Lowell saw that the jump master had similarly seen that he was afraid. He was now at arm’s length from his side of the door, stretching out his hand toward Lowell.
What the hell, if I screw things up and they have to abort the jump or something, I’ll never hear the end of it from Hanrahan and MacMillan.
With considerable willpower, he loosened the viselike grip he had on the frame and put his hand in Lieutenant Wood’s. He moved very carefully toward the center of the door, his other arm outstretched toward that of the jump master.
He finally reached it and grasped it as firmly as he could.
Whereupon the jump master and Lieutenant Wood let go of the aircraft frame, moved quickly to Lieutenant Colonel Lowell, lifted him off his feet with all the skill of longtime bouncers evicting an undesirable customer, and, carrying him backward between them, trotted the eight feet to the edge of the horizontal door and jumped off.
XV
(One)
The Officer’s Open Mess
Fort Bragg, North Carolina
1830 Hours, 2 March 1962
As he walked through the main door of the open mess, a graceful old building that always reminded him of the Winged Foot Country Club, Lowell was stopped by an officious club officer, a captain, who asked if he could help him.
“Thanks, I know where the bar is.”
“You are a member?”
“I’m on TDY here.”
“The dress code requires a necktie, sir.”
Lowell was wearing a dark green blazer, flannel slacks, a soft plaid shirt, and had a British civilian trenchcoat over his shoulders. There was an ascot around his neck.
He found nothing at all wrong with the way he was dressed.
“It’s all I have,” Lowell said simply.
“Then I’ll have to ask you to leave, sir.”
“You’re neither senior enough nor large enough, Captain, to throw me out,” Lowell said.
“Then I should have to inform your commanding officer, sir,” the captain said. “May I please see your identification?”
Lowell handed him a calling card.
“I’m on TDY to the Special Warfare Center,” he said. “My commanding officer is Brigadier General Hanrahan.”
The captain wrote Lowell’s name in a notebook. Lowell had the feeling the club officer disapproved of Brigadier General Hanrahan and correctly suspected that Hanrahan would ignore this notice of his flagrant disregard of prescribed sartorial standards.
Barbara Gillis, in uniform, was sitting at the bar.
“We’re going to have to stop meeting this way,” Lowell said when he walked up to her. “A man can ruin his reputation going out with soldiers.”
The bartender raised his eyebrows. He had taken Lowell at his word. In his expensive civilian clothing, with ascot, Lieutenant Colonel Lowell looked more like a civilian than he did a soldier in civvies.
“God!” Barbara Gillis said.
“If you promise to be good and not to try to take advantage of me, I will have one teensy-weensy little drink,” Lowell said. He looked at the bartender. “Wave the neck of a vermouth bottle over a large glass of gin,” he said. “And then serve it over ice.”
The bartender nodded and walked away.
“Why do I feel he disapproves of me?” Lowell said. “You’re a shrink—tell me.”
“Do you drink martinis all the time?” she asked.
“Only after I have been mugged,” he said.
“I have the strangest feeling that’s close to the truth,” she said. “You look strange. Were you really mugged?”
“Twice,” he said. “Once just now, and once earlier by friends.”
Her eyebrows went up in question. Beautiful eyes, he thought.
“There I was,” he said as the drink was delivered, “minding my own business, trying to mind my own business, when I was brutally assaulted and thrown out the door.”
“What door?”
“The back door of a C-130,” he said. “It was a long fall.”
“I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about. Are you drunk?”
“Not yet,” he said cheerfully. He raised the martini to his lips and took a healthy swallow. “Not quite enough gin,” he said, “but it will do.”
“Start all over again,” Barbara Gillis said.
“It’s too painful to think about,” he said. “You should understand that.”
She shook her head.
“I don’t suppose you have anything lethal in your purse, do you, Doc?” he asked quickly.
“Now what?” Barbara asked.
“Failing strychnine or something really good, how about a good laxative? Something that works infallibly and instantly?”
“Maybe you do need my professional services,” Barbara said.
