W E B Griffin - BoW 03 - The Majors

by The Majors(Lit)

  Algiers, he would not have ultimately wound up flying the

  Bird."

  "Fascinating," Melody said.

  "MacMillan feels guilty because it was Ed flying the Bird and not him. The Indo-China business, too, to a lesser degree.

  But primarily because he knew how to fly the Bird and wasn't flying it when it crashed."

  "I'm getting just a little bored with this conversation," Melody said. She got up and walked to the door, and for a moment it looked as if she was going to open it. Instead, she went to a table with bottles on it and splashed whiskey in two glasses.

  She walked back to General Black and handed him one. Then she sat down, drained hers at a gulp, and leaned back against the couch so far that her face was looking up at the ceiling.

  She sighed audibly.

  "Shitshitshitshit," she said.

  "Bob Bellmon," General Black went on and then stopped

  himself. "As of today, by the way, Brigadier General Bellmon.

  He doesn't know yet."

  "Whoopee!" Melody Dutton Greer cried, raising her empty

  glass gaily.

  "General Bellmon's feelirtgs of guilt are somewhat more intellectual. He was the one who came to me and asked for permission to build the Bird. And he was the one who had to order your husband to fly it."

  "He didn't have to order Ed," Melody objected. "My late

  husband was jvst as crazy as the rest of you. The ultimate

  volunteer: Look, Ma, no hands!"'

  "But they're all wrong," Black said. "I'm the sonofabitch

  responsible."

  "What are you on, General, some kind of a guilt trip? What

  the hell did you have to do with it?"

  "I'm the one who sent him to helicopter school," Black said. "That's at the low end, the personal end. I didn't want him to go. But I fixed it so that he could go. At the other end of the guilt spectrum, I'm the one who made the decision to go ahead with the Bird. Statistically, there was no question that someone would be killed during the testing. All I could do was hope it would be somebody I never heard of. Not Ed.

  It didn't work out that way. So if you're looking for somebody to blame, Melody, here I am."

  She looked at him for a moment, shook her head, and then leaned back again so that she was looking at the ceiling.

  "Which leaves us where?" she asked.

  "Has Major Lowell been to see you?" General Black asked.

  "No, he hasn't. Every other uniformed sonofabitch and his brother has, but now that you mention it, I have not been honored with the condolences of the legendary Major Lowell."

  "Lowell is the only practical one of us," General Black said.

  "He understands that when you really have nothing to say, the thing to do is to say nothing."

  Melody looked at him again.

  "Hey," she said, "I appreciate your coming here. I really do." She rested a hand momentarily on his arm. "It took, as

  Ed would say, balls."'

  He didn't reply.

  "But, at the risk of repeating myself, where does all of this leave all of us."

  "With him," General Black said, indicating the child.

  "Don't worry about him," Melody said. "Not only is my fatherŽwho at the moment, by the way, is drunk out of his mind, rich, but that baby is now eligible for all sorts of benefits from a grateful government. There was a guy here already just bubbling over with facts and figures."

  "He will not have his father," Black said.

  "No fooling? Jesus!"

  "You're a young and attractive woman," Black said. "You'll probably remarry, and the boy will have a man around. And

  I'm sure that Mac and Felter and Bellmon and his other friends will maintain their interest. But the boy will never know his father."

  "What the hell are you up to now? Are you trying to make me cry? To make me start screaming and pulling my hair out?

  Is this some new kind of new console-the-widow therapy?"

  "He'll never know what kind of a man his father was,"

  Black said.

  "He'll have that god damned medal you talk about," Melody said. "He can look at that and say, My daddy was a hero; here's ten bucks worth of silver-plated metal to prove it."'

  "He can have more than that, if you're up to it," Black said.

  "I don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about,"

  Melody saul

  "There are circumstances which make a very elaborate military funeral possible for Ed," General Black said.

  "You can stick your elaborate military funeral up where you put the medal," Melody said.

  "Bands, flags flying, troops marching, a... whatever they call it when they fly airplanes overhead.., and a four-star general, the Vice Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, pinning his medal on his widow."

  "Maybe I am getting a little drunk," Melody said. "Because you sound just about as impressed with that bullshit as I am."

  "It doesn't mean a thing to you, but to a kid in his impressionable years and older, looking at a movie of how the army buried his father, that just might make him think his father was something special."

  She looked at him.

  "Ed was something special," General Black said, barely audibly. After a moment, Melody Dutton Greer said: "Hey!

  Come on. For Christ's sake, what if somebody saw you? You're supposed to be a general. Stop crying."

