The Captains (28 page)

But that was it. Things calmed down, and there really wasn't a hell of a lot for a major general to do except follow the course of the war in Korea and keep an eye on Germany, which was where the Russians would strike if they came in.

General Black began to divide his day in two. In the morning he dealt with what he thought of as the current situation. In the afternoons he planned for the future. If the Russians came in, he would be expected to form and train an armored division. He planned, quite unofficially, to do just that. He went over the assets of the post and determined where he would house an armored division, where he would have firing ranges, fuel dumps, beer halls, and garbage dumps.

He went further than that. He started looking around for the equipment an armored division would need. He visited, officially and unofficially, the quartermaster depots and the ordnance depots and the general depots. He looked around the on-post warehouses at Knox and Sill and Benning, to see what they had stored away.

One of the things he had inherited when he got the basic training camp was an army aviator. All he knew about Captain Rudolph G. MacMillan, when McMillan was proposed to him as an aide-de-camp, was that he had the Medal, that he'd picked up a Silver Star Medal (his third) in the opening days of the Korean War, and that Jesus H. Christ MacArthur himself had written the Deputy Chief of Staff, Personnel (DCS-P) to keep him out of the war. That was enough for Black. Another soldier they didn't want for this war needed a home, and he had a home to give him.

They sent him an airplane pilot, but didn't give him an airplane to go with him. No aircraft, his G-4 had been informed, were available at the moment. They would be sent to Fort Polk when they were available. He didn't think MacMillan stood a chance in hell of getting airplanes or helicopters, but he gave him permission to scrounge for one.

MacMillan disappeared. When General Black asked the G-4 if he had sent him someplace, the G-4's reaction had been one of righteous outrage.

“The general is not aware that Captain MacMillan is in the Panama Canal Zone?”

“No, I'm not,” Black said, and stopped himself just in time before he finished aloud the question in his mind: “The Panama Canal? What the
hell
is he doing in Panama?”

“Captain MacMillan informed me, General,” the G-4 said, “that he was traveling to Panama VOCG.” (Verbal Order, Commanding General.)

“I wasn't aware that he had left,” General Black replied, wondering why he had impulsively covered for MacMillan. Because he was entitled to special consideration because of the Medal? Or because the S-1 was such a fucking sissy?

MacMillan returned from Panama with three Hiller H23/CE helicopters. General Black knew so little about helicopters that it wasn't until later that he learned they were not supposed to be flown over such great distances. They were supposed to be disassembled and shipped. MacMillan, with two borrowed Panama Canal Zone aviators, had flown them up, in 150 and 200 mile jumps, via Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Mexico.

It was the first excitement General Black had had recently, and it amused him. MacMillan had learned that the H23/CEs, specially modified versions of the H23 for use in mapping operations by the Corps of Engineers (hence, the CE designation), were in Panama, and not being used, because their pilots and the mapping crews had been sent to Korea.

He had gone down there and talked Panama into turning the machines over to him on the basis that while they were doing Panama no good at all, they could be put to “temporary” use as aerial ambulances at Fort Polk. MacMillan then found two helicopter mechanics who could be transferred and arranged for the medical evacuation helicopters and the mechanics to be assigned to the post hospital, where they would be unlikely to be discovered and even less likely to be taken away if they were.

Next, he arranged for the Medical Corps to assign two helicopter pilots to fly the “med-evacs” and turned one of the H23/CEs—now properly adorned with Red Crosses—over to them. The other two machines he kept, hinting that since there was a parts supply problem, he was going to use one of them for cannibalization. That is, it would furnish parts to the other helicopters, the one at the post hospital and the one which now permitted General Black to travel anywhere on the enormous Polk reservation in comfort and in a matter of minutes, rather than after an hour-long ride down bumpy roads that wouldn't take a staff car.

