The Generals (16 page)

There was a pause, then General Harmon broke it.

“Phil, I’m afraid we have to put the colors at half-mast.”

“Philip has fallen,” Colonel Parker said.

“No, sir,” Lowell said, quickly. “He went down, but he got out. His chute opened.”

“A prisoner, then?” Colonel Parker asked.

“Yes, sir,” Lowell said. “We believe that to be the case.”

“In that case, sir, with respect,” Colonel Parker said, “I do not think it appropriate to half-mast the colors.”

“Of course not, Phil,” General Harmon said. “That was stupid of me.”

“One has difficulty finding the appropriate words at a time like this,” Colonel Parker said. He looked at his daughter-in-law. “My dear Toni,” he said. “How terrible for you, and how good of you to come.”

“Oh, Jesus, Dad!” Dr. Parker said.

Colonel Parker saw his wife on the porch.

“Philip’s aircraft went down,” Colonel Parker said. “His parachute opened. They believe him to be a prisoner. I’m sure there are some other details, but they can wait, I believe, until we get the children out of the cold.”

Mrs. Parker came off the porch and scooped up the younger child. Dr. Parker picked up the older and the women went in the house.

“After you, gentlemen, if you please,” Colonel Parker said to the others.

There were a number of photographs of Philip Sheridan Parker IV on the mantelpiece of the library. There was one of him as a Boy Scout; another of him in cadet uniform at Norwich; another in a brand-new second lieutenant’s uniform on his graduation; another as a captain with an M4A3 tank in Korea; and one with his Mohawk in Vietnam.

“General Bellmon sends his compliments, sir,” Lowell said. “He just couldn’t get away. General Hanrahan is in Vietnam.”

“I was privileged to command the unit which released Bellmon from captivity,” Colonel Parker said.

“Yes, sir, General Bellmon asked me to remind you of that. He said he will remind you again when he telephones.”

“That’s very kind of him,” Colonel Parker said. “What details can you give me?”

“All that General Hanrahan had, sir,” Lowell said, “was that Phil was flying a Mohawk in support of a Marine operation. The Marines came under fire from VC mortars. Phil was strafing them when he went in. There was one brief radio message, a Mayday, saying he’d lost his hydraulics and was ejecting.”

“And what have you of a concrete nature to support your belief that he is a prisoner?” Parker asked.

“The Marines went after him, Colonel,” Lowell said. “They found the body of Phil’s copilot. His chute didn’t open. Navy pilots coming on the scene reported the deployment of a parachute, which had to be Phil. The Marines on the ground found Phil’s deployed chute in the trees. They reported signs which indicate Phil was captured and taken away.”

Colonel Parker nodded.

“It was good of you, Craig, to bring Toni and the children here.”

“My privilege, sir,” Lowell said.

“I’ve spoken with Colonel Felter, sir,” Lowell said. “He tells me that it is possible, repeat possible, that he will have some definite word on Phil within two or three weeks. If he is taken north, it may take a little longer.”

Colonel Parker considered that.

“If anyone can find Phil, Felter can,” he said finally.

“Would I be intruding?” Toni Parker said, coming into the room.

“You are, of course, quite welcome,” Colonel Parker said. “Despite the hour, I was about to offer a libation. I don’t suppose you—”

“Yes, I would, Dad,” Toni said, “please.”

Colonel Parker went to a liquor cabinet, took out a bottle of twenty-four-year-old Ambassador Scotch, lined up glasses, and poured Scotch an inch deep in each of them. He then passed out the glasses and raised his own.

“Absent companions, gentlemen,” he said.

“Absent companions,” they parroted, and drank it down.

“Colonel,” the Fort Riley CG said, “if I have to say this, if there’s any way Riley can be of assistance, or myself personally…”

“That’s very kind of you, General,” Parker replied. “But I can’t think of a thing.”

Colonel Parker ceremoniously refilled the glasses.

“I have a question of General Harmon,” Colonel Parker said. “Philip, I must tell you, Craig, was—is—rather amused at the notion of your being at Norwich as an undergraduate. I confess that I too find it, on the surface, rather amusing.”

“Well, I’m glad that someone finds it amusing,” Lowell said.

“How is Colonel Lowell doing as an undergraduate, General?” Parker asked.

