Clairy’s concerns were mounting, but she hid them. “I don’t know what could be such a big deal—my father was about the straightest arrow who ever lived. Unless he had some kind of secret life...”
“No secret life. But something he convinced himself threatened the foundation of the United States Marine Corps—something he was willing to bend, or break, the rules over.”
“Robert ‘Mac’ McKinnon a rule-breaker?” Clairy laughed, albeit nervously. “Come on...”
“I never knew it of him before. But when he chose to, he did it the way he did everything—in the extreme.”
Stress was making Clairy impatient. “Okay. So if you’re going to tell me, tell me.”
Quinn closed his eyes, arched his eyebrows and took another moment to gather himself.
After a deep breath, he said, “I think you know how Mac felt about women in the military—”
“He hated it with a passion. He said there was nothing a man couldn’t do and in the military that’s how it should be. Women were just a distraction. The one time I said I wanted to join—hoping that would make him like me as well as he liked you—he blew up!”
“I remember,” Quinn confirmed. “His ‘no women in the military’ was a pretty regular Mac rant.”
“Mac rant,” Clairy repeated. “That’s a good name for them. He had an opinion on everything. He never thought he was wrong, no one could convince him that he was, and he liked to hammer his point home over and over again,” Clairy said.
“That’s what I called a Mac rant,” Quinn confirmed affectionately, as if that aspect of the General’s personality had amused him. His fondness for her father was still clearly in play under the surface of this.
Whatever this was...
Quinn sobered again. “But when push came to shove—when regulations and protocols changed, progressed—he might have bitched, but he did what we all do. He followed orders, made the changes. Mac was old-school—”
“Old old-school when it came to this.”
“But I never knew him not to do the right thing. So when it came to women in the marines, in combat, regardless of his opinions and gripes, when that started happening, I thought he was doing what he was supposed to do.”
“You thought he was, but he wasn’t?”
“We talked about women in the marines more times than I can count. The marines are—”
“The toughest of the tough—I know,” Clairy said, repeating what she’d heard both her father and Quinn say.
Quinn didn’t comment on that; he merely went on. “We agreed that exceptions shouldn’t be given for women in the marines. We agreed that they needed to meet the same standards every marine needs to meet, that if they couldn’t, they shouldn’t be marines. We agreed that to be in the field with women, on a mission with women, we all had to be able to rely on them the same way we rely on any other marine.”
“In other words, there were parts of what my father was against that you supported.”
“Parts. Where we disagreed was that women could meet the standards, do the job—Mac thought that women were always a weak link. But I’d seen women who were good, capable marines and I told Mac so. I said that if they proved themselves the same way men did, they had a right to do the same jobs.”
Quinn got points with her for that, even if it did surprise her that he not only held that viewpoint, but had also grown into someone who could—and would—disagree with the bullheaded Mac McKinnon. “But, of course, that didn’t budge my father from his opinion because nothing and no one ever did.”
“No, it didn’t change his mind,” Quinn confirmed. “But he had me convinced that it was all just academic—that while it might be begrudging and reluctant, while he’d likely never put a woman in a crucial position himself, he was still following guidelines, protocols, laws and regulations about female personnel.”
“Only he wasn’t?”
Quinn didn’t seem eager to admit that. And didn’t at first. “The only thing my side of the argument accomplished was to make him hide what he was doing from me. Until I showed up earlier than expected at Camp Lejeune five months ago and overheard him giving orders to someone who didn’t dare buck him, someone who was trying to reason with him, who was pointing out the glaring difference—the risks, and that safety measures were being removed—in what he was setting up for the two women trainees.”
“He was making it riskier and purposely less safe for the women than the men?”
“Mac always set the bar higher for us all, which sometimes added some risk, but it was worth it—it made us better, stronger. But this was more than that. Worse... After I heard what I heard, I asked him what the hell he was doing. It was pretty clear that I wasn’t supposed to have heard. He got more defensive than I’d ever seen him. He just went off—”
“It never took much to get a rise out of him,” Clairy said, familiar with her father’s tirades.
“He said it was bad enough to have women marines at all, but women in special ops? They especially didn’t belong there and he wasn’t standing for it. He admitted to me that he was going to make them fail, come hell or high water. And once he got started on his rant, he said some things that made me think this wasn’t new or just about women in special ops...”
Quinn paused, clearly not relishing speaking against his mentor. Clairy had the impression that he saw this as a betrayal.
But he seemed to push himself to do it anyway, as if he was convinced he had to. “At Camp Lejeune, the orders Mac gave would have put the two women trainees in genuine jeopardy. They were strong, exemplary marines—they’d weathered everything he’d thrown at them. So he was stacking the deck against them, and that upped the odds that they might not have come out in one piece.” Quinn’s disbelief that the General would do something like that echoed in his voice.
