The Generals Page 10

  “Do you know and just won’t tell me?”

  “Spencer said McCall,” he said. “Now you know as much as I do.”

  They looked at each other a moment, until he bent and kissed her, allowing his hand to drop down and cup her buttocks, and then he pulled open the kitchen door and went out to the carport.

  As he pulled the Olds’s door closed, he heard her say, softly, “Take care of yourself, Peter.”

  When he got to Smokebomb Hill, Spencer gave him the requisitions. He looked at them in disbelief.

  Blank ammunition; inert shells for the rocket launchers; artillery simulators; explosive charge simulators, inert.

  “What the hell is this?”

  “So far as I know, you can read.”

  “You mean we’re really going to Camp McCall?”

  “So they tell me.”

  “Is this another of Minor’s nutty ideas? Where’s the general?”

  “I dunno, and I dunno,” First Sergeant Spencer replied.

  “Jesus H. Christ!” Crowley said.

  “Do me a favor, Pete,” First Sergeant Spencer said. “Shut up and load up.”

  It was not necessary to go to the ammo point for the “ammunition” and “explosives,” because, since the stuff was hardly any more dangerous than fireworks, permission had been granted to store it in a bunker near Smokebomb Hill. By the time the officers arrived, Crowley’s “A” Team was ready to roll.

  The officers were summoned to a meeting, and returned with the information that they were to fill the Jerry cans.

  “What the hell for? We can go back and forth to McCall a half dozen times on a tank of gas.”

  “Ours not to reason why, Sergeant Crowley, yours but to fill the goddamned cans.”

  Filling the cans was a pain in the ass, and the goddamned things would have to be unfilled when the alert was over. Which meant returned to a MOGAS storage tank by pouring them through a filtered funnel. That took forever and was another genuine pain in the ass.

  Thirty minutes later, after the Jerry cans were filled and the CONVOY signs hung on the jeeps, Crowley’s “A” Team rolled slowly away from Smokebomb Hill toward the Range Road, and the back gate that offered the shortest route to Camp McCall.

  The Fifth Special Forces Group was about to run around in the woods at McCall, eating snakes and making warlike noises, while the Regular army was gearing up to kick the Cuban ass. Crowley had never been so pissed in his life.

  And not only that, he had been so eager that he hadn’t had a goddamned thing to eat since an early hot-dog-and-beans supper.

  And then he saw the Beret standing by the side of the road making MP arm signals. They were being directed off onto a dirt road.

  Crowley knew what this was, he’d bet a dime to a doughnut. The minute the general was out of sight, Colonel Minor was always up to something chickenshit like surprise inspections or unscheduled alerts. Today he was putting the two together. First he called an alert, and now he was going to have the Ordnance creeps from the post on a back road. They would check the vehicles to see when they had last been serviced. They’d measure the depth of the tread of the tires, and make sure the MOGUS ONLY sign painted over the gas tank cap was legible. And issue formal inspection reports, which had to be answered.

  A quarter mile down the dirt road there was a field on which was a collection of vehicles that at first confirmed Crowley’s darkest suspicions. But then it turned out that this was not an Ordnance inspection team. Everybody out here was wearing a green beret. He saw Sergeant Major Taylor and Lieutenant Colonel Mac MacMillan, in fatigues. But no Colonel Minor.

  A sergeant Crowley recognized as one of the candy-asses at Center Headquarters stepped up on the GMC’s running board.

  “The first thing you do is drive down to the end of the field and dump the blanks and the rest of that shit,” he said. “Then you go to those trucks over there and pick up live ammo and explosives. When you’ve done that, you get in line over there and go up to the guys at the tables. They’ll give you your pay records, fuel vouchers, meal vouchers, and the rest of it. And road maps.”

  “Where the hell are we going?”

  “MacDill Air Force Base,” the sergeant said. Then he added, in what he thought was a credible Cuban accent, “Hey, GI, you wanna fook my seester?”

