The Berets

by W. E. B Griffin

“That’s true, of course, General,” Hanrahan said, “but that’s not what we’re training to do.”

  “And at best, you just might be on to something,” General Howard said.

  Hanrahan felt his temper rising, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on what precisely was making him angry. General Howard was being less disparaging about Special Forces than he normally was.

  “I made these same points this afternoon, when I came back from Washington,” General Howard said. “To General Harke. I do not believe I managed to make a convert of him.”

  Major General Kenneth L. Harke, formerly the commander of Eighty-second Airborne Division, had recently been assigned as Chief of Staff of XVIII Airborne Corps. It was generally believed that he was being groomed to take over the corps when “Triple H” Howard was promoted or transferred.

  “May I ask, General, how the subject came up?” Hanrahan asked.

  “For all practical purposes, General Harke will be running XVIII Airborne Corps for the next six months or so,” General Howard said. “I was trying to make him aware of how I think he should do that.”

  “You’re being transferred, General?” Hanrahan asked.

  “Yesterday, I was asked to come to Washington,” Howard said. “This morning, I met with the Secretary of the Army, the Chief of Staff, and DCSOPS. The Secretary of Defense is not satisfied with proposals submitted to him vis-à-vis the future of army aviation. He apparently met with the Chief of Staff; Brigadier General Bob Bellmon, the Director of Army Aviation; and a lieutenant colonel named Lowell, whom I believe you know.”

  “Yes, sir,” Hanrahan said. “Lowell is an old friend.”

  “The Secretary of Defense apparently feels he must choose whether to put army aviation out of business or to expand it exponentially,” Howard said. “He ‘suggested’ to the Secretary of the Army that General Bellmon submit a revised proposal, something on the order of a wish list, and gave him fifteen days to do it. It was delivered 20 October. There has already been a response indicating that General Bellmon has again failed to grasp the magnitude of the expansion the Secretary of Defense has in mind. So another proposal has been requested. I have been directed to oversee the preparation of the second proposal.”

  “Fascinating,” Hanrahan thought aloud.

  “In order, obviously, that I will be able to understand the problems of aviation better, the Secretary of Defense has waived the proscription against senior officers being trained as aviators.”

  “What?” Jeanne Howard asked, incredulously.

  “While Bellmon is having another shot at the ‘Army of the Seventies Aviation Estimates,’” General Howard said, “I will go to Fort Rucker and learn how to fly.”

  “That’s absurd,” Jeanne Howard said. “You’re too old.”

  “Be that as it may,” he replied, obviously annoyed with her, “the point of this conversation is not my decrepitude but the fact that I will frequently be away from the post. General Harke will be in command in my absence.”

  “I understand, sir,” Hanrahan said. Howard had warned him that Harke was another anti-Special Forces senior officer. Most senior conventional Airborne officers were. And the reason Howard had Paul and Patricia to dinner was also pretty clear. It would be known to every senior officer on the post by noon the next day that the general and the Green Beret colonel and their wives had shared a social meal at the club. That would suggest that Triple H Howard held Hanrahan in higher esteem than was generally believed.

  Hanrahan thought that was a very nice thing, indeed, for Triple H Howard to have done.

  “As you well know, Paul,” Howard went on, “you cannot leave an officer in charge and then second-guess his every decision. But on the other hand, since I will not be relieved of command of either the post or the corps, I want you to feel free to come to me—I expect you to come to me—with any problems you might have that General Harke may not understand.”

  That meant two things: that Harke was really going to go after him and Special Forces, apparently with the blessing of the CONARC commander; and that Howard was offering, at least to some degree, to protect Hanrahan personally, and Special Forces generally, from Harke.

  “Thank you very much, General,” Hanrahan said. “I’ll try not to bother you.”

  “Honey,” Jeanne Howard said, laying her hand on her husband’s, “you’re not really going to try to learn how to fly?”

  “Does anyone else detect a certain doubt in her mind that I’m not up to it?” General Howard asked. “Or am I wrong?”

  “You’re fifty-one years old!” she said.

