The Majors Page 15

  “I thought about trailers,” she said.

  “Oh, Christ!” he said, earning the disapproving glare of the waitress who had approached the table for his order. “Is it that bad?” Then he turned to the waitress. “You ready for another?” he asked his wife, and when she shook her head, “no,” he told the waitress, “Bring me a gin and tonic with a double shot of bitters, please.”

  “With what?” she asked.

  “A double squirt of bitters,” he explained. “I like them bitter.”

  “I’ll ask,” the waitress said. “But I don’t think we have anything like that.”

  “Ask,” he said. “And if you don’t, it’s OK.”

  “Welcome to the Wiregrass, you-all,” Barbara said, softly, when the waitress was out of earshot.

  “You aren’t really serious about a trailer, are you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what I’m serious about,” she said. “I’m really discouraged. There’s just no housing, period.”

  “But a trailer?”

  “Trailers,” she corrected him. “Plural. We’d need two.”

  “You’re serious, aren’t you?” he asked. “You’re suggesting we rent two trailers.”

  “We’d do better buying,” she said. “They cost about $10,000, for a nice one, and we’d need two, so that would be $20,000.”

  “Why do we need two?”

  “We have children,” she said. “Or have you forgotten? And unless you would like one or more of them sharing our bed, we’ll need two trailers.”

  “I thought they made big ones.”

  “I’m talking about big ones. The little ones are for newlyweds.”

  “No houses?”

  “The name of the game is screw the soldiers,” she said. “The houses that are available are either tiny, or outrageously priced, or both.”

  “We need what?”

  “Four bedrooms,” she said.

  “Dick and Billy could double up.”

  “Three bedrooms, if you are willing to have your children hate you.”

  “I’m willing,” he said. “Can you find a place?”

  “How about six bedrooms?” she asked. “I found an antebellum mansion we can have for $650 a month. Six bedrooms. No air conditioning. I guess in the olden days they had colored people waving fans at Massa and Mistress.”

  “Six hundred fifty bucks a month?” he asked. “That’s a hell of a lot of money.”

  “That’s what I thought,” she said, sarcastically, “but I thought I’d better check with you.”

  “Where is it?”

  “On Broad Street,” she said, “in Ozark.”

  “Let me finish my bitterless gin and bitters, and we’ll go look at it.”

  “It will be very conspicuous, Bob,” Barbara said. “It looks like Tara in Gone With the Wind. And it’s sort of a stock joke among the officers’ ladies.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “‘If I thought I could get somebody to buy the children, I’m desperate enough to rent the $650 mansion,’” she quoted.

  “Oh,” he said, and thought that over for a minute. “Oh, what the hell, honey, I’m a colonel, or will be next week, and there’d probably be as much talk if we rented, or bought, two trailers.”

  “God, I’m glad to hear you say that,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because now I can tell you I gave the man…and the man is the mayor of Ozark, and a lawyer, and a real estate guy…a deposit for it.”

  The reluctance of the Bellmons, separately, to take the antebellum mansion at $650 per month was not because of the rent, although $650 was nearly three times Colonel Bellmon’s housing allowance. The Bellmons thought of themselves as “comfortable.” Most of their peers, if they had known the extent of their holdings in real estate and investments, would have considered them wealthy. This could be an awkward situation in the army, where most officers lived from payday to payday, and they took great pains not to rub their affluence in anyone’s sensitive nostrils.

  On the way to Ozark in Barbara’s Buick (Lt. Col. Bellmon drove a Volkswagen to work), he told her about WOJG Greer.

  “I was assigned a new rotary wing pilot today,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “By an interesting coincidence, he’s the sergeant, the ex-sergeant, who went into Dien Bien Phu with Mac and Sandy Felter.”

  “How did you arrange that?” she said.

  “I didn’t arrange it. Bill Roberts arranged it.”

  “That was nice of him,” Barbara said.

  “This is no favor,” Bellmon said. “He stuck it in me.”

  “Explain,” she said.

  “I asked for an experienced warrant helicopter pilot, somebody who had experience in Korea, at the very least. I need experts, honey, not kids who just graduated from flight school.”

  “Oh,” she said, understanding.

  “This is the first shot at Fort Sumter,” he said. “Open warfare will shortly follow.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Roberts knows what a threat I pose to the aviation establishment,” Bellmon said. “And he’s a good enough soldier to know that the best defense is a good offense.”

  “I thought you were sort of friends,” she said.

  “We were, when I was a tanker, and he was trying to sell aviation to armor as a tool armor needed. But the minute I put on wings, I became a threat, a contender for control of aviation, and that he can’t tolerate.”

  “I don’t understand the rivalry.”

  “He’s been studying revolutions,” Bellmon said. “He understands that the first thing that usually happens after a successful revolution is that the leaders of the revolutionaries are stood against a wall and shot.”

  “That’s a little strong, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “What any officer wants is command,” he said. “What Roberts fears is that after all the work he’s done to convince the brass that aviation is necessary, the commands are going to go to newcomers. Like me.”

  “Is he right?”

