W. Griffin - The shooters

They were fixed up as nicely as possible, air-conditioned, furnished with the most elegant furniture to be found in Army warehouses, provided with a kitchen, and became VIP quarters in which distinguished visitors to the post were housed.

When Captain Tom Prentiss pushed open the door of Magnolia House and waved Beth Wilson into the living room, they found the place was immaculate. There were even fresh flowers in a vase in the center of the dining table.

"Looks fine to me," Beth Wilson said.

Prentiss didn't reply directly. Instead, he said, "I've got to make a telephone call. Have a seat."

"That sounds like an order," she snapped.

"Not at all. If you'd rather, stand."

He used the telephone in the small kitchen and, not really curious, she nevertheless managed to hear Prentiss's side of the conversation:

"Tom Prentiss. I'm glad I caught you at home. I need a big favor.

"Could you come to Magnolia House right now? It shouldn't take more than a few minutes.

"No, don't worry about that. He's not here.

"I stand in your debt, sir."

Beth Wilson wondered what that was all about, but was not going to ask.

When Prentiss hung up the phone, she said, "Will you tell me what you want me to do, so I can do it and get out of here?"

"There doesn't seem to be anything that needs doing," Prentiss said. "But we're going to have to wait until somebody comes here."

She locked eyes with him.

He went on: "You upset your dad with that recitation of what your boyfriend had to think about just about everything. I suppose you know that?"

"Is that really any of your business?"

"Let me explain where I'm coming from," Prentiss said coldly. "I admire your father more than I do anyone else I've ever met. If you were to look in a dictionary, there would be a picture of your dad in the definition of officer and gentleman."

"Maybe you should have thought of that when you let Castillo get him drunk and make a fool of himself."

"You're right. I should have," Prentiss said. "But your question, Beth, was 'Is it any of my business' that you upset your father by quoting your boyfriend to him and making him damned uncomfortable. And the answer is, 'Yeah, it is my business.' It's my duty to do something to straighten you out."

"Straighten me out?"

"Yeah, and your boyfriend, too. He's next on my list."

"I can't believe this conversation," Beth said. "And I don't think my parents are going to like it a bit when I tell them about it."

"I'll have to take my chances about that," Prentiss said.

"I'm leaving," she said. "I don't have to put up with this."

"I can't stop you, of course, but if you leave, you'll walk. And it's a long way from here to Colonel Gremmier's quarters."

He walked out of the living room and went through the dining room into the kitchen.

Beth started for the door, then stopped.

That arrogant bastard is right about one thing. I can't walk from here to the Gremmiers'.

So what do I do?

She was still staring at the door three minutes later when it opened and a middle-aged man wearing a woolen shirt, a zipper jacket, and blue jeans came through it.

He looked at her and said, "I'm looking for Tom Prentiss."

"I'm in the kitchen, Pete," Prentiss called. "Be right there."

When he came into the living room, Prentiss said, "Jesus, that was quick."

"Well, you said you needed a favor," the man said.

"Do you know Miss Wilson?" Prentiss asked.

"I know who she is."

"Beth, this is Mr. Kowalski. He was my instructor pilot when I went through Blue Flight. He was with Lieutenant Castillo in the desert."

Beth nodded coldly at Kowalski.

Kowalski looked at Prentiss.

"How'd you hear about that?" Kowalski said.

"From him," Prentiss said. "What he told the general was something like 'There we were, the best Apache pilot in the Army and the worst one, flying an Apache over the Iraqi desert at oh dark hundred with people shooting at us.'"

Kowalski chuckled.

"Well," he said, "that's a pretty good description. Except, as he shortly proved, he was a much better Apache pilot than he or I thought he was."

"Would you please tell Miss Wilson about that?"

Kowalski glanced at her, then looked back at Prentiss and said, "What's this all about, Tom? Did somebody tell the general what Charley's really doing here?"

"I don't know what he's really doing here," Prentiss said, "but I'll take my chances about learning that, too. Start with the desert, please, Pete."

"It would help if I knew what this is all about, Tom."

"Okay. A source in whom Miss Wilson places a good deal of faith has implied that the only reason Castillo was in an Apache in the desert was because his father had the Medal of Honor."

"Absolutely true," Kowalski said. He shook his head. "Jesus Christ, I'd pretty much forgotten that!"

Beth flashed Prentiss a triumphant glance.

Then Kowalski went on: "What happened was a week, maybe ten days before we went over the berm, the old man, Colonel Stevens? He was then a light colonel"-Prentiss nodded-"Stevens called me in and said I wasn't going to believe what he was going to tell me."

"Which was?" Prentiss said.

"That I was about to have a new copilot. That said new copilot had a little over three hundred hours' total time, forty of which were in the Apache, and had been in the Army since last June, when he'd graduated from West Point. And the explanation for this insanity was that this kid's father had won the Medal of Honor, and they thought it would make a nice story for the newspapers that the son of a Medal of Honor guy had been involved in the first action…etcetera. Get the point?"

"Now, Tom, isn't that very much what Randy said?" Beth asked in an artificially sweet tone.

"I'm not finished," Kowalski said. "Tom said I was to tell you what happened."

"Oh, please do," Beth said.

"Well, I shortly afterward met Second Lieutenant Charley Castillo," Kowalski continued. "And he was your typical bushy-tailed West Point second john. He was going to win the war all by himself. But I also picked up that he was so dumb that he had no idea what they were doing to him.

"And I sort of liked him, right off. He was like a puppy, wagging his tail and trying to please. So because of that, and because I was deeply interested in preserving my own skin, I spent a lot of time in the next week or whatever it was, giving him a cram course in the Kowalski Method of Apache Flying. He wasn't a bad pilot; he just didn't have the Apache time, the experience.

"And then we went over the berm and-what did Castillo say?-'There we were flying over the Iraqi desert at oh dark hundred with people shooting at us.' "What we were doing was taking out Iraqi air defense radar. If the radar didn't work, they not only couldn't shoot at the Air Force but they wouldn't even know where it was.

"I was flying, and Charley was shooting. He was good at that, and like he said, he wasn't the world's best Apache pilot.

"And then some raghead got lucky. I don't think they were shooting at us; what I think happened was they were shooting in the air and we ran into it. Anyway, I think it was probably an explosive-headed 30mm that hit us. It came through my windshield, and all of a sudden I was blind…

"And I figured, 'Oh, fuck'"-he glanced at Beth Wilson-"sorry. I figured, 'We're going in. The kid'll be so shook up he'll freeze and never even think of grabbing the controls'-did I mention, we lost intercom?-'and we're going to fly into the sandpile about as fast as an Apache will fly.' "And then, all of a sudden, I sense that he is flying the sonofabitch, that what he's trying to do is gain a little altitude so that he can set it down someplace where the ragheads aren't.

"And then I sense-like I said, I can't see a goddamned thing-that he's flying the bird. That he's trying to go home."