length of service. It was a damned good assignment for him, and for the Army. And now the orders were changed. Johnny was assigned to the John F. Kennedy Center for Special Warfare.
Those sonsofbitches in Green Berets again!
He was not going to stand still and have those bastards take a perfectly decent, upstanding, outstanding young officer and ruin him!
He lit a cigarette, and when he saw that his hand was hardly shaking at all, he punched his intercom button and, proud of the control he was now exercising over his voice, very calmly and politely asked his secretary to see if she could get Brigadier General Hanrahan at the JFK Center at Bragg for him.
“If he’s not in his office, Mrs. Delally, try his quarters, please.”
General Hanrahan was not in his headquarters. He was not in his quarters, either. General Bellmon spoke with Mrs. Hanrahan, and wished her a merry Christmas, and she told him Red was off somewhere with Craig Lowell, and that she didn’t really expect him back until Christmas Eve.
If he was off with Lieutenant Colonel Craig Lowell, God only knew where they would be. And God, if he had any sense, would probably not want to know.
When Mrs. Delally called the Office of the Adjutant General in the Pentagon, the only officer he could get on the phone, a light colonel, obviously didn’t have the brains to blow his nose without illustrated instructions.
“No problem, thank you, Colonel, I’ll call again in the morning. ”
He had less trouble getting Brigadier General George R. Rand on the telephone.
“I have a TWX here, George,” he said. “Assigning Johnny Oliver to Red Hanrahan and the snake eaters. You know anything about it?”
“You don’t?” Rand asked.
“First I’d heard of it. What do you know?”
“He called me a couple of days ago and very politely said that he’d been offered another job—”
“By Red Hanrahan?” Bellmon interrupted.
“He said ‘at the Special Warfare Center,’ but I’m sure he meant Red, because . . . after I told him I wouldn’t stand in his way . . . Red called me and asked if I minded. He said he had a job for him, with a little less pressure than he’s been under. But that if I really needed him . . . et cetera et cetera.”
“Hanrahan wanted him when he first became my aide,” Bellmon said.
“But you didn’t know about this, huh?”
“Oliver is on leave. It must have come up all of a sudden. George, if I can talk some sense to you, will you still take him?”
“Sure. Love to have him.”
“I’m going to look into this. I’ll probably get back to you. Thank you, George.”
General Bellmon hung up, and then broke, one by one, six #2 lead, rubber-tipped pencils into inch-long pieces. Then he walked out of his office, smiled at Mrs. Delally, and said that he would be going to his quarters now, and if it was important, he could be reached there.
[ FOUR ]
Annex #1, Officers’ Open Mess
Fort Rucker, Alabama
1505 18 December 1964
Second Lieutenant Robert F. Bellmon, Jr., sat at the bar of Annex #1 drinking Miller’s High Life beer from a can and feeling more than a little sorry for himself. He was about to lose the companionship of the officer sitting beside him at the bar, Captain John S. Oliver. Johnny Oliver was to report to the 11th Air Assault Division at Fort Benning, on 1 January 1965.
Bobby was staying on at Rucker to get transitioned into fixed wing. After that, he didn’t know what was going to happen to him. But an era, clearly, was over. He was being separated from the best friend he had ever made in his life, and nothing would ever be the same again. Bobby didn’t think much of his father’s new aide. Goddamned stuffed shirt.
It was difficult for a second lieutenant to be stationed on a post where the commanding general had the same name. His peers were generally divided into two categories, those who thought getting close to the general’s son was dangerous, and those who thought they might somehow be able to turn it to their advantage. Bobby was naive but not a fool.
The test of a friend, Bobby believed, was when someone did something for you that either cost him, and/or not because something was in it for him. The proof that Johnny Oliver was a friend had been several instances where he had done things for Bobby despite the fact that he was General Bellmon’s aide rather than