The Hunting Trip (22 page)

Besides, it wasn't setting a precedent, as the Browning company announced that with deep regret they were canceling their sponsorship of the Annual Berlin Brigade Brandenburg Gate Skeet Shoots for financial reasons.

Having both Brownings on the wall of Phil's sitting room in his suite in the field grade bachelor officers' hotel helped toward assuaging the pain in Phil's heart caused by his loss of Gwendolyn's comforting, but did not completely do away with it.

As someone once observed, all good things must come to an end, and so it was with Phil's having his own personal Red Cross Comfort Girl.

What actually had done him in, he believed, was either one of two contributing factors, or both.

The first was a growing awareness on Gwendolyn's part that her comforting of Phil had gone beyond simple comforting and into something resembling a boyfriend/girlfriend relationship.

Such a relationship, of course, violated the XIth through XIIIth Commandments of Red Cross Girls, to wit:

The second factor that removed Gwendolyn and her comforting from Phil's life was Second Lieutenant Oscar Hormell III, infantry, pay grade O-1, who the previous June had graduated from the USMA in the footsteps of his father, Major General Oscar “Hot Dog” Hormell, Jr., and his grandfather, Brigadier General Oscar Hormell, Sr.

Lieutenant Hormell had been assigned as the junior aide-de-camp to the Berlin Brigade's commanding general. This was a different Berlin Brigade commanding general than the one with whom Phil was familiar. That one had suffered a mental breakdown while watching Phil walk away from the Brandenburg Gate with his new 16-bore Browning Diamond Grade
und so weiter
shotgun and then had been reassigned to the War Plans Division in the Pentagon, where he had been given responsibility for launching missiles at the Russians should that, in his calm and rational judgment, be determined necessary.

As soon as Oscar went to his first meeting of the Berlin Brigade Chapter of the WPPA, his peers got him alone and—with the caveat “This is no bull
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, Oscar, this is the
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truth, the whole
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truth, and nothing but the
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truth”—began to fill him in on the
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staff sergeant who didn't even finish
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high school, who was not only living in the field grade bachelor officers' hotel but chauffeuring around town a Red Cross Girl named Gwendolyn—who had the most amazing
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teats and gluteus maxima—in his
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Cadillac.

“And not only that, the
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enlisted man cheated the previous commanding general of the Berlin Brigade, who was a USMA classmate of your father, which is why you're here in Berlin instead of learning how to dig foxholes at Fort Benning with the rest of your class, out of two—not just one—
two
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Browning Diamond Grade
und so weiter
shotguns.”

“How does he get away with all those gross infractions of Army Regulations? And how can a staff sergeant afford a Cadillac?”

“Well, the only thing I can say is that he goes around with a U.S. Pistol, Cal. 45 ACP Model 1911A1 in a shoulder holster and that when on rare occasions he wears his uniform, pinned to it are all his medals, of which he has two: The Army of Occupation Medal and The Order of Karl Marx, Second Class, with pearls and rubies.”

“That sounds like it might be a Russian medal.”

“You're a second lieutenant now, Oscar. Draw your own conclusions.”

—

Lieutenant Hormell
made a point of meeting the Red Cross Comfort Girl who the
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enlisted man was chauffeuring around Berlin in his Cadillac. He did so by waiting in the alley behind the Red Cross Doughnuts and Coca-Cola dispensary until her tour of duty was over.

For him, it was love at first sight. What he had been told about her physical attributes was right on the
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money.

“Excuse me, miss,” he said. “If you are a Red Cross Comfort Girl, I would like to introduce myself.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“Just before I left the United States Military Academy at West Point to embark on my military career in the footsteps of my father, Major General Oscar Hormell, Junior, and my grandfather, Brigadier General Oscar Hormell, Senior, I was counseled to seek out, if
possible, Red Cross Comfort Girls such as yourself. The guidance counselor said that your kind matches well with our kind, and are in fact the kind of young women a West Pointer should seek in case he is searching for a wife to march beside him in the Long Gray Line.”

“You don't say?” Gwendolyn replied, pleased. She had joined the Red Cross hoping that she might bump into a young officer of good family. “My name is Gwendolyn. What did you say your name was, handsome?”

Oscar drove Gwendolyn from the alley to the Berlin Brigade officers' club in his Volkswagen. There, after he plied her with beer, he told her he could look into her eyes and know that the things he had heard about her—that she was socializing with a common enlisted man who was chauffeuring her around Berlin in his Cadillac—simply couldn't be true.

“I can't imagine where those scurrilous rumors got started,” Gwendolyn replied.

The next day, she went to Phil's apartment in the field grade bachelor officers' hotel, handed him a chocolate-covered doughnut, a strawberry-stuffed doughnut, and an Economy Size 1.5-liter bottle of Coca-Cola to remember her by, and announced that it was all over between them.

[ FIVE ]

W
hen the master sergeant, wearing as many medals and ribbons as Phil had ever seen, appeared at Phil's office door, as previously stated, a good deal of water had flowed under the Bridge over the River Havel during the previous year.

“What can I do for you, Master Sergeant?”

“If you are Staff Sergeant Williams, Philip W. Third, the question should be rather than ‘What can you do for me? but ‘What am I prepared to do for you?'”

“I am. So, what are you prepared to do for me?”

