“I’ll come out of the Congo considerably richer than when I went in,” he said. “Which is more than a lot of other people can say.”
“And what are you going to do?”
“There’s a lot of old Boeing 707s on the market,” Captain Portet said. “I’m going to buy a couple of them, maybe three or four, and start up an air cargo, or maybe air cargo/passenger charter operation here. Operating into South America, and maybe, even probably, into Vietnam. That war seems to get bigger by the day.”
“Yeah,” Jack agreed.
“Are you going to have to go over there?”
“I don’t know. Christ, I hope not. Before the Stanleyville thing came up, I didn’t think so. They assigned me to the Instrument Examiner Board at Fort Rucker—”
"You were flying?”
“They don’t let enlisted swine fly. What they had me doing was writing the written parts.”
“Any regrets about not being an officer?”
“Not until Marjorie. Or until that got serious. I don’t think Marjorie cares, but her family, both sides, have been officers for generations.”
“I think you made a good choice there, but with her background, is she going to be happy married to an airplane driver?”
“I guess we’ll have to find that out,” Jack said. “But to keep the record straight, I did a little flying. When they were getting the B-26s ready for the Congo, they didn’t have anybody who knew how to fly them, so they looked the other way and turned me into an IP.”
“Where’d you get B-26 time?”
“I got about twenty hours just before I became an IP,” Jack said. “They were really desperate. I even flew one to Kamina, because there was no one else around who could. But to answer your question, what I’m hoping to do is finish my time giving written instrument exams at Fort Rucker.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” his father said.
“You know something I don’t?”
At that moment, what turned out to be a fifteen-pound grouper struck the port line, the rod bent nearly double, the reel screamed, and they jumped out of their chairs to help Jeanine. Jack’s question never got an answer.
[ THREE ]
Walter Reed U.S. Army Medical Center
Washington, D.C.
0930 12 December 1964
Brigadier General James R. McClintock, Medical Corps, U.S. Army, a tall, silver-haired, hawk-faced man of forty-six, arrived in the ward unannounced. He was wearing a white smock over a uniform shirt and trousers. The smock bore an embroidered caduceus, the insignia of the U.S. Army Medical Corps, but it did not have pinned to it, as regulations required, the small oblong black piece of plastic he had been issued, and on which was engraved his rank and name and branch of service.
He did not, General McClintock often informed his aide-de-camp when the question of the missing name tag came up, have to look down at his chest to remind himself who he was, and if there was a question as to his identity in the minds of the staff, the aide should tell them.
General McClintock was alone when he got off the elevator. Usually he was trailed by at least his aide, and most often by a small herd of medical personnel, and these people were most often smiling nervously. In addition to being an internist of international repute, General McClintock had a soldier’s eye. When he visited a ward, in other words, he was just as likely to spot a military physician whose hair was too long, or whose shoes needed a shine, as he was to find a misdiagnosis or something wrong with a patient’s chart.
He walked across the highly polished linoleum floor to the nurses’ station. There were three nurses and two enlisted medical technicians inside. The nurses looked busy, so General McClintock addressed one of the medical technicians:
“Hand me Captain Lunsford’s chart, will you, son?”
“Yes, sir,” the technician, a specialist six (an enlisted grade corresponding to sergeant first class), responded. He knew who General McClintock was, and, consequently, his response was far more enthusiastic and militarily crisp than usually was the case. So much so that it caught the attention of the senior nurse, Major Alice J. Martin, ANC, who had been standing with her back to the counter, talking on the telephone. She glanced over her shoulder, hung the phone up in midsentence, and walked quickly to the counter.
“May I be of help, General?” she asked.
“I thought I’d have a last look at Captain Lunsford before he’s discharged,” McClintock said.
He took the chart, which was actually an aluminum folding clipboard,