The Lieutenants

by W. E. B Griffin

  The records were also searched for prisoners whose skills were needed to administer the camp. Prisoners who spoke Russian were in great demand, and so were carpenters, foresters, tailors, and supply clerks. There was a surplus of food service personnel.

  Some of the NKVD records were flagged. These prisoners had either actual or professed socialist and/or Russian sympathies; and after a period of time, it was contemplated that they might be of some use. These were to be assigned duties which would give them a greater chance—by no means a sure chance—of surviving a winter or two in the swamp.

  Other prisoners’ records were flagged in a manner indicating that they were to be kept alive. The phrase used was that “the physical condition and status of reeducation of this prisoner will be reported monthly.” The NKVD expected to hear that the prisoner in question was not only alive, but that his reeducation was progressing satisfactorily.

  One of the prisoners whose records were so flagged was identified on the NKVD records as Greiffenberg, Peter P. von (formerly Colonel), 88–234–017.

  Number 88–234–017 was assigned to work as a clerk in the office of the logging master. It was inside work, and that was important in the winter in the swamp.

  IV

  (One)

  Fort Bragg, N.C.

  9 July 1945

  There were twelve multicolored ribbons above the breast pocket of Lt. Colonel Paul Hanrahan’s tunic, and above them was pinned the CIB, the Expert Combat Infantry insignia: a silver flintlock rifle on a blue background circled by an open silver wreath, and above that, parachutist’s wings with two stars signifying two jumps into combat.

  There were no ribbons above Lieutenant Rudolph G. MacMillan’s breast pocket, just his CIB and his jump wings with five stars.

  MacMillan walked into Hanrahan’s office and saluted. There was a pleased smile on his face.

  “How the hell are you, you kiltless Scotchman?” Hanrahan said, returning the salute casually, and then coming around his desk to warmly shake MacMillan’s hand.

  “Permit the lieutenant to say,” MacMillan said, grinning broadly, “that the colonel, so help me God, even looks like a colonel.”

  “With one exception, Mac,” Hanrahan said, waving him into an upholstered chair, “you don’t look so bad yourself.”

  “What’s the exception?”

  “There’s an order around here, Mac,” Colonel Hanrahan said, “that officers are supposed to wear their ribbons.”

  MacMillan shrugged, unrepentant.

  “You want some coffee, Mac?” Hanrahan asked.

  “Please,” MacMillan said. “What’s this all about, anyway?”

  In 1940, Hanrahan had been a second john, and MacMillan had been a corporal. They had made their first jump together, when the entire airborne force of the United States Army had been the 1st Battalion (Airborne) (Provisional) (Test) of the 82nd Infantry Division. They had been paratroopers together before anyone knew if the idea would work, and long before the 82nd Infantry Division had become the 82nd Airborne.

  They had last seen one another in 1942, when First Lieutenant Paul Hanrahan had suddenly vanished from the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment in 1942. Nobody knew for sure where he had gone, but rumor had it that he was on some hush-hush operation in Greece with something called the OSS.

  “You are about to be counseled about your career by a senior officer of suitable rank and experience,” Colonel Hanrahan said. “So pay attention.” He handed MacMillan a china cup full of steaming black coffee.

  “Thanks,” MacMillan said. “Can you get me away from those goddamned historians? I’m losing my marbles.”

  “The day after one war is over, we start training for the next one,” Hanrahan said. “The historians have a place in that. The presumption is that somebody who lives through a war must have been doing something right. So they will write down the Saga of Mac MacMillan, and force unsuspecting people to read it. You’ll be immortal, Mac.”

  “Bullshit, is what it is,” MacMillan said.

  “Shame on you!” Hanrahan said, laughing.

  “The division is coming home,” MacMillan said. “Can you get me a company?”

  “I could, but I won’t,” the colonel said, looking directly at MacMillan.

  “Why not?”

  “Can I talk straight, Mac, and not have you quoting me all around the division?”

  “Sure,” Mac said.

