The Colonels, page 50
part #4 of Brotherhood of War Series
“I thought,” Lowell said, “that I was being sent into durance vile.”
General Black was not amused.
“Why would you think that?”
“I made an error in judgment, sir,” Lowell said.
“Another one? Who’s annoyed with you this time?” Black asked.
“Felter, sir,” Lowell said. “Or I thought he was.”
“You’d better hope he was not,” Black said. He did not ask for an amplification, and Lowell did not offer one.
“If we go into Vietnam in any strength, Lowell,” General Black said, closing that subject, “and I’m afraid we will, we’re going to have to go in with somewhat unconventional forces—unconventional in the sense that we haven’t used them before. And I mean aviation heavy, not just Special Forces. Since the country is primitive, that means that there are insufficient aviation installations in place. We’re going to have to build our own. What I want you to do is recommend what we should build, and where.”
“Sir, isn’t that an engineer function?”
“So the engineers have reminded me,” Black said. He paused, as if debating whether Lowell should have an explanation, and then went on.
“There are two ways to go about this,” he said. “According to the book, the engineers would prepare a report of existing facilities and of facilities they are prepared to build. They’d turn this over to aviation and tell them this is it: adjust your plans accordingly. If it looked as if we were going to send conventional forces, that’s the way it would be.”
“Yes, sir,” Lowell said.
“The other way is the way I’ve decided to go. Have an aviator come up with what aviation would like to have, and then make the Engineers justify not giving it to them.”
“I understand, sir,” Lowell said.
“You hear a lot of smart-ass remarks about the ‘Big Picture,’ Lowell,” General Black said, “generally from officers who have not yet learned that no matter how important what they’re doing is, the army is also doing something else which is of equal or greater importance. I think you know that there is a Big Picture, and that everything has to fit in it.”
“I hope I do, sir,” Lowell said, aware that he had been complimented.
“I thought, Lowell,” General Black said, “and so apparently does General Bellmon, that you would be able to walk the edge of the razor and come up with a list of facilities that was right in the middle between an aviation ‘Wishful Thinking List’ and an engineer ‘We’d Really Rather Not Do That List.’”
“I’ll try, sir,” Lowell said.
(Five)
Near Bahia de Cochinos
Republic of Cuba
25 March 1961
There was no reason for the supervisor of the midnight to four shift in the radar-filled room at Jose Marti Airport in Havana to suspect that Honduran Air Force Six Six Four was anything but what he said he was: a Curtiss C-46 “Commando” en route from Miami home.
He personally thought if Honduran Air Force Six Six Four was in the employ of the Yankee imperialists and/or some counterrevolutionary group, they would not have got on the horn and requested permission to pass through the airspace of the People’s Democratic Republic of Cuba.
But orders were orders, and he picked up a red telephone. Accordingly, five minutes later two P-51F piston-engine fighters of the Cuban Air Force rose from Jose Marti to have a look at Honduran Air Force Six Six Four.
When they saw that Honduran Air Force Six Six Four was a battered and ancient C-46 painted in the Honduran scheme, which was able to exchange a few friendly words with them in Spanish, the fighters returned to Jose Marti.
Honduran Air Force Six Six Four proceeded on course, at 13,000 feet, toward Honduras. Havana area control continued to monitor the flight on radar, of course. And the radar, twenty minutes after the fighters had completed their investigation, showed little blips leaving the aircraft.
The radar operator didn’t even report this to the supervisor. The radar had not been properly maintained since the fall of General Batista’s regime. And since then, the servicing of radar had become something of a problem. No longer did the pleasant young men from Sperry catch a quick flight from Miami carrying attaché cases full of “short-life” parts.
They didn’t come at all, and no parts were available. By Herculean effort, the radars were kept working with one make-do fix after another, but they weren’t up to specs. They showed more and more glitches.
When the new and all-around superior radar came from East Germany, the problem would be solved of course. But there had been minor delays in getting the East German equipment at all, and then when it had arrived, certain parts had been missing. Havana area control was having to make do with what it had, and what it had often showed little blips that weren’t really there.
Twenty-two minutes after passing over Havana, eight men in black coveralls stood up in the cargo compartment of the Curtiss Commando and, on signal, jumped out the door.
“A” Team No. 64, Third Special Forces Group, First Lieutenant Thomas J. Ellis commanding, landed within two hundred yards of one another about a mile from their intended landing zone; a field several miles above the village of Aguada de Pasajeros. No one was injured and there had been no indication that they had been seen.
There was a stand of trees three hundred yards away at the upper end of the field, and they made their way to it. There they buried their parachutes and jump equipment and unpacked the equipment bags.
SFC Eaglebury and Lieutenant Ellis made a quick reconnaissance of the immediate area, determining their exact location, and then led the team across country to their destination. When they arrived, they made camp, and settled down for the night.
In the morning, Lieutenant Ellis and SFC Eaglebury made another reconnaissance, from which SFC Eaglebury did not return.
“Hey, Lieutenant,” SFC Juan Vincenzo Lopez asked, in English, “where the hell is Eaglebury?”
