The Majors Read online

  II

  (One)

  Dien Bien Phu, French Indo-China

  17 March 1954

  Including the smell, which was so foul he was really afraid that he might throw up, there was a hell of a lot about this escapade that was very familiar to Major Rudolph G. “Mac” MacMillan.

  The airplane was American, a good old faithful Douglas C-47 gooney bird. The frogs had been using it to evacuate their wounded. That’s where the stink came from, from blood and piss and rotting flesh and shit. The first thing a body did when it was dead was crap its pants, when the sphincter muscles relaxed. The frogs were evacuating only their badly wounded.

  The chutes, main and reserve, were American, but Mac MacMillan wasn’t at all sure they could be trusted. He suspected that the frogs who had packed them had not paid as much attention to the fine points of packing or to the condition of the chutes themselves as the riggers in an American airborne outfit would have. The uniforms the frogs were wearing were American, too: GI fatigues and web equipment, weapons, everything but the boots. The boots were native frog boots.

  The kid didn’t even have boots. He wasn’t even a parachutist, so obviously he didn’t have jump boots. He was going to jump in regular Class “A” uniform oxfords, the kind the army called “low quarters.” The kid was apparently a gutsy little bastard, but he was scared, and Mac knew it. Mac had had a lot of experience over the years with scared people.

  The kid was some kind of superclerk for General Black, and when Black had learned that they were going to Dien Bien Phu, he had sent the kid along.

  “If you think you could learn something, Greer,” was the way Black had put it. “For all I care, you can go along.”

  For a young sergeant working for Lieutenant General E. Z. Black, that was the same thing as a direct order. So the kid had come along on this little excursion thinking that he was going to be flown in and out. When the frogs said they would have to jump in, he’d said OK, he’d jump. He said he’d always wanted to try it anyhow. That was so much bullshit. The kid was scared shitless. But there was nothing anybody could do about that. Anything that anybody said to him would only make it worse. What was going to happen would happen, and he couldn’t do a damn thing for him.

  Mac MacMillan’s boots were standard American jump boots, not GI but Corcoran’s. It was accepted as an article of faith among parachutists that Corcoran jump boots not only took a higher polish than GI jump boots, but that you stood much less chance of breaking your ankles when you landed. MacMillan had started wearing Corcoran’s when there had been no GI jump boots, when somebody in the Quartermaster Corps had done something right for once and had asked the Massachusetts shoe manufacturer to come up with a pair of boots that would be suitable for crazy people who were planning to jump out of airplanes.

  The first order had been issued to the members of the battalion of the 82nd Infantry Division that had been designated as a Test Battalion (Parachute). Mac MacMillan, recent All-Philippines boxing champion, had joined up because they were going to pay him another fifty bucks a month to jump out of airplanes. He had just gotten married and needed the money.

  He hadn’t had those boots a month when some thieving sonofabitch slit his duffel bag at Benning and stole them. When he went to the supply room and looked at the non-Corcoran jump boots they wanted to issue him, he remembered hearing that the “good” boots were being sold in the PX. Every pair of jump boots he had ever owned since then he had bought either at the PX or direct from Corcoran in Massachusetts.

  He thought that if anybody had told him a month ago when he bought the pair he was wearing now that he would be jumping in them into some frog outpost in some asshole corner of nowhere, with Sandy Felter, some kid sergeant making his first jump, and a dozen frogs, he would have told him he was out of his fucking gourd.

  “Something on your mind, Mac?” Felter asked him, sticking his head so close because of the noise that MacMillan could smell his toothpaste.

  “Geronimo! You little bastard,” MacMillan said.

  “Geronimo!” was what John Wayne had shouted as he went out the door in a war movie about paratroops. Everybody knew about that. MacMillan, who had been a parachutist since 1940, and on whose wings there was barely room for the five stars he had earned, one a time, on five jumps into combat, had never heard anybody else yell “Geronimo!”

  Felter smiled.

  “You didn’t tell me this is what you had in mind,” MacMillan said, gesturing around the airplane. “You said ‘inspection trip,’ shitface.”

  “You love it,” Felter said.

