The Captains (19 page)

He signed his name with a grease pencil, licked the envelope, and only then remembered he hadn't addressed it. The address still tore him up.

Schloss meant castle in German; it sounded as if the mailman rode a horse and wore a suit of shining armor.

He folded that envelope smaller, so that it would fit inside the envelope which would take it to the firm, for remailing to Germany.

“I have to beg one more envelope,” he said. He looked at the company clerk. “You got one I can have, Stu?”

“What's the postage to Germany, Captain?” the company clerk replied.

“I have no idea.”

“I wrote my mother, Captain, about the trouble you were having writing to Mrs. Lowell, and she sent me a bunch of stamps for you. They're fifteen-cent ones. I'll put two of them on, to make sure.” He reached out his hand for Lowell's envelope.

“Why, thank you very much,” the Old Man said. “And thank your mother for me, too, please, Stu.” The Old Man turned, so that neither the exec nor the company clerk would see that his eyes, for some reason, had suddenly started to water.

(Three)
Washington, D.C.
6 September 1950

Rotary Wing Course 50–4 (Special) had been established at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, by verbal order of the Secretary of the Army in order to meet a requirement of the highest priority from Eighth United States Army, Korea (EUSAK). From the very first days of the Korean conflict, it had been quite clear that rotary-wing aircraft, specifically the Bell H13 and the Hiller H23, were ideally suited for use as battlefield ambulances. They saved lives.

Within two weeks of the commencement of hostilities, enterprising army aviators had fitted locally fabricated litter racks to the skids of the few helicopters available, turning them into aerial ambulances.

Technically, such modifications were aerodynamically unsound, for with a pilot, and two wounded men in the litter racks, both aircraft were over maximum gross permitted weight. They were also illegal, because they had not been approved by the air force, which had, under the Key West Agreement of 1948, sole engineering responsibility for army aircraft.

The aerial ambulances worked. To hell with the engineers, and screw the air force.

Both the H13 and the H23 helicopters were designed to carry a pilot and a passenger, each with an estimated weight of 180 pounds. It was believed, furthermore, that carrying an approximately 180-pound weight in the only position the litter racks could be fitted would severely affect the weight and balance characteristics of the aircraft. Carrying two such weights would not only further increase the imbalance, but would raise the aircraft's gross weight beyond the point where it could fly safely, if indeed at all.

On the other hand, loading a critically wounded soldier onto a helicopter litter rack meant that he could be flown quickly, and in relative comfort, to a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) where his life, 95 times out of 100, could be saved. That statistic stood out: If a wounded soldier arrived alive at a MASH, the odds were 95–5 that he would live.

Too many wounded men had arrived dead at the mobile hospitals after a two-hour-long ride over battered and potholed roads in the standard army ambulances—Dodge three-quarter-ton truck frames with square bodies capable of carrying five litters.

Notwithstanding the established principles of aerodynamics and the Key West Agreement of 1948, which forbade the army to do much more with airplanes than use them as aerial jeeps, the H13s and the H23s shuttled back and forth between the battlefield (known now as the main line of resistance, or MLR) and the mobile hospitals and saved lives. The call went out for many more helicopters, and the pilots to fly them, as quickly as possible.

The aircraft themselves were easier to come by than the pilots to fly them. Bell and Hiller went on a three-shift, twenty-four-hour-a-day production schedule. It was decided that for convenience in maintenance and parts supply, Hiller H23s should be used exclusively in Korea, at least until things straightened out. As a result, H23s from the army worldwide were hastily shipped to the Far East. They would be replaced, according to plan, by Bell H13s as they came off the production line.

Pilots posed a greater problem. There were few helicopter pilots in the army when the war broke out, and the pool of chopper pilots available in the reserve was negligible or nonexistent. An unusually well-qualified pilot is required to teach someone else how to fly, and the few highly qualified pilots around had quickly been ordered to Korea.

Contracts were let to engage the relatively small number of civilian helicopter pilots as instructors, and applications for helicopter pilot training, from commissioned and warrant officers, were quickly processed and approved, the criteria being essentially that the applicant could pass the rigid standards of a flight physical.

The Medical Corps, to spare its physicians from administrative matters, had established a corps of administrators, called it the Medical Service Corps, and issued them caducei with the letters MSC superimposed on them as lapel insignia. When the first medical evacuation helicopters were assigned to the Medical Service Corps, so were the pilots that came with them.

Then the Medical Corps, which had always been admired, but had never had much of a dashing military reputation, entered the political arena. The surgeon general received permission to gather together at the Army Medical Center, at Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas, sufficient numbers of its helicopter pilots to train
other
Medical Service Corps officers to be helicopter pilots. It also received authority to increase the number of Medical Service Corps officers it was permitted to have. Care of the wounded has always been given the highest priority within the army, and it was given here.

Almost immediately, however, it became apparent that if the Medical Corps got all it asked for in the way of instructor pilots and training helicopters, there would be an insufficient number of either available elsewhere in the army to train the helicopter pilots required for other missions. It was decided to return helicopter training to the artillery, where it had been before Korea, and to make available to the Medical Corps as many spaces as possible in the classes.

It was also decided that the training underway at San Antonio would be permitted to continue until such time as the Artillery School at Fort Sill was prepared for the massive influx of student pilots. In the meantime, a certain small number of officers of other arms and services would be sent to Fort Sam to undergo flight training with the medics.

