by James Philip
To most Americans LeMay was a fire-eating, cigar-smoking, red-necked martinet who was always the first man over the top, laughing in the face of death. He was Old Iron Pants LeMay, the man who had been Bombs Away LeMay, the gung ho commander of one of the first B-24 Groups in England in 1942, the Demon to anybody who got on his wrong side, or simply the Big Cigar to his airmen. But that was not the whole story; and LeMay, like any man was the complex sum of his many parts and hugely varied life experiences.
As a psychiatrist, LeMay professionally fascinated Caroline Konstantis.
Until she actually met him she had tended to accept the conventional wisdom, and to her chagrin taken him for what he had always seemed to be. He was the man who had prognosticated that a nuclear war was in some way ‘winnable’, and that if the worst happened it was his job was to bomb the Russians ‘back to the Stone Age’. He had acted as if he was an all-American ogre and she had fallen for the act.
In the eighteen months she had been his ‘pet shrink’ she had spoken to him – or more correctly, reported to him – about a dozen times. More importantly, true to his word he had taken her calls on each of the four occasions she had urgently needed to talk to him. The Air Force had its own internal medical services, a large posse of psychiatrists like her on tap; but LeMay had realized that was not enough. Seven months ago he had asked her to focus exclusively on the 100th Bomb Group survivors of the Malta ‘disaster’, and the fliers who had been duped into attacking British ships off Cape Finisterre just before the Battle of Washington in December, it was typical LeMay.
‘It’s worse for the Malta survivors,’ Old Iron Pants had observed grimly. ‘It’s bad enough seeing your buddies shot down when you’ve got right on your side. Most of the 100th guys were veterans, men like Nathan Zabriski who flew on the night of the war.’
Nathan was different of course.
His mother – a White House secretary - had assassinated the British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, shot Bobby Kennedy in the leg and had planned to murder the President. Had she not been wrestled to the ground by Walter Brenckmann, the man who was presently the US Ambassador in England, she might even have succeeded.
Therefore, Nathan was not just different, he was special.
So special...
‘Nobody hangs my guys out to dry, Colonel Konstantis,’ LeMay had declared. ‘That’s a promise. But I can’t do anything to help them live with what they’ve gone through. That’s your job.’
My job!
LeMay was happy with her work because none of his boys – the eight 100th Bomb Group survivors, or the eight Navy pilots and navigators on the A-4 Skyhawks which had crippled the British destroyers HMS Talavera and HMS Devonshire, killing and wounding over two hundred men - had completely gone off the rails on her watch. Several of her charges were deeply troubled, unhappy men but alive, and in the main getting on with their fractured day to day existence as best they could. The human mind was a remarkably resilient thing; she had stopped being their guardian ‘shrink’ early on, knowing that what these men really needed was ‘mothering’. Like Nathan they had all been resistant to ‘therapy’, although none as adamant as he and looking back that might have been the root of her personal downfall...
The first time Caroline had met Curtis LeMay the man had dropped the martinet with a heart of gold routine as soon as they were alone. It had been less than a week after the October War.
‘We think we won the war,’ he had said. ‘Maybe we did. It doesn’t matter. My boys need to be ready to do it all over again if the President orders them to do it. I need somebody to give me advice that I can trust about what’s going on inside the heads of my boys. And,” he had added gruffly, “I need to know who needs to be let down gently before it becomes a disciplinary problem. The regulations weren’t designed for the situation we’re in now and I won’t have brave men punished or in any way singled out because they’ve had enough. I need somebody like you operating outside the normal system; somebody acting as a ‘cut out’ with a direct line to me making sure that every one of my boys gets treated like a real hero.’
The case files had begun to pile up on her desk within days and she had been ‘on the road’ practically ever since. Generally speaking, the Air Force had got the message about processing the veterans of the October War with a hitherto unwarranted sensitivity, and on those rare occasions when some idiot tried to pull rank on her she carried a – now much creased and worn – letter bearing LeMay’s signature that instantly resolved any little ‘local difficulties’.
It had become her duty to break the news to a man that his operational flying career, or in extremis, his career in the Air Force was over. Afterwards, she and her team of ‘adjustment and resettlement’ officers would smooth a man’s path into a new role in the service, or back into civilian life. While Curtis LeMay remained in the background this was a thing accomplished without any of the normal military parsimony; although already Congress was sniping at such ‘non military’ largesse to undermine the generals and admirals who had earned its displeasure.
LeMay was a man who upset everybody sooner or later; the more so because it was patently obvious that he did not give a damn.
“What have you got for me, Colonel?” He asked when he and Caroline were alone in what had once been the duty controller’s office at the back of the control tower. Inside the building air conditioning fans whirred and the noise of the ongoing racing outside was muted, distant.
“I’ve come here fresh from a few days personal R and R in the Bay Area, sir,” she reported, trying not to blush.
Rogering and more rogering!
“During that time I took the opportunity to look in on Nathan Zabriski.”
I looked in on him for three days and we very nearly fucked ourselves to death!
Caroline formed her lips into a tight white line for a moment.
