“And you are telling me this because?” Gretchen asked, needing to know if the man was selling her a line just to get her out of the office without causing a monumental scene or if he really wanted a lasting rapprochement.
“From your resume I gather you speak French?”
“Yes. Conversational Spanish and Portuguese, also.”
“Well, there you are. That already puts you two or three languages ahead of most of the competition at the State Department. Let me have a word with the people over at Foggy Bottom.”
Gretchen had heard numerous wise cracks about how admirably the metonym ‘Foggy Bottom’ suited the Main State Building located at 2201, C Street which accommodated the United States Department of State, responsible for the nation’s foreign relations. Understandably, those relations were somewhat fraught in the aftermath of a war in which tens of millions of foreigners, by no means all inimical to the interests of the United States, had been killed, injured, made homeless and were now struggling to survive in the post-apocalyptic purgatory of their own ruined countries.
“Yes,” she heard herself saying, “that sounds fair.”
Chapter 32
General David Monroe Shoup, the sixty-two year old bespectacled warrior who had been appointed Commandant of the Marine Corps on the first day of 1960, was, officially only an ‘occasional member’ of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee of the United States Armed Forces. In fact, he was only attending this meeting of the Chiefs of Staff because, coincidentally, he had been in Washington when the shit had hit the fan.
It worried him that not everybody in the room had yet got used to the idea that the ‘shit had hit the fan’ but he did not intend leaving the room until he was convinced that everybody was of the same mind. Very little that had happened since the October War — which he viewed as a wholly avoidable disaster that in any other country would have resulted in those responsible being lined up against a wall and shot — had surprised him. Basically, the country was being run by idiots who had failed to act decisively to maintain the civil cohesion and military integrity of the nation in the aftermath of the war. Subsequent events had taken a depressingly inevitable path towards the current state of continental disunity and concomitant fast-spreading lawlessness. Events in the North-West ought to have sounded the panic bell in Washington DC; it was a disgrace that nothing seemed to have changed. The memory of Bellingham’s fate would pall into insignificance if the ongoing insurgency spread out of Chicago and the other bombed cities and towns. The late Maxwell Taylor had understood what had to be done. Shoup still had not made up his mind about Taylor’s successor in the hot seat, General Earl Gilmore ‘Bus’ Wheeler.
David Shoup had come up the hard way and he did not have a lot of time for men who had not, until, or unless they proved that they were worthy of his trust. Trust was not a given between the Marine Corps and the other services; Marines got too used to cleaning up the mess the Army, the Navy and the Air Force left behind. As a young man Indiana born Shoup had joined the Marines because that was the only way to get three square meals a day. Rising through the ranks he had twice seen service on the despised, half-forgotten China Station in the 1930s. When America entered the Second World War he had found himself in a staff posting in Iceland before eventually contriving a transfer to the Pacific where, in 1943, out of the blue he was given command of the 2nd Marines charged with the capture of the Japanese island fortress of Tarawa. Aptly named ‘Bloody Tarawa’, the conquest of the atoll marked the true commencement of the savage ‘island hopping’ campaign that had concluded with the bloodbaths of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. In true Marine Corps style Shoup had regularly collected decorations for valour and exceptional service as the Corps ‘hopped’ from island to island across the vastnesses of the Pacific. However, he owed his post-war rapid progress up the chain of command less to his reputation as a hard-driving leader of men in battle, than to his gifts as a trainer, and his achievements in ruthlessly overhauling the Corps’s budgetary and logistical eccentricities. Over the last year he had fought a dogged, frankly brutal rearguard action to preserve the fighting efficiency and combat readiness of the Marine Corps and consequently, his name had become ‘Mud’ in the Pentagon. If the bean counter running the Department of Defence or his master in the White House had had the guts they would have sacked him months ago. As it was the re-constituted 1st Marine Division was all that was securing American influence in the Far East, holding the line from Manila Bay to Tokyo and half a hundred other places in between all the way back to Hawaii; while on the North American continent the 2nd Marine Division was the only fully mobile, deployable war ready major ground force on the map. One month ago today he had been given a direct order by the Chief of Naval Operations, acting as the Secretary of Defence’s parrot, to stand down the 3rd Marine Division, which since the October War had functioned as the Corps’s training and replacement cadre. Thus far he had done no such thing; in fact he had placed the Division’s two operational regiments — the 31st and the 32nd — on seven days notice to deploy anywhere in the World and he had assumed his summons to DC was to account for his actions.
The Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff, Bus Wheeler had wanted the 3rd to remain ‘in being’ but when the moment of decision arrived he had not been prepared to go to the wall for the Marine Corps. A Marine got used to the kind of enthusiastic support ‘in principle’ from the Army which hardly ever actually materialised when the going got tough.
Shoup looked around the table in the underground War Room.
Curtis LeMay was off someplace in New Mexico or Arizona racing sports cars, the Deputy Chief of Staff of the US Army, who had been scheduled to speak at this meeting of the Chiefs was absent in Illinois, presumably explaining to the Governor why he was reluctant to put more troops that he no longer had — because of the ‘peace dividend’ — on the ground to reinforce the line on the central Chicago front!
The Secretary of Defence was represented by ‘Westy’ Westmoreland, with whom Shoup enjoyed decidedly prickly relations. The Commandant of the Marine Corps’s mistrust of ‘political generals’ like Westmoreland ran too deep, and in the case of the Secretary of Defence’s ‘special military advisor’ it was reinforced by the younger man’s recent meddling in the so-called ‘South East Asia Policy’; a farrago that Shoup regarded as an accident waiting to happen that unequivocally proved the fools in the Oval Office had learned nothing from the October War. Shoup regarded any attempt to maintain, let alone safeguard — whatever that meant — western interests in Vietnam as a waste of time; the country had tied down an enormous number of Japanese troops in the 1945 war that the Japs had badly needed elsewhere; sending more American ‘advisors’ to Saigon was madness at a time when the United States did not have anywhere near enough men under arms to defend the Philippines, South Korea, Japan or any place else in the Eastern Pacific theatre of operations.
The Air Force Chief of Staff’s place at the table was occupied by fifty-five year old Arkansan John Paul McConnell, the last Deputy Commander of the now defunct United States European Command. McConnell had been Stateside at a conference on the night of the October War, and therefore survived the obliteration of most of his command. The man had a sound reputation as a manager and an organiser. In his youth he had been a fighter pilot, and during the 1945 war he had flown combat missions with the Third Tactical Air Force against the Japanese in Burma. McConnell was in the room because he was one of Curtis LeMay’s closest lieutenants; a former Director of Plans and senior SAC commander, he was a shoe-in to replace LeMay when Old Iron Pants elected to retire.