W E B Griffin - BoW 03 - The Majors

by The Majors(Lit)

  The best kind of jobs, to a banker's way of thinking, ones that brought money into a community and took nothing out. If a factory opens, that means jobs, sure, but it also means you

  (the city) have to pay for firemen, and policemen, and sewers, and everything else people expect. But a military post either doesn't need that sort of thing or pays for it itself.

  There was all kinds of idiotic talk going around about what to do with the post, when it closed down. Turn it into a university.

  Get industry to relocate on it. Even, when things got desperate, turn it into a prison. After all, they'd had all those

  Eyeties out there, so you knew that worked.

  But those weren't answers and Howard Dutton knew they weren't. He had seen it from the beginning, from the day he'd come home from the war. War or not, the thing to do with

  Camp Rucker was keep it Camp Rucker, keep it filled with soldiers.

  That was the reason Howard had gone to work on the congressman, gone off to Washington, instead of taking over from his father at the bank or opening a law practice. He had learned in the Air Corps that if there is a system, you can figure out how the system works, and then make it work for you.

  That was his secret. He had made the system work the day he wanted it to work.

  He didn't think of himself as a hypocrite. What he had done was going to make a lot of people rich around town, be good for the whole county. But it was also, and he knew this, and was not embarrassed by it, going to make him a rich man, too.

  Richer than he ever would have gotten at the bank. Much richer.

  God helps those who help themselves. Say what you like.

  It was true.

  US Highway 84 was a two-lane macadam road, nearly straight, running through gently rolling land between farms and untended land. Fifteen miles from Dothan, Howard Dutton told

  Melody to take the right turn at a fork. This was the "new road," built when they built Camp Rucker in ninety days from the time the first nail was driven. It cut across large patches of what the Rural Reclamation Administration had called "submarginal farm land" to Daleville, one of the oldest communities in the county.

  Daleville was a ghost town when Melody drove her Daddy through it, in the Ford Super Deluxe. When the camp was open, Daleville was just outside the gate, and the single street was lined with cheap frame buildings that used to house laundries and dry cleaners and Army-Navy stores and hamburger stands and used car lots.

  No bars or saloons. Dale County (named after the same

  Dale who had set up a store at the crossroads and named it

  Daleville) was Baptist dry. That's not dry, that means that there are no bars, and you can't get a drink in a restaurant or beer at the grocery store. You generally get your own beer when you're out of town in a wet county, and you get your whiskey in pint bottles from a bootlegger. But there are no public places to drink, where people can go and ruin their lives with the

  Devil's Brew.

  A small general store was still open, and the one-room post office next door, and there were half a dozen worn-out pickups and as many battered old Fords and Chevvies on the weed grown lot of one of the used car places, but everything else was closed down and boarded up and falling down. There were no soldiers and there was no business.

  There was a sign at the deserted gate, where once MPs in white leggings and pistol belts had stood waving people through and saluting officers in their cars. The sign said, "MILITARY

  RESERVATIONŽDO NOT LEAVE MARKED ROUTE."

  What that meant was that you were supposed to follow the one road, which ran on the fringes of the built-up area, and which led to the other side, to the road to Ozark. They didn't want people running around loose in the built-up area, where they could help themselves to toilets and wire and pipe and even the barracks themselves because they were just sitting there asking to be stolen.

  Howard Dutton gestured with his arm.

  "Drive around the sawhorses, Melody," he said. "I want to have a look around."

  "Are we looking for anything in particular?" she asked.

  "Just drive around the area behind post headquarters," he said.

  To their left were enormous wooden garages, where once the rolling stock of infantry divisions, trucks and tanks and cannon, had been repaired. He knew, although he couldn't see it, that beyond the garages was a 2,000 bed hospital. A hundred or more single-story frame buildings connected with walkways to keep the patients out of the sun and rain as they were wheeled between the buildings.

  A flag still fluttered from the flagpole in front of post headquarters, for the caretakers had taken over that one building for their headquarters and living quarters. The last contract issued for more than a thousand dollars by the purchasing office before it had closed was to bring electricity from Dale County

  Ral Electrification Agency lines to the post headquarters.

  The coal-fired generators which had provided electricity to the post when it was open were still there, and ready to run, but it was cheaper with just a dozen men on the post to string a line and buy electricity from REA.

  The grass was cut right in front of post headquarters, but the parade ground in front was grown waist high with grass, and there was grass that high between the endless rows of barracks.

  Melody drove past post headquarters to the field house, and around it, and down crumbling macadam streets through regimental areas. The barracks looked in good shape, except for flaking paint and broken windows here and there. Beside each of the two-story wooden buildings, there was even a supply of coal for their furnaces in small concrete-block caches. There were even lights in the fixtures over the doors, and hanging from lamppoles every block.

