The Generals Read online

  “He’s a Special Forces lieutenant,” MacMillan corrected him.

  “—in the highlands in Vietnam,” Lowell finished.

  “Splendid troops,” Colonel Parker said, “and a fine idea!”

  The idea that Porter Craig’s son was an enlisted man, much less in Special Forces, took some moments for John H. Denn to get used to.

  “You’re talking about the ones who wear the berets, the green berets?” Denn asked.

  “Yes, indeed,” General Hanrahan said, and then resumed his story. “Dave told me to tell you, Craig, that he really did a good job.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Lowell said. “Could he stop the telegram?”

  “That’s why he got on MARS,” General Hanrahan said. “He thought it would be better if either you or I told his father. If you don’t want to, I’ll call them.”

  Lowell thought that over. “I’ll call him,” he said. “If you called him, Porter would call me anyway.”

  “I’ve heard,” John H. Denn said, “and read about the Green Berets. Are they really what they say they are?”

  Lowell looked at him. “You’re asking, ‘Do they really eat babies for breakfast?’ That sort of thing?”

  Denn was a little uncomfortable. “Well, some of the stories one hears….” he said.

  “Why don’t you ask General Hanrahan? He’s the head Green Beret, ex officio the chief baby-eater,” Lowell said.

  From the look on General Hanrahan’s face, Denn saw that Lowell was telling the truth.

  “Not very funny, Craig,” Hanrahan said, a little stiffly. “But we only eat babies, Mr. Denn, when we’re on duty.”

  “But an officer is never off duty,” Lowell went on. “Isn’t that so, Colonel Parker?”

  “An officer is never off duty until he retires,” Colonel Parker agreed, but sensing it was time to do so, he was willing to change the subject. Not completely off the Army, but to a previous war.

  “I got out my great-grandfather’s maps when I found we were coming here,” he said. “I’ll show them to you tonight, if you’re interested.”

  “I’d be fascinated,” Lowell said.

  “Me, too,” Hanrahan said.

  “What maps?” MacMillan asked, confused.

  “My great-grandfather, Colonel,” Colonel Parker said with quiet pride, “served with the 10th Cavalry, ‘the Buffalo Soldiers.’ They campaigned through this part of the world in the Indian Wars.”

  “And you have his maps?” Denn asked. “I’d love to see them.”

  “Why did they call them ‘Buffalo Soldiers,’ Colonel?” Lieutenant Wood asked. “Because they lived off buffalos?”

  “Actually, Lieutenant,” Colonel Parker said, “the name was given to them by the Sioux, or else the Chiricahua, no one seems to be sure. It made reference to the similarity between the fur of the buffalo and the curly hair of the Negro troopers.”

  “Oh,” Wood said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

  “They weren’t offended by it,” Colonel Parker said. “It was a proud thing for a Negro to be a Buffalo Soldier.”

  (Two)

  Near Wessington Springs, South Dakota

  1430 Hours, 22 October 1962

  The days had been good, and just about identical. Everyone rose about nine-thirty and sat down to enormous breakfasts of ham, eggs, sausage, and pancakes. At half past eleven, they got dressed, assembled outside, and were driven to where they would shoot.

  Most of the shooting was through cornfields. The hunting party would walk (“beat”) their way through corn higher than they were tall, with the Labradors trotting after them, toward the end of the field. Two or three hunters served as backup there. Backup was usually considered the best spot, for that was where most of the shooting happened, but that was not the way it was with these people.

  Because of the thickness and height of the cornstalks (though they could be heard scurrying ahead of the hunters) pheasant were visible when they flushed for only seconds. Then they flew away, most often toward the far end of the field, where the backup hunters waited. In the moment the bird was visible, the beaters had to throw their shotguns to their shoulders, determine that the bird was not a hen but a legal cock, and fire. Despite the difficulty of the shots, these beaters were taking pheasants three times out of four. And they were taking them clean: there would be a small cloud of feathers, and then the birds would drop like stones. The backup hunters had very few shots.

