They had then been assigned to a processing company, where they had been assigned to a barracks and issued a mattress cover, two sheets, a pillowcase, and two blankets. A specialist fourth class, drunk with his own authority, had then demonstrated the correct manner of making a GI bed and provided his own list of dire consequences for anyone failing to come up to his high standards.
They were then marched to a building where there were white-jacketed GIs, armed with chrome-plated devices, powered by air. These were intended to administer the required regimen of inoculations against disease.
Jack Portet was a believer in inoculations against disease. He had seen with his own eyes what happened to people in the Congo who let slip their appointment with the doctor to bring their international certificate of inoculations up to date. His own ICI was up to date, and that was what posed the problem, for he had also seen what happened to people who took shots that reacted with inoculations they already had. He had no intention of letting himself be injected with something that moments later might cause him to pass out, or writhe on the floor. Or to be, conceivably, dead.
"I'd like to see a doctor before I take any of these," Jack had said as politely as possible.
"Fuck you, lemme have that arm."
"Not until I see a doctor."
"Hey, Sarge! I got a wise guy!" The first physician to whom Recruit Portet explained his problem and showed his international certificate of immunization was a young first lieutenant who had obviously never seen an ICI before. Nor was he familiar with several of the immunization inoculations Recruit Portet's ICI said he had received against the vast array of diseases common to Africa.
Telephone calls were made. The duty officer at the base hospital said that probably the best thing to do was send the kid over there, where they could have a look at his ICI; he would send a staff car. As Recruit Portet's peers, who had taken their shots without causing any trouble, were lining up preparatory to being marched back to their barracks, they saw him, accompanied by a medical corpsman, being loaded into a Ford staff car and driven off.
The Chief of the Hematology and Immunology Service 01 [he Fort Leonard Wood Base Hospital was a pleasant youngish lieutenant colonel who told Recruit Portet that he was lucky he had refused the usual regimen of inoculations.
"Or we'd have probably had you over here wrapped in rubber sheets, getting iced down." He himself administered a tetanus booster, all that Jack needed to satisfy the Army's requirements, and then did what he could to make sure there were no problems in the future. He had the shots on Jack's ICI transferred to his Army inoculations record and added a comment to the effect that no immunization inoculations should be administered to Recruit Portet without a careful review of his immunization record.
"This is serious, Portet," the Colonel said. "Don't let them give you anything until you're sure they know what they're doing." And then he sent Recruit Portet back to the reception center in a staff car.
The damage, as Jack suspected, was done. He had had experience with being an oddball before, at Culver and at the lycee in Brussels. He was an oddball, and therefore a troublemaker, because he was different.
He was not at all surprised that night when he was chosen to be a fire watch, which required that he walk up and down through the barracks for two hours, twice, to make sure that if there was a conflagration there would be someone to shout "Fire" and pull the fire alarm.
On his first morning in the Army he received a partial pay of fifty dollars, with which he was expected to purchase necessary toiletries. Then they were marched to a warehouse, measured, and issued uniforms. In the afternoon they were subjected to a battery of tests designed to measure their intellectual, comprehensive, and visual skills.
On his second night in the Army he was selected to be a runner in the orderly room, which required that he stay awake to answer the telephone while the charge of quarters slept.
He was therefore sleepy and a bit out of sorts when he sat down at shortly after nine that morning in a small cubicle facing the desk of Specialist Fifth Class Roland P. Kohlman.
The enlisted ranks of the Army, above PFC (pay grades E-4 through E-7) were then divided into noncommissioned officers and specialists. Specialists ranked immediately below noncommissioned officers of the same pay grade. E.g., a specialist-5 (spec-5) ranked immediately below a sergeant; a spec-7 immediately below a master sergeant.
"Have a seat," Spec-5 Kohlman said to Jack Portet with a smile. "What happens now is that we put your civilian education and your civilian job skills on your form 20. And then we add to those your scores on the intelligence and aptitude tests, and then we decide where you would best fit into the Army's needs." Jack Portet gave him an uncertain smile, but did not reply.
"Did you finish high school?" Kohlman asked.
"Yes."
"Any college?"
"Yes."
"How much?"
"Four years."
"What's your degree?"
"History. "
"I meant AB, BS?" There followed a discussion of the differences between the degree-awarding procedures of the Free University of Brussels and those of American institutions of higher learning. Kohlman was told that the Free University of Brussels awarded a diploma in a given subject, such as history, but not a degree. The only degrees they awarded were doctoral degrees, and he had not completed that program.
Spec-5 Kohlman was suspicious of Recruit Portet from that point onward.
His suspicions that he was dealing with either a wise guy trying to award himself a background to which he was not entitled or a pathological liar deepened as the interview proceeded.
If Portet were to be believed, he was fluent in German, French, and had some knowledge of Flemish.
