The Majors Page 7

  “I was so hot,” Major Feeler said, “that I went down to the pool at the officer’s club. Dirty or not, I was going to have a swim.”

  “And you did?” Melody asked.

  “Would you believe there was three snakes in that pool?” the major said, and they laughed together.

  Melody said “Oook” and made a face.

  “Anytime you want a swim, you should come to Ozark,” Howard Dutton said.

  There was a community swimming pool at the community house.

  “I just may do that,” the major said. “I saw the car driving past headquarters. If I’d known it was you, I wouldn’t have chased you.”

  “I guess I’m violating the law,” Howard Dutton said. “But I had a few minutes, and I wanted to get a last look at the place before they start tearing it down.”

  Major Feeler, very obviously, made up his mind before speaking.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t be talking out of school, Mayor Dutton,” he said. “And I wouldn’t want you to quote me.”

  “I appreciate your confidence, Major,” Dutton said.

  “I just heard from Third Army in Atlanta that there’s a hold on the awarding of the demolition contract.”

  “Cancelled, you mean?” Dutton asked.

  “No, sir. Just a hold.”

  “Isn’t that interesting?” Dutton replied. “What do you suppose that means?”

  “I don’t know,” the major said. “Maybe they figured it would just be cheaper to let it all fall down than to pay to have it torn down.”

  “You may well be right,” Dutton said, seriously. “If you hear anything, I’d appreciate learning about it.”

  “I’ll tell you anything I can, Mayor,” the major said. “You know that.”

  The Farmers and Planters Bank of Ozark, at Dutton’s direction, never pressed Major Feeler hard when he was late with his car payment.

  “I appreciate that,” Dutton said, and shook Major Feeler’s hand. “I truly do. And now, I think, we’ve seen enough. Next time you get to town, you come and have a cup of coffee with me, you hear?”

  “I’ll do that,” Major Feeler said. He got back in his GI pickup truck and drove off, waving as he did.

  Dumb ass, Howard Dutton thought.

  But he was smiling. Even that had gone well. The demolition contract was on “hold.” That happened all the time, for any number of reasons.

  The secret, the secret that Camp Rucker was not going to be torn down at all, but reactivated, was still a secret. There were still several days, maybe as much as a week, to do things before the word got out.

  “Let’s go home, honey,” he said to Melody.

  He was going to make enough money so that when Melody went off to college, she would really have a good time, without having to worry about what things cost, the way he had had to, when he was at the university. Maybe he’d get her a car, a convertible. Pretty girls like Melody deserved to ride around in convertibles.

  (Two)

  Fort Knox, Kentucky

  26 March 1954

  “So there I was,” Major Rudolph G. MacMillan said to Colonel Robert F. Bellmon, Assistant G-3 (Plans and Training), Headquarters, the United States Army Armor School and Fort Knox, Kentucky, “surrounded by howling savages, low on water, about out of ammunition, when, far away, I heard the faint sound of a trumpet sounding ‘Charge.’”

  Then he lowered his head, addressed the ball, and sank a thirty-two-foot putt on the eleventh hole of the Fort Knox officer’s open mess golf course. He then raised his head and smiled warmly at Colonel Bellmon.

  “So there I was,” Colonel Bellmon said, “standing before the general, who had just handed me an URGENT radio, saying you were down and presumed dead, and the general said, ‘You better tell Roxie.’”

  Their eyes met.

  “So I figured I’d wait until morning,” Bellmon went on. “That wasn’t the first time the Pride of Mauch Chuck had been reported presumed dead.”

  “I owe you,” MacMillan said. “Some dumb sonofabitch from the CIA went and got Sharon Felter out of bed at three o’clock in the morning and told her. Complete routine, even a goddamned rabbi and a doctor.”

  “I know,” Bellmon said. “I’ve talked to Felter.”

  “And what did Felter have to say?”

  “He said he knew how close you and I are,” Bellmon said.

  Their eyes met for a long moment. Then Bellmon walked to his ball, wiggled into putting position, and stroked it. It hit the lip of the hole, half circled it, and then rolled two feet back toward Bellmon.

