“Excuse me?” Lustrous said.
“If he is dead, I cannot go to him, can I?”
Naylor thought: That means, of course, he knows about his mother. His reaction is coldblooded; to learning that his father is dead and that he now will have no family at all.
“Karl,” Netty said softly, “we’ve asked for his records; they will be sent here shortly. I can’t promise this, but it’s possible, even likely, that your father had a family . . .”
“And I would go to them? No. I will not. Pastor Dannberg says I can stay at Saint Johan’s . . .”
“But if there is a family,” Netty said, “they would love you . . .”
“Why would they love me? Mother says they don’t know I exist.”
That’s true, Naylor thought. And the boy senses, or has figured out, that it would be one hell of a transition, from das Haus im Wald to Texas, even if he doesn’t understand that with a name like Castillo it’s highly probable that his life in Texas would be that of a Texican, and that’s not at all like that of an upper-class German.
Naylor had developed his own theory of how nineteen-year-old Jorge Alejandro Castillo had wound up flying a Huey first in Germany and then in Vietnam.
There were two reasons seventeen- and eighteen-year-old young men had gone into the Army during the Vietnam War. It seldom had anything to do with patriotic notions of rushing to the colors, but rather with their economic situation and the draft. If there was no money to go to college, and get an educational deferment, the draft was damned near inevitable.
Jorge Alejandro Castillo had been bright enough to get into the Warrant Officer Candidate Program, which meant that he was certainly bright enough to get into college. That he had not gone suggested strongly that there hadn’t been money for college. Naylor knew that Army recruiters had regularly trolled high schools for seniors about to graduate, and, specifically, for those who couldn’t afford college. Their sales pitch was that if the kids enlisted now, rather than waiting for the inevitable draft, they would be “guaranteed” their choice of specialty, which almost invariably meant being trained in electronics or automobile mechanics, which also meant they wouldn’t be handed a rifle and told to go kill people.
The offer was valid. The training was given as promised. The price was a three-year enlistment. Draftees had to serve two years. The Army got another year of service, during which the kid got the five to eight months of specialist training promised and he then could serve for two years in his specialty. On the kid’s side, he got the training, and, if he didn’t screw up in training, he didn’t go to the infantry.
What happened when the kid got to the reception center was that he was given the Army General Classification Test, which was sort of a combined aptitude and intelligence test. The average GI scored between 90 and 100. Scores of 110 or better qualified the new soldier for such things as Officer Candidate School and the longer, more technical specialist courses. When a kid turned in a score of 120 or better, he came to the attention of a lot of people who needed really bright young men. Such as helicopter pilots.
Putting this all together, Naylor had reasoned that Jorge Alejandro Castillo had joined the Army to be trained as an electronics repairman, or some such, and to be kept out of the infantry. He had scored really high on the AGCT and been recruited for the Warrant Officer Candidate Program. It wasn’t hard to get a kid to agree to swap his promised training as a radio fixer for training as a pilot, and the flight pay and status of a warrant officer that went with it.
Naylor remembered a sign he had seen in an Officers’ Club Annex at Fort Rucker, the Army Aviation Center in Alabama. It had read:
WARRANT OFFICER PILOTS WISHING
TO DRINK BEER
MUST HAVE A PERMISSION NOTE
FROM THEIR MOMMY.
That was a joke, but there had been a lot of warrant officer pilots already back from a Vietnam tour who had had to do their drinking on post because they were too young to be served alcohol off post.
Jorge Alejandro Castillo was by no means the only Huey pilot who had looked like he was fifteen.
The bottom line to this was that Major Allan B. Naylor thought it entirely likely that Karl Wilhelm von und zu Gossinger of das Haus im Wald was about to find himself transported to a low-income housing development in Texas, and possibly even to one in which English was a second language.
“They would love you, Karl, because they are your family,” Frau Erika said.
“Mother, that’s nonsense and you know it is,” the boy said. “I am not going. And no one can make me.”
He marched angrily out of the library.
“I will talk to him,” Frau Erika said.
“This has to be tough for him,” Elaine Naylor said.
“There are no other options for him,” Frau Erika said.
“Erika,” Colonel Lustrous said, “there’s something else.”
She looked at him.