The Aviators

by W. E. B Griffin

  A second lieutenant of Armor marched into the room, came to attention, and saluted.

  "Sir!" he barked. "Second Lieutenant Bellmon reporting for the booze hour, Sir."

  "What were you doing in that room, Bobby?"

  "I moved in there."

  "You were not supposed to," Oliver saId. "As a matter of fact, I think your father had a chat personally with the housing officer on that specific subject."

  "Well, I told the sergeant in billeting that we were buddies and he gave it to me," Bobby said. "You going to tell my father?"

  "Eventually I'll have to," Oliver said. "But not today. He has other things on his mind right now."

  "You don't want me in there?"

  "What is important is that your father doesn't want you in there," Oliver said. "We have all been given a lecture about how you are to be treated like any other second john."

  "I'm not asking for any special privileges," Bobby said, hurt.

  "I understand Grandma bought you a car."

  "Yeah. "

  "What? "

  "A Pontiac convertible- like yours," Bobby said. "This year's of course. And they didn't make them in pink this year.

  So mine's red."

  "Well, I will let you take me for a ride in it," Oliver said.

  "My car's at the airport in Dothan. En route you will be lectured on the behavior to be expected of you."

  "Why's your car in Dothan?"

  "It's a long story, one I don't feel like getting into right now. "

  "OK. So what else is new? I hear Marjorie's got a new boyfriend. True?"

  "You heard about that?"

  "I even heard he's a classmate of yours," Bobby said.

  "That was boyfriend number one. That's history. You're going to be thrilled about boyfriend number two."

  "Am I? Why?"

  "He's a PFC," Oliver said.

  "Oh, come on!"

  "Boy Scout's honor, Bobby," Oliver said. "Come on, let's a; go."

  "A PFC?" Bobby asked incredulously. "You're putting me on, right?"

  XVI

  [ONE]

  The Magnolia House

  The Army Aviation Center & Fort Rucker, Alabama

  0715 Hours 29 May 1964

  Magnolia House was Fort Rucker's VIP house. It had begun life in 1942-rather rapidly; only thirty-six hours had passed from the time the first concrete foundation-block had been set until the contract compliance inspection officer had passed it as complete. It had been built to plans provided by the Corps of Engineers for" Bachelor Officers' Quarters [Brigade or Regimental Commander's], temporary, frame." The Corps of Engineers had projected the useful life of such structures to be no more than five years. All this one was originally required to do was provide a place where a regimental or brigade commander, a colonel or a brigadier general, could sleep and take a shower in privacy while training his regiment or brigade for service in War II.

  As originally constructed, it had three rooms: a bedroom, a living room, and a bathroom. The two-by-fours in the walls had been left exposed. There was a toilet and a shower, but no other comforts, not even a door for the crapper. But from the day after it had gone up, there had been modifications, some prescribed by the Corps of Engineers and some not quite legal.

  When its first occupant, a brigadier general of the Wisconsin National Guard, moved in, he told his aide to do something about getting a door for the bathroom.

  A door had been found and installed, and a concrete sidewalk poured. And the sergeant who did that was a man who took pride in his work, and so he uprooted a dozen small magnolia trees from someplace and installed them on what would have been a nice place for a lawn-if he could only lay his hands on some grass seed.

  When the National Guard went off to war, Camp Rucker became a POW camp for Germans and Italians captured in North Africa. Among the prisoners were a number of skilled craftsmen, who decided, after some debate, that fixing up the shack where ,their head captor resided did not really constitute giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

  There was heart pine on the Rucker reservation, with which the walls and floors were covered, and from which cabinets were made. A room and another bath were added to the right side of the original structure; and two more rooms, a dining room and a kitchen, were added to the rear.

  When the war was over and the POWs went home, the Captain commanding the caretaker crew at deserted Camp Rucker lived in the little house near what had been the main ::!reo. Then the Korean War came along, and midwestem National Guardsmen came to the deep south again, and their Colonels and generals moved into the little house with the magnolias on the lawn.

  ..:uld then that war was over too, and another small caretaker crew waited at Camp Rucker for the contracts to be let by the General Services Administration to tear the barracks and the theaters and everything else down so the place could finaly be closed.

  IN Ozark there was a lawyer named James Douglas Brown, who was the mayor, and who had come to realize that a military payroll was a nice thing to have in a little town without much else to offer. And he had a long talk with the Honorable John S. Sparkman, of the United States Senate. The Army was looking around the deserted air bases of the nation for a place where it could train pilots for the helicopter and light fixed-wing aircraft that had come into the Army after Korea. There were a number of surplus military air bases, mostly in the southwest, which had all the necessary facilities in terms of runways and hangars and fuel storage tanks. A list was made up. And Camp Rucker wasn't even on it.

