Craig, smiling broadly, put his arms around Antoinette's shoulders.
"You two have met?" he asked. And then without waiting for a reply, "You get what you needed?" "Yes, and yes," Cynthia said.
"Ask me when Phil is coming over, Craig," Toni Parker said.
He looked at her curiously. "OK," he said, agreeably. When is Phil coming over?"
"I don't think he will be," Toni said. "Why not?" Lowell asked.
"I thought you would never ask Toni said. "The reason Phil's not likely to come over, Craig, is because he's at Fort Benning."
"Oh? What's he doing at Benning?"
"Would you believe jumping out of airplanes?" Toni said. "What the hell's that all about?"
"And when he knows how to jump out of airplanes, he's going to learn how to make fire by rubbing two sticks together and all that sort of thing. He's a little old to be an eagle scout; io when he finishes, they're going to let him wear a green ,eret." "Oh, Jesus H. Christ!" Lowell said.
"A pied piper appeared," Toni said, bitterly, "by the name )f Macmillan and you have to see Mac in one of those hats to oelieve it. Macmillan piped away on his pipe, which I think is filled with what they call a controlled substance, and little Philip skipped gaily along after him." "Spare me the allegory," Lowell said, sharply. "Tell me what happened."
"Could I have a drink, first?" Toni said. "I'm aware I'm playing the bitch, but I can't help it. I'm so god damned mad!"
Lowell reached under the sink and came up with a half gallon of scotch.
"I was bitchy to you, too," Toni said, to Cynthia, "and I'm sorry. It's just that I'm a little upsei because my husband has lost his mind. Or else he's suffering from premature Cloud's Syndrome."
"What's that?" Lowell asked.
"Male menopause," Toni said. "Manifested by a desire to act youthful to the point of... oh, hell, there I go again. Sorry."
Lowell handed her a drink.
"Now tell me what's happened," he said.
"Well, first the pied piper appeared," Toni Parker said. "He's recruiting people for Special Forces. Phil told me he was going to see him, just to see Mac in a green beret. At first, I thought he thought it was just funny. It never entered my mind that he would volunteer."
"Didn't he talk it over with you?" Lowell asked.
"Oh, yeah," she said, bitterly. "A couple of days later. He had a cross-country RON to Bragg..
"What does that mean?" Cynthia said. Everybody looked at her.
"You have your own language," Cynthia said. "I don't understand half of what you're sayifig. Or am I intruding?"
"Phil's a flight instructor," Lowell explained. "What Toni said was that he took a group of student pilots on a crosscountry training flight to Fort Bragg. RON means Remain Over Night. He went along to make sure they didn't get lost, in other words. The students take turns navigating. They spend the night someplace in this case, Bragg and then come back."
"And when he came back," Toni Parker said, obviously anxious to tell her story, "he told me that he had been thinking about how much nicer Bragg was than Rucker, how the hospital was much larger, and how I could easily get a job there. I said that if he was thinking of volunteering for the Green Berets, he was out of his mind."
"Green Berets?" Cynthia asked, and immediately regretted it. Toni gave her a dirty look, Lowell an impatient one.
"They're sort of super-paratroops," Lowell said. "What they do is train native forces. Guerrillas, in other words." "Then Phil said," Toni Parker said, angrily, "that as a matter of fact, he had already volunteered, and his orders would probably be along in a day or two." "Jesus!" Lowell said. "What the hell was he thinking of'?" "He was thinking, Craig," Toni said, "that if they didn't give you command of that rocket-armed helicopter company, his chances of getting a command had dropped from remote to nonexistent."
Cynthia desperately wanted to know what that was all about, since it was the first suggestion she'd heard that Lowell wasn't the fair-haired boy of the U.S. Army, but she knew she couldn't interrupt again.
"Maybe," Lowell said, "he's right."
"Of course, he's right," Toni said. "Forgive me, Craig, but to use that delightful army expression, both of you are pissing into the wind.
The army will keep you around and squeeze what they can from you, but so far as promotions or meaningful assignments are concerned, forget it."
"Running the rocket chopper program is hardly the same thing as garbage disposal officer," Lowell said, a bit angrily.
"They took that away from you, didn't they? For all practical purposes, they took that away from you." "Something will turn up," Lowell said; and Cynthia saw that he was embarrassed, because of her. "It always has."
"How long have you been a major, Craig?" Toni asked. "Phil has been a captain since September 1950. And he's not even on the major's list!"
"I've been a major as long as Phil has been a captain," Lowell said.
"The two of you make me sick," Toni said. "Why don't you face facts?"
"What's Phil supposed to do, Toni?" Lowell said. "Become the "doctor's husband'? What would I do outside? The army is our life."
"That's why you make me sick," Toni said. She looked at Cynthia. "I'm really sorry you walked into this." "It's all right," Cynthia said.
"The only reason I can talk to Craig this way," Toni said, "is because he knows I love him. He wouldn't take it from somebody else."
