The Berets Page 12

  “Where are they kept?”

  “In the Provost Marshal’s Office, sir.”

  “And where is that?”

  “Right next door, sir.”

  “Sergeant,” Lowell said, “would you please fetch it for me?”

  The sergeant looked at the captain, who licked his lips nervously and looked at Lowell, who had raised his eyebrows, questioning delay in responding to his order.

  “Tell them I sent you for it,” the captain said, and the sergeant lifted a portion of the counter, slipped through it, and went out the door.

  “It won’t take him a minute, sir,” the captain said. He looked like he was about to ask a question.

  “How many men have you confined here?” Lowell asked quickly. Over the captain’s shoulder he saw the cadaverous lieutenant still standing at rigid attention.

  “Two hundred seventeen, sir,” the captain said.

  “Lieutenant, you may sit down and get on with your duties,” Lowell said.

  The lieutenant hastily folded his newspaper, dropped it in the wastebasket, and took something from his desk drawer. He then began to study it with rapt fascination.

  “How many pretrial?”

  The captain had to think about that.

  “Fifty-one, sir.”

  “And how many are confined in hospital?”

  “I don’t have that off the top of my head, sir,” Captain Foster said. “I’ll get it for you.”

  Lowell nodded.

  Take your time, Captain. I need time to dream up other appropriate questions to ask.

  The captain was still frantically searching for the right list when the sergeant returned, carrying a manila folder.

  “Thank you,” Lowell said to him, taking the file. He raised his voice slightly. “Get that information for me at your convenience, Captain,” he said. “Now I would like the table and chair I requested, so I can read this. And then please send for the soldier in question.”

  “Would the colonel like to use the confinement officer’s office, sir?”

  “I would rather not,” Lowell said. “Just a room and a table and two chairs will be fine.”

  “Yes, sir. Will you come with me, please, sir?”

  He showed Lowell to a small cubicle, obviously where the officer of the day slept at night.

  Lowell walked in, laid the file on the small table, and looked at Captain Foster.

  “You have sent for the prisoner?”

  “I’ll do that right now, sir.”

  Lowell shut the door in his face. He sat down and opened the file.

  There were five charges, the most serious of which was “Assault on a Noncommissioned Officer in the Execution of His Office.” The convening authority, the post commander, approving the recommendation of the Board of Investigating Officers, had directed trial by general court-martial on all the charges and specifications.

  A loudspeaker went off: “Attention on the parade ground. Attention on the parade ground. Confinee Craig to report to his barracks. Confinee Craig to report to his barracks. On the double.”

  V

  (One)

  The Coronado Beach Hotel

  San Diego, California

  0845 Hours, 11 December 1961

  There were a number of temptations put into the path of a physician, Antoinette Parker, M.D., thought as she watched her husband get dressed, and high among them was a physician’s virtually unquestioned access to any number of tranquilizing drugs. There was a plastic bottle of such a drug in her purse. Dr. Emory Stacey III, a colleague at Fayetteville, North Carolina, General Hospital, had given it to her a few days earlier.

  Dr. Stacey, like Dr. Parker, was a board-certified radiologist. They had become professionally acquainted shortly after Dr. Parker had found employment as what the army called, in its quaint way, a “contract surgeon” at the Fort Bragg hospital. They had quickly become friends, and this friendship bloomed even though Dr. Stacey was a white North Carolinian male who referred to his wife as “the little woman” and who believed the election of John Fitzgerald Kennedy was a national catastrophe of about fifteen on the Richter scale, while Dr. Parker was a black very professional female from Massachusetts who believed that Richard Nixon posed the greatest threat to the republic since Benedict Arnold and who was not at all reluctant to say so.

  For her part, Toni did not find Dr. Stacey sexually attractive, and she was sure that as a southern gentleman he would no more make a pass at a black woman than he would join the Abyssinian Baptist Church. Their friendship was thus initially based on mutual respect. Professionally they were head and shoulders over their peers, and that had immediately become apparent to both of them.

