At that moment our colonel got the word that the young soldier who had ignored his orders to hold fire and two others near him had been killed when one of
Lowell's tanks had returned his fire. The death of any soldier upsets an officer, and it upset our colonel.
"If you had been where you were supposed to be,
Major," our colonel said, "that wouldn't have happened!"
Young Major "Duke" Lowell looked at the colonel for a moment, and then he said, "What would you have us do, Colonel, go back?"
There shortly came a radio message for Major Duke
Lowell, and he left his task force in Osan. He had been ordered to Tokyo, where General of the Army Douglas
MacArthur was to personally pin the Distinguished Service
Cross to his breast.
Greer wondered what Lowell would do with his guidon. Put it away probably and never look at itŽeven if he'd gotten more than a little shaken up when Jiggs gave it to him.
The needles were in the green. Greer depressed the stick mounted mike switch as he picked it up.
"Light on the skids with the Bird," he said. He dropped the nose to pick up speed and then picked the Big Bad Bird up to get over the tops of the pine trees.
"Viper," Colonel Brandon's voice came over the FM radio.
"This is Viper Base. How do you read?"
"Loud and clear," Greer said.
"All right, Viper, I have you in sight," Colonel Brandon said.
Giving in to a perverse impulse, Greer dropped the Bird below the treeline so that PlO asshole couldn't see him. Then, when he was sure Brandon was searching for him, he pulled the cyclic and picked up a quick 500 feet.
"Viper," Colonel Brandon said, "what I want you to do is make one low level, low speed pass past the camera platform."
Greer complied.
"All right, Viper, very nice, thank you. What we're going to do now is do it. Take your position."
Greer flew a half mile away. Downrange he could see the
T34.
"Start the T34," Brandon ordered.
"T34 ready to roll," a voice came back immediately.
"Move the T34," Colonel Brandon ordered. Greer couldn't detect any movement of the tank at first, but he saw a man hoist himself out of the driver's seat and leap off the T34 over the left track. Then he could see that the tank was moving. He saw the man run toward the jeep which would carry him off the range.
viper," Colonel Brandon ordered, "hold your position!"
Greer amused himself by doing precisely that, holding his position, a motionless hover 500 feet off the ground, the most difficult of all rotary wing flight maneuvers.
"Stand by, Viper!" Colonel Brandon ordered.
Greer did not bother to reply.
Thirty seconds later, Colonel Brandon gave the order.
"OK, Viper, kill it!"
"Jesus Christ!" Greer said, to himself. He dropped the nose, gave it the juice, and felt the forces of acceleration against his back.
When he was 300 yards from the tank, he depressed the trigger of the rocket firing mechanism for the right-side canIster.
The fifty-four rockets had been manufactured at the Red
River Arsenal in Texas. For facility of manufacture, the stabilizing fins at the rear of the rocket were about the last step of the manufacturing process. It had been determined that it was easier and, more important, safer, to save this step for last. All it involved was the positioning of three wedge-shaped pieces of aluminumŽlike the feathers of an arrowŽinto slots already in position at the rear of the rocket's cylindrical body.
Each stabilizing fin was held in place with three rivets. The fins, the slots for them, and the rivets were aluminum, which does not spark. The automatic riveting machine was powered by compressed air. There was no danger of a spark there, either.
The worker who installed the stabilizing fins was required by her job description to inspect each rivet on each fin. The automatic riveting machine was a fine machine and seldom failed to do what it was designed to do. Inevitably, the riveters found the three rivets in place where they were supposed to be. Inevitably, particularly at the end of a long day, the machine operators didn't look quite as closely as they should.
The fourth 3.5 rocket in the right-hand system on Greer's
Bird had only one rivet, the most rearward one. The near perfect machine had run out of rivets.
The single rivet had been sufficient to hold the stabilizing fin rigidly in place during shipment and while passing through the bin into the chute when CWO (W4) Dutch Cramer had loaded the ordnance.
But the blast of firing the first three rockets in Greer's first firing run had been sufficient to loosen the stabilizing fin. When it was fired, the fins nose came loose. The strength of the rivet fastening the fin to the cylinder was strong enough to keep the fin from separating from the cylinder, however. What it did was hold the fin sideward against what had now become the rocket's slipstream. Obeying the laws of aerodynamics, Ed
Greer's fourth rocket, instead of moving horizontally toward the T34, raised its nose almost vertically.
The odds were that in such an event the rocket would pass harmlessly through the rotor arc. There were only three rotor blades, each only sixteen inches wide.
The odds went against Ed Greer and the Bird.
