The Lieutenants

by W. E. B Griffin

  “He’s strange, but he’s a good guy, Barbara,” Parker said. “He’s got money, I think.”

  “Doing his two years?”

  “If he has to serve that long,” Parker said.

  Bob Bellmon saw him then.

  “Jesus Christ, look at this! The last time I saw it, it wasn’t an inch over six feet.”

  “Congratulations, Colonel,” Parker said.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” Bellmon said. “We’re going to call your old man. If it wasn’t for your old man, I wouldn’t be here.” He grabbed Phil’s arm and led him into the crowded living room and to the telephone, and they placed a call to Colonel Philip Sheridan Parker III, Retired, in Manhattan, Kansas, and the name of Craig Lowell didn’t come up again.

  (Four)

  The next Saturday, very early in the morning, Lieutenant Phil Parker was introduced to Ilse Lowell on the telephone. Later, over breakfast in the main post cafeteria, Lowell asked Parker if he had any plans, or whether he would be free to go to Louisville with him.

  “What’s in Louisville?”

  “I’ve been thinking over what you said about getting a car.”

  “Perhaps you are not then quite as dense as the evidence suggests,” Parker said. “You want to go look at cars?”

  “No, I want to buy one,” Lowell replied, as if the question was a strange one.

  “What kind of car?”

  “A Packard.”

  “A Packard? Packards are driven by movie stars and uppity niggers,” Parker said.

  “Somebody in Bad Nauheim had a Packard,” he said. “A convertible. Ilse said it was the most beautiful automobile she had ever seen.”

  “Obviously the lady has taste,” Parker said. “But have you got the pocketbook to support it?”

  “Yeah, Phil,” Lowell said, “as a matter of fact, I do.”

  They went into Louisville in uniform, because Parker had been informed that the Brown Hotel would serve colored officers in uniform. They dropped off the rental car at the airport, had lunch with several drinks in the Brown Hotel, and then went to the Packard dealership on Fourth Street.

  The salesman on duty, fully aware that the basic pay of second lieutenants was just over $310 a month, didn’t even bother to pitch the two young officers. They had obviously come in solely to gape the Rollson-bodied 1941 convertible on the showroom floor. They certainly couldn’t afford a car like that; but on the other hand, they were officers, even if one of them was a nigger, and were unlikely to get the seats dirty or do something else to harm the car.

  The 180 convertible had been turned in three months before on a new Packard Clipper by the proverbial Little Old Lady. It had been up on blocks during all of World War II, and there was only a little over 9,000 miles on the clock.

  The sales manager had decided to hang on to it to draw customers into the showroom. They weren’t making cars like that anymore, and Packard wasn’t even going to have a convertible in the line until next year’s lineup. The sales manager hung a $6,500 price on it, which was about a thousand more than the car had cost when it was new. He would take a chance, he said, that someone would walk in with more money than brains and pay it. If no one bought it for, say, three or four months, then he would decide what to do with it. In the meantime, it would draw potential customers to the showroom floor.

  It was an enormous automobile, built on a 138-inch wheelbase, and was bright yellow, with the Packard stylized swan in chrome sitting on top of a massive grill. The headlights were separate, and the front fenders held spare tires.

  The two young soldiers examined the car from front to rear for about three minutes, and then the white one walked over to where the salesman sat in an armchair.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I just might be interested in that,” the white kid said.

  “That’s $6,500,” the salesman said.

  “I’ll give you six even,” the kid said.

  “Have you got any idea what the payments would be?” the salesman said. “We’d need a third down, that’s more than two thousand, and…”

  “I’ll give you a check for six thousand,” the young lieutenant said, interrupting him.

  He seemed perfectly serious. Since the sales manager normally didn’t come in on Saturdays, the salesman called him at the golf course and told him he had a soldier from Fort Knox who was prepared to write a check right then for six grand for the convertible.

