The Captains (7 page)

“Has the platoon sergeant the platoon commander's permission to speak informally, sir?” Sergeant Woodrow asked.

“Yes,” Lieutenant Parker said.

“I'll have that nigger motherfucker on the boat if I have to break both his legs,” Sergeant Woodrow said.

“Carry on, Sergeant,” Parker said.

(One)
New York City, New York
10 July 1950

Craig W. Lowell was not surprised to find Andre Pretier's chauffeur waiting for him beyond the glass wall of customs at LaGuardia, but he was surprised when the chauffeur told him that Pretier was in the car.

Andre Pretier was Lowell's mother's husband. Not his step-father. They had been married after Craig had been drafted into the army in early 1946, following his expulsion for academic unsuitability from Harvard. While the chauffeur collected his luggage, Lowell looked for and found the car.

It was a Chrysler Imperial, with a limousine body by LeBaron, a long, glossy vehicle parked in a
TOW AWAY
zone. There was an official-looking placard resting against the windshield, bearing the seal of the State of New York and the words
OFFICIAL
. Craig had often wondered if Pretier had been provided with some sort of honorary official position by some obliging politician, or whether he or his chauffeur (who had been with him for twenty-five years) had just picked it up somewhere and used it without any authority, secure in the knowledge that airport and other police asked fewer questions of people in custom-bodied limousines than they did of other people.

The first Pretier in America had come as a member of the staff of the Marquis de Lafayette during the American Revolution. He had stayed after the war and founded the shipping (and later import-export) company which was the foundation of the Pretier fortune. He had been at Harvard with Lowell's father, and there, incredibly, become enamored of the woman who was to become Craig Lowell's mother, an infatuation that was to last his lifetime. He had proposed marriage precisely one year and one day after Lowell's father had been buried.

Andre Pretier leaned across the velour seat of the Chrysler and offered his hand to Lowell as he bent to enter the car.

“I didn't expect this,” Lowell said. “Thank you, Andre.”

“We had to take your mother to Hartford,” Pretier said.

Oh, shit, that's all I need, Lowell thought.

Hartford was the euphemism for the Institute of Living, a private psychiatric hospital in Hartford, Connecticut.

Pretier handed Lowell a small crystal bowl, a brandy snifter without a stem.

“Bad?” Lowell asked.

Pretier threw up his hands in resignation.

“She simply can't take strain, or excitement,” Pretier said.

“What was I supposed to do, Andre?” Lowell asked, sharply. “Tell my father-in-law to stay in Siberia?”

“I don't think that had anything to do with it,” Pretier replied, not taking offense at Lowell's outburst. Lowell had often thought that the real reason he disliked his mother's husband was that Andre Pretier rarely, almost never, took offense at anything, no matter what the provocation.

“What set her off, then?”

Pretier threw his hands up in frustration again.

“I don't really know. She…uh…had a relapse in the city.”

“A spectacular relapse?”

“I'm afraid so,” Pretier said. “They had her at Bellevue.”

“She's all right, now?” Lowell asked.

Pretier nodded. “I thought you had enough on your hands,” he said. “Otherwise I would have called.”

“She didn't start asking for me?” Lowell asked.

“She was sedated rather heavily until today,” Pretier said.

“Medically, or because I was due in?”

“Both.”

“And you think I should go to Hartford?”

“I would be very grateful if you would,” Pretier said. “The doctors think it would be beneficial, if you could find the time.”

How the fuck can I refuse, when you put it that way? Lowell thought. What decent, true-blue American boy could refuse to go see his loony mother in the funny farm when that would both be beneficial, according to the doctors, and make her long-suffering husband very grateful?

“Of course,” Lowell said. “When?”

“I didn't think you would want to take the train,” Pretier said. “I've arranged for a plane.”

“That's very kind of you, Andre,” Lowell said. He reached up and helped himself to more cognac.

 

His mother, a tall, rather thin, silver-haired woman, didn't seem especially pleased that he had flown to Hartford to visit her, and she didn't ask more than perfunctory questions about what had taken place in Germany and France.

“You said he was a count, didn't you?” she asked. “Didn't I hear that someplace?”

“Yes, he is.”

“And lost everything in the war, doubtless, so that we'll have to support him?”

“Actually no, Mother,” he said. “The von Greiffenbergs are from Hesse, which is in the American Zone. He didn't have his property confiscated.”

“We'll see,” she said, closing the subject. She didn't like being told that the father of the foreign doxy her son had dragged home from Europe wasn't after her money as well as his.

A little ashamed of himself (she was, after all, a sick woman in a hospital), he refused to drop the subject.

“Actually, Mother, the reason I'm here is that he gave me a power of attorney to claim his property here.”

“What property here?”

“The government has it, under the Enemy Alien Property Act. Some money, some securities, even some art.”

“And you really think the government will give it up?”

“So the lawyers tell me.”

“We'll see,” she said.

 

It was after ten when he finally got to his house on Washington Mews, a private alley near Washington Square in Greenwich Village. Andre had suggested that he spend the night at Broadlawns on Long Island, the rambling estate that Craig had inherited from his father, and that he now rented to the Pretiers, because Andre refused to live there without paying. But Lowell wanted to go home to the town house that Ilse had decorated, to sleep in their bed, to be at least that close to her.

There was no one home at 11 Washington Mews. Their servants had been given the time off while he and P.P. and Ilse were in Europe, and he had to go through the complex procedure of first unlocking the door and then racing up the stairs and down the corridor to his bedroom to put another key into the burglar alarm, to deactivate it before it rang both Pinkerton's and the police precinct. Otherwise a platoon of police cars with howling sirens would descend on Washington Mews.