One of the rotor blades struck the impact fuse of the rocket
0.75 second later, and the firing mechanism detonated the explosive charge. The force blew off three-quarters of the blade and a half second later shattered the windshield of the Bird.
The Bird lost its aerodynamic lift and was simultaneously subjected to enormous out-of-balance dynamic pressures, as the engine whirled two intact rotor blades and the stump of the third.
The Bird crashed to the ground nose-first, striking it at 105 miles per hour and with sufficient force to detonate the explosive heads of the forty-seven, forty-eight, or forty-nine rockets still in the system. The precise number remaining at ground impact was never determined. There was not much left of the
Big Bad Bird, nor of First Lieutenant Edward C. Greer.
Quarters No. 1
Fort Rucker, Alabama
26 December 1958
Master Sergeant Wesley, in his dress blues, knocked at the door of the guest room (actually two rooms and a bath) of
Quarters No. 1.
"Come," General E. Z. Black said.
"That PlO colonel's out here, General," Master Sergeant
Wesley said.
"Get the sonofabitch in here, Wes," General Black said.
The general was bending over the bed, fixing his ribbons to his tunic.
"Zeke!" Mrs. Black said. "That's not going to change anything."
Mrs. Black was adjusting her hat before a mirror.
Sergeant Wesley stepped out in the hall.
"The general'll see you now, Colonel," he said. He held the door open for him, and then followed him into the room.
When General Black straightened up, Master Sergeant Wesley busied himself with the ribbons of the general's tunic.
"I sent for you an hour ago," General Black began. "I am not in the custom of being made to wait."
"I was on the horn to Washington, sir," Colonel Brandon said.
"Talking to the Chief of Staff, were you?" General Black inquired.
"No, sir. To the Chief of Information, trying to salvage as much as we can from this."
"The next time I send for you," General Black said, "you put everybody but the Chief of Staff in second place."
"Yes, sir," Colonel Brandon said.
"For your general information, Colonel," Black went on,
"I have spoken with the Chief of Staff. Two items on our agenda affect you."
"Yes, sir."
"One, I have been charged by the Chief of Staff with handling this situation," General Black said. "Two, the Chief of
Staff has approval for the immediate posthumous award of the
Distingui
shed Flying Cross to Lieutenant Greer."
"That's very nice, sir," Colonel Brandon said. "It fits right in with what I've discussed with the Chief of Information."
General Black looked as if he were going to say something, but then he was distracted by Master Sergeant Wesley, who was holding out the general's tunic. He slipped his arms into it.
"Mrs. Black, Sergeant Wesley, and myself are about to pay our respects to Mrs. Greer," General Black said. "You can ride with us and tell me what you have discussed with the Chief of
Information."
There were four Chevrolet sedans sitting half on the grass along the driveway, an MP patrol car in front. With his hand on her arm, General Black led his wife to the car immediately behind the MP car.
"I'll drive," Master Sergeant Wesley said to the sergeant first class who held the door open. He got behind the wheel.
General and Mrs. Black got in the back seat. Colonel Brandon got in front with Wesley.
Three of General Black's four aides-decamp got in the car behind his, and four burly young men in civilian clothes got in the last car. The MP car started moving.
"Who are the guys in civvies?" General Black asked.
"CIC, sir," Colonel Brandon said. "Just in case."
"Don't do that again, Brandon," Black said. "Is there a radio in this thing, Wes?"
"The CIC is gone, General," Sergeant Wesley replied, picking up the microphone.
"I am paying a personal visit to the widow of a friend of mine, Colonel," General Black said. "Can you get that straight in your mind?"
"I was thinking of the press, sir," Brandon said. "They're sure to be at the house."
"Fuck the goddamn press!" Black said.
"Zeke, for God's sake, get control of yourself," Mrs. Black said.
He exhaled audibly.
"Let me have the benefit of your thinking, Colonel," General
Black said. "Your's and the Chief of Information's."
"Yes, sir."
Colonel Brandon spoke reasonably, assuredly, and almost steadily during the fifteen minute ride off the post down Rucker
Boulevard to Ozark and then up Broad Street to the plantation style residence of Mayor and Mrs. Howard F. Dutton.
The major points he made were these:
(1) The networks were in town, and they were going to come up with some sort of a story, and the only option the army had was to make that story as little embarrassing under the circumstances as possible.
(2) The air force had already begun to "take shots" at them in Washington, the gist of their argument being that the "tragedy" would not have occurred if (a) the army had only asked for air force expertise in aerial rocket fire and (b) by implication, if the army had lived up to the 1948 Key West Agreement not to arm their helicopters.
