smiled.
“What?” Dan asked. He had pulled on his pants and half-buttoned his shirt. The morning was far enough advanced for one or other of the house ‘staff’ to have moved ‘above stairs’, and he did not want to risk encountering one of them in his skivvies when he went back down to the kitchen to fetch his wife fresh coffee.
“I told Daddy that I wanted to live here when I was fourteen years old,” Gretchen confided, a mischievous twinkle sparkling in her grey blue eyes.
“Oh, I...”
“Why do men always take me so seriously?”
