The Captains Read online

  When Sandy came home, he insisted they get married in the chapel at West Point. If their rabbi wanted to marry them, fine; otherwise, they would be married by an army chaplain. They would have the reception in the Hotel Thayer, which was a hotel owned by the army. He told her that it would be important to her later, to be able to say that she had been married at West Point.

  So they had been married at West Point, in a very nice ceremony. A few of the members of Sandy’s old class, ’46, showed up. They said that as far as they were concerned, Sandy was still one of them, and they gave him a ’46 class ring, and they gave Sharon a miniature of it. That made it better.

  Sandy hadn’t gone back to West Point, although he could have, because he had found out he could get a college degree by correspondence from the University of Chicago. Sharon went with Sandy to Fort Benning, where he went through the Parachute School, and then to Fort Bragg, where he went through the Ranger School.

  “I’ll probably never jump out of another airplane,” Sandy told her. “And they don’t want me in the Rangers. But that’s part of the game, and I have to play it.”

  “What game?” she’d asked him.

  “The army is like the boy scouts,” he said. “They have a system of merit badges. The more merit badges you have, the better. I’ll get jump wings from Benning, and a little strip with ‘Ranger’ on it at Bragg, and then I’ll have as many merit badges as someone of my age and rank is supposed to have. That’s the way the game is played.”

  So he became a paratrooper and a Ranger, and Sharon thought they would probably spend two or three years at Fort Bragg, while Sandy did what young officers were supposed to do—two years, preferably three, duty with troops.

  But as the honor graduate of the Ranger School, he was given his choice of assignments, and he chose what Sharon thought was the worst one. He volunteered for duty with something called the U.S. Army Military Advisory Group, Greece (USAMAG-G). Dependents were not authorized in Greece. She would be left behind again, for a year, maybe more.

  Sharon’s mother cried, and said Sandy had a devil in him, and Sandy’s mother was ashamed of what her son had done to Sharon. But he went. Greece was where he met Craig Lowell. Sandy wrote (often every day) and he told her about Craig. At first, to tell the truth, he hadn’t liked Craig Lowell. Lowell had been sent to Greece as some kind of punishment, and Lowell didn’t like the army. But as the letters kept coming, Sharon detected that Sandy was changing his mind about Lowell, and that they were becoming friends. Sharon was pleased that Sandy had found a friend. All of his life, he had really been friendless.

  Sandy also wrote that he was an administrative officer, in charge of supplies. He painted a picture of himself safe behind a desk, but when he sent a roll of film home, and she got it back from the drugstore, she knew he was lying to her. Four of the pictures on the roll were of dead people. One of them showed a large, blond, good-looking young man who looked American. He was holding a Garand rifle in his hand, smiling proudly like a hunter in Africa, with his foot on the chest of a dead man with a long mustache and a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.

  The same young man was in other pictures on the roll; in one of them he was sitting with Sandy at a table, holding his fingers up in a V behind Sandy’s head in a picture of six people. Sandy was carrying a gangsters’ tommy gun and the young man was carrying a rifle, and Sharon knew two things: The good looking young man was Sandy’s friend Craig Lowell, and what Craig Lowell and Sandy were doing was fighting a war, no matter what Sandy wrote he was doing.

  Sandy wrote her that he felt sorry for Craig, that as smart and as tough as he was, he had been taken in by a girl in Germany, a girl of low morals who was making a fool of him. She hadn’t written him once since he’d come to Greece, and Lowell was nearly crazy over it.

  And then there had been a letter from Sandy saying that Craig had been “injured” and that he would probably be sent home, and would come to see her. He warned her not to bring up the fraulein he’d gotten into the mess with.

  Three weeks later, in the Old Warsaw Bakery, glancing out the plate-glass window while she waited on customers, Sharon saw a limousine, even fancier than the Cadillac limousines the funeral homes used, turn off Chancellor Avenue. Sharon went over to the window to see if it was going to stop.

  It pulled to the curb halfway down the block, and a chauffeur in a gray uniform ran around and opened the door and a young man got out. Limping a little, the young man started to walk toward the bakery, carrying the suitcase, and Sharon Lavinsky Felter went back behind the counter, so that Sandy’s friend Craig Lowell wouldn’t know that she had seen him get out of a fancy limousine.

