The Captains (35 page)

“I'm not sure I should talk about it,” the warrant officer said.

“Goddamnit, you started it, now finish it,” MacMillan said sharply. He was more than a little curious to know what the warrant knew about Felter.

“Well, we had a captain who didn't want to relieve some Greeks stuck on a hill,” the warrant officer said. “They was dropping mortars on the road. And the Mouse figured he should at least try. There was some kid American lieutenant on the hill with the Greeks.”

“The kid's name was Lowell, right?” MacMillan said.

“Yeah, you know about it, huh?”

“Doesn't everybody who's been in the army more than two weeks?” Mac replied. Guessing it was Lowell was a wild shot. It had hit the fucking bull's-eye.

“I have nine years, six months, and four days, Major, sir,” the captain said. “And I don't know about it.”

“Tell him,” MacMillan said, grateful that he would now hear the rest of the story himself.

“When this captain lost his nerve, and not only wouldn't go up the hill, but told the Mouse he couldn't go either, the Mouse blew him away with a Thompson,” the warrant officer said. “Just like that.” He made the stuttering sound of a Thompson.

“No shit?” the captain said.

“No shit,” the warrant officer said. “Don't fuck around with him, he's meaner than shit.”

Unknowingly, Captain Sanford T. Felter had jut been raised 95 Brownie points in the opinion of Major Mac MacMillan.

(Five)

It took just over three hours to erect the antennae required. Felter stayed on the site until the network was in, and then saw to it that the enlisted men were fed and given places to sleep. Then he went to the club and asked if he could have an egg sandwich or something. When he'd eaten that, and drunk a Coke, he said that he was going to turn in, that it had been a long day, and would someone please show him where to go.

MacMillan summoned the waitress who had served them before, with whom Felter had spoken in Korean. He signaled for her to go with Felter.

Felter followed the girl to the thatch-roofed house. She showed him where the latrine was and the heated shower. He thanked her and went to the latrine, and then took a shower. Then he sat down at the folding wooden desk and took out his pen to write Sharon a letter.

There was movement behind him. For some reason, he was startled. He pushed himself sideward off the chair, rolled on the floor, and when he came up, he had his Colt .45 automatic, cocked, in his hand.

It was the Korean girl. She was no longer wearing the army fatigues. She was dressed in a flimsy nylon robe, so short that he could see her nylon panties and the tuft of black hair beneath.

He had frightened her; she yelped, almost screamed.

“You frightened me,” he said, laying the pistol on the desk. “I'm sorry.”

“I'm sorry,” the Korean girl said. “I did not mean to displease you.”

“You didn't displease me,” he said. “Is there something I can do for you?”

“You don't like me?”

“Oh,” Felter said, finally understanding. “I have a wife.”

“Here?”

“No, in America.”

“But here you need a woman.”

“I don't need a woman,” he said.

“You want, maybe, a boy?” she asked. “I go ask…” She had switched to English.

“You can speak Korean with me,” Felter said.

“If you don't want me, the major will send me away,” the girl said.

“Well, you go tell Major MacMillan that I said I want you to take care of me,” Felter said. “You tell him I said that.”

“You are a great gentleman,” she said. “I will take very good care of you.” She made a deep curtsy, and then backed out of the room.

Felter sat back down at the table, and began to write.

(One)
Ch' orwon, North Korea
23 August 1951

Major General John J. Harrier, Chief of Staff, IX Corps, pulled the sheet of paper from his sergeant major's typewriter, gave what he had written a quick glance, took a pen from a pocket sewn to the sleeve of his stiffly starched fatigue jacket, and wrote, “I Love You, Johnny,” on the bottom of the page. He put an envelope into the typewriter and addressed it to his wife, then folded the letter in thirds and put it in the envelope. He tossed the letter in the
MAIL
drawer, the upper of four stacked open boxes on the sergeant major's desk, and stood up.

He picked up a can of Schlitz beer, drained it, and then put the empty can in the sergeant major's wastebasket. He looked at his watch. It was nearly eleven. He had hoped that the beer would make him sleepy. It had not.

Maybe, he told himself, if he took a little walk it might help him sleep. The corps commander and the chief of staff took turns making middle-of-the-night visits to the IX Corps Operations Room. Tonight was Harrier's turn to sleep through. It made no sense to be off-duty, so to speak, and wake up two or three times in the middle of the night.

General Harrier picked up his soft leather pistol belt and Colt .32 ACP automatic pistol and strapped it around his middle. He went into the outer office. The duty officer stood up.

“Sit,” General Harrier said. “I'm going to take a little walk before turning in. I should be in my quarters by midnight.”

“Yes, sir,” the duty officer said. “Good night, General.”

General Harrier walked down the hill from the White House on the path that led past Colonel's Row. Colonel's Row was actually two rows of one-man tents, twenty in all, in which the fourteen full colonels of Headquarters IX Corps and the six aides-de-camp for the Corps' three general officers were housed, the latter for the convenience of the generals, not as a special privilege for the aides-de-camp.

