The Ten Thousand (22 page)

In those few moments before midnight, with less than two minutes to go before those orders became a reality, Haas still was unable to quiet the apprehensions he felt. Though attired alike, the thoughts that ran through the minds of the two commanders facing each other were worlds apart. The company commander’s mind was cluttered with all the very real and necessary practical matters that need to be considered when hurling over one hundred men into combat. Enemy dispositions and weapons, tactics and maneuvers necessary to overcome or neutralize them, the effectiveness and readiness of his own weapons, coordination for support of his unit by other elements involved in the assault, as well as numerous other considerations were of paramount concern to the company commander.

Haas, however, saw beyond the immediate operation. As a graduate of the famous Kriegsakademie and an officer impatiently awaiting his reassignment to General Staff duty, Haas could not easily push aside the possible worldwide political effects of what his unit was about to do. The other European powers, especially the French and Poles, would react. And the Americans, with forces actually deployed throughout Germany, would not simply roll over and accept the German action, no matter how just or reasonable their demands. The Americans, he knew, viewed international law as an instrument to be applied when it served them, and ignored when it didn’t.

Then there was his friendship with the Americans themselves. Even as he stood there listening to his company commander review his preparations to assault an American installation, Haas wore the American airborne wings he had been awarded after three grueling weeks of training in the hot Georgia sun. Many of his fondest memories as a soldier were of when he served side by side with the people he had now been ordered to attack, an attack he still felt was wrong.

But what was he to do? That, in the end, was the great dilemma that tore at his mind. According to the Bundeswehr’s own interpretation of an officer’s duty, Haas was obligated to conduct himself in accordance with his conscience. If given an order that he felt was morally wrong, it was not only his right but his duty to refuse to obey it. When the Bundeswehr was formed in 1955, the old Prussian tradition of moral choice when deciding right from wrong became a critical piece of an officer’s selection and training.

Throughout his military education, the July 20th plotters who had attempted to assassinate Hitler were used as examples of officers who refused to go against their conscience. As he stood mere half listening to his subordinate, the words of one instructor kept ringing in Haas’s ears, almost as if they had just been spoken. “While loyalty to your nation is, and should always be, uppermost in your mind, you must never forget that morality and conscience must be your final guide, the decisive element when deciding right from wrong.”

Yet such theories, Haas thought, seemed out of place here on this cold and bitter night He had no one to turn to for guidance, no one to discuss the issue of right and wrong with. To base a military decision on a feeling, regardless of how strong, was, to say the least, rather difficult. Yet at that moment in the cold darkness just before midnight, that and his own conscience were all he had with which to weigh the matter at hand and make a decision. Before the Battle of Leipzig in 1813 with the French, the Prussian King told those soldiers who could not in good conscience fight in the upcoming battle that they were free to leave. He did not want to create a conflict in the conscience of those officers who had served with the French when Prussia, as an occupied and reluctant ally, had been aligned with France in her war against Russia. Haas didn’t have someone offering him such a choice. His superiors in distant Berlin had only given him his orders.

He was still pondering those lofty matters when the young company commander finished his briefing.

Glancing down at his watch, and impatient to return to his unit, the company commander asked if there would be anything else. Without responding at first, Haas looked at the company commander for several seconds in order to refocus his mind on the situation at hand. Unable to come to any firm decision, Haas simply shook his head. With an expressionless face, Haas replied, “No, there is nothing else. You have your orders.”

The company commander, glad that there were no last-minute changes, saluted and left Haas standing alone, troubled by how easily he had uttered the words “You have your orders.” For the first time he understood how his father had felt in the last war. Now, as if a great veil had suddenly been lifted from his eyes, he knew what had happened in 1939. And as he walked away, Colonel Johann Haas, commander of the elite 26th Parachute Brigade, felt shame.