  “You may love it, you little prick,” MacMillan said. “I’ve been here before.”

  “That’s why I brought you along,” Felter said.

  “I’m going to get you for this, Sandy,” MacMillan said.

  Major Sandy Felter was one of the few people for whom Major MacMillan felt both affection and admiration. Felter had been responsible for one of MacMillan’s very few philosophical observations: You can’t tell what a warrior looks like.

  Felter was even a West Pointer, though he rarely wore his ring. He was Class of ’46, but he hadn’t been there when the rest of the Class of ’46 had thrown their hats into the air on graduation day. He’d resigned from the Corps of Cadets to take a direct commission as a linguist. As a POW interrogation officer with Major General “Porky” Waterford’s “Hell’s Circus” Armored Division, he had learned the location of a group of American officer prisoners-of-war being moved on foot away from the advancing Russians.

  Task Force Parker (Colonel Philip Sheridan Parker III) had been formed to go get them, and Felter had gone with them. By the time his classmates were admiring themselves in their brand-new second lieutenant suits, Felter had been a first lieutenant with a Bronze Star for the Task Force Parker operation, and the admiration of Porky Waterford, whose son-in-law, Lt. Col. Bob Bellmon, had been one of the rescued American officers.

  MacMillan had been in the stalag with Bellmon, as a technical sergeant, the senior NCO of the American enlisted men imprisoned with the officers. That had been before he had learned that his behavior in Operation Market-Basket, where he had been captured, had earned him both a battlefield promotion to second lieutenant and the Medal.

  Just after the Germans marched the officers off to the west, leaving the enlisted men to fend as well as they could, MacMillan had led an escape in an odyssey across Poland that had earned him the Distinguished Service Cross to go with the Medal. He’d heard about Felter when he and Bellmon had got together in the States.

  And he’d heard about Felter’s activities with the U.S. Army Advisory Group to Greece from another old buddy, Lt. Col. Red Hanrahan, who had been with Mac at Benning, jumping out of airplanes before there had been an 82nd Airborne Division. Felter had been sent to Greece as a Russian language linguist, and had wound up commanding a relief column that had stopped a major Albanian border-crossing operation. Hanrahan had refused to confirm the rumor that it had been necessary for Felter to blow away the American officer in charge, who’d turned yellow and wanted to run. So far as MacMillan was concerned, if the story wasn’t true, Hanrahan would have said so.

  And MacMillan had personal experience with the little Jew. In Korea, MacMillan had run an irregular outfit, Task Force Able, and Felter had dropped in one day with orders from above that Task Force Able was now in the spy business, and would take its orders from Felter. Felter wasn’t expected to do anything more than sit behind a desk and run the show. But he was a warrior, and he’d spent as much time behind North Korean lines as any of the agents, and he’d damned near got himself blown away when one operation went sour.

  He’d taken a nasty wound in the knee, that damned near cost him his leg, and had shown a lot of guts in dragging himself off the beach and back into the water, willing to drown rather than be captured; he knew too much to be captured.

  Sandy Felter was MacMillan’s kind of man. He was a warrior.

  The jumpmaster came
down the aisle and hesitantly gestured to MacMillan.

  “Talk to him, prick,” MacMillan said. “You speak frog.”

  Felter spoke to the jumpmaster in French, then switched to German. The eyes of the jumpmaster half smiled.

  “He wants to know if you have jumped before,” Felter said, smiling.

  “Oh, Jesus, that’s all I need, a kraut jumpmaster in the frog airborne!”

  “Somebody’s going to understand English, Mac, for God’s sake!” Felter said, torn between amusement and genuine concern.

  “Find somebody who does, and tell him I want to go home,” MacMillan said. Then he looked up and met the jumpmaster’s eyes and said, in not bad German: “Ja, ich war ein Fallschirmjäger im zweiten Weltkrieg.”

  The jumpmaster didn’t seem surprised that MacMillan had been a paratrooper in War II. “Und der Bub?” he asked.

  MacMillan replied that “der Bub,” the boy, was a virgin, but that he would take care of him.

  The jumpmaster nodded.

