The Berets

by W. E. B Griffin

  “How did Dianne take it?”

  “She paid for the mother to fly down for the funeral, but she didn’t go herself.”

  “A brother and a boyfriend buying the farm in a year is tough,” Lowell said. “How long is the legal business going to take?”

  “I don’t think the JAG* is busting their ass to hurry anything. Ellis’s father as much as accused them of trying to steal his stuff.”

  “The general will see you now, Colonel Lowell,” Lieutenant Wood said from the general’s open door, and then, when Lowell got to the door, he formally announced him: “General, Lieutenant Colonel Lowell.”

  Lowell marched in, stopped three feet from General Hanrahan’s desk, saluted stiffly, and announced, “Lieutenant Colonel Lowell, C. W., sir, requesting an audience with the commanding general, sir.”

  General Hanrahan returned the salute.

  “I would hate to think you’re making fun of my aide, Craig,” he said.

  “No, sir,” Lowell said.

  “You are being then a paragon of military courtesy, which makes me think you want something I’m not going to want to give you.”

  “You have always had a suspicious nature, General.”

  “Where you’re concerned, I have every justification. Charley, this is Colonel Lowell…”

  “The colonel and I have met, sir,” Wood said.

  “…whom I have known since he was younger than you. If he ever asks for anything, you check with Sergeant Major Taylor, Colonel Mac, or myself before you give it to him. He is not a nice man.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell Colonel Mac, please, what the cat has dragged in, and ask him if he is free,” Hanrahan said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Nice boy,” Lowell said.

  “What do you want, Craig?”

  “Nice to see you, too, sir.”

  “What do you want, Craig?”

  “Can you tell me all about HALO in thirty minutes?”

  “Why should I want to?”

  “Because then we can go to lunch and talk about something pleasant,” Lowell said.

  “I don’t know if I can tell you about HALO in one afternoon, much less thirty minutes, and I won’t tell you a thing about it until you tell me why you want to know.”

  Without knocking, Lieutenant Colonel Rudolph G. MacMillan walked into the office.

  “Uh-oh,” he said, “what’s he after?”

  “Aside from offering to buy us lunch, he wants to know all about HALO.”

  “I didn’t say anything about ‘us’ for lunch,” Lowell said. “Mac can buy his own lunch.”

  “Will you require anything else, General?” Lieutenant Wood asked.

  “Stick around, Charley,” General Hanrahan said. “Colonel Lowell is taking us all to lunch.”

  “Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Wood said.

  “Why do want to want to know about HALO, Craig?” MacMillan asked.

  “Odd that you should ask,” Lowell said. “It happens that General Roberts has decided that it is a blank in my military education that has to be immediately filled in.”

  “And how did that come to pass?” Hanrahan asked.

  “We were having a conference,” Lowell said. “I’ve been doing that a lot lately in case no one has heard, and Brigadier General Jack Holson made the astonishing announcement, apropos of nothing special that I can recall, that the army, specifically Special Forces, possessed the capability of exiting a jet at thirty thousand feet and landing in the pickle barrel of their choice.”

  “What’s so funny about that?” Mac bristled. “We can.”

  “So General Holson, who thought he saw disbelief on my face, somewhat pointedly informed me,” Lowell said. “He then observed that I really didn’t know much about airborne capabilities, did I? To which I responded I knew as little about airborne operations as I could manage. My aversion to exiting airplanes in flight is well known, I went on to say. For some reason, General Holson took umbrage at what I hoped would be considered an amusing reply.”

  Hanrahan chuckled. Brigadier General Jack Holson was an old paratrooper and later a convert to Army Aviation and air mobility. But he was first of all a paratrooper who had jumped a company of the Eleventh Airborne Division onto Corregidor to take it back from the Japanese. It was not hard for him to imagine just how “pointed” Jack Holson’s remarks to Lowell had been.

  “At which point,” Lowell went on, “in what I thought at the time was spreading oil on troubled waters, Brigadier General Bill Roberts announced that just as soon as there was time, I would bring myself up-to-date on airborne operations.”

