The Captains

by W. E. B Griffin

  All my love.

  He signed his name with a grease pencil, licked the envelope, and only then remembered he hadn’t addressed it. The address still tore him up.

  Mrs. Craig W. Lowell

  Schloss Greiffenberg

  Marburg an der Lahn, Germany.

  Schloss meant castle in German; it sounded as if the mailman rode a horse and wore a suit of shining armor.

  He folded that envelope smaller, so that it would fit inside the envelope which would take it to the firm, for remailing to Germany.

  “I have to beg one more envelope,” he said. He looked at the company clerk. “You got one I can have, Stu?”

  “What’s the postage to Germany, Captain?” the company clerk replied.

  “I have no idea.”

  “I wrote my mother, Captain, about the trouble you were having writing to Mrs. Lowell, and she sent me a bunch of stamps for you. They’re fifteen-cent ones. I’ll put two of them on, to make sure.” He reached out his hand for Lowell’s envelope.

  “Why, thank you very much,” the Old Man said. “And thank your mother for me, too, please, Stu.” The Old Man turned, so that neither the exec nor the company clerk would see that his eyes, for some reason, had suddenly started to water.

  (Three)

  Washington, D.C.

  6 September 1950

  Rotary Wing Course 50–4 (Special) had been established at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, by verbal order of the Secretary of the Army in order to meet a requirement of the highest priority from Eighth United States Army, Korea (EUSAK). From the very first days of the Korean conflict, it had been quite clear that rotary-wing aircraft, specifically the Bell H13 and the Hiller H23, were ideally suited for use as battlefield ambulances. They saved lives.

  Within two weeks of the commencement of hostilities, enterprising army aviators had fitted locally fabricated litter racks to the skids of the few helicopters available, turning them into aerial ambulances.

  Technically, such modifications were aerodynamically unsound, for with a pilot, and two wounded men in the litter racks, both aircraft were over maximum gross permitted weight. They were also illegal, because they had not been approved by the air force, which had, under the Key West Agreement of 1948, sole engineering responsibility for army aircraft.

  The aerial ambulances worked. To hell with the engineers, and screw the air force.

  Both the H13 and the H23 helicopters were designed to carry a pilot and a passenger, each with an estimated weight of 180 pounds. It was believed, furthermore, that carrying an approximately 180-pound weight in the only position the litter racks could be fitted would severely affect the weight and balance characteristics of the aircraft. Carrying two such weights would not only further increase the imbalance, but would raise the aircraft’s gross weight beyond the point where it could fly safely, if indeed at all.

  On the other hand, loading a critically wounded soldier onto a helicopter litter rack meant that he could be flown quickly, and in relative comfort, to a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) where his life, 95 times out of 100, could be saved. That statistic stood out: If a wounded soldier arrived alive at a MASH, the odds were 95–5 that he would live.

  Too many wounded men had arrived dead at the mobile hospitals after a two-hour-long ride over battered and potholed roads in the standard army ambulances—Dodge three-quarter-ton truck frames with square bodies capable of carrying five litters.

  Notwithstanding the established principles of aerodynamics and the Key West Agreement of 1948, which forbade the army to do much more with airplanes than use them as aerial jeeps, the H13s and the H23s shuttled back and forth between the battlefield (known now as the main line of resistance, or MLR) and the mobile hospitals and saved lives. The call went out for many more helicopters, and the pilots to fly them, as quickly as possible.

  The aircraft themselves were easier to come by than the pilots to fly them. Bell and Hiller went on a three-shift, twenty-four-hour-a-day production schedule. It was decided that for convenience in maintenance and parts supply, Hiller H23s should be used exclusively in Korea, at least until things straightened out. As a result, H23s from the army worldwide were hastily shipped to the Far East. They would be replaced, according to plan, by Bell H13s as they came off the production line.

  Pilots posed a greater problem. There were few helicopter pilots in the army when the war broke out, and the pool of chopper pilots available in the reserve was negligible or nonexistent. An unusually well-qualified pilot is required to teach someone else how to fly, and the few highly qualified pilots around had quickly been ordered to Korea.

