GRANT'S PET SHOP
by
Ron S. Nolan, Ph.D.
© 2008
Chapter 3
General Pratt Houston, a long-time veteran of the
Defense Department,
was beginning to show wear around the edges. His once muscular frame
had turned to flab and his loose belly slopped over his belt buckle.
Once pomaded in a smart crew cut, his gray hair had receded to a
fringe above his prominent ears. And in spite of the general's
indulgence in expensive hand-tailored uniforms, he still looked more
like a retired shopkeeper than a decorated war hero. But he had been
slim and ruggedly handsome when he began his career at the University
of Kentucky as an Army ROTC cadet in the fall of 1955. By the end of
his first year, Houston had found his calling in the service. A few
months into his junior year, he was promoted to the rank of
lieutenant of his unit and was shunned by every girl on campus. Even
the senior cadets found him to be a queer young man capable of
unexpected bouts of intense antisocial behavior and racial bigotry.
Ironically, in spite of having few friends and even fewer social
invitations, Houston was a natural leader—taking command of the
situation whenever the opportunity arose.
Houston, a self-proclaimed (albeit largely
unsuccessful) womanizer,
did excel in his capacity to consume alcohol. Even though his
countless boasts of female conquests were mostly fantasy, Houston did
manage to win the heart of a quite, plain girl whose father was a
Senator from the state of Rhode Island.
Upon graduation, Houston was admitted into Fort Knox
Armor School. The
bustling town of Louisville was a twisted version of paradise for
the newly commissioned lieutenant. The local whores, who performed
their service to country on their backside, soon discovered young
Houston's enormous appetite for intercourse. His drink of choice
shifted from beer to scotch in accordance with his raise in pay. Most
evenings during the week, and Friday and Saturday nights without
exception, Houston drove his 1958 Chevy convertible into town on Dead
Man's Road—that section of Interstate 84 between Fort Knox and
Louisville along which dozens of overly intoxicated soldiers had
smashed their big bore V-8s into head-on collisions with bridge
abutments and on-coming traffic. Alcohol and sex were Houston's
lifeblood. The fact that he never failed to show for duty, even
though oftentimes a little unsteady in the command seat of his tank,
attested to the remarkable resiliency of his constitution. His
hard-driving escapades on and off the base won him a great deal of
respect during an era when young army officers displayed their
prowess with booze and broads as proudly as their service ribbons and
insignia of rank.
A week into the Korean conflict, Houston volunteered
for combat. He
was promoted to the rank of captain and sent overseas. Captain
Houston was outspoken in his disappointment that his beloved tanks
only played a minor role during the Korean War. But another of his
passions, artillery, found heavy action. Company C, Third Battalion,
Fourth Brigade, under Houston's ardent command, devastated enemy
installations with furious day and night barrages of high explosive
rounds. The ordnance gunners and loaders learned to sleep in four
hour shifts within the gun installations. Houston's company expended
more ammunition than any three other artillery companies combined. By
the cessation of hostilities, Houston proudly claimed credit for
the death of thousands of enemy soldiers and his gung ho performance
was recognized in the form of a field promotion to the rank of major
and his already aberrant personality had begun to develop hairline
cracks deep within the recesses of his subconscious.
Following reassignment to the Pentagon in Washington,
Houston married
his college sweetheart. Even Annie had thoughts of backing out of
the marriage up to the very day of the wedding, but her father was
highly impressed with Major Houston's ambition and service record. He
privately advised her that she might not find a better catch. To
Houston's bitter disappointment, there were never any children, a
circumstance that he blamed on Annie and which ultimately served to
kill any passion which he may have once harbored for his wife. Houston
buried his domestic frustration by delving deeply into the
study of military strategy. Eventually he established liaisons with
the high class hookers who worked the expensive restaurants off
Pennsylvania Avenue.
By the time that the U.S. involvement in Vietnam had
escalated to
full scale combat, Houston had been promoted to the rank of general
and given the command of the 14th Armored Division. Armor, in the
form of tanks, did play a major role in Vietnam. The 14th Division's
primary assignment was to lay waste to suspected Vietcong hideouts.
General Houston was particularly proud of his contribution to the
design of a new kind of tank weapon that disintegrated jungle, hooch,
and VC in an intense explosion of jagged steel pellets. The 14th's
upper echelon officers were alarmed when Houston insisted on
personally participating in firefights. Shocking reports filtered
back from the front line describing the General standing erect on the
commander's seat of the lead tank, can of warm, foaming Budweiser in
hand, urging and coaxing as much death and destruction to the enemy
as his detachment could deliver.
