‘It’s worse for the Malta survivors,’ Old Iron Pants had observed grimly. ‘It’s bad enough seeing your buddies shot down when you’ve got right on your side. Most of the 100th guys were veterans, men like Nathan Zabriski who flew on the night of the war.’
Nathan was different of course.
His mother — a White House secretary — had assassinated the British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, shot Bobby Kennedy in the leg and had planned to murder the President. Had she not been wrestled to the ground by Walter Brenckmann, the man who was presently the US Ambassador in England, she might even have succeeded.
Therefore, Nathan was not just different, he was special.
So special…
‘Nobody hangs my guys out to dry, Colonel Konstantis,’ LeMay had declared. ‘That’s a promise. But I can’t do anything to help them live with what they’ve gone through. That’s your job.’
My job!
LeMay was happy with her work because none of his boys — the eight 100th Bomb Group survivors, or the eight Navy pilots and navigators on the A-4 Skyhawks which had crippled the British destroyers HMS Talavera and HMS Devonshire, killing and wounding over two hundred men — had completely gone off the rails on her watch. Several of her charges were deeply troubled, unhappy men but alive, and in the main getting on with their fractured day to day existence as best they could. The human mind was a remarkably resilient thing; she had stopped being their guardian ‘shrink’ early on, knowing that what these men really needed was ‘mothering’. Like Nathan they had all been resistant to ‘therapy’, although none as adamant as he and looking back that might have been the root of her personal downfall…
The first time Caroline had met Curtis LeMay the man had dropped the martinet with a heart of gold routine as soon as they were alone. It had been less than a week after the October War.
‘We think we won the war,’ he had said. ‘Maybe we did. It doesn’t matter. My boys need to be ready to do it all over again if the President orders them to do it. I need somebody to give me advice that I can trust about what’s going on inside the heads of my boys. And,” he had added gruffly, “I need to know who needs to be let down gently before it becomes a disciplinary problem. The regulations weren’t designed for the situation we’re in now and I won’t have brave men punished or in any way singled out because they’ve had enough. I need somebody like you operating outside the normal system; somebody acting as a ‘cut out’ with a direct line to me making sure that every one of my boys gets treated like a real hero.’
The case files had begun to pile up on her desk within days and she had been ‘on the road’ practically ever since. Generally speaking, the Air Force had got the message about processing the veterans of the October War with a hitherto unwarranted sensitivity, and on those rare occasions when some idiot tried to pull rank on her she carried a — now much creased and worn — letter bearing LeMay’s signature that instantly resolved any little ‘local difficulties’.
It had become her duty to break the news to a man that his operational flying career, or in extremis, his career in the Air Force was over. Afterwards, she and her team of ‘adjustment and resettlement’ officers would smooth a man’s path into a new role in the service, or back into civilian life. While Curtis LeMay remained in the background this was a thing accomplished without any of the normal military parsimony; although already Congress was sniping at such ‘non military’ largesse to undermine the generals and admirals who had earned its displeasure.
LeMay was a man who upset everybody sooner or later; the more so because it was patently obvious that he did not give a damn.
“What have you got for me, Colonel?” He asked when he and Caroline were alone in what had once been the duty controller’s office at the back of the control tower. Inside the building air conditioning fans whirred and the noise of the ongoing racing outside was muted, distant.
“I’ve come here fresh from a few days personal R and R in the Bay Area, sir,” she reported, trying not to blush.
Rogering and more rogering!
“During that time I took the opportunity to look in on Nathan Zabriski.”
I looked in on him for three days and we very nearly fucked ourselves to death!
Caroline formed her lips into a tight white line for a moment.
“Nathan’s still got a lot of issues. That said, he’s now quite settled in Berkeley. He’s spent the last month renovating the house he plans to live in ahead of starting back at college for the autumn semester. As you know I authorized a bursary via the offices of the Veteran’s Administration to allow Nathan to complete a Geography BA and a teacher training course. He did a lot of track running when he first joined the Air Force and I’ve encouraged him to pick up on that when he starts at Berkeley. We did not discuss his mother’s situation; he has blocked her out. It is probably best that way.”
Curtis LeMay digested this.
“I’m told Phoenix city is rotten with TV and newspaper people?”
“I couldn’t say, sir. I was whacked when I got into town last night. It wouldn’t surprise me… ”
Actually, Caroline was astonished that LeMay’s office had confirmed this meeting given the news from Chicago and Milwaukee. Things sounded bad up there and there had been new race riots in Louisville and Birmingham over the weekend.
“I worry about Major Zabriski,” the Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee confessed.
Nathan had refused to co-operate with any kind of formalized therapeutic ‘regime’. Like many of the young men Caroline Konstantis watched over he had initially been angrily resistant to any suggestion that he needed help. Nathan and his comrades had been indoctrinated, inculcated with the notion that they were latter day knights in shining armor, the shield of the West; that God was on their side and any suggestion that they should feel guilt, remorse and shame for their part in preserving freedom and American ideals was both traitorous and in some ways… unmanly. But with Nathan there was something deeper, non-negotiable going on. None of her charges had been through anything like the psychological meat grinder that twenty-seven year old former Major Nathan Zabriski had been through in the last twenty months.
Nathan’s aircraft had dropped multi-megaton bombs on Nizhny Novgorod and Dzershinsk on the night of the war, an airborne refueling mishap had left him drenched in avgas most of the way back home, and then last December the 100th Bomb Group had been ordered — nobody knew by whom — to attack the base of the British Mediterranean Fleet at Malta. His aircraft had been shot down and he had been captured; then when he got home to the US he had discovered that his mother, who had a long history of chronic mental illness, had been brainwashed into attempting to murder the President.
Nathan was a young man who already had hundreds of thousands of deaths on his conscience and was struggling to come to terms with having been duped into murdering hundreds of America’s friends and allies on Malta. The fact that in his brief captivity in Malta he had been befriended by a young Maltese woman had simply brought home the magnitude of his crimes; his mother’s insanity heaped iniquity on his head. He had lost his career, his belief in things in general and by any rights he ought to have been a paranoid wreck. That he was still, beneath the angst which roiled within him like a drowning current in a placid sea, so normal was almost too incredible to be credited.