“Eh!” Lieutenant Ellis replied. “Por favor. En Espagnol.”
It was understandable, Lieutenant Ellis thought, that Lopez would forget to speak Spanish. But correction was necessary.
SFC Lopez, of Los Angeles, California, was the second radio operator of the team. He had a very colorful vocabulary of profane and obscene words and phrases in the Spanish language, and now was the time he should use it.
“To tell you the truth, Lieutenant,” Lopez now announced, in English, “I’m not what you could call fluent in Spanish.”
Lieutenant Ellis now learned that SFC Lopez—despite his suggestions at Bragg that he was a “card-carrying wetback,” and despite his fluent Spanish profanity—was in fact a third generation Mexican-American who was considerably less fluent in Spanish than the first radio operator of the team, M/Sgt Stefan Karr, who had gone through an intensive three-week course in that language at the U.S. Army Language School at the Presido in San Francisco. The only Spanish SFC Lopez knew was what he had picked up while visiting the Los Angeles barrio (his father, a successful Mercedes salesman in Brentwood, housed his family in Marina del Ray) in search of ethnic food and feminine companionship.
“Goddamn it, one of the reasons you were picked for this mission was because you spoke Spanish,” Ellis exploded. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“I never said I spoke Spanish,” Lopez said. “And if I had said something, I’d be at Bragg, picking up cigarette butts…I really wanted to make this operation.”
He could not, of course, Ellis realized, be sent home in disgrace.
“You dumb sonofabitch,” Ellis said, in English.
“Where’s Eaglebury?” Lopez pursued.
“You don’t want to know,” Ellis said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just what it sounds like. You don’t want to know,” Ellis said.
Lopez looked at him a moment, and then nodded his head.
In point of fact, all Lieutenant Ellis knew about SFC/Lt. Commander Eaglebury was that his bag had contained civilian clothing and that Eaglebury had put it on before walking down the mountain.
And while Ellis was curious what Eaglebury was up to, he really didn’t want to know. Ellis and the others on the team had been kept in the dark against the possibility of their capture. If they were captured, they would be interrogated. Their only defense against a determined, skilled interrogator equipped with the best mechanical and chemical tools of the trade was ignorance.
Lieutenant Ellis’s “A” Team had a mission, of course, a mission which was both bona fide and a splendid cover for Eaglebury’s more secret mission. Ellis’s team was to install, at a precise location, a radio transmitter which—when the word was received—they would activate. This transmitter would allow the aircraft involved in the invasion to determine their precise location.
By noon of the first day, Ellis had learned that Lopez’s nonfluency in Spanish was not the only shortage he was going to have to cope with. The communications portion of the radio which the team had been equipped with had somehow been rendered inoperable during the insertion. The receiving function worked, but it was impossible to transmit. Neither M/Sgt Karr nor SFC Lopez were able to repair it.
Even that contingency had been planned for. At prespecified times during the night, flares were to be ignited for precisely sixty seconds and then extinguished. They lit the flares that night, and radio confirmation came quickly that Base understood that the team was intact and operational and that only their radio acknowledgment of orders was impaired.
From that point until they got the word, the team would have little to do except avoid making waves. Other flares were ignited at predetermined times to confirm that the team remained operational, but that was it.
XX
(One)
Headquarters
U.S. Army, Pacific
Honolulu, Hawaii
2230 Hours, 12 April 1961
Major Craig W. Lowell had been assigned a room in the basement. It contained two desks, one of them with a shelf holding an IBM electric typewriter, two chairs, a standard issue table, and a telephone on a stand.
He had originally been assigned a clerk-typist, but the Adjutant General, on whom the levy for a typist with a Top Secret security clearance had been laid, had naturally not deprived his organization of his best typist.
The typist he got was a nice kid, and Lowell didn’t want to send him back with the humiliation of being relieved for incompetence, so he told him to make himself scarce until he sent for him.
Then he did the typing himself, and there had been a good deal of it. It had taken him six days.
He took the covering letter from the IBM and looked at it.
TOP SECRET
HEADQUARTERS
U.S. ARMY, PACIFIC
HONOLULU, HAWAII
14 April 1961
1. Transmitted herewith in triplicate is the report of the undersigned concerning aviation logistic requirements in the event the United States Army should be required to participate in operations in the Republic of South Vietnam.
2. The report consists of this letter and eighteen (18) separate documents, attached as Inclosures 1 through 18 hereto. The report is classified Top Secret. Copies 2 and 3 are in the custody of the Classified Documents Officer, Hq, USARPAC, under control numbers TS-61 107 and TS-61 108. Copy 1 has been delivered personally by the undersigned to CINCPAC.
Craig W. Lowell
Major, Armor
Incl:
1. General topographical observations (w/maps) as they apply to the operation of conventional U.S. Army forces within the Republic of South Vietnam.
2. General topographical observations (w/maps) as they apply to the operation of airmobile U.S. Army forces (i.e., 11th Air Assault Division [Provisional] [Test]) within the Republic of South Vietnam.
3. General topographic observations (w/maps) as they apply to the operation of unconventional forces under U.S. Army control (i.e., native forces under the control of U.S. Army Special Forces).