As General Harrier walked past Colonel's Row, he was surprised to hear the staccato sound of a typewriter. He located the tent from which the sound came from faint cracks of light around the door of one of them; the others were dark, their occupants either on duty or off in one of the messes. It was coming from the tent of his junior aide, Major Craig W. Lowell.

So far as aides-de-camp went, Major Lowell was a mixed blessing. Harrier had suspected that would be the case from the moment he had first laid eyes on him. First of all, he had not reported for duty immediately, as Colonel Paul Jiggs had implied he would. It had been six days after the session in the corps commander's office, between Jiggs (a fine officer, in Harrier's opinion) and Minor (a fine paper-pusher; necessary, of course, but not really what General Harrier thought of as a fellow soldier), over Minor's purely chickenshit intention to assign Lowell to civil affairs.

“I expected you some days ago, Major,” Harrier had said to Lowell when he finally showed up.

“Sir, it took me some time to brief my replacement.”

The implication was that training an S-3 of a tank battalion on the line was more important than being a dog robber. That was true, but most officers would have rushed to duty with a general.

Lowell, moreover, had arrived somewhat out of uniform. Because of the heat around tanks, made nearly unbearable in the heat of the Korean summer, Jiggs's battalion (it was more like a combat command) had special, unofficial permission to wear their fatigue jackets outside of the trousers and to roll up the sleeves. Not only had Lowell reported for duty so dressed (unofficial protocol in the army would have seen him showing up in the uniform prescribed for his new organization), but wearing, instead of either a web pistol belt and a .45 or an issue shoulder holster (prescribed only for tank crews, but worn by most tank officers), a German Luger in a nonissue shoulder holster. On the holster was a shiny brass medallion reading
GOTT MIT UNS
.

Before he had suggested that Lowell take the rest of the day off to get himself settled and into uniform, Harrier had given him Speech Three, in which he traced the role of aides-decamp in the military from the days when they were general officer's messengers on horseback to the present, when the assignment of aides to general officers had a dual purpose: to relieve the general officers of bothersome details, and to give the aides an intimate glimpse of the duties and responsibilities of general officers.

The next day, Lowell, in proper uniform, had served briefly as Harrier's senior aide. That same day, Lieutenant Colonel Edmund Peebles had arrived from duties as executive officer of the 35th Infantry Regiment to become General Harrier's senior aide-de-camp. As General Harrier in his bones knew there would be, there was an instant personality clash between the two men.

Colonel Peebles was infantry, West Point, and thirty-eight years old. He had not been given command of an infantry battalion, and he suspected, correctly, that service as a regimental exec was not going to be worth as many Brownie points at promotion time as command of a battalion would have been. His performance as senior aide to General Harrier was about his last chance to make bird colonel. Peebles knew he was never going to command a regiment, but he was perfectly willing to settle for a silver eagle as a staff officer.

He knew the way to convince the general of his talents in a staff position was to function in a staff position, and the obvious way to do that was to make sure the junior aide was fully occupied with household chores, so that he wouldn't have the chance to function as a staff officer.

Unfortunately, but unavoidably, Major Lowell looked at Lieutenant Colonel Edmund Peebles, his immediate superior, through the eyes of a commander and saw in him the same things Peebles's other commanders had seen, the things that had kept him from command. Peebles was a good officer, providing someone told him what to do. He was incapable of making important decisions quickly, and often not at all.

Moreover, Lowell was generously endowed with self-confidence. He was, after all, a twenty-four-year-old major. He saw his role as aide-de-camp to General Harrier as Part Two of the functions of an aide: to see how upper echelon command worked, as training for the day when he would wear stars. Arranging the general's itinerary or composing rosters of people who would be invited to dinner in the IX Corps general officer's mess or seeing that the general's jeep was polished were not what he was there to do. Whenever Peebles assigned him such duties, Lowell delegated them to lieutenants and sergeants.

Major Craig W. Lowell was, in his own mind, a commander en route from a junior command (and Task Force Lowell, which had earned him the nation's second highest award for gallantry, the Distinguished Service Cross, was by any standard a more important command than an infantry battalion) to a larger one. Lowell had quickly seen that Colonel Peebles was en route from one desk to another.

Paul Jiggs had accepted General Harrier's vague invitation to “come to dinner” by showing up the day after the session in the corps commander's office and had used the opportunity to tell Harrier what a splendid young officer he was getting for his aide: that rare combination of logistician and combat commander. Jiggs was not given to undeserved praise, and there had been other evidence of Lowell's popularity as a commander. There had been a steady stream of officers and noncoms who, having completed their tours, had scrounged a jeep and driven to IX Corps to say so long to Lowell, their former commander, before going home.

They had come singly and in twos and threes as they'd gotten their orders, and it had been impossible not to hear their often drunken and sometimes quite emotional reminiscences.

