The Aviators Page 5

  "They'll give you a temporary car-pass until you can get your vehicle inspected and registered. Then you go to the AG office." The Adjutant General. "That's over by the post office-you know where it is?" Oliver nodded.

  "They'll take care of you from there," the MP said, and then added, "I never saw a pink car before. New, huh?"

  "Yes, it is," Lieutenant Oliver said. "And it's Desert Sand, not pink." The MP didn't argue, but his face said that he knew pink when he saw pink.

  Since it was his home state, the car had Vermont plates, but Oliver had actually bought it in San Francisco the day after he had returned to the United States. He had always wanted to drive across the country, and this seemed to be a good opportunity to do so. Especially since he was in no rush whatever to go home.

  Oliver had left Father Lunsford in the other bedroom of their suite in the Mark Hopkins. When he left, Lunsford was snoring loudly in the arms of a very tall, very thin, Afro American/Spanish/Tahitian stewardess who had been on the Northwest Orient Airlines Honolulu-San Francisco leg of their journey. Once Oliver was on the street in front of the hotel, he got in a cab and had himself delivered to the nearest Pontiac dealer.

  Two hours later, the deed done and almost all of his travelers checks gone, he was back in the hotel working himself up to defend to Lunsford his notion of driving across the country. Lunsford was certain to declare him mad.

  He was wrong again about Lunsford.

  "Sometimes, my boy, you are not as dumb as someone looking at you might surmise," Lunsford said. "I forget how many miles a day it is the Army considers a reasonable day's drive, but four hundred pops into my mind. That will give us at least a week, not chargeable as leave. We will drive, drink, wench, arising fresh the next morning to drive, drink, wench. . ."

  "You sound as if you're going with me."

  "I will even help a little, not much, but a little, with the gas," Father said.

  "I thought you would want to get home."

  "I'm going to have to psych myself up for that," Lunsford said. "I gather you are not terribly impatient to rush into the arms of your family, either?"

  "My parents are dead," Oliver said. "My family is my sister, her husband, and their house apes." Father looked at him for a moment, then replied, "Mine are alive. Unfortunately, before they got it right, they had three other children, to whom I am something of an embarrassment."

  "How?"

  "Soldiers and Dogs Keep Off the Grass?" Father Lunsford said. "My two brothers are doctors, medical doctors, like the old man. My sister is a PhD, married to an MD. High-class folk like that don't really want to mess with a lowlife sol-juh, Johnny."

  "You're kidding."

  "Not a bit. And what makes it worse is that Big Brother Number One, and Dear Old Sis, and of course her husband, are what is known as 'progressive.' Which means, in other words, that they're knee-jerk liberals who regard Uncle Ho as sort of a Southeast Asian George Washington, and who regard me-carrying this analogy along merrily-as sort of a black Hessian peasant stupidly standing in the way of freedom, a brave new world-et cetera et cetera. It gets a bit stiff sometimes, at dinner. I once livened things up by throwing my brother-in-law off the porch into a snowbank. They were delighted."

  "Delighted?"

  "He who uses violence confesses he has lost the argument" Father quoted. "That's their Holy Writ. You'll see what I mean when you meet them." Oliver's first impression of Father Lunsford's family was that they were all very bright, very charming people. But by the end of the second day, however, he'd come to divide them as Father had, into two groups: Father's father, mother, and Big Brother Number-two, who were great people, and all the rest, who obviously believed that anyone who did not agree with their pronouncements vis-a-vis. geopolitics had been shortchanged in the brains department.

  Oliver's own time at home turned out to be just about what he expected. His sister's twelve-year-old boy, his nephew, had moved into Johnny's room; and Johnny's stuff had been moved to the basement. He should have kept his mouth shut, but he had a couple too many drinks and pointed out that since the house was half his, he didn't think it unreasonable that a room in the ten-room place should be set aside for him, even if he wasn't home.

  His sister had thereupon thrown one of her screaming fits, tears alternating with outrage. How could he be so ungrateful for all she and her husband had done for him!

  The next morning Johnny left.

  After thinking about it all the way down from Vermont, he called Father's home when he was passing through Philadelphia. But Father had already left. His mother told Johnny that Lunsford had been recalled to duty and was at Fort Bragg which Oliver didn't believe for an instant. The Army would not recall people from convalescent leave until Russian T-72 tanks started rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue.

  When he reached Fort Bragg, he found that his guess was correct. Father confessed he just couldn't take it anymore at home. So he had rented a garden apartment in Fayetteville and was going to booze and wench with his peers until his leave was up. Oliver spent the next two and a half weeks with him, then drove the Desert Tan (and not by God pink) Pontiac - to Fort Rucker.