  “I will not, because I am a very nice fellow, respond in kind,” General Howard said, “with a recitation of your vital statistics.”

  The steamed clams were delivered.

  “Tell me, Paul,” General Howard said, “expert that you are on exotic food: Do these work the same way oysters do?”

  “I intend to put it to the test,” Hanrahan said.

  “Tonight?”

  “There is no time like the present, General,” Hanrahan said.

  “You’re a pair of dirty old men!” Jeanne Howard said, loud enough to turn heads throughout the dining room.

  IV

  (One)

  The Farm

  Fairfax, Virginia

  1645 Hours, 10 December 1961

  “Take a quick shower,” Barbara Bellmon ordered Brigadier General Robert F. Bellmon the moment he walked in the door. “I talked to Jeanne, and it’s black tie.”

  “Why?” he asked. Bellmon was a man on the very near side of fifty, medium-sized, losing some hair, and in the process of growing jowls. His wife was slender and freckled. Although only a year separated them, she looked much younger.

  “Because I felt like it,” she said.

  “Why?” he repeated, already starting to unbutton his tunic. “It’s only a play.”

  “Because I always feel je-ne-sais-quoi when I have to wear my mink with my dungarees.”

  He laughed at her. The mink she’d paid for herself. She had believed that Kodak was going to take a drop when no one else did, and against the advice of her broker, she’d put her money where her mouth was. Kodak had dropped nine and three-eighths, and she had a mink.

  And not many occasions to wear it, he thought as he climbed the stairs to their second-floor bedroom, except at times like this. Although he was not thrilled with this one—he wasn’t much on stage plays—what the hell; if it pleased Barbara, he could go along cheerfully.

  The bedroom was furnished in a style he thought of as Fu Manchu Modem. There had been a tour in Japan between War II and Korea, and they’d bought this furniture there. It wasn’t really Japanese (the bed had a headboard and a footboard, lacquered and carved; the Japanese slept on the floor), but it obviously wasn’t western.

  The farmhouse was furnished in a wide range of styles. Just about everybody who had lived here had added something or other brought home from foreign tours somewhere.

  The Farm had been in the Waterford (Barbara’s) family for four generations. Brigadier General (later Lieutenant General) Porterman K. Waterford, Sr., upon his appointment to that rank and assignment as Deputy Chief of Cavalry, War Department, had bought it before War I. He had decided that it made much more sense to take some cash he had accumulated and buy a Virginia farm than it did to settle for some landless brownstone in the District of Columbia.

  He correctly believed that he would one day be appointed Chief of Cavalry and major general, which meant that he would at that time be expected to live in the quarters set aside at Fort Meyer for the officer holding that appointment. He had seen those quarters and did not wish to live in them.

  So he bought The Farm, a six-room fieldstone house and 120 acres. He added two rooms to the house and was able to finance the whole operation with his fifty percent of the proceeds from renting the land to a local farmer.

  When he retired and left Washington, he did not sell The Farm; he rented it to his successor, who was s
imilarly disenchanted with the quarters provided at Fort Meyer. Six years after that, Lieutenant Colonel (later Major General) James D. Waterford was assigned to the War Department, and remained on and off in Washington for fifteen years. During his time at The Farm, he added another two rooms and a kitchen to the building, and acquired an adjacent farm of 360 acres.

  His son, Porterman K. Waterford II (ultimately major general), lived at The Farm three times during his military career, during which periods another 640 acres of farmland were added to the holding and four more rooms were built onto the farmhouse.

  Under Major General (then Colonel) Porterman K. Waterford II, the somewhat unimaginatively titled Virginia Farm, Inc., was set up under the laws of Delaware. Stock was issued to various members of the family, officers were elected, and thereafter, with scrupulous attention to the rules of the Internal Revenue Service, The Farm was operated as a business.