  But none of the others were represented in the United States Senate by John S. Sparkman. And in due course the Secretary of Defense announced, with as much of a straight face as he could muster, that a careful study of the problem indicated that Camp Rucker was the best place to station the Army Aviation Center. And it was so ordered.

  Colonel Jay D. Vanderpool, a distinguished and flamboyant paratrooper, moved into the little house by the gate, which by now was known as the Magnolia House. Vanderpool commanded the Aviation Combat Developments Agency, a kind of Army think-tank devoted to investigating the best way aviation could serve the Army.

  Vanderpool believed that an officer should never order his subordinates to do what he could not do himself. In his mind this was of greater importance than some still wet-behind the-ears chancre mechanic's notion that he was too old and too beat-up to be allowed in an airplane, much less taught how to fly.

  He learned how to fly, and he flew, and he and his boys put machine guns and rockets on helicopters, the first time either had been done. And if anyone noticed that there were no aviators' wings on his chest, no one said anything.

  After Congress came through with a multimillion-dollar authorization to build family housing at what was now Fort Rucker (by this time a permanent military installation), Vanderpool moved into family quarters appropriate to his grade on Colonels' Row.

  The Magnolia House was turned into transient VIP quarters.

  Suitable furniture was acquired, some from government stocks, some purchased with Officers' Open Mess funds, and some donated as gifts. Central air conditioning and heating were installed.

  There is a guest book there now, and the signatures in it are a who's who of important military brass (both American and foreign), the defense industry, and the upper echelons of the government. Many guests of the Magnolia House, especially foreign officers, have seen fit to express their appreciation for the hospitality shown them by sending a memento.

  This has often been an ornate plaque bearing the insignia of their army. A china cabinet is full of them. The overflow hangs on the walls.

  And outside, the magnolia trees planted so long ago have matured. They now tower over the building and give it both privacy and shade.

  Magnolia House was full today. In addition to General George F. Rand, who occupied the facility while attending :light school and who was set up in bedroom #3, there were some VIPs from Washington: a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, an Air Force Majo
r General, and an army Brigadier General. The latter two were forced to share bedroom.

  One of the orderlies, a tall, thin, blond-headed corporal in a starched white cotton jacket, laid the telephone handset dowwn and walked- to bedroom #1. Once inside, he went to the open door of the bathroom, where a man was standing beside the washbasin. He knocked on the doorjamb.

  "Mr. Secretary," he said, "there's a Colonel Lowell outside, who said to ask you if you could spare him a moment of your time."

  "Who?"

  "Lieutenant Colonel Lowell, Sir," the orderly repeated.

  John Xavier O'Herlihy paused in mid razor stroke. O'Herlihy was a stocky, redheaded man of thirty-nine, who was deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Development. The name Lowell was unfamiliar to him.

  "Did he say what he wanted?"

  "No, Sir."

  "Oh, hell, ask him to wait, please."

  "Yes, Sir." Jack O'Herlihy was a product of Seton Hall High School, Fordham, and the Harvard Law School. After a year with the law firm of McRae, McRae, Henderson, Belker and Saybrook, 38 Wall Street, in New York City, he went back to school and took a degree at the Wharton School of Business Administration of the University of Pennsylvania.

  He returned to McRae, McRae, Henderson, Belker and Saybrook and specialized in the practice of contract fulfillment, which he rather liked, because it gave him the opportunity to plead his clients' cases in court and sometimes even before a jury. Very few of the lawyers at McRae, McRae, Henderson, Belker and Saybrook ever went near a courtroom.

  Five years after he graduated from Wharton, he was named a partner, making him both the youngest partner (of thirteen) in the firm, and the man who had been appointed a partner in the shortest time since joining the firm.

  He had married in his last year in law school; and he and Mary Margaret bought a house in South Orange, New Jersey, not very far from Seton Hall.

  Sometimes a limo took him to the airport in Newark. Often on those occasions, he would be driven past the Seton Hall High School campus (shared with Seton Hall University).

  Whenever he passed by there, he allowed himself to remember how far he'd come from the kid who used to ride his bicycle to the campus from the Rosewood section of Newark.

  The O'Herlihy family had occupied the upper floor of a frame house there, across the street from the Rosewood fire station.

  He had stocked groceries in the Acme Supermarket to help pay the Seton Hall High tuition.