So far as Kohlman was concerned, the straw that broke the camel's back came when he asked Portet if he had any civilian work experience, and Portet told him that he had been a pilot.
"A commercial pilot?" Kohlman asked doubtfully.
Jack Portet was no fool. He knew that he was being disbelieved.
"A commercial pilot with an ATR."
"A what?"
"An Airline Transport Rating."
"You were an airline pilot?"
"That's right."
"Who did you work for?"
"Air Simba," Jack told him. "In the Congo."
"You don't happen to have your pilot's license with you, do you?"
Shit! Jack Portet thought. Now he will be absolutely convinced I'm bullshitting him.
"It's with my passport and other papers I didn't think I'd need in the Army. In a safety deposit box in the First National Bank of St. Louis." Spec-5 Kohlman thought over the best way to handle this character for a moment before he went on.
"I think you ought to know that it's a court-martial offense to tell me something to be entered on your official records that isn't true."
Fuck you, Jack Portet thought. Check it out.
He said nothing.
"Is there anything you've told me here that you would like to change before we go any further?"
"Yeah," Jack said, "about the languages?"
"What about them?" Kohlman asked, convinced that he had now opened the floodgates of truth.
"Add Swahili to the list," Jack Portet said. "I speak pretty good Swahili." Recruit Jacques Emile Portet posed something of an administrative problem for the reception center. Interviews with both the sergeant major and the assistant personnel officer for classification and assignment did not get from him an admission that he was telling a tale. The assistant personnel officer was prone to believe him.
He spoke a little French himself, and Portet had replied with obvious fluency when the Lieutenant asked, "Parlez-vous Francaise" that he did indeed speak the language.
In the end it was decided to turn the whole matter over to the CIC (Counterintelligence Corps) for an official investigation. The CIC wanted to hear about anybody being inducted who had a "foreign association," and if Recruit Portet had
indeed gone to the Free University of Brussels, that was certainly a foreign association.
Several days later Recruit Portet was placed on orders transferring him to the 3rd Armored Division (Training) at Fort Knox, Kentucky, for basic training as an Armored Infantryman.
His records were flagged with a coded notice saying that he was currently the subject of a CIC investigation.
(Two)
Fort Belvoir, Virginia 13 January 1964
First Lieutenant Karl-Heinz Wagner was in the copilot's seat of the DeHavilland L-20 Beaver when it landed at Fort Belvoir's Army Airfield, under verbal orders of the Assistant Adjutant of the U. S. Army Special Warfare School to report to Room 23-B-19 in the Pentagon.
"I don't know what the hell they want," the Assistant Adjutant said. "You ever hear what they say, 'Yours not to reason why. . . '"
"Yes, Sir," Karl-Heinz had said. Then he went to the BOQ and put on a class-A uniform and threw two changes of linen into a plastic overnight bag he had been given for having his Volkswagen repainted. Then he drove the Volkswagen to Army Ops at Pope Air Force Base and caught the regularly scheduled, if unofficial and technically illegal, morning courier flight to Washington.
The Army was forbidden by the Key West Agreement of 1948 to operate regularly scheduled air transport service. Doing so would step on the Air Force's prerogative of providing aerial transport to the Army. When the Army utilized the daily Air Force flight from Pope (which touches the Fort Bragg Reservation) to Washington, they billed the Army for each passenger seat at a rate only microscopically less than charged by civilian airlines.
The Army had Beavers: six-place, single-engine aircraft designed for the Canadian-Alaskan bush country and first used by the Army in Korea. It cost much less to fly a Beaver from Fort Bragg to Washington than the Air Force charged for flying five people there. The Air Force could not tell the Army when or where to schedule their training flights, so every day the Army scheduled a Beaver cross-country training flight from Bragg to Belvoir (which is outside Washington) and gave the pilots permission to take along any military personnel who needed a ride to Washington.
Karl-Heinz Wagner got to ride in the copilot's seat because he was senior passenger and it took only one man to fly a Beaver. The other passengers were all enlisted men, one on leave, the others running errands to the Pentagon.
Fort Belvoir is the Army Engineer Center, but its Army airfield served primarily as the primary (and again, technically illegal) air terminus for the Pentagon. When the Beaver touched down, there were perhaps thirty Army aircraft Beechcraft twin-engine L-23s, more Beavers, and a flock of Cessna L-19s, single-engine, two-seater observation aircraft, sitting on the transient ramp. Their vertical stabilizers bore representations of all the armies and of all the divisions based in the United States.
The Pentagon operated regularly scheduled bus service between Belvoir and Washington and assigned a half dozen olive drab staff cars to ferry colonels and generals arriving at the Belvoir airstrip to the five-sided building on the other side of the Potomac from the District of Columbia.
