Army Blue

by Lucian K. Truscott

  “Did you resign, sir?” the reporter persisted doggedly.

  “Hell, no. I was fired. Haven't you figured that out by now?”

  “That's what I heard, but I had to get it from you, sir.”

  “One of the things that's always amazed me about you bastards in the press is what you just said, Weatherby. You knew what was going on, but you said you had to get it from me. Why, for crying out loud? If you know the goddamned truth, why don't you just goddamned print it? Why do you have to rouse a tired old coot like me to put the stamp of approval on what you already know? Christ, if I was a goddamned newspaper reporter, I'd do one hell of a lot less bothering of the citizenry, and one hell of a lot more exercising of that goddamned muscle you've got up there between your ears. That would save everyone a good deal of time, wouldn't you say, Weatherby?”

  “Yes, but you know, sir . . . my editor. He's going to ask. I've got to have the answer.”

  “Next time you've got the answer and your editor doesn't, you tell him to call me, Weatherby, if he wants it from the goddamned horse's mouth. I don't want your goddamned questions about my breakfast, if you already know what goddamned cereal I ate this morning. Do you understand me, Weatherby?”

  “Yes, sir, I do. I have a few more questions, sir.”

  “No doubt,” growled the General.

  “What caused the White House's action, sir? Has anyone told you?”

  “Ask them.”

  “Was it that speech you gave in Lyons last month, sir? The one where you compared Tet to Dien Bien Phu? You said Vietnam was our Algeria. Did you mean that, sir?”

  “It's obvious you read the speech. What do you think?”

  “It reads like you were taking a walk from the last twenty years of your life, sir, if you want my frank opinion. You've been heading in that direction for some time, but at Lyons you weren't walking away. You were in a dead run.”

  “You see what I mean, Weatherby? You didn't need to call me this morning. You figured it out for yourself.” The General coughed and spat into his handkerchief.

  “One more question, if I may, sir.”

  “What's that, Weatherby?”

  “Why?”

  “Goddammit, Weatherby! Do your homework! The answer is right there in front of you, in everything I've ever done, in every word I've ever spoken, every stand I've ever taken, right there in the history of every unit I ever commanded. Read my goddamned book. Read what I had to say about the crap Clark pulled at Anzio. Read my damn book, Weatherby. You'll get your answer about Vietnam.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said the reporter from the Times.

  “Quote me correctly, Weatherby,” the General rasped, coughing again.

  “I will, sir,” said the reporter.

  “You'd better, mister,” said the General, hanging up the phone.

  His wife rubbed the top of his head with the palm of her hand, messing his hair.

  “You old coot,” she said. “You scared that poor thing to death, didn't you?”

  “I doubt it,” said the General, staring at his garden again. “He's been around the track a few circuits, and he'll be around again. He'll be on the phone to me tomorrow if he needs something else from me. It's his job.”

  He coughed and spat into his handkerchief again, and caught his breath after a moment.

  “Christ,” he rasped through gritted teeth. “It's my job. At this point, it's all I've got left to do, picking up the phone and answering questions, stating the obvious for the ignorant. The little bastard's got his job, I've got my job: spelling it out for them, chalkboarding my life and my opinions over and over again. MacArthur was wrong. Old generals don't fade away. They just answer the goddamned phone and talk to reporters.”

  “What's on the agenda today, dear?” Belinda asked, rubbing his neck.

  “I'm going to work in the garden after lunch. Bruce Pelton is coming over at cocktail hour.”

  “Will he be staying for dinner?”

  “No. He's leaving first thing tomorrow morning for Vietnam on one of those goddamned fact-finding missions for the Secretary of State. I think this is his last one. Old Bruce isn't going to last much longer. He hasn't got it in him, putting up with the crap they're dishing out over there.”

  “I'm off to the farm to ride, dear,” said Belinda. “I'll be home around six.”

  “Don't you have a show this weekend?” the General asked.

  “Yes, the one in Leesburg, remember?”

