The Colonels, page 7
part #4 of Brotherhood of War Series
He sipped thoughtfully on his coffee. He would offer Lowell a job again. The very reasons Lowell didn’t want a job, were the reasons he would be valuable. Hanrahan didn’t want super-troopers. He wanted people like Lowell, who had led foreign troops, and thought jumping out of airplanes was idiocy.
It was very interesting, now that he thought of it, that his records had been maintained by DCSINTEL. Felter was in intelligence, high enough up so they transferred his calls around the country as if he was a member of the White House staff.
III
(One)
Fort Rucker, Alabama
1430 Hours, 31 December 1958
Mrs. Jane O’Rourke Cassidy, Administrative Assistant, GS-7, of the U.S. Army Aviation Board, stood at the door to Major Craig W. Lowell’s office, leaning against the jamb, so that her sweater was drawn tightly against her breasts. It was the first thing Lowell noticed when, sensing her presence, he looked up from the papers on his desk.
Jane Cassidy, who had just turned thirty, was a tall lithe woman. She wore her natural, pale blond hair parted in the middle and drawn tightly into a bun at the base of her neck. She looked more Danish than Irish, and the family joke had been that long ago a visiting Viking had paid more than casual attention to one of the lasses on the auld sod.
Her job at the Aviation Board was new, her assignment to Major Craig Lowell even newer; and it was the second real job she had ever had. She had married Tom Cassidy the week she had graduated from Spring Hill College in Mobile. She became pregnant that fall, and there were now two children. The youngest, Tom III, was now eight; Patricia a year and two days older.
She had lived in Enterprise all of her married life. Six months before their marriage Tom had come out of Auburn University with a master’s degree in chemical engineering, to a job at Enterprise’s major (some said only) industry, the Wiregrass Peanut Oil Company. Tom joked that he had been offered the job because he graduated cum laude, and the Wiregrass Peanut Oil Company was determined to stay on top of Leguminosae technology—and also because his uncle, John Patrick Cassidy, not only had not been blessed with a son, but was president and major stockholder of the company as well.
Raising the kids, Jane had not had the time to learn to really hate Enterprise until Tom III had started school. She had been and was still a good mother. Caring for the children and making a home had kept her busy. But with the kids off at school, there was a lot of free time, and the interesting things to do in Enterprise were few and far between. She was, because of Tom and John Patrick Cassidy, part of the Enterprise Establishment, but her peers in this social class bored her out of her mind.
Jane had been born and raised in Mobile, where her family had been in the ship chandlery business since before the Civil War. Mobile was a somewhat unpleasant three-hour drive from Enterprise. When she made the trip, every month or six weeks, there was a chance to be with her peers, the girls she had grown up with. There was the country club, which her grandfather had helped found, and the Althesan Club, and half a dozen restaurants. Her peers scorned most of this, and went another three hours down the road to New Orleans for their escape from the boredom of children and home.
There was nobody to blame but herself. She had made her bed…her father had tactfully pointed out to her that Enterprise was not going to be Mobile…and now she would lie in it. Tom was happy. He was now out of the lab and into the plant manager’s office, and clearly the heir apparent. He had to travel a lot which was fun—for him. But even at home, the life for men in Enterprise was more varied than it was for women. The men had their golf, and they hunted in season, and there was an illegal bar in two rooms of the Hotel Enterprise where they met after work.
The idea of going to work at Fort Rucker had come to Jane as soon as the post had reopened and begun the transition from World War II infantry training base to the Army Aviation Center. When she had brought the subject up to Tom, he just didn’t understand why she should want a job. They didn’t need the money, and wives of members of the Enterprse Establishment generally, and the wife of the plant manager of the Wiregrass Peanut Oil Company specifically, did not take jobs.
“What would you do, anyway? Punch a typewriter?”
She had driven out to the civilian personnel office at the post one afternoon, where she was given a large packet of material describing careers in government service, plus a list of the available jobs. Tom had been right about one thing: she was unqualified to do anything but punch a typewriter, and truthfully, not even that. When she took the typist’s examination, she just barely passed, qualifying only for a job as a Typist (Trainee) GS-1.