"I'll talk to Jiggs," Lowell said. "Maybe something can be done." "I've already talked to him," Toni said, tiredly. "I talked to him ten minutes after Phil dropped his little bomb on me."
"What did he say?" "He said he would look into it. He called me back the next day and said there was nothing that could be done. Whoever Hanrahan wants, Hanrahan gets. He has clout running up to the White House. And we know who that means, don't we? The ACLU must be ecstatic. A Jew in a position to take care of a nigger." "Hey, Toni!" Craig said.
"I didn't mean that," Toni said. "And you know it. I'm just so god damned mad. At Phil. At you. At the god damned army!"
She set her glass down on the sink, knocking it over, and ran from the room.
Lowell looked at Melody Dutton Greer. He made a movement of his head, a suggestion that Melody go after her. Melody handed the baby to Cynthia and left the kitchen.
"Shit!" Lowell said.
Cynthia looked at him. Then she handed him the baby and went after the other women.
(Three) The Pentagon Washington, D.C. 1045 Hours, 20 March 1959
Mrs. Dorothy Washington Thomas, Personnel Officer, GS 15, Deputy Chief of the Special Assignments Branch, Commissioned Personnel Division, Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff, Personnel, Headquarters, Department of the Army, had been an employee of the army since 1945.
The same year, in a night-school class in business law, she met Theron Thomas, who was then employed by Pigglywiggly Supermarkets, Inc." as a stock boy. Mr. Thomas had passed the entrance examination for the Washington, D.C. police force and was waiting for an appointment.
Dorothy Washinguin and Theron Thomas were married in February 1948, in St. Matthew's African Methodist Episcopal Church by the Rev. Jerome Fortin Keyes, D. D." a week after Mr. Thomas had entered upon an appointment as a probationary patrolman on the Metropolitan Police Force.
A couple of years later the Deputy Provost Marshal General of the United States Army personally sought out Mrs. Thomas then assigned to the Office of the Chief of Transportation in the Pentagon to inform her that her husband had been wounded in action in Korea.
Sergeant Thomas had been struck by artillery fragments. He had suffered wounds to the head, the right arm, and the left leg. When Sergeant Thomas was airlifted to the United States, a silver plate had been implanted in his skull; and, while it had been impossible to repair the damage to his left eye, his right eye was intact. He still retained use of his right hand and fingers, although it had been necessary to repair his shattered elbow in such a manner that movement was restricted to thirty percent of normal. I
t had been necessary to surgically remove his left leg at a point three inches above the knee.
Sergeant Theron Thomas was honorably discharged from the U.S. Army in 1952, after having been adjudged to have sustained in the line of duty permanent damage entitling him to a one hundred percent disability pension.
Civil Service Regulations provide that spouses of veterans who are either deceased or disabled in military service are entitled to "veteran's preference," as if they themselves were veterans.
Mrs. Thomas believed that it was her veteran's preference that saw her selected as a "management intern" in an interior management development program established by the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel. She had not then completed her undergraduate work; and management interns, as a general rule of thumb, had to have one or more college degrees before being hired.
Theron Thomas tried to work, but his vision and his mobility were limited; and he suffered headaches, aches in his elbow, and "phantom pain" in the knee and lower leg that had been removed.
He and his wife decided that there was no reason for him to try to work. He had his pension, she had her job, and they didn't really need the money. Theron became the housekeeper and Dorothy the breadwinner.
They built a hbuse just over the district line in Maryland. Having nothing better to do, Theron watched the builders work, and was not at all impressed with the carpenters, the finishers, and the roofers.
Though he could no longer wield a hammer, he knew how one should be wielded. So he backed into the contracting business, which within four years became the Thomas Construction Company.
There was enough money for Dorothy to quit. But she didn't want to quit, and it wasn't only the money. She liked what she was doing, she was good at it, and she thought it was important. She was in charge of people's lives of picking or rejecting them for important assignments.
She privately and proudly believed she was making a bona fide contribution to the national security.
As a GS 15, whenever she traveled to a military base, she was entitled to the same accommodations and privileges as a colonel. She was proud of that, too. She had no intention of giving that up to sit around playing cards or run white elephant sales for the church, she told Theron.
There was no major fight about it. Both Theron and-Dorothy were convinced that they had more to be grateful for than they had to regret.
"Mrs. Thomas asks if you have a minute, General," the secretary to the Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel (DCSPERS) said through the intercom.
"Come on in, Dorothy," he called.
He thought her appearing now was a fortuitous happenstance. The day before he had had an unofficial, out-of-channels request that he had decided he could not ignore. Paul Jiggs had called him from Rucker and asked him to find out unofficially, out of school exactly what there was in the records of one of his captains that had kept him off the major's list.
He had been tempted at the time to tell Jiggs to bug off. Jiggs had no right to get involved. You simply couldn't afford to permit every general to get on the horn to Washington and foul up the smoothly operating system.
