The Colonels, page 13
part #4 of Brotherhood of War Series
“I didn’t know that,” Lowell said.
“Neither do they.”
“I see.”
“Is there anything in addition to the men, and their equipment, that you think you need?”
Lowell was ready for the question. “There is one officer I would like to have transferred to work with me, Colonel.”
“Who?
“Captain Parker.”
“Out of the question.”
“May I ask why, sir?”
“For one thing, he knows nothing whatever about this project,” Roberts said. “And for another, I dislike cronyism.”
“Captain Parker, in addition to being one of my best friends, is a highly skilled, highly intelligent officer who is at the moment being underutilized.”
“He’s an instructor pilot,” Roberts said. “You don’t think that’s important?”
In fact, Major Craig W. Lowell did not. He had a number of heretical ideas, but perhaps the most heretical—in the sense that it was the one most likely to see him burned at the stake—was his feeling about flying generally, and army aviators in particular.
So far as Lowell was concerned, flying was too romanticized. From the beginning of flight there’d been too much glamor about the guys that roamed the skies. You could see it in the early movies like Dawn Patrol, where handsome young men flew off to their deaths with silk scarfs flapping in the slipstream and smiles on their faces. The words of the Army Air Corps song in War II was another instance of the myth, “We live in fame or go down in flame.”
Lowell was qualified as both a fixed and rotary-wing aviator. He had flown multiengine planes, seaplanes, and planes with skis, and had a Special Instrument Certificate. That experience had taught him that flying was a skill that could be acquired by anyone with average intelligence and reasonable depth perception and coordination.
As far as he was concerned, there was no justification whatever for the rule that pilots had to be either commissioned or warrant officers. The Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force and even the U.S. Marine Corps had done very well with enlisted pilots. The army entrusted a multimillion dollar tank with a crew of four to a sergeant, while it insisted that a $75,000 two-seater observation plane required the ministrations of an officer and a gentleman.
Certainly, instructor pilots were important. Stripped of the heroic bullshit, they were probably nearly as important as a second lieutenant at Fort Benning teaching a sergeant how to take a squad of eight men and blow up a squad of the enemy in a pillbox. There was no question in Lowell’s mind that it was infinitely more difficult to teach someone of limited intelligence and education how to lead men into a situation where they are liable to lose their lives than it was to teach someone of above-average intelligence when to lower the flaps and chop the throttle on an approach.
But he could not say this to Colonel William Roberts, who had been an army aviator since the very first Piper Cubs had been leased to the army.
“I think, sir,” Lowell said, “that because of his experience commanding tanks in combat, Captain Parker would be of more value to the army in developing an aerial antitank weapon than he is sitting in the right seat of an H-13 teaching some kid how to fly.”
Even that had been too much. Roberts’s face had turned white, his lips had thinned, and for a moment Lowell had been sure Roberts was about to lose his temper. But he kept control of himself.
“You can’t have him,” Roberts said, finally, flatly, icily. “Unless, of course, you go over my head. Is that your intention?”
“You will permit me, Colonel, to respectfully take offense?” Lowell replied angrily. “You have no reason to believe that I would go over your head.”
“I’m pleased to hear that, Major,” Roberts said. “Have you anything else?”
“You recruited Parker when you recruited me,” Lowell said. “What have you got against him? Or, for that matter, me?”
“I have nothing against either of you,” Roberts had said. “But there is no place in the army for cronyism.”
That had happened only three days before. Tonight Roberts was apparently still nursing the rage he had worked himself into when he had had time to consider that he had been assigned an officer he really hadn’t wanted, and whom he would not be able to control completely.
Roberts did not ask him to sit down, so Lowell returned to his table. He found himself sitting beside Jane Cassidy.
“I hope,” Tom Cassidy said, “that this isn’t a breach of military manners, but I’ve been wondering about that medal.” He pointed to the medal suspended from the purple ribbon. “Is it all right to ask what it is?”
“It’s beautiful!” Jane Cassidy said. He could feel her breath on him; she smelled like spearmint. “I’m glad he asked, faux pas or not.”
“It’s Greek,” Lowell said, smiling, pleased that he had not responded as he normally did, by saying that it was “second prize in the All-Army bowling contest” or some other wise-ass remark.
“Oh? And what do they call it?” Tom Cassidy asked.
“The Big Round Medal,” he said, smiling, unable to stop himself, then he forced a laugh. “It’s the Order of St. George and St. Andrew,” he explained.
“Is that gold?” Tom Cassidy asked.
“I believe it is,” Lowell said. He took the ribbon from around his neck and handed it to Jane Cassidy. Their fingers touched. There was absolutely no reason that he should be excited by the innocent touch, he told himself, but he was.
You have just jumped on the soda wagon, Romeo.
He was saved from further discussion of the medal when lines of white-jacketed GIs, moonlighting as waiters, began to serve dinner. Dinner (roast beef, baked potatoes, French green beans, a salad, and a dessert) was included in the price of the party ticket. When Lowell saw it, his mind groaned at the thought of the perfectly pink standing ribs, the smoked turkey, and the salmon flown in from Scotland that Hester, the bone-thin black woman who was his cook in the house in Georgetown, would have put on his table in Washington an hour or so ago at the party at which he, the cohost, would be missing.