And then Tom had thrown another monkey wrench in the gears: “Honey, if you took a job like that, you’d be taking it away from some woman who really needs the money.”
That had put the idea of working at the post to rest, and for good, she had thought…until there was an advertisement in the Enterprise Star, announcing an examination for “Federal Service Interns.” College graduates would be taken into the federal service as GS-5s, to be trained for a year in some specialty, and afterward they’d enter into a “career field” as a GS-7.
It took only the price of a stamp to apply. So Jane applied, more than a little embarrassed that she could fill only one line in the large blank for “educational and work experience”: B.A. (French) Spring Hill College, Mobile, Ala., 1949.
In spite of that, two months later she received a letter announcing that she had been selected for the intern program. She was to report to the U.S. Army Hospital the following Tuesday “not later than 1330 hours” for her physical examination.
Tom, it turned out, wasn’t nearly as upset as she thought he would be. He just laughed: “Working for the government will drive you out of your mind,” he told her. “You really want to waste your time, go ahead and try it.”
Her interview with her first boss was more than a little disappointing. He was a colonel, Robert F. Bellmon, and he was in charge of something called “Aviation Combat Developments.” He had been politely blunt: “The fact is, Mrs. Cassidy, that I did my level best to avoid getting an intern. I consider what we’re doing here very important, and I tried to make the point that I don’t have time to run a training program. I lost. I will have an intern working here. Frankly, if you come to work here, you’ll probably be more trouble than you’re worth. On the other hand, you’re head and shoulders above the other people they’ve sent over for me to interview. If you’re willing to lend a hand here, wherever you’re needed, and clearly understand that any training you get will be on the job, I’m willing to give it a try.”
She had taken the job, convinced that what she was going to do would be what Tom had prophesied, punch a typewriter, and badly. But punching a typewriter was better than sitting around the house watching the maid polish the silver.
And there was already sort of an office manager, a dentist’s wife from Dothan, who was equally jealous of her prerogatives. Instead, Jane O’Rourke Cassidy spent her year’s internship maintaining the flight records of the aviators assigned to Combat Developments, and doing what was called “Updating the Jep.”
Every pilot’s entire flying time had to be accounted in his record: what kind of airplane; how long the flight had been; and whether or not the flight had been under instrument flight conditions. In addition, a certificate had to be sent each month to the Finance Office stating that the pilot had flown the four hours required to qualify for flight pay.
Because they flew all over the country, all the pilots at Combat Developments were issued a set of manuals in a salesman’s case. The manuals contained loose-leaf binders containing information about every airport in the United States, maps of the airfields, radio frequencies, and NOTAMs—“Notices to Airmen” about hazards or closed runways.
These were published by the Jeppsen Company, who each week mailed each pilot an update, reflecting changed information. The old sheets had to be removed from the binders and the new sheets inserted.
“Updating the Jep” struck Jane as an idiot’s job, but none of the clerks who had been doing it had been able to do it correctly or on time. But there were several things in the job’s favor: it allowed her to get out of the house every day and to meet interesting people. The pilots seemed to be very nice guys, very grateful to have an updated Jep and their flight pay certificates filed on time. Before long they began to take her to lunch at the officers’ club with them.
To her great relief, none of them made passes at her. Most of the pilots were married, and the ones that weren’t were so young they treated her with a respect that was almost embarrassing. Gradually, Jane began to do other services for them, typing up forms of one kind or another that the typists were either unwilling or unable to do.
She had made a good deal, Jane thought, in taking the job. It wasn’t quite what she had expected, but it was better than nothing. She also thought it was making a contribution to her marriage: she was more alive than she had been before she’d come to work. Though the magic—a nice word for lust—had long been gone from her marriage, at least now she could talk to Tom over dinner about something interesting that had happened to her during the day.
