The Berets

by W. E. B Griffin

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that, Paul,” Lowell said.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way, but it’s too late,” Hanrahan said. “The orders have been cut.”

  “I keep asking why,” Lowell said.

  “There are a number of reasons, some of them selfish, and some of them accruing to your advantage.”

  “My advantage? A lot of people are going to get a big laugh out of this.”

  “I just got off the horn from Jack Holson,” Hanrahan said. “I led him to believe that once it had been explained to you, you were so enthusiastic about HALO that you insisted on getting qualified. He seemed quite pleased. In fact, General Holson offered the opinion that under your layer of smart-ass, you’ve always been a pretty good officer.”

  “There’s a layer of dishonesty in all this,” Lowell said.

  “Let’s say ‘irregularity,’” Hanrahan said. “To reiterate, you did make the jump. And the element of irregularity is nothing compared to the way I understand you got your first commission, or the irregularity with which Paul Jiggs elected to give you command of Task Force Lowell. Irregularities are sometimes necessary for the good of the service.”

  “And how is this going to be for ‘the good of the service’?”

  “Craig, you if anyone should understand what we’re trying to do here. You should not be standing on the sidelines, making cracks about the berets. You should know better, damn it.”

  Lowell did not respond.

  “The first obligation of an officer is to defend his country,” Hanrahan said. “His second obligation is to keep his men alive while doing so. You tell me anyone in the army who is more dedicated to that than we are. My selfish reason for all this is that you are presently in a position with your mouth close to the ear of the Secretary of Defense. I had hoped that doing this would make you remember that you had once been one of us, that we still think of you as one of us, and that you would represent our interests accordingly. Apparently, I was wrong.”

  Lowell stood up. He looked at General Hanrahan. Then he bent over the table and picked up the green beret and walked to the mirror on the back of General Hanrahan’s door and put it on.

  “Now that I’m a Green Beret, I presume I am permitted to kick in the balls anybody who laughs at me wearing this?”

  “We expect it of you, Colonel,” MacMillan said, then stood up and went to him and pinned the parachutist’s wings to his tunic pocket.

  (Three)

  Apartment 2-C, Building Q-404

  14 Carentan Terrace

  NCO Housing Area

  Fort Bragg, North Carolina

  1045 Hours, 3 March 1962

  Ursula Wagner came out of the bathroom wearing a pair of pants labeled SATURDAY and nothing else. Geoffrey Craig, who was lying in the bed naked under the sheet, had several thoughts. He first wondered idly if it was coincidence or Teutonic orderliness that had her wearing Saturday’s pants on Saturday. Then he wondered if her odd modesty was Germanic or a personal quirk. She seldom took her pants off where he could see her without them. On the other hand, possibly because she had the most marvelous set of boobs he had ever seen in his life, she had from the first been wholly unconcerned with her nakedness above the waist.

  “I have something to tell you,” Geoffrey Craig said.

  “Tell me after you get dressed,” she said. She went to the closet door. On a hanger on the doorknob was his freshly pressed class “A” uniform. It had on it the Special Forces insignia and the three stripes of a sergeant. She lay it on the bed.

  Last night he had lay in the bed and watched her sew the patch and the insignia on. His emotions had been ambivalent. It was a touching, tender scene of the woman doing for her man. He had also been able to see her breasts under her bathrobe, which had given him an enormous erection.

  “You have marvelous teats,” he said to her.

  She shook her head in exasperation.

  “Get dressed,” she ordered. “You can’t be late.”

  “I’m rich,” he said.

  “Get dressed,” she repeated.

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  “I’m rich too,” she said. “I am very happy, and I am rich too.”

  “I mean rich rich,” he said. “Money-type rich.”

  She looked at him strangely.

  “Which means, among other things, that you can go with me to Belvoir,” he said. “I think it would be better if we got married before we went, or as soon as we get there, but your argument that we can’t afford it is now invalid.”

  “What are you saying?” she asked, concern in her voice.

  “Let me put it this way,” he said. “My income from the trust funds I have now, which does not include, of course, the trust funds I will come into possession of at age twenty-five, gives me an income that is at least as large as what the post commander is paid.”

  “You do not fool me?” Ursula asked.

  “I do not fool you,” he said.

  “Oh, mein Gott!” she said tragically.

  “It’s not a social disease,” he said. “Why does it make you unhappy?”

  “That is why you never talk about your family,” she accused.

  “No, it isn’t,” he said.

  “Yes, it is,” she accused. “And you have been talking of marriage!”

  “That’s exactly what I am talking about,” he said.

  “And what will your family say when they hear you want to marry somebody like me? Oh, damn you, Geoffrey!”

  “Actually,” he said, “I was thinking the best way to handle that is with a fait accompli. ‘Hi, there, Dad. Say hello to my wife.’”

  “And he would think, and your mother would think, that I am some cheap foreigner who has married you for their money.”

  “No they wouldn’t,” he said, although he considered that a very likely possibility. “And it’s my money, not theirs. And besides, you wouldn’t be the first kraut in the family.”

  “‘Kraut,’” she quoted bitterly. “You see!”