  And then up ahead he saw an Army pickup truck blocking the road.

  Melody stopped the Ford with its nose a foot from the pickup's fender and Howard Dutton got out of the car, a smile on his face.

  "Oh, it's you, Mayor," the major driving the pickup truck said. He waved his hand. "Hi, Melody!"

  Melody got out of the car and walked over to them. Howard

  Dutton wished she hadn't done that, with half of her bottom hanging out that way.

  Howard Datton was on his second term as mayor of Ozark.

  He had decided it was really easier to be mayor himself than to pick somebody for the job, and then have to watch every move he made.

  "Hot enough for you, Major?" Howard Dutton said, extending his hand. He was always very charming to Major Feeler, the post commander, even though he thought Feeler was a fool, and sometimes wondered what Feeler had done to find himself with an idiot job like this.

  "I was so hot," Major Feeler said, "that I went down to the pool at the officer's club. Dirty or not, I was going to have a swim.

  "And you did?" Melody asked.

  "Would you believe there was three snakes in that pool?" the major said, and they laughed together.

  Melody said "Qook" and made a face.

  "Anytime you want a swim, you should come to Ozark,"

  Howard Dutton said.

  There was a community swimming pool at the community house.

  "I just may do that," the major said. "I saw the car driving past headquarters. If I'd known it was you, I wouldn't have chased you."

  "I guess I'm violating the law," Howard Datton said. "But

  I had a few minutes, and I wanted to get a last look at the place before they start tearing it down."

  Major Feeler, very obviously, made up his mind before speaking.

  "Maybe I shouldn't be talking out of school, Mayor Dutton," he said. "And I wouldn't want you to quote me."

  "I appreciate your confidence, Major," Dutton said.

  "I just heard from Third Army in Atlanta that there's a hold on the awarding of the demolition contract."

  "Cancelled, you mean?" Dutton asked.

  "No, sir. Just a hold."

  "Isn't that interesting?" Dutton replied. "What do you suppose that means?"

  "I
don't know," the major said. "Maybe they figured it would just be cheaper to let it all fall down than to pay to have it torn down."

  "You may well be right," Dutton said, seriously. "If you hear anything, I'd appreciate learning about it."

  "I'll tell you anything I can, Mayor," the major said. "You know that."

  The Farmers and Planters Bank of Ozark, at Dutton's direction, never pressed Major Feeler hard when he was late with his car payment.

  "I appreciate that," Dutton said, and shook Major Feeler's hand. "I truly do. And now, I think, we've seen enough. Next time you get to town, you come and have a cup of coffee with me, you hear?"

  "I'll do that," Major Feeler said. He got back in his GI pickup truck and drove off, waving as he did.

  Dumb ass, Howard Dutton thought.

  But he was smiling. Even that had gone well. The demolition

  contract was on "hold." That happened all the time, for any

  number of reasons.

  The secret, the secret that Camp Rucker was not going to be torn down at all, but reactivated, was still a secret. There were still several days, maybe as much as a week, to do things before the word got out.

  "Let's go home, honey," he said to Melody.

  He was going to make enough money so that when Melody went off to college, she would really have a good time, without having to worry about what things cost, the way he had had to, when he was at the university. Maybe he'd get her a car, a convertible. Pretty girls like Melody deserved to ride around in convertibles.

  (Two)

  For: Knox, Kentucky

  26 March 19S4

  "So there I was," Major Rudolph G. MacMillan said to

  Colonel Robert F. Bellmon, Assistant G-3 (Plans and Training),

  Headquarters, the United States Army Armor School and

  Fort Knox, Kentucky, "surrounded by howling savages, low on water, about out of ammunition, when, far away, I heard the faint sound of a trumpet sounding Charge."'

  Then he lowered his head, addressed the ball, and sank a thirty-two-foot putt on the eleventh hole of the Fort Knox officer's open mess golf course. He then raised his head and smiled warmly at Colonel Bellmon.

  "So there I was," Colonel Bellmon said, "standing before

  the general, who had just handed me an URGENT radio, saying you were down and presumed dead, and the general said, You better tell Roxie."'

  Their eyes met.

  "So I figured I'd wait until morning," Bellmon went on.

  "That wasn't the first time the Pride of Mauch Chuck had been reported presumed dead."

  "I owe you," MacMillan said. "Some dumb sonofabitch from the CIA went and got Sharon Felter out of bed at three o'clock in the morning and told her. Complete routine, even a god damned rabbi and a doctor."

  "I know," Bellmon said. "I've talked to Felter."

  "And what did Felter have to say?"

  "He said he knew how close you and I are," Bellmon said.

  Their eyes met for a long moment. Then Bellmon walked to his ball, wiggled into putting position, and stroked it. It hit the lip of the hole, half circled it, and then rolled two feet back toward Bellmon.

