The Lieutenants

by W. E. B Griffin

  “Tell me about Palestine,” Bellmon said.

  “The Zionists are not going to give up. And neither are the Arabs. They will not tolerate a Jewish state.”

  “Whose side are you on?” Bellmon said.

  Felter was sure now that his mouth had got him in trouble.

  “I’m Jewish, as well as a Jew,” he said. “My sympathies lie with the idea of a Jewish state.”

  “And if you were ordered to Palestine, on the side of the English, for example, against the Zionists?”

  “I don’t know, sir. I would probably resign.”

  “Don’t say that to anyone else, Felter,” Bellmon said. “Never let the enemy know of your options until you have to.” He paused. “A classmate of mine is over there. Resigned his commission. Fighting for the Zionists.”

  “And you don’t approve, sir?”

  “No, Lieutenant, I don’t,” Bellmon said. “Does that make me in your eyes a bigot? An anti-Semite?”

  “No, sir. But it illustrates my point about Palestine being a trouble spot. There’s very little room for reason on either side. In a way like northern Ireland, which is another trouble spot.”

  “I hadn’t even thought about Ireland,” Bellmon confessed.

  Having said that, he realized that Felter’s assessment of the world was very much like his own. Charitably, it was realistic; or cynical. Like his own.

  “Your next assignment will be with troops,” Bellmon said, formally. “Junior officers need the responsibility of command. The following are vacancies available to you: 1st Cavalry Division, Dismounted, Kyushu, Japan; 187th Regimental Combat Team, Airborne Hokkaido, Japan; 24th Infantry Division, Hawaii; 5th Infantry Division, Fort Riley, Kansas; 82nd Airborne Division, here at Bragg; Any of the infantry basic training centers; 1st Infantry Division, Germany; Trieste United States Troops…that’s the old 88th Mountain Division…in Trieste. They call it TRUST. Those are your options, Lieutenant.”

  “Sir, I heard that we’re going to send company-grade officers to Greece. Would that be considered duty with troops?”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “From some of the men in class, sir. A number of them have volunteered.”

  “Volunteers are apparently being solicited from officers with combat experience,” Bellmon said. “You have none. At least officially.”

  “If I have to spend time with troops, sir,” Felter said, “as part of my education, I would prefer to spend time with troops who are engaged.”

  “What are you after, Felter, a reputation as someone spoiling for a confrontation with the Godless Red Hordes?”

  “I believe it is an officer’s duty to learn as much as possible about potential enemies,” Felter said.

  “It is, of course,” Bellmon said. “The trouble, historically, is that few people have been able to identify the next enemy in time to do anything about it. What if you’re wrong?”

  “You and I, Major,” Felter said, “already know the Soviet Union is our enemy.”

  “Watch who you say things like that to, Felter,” Bellmon said. “A lot of people think the Soviet Union is just a friendly bear.”

  Felter nodded.

  “It’s a hardship tour, Felter,” Bellmon went on. “No dependents. Your wife will be denied the opportunity to live high on the hog in an Army of Occupation.”

  “I understand, sir,” Felter said.

  Bellmon picked up his telephone and told his secretary to get Colonel McKee on the line. When, a moment later, the telephone rang, Bellmon turned the receiver from his ear so that Felter could hear both sides of the conversation.

  “Sir, this is Major Bellmon. I have one of your two company grades for Greece.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “A lieutenant named Felter. He was honor grad of the ranger school. He wants to go, and I think we should send him.”

  “I don’t think so, Bob,” Colonel McKee said. “For one thing, I’ve already got a couple of people who were ‘encouraged’ to volunteer. What did your guy do wrong?”

  “Nothing, sir. As I said, he was honor grad of the ranger course. He wants to go.”

  “Bob, I’m not getting through to you. We’re dumping people to Greece, not awarding it as a prize. It’s a lousy assignment.”

  “Lieutenant Felter wants to go, Colonel. As honor grad, he is more or less entitled to pick his assignment.”

  “There’s something you’re not telling me, Bellmon. But I’m not going to ask. OK, you want this guy shanghaied to Greece, consider him shanghaied. Give me his full name, rank, and serial number.”

