The Captains Read online

  “That fucking war is going to be over in six months. Just as soon as Truman gets the balls to drop the A-bomb on them.”

  The first thing that the Adjutant General’s Corps captain (who would interview Captain Lowell and determine his assignment) thought when he saw him was that, if he were not wearing the “Bloody Bucket” shoulder patch from the 28th Infantry Division, Pennsylvania National Guard, Lowell could have easily been mistaken for a regular, or what was known as a “career reserve” officer. He looked like a soldier, not like most of the other recalls, who generally showed up in a uniform that looked as if it had been stuck in an attic trunk for a half decade—if, indeed, they showed up in uniform at all.

  Captain Lowell’s Class “A” green tunic and pink trousers were immaculate and perfectly tailored. His feet were shod in the highly polished, pebble-grained jodhpurs normally worn only by regular armor—or armored cavalry—officers who felt their appearance justified the extraordinary cost. He wore no ribbons on his breast; it was bare save for the miniature, unauthorized version of the wretched silver flintlock on a blue background, the Expert Combat Infantry Badge.

  “You’re one of the unfortunates, Captain Lowell,” the AGC captain said to him with somewhat forced joviality. “Your service record seems to have been mislaid between here and Fort Benjamin Harrison.”

  At Fort Benjamin Harrison, in Indiana, in enormous, file-filled warehouses, the army maintains the records of officers and enlisted men not on active duty.

  “Where does that leave me?” Captain Lowell asked.

  “Well, what we’re going to do for you fellows is make up a temporary service record, and 201 file, and then correct it when the real thing catches up with you. I don’t suppose you’ve kept your own 201 file?”

  “As a matter of fact, I have,” Lowell said. He reached onto the floor beside him, picked up a softly gleaming, saddle-leather attaché case bearing his initials in gold. “May I?” he asked, placing it on the captain’s desk and opening it. He took out two inch-thick folders, their contents held in place by metal clips. “Everything’s in there,” he said.

  The AGC captain flipped quickly through them.

  “May I have these? They’d certainly be a help.”

  “You may make certified true copies of anything you want,” Captain Lowell said, “but you can’t have them.”

  The AGC captain didn’t like that at all. He spent the next fifteen minutes reading through the files.

  “You’ve had a very interesting career, haven’t you?” he said, finally.

  Lowell didn’t reply.

  “Captain, how would you feel about a detail to infantry?” the AGC officer asked.

  “I wouldn’t like that at all, Captain,” Captain Lowell said, flatly.

  “You’ve got to look at the big picture,” he said. “There aren’t that many vacancies for armor officers of your grade.”

  “Great, send me home.”

  “You’ve had service—according to your record, distinguished service—as an advisor to an infantry unit. And we need infantry company commanders. You have the Expert Combat Infantry Badge.”

  “Cut the bullshit,” Captain Lowell said, unpleasantly.

  “Now wait a minute!”

  “I’m not going to take a voluntary detail to infantry. If I’m detailed to infantry, I will make a stink you wouldn’t believe. I’m a qualified armor officer.”

  “Not as a captain, you’re not. You’re not a graduate of the Advanced Armor Officer’s Course.”

  “Neither am I of the Advanced Infantry Officer’s Course,” Lowell said.

  “I don’t really need your permission, you know.”

  “Yes, you do, you chair-warming sonofabitch, or else you wouldn’t have called me in here to feed me your line of bullshit.”

  “Have a seat, Captain Lowell,” the lieutenant colonel in charge of Recalled Officer’s Classification and Assignment said, and then he said to the AGC captain, “I’ll handle this, Tom.”

  He spent fifteen minutes going over Captain Lowell’s personal 201 file.

  “You’re very young to be a captain, you know,” he said, finally.

  “Yes, sir, I suppose I am,” Lowell said.

  “We need infantry company commanders,” the lieutenant colonel said.

  “I hope you find them, sir,” Lowell said.

  “What have you been doing as a civilian, Captain?” the colonel asked.

  Lowell took a moment to reply. The colonel looked up at him.

  “I’m an investment banker,” Lowell said.