Although there was absolutely nothing that he could do, Major General Earl Lowery couldn’t tear himself away from the operations center. All across Sembach Air Base, men and aircraft sat silent under a newly fallen blanket of snow. Only in the operations center was there any appearance of any sort of activity. And even here that activity was, to put it mildly, minimal. At 2:30 A.M., with operations temporarily suspended due to weather and failure of the German government to provide clearance for American military aircraft, there wasn’t much to do. Still Lowery remained. Like a captain lashed to the bridge of his ship in a storm, he watched, listened, and waited.

With his lanky six-foot, five-inch frame sprawled in a swivel chair and his feet propped up on the edge of the picture window that separated the command group booth from the operations room below, Lowery vacantly stared at the activities of his staff. Seated at rows and rows of desks arranged like a dark, sinister amphitheater, those junior officers, mostly majors, captains, and lieutenants, sat staring at either their own computer monitor or at the large tote board at the far end of the operations center that showed the status of the airfields, squadrons, and a host of other facilities that made up the United States Air Force’s European Command. Though Lowery, commander of all Military Airlift Command units and personnel in Europe, normally confined his interest to the missions and needs of his command, tonight he was interested in everything that was happening in the European Theater of Operations, or
ETO
.

Not much was happening, nor was anything, at that time, supposed to be happening. In accordance with the Air Force directive covering the current operation, Desperate Fumble, airlift operations from Sembach would not resume until after daylight. Only then would Lowery and his command be able to get rid of the nuclear devices flown in from the Ukraine during the previous day. Until then, “The Devices’’ sat in three hangars under heavy guard.

It was while he was inspecting the devices in the hangars earlier in the evening that Lowery was struck, as soon as he walked in the door of the first hangar, by how similar the heavy metal protective shipping containers were to aluminum military coffins. Stopping short, he looked about the room at the rows and rows of containers, each separated from the other by several feet. The air security personnel, rifles slung but ready, walking solemnly up and down the rows could just as easily have been an honor guard. Startled by this comparison, Lowery stood there for several seconds unable to think about anything other than his first real mission as a newly assigned C-130 co-pilot. Lowery, out of the Air Force Academy for less than a year and just finished with flight school, was sporting shiny new first lieutenant bars on his shoulders when he went to Viet-Nam in the late spring of 1968. Dispatched to Da Nang from Bien Hoa, the glamour and excitement of being a serving officer in an active theater of operations was turning out to be all he had imagined. Even his normal dour Oklahoma demeanor couldn’t hide the enthusiasm he felt at finally being part of the action.

That enthusiasm soon evaporated when he received his first cold slap of reality. Instructed by the pilot to go over to the hangar where the cargo for their return trip was being processed, Lowery had walked into a large hangar very similar to those at Sembach to find the loadmaster. He found the master sergeant standing in the center of rows of aluminum shipping containers inventorying them with an Army sergeant.

Lowery all but skipped over to the two sergeants, occasionally tapping some of the containers with his hand as he went by. When he reached the sergeants, smile on his face, Lowery asked how things were going.

The loadmaster looked up from his clipboard and gave Lowery a condescending smile. “Oh, pretty good, pretty good. Sergeant Johnson and I were just making sure that everything was in order. After all, the last thing we want is to give some gray-haired old lady the wrong box.”

Lowery, not understanding what the loadmaster was talking about, asked him what he meant.

Realizing that the young lieutenant didn’t know that the metal containers he was about to load on their aircraft were coffins, the loadmaster decided to introduce the new lieutenant to the reality of war. With a grin on his face, the loadmaster announced, “Well, sir, for your very first mission, you are being given the rare privilege of granting the fondest wish that every GI and airman in Nam harbors. You are going to fly home, at no expense to the families, ninety-six fathers and sons.” Then the loadmaster allowed his grin to change into a feigned look of concern as he looked about the hangar. “Of course, I really don’t think this was what they had in mind.”