  IV

  (One)

  Rail Marshaling Yards

  Fort Hood, Texas

  1015 Hours, 23 October 1962

  “Sir,” Captain Dwayne Smitherman’s first sergeant said, opening the door of Captain Smitherman’s compartment a crack. “There’s a light colonel from the I.G.’s office out here to see you.”

  “Jesus!” Captain Smitherman said, removing his feet from their resting place on the table. He was a tall, lanky, loose-limbed young man with a pleasant, easygoing look. He stood up, quickly checked the buttons on his fatigue shirt to make sure they were buttoned, looked down at his boots, saw that they were scuffed, and decided it was too late to do anything about them now. He went out of the compartment into the corridor.

  There were two officers with the light bird in the corridor, a chief warrant Smitherman had seen in G-3, and another chief warrant wearing a green beret. The presence of an I.G. worried Smitherman. There was nothing for which he could be called to account that he could think of. But some of his troops had discovered a new guardhouse lawyer technique that he could think of no legal means to counter. They ran to the I.G. the moment someone talked rudely to them and complained of “racial or ethnic discrimination.”

  That Captain Smitherman was himself what his grandfather had called “colored,” his father “Negro,” and Smitherman “Black” didn’t get him off the hook any easier than if he had been a freckle-faced redhead named O’Grogarty. Investigations were called for, and long letters headed “Report of Investigation Into Allegations of Racial Prejudice Claimed by Sp-4 JONES, Franklin D.” had to be written.

  Smitherman came to attention and saluted.

  “Sir, Captain Dwayne Smitherman, Commanding, 4027th Engineer Light Equipment Company.”

  “Good morning, Captain,” the light bird said. “My name is Lowell. This is Mr. Wojinski and Mr. Wallace.”

  He was an elegant sonofabitch, Smitherman thought. That uniform hadn’t come off the “Slightly Irregular-Reduced Price” racks in the clothing sales store.

  “I know Mr. Wallace, sir,” Smitherman said, as he shook their hands. “My first sergeant, Colonel, tells me that you’re the inspector general.”

  “I’m an inspector general,” Lowell said, “from JAF.”

  “JAF, sir?”

  “The Joint Assault Force, at MacDill,” Lowell explained.

  “I believe you’ll find everything is in order, sir. We’re loaded and waiting to be hauled off. But perhaps there’s something in particular the colonel would like to see?”

  “Some of those steaming cups of coffee we saw your mess sergeant passing out, Captain, would be very nice,” Lowell said.

  “Yes, sir. My pleasure, sir. First Sergeant?”

  “I’ve already sent for coffee for these gentlemen, sir,” the first sergeant said.

  “As you can see I have a first sergeant who looks ahead,” Smitherman said.

  “And is there someplace where we could sit down?” Lowell asked. “I have walked farther this morning than the sum of the distance I’ve walked in the last two years.”

  “Yes, of course,” Smitherman said. “The seats are a little dusty—I don’t think this car has rolled in years—but they’re soft.”

  He led them into his compartment.

  A moment later, a fat little man in cook’s white bustled in with a stainless pitcher of coffee and a handful of mugs. On his heels was a skinny young man in whites with condensed milk and sugar and a bowl full of spoons.

  “If the colonel would like some, I’m about to make doughnuts, it’d just take a minute.”

  “We accept,” Lowell said, “with profound gratitude.”

&n
bsp; “Now, how may I help the colonel?” Captain Smitherman said.

  “You’re loaded, you said, and ready to be hauled off?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “All of your equipment?”

  “Everything but the rock crusher, sir. I have been told there is one in crates which will be furnished to us at the port of embarkation.”

  “That’s quite an accomplishment, Captain,” Lowell said.

  “Well, sir, it’s easy to move things if you have the equipment to move them.”

  “I suppose it is,” Colonel Lowell said, smiling. “I was just thinking, Captain, that I’ve never seen an Engineer Heavy Equipment Company.”

  “Sir?”

  “You, Ski?” Lowell asked.

  “No, sir,” Wojinski said.

  “Maybe when they put in the floating harbor on D-Day in France, that was a Heavy Equipment Company,” Warrant Officer Wallace suggested.