An account in the widely acclaimed History of the
Vietnam War
by Ernest Stevens concluded, "If General Pratt Houston would
have had the real support of President Nixon and the American people,
Houston would have single handedly wiped every Vietcong off the face
of the planet." When Houston did not get that kind of backing
and when he learned that American college students had turned against
his country, he became chronically confused.
Houston was the last American officer to leave
Vietnam. Fatigues
encrusted with rice paddy mud, face blackened with camouflage grease
paint, he continued to fire his M-16 into the jungle as the chopper
flew to a waiting carrier. The Navy gunner who finally yanked the
weapon out of Houston's hands was startled to see tears running down
the General's face making rivulets of mud in the dry dust. Houston
had become very much insane.
As a matter of fact the more unbalanced Houston
became, the more he
was promoted until, after only twenty years in the service, he had
advanced to the rank of Four Star General, was charged with the
duties of Army Chief of Staff and had gone totally bonkers. His
paranoia and bizarre notions about the communist threat deepened and
became even more convoluted with every day of his appointment. The
softening of relations with Russia particularly infuriated him. To
his thinking, glasnost was nothing more than a premeditated
Soviet plot to weaken the U.S. strategic position. Houston was
absolutely convinced that the on-going reciprocal arms and NATO troop
reductions had been intentionally contrived to foster global
complacency. The Soviet offer of peaceful relations was nothing more
than a trick to encourage a false sense of trust—a communist
ploy to achieve the Soviet's primary and unwavering goal of world
domination. He often asserted to the President that the Soviet
submarine fleet continued to proliferate and still embraced more than
enough multiple and retargetable nuclear warheads to forthrightly
annihilate the United States with a preemptive attack—
especially now that world attention was focused on the
Mid-East.
Houston asserted that the much ballyhooed demilitarization process
had obviously not made a significant change in the overall strategic
balance. Bush and the vote hungry members of congress were inanely
playing into communist hands.
Houston believed that one of two possibilities were
inevitable: either
Gorbachev was a fake and his outward manifestations of
liberalism were merely a facade, or Gorbachev was in fact legit and
he would never last. The die hard communist party would replace him
with a mainstream party member true to the dogma of the past. And
then the blade of Soviet doctrine would slide effortlessly back into
the well worn groove of subterfuge and international intrigue. To
Houston, the stakes were simply too high to take the risk. Something
must be done and the time was ripe for action. With Bush and his
cronies playing kiss ass to the Russians, Soviet security would be at
an all time low—an opportunity too precious to waste.
Houston's first move was to convince the President to
authorize a new
post in the government to be known as the Office of Technology. In
this station, Houston automatically assumed the authority to direct
and oversee the development and integration of all newly developed
defense systems within each branch of the military. Houston argued
successfully that a coordinating bureau was desperately needed in
order to maintain inter-branch system compatibility and
interchangeability as a plethora of new high tech systems came on
line as a result of the War in the Gulf. His point that without a
coordinating clearinghouse each branch of the service would be likely
to procure technology from their own favored, independent sources was
looked on favorably by the President and the Congress.
Houston's early insistence that the President put an
end to the
Iraqi war by using tactical nuclear weapons had been such a dangerous
idea politically that the top brass in the Administration were
relieved that the General seemed to have been only moderately
involved in the conflict—even to the extent of having turned
over all field command decisions to General Schwarzkoff. And in
light of the forever compounding savings and loan fiasco, Houston's
proposal to cut costs (and stay out of the way) were well received.
Thus the new Office of Technology was given an inordinately prompt
birth.
But in reality, Houston had de facto gained an inside
position of
power superior to that of his fellow Chiefs of Staff. The General's
authority now encompassed all forms of technology throughout the
military complex—including approval rights for all new weaponry
purchased by the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps. His coup d'
e'tat had caught the military establishment off guard with no time to
prepare a logical counter proposal. Too late they realized Houston's
adept political maneuvering, but since another election year loomed
on the horizon, they understood that opposition to any sure fire
scheme to cut the budget deficit would be impossible to circumvent. At
the same time, those high ranking military officers that opposed
Houston continued to have their hands full in the aftermath of the
Gulf War.
Houston immediately used his newly acquired power to
initiate a
tightly guarded secret operation intended to destroy the USSR.
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