  XVIII

  (One)

  Fort Rucker, Alabama

  28 December 1958

  The main post chapel was a temporary building, thrown up as quickly as possible with the other temporary buildings in

  1941, designed to last six years. But when Rucker reopened, it had been painted and there had been a "rehabilitation allocation" from the Office of the Chief of Chaplains which had provided for interior refurbishment, for a red carpet for the aisles, an electric organ, and the other accoutrements of a church.

  It was full now. Admission had been by invitation only,

  and more invitations had been issued than there were seats.

  The remains of Lieutenant Edward C. Greer in a government issue gray steel casket, covered with an American flag,

  rested on a black cloth-covered stand in the center of the aisle.

  There were three clergymen. The Dutton family clergyman

  was a Presbyterian. He was there. The post chaplain was a

  Baptist. He was there. And so was the Third Army chaplain.

  Ed and Melody had been married by an Anglican priest, and

  Melody had requestedŽthe only thing she had asked forŽan

  Episcopal funeral ceremony. An L-23 had been dispatched to

  Third Army headquarters in Atlanta to get the ranking Episcopal chaplain.

  Sitting in the first pew on the left was the widow, holding

  Howard Dutton Greer on her lap, her parents (General Paul

  Jiggs wondered (a) how they had managed to sober up Howard

  Dutton and (b) if he was going to make it through the ceremony), and the black woman who had raised Melody and was now seeing her baby through this.

  Across the aisle were the pallbearers. The pallbearers were the Bird People, plus Brigadier General Robert F. Bellmon, less Major Craig W. Lowell and CWO (W4) Dutch Cramer.

  Major Lowell and Dutch Cramer had declined the honor of serving as pallbearers. Jiggs knew where they were. They were either in Annex I of the officer's open mess or in Dutch Cramar's

  BOQ paying their last respects to a lost buddy by drinking themselves into oblivion. Dutch Cramer was taking Greer's accident personally and hard. It was his ordnance that had gone off at the wrong time.

  The service was being filmed. Unobstrusive windows had been cut in the wall between the chaplain's and the choir's vesting rooms in the front of the church (permitting the camera to shoot the audience from that angle) and in the wall of the chaplain's office by the vestibule. These cameras, and the accompanying sound equipment, were manned by the army photo t
eam. General Black had personally denied the television crews access to the chapel; the film the army shot would be made available to them.

  The TV crews were outside the chapel. An army six-by-six truck would carry one crew during the procession from the chapel to Parade Ground No. 2so that it could film the procession in process, and other crews were in place along the route the funeral procession would follow and at the parade ground itself.

  An enormous amount of preparation had gone into Lieutenant

  Greer's final rites. The "Plan for the Memorial Services for Major General Angus Laird" had been taken from the file and used as the starting point. General Jiggs had been somewhat surprised at how far General Black had gone along with Colonel

  Tim F. Brandon. He had accepted most (but by no means all) of Brandon's suggestions. General iiggs had been even more surprised at General Black's willingness to make himself available to keep the TV networks happy.

  A tour of the WOC battalion, Colonel Brandon had pointed out, was not really news. A tour of the WOC battalion by the

  Vice Chief of Staff of the United States Army was news, worth forty-five seconds on the six o'clock news. The general had permitted himself to be trailed all over the post, out to Laird

  Field to the Aviation Board, anywhere Colonel Brandon had suggested. He had even (and this really had surprised General

  Jiggs) permitted himself to be taken for a ride in the white H

  13H by General Jiggs. All they had done was take off and fly out of sight and then return to Pad No. 1, but it had given the network TV people a "shot" of general officers in flight, and

  Black had gone along.

  And there had been, as there inevitably are when large numbers of people are involved in something solemn, elements of high comedy.

  It had been decided and accepted without question that Lieutenant

  Greer's casket would be carried on a tank from the main post chapel to Parade Ground No. 2, where Mrs. Greer would receive her husband's Distinguished Flying Cross. There were no tanks at Rucker, so two M48s had been ordered down from

  Fort Benning. Someone had then realized (I) that not having been ordered to provide tank crews, Benning had not sent any and (2) there was no place on a tank where a casket could be carried.

  Both of those problems had been solved by the Red Army maneuver troops from Fort Riley, the ones who had brought the Russian T34s down. They, of course, were qualified tank crewmen who could drivethe M48s, and they quickly welded a platform to support the casket over the engine compartment.

  Platforms. Both tanks had been so modified, in case something should go wrong with one of them. As the Red Army tank crews had brought six T34s from Riley to make sure three would be available, there were two M48s where one was going to be needed. There were two public address systems in place where one would be needed. There were four extra jeeps standing by in case something should go wrong with the four jeeps which would be used as flower cars. The term was redundancy.