Socially, Tom was in an awkward position regarding the post. The brass made overtures of friendship to the mayors and other officials of Enterprise and Ozark. These had been given associate memberships in the officers’ open mess. And the doctors and lawyers met regularly with their counterparts in uniform. But there was no counterpart to a peanut oil mill manager at Rucker; so Tom was left out.
But if Jane lasted the first year and was promoted to GS-7, she could join the officers’ club herself, since a GS-7 rating carried with it the “assimilated” grade of lieutenant. She wasn’t sure how Tom would respond—if he would feel embarrassed about being his wife’s guest. So she decided that if he objected, she wouldn’t join the club. But when she told him, all he wanted to know was whether he could use the golf course at the post.
“Find out about that, honey, will you?” Tom had asked.
The internship year passed quickly, and one day Colonel Bellmon had called her into his office.
“I had sort of a dilemma about you, Jane,” Bellmon said. “On the one hand, I’m more than a little grateful for the way you’ve been running flight records and the Jeps, and God knows what will happen when you’re gone. But on the other hand, it wouldn’t be fair to you or the taxpayers to keep you on as a clerk and pay you a GS-7’s wages. So I talked to Colonel Roberts at the Aviation Board about you, and next Monday you report out there to him.”
“I don’t quite understand,” she said. It was the first time she had thought about leaving Combat Developments.
“Well, I’ve signed the papers making you an Administrative Assistant, GS-7,” Bellmon told her. “And if there was someplace I could put you here, I would. But there isn’t. And Colonel Roberts says he’s sure he can find a place for you out at the Board where your talents can be properly utilized.”
They had a little party for her that Friday, coffee and cake, and gave her a plaque: aviator’s wings and the Combat Developments insignia mounted on a piece of mahogany. And on Monday she had gone out to the Army Aviation Board’s new building at Laird Army Airfield.
For two weeks, she had trailed the Board adjutant around, to get a feel of the place, and it had looked during the second week that she would be assigned to the Technical Publications Section. TBS functioned both as the technical publications library, and “publisher” for the reports the Aviation Board issued on aircraft and other equipment it tested. TBS was under a woman, an “imported” DAC (a Department of the Army civilian transferred to Fort Rucker from someplace else), and Jane had met and liked her.
But then she had been called into the office of Board president Colonel William R. Roberts. The adjutant was there when she walked in.
“Mrs. Cassidy,” Colonel Roberts said, “the Board has been directed to immediately set up a new section within the Flight Test Division. It will need an administrative assistant, and we think you could hold the job down. Would you be interested?”
She wondered if she was going to be clerk-typist under a fancier name, but she smiled and said she would.
“If it doesn’t work out, we’ll think of something else,” Colonel Roberts said to her. “Major Groppe will walk you over there—it’s in Hangar 101—and introduce you to Warrant Officer Cramer.”
Jane had been around the army long enough to know where a warrant officer fitted into the hierarchy, so she knew that she was going to be a clerk to someone with no authority or responsibility. She was disappointed until she reminded herself that being a clerk was better than sharing tuna fish sandwiches with the maid.
When they walked into an office in a concrete block structure built onto the street side of the hangar, CWO Cramer was standing on a chair, nailing a sign to an interior door. The sign read:
MAJOR C. W. LOWELL
CHIEF
ROCKET ARMED HELICOPTER SECTION
Jane O’Rourke Cassidy knew a good deal about Major C. W. Lowell. She had met him several times when he had visited Combat Developments. He was a friend of Colonel Bellmon. He was rich, and even owned his own airplane. And she knew that he was in deep trouble with the army.
Being assigned to work for him was proof that, rather than building on a career, she was being pushed aside. She would be working for a man who would shortly be out of the army.
Without meaning to, she had overheard a conversation between Major Lowell and Colonel Bellmon. Lowell had been caught in an affair with a U.S. senator’s wife in Washington, and they had sent him to Rucker, where Colonel Bellmon had told him he could either resign from the army immediately or be assigned as garbage disposal officer in the Panama Canal Zone until the board of officers was convened that would throw him out.
