He was pleased with his decision, taking it as proof that he was now flying upright, behaving as behooved a field-grade officer of the Regular Army of the United States.
There was a knock at the door.
"Come in!" he called.
It was Captain Jean-Philippe Jannier, now in dress uniform, complete to a round-crown cap adorned with gold braid. The uniform, Lowell thought, was absurd. The jacket was too short and looked too tight, but that was the custom, not bad tailoring. The French custom was that medals, not miniatures, were worn. And Captain Jean-Philippe Jannier had more than his share.
"Is there something wrong?" Jannier asked, aware that Lowell had been staring at him.
"I've been admiring your medals," Lowell confessed.
"And I yours, M'sieu le Chevalier," Jannier said. That was in reference to Lowell's French Legion of Honor, in the grade of Chevalier.
"A slight bow will suffice," Lowell said. "It will not be necessary for you to kneel.
Jannier bowed, mockingly.
"I think we are going to find mutual friends in the French Army," Jannier said. "You and I have been to the same places at different times." Lowell smiled at him. Jannier returned it. They liked each other, because they understood each other.
"You're going to meet two honorary members of your regiment tonight," Lowell said.
"Of the 3rd Parachutiste?" Jannier asked, surprised.
"Lieutenant Colonel Macmillan and Major Felter," Lowell said.
"Aha!" Jannier said, recognizing the names. "I have heard the story." "What I will do," Lowell said, "is give you a good deal to drink and encourage you to jump off the balcony."
Jannier laughed.
"We might as well go," Lowell said. "I can't think of any way to get out of it."
When he got in his Hertz Chevrolet, he was reminded again that he was going to have to figure out how he was going to get his car down from Washington. Or would Paul Jiggs consider the car itself, a Cadillac Eldorado, unbecomingly spectacular? Maybe, instead, he should ask his father-in-law to use his influence on the Mercedes people in Germany to arrange for them to ship him one of the new Mercedes-Benz convertibles.
The salesman at the Mercedes place in Washington had told him that there would be at least a nine-month delay in delivery from the time he placed a firm order, and he hadn't wanted to wait that long.
He had always liked the Mercedes. His father had had several of them.
The last of these, a 1939 convertible coupe, Craig Lowell at fifteen had wrecked after he had been chased all over Long Island, the papers reported, "by eight police cars in a fifty mile pursuit at speeds in excess of 110 miles an hour." He didn't think the new Mercedes was quite the car the prewar one had been, but there was something about the Eldorado that made people look at him, as if he had bought it with the wages of fallen women. It was time to get rid of it.
He would have to make a decision about that, and soon, and about the house and the staff in Georgetown.
He put those concerns from his mind as he concentrated on finding a place to park the rented Chevrolet near the mess.
(One) The Officers' Open Mess Fort Rucker, Alabama 2015 Hours. 31 December 1958
The officers' open mess was jammed by the time Lowell and Jannier arrived. Dale and Houston counties, which surrounded the Rucker reservation, were Bone Baptist Dry. So in addition to the officers, the Very Important Civilians from Ozark and Enterprise who couldn't drink anywhere else, were also in attendance.
Lowell started toward the stairway which led to the balcony but didn't make it. A lieutenant stopped Jannier.
He had been posted by Bellmon to look for an officer in French uniform, and to bring him to the Combat Developments' tables.
Lowell spoke to Jannier in French: "My compliments to General et Madame Bellmon," he said. "Please tell them I will present my respects later."
"Certainly," Jannier replied.
The lieutenant was awed, as Lowell had smugly expected him to be, by someone who actually spoke a foreign language.
Then he went up the stairway to the opposite second-floor balcony, where the Army Aviation Board's tables could be found.
There were fifty-four commissioned and warrant officers assigned to the Army Aviation Board and twenty-five "senior civilians": Department of the Army employees whose classification was GS-7 or higher, thus entitling them to become members of the officers' club. Looking at the packed tables, Lowell decided that they were all in attendance.
Including Jane Cassidy and a large, football-player type in a dinner jacket who must be Mr. Cassidy. Mrs. Cassidy was wearing an evening dress, he noticed, the major attraction of which was her cleavage. Not vulgar, not even very low cut, but drawing the eye to the curves like a magnet. He saw her smile at him across the mom and wondered if she had sensed his fascination with her chest.
More than a little uneasy, he walked quickly to the bar which had been set up to care for the balcony customers before going to the Board's tables. He had arrived, he saw, after the Board president, which was a faux pas. He wondered if Bill Roberts would take offense.
He looked down at the dance floor, and then across the room to the balcony opposite. There he saw faces he recognized Macmillan's and Bellmon's and somewhat cynically he concluded that the club officer, in his infinite wisdom, had physically separated the Board and Combat Developments as far as possible. There was friction between the two organizations, the Board thinking of CDO as a collection of upstarts without meaningful experience, and CDO thinking of the Board as a collection of gone-to-seed army aviators with no understanding of the role aviation was going to play in the army of the future.
Carrying his drink, Lowell went to the nearest of the Board tables. He worked his way down it and greeted the officers and civilians he knew.
He came eventually to the table where Jane Cassidy and her husband were sitting.
"Good evening, Mrs. Cassidy," he said. "May I tell you how very lovely you look tonight?"