  As a partner in McRae, McRae, Henderson, Belker and Saybrook, Jack O'Herlihy was making more money than he ever dreamed he would-though what he was getting as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Development was peanuts. But he resisted the temptation to think that working for forty-odd thousand was a sacrifice. For one thing he really believed that serving his country was a privilege. (An otherwise non troublesome heart murmur had kept him from serving it in uniform.) And for another, it was a learning experience which would be of great value to him in his future career. And finally, he had been led to believe that when his time with the Defense Department was up (he- intended to serve two years, no more), McRae, McRae, Henderson, Belker and Saybrook would make up the lost income in the form of a bonus. The firm knew the importance of contacts within the government.

  Jack O'Herlihy finished shaving, wiped his face clean with a towel, liberally splashed on his face St. .John's Island Spice after-shave. . . and recalled the U.S. Virgin Islands, which is where he first discovered it. And that triggered a thought that had come with greater and greater frequency: when his time with Defense was over and his income was back to normal (or maybe with the promised bonus), he dreamed of buying a little place down there in the islands, just for him and Mary Margaret, a place where they could get away from the ~ds.

  He tied his necktie, slipped into the jacket to his dark-blue, very faintly pencil-striped Brooks Brothers suit, and left bedroom #l.

  The soldier who wanted to see him was standing by the stair almost at attention. Jesus, he didn't even dare to sit down.

  O'Herlihy glanced around the living and dining rooms, looking for the two officers who had accompanied him here from Washington to settle this Chinook-testing business once and for all. But neither Major General Richard F. Stone, the other Deputy Chief of Air Force Research and Development, ~ Brigadier General Max Kramer, Vice Deputy Chief of staff for Operations,' U . S. Army, was in sight. So this poor Colonel was paying him that kind of respect. Jack O'Herlihy ~ a little embarrassed, but told himself, What the hell, I an the Assistant Secretary of Defense. . . .

  "Goodd morning, Colonel," O'Herlihy said, offering his hand. He had learned that lieutenant colonels like it when you call them colonel.

  "Good morning, Mr. Secretary," Lieutenant Colonel Lowell said politely. "Thank you for seeing me, Sir." Good-looking man, O'Herlihy decided. Even handsome.

  And he's been around the block. He didn't know what all the ribbons and other insignia hanging on Lieutenant Colonel Lowell's uniform were, but he recognized the Distinguished Service Cross and a Purple Heart dotted with oak leaf clusters. This man was a pilot, and a parachutist, and he'd seen a lot of combat. I wonder what the hell he wants?

  "How may I help you, Colonel?"

  "Actually, Mr. Secretary, this is completely unofficial," Lieutenant Colonel Lowell said.

  "Oh, I see." What the hell does that mean?

  "Dinky Saybrook said that if I ever bumped into you ~ around the Army, I should do what I could. Dinky's apparently rather fond of you." Haynes D. Saybrook was the youngest of the three managing partners of McRae, McRae, Henderson, Belker and Saybrook. He had inherited the necessary stock in the firm from his father when old Mr. Saybrook had retired. So far as Jack O'Herlihy recalled, the only partner who dared refer to him as Dinky was old Mr. McRae. O'Herlihy had only recently stopped calling him sir. "You're a friend of Mr. Saybrook?"

  "Dinky and I go way back, Mr. Secretary," Lieutenant Colonel Lowell said. "We went to school together."

  "Groton?"

  "St. Mark's, Mr. Secretary," Lieutenant Colonel Lowell said. "And then we were in Cambridge for a while." By Cambridge he means Harvard. What the hell is going on here?

  "Mr. Secretary, I realize you have a very busy schedule, but I thought I'd hate to have to tell Dinky that we got this close and couldn't get together, so I hoped, Mr. Secretary, that maybe we could have breakfast."

  "You see Mr. Saybrook regularly, do you?" O'Herlihy asked.

  "I'm going to see him tomorrow, Mr. Secretary, as a matter of fact," Lieutenant Colonel Lowell said. "He asked me to fill in as his number two. They're playing the Argentines."

  "Excuse me?"

  "Fellow named Hopper took ill, and Dinky asked me, Mr. Secretary, if I could come over to Palm Beach and fill in for him".

  Polo! Polo! That's what he's talking about. This guy plays polo at Palm Beach with Saybrook! What the hell is he doing in the Army?

  "Well, that's very kind of you, Colonel," O'Herlihy said.

  "But let me invite you to breakfast. They send a cook over here, and putting a couple of extra eggs in the pan wouldn't be any problem at all, I'm sure."

  "With respect, Mr. Secretary," Lieutenant Colonel Lowell said, "I'm a lowly lieutenant colonel. I'm a little uncomfortable around general officers."

  "No need to feel that way. No need at all. "

  "What I had in mind, Mr. Secretary-I thought perhaps you might find it interesting-was that we could have. breakfast with the WOCs."