  “What I was leading up to, Captain,” Colonel Lowell said, “is that I don’t suppose there’s anything that an Engineer Light Equipment Company couldn’t pick up and move around, is there?”

  “No, sir,” Captain Smitherman said, “I don’t suppose there is.”

  Lowell smiled at him.

  “Fifty tons, maybe?” he asked.

  “Colonel, two months ago, we picked up the whole Combat Command “A” Headquarters Building, two stories tall, fifty two point five feet by one hundred twelve, and moved it two miles.”

  “Fascinating,” Wojinski said.

  “In other words, for the sake of conversation,” Colonel Lowell said, “you could pick up and move an object, say twenty-five feet long, twelve feet wide, eleven feet tall, and weighing forty-seven tons?”

  “Yes, sir,” Captain Smitherman said.

  “You could pick it up, say, six feet, and move it, say, twenty feet sidewards over an obstacle?”

  “Yes, sir,” Captain Smitherman said. He was beginning to smell a rat. “That would depend, Colonel, on the size of the obstacle.”

  “Say six feet tall and twenty feet wide.”

  “Yes, sir,” Smitherman said. “We could handle that.”

  “Let’s carry this a little further,” Colonel Lowell said. “How long would it take you to set up to move such an object?”

  “Not long. No more than an hour, sir.”

  “And let us suppose that after you moved this object, you wanted to put it back where it was. How long would that take you?”

  “Once we were set up, Colonel, it wouldn’t take us more than a couple of minutes.”

  “And how long could you keep this up?”

  “Indefinitely, sir.”

  “Now, suppose there were several objects that had to be simultaneously lifted and moved the way we’ve been talking about. How many objects could you move at one time with the equipment you have presently available to you?”

  It took Captain Smitherman a moment to come up with the answer to that one. “Four, sir,” he said finally.

  Colonel Lowell smiled almost fondly at Captain Smitherman.

  “Now, understand that I don’t doubt your word, Captain, but Mr. Wojinski is a snake-eater who deals with nothing more complicated than spears and rocks. One has to explain things to Green Berets in simple terms, as to a child. Would you very much mind taking a piece of paper and showing Ski how you would do this, step by step?”

  “Not at all, sir,” Smitherman said. He was now convinced that he was about to be had, but he had no idea how.

  He took several sheets of paper from his attaché case, and using that as a desk, sketched how he would solve the problem posed to him by Colonel Lowell.

  He would place a “Drag Line, Self-Propelled, 25-ton Capacity” at each corner of the object to be moved, and a “Tractor, Caterpillar, D3,” on the other side of the six-foot-tall, twenty-foot-wide obstacle.

  “I would then devise some sort of a lifting cradle of steel cable—”

  “Let’s just say,” Colonel Lowell interrupted him, “that the object has lifting hooks.”

  “In that case, sir, it would be much easier. The drag lines would lift the object to a height greater than the height of the obstacle. The Cat would then, by a cable attached to the object, pull it over the obstacle. The drag line operators would permit their booms to swing as the object was being pulled away from them.”

  “And could they, if they wanted, lower the object gently onto the obstacle itself?” Colonel Lowell said.

  “Yes, sir,” Captain Smitherman said.

  “Mr. Wallace,” Colonel Lowell said. “I hope that you have been paying close attention to this.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There are several morals to be learned,” Lowell said. “First, that if you don’t know what you’re doing, ask somebody who probably does. Second, that if there’s a will, there’s a way. And third, virtue is very often its own reward.”

  “Yes, sir,” Wallace said, solemnly. “I will try to remember that, Colonel.”

  Lowell turned to Captain Smitherman.

  “Congratulations, Captain,” he said. “A kind fate has put you in a position to get the 2nd Armored Division off the dime.”

  “Sir?”

  “Will you please call your first sergeant in here and tell him to get the troops off their racks? They’re about to load some tanks.”

  Now that it was out in the open, Smitherman wondered why he was surprised. The colonel probably fondly believed he was the first one to think of loading tanks on flatcars using heavy Engineer equipment. Smitherman had thought of it often himself.

