Brothers in Arms

HE NEW YORK

a self-styled newspaper of record, tells us of the life and recent death of a celebrated fighter pilot who elected to fight in three of our national wars (World War II, Korea and Vietnam). He was also my stepbrother. How did

this happen? Like so much in our lives it was brought on by the boredom and dis­satisfaction of one Nina Gore Auchincloss Olds, whose restlessness with marriage of almost any sort was to bring together the unique aviation family of Major General

Robert Olds. Like most of the military fliers of his gen­eration, Olds had aggressively favored what was called in those days "a separate independent Air Force" in place of the Army Air Forces. And thanks to him, my father and others, a separate entity still known as the U.S. Air Force came into existence: Its birth was heralded by Bob Olds's period of service in the 1930s as a young military aide to , the fabled brigadier general Billy Mitchell, whose thesis ' was that airpower was bound to dominate sea power. Bob himself was to demonstrate this by sinking an ancient battleship called the Utah, an adventure that demon­strated even to the most die-hard admiral what airpower

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would be in our next war: not only decisive but preenrH nent. Althouah mv mother had married a

wealthy Mr. Auchincloss only on condition I that there be no sexual activity between I them, he changed the rules not long after we all moved into his Virginia estate ; called, inaptly, Merrywood. Unhappily for] "\ him, although he wanted children, he could not have normal orgasm accompanied by the traditional erection which makes fes­tive such joyous matings, or so aficionados now assure me. I still recall the day beside the swimming pool at Merrywood when the general, a fairly constant visitor when Mr. Auchincloss was otherwise engaged in his brokerage house, arrived with a pair of

very large West Point boys, both of whom would magically become my stepbrothers when Olds and Nina were married in a suite at Washington, D.C.'s Wardman Park Hotel. On the right-hand page you can see the fully adult oldest son at the time he commanded a fighter wing in Vietnam. His younger brother Steven was not allowed to serve in the reconstructed Air Force on the grounds, the medic said, that his Hodgkin's disease would soon be fatal. Happily, it was not, and he enjoyed a long and useful life.

My mother's household was not a cozy place for the vari­ous children who were beginning to accumulate. Since both Olds boys were still at West Point I sometimes think that

had they arrived a bit earlier I might have suffered less from a physically disagreeable response to my mother, whose presence in my vicinity often brought on uncontrollable vomiting. In due course, more happily, I had begun to read about Robin, whose career as an athlete at West Point was being noticed by the press, as he was an all-American football player, much as my father had been in 1917. It is now odd for me to look to the left of this page and read the obitu­ary of Robin, who has in my mind not changed at all since he proved to be the most formidable ace in the short history of the Army Air Forces. Now dead, we are told, at 84 he concen­trated his last years on the develop­ment of airpower rather as my father

had during the same period of his life — or, indeed, Bob Olds had done when he founded the famous

Air Command for the transport of pilots and aircraft from the U.S. to the U.K.

After his enlistments in three air wars he was again successful in battle. Unlike most officers he did not settle into his generaihood, as he was far too restless for staff work. But he used his fame as a flier to get permission to return to combat duty, in Vietnam. Finally, when the Air Force Academy was invented, he was chosen to be the first com­mandant of cadets. He became notorious for a line he was heard to give voice to when­ever things seemed to him to be a bit dull: "Vietnam is not much of a war, but it's the only war we've got." He also had a running commentary on the irony of his becoming—thanks to my mother having married his father— stepbrother to the only true persis­tent enemy of the only war we had. • At the end of his service, he com­manded a fighter wing operating out of Germany. I have one very vivid memory of him on Bastille Day after the war when he and the beautiful Ella Raines, his movie-star wife, were walking along the right bank of the Seine; she wore a glittering

silver dress, and they were like new American gods come down to earth as a new era in history began. My father regarded Bob Olds as a tiresome bureaucrat somewhat out of place in the rather gung ho U.S. Air Force that the two of them had, perhaps more than any other high officers, helped create. Gene Vidal also saw in Robin a younger self while the whole lot of them remained dedicated to the necessity of an independent air force. What do I remember most of that time? For boys who lived almost entirely with death and its nearness, the early Air Force pilots were very lively. Robin's great charm was his sar­donic sense of humor. At a time when he thought the Royal Air Force was given far too much credit for stuff

he thought the Army Air Forces should be given some credit for, he grew a vast RAF mustache to show he

could do it too. This caused all sorts of consternation in the office of the chief of staff. But Robin held on to his mustache until he received orders to shave it off, dooming him to become a clean-shaven legend.

