The Captains (12 page)

Barbara Bellmon and Lowell watched Bob Bellmon as he spoke. Then he said, “One moment, please, sir,” and turned to Lowell. “Let me have your orders, Lowell.”

Lowell handed him his orders. Bellmon read them over the telephone.

“Thank you very much, sir,” Bellmon said, finally. He handed Lowell his orders back. “I'll have Captain Lowell remain at Fort Meade until the paperwork comes through.”

“Now,” Barbara Bellmon said, “let's have a friendly drink.”

(Three)
The Naktong River
South Korea
24 July 1950

Lowell took the Pennsylvania Railroad to New York, a TWA triple-tailed Lockheed Constellation to San Francisco, a United DC-6 to Honolulu, and another DC-6—this one Pan American—to Tokyo via Wake Island.

He called Ilse from New York and told her what had happened; and when he hung up, he went to the VIP lounge and got wordlessly as stiff as a board before boarding the plane. When he called her again from San Francisco, it was ten hours later, and her father had apparently talked to her, because she was not hysterical, only weeping and trying to be brave. He got the colonel on the line, and the colonel said that whatever he did, he was not to worry about Ilse and Peter-Paul. He would take care of them. The colonel wished him God speed.

He called Porter Craig from San Francisco and told him what was happening, and asked him to personally make sure (which meant getting on a plane and going to Europe) that Craig, Powell, Kenyon and Dawes was doing everything possible to get the colonel's affairs straightened out as quickly as possible. He told Porter to personally make sure that Ilse understood that his army pay would be more than adequate for his needs, and that his salary from the firm would continue.

“I don't want her skimping and scraping, Porter, you understand?”

“Good God, Craig, don't worry about her. She's family, for God's sake!”

For some reason, that short sentence from Porter Craig, whom he generally thought of as a three-star horse's ass, reassured him.

“Yeah, Porter, she is,” he said, his voice tight.

“You take care of yourself, old boy,” Porter said. “Since you insist on going through with this, the least I can do is put your mind at rest about your wife and child. Andre does very well with your mother. You're the one we're all concerned about.”

“Yeah, well, you keep your sticky fingers out of the till, Chubby,” Lowell said and hung up because he was afraid he was going to start crying.

An army bus met them at Tachikawa Airport outside Tokyo and drove them through really stinking rice paddies and sooty industrial areas to a military base, Camp Drake. He was assigned a BOQ, issued a footlocker for his Class “A” pink and green and tropical worsted and khaki uniforms (which would be stored at Drake while he was in Korea), then issued a steel helmet, a .45 Colt pistol with a web belt, a holster, three magazines, a magazine holder, a first aid pouch, and, for reasons he didn't understand, a compass. He was told that in the morning he would be issued new fatigues and combat boots and taken to the range to fire the .45. In the meantime, he was restricted to the BOQ and the officer's open mess.

There was a telephone center in the mess, and he put in another call to Ilse. While he was waiting for it to go through, at 0310 Tokyo time, a sergeant came and found him.

“I thought you'd gone over the fence to Tokyo for the night, Captain, when I couldn't find you in your BOQ.”

“I'm trying to call my wife,” Lowell said.

“I got a car outside, Captain,” the sergeant said, uncomfortably. “There's a C-54 going to K1—that's Pusan—at 0400. With that priority of yours, you've got to be on it.”

The C-54 was an old and battered cargo plane. He rode to K1 airfield, on the southern tip of the Korean peninsula, stretched out on the pierced aluminum floor.

There was no one to meet him, and the air force types in the crowded terminal had only a vague idea where he might find the 73rd Medium Tank Battalion.

“If you can't get them on the phone, Captain, there's no fucking telling where the fuck they are.”

Lowell picked up his now nearly empty Valv-Pak (it held only four sets of fatigues, underwear, a second pair of tanker's boots, his toilet kit, and the 9 mm Pistole-08, the German Luger he'd carried in Greece) and walked out of the terminal.

His first impression of Korea was that it stank. Later that day he was to learn it stank because the Koreans fertilized their rice paddies with human waste. His second impression was that the U.S. Army in Korea was in shitty shape. There was an aura of desperation, of frenzy, even of fear. They were getting the shit kicked out of them, and it showed.

He hitchhiked a ride in a three-quarter-ton ammo carrier into Pusan itself, and asked directions of an MP.

“They're somewhere up near the Naktong, I think,” the MP told him. “Everything's all fucked up.”

The MP flagged down an MP jeep for him, and they carried him to the outskirts of town to the main supply route, a two-lane, once-macadamized road now reduced to little more than a rough dirt trail by the crush of tanks and trucks and artillery passing over it.

Lowell tried vainly to catch a ride with his extended thumb and finally stopped another three-quarter-ton ammo carrier by stepping into the middle of the road and holding up his hand like a traffic cop.

Two hours later, he was at the command post of the 73rd Medium Tank Battalion (Separate), on the south bank of the Naktong River.