  “I’m not entirely sure what that means,” the colonel said. “Did you have a title of some sort?”

  “Vice-chairman of the board,” Lowell said, distinctly.

  “The name of the firm?”

  “Craig, Powell, Kenyon and Dawes,” Lowell said.

  “I don’t know the name,” the colonel said. Lowell didn’t reply.

  “In New York City?”

  “Twenty-three Wall Street,” Lowell said.

  “Paid pretty well, I suppose,” the colonel asked, idly.

  “Is that an official request for information, Colonel?” Lowell asked.

  “Yes,” the colonel said. “I guess it is.”

  “I drew a hundred thousand,” Lowell said.

  “Captain,” the colonel said, more in resignation than anger, “if I have to tell you this, I will. It’s a court-martial offense, the uttering of statements known to be false in response to an official inquiry. According to your own 201 file, you were graduated from the Wharton School of Business just about a year ago. And now you’re telling me…”

  Lowell reached forward slightly and nudged the telephone toward the colonel. “Use my name and call collect, Colonel,” he said. “You asked for the information and I gave it to you. I inherited half the firm from my grandfather.”

  The colonel looked at Lowell for a long moment.

  “You were originally commissioned in the Finance Corps,” he said. “Is that what this is all about? You want to go back to the Finance Corps?”

  Lowell chuckled.

  “Colonel,” he said, “I would be outright disaster in the Finance Corps.”

  “But you were originally commissioned in the Finance Corps?”

  “That was simply an expedient means of getting me into an officer’s uniform,” Lowell said. “I never stepped behind the counter of a finance office.”

  “You won a battlefield commission?” the AGC lieutenant colonel asked.

  “First they handed me a commission,” Lowell said. “The battlefield came later.”

  “I think that needs an explanation,” the lieutenant colonel said.

  Lowell hesitated a moment before replying.

  “You know who General Porky Waterford was, I presume, Colonel?”

  “Yes, of course. He had the 40th Armored Divison, ‘Hell’s Circus,’ during War II. You were with ‘Hell’s Circus’?”

  “I wasn’t in the Second World War,” Lowell said. “I was drafted after the war and sent to the Army of Occupation in Germany. To the Constabulary, which Porky Waterford commanded.”

  “And?”

  “It was important to the general that his polo team play the polo team of the French Army of Occupation, and win.”

  “I don’t quite follow you,” the lieutenant colonel said.

  “I play polo, Colonel,” Lowell said. “In those days I had a three-goal handicap. The general wanted me to play on his team against the French. I could not play because French officers will not play with enlisted men. I was a PFC.”

  “And you’re telling me you were commissioned just so you could play polo?”

  “I made a deal with Waterford’s aide, a captain named MacMillan. I would take the commission, as a Finance Corps second john, and play polo, and within six months I would be out of the army.”

  “There was an officer named MacMillan who won the Medal,” the lieutenant colonel said.

  “That’s Mac,” Lowell
said. “But that well-laid plan didn’t quite work out the way it was supposed to.”

  “What plan?”

  “To get me out of the army,” Lowell said. “While we were playing the French at Baden-Baden, General Waterford dropped dead. He had a heart attack in the saddle, going for a goal. So that ended the polo, and that ended my chances to get out of the army the same way I got my commission, in other words, somewhat irregularly.”

  “Frankly, Captain, if this incredible yarn of yours is true, I don’t understand why they wouldn’t have been happy to separate you. As quickly as possible.”

  “I hadn’t been an officer long enough to be given an efficiency report,” Lowell went on. “So they got rid of me. They sent me to the Military Advisory Group in Greece, apparently in the belief that if luck failed them, and I didn’t get killed, the Advisory Group would get stuck with throwing me out of the army.”

  “What did they do with you in Greece?”

  “I wound up as advisor to Greek mountain infantry company. For all practical purposes, I commanded it.”

  The lieutenant colonel looked closely at him. Lowell met his eyes.

  “Then I got hit,” Lowell said. “And they sent me home. To the Basic Armor Officer’s Course, where officers who had never heard a shot fired in anger told me all about what I could expect if I should ever get in combat. But I came out of Knox, out of the army, trained as tank officer.”

