Lowell raised his eyes to meet Jannier's.
"You come very well recommended, Captain," he said, in French. "Paul Hanrahan is one of our finest officers. I will now repeat my question, meaning it this time, "What can I do for you?"
Jannier did not seem at all surprised that Lowell spoke in French.
"I don't quite understand," he said.
Lowell handed him the note. Jannier read it.
"That was very kind of Colonel Hanrahan," he said. "But I need nothing, thank you just the same.
"You've been assigned here?"
"I am to learn to fly, and then I will be a liaison officer," Jannier said.
"When did you get in?" Lowell asked.
"Two days ago. On the twenty-eighth."
"You tried to call me in Washington at this number?"
"Yes."
"Are you settled? Do you have a BOQ?"
"In the same building as the major's," Jannier said. "I saw the major's name on his door."
"Please call me
"Craig," "Lowell said. "If you're a friend of Paul Hanrahan's..
"I have that privilege, I believe," Jannier said.
"May I ask your plans for tonight, Captain?"
"if1 am to call you "Craig," you must call me Jean-Philippe," Jannier said. Lowell nodded.
"Madame le General Bellmon has been most kind to ask me to join them for the evening," Jannier said.
"I cannot, regrettably," Lowell said, smiling, "offer you a cinqsept, but I am about to take on some liquid courage to face that party, and I would like it very much if you were free to join me."
"A little Scots whiskey is, I suppose, the next best thing," Jannier said.
Lowell realized he liked this man. And if Hanrahan liked him, he must have something going for him.
"Let me put some papers in the safe," Lowell said. "And then we will have a little drink to toast le Colonel Hanrahan's promotion."
(Three) 227 Melody Lane Ozark, Alabama 194S Hours, 31 December 1958
Lieutenant Colonel Rudolph G. Macmillan, in the master bedroom of 227 Melody Lane, examined his reflection in the full-length mirror on the closet door. He was wearing, for the first time, his new blue mess uniform.
"Jesus!" he said.
"You look real nice, Mac," Roxy said, approvingly.
The blue mess uniform had been Roxy Macmillan's Christi Tuu COLONELS
mas present to her husband. They had known back in October that Mac had made the promotion list, but had had no idea when the promotion would actually come through. That had been enough for Roxy to decide to buy the uniform, even if he wouldn't be allowed to wear it until the promotion orders were cut. Blup mess was the army's most ornate uniform: a short jacket, which Macmillan thought made him look like a bar was worn over a white shirt with a formal collar and a white piqu6 vest. The sleeves were decorated with golden cord in ornate loops, reaching almost to the elbow. The number of golden loops indicated rank. A second lieutenant got one loop. There were four loops on Macmillan's sleeves. The lapels of the vest were the color of the officer's branch of service, in Macmillan's case the powder blue of infantry. Miniatures of the medals to which the officer was entitled were pinned to the impel. The jacket was worn with a cape, lined with satin in the %nnch color and fastened at the collar with a thick gold rope.
There weren't very many blue mess uniforms around the viny. They were mostly worn by officers assigned to the White House and by senior military attaches at importantmbassies (London, Moscow, Paris, Tokyo, and Rio de Janeiro, for example), but they were frighteningly expensive and there were few opportunities to wear them. Consequently, few officers had them, even though their acquisition was officially "encouraged."
Roxy had wanted Mac to have one from the very first time she had seen one. Years ago, before the Korean War, there had been an official reception at the Fort Knox officers' open mess for a visiting British Royal Tank Corps general officer. The invitations (actually commands to appear) issued to the officers of the Armor School had paid lip service to the notion that blue mess uniforms actually hung in most officers' closets. The bottom line had said: "Dress: army blue or blue mess.
