MASH 09 MASH goes to Vienna

by Richard Hooker+William Butterworth

  “I know dat,” the secretary said, “but a liddle breath fresh air’s good for you. My momma told me dat.”

  “Mr. Secretary,” the admiral said, “may I present Lieutenant Junior Grade Joanne Pauline Jones, U.S.N.?”

  “A couple of years ago, dolling,” the secretary said somewhat poignantly, examining the naval officer’s physique approvingly, “but now I’m a happily married man.”

  “How do you do, sir?” Lieutenant (j.g.) Jones said very formally.

  “Very nice, tank you,” the secretary replied. “The hair gets a liddle mussed from that whatchamacallit,” he indicated the rotor blade, “but dat’s vat dey sell combs for, right? You’re hungry, I hope? I had the chef fix something special. Ve’ll vork vhile ve eat, O.K.?”

  He took Lieutenant (j.g.) Jones’s arm and led her into the building, onto an elevator, and down long, highly polished corridors to a door marked secretary’s dining room.

  “Dat means me,” he explained helpfully. “Nod duh gurls with duh shorthand.” He ushered them inside.

  “So start vid duh movie already,” the secretary called after entering the room.

  The fights dimmed, and a motion-picture screen descended from the ceiling.

  The words “ABSOLUTELY TOP SECRET” flashed on the screen. “BY ORDER OF THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE.”

  Lieutenant (j.g.) Jones’s heart beat a little faster. She was about to become privy to top secret material. That was something else that hadn’t happened before in her naval career, even though she had been subjected to what is known as a Complete Background Investigation (or CBI)* by the Office of Naval Intelligence.

  (* A flock of sailors in civilian clothes, in other words, had circulated through her hometown and through her circle of university acquaintances, soliciting nasty thoughts and suspicions. When these had all been gathered together and prepared in seven copies, seven senior naval officers had sat down at a table to officially conclude that Lieutenant (j.g.) Jones was not really a Soviet spy and could be trusted with the nation’s deepest secrets, despite such damaging information in the dossier that she had seldom made her bed at college and had a “perfectly disgusting” habit of drying her unmentionable with a hairblower.)

  “NUCLEAR SUBMARINE FORCE, NORTH ATLANTIC” flashed on the screen, followed by “U.S. NAVY BASE, HERSTEAD-ON-HEATH, ENGLAND.”

  It was really a fascinating, well-put-together movie, taking the viewer not only into the interior of the nuclear submarines which prowled through the ocean’s depths on months-long patrols but also into their supply and maintenance base at Herstead-on-Heath, England. It made it quite clear that, for a number of reasons, the base at Herstead-on-Heath was absolutely indispensable to the Nuclear Submarine Force, North Atlantic, and without stretching anything, to the entire defense posture of the United States of America.

  And, she thought as the lights came on, her heart beating patriotically beneath her white tunic, she was going to be a part of all that!

  “So, you don’t mind telling me, vat do you tink about all dat?” the secretary said.

  “It’s inspiring, Mr. Secretary,” she said.

  “Dat’s vun vay to put it,” the secretary said. “Duh vord I vas looking for, frankly, was ‘indispensable.’ You vould agree, dolling, dat wit’out Herstead-on-Heath, we vould be, you should excuse duh expression, up duh creek wit’out a paddle?”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Secretary, I would say that.”

  “You’re a good girl. Your momma and poppa must be proud of you,” the secretary said.

  Lieutenant (j.g.) Jones blushed again.

  “Now here’s vere you come in,” the secretary said. “A liddle more background. Ve rent Herstead-on-Heath, pay a nice liddle price for it. Instead of own it. You get my meaning?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Duh fellow vot owns it is His Grace duh Duke of Folkestone. An Englisher.”

  “I see.”

  “No, you don’t, unless the admiral here’s been running off at the mouth again,” the secretary said. He looked at the admiral. “Hey, Admiral. Vake up! You been running around shooting off your mouth again?”

  “The admiral has told me nothing,” Lieutenant (j.g.) Jones said.

  “Not a word, sir!” the admiral said.

  “Try to keep avake,” the secretary said. “So, dolling, the admiral’s been telling me vat a wonderful job you been doing as ... vat’s her job title, admiral?”

