The Berets

by W. E. B Griffin

  Felter had come to believe that Kennedy hoped that he could solve the problem of Indochina with unconventional forces rather than getting involved in an all-out war. He suspected that this had a good deal to do with McNamara’s ordering the army to come up with a proposal for an air-mobile division.

  Felter did not believe that ten times as many Green Berets as were proposed, nor a dozen divisions, air-mobile or otherwise, would be of much use in Vietnam unless the decision were made to carry the war to Hanoi and, if necessary, to Peking.

  But his opinions had not been sought, and he knew they would not be listened to if he offered them.

  (Three)

  Ward 3-B-14

  Station Hospital

  Fort Bragg, North Carolina

  0930 Hours, 30 January 1962

  The candy-striper was carrying a foil-wrapped flower pot. She went to the nurse’s station.

  “Lieutenant Ellis?” she asked when she finally had the nurse’s attention.

  The nurse looked at her in surprise.

  “Flowers for Lieutenant Ellis,” the candy-striper repeated.

  “He can’t have anything in there,” the nurse said.

  “Not even flowers?” a tall, sharp featured black woman asked. She was wearing a medical smock to which was pinned a name tag reading ANTOINETTE PARKER, M.D., CHIEF, PATHOLOGICAL SERVICES.

  “He’s under arrest, Doctor,” the nurse said.

  “What’s that got to do with flowers? You think she’s got a file in among the roses?”

  “I don’t have the authority to pass anything in there,” the nurse said.

  “I think I do,” Dr. Parker said. “Go ahead, honey, he’s in 307, last door on the left.”

  “Doctor, I wish you’d put that you authorized that in writing,” the nurse said.

  “Sure,” Dr. Parker said. “Why not?”

  She took Tom Ellis’s chart, which she had just put in the rack, opened the aluminum cover, and wrote “Delivery of flowers authorized. A. Parker, M.D., 0935 hours, 30 Jan.” She showed it to the nurse and put the chart back in the case.

  Tom Ellis was sick and uncomfortable. Flying halfway around the world with open wounds, a fever, and an infection that was not under control had been both insane and debilitating. His foot and calf were swollen, inflamed, and painful, and they weren’t going to get much better anytime soon. He was subject to periodic sweats and chills, and they weren’t exactly sure what were causing them, although infection and any number of odd Asiatic viruses were under consideration. He had intravenous systems in both arms, one feeding him antibiotics, the other feeding a saline solution in case something unexpected should happen to him. His electrocardiogram had shown certain irregularities. As a precaution, to rest his heart, they were feeding him oxygen through his nostrils. First thing that morning, they had given him a barium enema and subjected him to a painful and humiliating X-ray examination of his entrails.

  Flowers, Dr. Parker decided professionally, and especially flowers delivered by a pretty young girl, were not contraindicated.

  Dr. Parker was looking at her watch impatiently when an air force captain came to the nurse’s station. She had hoped to see a bone-and-muscle guy and at least one of the four internal medicine guys who were working on Tom, to get their prognosis. But none of them were with him, and she had to get back to her lab.

  “Flowers for Lieutenant Ellis,” the air force captain said.

  “Popular devil, isn’t he?” Toni quipped, smiling sweetly at the nurse.

  “Very popular, Doctor,” the air force captain said. “With friends in high places.”

  “Oh?”

  He pointed to the green stick in the pot of flowers. There were two pieces of paper wired to it. One read, “Capitol Florist, 13th and M N.W., Washington, D.C.,” and the other was a small white envelope with gold embossing: THE WHITE HOUSE, Washington.

  “Really?” the nurse squealed.

  “Delivered to the plane by limo just before we took off to come down here,” the captain said. “Where is he?”

  “Right this way, Captain,” Dr. Parker said. “I’ll show you myself.”

