The Captains (30 page)

“Colonel,” Black said to the adjutant general, “send the following TWX to the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel, Headquarters, Department of the Army: ‘Captain Rudolph G. MacMillan has been assigned essential noncombatant duties.'”

“Sir, you can't do that,” the adjutant general said.

“I beg your pardon?” General Black said, as if he didn't believe that he had heard correctly.

“The regulation…I read it before I brought this to your attention, General…is quite clear. MacMillan's remaining here would be in clear violation of the regulation.”

“Let me tell you something, Colonel,” Black said. His normally ruddy face had turned white with anger, but he had control of his voice. “I don't know how you got to be a colonel without learning this, but since you apparently have, I'll try to embed it in your memory: Regulations and policy are for the
guidance
of a commander. Nothing more. Don't you
ever
tell me again that I can't do something because it's against regulations. I
command
this Corps, which is a horse of an entirely different hue than
administering
it to the satisfaction of some pencil-pusher in the Pentagon. Now, is that clear enough for you, or will it be necessary for me to have to make you write it a hundred times on that goddamned blackboard of yours?”

“It's perfectly clear, sir,” the adjutant general said, faintly.

“You are dismissed, gentlemen,” the XIX U.S. Corps commander said.

(One)
Socho-Ri, South Korea
22 May 1951

It took Mac MacMillan about three days to figure out what was going on at Socho-Ri. It was a low-level intelligence outfit. It was attached for rations and quarters to XIX Corps (Group), but it wasn't assigned to Eighth Army, or to the nearly autonomous X Corps. It was assigned to Supreme Headquarters, United Nations Command.

That explained the willingness of the XIX Corps (Group) aviation officer to assign a Beaver solely to supply the needs of the 8045th Signal Detachment. It was easier to simply turn a Beaver over, and thus insure their satisfaction with the quality of the support they were receiving from XIX Corps (Group), than to have Supreme Headquarters, United Nations Command breathing over their shoulders.

The XIX Corps (Group) aviation officer must be similarly pleased with the assignment, MacMillan realized. That freed one of his pilots for other duties.

MacMillan would have preferred to have been given command of a company of parachute infantry (the 187th Regimental Combat Team was in Korea). Failing that, any infantry company. Failing that, he would liked to have flown artillery spotting missions in an L-5 or the new L-19 Cessna they were supposed to be getting. And failing that, he would have preferred to be General Black's personal chopper jockey.

All of those things were obviously out of the question, which caused him to examine the 8045th Signal Detachment with great care. The commanding officer was a captain of the Signal Corps, but Mac outranked him, if it got down to that. There were three other officers, and a flock of sergeants, but only a very few lower-ranking enlisted men.

What they were doing was maintaining communications with intelligence agents—mostly Korean, though with a rare American involved—in North Korea. Most of the communications were by radio. But there were some messages that had to be carried by hand. And sometimes there was film that also had to be hand-carried out. In addition, the agents themselves had to be taken in—in other words, landed secretly on the beaches of North Korea—and when the time came, picked up from the beaches and taken home.

In that process, MacMillan saw his opportunity to make a greater contribution to the war effort than flying a Beaver back and forth between Socho-Ri and the XIX Corps (Group) airstrip.

There was an exhilaration he had almost forgotten when he thought about being behind enemy lines. He'd done that six times, five jumps into enemy-held terrain, and one odyssey across Poland when he'd left the POW camp. He was just about as good at that as he was at anything else.

There was no reason he could see why he couldn't go with the people planting and extracting agents, and while they were doing what they did, he would blow up railroad bridges, tunnels, and generally make a nuisance of himself.

But there were going to be some problems.

If General Black heard about it, he would find himself on the next plane to the White House Army Aviation Detachment. And he had given Black his word as an officer and a gentleman that he wouldn't fly within five miles of the front, so he couldn't use an airplane. But the important word there was “fly.” He hadn't given his word about walking or riding or going on a boat.

The second problem was the detachment commander. He was under the impression that Mac had been assigned to him as an airplane driver, period. He judged army aviators the way most people in the army did, including MacMillan; he thought of them as commissioned aerial jeep drivers. So Mac began to cultivate the Signal Corps captain, to let him know that he was not your run-of-the-mill asshole aviator.

