of snapping it as they moved apart unless additional cable was released from the winch. Conversely, if the vessels leaned toward each other, the lower part of the loop tended to go into the water, unless the cable was quickly winched in.
Dunn pulled his head in and looked at Chief Petty Officer Felix J. Orlovski, who had been in the Navy longer than many of his sailors were old.
“How are we doing with this, Chief?”
“We’re about to make a test run, sir,” the chief said, and pointed upward to the cable. A third bosun’s chair was hooked to it.
“What’s that strapped inside?” Dunn asked.
“The doc’s medical bag, sir, and some weights to bring it to two hundred pounds. You want me to go ahead, sir?”
Dunn nodded, and Chief Orlovski bellowed, “CHAIR AWAY!”
The chair began to move between the ships. When it was almost exactly in the middle between them, the two vessels leaned toward each other. The loop in the cable dropped the bosun’s chair to the surface of the sea, where it sank briefly beneath it.
When the two ships leaned away from each other, the loop straightened and the bosun’s chair rose out of the water. As it continued to move toward the Mansfield, everyone watching the “transfer” could see that Lieutenant Patterson’s medical bag and the weights that had been in the seat were no longer there.
Major Pickering said, “I am offering three-to-five the doc never makes it”—there was appreciative laughter from the pilots—“in which case, the colonel’s going to have to think of some better way to get me off this vessel.”
More laughter.
Dunn looked coldly at Pickering but said nothing.
He had been giving Pickering a lot of thought ever since the Air Force pilot had relayed McCoy’s “Bingo, heads up” message.
His first reaction had been personal: joy and relief that Pickering had not perished in some desolate rice paddy or at the end of some North Korean’s bayonet. That was understandable. They had been close friends since Guadalcanal, when, flying VMF-229 Grumman Wildcats off of Fighter One, Second Lieutenant Pickering had been First Lieutenant Dunn’s wingman.
His second reaction, he’d originally thought, was sort of cold-blooded professional. Pickering’s return to the Badoeng Strait after everyone—including himself—had decided he wouldn’t come back at all was going to do a great deal to restore the sagging morale Dick Mitchell’s death had caused among his pilots.
The first unkind or unpleasant thought had come when the Army pilot had flown the black H-19A out to the Badoeng Strait. For one thing, he had heard and believed that helicopters—particularly new ones, and the H-19A was as new as they came—were notoriously unreliable. Somebody who knew what he was talking about had told him that if it were not for the helicopter’s ability to land practically anywhere—or, for that matter, to flutter without power to the ground in what they called an “autorotation”—they would be banned as a general hazard to mankind.
It was well over one hundred miles from Socho-Ri to where the Badoeng Strait cruised in the Sea of Japan. Finding the ship itself was risky. And if the H-19A had engine trouble, the “can land anywhere” and “autorotation” safety features would be useless at sea. It could flutter to the sea intact, of course, but then it would immediately begin to sink.
Dunn hadn’t thought the H-19A would have life jackets—much less a rubber lifeboat—aboard, and he checked, and it didn’t. Everybody on board would have died if they hadn’t been able to make it to the Badoeng Strait.
And that was only the beginning of the problem. The Army aviator who had flown the machine had never landed on an aircraft carrier before. Dunn had admired his courage, and later his flying skill, but he had thought that if it hadn’t been for Pick trying to become the first Marine locomotive ace, he wouldn’t have been shot down, and no one would have had to risk their lives to save his ass.
That Pick had not been brought up short by a direct order to stop flying all over the Korean landscape looking for a locomotive to shoot up instead of what he was supposed to do, was what was known at the Command and General Staff College as a failure of command supervision. Major Pickering’s asshole behavior had been tolerated, not stopped, by his commander, whose name was Dunn, William C.
Phrased another way, what that meant was that Colonel Billy Dunn was really responsible for all the lives risked, and all the effort