The Berets

by W. E. B Griffin

  “I’m not the general,” Lowell said. “He just loaned me his car. Actually, he loaned me his wife’s car.”

  “Well, then, sir,” the captain said, “is there some way I can help you, sir?”

  “Well, I had planned to entertain that poor lonely soldier away from home at Christmas,” Lowell said, “but he has already found some female to do that for him.”

  The captain chuckled. “You scared hell out of the sergeant, sir. He saw the bumper sticker and called me.”

  “I’m sorry about that, Captain,” Lowell said. “Having to be on duty on Christmas Eve is bad enough without having a general sneaking around.”

  Geoff signed the sign-out book and came back out of the orderly room. He looked at the bumper. It bore both Fort Benning and Fort Rucker bumper stickers. The Rucker sticker was number six, the Benning number twenty-eight. Both stickers had the single star of a brigadier general.

  When they were in the car, Geoff said, “I wondered what you were doing with a Volkswagen.”

  “Never look a gift Volkswagen in the trunk,” Lowell said. “It belongs to a friend of mine, Bill Roberts.”

  “What are you doing here?” Geoff asked. “At Benning, I mean. You didn’t come here because of me?”

  “I’m shuffling paper,” Lowell said. “Unfortunately, I’m very good at that.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” Geoff confessed.

  “I am preparing a lengthy document, which will be signed by General Roberts and favorably endorsed, we hope, by General Howard, which will recommend to the Secretary of Defense how the army should use airplanes in the next war.”

  “Oh,” Geoff said. “Why is that unfortunate?”

  “Because those who write about it seldom get to do it,” Lowell said. And then he went on quickly, as if anxious to change the subject: “When General Roberts went home for Christmas this afternoon, he left me the keys to his car.”

  “You’re going to spend Christmas in a motel here?”

  I feel sorry for him, Geoff realized. He really wanted me to go with him, because he is going to be as alone on Christmas as he thought I was going to be.

  “No. I’ve got my airplane here. I’m going home myself. Home being Ozark, Alabama, outside Fort Rucker. I was going to take you with me and bring you back in time for duty on Thursday morning.”

  “I haven’t thanked you for getting me out of the stockade,” Geoff said, changing the subject.

  “When they have you running around in the Florida swamps, eating snakes, you may wish you were back in the stockade,” Lowell said.

  “Why Special Forces? Why did you do that for me?” Geoff asked.

  “For you or to you?”

  “Either.”

  “Are you miserable in Special Forces, the lady aside?”

  “No. So far it’s been interesting.”

  “You want a straight answer to that question?”

  “Please.”

  “For one thing, sounding like a guidance counselor at St. Mark’s, I thought that getting through Special Forces training would make a man out of you,” Lowell said.

  “Or kill me in the process,” Geoff said, chuckling.

  “To coin a phrase, ‘it separates the men from the boys,’” Lowell said. “And then I had a selfish interest.”

  “I don’t know what you mean by that,” Geoff said.

  “There’s an old saying; Kipling said something like it, which I forget. The modern version is ‘Soldiers and dogs, keep off the grass.’ Ten years from now, when you’re in your office at 13 Wall Street and you read in the WSJ that our Senator is about to take the army off the gravy train, I want you to remember the good people you met when you were a soldier. Underpaid and overworked and literally prepared to lay down their lives. And, remembering them, I want you to get mad enough to call the sonofabitch up and really tell him where to head in.”

  “Is that what you do?”

  “I get your father, kicking and screaming in protest, to do it for me,” Lowell said. “They pay more attention to him than they do to me. I’m just one more soldier they want to keep off the grass.”

  “You really like the army, don’t you?” Geoff said. “It’s not what Dad says.”

  “What does Dad say?”

  “That you just don’t like banking.”

  “I don’t like banking,” Lowell said. “He’s right about that.”

  “And you do like the army?”

  “I’m not sure you’ll understand this, Geoff,” Lowell said.

  “Try me.”