The post commander had shown up in army blue. Second Lieutenant Craig W. Lowell, then fresh back from Greece, had shown up in blue mess, wearing a Greek medal the size of a coffee saucer hanging from a three-inch-wide purple ribbon stretched across his chest. Bob Bellmon had thought he'd done it to be a smartass, and was furious. But Lowell had actually been trying to be a good guy. When he'd seen the invitation, he'd gotten on the telephone and called Brooks Brothers in New York and told them he didn't give a damn what it cost, he wanted a blue mess uniform cut and sewn that day, and enroute to Kentucky, via air freight, the next.
Despite the furor it had caused, Roxy thought Craig isad looked wonderful; and she'd promised herself that one day she would get a uniform like that for Mac. Thus when his name had come out on the light bird promotion list, she knew it was time.
Though blue mess was expensive (some would even say extravagant), they were doing all right money-wise, and there would be a bigger pay check when the promotion came through. And besides, it wasn't as if they had to put money away to send the boys to college. As sons of a Medal of Honor winner, they were entitled by law to go to West Point. And there was other money, too, if something went wrong with that.
Right after World War II, Mac got a whole bunch of money. It was his back pay for the time he'd been in the POW camp. Instead of blowing it on a car or something, they'd set Roxy's brother Jack up in a bar in Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania. They put in the money, and Jack put in his time. Jack had worked hard, and done well, and was a good manager, and the Hardesty House became the best restaurant and cocktail lounge for miles around. Now they split the profits right down the middle.
And then there were the houses. Soon after they'd loaned Jack the money to buy the bar, they'd been assigned to Bragg, and they'd bought a house on the GI Bill in Fayetteville, outside Fort Bragg. Mac's housing allowance had more than covered the mortgage payments. Later they'd sent him to flight school at Fort Riley, and Roxy had figured out there was no sense in selling the house when they could keep it and rent it to some other officer for more than the mortgage payment.
Before long Roxanne and Rudolph Macmillan, husband and wife, in joint tenancy, owned houses in Fayetteville, N. C., outside Bragg; Manhattan, Kansas, outside Fort Riley; Columbus, Ga." outside Fort Benning; and here in Ozark, in the Woody Dells subdivision. The Cadillac in the carport was paid for and Roxy often wished there was some way she could tell that to the people who wondered out loud how a major could afford the payments on a Cadillac.
"You know what I was wondering?" Mac Macmillan asked his wife, and then went on without waiting for a reply. "I run COLONELS wonder is there any chance they might give me Combat Developments?"
"The TOE calls for a bird colonel, Mac," she said. She bad thought about that before he had, and she had been afraid that notion would pop into his head. She knew it would never happen. They wouldn't give him Combat Developments even was a full colonel. It wasn't, she thought, that she was putting her husband down. Mac was as smart as anybody.
but, she reasoned, in a different way. There was probably no better warrior, no better fighter, in the army, period. And he was a good leader, the kind that made the people who worked for him like him, and who did what he said as best they could. He knew how to make people feel like part of the team.
But Mac just wasn't made up like Bellmon, or for that matter, like Lowell or Phil Parker or Sandy Felter. If the brass told Mac to take a company or a battalion and go take that hill, he could do it as well as anybody she had ever met. But that wasn't enough for doing what he was hoping for now. She didn't know the exact word for it, maybe "intellectual," but the others were "intellectual." They could talk about the army and plan for it in their heads. They knew history and could talk about people like Clausewitz, and things like Lee's campaigns, and "politico-military co
nsiderations." But when they did that, they might as well be talking Greek, for all Mac understood.
Mac was a nuts-and-bolts soldier, and Roxy was proud of him for being that. But she knew that he had no chance whatever of being given command of Combat Developments to replace Bob Bellmon.
Macmillan tugged one final time at the lower edge of his blue mess jacket, and then turned to face his wife.
"Jesus!" he said, as if something had just occurred to him.
"Jesus, what?" Roxy asked.
"With everything going on around here, you know what I forgot to do, Roxy?" "No," she said. "What did you forget, Mac?"
"Roxy, you know how much I've had on my mind."
"What did you forget, Mac?"
"I forgot to go to the safety deposit box to get the Medal." "Bullshit," Roxy said.
"Believe it or not, Roxy," Macsaid, "that's what happened."
