The Berets

by W. E. B Griffin

  Now she would have one of those goddamn pills, she thought.

  She went back to the rented Ford, sat behind the wheel, and ran her fingers over the scrambled eggs on the brim of Phil’s hat. Then she pulled the pill vial from her purse and took a pill from it. She stared at it a moment, then left the car and walked to a fifty-five gallon trash barrel on the pier and threw the pill and the bottle into it.

  (Two)

  Post Stockade

  Fort Jackson, South Carolina

  0845 Hours, 11 December 1961

  The day had begun for Confinee Craig at 0345 hours. The lights had been turned on, and a half-second later the corporal in charge of the barracks had blown his whistle.

  Confinee Craig was on the second floor of the barracks, along with a number of other confinees. A confinee was not a prisoner; a confinee was awaiting trial. A prisoner had been found guilty at his court-martial. For that reason prisoners were separated from confinees. And following the principle of American jurisprudence that individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty in a competent court of law, confinees were not denied the privileges taken from prisoners. Confinees, for example, were permitted to salute. Prisoners were denied that privilege.

  Confinees were also allowed the privilege of military training, although Geoffrey Craig had been unable to detect any difference whatever between “confinee military training” and “prisoner retraining.” Both consisted primarily of close-order drill, calesthenics, and the preparation of field sanitary facilities. That meant digging a latrine in the morning and then filling it back up in the afternoon.

  When the lights went on and the whistle blew, the confinees had leaped out of their beds, ripped from the beds the blankets and mattress covers issued in lieu of sheets, and thrown them to the floor—mattress covers to the left, blankets to the right. Pillows were not available for issue.

  They then stood to attention at the foot of their bunks for “confinee count,” which was conducted by the barracks corporal. As he walked past each confinee, the confinee sang out his last name, his first name, his middle initial, and the last four digits of his serial number.

  Confinees were required to be wearing at that time T-shirts, shorts, and socks, men’s, woolen, cushion-sole.

  Once confinee count was completed, the trainees had forty-five minutes to shower, shave, dress, make up their bunks (less mattress covers), and wash the mattress covers and the uniform they had worn the previous day. A good soldier takes pride in his personal cleanliness. The clothing and mattress covers were washed by taking them to the latrine and scrubbing them with a brush and GI soap on the concrete floor. The washed uniforms, underwear, and mattress covers were then taken outside and hung, in the prescribed manner, on a wire clothesline to dry.

  Inasmuch as Confinee Craig’s hand was in a cast, the daily laundry ritual posed something of a problem for the barracks corporal. This dilemma was resolved by the appointment of a roster of fellow detainees, one of whom each day would be responsible for washing Confinee Craig’s laundry in addition to his own. Because Confinee Craig was perfectly capable of taking the laundry down when it was dry and of making his bed as required, these tasks he did on his own.

  The confinees’ uniform of the day was fatigues (stenciled with P’s in the designated places), cartridge belts, canteens, first-aid packets, and helmet, steel, protective. It was the same uniform prisoners wore, except that prisoners were denied the privilege of soldier’s headgear. They wore instead caps, fatigue, with brim reversed, which made them look like German soldiers in the movie All Quiet on the Western Front.

  Prisoners wore their cartridge belts upside down with the flaps hanging open, signifying that they had lost the privilege of bearing arms.

  Roll call was held at 0430, and differed from confinee count in that it was held outdoors.

  The confinees were then marched to breakfast. Confinees were given the standard ration, which was spooned onto each confinee’s stainless-steel compartmented tray. Confinees were required to eat everything on their trays.

  At 0505 the day’s training began: First came forty-five minutes of calisthenics, followed by a ten-minute break, followed by an hour of close-order drill, a ten-minute break, and another hour of close-order drill.

  At 0800, training in techniques of field sanitary procedures began. Again Confinee Craig’s hand in a cast posed a problem for the noncommissioned officer in charge of training. Since he could not in fairness be excluded from the training, Craig was required to stand at the end of the latrine being dug and to count aloud the number of shovelfuls of dirt taken from the hole.

  It was unfortunate that some dirt spilled on the spot where he had to stand in order to make an accurate count. Much of this dirt, predictably, fell onto his boots. By the time the field sanitation facility had been dug to the required depth, his boots were just about completely covered.

  When the loudspeakers blared Craig’s name, he had just announced the removal of shovelful number 128.

  The call was probably a summons to the hospital, he thought, for the every-other-day examination of his hand. He didn’t believe that the hand required all that much examination, and there was always a wait for most of the morning, and it was humiliating standing there in the emergency room with an MP guard, but that was considerably less unpleasant than standing at the end of a field sanitation facility in the process of excavation, having your boots buried in dirt.

  The barracks corporal waited patiently for Craig to replace his muddy boots and trousers with clean items suitable for an appearance at the administration building. Confinee Craig had yet been unable to learn to tie his bootlaces with one hand, but he had grown rather adept at stuffing the loose ends beneath the crisscrossed laces so the ends wouldn’t drag on the ground.

  The barracks corporal ordered him to proceed to the administration building gate. Confinees always moved at double time. When Craig reached the rear door of the building he double-timed in place until the barracks corporal caught up to him and ordered him to halt.

