Free The Captains by W. E. B. Griffin

Point; and the West Point establishment, in and out of uniform, would not only see that Norwich graduates were given regular cavalry commissions but would regard them as professional and social peers.
    Similar gentleman’s agreements existed between the West Point establishment and the Citadel (assuring that the regular officer’s corps of all the arms and services had a fair leavening of well-bred Southerners) and the Texas Agricultural and Mechanical College (assuring that both the regular artillery and the reserve officer’s corps were liberally laced with Aggies). The relationship between the West Point establishment and the Citadel and Texas A&M was much better known, because the relationship between Norwich and the West Point establishment was seldom discussed.
    After graduating from Norwich and entering upon active duty, Lieutenant Parker had attended the Basic Armor Officer’s Course at Fort Knox, Kentucky. He had graduated “with Great Distinction”—that is to say, as the honor graduate of his class—but Fort Knox had not been entirely the beginning he had hoped to make on his career. Socially, it had been a disaster.
    He had shared a BOQ suite (two two-room “apartments” sharing a shower and toilet) with a second lieutenant who had attracted the wrath of the military social establishment like a magnet draws iron filings. He was not a West Pointer, nor even someone commissioned from the Reserve Officer’s Training Corps or Officer Candidate School. The man was Second Lieutenant Craig W. Lowell.
    Parker had thought of Lowell a good deal since this Korean business had started. Lowell was in New York, a civilian, and working in the family business, which was modestly described as an investment banking firm. Parker had wondered if Lowell would be recalled and decided that he probably wouldn’t be. And he’d really wondered, now that he was actually going to war, if he would be able to function as well as Lowell had functioned in Greece.
    No one would have thought that Lowell would be a good soldier, a good officer, but he had wound up with the second highest decoration for valor the Greek government gave. On the other hand, everyone would expect a Norwich graduate to at least “do his duty,” and possibly serve with distinction—especially the son of a Norwich graduate who had commanded a tank destroyer battalion across North Africa and Europe, the grandson of a colonel who as a captain had commanded a company of the 369th Infantry in War I, and the great-grandson of a master sergeant who had fought Indians with the 9th Cavalry and gone up Kettle Hill in Cuba with Teddy Roosevelt. Philip Sheridan Parker IV told himself he would be satisfied if he didn’t shit his pants and run when he first round came his way.
    (Three)
    When the platoon assembled on Pier One in Pusan, Staff Sergeant Sidney was present and accounted for, although complaining of pain from injuries suffered in a fall in the shower. Perhaps because of the “fall in the shower,” he seemed ready to do what was expected of him, and Parker put him to work—still another time—checking the machine guns on the M4A3s and the personal weapons.
    It took about two hours to unload the M4A3s from the hold of the Albert Ford and another hour to fuel and arm them. Parker found a supply of 76 mm high-velocity rounds in a warehouse directly across from where the Albert Ford was tied up; and in the belief that ammunition supply would be a problem (so far as he knew, he had the only medium tanks in Korea), he ordered that as many cases of the ammunition as possible be tied to the outside of the tanks.
    Sergeant Woodrow disappeared for thirty minutes during the off-loading procedure and returned with a General Motors six-by-six truck and a Dodge three-quarter-ton ambulance without the Red Cross insignia painted on its sides. The trucks bore bumper markings identifying them as belonged to the