  “Officer-in-Charge, Morale and Entertainment, Counseling and Advice, Non-American Midshipmen,” the admiral replied promptly.

  “Vat he said, taking care of the foreigners at the academy,” the secretary said.

  “May I ask what that has to do with this, Mr. Secretary?”

  “Keep your pants on ... you should excuse the expression, I’m getting to dat.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And among dese foreign midshipmen, I understand you get along special good vit one.”

  “You mean Midshipman Woodburn-Haverstraw, sir?”

  “Dat’s duh vun,” the secretary said. “You vant to tell me maybe a liddle aboud him?”

  “Well, I don’t really know what to say, sir. Woodburn-Haverstraw is a nice kid. He’s an orphan, you see, and perhaps for that reason he understands what it’s like to be alone. He’s always doing something nice for the other foreign boys. He plays the piano for them, talks to them, that sort of thing.”

  “And he likes you special, right?”

  “There is nothing romantic in our relationship, Mr. Secretary, if that’s what you are implying. Woody has a girl. A sweet girl. A student nurse. But we are good friends.”

  “You know the girl, too, right? Ven you get right down to it, Lieutenant, on more den vun ocassion, you haf sneaked Woodburn-Haverstraw off duh campus in the trunk of your Volkswagen so he could see duh girl, right?”

  “I wasn’t,” Lieutenant (j.g.) Jones said, after a long pause, “aware that this was common knowledge.”

  “Common knowledge it isn’t. But dah bottomline, dolling, is dat you and dis boy are good friends, right?”

  “His relationship with that girl is rather touching, Mr. Secretary,” Lieutenant (j.g.) Jones replied. “They are both nearly alone in the world, and they ... sort of cling to each other.”

  “Dolling,” the secretary said, “in the strictest confidence, of course, I vant to tell you that your government hopes dey keep clinging together like flypaper.”

  “Why should our government be interested in the romantic attachment between an obscure student nurse and an English midshipman ... an orphan midshipman, at that?”

  “I mentioned before, you were listening? I said that dot the fellow vot owns duh base at Herstead-on-Heath was His Grace Hugh Percival, Duke of Folkestone Viscount Wemberly, Baron Herstead?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I god news for you, dolling, about dat fellow you been carrying around in duh trunk of your Volkswagen,” the secretary said.

  “He’s English, of course,” Lieutenant (j.g.) Jones replied. “So it would logically follow that he’s connected in some way with the duke of Folkestone. Is that close?”

  “Not close enough. He is the duke of Folkestone.”

  “My God!” Lieutenant Jones said.

  “Just ‘Your Grace,’ ” the secretary said, “is vat you normally call him.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He’s vat you call incognaminous,” the secretary said.

  “Incognito, Mr. Secretary,” Admiral Saltee corrected.

  “What he said. Nobody knows but a couple of people, now including you.”

  “His secret is safe with me,” Lieutenant (j.g.) Jones said.

  “Ve know,” the secretary said.

  “What is this all about?” Joanne Pauline Jones asked.

  “Effery year, as you know, the midshipmen take vat dey call a cruise.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Dey find out about boats.”

  “Ships, Mr. Secretary.”
>
  “Look, Saltee, I’m the secretary of state. You’re just a lousy admiral. Ven I vant expert advice, I’ll ask for it. Until I do, you just sit there and try to sober up.” The admiral stiffened and assumed a look of injured dignity which would have been far more convincing had he not hiccuped. The secretary turned to Lieutenant (j.g.) Jones. “Ged oudt your pencil, dolling,” he said, “and take notes. I’m going to lay it all oudt for you.”

  Chapter Seven

  It took some time, because every detail had been carefully planned, but in just over an hour Lieutenant (j.g.) Jones had all the pertinent details of OPERATION HAPPY SAILOR.

