The Majors Read online

  To hell with Prissy.

  IX

  (One)

  Camp Rucker, Alabama

  22 December 1955

  Major General Angus Laird walked out of his office and through the front door of post headquarters where a Bell H-13D two-passenger helicopter sat parked. It was a special H-13D. Although it was mechanically identical to every other H-13D in the Aviation Center fleet, it was painted white. The others were painted olive-drab. The seats were upholstered in white leather, and there was an eight-by-ten-inch red plaque mounted on either side of the cockpit with the two silver stars of a major general (Scotty Laird’s second star had come in the month before).

  The helicopter was the aviation evolution of Patton’s jeep, General Laird had often thought. There was no mistaking whose H-13 it was. It was as flashy as they could make it. General Laird believed along with General Patton that generals should stand out visually from the troops in the ranks.

  General Laird walked around the H-13 and made the preflight visual inspection. Then he got in the pilot’s seat and fastened his lap and shoulder harness and put the earphones on over his cap with the two silver stars pinned to it. He threw the master switch and heard the gyros for the artificial horizon start to whirl. He adjusted the mixture and tuned in Ozark Army Airfield local control on the radio. He reached down and pulled up on the Engine Start switch. The starter whirred, and the engine coughed blue smoke and then started.

  It was a lot more complicated to start than a jeep, he thought, but once you were in the air, it more than made up for it. It would have taken him thirty minutes to drive a jeep to Hanchey Field, where they were just starting to turn 3,500 acres of pine-covered clay and sand into the world’s largest airport designed solely for rotary wing aircraft. He would be there in no more than ten minutes in the chopper.

  The engine and transmission oil temperature gauges moved their needles to points on the circular dial where a strip of green tape indicated the proper operating temperatures.

  The rotor was making its fluckata-fluckata-fluckata noise over his head. He pulled on the mike switch.

  “Ozark local, this is Center Six.”

  “Go ahead, Center Six.”

  “Center Six on the ground at post headquarters. Request clearance for a low level flight to Hanchey Field,” General Laird said.

  “Ozark Army local control clears Center Six for a low level flight to Hanchey Field. Be aware of traffic in the area. Have a nice flight, General.”

  “Thank you,” General Laird said. “Center Six light on the skids.”

  He picked it up, moved into transitional lift, and then out of ground effect. He lowered the nose and began to accelerate quickly across the parade ground. It was a wonderful feeling. Goddamn, it was like being a bird! He picked it up and flashed a hundred feet over a line of barracks in a climbing turn to the left.

  The soaring was the best part. It was almost dreamlike. You just pulled up on the cyclic, and you had your own personal elevator.

  He liked the feeling. He held the cyclic where it was and kept his eyes on the rotor rpm and the engine rmp needle indicators, which were both on the same gauge. The needles had to be superimposed. If you pulled too much cyclic, tried to take more power from the engine than it had to offer, you were in trouble. He wasn’t running the risk of doing that. He wasn’t a fool. He was well within what they called “the safe flight envelope.”

  He was over the pine forest now. He would be over the pine forest until he reached Hanchey Field.

  His eyes flicked to the altimeter. The altitude it indicated was a couple of seconds behind where he really was. It worked on a diaphragm, and the dampening necessary made the indicator a couple of seconds slow. It was 1,000 feet, so he figured he was probably at 1,200 feet, maybe 1,300. High enough.

  He just started to ease off on the cyclic when the engine above and behind him coughed. Coughed again. And died. The rotor and engine rpm needles split. The engine rpm needle swooped counterclockwise to zero. The rotor rpm indicator slowed less rapidly, but frighteningly.

  What the hell?

  He clamped the stick between his knees and pulled on the Engine Start switch. He heard it whine, thought he heard the engine cough.

  In the last few seconds before the white H-13D struck the pine trees, Major General Laird knew what happened: Carburetor ice! Carburetor ice! If you want to climb that fast, you are supposed to turn on the carburetor heat! Otherwise the carburetor intake, which is a venturi tube, loses temperature so rapidly that it freezes the moisture in the air passing through it and stops the fuel flow.

