Dress Gray

by Lucian K. Truscott

  Hedges had shown how it was done with his brigade in the Big Red One, the First Infantry Division. He demanded the toughest area of operations in the Iron Triangle, and he nailed down that AO like he was fencing in his own back yard. There wasn’t a gook within fifty miles who didn’t know Hedges’ Hellions were holding that piece of real estate. They kept their distance, that was for sure. Once an ambush captured a VC province infrastructure leader, and they interrogated him, scared the hell out of the little yellow coward. When he’d had enough, he said the VC had a name for Brigade Commander Hedges. It was some gook word—never could remember it right, but it translated to “Red Devil.”

  “Charlie, Charlie?” The voice of General Rylander broke the silence. “Charlie, what about this plebe they found up in Popolopen this morning? You got anything more for me? I’m going to need a report before close of business today, you know.”

  “I’ve got Terry King on it right now, sir, and I should be hearing from him any minute,” said Hedges, referring to his Third Regimental commander, Colonel Phineas Terrance King, with whom he’d served in the Big Red One. They had been battalion commanders together, before Hedges got his brigade—Hedges’ Hellions. Terry and the Pirates … those were the days … his mind was wandering again. He thumped the eraser on his desk and blinked.

  “Terry’s the best man we’ve got, sir. He’ll have the whole ball of wax wrapped up for us. I’ve got complete confidence in him, sir. We’ve got the lid screwed on tight, and it’s going to stay that way.”

  “Goddammit, Charlie, the lid better be on tight. June Week starts the day after tomorrow, and we’re going to be overrun with weight from Washington. The Chief of Staff’s going to be up here. You know that. And if there are any questions about this business …”

  “There won’t be, sir,” Hedges broke in, clipping his words crew-cut short. He knew how to deal with Rylander. Reassure the old bastard, reassure him again, then cut him off and let him go back to wondering what pasture he was going to graze in, when his time was up as supe. It worked every time.

  “Yeah. Okay,” said the superintendent. “Give me a call, will you, Charlie, when Terry comes in with that report? I want to know what went on.”

  “Will do,” said Hedges, again purposefully omitting “sir.” He dropped the phone in its cradle as soon as he heard the click on the other end. Talking with the superintendent of the Military Academy was like going shopping with the wife. Hedges reached for his binoculars. Sitting around waiting. Waiting. Waiting in one of those Fifth Avenue stores while she tries on this dress and that dress, saying yes, dear, reassuring the old bitch, then cutting her off, opening the wallet, flipping the credit card at her with a wordless glare. Worked every time.

  Christ, it was a pathetic state of affairs when the supe reminded you of your wife. Jesus! The army was in sad shape when a lily-livered old relic like Rylander could creak his way through the machinery and plop! There he is! Supe! Well, Rylander was just lucky as hell his classmates, that crowd from the class of ‘40, were in all the key slots down in the Pentagon right now. Every stud worth the price of his pants down in Washington knew the DCSPER, the deputy chief of staff for personnel, had been Rylander’s roommate when they were cadets. And everybody in the CIA knew Rylander’s Life magazine “victories” were just so much smoke Westmoreland and LBJ were blowing in the face of the country and the Congress. Everybody in the Agency knew Rylander and the 1st Cav had been just running around up there in II Corps blowing away a lot of bush and wasting a lot of brass and lead. Hell, Johnson had been screaming at Westmoreland for another face, another symbol, another set of starched fatigues he could put on the tube every night and show off, like generals standing around in front of TV cameras meant wars were being won. Rylander had gotten the nod.

  Now it was all over. Vietnam was finished. Hedges knew it. Just a few days before, he’d been talking about how the war was messing everything up with Colonel Addison Thompson, head of the Social Science Department at the academy. They talked frequently. Hedges had been a protégé of Thompson’s when he was a cadet, and Thompson had followed—some even said helped—the young general’s career ever since. Thompson was as politically plugged in as any officer in the army. His connections were older, and reached deeper, and were tethered to more debts than anyone Hedges knew. Thompson had powerful friends in both political parties, but more importantly, he had helped to place, over the years, career bureaucrats in every key agency in the federal government. Right now, at this very moment, Hedges knew, close friends of Thompson’s were in policy-making positions in the State Department, the CIA, the ultra-secret National Security Agency, not to mention the West Pointers he had sprinkled liberally through every echelon of the Department of Defense. Colonel Addison Thompson, in short, was a man of considerable power. And the truly astonishing thing about the man was that no one suspected the silver-haired old social science chief up at West Point of anything more than occasional pointy-headedness. He was known all over the army as West Point’s most liberal academician.

