There were two battalions of paratroopers, two battalions of Marines, Grabowski’s Wisconsin Guardsmen, twenty or thirty APCs and about a dozen mobile howitzers in positions on the eastern bank of the Yahara River.
Although new defensive positions were being hurriedly prepared to block the junctions of Interstate 90 coming up from the south, Interstate 94 from the east, and Route 151 coming down from the north-east, the logical key lines of advance on Madison, but…
To the young officer’s West Point trained eye most of the State Capital’s defenders were dug in on the wrong side of the four lakes of the Yahara River; Lake Mendota, Lake Monona, Lake Waubesa and Lake Kegonsa.
What if the enemy bypassed Madison?
The State Capital lay between and around the two northern lakes, Mendota and Monona, with the key roads passing to its east but the enemy’s movement was not dependent — as would any regular army be dependent — on the main routes; the rebels could take the back roads, tracks, paths through the hills and woods, passing virtually invisibly through this country. The enemy’s lack of heavy equipment was not a weakness, it was his biggest advantage; always assuming somebody was pulling the rebels’ strings. Schwarzkopf now took this as a given although he was unsure how far up his own chain of command that realization had travelled. Before he had brought Company ‘A’ east from Minneapolis there had been a lot of ill-informed, speculative talk — gossip really — about a ‘popular insurgency’ in Chicago, campaigns of widespread civil disobedience, of whole Midwestern towns refusing to co-operate with the military; but no rational discussion about how exactly a so-called ‘popular’, or spontaneous ‘resistance movement’ had managed to thwart the US military and in places drive it back in near rout. The rebellion ought to have been crushed at birth, long before it had a chance to become a magnet for anybody, anywhere in the US who had a grudge against the Federal Government or who felt moved to inflict his — or her — particular madcap religious or political convictions on fellow Americans.
Chillingly, the nightmare which had convulsed Washington DC in December seemed to have been resurrected — ten times bigger and meaner — on the western shores of Lake Michigan. The survivors and refugees choking the roads into Madison spoke of a brutal, unreasoning religious fanaticism, of a nihilistic unstoppable horde that gloried in the destruction of everything it touched; with its foot soldiers marching toward Armageddon in the sure and certain knowledge that the end of days was nigh…
He was dog tired.
I’m over-thinking this!
The young officer’s commanding officer could see that Schwarzkopf was practically out on his feet. Harvey Grabowski had been running a hardware store in Minneapolis when the World went mad on the night of 27th October 1962. However, what with one thing and another he had spent half his adult life in the Army and although he had not admitted it to his wife, he had missed military life so bad it had hurt. It had been his call to promote Schwarzkopf to major and give him Company ‘A’, the Brigade’s mechanized spearhead.
It had hardly been a tough call.
Schwarzkopf was head and shoulders — both in height and ability — the best young officer in the 32nd Infantry, and any fool could see it without having to wait for the man’s service ‘jacket’ to catch up with him.
Born Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf in Trenton, New Jersey, his father was a German-American graduate of the West Point class of 1917, and his mother a distant relation of Thomas Jefferson who hailed from West Virginia. Norman Schwarzkopf senior had joined the New York Police Department after World War I where, in 1932 he was chief investigator in the Lindbergh baby abduction case. The father was an interesting man in his own right. In the 1930s the New York detective had reinvented himself as the narrator of the ‘Gang Busters’ radio show before rejoining the Army in 1940. It was hardly surprising that the son was in the thrall of the father and had yearned, from an early age to follow him into uniform.
Between 1946 and 1951 Schwarzkopf senior had been posted in succession to Tehran, Geneva, Italy, Frankfurt and Berlin, and back again to Iran. As a boy young Norman had attended the Community High School in Tehran, the International School in Geneva, and the American High School in Frankfurt before graduating top of his class from the Valley Forge Military Academy in Pennsylvania. Unusually for a US Army officer he was a member of Mensa — the largest and oldest high IQ society — his IQ having been tested at 168.
Although Harvey Grabowski did not think his best company commander was quite the certifiable genius that that sort of IQ score supposedly denoted, he had absolutely no doubt that Schwarzkopf was by far and away the sharpest intellectual knife in the brigade’s draw.
At West Point Schwarzkopf had passed out 43rd in the 1956 class of four hundred and eighty students, graduating with a Bachelor of Engineering degree. While at West Point he had led the Chapel choir, wrestled, played football and acquired the — typically unimaginative because in some things the Army was timeless — nickname ‘Schwarzie’. According to his tutors at West Point the student Schwarzkopf had acquired a deep respect for the generalship of, among others Civil War heroes Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, and Patton’s hard-driving point man Creighton Abrams.
Schwarzkopf had enjoyed one of those busy, planned junior career paths that told old hands like Grabowski that he was somebody who had been marked out for future high command in the six years leading up to the October War. Commissioned into the infantry he spent six months at the Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, earning his Parachutist Badge ahead of joining the 187th Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Kentucky; promoted first lieutenant in 1958 by the following year he was a platoon commander in Germany in the 6th Infantry Division, and in July 1960 he was appointed aide-de-camp to Brigadier Charles Johnson, the commander of the US Berlin Brigade based in West Berlin. He had made captain in July 1961, where back at Fort Benning he had earned his Master Parachutist Badge prior to being enrolled, in 1962 in a Master of Science course in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Yes, he was a coming man.
Officers like Schwarzkopf held the future in their hands.
Albeit a different future to the one they were facing now.
“Get your head down, son,” Grabowski chuckled, patting the younger man’s arm.
Dismissed, Schwarzkopf went to check that his men were settling back into camp life and to ascertain the status of his wounded. Then he trudged back to the abandoned schoolhouse where he had left most of his earthly belongings — changes of uniform and skivvies, hardly any personal items — before he took Company ‘A’ up country a week ago. Stripping off his filthy, sweat-encrusted clothes he showered.
Afterwards, he was so tired that he was very nearly in a dream, pulled on a t-shirt and pants, toppled onto his field cot and slept.
Chapter 9
The newly married couple had moved into the house next to the Merchantville Country Club three weeks ago. The place was far too big for the two of them but it had a well-appointed reception room on the ground floor for meetings, and if the Brenckmann-Betancourts ever got around to it a not so small ‘banqueting hall’ in which to entertain guests. Upstairs there were two fully equipped bathrooms and five spacious bedrooms, three of which were still mothballed.
On the map Cherry Hill, situated seven or eight miles south east of Philadelphia on the New Jersey bank of the Delaware River was an ideal base for two ambitious young professionals on the Federal payroll. In fact it was way too far out, often it took as long as two hours to get through all the road blocks and security checkpoints on the routes approaching the bridges over the river, invasive military electronic countermeasures interfered with TV and radio reception, and made the telephone system crackle and hiss like a damp log on a hot fire.