“Nathan’s still got a lot of issues. That said, he’s now quite settled in Berkeley. He’s spent the last month renovating the house he plans to live in ahead of starting back at college for the autumn semester. As you know I authorized a bursary via the offices of the Veteran’s Administration to allow Nathan to complete a Geography BA and a teacher training course. He did a lot of track running when he first joined the Air Force and I’ve encouraged him to pick up on that when he starts at Berkeley. We did not discuss his mother’s situation; he has blocked her out. It is probably best that way.”
Curtis LeMay digested this.
“I’m told Phoenix city is rotten with TV and newspaper people?”
“I couldn’t say, sir. I was whacked when I got into town last night. It wouldn’t surprise me...”
Actually, Caroline was astonished that LeMay’s office had confirmed this meeting given the news from Chicago and Milwaukee. Things sounded bad up there and there had been new race riots in Louisville and Birmingham over the weekend.
“I worry about Major Zabriski,” the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee confessed.
Nathan had refused to co-operate with any kind of formalized therapeutic ‘regime’. Like many of the young men Caroline Konstantis watched over he had initially been angrily resistant to any suggestion that he needed help. Nathan and his comrades had been indoctrinated, inculcated with the notion that they were latter day knights in shining armor, the shield of the West; that God was on their side and any suggestion that they should feel guilt, remorse and shame for their part in preserving freedom and American ideals was both traitorous and in some ways...unmanly. But with Nathan there was something deeper, non-negotiable going on. None of her charges had been through anything like the psychological meat grinder that twenty-seven year old former Major Nathan Zabriski had been through in the last twenty months.
Nathan’s aircraft had dropped multi-megaton bombs on Nizhny Novgorod and Dzershinsk on the night of the war, an airborne refueling mishap had left him drenched in avgas most of the way back home, and then last December the 100th Bomb Group had been ordered – nobody
knew by whom – to attack the base of the British Mediterranean Fleet at Malta. His aircraft had been shot down and he had been captured; then when he got home to the US he had discovered that his mother, who had a long history of chronic mental illness, had been brainwashed into attempting to murder the President.
Nathan was a young man who already had hundreds of thousands of deaths on his conscience and was struggling to come to terms with having been duped into murdering hundreds of America’s friends and allies on Malta. The fact that in his brief captivity in Malta he had been befriended by a young Maltese woman had simply brought home the magnitude of his crimes; his mother’s insanity heaped iniquity on his head. He had lost his career, his belief in things in general and by any rights he ought to have been a paranoid wreck. That he was still, beneath the angst which roiled within him like a drowning current in a placid sea, so normal was almost too incredible to be credited.
She had wanted to mother him and ended up being his lover...
“I worry about Nathan too, sir,” Caroline muttered guiltily.
The man nodded, giving not indication that he was aware of the woman’s sudden, albeit fleeting, loss of composure. He was in a rare reflective mood, sucking his teeth and staring over her shoulder, briefly lost in thought.
“Until the war,” he guffawed ruefully, “I was planning to retire,” he hesitated, decided to continue, “I wasn’t slated to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs back then, and going racing seemed like a good idea at the time. Then the Cuban thing blew up and well...”
Caroline Konstantis smiled a forced smile.
“Life is full of surprises, sir,” she agreed.
Chapter 14
Thursday 11th June 1964
State Capitol Building, Madison, Wisconsin
The Wisconsin State Capitol was the tallest building in the city. It sat astride at the south western portion of the Madison Isthmus between Lake Mendota and Lake Monona, west of the Yahara River which cut the isthmus in the north east to link the two lakes.
A great two hundred and eighty-four feet high dome sat atop the fifth state capitol, the third to have stood on the modern site.
The first capitol was a wood-frame house in Belmont lacking any modern amenities in which the state’s founding fathers had congregated, and after forty-two days of deliberation had designated that town as the temporary capital of the then Wisconsin Territory, and Madison as the prospective location of the permanent new capitol. Thereupon, the state’s founders had decamped to Burlington, Iowa – the home of the second ‘Wisconsin’ capitol – until such time as Madison was ready to accommodate a state legislature.
The third capitol was erected on the site of the current building; a small oak and stone frontier building with a price tag of around $60,000. This was superseded by the construction between 1859 and 1869 of a building reminiscent of the US Capitol in Washington, which was further extended by the addition of two wings in 1882 and a cost of over $900,000.
It happened that a large part of this – the fourth - capitol was burned down on the night of 26th February 1904; some five weeks after the wise and sagacious men of the state legislature had voted to save money by the nifty expedient of cancelling the capitol’s fire insurance. Fire fighters had come from as far away as Milwaukee, to no avail because when the flames died down only the north wing of the fourth Wisconsin State Capitol had remained standing.
