The Captains Read online

  “She didn’t start asking for me?” Lowell asked.

  “She was sedated rather heavily until today,” Pretier said.

  “Medically, or because I was due in?”

  “Both.”

  “And you think I should go to Hartford?”

  “I would be very grateful if you would,” Pretier said. “The doctors think it would be beneficial, if you could find the time.”

  How the fuck can I refuse, when you put it that way? Lowell thought. What decent, true-blue American boy could refuse to go see his loony mother in the funny farm when that would both be beneficial, according to the doctors, and make her long-suffering husband very grateful?

  “Of course,” Lowell said. “When?”

  “I didn’t think you would want to take the train,” Pretier said. “I’ve arranged for a plane.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Andre,” Lowell said. He reached up and helped himself to more cognac.

  His mother, a tall, rather thin, silver-haired woman, didn’t seem especially pleased that he had flown to Hartford to visit her, and she didn’t ask more than perfunctory questions about what had taken place in Germany and France.

  “You said he was a count, didn’t you?” she asked. “Didn’t I hear that someplace?”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “And lost everything in the war, doubtless, so that we’ll have to support him?”

  “Actually no, Mother,” he said. “The von Greiffenbergs are from Hesse, which is in the American Zone. He didn’t have his property confiscated.”

  “We’ll see,” she said, closing the subject. She didn’t like being told that the father of the foreign doxy her son had dragged home from Europe wasn’t after her money as well as his.

  A little ashamed of himself (she was, after all, a sick woman in a hospital), he refused to drop the subject.

  “Actually, Mother, the reason I’m here is that he gave me a power of attorney to claim his property here.”

  “What property here?”

  “The government has it, under the Enemy Alien Property Act. Some money, some securities, even some art.”

  “And you really think the government will give it up?”

  “So the lawyers tell me.”

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  It was after ten when he finally got to his house on Washington Mews, a private alley near Washington Square in Greenwich Village. Andre had suggested that he spend the night at Broadlawns on Long Island, the rambling estate that Craig had inherited from his father, and that he now rented to the Pretiers, because Andre refused to live there without paying. But Lowell wanted to go home to the town house that Ilse had decorated, to sleep in their bed, to be at least that close to her.

  There was no one home at 11 Washington Mews. Their servants had been given the time off while he and P.P. and Ilse were in Europe, and he had to go through the complex procedure of first unlocking the door and then racing up the stairs and down the corridor to his bedroom to put another key into the burglar alarm, to deactivate it before it rang both Pinkerton’s and the police precinct. Otherwise a platoon of police cars with howling sirens would descend on Washington Mews.

  He turned off the burglar alarm and then went back downstairs to get the one suitcase he had with him and which he had dropped at the door. He remembered seeing some mail on the floor, too.

  There were five or six letters, which he tossed unread onto the hall table, and the yellow envelope of a telegram. He almost tossed that with the unopened letters, but then decided it might be a cablegram, rather than a telegram, some just remembered bit of information his father-in-law thought he should have in order to better handle his affairs in New York.

  He opened it. It wasn’t a cablegram. It was a telegram.

  WASH DC (GOVT RATE) JUL 7 1950

  CAPTAIN CRAIG W. LOWELL 0-495302

  11 WASHINGTON MEWS

  NEW YORK CITY

  FONE & DELIVER

  BY DIRECTION OF THE PRESIDENT, YOU ARE ORDERED TO REPORT TO FORT GEORGE G. MEADE, MARYLAND, NOT LATER THAN 2400 HOURS 12 JULY 1950 TO ENTER UPON AN INDEFINITE PERIOD OF ACTIVE DUTY IN CONNECTION WITH THE KOREAN PEACE ACTION.

  EDWARD F. WITSELL

  MAJOR GENERAL, US ARMY

  THE ADJUTANT GENERAL

  (Two)

  Pusan, Korea

  12 July 1950

  The third platoon of Tank Company, 24th Infantry Regiment, debarked from the USNS Private Albert Ford at Pusan four days after the rest of the company had arrived.