  Contracts were let to engage the relatively small number of civilian helicopter pilots as instructors, and applications for helicopter pilot training, from commissioned and warrant officers, were quickly processed and approved, the criteria being essentially that the applicant could pass the rigid standards of a flight physical.

  The Medical Corps, to spare its physicians from administrative matters, had established a corps of administrators, called it the Medical Service Corps, and issued them caducei with the letters MSC superimposed on them as lapel insignia. When the first medical evacuation helicopters were assigned to the Medical Service Corps, so were the pilots that came with them.

  Then the Medical Corps, which had always been admired, but had never had much of a dashing military reputation, entered the political arena. The surgeon general received permission to gather together at the Army Medical Center, at Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas, sufficient numbers of its helicopter pilots to train other Medical Service Corps officers to be helicopter pilots. It also received authority to increase the number of Medical Service Corps officers it was permitted to have. Care of the wounded has always been given the highest priority within the army, and it was given here.

  Almost immediately, however, it became apparent that if the Medical Corps got all it asked for in the way of instructor pilots and training helicopters, there would be an insufficient number of either available elsewhere in the army to train the helicopter pilots required for other missions. It was decided to return helicopter training to the artillery, where it had been before Korea, and to make available to the Medical Corps as many spaces as possible in the classes.

  It was also decided that the training underway at San Antonio would be permitted to continue until such time as the Artillery School at Fort Sill was prepared for the massive influx of student pilots. In the meantime, a certain small number of officers of other arms and services would be sent to Fort Sam to undergo flight training with the medics.

  Despite what he had been told in the Far East (that he was being sent home in order to go to chopper school), Captain Rudolph G. MacMillan quickly learned by phone what the candy-asses in the Pentagon really wanted to do with him. First, they wanted to put him on display for a couple of months as a hero. Then, maybe, they could talk seriously about “finding him a space” in a rotary-wing transition course.

  Well, screw that! He wanted to get back in the goddamned war before it was over.

  He hung up the telephone, went upstairs in Roxy’s mother’s row house on Railroad Street in Mauch Chuck, Pennsylvania, and took a green tunic from the closet. He laid it on the bed, pinned his ribbons on it—all of his ribbons, including the one which sat alone and on top of all the others, the blue-silk, star-spotted ribbon of the Medal—and then hung the tunic on the hook in the back seat of his brand-new 98 Olds “Rocket” and started out for Washington.

  Lt. Colonel Robert F. Bellmon, who had been in the Polish stalag with him, was assigned to the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Operations. If Bellmon couldn’t do him any good, there were other people. Before he became a talking dummy for the assholes in PIO, he would complain right up to the top, as far as the Chief of Staff, if that was necessary.

  Bellmon laid it on the line, and told MacMillan what he suspected. They wanted him out of the Far East because of the Medal. They didn’t want anybody with the goddam
ned Medal to get blown away. A dead hero is worse, public relations-wise, than an ordinary dead soldier. He had been sent home to get his ass out of the line of fire, not to become a chopper jockey.

  “I can probably get you out of the hands of public relations, Mac,” Bellmon told him. “But you better get used to the idea that you’re going to sit out the rest of this war. They’re not going to send you back to the Far East, period.”

  Colonel Bellmon walked MacMillan down the labyrinthine corridors of the Pentagon to the office of a classmate assigned to the Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff, Personnel. He introduced Mac to him as an old and dear friend, who had been in the stalag with him, who had been in the Far East, and who was now in the clutches of the people in public relations.

  Bellmon seldom asked for favors. Colonel Bellmon’s classmate was prepared to do anything within reason for an old and dear friend of Bellmon’s, particularly one with the Medal, short, of course, of sending him back to the Far East.

  It posed no problem at all. An infantry captain at Benning, an assistant instructor in the Department of Tactics, would receive notification that because of space limitations, his orders to attend helicopter flight training at Fort Sam Houston had been cancelled, and that he was being rescheduled for a subsequent class, details to follow.