And then, an omen literally out of the fucking blue, that problem solved itself. A Navion landed unannounced on the dirt strip running parallel to the beach at Socho-Ri. The strip wasn't on charts, and it wasn't supposed to be used, but a Navion made one pass over the village and then touched down.

MacMillan and the Signal Corps captain went down to run whoever it was the hell off. And then the canopy opened.

“Well, look what the fucking cat drug in!” MacMillan called.

“Jesus Christ, the world's ugliest Scotchman,” Lt. Colonel Red Hanrahan, the Navion's sole passenger, said. He jumped off the wing root and embraced MacMillan.

Lt. Colonel Hanrahan was the officer in charge of the operation, back in Tokyo. Mac had known him for years. As a second lieutenant, when MacMillan had been a corporal, Hanrahan had been MacMillan's platoon leader when what was later to become the 82nd Airborne Division was two provisional companies of volunteers jumping out of small airplanes with civilian parachutes.

Hanrahan had left the 82nd Airborne under mysterious circumstances. MacMillan had learned he'd been in the OSS, in Greece during the German occupation, and that he'd later been in Greece after the war when Lowell had been there.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“General Black sent me over to make sure your people got treated right, Red,” MacMillan lied, and purposefully used Hanrahan's nickname, rather than his rank, in the correct belief that Hanrahan would not correct him, and that this would awe the shit out of the Signal Corps captain.

Right on both counts.

The next time the Signal Corps captain planted an agent, MacMillan went along for the ride. The captain was not about to tell the colonel's asshole buddy he couldn't.

What this outfit needed, MacMillan decided, was some better equipment than the Korean junks they were using. What they needed was something fast, maybe a junk powered by a diesel. Maybe double diesels. Maybe even a PT boat. He had heard there were some PT boats at the U.S. Navy Yard in Yokohama. He'd have to come up with some excuse to get to Japan, and look into that. He knew where there were a couple of Marine diesels. Just to try his feathers, he flew to XIX Corps, and submitted a requisition through the XIX Corps G-2, saying it was from the outfit—the Supreme Headquarters, United Nations Command's outfit—in Socho-Ri.

Eleven days later, a GI tractor trailer delivered two marine diesels to Socho-Ri. There was a Korean shipyard further down the coast. MacMillan acquired a junk they didn't have much use for, for a truckload of gasoline in five-gallon jerry cans. XIX Corps (Group) gave him whatever fuel he asked for and asked no questions. For an additional 1,000 gallons of gas, the Koreans installed the diesel engines and reinforced the junk in several places, so that MacMillan could mount .50 caliber machine guns.

He ran into General Black one time at the XIX Corps (Group) airstrip.

“You staying out of trouble, Mac?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You been flying any closer to the front than you should be, to get to specifics?”

“To be specific, sir, I never fly closer than ten miles to the front.”

That same night, he blew up the first of what was to be more than seventy North Korean railroad bridges.

(Two)
Ch'orwon, North Korea
20 May 1951

Headquarters, IX U.S. Army Corps, Eighth U.S. Army, had established itself in a ravine off the main supply route about six air miles (fourteen by road) from the main line of resistance. The commanding general and his staff had been put up in quonset huts, and the General Staff and the Technical Services (including the four messes, field-grade officers, company-grade officers, first three graders, and enlisted men) in tropical buildings, that is to say, sheet steel buildings on poured concrete slabs.

Four huge diesel generators provided electricity. There was a water purification plant, a laundry, and two shower points, one for enlisted men and company-grade officers, and a second for field-grade and senior officers. The general officers (three of them, the commanding general, the chief of staff, and the artillery commander) had their own mess and shower.

There was an airstrip, serving both C-47 aircraft and the light aircraft: Stinson L-5s, Cessna L-19s, Navion L-17s, DeHavilland L-20 Beavers, and Hiller H23 helicopters organic to IX Corps and its subordinate commands. There was the 8404th Military Police Company to provide security and the 8319th Transportation Car Company to provide jeeps and light truck transportation. The 8003rd Army Band played twice a day, at the reveille formation and at retreat, and also provided popular music at the IX Corps recreation center to which troops on a roster basis were brought from the front lines for a day's recreation, including hamburgers and ice cream sodas.