  The next week was tough on Sharon. Craig, who slept on the couch in the Felters’ apartment, talked about nothing but Ilse. He said he was waiting for his passport, so he could fly to Germany and marry her. Sharon was very tempted to tell Craig that Sandy—who was generally right about things like that—felt he was being made a fool of, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it.

  Craig flew to Germany, and came back married, and told Sharon his Ilse was pregnant. He said he didn’t give a shit what anybody else thought, including Sandy. He knew Sandy thought Ilse was a kraut whore, but it was important to him that Sharon know that Ilse was a good woman.

  Craig asked Sharon if she would meet Ilse when she came to New York from Germany, and see that she got on a plane to Louisville. Craig was in the Basic Armor Officer’s Course at Fort Knox, near Louisville, and he didn’t think the bastards would give him time off to come to New York to meet Ilse himself.

  The first thing Sharon thought when she looked into Ilse Lowell’s tear-filled eyes was that when Sandy was wrong, he was really wrong. This was no whore. This was an seventeen-year-old girl who was six months’ pregnant and thoroughly terrified.

  “Could I kiss you?” was the first thing Sharon Felter had ever said to Ilse Lowell.

  In the Lavinsky Chevrolet on the way to New Jersey, Ilse said there had been “a terrible mix-up about the ticket.” When she got to Rhine-Main, they had a First Class Royal Ambassador Drawing Room in the Skies ticket waiting for her.

  “I asked what the difference in price was,” Ilse said. “And would you believe it was two and a half times the price of a regular seat? I made them give me the difference back. We’re going to need all our money for the baby.” She opened her purse and displayed the money.

  Sharon had decided that if Ilse didn’t know Craig was rich, it was not her business to tell her. And she was pleased, too, to have the proof that Ilse hadn’t gone after Craig because he was rich.

  Peter-Paul Lowell was born in the U.S. Hospital at Fort Knox, Kentucky, shortly before his father graduated from the Basic Officer’s Course. Sandy and Sharon saw him for the first time there, when Sandy came home from Greece and they were on their way to the Army Language School at the Presidio in San Francisco.

  They later figured out that it was in the guest bedroom of Lieutenant Lowell’s quarters (a converted barracks) that she and Sandy had started Little Sandy.

  After the Language School, Sandy had gone to the Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) Center at Fort Holabird in Baltimore. The general’s wife there had all the ladies in for a tea, and then given them a little speech saying the best way they could help their husbands’ careers from now on was not to try to share it; not to ask questions; not even to think about it, just to provide a warm nest.

  At first she’d liked the CIC. Sandy was assigned to the detachment in New York City. He wore civilian clothes, and they lived with his parents on Aldine Street. He went to work every morning just as if he was a businessman, even carrying a briefcase. That had lasted about five months.

  Just after Craig had gotten out of the army, and he and Ilse were in Philadelphia where Craig was enrolled in the Wharton School of Business, Sandy and Sharon and Little Sandy went to Berlin.

  The only question she’d asked Sandy was if he was still in the CIC and he told her no, he wasn’
t. She didn’t like Berlin. Physically, it was all right. They had a very nice house in Zehlendorf. There was even a yard man and a driver. The yard man was never very far from his wheelbarrow, and in the wheelbarrow were a two-way radio and a submachine gun. The driver carried a gun, and Sandy carried a gun.

  And then, all of a sudden, they left Berlin and went to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in Bavaria. Sandy put his uniform back on, but he still carried a pistol all the time, under his uniform, and they lived in a compound surrounded by barbed wire. They had tried to hide the barbed wire, but it was there, and Sharon had never grown used to it.

  She did not ask, or allow herself to think much, about what Sandy was doing. They were together, and he was happy, and she was happy, too.

  For a while, it had looked like everything was perfect. Sandy had found out that Ilse’s father wasn’t dead after all, and then he had found out that he was going to be released by the Russians. He’d talked to her about that, asked her advice.