  “The toughest thing a decent man has to do in life is send another decent man somewhere where he’s probably going to get killed,” Lowell said. “That’s called command. And the most satisfying thing a man can do in life is to be a commander.”

  “I don’t think I understand that,” Geoff confessed a moment later.

  “I didn’t think you would,” Lowell said. “Tell me about the lady.”

  “Why?” Geoff said, unwilling to end the conversation. “Why is that satisfying?”

  Lowell down geared the Volkswagen. They were approaching the Fort Benning Gate. The MP on duty, who had been casually waving cars through, saw the general officer’s sticker, popped to rigid attention and saluted.

  Lowell absentmindedly returned it.

  “I don’t know,” Lowell said thoughtfully. “It’s probably got something to do with the fact that we are far less removed from the savage than we like to think we are. All I know is once you experience it, you’ll do anything to have it again.”

  “You’ve been a commander.” It was more of a statement than a question.

  “Once, when I was about your age, in Greece. And a couple of years later, in Korea.”

  “And that’s it? That’s why you put up with all this bullshit?”

  “Tell me about the lady, Geoff,” Lowell said. “We have exhausted the previous subject.”

  Geoff knew that he had somehow disappointed his cousin. And he sensed that in saying what he had, Craig Lowell had opened a door that was rarely opened. Now that it was closed again, it would not soon be reopened.

  He wished that he had been unable to understand.

  “She’s the sister of a friend of mine,” Geoff said. “She’s German.”

  “German German, or what?”

  “German German,” Geoff said. “They escaped from East Germany.”

  “And you’re stuck on her?”

  “I never felt this way before.”

  “It will go over like a lead balloon with your parents,” Lowell said. “Can you handle that? Or isn’t it that serious?”

  “What’s wrong with Germans?” Geoff snapped, and then remembered. “Your wife was German, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes, she was,” Lowell said. “The family, with the possible exception of your mother, was united in the belief that Ilse, who was eighteen when I married her, was a conniving European slut who had latched on to a meal ticket.”

  “They’ll jump in on Ursula, then. They don’t have a pot to piss in.”

  “Does she know that you’re…‘comfortable’?”

  “No.”

  “One final profound philosophical observation as we approach the end of our journey,” Lowell said, turning into a Ramada Inn. “One of the advantages someone like you has in being in the army as a private soldier is that you’re likely to come in contact with a girl who will look at you as a private soldier, not as Craig, Powell, Kenyon and Dawes, Jr.”

  Geoff looked at him as he stopped the Volkswagen in front of a motel building.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “I keep this room all the time,” Lowell said. “I’ll give you a key.”

  “She’s not that kind of a girl.”

  “All I said was, you can use it if you want to,” Lowell said.

  “When did your wife die?” Geoff asked.

  “God was in his heaven, and all was right with the world,” Lowell said. “I was commanding the task force that mad
e the breakout from the Pusan perimeter. An hour before I was to link up with the people who had landed at Inchon, my battalion commander caught up with me in an L-4. I was convinced the sonofabitch was going to steal my glory. I was wrong. I got the glory and the DSC. What Jiggs wanted to see me about was a TWX he had just got from Germany. The TWX said that Ilse had been killed twenty-four hours before in an automobile accident.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Grab what you can while you can, Geoff,” Lowell said. “There’s not much out there.”

  Geoff didn’t reply.

  “Do I get to meet her?” Lowell asked.

  “Shit, I want you to,” Geoff said. “But I think now would be a lousy time.”

  “I understand,” Lowell said. “Let’s go talk to Mommy. I’ve still got to go to Rucker tonight.”

  X

  (One)

  Miller Army Airfield

  Fort Benning, Georgia

  1905 Hours, 24 December 1961

  Lowell parked Bill Roberts’s wife’s Volkswagen in a spot reserved for colonels’ automobiles and then went into Base Operations. He gave the keys to the noncom on duty and told him that as far as he knew, General Roberts would be returning to Benning early Thursday morning.