  “The goddamned prissy little assholes from Leesburg,” he rasped. “How could I have forgotten?”

  She kissed the top of his head and headed out the door. He heard the car back out of the driveway, and he was alone.

  The General finished reading the Post and walked downstairs to his basement study. A large mahogany desk was along one wall, next to a drafting table where he made plans for his garden and designed furniture. He was entirely self-educated, and it was an education that had begun with his hands. If it was made from wood, he could build it. If it was green, he could grow it. If it was a horse, he could ride it. If it was a polo ball, he could hit it.

  The walls of his study were bookshelves, floor to ceiling, except for the brick wall over the fireplace, which was hung with artifacts of the General's thirty-year Army career: a polo ball and mallet, a German Army helmet, a Beretta semiautomatic pistol that had belonged to Field Marshal Kesselring, a riding crop, a Colt revolver of Civil War vintage that the General had found in the attic of a farmhouse he owned just after the war. The General sat down in a deep leather armchair and was drifting off to sleep when the doorbell rang. He struggled to his feet and climbed the stairs. Through the smoky glass of the front door he could make out a slender figure. He opened the door.

  “General, I'm awfully sorry to bother you at this time of day, but—”

  “Brownie! What the hell are you doing here at this hour? You're not due until the sun's over the yardarm. What's up?” Brownie was the General's nickname for Lieutenant General Bruce Pelton, who had served as a battalion commander under him in North Africa and Italy, and was now Assistant Secretary of State for Military Affairs. He didn't stand much over five feet six inches, and he was as skinny as a college wrestler. He had a prominent, aquiline nose, and his hair, once wiry and black, was now peppered with gray.

  “I'm afraid I've got some disturbing news, sir,” said Lieutenant General Pelton, still deferring to the General after all those years.

  “Well, come on in, Brownie, goddammit. Tell me what's on your mind. Time's a-wasting.” He led Pelton downstairs to the study and pointed to a chair. The General took the leather armchair. The two men sat facing each other across an ancient, moth-eaten Persian rug.

  “I just received information that your grandson, Matt the fourth, has been charged with desertion in the face of the enemy by his brigade commander in Vietnam. He's under arrest, sir.”

  “What in hell did you say, Brownie?” The General sat upright in the armchair and leaned toward the other man. The dark study suddenly seemed stiflingly hot, and he fumbled with the top button of his shirt.

  “We got a cable on it today, sir. It came in from the ambassador. Every time an American, military or civilian, is charged with a capital offense, the Secretary is cabled immediately. Came in this morning.” He handed a file folder to the General.

  “Lieutenant Blue was charged late last night and placed under arrest. The technical charge comes under Article 121 of the Uniform Code having to do with discharge of duties under combat conditions. They've charged him with cowardice and desertion in the face of the enemy, sir. They're very serious charges.”

  The General reached for his half-glasses and flipped on the fluorescent lamp mounted on his desk. He studied the file for a moment and looked up.

  “What else have you got?” he asked slowly. He looked and sounded tired.

  “That's all, sir. Just the initial cable notifying the Secretary that capital charges have been filed. The rest of the stuff in there is t
he acknowledgment to MACV and the notations by the duty officer who received the telex.”

  “Who preferred the charges?”

  Lieutenant General Pelton studied the toes of his shoes for a moment, then looked the General in the eye. When he spoke, his words were measured. Just delivering the news to the General was hard enough. Talking about fellow officers made it worse.

  “Colonel James Franklin Testor, sir. He's Third Brigade CO in the 25th Infantry Division. You probably know your grandson has been in command of a weapons platoon in the Second of the 22nd, which was attached to the 25th. Technically, he was under command of the Third Brigade, under Testor.”

  “What could possibly be going on, Brownie?” the General asked, slamming his fist on the arm of the chair. He coughed and spat into his handkerchief and fixed the other man with his huge eyes, a wide-eyed glare that for years had telegraphed his intelligence, intensity, and hatred.