  There would be, of course, a riderless horse with reversed boots in the stirrups to be led in the procession behind the tank with Greer's casket. In the dry run, the first time the horse heard the tank engine start, he voided his bowels and then jerked loose from his handler and galloped wildly away with half a dozen field-grade officers in hot pursuit.

  A second horse had been acquired, who was not terrified at the sound of a tank engine.

  In the middle of all this, there had been grand theft, helicopter.

  More than a little chagrined, the commanding officer of

  Rotary Wing Training had sought audience with General Jiggs.

  An H- 19C was missing, and the colonel was absolutely convinced that it had been stolen. He wanted the FBI notified and a bulletin sent to all airfields within 350 miles of Rucker asking that they report any H-19C that had landed at their field.

  General Jiggs had not been willing to go along with that.

  He didn't doubt that an H-19C was missing, but the idea that anyone would steal one was absurd. If someone had reported an H-34B was missing or an H-37 or one of the new YH-.40s,

  Jiggs would have been concerned. An H-34B could be flown somewhere and stripped for parts, for the Sikorsky was now in wide civilian use. It was conceivable, though unlikely, that the Russians might want to grab a YH-40, so they could study it. But a worn-out, ancient H-19C? Absurd!

  What would you do with it? To whom could it be sold? He concluded, and so informed the commanding officer of Rotary

  Wing Training, that one of two things had happened to the

  "stolen" H-19C:

  (I) It had simply been misplaced; that is, someone had taken the wrong H- 19C when making an authorized flight. The thing to do, General Jiggs told him, was to conduct an inventory and see if anybody had an extra H-19C, which would be the case if someone had taken the wrong one off someplace.

  (2) A practical joker was at work, someone who thought more of a good belly laugh than of his career and had taken the machine and hidden it somewhere on the reservation in the sure and certain knowledge that a lot of people would be running around like headless chickens when it was discovered missing. If this scenario were valid, the thing to do was look for the missing H-19C in places where someone so inclined would be likely to hide it.

  None of this, however, affected the people or the proceedings in the chapel. On the right side of the chapel immediately behind the pallbearers, sat the brass: General and Mrs. E. Z.

  Black; Lieutenant General and Mrs. Richard D. Hoit (General

  Hoit commanded Third Army, in whose area Rucker was located.

  He had not known Lieutenant Greer, but if the Vice

  Chief of Staff was going to his funeral, so was he); Major

  General and Mrs. Paul Jiggs, and Mrs. Robert F. Bellman.

  Behind the family (on the left) and the brass (on the right) were the other distinguished guests and friends. An area of the lawn outside had been set aside for distinguished guests and friends who had invitations, but for whom there was no room inside. Loudspeakers would carry the ceremony to them.

  The Third Army chaplain raised his hand in blessing.

  "The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, be with you and yours," he said.

  The pallbearers (Brigadier General Robert F. Bellmon; Major

  Rudolph G. MacMillan; WOJG William B. Franklin; Master

  Sergeant Wallace Horn; Staff Sergeant Jerry P. Davis and

  Corporal Sampson P. Killian) rose and took their places around the casket. The organ began to play "Nearer My God to Thee."

  On the fourth bar, the organ was joined by the 77th U.S. Army

  Band outside.

  The casket was carried down the aisle.

  The widow and her family followed it out and then the brass. By the time they were outside, the casket had been installed on the rack on the back of the M48. A line of soldiers moving quickly, but not running, carried the floral tributes from the chapel to waiting jeeps. The floral tributes included one from the French government, who had also ordered their consul general from New Orleans to pay final respects to a holder of the Croix de geurre. The decision to send the consul may have been based more on the fact that network TVcrews were going to be on hand than on Greer's service to France, but the point was that he was there, and his Citroen with the CD tags and his purple ribbon of office worn diagonally across his chest gave Colonel Brandon another good shot.

  As soon as the widow and her baby and the black lady had gotten into the first of two limousines, the driver of the M48 started his engine. A cloud of acrid diesel smoke was blown down the line of cars and the people waiting to get in them.

  There was a second Cadillac limousine canying Mayor and

  Mrs. Dutton, and then General Black's staff car, and then (as protocol demanded, since a consul general of a friendly power ranks a three-star general) the Citroen with the CD tags, then

  General Hoit's and General Jiggs's staff cars. Mrs. Bellmon rode with Gen
eral and Mrs. Jiggs.

  Preceding the M48 were a company of the WOC battalion; the color guard; the staff car carrying the three clergy; and the four jeeps carrying the floral tributes.

  Following General Jiggs's staff car were the 77th U.S. Army