  (Three)

  West Point, New York

  9 July 1946

  Major General Peterson K. Waterford was laid to his final rest in the cemetery of the United States Military Academy at West Point. When the volleys had been fired, when the trumpeter had sounded the last taps, when the flag, folded into a triangle with no red showing, had been placed in Mrs. Waterford’s hands by the Chief of Staff of the United States Army, the funeral party moved to the quarters of the Commandant for refreshments.

  Major Robert F. Bellmon sought out Captain Rudolph G. MacMillan.

  “I haven’t had the chance before, Mac,” he said, “to express my thanks. My mother-in-law’s told me what a help you’ve been.”

  “What the hell, I was awful fond of the general,” MacMillan said, embarrassed.

  “And he of you,” Bellmon said.

  The Chief of Staff of the United States Army walked up and joined them.

  “I’ve got to be getting back, Bob,” he said. “But I didn’t want to leave without saying good-bye and God bless, and without thanking you, Captain MacMillan, for all you’ve done for Mrs. Waterford.”

  “My privilege, sir,” Mac said.

  “You were with Porky a long time, weren’t you?” the Chief of Staff said. He was a tall thin man, one of the few four-star generals then entitled to wear a Combat Infantry Badge, which General of the Army Omar Bradley insisted should go only to soldiers who had functioned well in ground combat. More than one general who’d been awarded one by orders he had signed himself had been told to take it off.

  “No, sir,” MacMillan said. “Not long at all. But Colonel…I’m sorry, Major Bellmon and I go back a long way.”

  “Mac and I were in the stalag, together, General,” Bellmon said.

  “Oh, of course. I knew there was something.” His eyes dropped to the blue-starred ribbon topping MacMillan’s display of fruit salad. “You are the MacMillan.”

  “The one and only,” Bellmon laughed.

  “And now what happens to you?” the Chief of Staff asked. “You’re sort of left hanging, aren’t you? Where would you like to go?”

  “Anywhere they send me, sir, of course,” MacMillan said.

  “Oh, come on, MacMillan. The army owes you something,” the Chief of Staff said.

  “Sir, now that you bring it up,” MacMillan said, “I was about to ask Major Bellmon if he could find a home for a battered old soldier.”

  “You got a spot for MacMillan, Bob? Where are you…oh, yeah. The Airborne Board. I heard about that.”

  “I think, sir,” Major Bellmon said, “that we could find something to keep Mac occupied.”

  “I also heard—out of school, of course—that you’re not going to be at Bragg much longer,” the Chief of Staff said. “Among other things, I. D. White wants you at Knox. Why don’t I just—?” He stopped in midsentence and made a barely perceptible movement of his head. A brigadier general walked over. He was a distinguished-looking officer with silver hair, and he wore the gold cord of an aide-de-camp.

  “Tom, Major Bellmon will call you with the details,” the Chief of Staff said. “The idea is to have Captain MacMillan assigned to Knox. Tell the G-1 to find something suitable for him to do there, will you?”

  “Sir,” MacMillan said, “the minute I get near personnel types, they want me to make speeches. Can it be arranged to sneak me into Knox?”

  T
he Chief of Staff laughed.

  “Sneak him into Knox yourself, Tom. I understand the captain’s problem.”

  “Yes, sir,” the aide-de-camp said. “Sir, we’re going to have to be moving on.”

  “Let me say good-bye to Mrs. Waterford,” the Chief of Staff said. “Get the car.”

  (Four)

  McGuire Air Base

  Wrightstown, New Jersey

  10 July 1946

  Sharon Lavinsky Felter was ashamed of herself because she hated her husband on the very day he was going away.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t love him. She loved him as she had loved him for as long as she could remember. But it was possible, she had learned, to love and hate the same man at the same time.

  She hated Sandy when he was being an officer, when he was giving orders she had to obey, and not listening to her, or even caring what she thought about anything.