MacMillan next turned up (in Alaska) a five-passenger Cessna LC-126, an airplane designed for operation in the “bush” of Alaska and Canada. With the first money to fight the Korean War, the army had come up with a new airplane it thought it wanted, another “bush” airplane, a DeHavilland of Canada “Beaver.” It was being “user tested” in Alaska, and doing splendidly; and Alaska hoped that by giving one of their old LC-126s to Fort Polk, they would thus be able to plead that they should be allowed to keep a “Beaver” after the user test.

While nothing had been said to General Black about his frequent trips to other posts and the supply depots, he had been a little uneasy. While he had the authority to order himself anywhere he wanted to, it being presumed that he knew what was official business and what was not, copies of the orders he issued to himself for travel to Forts Knox and Benning and the supply depots at Atlanta and Anniston and Lexington were routinely sent to Fourth Army Headquarters at Fort Sam Houston. Eventually, somebody was going to ask him about it, and tell him, either officially or unofficially, that when it was time for him to start gathering the logistics for an armored division, he would be told; and until then, he should not be making a nuisance of himself.

The LC-126 MacMillan had brought back from Alaska and which no one seemed to know about (officially or unofficially) was an ideal means to make his “visits,” and traveling in it could be performed without putting himself on orders.

So General Black came to spend a good deal of time in MacMillan's company, visiting the widespread activities of the basic training operation in the H23/CE and traveling to other posts and the supply depots in the LC-126. He learned a good deal about MacMillan that he hadn't known before. General Black, as a colonel and then as a brigadier general, had commanded Combat Command B of the late Major General Peterson K. Waterford's “Hell's Circus” in Europe. He knew about Waterford's son-in-law, Bob Bellmon, being a prisoner. MacMillan had been in the
stalag
with Bellmon; and at the time Porky Waterford had bought the farm (he had dropped dead playing polo, which everybody who knew him thought was the way Porky would have wanted to go out), MacMillan had been his aide-de-camp.

In General Black's opinion, MacMillan was not overendowed with brains, but he knew how to keep his mouth shut, and there was no question about his scrounging ability. They became, if not quite friends, then a good deal more like pals than a general and his dog robber normally are.

MacArthur sent Ned Almond in with X Corps at Inchon, as brilliant a maneuver as General Black had ever seen. Walker had finally broken out from the Pusan perimeter, and in the first maneuver of General Walker's that met General Black's approval, had sent a flying column, a battalion-sized M46 force, racing around behind the enemy lines. It was a classic cavalry sweep, destroying the enemy's lines of communication, keeping him off balance, and then finally linking up with X Corps.

Almond and X Corps had been on the Yalu when the chinks came in. Black and MacMillan had been at the Lexington Signal Depot.

Almond had pulled X Corps, with all its equipment, all of its wounded, and even its dead, off the beach at Hamhung on Christmas Eve, 1950, after the chinks had chewed up Eighth Army again. Black and MacMillan had spent Christmas Eve in the Prattville, Alabama, Holiday Inn, forced to land there by weather on the way home from a “visit” to the Anniston Ordnance Depot.

Truman relieved MacArthur. General Black was really of two minds about that. MacArthur was right, of course. There is no substitute for victory. But Truman was right, too. Soldiers take orders, and they stay out of politics.

In March 1951, General Black learned that MacMillan had not been using the third H23/CE as a source of “unobtainable” parts to keep the other two flying. When he thought about it, he realized that he should have known that if MacMillan could scrounge entire helicopters, he would have no trouble scrounging parts to keep them flying.

On a Saturday afternoon, drinking a beer on the back porch of the general's quarters after a basic training graduation parade (the general always felt bad watching the trainees march proudly past; in a month, a lot of those handsome, tanned, toughened young men would be dead), MacMillan said if the general didn't have anything important to do on Sunday morning, say about 0900, he had something he wanted to show him.

The general had absolutely nothing to do on Sunday morning.

At exactly 0900, MacMillan fluttered down in the third H23/CE into the general's backyard. There was something hooked up to the skids, and when the chopper was on the ground, the general saw that there was an air-cooled .30 caliber machine gun on the right skid, and four tied-together 3.5 inch rocket launchers on the left.