(3) The national television media was going to want visuals.
It was Colonel Brandon's judgment that they had no choice but to turn over the film the army film crew had shot of what was to have been the dress rehearsal. In response to General
Black's inquiry, "how gory is it?" Colonel Brandon replied that it wasn't "really gory." It was "heart stopping." The explosion had been "spectacular" rather than "gory.
Since the network TV crews were here, they could probably be talked into taking additional material. Colonel Brandon suggested that a full military funeral, with an aircraft flyover, would probably receive "good coverage." Greer's posthumous award of the DFC would "tie in nicely" there, particularly if
Mrs. Greer could receive it from the hands of General Black.
(5) There was nothing the army could really do about getting caught in violation of the Key West Agreement of 1948 but plead excessive enthusiasm, as had been previously decided.
A short announcement by General Black (Colonel Brandon handed him "Proposed Remarks vis d vis The Viper") could, if properly handled, take care of that nicely. In essence, what he would say was that the idea of rocket-armed helicopters was a good one, and one which, after joint air force-army development, was surely going to become an important weapon in the arsenal which guaranteed the peace. The implication, Colonel
Brandon explained, was that all the army had done was investigate the feasibility of the idea. Now that they were convinced the idea had merit, they would of course, in keeping with the spirit of the Key West Agreement of 1948, turn responsibility for technical development over to the air force.
General Black grunted once dr twice during Colonel Brandon's presentation. It was his only reaction to it.
There was a large crowd of people gathered on the sidewalk in front of Howard and Prissy Dutton's plantation-style mansion.
There were half a dozen Ozark city policemen, as many
Dale County deputy sheriffs, and even two Alabama state troopers.
Only known personal friends of the Duttons were permitted to walk up the sidewalk to the porch of the house.
The state troopers waved the little convoy to the curb.
"$tay in the car, please, Colonel," General Black said. "I
will give you my decision shortly."
Colonel Brandon was surprised to see that Sergeant Wesley
marched into the house with the general.
They were greeted by Prissy Dutton, who looked as if she
were dazed on tranquilizers. She announced that "the mayor's
taken to his bed."
The sliding doors between the parlor and the dining room of the Dutton house had been opened. A buffet had been set up on the dining room table. There were thirty people munching in the dining room, as many standing around the parlor, and about as many filling folding chairs which lined the walls of both rooms.
Mrs. Edward C. Greer, in a black dress, a single strand of pearls around her neck, sat on a red plush couch resisting attempts from a black woman standing behind her to take the baby, who was sleeping on his mother's shoulders.
"Wes," General Black said, "close that door and get these
people out of here."
Master Sergeant Wesley first closed the sliding doors, and then started easing people out of the room. The room emptied with surprising speed, until only three couples remained: Colonel and Mrs. Robert F. Bellmon; Major and Mrs. Rudolph G.
MacMillan, and Major and Mrs. Sanford T. Felter.
"I said everybody, and I meant everybody," General Black
said. "That includes you and Wes," he added to his wife. He looked at Melody Dutton Greer. "You want to give the baby to one of the women?" he asked.
"Is that a command, General?" Melody asked.
He took her meaning. He waited until the black woman, very reluctantly, had allowed herself to be ushered out of the room by a firmly gentle Master Sergeant Wesley, and then he closed the door after her.
He walked to where Melody sat and sat beside her.
"Let me hold him," he said. "Your shoulder will go to sleep."
"Why not?" Melody said, bitterly, and passed the sleeping infant to him. The child stirred, but did not wake.
"You been drinking?"
"Sure," Melody said.
"You want another drink?"
"No," she said.
"I just learned that Ed's being given the DFC," General
Black said.
"You know what you can do with your god damned medal,"
Melody said. "Is that what you're doing here? To tellme they're coming up with a medal?"
"No," he said. "I came to tell you I'm sorry."
"Thank you," she said. "Now, can my friends come back in?"
"Not just yet," he said.
"Why not?"
"Because I'm the one you want to see," he said.
"Is that so?"
"Yeah, I'm the one you want," he said.
"I don't know what the hell you're talking about," Melody said. "And forgive me, General, but I really don't much give a damn, either."
"Aside from the expected, ritual expressions of sympathy, let me tell you why the others feel bad," General Bl
ack said.
"Be my guest," Melody said, sarcastically.
"Felter feels guilty because Ed kept him alive when they walked out of the jungle at Dien Bien Phu," General Black said. "And because if Felter had not arranged for Ed to go to
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