“I'll never forget the day this chickenshit baby face took over the company. Goddamn, did he shake us up!”

“So, finally, after running all up and down the goddamned peninsula for nine days, we finally make it to Osan, and we're almost there, and some dumb fucking infantryman can't tell the difference between an M46 and a T34, and lets fly with a bazooka at us. Well, shit, one of the tanks blows him away, and we finally make the link-up. So there's this full bull infantry colonel, and
he's
pissed, believe it not, because this dumb fucker of his has taken a shot at us and gotten himself blown away, and he jumps on the Duke's ass, and he says, ‘Major, if you had been where you were supposed to be, this wouldn't have happened.' So the Duke looks him right in the eye, and says, ‘Colonel, what would you have us do, go back?'”

“So we're making the bug-out from the Yalu, and we just barely get our ass off the beach at Hamhung, and there we are on this goddamned troop ship, assault ship, whatever the fuck they called it. It was Christmas Eve, and for the first time in a month, six weeks, we're warm and we get a bath and something besides fucking 10-in-1 rations, and the Duke comes down in the hold with a couple of the officers carrying a couple of cases of 90 mm HEAT, and this Swabbie officer flips his lid, and says, ‘The Major should know that he can't bring live ammo into a personnel compartment.' The Duke tells him not to worry, it ain't ammo, it's booze. Goddamn, that made him even madder. I don't know how the Duke handled it, but the 73rd Heavy Tank had a drink on Christmas Eve, the night we come off the beach with all our equipment and our wounded and even our KIAs, and fuck the navy and its regulations.”

Harrier especially remembered the warrant officer, a great big bull of a man. Lowell had told him later he'd been his S-3 sergeant, and he'd gotten him the warrant. Mean-looking son of bitch, looked like he could chew spikes and spit out tacks. He stood there with the tears running down his cheeks as he said good-bye, and finally ended up hugging Lowell. For a moment, it had looked to General Harrier like he was going to kiss Lowell.

General Harrier suspected that Lt. Colonel Peebles was one of those officers who based their philosophy of command on the belief that all an officer can expect from his subordinates is obedience and that most good commanders are hated and feared by their troops (a commonly held belief, inspired by George Patton, and one with which Harrier disagreed). Harrier was also aware that Peebles deeply resented Lowell's troops, especially the officers, taking the trouble to come by and say “so long.”

It had been necessary to get Major Lowell out from under Colonel Peebles before there could be trouble. Harrier had arranged for Lowell to work with the Secretary of the General Staff and for his sergeant major to handle the dog-robbing tasks for him. Lowell was shortly to go home, anyway, and Harrier decided he was entitled to go home without having an official run-in with Peebles.

Idly curious to see what Lowell was up to, pushing a typewriter at midnight in his tent, General Harrier turned off the pebble path, walked to Lowell's tent, and pushed open the door.

Wearing nothing but his drawers, Lowell was sitting before a typewriter, his fingers flying over the keys, and for a moment General Harrier thought he was writing a letter. Then he realized that was wrong. Lowell was retyping something. There were sheets of carbon in the typewriter, and all sorts of official-looking documents strewn on the folding table and on Lowell's cot, which he had dragged beside the typewriter.

General Harrier watched him for a moment, and then he said, softly: “We have typists, you know, to do that sort of thing.”

Lowell instantly stood up.

“Sorry, sir, I didn't know it was you. I thought it was Colonel Peebles.”

“What the hell are you doing, anyway?” Harrier asked, and walked to look at what was in the typewriter.

“This is the staff study for the organic air section, sir,” Lowell said.

“I'm touched at your dedication,” the general said, dryly.

“You said as soon as possible, sir,” Lowell said.

“What I meant to suggest was that you apply the whip to the typing pool,” the general said, “not do it yourself.”

“Well, sir,” Lowell said, “the truth of the matter is, I've made several changes in your study. While the typists are typing yours, I'm typing mine. It was my intention to present both of them to the general for his consideration, sir.”

“You have
improved
what I gave you, Lowell?” the general asked. “Is that what I hear you suggesting?”

“There were several areas I thought perhaps the general had overlooked,” Lowell said.

“Why don't you tell me about them now?” the general said, dryly sarcastic. “You might save yourself a lot of typing.”

The air section had simply evolved. According to the tables of organization and equipment, aircraft—either airplanes or helicopters—were provided only to tactical organizations. L-5s and L-19s were assigned to the Corps for messenger service as aerial jeeps; to the Corps of Engineers for aerial survey; and to the Medical Corps for use as ambulances.

As far back as World War II, it had been obvious to some officers that there were other uses for light aircraft. Patton had ferried an entire infantry battalion across the Rhine River, one man at a time, in the back seat of two-man L-5s taken from tactical units and pooled for that specific purpose.

Once the Korean War had started, the need for more and more aircraft within the army had become immediately evident. The commander of the X Corps at Inchon, General Ned Almond, had had to borrow a helicopter from the Marines to make his way around Korea.