Clairy understood how difficult it had to have been for him to discover that the man he’d idolized—the man he’d fashioned himself after—had flaws. But her father having flaws was not news to her, and while it wasn’t easy to learn what she was learning about the General, it didn’t hit her the way it did Quinn.
Still, she wanted to make sure she understood completely. “And my father knew that he was putting the women in higher danger?”
“He knew,” Quinn said, as if he wished it had been otherwise. “He knew exactly what he was doing—he said it was what he had to do.”
There was a note in Quinn’s voice that must have been similar to the tone her father had used, because he made it sound reasonable.
Then it was Quinn’s own conscience that finished what he’d been about to say. “But this was bad, Clairy...”
Another pause, another moment when Clairy thought Quinn was struggling with his loyalty to her father. She could see how torn he was between that and doing what he thought was right.
But eventually he continued. “I thought about the other things Mac had said—they made me wonder how long he’d been at this, how far he might have already gone with women assigned to him for combat. I decided I’d better do some digging, beginning with Camp Lejeune, where I made sure the specially designed training they’d been assigned was postponed. It wasn’t easy to get people to talk honestly to me, because my connection to Mac made me the last person anyone wanted to squeal to—”
“That can’t surprise you,” Clairy said.
“I always did have his back...” Quinn responded, as if now he wasn’t so sure that had been wise. “But it wasn’t only that there was suspicion that I might be testing them on behalf of Mac. I talked to one former officer who had served in a unit I’d also served in under Mac, and found out that part of Tom’s orders to make life harder for any woman in the unit was to also make sure I was kept completely in the dark about it—”
“So there were times when this was being done right under your nose?”
“I gues
s so,” he admitted reluctantly. “And that made me analyze things that I’d seen myself, incidents I’d written off, justified with my own opinion that if any woman couldn’t cut it, they didn’t belong with us...”
There was more hesitation, more reluctance to talk.
Then Quinn again seemed to force himself.
“In retrospect, I realized that I had seen a few things where Mac could have been purposely putting a woman in harm’s way. I remembered even questioning him about his orders once or twice, but he’d said he was giving the woman the chance to prove herself to the men, to gain their respect. I remembered thinking at the time that had validity, that whenever I was assigned a woman—while I never put them in any position that could get them killed—I did use them sparingly, hold them back until I was convinced they really could cut it, so—”
“You’d bought it.”
“And I shouldn’t have,” he said flatly. “Looking at those times through a new lens, I started to see that Mac was setting those women up to fail, hoping to show them and everyone else that they couldn’t do it, to scare them off. I think that if they were hurt in the process, getting them sent home or transferred out of combat duty—or at least reassigned so he didn’t have to deal with them—was worth it to him.”
As all of this was beginning to sink in, Clairy realized that she was less stunned by her father’s willingness to take some kind of action to get women out of the marines than Quinn was. In fact, she saw an added element to it that meant something else to her.
She’d had so many years of feeling as if, to her father, she mattered less than Quinn, that she was invisible, insignificant, irrelevant. So many years when she’d felt as if her father hadn’t liked her, as if she’d somehow disappointed him, as if she wasn’t enough, as if there was something wrong with her.
But to hear now that he’d felt this strongly even against women striving for what his entire life had been about opened her eyes to a facet of the General that she’d never considered. And that caused her to wonder if maybe her father had been so much of a sexist that he’d seen not just her, but all women as having less worth than men, that in his eyes no woman could rise to his standards or be worthy of anything but insignificant status.
And if that was true, it shed new light on her relationship with him.
Maybe it hadn’t been about her...
Maybe it hadn’t even been about Quinn commandeering her father’s attention.
Maybe this was wholly her father’s failure.
Quinn was lost in his own thoughts and didn’t seem to notice that Clairy had been, too. But then he began again. “After just the quick-and-dirty look into it that I did, after what I opened my own eyes to, I had to put a stop to it,” he said, his furrowed brow even more deeply troubled with that announcement. “We had one hell of a fight that night, Clairy...”
Why did that sound like a confession with a plea for understanding? For mercy, maybe?
“I told him I knew what he’d been doing, and I gave him an ultimatum—I told him he needed to step down and put in for retirement.”
“But if he didn’t?”
“I said that I’d formally report him.”
That hung as heavily in the air as Clairy knew it had to have felt to Quinn when he’d made the threat.
“Would you have?” she asked quietly.
“Yes.”
No hesitation, no wavering—only strength, determination and sorrow.
“What did he say?”
“One hell of a fight...” Quinn repeated. “We went back and forth until after one a.m. It was as ugly as it could have been. But ultimately, he knew I meant what I said, that I’d follow through...” Quinn smiled the saddest smile Clairy had ever seen. “He said he didn’t doubt it because it was what he’d made of me...”
This pause was the longest of them all, with Quinn looking past her. She had the sense that he was reliving that night, that fight.
