The Hunting Trip (6 page)

He also learned that the CIC—in addition to denying the Russians and the Cubans and a long list of other “un-friendlies” access to the secrets of the U.S. Army—had two other roles.

One of these was investigating the misbehavior—usually the sexual misbehavior—of field rank and above officers and their dependents. That meant majors through generals and their dependents. Sexual shenanigans of captains, lieutenants, and noncommissioned officers and their dependents were dealt with by the Criminal Investigation Division of the Corps of Military Police.

Phil thought preparing the special agents' reports of the sexual
shenanigans of majors and up—and their dependents, which he had learned meant their wives and offspring—might be very interesting and quietly hoped he would be assigned to a CIC detachment in some hotbed of forbidden sexual activity.

But he thought of himself as a realist, and the reality was that he was probably not going to wind up assigned anywhere interesting, but instead wind up in someplace like Sunny Lakes, Wisconsin, preparing the reports of CIC special agents who spent their days working on complete background investigations.

This was known somewhat disparagingly in the counterintelligence community as “ringing doorbells” because the CIC special agents conducted these investigations by going to the neighbors of those being investigated, ringing their doorbells, and then when the door was opened making a presentation from a script they had memorized along these lines:

Phil, who had by then accepted the CIC premise that the worst scenario of any situation was nine times out of ten the one right on the money, saw himself spending the foreseeable future in Sunny Lakes, Wisconsin, or some similar bucolic metropolis in the middle of the corn belt, preparing the reports of CIC agents who had spent their days ringing doorbells.

He was wrong.

When graduation day from CIC Administrator School came, and with it both his promotion to corporal and his assignment orders, the latter read:

Because he had paid attention while a CIC administrator in training, Phil had no difficulty at all in deciphering his orders. He was a bit surprised to see that Sunny Lakes, Wisconsin, or whatever bucolic village in the Great American Midwest he was to be banished to had
its own Army Post Office (APO) number, but the rest of his orders he understood.

He was being detached from Company B, CIC Center & School, and transferred in grade and would proceed to the 33rd CIC Detachment (for reasons never explained, the CIC used Roman, rather than Arabic, numbers on its CIC detachments). Travel by civilian air transportation in civilian clothing was directed. Ten days of delay-en-route leave were authorized, and so were a passport and a $350 allowance to buy the civilian clothing. The money was to come from Congressional Appropriation 99-99999999903, which was classified Secret because Congress didn't want the Russians and the other un-friendlies to know how much they were willing to pay to keep the U.S. Army's secrets secret.

As soon as he could, Phil found the book listing all APO numbers and the physical locations thereof. With a feeling of great foreboding, he ran his finger down the list of numbers until he came to 09237.

When he found it, he exclaimed, “I'll be a
EXPLETIVE
DELETED!!
I'm not going to
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
Sunny Lakes, or any other
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
place in the
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
Midwest! I'm going to Berlin! Berlin,
Germany
! Not the Berlin in
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
New Hampshire!”

“Watch your mouth, Corporal!” a stern voice chided him.

Phil turned to see that he was being addressed by a second lieutenant who was wearing the identification badge of a CIC agent in training.

“You're in the CIC now,” the second lieutenant went on. “We of the CIC do not use obscene language such as ‘
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
New Hampshire,' which is one of the United States we are sworn to defend from undue Soviet and other unfriendly curiosity.”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. I will endeavor to remember that.”

“See that you do!”

—

Over the next few days,
as he waited for the administrative wheels of the CIC Center to slowly turn, Phil wondered if his assignment to Berlin was possibly a
sub-rosa
award for his having been a member of the Fort Holabird Skeet Team, which not only had kicked the
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
out of the Navy Intelligence Skeet Team the very week he had joined it, but on other occasions during his time as a student had inflicted similar defeats upon the skeet teams of the National Park Service and the Pentagon Police Force in Washington, D.C., and the security forces of the National Center for the Control of Venereal Diseases in Baltimore.

In the end, he decided it was just a coincidence, as he had been told again and again there was no room for personal favoritism in the CIC.

—

As soon as he got
the $350 check to buy civilian clothes, his new passport—which identified him as an employee of the U.S. Government—and his airline tickets, Phil started to faithfully execute the orders laid out in Par. 17 above.

Well, maybe not faithfully.

If he executed them absolutely faithfully, he would have gone on leave—he was headed for New York—at his own expense.

Ten days later—if he faithfully followed his orders—he would have taken the train back from New York, again at his own expense, and upon his arrival in Baltimore gone to Baltimore-Washington Airport and taken an Eastern Airlines flight to Newark using the Army-provided ticket. From Newark he would have taken the shuttle bus (ticket provided) to Idlewild Airport, where he would board the Pan American flight to Frankfurt.

He decided it would make more sense to skip the Go Back To
Baltimore
et seq
elements of this agenda, and instead take a cab to JFK from his father's apartment in Manhattan when his leave was over.

In the club car of the train carrying him to New York City, to which, having no civilian attire, he was traveling in uniform, he picked up a discarded copy of the Sunday edition of
The New York Times
.