  “You going to give me that?” Bellmon asked. MacMillan shook his head. “No.” Bellmon shrugged, and then sank his putt. They walked to their clubs, mounted in two-wheel carts, and dragged them to the 12th tee.

  There was a Coke machine there, inside a small gazebo. MacMillan fed it dimes, handed a Coke to Bellmon, and leaned on one of the pillars supporting the roof.

  “We went over there nonstop in a bomber,” MacMillan said. “From Andrews Air Force Base in Washington.”

  “Nonstop?” Bellmon asked.

  “They refueled us in the air twice,” MacMillan said. “Once over the West Coast, and again over Hawaii, or near Hawaii. Scared the shit out of me. What they do is fly up under the tanker, and then the tanker extends a probe, got little wings on the end of it to guide it. And then it meshes with a thing on the front of the bomber. We’re going six hundred miles an hour, you understand. Very hairy.”

  “So you went where?” Bellmon asked.

  “Seoul. K16. They were holding a civilian transport for us. CAT. You know, from Formosa. A DC-4. Everybody’s there, in civilian clothing. E. Z. Black’s in charge. Had an air force brigadier who was very unhappy when Felter told him we were going into Dien Bien Phu. Felter had a note from Eisenhower. That shut up the air force.”

  “I thought you said General Black was in charge.”

  “Black’s people were told to stay away from Dien Bien Phu, and to wear civilian clothes,” MacMillan said. “Jesus, that was funny.”

  “Funny?” Colonel Bellmon asked. “How funny?”

  “Well, the whole operation is a big damned secret, see, very hush-hush. They even hid the CAT DC-4 in a hangar in Seoul, for Christ’s sake, so nobody would see it. So we arrive in Hanoi. Only Felter and me are in uniform. Everybody else is in civvies. And there’s half of the French Army out there, honest to God, Bob, a battalion of troops and a brass band. Cymbals, trumpets with flags hanging down from them, bass drums. Even a couple of goats with gold-painted horns. Full dress reception. Frog brass in dress uniforms. Our brass in mussed civvies, looking like they’ve been sleeping in their clothes. Except for a couple of the enlisted men. You know that big black orderly of Black’s?”

  “Sergeant Wesley,” Bellmon said.

  “Yeah. He must weigh three hundred pounds. Well, Black brought him along. And he’s got this kid who works for him, a guy named Greer. He reminds me of Craig Lowell in the old days, except this kid knows what he’s doing. Black sends him along to keep an eye on us. About as subtle as a Honolulu whorehouse madam. Well, the first thing the frogs tell us is that we can’t land, we have to jump. And the kid is no jumper. But he says he’s going even if he has to jump. And he does.”

  “Lowell, by the way,” Bellmon said in a level tone, “just graduated from flight school. He and Parker.”

  Major Craig W. Lowell and Captain Philip Sheridan Parker IV bothered Lieutenant Colonel Robert F. Bellmon. But he was honest enough to admit to himself that it was probably because he couldn’t simply dismiss them as a pair of wise-asses.

  Parker was establishment, the fourth soldier to bear the name. The first Philip Sheridan Parker had been the son of a master sergeant who rode in the Indian Wars with General Philip Sheridan. His son, Colonel Philip Sheridan Parker, Jr., had been the senior “colored” tank officer in World War I. Colonel Philip Sheridan Parker III, of General Porky Waterford’s “Hell’s Circus” Armored Division, had commanded Task F
orce Parker that had saved Bellmon from whatever plans besides instant repatriation the Russians had for two hundred “liberated” American prisoners.

  Lowell, if not antiestablishment, was certainly not of it. He came from a wealthy family, but had entered the army as a draftee after having been kicked out of Harvard. He had turned up in Bellmon’s life, when MacMillan, serving at Bellmon’s recommendation as aide-de-camp to General Waterford, had been ordered to produce a polo team from personnel assigned to the Constabulary in occupied Germany. And Craig W. Lowell was a three-goal polo player. There are not many three-goal polo players anywhere, and there had been none in the Constabulary except Lowell.

  The idea of having the best polo team possible was General Waterford’s obsession. General Waterford had graduated, in 1937, from the French cavalry school at Samur. Now he wished to play the French, both for personal reasons, and, Bellmon was sure, for reasons involving the prestige of the U.S. Army. If he was going to win playing the French, he was going to have to have PFC Craig Lowell playing as his number two.