The trouble with Jiggs and the reason the DCSPERS had decided not to tell him to please stay within channels was that Jiggs was one of those post commanders thought of as influential. As it had been so aptly phrased by that English writer, "Some pigs are more equal than others."
For years thirty, forty of them-the commanding generals of four posts Fort Benning (infantry), Fort Sill (artillery), Fort Knox (armor), and Fort Bragg (airborne) had been more equal than the commanding generals of, say, Fort Dix, which was a basic training center. It was perfectly clear to DCSPERS that very recently Fort Rucker (aviation) had become important.
The commanding generals of, say, Fort Dix, NJ." or Fort Polk, La."
were responsible to their army commanders and then Continental Army Command. That wasn't true of Benning, Sill, Knox, Bragg, and now Rucker. Their commanders spent at least two days a month in Washington, and while they were nominally under the command of' the army commanders and CO NARC de facto they were not. They worked for DC SOPS and the Vice Chief of Staff; and when they didn't like something, they were all skilled at putting a polite word in the ears of those luminaries.
And they couldn't be stepped on; for the commanders of the combat arms posts had a long tradition of being further and rapidly promoted. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs was once a commander of Sill; the Chief of Staff a commander of Benning; and the incumbent Vice Chief who had once commanded Knox, was about to be replaced by a former commander of Bragg.
Thus the DCSPERS had decided that discretion dictated that he find out what Paul Jiggs wanted to know about that captain of his. The person who had that answer was Mrs. Dorothy W. Thomas, the Deputy Chief, Special Assignments Branch, Commissioned Personnel Division.
Dorothy Thomas gave him an icy smile. She was angry. Her eyes showed it.
"Sit down, Dorothy," the DCSPERS said, with a smile. "Would you like some coffee?"
She deposited a five-inch-thick stack of records on his desk. "Yes, thank you, I would like some coffee," she said. "Then look at this file. You won't believe what you'll read in it."
He glanced at the tab on the file she had laid before him. It was neatly lettered with an officer's name, branch of service, and serial number: PARKER, Philip Sheridan IV, Armor 0 230471.
"We have a problem," Mrs. Thomas said. "We have to figure out how to right the wrong done to this officer."
"I see," the DCSPERS said. He opened the top file. There was a 4 x 5 inch color photograph of the officer whose record it was. Captain Philip Sheridan Parker IV was a Negro. Mrs. Thomas was obviously as mad as a wet hornet, and that could mean that whatever was wrong had racial overtones.
"How has Captain Parker been wronged?" the DCSPERS asked.
She looked at him a moment, and then nodded her head.
"The officer in question is regular army," she said. "Norwich. He was promoted to captain under AR 615 399, after having performed satisfactorily in a higher grade in combat, the exigencies of the service having required such service. His promotion was justified by subparagraphs (a) and (b): (a) stipulates that such performance of duties be for any period of time dunng combat for which the promoted officer was decorated for valor and/or personally observed by a general officer; (b) stipulates that such assumption of brevet rank or command be over a period of no less than ninety days, at least forty-five of which were in combat. In other words, he got an unquestionably legal battlefield promotion in Korea. Subsequently he went to aviation, where he has been until now. He has just been selected, after volunteering, for Special Forces. At the moment, he's at Benning, going to jump school."
"What's his date of rank?"
"September 1950."
"That's more than eight years ago," the DCSPERS said.
"He was court-martialed in Korea," Mrs. Thomas said. "And acquitted."
"What for?"
She didn't reply to the question. Instead, she said, "When an officer is acquitted by a court-martial, all references to that court-martial must be expunged from his record. There is no indication on his record that he was ever court-martialed," she said.
"Then how do you know?" "I took the time and trouble to find out," she said. "You can tell when a new service record has been made up. He was tried for murder, two counts, and acquitted."
"I see," the DCSPERS said.
"He has subsequently been rated quarterly and annually. He has never been in trouble of any kind since; and his efficiency ratings generally place him in the
"Excellent' to
"Outstanding' categories. I would not have been surprised to see that he had been on the five percent list in any of the past three years." (Promotion boards are given a specific number of officers to promote from a pool of officers eligible by virtue of their having completed a specified period of service, a specified period of time in grade, requisite formal schools, and other qualifications. Provision is also mad
e, however, for the promotion of no more than five percent of the total officers to be promoted "outside the zone of consideration." These officers are those not meeting the established criteria, but who have nevertheless demonstrated unusual talent meriting their promotion. Officers so promoted are said to have been promoted "on the five percent list.")
"Why hasn't he been?" the DCSPERS asked.
"Because, at the time the charges were made against him, his records were flagged to delay any personnel actions, advantageous or detrimental, until the resolution of the charges made against him."
"That's standard procedure," the DCSPERS said.
"The flags were never taken off, General," Mrs. Thomas said. "This officer has not been promoted because his records were never sent before a promotion board."
W E B Griffin - BoW 04 - The Colonels Page 36