Deadly Assets (38 page)

“Very possibly, Sergeant,” the range officer said. “But let us not jump to a hasty conclusion. One in the X Ring may be a fluke. Two in the X Ring may indeed be an extraordinary coincidence. But we should investigate further. Give your shooter another round, Sergeant. No! Give him a clip.”

“Yes, sir,” Sergeant McCullhay said, and handed PVT WILLIAMS P a metal clip holding eight cartridges.

PVT WILLIAMS P loaded the clip into his Garand and squeezed off eight rounds.

“I don't
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believe this,” the range officer said, when the pit crew had marked PVT WILLIAMS P's target and reported what they had found. “Bring the target to the line.”

The target was removed from the frame and brought to the line. It showed beyond any question that PVT WILLIAMS P had fired a total of ten shots. All of them had gone into the bull's-eye. Six of them had gone into the X Ring.

“Son,” the range officer said, “I predict a brilliant career for you as an Army Marksman.”

[ Six ]

1000 Scharwath Road

South Orange, N.J.

Friday, December 13, 1946

During the sixth week of his Basic Training, Phil turned, depending on which birth certificate one looked at, either eighteen or seventeen.

And eight weeks and five days after getting the boot from St. Malachi's School, Phil finally made it home to South Orange.

On his sleeves were the single stripes of a private first class, to which rank he had been advanced the previous day after being adjudged the “Distinguished Graduate” of his Basic Training Company.

And on his chest was a silver medal, looking not unlike the Iron Cross of Germany. It was the Expert Marksman Badge. Hanging from it were three small pendants, one reading Rifle, a second Sub-Machine Gun, and the third, Pistol.

He saw his mother on that Saturday. On Sunday, he went to New York to see his father. His father took him to lunch at his favorite watering hole, which was on West Fifty-second Street not far from Radio City Music Hall.

Jack, one of the two proprietors of the establishment, on seeing the marksmanship medals on Phil's chest, said, “I wish you'd seen me before you enlisted, Phil. I'd have steered you to the Corps. They really appreciate good shots.”

It was well-known that the proprietors of what the cognoscenti called “Jack and Charley's” bar had served in the Marine Corps and had never quite gotten over it.

Phil didn't argue with Mr. Jack, as he had been taught to call him, but he thought he was better off where he was. From what he'd heard of Marine Corps recruit training, he didn't want anything to do with it.

After lunch, he went to Pennsylvania Station and took the train to Trenton, where he caught the bus to Fort Dix.

—

The next Monday morning, Phil learned that rather than being shipped off to a remote corner of the world to fill an empty slot in the manning tables of an infantry regiment, he would be retained at Fort Dix as cadre.

He was just the man, Training Division officers decided, to teach the dis- and re-assembly of the U.S. Rifle, Cal. 30, M-1 Garand to the stream of recruits that flowed incessantly through the battalions and regiments of the division.

This training was conducted in three two-hour periods over as many days. On Monday mornings, Phil would go to the Basic Training Company where this training was scheduled, do his two-hour bit, and then have the rest of the day off. He would do this for the next two days, and then have the rest of the week off.

During the week, Phil spent most of his off-duty time on the KD ranges. It was like Coney Island for free. He didn't get to win any stuffed animals, of course, but on the other hand the Garand was a much nicer weapon than the Winchester pump-guns firing .22 shorts at Coney Island, and instead of five shots for a dollar, he had all the ammunition he wanted at no charge at all.

His weekends were free. He spent most of them in Manhattan, in a relentless but ultimately failing attempt to get a tall, thin, blond seventeen-year-old named Alexandra Black, who lived in the apartment directly above his father's, to part with her pearl of great price.

Close, but no brass ring, so to speak, which caused Phil to suspect that he and Alexandra were the only seventeen-year-old virgins in the world.

—

On the Thursday of his fifth week as the dis- and re-assembly cadre instructor, one of the officers, Captain Barson Michaels, head of the Fort Dix Skeet and Trap Shooting Club, needed someone to operate for him the “trap” at the Post skeet range while he practiced, and his eye fell upon PFC Williams.

The “trap,” Phil learned, was an electromechanical device that, when triggered, would throw a frangible clay disc into the air at great speed. Captain Michaels showed Phil how to load stacks of the discs, which were called “birds,” into the trap, and handed him the trigger.

“When I call ‘pull,' Hotshot,” Captain Michaels ordered, “you push the button, which is the trigger, whereupon the trap will fire, the bird will fly, and I will shoot at it. Got it?”

“Yes, sir, Captain Michaels, sir.”

Perhaps forty-five minutes later, during which time PFC Williams had flawlessly carried out his orders, and most of the carton of birds had flown, Captain Michaels, perhaps because he had heard a probably
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story that the kid was some sort of Annie
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IVE DELETED!!
Oakley in pants with an M-1, decided he could afford to be a nice guy.

“You ever fire a shotgun, PFC Hotshot?”

“No, sir.”

“Let me show you how it's done, and then you can have a try at it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Captain Michaels then handed Phil a shotgun. It was the first shotgun he had ever had in his hands. He later learned that it was a Remington Model 11, but at the time all he knew about it was that it was a semiautomatic weapon into which one fed—through the side, not the top—shotgun shells.

He was given a sixty-second course in its operation—
Drop the shell in, push that little button, and you're ready to go
.

Captain Michaels put Phil in position.

“Anytime you're ready, son.”

Phil called “pull.”

Captain Michaels pushed the trap's trigger. The bird flew. Phil fired. The unscathed bird kept flying.

