The Generals Page 9

  When he went into the Army he never dreamed he would make warrant officer. And he knew, too, that if they’d ever made him take the written exam, he would still be running around with six stripes on his sleeves. He’d gotten the warrant when the Duke got his silver leaf, after they’d gone to Cuba and bailed Colonel Felter’s ass out of the soup. The promotion was more like a medal than anything else, the big difference being that it meant he could retire on the same pay as a first john right now, and if he kept his nose clean, he could make W-4, and retire on a major’s pay. Medals didn’t pay a goddamned thing, except that there was some kind of a pension connected with the Congressional, and you got to send your kids to West Point. Two of Colonel Mac’s were at the Point, and that saved him a bunch of money.

  So now, anyhow, he was a chief warrant officer of Special Forces. He was somebody. He didn’t think there were many aviation warrants who got to go hunting with the general and a bunch of colonels. In aviation, he would be just one more anonymous warrant who had somehow managed to get through flight school. The grass was not always greener.

  When they landed at Hood it was almost three o’clock in the morning. By the time they got from the airfield to the post and into a BOQ, it was almost four.

  “We have time for an hour and a half in the sack,” Colonel Lowell told him. “Use it.”

  He woke up to the sound of the Duke having it out with Avis Rent-A-Car in Killeen, Texas. They were willing to send a car out to him, but they insisted that he drive the man who delivered the car back to Killeen. Colonel Lowell told them he didn’t have time for that. He was polite at first, but when he didn’t get his way, he jumped all over their ass. When the Duke was crossed, he could eat ass as well as anybody Ski had ever met. So he was not at all surprised when Avis sent two cars.

  They went to 2nd Armored Division Headquarters, where Lowell got into another argument, this time with the staff duty officer. When the staff duty officer told him that the way he was supposed to report in was to go to the secretary of the general staff (who would come on duty at 0730), Lowell told the guy he was under orders to report to the commanding general immediately on arrival and that it was his intention to comply with his orders.

  “I’m an inspector general on the staff of General Boone, Colonel,” Lowell said. “And if you refuse to put me in touch with the commanding general right now, that fact will be paragraph one in my report.”

  The staff duty officer turned white in the face.

  “The general is having breakfast at the Officers’ Open Mess, Colonel,” he said. “If you wish to go there, I cannot, of course, stop you.”

  Ski wondered if the staff duty officer had gotten on the phone the minute they’d left his office. The very pissed look the general was giving them now made that seem a very likely thing.

  “Are you trying to attract my attention, Colonel?” Major General Stuart G. Lemper asked.

  “I had hoped to, sir,” Lowell said. He walked closer to the table where the general was having a breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausage, and toast, came to attention, and saluted. Ski, three feet behind, copied him.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Lowell reporting to General Lemper at the orders of General Boone, sir,” Lowell said.

  General Lemper returned the salute.

  “And who is this gentleman?” he asked, thickly sarcastic, nodding at Ski. “Is he with you? Yet another expert to help us through our problems?”

  “Sir,” Lowell said, “may I introduce Chief Warrant Officer Wojinski?”

  General Lemper almost immediately regretted his sarcasm. It was not this lieutenant colonel’s fault that he had been sent here. General James G. Boone had sent him. He should not hold that against Lowell.

  “Have you gentlemen had your breakfast?” General Lemper said, with considerably less venom. “Will you join me?”

  “Thank you, sir,” Lowell said.

  There was a cafeteria line rather than waiter service.

  “I’ll get it, Colonel,” Ski said. “What would you like?”

  “Anything but grits,” Lowell said.

  When Ski had gone off to join the line, General Lemper looked at Lowell.

  “All else having failed, General Boone sent a couple of snake-eaters?”

  “Ski’s a professional snake-eater, sir,” Lowell said. “I’m more of a paper pusher. Not that I want to be, but that’s how it’s turned out.”

  “What kind of paper?” General Lemper asked.

  “When this came up, I was helping General Howard with the Howard Board,” Lowell said.

  “And he sent you to MacDill?”