  Captain Rudolph G. MacMillan would receive orders directing him to report for helicopter pilot training at the U.S. Army Medical Center, Fort Sam Houston, San Antonio, Texas.

  Afterward, Bob Bellmon insisted that Mac spend the night at the Farm. Barbara, Bellmon said, would not forgive Mac for not bringing Roxy with him to Washington, but he would just have to face up to that.

  They stopped and bought steaks on the way to the Farm, and grilled them, and talked about how General Waterford, despite the long hours he had spent concealed by charcoal smoke, was probably the world’s worst steak broiler, personally responsible for the destruction of more good meat than any other human being.

  “Good God, Mac!” Bellmon said, suddenly. “You don’t know about Colonel von Greiffenberg, do you?”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s back,” Bellmon said.

  “I thought he was dead,” MacMillan said. “I heard—you told me—that the Russians blew him away just before you got liberated.”

  “That’s what I thought. So did everybody else. But he showed up alive. The Russians had him in Siberia.”

  “Well, I’ll be goddamned,” MacMillan said, pleased. “That’s damned good news.” And then his face clouded. “And what about Lowell?”

  Craig W. Lowell was not one of Captain Rudolph G. MacMillan’s favorite people. Despite what Lowell had done in Greece, in MacMillan’s judgment Lowell was a candy-ass who should never have been commissioned.

  “I’ve seen him twice lately,” Bellmon said, looking at his wife to signal her to keep her mouth shut.

  “And?” MacMillan asked.

  “Once, in Germany. He was there, of course, to meet the colonel when he came across the border,” Bellmon said.

  “I’m glad for Ilse,” Mac said. “Roxy and I always liked her. I never could figure what she saw in Lowell, but she was all right.”

  “And then we saw Captain Lowell,” Barbara said. “When he stopped by on his way to the Far East.”

  “Captain Lowell?” Mac asked, disbelieving.

  “What do you think about that?” Bellmon asked.

  “How the hell did he arrange that? He can’t be more than twenty-four or twenty-five years old?”

  “Twenty-three, actually,” Bellmon said. “He went in the National Guard, and arranged to get himself promoted. He’s good at that sort of thing, you may have noticed.”

  “Ah, that makes me sick. He’s got no more right to be a captain than Roxy does. What’s he doing? Playing golf at Camp Drake?”

  “There is a pool of misfit officers, relieved officers, incompetent officers, in Pusan,” Lieutenant Colonel Bellmon said. “They are engaged as stevedores, I understand. I devoutly hope that Lowell is among them.”

  “That’s a filthy, rotten thing to say!” Barbara said, furiously.

  “Your friend Lowell is a thoroughly rotten man,” Bellmon said.

  “You’ve got no right to say anything like that,” she said.

  “After his coming here the way he did,” Bellmon said, as angrily, “I have the perfect right.”

  “The reason you don’t like Craig, darling,” Barbara Bellmon said, icily, “is because he has the balls to do things you don’t. He won’t let the system crap on him, and call it ‘cheerful willing obedience to orders.’ You don’t like Craig, darling, because he makes you realize that you’re more of a clerk than you like to admit.”

  She jumped to her feet, spilling her drink in the process, and stormed inside the house.

  “Jesus, what was that all about?” Mac asked.

  “I was just thinking,” Bellmon said, “that my wife, when she is angry, is really her father’s daughter.”

  “Jesus, yeah,” MacMillan said. “That sounded just like one of the general’s tantrums, didn’t it?”

  “I’ll give her a couple of minutes to cool down,” Bellmon said. “And then I’ll go get her.”

  Goddamn that bastard Lowell, he thought. He can cause trouble when he’s ten thousand miles away.

  (Four)

  Brooke U.S. Army Medical Center

  Fort Sam Houston, Texas

  10 September 1950

  When he reported for duty at Fort Sam, MacMillan’s breast pocket was bare of all ribbons and qualification badges except his aviator’s wings. He did not want to call attention to himself at all, just get through this bullshit as quickly and as smoothly as possible. If his orders had not identified him as a fixed-wing, instrument qualified aviator, he would not have worn his wings either.