“What the hell is all this, Mac?” General Black asked, but he got in the helicopter.

“The cavalry rides again, General,” MacMillan said. “C Troop of the 7th Cavalry, Second Lieutenant George Armstrong Custer—that's you—has just been ordered to check out a story that Sitting Bull is moving an armored column around the Little Big Horn River. You and your first sergeant, that's me, 1st Sgt. John Wayne, ride out together.”

“You're starkers, MacMillan,” General Black said, but he was smiling.

MacMillan picked up the H23/CE, not far, not more than fifty feet off the ground, and flying no more than ten feet over the top of the pine trees that covered the Polk reservation, flew out to the Distance Estimation Course.

While located in the range area, the DEC was not a firing range. What it was was a field 1,000 yards long and 400 yards wide on which worn-out trucks and jeeps and even two ancient M3 tanks from War II had been scattered among pill boxes, foxholes, and trenches. Basic trainees were required to estimate how far away the various battlefield targets were from their positions.

“Geronimo, Geronimo,” MacMillan's voice came over the intercom. “This is Geronimo Forward. Enemy force consisting of three jeeps, three trucks, and two M3 tanks spotted 1,000 yards from Little Big Horn. Engaging.”

“You're in your in your second childhood, MacMillan. You know that?” General Black said.

“Watch this,” MacMillan said. He zoomed low over the DEC, and came to a hover 200 yards from the M3 tank hulks. There was a sudden, frightening whoosh two feet below General Black's feet, followed by an orange flash. A 3.5 inch rocket flashed away, and passed fifty feet over the M3.

“Maggie's Drawers, MacMillan,” the general said, making reference to the red flag waved on firing ranges to indicate a complete miss.

“I haven't had very much practice,” MacMillan said. “I had one hell of a time stealing these rockets from ordnance.”

There was a second roar and a second burst of smoke.

The 3.5 inch rocket hit the M3 hulk's chassis. The hulk seemed to lift, just barely, off the ground, and then settle again. In the split second he had to look before MacMillan moved the helicopter, almost violently, to engage the second M3, General Black saw a cratered hole in the M3, right in front of the driver's hatch. MacMillan hit the second M3 with both of his two remaining 3.5 inch rockets. Then he moved the helicopter 150 yards from the remains of an ancient GMC six-by-six truck.

The .30 caliber machine gun on the other skid began to chatter. There was surprisingly little noise, but General Black felt the entire helicopter vibrate, alarmingly, from the recoil. He was frightened for a moment, but then fascinated as he watched MacMillan move the tracer stream (every fifth round in a normal belt of machine gun ammo was a tracer; from the steady stream of tracers here, Black realized that MacMillan was firing all tracers) across the ground and into the old truck.

Finally, the ammunition all gone, MacMillan zoomed off from the truck, and flew back to the nearest M3 hulk, where he put the H23/CE gently on the ground, and turned to look at General Black.

“I'm not the brightest guy in the world, General,” MacMillan said. “How come I had to figure this out?”

General Black didn't reply. He got out of the H23/CE and examined the crater hole in the M3's hull. And then, impulsively, he hoisted himself onto the tank, and then onto the turret, and lowered himself inside. He'd fought, briefly, in M3s in North Africa as a technical liaison officer with the British, teaching them the M3. The older models, this one, had had riveted hulls. When they were hit, the hulls came apart, and the rivets rattled around the interior of the hull, killing the crews. Later models were welded. The British had called it the “Priest,” because the side-mounted cannon made it look something like a pulpit in a church.

The M3s had been replaced by the M4s, and that's what he'd commanded in Europe. And now they were gone. The task force that Walker had sent north from Pusan had had M46s. And now Bulldog Walker was gone. Bulldog bought the farm, in a jeep accident, on Christmas Eve in Korea. And here he sat at Fort Goddamned Polk, Louisiana, giving basic training and dreaming of an armored division he knew goddamned well wasn't coming.