  “No, sir,” Lowell said. “He’s probably wondering where I am. General Jiggs is at MacDill. He asked for me.”

  “You’re acquainted with Jiggs?”

  “I once worked for him, sir.”

  “I have explained to General Jiggs our problems here,” General Lemper said. “Would you say that your presence here, Colonel, indicates that my explanation was unsatisfactory to him? Or perhaps he understands, but General Boone is unable to?”

  “Sir, General Boone instructed me to tell you that I am not here to find fault with any officer, but rather to help in any way I can.”

  “That’s what is known as coating the cyanide pill with chocolate,” General Lemper said. “Unless, of course, you are some sort of expert. Are you some sort of expert, Colonel?”

  “No, sir,” Lowell said. “I have never been assigned to an Armor unit larger than a battalion.”

  “But here you are to find fault with us, right?”

  “I’m here to help in any way I can, General.”

  “When you’re not writing science fiction for Triple H Howard, what do you do, Colonel?”

  “I’m at the Aviation Board at Rucker, sir.”

  “General Boone must really think highly of me,” General Lemper said. “To send an aviator and a Green Beret warrant officer to get me out of the rough.”

  Ski returned with two trays, set one in front of Lowell, and then sat down.

  “I can only repeat, sir,” Lowell said, “that my orders are to make myself useful in any way I can, and that I am not here to find fault.”

  “And you can make me a good price on a bridge in Brooklyn, right?” General Lemper said. And then he looked over Lowell’s head. “You want to see me, Wallace?”

  A huge chief warrant officer, a W-4—the most senior warrant—broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, and crew-cut, was standing almost at attention behind Lowell.

  “I had hoped to have a word with the colonel, sir,” he said, in a deep gravelly voice. “That is, if the colonel remembers me.”

  Lowell looked over his shoulder and got quickly to his feet. He was smiling broadly.

  “Prince!” he said. “How the hell are you?”

  He put out his hand, and it disappeared in the huge hand of Chief Warrant Officer Prince T. Wallace, and then the handshake turned into an embrace. They pounded each other on the back. It was an extraordinary demonstration of affection.

  “I gather the colonel does indeed remember you, Wallace,” General Lemper said dryly. “Curiosity overwhelms me.”

  “I was with the Duke in Task Force Lowell, sir, in the Pusan Breakout,” Wallace said with quiet pride. “And then I went to the Yalu and back with him.”

  General Lemper, who had been a colonel in Europe at the time, had heard of Task Force Lowell. It had been a classic use of Armor in the breakthrough and the old Cavalry task of disrupting the enemy’s lines of supply and communication. Lemper had gone from Germany to duty as an instructor at the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, where he had replayed Task Force Lowell on the sand tables a dozen times. Task Force Lowell had made the textbooks.

  “You’re that Lowell?” General Lemper asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Chief Warrant Officer Wallace answered for him. “It had a bullshit name, Task Force Bengal, but we changed it.”

  “We had a stowaway, General,” Lowell said. “In direc
t disobedience to orders, Prince, who devoutly believed I couldn’t find my way across the street without his help, pulled a driver out of his hatch in an M46, threw him fifty feet into the bushes, and climbed in.”

  “I didn’t throw anybody anywhere,” Wallace corrected him. “I told him the chaplain wanted to see him. By the time he found the chaplain, we were gone.”

  “Maybe Paul Jiggs believed that,” Lowell said. “I never did. I believed the kid with the pine cones in his nostrils. Say hello to Mr. Wojinski, Prince. I’ve known Ski even longer than I have you. Ski, this is Prince Wallace.”

  The two warrants shook hands.

  “You did say, didn’t you, Colonel,” General Lemper said, “that you were acquainted with General Jiggs? But I didn’t, did I, ask you how well acquainted?”

  It was not the sort of question to which a reply was expected.

  “Wallace,” General Lemper said, “General Boone, very likely at the suggestion of General Jiggs, has sent Colonel Lowell over here to point out our errors to us.”

  “Well, sir,” Wallace blurted, “if anybody can get us out of low gear, the Duke can.”