4. Evaluation of existing air facilities at Saigon, together with an appraisal of their capability for expansion to meet U.S. Army needs under the following conditions:
(a) U.S. Army strength level to 25,000 personnel
(b) U.S. Army strength level to 50,000 personnel
(c) U.S. Army strength level to 100,000 personnel
(d) U.S. Army strength level to 200,000 personnel
(e) through (h) Same as (a) through (d) but assuming forces include 11th Air Assault Division (or equivalent)
5. Same as 4 above for Hue
6. Same as 4 above for Tourane (Da Nang)
7. Same as 4 above for Gia Lia (Pleiku)
8. Same as 4 above for Ban Me Thuot
9. Same as 4 above for Da Lat
10. Same as 4 above for Nha Trang
11. Same as 4 above for Vung Tau (Cap St. Jacques)
12. Same as 4 above for Long Huyen
13. Same as 4 above for Phu Quoc Island
14. Evaluation of existing aviation petroleum storage facilities at Saigon, together with an appraisal of their capability for expansion under the conditions specified in 4 above.
15. Same as 14 above for Quang Ng Ai
16. Same as 14 above for Binh Dinh
17. Same as 14 above for Vinh Cam Ranh (Cam Ranh Bay)
18. An appraisal of special aviation requirements in the event of deployment of U.S. Army Special Forces in the highlands (w/maps).
Craig W. Lowell
Major, Armor
TOP SECRET
He took a pen from his pocket and wrote his signature above his typed name.
Then he called the Classified Documents Officer and asked him to send somebody over to help him carry everything to the vault. There was no way he could carry it all by himself.
He thought that what would happen now was that he would present it to General Black in the morning. Black would tell him to amuse himself—while keeping himself available—until he had time to read it. That would be followed by two days of nitpicking and answering questions he hadn’t answered in the report. Or maybe a week of that. It was an enormous report.
He misjudged again what General E. Z. Black would do.
“There’s no point in you sticking around, Lowell,” Black told him. “If I have any specific questions, I’ll get them answered by someone with fresh eyes.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Thank you, Lowell,” General Black said. “Jiggs was apparently right.”
“Sir?”
“The problem dealing with you is keeping you busy; when you’re busy, you’re everything that can be expected of a good officer.”
“Then I shall try to keep busy,” Lowell said.
“Perhaps they’ll have something for you to do when you get back,” Black said, offering Lowell his hand.
There was more in that remark than the words, but of course Lowell could not ask him.
He went back to the Royal Hawaiian. He went to his suite and took a long shower, and then he made himself a drink.
He gave into the temptation, and reached for the telephone, as he knew he would. He had written Cynthia his own version of her “Get Thee Out of My Life, My Darling” letter, just before he’d gone to Vietnam.
He had told her that he simply couldn’t settle for the odd weekend now and again. He told her he was being “sent away” and would use the time to think the whole thing through. And he wrote that it seemed only decent to say that he thought it would be better if he never tried to call her again—and that he probably wouldn’t.
And now that he had changed his mind, the editorial offices of Time-Life in New York would not tell him where he could reach Miss Cynthia Thomas. But, they said, if he would leave his name and his number, they would try to get his message to her.
He controlled his temper and gave the name. Porter Craig or that press agent would have known someone at Time-Life who could get him through to Cynthia, but obviously—under the circumstances—he could not call Porter.
He looked out his window at the beach and the Pacific Ocean. It would be a shame to have been in Hawaii and not taken a swim, he decided. And it was not entirely beyond possibility that there would be a female on the beach who had come to Hawaii in search of romance. But just as he was about to leave his room, the telephone rang. He would have given odds that it was some sonofabitch at Hq USARPAC who had seen his report and wanted to talk to him about it.
“Lowell,” he snarled into the telephone.
“You drop out of sight for six months, and you snarl?” Cynthia Thomas asked.
“Jesus!” he said.
“Where were you? Where are you? How come not a lousy postcard?”
“I’m in Honolulu.”
“What are you doing there?”
“I’m about to leave.”
“I have the feeling we’ve had this conversation before,” she said.
“I hope it ends the way the other one did.”
“Excuse me?” Cynthia said, not taking his meaning.
“With breakfast, so to speak,” Lowell said.
“Oh, so that’s why you called me?”
“It was in my mind.”
“Tell me where you’ve been while I think about it,” she said.
“I’m sorry, I can’t do that.”
“Oh, here we go again. C. Lowell, defender of the world!”
“I can’t.”
“I’m in Los Angeles,” she said. “But I’m leaving.”
“Oh?”
“For Mexico City.”
“Mexico City is lovely this time of year,” he said.
“It is. But I’ll be working for a week.”
“At night?”
“Night and day,” she said. “How about a week from today?”
“All right. Where will you be?”
“You get a place,” she said. “And then call me at the bureau, and I’ll rush over with a rose between my teeth.”
The phone went dead. He looked at it. Cynthia for a couple of days was not as nice as Cynthia forever, but Cynthia for a couple of days was a lot better than no Cynthia at all.