  When the barracks corporal knocked at the door, it was opened by the confinement sergeant.

  “What the hell took you so goddamned long?” the sergeant barked at the barracks corporal. Then, to Confinee Craig, he said, “I will knock at the door. When we are told to enter, I will enter. You will follow me. When I stop, you will stop one pace behind me. When I render the hand salute, you will render the hand salute.”

  “Yes, Sergeant,” Confinee Craig said.

  When the confinement sergeant knocked at the door, a voice said, “Come in.”

  The confinement sergeant and Confinee Craig marched into the room and stopped.

  “Sir, Confinee Craig is present, sir,” the confinement sergeant said, and saluted.

  “Thank you, Sergeant,” the officer said. “I’ll call you when I need you.”

  “Sir, confinees are to be accompanied at all times.”

  “I won’t tell you again, Sergeant,” Lowell said. “You are dismissed.”

  The sergeant saluted again, about-faced, and marched out of the office.

  “Hello, Geoff,” Lowell said.

  “What do I call you, under the circumstances?” Geoff asked.

  “‘Colonel’ or ‘sir’ will do nicely,” Lowell said.

  “How did you hear about this?” Geoff asked, and remembered after a moment to add “sir.”

  “The check you wrote to the lawyer was called to your father’s attention,” Lowell said. “He brought it to mine.”

  “I’m sorry he found out,” Geoff said.

  “You’re in no position to antagonize me, Geoff. I told you to call me ‘sir.’”

  “Yes, sir,” Geoff said.

  “You do have, I hope, some idea of the magnitude of the jam you’re in?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  For the first time Geoff saw Craig Lowell as an officer. For as long as he could remember, he had known his cousin was in the army. But he had rarely seen him, and never b
efore in a uniform. He wasn’t exactly an expert on the army’s doodads, but he recognized some of the things pinned to Craig Lowell’s uniform: the pilot’s wings, the Combat Infantry Badge, and the Purple Heart medal, with the little gadgets that indicated his kin had suffered wounds on a number of occasions. And there was row after row of ribbons, more than Geoff remembered seeing on most of the officers he had seen here.

  The lieutenant colonel’s silver oak leaves he recognized. His kin did not rank as high as the regimental commander, but he outranked the battalion commander, the bastard who had put him in here and who was probably going to send him to prison.

  “What happened to your hand?” Lowell asked.

  “It’s broken in several places, Colonel,” Geoff said.

  “Apparently you’ve had adequate treatment for it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you in pain?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why did you beat up the sergeant? Beat up, as opposed to punch.”

  “I lost my temper, sir.”

  “What did he say to you that made you lose your temper?”

  “He didn’t say anything; he hit me.”

  “‘He hit me, sir.’”

  “He hit me, sir.”

  “Any witnesses?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You would be expected to accuse the sergeant of landing the first blow,” Lowell said. “Why do you think he did that?”

  “Because the ignorant bastard thought he could get away with it,” Geoff said.

  “Geoff, it is also a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, 1948, to refer to a noncommissioned officer in disrespectful and/or obscene terminology,” Lowell said. “The next time I hear you do it, I’ll charge you with it. Do I make my point?”

  “Yes, sir. May I ask what it is you’re doing here, Colonel?”

  “When your mother heard that you’re about to go to the Federal Penitentiary at Leavenworth, she grew hysterical to the point where your father felt it necessary to summon a physician. Your father reacted to this by telephoning our senators. Fortunately, I was able to turn off the senators.”

  “Excuse me, sir, I don’t know what you mean by that.”

  “When it became known to the members of your court-martial that there was what is known as ‘congressional interest’ in your case, they would feel honor-bound to throw the book at you,” Lowell said. “We’re not at war, so they couldn’t sentence you to death. But in peacetime, what you’re charged with is punishable by life imprisonment. What that really means is that you would probably pull six months at Leavenworth. At that point you would be offered a chance at rehabilitation—that is presuming good behavior, of course. That’s sort of basic training, extending over a period of six months, right in Leavenworth. Presuming successful completion of that, you would be offered the chance to enlist for three years, and your offense would be expunged from the records.”

  “They only drafted me for two,” Geoff said.

  Lowell decided to forgive the omission of the term sir.

  “If you were not selected for rehabilitation, or declined it, you would probably come up for consideration for parole toward the end of your fifth year of confinement,” he went on conversationally. “Your status would be that of a paroled felon, which means that you could not have a seat on the stock exchange or for that matter own a shotgun or get a driver’s license. After several years on probation, depending on who was in office, we could probably get you a pardon, and you could resume your normal life.”

  Geoff said nothing.

  “Now, your attorney has promised you that the army always makes enough mistakes so that he can get the conviction reversed on error,” Lowell said. “Well, cousin, you can treat his promise as bullshit.”

  Geoff looked at him in genuine surprise.

  “I talked to that sonofabitch last night,” Lowell said. “I was disappointed in you. I thought that by now you would have learned that the primary motivation of lawyers is not justice but money. You never feed a bird dog before you take him hunting, and you never pay a lawyer before he’s done what you’re hiring him to do.”