  When she pushed the door to 307 open, a young woman who was not the candy-striper was in Lieutenant Ellis’s room. He was still on his back, with the oxygen pipes in his nostrils, and the intravenous devices in each arm. The girl was sitting on the bed beside him, tenderly mopping his forehead with a washcloth. She had been crying, and her mascara had run, and her lipstick was mussed. There was lipstick on Tom Ellis’s forehead and cheeks and mouth, and it looked as if he, too, had been crying.

  “Miss Eaglebury, I presume?” Dr. Parker said. “General Hanrahan told me he thought you might drop by.”

  (Four)

  Office of the Commanding General

  U.S. Army Special Warfare School and Center

  Fort Bragg, North Carolina

  1245 Hours, 30 January 1962

  Sergeant Major Taylor entered the office without knocking and closed the door after him.

  “There’s a gentleman from the CIA outside, General,” he said. “I told him you were busy, but he insists.”

  General Hanrahan looked at Lieutenant Colonel Felter, who shrugged his shoulders.

  “Ask him to come in, Taylor, please,” Hanrahan said.

  A man of about thirty walked briskly into the room. He wore a gray flannel suit, a white button-down—collar shirt, a red-striped necktie, and highly polished plain-toed cordovan shoes. He carried an expensive camel-hair overcoat over his arm and held a snap-brimmed hat in his hand. He looked, Sandy Felter thought, as if he were a bright and successful young stockbroker.

  “General Hanrahan?” he said, extending a leather folder. “Thank you for letting me interrupt.”

  He didn’t give Hanrahan what Hanrahan considered a long enough look at his credentials, and Hanrahan asked, “May I see that again, please?”

  With visible impatience the credentials were returned to Hanrahan. The CIA man looked at Felter.

  “Colonel, I don’t mean to run you off, but I’ll have to see General Hanrahan in private.”

  “I didn’t catch your name,” Felter said.

  “I didn’t give my name,” the CIA man said.

  “J. Croom Winston the Third,” Hanrahan read from the credentials, earning him a look of displeasure from J. Croom Winston III.

  “Colonel Felter,” Hanrahan went on, “is authorized access to anything here, Mr. Winston.”

  “I’m afraid I must be the judge of that,” Winston said. “Would you excuse us, Colonel?”

  “Certainly,” Felter said. He got up and walked out of the office and closed the door behind him.

  “Was it all right, my coming in there?” Sergeant Major Taylor asked.

  “How could you resist?” Felter asked. “Is there a scrambler phone around here?”

  Taylor reached in the neck of his fatigue shirt and came out with his dog-tag chain. This held three keys in addition to his dog tags. He unlocked a steel credenza, took a telephone from it, and set it on top of the credenza.

  “How does it work?” Felter asked, going to it.

  “You tell the operator. You need a scrambler access authority code.”

  “Will mine work?”

  “If it doesn’t, I’ll give you ours,” Taylor said.

  Felter nodded and dialed O.

  “Able One-Nine Willy,” he said. “Get me a military liaison at the CIA in McLean.”

  There was a pause as the operator checked the access code.

  “One moment, sir.”

  There followed a series of buzzes and clicks.

  “Military liaison, Martindale.”

  “You have an incoming, sir. Would you please engage your scrambler?”

  “Engaged,” the man said again in a moment.

  “Go ahead, please; signal when finished. I am going off the line at this time.”

  “Sandy Felter, Marty,” Felter said.

  “What can we do for the White H
ouse?”

  “Does the name J. Croom Winston the Third mean anything to you?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He’s got credentials, and he’s waving them around to Paul Hanrahan. Find out who he is, will you?”

  “Hang on. You seem annoyed.”

  “I am.”

  There was a ninety-second wait.

  “He works out of Southeast Region, for the East German desk.”

  “Who’s got the East German desk?”

  “Hoare.”

  “Which would be quicker, you calling Hoare there, or me breaking this down and starting from scratch?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “What he wants from Hanrahan, why, and who authorized it.”

  “Quickest is me walking down the hall and getting Hoare.”

  “Would you, please, Marty?”