  “If we were going to war, you’d have a company,” the colonel said. “But we’re going to have peace, Mac, and that’s a whole new ball game. They don’t want company commanders, even with the Medal, who quit school in the tenth grade.” He looked at MacMillan to get his reaction. MacMillan didn’t seem very surprised.

  “The war is over, soldiers and dogs keep off the grass?” he replied.

  “Don’t feel crapped upon,” Hanrahan said. “They don’t want twenty-six-year-old light birds, either.”

  “They gonna bust you back?”

  “They’re trying hard,” Hanrahan said. “I want to show you something, Mac.” He motioned Mac to the desk, where he had MacMillan’s service record open before him, and pointed to a line on one of its pages.

  18Apr45 Returned US Mil Control, US Embassy

  Cairo Egypt

  20Apr45 Transit Cairo Egypt via Mil Air Ft Devens,

  Mass

  22Apr45 VOP 4 days lv

  26Apr45 Transit Hq War Dept

  29Apr45 Hq Ft Bragg Dy w/US Army Historical

  Section

  “What the hell is VOP?” Mac asked. He could translate without thinking all other abbreviations, but VOP was new to him.

  “I had to ask to find out,” the colonel said. “It stands for Verbal Order of the President.”

  “That’s funny,” Mac said. “He told me when I was there, that when he was a battery commander, he found out there ‘was AWOL and then there was AWOL.’”

  “It’s not funny, Mac,” the colonel said. “That VOP is going to follow you around the army from now on. Forever, until you turn in the suit.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “The bottom line is that you went AWOL,” the colonel said.

  “Not according to that, I didn’t. I went VOP,” Mac said, smiling, pronouncing it as a word, not as individual letters.

  “You went AWOL and were pardoned by the President. You went AWOL! And every time somebody asks what the hell is ‘VOP,’ that story will be told. And what they are going to remember, because they will want to remember it, is that you went AWOL. That gives them a hook, Mac. And you better get used to the fact that the hook is going to be out for you from now on.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? I’m a goddamn hero. Didn’t you read that bullshit citation?”

  “Don’t mock it. You are a hero. And that’s your problem.”

  “I don’t have idea fucking one what you’re talking about,” MacMillan said.

  “Then pay attention. One officer in twenty gets into combat. Of the officers who do get into combat, maybe one in ten gets any kind of a medal, and one in what—ten thousand? fifty thousand?—gets the Medal.”

  “So?”

  “So there’s a hell of a lot more of them, Mac, then there is of you. Call it jealousy. ‘How come that dumb sonofabitch, and not me?’”

  “So they’re jealous, so what?”

  “So they will stick whatever they can—your lousy education, for example—up your ass whenever they can.”

  MacMillan didn’t like what he had heard, but he trusted the colonel; they went back a long way. He decided he was getting the straight poop.

  “What about me getting out and re-upping as a master sergeant?”

  “No sense giving anything away,” Hanrahan said.

  “You just as much as told me I don’t have what it takes to be a good company commander,” Mac said. “I may not be. But I know, goddamnit, that I’d be a good first sergeant.”

  “I didn’t say that you wouldn’t be a good company
commander, Mac,” Hanrahan said. “You’re not listening to me.”

  “Then what the hell are you saying?”

  “You’re a brand-new first lieutenant,” Hanrahan said. “So you can forget about getting promoted for a long time. Five years, maybe six. Maybe longer.”

  “I don’t find anything wrong with being a first lieutenant,” MacMillan said. “But I thought you were just saying they’d try to take it away from me.”

  “What you have to do is pass the time doing something where you can’t get in trouble, where there won’t be too much competition for your job.”

  “That brings us right back to me commanding a company. Goddamn, airborne is what I know. Airborne is all I know.”

  Hanrahan was losing his patience. No getting around it, MacMillan was none too bright.

  “Airborne is dead. It just doesn’t know enough to fall over,” Hanrahan said, patiently. “But for Christ’s sake, Mac, don’t quote me on that.”