He turned off the burglar alarm and then went back downstairs to get the one suitcase he had with him and which he had dropped at the door. He remembered seeing some mail on the floor, too.

There were five or six letters, which he tossed unread onto the hall table, and the yellow envelope of a telegram. He almost tossed that with the unopened letters, but then decided it might be a cablegram, rather than a telegram, some just remembered bit of information his father-in-law thought he should have in order to better handle his affairs in New York.

He opened it. It wasn't a cablegram. It was a telegram.

 

WASH DC (GOVT RATE) JUL 7 1950

CAPTAIN CRAIG W. LOWELL 0-495302

11 WASHINGTON MEWS

NEW YORK CITY

FONE & DELIVER

 

BY DIRECTION OF THE PRESIDENT, YOU ARE ORDERED TO REPORT TO FORT GEORGE G. MEADE, MARYLAND, NOT LATER THAN 2400 HOURS 12 JULY 1950 TO ENTER UPON AN INDEFINITE PERIOD OF ACTIVE DUTY IN CONNECTION WITH THE KOREAN PEACE ACTION
.

EDWARD F. WITSELL
MAJOR GENERAL, US ARMY
THE ADJUTANT GENERAL

(Two)
Pusan, Korea
12 July 1950

The third platoon of Tank Company, 24th Infantry Regiment, debarked from the USNS
Private Albert Ford
at Pusan four days after the rest of the company had arrived.

Lieutenant Parker had a premonition that he was going to be very much alone in this police action, this show of force, or whatever it was. He was worried, even frightened by the prospect. He had never heard a shot fired in anger, had never issued an order involving life and death. Parker was quite as innocent—as virginal—at war as most of the troops in his platoon.

On the other hand, he had heard a good deal about war, about the unpredictability of human reaction to it. He had often heard that sometimes it was the apparently strong who turned out to be unable to handle their fear; who, if they didn't actually collapse under fire, were unable to think clearly, who couldn't make rational decisions. He wondered if that would happen to him.

There was no question in his mind that so far as junior armor officers were concerned, he was as well trained as any. He was, like his father before him, a graduate of Norwich University, a small institution little known outside Vermont and the army. Norwich had been providing the army with regular cavalry officers for more than a century. Norwich second lieutenants “coincidentally” were given regular army commissions on the same day West Point graduates got theirs; “coincidentally” it had as its president a retired West Pointer general officer of cavalry; and “coincidentally” it had a faculty for the military arts and sciences provided by the army to the same criteria as the faculty to West Point.

There was a gentleman's agreement going back to the time that Sylvanus Thayer had become Commandant of West Point. The cavalry establishment, in and out of uniform (and in and out of uniform, cavalry has been, since the first warrior mounted a horse, the service of the wealthy and powerful), would not fight the Corps of Engineers and the infantry and Sylvanus Thayer and West Point; and the West Point establishment, in and out of uniform, would not only see that Norwich graduates were given regular cavalry commissions but would regard them as professional and social peers.

Similar gentleman's agreements existed between the West Point establishment and the Citadel (assuring that the regular officer's corps of all the arms and services had a fair leavening of well-bred Southerners) and the Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College (assuring that both the regular artillery and the reserve officer's corps were liberally laced with Aggies). The relationship between the West Point establishment and the Citadel and Texas A&M was much better known, because the relationship between Norwich and the West Point establishment was seldom discussed.

After graduating from Norwich and entering upon active duty, Lieutenant Parker had attended the Basic Armor Officer's Course at Fort Knox, Kentucky. He had graduated “with Great Distinction”—that is to say, as the honor graduate of his class—but Fort Knox had not been entirely the beginning he had hoped to make on his career. Socially, it had been a disaster.

He had shared a BOQ suite (two two-room “apartments” sharing a shower and toilet) with a second lieutenant who had attracted the wrath of the military social establishment like a magnet draws iron filings. He was not a West Pointer, nor even someone commissioned from the Reserve Officer's Training Corps or Officer Candidate School. The man was Second Lieutenant Craig W. Lowell.

Parker had thought of Lowell a good deal since this Korean business had started. Lowell was in New York, a civilian, and working in the family business, which was modestly described as an investment banking firm. Parker had wondered if Lowell would be recalled and decided that he probably wouldn't be. And he'd really wondered, now that he was actually going to war, if he would be able to function as well as Lowell had functioned in Greece.

No one would have thought that Lowell would be a good soldier, a good officer, but he had wound up with the second highest decoration for valor the Greek government gave. On the other hand, everyone would expect a Norwich graduate to at least “do his duty,” and possibly serve with distinction—especially the son of a Norwich graduate who had commanded a tank destroyer battalion across North Africa and Europe, the grandson of a colonel who as a captain had commanded a company of the 369th Infantry in War I, and the great-grandson of a master sergeant who had fought Indians with the 9th Cavalry and gone up Kettle Hill in Cuba with Teddy Roosevelt. Philip Sheridan Parker IV told himself he would be satisfied if he didn't shit his pants and run when he first round came his way.

(Three)

When the platoon assembled on Pier One in Pusan, Staff Sergeant Sidney was present and accounted for, although complaining of pain from injuries suffered in a fall in the shower. Perhaps because of the “fall in the shower,” he seemed ready to do what was expected of him, and Parker put him to work—still another time—checking the machine guns on the M4A3s and the personal weapons.

It took about two hours to unload the M4A3s from the hold of the
Albert Ford
and another hour to fuel and arm them. Parker found a supply of 76 mm high-velocity rounds in a warehouse directly across from where the
Albert Ford
was tied up; and in the belief that ammunition supply would be a problem (so far as he knew, he had the only medium tanks in Korea), he ordered that as many cases of the ammunition as possible be tied to the outside of the tanks.