The Generals (12 page)

General Howard did not immediately reply. Harke realized that he’d got a little carried away.

“Got it all out, Ken?” Howard said.

“I guess I got a little carried away, sir.”

“Yes, I think you did,” Howard said. “You said something a moment ago about how this could all have been avoided.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It could have been avoided if you had done what I expected you to do, Ken, which was to get in touch with me when you were faced with a problem you didn’t know how to handle.”

Howard looked to his side, and pushed a telephone with his fingers. “I was no farther away than that.”

“I was aware of how busy you were, sir, and didn’t want to bother you.”

“That was an error in judgment, Ken. I’m afraid it’s going to prove costly.”

“Sir?”

“I had a telephone call from the Chief of Staff about two o’clock. He told me that he had heard from General Boone. Since you had been running around the country out of channels, like a headless chicken, General Boone wanted to know if I could not be sent back here to take over from you. With the concurrence of the Secretary of Defense, here I am.”

“I don’t quite understand, sir.”

“That, I’m afraid, is your basic problem, Ken. You go off half-cocked. You went off half-cocked here. The reason you’re at the moment a little light on Army aviation is because, among other things, I have formed a provisional aviation battalion from the assets of the Howard Board. If we go to Cuba, there will be three helicopter transport companies, and one company each of Beavers, Otters, and Caribou. When I made these assets available to General Jiggs, he assigned them to XVIII Airborne Corps. He was fully aware that you needed more transport. He was prepared to close down the Aviation School and confiscate the Aviation Center Fleet to get it for you, if that was necessary.”

“He said nothing to me, sir.”

“He kept the XVIII Airborne Corps commander advised. I am the XVIII Corps commander, a fact that seems to have slipped your mind.”

Harke’s face stiffened.

“All you had to do, Ken,” Howard went on, “was get on the phone to me, and you would have been told what was going on. I put off telling you about the provisional aviation battalion, because I wanted you to do as much as you could with what you had. I hoped, still hope, that I will be able to return to General Jiggs for use elsewhere some of the aircraft he has assigned here. In my judgment, the assignment of all of them here is over-generous.”

Harke did not reply.

“I presumed, Ken, that you would have the common sense to understand that Paul Jiggs was named JAF S-3 because he was the best man for the job, and that he would allocate available assets with the mission in mind, and nothing else. I also presumed that you knew what is expected of a chief of staff. He is to do only those things in the name of his commander that he knows, without any question, the commander would do himself. And that when he doesn’t know what to do, he is to ask the commander, not confuse being left in charge with assuming command.”

General Harke’s face was white.

“Obviously, I was wrong on both counts. And there is, unfortunately, more. When I tried to cover for you with General Boone, he put a question to me I was hard pressed to answer,” General Howard said. “He asked me if I could not trust you to do what you were told, why should he?”

“I was acting as I believed the general would wish to me act, sir,” Harke said.

“Did you listen to what you just said? It’s an admission that you really believe if I had been here, and didn’t get all the assets I thought I needed, that I would have jumped in an airplane and left my command with the balloon about to go up and rushed off to DCSOPS and told them those nasty boys in JAF were picking on me. For Christ’s sake, Ken, you’re an officer. When an officer gets an order he doesn’t like, he salutes and says ‘Yes, sir’ and tries his damnedest to carry it out.”

“Am I to understand that General Boone believes I should be relieved, sir?” Harke said.

“I’m sure he thinks you should, but if you’re really asking did he tell me to relieve you, no. He left that decision to me. To be truthful, Ken, I would relieve you if I had somebody to replace you. But I don’t. Until this Cuban thing is over, I need you. You will not be relieved for the moment.”

“In that circumstance, sir,” Harke said, angrily, “I can see no alternative but to respectfully demand, since you do not trust me, that I be relieved of my duties.”

Now Howard’s face tightened in anger.

“‘Demand’?” he quoted furiously. “‘
Demand’?
For Christ’s sake! Sitting in my chair really went to your head, didn’t it?”

Howard stopped, and it was a moment before he trusted himself to go on.

