W E B Griffin - BoW 03 - The Majors Read online

  The doctor who had treated him, after professing astonishment and joy that the American spoke French, told him that the greatest risk of infection was not from the shrapnel wound, but from the leech and other insect bites, and that "after you're out of here, take a lot of baths with antibacteriological soap."

  He was put to bed for the night in a private room, a small cubicle equipped with a U.S. Army hospital bed, an American

  Coleman gasoline lantern, two canteens of water and a glass, and copies of months-old French and Indo-Chinese newspapers.

  Felter and MacMillan came to see him. MacMillan explained the situation precisely, if not with overwhelming tact.

  "We're going to party with the officers," he said. "That leaves you out. You can party with the troops, if you like, but if you're smart, you'll stay where you are in the clean bed.

  The troops here sleep on the ground. They're going to try to get us out of here in the morning, or the next day."

  "I'll stay here," Greer said.

  "Got you some clothes," Felter said. He hung a set of Foreign

  Legion jungle pattern camouflage fatigues on a nail driven into one of the white-painted tree trunks which supported the hospital bunker roof.

  "You want something to drink?" MacMillan asked.

  "Please," Greer said.

  "I'll see what I can do."

  Ten minutes later, the legionnaire the Viet Minh had tied to the tree came into his room accompanied by two other very drunk legionnaires. Greer was sure that one of them was an

  American, although he denied it and said he was a Belgian.

  He was either American, or he'd lived in the States long enough to acquire a perfect command of Chicago English. He was a sergeant, and he had been brought along to translate by the company sergeant major, who didn't know that Greer spoke

  French.

  "Franz told us what you did for him," the "Belgian" legionnaire said. "And the sergeant major says that now that you nearly got yourself killed in this sewer, and jumped into here, you are now one of us."

  They sat him up in bed, put the camouflage fatigue jacket on him, pinned parachutist's wings on it, the company sergeant major kissed him on both cheeks, they both saluted him, helped him out of the jacket, handed him two unlabeled bottles of red wine, and left, staggering.

  Greer drank about half a bottle of wine, from the neck, while reading Paris Match and Le Figaro by the hissing light of the Coleman lantern. Then he turned it off and went to sleep, naked under the damp sheet.

  He woke up when he sensed the nurse's flashlight probing the room, but didn't move until he heard the hiss of the Coleman as she lit it. Then he turned his head and looked up at her.

  A blond, her hair was parted in the middle and drawn tight against her skull. She wore the legionnaire's jungle fatigues.

  Thirty, Greer judged. Maybe not that old. A woman would turn old quick here.

  "I will bathe your leech bites," she said, in English.

  "Je pane franais, MademoiselLe," Greer said.

  She asked him how he came to speak French, and he told her that he had been with a carnival, and there had been some

  French acrobats. She asked him what he had done with the carnival, and he lied and told her his father had owned it.

  And all the time, she dabbed at the leech bites and the insect bites on his backside with cotton-soaked alcohol, pulling the sheet off him when it was necessary to work below his waist.

  He smelled the alcohol, of course, but it was overwhelmed by the smell of her perfume.

  By the time she had worked her way down to his calves and ankles, he had a prize-winning erection.

  "Roll over," she said.

  "That would be very embarrassing for both of us, just now,"

  Greer said.

  She laughed, and handed him a towel.

  He told himself that he was embarrassed, and that it would go down naturally under the circumstances, which were, after all, nurse-patient, rather than romantic.

  She found a bite they hadn't noticed before under his armpit, and worked on that, and then she worked her way down his body. The hard-on did not go down. She worked around it, down his legs. She rebandaged the sutured shrapnel wound.

  "You still have it hard," she said, level voiced.

  He blushed. She chuckled, deep in her throat.

  "It is nothing to embarrass," she said.

  Her hand was on his stomach, an inch or so above the tent his erection was making of the towel.

  "There are thirty-nine women here," she said. "French women. Five of them are married, three to officers and two to sergeants. That means thirty-four women for several thousand of mens."

  "Those are pretty good odds," he said.

  "We have enough with the Viet Minh without fighting among ourselves over men," she said. "And we are not whores."

  He had no idea what she was leading up to.

  "I only once in a while wish a man," she said. "But if I were to have to do with a man here, it would cause difficulty."

  He nodded.

  "You understand?" she asked.

  He met her eyes.

  She slid her hand under the towel, held him, chuckled appreciatively. She picked the towel off him with the other hand, and hung it over the rail at the foot of the bed.

  "No move," she said, and let go of him, and got out of her

  Foreign Legion fatigue pants, and climbed onto the bed and straddled him and guided him into her.