It was, in other words, what Colonel Thomas C. Minor felt was a
proper
headquarters, one in keeping with the requirements of a senior command, one from which he, as assistant chief of staff, G-1 (Personnel), could bring order from administrative chaos. The smooth functioning of the army (not only here, in the field but the army worldwide) depended on adherence to regulations.

Personnel-wise, the major problem was twofold. In the confusion which had been rampant since the police action started, commanders had seen fit to ignore army regulations under the authority granted them (an error, in Colonel Minor's judgment) to do whatever they considered necessary for the discharge of their mission in combat. They had been particularly blind to regulations regarding both enlisted and officer promotions, and in the assignment of officers without regard to suitability and qualification and even date of rank.

Enlisted men had gotten off the ships as privates and privates first class and five
months
later, as the result of a
series
of highly irregular and often blatantly illegal promotion policies, had become master sergeants and first sergeants. One of the first things Colonel Minor had done upon taking over as assistant chief of staff, G-1, three weeks before was to stop that. There would be no promotions above staff sergeant below division level and no promotions to the first two enlisted grades without Corps, that is,
his
permission. God alone knew what havoc had already been wrought on the Enlisted Personnel Picture worldwide by promoting draftees to master sergeant. The Enlisted Personnel Picture was sort of the colonel's own ball of wax. Before coming to Korea, he had been Deputy to the Chief, Enlisted Personnel Division, Manpower Section, Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Personnel, Headquarters, Department of the Army in the Pentagon. He knew, probably better than anyone else in the army, what was going to happen to carefully thought-out Enlisted Promotion Programs (promotion from private to master sergeant should, it had been decided, take a minimum of twelve years active service) if every other soldier who went to Korea as a PFC came home as a technical sergeant or higher. That had had to be stopped, and Colonel Minor had stopped it.

The officer personnel situation was even worse. The subordinate commands of IX Corps were riddled with officers who held down table of organization and equipment positions for which they were totally unqualified, or who had been promoted with little or no consideration being given to qualification or time in grade, or both.

On the other hand, the careers of many officers who had previously been quite good, and even outstanding, to judge by their service records, had been ruined by the whim of combat commanders, who had relieved them on the spot without so much as a moment's warning and sent them packing. Officers were entitled by regulation to counseling before any action—much less relief—which might be considered detrimental to their careers could be taken.

Colonel Minor, during a visit to the 73rd Heavy Tank Battalion (Reinforced), had seen something even worse, insofar as good order and discipline were concerned: Apparently with the approval and certainly with the knowledge of the battalion commander, there was an obscenity painted on the turrets of the tanks. It was even worse than obscenity, even though it was certainly that. It was clearly prejudicial to good conduct and order. The army functioned on cooperation between separate commands. There was simply no justification for the philosophy of the 73rd Heavy Tank Battalion (Reinforced) which was painted on the turrets:
YOU PLAY BALL WITH THE 73RD, OR WE'LL STICK THE BAT UP YOUR ASS
.

The general had agreed with him about
that
. Just as soon as he had returned to the IX Corps CP and briefed the general on what he'd seen, the general had authorized him to send a TWX absolutely forbidding the painting of any obscene or vulgar word or term or drawing on army property.

Colonel Jiggs's response to that order had been right on the edge of insubordination. Colonel Minor had decided he wouldn't carry
that
tale to the general. He would wait until the general visited the 73rd Heavy Tank Battalion (Reinforced), and saw for himself that the only thing Colonel Jiggs had done was paint over one word.

There was still outrageously emblazoned over the turrets of the 73rd's M46 tanks the legend, “
YOU PLAY BALL WITH THE 73RD OR WE'LL STICK THE BAT UP YOUR
XXX.” There was no mistaking what the painted-over word was.

The second thing Colonel Minor had seen at the 73rd Heavy Tank Battalion that he never thought he would see in this man's army was the S-3. For one thing, he was barely old enough to vote. For another, he was a National Guardsman. For another, not only had he not attended the Command and General Staff College, a normal prerequisite for staff duty, he hadn't even attended the Advanced Armor Officer's Course. When Colonel Minor was as old as Major Craig Lowell, he had been looking forward to his promotion to
first
lieutenant.