"You forgot on purpose, you bastard, the way I knew you would: You did that last year, too." "I forgot, so like it or lump it," he said, righteously.
"Yeah, well, I figured that you were going to forget it, wise-ass," she said. "So I'm two full jumps ahead of you."
She went to her dressing table, opened a drawer, and took out a blue leather-covered case. She smiled smugly at her husband as she exhibited it to him, and then she opened it. She wiggled her finger at him to come to her. And when he did, somewhat sheepishly, she took from the box the Medal of Honor, the nation's highest award for valor, which Harry Truman had personally hung around his neck. Then she put the blue-starred ribbon around her husband's neck and arranged the medal on his shirt front. It really stood out, she thought, against the white shirt.
(Four) BOQ No. 1 (Bldg. T-1 703) Fort Racker, Alabama 2015 Hours, 31 December 1958
Major Craig W. Lowell had decided somewhat reluctantly that he had to wear his blue mess uniform to attend the New Year's Eve party at the Fort Rucker officers' mess. He would have preferred not to go to the party at all, but in keeping with his new straighten-up-and-fly-right code of conduct, he knew he had to go. Blue mess was a bit much for Fort Rucker. But because the Mouse would be there and wearing blue mess, Lowell thought he better wear his own. Otherwise he would have worn blues with a black bow tie.
He'd worn blue mess a good deal in Washington. Under the right circumstances, he rather liked to wear it. But not here, where it would earn him gapes of curiosity and resentment. Still, he consoled himself with the thought that he would not be the only one going to a converted service club to sit on folding chairs in a uniform that would have been more at home at a reception given by the President of France in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.
Barbara Bellmon had told him Bob would be wearing his, out of kindness to Sharon Felter. Sharon, whom Lowell admired and loved above most women, had bought Sandy blue mess. In her touching naivetd, she had thought his assignment to the White House would mean that they would become part of the social whirl there. And so she'd thought that he would need it. As it had turned out, while he was frequently on White House guest lists, the invitations were directed to Mr. and Mrs. Felter, not Major and Mrs. Felter. Only a few people at the White House even knew he was in the army. It was generally believed that he was some sort of financial advisor, out of Harvard or MIT, to the President.
Sharon bad carried Sandy's blue mess uniform to Rucker with her, and Sandy was going to wear it, aide-to-the-President gold rope and all, to please her. And to insure that Sharon's husband wouldn't stick out like a sore thumb, Bob Bellmon would wear his. Even Mac would be in one, Barbara Bellmon had told Lowell.
"Mac?" he had asked in disbelief.
"There's a reason," Barbara Bellmon had laughed. "You'll see." "They cut his promotion orders," Lowell said.
"Spoilsport," Barbara had laughed and hung up on him.
Craig Lowell, aware that there was probably an element of sour grapes in it, thought that the only reason Macmillan had been given the silver leaf of a lieutenant colonel was because he was a Hero, First Class. He had a chestful: the Medal, the Distinguished Service Cross, a flock of others. There was no question that Mac had balls, and with the possible exception of Phil Parker, there was no one he'd rather have with him if he had to pick up a rifle and go shoot bad guys. Mac had been the platoon sergeant of the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment's intelligence and reconnaissance platoon through five combat jumps in War II and lived. Ergo sum, he was an extraordinary warrior.
But he simply wasn't bright enough to be a lieutenant colonel. He would have to be carried by his subordinates. Officers at Combat Developments weren't going to be crawling around in the boonies on their hands and knees matching wits with riflemen; they were going to be sitting around conference tables matching wits with some very bright people, guys who could cut their throats as neatly with a well-turned phrase as some guerrilla could with a sharpened carbine bayonet. Mac simply wasn't up to handling that kind of combat.
And those conference room battles were not small unit fire fights. If you lost one, you couldn't pull back and call for the artilery to bail you out. If you lost these battles, the losses would be irreversible.
The army would not get its own air mobility or its own armed helicopters as quickly as it had to have them. It might not get them at all.