  “I know that boy. He spent every summer with me for fifteen goddamned years. That boy would never goddamned desert, any more than he'd take a kitchen knife and stab his goddamned mother!” He banged his fist on the armchair, his half-glasses tumbling into his lap from the blow.

  “It's unthinkable, Brownie, goddammit. There's something wrong. Something's missing. I can feel it.”

  “What's missing is young Matt's side of the story, sir. Just because a charge has been brought doesn't mean a crime has been committed. He's innocent until he's proven guilty, sir.”

  “Of course he is, goddammit, Brownie. I mean something else is missing. I told you last week I'd gotten a letter from the boy with news of a unit commendation and the Silver Star he'd been put in for. You goddamned just don't go putting in a soldier for a Silver Star one week and charging him with desertion the next. I know that goddamned war is about as loony a military exercise as I've ever witnessed, but young Matt a deserter? Not on your goddamned life, Brownie. I'll stake my entire goddamned career on the notion that something corrupt is going on, Brownie. And I'm going to be at the bottom of it so goddamned fast, they won't even see me coming.”

  “I'm inclined to agree with you, sir,” said Lieutenant General Pelton, carefully picking his words. “But if you're not careful here, sir, you could end up doing more harm than good. That's why I came over as soon as I got news of the charges, sir. I didn't want you hearing about this from anyone else.”

  “For which I'm very grateful, Brownie. You can rest assured that I'm aware of the dangers,” said the General, biting off his words in crisp chunks. “What do you think we can do? How far can we go and not alert the command over there that one of us, either you or I, is taking an interest?”

  “We can cable something about how potentially explosive a charge like this could be, the need to keep the Secretary informed every step of the way.”

  “That sounds like the ticket, Brownie. Anybody you can call?”

  “There's a man out at CINCPAC, in Honolulu, who served under me in Korea. Good man. Albert Kaufman. He was one of my battalion commanders. He's a buck general now, loyal as a hound dog. He's in a liaison slot between CINCPAC and MACV. He's smack in the middle of the paper flow. Everything from Military Assistance Command Vietnam goes straight through him. Everything is in his bailiwick. I'll get him to make the inquiries.”

  “What about within the 25th Division itself? Who's the CG?” the General asked. He eased his feet into his slippers, which he'd removed when he sat down in the big armchair.

  “Major General Lawrence Cardozo, sir. West Point June ‘43. Don't know him. The word is, he's a comer, a real go-getter. He's one of those men who wants everyone in the division to wear an Infantry blue neck scarf. Spit-shined boots. Anything that doesn't move, paint it white and line it up. Westmoreland and his crew just love him.”

  “Figures,” growled the General, who during the war had worn riding boots, Cavalry britches, and an old leather jacket over an open-necked khaki shirt. The boots were scuffed, the jacket was tattered and frayed, the britches patched in the seat. The war, the big war, was a time when commanders wore pretty much whatever they wanted, and the General had taken advantage of the custom. The way he wore the uniform was the way he commanded. He cut a striking figure—a cavalryman who'd taken Infantry divisions and treated them like they were riding, not walking, into battle, marching hard, striking fast, moving on. The man he'd modeled himself on had been Phil Sheridan, whose statue stood in a little park in the middle of New York's Greenwich Village. Sheridan had been suspended from West Point in his second year for having run his platoon sergeant through with an eighteen-inch-long bayonet because the platoon sergeant was making a career out of harassing him. They suspended Sheridan, and he graduated a year late, but he took his rebellious nature into the Army with him. During the Civil War, every time Grant needed someone to raid the enemy—hit them hard and fast at night or at daybreak and get out quick, leaving the enemy wondering what the hell had happened—he called on Phil Sheridan. General Blue was that kind of general. When he was through with you, either in war or in peace, you wondered what the hell had happened.

  “So who the hell is this Cardozo? Do we know him?” asked the General.

