The Berets Read online

  Colonel Hanrahan looked at the captain and then at Dianne, who got the feeling that he wished she were not there.

  “Warrant Officer Wojinski, Lieutenant Colonel Lowell, Lieutenant Ellis, and I will be among the pallbearers, Captain,” Colonel Hanrahan said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I said that half of the pallbearers will be soldiers,” Hanrahan said.

  “I’m afraid that’s out of the question, Colonel,” the captain said. “The admiral has personally approved these plans.”

  “What admiral is that?” Hanrahan asked.

  “Rear Admiral Foster, whose flag flies at the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard.”

  “How did he become involved?” Hanrahan asked.

  “I don’t quite understand your attitude, Colonel,” the captain said. “You’re aware, I presume, of the President’s personal interest in the funeral?”

  Hanrahan nodded.

  “When the admiral learned of the presidential interest, he naturally took a personal interest,” the captain said. “And, to reiterate, he has approved this scenario. Any changes would have to come from him.”

  “I hope I don’t have to carry this any further,” Hanrahan said, “but it has been decided by a higher headquarters than the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard that Special Forces personnel will be among the pallbearers. I think we’re embarrassing Miss Eaglebury with this, Captain.”

  “I don’t know what you’re arguing about,” Dianne said, “but I think both my father and my sister expect Colonel Hanrahan and Lieutenant Ellis to be pallbearers.”

  “I understand your feelings, Miss Eaglebury,” the captain said, “but it’s not quite that simple. There’s a good deal of naval tradition involved here. And, to reiterate, these plans have been approved by the admiral.”

  “This has gone quite far enough,” Hanrahan said icily. “Commander Eaglebury was serving as a Green Beret when he died. And Green Berets will carry him to his grave.”

  “I understand your sentiments, of course,” the captain said, “but the plan has been approved by the admiral—and that, I’m afraid, is it.”

  “He’s my brother,” Diane heard herself saying, “and the soldiers will help carry his casket!”

  The captain looked very uneasy at that.

  “Are you speaking for Mrs. Eaglebury?” he asked.

  “Do you want me to go get her?” Dianne asked. She was close to tears, she realized.

  “Your wishes, of course, are our first consideration,” the captain said, “but I will have to discuss this with the admiral.”

  “You do that,” Hanrahan snapped.

  “Is there anything else to which the army objects?” the captain asked.

  “Aside from insisting that the people I mentioned serve as pallbearers,” Hanrahan said, “your plans, Captain, are fine.”

  The captain left the room as a maid served breakfast.

  “I’m very sorry about that, Miss Eaglebury,” Hanrahan said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I’m glad you insisted.”

  The truth was, she hadn’t liked the captain from the moment she’d first met him.

  “Thanks for your help,” Ellis said. “The alternative was throwing that clown in a snowbank.”

  “Ellis!” Hanrahan snapped, but when Dianne looked at him, she saw he was smiling. She thought it over and decided that Lieutenant Ellis was entirely capable of picking the captain up and throwing him in a snowbank.

  Suzanne Eaglebury came into the dining room a moment later. No one said anything to her about the argument.

  An hour or so later, when Dianne again opened the front door, this time to admit the Reverend Helmsley, she saw Lieutenant Ellis sitting, despite the chill, on the railing of the porch. She gave in to the impulse and got him a cup of coffee and carried it to him.

  “I thought you could use this,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “What are you doing out here? Aren’t you cold?”

  “This is what is known as ‘staying out of the line of fire,’” he said. “When lieutenants are around colonels, the colonel’s generally find something for the lieutenants to do.”

  “Can I ask you something personal?” she heard herself saying, and then blurted out the rest of it. “Aren’t you kind of young to be an officer?”

  “I’m twenty,” he said.

  “Then you must have graduated from college very young,” she said.

  “I didn’t go to college,” he said.