  “What do you want, Captain?” the AGC lieutenant colonel asked.

  “If I have to go to war again, I want to go as an armor officer.”

  “You have been around the army long enough to know that what counts is what the army needs, not what the individual would like.”

  “I have no intention, sir, of taking a detail to infantry,” Lowell said.

  “What’s wrong with the infantry?” the colonel asked.

  “Right now, the infantry in Korea is being sacrificed for time. I don’t intend to be part of that sacrifice.”

  “That could be interpreted as an admission of cowardice,” the colonel said.

  “I readily admit to being a coward,” Lowell said. “But I’m not a fool.”

  “Captain Lowell,” the colonel said, “the personnel requirements of the army are such at the moment, due to the situation in Korea, that there is a surplus of armor officers, and a shortage of infantry officers. To meet the requirement for infantry officers in Korea, the army is detailing a number of armor officers to infantry, selecting those who have infantry experience, and for whose service as armor officers there is no projected need. You have been selected as one of those officers, Captain Lowell. That is all, you are dismissed.”

  HEADQUARTERS

  U.S. ARMY RECEPTION CENTER

  FORT GEORGE G. MEADE, MARYLAND

  SPECIAL ORDERS

  NUMBER 187 14 July 1950

  EXTRACT

  18. CAPT Craig W. LOWELL, ARMOR, 0–495302, Co “B” USARC, Ft Geo G Meade, Md, is detailed INFANTRY trfd and will proceed USA Inf Sch Ft Benning, Ga, for purp of attending Spec Inf Co Grade Off Crse # 50–5. On completion trng off will report to CG Ft Lawton, Wash, for air shpmt to Hq Eight US Army, APO 909 San Fran Calif for asgmt within Eight US Army. Five (5) Days delay-en-route leave authorized between Ft Benning and Ft Lawton at Home of Record, 11 Washington Mews, New York City NY. Off is not entitled to be accompanied by dependents. Off auth storage of personal and household goods at Govt Expense. S–99–999–999. Auth Ltr, The Adj Gen dtd 1 Jul 50, Subj: Detail of Surplus to Needs Armor, Artillery and Signal Corps Officers to Infantry.

  BY COMMAND OF

  MAJOR GENERAL HARBES

  Morton C. Cooper

  Lt. Col, AGC

  Acting Adjutant General

  (Two)

  Fairfax, Virginia

  15 July 1950

  Lt. Colonel Robert F. Bellmon, Armor (Detail, General Staff Corps), Chief of the Tank and Armored Personnel Carrier Section of the Tracked Vehicle Division of the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Operations, had caught himself making six stupid mistakes in a two-hour period in his office in the Pentagon, and had decided to call it quits.

  He knocked at the office door of his boss, a brigadier general, who looked up and smiled, but did not speak.

  “With your permission, sir,” Bellmon said, “I’m going to hang it up. I’m spending more time correcting the stupid mistakes I’m making than I am doing anything worthwhile.”

  “You’ve been reading my mind, again, Bob,” the general said. “Honest to God, I was just about to get up and run your ass out of there. You’ve been putting in too much time.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Bellmon said. “I’ll see you in the morning, General.”

  “No, Colonel. You will see me Friday morning. You will take tomorrow and the day after tomorrow off.”

  “I’ll be all right in the morning, General,” Bellmon protested.

  “Indulge me, Bob,” the general said. “Take a couple of days off. Get drunk. Charge your batteries.”

  “I’ll really be all right in the morning, General.”

  “Splendid,” the general said. “Then you will be able to enjoy your morning ride through the Virginia hills, or your golf game, or for that matter, whatever indoor sport strikes your fancy. Goddamn it, I told you Friday.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bellmon said. “Good afternoon, General.”

  “You tell Barbara what I said,” the general said.

  “About indoor sports, General?” Bellmon asked, with a smile.

  “Leave, Colonel!” the general said, and pointed his finger out the door.

  Bellmon went to Pentagon Parking Lot A64-B and found his 1948 Buick convertible (as far as he was concerned, the last of the good ones) and started home.