  There was another ninety-second wait.

  “Joe Hoare, Sandy. What can I do for you?”

  “You have an arrogant young man named J. Croom Winston the Third working for you, Joe?”

  “I suppose, on balance, that is a reasonable description. I gather he’s annoyed you somehow? How?”

  “He just ran me out of Paul Hanrahan’s office,” Felter said. “Hanrahan told him I was cleared, but he announced he would be the judge of that. Is something going on that I don’t know about?”

  “I would be very surprised, Sandy, if anything went on anywhere that you didn’t know about,” Joe Hoare said. “Give me a minute to check to make sure, but I don’t think Hoare has been assigned anything important.”

  “I’ll wait,” Felter said. “Thank you, Joe.”

  “Sandy, what he’s doing down there is looking for a man named Karl-Heinz Wagner. Do you remember the East German Pioneer lieutenant who came through the wall in a truck?”

  “No,” Felter said.

  “Well, this guy did and made it to the States, enlisted, and joined the Berets. We’re still digging tunnels over there, and the action officer came up with this Wagner’s name, and he wants to search his brain. He knows something about the other side, or the action officer hopes he does. Winston was sent down there to talk to him and, if he appears to have any information of importance, to ask the army if they can borrow him for a month or six weeks.”

  “That’s all?” Felter asked incredulously.

  “Yeah. You thought there was more?”

  “The close working relationship everyone hopes can be maintained between the company and the army is not going to be helped at all, Joe, if you don’t train your people to recognize the difference between a routine matter and something important.”

  “You are annoyed, aren’t you, Sandy?”

  “Or,” Felter went on coldly, “if you permit them the misconception that because they have been hired and given a piece of plastic with their picture on it, that they have the authority to order sergeants major, much less general officers, around like clerks.”

  There was a pause before Hoare replied.

  “I take your point, Sandy. Is he around there somewhere?”

  “He’s in with Hanrahan.”

  “Would you please call him to the phone?”

  “I’m sure you understand that my concern is not solely with this young man,” Felter said.

  He covered the microphone with his hand. “Sergeant Major, would you please tell Mr. J. Croom Winston the Third that Mr. Joseph Hoare hopes he can be torn away from his duties to chat a moment on the telephone?”

  “It would be my very great pleasure, Colonel Felter, sir,” Taylor said.

  He went to Hanrahan’s door, knocked with his knuckles, and went immediately in.

  “Mr. Winston has a telephone call, General,” he said.

  “That’s a bit odd,” J. Croom Winston said to General Hanrahan. “It must be important if they called me here.”

  He followed Sergeant Major Taylor out of Hanrahan’s office.

  “Is that line secure?” he asked the small, balding Jewish lieutenant colonel who held a telephone out to him.

  “It’s a scrambler line,” Felter said.

  “I’d like to take this in private, if you don’t mind,” Winston said. “I’m sure you understand.”

  “Perfectly,” Felter said. “Would you come with me, please, Sergeant Major?”

  They went into General Hanrahan’s office and closed the door.

  “Winston here,” he said to the telephone.

  “Joseph Hoare, Winston.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Winston, there are half a dozen people who are put right through to the director when they call here.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “You have just made an ass of yourself, and thus of me, in front of one of them.”

  “Sir?”

  “Your superiors will, I am sure, discuss this at greater length with you, but for the moment, all you have to know is that the lieutenant colonel you ordered from General Hanrahan’s office is the President’s personal representative to the intelligence community. He holds the opinion that you are an arrogant ass whose delusions of self-importance threaten the working relationship between the Company and the army. The only tiny sliver of silver in this black cloud is that he chose to telephone me and not the director.”

  While J. Croom Winston III was trying to frame a reply, the telephone clicked twice and Joseph Hoare said, “Break this down.”

  And then there was only the hiss of the carrier on the line.