The party had been Constance’s idea. Constance was his next-door neighbor in Georgetown, the thirty-two-year-old wife of a sixty-eight-year-old United States senator. Rather than do something common, such as going to Burning Tree, or the Club on F Street, where they would have to mingle with the riffraff, Constance had decided that, provided Craig was willing, there was enough room to have a “nice” party for the nicer people in both of their town houses. All they would have to do would be hire someone to build a stairway over the brick wall that divided their adjoining gardens.
If Craig would provide the food, she would provide the booze, which would cause the guests to move toward her town house in the shank of the evening. With the bar in her house, his house would be empty.
“With a little bit of luck,” Constance had said, “I can have you tucked in bed by the time they’re finished singing ‘Auld Lang Syne.’”
One of the last things he had seen before he had been sent in disgrace to Rucker was the bill for the temporary stairway. It had cost him $2,970.60.
Constance, he thought, admiringly, was a survivor. When news of their affair had reached the Chief of Staff, she had accepted it philosophically.
“We were getting a bit obvious, I suppose,” she said. “Does this mean I can’t go ahead with the party?”
At this moment, he thought, Constance was already looking at the younger males at the party, picking out the one she would entice into bed. His bed. Constance had planned the evening carefully. The only thing that was going to be changed was the stud.
For reasons he couldn’t imagine, he rarely had complaints about food he got from an army mess, even if it had been prepared by an unshaven sergeant on a gasoline-fueled field range. But he almost always found food from officers’ open messes to be nearly inedible. He did so again. The only thing he could eat was the baked potato.
After dinner, he was expected to dance with the wives of the officers and civilians at his table. There were six of them, and only one said, “Perhaps later.” He danced with Jane Cassidy last, and it wasn’t until they were on the dance floor that he realized she had been drinking. She was tight. Tiddly. Proper, but tiddly.
He was uncomfortable dancing with her. There was no place for his hand but on her bare back, and her back was warm and soft. And then he got an erection. He wasn’t sure she knew, since they were dancing with inches separating them—but it enraged and shamed him.
And then, when they were walking up the stairs back to the table, she turned to him and said: “I understand that’s an involuntary reaction. But wipe that guilty scowl off your face or my husband will be suspicious.”
He did not sit down again. He asked to be excused. He had people to see, he said.
(Two)
Lowell went down the stairs to the main dining room to look for Phil and Antoinette Parker. A seating map had been posted on the wall, showing the location of various units within the club. After he’d looked at it, he headed for the cafeteria. Tonight, the cafeteria was “Drawing Room C” and had been set aside for the officers of the hospital and their ladies.
He looked in vain for the Parkers for several minutes until he realized the Parkers would be with the school. Tonight, Toni would be the wife of Captain Phil Parker, rather than Dr. Parker, U.S. Army contract surgeon.
It took him another couple of minutes in the main ballroom to spot them. He made his way along the edge of the dance floor, and then bent over Toni and whispered in her ear: “Doctor, I have this little pimple sort of thing on the tip of my…”
“God!” she said, looking up at him, laughing. Then she got up and he led her to the dance floor.
While they were dancing, she snorted in his ear.
“Most ladies tell me I’m a very good dancer,” he said.
“I just realized why people are looking at us.”
“Oh, I don’t think they are,” he said.
“We are,” she said softly, amused, in her luxurious Bostonian accent, “what they call the cynosure of all eyes. And until just now I thought it was because the dinge lady doctor was dancing with the white guy in the Imperial Hussar’s uniform,” she said.
“Screw ’em,” he said.
“You are spectacular, Craig,” she said. “But that isn’t it.”
“What is it? What is ‘it’?”
“You’re sort of a hero,” she said, and then corrected herself. “Not sort of. A hero, period.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“To the officers Phil works with. Because of what you did at the funeral. You did something they can only dream of. More important, you got away with it.”
“Come on, Toni,” Lowell said, embarrassed.
“When we go back to the table, can I show you off? I know Phil would like it.”
“No, you can’t.”
She chuckled. “I will anyway.”
“You send them to medical school, let them wear shoes, and the first thing you know they’re running your life,” he said.
“Nature abhors a vacuum,” she said.
“Just dance,” he said. “Just dance.”
“I’m more than a little surprised that you actually showed up.”
“Command performance,” he said.
“Phil, too,” she said. “He hates these things.”
“I understand social gatherings of this sort are very important to the ladies, and the military axiom is that a well-laid husband is an efficient officer.”
“Then you and Phil should be generals,” she said.
“Give us time,” he said.
“You really believe it, don’t you?” Toni said, suddenly serious, and a little sad. “The both of you. That you’ll be generals.”
“I believe there’s a chance,” he said.
“And that’s so important to you?”
“Yeah. I guess it is,” he said. “I didn’t realize how much the army meant to me until I was about to be thrown out.”
“I don’t understand that,” she said. “For some of these people, sure. It’s social security, and you get to wear a pretty uniform that tells the world how important you are. Do what you’re told and the system takes care of you. That’s very important to a lot of people. But it shouldn’t be to people like you and Phil.”