  They had ridden to McGuire, she and Sandy, and her mother and father, and Mama and Papa Felter, in a brand-new Buick Super two door. Now especially, with him going away, she needed a brand-new Buick Super two door like she needed a third leg. For one thing, she wasn’t that good a driver, and for another, the Buick seemed to want to get away from her almost as if it had a mind of its own.

  She had had no say about the Buick at all. He couldn’t tell her father or his, or especially his mother what he’d told her (“The question is not open for discussion”), so he’d listened to their objections: All that money. Sharon didn’t need a car. There was the Lavinsky’s perfectly good 1938 Plymouth to carry her anywhere the Old Warsaw Baker’s Dodge panel truck couldn’t take her. If he had to have a rich man’s car, he could buy one when he came to his senses and came home.

  He heard the objections and ignored them.

  “Try to understand this, Sharon,” he said to her. “I’m getting a little tired of repeating it. I am a regular army officer.”

  He had told her that thirty-five times. She didn’t really understand what that meant, but he had been very pleased with himself when the letter had come in the mail. They’d had to waste one whole day going down to Fort Dix, where he got another physical examination, and then was sworn in. But he was still a first lieutenant, and he wasn’t going to get any more money, and the only difference she could see was that they gave him a new, shorter serial number.

  Regular army officers, she tried to understand, had different obligations from reserve officers on extended active duty. And for reasons she could not understand, one of these was apparently that they had to have a rich man’s car, a new one, just sitting around so that in case one was needed in a hurry, there it would be.

  “We can afford it. For the couple of hundred extra dollars, I would rather have the reliability of a Buick. If I didn’t think we needed it, or I didn’t think we could afford it, we wouldn’t buy it. Now let it be, Sharon.”

  He made her drive from Newark to McGuire Air Base, although that was the last thing she wanted to do. “Otherwise,” he said. “You would never drive it. And I want you to know that you can.”

  It was crowded in the Buick, as big as it was, with Sharon and Sandy and Papa Felter in the front, and Sharon’s mother and father and Mama Felter in the back. And with Sandy’s luggage in the trunk, the front of the Buick was high up and Sharon had trouble seeing over the bull’s-eye ornament on the hood.

  And there was a lot of tension in the car, although everybody naturally tried to hide it. The Felters and the Lavinskys were really angry with Sandy, angry and hurt by his behavior and confused by it.

  So far as they were concerned, he had done his part by going off to the war when he could have stayed safe and sound at West Point. Then when he had, thank God, come home in one piece, he had done more than his part by not taking the honorable discharge he had been offered.

  Sharon had agreed with everything Mama Felter had said to Sandy, when she really laid it into him. Sandy could be anything he wanted to in life. God had given him the brains to be a doctor or a lawyer, or anything else he wanted to be. There was the GI Bill of Rights, which would pay for his education; and the bakery was coming along nicely, so there would be money for them to get a little apartment of their own and maybe even start a family while he was still in school, if that’s what he and Sharon wanted to do. He had everything a reasonable man could ask for, and he was throwing it all away like a little boy running off to the circus. A soldier! Who did he think he was, Napoleon, because he was so short?

  Papa Felter tried to shut Mama Felter up and calm things down. What Sandy was doing, he said, was proving himself, because he was small. After a while, he would come to his senses; he wasn’t old yet. He said that Sandy had never had the time to sow any wild oats, the way he’d gone off to the war. Papa Felter said they should stop worrying, and be glad that he hadn’t started drinking, or gambling, or chasing women, or whatever, the way most young men did.

  After a while, Papa Felter said, Sandy would see things for what they were, and he would come to his senses. He had every confidence in that. For the time being, if it made Sandy happy to jump out of airplanes, and eat snakes in the jungle the way they made him do in ranger school, they would just have to go along with him.

  That was all very nice, but it wasn’t much help to Sharon. She wasn’t asking much. She had been perfectly content in their room in Columbus, Georgia, outside Fort Benning, and in the little apartment in Fayetteville, North Carolina, outside Fort Bragg. As it said in the Bible, “Whither thou goest, I will go.” If Sandy had wanted her to go with him to the North Pole, she would have gone and been happy, but that wasn’t this. This was a whole year, maybe more, with her working in the bakery and Sandy doing God alone knows what in Greece. Greece!