  He was going in. He reached forward and killed the Master switch.

  Major General Laird and the white-painted H-13D hit the ground at a thirty-three degree angle at ninety knots. The helicopter sheared off the first two trees it hit and then struck a larger tree squarely in the middle. The trunk came through the plexiglass bubble and the instrument panel and crushed him against the seat. A fraction of a second later, the engine, torn loose from its mounts, smashed into the rear of the seat. He was probably dead before the gasoline rushed from the ruptured tanks through the remains of the bubble and soaked his flight suit.

  WOJG Edward C. Greer was two miles away at the controls of an H-19. He had been in Montgomery, Alabama, at the Air War College, simultaneously running an errand for Colonel Bellmon and practicing low level flying. According to the standing operating procedure of the U.S. Army Aviation Center, aircraft commanders who wish to leave the area, or practice low level flight, were required to seek permission of the Ozark Army Airfield operations officer.

  In the case of aircraft leaving the area, there was generally some officer trying to catch a ride, either to Montgomery or Atlanta, because of the lousy commercial service available from Dothan. In the case of aircraft wishing to practice low level flight, the operations officer generally directed the aircraft to areas on the post which were virtually flat.

  Warrant officers junior grade were in no position to deny rides to senior officers or to protest that the whole purpose of practicing low level flight was to learn how to go between hills and mountains and over electric power lines.

  The USAACDA policy, unofficial of course, was simply to ignore the U.S. Army Aviation Center standing operating procedure and to use one of their own. Greer had radioed the USAACDA operator when he was taking off from Ozark Army Airfield, and he telephoned him immediately upon landing at Maxwell Air Force to let him know he had safely arrived.

  He had telephoned Mrs. Heatter just before he took off from Maxwell, and had been just about to reach for the FM radio to call in and say he was back on the Rucker Reservation when he saw the H-13D drop out of the sky.

  He tuned the radio instead to 121.5 megacycles and called “MAYDAY! MAYDAY!” even as he put the Sikorksy into a steep, diving turn toward the crash site.

  “Aircraft calling MAYDAY, go ahead.”

  “H-13 down halfway between Hanchey and the post,” Greer reported. “No sign of fire. I’m landing.”

  “Down or crashed?”

  “He went in from six seven hundred feet, anyway,” Greer said. “Crashed.”

  Greer raised the nose of the H-19, to lose speed, and then put it quickly on the ground, as close as he could to the wrecked H-13. He unfastened his harness and climbed out of the cockpit window. His foot missed the spring-loaded cover of the step in the fuselage wall. He pushed himself away from the helicopter and fell to the ground. He fell on his back, hard, and it knocked the wind out of him. It took him a moment to get it back.

  Then he ran through the pines to the wrecked helicopter. Only when he was close enough to smell the avgas did he recognize the H-13D as the white-painted bird of the post commander. He saw the twisted frame, and the twisted body inside.

  And he smelled the gas again.

  Sonofabitch was very likely to blow.

  If it blew, there wouldn’t be enough left of the body to fill a fire bucket.

  He ran to the machine, s
huddered, and then threw up when he saw what the crash had done to the body. In moments, though, he steeled himself, reached in, and tried to tug the body loose. The release for the seat and shoulder harnesses was jammed. He reached into the ankle pocket of his flight suit and took out his knife.

  The knife had begun life as a bayonet for a .30 caliber U.S. carbine. Sergeant Ed Greer had ground it down to half the original length even before he’d left the 223rd Infantry to go to XIX Corps (Group). It was as sharp as he could make it, and the only time he had ever had a chance to use it (running around in the goddamned Indo-Chinese jungle with MacMillan and Felter), it had proved to be as good a people killer as he hoped it would be. A lot better than that thin English Fairbairn commando knife a lot of people had thought was hot enough shit to pay forty-five bucks for.

  He sliced through the shoulder and lap belts and pulled the body from the wreck. He grabbed it as well as he could under the armpits, and he was twenty yards from the wreck when it exploded.

