“How do you know all this?”
“Because Billy—not knowing that I was already in the loop—came to me and asked for permission to participate. Knowing Billy, if I had said, ‘Hell, no!’ he probably would have done what he did anyway, but I thought it was nice of him to ask. You’ll recall Billy doesn’t always ask permission.”
Harmon laughed. “Billy once told me, with a straight face, that if you think you’re going to get your ass chewed anyway, it makes more sense to get it chewed after you’ve done what you want to do instead of getting it chewed just for asking.”
“Maybe that’s the way you get to be a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant colonel. Why didn’t we think of that?”
Harmon laughed. It came out as a grunt.
“I’ve been trying to figure out what you think of all this,” Harmon said.
White understood he had been asked a question, and he answered it: “I don’t think we should rearm the Wehrmacht and head for Moscow, but I believe the Soviet Union is a real threat. And it looks to me like few people outside of the loop realize how serious a threat. And I’m a soldier, Ernie. When someone gives me an order I know is lawful, I salute and say, ‘Yes, sir.’”
When Harmon didn’t immediately reply, White went on: “To answer your original question, Why am I not going home? Apparently Ike decided that the role originally envisioned for the Constabulary is not going to happen. The Germans are behaving. The Russians are not. The Constabulary is going to have to be more border police than anything else, at least for the time being. And Ike also probably realized that the support the Constabulary has been ordered to provide DCI-Europe is going to go far beyond sending a platoon of M8 armored cars somewhere.
“I think Bull decided—and I don’t know this, Ernie—that I had too much on my plate to handle, and that the solution to that was to keep you in command for a little longer, until things sort themselves out.”
For a long moment Harmon was silent.
Then he said: “I knew the minute I laid eyes on the dependent housing officer at Fort Knox that if I took him under my wing, sooner or later he was going to royally fuck me up.”
“That’s why you got me out of that damned job and gave me that battalion of Armored Infantry, right?”
“But, me too, I.D.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m a soldier, too. When I get a lawful order, I salute and say, ‘Yes, sir.’”
[ THREE ]
Office of the Chief, Counter Intelligence Corps
Headquarters, U.S. Forces European Theater
The I.G. Farben Building
Frankfurt am Main
American Zone of Occupation, Germany
0715 24 January 1946
A tall, hawkish-featured man in his early thirties in ODs with triangles pushed open the door to the outer office of the chief, CIC USFET, and smiled at the WAC chief warrant officer, an attractive woman in her late twenties sitting behind the desk. She was wearing the female version of pinks and greens.
“What got you up so early?” he asked.
“The Greene monster,” she replied. “Someone had to cut your orders.”
“What orders?”
“He’ll tell you all about it,” she said, and pointed at an interior door. On it was a neatly lettered sign: BRIG. GEN. H. P. GREENE.
The man went to the door and knocked.
“Come.”
The man pushed the door open. A stocky, forty-three-year-old officer with a crew cut waved him in. His olive drab uniform had the single star of a brigadier general on its epaulets.