  Reduced to its essentials, it was simply a plan to (a) keep Midshipman His Grace Hugh Percival, Duke of Folkestone, Viscount Wemberly and Baron Herstead, happy and (b) to impress upon him how much the United States government appreciated the privilege of being allowed to lease Herstead-on-Heath as a nuclear- submarine supply and maintenance base. The United States government was paying an annual rental of one pound sterling for the base, as the result of an agreement negotiated between the previous duke and Rear Admiral (Upper Half) Casper C. Davies, U.S.N. The negotiations took place in La Maison de Toutes Les Nations in Marseilles, France. The two old salts had met by coincidence there while the American admiral was conducting an investigation vis-a-vis making the establishment off limits to U.S. Navy Personnel and the retired English admiral and nobleman was revisiting the scene of some youthful wild oats sowing, in company of Mr. Angus MacKenzie. After a number of toasts to Anglo-American naval camaraderie, Vice Admiral His Grace the Duke of Folkestone had discovered he was without funds to either pay for his rounds of drinks or for other services offered by the establishment.

  Wittily paraphrasing that cherished phrase of English literature, “My Kingdom for a Horse,” the duke had literally bartered away on a lease basis, his baronial property, the port of Herstead-on-Heath, to the U.S. Navy in exchange for a cash advance. In the morning, proving that he was an English gentleman, in or out of his cups, he had honored the agreement made in the wee hours of the previous morning. The present duke had renewed the lease, on the one-pound-per-annum basis, shortly after assuming his title.

  Since the most conservative estimate of the real value of the leasehold was in the neighborhood of one million dollars per annum, the United States government was understandably anxious to maintain the status quo.

  Hence, Leutenant (j.g.) Jones learned (she was not told where, of course, or under what circumstances the original negotiations had taken place) of the government’s interest in keeping Midshipman Woody Woodburn-Haverstraw happy.

  Actually, very little deviation from the procedures long established for foreign midshipmen would be required. Every year at the close of the school year, midshipmen from abroad were given a two-week leave in the United States, during which they were entertained by sponsors recruited among naval academy faculty and other interested personnel. This was followed by a cruise aboard a U.S. Navy man-of-war, which customarily traveled to foreign ports. Another leave was granted in the foreign port, permitting the midshipmen to visit their homes. Finally, they rejoined their ships and sailed back to the United States in time for the fall term at the naval academy.

  In this case, Midshipman Woodburn-Haverstraw would spend his two-week leave with his sponsors (Dr. and Mrs. Benjamin Franklin Pierce and Dr. and Mrs. John Francis Xavier McIntyre) in the quaint and bucolic Maine sea-coast village of Spruce Harbor. Other foreign midshipmen, after spending their first leave elsewhere, would join together at Spruce Harbor. When they were all assembled, they would board at Spruce Harbor the USS Satyriasis, a nuclear submarine of the latest model, and sail across (actually under) the broad Atlantic to Herstead-on-Heath. After a tour of those facilities, the midshipmen would be placed on leave to visit their families in Europe and would later rejoin the USS Satyriasis for the return voyage to the United States.

  It was even customary to send an escort officer along with the midshipmen, to ease their transition from student status to that of supernumerary crewmen aboard the man-of-war and to keep them out of trouble as much as possible.

  Lieutenant (j.g.) Jones would serve as the escort officer. It wasn’t exactly what she had envisioned was going to happen when Admiral Saltee had gleefully cried “Anchors aweigh!” at her and told her she was going to sea, but it was an improvement over what the navy had originally planned to do with her over the summer (a series of speeches to women’s liberation groups, during which she was expected to extol the manifold opportunities offered by the navy to those of the allegedly gentle sex), and she consoled herself with the knowledge that she would be, in fact, the first skirted naval officer ever to sink beneath the waves aboard a nuclear submarine.

  Her orders were simple: “Whatever makes that dolling boy happy, dolling, do it. Within reason, of course,” the secretary told her.

  Lieutenant (j.g.) Jones anticipated no trouble whatever. Woody would, of course, be in seventh heaven just being with Miss Beverly Chambers for two uninterrupted weeks. And certainly, sponsored as he was by two distinguished practitioners of the healing arts and their wives, nothing untoward could possibly happen.

  As the briefing was being carried out in the Secretary’s Dining Room of the State Department Building, in our nation’s capital, another conference, at the highest political level, was being held in the Senate Office Building.