Lieutenant Wagner, who had never been to either the Pentagon or Washington before, was told about the bus, told to take it to the Pentagon, and once inside to look for a map of the building hung on a wall. That would show him how to get where he was supposed to go.
But when he climbed down from the Beaver, a black civilian wearing a blue suit was waiting for him.
"Lieutenant Wagner?"
"That's right."
"I been sent to fetch you."
"To take me to the Pentagon?"
"To fetch you," the black man repeated. "You got any bags or anything I can help you with?"
"Just this," Karl-Heinz replied, holding up his "I Had My Car Painted by Earl Schieb" plastic overnight bag.
He got in the front seat of the new-model, but already well worn (like the taxi it was), olive-drab Ford staff car. Within minutes they were on a heavily traveled expressway, and not long afterward, the Pentagon building appeared on the left.
It grew larger as they approached, and Karl-Heinz had time to reflect on just how huge it was.
It was surrounded by a complicated system of access roads, and Karl-Heinz was not particularly surprised when the Pentagon fell behind. He had learned that on American expressways it was often necessary to head in the opposite direction to ultimately reach your intended destination.
But then they crossed a bridge, and there was a sign, WELCOME TO OUR NATION'S CAPITAL.
"Hey," he said. "We passed the Pentagon."
"You ain't going to the Pentagon," the driver said.
"I'm supposed to go to the Pentagon," Karl-Heinz said flatly.
"Your name Lieutenant Karl Dash Heinz Wagner?"
"That's right."
"Then you ain't supposed to go to the Pentagon," the driver said with absolute certainty. "You going to State-War-and-Navy." When he looked at the driver, he gave him a broad, if tolerant, smile- the city boy dealing with the country boy unfamiliar with the big city.
The Ford turned left, and almost immediately Karl-Heinz realized that they were driving past the White House. He looked at the building with fascination, wondering if the President of the United States was in there at this moment. Then he noticed a sparse line of men and women, some neatly dressed and others looking like beggars, all of them carrying signs, marching slowly and unevenly on the sidewalk outside the fence.
Gottverdammte Kommunisten! he muttered.
"Communists or cowards," the driver said. "One or the other." Karl-Heinz looked at him curiously.
"I done my hitch in Nam," the driver said.
Karl-Heinz was surprised but said nothing.
They turned left again, right then, and stopped before a substantial, steel-barred fence. A policeman came to the car, carrying a clipboard The driver rolled down his window.
"Wagner," he said to the policeman. "Lieutenant Karl Dash Heinz."
The policeman ran his finger down a list on his clipboard and then lowered his head to look through the window.
"May I see your AGO card, please, Lieutenant?" As Karl-Heinz fished it out, he glanced at the driver, who had pushed himself out of the way so that Karl-Heinz could hand the identity card to the policeman. In doing so, his jacket opened.
The driver had a .45 Colt Model 1911 Al pistol in a cross-draw holster on his left hip.
The policeman compared the photograph on the AGO card with Karl-Heinz's face and then gave it back. He gave a signal and the sturdy gate rolled open to the left.
They went inside the compound and stopped before the broad sandstone stairs of a large, and Karl-Heinz thought, quite ugly Victorian building.
"There's a reception desk right inside," the driver said. "Just give her your name." Five minutes later, wearing a visitor's badge and accompanied by a White House policeman, Karl-Heinz Wagner was shown into the small and simple office of Sanford T. Felter.
The last time he had seen Felter had been what now seemed to be a very long time ago, at Fort Bragg, when Karl-Heinz had been just about to graduate from the Basic Course at Camp Mackall, and Felter had recruited him to go to Berlin. Felter was now in civilian clothes, but Wagner saluted him anyway.
There was a flicker of surprise on Felter's face, but he returned the salute.
"How are you, Wagner?" he asked. "Good to see you again."
"Fine, thank you, Sir."
"I just heard the good news in the Craig family," Felter said, motioning for Wagner to sit down.
"My sister, you mean, Sir?"
"Yes, of course. I saw Colonel Lowell at McDill, at STRICOM, and he is now acting very much like a prospective grandfather."
Wagner could think of nothing to say in reply.
"How's Camp Mackall?"
"I would rather be in Vietnam, Sir," Wagner said.
"So would I," Felter said, "but that wasn't my question."
"It is difficult to make the men serious," Wagner said. "To make them understand wh
at they will be facing."
"I suspect that someone like you in Roman Legions said very much the same thing about Centurion boot camp," Felter said. "The human mind tends to alter that which it does not want to believe."
"May I ask why you sent for me, Sir?" Wagner asked.
"I have a job for you, if you'd be interested."
"Sir, with respect, I am a soldier."
"So'm I," Felter said. "Soldiers do what they're ordered to do."
"I am not, then, being given a choice? With regard to the job you mentioned?" It was a moment before Felter replied.
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