  Each day by four o’clock, they were back at the farmhouse, where they made themselves as useful as they could cleaning and freezing the birds. Colonel Parker had impressed both John H. Denn and the caretaker with his surgeonlike skill in skinning his catch. Most hunters ran the birds through a pot of melted paraffin so they could easily pluck them.

  Colonel Parker’s Labradors, a bitch and a male, also impressed John H. Denn. They were superbly trained, much better dogs than the Labs on the Farm. When Denn asked the colonel how he’d managed to produce such terrific animals, Parker replied that retirement gave him time to properly train dogs. There was also time to sew canvas seat covers to protect the brocade upholstery in the back of his Cadillac Fleetwood.

  “When I was a young officer, Cavalry was still mounted,” Parker said. “We had a saddler who taught me what he could of his trade. I found it a very useful skill.”

  By five o’clock each day, everyone had bathed and was into his whiskey. Vast quantities of it disappeared with surprising speed, but no one (except Lieutenant Wood, who demonstrated a tendency to drop off to sleep) seemed to feel it. They ate enormous dinners, roast beef the first night, roast pheasant the second, and they stayed up late talking and playing a game with dollar bills called “Liar’s Dice.”

  John H. Denn had never served in a uniform, and had up until now little regard for the military, yet he found the nightly conversations fascinating. There was apparently much more to the Army than he’d been aware of. And he was more than a little surprised to learn that there was just as much politics in the Army as there was in the corporate corridors of CONTBANK. The difference seemed to be that their political battles were punctuated from time to time with genuine battles.

  Denn learned further that “blown away” meant “to be shot to death”; that “bought the farm” meant “blown away”; and that “nervous” meant “frightened,” or more probably “terrified.”

  And late the second night, Colonel MacMillan’s even more obscure remark about “this is where I came in” was explained when General Hanrahan, his tongue slightly loosened by a good deal of Scotch, related the story of then–Second Lieutenant Lowell’s exploits in Greece. The man whose American Express card identified him as vice chairman of the board (for tax purposes, Denn understood) of Craig, Powell, Kenyon and Dawes, Investment Bankers, had once, while severely wounded, defended a position in the mountains on the Greek-Albanian border with sufficient valor and skill to be personally decorated by the King of Greece.

  Lowell tried to make light of that, but Wojinski, who had also been there, wouldn’t let him. “Come on, Duke,” he said. “You can’t forget that any more than I can. All those dead Reds all over the place. There was no way to bury that many people there, nothing but goddamned rocks, we would have had to blast graves, and we couldn’t get the Greek monks to take them…they wouldn’t bury the Communists, said they were godless, wouldn’t even touch them…. So what we did was make up a convoy of trucks and carried them to Athens and left the trucks in the Military Assistance Command motor pool and disappeared. By then they was starting to smell. When we showed up a couple of days later, they were madder than hell, but the bodies were gone.”

  John H. Denn, Colonel Philip Sheridan Parker III, and Lieutenant Charles J. Wood, Jr., stood ten yards from the end of a cornfield, holding their shotguns at the ready.

  Colonel Parker was lightly holding in his hands a Sauer und Sohn Drilling, two side-by-side 16-bore barrels above a rifle barrel. John H. Denn knew a little something about shotguns, and he knew the Dr
illing was worth more than three thousand dollars.

  And the Drilling was not the most valuable of the shotguns being used by the party. Lieutenant Wood was armed with one of two shotguns Lieutenant Colonel Craig W. Lowell had brought to South Dakota in a leather case. They were a matched pair. The numerals “1” and “2” had been inlaid in gold on the opening lever of each gun. The guns were Holland and Holland’s “Best Grade,” and were worth somewhere in the vicinity of twelve thousand dollars. Denn suspected that Wood had no idea of the worth of the gun he had been using for the past three days. He knew it was a fine gun, of course, but not quite how fine.

  There had been shooting now for five minutes, and every once in a while the rainlike sound of spent shot falling onto the cornstalks, but the cornfield was half a mile in depth, and the beaters could neither be seen nor heard.

  Then there was the crunching, whistling sound of men and dogs moving down corn rows, and pheasants began to flush as they were beaten toward the end of the field. They had several minutes of good shooting, but then MacMillan’s voice sounded from inside the field.