  She wondered if she had embarrassed him. She had presumed that to be an army officer, you had to go to college. The open areas at Duke were often full of young men marching around in their Reserve Officer Training Corps uniforms.

  “Oh,” Dianne said lamely.

  “I got my commission from OCS,” Ellis said. “Officer Candidate School. I joined the army to be a cook.”

  “A cook?”

  “That was a mistake,” he said. “So I went to OCS.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “I guess you’re in college?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “At Duke. It’s in North Carolina.”

  “I know,” he said. “I’m stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.”

  “You’ll have to come see me sometime,” she said.

  “Well, maybe,” he said uncomfortably.

  She fled then, aware that she must have sounded like an idiot. She wondered what there was about Lieutenant Ellis that flustered her so.

  Two hours later Lieutenant Commander Edward Eaglebury was laid to his final rest. He was carried to his gravesite by officer pallbearers, half army officers, half navy. A Marine Corps firing squad fired the traditional three volleys over the open grave, and a moment later five navy fighter aircraft, jets from the Willow Grove Naval Air Station, flashed low over the cemetery. One spot was missing in their formation, signifying the fallen flier. Directly overhead they cut in their afterburners and soared with an enormous roar out of sight. A sailor played taps.

  Dianne Eaglebury saw Lieutenant Tom Ellis climb in a maroon limousine with the other army officers, but they did not appear again at the house. So she didn’t get another chance to speak to him.

  (Four)

  Quarters #33

  Fort Bragg, North Carolina

  1830 Hours, 30 November 1961

  Funerals always reminded Paul Hanrahan that, according to the laws of probability, he was actuarially unlikely. His body was not decomposing in either a mattress cover or a GI casket, and his soul was not suffering the eternal torments of the damned. He was still alive and kicking, in a position to watch his children mature and, more urgently, to give his wife a little squeeze on the ass as a signal of his carnal intentions.

  Which he did, immediately upon walking into his quarters. He and MacMillan, Wojinski, and Ellis had arrived ten minutes before at Pope Air Force Base. Roxy MacMillan had left one of their cars for Mac at Pope, and Mac had given him a lift to the two-story brick house on “Colonel’s Row” on the main post of Fort Bragg.

  “The children!” Patricia hissed in his ear as he pulled her to him. For some reason she was dressed up. The dress exposed the very pleasing swell of her breasts. Despite four children and twenty years of marriage, Patricia Hanrahan had a fine body.

  “Send them out to play in the street,” he said. That was a joke. The children were too old to be sent out to play.

  “We’re going out to play,” Patricia said, moving out of his reach, but hanging on to his hand.

  “What?” he asked levelly.

  What he wanted was to get out of his uniform, into slacks and a sweater, and make himself a very large, very cold martini. Just one, for more than one martini made him act the horse’s ass. But one. He was entitled to that. Afterward he just wanted to have supper and then sit down and watch television until such time as he could entice Patricia to the nuptial couch. He did not want to go out.

  That explained why she was dressed up, of course. He was m
ore than a little annoyed that she had committed them to go someplace. The function of a husband, he thought angrily, was to provide for a wife and their children. There was nothing in the marriage vows that said anything at all about the husband being obliged to amuse the wife socially.

  “With the general,” Patricia said.

  “What?” he asked, and then, when he was sure she was serious: “With what general?”

  “The general,” Patricia said. There were half a dozen general officers at Fort Bragg, but only one was referred to as “the general”: Lieutenant General H. H. “Triple H” Howard, Commanding General, United States XVIII Airborne Corps and Fort Bragg.

  Technically, Colonel Paul T. Hanrahan was not subordinate to General Howard. The U.S. Army Special Warfare Center and School was a Class II Activity of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, Department of the Army. Hanrahan took his orders from DCSOPS, and his efficiency reports were written by the Vice-Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and endorsed by DCSOPS himself. He had nothing whatever, officially, to do with General Howard when General Howard was wearing his XVIII Airborne Corps commander’s hat. When he was wearing his Commanding General, Fort Bragg, hat, General Howard was responsible for providing logistical and administrative support to the Special Warfare Center. He provided barracks and general court-martial authority, pay, rations, ammunition and POL (petroleum, oil and lubricants) and maintenance facilities for Special Warfare’s hardware, from typewriters to pistols to aircraft.