  They saw themselves in the company of all-too-enthusiastic cutters, who saw carcinoma in every dark smudge of a film and considered it their joyous duty to exorcise the evil with a knife. Compensation for their selfless service to mankind naturally came quickly from the friendly folks at Blue Cross/Blue Shield.

  Emory Stacey and Toni Parker believed surgery to be the last resort, and they found in each other allies of great value when surgery was being debated by the medical staffs of the two hospitals with which they were affiliated. Stacey had come out of Tulane and the Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans, and had done his residency at the Mayo Clinic. Parker had come out of Harvard and Massachusetts General. Their opinions could not be easily disregarded, and the cutters were often denied the chance to wield their knives.

  Later they had become friends. They were both married to and in love with difficult people. Difficult, however, in very different ways. Jo-Ellen Stacey was a tall, good-looking southern belle with the brains of a gnat. Philip Sheridan Parker IV was a highly intelligent, well-educated, extremely capable man who was absolutely convinced that it was graven on stone tablets that he was destined to be a soldier, as his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been before him.

  In time Emory Stacey learned, though not from Toni, that Phil Parker, who had earned a battlefield promotion to captain in Korea, had also not long afterward been court-martialed there. He had been charged—and acquitted—of having shot down a cowardly officer who had refused to fight. Legally the accusation was to have been expunged from army records on the return of a not-guilty verdict. But he remained by reputation the cold-blooded coon who had blown away some poor battle-weary first john and gotten away with it.

  Philip Sheriden Parker IV later trusted the army when he was told that he was not promoted to major when he should have been because somehow the army had lost his records, and as a result his name had not been put before a promotion board. Dr. Toni Parker did not believe that explanation for a second. (The promotion eventually came through.)

  Toni Parker learned, though not from Emory Stacey, that Jo-Ellen Stacey had had an affair with both her pediatrician and the pilot who had tried, and failed, to teach her to fly an airplane. Emory was not too embarrassed to talk about his wife to Toni, however. He had to talk to somebody, after all, and Toni was smart, sophisticated, discreet, and sexually unavailable. What Emory told Toni about Jo-Ellen was that she was dumb. Plain dumb. Not bad, just dumb. When she ran out of things to say to a man, she pulled her panties down.

  And they continued to be married, Emory and Jo-Ellen, Toni and Phil, and there were children; yet, neither Emory nor Toni could imagine a normal married life with their lawful spouses. Still, it was nice to have somebody to talk to.

  “He’s going to Indochina for a year,” Toni Parker told Emory Stacey not long before Phil—well, abandoned her yet one more time. “He thinks they have finally recognized his potential.”

  “What’s he going to do in Indochina?”

  “Fly airplanes. Kill people. Who knows?”

  “You can’t talk him out of going?”

  “No more than Pavlov could make the dogs stop salivating once he rang the bell,” she said. “He has heard the bugle blow and is pawing the ground.”

  “When’s he going?”

  “Right away.
Everybody else in the army gets three, four months’ notice. He sails from San Diego on December eleventh.”

  “By ship?”

  “By aircraft carrier,” she said. “That’s a big secret, by the way. Don’t tell anybody. The military is absolutely convinced that if they stamp Top Secret on somebody’s orders, that will make an aircraft carrier loaded with army airplanes and helicopters invisible.”

  “You’re going to stay here?”

  “Sure,” she said. “What else? I’m an officer’s wife, and officers’ wives smile bravely and put candles in their windows and wait for their men to come home.”

  Their eyes met, and he shrugged in sympathy.

  “I know a fellow,” Emory Stacey said. “He’ll be helpful about a house.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t you have to give up your quarters when he leaves?” Stacey asked.

  “Oh, that’s nice of you, Emory,” she said, understanding what he had offered: to use his influence to get a black woman and her kids into a decent house.

  “Not at all,” he said.