  “And he wasn’t kidding…. There is now time?” Hanrahan asked.

  “He was not kidding,” Lowell said. “Yet another draft of the air-mobility business has been sent around for criticism, and Roberts sent me up here to learn all there is to know about HALO.”

  “Not about regular operations?” Mac asked.

  “I was able to make the point, Colonel, that anyone who had served with you for any length of time had all the details of World War Two or conventional parachute operations burned indelibly in their memory.”

  “Screw you, Lowell,” MacMillan said, laughing.

  “But you’re serious about HALO?” Mac asked.

  “I believe there will be both a multiple choice and an oral quiz on my return,” Lowell said.

  MacMillan went to the phone and dialed a number.

  He was calling an expert, Lowell thought. The expert would give him a quick briefing, taking no more than an hour, probably. He would be finished then at, say, half past two or three, and then he could call the hospital and see if Captain Joan Gillis, Medical Corps, was free for cocktails with him and his very good friend, Antoinette Parker, M.D. If Antoinette was part of it, he believed, Joan Gillis would agree to come. And since Toni Parker was indeed a very good friend, she could be expected to find excuse to leave them immediately after dinner.

  He had telephoned Joan Gillis five times since he’d met her coming home from Frankfurt. They had always been pleasant, amusing conversations, and he thought that tonight might be the night. This insane idea of Bill Roberts that he find out all there was to know about HALO might have a happy ending after all.

  “Roxy,” Mac said to the telephone, “put a dress on, pick up Patricia Hanrahan, and meet us at the main club. Lowell’s here and he’s buying lunch. Half an hour.”

  “I thought you were calling a HALO expert for me,” Lowell said.

  “There he is,” Mac said, pointing at Lieutenant Wood. “Before he went to work for the general, he was assistant HALO project officer. He’s made sixty? Wood?”

  “Sixty-four, sir,” Wood said.

  “Sixty-four HALO’s,” Mac said.

  “Strange, Lieutenant,” Lowell said. “You don’t look insane.”

  “It’s a very interesting capability, Colonel,” Lieutenant Wood said.

  About which, beyond any question, I am about to learn more than I really care to know, Lowell thought.

  Hanrahan put that into words: “After lunch, Craig, I’ll have Charley brief you and run you through the training program.”

  “Show me the program, you mean,” Lowell said. “‘Running me through it’ has an entirely different connotation.”

  Lunch was mostly pleasant. Lowell really liked Roxy MacMillan and was fond of Patricia Hanrahan. But neither was pleased with his solution—his having landed at Fayetteville and rented a car and a motel room—to the problem of whose feelings would be hurt if he spent the night with somebody else. And Roxy MacMillan, who was still angry about the way Tom Ellis’s father had gone through his BOQ “like a vacuum cleaner,” talked about that.

  “I’m not sure if I should call up Dianne Eaglebury and ask her down for a weekend or whether that would be opening the wound again,” Roxy said.

  “Leave her alone,” Mac said. “She’s lost a brother and a boyfriend. If you were her, would you want to come down here?”

&
nbsp; “I didn’t ask you,” Roxy said.

  “Mac is right, Roxy,” Lowell said.

  Roxy thereupon announced that she would get some steaks and call Toni Parker, and they would have a barbeque.

  “Can I ask somebody?” Lowell asked. There was no way out. Refusing Roxy would hurt her feelings, and he was unwilling to do that, no matter what the damage to his seduction of the lady shrink.

  “I’m afraid to ask who,” Roxy said. “But I will.”

  “A doctor I know at the hospital,” Lowell said.

  “Who is he?”

  “He’s a her,” Lowell said.

  “Sure,” Roxy said.

  “She’s a shrink,” Lowell said. “She can ask Charley Wood what has driven him to jump out of an airplane at twenty-thousand feet sixty-four times.”

  “Thirty-thousand feet, Colonel,” Wood corrected him. “They call it ‘jump pay.’”

  Lowell chuckled. Now that he’d been around him a little, he liked the starchy little West Pointer.