  Whenever the Waterford men, or the husbands of the Waterford women, happened to be stationed in Washington (which was virtually inevitable two or three times in an officer’s career), they were permitted to live on The Farm, paying the corporation a rent equal to his army housing allowance. If there were two such men in Washington at the same time, the rules of seniority prevailed. On several occasions two families of young officers occupied The Farm at the same time, which had made it necessary to construct a second kitchen so there would be no conflict over that. Later the family had a second house built, “the guest house,” in which lived the junior officer and his family.

  The resident was required to manage The Farm during his residence, advised by whoever rented the farmland. This made it legal under IRS rules for The Farm, Inc., to furnish the manager an automobile in addition to the station wagon and the jeeps and other vehicles already property of The Farm.

  The Farm now contained 1,240 acres of land. There were sixteen rooms in the farmhouse and seven in the guest house. Outside were a swimming pool, two tennis courts, and a skeet and trap range. If they got what they hoped to get for their share of this year’s corn and soybeans, Brigadier General and Mrs. Bellmon were seriously considering bulldozing a dirt landing strip and building a simple hanger.

  The Farm manager’s vehicle was a Cadillac Fleetwood sedan, eight months old, and bore none of the military decals that festooned the Buick coupe and Ford station wagon that General Bellmon drove to work at the Pentagon. The Cadillac rarely went “officially” to the District. Officers, even brigadier generals, are as reluctant to be seen driving Cadillac Fleetwood automobiles as they are for their wives to be seen in full-length mink coats.

  Neither was there anything so indiscreet as a sign to assist visitors to find The Farm. Instead, an ancient mule-drawn plow had been retrieved from one of the barns, sandblasted to remove the rust, painted black, and installed on a fieldstone pillar.

  First-time visitors were instructed to “turn off the country road when you come to the black plow, and drive 1.5 miles. It’s the first house you’ll come to, an old fieldstone thing behind a stone fence.”

  Tonight they were going to the theater and then to dinner as the guests of Lieutenant Colonel Craig W. Lowell. Lowell, who was in Washington on TDY, working for Brigadier General Bill Roberts, had been a guest at The Farm for the weekend. Barbara had mentioned then in passing that she had been unable to get tickets for a touring Broadway-cast performance of a show she wanted to see. She had been not only frustrated but angry: Thirty minutes after she’d read the advertisement in the Washington Post she tried to buy tickets and was told nothing was available.

  Shortly before noon on Monday, Craig Lowell had telephoned The Farm with the announcement that if she and Bob were free, he had “fallen into” tickets for the play for Wednesday night. Whether Craig was repaying their hospitality or showing he was very fond of Barbara Bellmon, it didn’t matter. Barbara was going to get to wear her mink, go to the theater, and afterward have dinner.

  Barbara drove the Fleetwood. She was a good driver, she liked to drive, and Bob had already made one round trip to the Potomac that day. They crossed the Fourteenth Street Bridge, drove past the White House, and circled Lafayette Square.

  “You’ll never find a place to park,” General Bellmon said. “You’re going to have to go to that parking garage.”

  “Watch this,” she said, pulling up before the marquee of the Hay Adams Hotel.

  The uniformed doorman hurried around the front of the car.

  “General Bellmon,” Barbara said, “as guests of Colonel Lowell. Will you take care of the car, please?”

  “Certainly, madam,” he said, and raised his hand over his head and snapped his fingers. A bellboy appeared and waited for Barbara to step out from behind the wheel.

  As they walked across the lobby to the elevator Bellmon took his wife’s arm and whispered in her ear, “Have you been here before? You seem to have everything pretty well organized?”

  “I should tell you I have been carrying on with Craig every afternoon,” she said, “but you’d be liable to believe it. He told me what to do.”

  He had not told her which way to go when they got off the elevator, and they had a long walk before they found the door with 623 on it.

  Lowell, in a dinner jacket, answered the knock. He embraced Barbara enthusiastically, and she responded in kind, primarily because they both knew it annoyed General Bellmon.

  “Looking the gift horse in the mouth,” General Bellmon said, “I’d like to know how you managed to get tickets to this thing.”

  “Where there’s a will, there’s a way, General,” Lowell said. “Set your heart on something and go after it.”

