By Order of the President (Presidential Agent 1)

“You don’t look Tex-Mex,” Casey said. “Lieutenant Castillo just gave me an aerial tour of the main post, Mackall, and Fayetteville,” Casey said.

“I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

“Auld lang syne,” Casey said. “Can I ask you a question about him?”

“Certainly.”

“Where’d he get that CIB he’s wearing?”

“In Iraq.”

“I’ve been on patrols longer than that war,” Casey said. “You think he deserves it?”

“I gave it to him, Mr. Casey,” McNab said, bristling a little. “He earned it.”

“He’s a pilot, right?”

“And he earned the CIB on the ground, Mr. Casey,” McNab said, measuring his words to control what he feared was his building temper.

“I thought, on the chopper just now,” Casey began, then hesitated, and then went on, “I remembered a guy, an aviator, a Signal Corps captain named Walker. He was trying to exfiltrate us up in Laos . . .”

“Do I understand that you were in SOG, or something like that, in Vietnam?”

“I was a Green Beanie in Vietnam, General,” Casey said. “Let me finish my story. Anyway, his Huey took some automatic weapons fire from Charley on his way in and he bent the bird pretty badly getting it on the ground. He wasn’t hurt, but the chopper wasn’t going to be able to fly out of there.

“The exec—the old man had taken a couple of hits and was in pretty bad shape—ran up to this Walker character and said, ‘Not to worry, we’re Green Beanies and we’ll get you out of here. We can probably make it back in a week or ten days.’

“Walker looked at our exec—he was a lieutenant; looked a lot like this one—and decided while he might be a nice guy and would try real hard, he was no John Wayne.

“ ‘Lieutenant,’ he says, ‘let me tell you something about the structure of the U.S. Army. The Signal Corps is both a technical service and a combat arm. As the senior combat arm officer present, I hereby assume command.’

“Then he looked around at the rest of us. ‘Anyone got any problems with that?’

“He was a great big, mean-looking sonofabitch with scars on his face he didn’t get shaving. There was a couple of grenades in his pockets, he had a .45 shoved into his waist, and he was carrying a shotgun—a Remington Model 1100 with the stock cut off at the pistol grip. Nobody had any problems.

“ ‘Okay,’ he goes on, ‘first we torch my machine and then we get the hell out of here. Anybody got a thermite grenade?’

“It took us fifteen days to walk out of there—we couldn’t make very good time bringing Captain Haye along with us—longer than your, quote, war, unquote, in Iraq—and when the colonel heard what Walker had done he pinned the CIB on him. I heard he was the only Signal Corps aviator with the CIB.”

“I’ve heard that story before,” General McNab said as the waitress approached carrying a tray with three bottles of Schlitz and three frosted glass mugs. “Welcome home, Mr. Casey.”

The men watched quietly as the waitress distributed the drinks before each, then said, “I’ll be back shortly for your order,” and turned and left.

“Yeah,” Casey said when she was gone. “I never volunteered for Special Forces, General. I mean, yeah, I signed the papers, but the guy who recruited me was a lying sonofabitch, but I was eighteen years old and too dumb to know it.

“I was a ham—a radio amateur—when I was a kid, and, before I got drafted, I took the exam and got an FCC first-class radio telephone license. They sent me right from basic training to Fort Monmouth and put me to work as an instructor. Everybody but me was a sergeant, so I spent more time on KP than instructing.

“So this guy shows up and says if I volunteer for Special Forces, where they really need radio guys, I get to be a sergeant. So I signed up.

“What that bastard didn’t tell me was that I got to be a sergeant after I got through jump school at Benning and the Q Course at Mackall.”

“Does that sound familiar, Lieutenant Castillo?” General McNab asked, and then explained, “Lieutenant Castillo is himself a very recent graduate of the parachute school at Fort Benning and the Q Course.”

Casey looked at Castillo but didn’t respond to McNab’s statement.

“So I finished the Q Course,” he went on, “and they made me a buck sergeant, gave me a five-day leave and shipped my just-turned-nineteen-year-old ass to ’Nam, which turned out to be one of the less pleasant experiences of my life. I did all of my time in ’Nam on an A-Team, mostly in Laos.

“But I managed not to get blown away and they sent me home. A long-haired sonofabitch and his girlfriend—who wasn’t wearing a bra; I still remember her tits—spit on me in the airport and called me a ‘baby killer.’