The mission could be regarded in two ways: As a dirty, unnecessary job dreamed up by some jackass at Division Headquarters. In an artillery impact area, it would be just a matter of time until the chimney and the buildings around it were reduced to rubble. Or as an opportunity to give his men some realistic, hands-on training in demolitions and using bulldozers and other heavy equipment.
Captain McGuire elected to see the mission in the latter regard. He thus received permission from Battalion to delay the prescribed company training for five days, successfully arguing that it would benefit the men of his company more not only to practice their skills, but to become familiar with how other specialists performed their duties.
In other words, the entire company would watch the second platoon rig explosive charges on the chimney and the gutted buildings (these would be designed to knock the chimney down and reduce the massive brickwork to large chunks). Then the entire company would watch the first platoon, using air-hammers, reduce the large chunks of masonry to sizes which the third platoon would then load onto trucks and haul away. During all of these operations, everyone would lend a hand, wherever possible; they’d all get their hands dirty. Finally, everyone would get a chance to watch the company’s bulldozers scrape the area and turn it back into bare ground.
Since Captain McGuire thought of himself as something of an expert in the skills required for this project, he had given it a good deal of thought. In his judgment, it would take two days to lay the initial demolition charges. Using the available engineer manuals, he had precisely calculated the explosive needed to topple the chimney and shatter the brickwork of the surrounding buildings.
It would then take another two days, using both explosives and air-hammers, to reduce the chunks to manageable sizes, and a final day to load everything up, truck it off, and bulldoze the site.
He had kept this information to himself. In his view, the best way for his platoon-leading lieutenants to learn how to do something was to do it themselves—using the available manuals as a guide, of course.
Because Second Lieutenant Anthony J. Pelosi commanded his second platoon, he was charged with toppling the tower. After Pelosi surveyed the site, he came up with an Explosives Requirement that, in Captain McGuire’s judgment, was woefully insufficient for the task.
Even so, McGuire decided to let Pelosi fail. When Pelosi blew his charges and the chimney and the buildings still stood, he would learn the painful and humiliating truth that he didn’t know nearly as much about demolitions as he thought he did.
Pelosi’s overconfidence was perhaps understandable. Very soon after he arrived in Able Company, Pelosi informed McGuire that in Chicago, where he came from, his family operated a firm called Pelosi & Sons Salvage Company; his father was one of the sons. McGuire instantly concluded that the firm was connected with used auto parts or something of that nature; but that did not turn out to be the case. Rather, the business involved the salvage of bridges, water tanks, and other steel-framed structures. The first step in the salvage process, Lieutenant Pelosi went on to explain, was knocking the structure down. This was normally accomplished by explosives.
While he was not arrogant about it—Pelosi was really a nice kid, who had the makings of a good officer—he was nonetheless unable to conceal his conviction that he knew more about explosives and demolition than anyone he’d met in the Army.
After Pelosi gave him his Explosives Requirement list, his more than a little annoying aura of self-confidence inspired McGuire to go back and recalculate the explosives necessary for the job. Recalculation confirmed McGuire’s belief that all Pelosi’s charges were going to do was make a lot of noise.
Captain McGuire’s major problem with Pelosi, however, was not his misplaced self-confidence, but his application for transfer. McGuire was trying to be philosophical about it.
For one thing, he told himself, no officer is indispensable. Losses of officers, either through routine transfers or eventually in combat, were inevitable; and as commanding officer, he should be prepared to deal with them. For another, when a young, full-of-piss-and-vinegar second lieutenant, fresh from both Officer Candidate School and the Parachute School at Fort Benning (in other words, he had volunteered for both OCS and Airborne), saw a notice on the Bulletin Board soliciting volunteers for an unspecified military intelligence assignment—volunteers who were parachute-qualified officers fluent in one or more of a dozen listed foreign languages—it was to be expected that he would volunteer.
Lieutenant Pelosi was not quite old enough to vote; and, Captain McGuire was quite sure, he had not yet lost either his boyish enthusiasm or his boyish taste for adventure. He almost certainly saw himself parachuting behind enemy lines, Thompson submachine gun in hand, à la Alan Ladd or Tyrone Power in the movies. On the ground, when he was not blowing up Mussolini’s headquarters, he’d spend his time in the arms of some large-breasted Italian beauty. (He was fluent in Italian; where else could they send him?)
If real life actually worked that way, McGuire thought, he would have been happy to see Pelosi go. But McGuire had been around the Army long enough—his father, also a West Pointer, had just been promoted to Brigadier General—to view somewhat suspiciously the recruitment of parachute-qualified officers with foreign language skills.
Military Intelligence, for example, needed people to read the Osservatore, the Vatican newspaper, to see if there was anything there that could remotely be of interest to the U.S. Army. After receiving permission to recruit volunteers, Military Intelligence had decided to recruit from the Airborne Forces, since a selection process eliminating all but the most intelligent and highly motivated officers had already been performed.
Captain McGuire did not believe that Military Intelligence would be crippled if Second Lieutenant Pelosi did not join its ranks. Able Company, however, needed him. He possessed a quality of leadership that McGuire to a large degree found missing in his other lieutenants.
McGuire was therefore determined to retain at all costs the services of Second Lieutenant Pelosi in Able Company.
First he tried to counsel the young officer, suggesting to him that he could make a greater contribution to the war effort right here in Able Company than he could reading the Vatican newspaper behind a desk someplace. When that failed (Pelosi was polite but adamant), McGuire wrote what he frankly thought was a masterful 1st Indorsement to Pelosi’s application for transfer, outlining his present value to Able Company and his potential usefulness in the future, and recommending that for the good of the service, the application should not be favorably considered.
He then led the Battalion Sergeant Major to understand that he would not be heartbroken if Lieutenant Pelosi’s application for transfer became lost.
Next, he tried, and failed, to have the battalion commander declare Pelosi as essential, and thus ineligible for transfer.
“The only thing you can do is talk him out of it, Red,” the battalion commander said. “There’s nothing I can do to keep the application from going forward.”
That had been more than a month ago, long enough for Captain McGuire to begin to hope that Pelosi’s application would never reemerge from the maw of Army administration—like so many other documents inserted into it.
But this morning it had finally surfaced.
And now there was one last hope…because it actually looked like MI had sort of shot themselves in the foot: When Pelosi saw what they’d done, he could, after consideration, withdraw his application for transfer. An officer could change his mind about a volunteer assignment. People decided every day, for example, that they’d rather not jump out of airplanes anymore. Since parachute duty was voluntary, they could quit. This MI assignment was also voluntary; Pelosi could change his mind about it.
When the charges Pelosi had been laying all morning (in half the time McGuire felt was necessary to do a proper job) failed to do more than make noise, a chastened, humiliated Second Lieutenant Pelosi might be willing to listen to reason. Instead of jumping all over his ass, McGuire was going to be kind and understanding.
When McGuire’s jeep reached the power station, he found the company scattered over a small rise two hundred yards from the chimney, some on the ground, some sitting on trucks and three-quarter-ton dozers, scrapers, and the flatbed tractors that had carried them to the site.
When they saw the company
commander’s jeep, some of the noncoms started moving among the men, to get them up and at least looking interested.
McGuire turned toward the chimney and saw Second Lieutenant Pelosi coming out of one of the gutted buildings. He signaled for his driver to head for the chimney.