  Earlier that same day, Senator J. Ellwood “Jaws” Fisch (Moralist-Liberal, Calif.) had received a telephone call from, of all places, Spruce Harbor, Maine. The call was, of course, collect (there was no sense throwing money away when one could arrange for the unsuspecting taxpayers to pick up the tab), and it came from the famous gourmet and, more to the point, animal lover, Taylor P. Jambon.

  “It’s all fixed, Jaws,” Mr. Jambon said. “There’s only one teensy-weensy problem.”

  “What's all fixed ... and will you stop calling me ‘Jaws’ ... and what’s the teensy-weensy problem?”

  “Miss Patience Throckbottom Worthington has graciously consented to make at least a half-dozen sixty- second television appeals for funds for the Association of Pup and Pussy Lovers in Earnest, Inc.,” Mr. Jambon said.

  “How much is it going to cost us?” the senator inquired.

  “You must remember, Jaws, that it is necessary to spend a little bread to make a little bread, as Henry Ford was saying to me just the other day,” Taylor P. Jambon said. “And it’s not us it will cost, but APPLE.”

  “How much, Taylor P?” the senator demanded firmly. “In case you’ve forgotten, we own APPLE.” Mr. Jambon gave the figure.

  “That much?” the senator said, shocked. “Taylor P., you’re out of your gourd. There won’t be anything left for the goddamned animals, much less us.”

  “Now listen, Jaws,” Taylor P. said firmly. “That old broad is America’s most beloved thespian. I told you before, when she gets on the tube and starts pitching starving puppies and poor little motherless pussies all across the length and breadth of this great land, there won’t be a dry eye from Maine to Oregon.”

  “You better be right,” the senator replied. “I didn’t get into the animal game to lose my shirt, you know.”

  “Trust me, Jaws,” Taylor P. Jambon had replied. “Believe me, once we get the old hag in the can, the money will roll in by the bucketful.”

  “It’ll have to, if we’re going to pay her that much money,” the senator said. “You still haven’t mentioned the teensy-weensy problem, Taylor P.”

  “It’s right down your alley,” Taylor P. said. “All you have to do is figure some way to get Miss Patience Throckbottom Worthington and a camera crew back and forth to Vienna, Austria.”

  “Vienna, Austria?” the senator replied. “You mean, the one in Europe? That Vienna, Austria?”

  “Right.”

  “What the hell for?”

  “She said that to do a really good job for us, she must be in the right frame of mind, must really feel the plight of the pu
ps and pussies.”

  “And they don’t have any cats and dogs in Maine, is that what you’re trying to tell me?”

  “She needs, she says, the right ambience, the proper circumjacence. ”

  “The proper what?”

  “Circumjacence,” Taylor P. Jambon repeated.

  “What the hell is circumjacence? Doesn’t she even speak English, for Christ’s sake?”

  “I think that is English,” Taylor P. Jambon replied. “But the bottom line, Jaws, is that she goes to Vienna or the deal is off.”

  “Then the deal is off. Don’t you have any idea how much it would cost to get a camera crew back and forth to Vienna?”

  “I figured you could work something out at your end,” Taylor P. Jambon replied.

  “Well, you figured wrong,” the senator said firmly.

  “Then we have another teensy-weensy problem,” Taylor P. Jambon said.

  “Now what?”

  “I already signed the contract,” Taylor P. said. “I don’t know how to tell you this, Jaws, but she gets ... that figure I mentioned ... whether or not she makes the commercials, and she won’t make the commercials unless she can make them in Vienna, Austria.”

  “What’s with Vienna, Austria? Is she some sort of Wiener schnitzel freak, or what?”

  “I don’t really know how to put it,” Taylor P. Jambon said.

  “Try,” the senator said.

  “Well, when I was in to see her, it was time for her bath ... she’s got a broken leg, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know,” the senator said. “But now that I think about it, if she makes these commercials holding herself up on a crutch, it’s not a bad idea.”

  “My thinking exactly,” Taylor P. Jambon said. “There’s a visual tie-in. Anyway, as I was saying, when they came into the room to give her her bath, they put one of those screens, so you couldn’t see in from the hall, and I went out and stood in the hall, you know ...”

  “Get to the point, for God’s sake!”

  “You’re going to have trouble believing this,” Taylor P. said. “Well, there I was in the hall, and all of a sudden, down the hall comes half-a-dozen Arabs.”