  Lowell’s face tightened, almost into a wince. But to his surprise, General Lemper did not take offense.

  “Our basic problem, Lowell, is rail transportation,” General Lemper said. “That can be further defined as follows: (a) The Congress has not seen fit to fund the construction of an adequate rail yard here, or to provide sufficient switching locomotives. (b) The railroads, although I am sure they are doing their best, have not been able to furnish us with enough flatcars, particularly of the type without braking wheels at one end, which means we cannot simply form a train of flatcars and drive tanks and other heavy vehicles onto it. (c) In their haste to provide us with the cars we have requested, the incoming empty trains are mixed: flatcars and boxcars. This necessitates our forming new trains, composed of cars in the order we need them.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “With our limited rail yard facilities, this is time consuming. And so is the necessity of backing up one car at a time to a ramp, so that a tank can be loaded. Do you see the problem?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We are working two shifts, each of twelve hours,” General Lemper went on. “The enthusiasm of the men is such, Colonel, that I have had to threaten disciplinary action against any commanding officer I catch permitting his men to work more than sixteen hours.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Can you see a solution to this problem, Colonel, right off the top of your head?” General Lemper asked.

  “No, sir,” Lowell said. “I cannot.”

  “Would you like to have a look around, Colonel? You might just think of something if you saw the system in operation.”

  “If that is the general’s desire, sir,” Lowell said. “Perhaps I could make a suggestion, here and there.”

  “I think Generals Boone and Jiggs expect more of you than that, Colonel,” General Lemper said. “Wallace, I want you to take Colonel Lowell and his people around, anywhere they wish to go. If Colonel Lowell sees any means to speed up our loading, I want it implemented, then and there. You will inform anyone who questions this that Colonel Lowell is acting at my specific orders, and that any objections to his suggestions will be made to me personally, after the fact. If General Boone and you both believe that Lowell is the man to get us out of low gear, far be it from me to stand in his way. Is that clear to you?”

  “Yes, sir,” Chief Warrant Officer Wallace said.

  (Five)

  Fort Bragg, North Carolina

  0715 Hours, 23 October 1962

  Master Sergeant Peter C. Crowley, who was operations sergeant of “A” Team Number Seven of Company “A,” Fifth Special Forces Group, was a squat, crew-cut man of thirty. He had been in the Army since he was seventeen, and he could not remember ever having been as pissed at the dumb sonsofbitches in charge as he was at this moment.

  At the moment, he was behind the wheel of a GMC six-by-six, in a small convoy consisting of a jeep (up in front with a sign reading CONVOY FOLLOWS hanging from its bumper), two three-quarter-ton Dodge trucks, another six-by-six GMC, and a jeep trailing (with a sign reading END OF CONVOY hanging from its rear bumper).

  In the “Regular” army, which, from Master Sergeant Crowley’s point of reference meant anything but Special Forces, master sergeants did not normally drive trucks. Trucks were driven by PFCs or corporals, who had the appropriate MOS*, and did nothing else but drive trucks.

  Master Sergeant Crowley was at the wheel of the GMC six-by-six because there were no PFCs or corporals around to drive it. The junior member of his “A” Team was a staff sergeant. There were six vehicles assigned to the “A,” which had a strength of two officers and seven enlisted men. Only the officers (one in each jeep) and one of the noncoms (Sergeant First Class Willy Stern) did not have the additional duty of “Wheeled Vehicle Operator.”

  SFC Stern knew something about jeeps and trucks, and so he had the unofficial responsibility of fixing them when they broke. He was carried as a passenger in one of the three-quarter-tons, from which he could be dropped off to aid a stalled vehicle. That was convenient, because following an incident in which the North Carolina State Police had charged SFC Stern with exceeding the posted sixty miles per hour speed limit by fifty miles per hour, the judge in Fayetteville had suspended his license for six months, and the Army, in a spirit of cooperation with civilian authorities, had pulled his GI license “permanently.”