  Then he checked the weather. He had seen the jeep driver comfortably curled up on a cot with Action Comics, and decided it wouldn’t hurt him to leave him there and walk to the aero commander. He thought wryly that he had nothing else to do anyhow.

  The commander was parked some distance from Base Ops, in a parking ramp behind the hangars, where it wouldn’t be quite so conspicuous among its olive-drab brothers. He had walked no farther than the end of the parking ramp in front of Base Ops, where the VIPs’ airplanes and transient aircraft were parked, when he glanced at the line of aircraft and stopped short.

  He was as much upset at what he would now have to do—chew ass, and rather intensely, on Christmas Eve—as at the violation itself. He turned and went back in Base Ops.

  “Where’s the aerodrome officer?” he asked.

  “He’s taking a nap, sir. Can I help you?”

  “Wake him up,” Lowell said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The aerodrome officer, a captain wearing the infantry center insignia, appeared, sleepy-eyed, a moment later.

  “Can I help you?”

  “There’s an armed Mohawk on the line,” Lowell said. “Who does it belong to?”

  The aerodrome officer did not know who the guy in the Tyrolean hat was, and he was annoyed at having been roused from his nap.

  “We don’t talk about armed Mohawks,” he said. “May I ask who you are?”

  “I’m Colonel Lowell, and we don’t park armed Mohawks on the transient ramp. I asked you who it belonged to, Captain.”

  “Sir, I don’t know,” the captain said. “But if it’s important, Colonel, I’ll see if I can find out.”

  “Get to it!” Lowell ordered sharply.

  The captain was on the telephone when another captain in an International Distress Orange flight suit walked into Base Ops carrying a flight helmet and a Jepp case. An embroidered cartoon insignia of the Mohawk was sewn to the flight suit.

  “Who the hell parked that Mohawk on the line?” he demanded angrily.

  “Who are you?” Lowell asked.

  The captain looked at him and after a moment recognized him.

  “I’m Captain Witz, Colonel,” he said. “I’m to take that Mohawk to Rucker. But I didn’t expect to find it on the line.”

  “Neither did I,” Lowell said. “Why is it going to Rucker?”

  The captain visibly considered for a moment Colonel Lowell’s Need to Know, and decided in the affirmative. He knew Lowell to be in the small group of brass in charge of what was going on.

  “The story I get is that half of the black boxes are out, and that they gave up on fixing them here. Major Brochhammer’s arranged to have SCATSA fix them tomorrow at Rucker. He told me to take it down there and make sure that it was fixed.”

  “Guns and all?” Lowell asked.

  “I guess it was time, sir. It’d take three, four hours to get them off.”

  “When did all this happen?”

  “Major Brochhammer called me about half an hour ago, sir.”

  “Taking you away from your family on Christmas Eve?” Lowell said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “If you’ll loan me your orange rompers and your hat,” Lowell said, “I’ll take it to Rucker. I presume they expect it?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m to taxi right to the SCATSA hangar Colonel.”

  “I think I know what happened,” Lowell said. “The people who couldn’t fix it were anxious to get home on Christmas Eve. So instead of waiting for you to show up at the hangar, they had it pulled out here so they could lock the hangar up and go.”

  “That’s probably it, sir,” the captain agreed.

  “We can’t have that,” Lowell said. “So before you go home, Captain, you will find out if that’s what’s really happened. If it is, you will call the sergeant—I think it’s a warrant officer, come to think of it—out here, and really eat his ass out. We simply can’t have the air force finding out what we’re doing. That’s really more important than whoever was in charge disobeying his orders.”

  “I understand, Colonel.”

  “If it turns out that he got permission from his commanding officer to do what he did, call Major Brochhammer and turn the incident over to him. And tonight. I want some ass chewed tonight.”

  “Yes, sir,” the captain said.

  “Beneath his friendly smile,” Lowell said, “behind the smoke screen he sets up from that smoldering root he keeps in his mouth, Major Brochhammer can be one mean sonofabitch when aroused. I think he should be aroused tonight. To repeat myself, more is involved here than somebody taking off early because it’s Christmas Eve. If the air force can prove we’re putting guns on these things, we’re in trouble.”