  "You going to give me that?" Bellmon asked. MacMillan shook his head. "No." Bellmon shrugged, and then sank his putt. They walked to their clubs, mounted in two-wheel carts, and dragged them to the 12th tee.

  There was a Coke machine there, inside a small gazebo.

  MacMillan fed it dimes, handed a Coke to Bellmon, and leaned on one of the pillars supporting the roof.

  "We went over there nonstop in a bomber," MacMillan said.

  "From Andrews Air Force Base in Washington."

  "Nonstop?" Bellmon asked.

  "They refueled us in the air twice," MacMillan said. "Once over the West Coast, and again over Hawaii, or near Hawaii.

  Scared the shit out of me. What they do is fly up under the tanker, and then the tanker extends a probe, got little wings on the end of it to guide it. And then it meshes with a thing on the front of the bomber. We're going six hundred miles an hour, you understand. Very hairy."

  "So you went where?" Bellmon asked.

  "Seoul. K16. They were holding a civilian transport for us.

  CAT. You know, from Formosa. A DC-4. Everybody's there, in civilian clothing. E. Z. Black's in charge. Had an air force brigadier who was very unhappy when Felter told him we were going into Dien Bien Phu. Felter had a note from Eisenhower.

  That shut up the air force."

  "I thought you said General Black was in charge."

  "Black's people were told to stay away from Dien Bien Phu,

  and to wear civilian clothes," MacMillan said. "Jesus, that was funny."

  "Funny?" Colonel Bellmon asked. "How funny?"

  "Well, the whole operation is a big damned secret, see, very hush-hush. They even hid the CAT DC-4 in a hangar in Seoul, for Christ's sake, so nobody would see it. So we arrive in

  Hanoi. Only Felter and me are in uniform. Everybody else is in civvies. And there's half of the French Army out there, honest to God, Bob, a battalion of troops and a brass band.

  Cymbals, trumpets with flags hanging down from them, bass drums. Even a couple of goats with gold-painted horns. Full dress reception. Frog brass in dress uniforms. Our brass in mussed civvies, looking like they've been sleeping in their clothes. Except for a couple of the enlisted men. You know that big black orderly of Black's?"

  "Sergeant Wesley," Bellmon said.

  "Yeah. He must weigh three hundred pounds. Well, Black brought him along. And he's got this kid who works for him, a guy named Greer. He reminds me of Craig Lowell in the old days, except this kid knows what he's doing. Black sends him along to keep an eye on us. About as subtle as a Honolulu whorehouse madam. Well, the first thing the frogs tell us is that we can't land, we have to jump. And the kid is no jumper.

  But he says he's going even if he has to jump. And he does."

  "Lowell, by the way," Bellmon said in a level tone, "just graduated from flight school. He and Parker."

  Major Craig W. Lowell and Captain Philip Sheridan Parker

  IV bothered Lieutenant Colonel Robert F. Bellmon. But he was honest enough to admit to himself that it was probably because he couldn't simply dismiss them as a pair of wise asses.

  Parker was establishment, the fourth soldier to bear the

  name. The first Philip Sheridan Parker had been the son of a

  master sergeant who rode in the Indian Wars with General

  Philip Sheridan. His son, Colonel Philip Sheridan Parker, Jr., had been the senior "colored" tank officer in World War I.

  Colonel Philip Sheridan Parker III, of General Porky Waterford's

  "Hell's Circus" Armored Division, had commanded Task

  Force Parker that had saved Bellmon from whatever plans besides instant repatriation the Russians had for two hundred

  "liberated" American prisoners.

  Lowell, if not antiestablishment, was certainly not of it. He came from a wealthy family, but had entered the army as a draftee after having been kicked out of.Harvard. He had turned up in Bellmon's life, when MacMillan, serving at Bellmon's recommendation as aide-decamp to General Waterford, had been ordered to produce a polo team from personnel assigned to the Constabulary in occupied Germany. And Craig W. Lowell was a three-goal polo player. There are not many three-goal polo players anywhere, and there had been none in the Constabulary except Lowell.

  The idea of having the best polo team possible was General

  Waterford's obsession. General Waterford had graduated, in

  1937, from the French cavalry school at Samur. Now he wished to play the French, both for personal reasons, and, Bellmon was sure, for reasons involving the prestige of the U.S. Army.

  If he was going to win playing the French, he was going to have to have PFC Craig Lowell playing as his number two.

  French officers, however, do not play with enlisted men.

  So General Waterford delegated the problem to Captainr />
  MacMillan. MacMillan arranged for Lowell to be temporarily commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Finance Corps. He would play polo, and then be released from active duty for the convenience of all concerned.

  But on the day of the polo game against the French, Porky