Captain Michaels then imparted to PFC Williams the First and Great Commandment of Skeet and Trap Shooting, to wit:
Shoot where it's going to be, Hotshot, not where it's at
.

“Yes, sir.”

The second bird at which Phil fired disappeared in a cloud of dust.

And the third and the fifth—not the fourth—and the sixth, and the seventh,
und so weiter
, until the twenty-second, which he also missed, and then the twenty-third, -fourth, and -fifth, which were also reduced to puffs of dust.

“You sure you never did this before, Hotshot?”

“No, sir. I mean, yes, sir, I'm sure I never did this before.”

“I'll be a
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” Captain Michaels said, his mind full of images of the greenbacks he was going to take from his pals at the next skeet shoot after betting this innocent young enlisted man could beat them.

“Get another box of shells, my boy, and we'll have another go at it.”

“Yes, sir.”

Phil went “straight”—that is, broke all of the twenty-five birds—in his second “round” of twenty-five birds.

—

Phil repeated the feat the next Saturday morning—in fact went fifty-two straight—at the weekly competition of the Fort Dix Skeet and Trap Shooting Club, following which Captain Michaels handed him two twenty-dollar bills with the explanation he'd made a small bet for him. As PFC Williams was being paid fifty-eight dollars a month at the time, this was a small fortune.

Phil blew just about all the forty bucks that same night on Alexandra Black in Manhattan. But to no avail. Worse, that night as she gave him a friendly kiss on the cheek good night, Alexandra told him that she had met a very nice boy from Yale and didn't think she and Phil should see each other anymore.

—

Even worse, the next Monday morning, Phil was summoned by his first sergeant.

“How come you know General Schwarzkopf, PFC
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head?”

General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Sr., who invented the New Jersey State Police and later returned to the Army for service in World War II, was a pinochle-playing crony of Phil's grandfather, the corporate counsel for the Public Service Company of New Jersey. The other General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, his son, the one who would win the first Desert War, was at about this time a second lieutenant.

“First Sergeant, sir, he's a family friend.”

“Well, he got you a Top Secret security clearance. I never saw one of the
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D!!
come through so
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!!
quick.”

Why in the world,
Phil wondered,
would General Schwarzkopf get me a Top Secret security clearance?

And then he remembered that early in his military career he had opted for the Army Security Agency to avoid going to West Point, and that he had been then required to fill out a multi-page form wanting to know every detail of his life. The form had asked for references, and as he was hard-pressed to think of any, he had given General Schwarzkopf as one of these.

“Just as soon as you pass the Morse Test, PFC
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TED!!
head, you will pack your duffel bag and head for Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, for Army Security Agency training,” the first sergeant said.

“The what test, First Sergeant, sir?”

“There are three requirements to get into the ASA, PFC
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ED!!
Head,” his first sergeant explained. “You have to type thirty
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D!!
words a minute, hold a Top
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!!
Secret clearance, and pass the
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Morse Test. You know, Dit
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Dot
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DELETED!!
Dit?”

“Yes, sir, First Sergeant.”

“You got two out of
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ELETED!!
three, and as soon as you take the Morse Test, you'll have all
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LETED!!
three. And then sayonara, PFC
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ETED!!
Head, don't let the doorknob hit you in the
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TED!!
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ED!!
on your way out.”

Phil saw a problem concerning a military career as an Intercept Operator in the ASA. He had learned that while such personnel did in fact perform their duties indoors sitting out of the sun, snow, and rain, they did so while wearing earphones for eight hours at a stretch, day after day.

That didn't seem like much fun compared to working three half days a week and spending the rest of his duty time on the KD and skeet and trap ranges. Besides, there was a possibility, however slim, that Alexandra might become disillusioned with the nice boy from Yale she had met.

Before the
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D!!
Yalie had appeared on the scene, Phil had been tantalizingly close to achieving what was the greatest ambition of his entire seventeen years.

“First Sergeant, do I have a choice in this?”

“Indeed you do, PFC
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!!
Head. You can get the
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out of my sight now, or delay doing so for thirty
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seconds, after which I will shove my boot so far up your
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ETED!!
that you'll have
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TED!!
shoelaces coming out of your
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ED!!
nose.”

—

After giving the subject a great deal of thought, Phil purposefully failed the Morse Test. Failed it twice, as the tester suspected he wasn't really trying on his first try. And then a third time when his failure came to the attention of various officers in the chain of command.

Phil saw for the first time in his life the unexpected ramifications that can occur when there is a bureaucratic misstep. This took place immediately after he failed the Morse Test for the third time.

Captain Barson Michaels, who looked kindly on Phil as a result of their time together on the skeet and trap ranges, turned to him and said, not unkindly, “What the hell are we going to do with you now, Phil?”

“Make him take the
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D!!
Morse Test once an hour until he passes the
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!!
thing,” another officer in the room suggested.

“There has to be another option,” Captain Michaels said. “I know this young soldier, Lieutenant. He's given the test his best shot, so to speak.”

He winked at Phil, which suggested to Phil that Captain Michaels understood and sympathized with Phil's reluctance to become an ASA Intercept Operator.

“The regulation is clear,” the lieutenant argued. “Complete background investigations, which cost a
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arm and a leg, are not to be initiated until all testing has been satisfactorily completed. It's the same with the CIC. No background investigation until the soldier passes the tests. Do you want to tell the Inspector General who
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that up here?”

Phil had never heard of the CIC.

“What are the tests required for the CIC?” Captain Michaels inquired.

“Two years of college. PFC Williams has two years and two months of high school. I thought of the CIC, Captain,” the lieutenant said.