  The check he offered was on the Morgan Guaranty Trust of New York. The price was all right, but there was a large question about a second lieutenant having enough cash in his checking account to cover the check. It was finally decided to accept his offer, and to tell him that the car would have to be “gotten ready” and unfortunately there was no one around on Saturday to do that. They would be happy to deliver the car out to Fort Knox on Monday after it had been “gotten ready.” That would also give them a chance to call the Morgan Guaranty Trust and see if the check was any good, or whether, as the sales manager half suspected, it was just one more crazy soldier boy from Fort Knox just fucking around with half a load on.

  The car was delivered Monday afternoon. It was waiting for Parker and Lowell when they came back to the BOQ to find the academic standings for the first two weeks of the course posted on the BOQ bulletin board.

  Parker, Philip S IV was first, with an average of 98.7.

  Lowell, Craig W was third, with an average of 97.9.

  Parker was delighted. Lowell was amused. He understood why he was getting such good grades. For one thing, the course material was rather simple. It was, in effect, a basic training course for officers upon first entering the army. Lowell had had enlisted basic training, and for all intents and purposes he had been running a company in Greece. Parker had gone to Norwich, a military college. And they had studied, not very hard, nor very long, but apparently long enough and hard enough to be able to beat the tests.

  They had a couple of drinks to celebrate and then decided to get a steak at the main post officer’s club to “test” the yellow Packard convertible. They put the roof down, and snapped the boot in place, and then, for a joke, Parker insisted on riding in the back seat.

  They were both astonished at how often and how snappily they were saluted. Not only by enlisted men, the only people required by military custom to salute second lieutenants, but by officers as well, even one full bird colonel.

  It was obviously the car, they decided over their drinks and steaks; and they were correct but not in the way they thought.

  Two weeks after the convertible was delivered, Lowell ran into Captain Rudolph G. MacMillan at the Class Six store.

  Lowell was coming out of the store with his arms full of booze and ale. There was no way he could salute.

  “Hello, Captain MacMillan,” he said.

  “I’ll be damned,” MacMillan said. “What the hell are you doing here?” He turned and followed Lowell into the parking lot. The Packard was parked next to a Ford coupe. MacMillan opened the door of the coupe, so that Lowell could unload his whiskey and beer. Lowell put the whiskey and beer in the Packard. He didn’t have to have the door opened, for the top and windows were down.

  “I don’t know why I’m surprised, but I am,” MacMillan said, when he realized his error. “That’s the sort of thing I should have expected from you, rich boy.”

  “It’s nice to see you, too, Captain,” Lowell said.

  “Why aren’t you in Greece?” MacMillan asked.

  “The real question, Captain, sir, is why am I still in the army. Do you remember telling me, sir, that you’d get me out of the service?”

  “You know what happened,” MacMillan said. “I asked you how come you’re not in Greece?”

  “I didn’t like it there,” Lowell said. “People were shooting at me.”

  “And so you pulled some strings and got out?”

  “That sums it up neatly, sir,” Lowell said.

  “You’re in Basic Officer’s Course?”


  “That’s right,” Lowell said.

  “Maybe you’ll learn something,” MacMillan said.

  “As you told me, Captain, I don’t know enough about the army to make a pimple on a good corporal’s ass. That was just before you told me I would be able to get out of the army.”

  “I hope they run your ass off over there,” MacMillan said.

  “Actually, sir, I’m number three in my class.”

  MacMillan’s face flushed. He looked as if he was going to say something, but he simply turned around and walked away.

  “Captain MacMillan,” Lowell called; and when MacMillan ignored him, he called his name again so loudly that MacMillan, aware others in the parking lot were looking, had no choice but to turn around.

  Lowell saluted crisply. “It was very nice to see you again, Captain MacMillan,” he said. “Please extend my best wishes to Mrs. MacMillan, sir.”

  MacMillan returned the salute and walked into the Class Six store.