  After Lieutenant Oliver left the MP at the Rucker gate, he found his way to the AG's office. When he got there, he discovered that he was on the shit list. The AG had attempted to make contact with him at his leave address of record and had been unable to do so. Parties at the LAOR had reported they had no idea where he was. Army regulations required that personnel on leave keep the appropriate authorities notified of their location.

  "What did you want?"

  "You were supposed to go to Fort Devens, Massachusetts, for a physical en route here," the AGe Captain said.

  "Would you like me to go back, Sir?"

  "Don't be a wiseass, Lieutenant."

  "Sorry. What would you like me to do?"

  "I suggest you go over to the station hospital and take the physical. Report back to me when you have."

  He spent the afternoon taking the physical. And because he did nor want to fool around with the billeting office about getting a BOQ, he drove into Dothan and spent the night in a motel.

  When he returned to the AGe Captain's office the next morning, he learned that the Army had sent him another communication:

  Lieutenant John S. Oliver, Jr., Armor, was promoted Captain, with Date of Rank 1 October 1963.

  [ONE]

  Office of the Commanding General The Army Aviation Center & Fort Rucker, Alabama 12 December 1963

  Major General Robert F. Bellmon sat in his high-backed leather chair in his office on the second floor of the Post Headquarters Building. He had pulled out the lower-right hand drawer of his desk and was using it as a footstool. Bellmon was forty five years old, just over six feet tall, and weighed 180 pounds. He wore his brown hair closely cut, but just long enough to part. He was wearing a Class A uniform, an Army Green blouse and trousers.

  On the breast of the blouse he wore his Combat Infantry Badge and aviators' and parachutists' wings, but no ribbons.

  There was a wide ("General's") black band around the cuffs of the blouse, and another black band down the trouser seams.

  And two silver, five-pointed stars were pinned to each epaulet. But with those exceptions, there were few visible differences between his uniform and those worn by captains, or for that matter, by PFCs.

  His feet were clad in old and soft from wear, but highly polished tanker's boots. This footgear was not prescribed by uniform regulations, and might indeed be proscribed, but Bellmon had worn tanker's boots as a young tanker, and he had always found them comfortable. . . . And of course no one at Fort Rucker was going to tell him they were unauthorized.

  On General Bellmon's desk was an eight-inch-high stack of officers' service records: ten of them, each holding the official story of the military career, so far, of seven lieutenants and three captains. Each man had been proposed to General Bellmon as a replacement for his present aide-de-camp.

  When Bellmon
was on the fifth of the ten, that of Captain John S. Oliver, Jr., Armor, he realized that he had probably come across the young man he was looking for.

  Captain John S. Oliver, Jr., was twenty-five years old. He was a bachelor, regular army, Armor, Presbyterian, an aviator, and a Norwich University graduate, class of 1959. Norwich, the Military College of Vermont, is the oldest of the private military colleges in the United States, and it has sent, its graduates off to be regular officers, predominantly Cavalry (later., Armor), since the early 1800s.

  Oliver, according to his records, was just back from Vietnam. And this interested General Bellmon. But it interested the General more that Oliver was a captain. Since he had not been in the service long enough to win that promotion routinely, ergo, he had made it on the "five-percent list." What that meant, Bellmon knew, was that the Captains' Selection Board had been authorized (but not required) to select for promotion a number of lieutenants, not exceeding five percent of the total selected, from "below the zone of consideration." In effect, that meant the Board could pick lieutenants of outstanding ability and demonstrated performance who did not have the required time in the Army (or else the time as lieutenants) normally required for promotion.

  Those on the five-percent list were selected by reviewing their service records and efficiency reports. One of the factors certainly considered in the case of Lieutenant Oliver was, that his rating officer had recommended him 'without qualification, to command a company in combat,' and described him as having "an unusual grasp of the principles of leadership and warfare uncommon in someone of his youth and service." It probably hadn't hurt Lieutenant Oliver's chances very much, either, that when the Board examined the portion of his service record devoted to awards and decorations they learned that he had come home from Vietnam with two Purple Hearts for wounds received in action against the enemy.

  Reading further, Bellmon saw that one of the Purple Hearts was connected with Oliver's receipt of the Distinguished Flying Cross.

  Reading- further, Bellmon saw that the second Purple Heart was connected with Oliver's Silver Star, the service's third highest award for gallantry.

  . . . Seriously wounded while flying an aerial supply mission in the vicinity of Soc Ie Dug, Republic of Vietnam, Lieutenant Oliver managed not only to complete the delivery of desperately needed supplies, but, ignoring grievous and painful wounds to his leg and neck, remained on the ground-constantly under heavy enemy mortar and machine-gun fire, while wounded were loaded aboard his aircraft. He then took off, under fire, and flew the severely damaged aircraft more than sixty nautical miles. He managed a successful landing of the aircraft moments before losing consciousness.