  “Keep those muzzles up! Here we come!”

  The beaters appeared a minute later, their jackets heavy with pheasant.

  “I’m sure that’s the limit,” Lowell said. “We should have probably stopped shooting a couple of minutes ago.”

  “Why didn’t you?” Colonel Parker demanded coldly. “I don’t like taking more than the limit.”

  Lowell was embarrassed. “Let’s count them,” he said. “Maybe I’m wrong.”

  When the birds were laid out he was visibly relieved that they were one bird under.

  “Let’s not start anywhere else for just one bird,” Lowell said. “I need a drink and a bath, in that order.”

  Wood and Wojinski began collecting the pheasants from the others. They carried the birds by their necks to the Mercury, whose back seat had been put down and covered with plastic.

  “General Hanrahan,” Colonel Parker said, “may I suggest that you and I leave these gentlemen to their labors? I recall hearing somewhere that rank is supposed to carry with it certain privileges. I would like first shot at the shower, before certain unnamed officers and alleged gentlemen again exhaust the hot water.”

  Parker, Hanrahan, and John H. Denn got in the Cadillac and drove off.

  The others finished loading the birds and crowded into the Mercury station wagon.

  A half mile down the dirt road, they saw Colonel Parker’s Cadillac stopped by the side of the road.

  “I wonder what the hell that’s all about?” MacMillan asked, concerned.

  As they approached, an arm came out of the driver’s window of the Cadillac. Hand open, it extended upward, as a child extends its arm asking to leave the classroom. Or the commander of an armored cavalry troop signals the troops behind to halt.

  MacMillan got out and walked quickly to the Cadillac, bent down to the window, listened a moment, straightened, made a gesture for those in the Mercury to join him, and then bent to the window again.

  By the time they had gotten out of the Mercury and walked to the Cadillac MacMillan was standing straight again.

  “What’s going on?” Lowell asked.

  “You just missed it,” MacMillan said, gesturing toward the radio.

  “What?” Lowell demanded, impatiently.

  “Kennedy,” MacMillan said. “He was on the radio. The Russians have missiles in Cuba. He just ordered a naval blockade.”

  “Good God!” Lowell said.

  “Perhaps,” Colonel Parker said thoughtfully, “someone has read some Clausewitz to him after all.”

  “The nearest phone, I suppose, is at the farmhouse,” General Hanrahan said.

  “Yes,” Colonel Parker said. He put the Cadillac in gear and stepped hard on the accelerator. The Cadillac’s wheels spun getting out of the small ditch. The others, left standing in the road, ran in a moment to the Mercury.

  (Three)

  “Army Aviation Board,” Mrs. Ann Caskey said. “Office of the President.”

  “Ann, this is Colonel Lowell. Let me speak to Colonel Martinelli.”

  “He’s on the phone, Colonel,” Mrs. Caskey said.

  “Break in,” Lowell said.

  “All right,” she said. “We’ve been looking all over for you, Colonel.”

  There was a moment’s pause.

  “Where the hell are you?” Colonel Jack Martinelli asked. “We’ve been looking all over North Dakota for you.”

  “I’m in South Dakota,” Lowell said. “And Hanrahan’s people knew where we are.”

  “Obviously not,” Martinelli said. “How long will it take you to get to MacDill Air Force Base?”

  Lowell did the arithmetic in his head.

  “Six hours, maybe a little longer.”

  “Report to General Jiggs,” Martinelli said. “I’ll call and let him know you finally turned up.”

  “What’s going on?” Lowell asked a dead telephone.

  He put the telephone in its cradle and looked at Paul Hanrahan, who was on the other telephone.

  “Hold on,” Hanrahan said to whomever he was talking to and covered the microphone with his hand.

  “I’m to report to Jiggs at MacDill,” Lowell said.

  Hanrahan looked thoughtful a moment.

  “Can you drop us at Bragg?”

  “It would take me another two hours,” Lowell said, adding bitterly, “and I’m already apparently AWOL.”

  Hanrahan thought that over a moment, then removed his hand from the microphone.

