The Aviators

by W. E. B Griffin

  SFC Wilters

  Oliver had learned that having room six (the other side of the bathroom) empty was another perquisite of being the General's aide. He wondered why that was, but didn't question the custom. And then his mood turned darker. To wit:

  The enforced camaraderie he now faced with a new roommate reminded him of the prejudice he was forced to suffer as a bachelor. And this was one more proof of that prejudice:

  they hadn't moved this second lieutenant into some second lieutenant's family quarters when they ran out of space in the Student BOQs.

  Oliver crumpled up the note and the envelope and scored two baskets in the tin wastebasket by the desk in the "study." Then he walked down the corridor and got a waxed-paper bucket full of ice from the ice-maker. He carried it back to his room, took the good bottle of Johnnie Walker from the closet, and made himself a drink. After that, he took off his blouse and tie and started putting his laundry and dry cleaning away.

  There came a knock on the door to the latrine.

  "Come," Oliver said.

  A very short officer put his head through the doorway.

  "Captain Oliver? I'm Lieutenant Newell. They moved me in next door. There's no room in the Student BOQ."

  "Welcome to the Rucker Hilton," Oliver said. "Come on in. Pour yourself a drink."

  "No, thank you, Sir. I just wanted to introduce myself."

  "Oh, have a drink. Drinking and screwing aren't any fun by yourself."

  "I'm married, Sir," Newell said.

  "Well, good for you, but so what?"

  "The billeting sergeant made it pretty clear that I was not to have females in the room."

  "Why?" Oliver asked. "I've been in whorehouses with fewer broads than are usually here on weekend nights."

  "I think his point was that I wasn't to disturb you, Sir."

  "Oh, Jesus!" Oliver said, and then had a fresh thought.

  "If you're married, where is she? If she was here, you'd have a whole damned house to yourself."

  "Home, Sir. EI Paso. I'm National Guard, and we're not authorized dependents."

  That explains why, Oliver thought, this guy doesn't look, or act, like your typical bushy-tailed second john fresh from an officer basic school.

  "When did they stop drinking in Texas?" Oliver asked.

  "Well, if you're sure, I'd like a drink. It's been a bitch today."

  "Then we have something in common," Oliver said. And then he thought of something else. "Is that MGB of Many Colors outside yours?"

  "Yes, Sir."

  "No one is watching," Oliver said, handing him the bottle of Johnnie Walker. "You can call me by first name-John within the walls of our little home."

  "My name is Joseph," Newell said.

  "I knew it would be. As in 'Joseph's Coat of Many Colors.' Is there some story behind that technicolor MGB?" Newell smiled.

  "I rebuilt it," he said. "Or I made one that runs out of three that didn't." He didn't mix the scotch with ice. Raising the glass of straight whiskey to Oliver, he said, "Thank you," and then took a sip. "That's good booze."

  "May I infer, Joseph? Do people really call you Joseph? What does your wife call you?"

  "Butch."

  "Dutch? "

  "Butch," Newell said. "From the haircut." He rubbed his hand over his crew cut. "I always wore it like this." He looked at Oliver a moment. "My father calls me Joe and my mother calls me Jose. I'm a Mex-Tex, or a Tex-Mex."

  "And do you carry a chip on your shoulder because of that?"

  "Why do you ask?"

  "Because I think I'm going to call you Jose and I wouldn't want you running to the minority affairs officer and raising a bitch about it." Newell smiled. "Jose's fine," he said.

  "As I was saying, Jose. Would it be reasonable to presume you know something about MGBs?"

  "Yeah. Why?"

  "Why would an MGB-one which has had its fuel line blown out three times-cough, sputter, and suffer complete engine malfunction every time it's driven in the rain?"

  "Sounds like a cracked distributor head," Newell said after a just perceptible hesitation.

  "I looked for that."

  "Where it cracks most often is in the center lead-the wire from the coil?-and it's damned near impossible to see. And then when you run it in the rain, a sort ()f mist gets through the radiator, or up from under the engine, condenses in the molding, and shorts it out. You've got an MGB?"

  "A friend of mine does. I have just decided, Jose, that our enforced association is going to be fortuitous." Newell smiled at him.

  "I'll look at it, if you'd like," he' said. "I've got a new distributor cap in my trunk. They're always cracking. I think they make them out of papier-mache."

  [THREE]

  0830 Hours 12 January 1964

  Johnny Oliver and Jose Newell started work on Marjorie Bellmon's MG early the following morning. By that time Johnny had learned quite a lot about Second Lieutenant Joseph M. Newell, Signal Corps, Texas Army National Guard, the new occupant of room six.