  Shot down while attempting to recover by helicopter a long-range Special Forces patrol operating in enemy controlled territory in the vicinity of Dak To, Republic of Vietnam, Lieutenant Oliver, then assigned to the 170th Aviation Company, after managing a safe landing of a severely damaged HU-1B helicopter, established contact with the Special Forces patrol, three of whose members, including the commanding officer, were wounded. He then assumed command of the entire force of thirteen men and successfully, over a period of nine days, led it through enemy-controlled territory to friendly lines.

  During this period, there were three encounters with enemy forces. For the last five days of the withdrawal operation, Lieutenant Oliver was suffering from shrapnel and small arms wounds to his right arm and chest and refused available pain-deadening medication in order to maintain his full mental faculties.

  Captain Oliver met all the criteria Bellmon had established in his mind for his new aide-de-camp; in fact, Oliver was more than he had hoped for. But he laid his record on the desk and picked up the next one, and read that.

  General Bellmon was by nature and training methodical.

  Although, when the occasion demanded it, he could be imaginative, he was a great believer in precedent. He had found that it was often valuable to profit from the experience of others.

  The precedent he was about to follow had been the practice followed both by his father, the late Lieutenant General Thomas Wood Bellmon, Jr., and by his father-in-law, the late Major General Porterman K. Waterford: both men replaced their aides-de-camp on an annual basis.

  The office of aide-de-camp originated back in a time when communications were primitive. And aides functioned then as the chief messengers for generals. General officers would point to an aide and give, him a message, either written or oral, and the aide would climb aboard his horse and gallop off to deliver it to another senior officer.

  That function of aides-de-camp had begun to grow obsolete, however, with the introduction of the heliograph-the technique of sending messages by flashing mirrored sun's rays. But by then general officers had found it handy to have bright young officers around them to perform errands. And such became the custom. As a consequence, in the modem Army, promotion to general officer brings with it the assignment of an aide-de-camp.

  Some maintain that the modem-day function of aides-de-camp, is to be general officers' social secretaries. And there is more than a grain of truth in this. But aides do much more than that: essentially, insofar as it is-humanly possible, an aide makes sure that the machinery of his general's professional life (and often his private life, too) runs smoothly. In practice this means that aides-de-camp end up becoming what their peers, the platoon leaders and company commanders, commonly call them: dog-robbers-guys who would rob a dog if that's what it took to better serve their generals. If that meant running errands, the aide ran errands. If that 'meant getting an inebriated Mrs. General home safely from the Officers' Club, he drove her home. If it meant pushing canapes, he pushed canapes.

  Major General Bellmon believed such a perception of the role and function of aides to be unfortunate and limited (though partially true). As far as he was concerned, an aide-de-camp had two responsibilities: one to his general and one to himself. His responsibility to his general was to relieve him of minor, time-consuming, administrative details. And to himself: a bright young officer standing quietly in the background could learn more about how the Army was really run in six months as an aide than he could in the year-long course at the Command and General Staff College.

  Like a chief of staff-perhaps even more so-the value of an aide-de-camp was based on his ability to read his general's mind, so that he could do, or have done, what the general wanted done, even before the general so much as expressed his desire. That, in practice, meant that the general had to like his aide. And since for the period of his assignment he became sort of a member of the general's family-an obedient, wanting-to-please son, so to speak-the aide had to like and be liked by the general's family as well. An aide who had trouble concealing his opinion that the general's wife was an old bitch, for example, would be unsuitable. And so would an aide the general's wife believed to be an unpleasant young man Or an unsatisfactory role model for her son.

  And a year on the job was enough. By then a young officer had learned about all he was going to learn from proximity to his general (by being privy, for instance, to meetings either officially or socially confidential), and it was time to give some other deserving, and suitable, young officer a chance.

  The experience wasn't all that made service as a general's aide "useful to a young officer's career. There was also the general's efficiency report of his performance. A good efficiency report on an aide's record could make a tremendous difference even years later in his career. If Colonel Jones, say, now being considered for brigadier general, had served his general well when he was a lieutenant, that meant he had been constantly examined by a senior officer presumed to be a better judge of military potential than, for example, a captain. When he had finished all of the records, Bellmon had seen that he had, without thinking about it, separated the ten folders into two stacks. There were three records in one stack and seven in the other.

  He pushed a button on his intercom and summoned the incumbent aide-de-camp.

  "Jerry, arrange for th
ose three to come in for a chat. Am I busy tomorrow afternoon?"

  "Yes, Sir, you're full," Captain Thomas replied.

  "Then first thing Monday morning," General Bellmon ordered. "Schedule Captain Oliver last."