  “That’s a hell of a thing to say,” MacMillan said. He was truly shocked. It was as if the colonel had accused Jim Gavin of cowardice.

  “For Christ’s sake, think. You were at Sicily. Look what our own navy did to us, by mistake. How many planeloads got shot down before they got near the goddamned drop zone? You made Normandy. Look how they tore us up in Normandy. And you jumped across the Rhine. That was a disaster, and you know it was.”

  MacMillan was looking at him, Hanrahan thought, like a hurt little boy.

  “For Christ’s Sake, Mac,” Hanrahan said, “you were there. You were bagged there. And you don’t understand what a colossal waste of assets and people that was?”

  “I never expected to hear something like that from you, of all people,” MacMillan said. “Jesus Christ, you and me started airborne!”

  “I’m a soldier, Mac. Not an airborne soldier, not any kind of special soldier. I’m a soldier. My duty is to see things as they are, not how I’d like them to be.”

  “And you think airborne is finished? You really think that?”

  “It’s a very inefficient way of getting troops on the ground. And it will grow more inefficient every passing day. And it wastes a lot of talent.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Mac demanded. They were no longer colonel and lieutenant, or even lieutenant and corporal. They were friends and professionals. They were, in fact, comrades in arms.

  “You’ve heard that an airborne corporal is just as good, just as highly trained, just as efficient a leader, as a leg lieutenant?”

  “And I believe it,” MacMillan said, firmly. “For Christ’s sake, if I had volunteered six months later, they wouldn’t have taken me. I didn’t have a high enough Army General Classification Test score.”

  “That’s my point. They had almost as high qualifications for jump school as they did for OCS.”

  “Your goddamn right they did,” MacMillan said, righteously.

  “Then apply some logic. Extend the argument,” Hanrahan said. “If a man is good enough to be a lieutenant, we should be using him as a lieutenant, not an assistant squad leader. If we’re going to spend people, which is the name of the game, Mac, keep the price high. Every airborne sergeant we spent, dead before he hit the ground, probably could have kept twenty legs alive if he had been a leg sergeant.”

  “Jesus!” MacMillan said.

  He walked to the window and looked out. Hanrahan saw that he was disturbed and was pleased. To get his point across, he was going to have to really shake MacMillan up.

  MacMillan finally turned from the window and leaned against the sill, supporting himself on his hands.

  “You’re trying to tell me the whole airborne idea was wrong?”

  “There were two mistakes in War II, Mac,” Hanrahan said, gently. “Airborne and bombers.”

  “Somebody did something right. We won,” Mac said, sarcastically.

  “The navy did what it was supposed to do,” the colonel said. “And so did the artillery. But the ones who really came through, on both sides, were the tankers.”

  Mac just looked at him.

  “You ever wonder why we didn’t jump across the Rhine near Cologne? You know why we didn’t jump on Berlin?” Hanrahan pursued.

  “You tell me, Red,” Mac said. “I’m just a dumb paratrooper who apparently doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.”

  “Because when the tanks crossed the Rhine, they brought their support with them, and they brought firepower with them. Not some lousy 105 howitzers with fifty rounds a gun. The big stuff and all the ammo they needed for them. And we didn’t jump on Berlin because the 2nd Armored was already across the Elbe.”

  “The Russians took Berlin.”

  “Correction. Three mistakes in War II. Ike giving Berlin to the Russians. 2nd Armored could have taken it. Eisenhower ordered them to hold in place.”

  “He did?” MacMillan had apparently never heard that before. “What for?”

  “Political considerations,” Hanrahan said, watching his tongue very carefully. He thought it was entirely possible that MacMillan had never considered why World War II was fought. The more he thought about that, the more sure he was he was right. MacMillan had fought in World War II, fought superbly, risked his ass a hundred times, simply because he was a soldier and somebody had issued an order.

  “I didn’t know that,” Mac said. The colonel said nothing. “What are you telling me I should do, Red? Go to armor? I’m infantry. Airborne infantry.”

  “No, you shouldn’t go to armor. First of all, they wouldn’t take you. And if they did, they’d eat you up worse than airborne would.”