“Then I left,” he said ominously. “And when I came back at zero six hundred, I found his aide there...” Quinn looked Clairy in the eye again, as if he had to. “Mac had had the heart attack sometime between when I left and when I went back...”
Clairy stared at him as she began to absorb what he was telling her.
She’d known that Quinn was at Camp Lejeune visiting her father when he’d died. She’d known the heart attack had happened during the night, that he’d been alone at the time. She hadn’t known that just shortly before that heart attack her father had had a heated confrontation and been given a career-ending ultimatum by the man he’d considered his son.
She wasn’t sure what to think, what to feel.
But as that information hit her and she analyzed her own response, she discovered that it was sympathy for Quinn and what it had to mean to him that was uppermost in her mind.
“You feel like you caused the heart attack,” she commented in a near whisper.
“It was a bad fight, Clairy,” he reiterated. “I was making him do something he wanted never to do—leave the marines.”
And Quinn’s remorse was so huge it was almost palpable in the air.
“There was one thing you didn’t know about him,” Clairy said. “One thing that didn’t make his heart attack a surprise to Mim and me because we were the only people—outside of his doctors—who knew it. He wasn’t well, Quinn.”
Quinn’s brow furrowed even more. “What do you mean he wasn’t well?”
“A year ago he came to Denver without warning. He said he hadn’t been feeling well and he wanted to see a private doctor, that he was going to pay for it out of his own pocket so it was completely off the record. He said he didn’t want any decline in his health known by anyone in the marines because he wasn’t going to be forced into a medical discharge.”
“That sounds like Mac. But he didn’t even tell me?”
Clairy heard in Quinn’s voice what had been in her own so many times—the shock and disbelief at learning that the General had excluded him. So she understood what had to be going through Quinn’s mind. “He knew you well enough to keep what he was doing to women marines from you—he probably knew you were by-the-book enough not to let him go on working when he shouldn’t have.”
Quinn’s only response was another raise of his eyebrows that confirmed her theory.
“Anyway,” Clairy said, to get to the point, “when I took him for his appointment, the internist sent him from his office straight to the emergency room. A cardiologist there did a full workup—his heart was in bad, bad shape. The cardiologist didn’t know how he was still walking around. Apparently, he’d already had a heart attack—”
“Something he’d felt? Or some kind of silent thing?”
“He knew it. It’s what brought him to Denver—apparently, he’d had a physical the January before, gotten a clean bill of health. But in late May he’d been alone, had chest pain and passed out. He was still alone when he came to, he didn’t feel well, but—” Clairy shrugged “—you know how he was. He wasn’t going to let it keep him down. Still, he figured whatever it had been hadn’t been good. That’s when he decided he was only going to see a civilian doctor—”
“And went to Denver,” Quinn said.
“The cardiologist called in a surgeon—they wanted to schedule him for immediate valve replacement surgery and a pacemaker. The cardiologist said Mac needed to retire, change his diet and lifestyle, that he’d need to take medications to thin his blood, and a half-dozen other drugs if he had any hope of his heart not giving out at any moment—”
“And he wouldn’t do it,” Quinn said, making an educated guess.
“He wouldn’t even consider it,” Clairy confirmed. “Mim and I both went round and round with him, and in spite of the cardiologist telling him point-blank that he was asking for a massive heart attack that could come at any time, he said he’d rather go out
that way than live twenty more years not being a marine. The most he would agree to do was take the training command at Camp Lejeune rather than more active duty—”
“So that’s why he did that! I wondered but he wouldn’t give me a straight answer when I asked him.”
“He was a ticking time bomb,” Clairy said, finishing what she’d been about to say.
“And I threatened him with losing what he would have rather died than give up...”
Clairy had meant to decrease Quinn’s feelings of guilt, not increase them. “My point is—the blame was his own, Quinn,” she said more firmly, in hopes of convincing him he wasn’t at fault. “The only thing that mattered to my father was to do things his own way and, in this, that meant to be a marine right to the end—”
“Which was what he was fighting for with me.”
“You offered him the option of just stepping down gracefully before what he was doing was exposed—which it probably would have been, because eventually someone would have blown the whistle—and he refused. The heart doctor offered him help and he refused. Nobody could protect him from himself,” Clairy concluded.
Quinn shook his head, and Clairy had the impression that nothing she said was causing him to relinquish what he clearly saw as his part in his mentor’s death. “It still shouldn’t have been me, of all people, who—”
Clairy decided to take a different approach. “I understand how you see this,” she said. “But it had to be you who went up against him over the women he was putting in jeopardy. No one else—no one—carried the weight with him that you did. No one meant as much to him as you did. So no one else could have stopped him. And if you hadn’t, if you had let him go on doing what he was doing even after you knew, then any injury any woman suffered at his hands would have been as much your fault as his.”
Quinn conceded to that only with another raise of his eyebrows, which compelled Clairy to go on trying to lessen the weight he was carrying about this.
The Major Gets it Right Page 14