“Well, Phil,” Harmon said, “he posed a small problem for one of my colonels, who based his Armor Operations course on Task Force Lowell. He found it disconcerting to have Lowell there while he was playing it out on the sandtable. Aside from that, he seems to have adjusted well.”

“I very much appreciate your coming here, General,” Colonel Parker said.

“We’re old friends, Phil,” Harmon said. “I regret the circumstances.”

“Phil’ll be all right, Colonel,” Lowell said.

“Yes, I have every confidence he will be,” Colonel Parker said.

“He told me,” Toni blurted, “that he’d rather be killed than captured.”

The men looked at each other, but none of them could think of anything to say in reply.

(One)
Personal Effects Storage Area
Camp Buckner, Okinawa
16 August 1962

“You got the wrong place, Lieutenant,” the sergeant said, with the clear implication that here was yet another proof that officers couldn’t read. “The sign says ‘Stored Enlisted Gear.’”

“I went over there as a sergeant.” the lieutenant replied. “Craig, Geoffrey, US 5260674.”

The duffle bag was found and delivered, and he carried it to his BOQ.

First Lieutenant Geoffrey Craig, late of the First Special Forces Group, was now out-processed from Vietnam duty via Okinawa. What that meant was that, dreadfully hung over, he was flown out of Foo Two by helicopter one morning and taken to Da Nang. There, nursing a cold beer, he went through a brief in-Country out-Processing briefing. He was then told his next stop would be Okinawa. There he would reclaim his personal gear, undergo a physical, and could expect to be on a plane to the Land of the Big PX within no more than thirty-six hours. The briefing officer carefully pointed out that war souvenirs were forbidden. And fully automatic weapons, such as the AK-47, placed their possessors in great jeopardy from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Lieutenant Craig had turned in his issue weapon, an M-1911A1 .45-caliber pistol, and then boarded a C-131 bound for Okinawa, carrying a barracks bag with a suspiciously AK-47–like bulge.

At Camp Buckner, he was provided with a steak dinner, shown temporary quarters, subjected to a rather detailed physical, and told that since a chartered American Overseas Airways jet had departed for San Francisco not long before his C-131 had landed, he would have the opportunity to wallow in the cultural attractions of Okinawa for at least twenty-four hours before the next one left. There would be plenty of time for him to get paid and collect his gear and have a couple of beers.

Two events made him profoundly aware that he had been for more than six months an officer and a gentleman. The first was the sight of the stack of twenty dollar bills counted out to him when he endorsed the check Finance gave him. It was as much cash as he could ever remember seeing at one time, even in the legendary poker games at Da Nang. Lieutenants, obviously, got paid considerably more than sergeants. He converted all but six hundred dollars of it into U.S. Postal Money Orders.

The second happened when he carried his duffle bag to the Transient BOQ and unpacked it. He had been taught to pack a duffle bag by his brother-in-law, and he marveled anew at Staff Sergeant Karl-Heinz Wagner’s all-around soldierly skills. When he took his clothing from the duffle bag and shook it out, it was practically creaseless, even after thirteen months in the warehouse. There was sort of a wave in the trousers, but that would shake out.

There was only one problem with the uniform. It was an enlisted man’s uniform. Not only did the sleeves carry the three stripes of a sergeant, but the blouse did not have the black stripe on the cuff, nor the trousers the black stripe down the seam that an officer’s blouse and trousers did.

Fuck it, Lieutenant Craig decided. He was only going to wear the sonofabitch long enough to go home and resign anyway, and there was no sense buying a uniform to wear no more than he intended to wear it. He could think of no good reason why he couldn’t resign the moment he hit the States.

He took a razor blade and very carefully slit the stitching of the chevrons, and then very carefully pulled all the little threads loose. You could still see where the stripes had been, but unless he ran into some chickenshit, he could get away with it. He started to throw the stripes away, and then decided against that. He would frame them. He took lieutenant’s bars and the gold crossed rifles of Infantry from his toilet kit, and replaced the enlisted insignia with them. Headgear posed no problem. The only difference between enlisted and officer green berets was that officers wore their rank insignia pinned to the flash.

He examined himself in the mirror, decided he passed muster and that he could now go to the O Club for a medicinal beer and something to eat.

He almost made it before he encountered some chickenshit captain of the Adjutant General’s Corps, who was officer of the day. Restraining the impulse to tell the captain to take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut (the consequences of which would likely involve at least missing the next plane), he said, “Yes, sir, I’m on my way to the Officers’ Sales Store at this very moment.”