  “They’d eat me up? I’m airborne. But the way you talk, you don’t think of yourself as airborne,” Mac said.

  “I haven’t been airborne since I left the 508th Parachute Infantry,” Hanrahan said.

  “I notice you’re wearing two combat jump stars on your wings,” MacMillan replied.

  “I went into Greece twice,” Hanrahan said. “Once out of a B-25, the other time out of a B-24. A combat jump is defined as a jump into enemy-held territory.”

  “I never thought about that,” MacMillan said. “You know what I think of when I think of a combat jump? A whole regiment, a whole division.”

  “I’ve known you long enough to say this,” Hanrahan said. “Without you thinking I’m just making an excuse for leaving the 508.”

  “Say what?” Macmillan asked.

  “Mac, we jumped in four guys, five guys at a time. Sometimes just one guy. But we did more damage to the enemy than a battalion of parachutists, maybe a regiment. Maybe even, goddamnit, a division.”

  “You and three, four other guys?” Mac asked, in disbelief.

  “We had more Germans chasing us around Greece than you would believe. And every German that was chasing us wasn’t fighting someplace else. That’s the name of the game, neutralizing the enemy’s forces, Mac, not ‘Geronimo,’ not ‘Blood on the Risers.’”

  MacMillan was made uncomfortable by the discussion. He realized that he really thought, at first, that jumping all by yourself out an Air Corps bomber wasn’t really a combat jump. But then he carried that further. At least when the regiment had jumped, he hadn’t been alone. Hanrahan’s jumping had been more dangerous than even his own jumping in as a pathfinder had been, and the pathfinders had gone in a couple of hours before the rest of the division had jumped. Hanrahan, MacMillan realized, with something close to awe, had jumped into Greece knowing that there would be no regiment jumping after him.

  “So what are you going to do, in this peacetime army we’re about to have?” he asked.

  “I’m going back to Greece,” Hanrahan said.

  “Why do you want to do that?” MacMillan replied, surprised. “I didn’t even know we had any troops there.”

  “Because I like being a lieutenant colonel, for one reason, and they tell me that if I’m in Greece, I can keep it, at least for a while. I hope I can keep it long enough to keep it, period.”

  �
��What are you going to do in Greece?” MacMillan asked.

  “Train the Greeks to do their own fighting,” Hanrahan said. “We send in an experienced company-grade officer and a couple of really good noncoms, make them advisors to a company, or even a battalion. That’s where it’s going to be, Mac: for the price of three or four people, you get a company.”

  “Special people, huh? Regular soldiers, who really know what they are doing?”

  “Special people, but stop smiling; you can’t go.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Because you’re a hero, MacMillan. I keep trying to tell you what that means. It would be embarrassing for the army if we lost a Medal of Honor winner on some Greek hill in a war we aren’t even admitting we’re fighting.”

  “Fuck the medal, I’ll give it back.”

  “Don’t be an ass, Mac,” Hanrahan said. “That medal is your guarantee of a pension at twenty years as a major, maybe even a light bird.”

  “I don’t want to sound like damned fool, but I don’t want to spend the next fifteen years as somebody’s dog robber,” MacMillan said. “I’m a soldier.”

  “For the next couple of years, until things simmer down and get reasonably back to normal, all you have to do is keep your ass out of the line of fire.”

  “Like doing what, for example?”

  “Army aviation,” Hanrahan said.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” MacMillan said. “Army aviation, shit!”

  Hanrahan lost his temper. His voice was icy and contemptuous when he replied, “Engage your brain, Mac, before opening your mouth.”

  MacMillan colored and glared at him. Hanrahan did not back down.

  “OK,” MacMillan said, after a long pause. “I’m listening. Tell me about Army aviation.”

  “Those little airplanes, and helicopters, too, are going to be around the army from now on. And it’s going to get bigger, not smaller and smaller. The Air Corps is going to go after bigger and bigger bombers, and the army is going to have to fend for itself with light airplanes.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?”