  Everybody in the car was torn between being mad at Sandy and feeling sorry for Sharon, and feeling sorry for the both of them.

  When they got to McGuire Air Force Base, Sandy directed her to park the Buick Super in an area designated DEPARTING PERSONNEL PARKING.

  He picked up his two heavy Valv-Paks and walked into the passenger terminal with his wife and his parents and his wife’s parents trailing reluctantly behind him.

  “Well, look who’s here,” he said, softly, as much to himself as to Sharon when he stepped inside the door.

  “Who’s here, Sandy?” Sharon asked.

  “Some of my classmates,” he said. “I heard about that. They report in early, and then take another two weeks in Germany when they get there.”

  She didn’t know what he was talking about, but she could see who he was talking about. There were twenty second lieutenants in the waiting room wearing Class “A” tropical worsted summer uniforms—shirt, tunic, trousers, and brimmed cap—and twenty young women, all dressed up with flowers pinned to their dresses and suits, looking like brides.

  Sharon deeply loved her husband, and wouldn’t have swapped him for any man in the world, but being honest about it, when you looked at him in his khakis, Sandy looked like somebody delivering from the delicatessen.

  “Honey, why didn’t you wear your TWs?” Sharon asked.

  “If you’re going to have to spend eighteen hours in an airplane seat in a uniform,” he said, just a trifle smugly, “you wear khakis.”

  He picked up the two Valv-Paks and walked across to the desk. Sharon trailed after him.

  “Lieutenant,” the sergeant said, scornfully, looking at the heavy Valv-Paks, “you’re going to be way over weight.”

  “Take a look at my orders, Sergeant,” Sandy said, unpleasantly.

  The sergeant read the orders Sandy handed him.

  “OK, Lieutenant,” he said. “My mistake.”

  Sharon became aware that several of the second lieutenants were looking at them. She thought it was because Sandy was wearing khakis.

  “It’ll be just a couple of minutes, Lieutenant,” the sergeant said. “Stick around the waiting room.”

  “Thank you,” Sandy said. Then he took Sharon’s arm and marched her over to the second lieu
tenants and their wives.

  “Hello, Nesbit,” Sandy said. “Pierce. O’Connor.”

  “I’ll be damned, Felter,” one of them said. “It is you.”

  “You’ll be damned, sir,” one of the others said. “Note the silver bar.” He put out his hand.

  The third one smiled broadly, and said, “Sir Mouse, sir, may I present my wife?”

  “How do you do?” Sandy said. “And may I present mine?”

  One of them, as they were all shaking hands, told his wife that “Lieutenant Felter was with us at the Academy for a while.” Sharon saw the explanation confused the wife. And she didn’t like it when people called Sandy “Mouse,” even though he told her he didn’t mind.

  “Deutschland bound, are you, Mouse?” one of them asked.

  “Greece,” Sandy said.

  “Greece?” he responded, incredulously.

  “There’s a Military Advisory Group there,” Sandy said.

  “I didn’t know that,” he said.

  Despite the fact that she knew Sandy was right that there was no sense in mussing a tropical worsted uniform on an airplane, Sharon wished that Sandy had worn his anyway. Or at least put on his other insignia. All he was wearing was his silver lieutenant’s bar on one collar and the infantry rifles on the other. He was wearing regular shoes, even though he was entitled to wear paratrooper boots. He wasn’t even wearing his parachutists’ wings and boots or his Ranger patch.

  Sharon could tell from the way the others talked to him, the way they looked at him, that they didn’t think very much of him, either. Sad Sack Felter is what he looked like, two pastrami on rye and a side order of cucumber salad, double cream in the coffee. And meeting the young West Pointers and their wives confirmed what Sharon had suspected. Sandy said going to Greece was a great opportunity for him. The others didn’t think it was such a great opportunity; they didn’t even know the United States had soldiers in Greece. They were going to the 1st Division and the Constabulary in Germany.

  And they were taking their wives with them. Right on the same plane.