“How about people like Phil and me and Jiggs?”
“Jiggs too. I don’t understand any of you bright ones. Does that make me a disloyal wife, do you think, Craig?”
“It makes you a smart wife, and there aren’t a hell of a lot of them around.”
The music stopped. Toni put her arm in his, and led him back to the table.
(Three)
Major Craig Lowell was uncomfortable at the Parker table. Toni had been right. He was sort of a hero to Phil’s fellow officers. He was the guy who had the balls to tell the system to go fuck itself and had, as a result, saved the armed helicopter from being squashed by the goddamned air force. So there was a steady stream of drinks, more than he wanted. When it became apparent to him that the liquor was getting to him, he excused himself by saying that he had to get back to the Board’s tables.
On the way to the stairway to the second floor, he changed his mind. He was not anxious to return to sit beside Jane Cassidy, especially now that he had had more to drink. She was really getting to him, actually making his heart beat faster, and under those circumstances being half in the bag was very dangerous indeed.
What he needed, he decided, was something to counter the effects of the liquor. He went to the bar, a long, curving affair with windows behind it that looked out on the officers’ swimming pool, and beyond that, to the scraped-away land where the contractors were about to build more dependent housing.
At the crowded bar there was one empty stool between two groups of drinkers, but there wasn’t enough room to climb onto it without pushing his way in.
A red-jacketed bartender, a black man in his thirties, one of the regular bartenders, came down the bar.
“If you gentlemen would be good enough to move down just a foot or so,” he said to one of the groups of drinkers, “the major could sit down.”
They moved, but not without giving both the bartender and Lowell dirty looks.
“What can I get you, Major Lowell?” the bartender asked with a smile. Lowell was surprised that the bartender knew his name.
“A large glass of straight soda water with a couple of large squirts of bitters in it, please,” Lowell said. “Evil companions have been plying me with spirits.”
The bartender chuckled and filled the order.
Without knowing it, Lowell enjoyed a very good reputation among the black troops on the post. He had come to their attention the first time he had flown to Rucker to see Phil and had immediately become “the white dude with his own personal Aero Commander.” He had brought further attention to himself when they learned that he visited the post for the sole reason of visiting Captain Philip S. Parker IV and his wife, the lady doctor.
There was, especially among the senior black noncoms, a good deal of resentment toward do-gooders—a do-gooder being defined as someone who publicly professed admiration for his black brothers-in-arms and devotion to their welfare. The blacks knew that stuff was patronizing and humiliating.
But the white dude’s friendship with the Parkers, they had come to understand, was not that sort of thing. Captain Philip Sheridan Parker IV and his wife were held in high esteem by the black military community. The old-timers knew that Captain Philip Sheridan Parker was the fifth generation of soldiers holding that name. His great-great-grandfather, after he’d ridden with General Philip Tecumseh Sheridan, had named his firstborn after the great cavalry officer. First Sergeant Philip Sheridan Parker had gone up Kettle and San Juan hills with the regular 10th U.S. Cavalry (Colored) and Teddy Roosevelt. First Sergeant Parker was buried in the cemetery at Fort Riley, Kansas, between his father, Sergeant Moses Parker, and his son, Colonel Philip S. Parker, Jr., who had commanded the 179th Infantry in France in World War I.
Colonel Philip Sheridan Parker III had commanded the 393rd Tank Destroyer Regiment in General Porky Waterford’s famed “Hell’s Circus” 40th Armored Division in World War II. Captain Philip Sheridan Parker IV had earned his promotion to captain at twenty-four in command of a tank company on the battlefield in Korea. In other words, he did not need the benevolent interest of a white major.
The feeling among the black troops and officers was that “if Phil Parker calls the guy a friend, he’s got to be all right.”
Lowell extended a bill to the bartender.
“Soda water’s free,” the bartender said, waving the money away.
“In that case, Sergeant,” Lowell said, “I’ll give you all my business.”
Lowell sipped at his bitter soda and stared out the windows behind the bar—fascinated by the flickering lights—until he sensed that someone was standing behind him. He glanced over his shoulder, and then got off his stool.
“Major Lowell, I believe,” the young woman said. She was, Lowell thought, a younger version of Jane Cassidy. Long-legged, lithe, blond, and exquisitely feminine. A genuine Alabama magnolia blossom, he thought. She was wearing a simple white evening dress with a string of pearls plunging into the valley of her breasts. The pearls were real, he saw, and so was the diamond on their clasp.
“May I be of some service?” Lowell said, his voice at once formal and gentle.
“Do you know who I am?” she asked.
“Yes,” Lowell said, “I do.”
“You could offer me a drink,” Melody Dutton Greer said. “I don’t belong here anymore.”
Without taking his eyes from her, Lowell raised his hand over his head and loudly snapped his fingers. The bartender who had served him the soda looked down the bar in annoyance, even anger, and then when he saw who it was, hurried down the bar.
“The lady would like a drink,” Lowell said.
“What can I get you, Mrs. Greer?” the sergeant asked.
“What is Major Lowell drinking?” she asked.
“Soda water and bitters,” Lowell replied.