  “What do I do, Sharon? Do I tell her? So that she can be here when her father comes across the border? Or do I wait until he does? In case something goes wrong?”

  “Are you sure of your information?”

  He thought about it a minute. “My sources are reliable.”

  “Then you’d better tell her,” Sharon told him, and he did. And Craig and Ilse and P.P. had flown over, and were waiting for her father when he came home, after all that time in a Soviet prison camp in Siberia.

  Everything was just perfect for them, and then the army had called Craig back in, and just about the next day sent him to Korea.

  “At least,” she had told Sandy, “if something happens to Craig, Ilse has her father.”

  Sandy said something funny: “Craig is not the kind that gets killed in a war, Sharon. He’s the kind that thrives on it.”

  Sharon didn’t believe that. She was nearly as worried about Craig as Ilse was, and she wondered why, whether it was for him or for Ilse. She concluded that it was because of Ilse, and when she asked herself why that was, she realized that Ilse was the first real friend she had ever had, too, the first friend she had loved, rather than just gotten along with.

  “Why don’t you and P.P. come and see us for a couple of weeks,” Sharon asked. “Bavaria, the mountains, are just beautiful this time of the year.”

  “Do you have room?” Ilse asked.

  “All the room we’ll need.”

  “I’d like that,” Ilse said, and Sharon was pleased for the both of them.

  And she was pleased for everybody when she saw Sandy and the colonel having such a good time together. It was a crying shame that Craig had to be so far away, in Korea.

  (Two)

  Pusan, Korea

  12 September 1950

  The harbor of Pusan was crowded with ships. There were gray warships and troop ships and supply ships of the U.S. Navy, and a motley assortment of civilian ships—cargo ships, tankers, even two passenger ships. And the white-painted hospital ship, the USS Consolation.

  A steady stream of lighters moved between the inadequate piers and the ships, off-loading all sorts of supplies. Only when there was something aboard that could not be off-loaded into a lighter or a barge was a ship given pier space. Even the troops disembarked by climbing down rope cargo nets into small boats and Coast Guard landing barges.

  Lt. Colonel Paul T. Jiggs, commanding officer of the 73rd Medium Tank Battalion (Separate), stood on the wharf of Pier One and watched as M46 medium tanks were off-loaded.

  Teams of Ordnance Corps technicians, who themselves had often been in Korea only a day or two, had gone out to the transport when she was still waiting her turn to come to a pier, and had readied the tanks for instant movement. They ripped the protective coverings from the engines, charged the batteries, and fueled the tanks, then started the engines and ran them long enough to make sure they would run.

  An M46 weighs forty-four tons. The ship that had carried them from San Francisco, as huge as it was, leaned toward the pier as each tank was hoisted from her holds and swung over the side. It straightened again when the tank’s weight was on the pier.

  Ordnance noncoms got in the tanks before the cables were taken off, and started the engines. Then, when the cables were free, being hauled up and back over the holds, they drove the M46s off the pier.

  The tanks were freshly painted. They looked new. They smelled new, as the paint burned off their exhaust manifolds. They were fresh from ordnance depots across the United States. But they weren’t truly new tanks. They were M26s which had been rebuilt, incorporating a new turret cannon, a high-velocity 90 mm tube with a muzzle brake and a powder fume extractor; a new power train, a brand-new GM Allison combined cross drive and steering unit that made the M46 considerably easier to drive (all the driver had to do was push a “joy stick” in the direction he wanted to go, and that was it—wrestling the double levers of an M4A3 would soon be an thing of the past); and a new, more powerful Continental 12-cylinder engine.

  The M26 with the new cannon and new engine and new power train were reborn as the M46, the Patton, named after the general.

  Colonel Jiggs had come to Pier One to see for himself that the M46s were indeed on hand, and not the wishful figment of some G-3 planner’s imagination. The reason was that the M46s being taken off the ship, and driven off the pier, were Colonel Jiggs’s M46s.

  He had come to Pier One from a meeting with the deputy chief of staff and the assistant chiefs of staff, G-1, G-3, and G-4 (Personnel, Plans and Training, and Supply) at the forward headquarters of the Eighth United States Army. He had learned that, as of 0001 hours that morning, the 73rd Medium Tank Battalion, (Separate) had become the 73rd Heavy Tank Battalion (Reinforced).