The command post was new; it wasn't even completed. Soldiers, naked to the waist, sweat-soaked, were filling sandbags with the sandy clay soil and stacking them against a timber-framed structure built into the side of a low hill.

The unfinished structure, however, was already in use. When Lowell walked inside, a very large sergeant was marking on a celluloid-covered situation map with a grease pencil; a GI manned a field switchboard; and, most importantly, a wiry lieutenant colonel and a plump major were crowded together at a tiny, folding GI field desk, examining what Lowell thought was probably an inventory of some kind.

He walked up to the desk and waited until they became aware of his presence. The major spoke first.

“Something for you, Captain?”

Lowell came to attention, saluted, and said: “Captain C. W. Lowell reporting for duty, sir.”

The wiry little lieutenant colonel returned the salute. “Got your orders, Captain?” he asked, and Lowell handed them over. The lieutenant colonel read them carefully, and then passed them to the major.

“You have a personal copy, Captain?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Let's take a little walk,” the lieutenant colonel said. He stood up and put his hand out. “I'm Paul Jiggs,” he said, dryly. “Commander of this miraculous fighting force.”

Lowell shook his hand.

“Major Charley Ellis,” Jiggs continued. “S-3. We don't have an exec at the moment. He got blown away before he got here.” Lowell was aware that Colonel Jiggs was watching his face for his reaction to that somewhat cold-blooded announcement. He tried to keep his face expressionless. Major Ellis offered his hand and gave Lowell a smile.

“We won't be long, Charley,” Colonel Jiggs said. “Do what you think has to be done.”

“Yes, sir,” Major Ellis said. Colonel Jiggs put his hand on Lowell's arm and led him out of the half-finished bunker, around it, and to the crest of the hill against which it was built.

“That's the Naktong,” he said, indicating the river. “If they get across that, it'll be Dunkirk all over again, except that we're not twenty miles from the White Cliffs of Dover. It will be a somewhat longer swim across the Sea of Japan.”

“And are they going to get across?” Lowell asked.

“Of course not,” Jiggs said, sarcastically. “If for no other reason than my magnificent fighting force is digging in to repel them. I say magnificent, Captain, because the 73rd Medium Tank Battalion, Separate, didn't even exist a month ago. It sprang miraculously from the ground to do battle for God and country, manned with rejects, clerks, gentlemen from various Army of Occupation stockades, and equipped with junk from various abandoned ordance depots. Do you get the picture?”

“Yes, sir, I think so,” Lowell said.

“You will forgive me, Captain,” Colonel Jiggs said. “There is nothing personal in this. But I confess a certain disappointment in what I got in response to a desperate request for experienced company commanders. In my innocence I was hoping to get a battle-experienced company commander. And what I get is a National Guardsman, to judge by that Bloody Bucket patch on your sleeve. And—forgive me, Captain—a captain who doesn't look either old enough to be a captain, or to have earned that CIB he's wearing.”

Lowell flushed but said nothing.

“And who is, moreover, to judge by his orders, either someone with friends in high places, or a fuck-up, and most probably both.” When Lowell didn't reply, Colonel Jiggs went on. “I solicit your comments, Captain. And please don't waste my time.”

“What would you like me to say, Colonel?” Lowell asked.

“For example, tell me how old you are?”

“Twenty-three, sir.”

“How the fuck did you get to be a captain at twenty-three?”

“The truth of the matter, Colonel, is that I made a deal with a regimental commander in the Pennsylvania National Guard. If he would make me a captain, I would get his M46s running. He did, Colonel, and I did.”

“That figures,” Colonel Jiggs said. “The goddamned National Guard has M46s, and here I sit with a motley collection of M4s!” Then he looked at Lowell. “How did you get to be an expert with the M46s?”

“I was assigned to the Armor Board. I was project officer on the 90 mm tube project.”

“How the hell did you get an assignment like that?”

Lowell didn't reply.

“Not important. I'll take your word about that. I have been promised, in the oh, so indefinite future, that we'll be given M46s. If we're both alive when that happens, we'll be able to see if you're an expert or not. Tell me about that CIB you're wearing. Did you get it in War II? That would mean, if you're twenty-three, that you are a very young veteran indeed of War II.”

“I came in the army in 1946,” Lowell said. “I got the CIB in Greece.”

“Doing what?”

“I was an advisor to the 27th Mountain Division.”

“They didn't have tanks in Greece,” Jiggs said.

“I didn't say they did, Colonel,” Lowell said.

“You want to explain those fascinating orders of yours? How come the Assistant Chief of Staff, Personnel, took a personal interest in your assignment?”

“No, sir, I do not,” Lowell said.

“Are you influential, Lowell, or a fuck-up?”

“Both, sir,” Lowell said.

For the first time, Colonel Jiggs smiled at him.

“Do you think you're qualified to command a tank company, Lowell?”

“No, sir,” Lowell said. “I can probably command a platoon all right, but a company would be more than I can handle.”

“Is that so? Are you modest, Captain Lowell?”