  And then the body burst into flame. Greer looked down in horror and saw that the front of his flight suit was on fire. So were his sleeves and his legs and even his leather flying gloves.

  He pulled the gloves off frantically and started to work the long zipper that ran down the front of the USAF flight suit. His fingers fumbled, and terror swept through him. He calmed himself, put both hands to the opening of the flight suit, and ripped it open with brute force.

  When he had it off, he started throwing sand on the flaming body.

  When the ambulance helicopter arrived a couple of minutes later, they found him wearing nothing but jump boots, and charred skivvies. He was sitting on the ground near the body retching from an empty stomach.

  (Two)

  Camp Rucker, Alabama

  23 December 1955

  HEADQUARTERS

  CAMP RUCKER & THE ARMY AVIATION CENTER

  CAMP RUCKER, ALABAMA

  23 December 1955

  SUBJECT: Christmas activities

  1. Mrs. Angus Laird has informed the undersigned that she and the other members of the family of the late Major General Angus Laird, while they appreciate the expression of sympathy implied, desire that General Laird’s death in no way interfere with Christmas and New Year’s activities previously scheduled at Camp Rucker.

  2. No cancellation of activities scheduled to mark the Christmas and New Year’s holidays is encouraged or desired.

  3. A memorial ceremony honoring Major General Angus Laird will be conducted at Parade Field #2 at 0815 hours 26 December 1955. Participation of all USAAC subordinate units is expected. Participation by USAAB, USAACDA, and USASATSA is invited.

  4. Major General Angus Laird will be interred at the cemetery of the United States Military Academy at West Point at 1600 hours 26 December 1955.

  William F. Adair

  Colonel, Corps of Engineers

  (Acting) Commanding Officer

  The army does not know how to cope with civilian dignitaries in matters of protocol. The tendency is to attempt to equate civilians of surrounding communities with their military counterparts.

  Prissy (Mrs. Howard) Dutton barely knew Jeannie (Mrs. Angus) Laird, but when she and her daughter Melody showed up at Quarters # 1 to pay their respects to the widow, they were immediately ushered into the room (which had been Scotty Laird’s study) where the widow was surrounded by the senior ladies of the post. Prissy Dutton was the mayor’s wife and thus Jeannie Laird’s peer.

  Jeannie Laird was glad to see her, not for the ritual expression of sympathy, but for the ritual offer to help in any way she could, which she was sure would follow.

  “There is something,” she said, “now that you mention it.”

  “Anything,” Prissy said. “Anything at all.”

  “Do you have your car with you?” Jeannie Laird asked.

  “We came in my daughter’s car,” Prissy said.

  “I want to go over to the hospital,” Jeannie Laird said. “And I want to do so as quietly as possible. Could I borrow your car? And perhaps Melody to drive me?”

  “Certainly,” Prissy said. “Would you like me to go with you?”

  “No, what I want Melody to do, if you would, dear, is bring your car up to the kitchen door. And then I’ll just run out and jump in, and no one will see me. We won’t be gone long. But there is something I have to do.”

  In the Ford convertible on the way to the hospital, Jeannie Laird told Melody that the pilot of another helicopter had seen her husband crash, had immediately landed to see if he could help somehow, and in pulling General Laird’s body from the wreckage, had been badly burned.

  “I think they’re going to decorate him,” Jeannie Laird said. “But I wanted to thank him myself.”

  When they got to the hospital, Jeannie Laird sent Melody inside alone to ask what room WOJG Edward C. Greer had been assigned. When Melody found out, Jeannie Laird told her where to drive in the maze of hospital buildings.

  “You sure know your way around here,” Melody said.

  “I’ve worked here three afternoons a week,” Jeannie Laird said. “Two afternoons pushing the library cart around and one afternoon in the maternity ward teaching young mothers how to wash their babies.” She paused. “I’m going to miss it,” she said.

  She showed Melody where to park the car, next to one of the interconnected single-story frame buildings, and then she led her inside through a door above which was written, “FIRE EXIT ONLY—NO ADMITTANCE.”

