NECESSARY SUPPORT. DCSLOG WILL MAKE EVERY EFFORT TO ENSURE THAT OFFICER AND ENLISTED PERSONNEL ASSIGNED WILL POSSESS KNOWLEDGE OF THE SPANISH LANGUAGE. A WEEKLY REPORT OF PROGRESS WILL BE FURNISHED TO THE OFFICE OF THE CHIEF OF STAFF.
FOR THE CHIEF OF STAFF, US ARMY
CHARLES M. SCOTT, JR.
LT GEN US ARMY
DEPUTY CHIEF OF STAFF
“I will be damned,” Colonel Harris said. “When I asked for a Beaver, they as much as laughed at me.”
“I remember,” Master Sergeant Wilson said.
“If something is too good to be true, it usually is,” Harris said.
“You want me to get on the horn and see if I can find out anything? ”
“No. It’s Christmas Eve, and nobody who knows anything will be working in the Pentagon anyhow. We’ll wait a couple of days, at least until 2 January, and then if we don’t hear anything more, we can give them a call.”
“Yes, sir.”
“At the risk of repeating myself, it’s Christmas Eve. Why don’t you take off?”
“Same to you,” Colonel Harris said, getting out of his chair to shake Wilson’s hand.
When the sergeant had gone, Harris started to sit down again, but changed his mind, picked up the teletype message, and walked down the third-floor corridor to the office of Colonel H. Robert McGrory, USAF, the defense attaché of the U.S. Embassy.
He already had a difficult relationship with Colonel McGrory, and he suspected the L-23 was going to make it worse.
Buenos Aires was an “air force post.” That is to say, the defense attaché was always an air force officer, and the army and navy officers, called the “army attaché’ and the “naval attaché,” were subordinate to him. Other embassies were “army posts,” or “naval posts,” and the defense attaché was an army officer or a navy officer.
Harris had no idea where the stupid idea had started, but he knew there was nothing he could do about it, so he tried to live with it as best he could. Which was difficult for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that Colonel Bob McGrory, who had spent most of his career driving airplanes, knew very little about anything else.
He spent most of his lunches, and the afternoons following, in the Argentine air force officers’ club, where he regaled his Argentine peers with flying stories, which he could afford to do because he delegated just about all of his duties to Colonel Richard J. Harris, Jr., the army attaché, and Captain Sam Duckworth, USN, the naval attaché.
The problem was further compounded by seniority. Harris outranked McGrory by more than a year. Harris had been asked, when offered the Argentine assignment, if he could deal with that, and almost without thinking about it, had said it would pose no problem.
Certainly, there would be little problem between two officers with nearly thirty years of service simply because one of them outranked the other. And Harris had wanted to come to Buenos Aires because he thought he could do some good in the assignment, build a relationship between the Argentine officer corps and the American, among other things.
But McGrory, who was led around by the nose by his wife, had made it very clear from the beginning that he regarded Dick Harris and Sam Duckworth as not only subordinate officers on his staff, but junior officers. And Mrs. Constance McGrory held the belief that she was in command of the military and naval ladies.
Joanne Harris had put up with that for a while, but had finally told Constance McGrory where to head in, about which Constance had complained to Bob. Bob McGrory had called Harris in for a little chat, during which—to his lasting chagrin—Harris had lost his temper.
McGrory had referred to Constance as the “senior military lady, deserving of more respect than your wife is apparently paying her,” and that had pushed Harris over the edge.
“I don’t think wives wear their husbands’ rank, Bob, but if we’re going to play that game, Joanne is the ‘senior military lady,’ as I’m the senior military officer attached to the embassy. I outrank you by a year, which means I can order you around, and I’m ordering you to keep your wife away from my wife.”
From that moment on, it had been “Colonel Harris” and “Colonel McGrory” when they spoke, and Harris spoke to McGrory as little as possible.
But the assignment of an airplane to the embassy was clearly of legitimate interest to the defense attaché, and Dick Harris knew he had to tell the stupid