  “Right now, the Aviation Board is hot stuff. They’ve got a bunch of money, and a bunch of people, and they’re about to get a bunch of new aircraft, and everything that goes with them. They’re going to get their pictures in the paper. But, and Bill Roberts is smart enough to know it, I have the clout. I’m going to be deciding what aviation is going to do with the equipment, and the capability. He knows, in other words, that he’s already been shunted over to a support role.”

  “How come you’re so important?” she asked, gently sarcastic.

  “I’ve had a battalion,” he said. “The brass trust people who have had commands. And they don’t trust aviators. They don’t take them seriously.”

  “Is that fair?”

  “What’s fair? It’s the way things are. The only chance the Cincinnati Flying Club has to keep control of aviation, to keep as much as they can, is to discredit me, people like me. They’ll try to make the brass believe that you can’t turn over the decision-making to brand-new aviators, because we don’t know what we’re doing.”

  “Who’s right?”

  “That’s the bitch, Barbara,” he said. “We both are. I don’t think the birdmen know, because they haven’t been there, what the combat arms need, and what it takes to make a battalion work. And the birdmen don’t think that we know, because we haven’t been here, what aircraft are, and what they can do.”

  “So what happens?”

  “Darwin. Survival of the fittest. After a good deal of internecine warfare.”

  “Then you’ll win,” she said, confidently.

  “I’m not entirely sure about that,” he said. “And I’m not entirely sure I should.”

  “Look at Mac,” she said. “Trust Mac’s instincts.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Mac is the legionnaire in the phalanx,” she said. “Nature’s natural warrior. No philosophical questions in his mind. He just wants to follow an officer who’ll keep h
im alive and win the battles he’s sent to fight. And he enlisted in your army.”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “I remember, I was old enough, when Daddy and I. D. White and Creighton Abrams went to armor from cavalry,” she said. “Everybody said they were throwing their careers away. That’s what you’re doing. They couldn’t fight the last war on horses, and they probably won’t be able to fight the next one with tanks, or with troops jumping in with parachutes. Army aviation is the answer, and you know it, and you know you’re the guy best qualified to figure out how it should be done. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have been given the job.”

  “Have you ever considered a career in the WACs?” he asked.

  “I prefer to stand on the sidelines, wearing a big floppy hat, and with a rose in my teeth,” she said.

  She showed him where to park, before Howard Dutton’s office on Courthouse Square in Ozark, directly across the street from the Confederate monument. And they went into Dutton’s office, where they met his daughter Melody, and had a cup of coffee. Then they walked down Broad Street where Howard Dutton showed Colonel Bellmon the old Fordham place, which had sat empty for five years, and which he was now going to rent to Bellmon for $650 a month.

  VII

  (One)

  Frankfurt am Main, Germany

  17 April 1955

  As regulations prescribed, Major Craig W. Lowell was given an efficiency report at the conclusion of his year-long initial ultilization tour as an aviator. It wasn’t much of an efficiency report; it wouldn’t do him much good.

  It said that he had performed the duties required of him in an exemplary manner and had materially increased his skills and knowledge as an aviator. Aviators on initial utilization tours were expected to materially increase their skills and knowledge as aviators. Most of them worked hard at it.

  The efficiency report also said: “Inasmuch as subject officer has been on an initial utilization tour during the reporting period, he has not been required to perform any functions of command. Consequently, the rating officer has been unable to evaluate his performance as a commander, or to form any opinion concerning subject officer’s potential performance as a combat commander in his present or in a higher rank.”

  In effect, what the efficiency report said was that he managed to put in another year’s service without either killing himself in a helicopter or getting into trouble.

  What he had become, Major Craig Lowell thought, was a taxi driver to the brass. He was nowhere nearer to doing anything important than he ever had been. There was no reason that a second lieutenant, six months out of flight school, couldn’t do what he was doing.

  The brass preferred not be flown by second lieutenants. The more senior the brass, the more they could make this known. They felt more comfortable being flown by senior captains and majors and even lieutenant colonels than they did by second lieutenants.

  It was Lowell’s belief that the younger the pilot, the better. He had prepared a staff study (for Bill Robert’s signature; his own signature would make the document meaningless) proposing that fifty enlisted men no older than eighteen years of age, who met the basic requirements for OCS in terms of physical and mental ability, be sent to flight school for training as warrant officer rotary wing aviators. Current practice was to send to flight school deserving noncoms of long and faithful service, technical and master sergeants only, which generally made them twenty-eight or thirty. The performance of the fifty boy pilots over a couple of years would either confirm Lowell’s theory, or disprove it.

  Roberts had reported that the staff study had caused fits all up and down the Pentagon, particularly with the Transportation Corps, whose senior officer, the Chief of Transporation, had only recently won a major skirmish to have L-20 Beaver and H-34 Choctaw companies designated Transportation Airplane and Helicopter Companies, on the lines of Transportation Truck Companies, and bluntly announced he didn’t want a flock of teen-aged warrant officers running loose with his aircraft. The staff study had not been rejected, however. It was “being studied.” Rumor had it being studied by the Secretary of Defense himself.

  “When you inevitably get us shot down in flames, Lowell,” Bill Roberts had written, “we will make a spectacular crash.”