“I am Master Sergeant F. J. Lacitignola, known as ‘Friendly Frank the Recruiter,' and I am here, Sergeant, to point out to you the manifold benefits of reenlistment in the U.S. Army.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“Because your enlistment is about over, and before you know it you're going to be out of the Army, living under a bridge somewhere, rooting through garbage cans for something to eat. Unless of course you have other alternatives in what we recruiters call the cold and cruel outside.”

Phil was very much aware of his options on his discharge. He could either wait tables, et cetera, at Groton, or undergo what horrors the Jesuits and the Brothers of St. Hippolytus had waiting for him in Pascagoula, Arkansas. After “Daddy Keyes” had counseled him at length, of course. None of which had much appeal.

He took a chance. Despite the reputation that recruiting sergeants have made for themselves, there was something about this one he liked. He suddenly understood why. Friendly Frank the Recruiter had big soft eyes like Pasquale of Pasquale's Pizzas and Subs in the Village of South Orange. And Pasquale had always slipped a couple of extra anchovies and/or slices of pepperoni onto Phil's pizzas without charge.

“Please tell me what you have to offer, Master Sergeant Lacitignola.”

“Instead, Staff Sergeant Williams, tell me what you would want if you had your druthers.”

“I would like to be an intelligence officer,” Phil replied without hesitation.

“That we can do. You reenlist—and there is a
five-hundred-dollar-per-year, up to six years, reenlistment bonus, plus a one-grade promotion, which I thought I should mention—and once you have that money in hand, and that extra stripe on your sleeves, you apply for West Point—”

“No.”

“That AGCT score of yours makes you a shoo-in—”

“I said no.”

“And then you go to the West Point Preparatory School.”

“Not only no, but hell no.”

“And on your graduation therefrom, you matriculate at West Point. On your graduation therefrom, which takes four years, you get your commission and then you apply for intelligence duties.”

“Read my
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lips, Friendly Frank. I have no
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intention whatso
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ever of applying for
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West Point. The last thing I want to do with my life is to be identified as a
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West Pointer.”

“Well, I can understand that. I don't like those
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ring-knockers much myself. Let me think.”

He thought.

“You're nineteen, right?” he asked.

“I will be. Depending on which birth certificate we're looking at.”

“Well, that knocks out Officer Candidate School as a possibility. You have to be twenty-one to get a commission from OCS. Let me think a little more.”

Sixty seconds later, after having thought a little more, he said, “Eureka, Staff Sergeant Williams! I have found it!”

“What?”

“As an enlisted intelligence man, I'm sure you're familiar with area intelligence specialist officers?”

“We have a couple—actually, three—of them around here.”

“And you know what they do?”

“I don't have a clue. I have noticed that ours are always reading telephone books from cities behind the Iron Curtain.”

“Well, let me fill you in. Imagine that the U.S. Army is going to invade someplace. Hungary, for example. It is obvious that the planners of such an operation need to know as much as possible about the target. Where is the police station in Budapest? For one example. What river flows between Buda and Pest? Where exactly is, and what is the phone number of, the brothel most popular with the Hungarian Officer Corps? That sort of intelligence. Can you see where I'm going with this?”

“I'm not sure.”

“What the planners do when they need such intelligence to plan the invasion is to turn to the Army's corps of area intelligence specialist officers, whose area of specialty this is. These officers spend their careers learning everything there is to know about a potential target area so that it's at their fingertips when needed.”

“Makes a lot of sense, now that I'm thinking about it for the first time. But what does that have to do with me?”

“Have you ever wondered where the Army gets its area intelligence specialist officers?”

“Frankly, Friendly Frank, I have not.”

“Well, I can tell you they don't get them from West Point. Or ROTC. Or OCS. That give you a clue?”

“Doesn't help, I'm afraid.”

“They get them, directly commission them as first lieutenants, from the Groves of Academe, specifically from the Groves of Academe in foreign countries. Like Venezuela and the Belgian Congo and, pertinent to this, Germany. I'm always on the lookout for such people, but believe you me, Staff Sergeant Williams, they're hard to come by.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, to get a direct commission as a first lieutenant area intelligence specialist officer, you have to meet the following requirements. You have to be a U.S. citizen twenty-one years of age or older. You have to speak two—and three is better—foreign languages. And you have to have a Secret or higher security clearance. Now the potentials I've been dealing with pose no problems with regard to the first two criteria, but for them the third, the Secret security clearance, is a ball—I mean deal—breaker.”

“Why is that?”

“Well, as I'm sure you're aware, the CIC will not grant a Secret security clearance to persons who sniff a certain white powder up their noses, or hypodermically inject controlled substances between their toes, or manifest a great interest in other persons of the same sex. Need I say more?”

“I take your point. I gather you mean to say that American students studying in foreign universities do have problems in those areas?”

“Phil, I could tell you stories that would curl your hair. But before we go any further, you do have a Secret security clearance, right?”

“Actually, I have a run-of-the-mill Top Secret security clearance. And also a Top Secret-Honorable Peters security clearance, so that I can deal with the CIA. And a Top Secret-Sexual security clearance, which is necessary for me so that I can deal with investigations—and I could tell you stories, Friendly Frank, if it wasn't against the law, that would curl your hair—of hanky-panky by senior officers and their dependents. I could write a book—more than one book—about such hanky-panky if it wasn't against U.S. Army Regulations for me to do so.”