  It had been Thompson who told Hedges about Bobby Kennedy. Only days before the California primary, Kennedy was chasing Hubert Humphrey right off the map. The thing that rankled Thompson was the fact Kennedy was using the war to do it to Humphrey. Hell, it had been his brother, JFK, who started the war. And according to Thompson, Bobby Kennedy had goosed the war along while he was Attorney General. Thompson had found out about Bobby Kennedy and his meddling ways from his friends in the CIA. He was always sticking his nose in the Agency’s business when he was Attorney General. It was like JFK had given him some kind of family credit card to play around with the world. Both Kennedys, but especially Bobby, were constantly meddling in the affairs of the Agency. And Vietnam was the mechanism for the meddling. They had wanted to know everything that was happening in that godforsaken little country. They had pressed the CIA into operations its own experts warned against. Then JFK had committed troops—they were called “advisers,” but everyone knew they were just the opening wedge.

  And now Bobby Kennedy was using what had been his own personal little war to clobber Humphrey. He was successfully stealing the war issue from McCarthy, and nobody—nobody—knew the real truth about Bobby Kennedy and the CIA and the war in Vietnam. Nobody but Colonel Addison Thompson and a few others. And Hedges knew. He remembered the time back in ’62 Bobby Kennedy had worn a green beret as he had helicoptered around, on a secret mission for his brother the President. Hedges had been his escort officer. The memory settled inside him like a good hot meal. Hedges was satisfied.

  He’d gotten his, over in Vietnam: two tours of duty, one in ’62–’63 as one of Kennedy’s “advisers,” the kind of job where you could drop out of sight for a year and really get your feet wet, really get a handle on what was happening over there. That was when he first found out about Bobby Kennedy and his toy green beret and his unusual affection for things military. Then ’66–’67, his battalion command, a field promotion from lieutenant colonel to brigadier general (skipping the rank colonel altogether), and his brigade in the Big Red One.

  He watched his flanks over there. He nailed down his little piece of real estate and he stayed put. He collected his basic load of medals, even pulled down a little publicity himself, the night his battalion had been overrun by an NVA regiment, and they hadn’t suffered a single KIA. Blew away two hundred gooks that night. Vietnam had had its glamour, but now anybody could see that career-wise, the war was finished. Addison Thompson had been predicting as much for two years. And so Hedges was already lining up his ducks for his next move. The first duck in line was the superintendent.

  Brigadier General Hedges had always thought of himself as a kind of dues collector, the man you pay. In 1948, the year they graduated from the Point, his roommate told him he should have studied accounting, not tactics. It seemed like Charlie Hedges was always tallying things up, counting. Naturally, his roommate missed the point. Charlie Hedges never counted. He measured. He was one of
those rare individuals with a nearly animalistic sense of smell for other men. He didn’t need to count the odds. He just knew, just like he now knew that the war had peaked, careerwise. It was indeed no mistake that Charles Sherrill Hedges was the first man in the class of 1948 to be promoted to brigadier general, two years ahead of his class 5 per cent list, the select group promoted ahead of schedule.

  General Hedges could smell the fear coming off the superintendent’s words over the phone. He could see it. It was like … steam, rising out of those vents along Thayer Road, hot mist rising and disappearing into the air. Everybody tended to ignore fear, especially when they sensed it might be coming from their superiors. But not Hedges. He used fear, used his nose for the weaknesses of men to maneuver them into positions most advantageous to him, Hedges. In his mind’s eye, he pictured the superintendent of the Military Academy, pacing the carpet in front of his desk, switching the phone from ear to ear, staring out his windows overlooking the Hudson, staring out there, waiting. Men like him were always waiting. Waiting and worrying, Rylander was a worrier. Every moment in the life of the Rylanders of the world was that moment in Nam when somebody yelled “Incoming!” and you ducked and ran for cover. Rylander was always ducking and running, and he didn’t even know it.