  “He served in the Pacific, sir, from ‘43 to ‘45. He was part of the occupation forces in Japan after the war. Then he was a battalion XO, then a CO in Korea, right at the end of the war, in the Second Division. I didn't know him. He went through the schools, got a brigade out at Carson, was Commandant of Cadets at West Point, and picked up the 25th earlier this year.”

  “Wait a minute. He was Commandant at West Point?” The General stood up and began pacing the study. Lieutenant General Pelton instinctively stood up with him.

  “That's right, sir.”

  “When?”

  “Let me see . . . from September ‘66 to September ‘68. That's right. Two years.”

  “Then he would have been there when Matt was a cadet.”

  “That's right, sir. Matt graduated when? Last year?”

  “Yep,” said the General. “He sure did. I think we're getting somewhere, Brownie. I want to know more about this Cardozo character. Who can we talk to?”

  “Hell, General, the Supe.”

  “Jesus. You're right. He was in your Battalion, wasn't he, Brownie? In the Ninth Regimental Combat Team? He was with us at Port Lyautey, wasn't he?”

  “Yes, sir. He was the best company commander I ever had,” said Lieutenant General Pelton.

  The General stood at his drafting table, and picked up a pencil. He tapped the eraser on the table as he spoke, emphasizing the points he made.

  “I want to know everything he knows about this Cardozo character. What color are his socks? Where did he get his socks? Who darns his socks? Who washes his socks? Who's sending him socks? I want a pair of his goddamned socks! I want him forelock to toes, elbow to elbow. If he burps, I want to know what key he burped in and what he's taking for indigestion. I want the brand of tonic he's rubbing in his hair every morning. Are you getting the message, Brownie?”

  He was tapping the pencil on the drafting table and looking at the marks he'd left on the sketch he had been working on. Behind him he heard a gurgling chuckle, a laugh he'd heard for over thirty years, but not very often. Lieutenant General Pelton was a dour man, for the most part a true believer that things could and would get much worse before they got even a smidgen better. It was one of the reasons he had a real affection for his old friend. When he laughed, you knew he had found what you'd said truly funny.

  “We're going to get to the bottom of this, aren't we, Brownie?” asked the General, as much to reassure himself as to encourage his friend.

  “Yes, sir. We'll knock down some walls.”

  “Christ. They're like ghosts, aren't they, Brownie, these men are like ghosts. Goddamned ghosts. Sometimes I think I'm living in a dream, Brownie. Everything changes, but everything stays the same. You keep seeing yourself coming, then going, coming and going, like you're looking at yourself in those mirrors in the men's
department at Woodward & Lothrop. The same names, the same faces . . . you catch a glimpse and it's goddamned gone, then it's back again, and you're not sure you saw it the first time . . .” The General drifted off, staring at a wall of books, and his friend, the Assistant Secretary of State for Military Affairs, waiting for him to focus his thoughts.

  “You know what Carey used to say about the Army, Brownie?” the General asked, referring to his first wife by name for the first time since her death, though his friend had no way of knowing of the years that had passed since the General had admitted to himself, or anyone else for that matter, that she had existed.

  “No, sir, I don't,” said Lieutenant General Pelton, watching his friend and former commander with no small amount of awe.

  “She used to say the Army is just a big small town, Carey did. And I think she was right. Everybody knows everybody. They see you coming, and they watch you going. The Pentagon is like our goddamned county courthouse. And the Army is the county. They're all just sitting over there sipping coffee, watching the traffic, getting their hair cut, exchanging gossip, waiting for something to happen. That's the nature of small towns. Nothing ever happens, so everyone just sits around waiting for something to happen. When it does, then you talk about it. Then you go back to waiting. Hurry up and wait, the troops used to say. That's the goddamned Army, Brownie, in a goddamned nutshell. Carey was about as military as a lace tablecloth, but she knew the goddamned Army. She knew the goddamned Army.”

  “Yes, sir, I believe she did,” said Lieutenant General Pelton.

  “Where do we go from here, Brownie?” asked the General.

  “I'll call you in a couple of hours, sir. I'll have something for you.”

  “Yep.”