The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [124]
"Mister Chairman, might I put in about two bits' worth of questions, just to earn my keep?"
"I yield to my friend, the gentleman from Montana."
"Thank you kindly." The Senator pulled at his weathered beak of a nose for a long moment as if tugging loose whatever was stored in his head, then addressed the OWI chief. "There's one setup here in the scheme of things you're in charge of that I'm a little curious about. It for some reason gets funded as a 'project'—year after year, I might add—instead of a line item. I think you know the one I mean."
The OWI man smoothed back his hair and made his bureaucratic escape. "The colonel, here with me, will need to address that."
"Trot the fellow on up to the witness chair," drawled the Senator.
Hastily tucking away the dispatches he had been skimming, the colonel took the seat indicated. He was barely there before the Senator was asking, "How about enlightening us on just what your agency does?"
"Glad to, Senator. At TPWP we—"
"Where I come from," the Senator interrupted, "big initials like that are only used on the hides of cows. Might we have the full name of your outfit for the record?"
"Naturally." The colonel cleared his throat. "The Threshold Press War Project was conceived to disseminate news stories about our armed forces that otherwise would not reach the public. To fill a void in the home front's awareness, you could say."
"Why is the government in the business of dishing out news, through you?"
"If I may explain, Senator. The larger newspapers have their own war correspondents or the financial wherewithal to subscribe to the wire services. Our mission is to provide items of interest to the less prosperous news enterprises, primarily the smaller dailies and weeklies."
"That's all the newspapers in my neck of the woods," the Senator noted. "Would you say people in states such as mine get their picture of the war pretty much from you?"
"A decent proportion of it, Senator, if we're doing our job right," the colonel said carefully. "We want the folks at home to know the great service to this country their sons and daughters are providing—it's all part of the war effort."
The Senator leaned forward with a long-jawed smile, one old wolf to another. "Furnish them some heroes to help keep their morale up, would you say?"
"The genuine exploits of our fighting men and women deserve to be told, in our view," the colonel skirted that as wide as he could. "I would submit, Senator, that your constituents are as eager as any others for such news."
"In Montana we're a little leery of bragging people up too much ever since General Custer," the Senator stated, drawing laughter in the hearing room. He studied the colonel as if marking his place in a chapter, then sat back saying: "No further questions for now, Mister Chairman."
"Let's have a chin-chin about what's wanted of you, Captain Reinking," the colonel came out with now, still occupying a corner of the desktop in all apparent ease. He paused to tap one of the little Cuban stinkers out of a cigarillo pack and fire it up with a flick of his lighter. Considerately he blew the smoke away from Ben and at the same time fixed total attention on him. "You seem a bit bothered by the recent course of events in your war coverage. I sympathize, over Angelides and Prokosch—'the dear love of comrades,' as I believe a poet put it. But the war did not end with them. There are still your other teammates—"
"That's what's on my mind, sir," Ben could not stop himself. "The way it's turned out, some of the guys barely stood a chance of making it through while others—" He halted, not sure where the next words would take him.
"Share it out bold, Captain. It's just the two of us here."
Ben mustered it for all he was worth.
"How much has Tepee—TPWP had to do with where the ten besides me have ended up in the war?"
The colonel