  It was a week after his meeting with MacMillan before Lowell understood why he and Phil Parker had been so enthusiastically saluted while riding around in the Packard and why MacMillan had made the crack about the car. The major general commanding Fort Knox also drove a Packard convertible. It was also yellow, but it was a 120, and not nearly so ostentatious as Lowell’s 180. They had been saluted in the belief that the car was the commanding general’s personal vehicle. It was now believed that Lieutenant Lowell was not only guilty of a breech of etiquette which decreed that lieutenants do not drive automobiles as expensive as the commanding general, but that he (and Parker) were intentionally mocking him (because Parker rode in the back seat with the roof down in the winter, grandly returning the salutes).

  They stopped putting the top down, and when they went to the main post, they now went in Phil’s old Cadillac; but the damage was done. They had been identified as smart-asses, and there was nothing they could do to alter that perception.

  Lt. Col. Bob Bellmon, when he heard about the two wise-ass lieutenants in SOC, one of whom was a nigger who had gone to Norwich, called Phil Parker on the telephone.

  “Phil,” he said. “A word to the wise should be sufficient. Get yourself a new roommate. I’ll speak to the SOC commander, if you like.”

  “With all respect, sir, I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

  “Goddamn it, Phil, I know that you weren’t mocking the general. But the general doesn’t know that.”

  “Sir, neither was Lowell.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Sir, Lowell is my friend.”

  “Your friend is a wise-ass, and he’s going to hurt your career.”

  “I’ll have to take that risk, sir.”

  “Your loyalty, Phil, is commendable,” Bellmon said, dryly. “Don’t say you weren’t warned.”

  (Five)

  Even the continued ranking of Second Lieutenants Parker and Lowell at or very near the head of their class did nothing to reduce their ostracism. The word was out that they were a couple of smart-asses, and that was that. They even had a goddamn refrigerator in their room; they thought they were too good to drink with everybody else in the rec room.

  But what really pissed their classmates and their instructors was what happened at the retreat parade. There was a regular once-a-month formal retreat parade, at which people got medals and citations, and heard their retirement orders read. Student Officer Company marched over to the main post in formation, a hell of a long walk, especially since nobody in SOC was going to get a medal or a citation, or be retired.

  When they had roll call in the SOC area, Lieutenant Lowell did not answer when his name was called. The tactical officer even asked the nigger if he knew where he was, and the nigger said, “No, sir.”

  So they marched over to the main post without him. While they were walking at route march, before they got near the main post and the tac officer started calling cadence, it was whispered about that the smart-ass nigger lover had finally fucked up. He should have known there would be roll call and that he would get caught ducking the formation. He’d have a hard time explaining by indorsement hereon (which is probably the way they would handle it) why he had absented himself without authorization from a scheduled formation.

  But when they were all lined up, and the school commandant stood up in front and bellowed, “Persons to be decorated, Front and center, March!” there was the nigger lover, right at the head of the line. And when the adjutant stepped to the microphone and called, “Attention to orders,” it was something none of them had ever heard before.

  “His Most Gracious Majesty, Philip, by the Grace of God, King of the Hellenes, is pleased to bestow upon Lieutenant Craig W. Lowell, United States Army, the Order of St. George and St. Andrew with all the rights and privileges thereunto pertaining, in token of His Most Gracious Majesty’s appreciation of Lieutenant Lowell’s outstanding valor and military prowess while attached to the 27th Royal Hellenic Mountain Division.”

  It wasn’t even a regular-sized medal. It was about the size of a coffee cup saucer, and the VIP from Washington didn’t pin it on him, he hung it over his shoulder on a purple ribbon six inches wide.

  “Hey,” one of his classmates asked sotto voce, “who the fuck are the Hellenes?”

  “The Greeks, you clod-kicking hillbilly,” Lieutenant Parker informed him.

  Smart-ass nigger.

  For a couple of days, the citations for his medals (they’d also hung a U.S. medal on him, an unimportant one, the Army Commendation Medal, called the Green Hornet) were on the SOC-TAS bulletin board, and then somebody tore them down.