  “The second German lady,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “My cousin Craig, the one who’s a colonel, was married to a German woman,” Geoffrey said. “She was killed in an automobile accident a long time ago.”

  “He’s an officer, he married a German lady,” Ursula said. “He would think what your mother and father would think.”

  “Well, we’ll find out soon enough,” Geoffrey said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I am not to ‘run away’ after the parade. Tourtillot said that a ‘Colonel Lowell’ wants to see me.”

  “I am not going,” she said.

  “You’ll go if I have to carry you over my shoulder,” he said.

  “I don’t want to go,” Ursula said, tears in her eyes.

  “There’s only one thing you have to make up your mind about,” he said. “Do you love me or don’t you?”

  She looked at him and sobbed.

  “Do you or not?”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Yes or no, goddamn it, Ursula!”

  “Yes. You know that, yes.”

  “Well, in that case, it’s you and me, sweetheart. Fuck everybody else, including my parents, Staff Sergeant Karl-Heinz Wagner and Colonel Craig W. Lowell.”

  (Four)

  It wasn’t much of a reviewing stand, but then, it didn’t get much use, and there weren’t all that many Green Beret graduation ceremonies.

  The usual procedure was for the graduating class to march onto the parade ground (normally the athletic field) and then, on command, to file onto the reviewing stand, where they shook hands with the commanding general. He congratulated them by name. They took two more steps, and in a complicated (and thus previously rehearsed) maneuver, they shook the right hand of the Deputy Commandant for Special Projects while simultaneously reaching out with the left for the diploma. They then reformed where they had been.

  When they
had all reformed, Sergeant Major Taylor would give the command to “Discard hats,” the hats would be thrown into the air, green berets would be put on, and the formation would be over.

  This was the end of the first phase of training. Unless they were already qualified, the graduates would next be trained in a specific MOS and then cross-trained in a second MOS. Every member of an “A” Team had to have two MOSs. During the period between this graduation and the final graduation (which was most often unmarked by ceremony), when they had become fully qualified, the trainees could wear the green beret, but not the flash sewn to it by fully qualified Green Berets.

  This graduation, however, marked the end of the chickenshit. Once they had graduated from John Wayne High, as Camp McCall was somewhat irreverently called, they were considered to have proven themselves extraordinarily well qualified in basic soldierly skills. In further training, from now on, they would be treated as responsible noncommissioned officers.

  The ceremony went less smoothly today than it usually did. The strange light bird who was passing out the diplomas instead of Colonel Mac (the light bird had been identified by somebody as “one of the real old-timer Green Berets,” some guy who had been in Greece with Warrant Officer Wojinski and the general even before there was such a thing as the Berets) did not have the simultaneous right-hand-shake, left-hand-here’s-your-diploma routine down pat. He kept dropping the rolled-up diplomas, or in one case jabbing a master Sergeant accidently in the crotch with one.

  Finally, Geoffrey Craig faced the clumsy colonel.

  “Congratulations, Sergeant,” the clumsy colonel said.

  “Thank you, sir,” Sergeant Craig said.

  “Stick around afterward, I want a word with you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sergeant Craig wondered again why he had never seen Cousin Craig wear a beret before, or for that matter jump wings; but he had more important things on his mind. When he came off the little platform, Ursula was not standing where she had been.

  They caught up with her in Geoff’s Volkswagen on the road from Smoke Bomb Hill to the main post and Pope Air Force Base.

  “Honey, get in the car,” Geoff said.

  Ursula shook her head and refused even to look at the car.

  “Fräulein,” Lieutenant Colonel Lowell said in impeccable German, “if you don’t come get in the car, I am going to get out, boot you in the ass, and throw you in the car.”

  She looked at him in shock and anger and a little fear. But he was smiling at her, and she threw her hands up in resignation and got in the car.

  (Five)

  The Tri-Delta House

  Duke University

  Durham, North Carolina

  1320 Hours, 3 March 1962

  Dianne Eaglebury had not felt very hungry, so instead of eating lunch, she had made a quick swoop through the kitchen and returned with two pears and an apple.

  When the army staff car had pulled to the curb outside, she had been sitting on her windowsill, watching the wind move the limbs of the trees in front of the house. She hadn’t paid much attention to the staff car after the driver got out. He was a captain who wore regular shoes (what Tom would have called a “straight-leg”) and a hat with a leather brim and carried a heavy briefcase. There were no parachute wings on his tunic. He was, she concluded, one of the ROTC officers who wanted something from the Tri-Delts. As long as they didn’t try to get her involved, she didn’t give a damn who he was or what he wanted.

  The housemother knocked on her door a minute later.

  “There’s an officer to see you, Dianne.”

  “Who is he?”

  “He said he’s from Fort Bragg,” the housemother said.

  Dianne went down the stairs. The captain was a bookish type, she thought.

  “You wanted to see me?”

  “Miss Dianne Eaglebury?” he asked. She nodded. “I’m Captain LeMoyne from the Office of the Judge Advocate General at Fort Bragg. Is there somewhere we can talk?”

  She didn’t want to take him into the sitting room because she thought she might start crying. She didn’t even trust herself to speak now. She made a waving motion with her hand, signaling him to follow her, and went back up the stairs and to her room.