  He had never had anybody do that to him before, and he never forgot it.

  The plane that came to get them out the next day crashed on landing, and then there was fog the day after that, and no plane; so it was the third day before they ran out to a gooney bird in the midst of an artillery barrage, got in it, and were soaked with the clammy sweat of fear until it got down the runway and into the air out of range of the Viet Minh's heavy

  .50s.

  (Five)

  The Embassy of the United States of America

  Taipei, Formosa

  25 March 1954

  It. General E. Z. Black returned from dinner with the ambassador as soon as he could without giving offense. He had declined the offer of the VIP guest house and had been assigned quarters in the main Embassy building instead.

  When the marine guard saluted him, even though he was in civilian clothing, Black asked him if he had happened to see

  Sergeant Greer.

  "Yes, sir," the guard said. "He's in the attache's office, sir."

  "What's he doing there?" Black wondered out loud.

  "Sir," the guard said, "he told the officer of the day that he was acting under your orders."

  "Yes, of course," General Black said. "That's on the third floor, right?"

  "Yes, sir," the marine said.

  He had inquired of Greer's whereabouts out of some vestigial

  (perhaps parental?) concern that Greer would celebrate his safe return with whiskey and wild, wild women. What he had hoped to learn was that Greer hadn't left the Embassy, not that he had invoked his name and was up to God alone knows what in the attache's office.

  It wasn't hard to find the attachd's office. Its door was the only one in the long corridor from which light spilled into the corridor.

  There was a soldier from the Embassy, a technical sergeant in his late thirties, perhaps even his early forties, in the outer office. Greer had installed himself at the secretary's desk, and was furiously pounding her IBM electric typewriter.

  The Embassy sergeant came to attention the instant he saw

  General Black. Sergeant Greer glanced up at him, and then resumed his typing, finishing the line or the paragraph or whatever, before finally standing up.

  Greer was in a new khaki uniform. When they thought he was dead, they had packed up his personal gear and his uniforms and sent them home. When MacMillan, Felter, and Greer finally returned from Dien Bien Phu, the three had been wearing

  French Foreign Legion jungle fatigues. The khakis had p
robably come from the military attache's supply room here.

  Greer's sleeves now held chevrons with one more stripe.

  He has just as many stripes, General Black thought, as the sergeant who has been sent to keep an eye on him, a man twice his age. Greer was also wearing a set of French parachutist's wings, and pinned to the epaulets of his khaki shirt was the regimental badge of the 3rd Regimemt Parachutiste de la

  Ugion ktranger. He could probably get away with wearing the jump wings, General Black thought, bat the Foreign Legion regimental crest had to go. But now, he decided, was not the time to tell him so.

  "You about finished, Greer?" General Black asked, when

  Greer had finally found time to come to attention.

  "Another half a page, General," Greer said. He picked up a stack of paper from the secretary's IN basket and handed them to General Black. Then he sat down, put a sheet of paper in the typewriter, and resumed his furious typing. He was finished, tearing the page from the typewriter with a reckless flourish, before General Black had read what Greer had given him.

  "This would have waited until morning," General Black said, as he read. It was his final report on the Hanoi Conference.

  He corrected himself. Not exactly. His nineteen-year-old technical sergeant, fresh from vanquishing the enemy on the field of battle, had taken it upon himself to "improve" the draft Col.

  Carson Newburgh had written, and which he had just about decided to transmit.

  I should jump all over his ass, Black thought, but the truth was that the boy had cleaned it up, removed what could have been ambiguities.

  "I had planned to be hung over in the morning, General,"

  Greer said. He had had his tic pulled down. He was now standing in front of a mirror, adjusting it in place.

  Devotion to duty, General Black thought, wryly, may be defined as correcting your general's sloppy English before you go out and get drunk.

  "Do you know what hoist on your own petard' means,

  Greer?"

  "I'm afraid to ask."

  General Black turned to the Embassy sergeant. "Can you get Colonel Newburgh on the horn for me?" he asked.

  "Carson," he said when Newburgh came on the line, "Greer has made certain improvements to our document. Do you feel up to having a look at them now?"

  Sergeant Wallace, the court reporter, was summoned, and the sergeant from the Embassy dismissed. It took more than an hour to make still further changes, until Colonel Carson W.

  Newburgh announced: "That ought to do it. We can sit around here from now on, just moving commas around. It looks good to me, E. 7."

  "All right, Sergeant," General Black said. "Please retype it and have it encrypted and sent off. URGENT, I think. I don't think paioitrry will hack it."

