The Captains (53 page)

Chaplain (Lt. Col.) James Jackson “Brother Jack” Glover, Fort Sill's senior chaplain, was a Southern Baptist from Daphne, Alabama. He naturally reflected the “mores of his background,” as he thought of it, but he prided himself on keeping his feelings about colored people to himself. They were all God's children, after all, and this wasn't Daphne, Alabama, but the U.S. Army. There was no room for prejudice in the armed forces of the United States, and he did whatever he could, whenever he could, to condemn bigotry.

Having said that, there was really no phrase Brother Jack could think of to better describe the colored officer who had come to his office five days before than “an uppity nigger.”

His door had been open to him, and his heart, and he had been willing to render unto him precisely the same services that he would render to any of his Protestant military flock, regardless of color.

He had tried to explain to him that marriage was a sacrament and that it should not be entered into lightly and not without a lot of prayer. He had told him that he had regularly scheduled marriage counseling sessions and that he would be happy to schedule the captain and his young lady for the next one.

“Chaplain, all I want from you is to tell me when I can have the chapel in the next five days. I intend to provide my own clergyman, and I'm really not interested in counseling. I've given this marriage a good deal of thought for a long time.”

“But has your young woman?”

“My ‘young woman,' Chaplain, is a doctor of medicine, and she's given the matter even more thought than I have.”

“Captain,” Brother Jack had told him, “my marriage counseling sessions have the enthusiastic support of the general. It is official command policy that officers and enlisted men be encouraged to participate before assuming the responsibilities of marriage.”

“With all respect, Chaplain, when can I have the chapel?” he asked, not even bothering to conceal his impatience.

Brother Jack would not have been surprised if the colored captain's intended had turned out to be a white woman. There was a certain class of white women, mostly Yankee intellectual types, who really chased after big black bucks like this one. But she was a coon, too. She had brought their wedding license to the chaplain's office two days later, after he'd told the colored captain that he would have to see the marriage license before he could turn the chapel over to a civilian clergyman. Good-looking woman, Brother Jack thought. Obviously had a lot of Arab—or white—blood in her. Not one of your flat-faced jungle bunnies. Maybe she really was a doctor. That's the way she signed the marriage license, anyway.

Then things started happening that really began to bother Brother Jack, though the way the liberals were running things and ruining the army, the last thing he wanted was a run-in with the NAACP about picking on the colored.

The first thing that happened was that he walked into the chapel and found the general's aide snooping around. When he asked him what he could do for him, the general's aide said all he knew was that the general had told him to come to the chapel and make sure things were up to snuff.

Brother Jack could hardly call the general and ask him what he was worried about, but just to be sure, he called in all the chaplain's assistants and had them give the chapel a good GI party, top to bottom. It didn't need it, of course, but a chapel could never be too clean.

The next thing that happened was that Mrs. Roberts, the wife of the head aviator, came to the chapel and started nosing around herself. She told him that an old friend of hers was being married there, and she wanted things to be first rate.

He wasn't really surprised when the friend turned out to be the colored captain.

He expected that the civilian minister who was going to perform the ceremony would be in touch with him, but that didn't happen; so Brother Jack called the president of the Lawton Ministerial Association, of which he was a member, and asked him who would be a likely candidate among the colored clergy to marry a colored officer and his fiancée. He got three names, and called all three of them, but they had never heard of a Captain Parker.

On the morning of the wedding, Brother Jack went by the chapel just to make sure things were all right. There was a self-propelled 155 mm cannon, a Long Tom on a tank chassis, parked in front of the chapel. He didn't know what was going on, and he went to the driver and asked him what he was doing, and the driver told him all he knew was that he had been told to bring the vehicle to the chapel, and that the general's aide would meet him there.

And then things really started to happen. Two panel trucks showed up from Lawton loaded with flowers; and then Mrs. Roberts started to arrange them all over the chapel. The obvious thing to do, to show her he had no prejudice, was to help her with that, and that's what he was doing when he saw the front door of the chapel open, and a major wearing a sword came in.

“I got the sabers, Chaplain,” the major said. “Where's the condemned man?”

The major's name was Green, and he said that he was president of the local chapter of Norwich graduates, and he just wished to hell they'd given him a little more time; all he could come up with on such short notice was twelve officers, including himself. Brother Jack had never heard of Norwich, and didn't know what he was talking about, and moreover, Major Green had obviously been at the bottle. You could smell it four feet away.

And then what really put the cork in the bottle, the chapel door opened again and a major general came in. Brother Jack saw the stars first, and only afterward the silver crosses on his lapels. There is only one man in the U.S. Army who wears the two stars of a major general and the crosses of Christ: the Chief of Chaplains.

Mrs. Roberts ran and kissed him on the cheek.

“Father Dan,” she called him, even though Brother Jack knew for a fact that he was Episcopalian, not Roman Catholic. “I'm glad you could make it.”

“Not only that, I came in style,” he said. “E. Z.'s here, too.”

“Where?”

“The bar at the club is open,” he said. “Where else?” Then he saw Brother Jack. “I really hate to just jump in on you like this, Chaplain,” he said, “but I went through War II with the colonel, Colonel Parker, that is, and I christened the groom, so I figured that it was my duty to marry him.”

“We're honored to have you here, sir,” Brother Jack said. “Is there anything I can do?”

“Nothing but clean up the mess afterward,” the Chief of Chaplains said, cheerfully. “I know this chapel. I was stationed here. The reason the organ is new is because the old one, when I was here, used to collapse once a month.”

Then the guests started to arrive. Including the officer the Chief of Chaplains had identified as “E. Z.” E. Z. turned out to be the newly appointed Vice Chief of Staff of the United States Army, General E. Z. Black.

The Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army smelled as heavily of booze as did Major Green.

Fair's fair, Brother Jack decided, admitting that the very brief Episcopalian wedding ceremony had a lot of class, even if it meant the minister didn't have much of an opportunity to exhort the bride and groom on their responsibilities to God and the community as man and wife.

And he really liked the officers lined up outside the chapel afterward, with their sabers forming an arch over the newlyweds. He hadn't been able to find out what this Norwich Association was, but he made a note to look into it. Maybe he could get them to do the saber thing regularly. It added a nice military touch.

The self-propelled 155 mm cannon was a disaster, as Brother Jack knew it would be. First, when they started it up, it made so much noise you couldn't hear the organ music during the recessional. Next, it frightened the bride, when the groom and she got into it. And when she rode it to the officer's club, she got grease all over her white dress.

And, as Brother Jack knew very well it would, it just tore up the macadam road in front of the chapel and all the way to the officer's club, where there was a party that could only be described as drunken.

But he couldn't say anything to anyone about that. For what happened was that the Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, a four-star general, obviously in his cups, had called out to the groom's father (whom Brother Jack had learned was a retired colonel). “Come on, Phil,” the Vice Chief had said, “it's our last chance, probably,” and then ordered the driver and the commander of the self-propelled 155 mm off the vehicle and had driven Captain and Mrs. Philip Sheridan Parker IV to their reception at the officer's open mess.