  For one thing, he now knew that Jose Newell was just half an inch taller than the minimum prescribed height for commissioned officers, and five pounds heavier than the minimum prescribed weight. Over their fourth drink, for which they had adjourned to the bar of Annex #1 of the Officers' Open Mess next door to the BOQ, Jose told him that that made him five and half inches shorter and twenty pounds lighter than his wife. He produced a picture of the' lady, a statuesque blonde in a cowboy hat, hanging tightly on to Jose's arm and looking down at him with an expression that was visibly near ecstasy.

  Twenty-three years before, Joseph M. Newell, Sr., then twenty and working for the railroad in EI Paso on a tie-tamping machine, had enraged his family and Anglo-Texan sensitivities generally by taking to wife one Estrellita Gomez.

  Miss Gomez, eighteen at the time, had similarly enraged her family and Tex-Mex sensitivities generally by running off to Las Vegas with a Protestant gringo.

  Joseph M. Newell, Jr., had been born the day after his parents' first wedding' anniversary. He had always been a runt, he told Johnny Oliver, which both sides blamed on the weak blood of the other. And he'd always been so dark he looked Spanish.

  In time, though, a sort of armed truce had been reached between the families, largely through the good offices of Monsignor Antonio Delamar, rector of EI Paso's Our Lady of Guadalupe Roman Catholic Church. Monsignor Delamar managed to convince Lita Gomez Newell's mother that the marriage was valid in the eyes of God, that Lita and Joe were not living in sin, and that Little Jose was not illegitimate. All this followed, the Monsignor told her, because the Holy Father himself had pronounced that many Episcopal priests had valid holy orders, and that the wedding had been performed by such a cleric.

  Similarly, the Reverend Bobby-Joe Fenster of EI Paso's Second Church of the Nazarene, Full Gospel, had managed to convince Mrs. Archie Newell that since it was true that God did indeed move in mysterious ways, perhaps there was a purpose in what had happened between Joe ilnd that sweet little Mex girl. There was no disputing the fact that she'd gotten him away from the bottle, Praise God, something she had to admit they had been unable to do. And the Mex girl wasn't trying to get Joe to convert-not that he would, of course, but some of them did. . . . And he'd hate to tell her what he'd heard about how some Roman Catholic women did that. And later, when the time came for Little Joseph/Jose to

  begin school, the Reverend Fenster told Mrs. Newell he personally found nothing wrong in Little Joe going to the parochial school, especially since Joe's wife felt so strongly about it. He had Monsignor Delamar's word on it -and, giving the Devil his due, Delamar was an honorable man-that the nuns wouldn't try to convert the boy. And Mrs. Newell knew full well it was a shame what they were teaching in the public schools. Little Joe wasn't going to hear in the Saint Agnes Parochial School that human beings are nothing more than super developed orangutans.

  When Jose Newell was a junior in high school, he joined the Texas National Guard. The first summer they s
ent him to basic training. And the summer after he graduated, the National Guard sent him to radio school at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. He learned enough there to get taken on at Lone Star Aviation at the EI Paso airport, where he repaired aviation radios. During that time his boss took him for his first airplane ride, in a Cessna 172. And from that moment, Jose Newell knew that all he wanted to be in life was an aviator.

  He soloed in a Piper Cub. Subsequently he picked up what to Oliver seemed a nearly incredible thousand hours by swapping his electronic expertise for time, and by flying as an unpaid copilot on business aviation airplanes. He had a commercial multiengine land ticket with an instrument rating.

  And while he was doing this, he went to Officer Candidate School in the Texas National Guard and at Fort Benning, giving up two weekends a month and taking six weeks' unpaid vacation two summers in a row to do it. He had by then met and wooed Lucy, and decided that there was no real future for them in his being an airfield bum. He had seen, he said, too many guys in leather jackets and wire-rimmed sunglasses hanging around airfields competing with two hundred similarly qualified pilots for whatever rare flying jobs were available.

  The airlines, Jose Newell continued, wanted six-foot, preferably blond, Anglo-Saxon pilots who had several thousand hours of Air Force or Navy/Marine jet time. (He said this without rancor, accepting it as the way things were.) And the Air Force and Navy/Marines were accepting for flight training only college graduates, so that was out, too. Air charter companies, or corporations hiring pilots, were even worse.

  But when Jose Newell had graduated from OCS they commissioned him a second lieutenant in the Signal Corps, and he thought that might open a door that would let him fly without becoming an airfield bum.

  There had been a Texas Army National Guard Aviation Company at the airfield that flew Sikorsky CH-34s. As a civilian, the commanding officer (who was a friend of Jose Newell's) flew a Beech King Air for an EI Paso real estate operator. The deal struck was that because the helicopter company desperately needed someone to maintain its avionics, Lieutenant Newell would transfer into it from the Field Artillery unit he belonged to . . . providing the helicopter company sent him to flight school.