  "It doesn't have to be retyped," Sergeant Greer said. Black glowered at him. "We're going to burn the god damned original anyway," Greer said.

  "Encrypt it the way it is, Sergeant Wallace," General Black said.

  "We don't have a title for it, sir," Sergeant Wallace Black said.

  "Report of Lieutenant General E. Z. Black to the Joint

  Chiefs of Staff,"' Sergeant Greer answered for him. "Subject:

  An Evaluation of the French Military Position in Indo-China, with Emphasis on the French Garrison at Dien Bien Phu."'

  Black thought a minute, and then nodded his head.

  Sergeant Wallace took the report and went in search of the cryptographer.

  "Your head is so large now, Greer, that I say this reluctantly,"

  General Black said. "But you did a good job, and I appreciate it."

  "And may the sergeant say, general, that the sergeant is delighted with the manner the general has chosen to show his appreciation?" He fondly patted his new chevrons.

  "That's in lieu of a medal," Black said. "You deserve them."

  "When I get the medal, do I have to give it back?"

  "What medal?"

  "Croix de guerre," Greer said. "For preserving that Frenchman's most important possession. It'll probably say for valor, or some such bullshit, but that's what it'll be for. I thought you knew about it."

  "The Pentagon won't let you accept it, Greer," Carson Newburgh said. "It would be embarrassing politically."

  "Christ, and I always wanted to be a certified hero," Greer said.

  "And those Foreign Legion regimental crests have to go, too," General Black said. "Have them put on a cigarette lighter, or something, but get them off your uniform."

  Greer started to take them off.

  "What about the wings?" he asked.

  "I think he can keep those, can't he, Carson? As a qualification badge?" Newburgh nodded. "If anybody asks, say you took the French parachute course."

  "I did, I did," Greer laughed. "The quick course."

  "You know what we mean, Greer," Colonel Newburgh said.

  "I'm sorry about the Croix de guene, Greer," General Black said. "The French pass out medals like samples, but they're generally pretty choosy about the Croix de guerre."

  "They also parade magnificently," Newburgh said, sarcastically.

  "I thought about that," Greer said. "Maybe we're too quick to make fun of them. They need that bullshit. We don't."

  "I don't follow you, Greer," Colonel Newburgh said.

  "We haven't lost a war, yet," Greer replied. "They have."

  Black looked at him intently. The same thought had occurred to him during the four days of the conference. It was not the sort of observation you expected from a sergeant. A nineteen year-old sergeant.

  "Now what, Greer?" Black said.

  "Sir?"

  "What are you going to do now?"

  "Well, sir, the sergeant hoped that the general could see his way clear to placing the sergeant on, say, five days' TDY right here in Taipei. To tidy up loose ends, so to speak."

  "That would obviously explain those gorgeous wings you're wearing," Colonel Newburgh said.

  "I am solemnly informed they work wonders with the ladies."

  "You can have the TDY," General Black said. "But that's not what I was asking."

  "I wanted to talk about that, too," Greer said. "But I didn't think this was the time or place."

  "You want to stay in? You want to go to West Point?"

  "Yes, sir, I want to stay in," Sergeant Greer said. "No, sir,

  I don't want to go to West Point."

  "Why not?" General Black asked, somewhat sharply.

  "Being a plebe would be a hell of a comedown after I've been a hero of the French Foreign Legion," Greer said, laughing.

  Col. Carson Newburgh laughed. "Is that it? You think you're too good to be a plebe?"

  "I don't think I'd last very long, Colonel," Greer said.

  "How about Norwich?" Black asked. "I think I can get you a scholarship."

  "Or A&M," Newburgh said. "I have some influence there."

  He was, in fact, a trustee and former president of the Alumni

  Association.

  "How about a direct commission?" Greer asked. "As a first john?"

  Newburgh looked at Black, who took a long moment to collect his thoughts before replying.

  "If you had come to work for me as a lieutenant, Greer, I would write an efficiency report on you that would, unless you really fucked up, get your career on the right tracks."

  "But?" Greer replied.

  "You didn't. You're an enlisted man."

  "I get your point," Colonel Newburgh said.

  "Forgive me, sir," Greer said, disappointment evident in his voice. "I don't."

  "You haven't had your card punched, Son," Newburgh said.

  "You've got to play the game by the rules. You shouldn't even be a tech sergeant."

  "Sir, I was under the impression I was earning my keep."

  "Technical sergeants are supposed to be thirty years old,"

  General Black said. "Lieutenants, at least those who will have responsible careers, are supposed to come out of the Point, or

>   A&M, or Norwich, or the Citadel. I can get you a commission,