“Yes, sir,” Lustrous said and looked at Major Naylor, who said, “Yes, sir.”
“What did he do to get the Medal of Honor?” Towson asked.
“Sir, are you familiar with Operation Lam Son 719?”
Towson searched his memory, then nodded.
“Mr. Castillo was on his fifty-second rescue mission, picking up downed chopper crews, when he was hit and his Huey blew up.”
“I know that story,” Towson said. “He kicked his copilot and crew chief out of his bird, told them there was no sense all of them getting killed. That young man really had a large set of balls.” He heard what he had said and added: “An unfortunate choice of words, right? I have an unfortunate tendency to do that.”
[FIVE]
Headquarters Eleventh Armored Cavalry Regiment Downs Barracks Fulda, Hesse, West Germany 1640 8 March 1981
“Sir, I have Frau von Gossinger on the line,” Sergeant Major Dieter called from the outer office.
“That’s ‘von und zu,’ Dieter,” Lustrous said, gestured for Major Naylor to pick up the extension on the conference table, and then picked up the telephone on his desk.
“Fred Lustrous here, Frau Erika,” Lustrous said.
“Good afternoon, Colonel.”
“There have been some developments in this situation,” Lustrous said. “I’d really like to discuss them with you in person rather than over the telephone. Would that be possible? ”
“Of course.”
“When would that be convenient for you?”
“Whenever it is for you,” she said. “Now, if you’d like.”
“I thought I would bring Netty with me,” Lustrous said, “and Elaine Naylor, and her husband, Major Naylor, who’s going to help us with this.”
“Of course.”
“It will take me, say, thirty minutes to go home, pick up the ladies, and change out of my work uniform, and then forty-five minutes or so to drive up there. That would make it a little after six-thirty. Would that be all right?”
“That would be fine, Colonel. And there is no necessity for you to change uniforms. And if you have the time, please take supper with us.”
“That’s very kind,” Lustrous said. “But I don’t want to impose.”
“Don’t be silly. It is I who is imposing on your friendship with my father. I will expect you sometime before seven. And thank you.”
There was a click as the line went dead.
Lustrous looked at Naylor.
“She said ‘supper with us,’ Colonel,” Naylor said.
“Yeah, I heard,” Lustrous said. Then he raised his voice: “Rupert!”
Sergeant Major Dieter put his head in the doorway.
“I heard,” he said. “You want me to drive you?”
“No, I think we’ll go in the Mercedes,” Lustrous said. “Will you make sure Colonel Stevens knows he’s minding the store?”
“Yes, sir,” Dieter said. “Sir, if you want I can give the ladies a heads-up.”
“Good idea. Thank you. Lie. Tell them we’re already on the way. I’ll bring you up to speed first thing in the morning. ”
“Sir, your call. Since I couldn’t make lunch with Baker Troop today, I thought I might make breakfast tomorrow.”
“Do it,” Lustrous ordered. “I’ll see you when you get here.”
[SIX]
Haus im Wald Near Bad Hersfeld Kreis Hersfeld-Rotenburg Hesse, West Germany 1845 8 March 1981
The first time Major Allan B. Naylor, Armor, saw Carlos Guillermo Castillo, he was standing beside his mother on the flagstone steps of das Haus im Wald as they drove up in Lustrous’s Mercedes. The boy was wearing a nearly black suit with a white shirt and tie and his blond hair was neatly combed.
The Naylors had two sons, a fourteen-year-old and a ten-year -old, and the first thing Allan Naylor thought was, There’s not much fun in that kid’s life.
That was closely followed by, Shit, and now this!
Colonel Lustrous had taken Frau Erika von und zu Gossinger at her word. He and Naylor were still wearing fatigues. Their wives were more formally dressed.
Mother and son waited on the steps for the Lustrouses and the Naylors to get out of the Mercedes and walk up to them.
“How good it is to see you again, Colonel Lustrous,” Frau Erika said, offering her hand. “Welcome.”