  “Send an L-23 to MacDill,” he said. “Have the pilot report to General Jiggs.”

  There was a reply. Hanrahan’s face tightened in fury.

  “Well get one of them back from the Corps fleet,” he snapped. “By force if necessary.”

  There was another reply.

  “Colonel, until such time as either you or I are relieved by proper authority, you are subject to my orders. Now do what I tell you, and don’t argue with me about it.”

  He took the telephone from his ear and put it in the base with such slow precision that it was obvious he very much wanted to slam it down.

  “I have been sandbagged,” he said to Lowell. “I am being ‘represented’ by XVIII Airborne Corps at MacDill. My ass of a deputy has seen fit to turn my airplanes ‘temporarily’ over to XVIII Airborne Corps. He has justified this action with the ‘explanation’ that he ‘believes’ they have a higher operational priority.”

  “That sonofabitch,” MacMillan exploded. “I never trusted him.”

  “As soon as I’m at MacDill, Paul,” Lowell said, “you and Mac can have the Aero Commander. If I need wings, I can get them from Rucker.”

  “Just get us to MacDill, Craig,” General Hanrahan said. “As quickly as we can get there.”

  (Four)

  MacDill Air Force Base

  Tampa, Florida

  2145 hours, 22 October 1962

  “MacDill,” Craig Lowell said to the microphone, “Aero Commander One Five, descending from one zero thousand, estimate five minutes north northwest of your station. Requesting landing instructions.”

  “Aircraft calling MacDill, say again,” the MacDill tower replied.

  “MacDill, Aero Commander One Five, five minutes out, north northwest, request landing.”

  “Aero Commander One Five, MacDill is closed to civilian traffic at this time. Permission to land is denied. I say again, denied.”

  “Oh, shit, that’s all we need,” Wojinski, kneeling on the floor between the pilot’s and copilot’s seat, said.

  “There it is,” MacMillan said. He was in the copilot’s seat and pointing out the left window.

  Lowell looked over him, then pushed the nose down, and turned to the left.

  “What do we do, go into Tampa?” MacMillan asked.

  There was a lot of traffic at MacDill. Lowell could see two Air Force fighters taking off simultaneously on one runway, while a C-131 made its landing roll
on a parallel runway.

  “MacDill, Commander One Five is on official business, we have a Code Seven* aboard.”

  “Commander One Five, MacDill. Advise landing at Tampa International. This field is temporarily closed to civilian traffic.”

  “MacDill, did you hear what I said about a Code Seven aboard?”

  “Affirmative, One Five. I say again, this field is temporarily closed to civilian traffic.”

  “MacDill, Aero Commander One Five declares an emergency. Request immediate straight-in approach to Runway Two Seven Left.”

  “Jesus!” MacMillan said.

  “Attention all aircraft in the MacDill approach and departure patterns. We have a declared emergency. The aircraft is a civilian Aero Commander, approximately three miles north of Runway Two Seven. We have a declared emergency. All aircraft in the approach pattern will execute one minute three hundred sixty-degree turns at their present altitude until further notice. MacDill clears Aero Commander One Five to make an emergency straight-in approach to Runway Two Seven. The winds are five from the north. The altimeter is three zero zero zero.”

  “Understand Two Seven,” Lowell said. “One Five on final.” He turned to MacMillan. “Put the wheels down, Mac,” he said. “It’s smoother that way.”

  “Jesus,” MacMillan said again, as he put his hand on the lever.

  “Aero Commander One Five, you will stop at the end of your landing roll. You will not, repeat not, depart the runway. You will be met.”

  “I’ll bet we will,” MacMillan said.

  “Understand Taxiway Two Seven Left,” Lowell said.

  The tower was back on the air instantly. The operator seemed upset.

  “One Five, negative! I say again, negative! Commander One Five, you are directed to stop in place at the completion of your landing roll. I say again, you are ordered to stop in place at the completion of your landing roll.”

  As they came in over the outer marker, they could see a procession of airfield vehicles, huge red fire trucks, two ambulances, a sedan painted in a black-and-white checkerboard pattern, and three jeeps, all with flashing red lights, racing down the taxiway parallel to the runways.