“Among the other things that have gone wrong today, my plans to get you alone and ply you with spirits to overcome your maidenly inhibitions have gone awry,” Lowell said. “The gorilla making his way toward us is an old friend of mine who said that he had to ‘talk to me in private.’ I didn’t know how to tell him no.”
“Good evening, sir,” Warrant Officer Stephan Wojinski said. He was wearing a shirt and tie and a multi-hued plaid sport coat. He was accompanied by a tall, sharp-faced woman with a beehive hairdo, in a slinky black dress cut low enough to reveal a spectacular freckled bosom and the black undergarments that kept it more or less restrained. She looked more than a little ill at ease.
“Hello, Ski,” Lowell said warmly, shaking his hand. “Captain Gillis, may I present Warrant Officer and Mrs. Wojinski? Ski is one of my oldest and best friends.”
Mrs. Wojinski, Barbara thought, seemed almost pathetically pleased at the way Lowell had described her husband.
“Mrs. Wojinski, on the other hand,” Lowell went on, “thinks I am a bad influence on her husband. Before he met me, she says, he was a tea-totaler.”
“Like hell he was,” Mrs. Wojinski said. “I never said nothing like that.”
“Speaking of drinks,” Ski said, and turned to the bartender, “Nelson, bring the colonel and his lady another round of whatever it is they’re having, and me and the missus a couple of CC’s and Cokes.”
“Whoa!” Lowell said. “One double martini is enough. When I finish this, I’ll have a Scotch. And put whatever poison you happen to have handy in Mr. Wojinski’s drink. Anything, so long as it’s either lethal or will make him very sick.”
“I didn’t have nothing to do with that, Duke,” Wojinski said, very seriously. “So help me Christ! I guess they figured I’d tell you.”
“Is somebody going to tell me what all this is about?” Barbara Gillis asked.
“They threw the colonel out of a C-130,” Mrs. Wojinski said, matter-of-factly.
“Actually, they carried me out,” Lowell said.
“They did what?” Barbara asked.
“They tricked him into getting suited up,” Ski said. “And then they took him to thirty-thousand feet and jumped out with him.”
Barbara saw that Wojinski thought this was funny and was making a valiant effort not to show it.
“Whatever for?” Barbara asked. And then she thought of another question, and asked it before there could be a reply. “Thirty-thousand feet? You can’t live without oxygen at that altitude.”
“They gave me oxygen,” Lowell said. “They thought of everything.”
“Yeah,” Ski said, laughing, “they did that.”
Lowell gave him a dirty look.
“No wonder you wanted a double martini,” Barbara said.
“Enough of this idle conversation,” Lowell said. “What’s on your mind, Ski?”
Warrant Officer and Mrs. Wojinski both looked uncomfortable.
“The bar isn’t really the place for it,” Ski said finally.
“Well, I would suggest the dining room,” Lowell said. “But that pompous little sonofabitch at the door is the assistant club officer, and I’ll give you three to five that he’s w
aiting to tell me he’s checked with higher authority and I can’t come in with my ascot.”
“What’s an ascot?” Mrs. Wojinski asked.
“That thing around his neck,” Ski explained.
“Oh,” she said. “I always wondered what they called those.”
“Is that lobster place in Fayetteville still open?” Lowell asked.
“Yeah, but it’s expensive as hell,” Ski said.
“Lobster all right with you, Barbara?” Lowell asked.
“I didn’t even know there was a place to get lobster,” she said. “I’ll pay. Just take me there.”
“No,” Ski said immediately, flatly. “My treat. Ain’t every day somebody gets to be an instant paratrooper.”
“If that’s the case,” Lowell said, “you can split it between you, and we’ll all have two lobsters.”
Halfway to Fayetteville in the Wojinskis’ Oldsmobile station wagon, Mrs. Wojinski, who to Lowell’s annoyance had insisted “the ladies” ride in back together, pushed herself forward on the seat.
“This is as good a place as any,” she said. “And I suppose that the captain, being a doctor, isn’t going to be all that shocked.”
“Go right ahead,” Dr. Barbara Gillis said. “I’m unshockable. And please call me Barbara.”