Only then, as he too looked about, did Lowery understand what the sergeant was saying. In a flash, the jaunty, almost childish grin on Lowery’s face was replaced by a look of horror. When the loadmaster saw this, he grinned. After having listened to Lowery harp on the virtues and benefits of his strong Baptist upbringing all the way from Travis Air Force Base in California to Bien Hoa, the loadmaster saw his chance to get even. Patting Lowery’s shoulder, the loadmaster looked about the hangar. “Oh, don’t worry, sir. Sergeant Johnson here assures me that there will be no second comings from this group.”

Equally appalled by the idea that he was surrounded by the bodies of so many of his countrymen and the ease with which the two sergeants made fun of the dead, Lowery turned and fled from the hangar. It would be a long time before he could forget the ring of the sergeants’ laughter echoing in the hangar filled with coffins as Lowery tried to run away from the reality of his profession.

Lowery watched in silence as his young staff officers in the operations room below went about their duties. Pulling his long arms into his sides, he linked his bony fingers together over his stomach, keeping his own counsel as the images of that day in Bien Hoa ran through his mind. Behind him, his senior staff officers sat, like Lowery, watching the comings and goings of the officers in the ops center. A few gave in and nodded off to sleep at their desks. None of them really knew their commander on a personal level, since he kept to himself, and his laconic manner and fundamentalist religious beliefs let few people past his professional side, but they did know of his reputation, which started in Viet-Nam during the height of the siege of Khe Sanh. It was rumored that Lowery, unable to stay out of the action, requested and was granted a transfer out of the C-130 squadron at Bien Hoa to one that was resupplying the Marines at Khe Sanh. It was during this assignment that Lowery made his mark. For in the spring of 1968, Lowery flew every mission he could, day and night, into Khe Sanh during the height of the siege, bringing in desperately needed supplies and hauling out the wounded. He stood out from the many pilots who made that run, because he was one of the few pilots who always brought his aircraft to a full stop, even when in the middle of
NVA
artillery barrages, to allow the corpsmen and litter bearers of the besieged garrison to run out to load the wounded. This single-minded, almost obsessive drive to deliver the goods to the troops in forward areas, whether in war or in peace, made him very popular with Army and Marine commanders and a demanding taskmaster. From their first introduction to him, new officers in his command were told over and over again, “We make a difference, through hard work and dedication to duty. And if we don’t get it right the first time, those poor bastards on the ground will pay for it.” Though his senior staff officers, like Lowery, could do nothing at the moment, the apprehensions and uneasiness of a commander can be as contagious as confidence. So they sat there watching Lowery sit where he was, wondering what heinous new missions he was pondering that would task them to the limit.

The buzz of a phone, though muted, startled several of the senior staff officers who were close to dozing off. When they saw that it was not their phone ringing, everyone in the command booth turned this way and that to see whose phone was ringing. Only after they saw Colonel Horst Maier, the Luftwaffe liaison officer to the Military Airlift Command, pick up his phone did everyone, including Lowery, go back to their own thoughts.

Seeing that it was the encrypted direct line to the Luftwaffe’s own military airlift command, Maier answered in German, “Maier here.”

On the other end of the line he heard the familiar voice of an old classmate and fellow officer. “Hello, Horst. This is Rudi, Rudi Poersel. Do you recognize my voice?”

Taken aback by this strange introduction, Maier frowned. “Why of course, Rudi, I recognize your voice. What are you doing in Frankfurt? I thought? ”

Poersel cut Maier’s question short “Horst, I am not in Frankfurt I am in Berlin. We have been patched into this line.” There was a pause as Maier heard his old friend take a deep breath before he continued.

“Listen, Horst. I am about to put General M. G. Gorb on the line. And believe me, this is General Gorb and I am in Berlin.”

While Maier waited for the chief of staff of the Luftwaffe to come onto the line, his surprise turned to concern. “Colonel Maier, this is General Gorb. Do you believe me?”

Pulling the phone away from his ear, Maier stared at the receiver for a second before putting it back to his ear and acknowledging, “Yes, General Gorb, I believe you are who you say you are. What, sir, may I do for you.”