  French officers, however, do not play with enlisted men.

  So General Waterford delegated the problem to Captain MacMillan. MacMillan arranged for Lowell to be temporarily commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Finance Corps. He would play polo, and then be released from active duty for the convenience of all concerned.

  But on the day of the polo game against the French, Porky Waterford suffered a heart attack, dying in a way which would have met his approval: in the saddle, at the gallop, almost at the opposition’s goal and about to score.

  That left the problem of what to do with 2nd Lt Craig W. Lowell. He was not discharged, but instead swept under the rug. He was sent to Greece, where, it was believed, if he wasn’t killed, at least he would be out of sight.

  Forced into it, Craig W. Lowell took to soldiering as if he had been born to be a warrior. He came home from Greece with the second highest decoration for valor the Greek throne bestowed, the highest being reserved for Greek nationals. As Bellmon had heard from Red Hanrahan, Lowell had assumed command of a Greek Mountain Division company after the officers had been killed, and despite several serious wounds, repulsed a communist attack, personally killing more than a dozen of the enemy himself.

  After that, Lowell got out of the army, and settled into his new home in Washington Mews with his wife Ilse, a girl he had met in Germany. But then was recalled for Korea. In Korea, he had commanded Task Force Lowell, which spearheaded the breakout from Pusan, earning himself a Distinguished Service Cross and a major’s golden leaf. But at the moment of his greatest glory, he learned of the death of his wife in Germany.

  Choosing to stay in the army, Lowell had a distinguished military career ahead of him. But the following year, he threw it away, first by cavorting with a visiting movie star in a way unbefitting an officer and a gentleman, and then by defending Philip Sheridan Parker IV, who was court-martialed for having found it necessary to shoot an officer who had lost control on the battlefield.

  Bellmon genuinely believed that both Phil Parker and Craig Lowell should have resigned from the service. They had not. They had volunteered for army aviation, which Bellmon (and most other members of the establishment) regarded as a dumping ground for misfits and ne’er-do-wells.

  “I heard about that,” MacMillan said. “Where’d they send them?”

  “Lowell went to Germany, Parker to Alaska. We seem to have gotten away from Hanoi.”

  “Yeah. OK. Well, this kid sergeant is a real sharp operator. He had just come back from leave in Hong Kong. Where he’s bought civilian clothes. He’s wearing a plaid suit with a suede vest, and he’s bought clothes for Wesley too. Pin-striped, double-breasted suit. Looks like a nigger undertaker. So what we have here is Black’s colored orderly and this kid who works for him looking like an advertisement in Esquire, and here’s all the brass looking like a bunch of bums. So they play the Marseillaise and the Star Spangled Banner, and Black, in a tweed suit, troops the colors. And then they load everybody into limousines—a Rolls-Royce for Black, and old Packards and old Cadillacs from before War II for everybody else—and sirens screaming, they take us into town in a convoy.

  “If Ho Chi Minh didn’t know the Americans were coming, the frogs sure arranged for him to find out. Black gets taken to a frog VIP villa, him and Carson Newburgh, and the other generals are spread around among the other frog generals. The rest of us are taken to the Cercle Sportif, which is sort of a golf club, with a place where the frogs jump horses over fences. What do you call it?”

  “Steeplechase?”

  “I don’t think so. But something like that. Anyway, it’s pretty first class. So there’s going to be cocktails at five o’clock and then dinner. And then the frogs find out that Wesley and the kid who works for Black, and the other technicians, the cryptographer, the map guys, are enlisted men. And the shit hits the fan. Christ, there are fifteen frogs running around flapping their arms and chattering like whores in a cathouse raid. Enlisted men in the Cercle Sportif! Napoleon will spin in his grave!”

  “I thought you said they were in civvies?” Bellmon asked.

  “They were. And they were all high-class troops, too. They weren’t about to piss in the potted palms. But anyway, even Black gets involved in this. And he was pissed, too, let me tell you. They finally move them into a hotel in town, which means that they have to lay on transportation for them, to get everybody back and forth…”

  “Tell me about the meeting,” Bellmon said.