“Colonel, your cousin is fooling around,” Mrs. Wojinski said.
“Is he?” Lowell asked. “With women—a woman, you mean?”
“Before Ski got the warrant, we used to live on Carentan Terrace,” Mrs. Wojinski said, “and we still got friends there, of course. And, well, they thought I should know so I could tell Ski. They told me and I told him, and he said we had better tell you.”
“Tell me what, exactly?”
“That he’s fooling around,” she said.
“With somebody’s wife?”
“With a German girl, sister of a guy named Wagner.”
“Isn’t that their business and nobody else’s?” Lowell asked.
“Ordinarily it would be, Duke,” Ski said. “But there’s two things. First, there was a bunch of wife-swappers over there, and they got caught at it. Hell of a mess. They gave half a dozen couples six hours to get off the post.”
“Geoff is involved with wife-swapping?” Lowell asked. “How did he manage to do that without a wife to swap?”
“Craig,” Barbara said sharply. “God!”
“And there’s also a bunch of Christers over there,” Ski went on. “They got a new Come-to-Jesus chaplain, and he got them all fired up. Real bunch of dingbats. They sent a letter to the post commander complaining that the high school cheerleaders’ dresses were too short, that kind of crap. And after the wife-swapping, they appointed themselves in charge of morals in the NCO housing area. They’re going to turn the kid in.”
“Turn him in for what?”
“For spending his nights in Sergeant Wagner’s quarters,” Mrs. Wojinski said. “He’s not here.”
“Where is he?”
“In Berlin, on TDY,” Ski said.
“Oh,” Lowell said, understanding.
“Once it gets official, the army’s going to have to get moral,” Ski said.
“Okay. I’ll handle it,” Lowell said. “Thanks for letting me know. Do I have to do anything tonight, do you think?”
“Tomorrow, for sure,” Ski said.
“He graduates tomorrow,” Lowell said. “Can you arrange to have him sent to see me, Ski?”
“I already done that,” Ski said.
“In that case, I’ll pay for the lobsters,” Lowell said.
“Can I ask who you’re all talking about?” Barbara Gillis asked.
“The Duke’s cousin,” Ski explained. “He’s in training. We been sort of keeping an eye on him.”
Barbara said what she was thinking: “You people really take care of each other, don’t you?”
“Sure, why not?” Ski said. “I’ve known the Duke a long time. He takes care of me, and I look out for him.”
“How does he take care of you?” she asked.
“I take him on airplane trips to the Caribbean,” Lowell said. “That sort of thing.”
Mrs. Wojinski laughed and snorted. “You damned near got him blown away doing that,” she said.
“Got him promoted, too, don’t forget that,” Lowell said.
“I think I would have rather took the warrant exam,” Ski said.
“You couldn’t pass the warrant exam,” Lowell said. “You have to read and write to take the exam. Face it, Ski, without me, Ski, you’d still be on Carentan Terrace, throwing your house keys on the floor.”
“Well, Jesus, one of them wives was a real looker…” Ski said.
“The both of youse,” Mrs. Wojinski said, “can go to hell.”
In the Lobster House, while they were powdering their noses, Mrs. Wojinski told Captain Gillis that she was the first of “the Duke’s girls” she had ever met.
“He likes you,” she said. “I can tell by the way he looks at you.”
“I’m not one of his ‘girls,’” Barbara said.
“You could do a hell of a lot worse,” Mrs. Wojinski said. “Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it.”
“Because he’s rich?”
“They don’t come no nicer,” Mrs. Wojinski said. “Rich goes on top of that.”
Dr. Antoinette Parker had also discussed Lieutenant Colonel Lowell with Dr. Barbara Gillis.
“As a shark swims through the sea, automatically eating everything that comes his way, Craig paddles around, genetically compelled to copulate with everything female he can get in a horizontal position. Once you understand that, everything else about him falls into place.”
“Then why should I go out with him?”
“Well, for one thing, he’s a very nice guy,” Toni Parker had told her, “and from what I hear, he has received very few bad comments on the postcoital critique.”