He smarted at the captain’s condescending treatment of him.

“Now that you’re an officer, you have certain obligations in manners of dress and in other ways.”

He had been treated as if he had just got here from some desk in Saigon rather than as somebody who had completed a tour with the Montagnards in the Highlands. But when he got to the sales store and saw himself in the mirror, he found the explanation. There was nothing on his uniform but the bars and rifles. No Combat Infantry Badge, no parachutist’s wings, no fruit salad. The only thing that identified him as a Highlands type was a bracelet made from strands of an elephant’s tail, and that dumb shit from the AGC couldn’t be expected to know what that was.

Fuck it, give in. He had a pisspot full of dough anyway.

An hour later, he emerged from the sales store wearing one new officer’s uniform and carrying another. He had come to a deal with the young soldier in charge: old uniform and the price of a bottle of bourbon for instant tailor service. He had black stripes where there were supposed to be black stripes, and he had all his fruit salad and other doodads. He looked, he thought, not entirely modestly, like a recruiting poster. He had never worn his ribbons before, and he was astonished by how many, both American and Vietnamese, he had. He even had Vietnamese parachutist’s wings, the result of having met a Vietnamese Beret while on a three-day R&R on the beach. Jumping with Vietnamese Berets had seemed like a splendid idea at three in the morning; and at half past five, when they woke him up to take him, it had been too late to back out.

He went to the PX and bought two suitcases, packed them, and then finally went to the O Club for several medicinal beers and another steak. Twenty-two hours later, he boarded a Northwest Orient Airlines airplane for San Francisco.

There were stewardesses aboard, lovely young women who smelled of erotic perfume and the swell of whose breasts were delightfully apparent as they served meals and otherwise made themselves hospitable. He could now afford to think again of Ursula in ways he had been wise not to do at Foo Two. He was headed at six hundred miles per hour for the sanctioned joys of connubial congress. He was married to the best-looking woman in the world, and three minutes after he got home, he intended to be fucking her eyeballs off.

It didn’t go quite the way he envisioned over the Pacific, and later aboard TWA 105 from San Francisco to Idlewild, nor in the cab from Idlewild to the apartment of his parents on upper Park Avenue, where Ursula should be waiting for him.

For one thing, there was a new doorman. O’Hara was gone. The ruddy-faced, whiskey-nosed Irishman had been the daytime guardian of the portals for as long as Geoff could remember. A Latin-American of some species, with a pencil line mustache, had taken over O’Hara’s post—and his overcoat, too, to judge by the way it fit him.

He could not, he said, permit Geoff to go upstairs without being announced. He seemed to relent, after Geoff showed him both his I.D. card and the key to the apartment, which he had carried all through Vietnam on his dog tag chain. But as Geoff got on the elevator (the elevator operator was new, too, this one an Afro-American gentleman with what looked like twenty pounds of hair) Geoff saw the doorman working the telephone switchboard.

Neither Ursula nor the housekeeper opened the door. The butler did.

“Welcome home, Mr. Geoff,” Finley said, formally, and then abandoned butler protocol and embraced his employer’s son in a bear hug.

Which somewhat dismayed Geoff. It was not that he was not glad to see Finley, for whom his affection was deep and lifelong, but Finley was supposed to be in the house in Palm Beach with his mother. If Finley was here, his mother was here, and that was going to interfere with his plans for connubial congress.

“Oh, my
God!
” his mother wailed as she appeared. “What have they
done
to you? You’re as thin as a rail!”

It was five minutes before he learned that Ursula wasn’t even in the apartment. She was living in Greenwich Village, his mother told him.

“No,” his mother said somewhat tartly when she saw Geoff’s look, “I have not lost my mind. It wasn’t my idea that Ursula should live down there. I was of course opposed to the whole idea. But she was aided and abetted in the notion by your cousin Craig, who, as you know, owns an apartment there. And so she left because she ‘felt bored to death by life on Park Avenue.’”

“Do you have a key?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. I try to drop in on her from time to time, so she gave me this one in case she wasn’t at home.”

He could have walked down Fifth Avenue, he thought, considerably faster than the cab carried him.