  Fixed-wing aviators, he learned on arrival, had no set program. They would be rotary-wing students until such time as they had been adjudged competent, entry-level helicopter pilots, or until it became clear that they were never going to master safe flight in rotary-wing aircraft.

  Fixed-wing qualification is no indicator at all of an individual’s potential as a chopper jockey. Helicopter piloting is the most difficult of all flying in terms of coordination; and numbers of splendid fixed-wing pilots have never been able to make the transition.

  MacMillan’s instructor had long before learned that it was quite necessary to destroy the ego and self-confidence of a fixed-wing pilot about to undergo rotary-wing training in order to make him pay attention. The quickest and surest way to do that was to take him for an orientation ride and let him see for himself how difficult it was and how embarrassingly inept he was at it.

  A fixed-wing aircraft is controlled, simplistically, by the stick and the rudder pedals. Climbing is accomplished by pulling back on the stick, descending by pushing forward on it. Turns are accomplished by moving the stick from side to side and by depressing one of the rudder pedals. Straight and level flight can often be accomplished simply by removing one’s hands and feet entirely from the stick and rudder pedals, and letting the plane fly itself.

  Helicopter flight is somewhat more complicated. There are pedals which function essentially like rudder pedals, but they are not rudder pedals, and taking one’s feet off them entirely will immediately start the helicopter’s fuselage spinning. It is necessary, using the “rudder pedals” (which actually control the small, counter-torque rotor mounted vertically in the tail), to maintain an equilibrium between opposing forces.

  There is a “stick” between the legs, and it too has major differences from the stick on a fixed-wing aircraft. What it actually does is tilt the “rotor cone” in the direction it is moved. The rotor cone is the arc described by the rotor blades as they revolve. Imagine an empty, very wide-mouthed, very shallow ice cream cone. If the cone is tilted forward, it tends to move the helicopter forward; tilted to the rear, it tends to move the aircraft to the rear. It can be tilted in any direction. />
  The helicopter pilot’s left hand is simultaneously occupied by a third control. A motorcycle-like rotary throttle is held in the curled fist. The straight piece of aluminum tubing on which it is mounted also controls the angle of the blade. In other words, it adjusts the “bite” the rotor blades take of the air as they spin around the rotor head. The steeper the bite (angle of attack), the more lift is provided. And the steeper the angle of attack, the more power is required. Constant throttle adjustment is required. An instrument in front of the pilot has two separate needles, one indicating rotor speed, and the other engine rpm. The needles are supposed to be superimposed, within a small range indicated by a green strip on the dial.

  For purposes of comparisons, when the pilot of a fixed-wing aircraft is poised for takeoff, he simply pushes the throttle forward to “take off power.” Then he steers the airplane, as it gathers speed down the runway, by use of the rudder pedals and stick. At a certain point, the speed of the air passing over his wings generates sufficient lift to literally lift the airplane off the runway.

  A helicopter pilot, on the other hand, must first acquire lift by judicious application of engine power and simultaneous raising of the cyclic control. The instant the helicopter leaves the ground, he must establish and maintain equilibrium between opposing forces by use of the “rudder pedals” to keep the machine from starting to spin, and then adjust the position of the rotor cone to control the direction of flight—even if that direction is not to move at all: the most difficult of all flight manuevers, the “hover.”

  Having accomplished all this, the helicopter is still not in a flight condition, but in an intermediate step called “transitional lift.” What this means is that the helicopter is sort of floating on a cushion of air compressed between the rotor blades and the ground. When he climbs higher, or when he moves off in any direction, he “loses the cushion” and instantaneous compensatory movements of all the controls are necessary.

  The easiest way to convince anyone of what a hairy bitch chopper driving is—but especially a well-qualified fixed-wing pilot—is by demonstration rather than explanation. And once the student pilot is convinced that he has a hell of a lot to learn, as he inevitably is when the chopper instantly gets away from him, he then becomes a docile and dedicated student.