Lowell had agreed to resign as of January 1, 1959, but he told Bellmon that he intended to spend the holidays with his friends on the post. When Jane had told Tom about Lowell one night at dinner, he’d laughed.
But then the next day, Ed Greer had been killed when the Big Bad Bird crashed and exploded. Jane had known Greer, of course; Greer had been assigned to Combat Developments, but he was also married to Melody Dutton, the daughter of Howard Dutton, the mayor of Ozark. Howard and Tom were good friends.
Jane and Tom Cassidy had been sitting in their reserved seats in the bleachers on the parade ground for Ed Greer’s funeral services when the black-painted helicopter had appeared out of nowhere, buzzed the field, and then blown up a line of Russian tanks.
Before they left the parade ground, one of the Combat Development guys had told her what had happened. Major Lowell had stolen an H-19 from the Aviation School. He’d taken it somewhere out on the post—in the pine thickets—and hidden it there. Then he’d made all sorts of unauthorized modifications to it: he had another door cut in the fuselage; had mounted rocket launchers on the skids; and then he had used it to shoot up the Russian tanks lined up at the funeral ceremony.
Jane thought she understood why he had done it. The rocket-armed helicopter was important to the army, and it was liable to go down the tube because of Ed Greer’s accident. Lowell had decided in effect, to commit suicide in order to prove beyond question that a helicopter could kill a tank. It was generally agreed that Lowell would be court-martialed for what he had done, and would probably spend some time in the federal prison at Leavenworth.
Thus, when she walked in on Cramer hanging up the sign with Lowell’s name on it, she believed she had been assigned to an office where nothing would happen until they court-martialed Major Craig Lowell.
As it turned out, Jane was wrong. She soon learned that Major Lowell was not going to be court-martialed, nor was he going to resign. The Rocket Armed Helicopter Section of the Flight Test Division was indeed what Colonel Roberts had said it was, a brand new division of the Board, and she was its administrative assistant.
And Major Lowell himself was not what she expected him to be. She had thought he was a swinging bachelor—and had learned that he was instead a widower; a widower with a son, whose photograph in a silver frame was the only decoration in Lowell’s office. About the first thing he ordered Jane Cassidy to do was to put in a telephone call to his son in Germany.
Neither did he look at her as a man on the make looks at a woman. He spoke to her briefly when Mr. Cramer introduced them, telling her that if she had worked for Bellmon for a year, that was all the reference she needed. He was polite, but not charming.
Other small things about him surprised her, too. For instance, he immediately proved that he was the best and most accurate typist in the office. She would not have expected a somewhat dashing pilot to be a skilled typist…Tom couldn’t type at all.
And she saw something else that interested her. The officers and men who worked for him, with whom he dealt casually and jokingly, regarded him with great respect and admiration. Colonel Bellmon had been known behind his back as “Old Iron Britches.” But Lowell was either “the Duke,” a flattering reference to his finely tailored uniforms and to the mustache, or he was simply “the Major.”
By the end of her first day working for Major Craig W. Lowell, Jane O’Rourke Cassidy had learned something else: she was as attracted to Major Lowell as she had been to Tom Cassidy, Auburn halfback, the first time she had seen him up close.
At 2:30 P.M., there was a phone call for the Major, and she had to wait before he looked up at her. He had an ability to concentrate on what he was doing—to shut everything else out—that was almost frightening. Despite his casual manner, she knew right away that he was probably the most intense individual she had ever met.
“Colonel Bellmon’s wife,” Jane said, then immediately corrected herself, “I mean General Bellmon’s, is on the phone if you’re not busy, Major.”
Lowell picked up the telephone, idly thinking that tension had done it again, had made him aware of Jane Cassidy’s breasts and her sexuality. Whenever he was tense, he got horny. Of course, after the ass-chewing session he had had with Paul Jiggs, he would not have jumped her if she had come into the office starkers.
