is two-niner-niner. Take the first taxiway to the Base Operations tarmac.”
Fort Rucker airplanes with a brigadier general aboard get to park in front of Base Operations.
“Six-oh-six,” Captain Smythe said into his microphone. “I have the L-23 in sight.”
As Captain Smythe lined up with Runway 27, he saw the L-23 touch down. On his landing roll, Captain Smythe saw the L-23 taxiing toward the Base Operations building, and decided it was a transient aircraft, or possibly a Rucker airplane with a colonel aboard. Exceptions were often made for full-bull colonels, too.
As ground crewmen directed him to park immediately adjacent to the just-landed L-23, its crew and passenger debarked. There were three people aboard. All were wearing flight suits. They were all wearing green berets. One of them was slight, and very fair-skinned, and looked like a boy, and Captain Smythe at first decided he was the enlisted crew chief, being taken along for a ride.
As Captain Smythe helped Brigadier General Edward J. Devlin, Assistant Chief of Staff for Plans and Training of the III Corps at Fort Hood, disconnect himself from his seat and shoulder harness and the connections to his helmet, Smythe noticed, idly, that the two officers in the L-23 were tying the aircraft down, while the young-soldier-who-was-probably-the-crew -chief stood by watching, and wondered what that was all about.
It could be, he decided, that the kid was not the crew chief, but rather an enlisted man at Fort Bragg who had caught a ride to Rucker.
“Goddamn Green Berets,” General Devlin said.
“Sir?”
“My general is long overdue for an L-23, and when he was finally advised it was on the way, the next day they told him the goddamn Green Berets were going to get it instead. That one looks brand new; that’s probably it. What the hell do they need an aircraft like that for?”
“Yes, sir,” Captain Smythe said.
“There is no place in the Army for a quote elite force unquote,” General Devlin said. “The Marines understand that. I have never been able to understand the mystique surrounding the goddamn Green Berets.”
“Yes, sir,” Captain Smythe said.
By the time a ladder had been produced so that General Devlin and Captain Smythe could climb down from the cockpit of the Mohawk, the three people from the L-23 had entered the Base Operations building.
When General Devlin and Captain Smythe entered the Base Operations building, the two Special Forces officers were leaning on the wall under the oil portrait of Major General Bogardus S. Cairns, for whom the field had been named. Neither showed any interest when they saw General Devlin.
General Devlin had served—as a major—with General—then colonel—Cairns in the 1st Armored Division, and had admired him greatly. The entire armor community had been saddened when Cairns, shortly after receiving a well-deserved second star as commanding general of Fort Rucker and the Army Aviation Center, had crashed to his death in an H-13. There was a story that it was his own fault, that as a nearly brand-new pilot, he had forgotten to turn on his carburetor heat, whatever the hell that meant, but Devlin didn’t believe it.
What he did believe was that junior officers should come to attention in the presence of a general officer, maybe especially when they were standing under a portrait of a distinguished general officer, and these two Green Beret clowns had not done so.
He marched purposefully toward them to deliver a small lecture on the military courtesy expected of majors and lieutenants and had almost reached them when a female voice called his name.
“Hello, Eddie,” Mrs. Barbara Bellmon called. “Bob didn’t say anything about you coming here.”
General Devlin had the highest possible regard for Major General Robert F. “Bob” Bellmon, with whom he had served at three different occasions during his career. Mrs. Mary-Catherine O’Hare Devlin and Barbara Bellmon were friends from the start, at least to the extent that the wife of a captain can be friends with the wife of a senior colonel.
The two Green Beret clowns would have to wait.
He went to Barbara Bellmon and kissed her cheek.
“I’ll only be here for lunch,” he said. “Bob called me and said it was high time I had a good orientation ride in the Mohawk, and sent Captain Smythe to Hood to pick me up in one.” He turned. “Captain?”
Captain Darrell Smythe walked to General Devlin and Mrs. Bellmon.
“Do you know Mrs. Bellmon, Captain?”
“Sir, I haven’t had that privilege,” Smythe said.
“How do you do, Captain?” Barbara Bellmon said, smiling at Smythe and offering him her hand.