“Yes, sir. I talked him into going to the Point.”
“You’re saying he got special treatment?”
?
?I’m saying . . . what I said before, General, was that Aviation is worse than the Marines about getting publicity.”
“Because of his father, his father’s MOH, they rushed him through training and sent him over here?”
“Where he is way over his head,” Naylor said.
“He seems to have done pretty well,” Schwarzkopf said.
“He’s over his head, sir,” Naylor argued.
“You don’t think he deserves the DFC?”
“Yes, sir, I think he does. And he was wounded. What I want to do is get him out of there before he kills himself trying to do something else he’s not capable of doing.”
“Jesus, Allan. People get killed,” General Young said.
“And some sonsofbitches are willing to bet on how many,” Schwarzkopf said. “I think I know what Allan’s thinking. The Class of ’50, right?”
“That’s in my mind, sir. My brother was in the Class of ’50.”
“And didn’t come back from Korea?” Schwarzkopf asked.
“Tom had been an officer six months when he was killed, sir.”
“And your son is here, too, right, with Freddy Franks?”
“Allan’s Class of ’88, sir. He’s had two and a half years to learn how to be a tank platoon leader.”
“I take your point. I always thought it was insanity to get the Class of ’50 nearly wiped out in Korea,” Schwarzkopf said. “You can’t eat the seeds. If you do, you don’t get a crop.” He paused. “Okay, Allan, I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt on this. Handle it any way you want.”
“Thank you, sir. Sir, I told Colonel Wallace to embargo this story until you gave him permission to release it.”
“You think that’s important?”
“Yes, sir, I do.”
“Okay. It’s squashed. There will be other impact awards. So far, Phase I—knock on wood—seems to be going well.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I don’t want to hear one more goddamned word about a how-many-casualties pool. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Generals Naylor and Young said, almost in unison.
General Schwarzkopf momentarily locked eyes with each of them and walked out of the office.
“So what do we do with this young officer?” General Young asked.
“You’re the personnel officer, Oz. You tell me.”
“Okay. There aren’t many options. Or at least good ones,” General Young said. “If he got out of West Point six months ago, and is an Apache pilot, we can presume two things: one, that he can fly helicopters . . .”
“If my memory serves, it takes longer than six months to get qualified in an Apache, after you’ve got X many hundred hours and X many years flying Hueys.”