  Lieutenant Parker had a premonition that he was going to be very much alone in this police action, this show of force, or whatever it was. He was worried, even frightened by the prospect. He had never heard a shot fired in anger, had never issued an order involving life and death. Parker was quite as innocent—as virginal—at war as most of the troops in his platoon.

  On the other hand, he had heard a good deal about war, about the unpredictability of human reaction to it. He had often heard that sometimes it was the apparently strong who turned out to be unable to handle their fear; who, if they didn’t actually collapse under fire, were unable to think clearly, who couldn’t make rational decisions. He wondered if that would happen to him.

  There was no question in his mind that so far as junior armor officers were concerned, he was as well trained as any. He was, like his father before him, a graduate of Norwich University, a small institution little known outside Vermont and the army. Norwich had been providing the army with regular cavalry officers for more than a century. Norwich second lieutenants “coincidentally” were given regular army commissions on the same day West Point graduates got theirs; “coincidentally” it had as its president a retired West Pointer general officer of cavalry; and “coincidentally” it had a faculty for the military arts and sciences provided by the army to the same criteria as the faculty to West Point.

  There was a gentleman’s agreement going back to the time that Sylvanus Thayer had become Commandant of West Point. The cavalry establishment, in and out of uniform (and in and out of uniform, cavalry has been, since the first warrior mounted a horse, the service of the wealthy and powerful), would not fight the Corps of Engineers and the infantry and Sylvanus Thayer and West Point; and the West Point establishment, in and out of uniform, would not only see that Norwich graduates were given regular cavalry commissions but would regard them as professional and social peers.

  Similar gentleman’s agreements existed between the West Point establishment and the Citadel (assuring that the regular officer’s corps of all the arms and services had a fair leavening of well-bred Southerners) and the Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College (assuring that both the regular artillery and the reserve officer’s corps were liberally laced with Aggies). The relationship between the West Point establishment and the Citadel and Texas A&M was much better known, because the relationship between Norwich and the West Point establishment was seldom discussed.

  After graduating from Norwich and entering upon active duty, Lieutenant Parker had attended the Basic Armor Officer’s Course at Fort Knox, Kentucky. He had graduated “with Great Distinction”—that is to say, as the honor graduate of his class—but Fort Knox had not been entirely the beginning he had hoped to make on his career. Socially, it had been a disaster.

  He had shared a BOQ suite (two two-room “apartments” sharing a shower and toilet) with a second lieutenant who had attracted the wrath of the military social establishment like a magnet draws iron filings. He was not a West Pointer, nor even someone commissioned from the Reserve Officer’s Training Corps or Officer Candidate School. The man was Second Lieutenant Craig W. Lowell.

  Parker had thought of Lowell a good deal since this Korean business had started. Lowell was in New York, a civilian, and working in the family business, which was modestly described as an investment banking firm. Parker had wondered if Lowell would be recalled and decided that he probably wouldn’t be. And he’d really wondered, now that he was actually going to
war, if he would be able to function as well as Lowell had functioned in Greece.

  No one would have thought that Lowell would be a good soldier, a good officer, but he had wound up with the second highest decoration for valor the Greek government gave. On the other hand, everyone would expect a Norwich graduate to at least “do his duty,” and possibly serve with distinction—especially the son of a Norwich graduate who had commanded a tank destroyer battalion across North Africa and Europe, the grandson of a colonel who as a captain had commanded a company of the 369th Infantry in War I, and the great-grandson of a master sergeant who had fought Indians with the 9th Cavalry and gone up Kettle Hill in Cuba with Teddy Roosevelt. Philip Sheridan Parker IV told himself he would be satisfied if he didn’t shit his pants and run when he first round came his way.

  (Three)

  When the platoon assembled on Pier One in Pusan, Staff Sergeant Sidney was present and accounted for, although complaining of pain from injuries suffered in a fall in the shower. Perhaps because of the “fall in the shower,” he seemed ready to do what was expected of him, and Parker put him to work—still another time—checking the machine guns on the M4A3s and the personal weapons.