  “He demanded a retainer,” Geoff said, and remembered to add “sir.”

  “He smelled money,” Lowell said. “He doesn’t have any idea how much, but he figured that if there was a colonel in the family, there was probably another fifteen hundred to be had. He asked me for it. I fired him, of course.”

  “You had no right to do that!” Geoff said.

  “See if you can get this into your stupid head, Geoff,” Lowell said. “You are in no position to tell me what I have any right to do. I am very fond of your mother. I will do what I can for you because of what I feel for her.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That corn-pone shyster did not tell you that the Judge Advocate takes very particular care not to make any technical mistakes when the local legal civilian hotshot appears on the scene. And contrary to what you might think, all lawyers in the army are not stupid.”

  Geoff was white in the face.

  “Cousin Craig,” he said, “what the hell am I going to do?”

  “Now we’re down to ‘Cousin Craig,’ are we?” Lowell asked. “I suppose that’s an improvement over a surly ‘sir.’”

  “I didn’t mean to sound surly, sir.”

  “You will be defended at your court-martial by the army lawyer appointed to defend you,” Lowell said. “He will try to get you off on your self-defense plea. I don’t think he will get away with that, but he’ll try. I’ll come down here just before the trial and suggest to him that we paint you in court as a spoiled rich kid to whom the army posed such a culture shock that you lost control. I will suggest to him that he plead with the court that because you were pushed beyond your limits, a lengthy sentence would not be in the public interest.

  “When your trial is over and goes through the local review process, we will get letters from your priest, the headmaster at St. Mark’s, and whoever else your father can beg them from, saying what a saintly character you are. That may induce the commanding general here to cut a couple of years off your sentence. The more we can get off, the better.”

  “Oh, Jesus!” Geoff Craig said.

  “And at that point, we’ll call in some competent lawyers experienced in this sort of thing, and we’ll appeal your sentence all the way up to the Court of Military Appeals. With a little bit of luck, we’ll have you out in eighteen months or two years.”

  “Two years?” Geoff Craig asked.

  “That’s presuming you don’t get in any more trouble in the stockade,” Lowell said. “You had better be the ideal prisoner.”

  “Two years!” Geoff Craig repeated.

  “Be happy if it’s only two years,” Lowell said.

  “But all I did was defend myself!”

  “So you say,” Lowell said. “But you’re going to have to convince the court of that, and my estimate of your chances of doing that range from very slight to none.”

  He stood up and went to the door and knocked on it.

  “Take your punishment like a man, Geoff,” Craig Lowell said. “You did it, and you’re going to have to pay for it.”

  He nodded curtly at Confinee Craig and walked out of the room.

  (Three)

  Station Hospital

  Fort Jackson, South Carolina

  0940 Hours, 11 December 1961

  “Base, this is One-Seven,” the military police sergeant said into the microphone of his Motorola police radio.

  “Go, One-Seven,” the military police dispatcher replied.

  “I think we got that Hertz rent-a-car MP Five is looking for. It’s parked at the hospital.”

  “Is the subject in it?”

  “Negative, negative.”

  “You’re sure it’s the car?”

  “Affirmative, affirmative. We checked it out. It’s unlocked, and the rental papers are on the driver’s seat. The name checks out, but it doesn’t say anything ab
out him being an officer. Same name, but it says he’s vice-chairman of the board of some company.”

  “Hold on, One-Seven,” the military police dispatcher said.

  There was a delay of several minutes.

  “One-Seven, Base.”

  “Go ahead, Base.”

  “MP Five is en route to join you. If subject tries to leave the hospital, you are to detain him until MP Five arrives on the scene.”

  “Understand MP Five is en route?”

  “That is affirmative, affirmative.”

  “Roger, Base,” the MP sergeant said.

  MP Five, who was the Deputy Provost Marshal, arrived in the hospital parking lot at the wheel of the Provost Marshal’s staff car (though PROVOST MARSHAL rather than MILITARY POLICE was painted on the trunk and doors, it was otherwise identical to an MP patrol car) just as Lieutenant Colonel C. W. Lowell came out of the hospital entrance and started toward his car.

  MP Five, Major J. William Hasper, Jr., MPC, was a roly-poly little man of thirty-five with a carefully tended pencil-line mustache. With the exception of white MP leggings, he was wearing MP accouterments.

  “One moment, please!” he called out as he opened his door and Craig Lowell opened his.

  He walked quickly to Lowell.

  “May I see some identification, please?” he demanded.

  “Doesn’t anyone at Fort Jackson salute or say ‘sir’?” Lowell asked.

  The MP major considered that a moment, and repeated: “May I see some identification please?”

  “You salute me, Major, and call me ‘sir,’ and I will show you my identification,” Lowell said. “And then you will show me yours, because I want to make note of the name of an MP major who displays such an appalling lack of military courtesy.”

  MP Five lost his temper.

  He gestured angrily toward the two MPs who were standing beside Patrol Car 17, and they came over at a trot.

  Trained by long habit, the MP sergeant saluted. Lowell returned it crisply.

  “Good morning, Sergeant,” he said. He looked at the Major. “Your men display fine military courtesy, Major.”