  (Six)

  When he finally got word that Ilse had her visa, Craig Lowell went to the orderly room and asked the Student Officer Company commander for a few days off. He wanted to look for an apartment for his wife, he said, and then he wanted to go to New York to meet her plane. He was sure, he said, that he could make up what academic work he would lose. His overall average so far was 98.4.

  “You’re in the army, Lowell,” the major who was his company commander said. “Even if you don’t seem to fully understand that. Don’t let that goddamn medal go to your head. You can’t just take off whenever you feel like it to handle your personal affairs. I can see no reason why an adult female can’t get off one airplane and onto another by herself. And when she gets here, you’ll be given two hours off, like everybody else, to go by post housing.”

  “Sir, I hadn’t planned to live on the post,” Lowell said.

  “Quarters are available, Lieutenant. You will live on the post. Is there anything else?”

  When he told Parker what that chickenshit sonofabitch had said, Parker said it was what he should have expected for being a nigger lover. And he fixed the business about quarters (probably with a couple of bottles of bourbon; Lowell never knew how for sure). The day before Ilse was scheduled to arrive, he took him to the company-grade family housing area, where barracks had been converted into apartments. A neat little painted sign LT LOWELL was on the door of one of them. When they went inside, it was full of brand-new furniture from the quartermaster warehouse. All they had to do was push it around where it looked best.

  Parker didn’t go with him to meet Ilse at the airport in Louisville, and he was sort of glad that he didn’t. Because when he saw Ilse coming awkwardly down the steps from the plane, as big as a house, looking frightened and pale, and when he hugged her, both of them cried, and he wouldn’t have wanted Phil to see that.

  Ilse told him that Sharon Felter and the elder Felters had met her plane. Then they had driven her to someplace called Newark and put her on the plane to Louisville.

  He was disappointed with Ilse’s reaction to the Packard. She said it was beautiful all right, but with her pregnant and his mother sick, he must be really out of his mind to think they could afford something like that.

  “Liebchen,” Lowell said. “I’ve got a lot of money. We’ve got a lot of money. Much more than most people do.”

  “I know,
” she said, and he understood that she didn’t have the first faint idea what he meant. It was not the time to get into it, not now.

  Ilse was pathetically pleased with the apartment and the furnishings, and he wondered how she would have reacted if he had gone through with his original notion to call Andre Pretier and tell him he was married, and would Andre either meet his wife’s plane or at least send a chauffeur and a car and see that she got on the Louisville plane.

  If Sharon hadn’t seemed so delighted that she could go and meet the plane, he’d have had to do something like that; and if learning that her baby was married unduly upset his mother, fuck it. She was going to have to find out sooner or later anyway. She was about to be a grandmother.

  But Sharon had really wanted to go meet the plane, and the problem of how and when to tell his mother—and for that matter, his grandfather—about Ilse could be delayed for a while.

  Ilse smiled, but she really didn’t understand the flowers Parker had sent to the apartment—a huge horseshoe, with the words DEEPEST SYMPATHY in gold foil letters on a purple sash hung on it. Ilse didn’t understand, if that was what Americans sent to a funeral, why Craig thought it was so funny.

  Ilse’s nearly joyous reaction to the crappy little apartment with its veneer furniture and thin rugs (Lowell thought the shag living room carpet looked like an enormous bath towel) made him face what he thought was an unpleasant truth about his wife. She wanted him to think she came from a good background—that von Greiffenberg bullshit—but when he pressed her for details, she didn’t want to talk about her family. She’d tried once to tell him her father had been a count and a colonel, and that the castle in Marburg (it was more of a villa than a castle; didn’t she know the difference?) was the house she had grown up in.

  If that was so, why was she broke? Why was she in Bad Nauheim, doing what she was doing? The truth to be faced was that she was lying through her teeth about her father (or else he had been a Nazi, which was something else to consider). She was ashamed that she had been a whore (or at least that she had been willing to be a whore, and would have been one if he hadn’t come along), and so she was making up stories. So what was wrong with that?