He realized that he had gone a bit overboard, but she didn't seem to be unnerved by it.
"Major, I'd like you to meet my husband," she said. "Tom, this is my new boss, the man I spent the afternoon in Atlanta with."
Tom Cassidy rose, smiling, and offered Lowell his hand. He was a good-looking, pleasant fellow, whose dinner jacket hadn't come from the racks at Sears, Roebuck.
"I'm pleased to meet you, Major," he said, with a smile. "Jane had a lot of fun with that."
"Pardon me?" "I didn't believe her at first when she said you'd been back and forth to Atlanta this afternoon."
"All I could show her was the Fulton County Airport," Lowell said.
"Well, you thrilled her, and I thank you for it, although it made me a little jealous."
Oh, Jesus!
"I've got to catch a plane tonight," Tom Cassidy said. "Which means that I have to leave here early, drive thirty miles to Dothan, and then pray Southern is flying when I get there. It must be very nice to have your own airplane." Lowell smiled at him, wondering why he was so relieved that Cassidy was talking about airplanes and not his wife.
"Tom's going geese shooting near Huntsville," Jane Cassidy explained.
"Now that sounds like fun," Lowell said.
"Do you hunt, Major?"
"Yes, I do. When I can find someplace to hunt."
"We've got a club, about nine hundred acres of marshland, on the flyway; and I'd be honored to have you join me sometime."
"I accept," Lowell said. "Thank you."
"Come hunting with me," Jane Cassidy said. "Bring your airplane."
"Jesus!" Tom Cassidy said, embarrassed.
"You let me shoot on nine hundred acres on the flyway, and I'll be happy to bring my airplane," Lowell replied.
"I had nothing in my mind at all about your airplane," Tom Cassidy said. "I hope you can believe that."
"Your wife was pulling your leg," Lowell said. "And now I'd better pay my respects to Colonel Roberts and find my seat."
"You've found it," Jane Cassidy said. "I hope it's all right, but when the secretary called and asked where you wanted to sit, I put you here.
I wanted you to meet Tom."
"Well, that was thinking ahead," Lowell said. "Thank you. I'll be right back."
He made his way to the head table. "Good evening, sir," he said to Colonel Roberts, adding air" to his wife.
"You're... splendiferous... Craig," Jeanne Roberts said.
"Thank you, ma'am," he said.
"Yes, you are," Roberts said, dryly.
"When things settle down a little, will you come to supper?" Jeanne Roberts asked.
"I'd be delighted," Lowell said. He saw from the look on Roberts's face that the invitation had not been planned.
"There was a Frenchman looking for you today," Roberts said. "What was that all about?"
"He's come here for chopper school," Lowell said. "And then he'll stay on as a liaison officer."
"He found you, then?"
"He had a note from Colonel Hanrahan," Lowell said, "asking me to look after him."
"Hadn't you better introduce him to us, then?" Roberts asked.
"I will, sir," Lowell said. "He's across the room, as General Bellmon's guest."
"I see," Roberts said. He obviously didn't like that at all. "He's a friend of Bellmon's, is that it?"
"I believe General Jiggs arranged it, sir," Lowell said.
"You could have gone with Combat Developments tonight," Roberts said, "if you'd preferred." "I'm assigned to the Board, sir," Lowell said. "And I would have been out of place over there."
Roberts, he thought, was making no secret that he questioned Lowell's loyalty to the Board.
Their antagonism went back to the day Roberts had recruited Lowell for army aviation. Fully aware that Lowell's career was then in very bad shape, Roberts had wanted him in aviation for two reasons. He had political influence, and Paul Jiggs had told him Lowell was the best young staff officer he had ever met. Roberts and Lowell had disliked each other at sight almost a chemical reaction and things had not gotten any better between them over the years.
Roberts, a West Pointer, had presumed that Lowell, a non West Pointer whom he had rescued from military oblivion, would align himself out of gratitude, with his faction. Lowell, however, was not only an unrepentant sinner but had made it clear almost immediately after graduating from flight school that he did not share Roberts's vision of army aviation's future. So far as Roberts was concerned, Lowell was both an incredibly lucky wise-ass to still be in the army at all and entirely too close to Bob Bellmon, the head of Combat Developments.
They had already had a clash, on Lowell's first day of duty with the Board.
"I'm not simply putting the best face on a fait accompli, Lowell," Roberts said then, making reference to General E.Z. Black's unexpected, nearly incredible order assigning Lowell to the Board as project officer for rocket-armed helicopters. "I really think you're the man to run the rocket-armed helicopter program."
That was true. Obnoxious as he was, he was the best man for the job.
"Thank you, sir."
"Having said that, I will add that under the circumstances, you can have any assets at my disposal to carry out your job."
"Thank you again." "And having said that, I feel constrained to add that there is no room in the Board for your flamboyance. There will be no clever little deals, no clever little shortcuts, no deviation from standard Board operating procedure. I hope you understand that."
"Yes, sir."
"For your general information," Roberts said, "Big Bad Bird personnel and equipment have been transferred to the Board."
"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 apother, 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 under utilized
"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 multi engine 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 ii a pillbox. There was no question in Lowell's mind that it wa 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.
W E B Griffin - BoW 04 - The Colonels Page 12