  Hanrahan had never met General Howard until he had come to Fort Bragg to assume command of the Special Warfare Center and School. Hanrahan had not been General Howard’s choice for the assignment, and there was serious disagreement between them on the role of Special Forces with regard to the “Airborne family” and within the army. Their relationship had been strained and formal.

  “Howard?” he asked.

  “He called himself,” Patricia said.

  That, too, was very unusual. Official contact between them had been either written or via one of XVIII Airborne Corps’ general officers or full colonels. There had been virtually no unofficial, semiofficial, or social personal contact between them. General Howard did not have the power to banish Hanrahan from his post, but he did not have to talk to him and be reminded that he did not have the authority to issue orders to him.

  “What, exactly, did he say?” Hanrahan asked.

  “He said that he had just received word from Pope that you were in a civilian airplane…. Where is Craig Lowell, by the way? I thought he was going to spend the night?”

  “When he checked in with Bragg, Jiggs told him to come home,” Hanrahan answered impatiently. “Get on with it, honey.”

  “He said you were an hour out, and that if we didn’t have anything planned for tonight, he would like us to have dinner with him. At the Club. Civvies. At 1900.”

  “I wonder what the hell this is all about?” Hanrahan asked.

  “It’s half past six, Paul,” she said.

  A personal invitation from the commanding general, XVIII Airborne Corps and Fort Bragg, to dinner was a command, not an invitation, and Patricia had known this.

  Instead of going into the kitchen to make a stiff martini, Paul Hanrahan went up the stairs to the second floor of his quarters, unbuttoning his tunic and pulling his necktie as he went.

  When he came out of the bathroom from his shower, he was naked. He was a wiry man and not very hairy. The skin at his neck and on his arms was permanently tanned; the rest of his body was pale.

  Patricia was sitting at her vanity, putting lipstick on. Their eyes met in the mirror.

  “You know what I’d really like to do,” he said.

  “Well, don’t drink too much at dinner and maybe you can,” she said.

  A glen plaid suit was laid out on the bed. When they had been in Saigon, French Indochina, he had sent Patricia to Hong Kong with two thousand dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks, to spend as she wished.

  She had spent more than half of the money on Paul. In a Chinese tailor’s in Kowloon, she bought him five suits, three sport coats, a dozen shirts, and a half-dozen pairs of slacks. It was more than selflessness on her part; it was prudence. They both believed he would soon be a civilian. He was then a lieutenant colonel who honestly considered his chances of promotion to be nil. Failing promotion, Paul would have been involuntarily retired at the completion of twenty years’ service.

  The clothes had been intended for his civilian wardrobe. With four kids to put through college, he could not live on his pension. Thus he would have had to get a job.

  On their way home from Asia, all these fears were dispelled, however, after Paul was called from the airplane at Honolulu so that the pertinent points of a Department of an amended Army general order could be read to him: “So much of paragraph 34 as reads ‘Lt. Col. Paul T. Hanrahan’ is amended to read ‘Colonel, Signal Corps, Detailed Infantry’ and so much of subject paragraph as reads ‘will report to USASWS&C for duty’ is amended to read ‘will assume command of USASWS&C.”’

  He still hadn’t worn two of the suits. He didn’t have that much need to wear civilian suits, and when he did get to wear one, he liked the one Patricia had laid out for him. The glen plaid was the nicest suit he had ever owned. He looked like a successful civilian in it, he thought, not an officer in civvies.

  They drove to Main Club, a brick building, and parked in one of the slots reserved for full bull colonels.