  “Are you making your paratrooper cracks again?” Roxy said. “Don’t you ever knock it off?”

  “Only when I am offering observations about people who wear girl scout hats,” Lowell said.

  “Well, we’re all sick of that too, Lover-Boy,” Roxy said. “Knock it off.”

  “When Tom’s girl came to the hospital,” Patricia Hanrahan said, “she had made him a doll with a green beret.”

  “Oh, hell,” Roxy said.

  “Let’s change the subject,” General Hanrahan said.

  “Think of something funny,” Roxy said.

  “Like throwing Lowell out of an airplane?” Mac said.

  “That’s funny,” General Hanrahan said. “The idea has a certain appeal.”

  “Is there any way I could see my cousin without causing any trouble?” Lowell asked.

  “He finishes McCall today,” Mac said. “They get their berets tomorrow. Being the louse that you are, you could and probably will see him when they come in from McCall. If you were a nice guy, you’d go to the graduation parade and leave him alone tonight.”

  “What’s wrong with tonight?” Roxy asked. “What the hell, bring him to the steak broil.”

  “No, Roxy,” Mac said.

  “Why not? I mean after all he’s family. I remember when you brought PFC Lowell to a steak broil in Bad Nauheim.”

  “I was ordered to,” Mac said. “General Porky Waterford ordered me to.”

  “So order him, General,” Roxy said.

  “No, Roxy,” Mac repeated.

  “Why not?” Roxy demanded.

  “Because tonight they let them go,” Mac said. “Tonight they have a few beers and chase girls. He don’t want to be with a bunch of officers and their wives.”

  “I hate to say this, but he’s right again, Roxy,” Lowell said. “Maybe I can buy him lunch tomorrow.”

  “Well, okay,” she said, genuinely disappointed.

  From 1415 until 1730, with time out only for a telephone call to Toni Parker to make sure that she would bring Dr. Gillis with her to the MacMillans, Lieutenant Colonel Lowell was briefed by First Lieutenant Charley Wood on HALO operations, techniques, and capabilities. Lieutenant Wood was indeed an expert on High-Altitude, Low-Opening parachute techniques and seemed possessed by a burning desire to impart all that he knew to Lieutenant Colonel Lowell. He did indeed learn a good deal more than he wanted to know.

  Some of it he found interesting. He had had no idea how great a distance HALO parachutists could move over the ground. The special parachutes were in fact more like an inefficient wing than a parachute. They could achieve speeds approaching twenty miles per hour in a chosen direction across the ground as the parachutist descended.

  They could, in other words, be dropped well within friendly lines and land well inside enemy territory. That was an interesting capability. And according to Wood, they really could, with a little practice, land in an area the size of a pickle barrel. There were many interesting military applications of that capability, and by the time the briefing session was over, Lowell found himself paying rapt attention to what Wood told him.

  He had believed his enforced familiarity with HALO was nothing more than a pointed lesson from Bill Roberts that one should be very careful what one said about parachutists in the presence of a general officer who happened to be a distinguished parachutist. That belief changed.

  When Lieutenant Wood told him that a HALO was scheduled the next morning and that he could actually watch them jump, he quickly accepted the offer.

  The steak broil was very pleasant. Toni had a couple of drinks and related the romantic nature of her proposal of marriage while Phil Parker and Lowell were sharing a picture-window house in a housing development outside Fort Riley. Everyone from Joan Gillis to Hanrahan (who had heard the story a half-dozen times before) laughed out loud at her recitation of their bachelor quarters, and how they had left the MODEL HOME sign on the lawn because they got to meet interesting engaged young women that way.

  As she prepared to return to the hospital with Toni, Joan seemed to squeeze his hand when she quickly agreed to have dinner with him the next night.

  At 0510, Lowell met Lieutenant Wood at the mess hall, had a forty-five-cent breakfast of bacon and eggs and hash-browns, and then was driven to Pope Air Force Base, where a group of twenty-one Green Berets were about to make their first HALO jump from a C-130 at thirty-thousand feet.