  She sat on her bed and waved him into the chair by her desk. Then she stood up and went to her dresser and picked up the doll in the short skirt, black panties, and green beret and carried it back to the bed.

  “Miss Eaglebury, I am an army lawyer,” Captain LeMoyne said, “and I have been assigned the job of settling the affairs of the late First Lieutenant Thomas G. Ellis, with whom I believe you were acquainted?”

  “Yes,” Dianne said, surprised at how natural her voice sounded, “we were acquainted.”

  “Shortly before entering upon a Temporary Duty assignment, Miss Eaglebury, the late Lieutenant Ellis prepared a last will and testament, and left it in the custody of the adjutant of the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg. It was ultimately placed in my hands for action. Here is a copy of Lieutenant Ellis’s last will and testament.”

  “Put it on the desk,” Dianne said. “I’ll look at it later.”

  “In his last will and testament, Miss Eaglebury, Lieutenant Ellis identified you as ‘his very good friend’—”

  “‘Very good friend?’”

  “—and left you his entire estate,” Captain LeMoyne concluded. “The estate has now been probated. There is not much, it consists in the main of his personal effects, a stereo and a television, his uniforms, that sort of thing…his pay to the day of his death. But there is a Jaguar automobile. In addition, Lieutenant Ellis named you as beneficiary of his National Service Life Insurance, and I have that check with me, and a check representing his final pay and allowances.”

  Captain LeMoyne did not like Miss Dianne Eaglebury. She obviously did not give much of a damn for the late Lieutenant Ellis. She’d probably given him a little pussy, and now she was going to get about fourteen grand and a Jaguar.

  If she had cared about the late Lieutenant Ellis, Captain LeMoyne decided, she would have shown some emotion, not just sat there on the bed, playing with a vulgar doll and not even looking at him.

  (Six)

  The Oak Room

  The Plaza Hotel

  New York City, New York

  1330 Hours, 3 March 1962

  Porter Craig went from his apartment to the Plaza by taxi. He disliked taxis and for that reason if they stayed in the city over the weekend, he seldom left the apartment to go any farther than the Gristede’s on the corner. There was no help in the apartment over weekends, neither maid, cook, nor chauffeur. It would have taken a half hour or more to get the car from the garage, and then he would have the problem of parking it himself. So he had taken a cab, and it had been just as dirty and battered inside as it had looked when it pulled up in front of the apartment.

  He entered the Oak Room.

  Craig Lowell was staying at the Plaza, possessed of a “lady” he wished Porter to meet and a report on Geoff. If it wasn’t for the report on Geoff, Porter told himself, he would have told Craig Lowell to piss off. If he had something to say to him, he could come to the apartment and say it. But Craig had said that what he had to tell him about Geoff he would rather tell Porter privately and have Porter decide when, how, or if Geoff’s mother should be told.

  So he had come to the Oak Room and was standing by the end of the bar, and Craig Lowell was nowhere in sight.

  Porter decided that patience was the best course. He walked almost all the way across the room to a table by the window in the corner. One of the waiters (he looked German but was doubtless Puerto Rican) came for his order, and Porter decided on a Scotch and water rather than a Bloody Mary. He suspected that what he was going to hear from Craig, coupled with the acid in a Bloody Mary, would give him heartburn.

  Craig Lowell arrived as the Scotch was delivered. He was in civilian clothes, a tweed jacket, and a turtleneck sweater, and if you weren’t supposed to come into t
he Oak Room tieless, that rule had been waived by anyone in a position to throw him out.

  He was holding the hand of a blonde. The blonde was hatless but wearing a mink jacket. As they got closer Porter saw that the blonde was a young blonde, much too young for Craig Lowell. The blonde was spectacular, however, giving credit where credit was due. Craig knew how to pick them. He wondered, unkindly, if the blonde had gotten the mink the way the minks got theirs. Then he realized that was unkind and unfair. Craig Lowell had never had to purchase a woman’s favors with mink coats or jewels.

  Porter Craig stood up as they got to the table.

  “Ursula, this is my Cousin Porter,” Lowell said. “How are you, Chubby?”

  “Hello,” said Ursula, smiling shyly at Porter Craig. She gave him her hand. There was a diamond ring on it, emerald cut, maybe three carats, and on the third finger, left hand. An engagement ring.

  “I’m happy to meet you,” Porter said, “lovely ring.”

  “Isn’t it?” Craig Lowell said. “It’s new. Bought this morning.”

  “This morning? How did you do that? It’s Sunday.”

  “There was a little card in the window of Van Cleef’s,” Lowell said, matter-of-factly, “giving a number to call in case of emergency. This was an emergency, so I called and gave them your name.”

  “And they opened the store for you?”

  “No, but they did send a charming little pansy to the hotel with a briefcase full of rings. This one doesn’t quite fit, but they said they’d shrink it for Ursula on Monday.”

  “Congratulations are in order, I gather?” Porter Craig said.

  “I would say so, yes,” Craig said. “I didn’t know how you were going to feel about this.”

  The waiter appeared.

  “Scotch for me,” Lowell said to the waiter. “Ursula?”