  (Five)

  Known Distance Range Three

  Camp McCall, North Carolina

  1340 Hours, 30 January 1962

  The range had changed a great deal from the time when thousands of basic trainees had fired Garand rifles at bull’s-eye targets in World War II. The butts had been eroded by rain and time, and the target frames had long ago disintegrated. The area between the firing line and the butts at two hundred, three hundred, and five hundred yards was now crisscrossed with gulleys and grown heavily with weeds and trees, some dead, some cut off by bullets, and some miraculously intact. More than a dozen hulks of trucks, passenger cars, tanks, and armored personnel carriers, rusty and bullet-pocked, were scattered between what had been the firing line and the butts. There were bunkers, machine-gun emplacements, fox holes, and explosive-charge craters.

  Despite the appearance of neglect and disarray, however, what had been Known Distance Range Three was in fact a carefully thought-out practical firing range. At some time during their Camp McCall training, Special Forces trainees, two at a time, in the buddy system, accompanied by an instructor, fired the course three times. They fired one course (M-14 rifle, grenade launcher, and M-60 machine gun) and then set up the range for the next firer.

  Steel targets, outlines of torsos (in some cases, just of heads), were set up in the cabs of the trucks, where gunners would be in machine-gun emplacements, in bunkers, and in tank hatches. The targets would fall down when struck. The object of the exercise was to knock down all the targets with the ammunition provided, and to pass through the course in a specified period of time.

  The instructor walked behind the trainees as they took one of five paths, chosen at random by him, making sure the steel targets of opportunity were struck. It was necessary to hit each target before moving on to the next. If the trainee ran out of ammunition before all the targets were struck, it was necessary for him to fire the course again, the next time during normal training hours, and the second and subsequent courses on Sunday, which was the only day the trainees were given off from training.

  Private Geoffrey Craig had fired his first course and was reasonably sure that he could learn enough of it on his first (failing) run through so that he would possibly even be able to pass his second run, and more than likely pass it on his first Sunday excursion.

  The first run was with the M-14 rifle. He had carried a double twenty-round magazine in the rifle and four more double magazines in pouches on his web harness. When that ammunition was exhausted, he
would swap the empty magazines for full ones carried by his buddy, Private Karl-Heinz Wagner, for that purpose. He had been alarmed at how quickly he had exhausted his first two hundred rounds of ammunition, and he vowed to expend the second two-hundred-round supply with far greater care.

  And then he had turned to the instructor for instruction, certain that with the hearing-protector ear sets in place that he had missed the instructor’s right or left command.

  The instructor signaled for him to remove the bright green ear protectors and then paid Private Geoffrey Craig the nicest compliment he could ever recall having been paid: “For a candy-ass, Craig, you’re not a bad shot.”

  “That’s it?” he had asked, in genuine surprise.

  “That’s it,” the instructor said. “Clear the piece and hand me the magazine. I want to count the rounds.”

  Private Craig had then learned there was a more or less voluntary pool in effect. Everybody theoretically contributed to the pool a nickel for every round issued (four hundred rounds equaled twenty dollars) and was given a theoretical rebate of a nickel per round for every round left over when the course had been successfully completed. If you didn’t have any rounds left over, no rebate. Craig had 106 rounds left over, and thus would be required to contribute “voluntarily” only $14.70 to the pool.

  When all the trainees had successfully completed the rifle course (and the grenade launcher and machine-gun courses, which had different but similar rules, each requiring a maximum contribution of twenty dollars, less rebate) the money in the pool would be awarded to the three best (less expended ammo) shots on a ratio of 50:30:20.

  It had been more or less tactfully mentioned that there was no reason the trainees could not afford the pool, since they were all, even Candy-Ass Craig, on parachutist’s pay, and especially since the winners would almost certainly be happy to contribute half of their winnings to pay for a beer bust.

  To Private Geoffrey Craig’s genuine surprise and immense delight, he was the second best shot with the M-14, the best shot with the grenade launcher, and if luck was with him now and he didn’t blow it, he was going to take the machine-gun course.