  He was not talking about theater tickets, Bellmon thought. He was up to something. Whenever Lowell called him “General,” alarm bells rang.

  Bill and Jeanne—Brigadier General and Mrs. William R. Roberts—were in the sitting room of the suite. They had obviously just arrived. The women smiled at each other; they were not the kissing kind. The men shook hands.

  “This is very nice,” Barbara said, looking around the suite.

  “It’s comfortable,” Lowell said. “And there’s an office over here.” He led her to a room off the sitting room. It was an office, Barbara was surprised to see—a real, functional gray metal desk and IBM electric typewriter-type office, not a portable typewriter on a writing desk. It was complete, she saw, to a multiline telephone, a dictating device, and even a large combination-lock safe.

  “Very nice,” Barbara repeated.

  “It’s a good place to work,” he said.

  There was another knock at the door, and Barbara wondered who else’s hospitality Craig Lowell was repaying. It was, instead, a waiter pushing a cart loaded with silver-domed dishes.

  The waiter uncovered the dishes one by one with great flair. Barbara saw that Craig was as pleased and surprised by what was offered as she was. There was, she thought, an explanation for that. Lowell’s order for the hors d’oeuvres had probably been simplicity itself.

  “I’m having a few people in for a drink. Would you send up something we can munch on?”

  He probably had in mind chunks of cheddar, crackers, and peanuts. What the hotel delivered was oysters and clams, shrimp, ham, caviar, smoked salmon, and tiny sandwiches holding various combinations of the meat and fish. There was a wedge of Brie and a half-moon of Stilton. And two silver coolers, each with a large bottle of champagne.

  “That’s nice, isn’t it?” Lowell said innocently. “I ordered the wine. There’s booze, of course, but if I have two drinks, I’m sound asleep by act two.”

  “I thought we were going to have dinner afterward,” Bill Roberts said.

  “We are,” Lowell said. He turned to the waiter. “Is that all the wine?”

  “There’s half a dozen bottles in all, Colonel,” the waiter said.

  “Well, that ought to be enough,” Lowell said. “We can serve ourselves, thank you.”

  He handed the waiter a folded bill.

  Barbara saw he
r husband shaking her head at the hors d’oeuvres. Like her, he had been estimating what the display had cost. Unlike her, he was sure it was simply another example of Lowell throwing his money in people’s faces. Barbara thought differently. Lowell didn’t look at money as other people did. He literally came into more money, month after month, than he could spend. When he was around his subordinates or people he didn’t know, he was careful not to wave it around (his uniforms and automobiles and the airplane being obvious exceptions); but here and now, in what he believed was the company of his friends, his only concern was whether they would be pleased with what he offered. He had not a thought about the cost, she was convinced. There were people in the offices of Craig, Powell, Kenyon and Dawes charged with verifying and then paying Craig Lowell’s personal bills. He never even saw them.

  Lowell opened the champagne and filled glasses. As he was passing them out, there was another knock at the door. Barbara was closest to it and opened it.

  A small, dark-haired, large-eyed woman was standing in the corridor.

  “Sandy can’t come,” Sharon Felter announced.

  “Well, at least you’re here,” Barbara said.

  Lowell walked quickly to Sharon Felter and handed her a glass of champagne.

  “Am I late?” Sharon asked. “I had to wait for the babysitter.”

  “Not at all,” Lowell said. “We just opened the grape, and I am about to propose the first toast.”

  The others looked at him curiously.

  “To the Eagle flights,” Lowell said, “and those who shall fly them.”

  Barbara had never heard of the Eagle flights. She glanced at her husband, and then at Bill Roberts. From their stiff faces it was evident they didn’t like the subject coming up.

  “And a question, gentlemen,” Lowell said. “How come I’m here, shuffling paper? And not an Eagle flier myself?”

  “Christ,” Bill Roberts said. “That’s classified, Craig. Don’t you know that?”

  “And here’s three Kremlin moles if I ever saw any,” Lowell said, nodding at the women. “Sharon even speaks Russian.”