  “Ungefähr fünf Minuten,” he announced. He wore the stripes of a company sergeant major and the unit insignia of the Third Parachute Regiment of the French Foreign Legion.

  The jumpmaster gave the commands in French, but they were still all very familiar to MacMillan.

  “Stand up,” the jumpmaster said. And the parachutists—the legionnaires and Felter, MacMillan, and Greer—got up out of their aluminum and nylon sheeting benches and stood up, fastening the chin harnesses of their helmets, checking the position of their scrotums relative to the straps that ran between their legs, and making whatever adjustments were necessary.

  “Check your equipment,” the jumpmaster ordered. The buddy system. Major Rudolph G. MacMillan, Armor, USA, checked the harness and other equipment of Staff Sergeant Greer, trying not to make a big deal of it, and then checked Felter. Finally, Felter checked MacMillan.

  “Hook up!” They snapped the hooks of their static lines around the stainless steel cable running along the roof of the cabin, and tugged on it to make sure it was secure and that the spring-lock opening had closed as it was supposed to.

  “Stand in the door!”

  The jumpmaster put Felter and MacMillan second and third on line, and Greer after them. MacMillan changed that. He unhooked his static line and put it behind the kid’s, and then got in the line behind Felter and Greer. It would be better to have the kid in the middle.

  First man in the stick was a Foreign Legion corporal. He was a Frenchman, a foreigner in his own army (no Frenchman can serve in the Foreign Legion) because he had believed that National Socialism was the wave of the future and had gone off with ten thousand other Frenchmen into the Charlemagne Legion of the Waffen SS. The Charlemagne Legion fought with distinction in Russia, and died in the battle of Berlin, but Unterfeldwebel Francois Ferrer had been one of the lucky ones. He hadn’t died, and he had made his way west and gone into French captivity, but as a German with a Waffen SS paybook. Being in the SS was bad, but not as bad as being a member of the Charlemagne Legion. Once the war was over, there was a rebirth of fervent patriotism in France.

  One day they had taken him from the POW enclosure and carried him to Marseilles, and he had thought he had been found out and would be tried as a traitor. He had been found out, but what they did was drop him off without a word before the recruiting office of the Foreign Legion.

  He was a corporal again. The Legion carried him on their rolls as Franz Ferrer, and in 1957, when he’d done his twelve year hitch, he would be eligible for French citizenship. The Legion didn’t care where you came from. If you gave the Legion twelve years, and lived through it, and wanted to try Civvie Street, they would see to it that you got the proper papers.

  The legionnaire did not feel sorry for himself. He had enlisted in the Charlemagne Legion of the Waffen SS to fight communists, and that’s what he was doing now.

  The gooney bird’s pilot throttled the engines back and lowered the flaps. They were six or seven hundred feet over thickly forested mountains, approaching a valley.

  There came a sound, a dull, metallic pinging, like a full garbage can being kicked. The gooney bird lifted its left wing and started to bank to the right. A faint trail of smoke began to flow off the left wing. It grew larger, darker.

  “Oh, shit!” Major Mac MacMillan said.

  The dense cloud of dark smoke began to glow, then burst into orange. There were flames now, furious flames.

  MacMillan let go of the stainless steel static line cable and with both hands pushed Corporal Franz Ferrer out of the door. He didn’t have to push Felter. Felter had figured out what was happening. He went out the door a split second after the legionnaire.

  MacMillan grabbed Staff Sergeant Greer’s shoulders and shoved him, with a mighty heave, through the door.

  MacMillan felt himself falling backward into the gooney bird as the door side of the airplane went high. He managed to get one hand on the leading edge of the door; otherwise he would have fallen across the cabin. The C-47 was in a steep diving bank to the right. MacMillan pulled himself closer to the door; got both hands on it; and finally, using all his strength, pulled himself through it.

  His static line caught momentarily on the doorsill, then slid to the rear. MacMillan thought he would slam into the tail assembly. But it passed a foot from his face. A moment later, he felt the barely perceptible tug as the static line pulled first the cover off and then the pilot chute from his main chute. Soon he felt the chute deploying, sensed that it was out of the bag, that it was opening. At the moment when his experience taught him to expect the opening shock, he felt it.