  Today, leading a flight of eight Bell H-13s, Lowell had flown up the autobahn from Heidelberg to Rhine-Main Airfield outside Frankfurt, where they had topped off the fuel tanks. After they’d taken off, they’d cut directly across Frankfurt over the Bahnhof and then up Erschenheimer-Landstrasse to the grassy expanse in front of the enormous curved facade of the former I. G. Farben Building, now Headquarters, U.S. Forces, European Theater (USFET).

  The seven other Bell H-13s flew in trail behind him in a V, each chopper flying two hundred feet behind and one hundred feet above the bird in front of him. They would make an intentional display of themselves when they all suddenly, and virtually simultaneously, swooped out of the sky to pick up a visiting one-star and his collection of colonels and lower hangers-on and ferry them to Heidelberg, to Headquarters, U.S. Army, Europe.

  “All right,” Major Lowell said to his microphone, “now let’s do it right.”

  He put the H-13 into a steep turn to the left, his eyes on the white painted H of the helipad. He straightened the bird out, dropped like a stone, flared, and touched down. He looked out the plexiglass bubble. Six of the seven choppers were on the ground. The seventh was coming in very slowly, like a bather about to test the temperature in a swimming pool. There’s always one sonofabitch who’s a minute late and a dollar short, Lowell thought, and then started to shut the helicopter down.

  A tall, quite handsome officer, with a glistening star pinned to his overseas hat (you didn’t see many of them anymore; the generals had taken to wearing the new olive-green uniform, whose hat was generously provided with scrambled eggs on the brim—far more general-like than an overseas cap) came rapidly striding toward Lowell’s H-13.

  Lowell hadn’t expected them for a good five minutes. But he unsnapped his harness, jumped out of the helicopter, ran under the still rotating blades, and held open the passenger door for the buck general with one hand while he saluted with the other.

  The general looked him up and down and got into the helicopter. By the time Lowell got back in, the general had already found the headset and put it on.

  “I’m Major Lowell, sir,” he said. “Were we by any chance late?”

  “No, you were thirty seconds early,” the buck general said. “That was pretty spectacular, that swooping pigeons bit. Do you do that all the time, or just to impress visitors?”

  “We practice all the time, sir,” Lowell said. “So that we can impress visitors.”

  “One of your pigeons was late,” the general said. “Did you notice?”

  The other pilots reported in, one at a time, giving just their number, to signify their readiness to take off: Five. Two. Seven. Four. Three. Six.

  The needles were in the green. Lowell picked up on the cyclic, swooping back in the air. He saw in the mirror that the rest of the flight had taken off when he did. Perfect. The general hadn’t seen that, of course. Just the bastard who was late.

  “You’re smiling,” the general said. “I suppose the rest of your flock got off the ground by the numbers.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Including Tailgate Charley?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now that we’re in the air, don’t you think it would be a good idea to ask me where we’re going?” the general asked.

  “I was informed the general’s destination was Heidelberg, sir.”

  “There has been a change in plans. I want to go to Bad Godesberg. Can you do that, or are you going to have to fuel up someplace?”

  “We have enough fuel for Bad Godesberg and a thirty-minute reserve, sir,” Lowell replied. He pressed his microphone button and called Rhine-Main area control and told him of the change in flight plans.

  “That swooping pigeon bit was very impressive,�
�� the general said, when he had finished. “Does it have some sort of bona fide military application, or is it like chrome-plating mess kits?”

  “If the general can imagine each of these machines as capable of carrying eight fully armed infantrymen, the general can probably imagine that we can discharge a platoon and its basic load of ammunition in just about the time it took us to pick up the general’s party, sir.”

  “And each of those machines could be flown by a teen-aged boy, right?”

  That surprised Lowell to the point where he looked at the general.

  “Yes, sir, I think they could.”

  “You are one of Bill Robert’s acolytes, then?” the general said.

  “I don’t think of myself so much as an acolyte, General, as a monsignor to his bishop.”

  The general laughed. “You’ve heard about the teen-age pilots, then?”

  “I was able to help the bishop draft the appeal to the heavens, sir.”

  “That suggests you wrote it,” the general snapped. Lowell didn’t reply. “Either you did, or you didn’t,” the general snapped. “Which is it?”

  “I wrote it, General.”

  “Then you must be another of the recent recruits to peace on earth through air mobility,” the general said. “Another bright young officer throwing his career away in a quest for the Holy Grail.”

  Lowell didn’t trust himself to reply.

  “Had second thoughts already, have you?” the general asked.

  “No, sir,” Lowell said, and then he thought, fuck it, this guy hates army aviation anyway. “I’m in army aviation because I don’t have a career to throw away. And, with all respect, sir, I think a lot of people are going to eat their words about Colonel Roberts. He’s right, and most of his critics are wrong.”

  The general said, dryly: “Your loyalty is commendable.”

  Lowell now knew that whatever he said would be wrong. He said nothing.

  The general said, “That was a colorful phrase, didn’t you think? ‘Another bright young officer throwing his career away in a quest for the Holy Grail.’”