  Instead of three line companies and a headquarters and service company, he would now command five tank companies, all M46s with that beautiful 90 mm high-velocity cannon; one cavalry troop, equipped with M24 light tanks, for reconnaissance purposes; two batteries of 105 mm howitzers, self-propelled (howitzers mounted on an M4 chassis); an ordnance ammo platoon; an ordnance maintenance platoon; a Transportation Corps truck company; a Signal Corps communications platoon; a medical team detached from the 8005th MASH; and two companies of mechanized infantry.

  The ordnance types unloading the tanks before his eyes belonged to him, although they didn’t know it yet.

  73rd Medium Tank had become a combat command in everything but name. Its size made it a command calling for a full colonel, possibly even a brigadier general. But they were giving it to him.

  “I’m not going to sit here with my thumb up my ass wondering,” he had told them. “Do I get to keep this beautiful pocket division you’re giving me, or am I going to be relieved as soon as I get it organized?”

  “If you can get it together and keep it together for the next month, Paul,” the assistant chief of staff had told him, “it’s yours.”

  Jiggs had nodded, deciding the assistant chief of staff would not have said that if it weren’t true. He had done a damned good job with the 73rd, and they knew it. He was entitled to a chance with this pocket armored division they were setting up.

  “You want to borrow some staff officers?” the assistant chief of staff said. “That’s a lot of spaghetti to hold on one fork.”

  “No, sir,” Jiggs said. “My staff is fine the way it stands.”

  “Anything you need, Paul,” the G3 said. “Speak up. Quickly.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  (Three)

  When the last of the forty-two M46s had been off-loaded onto Pier One, Lieutenant Colonel Paul T. Jiggs drove back to the command post, slowly, knowing what he had to do, wondering if it was the right thing, wondering if he could carry it off.

  When he was almost at the command post, he made a U-turn on the main supply route and drove a mile back to the MASH. He found the commanding officer, an old acquaintance, but not an old friend, in one of the wards and asked him for a few minutes of his time.

  There was no
problem. The MASH commander was as much an old soldier as he was a surgeon. He didn’t even ask any questions. He simply nodded his head and agreed to do what Jiggs asked. It was the kindest way to do an unkind thing that had to be done for the overall good of the army.

  Jiggs then drove back to his CP and went to the S-3 (Plans and Training) section. The S-3, looking somewhat haggard, was bent over thick mounds of paper on his desk, a sheet of three-quarter-inch plywood set on two-by-four sawhorses. It was a moment before the S-3 was aware that Jiggs was standing by the desk.

  “Yes, sir?” he said. “Sorry, Colonel, I was pretty deep in that.”

  “Get your pot, Charley,” Colonel Jiggs said. “I want you to take a ride with me.”

  Jiggs drove them out of the battalion area, down the main supply route (MSR) back toward Pusan, and then turned off onto a finger of land looking down on the ships crowding Pusan Harbor. It was a wet and miserable day, raining, and yet warm enough for the putrid stink from the rice paddies to be heavy in the air. A shitty smell, Colonel Jiggs thought, to go with a shitty job to do on a shitty day.

  “Charley,” he said, when he had stopped the jeep and turned sideward on the seat to face him, “how much service do you have?”

  “Sixteen years, Colonel.”

  “I want to talk to you about you,” Jiggs said.

  “Yes, sir?” There was the faintest suggestion of concern, even alarm, in Major Ellis’s voice.

  “As of 0001 this morning,” Jiggs said, “we are, in everything but name, a combat command. Our morning report strength tomorrow will be two and a half times what it was today.”

  “That sounds like good news, sir.”

  “Not for you, it isn’t,” Jiggs said, finally biting the bullet. Shit, get it over with. “You can’t handle it.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, Colonel,” Ellis said. “I’ve tried to do my best.”

  “That hasn’t been good enough,” Jiggs said. “We both know that Lowell’s been carrying you.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t accept that, sir,” Ellis said. “Certainly, Captain Lowell has been a great help to me, but—”