  Six months after Jose Newell transferred to the National Guard helicopter company, he was ordered to active duty for the purpose of attending the prescribed course of instruction leading to designation as a rotary-wing aviator.

  "What I figure," Jose Newell, somewhat thickly, told Johnny Newell just before they called it a night, "is that if the Army is as hard up for avionic maintenance officers as the National Guard, maybe I can wangle extended-maybe even indefinite-active duty, college degree or no college degree."

  "I don't really know what I'm talking about," Oliver told him, "but I thought there was a board here that would rate you on your civilian experience. It seems pretty silly to send you through the whole course when someone with your experience should be able to transition to choppers in a couple of weeks."

  "Catch-22," Newell replied. "They will rate regular or reserve officers on indefinite active duty, but not National Guard. And without a goddamned degree, I can't come on active duty, much less get a regular commission. But there's always an exception to every rule, and I intend to be it."

  When they drove into the driveway of Quarters # 1 in Jose Newell's MGB of Many Colors, Captain John S. Oliver saw no sign of life within the house. So they went right to work on Marjorie Bellmon's MGB.

  It turned out that Jose Newell's shot-in-the-dark diagnosis had been right on the money. He pulled the cap from the distributor, wedged a screwdriver into the coil wire hole, held it up to the light, and showed Oliver a tiny crack.

  Two minutes later, with a new cap in place, the engine coughed into life.

  "It sounds like a thrashing machine," Jose said. "Who tuned this thing, anyway?" As Jose Newell, with all the delicacy of a surgeon, was adjusting the MGB's timing, Miss MaIjorie Bellmon, sleepy eyed, in a bathrobe, came into the carport from the kitchen.

  "Does this mean I won't have to shoot it?" she asked.

  "Or is that too much to hope for?"

  "I am the compleat aide," Johnny said. "All problems solved, the difficult immediately, the impossible a few minutes later. Marjorie, say hello to Jose Newell, Master MG Mechanic, who I imported all the way from Texas to get your ridiculous little machine running. Miss Bellmon, Ma'am, Lieutenant Newell of the Texas National Guard. My new roommate. "

  "Hi," Marjorie said. "And welcome, welcome, welcome!"

  But don't let me disturb you. I'll put some coffee on, and get some clothes on. And you just keep doing what you're doing.

  Please! "Very nice," Jose Newell said, softly, after Marjorie had gone back in the house.

  "She's a pal of mine, Jose, that's all," Oliver said.

  Newell's eyebrows rose in question.

  "You've heard about love at first sight? Well, with Marjorie and me, it was pals at first sight. Once I got used to the idea, I found I like it that way."

  "That's interesting," Jose said, and returned his attention to the engine.

  Fifteen minutes later, as Captain Oliver and Lieutenant Newell were being served poached eggs atop English muffins by Miss Bellmon in the kitchen, the phone rang and Oliver rose to answer it.

  "Stay there," Marjorie ordered. "Dad's up. I heard him.

  And it's your day off." A minute after that, Major General Robert F. Bellmon walked into his kitchen. He was wearing a uniform shirt and trousers, but no tie, and he was unshaven.

  Oliver and Newell rose to their feet. "Good morning, General," Oliver said.

  "I thought I heard your voice out here," Bellmon said distractedly.

  He's upset as hell about something, Oliver thought.

  "Sir, this is Lieutenant Newell," Oliver said.

  "Who just brought my car back from the dead," Marjorie added.

  Absently, General Bellmon nodded at Newell.

  "One of the Board's Chinooks just went in," Bellmon said.

  "Badly. The other side of Enterprise. The crew's apparently dead."

  "Oh, God!" Marjorie said softly.

  "I'm going to the crash," Bellmon said. "You want to come along with me, Johnny?"

  When Bellmon looked at him, Oliver gestured at his civilian clothing. He was wearing a red nylon ski jacket and blue jeans.

  "So what?" Bellmon replied. "Call Hanchey and lay on a bird for us." Oliver went to the note pad fixed to the wall beside the telephone and scribbled on it. Then he tore the sheet of paper off.

  "Call this number, Jose," he said. "Tell them to have a Huey warmed up by the time the General and I get there."

  "Yes, Sir," Jose Newell said.

  "Give that piece of paper to Marjorie," General Bellmon ordered. "Lieutenant. . . what's your name?"

  "Newell, Sir."

  "Lieutenant Newell can come with us. We may need another pair of hands."

  [FOUR}

  Hanchey Army Airfield Fort Rucker, Alabama

  0905 Hours 12 January 1964

  Though it was Lieutenant Joseph M. Newell's first ride in a Bell HU -I-Series helicopter, it was not his first ride in a helicopter. So he knew more or less what was going on in it.