  They all had their equipment laid out on the concrete beside the aircraft, and Lowell suspected that if they had not known he was coming, they would have been suited up long before now.

  He was introduced to the jump master, a competent-appearing master sergeant as old as he was, and to his staff of instructors. There was one instructor per trainee. The jump master told him they went together to the open rear door of the aircraft. The trainee, on command, went off backward, and the instructor then jumped after him, “flew” beside him, and made sure that everything was all right and that the trainee pulled the D-ring, which would deploy his parachute, when he was ordered to do so. There was as a safety measure an atmospheric pressure-controlled device that would open the parachute at five thousand feet. If something went wrong with that, there was an emergency reserve parachute.

  “I understand you’re going up with us, Colonel, to observe?”

  “If I won’t be in the way.”

  “Not at all, sir,” the master sergeant said. “Glad to have you.”

  “Thank you,” Lowell said.

  “I understand you and Mr. Wojinski and the general all served together in Greece, Colonel?”

  “Yes, we did.”

  “Ski’s an old friend of mine,” the master sergeant said. “Glad to have you, Colonel. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll check things here. Lieutenant Wood will see that you’re properly suited up.”

  “I’m to be suited up?”

  “Colonel, without leathers and oxygen, it gets pretty uncomfortable at thirty thousand feet.”

  “I suppose it does,” Lowell said, more than a little uncomfortable that he had exposed his ignorance and stupidity before the jump master.

  The “leathers” to which the jump master referred were a sheepskin-lined jacket and trousers. To this was added a sheepskin-lined helmet, much like those worn by aviators in the days of open-cockpit airplanes, and an ordinary pair of jump boots. Lieutenant Wood told Lieutenant Colonel Lowell that it was necessary for him to wear the jump boots because at the temperature they were going to encounter, he would frostbite or freeze his ankles unless they were covered and the cuffs of the sheepskin trousers were closed tightly over the boots.

  The helmet was equipped with goggles and a face mask, through which oxygen was fed, either from one of the two portable bottles fastened to the parachute harness or from the aircraft’s oxygen system. There were two parachutes: the controllable chute and the hemispherical canopied reserve chute. Just walking around “suited up” was difficult. Lowell did not envy the jump master
and the instructors who had not only to worry about themselves, but to keep an eye on their students.

  Thirty-five minutes into the flight, the order was given to change from the aircraft oxygen supply to the portable oxygen bottles. As soon as the jump master was making sure that everybody’s portable oxygen equipment was functioning properly, there came a hydraulic whine and the sound of rushing air. The rear door of the aircraft opened, forming a shelf.

  Lieutenant Wood removed his oxygen mouthpiece from the leather face mask of the helmet long enough to tell Lowell to come with him. He led him three feet out on the now horizontal door and guided Lowell’s hand to a fuselage frame. He was really going to get a good look at these courageous—or crazy—young men as they took a thirty-thousand-foot step, Lowell decided.

  He could see the instructors checking the equipment of each trainee, then the trainees and instructors forming a two-man column in the fuselage, getting ready to make the jump.

  It was both, Lowell decided. These people were demonstrably both courageous and crazy.

  The jump master came out onto the horizontal door, put his hand on a frame, and nodded at Lowell. Then Lieutenant Wood came out on his side. They looked like 1930’s high-altitude balloonists, Lowell thought. He remembered pictures from National Geographic magazine.

  The jump master beckoned to him to come over to him.

  He’s out of his mind if he thinks I’m just going to walk over there. I have no intention of falling out of this airplane. I would get exactly in the middle of the door when the pilot of this thing would decide to raise the nose a little, and I would go sliding out like gravel from a dumptruck.

  He shook his head violently, “No.”

  Lieutenant Wood tapped his shoulder and pointed to the jump master and signaled urgently for him to cross over to him.

  Lowell shook his head violently again.

  Lieutenant Wood pointed to a flashing red light, then made gestures indicating that he would literally hold his hand if Colonel Lowell was so chicken as to be unwilling to walk across eight or ten feet of perfectly level floor so as to get out of the way in order to let the men get on with their business.