  They went to the Main Club so seldom that the hostess at the entrance to the main dining room didn’t know who he was.

  “Have you a reservation?” she asked.

  “Colonel Hanrahan,” he said. “I’m to join General Howard.”

  “Oh,” she said. “The general’s not here, but I’ll take you to his table.”

  The general’s table was in a corner by a window, separated from other tables by a distance sufficient to prevent conversation there from being overheard. It was set for only four, which was another surprise. Paul would have guessed that there would be half a dozen colonels and their ladies.

  A waiter immediately appeared. He could practically taste the martini, but forced the urge down.

  “Patricia?”

  “A glass of white wine, please,” Patricia said.

  “Twice,” Hanrahan ordered.

  Lieutenant General H. H. and Mrs. Howard appeared as the wine was being served. The general was in uniform. Hanrahan stood up.

  “Paul,” Howard said, “I believe you have met my wife?”

  “Yes, sir,” Hanrahan said. “Good evening, Mrs. Howard.”

  “Colonel,” Mrs. Howard said, and smiled at Patricia. “Hello, Pat,” she said. “I want you to know I had as much notice about this as you did.”

  “Thirty seconds less,” General Howard said.

  “We had nothing planned, Jeanne,” Patricia said. “This is very nice.”

  “I got hung up,” General Howard said. “I figured it would be better to come in uniform than it would be go home and change and be even later.”

  A waiter hovered at his shoulder.

  “Well, the Hanrahans are drinking wine, so why don’t you bring us a bottle of whatever that is?” the general ordered.

  “Yes, sir,” the waiter said.

  “How was the funeral?” General Howard asked.

  “Now, there’s a conversation-stopper if I ever heard one,” Mrs. Howard said.

  Her husband looked at her curiously and then chuckled.

  Hanrahan decided that the mystery of the invitation had been solved. The fight he had had with the navy over who was going to carry Eaglebury’s casket had already been relayed to Howard.

  “I insisted,” Hanrahan said, “that Green Berets serve as pallbearers. There was some discussion about that, but I won.”

  “Good for you,” Howard said, surprising Hanrahan. “He died as a Green Beret, even if he was a sailor.”

  “The conversation is going from awful to unspeakable,” Mrs. How
ard said.

  “This is, as I’m sure Paul has suspected, sort of a working dinner,” General Howard said.

  The waiter appeared with the wine. They went through the bottle-opening and cork-sniffing ritual, and then the waiter handed them menus.

  “And, General, if I may remind you, it’s lobster night.”

  Howard closed his menu immediately. “That settles that for me,” he said.

  Once a month the club had lobster air-freighted from Maine. It was supposed to be by reservation only, but there were always a dozen or so extras, and first call on them was one of the privileges of rank for General Howard.

  Patricia closed her menu. It was lobster all around, with steamed clams for an appetizer.

  “We always swear we’ll come for the lobster,” Patricia said, “and then we never do.”

  “That’s my line,” Jeanne Howard said.

  “Paul,” General Howard said, out of the blue: “I want you to know that I had nothing to do with that ’no foreign-type headgear’ CONARC directive.”

  That literally left Hanrahan speechless.

  “What’s that?” Patricia asked, and immediately looked as if she was sorry she had spoken.

  “CONARC’s banned the berets,” Hanrahan said.

  He wondered if that was why he had been invited to dinner.

  “While I don’t like them,” Howard said, “and continue to think they make you look like Frenchmen, I have decided that if they were important to you, I should mind my own business.”

  “Well, thank you anyway, General,” Hanrahan said.

  “I have also had occasion recently,” Howard said, “to rethink my attitude toward Special Forces generally.”

  “And did you reach a different conclusion, General?” Hanrahan asked.

  “Let me put it this way,” Howard said, “which is just about how it was put to me: If nothing else, you represent a pool of some thousands of officers and noncoms who could form the cadre of another Airborne division if it should be necessary to activate one.”