  Melody followed her down a polished linoleum corridor to a ward marked BURNS.

  Melody didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to see somebody all burned up, but she couldn’t back out.

  Jeannie Laird knocked at a wooden door, and without waiting she walked in.

  There was a young man in the bed, both hands wrapped in white gauze. There was more gauze wrapped around his otherwise bare chest, and still more around his right leg.

  The only clothing he was wearing was a pair of pajamas. The right leg of those was cut off above the knee. Melody could see the hair around his thing peeking out of the fly. She flushed and looked away. He didn’t have any eyebrows. Where they were supposed to be, he was coated with a pink grease. She realized his eyebrows had been burned off. He didn’t look old enough to have done what Mrs. Laird said he had done.

  “Ladies, I am sorry to say I think you’re in the wrong place,” Greer said.

  “I don’t think so. I’m Jean Laird.”

  “Jesus!” Greer said, then: “Sorry.”

  “And this is Melody Dutton,” Jeannie Greer said. “She was kind enough to drive me over here.”

  “Hi!” Melody said. Greer looked at Melody and nodded his head, just once.

  “I wanted to thank you, Mr. Greer,” Jeannie Laird said, “for what you tried to do for Scotty.”

  “Nothing to thank me for,” Greer said.

  “Everyone has been telling me he went quickly, without pain,” Jeannie Laird said. Greer nodded. “If that happens to be true, I’d like to hear that from you. You saw it. No one else did.”

  “He went quick,” Greer said.

  “He was dead when you got there?” Jeannie Laird asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Greer said. “He died when it hit.”

  “Then why did you…risk what you did, to do what you did?”

  Greer looked at her a moment. Then he shrugged.

  “Then you did what you did more for me, than for my husband?” Jeannie Laird asked. After a moment, Melody realized that what Mrs. Laird was asking was why Greer had risked his life to pull a corpse from a wreck. And then she understood why: because otherwise the body would have burned.

  “I did it because I would want somebody to do the same thing for me,” Greer said.

  “If it makes you feel any better, Mr. Greer, Scotty would have done the same thing for you had the circumstances been reversed,” Jeannie Laird said, and then, for just a moment, her voice broke and there was the suggestion of a sob. Then she got contr
ol of herself.

  “I’ve brought you something, Mr. Greer,” she said. She reached in her purse and came out with a battered silver flask. She handed it to him.

  “I don’t want that,” Greer said, uncomfortably.

  “If it wasn’t for you, Mr. Greer,” Jeannie Laird said, “it would have melted.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Greer said.

  “I’m sure giving it to you would be what Scotty would want me to do with it,” she said. She laid it on the bed. He picked it up awkwardly in his bandaged hands. Melody saw there were tears in his eyes.

  “There’s something in it,” Greer said.

  “Then I think we should drink it,” Jeannie Laird said. “Don’t you?”

  “Why not?” Greer said. His voice broke.

  Jeannie picked the flask up, opened it, and tilted it up.

  “Good brandy,” she said. “That was his medicine for everything.”

  She started to hand him the flask, and then saw how encumbered he was with the bandages. She held it to his mouth. He took a healthy swallow. Then Jeannie handed the flask to Melody. Melody didn’t want to drink straight liquor, and she especially didn’t want to do it from a dead man’s flask. But she realized there was nothing she could do. She took a swallow. It burned her throat. It made her cough.

  “I don’t think your friend is used to booze,” Greer said.

  The door opened. Bob and Barbara Bellmon started to come into the room, but stopped when they saw Greer had visitors. They continued when they saw who it was.

  “You all right, Jeannie?” Colonel Bellmon asked.

  “We’ve just been having a little drink,” Jeannie said. “Recognize this, Bob?”

  “How well,” he said.

  “Scotty carried that for twenty years,” she said. “Longer.”

  “I think you’d better hang on to it, Mrs. Laird,” Greer said. “Thank you just the same.”

  “I’ve told Mr. Greer that Scotty would want him to have it. Do you think he would?”