Plus three expensive suitcases and what looked like six months’ supply of disposable diapers and other infant accoutrements.
Although both Captain Dugan and Lieutenant Matthews would have endured a fair amount of torture rather than admit this, they had both felt a flush of excitement during their recruitment, which had happened very much the same for both of them, although a day and more than a thousand miles apart.
There had been a message for them to call the Office of the Commanding General, which rarely happens to junior officers. When they had called, they were ordered to report to the airfield at a certain time.
There—in Dugan’s case—the assistant division commander had been waiting for him, and in Matthews’s case the Third Army’s assistant chief of staff, G3.
A Major Hodges would be shortly arriving, they were told, to ask them to volunteer for a classified overseas mission. They were as free to reject the assignment, they were told, as they were to accept it. Major Hodges was acting on the verbal order of the chief of staff of the United States Army, who had personally telephoned the general to set this up. The matter was considered Top Secret.
Major Hodges arrived flying a Mohawk that had U.S. Army markings, but none of the to-be-expected markings indicating to which unit the aircraft was assigned. This was because Pappy Hodges had been at the Grumman Aircraft Plant at Bethpage, Long Island, picking up a new Mohawk when he got the call from Colonel Sanford T. Felter telling him that Finton had found two black aviators, one at McPherson and the other at Riley, and that Pappy was going to have to go to McPherson and Riley as soon as possible to see if the two met the requirements.
Requirement one would be their willingness to volunteer for a classified overseas assignment. Requirement two was professional qualifications. Since all Army fixed-wing aviators had learned to fly in the L-19, they obviously met that requirement, Felter said.
“Father needs black pilots right now,” Felter had said. “We’re not in a position to be choosy. The 707 leaves in four days, and if these two fellows can see lightning and hear thunder, I want them on it.”
The four days they had spent after volunteering for a classified overseas flight duty assignment involving a substantial personal risk, and before boarding the 707 at Pope Air Force Base, had given both Captain Dugan and Lieutenant Matthews ample time to reflect on, and wonder whether, their impetuosity hadn’t gotten their ass in a narrow crack.
That started before they arrived at Pope Air Force Base and were taken to a hangar guarded by Special Forces noncoms. Seeing that the hangar held an aircraft of an airline neither of them had ever heard of—Intercontinental Air Cargo, Ltd.— which was being flown by a captain who had a French accent and a Cuban who spoke very little English, did not restore their morale to any appreciable degree.
At the very last minute, after the 707 had been towed out of the hangar, three other passengers were escorted into the cabin by the captain with the French accent. One was an enormous black woman who had a sleeping blond-headed infant in her arms, and the third was a good-looking blonde, who had to be the infant’s mother.
There was just time, before the engines were started, to ask a few discreet questions of the blonde. She said she was an Army wife about to join her husband, a first lieutenant.
“And where is that?”
“I don’t think I’m supposed to say,” she said.
She had a slight German accent.
Obviously, if the Army was permitting a lieutenant to have his wife and infant child accompany him, wherever they were going couldn’t be all that rough.
They had no way of knowing, of course, that the Army was permitting Mrs. Geoffrey Craig to join her husband because there was very little they could do to stop her, and could only hope that the situation vis-à-vis lieutenants’ wives of Special Forces Detachment 17 could be controlled somewhat better than it had been so far.
They had not, of course, been privy to the telephone conversation between Captain Jean-Phillipe Portet of Intercontinental Air, Ltd., in Miami, and Colonel Sanford T. Felter, General Staff Corps, in Washington, D.C.
“Ursula Craig put an interesting question to me last night, Sandy,” Jean-Philippe Portet had said.
“She wants to know,” Felter asked immediately, “since Marjorie is over there, why she can’t be? I was waiting for that.”