  Hedges prided himself not for his courage—for which he had been amply decorated—but for his sense of timing. What good was courage if you didn’t know when to exercise it? What good was an act of bravery if no one noticed? And so General Hedges honed his sense of timing, worked on it, polished it … labored over it the way Rylander probably worked on his golf strokes. Hedges knew one day his sense of timing would really pay off. And he knew that day was fast approaching.

  Hedges leaned back in his leather reclining desk chair and ran his stubby fingers through his thinning hair. At 5 ′9″ tall, forty-two years of age, he cut a figure of extraordinary military bearing. He weighed a perfect, trim 155. His face had the ruddy good looks of a young Jimmy Cagney, helped along by five minutes each morning in front of a sun lamp, which he kept in the lower right-hand drawer of his desk. The eighteen customembroidered ribbons on the breast of his uniform jacket were arranged in seven rows: two rows of four, two rows of three, two rows of two, topped with the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second highest award for heroism in the face of the enemy. He got that one the morning after the NVA regiment had tried to run over his battalion. A miniaturized Combat Infantryman’s Badge was poised over the DSC, between the edge of his lapel and the seam of his jacket sleeve, giving his uniform breast an uncrowded, yet massively impressive display of official decorative color. For this reason, Hedges did not often remove his uniform jacket, preferring to wear it even when he felt a bit uncomfortable. But he would remove his jacket and hang it on one of those standing valet hangers next to his desk—the breast of the jacket still visible to anyone in the office—to achieve the appearance of informality, if seeming a little loose served his interests. In fact, it could be said accurately that General Hedges wasted little time with matters which did not in some direct way serve his interests. Leisure time, he reasoned, was wasted time. And so when he played squash during his lunch hour, he played for two reasons: One, to win. Two, to stay fit. The game, squash, was good for his image.

  Having disposed of the superintendent and his niggling, time-wasting telephoning. Hedges was indulging in a little image-building. Patton had his pistols, MacArthur had his dark glasses. Hedges had his binoculars. He was sitting in his wood-paneled, forest-green carpeted office in the Brigade Headquarters at the southeast corner of Central Area, and through his Nikon binocs (which he had bought on sale at the Ton Sun Hout Air Force Base PX while waiting for his R & R flight to Hawaii) he was watching the two dozen or so cadets marching Central Area below him. Hedges kept the binocs in their shiny black leather case at the upper right-hand corner of his desk expressly for this purpose. Anyone walking in his office would see the binoculars case, nicked and scraped from hanging around his neck in combat, one of the many mementos of his career strewn around his office: the six unit plaques on the wall behind him gleaming brass and enamel and polished walnut reproductions of regimental crests; a relief map of the Iron Triangle on the wall above a three-cushion brown leather sofa; a pair of chromed, crossed bayonets mounted on a VC flag next to the map; on his desktop, a 1:25 scale model of a Huey Model D, outfitted with miniature M-60 machine guns on its door, a toy version of his C & C ship back in Nam.

  Hedges held the binoculars to his eyes and with his right index finger focused each eyepiece. He could see the mouths of the cadets marching the area. He watched them passing each other on the area, one heading north, the other south. General Hedges shifted his vision from cadet to cadet until he identified what he believed to be a continuous conversation between two cadets whispering to each other as they passed on the area. Then he picked up the telephone and called the Cadet Guard Room, located immediately beneath his office in the Headquarters. But he didn’t pick up just any phone. He picked up a battery-operated army field telephone, directly connected to a similar unit in the Guard Room. Hedges turned the crank on the side of the field telephone and listened to the pleasant whirr of the little generator which would ring a bell on the field telephone downstairs.

  “Yessir!” came an excited voice over the field phone. “Cadet Guard Room, sir!”

  “Give me the area sergeant. This is the commandant speaking,” said Hedges. When the area sergeant, the cadet in charge of the punishment tour detail, came on the line, Hedges told the cadet to report to him. Within thirty seconds, the area sergeant was at his side. Hedges pointed out the offending cadets and ordered their names be brought to his desk.