  It took about two hours to unload the M4A3s from the hold of the Albert Ford and another hour to fuel and arm them. Parker found a supply of 76 mm high-velocity rounds in a warehouse directly across from where the Albert Ford was tied up; and in the belief that ammunition supply would be a problem (so far as he knew, he had the only medium tanks in Korea), he ordered that as many cases of the ammunition as possible be tied to the outside of the tanks.

  Sergeant Woodrow disappeared for thirty minutes during the off-loading procedure and returned with a General Motors six-by-six truck and a Dodge three-quarter-ton ambulance without the Red Cross insignia painted on its sides. The trucks bore bumper markings identifying them as belonged to the 25th Infantry’s Headquarters and Service Company. The bumpers were spread with track grease and then covered with dirt from the pier so the markings could not be read. When the platoon moved out, both trucks, loaded as heavily as possible with 76 mm ammunition, were placed in the column after the first two tanks.

  Five hours later, coming around a bend in a narrow, tar-covered road, Lieutenant Parker came on the regimental headquarters. It consisted of a tent fly erected by the side of the road to shade the headquarters staff from the hot sun, and the regimental headquarters’ vehicles, halfheartedly camouflaged across the road.

  There was also one M24 tank. When Parker saw it, he thought he might be in luck; it was possible the company commander was at the command post.

  He was not. And the M24 was all that was left of the first and second platoons of the tank company.

  “My report to division said that Captain Meadows and the others are missing and presumed dead or captured,” the regimental commander said bitterly. “I have, however, been reliably informed that the captain, was seen together with several of his officers and approximately seventy men, on foot headed in the general direction of Pusan.”

  “I don’t quite follow you, sir.”

  “I mean they bugged out, Lieutenant. They turned tail and ran. Is that clear enough for you?”

  “What are my orders, sir?”

  “Render what assistance you can to the 3rd Battalion,” the colonel said, pointing out their location on a map laid on the hood of a jeep. “The last time I heard, they were in this general area.”

  The colonel was obviously distraught. And it was equally obvious that the colonel, if he did not expect Parker and his men to run like the others, at least would not be shocked or surprised if they did.

  “I presume, sir, the orders are to hold that line?”

  “Those are my orders, Lieutenant,” the colonel said.

  Parker went back to the road and climbed in the turret of his M4A3. He put on his helmet and adjusted the radio microphone in front of his lips.

  He looked around at his force: a few tanks, manned by frightened, inexperienced, inadequately trained black men. And they were supposed to take on the whole North Korean Army? It was absurd on its face. What was going to happen was that they were all going to get killed. Unless they ran.

  But then he had another thought. This was not the first time a few black men had faced an enemy superior in numbers—and probably in skill. Master Sergeant Parker of the 9th Cavalry had fought and beaten Chiricahua Apache, and had lived to run up Kettle and San Juan hills with the Rough Riders.

  The cold fact was that if he didn’t do this right, if he didn’t come through now as his heritage and his training required, the men with him would die.

  It was clearly better to die fighting than die running.

  He pressed the mike button.

  “Wind ’em up,” he heard himself say. “Charge the machine guns. Load the tubes with a HEAT round. The bad guys are about a mile from here.”

  He was frightened. He laid his hand on the wooden grips of the 1917 Colt revolver. So this was what it was all about. Not knowing what the fuck you were supposed to do, or how the fuck to do it.

  Had his father and his grandfather gone through something like this?

  “Move out,” he said to the microphone. The M4A3 jerked under him.

  Around the next bend, he could see men on foot coming down both sides of the road. When he got close to them, he told the driver to slow. He put binoculars to his eyes. He could see nothing, except a haze that might be smoke residue from incoming rounds—or which might be haze, period.

  A lieutenant flagged him down. Parker ordered the tank driver to stop. The lieutenant climbed with difficulty over the tied-on cases of 76 mm ammo.