“Thank you,” Lustrous said. “May I introduce my good friend, Major Allan Naylor?”
“Of course, Elaine’s husband. How do you, Major?”
Netty walked up to Frau Erika and kissed her on the cheek and then Elaine did.
“And this is my son,” Frau Erika said. “Karl Wilhelm.”
The boy put out his hand first to Netty, then Elaine, then Lustrous, and finally Naylor, and each time said, in English, “How do you do? I am pleased to meet you.”
His English, while obviously not the American variety, was accentless, neither the nasal British variety taught by English teachers at Saint Johan’s—which Allan B. Naylor III had brought home and earned him the nickname “Lord Fauntleroy”—or the to be expected German-accented English of a young German boy.
“My boy goes to Saint Johan’s,” Elaine said. “Allan? Do you know him?”
“He is two forms before me . . . ahead of me,” Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger said. “I know who he is.”
“Why don’t we go in the house and have a cocktail?” Frau Erika said.
A maid in a white apron stood behind a bar set up on a table in the library. There were bottles of Gossingerbrau in dark bottles with ceramic and rubber stoppers, bottles of German and French white and red wine, French and German champagne, bourbon and scotch whiskey, gin, cognac, and an array of glasses to properly serve any of it.
Lustrous, Netty, and Allan Naylor asked for scotch; Elaine Naylor said she thought she would have a glass of Rumpoldskirchener, and Frau Erika poured a snifter heavily with cognac.
“Welcome, friends, all of you, to our home,” Frau Erika said, raising her glass. “What is it you taught my father to say, Oberst Lustrous? ‘Mud in your eye’? Mud in your eye!”
She took, everyone noticed, a healthy pull of her cognac.
“I don’t know what that means,” Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger said.
“Neither do I, come to think of it, Karl,” Lustrous said.
“Is it all right if I call you Karl?”
“Yes, sir. Of course,” the boy said.
“Would you mind, Karl, if we had a private word with your mother?” Lustrous said.
“Of course not, sir.”
“Frau Erika?” Lustrous said.
“Of course,” she said. “Karl, would you go into Gross-pappa ’s office for a moment?”
Karl didn’t like it all, but he nodded curtly and walked to the far end of the library. Lustrous saw there was an office of some kind in an adjoining room. There was a desk, a typewriter, a leather armchair, and several tables in a small room lined with bookcases.
“When my father was very angry about something,” Frau Erika said, “he used to go there to write the editorial. He said it was very difficult to stay angry in there.”
“Then I have to presume most of the editorials I read were not written here,” Lustrous said.
Frau Erika smiled at him.
“He also used to say losing your temper had to be a sin; it was so pleasurable,” she said.
Lustrous smiled and turned to Netty.
“Can I have that, please, honey?” he asked.
Netty dug in her purse and came up with a plasticized Xerox copy of the newspaper photograph. Spec5 Sam Rowe, Sergeant Major Dieter’s jack-of-all-trades, had spent several hours doing the best he could.
Netty handed it to her husband, who wordlessly handed it to Frau Erika.
She looked at it carefully and then at Lustrous.
“Yes, that’s him. It must have been taken at the time. My God, he was so young! Only nineteen!”
“I’m afraid I have to tell you that he was kille
d in Vietnam, ” Lustrous said.
Erika met his eyes for a moment, then nodded.
“Somehow I knew that,” she said. “He said . . . he said that I would probably not hear from him much, he wasn’t much at writing letters. But that as soon as he came home from the war, he would come back. I was very young. I believed him. Even when there were no letters at all. It’s easy to believe when you are young.”
“For what it’s worth, he died a hero,” Lustrous said.
“It doesn’t mean anything to me but it will to Karl,” Erika said and raised her voice. “Karl, kumst du hier, bitte!”
She sounded almost gay. Lustrous saw the cognac snifter was just about empty and then looked at Netty and saw the pain in her eyes.
The boy came back from the small office.
“Yes, Mother?”