  “Our quarters are my quarters,” she said. “I hold the assimilated grade of colonel. They’re really desperate for physicians, and they provide quarters. Assimilated colonels don’t get to live on Colonel’s Row, but they do get quarters. I’ll stay on the post. I don’t want to put the kids in one of your schools.”

  “No,” he agreed.

  “I’ll have to ask you to cover for me for a week at the hospital though,” she said.

  “Sure,” he said. “You’re going to California with him?”

  “With a stop at Valhalla,” she said.

  “Valhalla?”

  “That’s not fair of me,” she said. “Phil and I are going to stop off to see his parents—that’s Colonel Philip Sheridan Parker III, Retired. They have a house outside the gate of Fort Riley. That’s not fair, either. They have a very nice house on 160 acres outside Manhattan, Kansas. The colonel raises horses. He was a cavalryman. But it is sort of Valhalla, or at least the Valhalla Museum. All the souvenirs all the Parker soldiers—and there have been a lot of them—have brought home from their wars. It’s a sacred ritual, like Japanese ancestor worship, to go there and be reminded of Phil’s noble, soldierly heritage. There is even a symbol like a ceremonial sword, an enormous Colt revolver, that Phil’s grandfather carried in World War I.”

  “An old six-shooter?”

  “Not the cowboy gun, but an old revolver. The colonel carried it in World War II, and Phil carried it in Korea. When Paul Hanrahan told Phil he was going to Indochina, he took it to pieces and cleaned it. Not that it needed cleaning, but that is the ritual.”

  Dr. Stacey chuckled.

  “And while his daddy was taking it apart and putting it back together, little Phil stood quietly behind him, eyes wide, watching, just dreaming of the day when he can be a soldier.”

  “Don’t get sore at me, Toni,” Stacey said, “but I sort of understand that.”

  “That’s because you’re a male chauvinist,” she said.

  “You knew that,” he said. “Is there anything I can do, Toni?”

  “Come to the party,” Toni said. “Prepared to tranquilize a hysterical wife.”

  “Whose party?”

  “Mine, of course. An officer’s wife has a ritual party for a husband going away. Everybody gets drunk and worships Mars with a ritual bloody steak.”

  When Emory and Jo-Ellen came to Quarters Six, Hospital Area, for the party, Emory slipped a bottle into Toni’s hand. He had taken her at her word. There were enough tranquilizers in the bottle to put the officer corps of the Eighty-second Airborne Division into a happy stupor.

  She had yet to take one, although there had been great temptation at the farm outside Manhattan, when, with tears in their eyes, the kids had waved good-bye to them. She was also tempted the day before when Phil had had to go to the navy base to check in and had left her alone in the hotel. Toni had really wanted to be either drunk or tranquilized then.

  She did not do either, though. Phil didn’t like her when she had too much to drink, and she didn’t want him to go away remembering her that way, so that was out. But so were the pills. She was afraid of drugs, medical efficacy aside. She had seen too many women, Jo-Ellen Stacey among them, riding around on cloud nine.

  So she’d gone to the pool and swam to work the emotional poisons out of her system before Phil came back from the navy base. When she went up their room, there was an enormous floral display standing in front of the dresser. It was in the shape of a horseshoe, and it carried a legend, Bon Voyage!, in gold letters on a purple ribbon. She didn’t have to open the card to know that it was from Craig Lowell. Lowell sent flowers on every occasion—always too many, too garish.

  Lowell, whom Toni Parker regarded as another lost soul, was Phil’s best friend. They had met at Fort Knox long ago as second lieutenants, and Phil believed Lowell’s testimony in his behalf was the reason he had been acquitted at his court-martial. Lowell had been Phil’s best man at their wedding. The flowers made her think of that and consider that she very possibly was on the next to the last day of her time with the man she had married. Soldiers got killed in wars, and her husband, goddamn him, insisted on being a soldier.

  She had not taken a pill then, either. If these were to be their last hours she wanted to remember them in detail, not through a chemical fog.

  As Phil tied his tie, Toni jumped out of bed.

  “I’m going with you to the dock.”

  He turned and looked at her.