  “Turn around,” he said. “They’re right behind me.” There was terror in the lieutenant’s eyes.

  “I don’t see anybody back there,” Parker said.

  The lieutenant looked over his shoulder.

  “The colonel told me to tell you to secure your positions,” Parker said. “Reinforcements are on the way. We’re the first of them.”

  “I’m not going back up there.”

  “Tell your men to climb on my tanks,” Parker said. “You’ll have to show me where to go.”

  The lieutenant looked at him out of wide eyes.

  “Tell them,” Parker said, again, softly. “Everything’s going to be all right.”

  For a moment, he thought that he had won.

  “Fuck you,” the lieutenant said, not angrily. A man who had made his decision. He jumped off the tank.

  His men had gathered in a clump around Parker’s tank, watching. Paying no attention to them at all, the lieutenant resumed walking toward the rear. Parker pulled the Colt from its holster, pointed it at the sky, and pulled the trigger.

  The noise was shocking, hurting his ears.

  The lieutenant turned and looked at him.

  “Get your men on the tanks,” Parker ordered.

  The lieutenant looked at him for a long moment, and then deliberately turned his back and started walking.

  I’ll fire a shot into the ground beside him, Parker thought; but even as he raised the pistol, he knew that wouldn’t work. The sights lined up on the lieutenant’s back. He pulled the trigger. The old pistol leapt in recoil. The lieutenant fell spread-eagled on the ground, tried to rise, then fell again and didn’t move.

  Parker looked at the men gathered around his tank. His eyes fell on a sergeant.

  “Have your men climb on the tanks, Sergeant,” Parker shouted. “You are now under my command.”

  The sergeant didn’t move. Parker tried to put the Colt back in its holster. He missed. He could hear the pistol clattering around in the hull. He hoped it wouldn’t land on its hammer and fire. He put his trembling hands on the handles of the .50 caliber machine gun, and—awkwardly—trained it on the infantrymen on the ground.

  “Mount your men, Sergeant,” Parker ordered.

  “OK,” the sergeant said, softly, and then raised his voice. “On the tanks,” he shouted. “Everybody on
the tanks.”

  Parker touched his throat microphone.

  “If anyone jumps off, shoot him,” he ordered. “Move out!”

  A half mile further down the road, he came on the defense positions. There were twenty men manning them. Another sergeant ran out when the tanks approached.

  “Is there an officer here?” Parker asked.

  “No, sir, he bugged out,” the sergeant said.

  “You’re in command?”

  “I guess so, Lieutenant.”

  “Put these men to work,” Parker ordered. “If any of them try to leave without my specific order to move, shoot them.”

  The sergeant, a wiry little black with an acne-scarred face, came to attention and saluted.

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  “I’ll see you’re decorated for this, Sergeant,” Parker said. Then he touched the throat microphone. “Woodrow, put the tanks in a defensive position.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sergeant Woodrow’s voice came back.

  “Let’s take a run up the road a little and see what we can see,” Parker said to his driver.

  There was no response. Parker looked into the tank interior. The driver was handing the old Colt up to him.

  “You really shoot that bastard, Lieutenant?” the driver asked.

  Parker looked at him a moment before he nodded his head.

  “Get back in the saddle,” he ordered. “I want to see what’s up ahead.”

  “Yes, sir!” the driver said. He dropped back into the hull. In a moment his voice came over the intercom. “OK, Lieutenant.”

  “Scouts forward,” Parker said, almost to himself.

  “Right up the fucking road, Lieutenant?” the driver asked, as the tank began to move.

  “Right up the fucking road,” Parker replied.

  Another half a mile further forward, they came across six M24 light tanks. Five were facing forward, one toward the rear. They formed a half-circle.

  “Maybe they’re booby-trapped,” the driver said, putting Parker’s thoughts into words.

  “Yeah, and maybe they’re not,” Parker replied. “Maybe they were just left here.” He thought for a moment. He touched his throat microphone again. “If anybody shoots at me, return the fire,” he said. “I’m going to go see.”