“Oberst Lustrous has brought a photograph, from a newspaper, of your father,” Erika said.
The boy said nothing. Erika handed him the plastic-covered clipping.
He looked at it and then at his mother.
“He never came back to us, Karl, because he was killed in the war,” Erika said.
“Your father was quite a hero, Karl,” Lustrous said.
“Mother said he is dead,” the boy said.
“He was killed while trying to rescue other helicopter pilots, ” Naylor said.
“So how, if I may ask, will that affect things?” the boy asked.
“Excuse me?” Lustrous said.
“If he is dead, I cannot go to him, can I?”
Naylor thought: That means, of course, he knows about his mother. His reaction is coldblooded; to learning that his father is dead and that he now will have no family at all.
“Karl,” Netty said softly, “we’ve asked for his records; they will be sent here shortly. I can’t promise this, but it’s possible, even likely, that your father had a family . . .”
“And I would go to them? No. I will not. Pastor Dannberg says I can stay at Saint Johan’s . . .”
“But if there is a family,” Netty said, “they would love you . . .”
“Why would they love me? Mother says they don’t know I exist.”
That’s true, Naylor thought. And the boy senses, or has figured out, that it would be one hell of a transition, from das Haus im Wald to Texas, even if he doesn’t understand that with a name like Castillo it’s highly probable that his life in Texas would be that of a Texican, and that’s not at all like that of an upper-class German.
Naylor had developed his own theory of how nineteen-year-old Jorge Alejandro Castillo had wound up flying a Huey first in Germany and then in Vietnam.
There were two reasons seventeen- and eighteen-year-old young men had gone into the Army during the Vietnam War. It seldom had anything to do with patriotic notions of rushing to the colors, but rather with their economic situation and the draft. If there was no money to go to college, and get an educational deferment, the draft was damned near inevitable.
Jorge Alejandro Castillo had been bright enough to get into the Warrant Officer Candidate Program, which meant that he was certainly bright enough to get into college. That he had not gone suggested strongly that there hadn’t been money for college. Naylor knew that Army recruiters had regularly trolled high schools for seniors about to graduate, and, specifically, for those who couldn’t afford college. Their sales pitch was that if the kids enlisted now, rather than waiting for the inevitable draft, they would be “guaranteed” their choice of specialty, which almost invariably meant being trained in electronics or automobile mechanics, which also meant they wouldn’t be handed a rifle and told to go kill people.
The offer was valid. The training was given as promised. The price was a three-year enlistment. Draftees had to serve two years. The Army got another year of service, during which the kid got the five to eight months of specialist training promised and he then could serve for two years in his specialty. On the kid’s side, he got the training, and, if he didn’t screw up in training, he didn’t go to the infantry.
What happened when the kid got to the reception center was that he was given the Army General Classification Test, which was sort of a combined aptitude and intelligence test. The average GI scored between 90 and 100. Scores of 110 or better qualified the new soldier for such things as Officer Candidate School and the longer, more technical specialist courses. When a kid turned in a score of 120 or better, he came to the attention of a lot of people who needed really bright young men. Such as helicopter pilots.
Putting this all together, Naylor had reasoned that Jorge Alejandro Castillo had joined the Army to be trained as an electronics repairman, or some such, and to be kept out of the infantry. He had scored really high on the AGCT and been recruited for the Warrant Officer Candidate Program. It wasn’t hard to get a kid to agree to swap his promised training as a radio fixer for training as a pilot, and the flight pay and status of a warrant officer that went with it.
Naylor remembered a sign he had seen in an Officers’ Club Annex at Fort Rucker, the Army Aviation Center in Alabama. It had read:
WARRANT OFFICER PILOTS WISHING
TO DRINK BEER
MUST HAVE A PERMISSION NOTE
FROM THEIR MOMMY.
That was a joke, but there had been a lot of warrant officer pilots already back from a Vietnam tour who had had to do their drinking on post because they were too young to be served alcohol off post.