  “I didn’t get to go to the meeting,” MacMillan said. “First thing in the morning, Felter takes my ass out to the airport. We’re going to fly to Dien Bien Phu. We did. We just didn’t land.”

  “No landing strip?”

  “Oh, yeah. Under 105 and mortar fire. The only time they land is to evacuate people. The rest of the supplies go in by being kicked out the door. They don’t even put the landing gear down. You know about Air America?”

  “Something.”

  “They’ve got a bunch of ex-air force guys, and some Flying Boxcars, and they supply the place. Parachutist replacements jump in. It’s safer.”

  “You got hit,” Bellmon said.

  “They got .50s on the hilltops. And some 20 mm stuff, too. I think they got us with .50s. It didn’t blow up when it hit us, just set the goddamned engine on fire.”

  “So you went out the door?”

  “There was a French Foreign Legion guy, a frog, which is unusual, in the door. I pushed him out, and then this Greer kid, and then I went out.”

  “Where was Felter?”

  “You know Felter,” MacMillan said. “He knows how to take care of Number One. He was out the door like a shot.”

  “But nobody else got out?”

  “If we hadn’t been standing in the door, we wouldn’t have gotten out,” MacMillan said. “It was hairy.”

  “Then what?”

  “So we land in the trees. Smashed my goddamned watch. So I started sneaking around in the bushes, and I see that the Viet Minh, the communists, have caught the frog, and, honest to God, Bob, they’re about to cut off his dick and feed it to him. So I shot one of them…”

  “With what? You were specifically ordered to go unarmed.”

  “I shot them with that .32 Colt you gave me in the stalag,” MacMillan said. “A goddamned good thing I had it, too. And then I ducked behind a tree, to kiss my ass good-bye, because the slopes I don’t blow away had Chink submachine guns. And then, all of a sudden, Boom! Boom!”

  “What was that?”

  “That’s this Greer kid. He’s got a sawed-off Winchester Model 12, loaded with single ought buckshot. He blew one slope’s head half off, and a hole right through the other one. No shit, right through him. You could put your fist in the hole.”

  “Where was Felter?”

  “After it’s all over, the little bastard walks up, calm as shit, out of the jungle. He told me not to take a gun, but he had that goddamned .45 he always carr
ies.”

  “And then you walked into Dien Bien Phu?”

  “Walked is not the word. It took us four days. We crawled. We ran. We climbed trees. But we did very little walking. The legionnaire, who had been there before, made us hide all day, and move at night. Very hairy. The woods were full of gooks looking for us. We hid in trees. Got eaten alive by bugs. And then, and this was the hairy part, we had to get into Dien Bien Phu. They got a major base and a couple of outposts, separated, and as far as they’re concerned, anybody out there in the woods is a bad guy. If it moves, shoot it.”

  “But you made it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “The French didn’t see anybody get out of the C-47,” Bellmon said. “That’s when they sent the casualty cables.”

  “Anyway, we got there. You wouldn’t believe that place, Bob. It’s like what France in War I must have been. Everything underground. The gooks lay in harassing and intermittent all the time, and then, every once in a while, they shoot boom boom boom, twenty-four hours a day. So the officers stay half drunk, and the troops stay mostly drunk.”

  “Can they hold it?”

  “No way,” MacMillan said. “After we kept the gooks from cutting off his dick, the legionnaire told us whatever we wanted to know. I don’t know how the hell they’re doing it, but the communists are moving 105 howitzers…ours, incidentally, ones the First Cav lost in Korea…over those goddamned mountains by hand. And ammunition for them. More and more all the time. There’s no way the frogs can hold Dien Bien Phu. The legionnaire told me that there’s a couple of more cannon every day. Sooner or later, that’s it.”

  “You didn’t go to the meetings in Hanoi at all?”

  “No, but Sandy got a report from Black, and I was there when he told him.”

  “Well?”

  “The frogs are crazy. They want the First Cav, all right, and they want the 187th RCT, right now, but they want it under French command. They want to run the show.”

  “How did you get out of Dien Bien Phu?” Colonel Bellmon asked, half idle curiosity, half because he wanted to consider the ramifications of MacMillan’s last remark.