  The area sergeant returned with the cadets’ names, General Hedges pulled from his center desk drawer a pad of two-dash-ones, disciplinary Report Forms, and in his neat, tutored hand, wrote up the cadets for talking on the area. Eight more hours walking the area. In his nine months as commandant of cadets, General Hedges had become known for his binocular-fed pad of 2-1’s. In fact, it was so extraordinary for a man of his rank and stature—a general, the commandant of cadets—to take time out of his day to write up cadets for minor infractions of regulations, that the general had become known among cadets as “Two-Dash Hedges,” a sneering reference to the pad of 2-1’s he kept close at hand. But still cadets talked on the area.

  This was a source of some discomfort to the general, for when he began his campaign to control talking on the area, he figured it would take only a few slugs to bring the practice to an abrupt halt. Nine months later, he found himself on the lookout for repeat offenders. If the commandant observed the same cadet or cadets talking again, even several weeks after he had first reported them, he would whip out his 2-1’s again, adding to his disciplinary report the words “Gross lack of judgment.” This wording escalated the punishment to twenty hours. There was one cadet walking punishment tours on the area who had been out there every weekend for nine months, having been caught repeatedly talking on the area by the commandant. In all that time, it had never occurred to General Hedges to order the man up to his office to answer the obvious question: Why? So the cadet walked and the general watched, and the eternal game went on. As he watched the cadets marching back and forth across the area, as he zeroed in on their lips with his Nikon binoculars on this afternoon in late May, Brigadier General Charles Sherrill Hedges knew that today, anyway, he had accomplished his mission. In the time-honored way of the Military Academy, cadets were being taught a lesson. They were being punished.

  3

  “General? General?” Thirty-five-year-old Althea Shanks peered around the door leading into Hedges’ office. “General, Colonel King is here to see you. Should I show him in?” Hedges placed his binoculars on his desk and looked up.

  “I’ll see him now,” he said. The door opened, and Colonel Phineas Terrance King, a lanky six-foot-tall Oklahoman who walked with a slight limp, a shrapnel wound received in Vietnam, stood in the doorw
ay.

  “Terry! Come on in! What have you got for me?” Hedges rose from his chair and walked around his desk, tugging at the front of his uniform jacket. Phineas Terrance “Terry” King was his personal emissary to the rest of the world, his right-hand man, his most trusted subordinate. And he was more than that. He was a buffer zone between Hedges and everyone below him in the chain of command. Though the office of the commandant was fully staffed—deputy commandant, S-1, S-2, S-3, and S-4, several special assistants, cadet activities officer, a normal quota of noncommissioned officers including a brigade sergeant major—Terry King was Hedges’ man. He was present at all sensitive policy meetings. He was taken into the confidence of the commandant on matters considered to be of importance to the academy, the army, and the nation. But most importantly, he was used by the commandant as a kind of major-domo executive assistant, given secret extra duties which he understood were of special sensitivity. It was Hedges’ sly way of stepping slightly outside the direct strictures of the chain of command to pick the man in whom he would place the burden of his trust. He picked his Third Regimental commander, one of four colonels who served in that capacity for each of the four respective cadet regiments. But Terry King was Big Red One. He was Terry and the Pirates. He was … combat. King understood this. He appreciated the fact Hedges had chosen him. He knew it meant that Hedges would look out for him. Hedges was going places. Therefore, King was going places, too.

  Colonel King walked twelve steps forward to the spot where Hedges stood waiting for him, exactly opposite the middle cushion of the leather sofa. King’s garrison cap was clamped tightly under his left elbow. Hedges held out his right hand. It was one of their signals. King did not have to salute Hedges, as did all other officers who reported to the office of the commandant of cadets, no matter their rank, position, or relationship to General Hedges (with the sole exception of the supe, of course). The two men shook hands. Hedges sat on the middle cushion of the leather sofa, where he always sat. King sat on the edge of an armchair across from the general, where he always sat. On his lap he held a manila folder containing the report on the dead cadet.