In it was a society section story informing the world that Mr. and Mrs. T. Jennings Black III of New York City and Rowayton, Connecticut, announced the marriage of their daughter Alexandra to Mr. Hobart J. Crawley IV, son of Mr. and Mrs. H. J. Crawley III of New York City and East Hampton. The story went on to relate that the ceremony had taken place in the Yale Club of New York City, with the Reverend K. Lamar Dudley, D.D., of St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church, presiding, and that the groom was at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, where the couple would reside following their return from their wedding trip to Bar Harbor, Maine.

Phil was understandably distraught.

Alexandra had married another.

After all of my efforts, she married a
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
Yalie!

And that
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
Yalie was going to get—by now probably had gotten—her
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
pearl of great price.

Which leaves me not only desolate but the last
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
seventeen-year-old
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
virgin in the world.

He decided he would drown his sorrows.

He caught the waiter's eye.

“Bring me a double Famous Pheasant, no ice, please.”

The waiter leaned close to him.

“No
EXPLETIVE DELETED!!
way,” the waiter said softly, so that no one else would hear him. “How old are you, boy? Eighteen?”

Following the theory that when all else fails, tell the truth, Phil shrugged his shoulders and confessed, “Seventeen,” and then blurted, “The love of my life has married a Yalie.”

He held up
The New York Times
as proof.

“Well, that would tend to make a man turn to drink,” the waiter said. “But this is the Pennsylvania Railroad and you have to be old enough to vote to buy a drink in a PRR club car. Which you ain't. Sorry.”

“I understand,” Phil said.

The waiter left only to return several minutes later with a teapot and cup.

“Drink this, boy. It'll make you feel better.”

“Thank you kindly, sir, but I don't drink tea.”

“This is special tea. They make it in Dungaress, Scotland. I understand Her Majesty the Queen herself really likes to sip it. Try a little sip, why don't you? See for yourself if you think it's worth the ten dollars a cup market forces require me to charge for it.”

—

By the time
the train reached Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station, Phil wasn't feeling much of the pain he had been feeling since learning of Alexandra's nuptials. Or much pain at all.

When he entered his father's apartment, his sire was there.

“I would say ‘welcome home,'” his father greeted him, “except it's Wednesday, and my own military experience has taught me that privates are rarely, if ever, given time off in the middle of the week. Which makes me suspect that you have experienced more of the rigors of military life than you like, and have, as we old soldiers say, ‘gone over the hill.'”

P. Wallingford Williams, Jr., having taken ROTC at Harvard College, had entered military service as a second lieutenant of artillery and gone to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where in the sixth week of the Basic Artillery Officer's Course he had dropped the trail of a 105mm howitzer on his left foot while attempting to set the cannon up for
firing. Army surgeons saved the foot, except for the big toe, the loss of which caused Lieutenant Williams to be medically retired from the service with a five percent disability pension. He later became quite active in several disabled veterans organizations.

“Actually, Pop, I'm on my way to Berlin.”

“I have to tell you, son, that it won't do you any good to go to New Hampshire. The military police will run you to earth no matter where you try to hide. My advice is that you go to Penn Station, or Grand Central, whichever you prefer, and surrender yourself to the military police who patrol there. Perhaps, considering your youth, the courts-martial will temper your sentence with compassion.”

“I'm not AWOL, Pop. I'm en route to the Berlin in Germany.”

“And why are you wearing corporal's chevrons? In my day in uniform, impersonation of a noncommissioned officer was nearly as serious an offense as impersonating a commissioned officer. You're never going to get out of Leavenworth.”

“I'm wearing corporal's chevrons, Pop, because I am a corporal. Here, have a look at my orders.”

On doing so, Second Lieutenant P. Wallingford Williams, Jr., Artillery, Medically Retired, announced, “I can't make heads or tails of that gibberish. Why don't we start over?”

“Sir?”

“Hello, Philip. What brings you home, wearing corporal's chevrons, in the middle of the week?”

Phil told him.

“Obviously, I owe you my profound apologies,” his father said when he had finished. “I can only offer in extenuation that on the last seven occasions on which you appeared unexpectedly at my door in the middle of the week, it was because you had been booted from the finest boarding schools on the East Coast. And each time that happened, it cost me an arm and a leg—I shudder to remember what
it cost me to get you into Saint Malachi's—to get you into another one.”

“I understand, Pop. No apology is necessary.”

“But I must tell you, Philip, that even when I so unthinkingly thought, ‘My God! Now he's Gone Over The Hill,' I also thought,
Well, at least he
didn't do to me what Hobo Crawley's boy did to ol' Hobo
.”

“Pop, are you talking about Hobart J. Crawley the Fourth?”

“Indeed I am. The son of Hobart J. Crawley the Third.”

“And what was that, sir?”

“I ran into ol' Hobo at the bar at the New York Athletic Club. Actually, I picked him up off the floor of the bar at the Athletic Club, where he was curled in a fetal position and weeping piteously. When I got him into an armchair in the lounge and got about a quart of black coffee into him, he confided in me his shame.”

“And what was that, Pop?”

“That idiot son of his, the one they call ‘Little Hobo,' couldn't keep his You Know What in his pocket and instead used it to get another mental deficient in the family way. You may have seen her around. They live in this building. Tall blonde with a vapid face and no bosom worth mentioning. Anyway, these two are now going to contribute to the further degeneration of the gene pool, and poor ol' Hobo's stuck for the tab for the whole operation for the foreseeable future. Little Hobo is now on his third try to get out of the freshman class at Yale. I thank you from the bottom of my heart, son, for not doing anything like that to me.”