“Will he take no for an answer? Or am I going to have to wrestle with him?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think he’s ever been turned down,” Toni said.
“I think I have just been told I have the duty tonight.”
“Oh, I think you should go,” Toni said. “As Oscar Wilde pointed out, Doctor, celibacy is the most unusual of all the perversions.”
“Very funny.”
“And maybe you’re the one,” Toni said. “He was looking at you very strangely last night.”
“What makes you think I would want to be the one?”
“Psychiatrist,” Dr. Parker had laughed, “heal thyself.”
Dr. Gillis was surprised and disappointed when they drove back to the officers’ open mess from Fayetteville. Lowell did not suggest a nightcap, and when he walked her to her car, he didn’t so much as touch her arm.
“I’m glad you were free,” he said. “We’ll do it again sometime.”
The more she thought about it, the more the truth became evident.
She had been examined and found wanting by Duke Lowell.
God damn him, the arrogant bastard!
And then she had another thought.
Maybe the reason he hadn’t tried to get into her pants, or even acted as if that idea had any appeal to him, was that he thought she was different from other women. She had caught him looking at her strangely several times, and she didn’t think that was because she had seaweed from the steamed clams stuck between her teeth.
But if that was the case, why the “We’ll do it again sometime” remark? Sometime was pretty damned vague.
The bottom line in the second line of reasoning was the same as the first: God damn him, the arrogant bastard!
There was only way, Dr. Barbara Gillis decided, to handle Lieutenant Colonel Craig W. Lowell. When he called—if he called—she would have other plans.
(Two)
Office of the Commanding General
U.S. Army Special Warfare School and Center
1040 Hours, 3 March 1962
“Come in, Craig,” General H
anrahan said. “Sit down on the couch beside Mac.”
Lowell went to the couch and sat down beside MacMillan on the couch. There were two green berets on the couch, both with the silver leaf of a lieutenant colonel pinned to the flash. A set of silver paratrooper wings, pinned to a piece of cardboard, sat on top of one of the berets.
“You seem extraordinarily quiet, Craig,” Hanrahan said.
“I’ve been had,” Lowell said. “With great skill and obviously after a good deal of careful planning. What is there to say?”
“While there are humorous elements, you’ll notice we are not smiling, nor do either of us intend to crack wise about what you did,” Hanrahan said.
“What was done to me,” Lowell corrected him, and then the anger took over. “I hope you don’t really think I’m going to pin those wings on me, much less wear that absurd hat.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Craig,” Hanrahan said seriously.
“Getting thrown out of an airplane does not a paratrooper make,” Lowell said.
“Sometimes it does,” Hanrahan said.
Lowell looked at him with his eyebrows raised but said nothing.
“Tell him, Mac,” Hanrahan said.
“I don’t understand the point of all this,” Lowell said.
“Tell him, Mac,” Hanrahan repeated.
“I had to throw Paul out his first time,” MacMillan said reluctantly.
“What?” Lowell asked. Brigadier General Paul T. Hanrahan’s parachutist’s wings carried two stars for two combat jumps into German-occupied Greece during World War II. He and MacMillan had become paratroopers when the Eighty-second Airborne Division was still the Eighty-second Infantry Division, and the entire airborne forces of the United States Army had been two test companies.
“I said he froze in the door the first time, and I had to pry him loose and throw him out,” MacMillan said. “For Christ’s sake, don’t make any smart-ass remarks about it.”
“And with all the imaginative devices that come to someone who is afraid, I have been putting off making my own first HALO,” Hanrahan said. “So you’re one up on me, Craig. You’ve made yours.”
Hanrahan was obviously telling the truth.
“I was thrown out,” Lowell repeated.
“You made the jump,” Hanrahan said. “After a special course of instruction conducted by the former assistant HALO project officer, you made a HALO descent by parachute. You are on TDY orders here. We will cut special orders stating that you are now HALO-qualified and that, in consideration of your previous experience commanding indigenous troops in combat, you have been certified as Special Forces-qualified.”
The Berets Page 42