“General,” he said, finally, speaking calmly and perhaps even a bit more slowly than normal, “the question of your trustworthiness and misapplication of the authority entrusted to you came up in another connection. General Boone asked me if I wasn’t carrying my animosity toward Special Forces a little far. I told him that not only did I bear Special Forces no animosity, but that I had no idea what he was talking about. It was then I learned that in direct violation of my instructions to do nothing with the Special Warfare Center without my express permission you took it upon yourself to exclude them from this Cuban business. And you did that in a sneaky manner, by permitting General Hanrahan to go off hunting without telling him what was going on, and then ‘by not being able to get in touch with him.’”

“Sir—”

“Be silent!” Howard snapped. “It was my intention to permit you to retire gracefully, General, in consideration of your past service, and because it does the Army no good when it becomes known that it has been necessary to relieve a general officer. I have now concluded neither I nor the Army can afford that gesture. You stand relieved, sir. Get out of my headquarters, and get out within the next three minutes, and on your way out, take your Colonel Minor with you. You might suggest to him that when Hanrahan writes and I endorse his efficiency report, it might well behoove him, too, to plan for immediate retirement.”

General Harke, white-faced, marched stiffly up the aisle and out of the War Room.

General Howard’s stomach churned. He looked at his cigar, and then lit it with a shaking hand.

Then he picked up the telephone beside him, and dialed a number from memory.

“General Howard for General McKee,” he said. General McKee, the 82nd Division commander, came immediately on the line.

“I don’t want to discuss this, Mac, and I don’t want you to play games with me. I just relieved Ken Harke, and I need a chief of staff, right now. You can’t have the job because I need you where you are, and I don’t want your chief of staff. Now, who can you give me?”

He knew, as he had known on the trip from Benning to Bragg (realizing then that he might have to relieve Harke), that he had just the man for the job, but couldn’t have him. One of Paul Jiggs’s protégés, a lieutenant colonel named Lowell. Lowell would have been an ideal chief of staff. The problem was that he was a lieutenant colonel; the TO&E called for a major general. While Howard could dip to a promotable full colonel, he could not have an officer as junior as a lieutenant colonel.

Thirty minutes later, a young colonel, who had begun the day fully expecting that he might today parachute into Cuba in the command of his regiment, was ordered to report to XVIII Airborne Corps Headquarters. His bitter disappointment at being denied command of his regiment in a combat jump was only partially alleviated by his realization that there was probably no quicker way for a colonel to become a brigadier general than to do a good job in the next week or ten days as Chief of Staff, XVIII Airborne Corps.

(Three)
Headquarters
2nd Armored Division
Fort Hood, Texas
0645 Hours, 24 October 1962

“General,” the post transportation officer, Colonel L. L. Sapphrey, said, “Major Gubbins has brought something to my attention that I thought I should bring to your attention, sir, as soon as possible.”

Major Gubbins was the 2nd Armored Division’s transportation officer. He had, General Lemper thought, obviously carefully arranged for Colonel Sapphrey to make his pitch for him. Colonels have more influence with generals than majors. He thought that was a clever thing for Gubbins to do, and wondered if Sapphrey had done it because he had been tricked into it, or because he was as annoyed with Lieutenant Colonel C. W. Lowell as Gubbins obviously was. There was no question in General Lemper’s mind that Lowell was at the root of whatever it was.

There had been a telephone call from Major Gubbins the previous afternoon: “Does the general know that the Engineer Light Equipment Company has been off-loaded? At the orders of a Lieutenant Colonel Lowell?”

“No, I didn’t,” General Lemper had said.

“Does the general approve?” Gubbins had asked.

“I think we have to presume that Colonel Lowell had his reasons,” Lemper had said.

He had no idea what Lowell was up to, but he had decided to give him twenty-four hours. That twenty-four hours was just about up.

“General,” Colonel Sapphrey said, “these are the reports from the yardmaster.” He waved a sheaf of paper. “In the twelve-hour period from 1200 yesterday until 2400, at the orders of Colonel Lowell, one hundred and eighty-two railcars, mixed flat, box, and tanker, have been ordered unladen to New Orleans.”