Notwithstanding that it was no longer a frontier state, Wisconsin had responded to this disaster with true ‘frontier grit’. The present magnificent capitol had defiantly arisen from the ashes of the old building between 1906 and 1917 at a cost of $7,250,000. Constructed from over forty different types of stone quarried in six countries – the outer cladding of the capitol was Bethel white granite from Vermont ensuring that the dome became and remained, the largest granite dome in the World – it was designed to be a statement that the wealth of the state depended upon its trade with the globe and the rest of the US via the Great Lakes. Internally, the capitol’s floors, walls and columns used marble from Tennessee, Missouri, Vermont, Georgia, New York, and Maryland; and granite and limestone from Minnesota and Illinois. Marble had been imported from as far away as France, Italy, Greece, Algeria and Germany. Granted that construction might have been phased over a decade but no cost had been spared in the materials worked into Madison’s greatest monument.
The State Capitol accommodated the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the Office of the Governor and both houses of the Wisconsin Legislature; and since a week ago, the forward Headquarters of the 32nd Infantry Division – only the leading elements of the unit, presently being thrown together outside Minneapolis had reached Madison thus far - under the command of forty-five year old Major General William Bradford Rosson.
Rosson’s predecessor, Brigadier Jacob Sinclair, a competent, fifty-four year-old whom he had briefly served under in Sicily in 1943, had been badly injured when the Jeep he was travelling in had overturned a week ago; and when Rosson had arrived in Madison he had had no idea things were so bad. Not that it had taken him overlong to form a detailed tactical appreciation of situation. The shit had not so much hit the fan in front of Madison as hit it, gone through it and splattered everywhere around the city out to a radius of at least fifty miles either side of it.
Thus, when he rose to his feet as Governor John Whitcombe Reynolds and his senior staffers walked into the cramped situation room he saluted the newcomer with weary gravitas.
“Why has the evacuation been halted?” The Governor of Wisconsin demanded, seething with impotent anger.
Fifty-three year old Reynolds had been his state’s Attorney General before running for governor. Born in Green Bay he had returned home from four years war service to study philosophy and law, later holding a position as a director of the US Office of Price Stabilization, and serving as US Commissioner for the District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. Reynolds was a very well connected Democrat, a senior man whose calls members of the Kennedy Administration invariably took. He and Rosson’s predecessor, Jake Sinclair had worked together tolerably well but unlike his predecessor, Rosson did not have the time or the inclination to waste stroking the Governor’s ego.
Rosson had won a Distinguished Service Medal for velour at Anzio. He was one of those soldiers who just looked soldiery all the time, whether at rest, at play or on the parade ground. His battledress fatigues became him and he exuded a stocky teak hardness.
“Overnight we lost contact with our ‘tripwire’ pickets at Janesville and Fort Atkinson,” the soldier explained tersely. “That means the rebels have cut Interstate 90 to the south of us. A company of the 101st Airborne is keeping Interstate 90 open north of the city at Deforest, but we cannot discount the possibility that the highway may already have been cut farther north...”
“You must keep those roads open, General.”
Bill Rosson was in no mood to take orders from a civilian who had ignored his repeated blandishments to prepare the civilian population of the state capital for evacuation until, tragically, it was too late. Perhaps, thirty to forty percent of the people of Madison had left under their own steam; the rest of the citizenry would have to stay for the duration.
The soldier shook his head.
“Route 14 doesn’t go anywhere and I don’t have any transport to spare for civilian traffic. Route 18 is now reserved for military use. Sooner or later the enemy will envelope Madison; I need to get as many supplies, food stuffs, medicines, and most of all, bullets, into the defended perimeter before that happens.”
“Why aren’t you doing anything to re-open the corridor to the north?”
Rosson took a deep breath and counted.
One thousand and one.
One thousand and two.
One thousand and three.
Madison was going to become a battleground and the idiot standing in front of him had done everything he could to ensure that tens of thousands of civilians would be trapped within it. Those civilians repre
sented thousands of useless mouths that Rosson had no way of feeding; men, women and children who would have to fend for themselves in the coming days because Governor Reynolds had refused to take any of the hard decisions that had needed to be taken in the last week.
The evidence accumulating from the ongoing interrogations of captured rebels – not to mention the insane ranting of men who claimed to be ‘members of the Supreme Governate of the Great Lakes’ broadcast on local FM radio channels - left little doubt as to the nature of the storm beginning to lap around the city’s defenses.
The ideology of the ‘blood soldiers’ – so called ‘Revelation Soldiers’ - was incoherent, a bizarre echo from the Middle Ages or Europe’s sixteenth and seventeenth century wars of religion.
The ‘blood soldiers’ believed in the literal truth of the Book of Revelation; for them the October War had been a signal of God’s wrath. The ‘end of times’ was nigh and they were its heralds, the dark angels of the death of the World; nothing mattered but the purification of their eternal souls, and the merciless eradication of the unworthy, the unbelieving and the ungodly.
True ‘blood soldiers’ were fearless, suicidal, and fought like Viking berserkers of yore. What had begun as a tiny, insignificant – anonymous - sect in the ruins of Chicago had turned into a nightmare. While the US Army was attempting to restore the rule of law in the shattered Windy City, fighting in the main criminals and local war lords, the ‘elders’ of the Council of the Governate of the Great Lakes had dispatched a small army of emissaries, missionaries by any other name all over the Midwest.
They had preached a message of unremitting hate.
These were terrible times.