Despite what he had been told in the Far East (that he was being sent home in order to go to chopper school), Captain Rudolph G. MacMillan quickly learned by phone what the candy-asses in the Pentagon really wanted to do with him. First, they wanted to put him on display for a couple of months as a hero. Then, maybe, they could talk seriously about “finding him a space” in a rotary-wing transition course.

Well, screw that! He wanted to get back in the goddamned war before it was over.

He hung up the telephone, went upstairs in Roxy's mother's row house on Railroad Street in Mauch Chuck, Pennsylvania, and took a green tunic from the closet. He laid it on the bed, pinned his ribbons on it—all of his ribbons, including the one which sat alone and on top of all the others, the blue-silk, star-spotted ribbon of the Medal—and then hung the tunic on the hook in the back seat of his brand-new 98 Olds “Rocket” and started out for Washington.

Lt. Colonel Robert F. Bellmon, who had been in the Polish stalag with him, was assigned to the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Operations. If Bellmon couldn't do him any good, there were other people. Before he became a talking dummy for the assholes in PIO, he would complain right up to the top, as far as the Chief of Staff, if that was necessary.

Bellmon laid it on the line, and told MacMillan what he suspected. They wanted him out of the Far East because of the Medal. They didn't want anybody with the goddamned Medal to get blown away. A dead hero is worse, public relations-wise, than an ordinary dead soldier. He had been sent home to get his ass out of the line of fire, not to become a chopper jockey.

“I can probably get you out of the hands of public relations, Mac,” Bellmon told him. “But you better get used to the idea that you're going to sit out the rest of this war. They're not going to send you back to the Far East, period.”

Colonel Bellmon walked MacMillan down the labyrinthine corridors of the Pentagon to the office of a classmate assigned to the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff, Personnel. He introduced Mac to him as an old and dear friend, who had been in the stalag with him, who had been in the Far East, and who was now in the clutches of the people in public relations.

Bellmon seldom asked for favors. Colonel Bellmon's classmate was prepared to do anything within reason for an old and dear friend of Bellmon's, particularly one with the Medal, short, of course, of sending him back to the Far East.

It posed no problem at all. An infantry captain at Benning, an assistant instructor in the Department of Tactics, would receive notification that because of space limitations, his orders to attend helicopter flight training at Fort Sam Houston had been cancelled, and that he was being rescheduled for a subsequent class, details to follow.

Captain Rudolph G. MacMillan would receive orders directing him to report for helicopter pilot training at the U.S. Army Medical Center, Fort Sam Houston, San Antonio, Texas.

Afterward, Bob Bellmon insisted that Mac spend the night at the Farm. Barbara, Bellmon said, would not forgive Mac for not bringing Roxy with him to Washington, but he would just have to face up to that.

They stopped and bought steaks on the way to the Farm, and grilled them, and talked about how General Waterford, despite the long hours he had spent concealed by charcoal smoke, was probably the world's worst steak broiler, personally responsible for the destruction of more good meat than any other human being.

“Good God, Mac!” Bellmon said, suddenly. “You don't know about Colonel von Greiffenberg, do you?”

“What about him?”

“He's back,” Bellmon said.

“I thought he was dead,” MacMillan said. “I heard—
you
told me—that the Russians blew him away just before you got liberated.”

“That's what I thought. So did everybody else. But he showed up alive. The Russians had him in Siberia.”

“Well, I'll be goddamned,” MacMillan said, pleased. “That's damned good news.” And then his face clouded. “And what about Lowell?”

Craig W. Lowell was not one of Captain Rudolph G. MacMillan's favorite people. Despite what Lowell had done in Greece, in MacMillan's judgment Lowell was a candy-ass who should never have been commissioned.

“I've seen him twice lately,” Bellmon said, looking at his wife to signal her to keep her mouth shut.

“And?” MacMillan asked.

“Once, in Germany. He was there, of course, to meet the colonel when he came across the border,” Bellmon said.

“I'm glad for Ilse,” Mac said. “Roxy and I always liked her. I never could figure what she saw in Lowell, but she was all right.”

“And then we saw Captain Lowell,” Barbara said. “When he stopped by on his way to the Far East.”

“
Captain
Lowell?” Mac asked, disbelieving.

“What do you think about that?” Bellmon asked.

“How the hell did he arrange that? He can't be more than twenty-four or twenty-five years old?”

“Twenty-three, actually,” Bellmon said. “He went in the National Guard, and arranged to get himself promoted. He's good at that sort of thing, you may have noticed.”

“Ah, that makes me sick. He's got no more right to be a captain than Roxy does. What's he doing? Playing golf at Camp Drake?”

“There is a pool of misfit officers, relieved officers, incompetent officers, in Pusan,” Lieutenant Colonel Bellmon said. “They are engaged as stevedores, I understand. I devoutly hope that Lowell is among them.”

“That's a filthy, rotten thing to say!” Barbara said, furiously.

“Your friend Lowell is a thoroughly rotten man,” Bellmon said.

“You've got no right to say anything like that,” she said.

“After his coming here the way he did,” Bellmon said, as angrily, “I have the perfect right.”

“The reason you don't like Craig, darling,” Barbara Bellmon said, icily, “is because he has the balls to do things you don't. He won't let the system crap on him, and call it ‘cheerful willing obedience to orders.' You don't like Craig, darling, because he makes you realize that you're more of a clerk than you like to admit.”

She jumped to her feet, spilling her drink in the process, and stormed inside the house.

“Jesus, what was that all about?” Mac asked.

“I was just thinking,” Bellmon said, “that my wife, when she is angry, is really her father's daughter.”