“Let me see that,” General Lemper said. As much trouble as they had getting railcars, something sounded wrong about sending any of them away unladen. And 182 railcars was a
lot
of railcars.

The yardmaster’s report consisted of long columns of car numbers and some sort of a code General Lemper didn’t understand.

“I don’t understand this,” he said.

“I understand the same pattern is continuing, sir, in the period between the end of this yardmaster’s report and now,” Colonel Sapphrey said.

“Can you look at this, Sapphrey, and tell me how many tanks have left?”

“Yes, sir,” Sapphrey said. “It will take me a moment, sir.”

Two minutes later, he reported that, if the figures could be believed, 217 tanks had left the yards on the trains in question.

“And there would be more, you would say, Colonel, in the time since the end of this report?”

“I would presume so, sir.”

Lemper doubted that figure. As a logistic rule of thumb, under ideal conditions, he had always figured ten minutes per tank before the train was ready to roll. Six tanks per hour, twelve hours, seventy-two tanks. Two sidings capable of handling that, 144 tanks. Lowell was supposed to have loaded 180% of that figure.

“I think I’ll go have a word with Colonel Lowell,” General Lemper said. “Perhaps you gentlemen would like to accompany me?”

The Fort Hood rail marshaling yard was beyond the troop housing area and the tank parks. Beside the two-lane macadam road that ran from the tank parks was a dirt road, capable of handling two-way tank traffic. Tanks, because of their weight, cannot travel on macadam roads without almost immediately destroying the macadam surface and the base beneath it. On the other hand, because tanks are tracked vehicles, they can move with ease along badly chewed-up dirt roads. General Lemper saw that the dirt tank road was badly chewed up, which was not surprising, considering how many tanks were being moved along it, six feet apart, two abreast. The tanks were dusty, and muddy, and there was the smell of diesel fumes in the air.

When he got to the rail marshaling yards themselves, he saw that the double column of tanks did not turn into the marshaling yards. He was curious about that. At first he thought both columns were moving straight ahead, but as he got closer he saw that the left column, closest to the rail yards, split off and disappeared in the direction of the two loading docks in the marshaling yards.

The rest of the column continued on, reforming itself into two columns, and disappeared from sight down the road along the tracks that left the marshaling yards.

General Lemper saw a sergeant giving arm signals to one tank to turn off into the marshaling yard, and then to the tank behind it to continue moving straight ahead.

“Jerry, go straight,” General Lemper said to his driver, a young and natty sergeant. Next to him sat Lieutenant Bill Cole, General Lemper’s aide-de-camp, and Major Gubbins. Colonel L. L. Sapphrey sat beside the general in the back of the olive-drab Chevrolet.

The double line of tanks continued for a quarter of a mile, where it merged, under the hand signals of a sergeant, into one column. On the other side of the column, General Lemper spotted the observation windows of a caboose. As he watched it, it jerked into motion. He heard the crashing sound of a train starting up, and then, ten or fifteen seconds later, the sound of couplers crashing together as they do when a train stops.

The train itself was mixed flatcars and boxcars. There was nothing on the flatcars, and the doors of the boxcars were open. In perhaps half of the box cars, General Lemper could see jeeps, three-quarter-ton trucks, their cargo and water trailers, wooden crates, and palletized cargos. Soldiers in fatigues were also in these cars, either leaning against the open doors, or on the floor dangling their legs over the side. In one car he saw two sergeants sitting in folding aluminum-and-plastic-webbing lawn chairs, holding what looked very much like cans of Schlitz in their hands.

Most of the boxcars were empty, and all of the flatcars were unladen. The reason for that became evident a moment later when they came to four drag lines, parked on the far side of the column of tanks and the railroad tracks.

“Stop!” General Lemper ordered. He was out of the car the moment it halted.

Colonel Sapphrey started to follow him, as did the officers in the front seat.

“Stay,” General Lemper ordered, and gestured with his hand.

Then he trotted along the column of tanks.

He heard some soldier say, “Jesus, there’s the general.”

He reached the end of the column of tanks.

Its four-man crew was standing to one side.

One of them spotted him.