The clowns in Washington had absolutely no inkling how much trouble they were storing up for themselves; prematurely retiring and discarding hundreds of thousands of good and true, patriotic Americans to whom their uniform was an integral part of their personal identities, and the one thing that gave their lives purpose and meaning.
Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won. That was what the Duke of Wellington had said after Waterloo and every real soldier understood as much.
Curtis LeMay’s gaze flicked across the small group of Air Force Officers who accompanied him wherever he went, lingering momentarily on the stocky Captain chained to the nuclear football. A number of men at all levels in the Air Force — three to four times the pre-war rate — had committed suicide in the last thirteen months, unable or unwilling to come to terms with what had happened in October 1962. As many as one in ten of the surviving SAC aircrew who had participated in bombing missions in the war had later been officially deemed unfit for future operational deployment on medical — mainly psychological — grounds, others had requested transfers to ground duties or terminated their service early. There were over thirty documented cases of B-47 and B-52 airmen killing themselves; ‘psyche evaluation’ was the one growth operational area of Strategic Air Command activity.
Before the October war there had been a great deal of speculation about how men would perform in the ultimate battlefield. How many men would baulk at carrying out their terrible duty? Might SAC crews refuse, en masse, to drop their bombs? Might SAC crews jettison their bombs uninitiated and therefore, harmlessly? Intensive interrogations and studies of operational records indicated that all the surviving crews had done their duty. Three B-52s had brought back bombs but in each case technical issues had prevented the unlocking of these weapons — all four bombs brought back were free fall Mark 39 bombs — with faulty, factory-sealed, fail safe mechanisms. Lemay had personally ensured that the crews concerned had been treated in the same way, and had received the same rewards for gallantry, as every other survivor. Of the four hundred and twenty-nine bombers — three hundred and eighty-eight B-52s and forty-one B-47s — despatched on war missions on the night of the October War, two hundred and sixty-eight had failed to return, a loss rate of over sixty-two percent.
The most senior ranking suicide was the case of a man he had flown B-24 missions with over Hitler’s Germany in 1943. He had seemed fine but one day he had driven out into the country, walked a short distance from the road, put the muzzle of his service pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
The Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force could never really be one hundred percent absent on ‘R and R’. Curtis LeMay wiped the pouring sweat off his brow with a grimy rag, and attempted to dry his palms on the dirty grey boiler suit he wore over his civilian clothes as he approached his coterie of staffers.
“What’s the latest on the inquiry into Colonel Gunther’s death?” He demanded. He did not need the FBI snooping around Ent Air Force base; the Air Force’s Special Investigation Branch was in a far better position to investigate ‘suspicious suicides’ than a bunch of G-men working for that asshole Hoover.
“SIB confirms that there was no suicide note, sir,” the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force was informed flatly. “Further inquiries indicate that Gunther’s home life was ‘settled’. There was ‘no other woman’ and he had not talked to anybody about taking his own life. His doctor says he had chronic, albeit mild, physical issues associated with shrapnel injuries he sustained in 1942 on Guadalcanal. Gunther would complain about occasional pains and stiffness but always in a ‘jocular’ fashion. Gunther had been the subject of complaints from both IBM and IBM’s sub-contractor at the NORAD Air Direction Centre at Ent Air Force Base. Gunther’s commanding officer had rejected these complaints out of hand and Gunther himself seems to have taken the complaints with a pinch of salt. He was Head of Security, one imagines he was used to putting people’s noses out of joint, sir.”
Curtis LeMay scowled.
“What about Bellingham?”
“Major General Dempsey has that, er, situation, under control, sir.”
“Explain to me what ‘under control’ means, son,” the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force demanded with menacing impatience.
“The town of Bellingham has been successfully ‘pacified’ and returned to State control, sir. There was heavy fighting and the majority of the insurgents were killed in retaking Bellingham. There is a general embargo on news stories at State level, and the Pentagon has imposed an indefinite Federal news blackout until it has established a clearer understanding of the facts on the ground. US Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach visited the capital of Washington State, Olympia, to be briefed by and to confer with Governor Rosellini and the other two West Coast Governors about the situation in Bellingham, and generally, on the West Coast.”
Curtis LeMay would have queried why the Secretary of the Interior, or his own political boss, Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara had not made the trip to Olympia, rather than a senior, but below Cabinet level, Administration member like Katzenbach. It stank of ‘arse covering’ and it was typical of the way the Republic had been governed in the last year. As for why McNamara had not gone to Washington State he suspected he already knew the answer to that question.
To the American public the Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force was a fearless, fire-eating, cigar-smoking, red-necked martinet who was always the first man over the top, laughing in the face of the enemy. He was Old Iron Pants LeMay, the man who’d been Bombs Away LeMay, the gung ho commander of one of the first B24 Groups in England in 1942, the Demon to anybody who got on his wrong side, or simply the Big Cigar to his airmen. But that was not the whole story; and LeMay, like any man was the sum of his many parts and hugely varied life experiences.
Within days of the October War Robert McNamara had reminded him of his earlier prognostications that in some circumstances a pre-emptive nuclear war was ‘winnable’. LeMay had interpreted this ‘reminder’ as a warning that sooner or later the Administration would hang him out to dry; a conclusion he had already embraced and oddly, come to terms with because the concept that the man at the top ought to actually take responsibility for his actions was deeply ingrained in his psyche. However, the idea that ‘somebody, somewhere ought to take responsibility’ was, it seemed, alien and mortally distasteful to the psyches of his political overlords.