  “I wasn’t aware the colonel was checked out in the Mohawk, sir,” the captain said carefully.

  “Captain,” Lowell said with a smile, “I’ll have you know I was co-pilot on the famous, very first acceptance test of the very first Mohawk. It was famous because Lieutenant Colonel Rudolph G. MacMillan, who was driving, got us as far as the threshold of the active before he set the brakes on fire. We had to be towed ingloriously back to the hangar.”

  “I’d heard about that, Colonel,” the captain said, chuckling. “But I didn’t know it was you with Mac.”

  He pulled the heavy plastic zipper that ran all the way down the front of the flight suit, and started pulling the suit off.

  “Oh, to hell with it,” Lowell said. “No one’s going to see me in civvies on Christmas Eve. Just loan me your helmet and help me turn the airplane on.” He turned to the aerodrome officer. “I presume there’s an APU* in place?”

  “No, sir,” the aerodrome officer said. “No one asked for one.”

  “If you weren’t napping, Captain,” Lowell said, “you would have seen that Mohawk on your line and known that either a tractor or an APU would be required. Get one out there!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What do we put on the manifest, sir, authorizing you to replace me?”

  “I’ll sign it,” Lowell said. “I think everybody but Jim Brochhammer and I are gone. In that case, the rules of seniority probably put me in charge.”

  They walked out to the Mohawk. There were those who considered it an ugly airplane and those, Lowell included, who thought it was beautiful, in the sense that function is beauty. It was a no-nonsense, businesslike airplane, the first “real war-plane” the army had ever had.

  He was in large measure responsible for the army having it at all. When he was flying a desk in the Pentagon, he had been the money man in a conspiracy involving himself, Bill Roberts, then still a colonel, and Brigadier General Bob Bellmon.

  Roberts and Bellmon had had the idea, and he had found the money in available funds. The o
ther piece in the pie was the marine corps.

  The marine corps had been authorized to look into a new observation airplane to replace the Cessna L19, a two-seater single-engined airplane. The navy pretty well left the marine corps alone when it wanted new equipment, exercising control through control of funds. And the marine corps was not restricted, as the army was, to a very limited aviation role. The marine corps was authorized fighters and fighter-bombers and had unquestioned right to twin-engined airplanes, if that was what they thought they needed and if they could get the money from the navy.

  The marines had been concerned about “twin-engine reliability.” They wanted an observation airplane that could continue to fly if one engine failed or was damaged by ground fire while the plane was directing artillery over enemy-held terrain. They had been looking at a Cessna idea. Cessna proposed to put two engines on a version of its single-engined civilian model 172.

  It was a good idea. Instead of mounting an engine on each wing, which would have required beefing up the wings to take the strain and would have been enormously expensive, they planned to mount the second engine in the rear of the cabin, in line with the engine in front. There were several advantages to this: For one thing, it would be very easy and cheap to design and build two thin booms—which had only to be strong enough to support themselves—to replace the existing single tail and make room for the propeller arc of the second, rear-mounted engine.

  Reinforcing the existing cabin to take the second engine would not be a major expense. And the airplane could be flown by anyone who could fly a single-engine airplane. With the engines in line in a “push-pull” configuration, all that happened when either one of the engines quit was that the airplane flew slower. When a wing-mounted engine quit, the plane immediately made a sharp turn toward the dead engine. Training pilots for this eventuality was both expensive and dangerous, for the only way to demonstrate the condition was to shut one of the engines down.

  The army placed an order for half a dozen of the marines’ push-pull Cessnas for test purposes and to put the air force to sleep. And after Colonel Bill Roberts and General Bob Bellmon had some discreet talks with some old friends in the marine corps, the Deputy Chief, Plans and Requirements Section (Fiscal), Aviation Maintenance Section, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics—an obscure office under the command of an anonymous major named C. W. Lowell—quietly made available to the marine corps almost nine million dollars of the funds available to his office.