  “I thought we talked that through,” he said. “The dock will be loaded with sailors’ wives.”

  “And at least one soldier’s wife,” Toni said.

  “It’s not smart,” he said.

  “Maybe not,” she said, “but I’m going.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  My God, she thought, he’s pleased. He really is pleased. He wants me to go with him. And I almost lay here on my tail and didn’t go.

  There was a marine guard at the gate to the navy base. He started to wave them through with a crisp salute, but then held his hand out.

  Toni thought she understood that. He had first seen the officer’s insignia, the gold major’s leaves, on Phil’s epaulets. Then he had seen, certainly, the color of the major’s skin.

  “Good morning, sir,” he said, and leaned down to look in the window, looking at both of them carefully. “Your destination, sir?”

  “The USNS Card,” Phil said.

  “Thank you, sir,” the MP said, and waved them through.

  She had never seen an aircraft carrier up close before. This one, Phil had told her, wasn’t even a full-sized one. It was a World War II carrier taken out of mothballs and converted into an aircraft ferry. It wasn’t even officially a navy ship, but crewed by civilians and called USNS for U.S. Naval Ship rather than USS, which stood for United States Ship. Toni didn’t pretend to understand the convoluted military logic behind that.

  From a distance she could see the flight deck. It was jammed with helicopters and airplanes. She knew what they were. Piasecki H-21 “Flying Bananas,” with a rotor at each end. DeHavilland of Canada L20 “Beavers” and the larger version of the Beaver, the U1A “Otter.” There were Mohawks aboard, too, but they were being carried internally, Phil had told her. The twin turboprop Grumman reconnaissance aircraft were a deep secret within the larger deception involved in sending army airplanes to Indochina.

  Even though Card was a small vessel, close up it was so large, it was overwhelming. When Phil stopped the car at a marine MP’s hand signal on the dock, Toni could not see anything but the carrier’s enormous expanse of gray steel.

  “You’re going aboard, sir?” the marine asked.

  “Yes,” Phil said.

  “You’d better hurry, sir. They’ve already begun to take in the lines.”

  With a little bit of luck, it’ll leave without him.

  “Thank you,” Phil said.

  H
e took off his brimmed cap and handed it to Toni.

  “Take care of that for me, will you?” he said. He opened his attaché case, which contained, among other things, the ceremonial Colt revolver, and took out a green beret.

  “I thought they were outlawed,” she said.

  “CONARC directives apply only in the States,” he said, setting the beret in place on his head. He twisted the rearview mirror of the Econo-Rent Ford to examine himself.

  They’re like little boys with those hats. Little boys dressing up to go play war.

  “If I have neglected to mention this,” Phil said, “I love you. Take care of yourself.”

  He leaned over and kissed her, very tenderly, on the lips, then quickly stepped out of the car. He stuck his attaché case under his arm and then pulled his two suitcases from the backseat.

  Their eyes met and he smiled. Then he straightened up, kicked the door shut, and marched down the pier in the shadow of the enormous gray bulk above him.

  Two soldiers in green berets came running to him and relieved him of the suitcases. He turned and looked at her for a moment, waved, and walked farther down the pier.

  Toni jumped out of the car and walked after him.

  There was an open door, as large as a house, in the side of the ship, with a wide stairway leading into it. She thought she caught a glimpse of him at the top, but she wasn’t sure.

  She stood on the pier looking up at the ship.

  A crane pulled the wide stairs away from the door in the ship.

  A navy band began to play “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You.”

  She sensed, rather than saw, that the carrier was moving.

  She walked backward away from it, and gradually the deck came in sight. It was possible now to see people up there, army officers among them, looking down at the pier, but she didn’t see Phil.

  It took a long time for the USNS Card to begin to move, and the band changed tunes. They played “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.” That was an old Cavalry tune she had learned from Colonel Philip S. Parker III. The navy was playing it for the army. That was nice, she thought.

  She did not see Phil again, although she searched the USNS Card until it was too far away to make out faces.