To end this military reminiscence I should note that the Army medics, after carefully misdiagnosing the problem I was having with my legs, let me go for sea duty. Robin, heroically, expanded his own legend in Vietnam, ending in the new Air Force Academy. As he had no son there will not be another General Olds as we had two in my lifetime: The ending of a story like Robin's is generally at Arlington. What made him so many times a func­tioning ace in the relatively new Army Air Forces, where he was already a unique figure, were his reenh'stments. As can be seen on this page. The New York Times illuminated in tts own lumi­nous prose what Keats would have called Robin's "cloudy trophies." While talking to a contemporary pilot-general like himself, Robin said, "What do you think ever happened to those god-awful generals that my father had to contend with in the First World War?" The other general said comfortingly, "Haven't you figured it out? They are us."

As commandant of the Air Force Acad­emy, Robin had come full circle in an astonishing (concluded on page 162)

BROTHERS

u'onlmufd from pagt 60) military branch of (he nation almost as high as that of his Meigs ancestor who served General Washington, obviously earthbound in those days. I faded from view with a Lime leg while, contrary to the best doctors at the Point, Steven Olds did not die promptly of Hodgkin's disease and was able to conduct a life as a husband and father of two handsome girls, whom I met by accident while campaign­ing for the U.S. Senate in California in 1982.

A question often asked of those mistakenly considered "only children": Were vou lonely as a child? True answer? No. In my lifetime there were already too main' people coming and going. However, had I known the Olds !x>ys earlier the dark side of Merrywood might have been much less stomach-turning. Steven, the stepsibling closest to me in age, became a friend, but, unfortunately, he wanted a career on the silver screen. For a time he sang on a Washington radio program. During this period, F.lla Raines told me Robin was jealous of our attachment. I also recall the powerful effect the film The Prime and the Pauper had on me as I watched a pair of American twins named Billy and Bobby Mauch, who enacted the leads in the film based on Mark Twain's novel, an intensely populist romance of the Prince of Wales and his look-alike poor boy from the l-ondon slums. I daydreamed about both twins. Later I got interested in the psychology of twins, as had Twain by the time he had written that darkest of American novels, ftidd'tihmd WiLvm, where a black baby is switched with a white one, and the "wrong" one gets shipped down the Mississippi to be sold to slave dealers and a short brutal life. It is the most chilling tale of those terrible days. When the Prince Bobby Mauch read my reference to the movie he wrote me about his reign as King Edward VI in England. We were not destined to meet though he lived relatively nearby in northern California. He had ceased to act but made his living as a film editor. His twin, Billy, lived on the East C/oast. It was like living in one of Henry James's ghost stories, both emotionally satisfying and tantalizing as one observed the poor of London rise against their masters while I.. .what? Fell in love with a ghost boy from the screen? He died not long after our corres(x>ndence began.

Robin faded into national legend, which t(X)k an <xld mm when whoever was president at the moment, along with other high officers of state, came to (lolorado Springs to celebrate some sort of anniversary, and Robin received them with a banquet and much gcxxl humor. Robin acted as gracious host to the brass, and perhaps as an unconscious response to the shaving of his magnificent mustache he enhanced his position as an American war­rior legend as the festive triumphant dinner ended. He looked about for something to relieve himself into: Ilils turned out to be an empty flower vase behind his chair at the ban­quet table, which he then proceeded to use, ending his career as an Air Force bureaucrat and placing himself firmly at the heart of an agreeable military legend. Robin, need I say, took early retirement at a ski resort in a place called, with Twainsian prcciseness. Steamboat Springs. Old Mark would have liked him. I did.

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