“Don’t push it, Colonel. I might understand it, but I don’t have to like it. What’s the rest of the fallout from this disaster? You know, the disaster that never happened?”
“It was a training accident, Captain. That’s what we’re calling it, and it’s classified.”
“And I was there, remember, so tell me everything if you want it to stay classified!” I pushed back.
Featherstone shrugged. “Well, like you said, shit flows downhill. Wilcox is taking early retirement…”
I must have gaped at that. “Lieutenant Colonel Wilcox? The battalion commander?!”
He nodded. “I can almost sympathize with him, but he should have never let Hawkins jump you from those planes. He should have stood his ground. Your brigade commander would have backed him up. He was absolutely furious when he heard about it.” I shrugged and Featherstone continued, “Carmichael is gone, too. I made it clear to him that the only way he was avoiding something even worse was if he testified against the MP sergeant, Walsley. I tossed the book at him. He pled out and is getting two years in Leavenworth and a Big Chicken Dinner.” That was a BCD or Bad Conduct Discharge. “He’d have gotten five years if he had fought it. The corporal took an Other Than Honorable discharge, and was damn glad to get it. Hell, the only reason the brigade commander didn’t get canned was that he was called to Washington before this happened.”
“And Hawkins?”
We were interrupted by a nurse coming in to take my temperature and ask me about lunch (“Chicken broth or beef?”) She gave Featherstone holy hell about his smoking in a hospital. As soon as she left, he lit up another cigarette.
“Hawkins?” I repeated.
“Brigadier General Hawkins is now Major General (Designate) Hawkins. He will get his second star effective January 1. Operation Southern Shield ’81 has been a rousing success,” he replied, deadpan.
My jaw dropped, and I gaped, my mouth flapping open and shut like a beached fish. After a minute or two, I got my wits together and cried out, “You’re kidding me, right? They give him a battalion on a routine training deployment, and he gets two men killed, two medicalled out, two more cashiered, and another man sent to Leavenworth — and they gave him another star! Jesus Christ! Why not just give him the entire fucking brigade! He could have killed us all and made Chief of fucking Staff!”
“That’s the way it works, Captain,” he replied. He shrugged. “Not that it matters much, but he had already been approved before this disaster. Maybe it will catch up to him before he gets his third star.”
I knew what it was. It was the WPPA, the West Point Protective Association, at work. This was the informal association of West Point graduates, or ‘ringknockers’, so named because of the heavy and distinctive class rings they wore. They were known to rap their rings on a desk or chair arm on occasion, to let people know that as graduates of Hudson High, their opinions counted more than others.
When I graduated ROTC at RPI, I ranked high enough to be Regular Army, not Reserve. All West Point graduates are Regular Army, even the village idiot. All pigs are equal, but some pigs are more equal than others. The WPPA usually makes itself known by making sure that various graduates of West Point move up the ladder of promotion at the correct pace, or by otherwise getting them an appropriate posting or assignment. Sometimes it can be harmless, like when my old CO, Captain Harris transferred to Fort Rucker for helo flight training. His record with Battery B hadn’t exactly been stellar, so the WPPA moved him somewhere else for a second chance.
Now it looked like the ringknockers were circling the wagons around Hawkins. I shook my head in disgust. “What’d they do with the pilot? Give him a medal?”
Featherstone shrugged. “Probably. You’re getting one, why not him?”
“Excuse me? What medal? Best behaved prisoner?”
“Try a Bronze Star,” he said drily.
“Right.” I stared at him, and he wasn’t smiling. “You’re serious?” He nodded. “For what?”
“The Bronze Star can be awarded for either bravery or merit, or both. You qualify, Captain, on both counts.”
“Forget it! I’ll never wear it! It’s an insult to the men I was with!”
“You don’t wear it for yourself, Captain, you wear it for the men you were with. It’s always that way, son, for any medal. Believe me. Wear it for the ones who can’t,” he replied. “Hell, if you want to, think of it as a payoff for keeping your mouth shut about this fucking nightmare. It doesn’t matter. Believe me, you earned it!”
I looked at Featherstone. He was in his Class As, and for the first time I looked at his chest. He had a Bronze Star with a V for Valor and an oak leaf cluster adorning it, signifying a second award, along with a Purple Heart and the red, yellow, and green Viet Nam Service Medal. Colonel Featherstone hadn’t always been a lawyer. I nodded in understanding to him.
“Technically you need to be in either a combat theater or serving with troops in a combat situation, but I convinced your brigade commander that Nicaragua qualified,” he commented. “By the way, what did you do to get your battalion commander so pissed off? He refused to recommend you for the award. I got the recommendation from the commander of the 505th. You don’t get the V device, but so what.”
I laughed at that. “I kept growing! Mighty Mouse has a problem with officers of height. You’d do even worse!” Featherstone was even taller than I was, by an inch or so. “Unfortunately for me, but fortunately for the battalion, he’s disturbingly competent otherwise.”
“Well, they can’t all be bad, now can they?”
The nurse returned with my broth and gave Featherstone another ration of shit for smoking. He put away his smokes and conned her into getting him a sandwich while I slurped my broth and Jell-O. He made several disparaging remarks about my meal, so I gave him a Bronx salute, which he just laughed off.
After lunch, Colonel Featherstone said, “Take me through the mission, start to finish. I want to hear your side of it. You’re the only one I haven’t heard it from. Take it from the top.”
I spent the next half hour going over the drop, from the time we were trucked over to the Gooney Birds to the time we landed back at the base in the Hueys. “I can figure why Hawkins was pissed at me. What happened? Did he have the MPs waiting for me as soon as the first bird landed?”
“Pretty much. The Provost Marshal snapped up your Lieutenant Fairfax as soon as he landed. He’s the one who said you killed the four civilians.”
I stopped at that point, and eyed Featherstone for a moment. “I think you meant to say allegedly killed the four civilians, counselor.”
He shrugged. “Eh. Maybe so, maybe so. Tell me about them, Captain. Hypothetically, of course.”
I took a second to gather my thoughts. No way was I about to confess to jack shit with this guy! “Hmmm… hypothetically speaking of course. Well, remember, once we were all down, my mission was twofold. First, get all my men back home, no matter what. Second, not to let the Nicaraguans know that they had been invaded. No international incidents.”
Featherstone nodded. “International incidents are bad. If you guys had been captured by the Nicaraguans, they could have had you in the headlines for a year. Remember the Pueblo?”
“Quite. So anyway, we captured these four narcos, not soldiers or civilians, but drug traffickers. Unfortunately for us, our resident genius, Lieutenant Fairfax, disobeyed orders and spoke to these clowns in English, so they knew we were Americans. Hypothetically speaking, of course, anything that happened to those men was ultimately his responsibility.”