  He had spun around and around, and when the canopy filled and the risers grew taut, he was facing in the direction where he could see the C-47. In a gentle, graceful curve, the left engine nacelle an orange ball of fire, it flew into the forest canopy, disappeared for a moment, and then exploded. No one else got out.

  MacMillan twisted his head to see what had happened to Felter and the kid and the frog corporal. There was only one parachute canopy still in the air. That was Felter. He had gone out before the kid, but soaking wet the little bastard didn’t weigh 130 pounds. He would take a little longer getting down.

  MacMillan saw the frog corporal’s canopy and the kid’s hanging from treetops. Then he saw Felter’s canopy lose its fullness. Felter was down in the trees, too.

  MacMillan looked between his feet, put them together, and bent his knees to protect his balls. In that instant he hit the first upper branches. He closed his eyes and put his arm over them as protection against a branch getting him in the eyes.

  And then, amid the sounds of breaking branches, recoiling from painful slaps and punches at his head and legs and body, he was down. He opened his eyes. He was thirty feet up in a tree, maybe forty.

  It was very, very quiet.

  He got himself swinging, hoping the chute wouldn’t rip free and he wouldn’t suddenly find himself dropping to the ground, and in time was able to grab a branch he thought would hold his weight. He climbed on it, hit the quick release on his harness, and stood there for a moment, hanging on to the tree trunk with both arms.

  He heard movement, fifty yards away, a hundred, who knows. The thing to do was get out of the goddamned tree.

  He climbed to within twenty feet of the ground, beneath which there were no branches. He hung from the lowest branch and dropped. The landing was surprisingly soft; the ground was covered with rotting vegetation. It smelled like a septic tank.

  He sat a moment and considered his position. This wasn’t his goddamned war. Personally, he wasn’t all that fond of the French, and he didn’t give a shit if they owned Indo-China or not. He was a neutral. The Viet Minh, Sandy had told him, were run by a guy named Ho Chi Minh. All during War II, the United States had had an OSS detachment with Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh might hate the frogs, but he might like Americans.

  If Ho Chi Minh’s people saw him in this frog jump suit, they would naturally decide that he was a frog.
MacMillan unzippered the jump suit and climbed out of it. Beneath it, he wore a Class “A” (less tunic) summer uniform. Including decorations. Sandy Felter had told him to wear his decorations. Frogs were big on medals, and Mac had the big medal, the Medal of Honor. The reason they were all in goddamned Class “A” tropicals was that they were sort of sneaking into Dien Bien Phu. If it had come to the attention of some of the big frog brass that they were going to take a look at Dien Bien Phu for themselves, instead of relying on the word of le Général that everything was peachy keen, he more than likely would have tried to stop them. So they had had breakfast in the Cercle Sportif in their Class “A” tropical worsteds, so the frogs could count noses, and then they had sneaked off to the airport, where Felter, somehow, had it fixed for them to get on the gooney bird bound for Dien Bien Phu.

  He started walking in the direction of the noise he thought he had heard. He kept sinking into the rotting vegetation and cursed, thinking he had ruined what were damned near new jump boots.

  He heard voices after a while, and they damned sure weren’t American or French. Sort of sing-songy. He moved quietly, with a skill learned stalking deer and an occasional bear in the woods around Mauch Chuck, Pennsylvania, and honed as a pathfinder in North Africa and Sicily and France and Germany. Then he dropped to his hands and knees and scurried across the ground like an insect. Finally, he dropped flat on his belly and crawled. He thought he was fucking up a nearly new set of TWs, too.

  There were three Chinks, or whatever they were, dressed in black pajamas, and they had the frog, the one he’d pushed out the door. The gooks were armed with Chink submachine guns and one GI carbine, and knives. They had the frog tied to a tree, spread-eagled, and what they were doing was working on him with the knives.

  They had slit his cheeks and his chest, and he was covered with blood. The reason he wasn’t screaming was because they had his mouth stuffed full of the rotting shit from the jungle floor.

  Then they pulled his pants off. He tried to scream, and almost made it, when he realized what the gooks were going to do now.