  He started to plan, for he was by nature a planner. The statement of the problem was that he was exhausted, physically and, more important, mentally. Since he had returned from Europe, summoned off leave when the Korean balloon went up, he had been putting in eighteen-hour days of logistic chess. He had been trying to find and move and arrange for the inspection and repairs of sufficient tanks to equip the forces presently in Korea, those in Japan about to go to Korea, those in Hawaii about to go to Japan and/or Korea, those in the United States about to go to Hawaii, Japan, and/or Korea, and those about to be formed.

  He loved the challenge. Not as much as he would have loved to command one of the tank battalions, of course, but as the next best thing. It was a bona fide intellectual challenge, even more fascinating than chess, because the available supplies and the requirements for them changed literally hourly.

  He had done a good job, shuffling around literally billions of dollars’ worth not only of tanks and personnel carriers, but the support for them, human and materiel. This had exhausted him. He’d reached his limits.

  He would be all right in the morning, but the general had been dead serious. He was not to report back to work before Friday.

  With a little bit of luck, he could get the kids to go to bed early, and then he’d feed Barbara a couple of martinis, and they could make whoopee tonight. That’s what he needed. Dr. Bellmon’s prescription for Colonel Bellmon’s exhausted condition: three martinis and a piece of tail.

  Twenty minutes after he left the Pentagon, he reached the split rail and fieldstone fence of “the Farm.” There was no name on the mailbox by the drive and no sign. There was only an old mule-drawn plow, painted black, sitting on the fieldstone fence, clearly visible.

  It was a question of being discreet. The Farm was far too luxurious a place for a lowly lieutenant colonel to live in without comment. Unless, of course, one knew the circumstances. The truth was that it was indeed a farm. It had been a farm in great financial distress when Bellmon’s grandfather had bought it, when he was a major assigned to the War Department in 1909. Major (later, Lieutenant General) Thomas Wood Bellmon had seen the place as a good investment. Its lands could be farmed on shares, or rented out, and the income would pay the mortgage. In
effect, it gave him a rent-free place to live while stationed in Washington, at the expense of having to drive an hour each way to the State, War and Navy Building on Pennsylvania Avenue next to the White House.

  The Farm had long since been paid off (it had twice changed hands by inheritance) and it now contained 480 acres more than it did when Major Bellmon had bought it. It was more than self-supporting. All but the seven acres around the house itself, these in woods, were rented out.

  When a Bellmon (Bellmon’s two older brothers were general officers) or a Waterford (Bellmon’s wife was the daughter of the late Major General Peterson K. Waterford and she had two brothers who were officers, one army, and one, God forgive him, a flyboy) was stationed in the Washington area, he occupied the house. When none was in the area, it was rented out to old friends. The rent charged was the housing allowance, which wouldn’t come close to paying what the Farm was worth, but did pay for repairs, taxes, and upkeep, more important, it kept somebody in the house to see that the pipes didn’t burst or that someone didn’t steal all the furniture.

  The house itself was three or four times as large as the original Virginia farmhouse Major Bellmon had bought forty-one years before. Additions had been made. The original house, now the left wing, was converted into a study. The house now had nine rooms, four baths, a swimming pool, a garage, an outbuilding where the kids played, and even a trap range overlooking a valley.

  There was a similar establishment, Casa Mañana, owned by the family in Carmel, California. There was no rule that said that simply because you were an officer you had to raise your family in the really dreadful family housing found on most camps, posts, and stations. There was an unwritten law that you could live comfortably—in keeping with your means—and discreetly. Hence, no sign at the gate to the estate. Just the old plow, painted black.

  “Turn in, General, at the old plow on the fence. The house is a quarter mile down the dirt road. We generally have a nip about seven, and eat around 2000.”

  Bob Bellmon blew the horn as he approached the house. This annoyed Barbara greatly, but the kids liked it. He parked the Buick convertible beside Barbara’s Ford station wagon and the jeep, and got out. He was surprised and pleased to see her, and the kids, a boy and a girl, waiting for him at the door.