  At approximately 0345 hours that morning, Master Sergeant Crowley had been wakened in his quarters by a telephone call from first Sergeant Tom Spencer of Company “A,” Fifth Special Forces Group. Mrs. Crowley was like a wet cat when wakened from her sleep by a ringing telephone, and she had hissed and muttered and raked her claws along the sheets while First Sergeant Spencer informed Master Sergeant Crowley that an alert had been called, and the log would show that Master Sergeant Crowley had been notified at 0347 Hours.

  “Where we going?” Crowley asked.

  “Camp McCall, where else?” Spencer said, and hung up.

  That was so much bullshit, of course. The Cuban thing was about to happen, and they were obviously going to be involved. Camp McCall was the Special Forces training area, an otherwise deserted World War II Army base where what barracks and other buildings had not collapsed of old age had been torn down as health and safety hazards. Wherever the team was being sent, it was not being sent to the Carolina Boonies. Spencer couldn’t say anything on the phone, of course, and it had been dumb to ask.

  The only thing that surprised Master Sergeant Crowley was how long it had taken the bastards to blow the whistle.

  He had then turned the bedside table lamp on, which normally caused Mrs. Crowley to arch her back, show her teeth, and bare her claws even more than the ring of the telephone.

  “Where you going?” Mrs. Crowley asked, almost civilly.

  “McCall,” he said.

  “Like hell,” she said, and pushed herself out of bed. She went into the kitchen, and he could hear the sound of the teakettle on the stove as he dialed the two numbers he was responsible for in the telephone alert procedure, those of the two officers.

  That worked like sort of a pyramid. Headquarters—usually Sergeant Major Taylor, once the word was given—called two numbers at Headquarters, Fifth Group. One of the two people he called relayed the word to somebody else at Fifth Group, the other one called somebody at one of the companies. If there was no answer, there was an alternate name. Everybody that got called was responsible for calling two other people. In a matter of minutes, everybody had the word.

  One of the people Crowley called was the “A” Team commander, Captain Dick Brewer, who had just got his railroad tracks and who, because he wasn’t eligible for housing on the base, lived in Fayetteville. Brewer would call the other officer, Lieutenant Bob McGrory, who also lived in Fayetteville. Then, since they had reached the bottom of the pyramid, and there was nob
ody else to call, they would each call one other guy to make sure he’d gotten the word. Then one or the other of them would pick up the other officer (and whoever else on the team who lived in Fayetteville and needed a ride) and drove to Smokebomb Hill on the post.

  Master Sergeant Crowley was prepared for an alert. The hall closet held a completely packed set of field gear, everything but a weapon and ammunition, and a small web bag packed with Master Sergeant Crowley’s creature comforts, ranging from Band-Aids and Preparation H to a sealed can of cigars and two well-wrapped quart bottles of Jack Daniel’s Old Number 7.

  All he had to do for an alert was put on his fatigues, grab the field gear, and go.

  This wasn’t an ordinary alert, however, and when he had his pants and boots on he went to the bedroom closet and took from it a shoulder holster and a Colt Trooper Mark III .357 Magnum revolver. Taking your own weapon with you was expressly forbidden, and Crowley supposed that here and there there were probably a couple of guys who didn’t. He devoutly hoped that he would never have to use the .357, but it was nice to have in case something came up.

  Mrs. Crowley, carrying a cup of instant coffee, came into the bedroom as he was putting his arms into the shoulder holster’s loops.

  “You want a doughnut or something?” she asked.

  “No, thanks,” he said.

  “Camp McCall, like hell,” she repeated.

  “This is what I do for a living,” he said.

  “I noticed,” she said.

  He put on his fatigue shirt and tucked it in his trousers, then picked up his field jacket and his beret and put them on.

  “Don’t get her all excited,” Mrs. Crowley said when he stepped past her into the corridor, obviously headed for the kid’s room.

  The kid was sleeping like a log, and only stirred when he bent over and kissed the top of her head.

  “You all right for dough?” he asked as he walked into the kitchen.

  “Yeah. How long are you going to be gone?”

  “I’ve done this before,” he said. “We go out to McCall, pitch tents, run around in the woods for a couple of days, and come back.”