There were two places where Major Craig Lowell thought the next war would be fought, and these weren't where most everybody else did: on the plains of Hesse in Germany. He thought the Russians were probably going to make their next move in the Near East. Or, alternatively (and perhaps simultaneously), in the Far East. In either of these areas mobility was going to be the key to success.
Trying to get information out of Sandy Felter was like trying to squeeze water from a rock, but he had known him long enough to get a few drops, and after a conversation with Felter about Vietnam, Lowell had conclvded that Felter was convinced that American forces would find themselves engaged there. He hadn't yet had a chance to pump Hanrahan's friend, Captain Jean-Philippe Jannier, at length. But he had already learned from the Frenchman over two beers at the officers' club that he agreed with Felter... with the typically French certitude that Americans wouldn't do as well there as the French had.
And the French had lost. Lowell had already decided that as soon as he could get a day off, he would go to see Hanrahan at Bragg. Hanrahan would have some answers.
But wherever the next war was going to be, the army was going to need its own aviation, and getting it at all, much less in the quantity and quality required, was going to be considerably more difficult than ordering the bugler to sound "boots and saddles."
Major Lowell examined himself in the full-length mirror on the wall. It was wavy and the reflecting material was beginning to flake off. They had bought the mirror, he decided, at a distress sale of shopworn merchandise at Woolworth's.
The cheap mirror, in the Spartan BOQ, triggered another line of thought.
Straighten-up-and-fly-right be damned. I am not going to live in this goddamn BOQ like some sophomore working his way through Slippery Rock State Teacher's College.
He had not been ordered to live in it, he remembered. Paul Jiggs had implied that he should, the time when he had eaten Craig's ass out. The way Jiggs had put it, he was "to forego his flamboyant ways." Jiggs thought it Was "flamboyant" for an officer to rent one of the two suites in the Daleville Inn, the newly built motel outside the gate.
And so in a burst of righteous determination to do the right thing, Lowell had asked that he be assigned a BOQ. Even at the time, he had known in the back of his mind that he was acting the fool. There was no way he would be able to put up with either the Spartan accommodations of a BOQ or the forced camaraderie. He decided now he would move into the Daleville Inn tomorrow. There was no reason he couldn't straighten-up-and-fly-right in something approaching reasonable comfort.
He debated for a moment wearing what he thought of as "the Golden Saucer," and concluded he might as well go the whole hog. He took off his jacket and laid it on the bed.
Then he went to an attache case, which he thought of as "the things case." Inside the battered pigskin case, which had been his father's, were a number of things that experience had taught him should be kept together in a portable form in case of unexpected need.
It held a spare razor, comb, and brush. There was a change of underwear, still in plastic wrapping. There was paper and a package of six ball-point pens. In an interior compartment which hooked to the top of the case were his passport and an envelope containing $2,000 in fifty dollar bills. There was a small leather-bound address hook. A plastic bag held a 9 mm Pistol-08 Parabellum more popularly known as a "German Luger' " and two loaded spare clips. There was a box, sealed with Scotch tape, of fifty Winchester-Western 9 mm cartridges. And there were several boxes holding insignia and his medals in their various forms: the medals themselves (in individual boxes), and a box which held the miniatures of the medals, assembled together on a single mounting for wear with either the blue mess or on the lapel of a civilian tailcoat. He had already pinned the miniatures to his blue mess lapel, but now that he had decided to go the whole hog, he took from a thin blue leather case the medal of the Order of Saint George and Saint Andrew. It was a spectacular sonofabitch, a four inch hunk of sculptured gold hung on a three-inch-wide purple band. As he tugged the ribbon into place diagonally across the stiff front of the dress shirt, he almost changed his mind about wearing it. But in the end, he decided that wearing it was the right thing to do. If the Mouse showed up wearing all that aide-to-the-President crap, and Mac wore his Medal, and he showed up without his spectacular decoration, they would be liable to think he disapproved of them wearing theirs.
W E B Griffin - BoW 04 - The Colonels Page 11