  “Sir,” Captain Smitherman said uncomfortably, “it’s specifically forbidden by regulation to use drag lines to lift tanks.”

  “Is that so?” Colonel Lowell asked. “Do you happen to know why?”

  “The danger to the equipment is too great.”

  “You mean the weight could snap the cables?”

  “Either snap the cable or cause the booms to fail, sir,” Smitherman said.

  “Explain that to me, please,” Lowell said.

  “There’s a thirty-three and one-third percent safety factor built into the equipment, sir. In other words, equipment with a ten-ton capacity can really lift about thirteen point three tons. I don’t know exactly what an M48A5 weighs—”

  “Ninety-four thousand, six hundred pounds, give or take a couple of hundred,” Colonel Lowell said. “Right at forty-seven tons.”

  “Yes, sir. What I’m trying to point out, Colonel, is that that much weight exceeds the combined rated load of four drag lines by seven tons.”

  “But with the safety factor, four of your machines should be able to lift fifty-two tons. As a matter of fact, fifty-three point two tons.”

  “Yes, sir, but, in this case, if just one cable should snap, or any other part of one machine should fail, that would divide the weight between the remaining three. Let’s see, that would put a little under sixteen tons on each of the remaining machines, and they could be expected to fail. And when I say fail, sir, I mean they’d more than likely be destroyed.”

  “You’re going to just have to take that risk,” Lowell said. “Tell your men to be careful. Take the strains cautiously, work together.”

  “Sir, I respectfully repeat that it’s against regulations,” Captain Smitherman said, “and I can’t do it.”

  “Your intact drag lines would look pretty silly on a Cuban beach when the division’s tanks are sitting in Texas,” Lowell said. “Has that occurred to you?”

  “Sir, respectfully, regulations are regulations.”

  “Captain, are you familiar with the name E. Z. Black?”

  “General Black? Yes, sir.”

  “General Black is famous in the service for a number of things,” Colonel Lowell said. “But perhaps most famous for his temper when aroused. I have been reliably informed that an incident in Korea triggered his rage almost as much as when he had elements of your own division across the Elbe, was about to take Berlin, and received a radio call
to halt in place and let our Russian allies take it.”

  “I’ve heard that story, sir,” Smitherman said.

  It was division legend that General Black had methodically kicked each of the windows out of his van while he was warming up to a full rage.

  “As I was saying, Captain, he was angered almost to the same degree in Korea. Have you heard that story?”

  “No, sir.”

  “A colonel told General Black that he couldn’t do something he wanted to do because it was against regulations,” Lowell said. “The gist of General Black’s remarks on that occasion, which no one who heard them will ever forget—phrased as they were in the somewhat colorful language of the cavalryman—is that regulations are for the guidance of the commander, only; that they did not come off Mount Sinai graven on stone; that the only order or regulation binding on a commander is the execution of his mission. And that any officer who doesn’t know that should not be entrusted with the command of anything more important than a Quartermaster Corps mess-kit repair platoon. Am I making my point, Captain?”

  “Sir, with all respect—”

  “In the worst possible scenario here,” Lowell interrupted him, “we would load zero tanks before your equipment failed. We would then be no worse off than we are now. Your equipment, by itself, has zero value to this operation. On the other hand, depending on how well you have trained your people and maintained your equipment, and with a little bit of luck, we can perhaps load a lot of tanks without destroying all of your equipment. So far as I’m concerned, that’s it.”

  “Sir, is that your decision to make?” Smitherman asked.

  “Tell him, Wallace,” Lowell said.

  “Sir,” Wallace said, “General Lemper asked me to come along with Colonel Lowell, and to tell anyone who questioned Colonel Lowell’s authority that he was to first comply with Colonel Lowell’s orders, and then complain about it, personally, to the general later.”

  “Actually,” Lowell said, “the general’s words were ‘after the fact.’ Now, are you going to take Mr. Wallace’s and my word about that, or do you want to run over and ask General Lemper yourself?”

  Captain Smitherman looked at Lowell, whose eyebrows were raised in amusement and question.