Washington Mews, all of which the family (or perhaps Cousin Craig personally) owned, was a double row of old houses on either side of a private, cobblestone street just north of Washington Square. When he stepped over the chain barring access to the street, he realized he had no idea which of the houses he was looking for.

He finally found a red-painted door to which a shiny cast-brass plaque reading
LOWELL
was bolted. The key fit the door, and he pushed it inward.

“Ursula!” he called.

There was no answer. He walked through the house. It was elegantly furnished. Obviously, Craig and his dead wife Ilse’s furniture. There was a picture of the dead woman holding a new baby, with a very proud-looking second Lieutenant Craig W. Lowell beaming, in a silver frame on a table.

He went through the entire house, even down into the basement. In the bathroom of the master bedroom he found two pairs of white underpants and two brassieres hanging on a steam-heated towel rack. He found this highly erotic.

“Where the
hell
is she?” he asked, aloud.

He would, he thought, keep calm and collected, have a drink, and Ursula, who was probably shopping, would come home while he was drinking.

There had been a bar in the basement, a real bar with stools and a sink and coolers and a large assortment of bottles, and there was a portable bar in the living room mounted on huge wheels. He went to it, poured Scotch in a glass, and just because it was there, not because he expected that there would be ice in it, raised the lid of a silver ice bucket.

There turned out to be a few nearly melted ice cubes inside, and as he dropped them in his glass and added water, he was curious about them. Ursula’s drinking was generally limited to a glass of wine. To whom had she been feeding booze?

He forced the question from his mind, then took his whiskey and sat down in a stainless-steel-and-leather chair facing a wall-mounted television. There was a cigar box on the table. It certainly would not contain cigars, but what the hell, have a look.

It was full of cigars. Big black cigars. Fresh big black cigars.

Cousin Craig was obviously spending time here.

He assured himself that he had a despicably suspicious mind.

He took one of the cigars and lit it.

He assured himself again that he had a despicably suspicious mind. While Cousin Craig had an Army-wide—not to mention family—reputation for fucking any female over fifteen who could be induced to hold still for thirty seconds, he certainly would draw the line at Ursula.

On the other hand, why was he being so nice to her?

He looked at the match box in his hand.

GASTHAUS BAVARIA 21 WEST THIRD STREET GREENWICH VILLAGE

The matches, at least, were Ursula’s. He doubted that Cousin Craig would spend much time in a Bavarian Gasthaus on West Third Street.

That was why she was in the Village. Of course she was bored with life in the uptown apartment. For a wild time, she could look down from the garden at the cars going up and down Park Avenue, and top that off with a quick trip to Gristede’s Grocery Store.

Was it possible that she was at the Gasthaus Bavaria now? And if he went to look, wouldn’t she walk in the door two minutes after he walked out?

What the hell, it was only a couple of blocks away, just the other side of Washington Square. It wouldn’t hurt to look.

As he crossed Washington Square, an extraordinary thing happened. Someone sitting on one of the benches, he wasn’t sure who, hissed “Baby killer!” at him.

He wondered what the hell that was all about.

There was a knot of people at the covered entrance to Gasthaus Bavaria.

With a clear conscience—he wasn’t after a table, just looking to see if Ursula was there—he shouldered his way through.

He got as far as the velvet rope before being challenged.

“This isn’t the Army, Lieutenant,” a man hissed at him. “You have to wait in line like everyone else.”

Geoff ignored him and looked around Gasthaus Bavaria. There was even an ooom-pah band. The waiters were in lederhosen.

“Did you hear what I said, Lieutenant?” the man said, petulantly, tugging at Geoff’s sleeve.

Geoff looked at him.

“Fuck you,” he said, clearly and distinctly.

He spoke loud enough for his voice to carry around the room. Heads turned, including that of the hostess, who was attired in Bavarian costume, with a white blouse and a pleated skirt and knee-high woolen stockings. She even had her hair done up in a bun. When she located the source of the obscenity, she dropped her menus and ran across the room, crying, “
Liebchen! Oh, Liebchen! Meine Liebchen!
”

Geoff thought Ursula looked really terrible in her Bavarian costume and hair in a tight bun. It didn’t really matter, for ten minutes after he first saw her in it, he had her hair down, and Ursula was wearing her birthday suit.

(Two)

Ursula was tracing with the balls of her fingers the small white scars on his left leg (Purple Heart #2) and upper right chest (Purple Heart #3), when the door chimes sounded.