Jorge Alejandro Castillo was by no means the only Huey pilot who had looked like he was fifteen.
The bottom line to this was that Major Allan B. Naylor thought it entirely likely that Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger of das Haus im Wald was about to find himself transported to a low-income housing development in Texas, and possibly even to one in which English was a second language.
“They would love you, Karl, because they are your family,” Frau Erika said.
“Mother, that’s nonsense and you know it is,” the boy said. “I am not going. And no one can make me.”
He marched angrily out of the library.
“I will talk to him,” Frau Erika said.
“This has to be tough for him,” Elaine Naylor said.
“There are no other options for him,” Frau Erika said.
“Erika,” Colonel Lustrous said, “there’s something else.”
She looked at him.
“To prove that Karl is indeed Mr. Castillo’s son, we’re going to have to have a sample of Karl’s blood.”
“Really?” she replied, icily.
“And as quickly as possible,” Lustrous said.
“I suppose it was naïve of me to think I would be taken at my word, even by you.”
“I take you at your word,” Lustrous said.
“Do you, really?”
“Yes, I do,” Lustrous said, flatly.
“We all do, Erika,” Netty said.
“Very well, we will bleed my son,” Erika said. And then she smiled. “Shall we go into the dining room?”
Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger—surprising all the Americans—was standing behind a chair at one end of the table politely waiting for the others to take their seats.
Neither he nor his mother gave any sign that he had lost his temper.
Wine was offered and poured.
Frau Erika held her hand over her wineglass and said, “I think I would like another taste of the cognac, please. Bring the bottle.”
Halfway through the main course, Frau Erika said, “Karl, it will be necessary for you to have a blood sample drawn.”
“The Americans won’t take your word for what you have told them?” he replied.
“You will give blood,” Frau Erika said. “Tomorrow, you will give blood.”
“What I thought I would do, Karl,” Allan Naylor said, “was come out here in the morning, drive you past the kaserne—Downs Barracks?—and, afterward, take you to Saint Johan’s.”
The boy studied him a moment.
“Wouldn’t it make more
sense, Herr Major, for Mother’s driver to take me to school as he usually does and for you to meet me there? That would save you the drive all the way here.”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, Karl, it would,” Naylor said.
“Then it is settled. I will see you just inside the gate tomorrow morning.”
“Deal,” Naylor said.
The rest of the dinner was a disaster.
Erika—suddenly, Naylor thought—got very drunk, knocked over her glass, and then stood up.
“You will have to excuse me,” she said. “I suddenly feel ill.”
Netty and Elaine, seeing she was unsteady on her feet, jumped up and helped her out of the dining room.
“Mother’s in great pain,” Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger said, matter-of-factly. “The cognac helps, but then she gets like that.”
“We’re all very sorry your mother is ill, Karl,” Naylor said.
“Yes,” Karl said. “It is a very unfortunate situation.”
[SEVEN]
Quarters # 1 “The Pershing House” Fort Sam Houston, Texas 0715 12 March 1981
The commanding general, Fifth United States Army, was in the breakfast room of the house named for—and once occupied by—General of the Armies John J. “Black Jack” Pershing when he was joined by Major Allan B. Naylor.
“Good morning, sir,” Naylor said.
“Long time no see, Allan,” General Amory T. Stevens said, offering his hand. He was a tall, very thin man with sharp features.
“Yes, sir,” Naylor said. “General, I feel I’m imposing.”
“Don’t be silly. Could I do less for an officer who was once a darling baby boy I bounced on my knees? Sit down and have some coffee and then tell me what the hell this is all about.”
“You’re not eating?”
“I hate to eat alone. Marjorie’s with her mother. And I didn’t think you’d get up before noon. What time did you get in?”
“A little after three, sir.”
“I said I don’t like to eat alone. I didn’t say I don’t like breakfast.”
“May I fry some eggs for you, sir?”
“I thought you would never ask,” General Stevens said. “I will even go in the kitchen and watch.”
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