Generally Speaking

by Claudia J. Kennedy

  Colonel Morrissey thought a moment. “Lieutenant, make a list of everything you do and we'll look into it.”

  I listed the thirty-odd tasks assigned to me, some of them definitely odder than others. But all of them could have been done by a corporal or junior sergeant with a modicum of training. When Colonel Morrissey read my list he tried to enhance the assignment somewhat. But basically he was satisfied that I was indeed in the right job. After all, this was the kind of work WAC officers were good at—always had been, always would be.

  As a new lieutenant in my twenties, I didn't see any way out, but I did make the best of the situation. My assignment was like most entry-level positions. It's best just to use the experience to learn as much as possible while recognizing that the frustration will end and that you'll get more challenge in the next assignment. Recently, I had the chance to talk about this issue with my cousin Lele, a smart young woman with a degree in business who is interested in advancing into a management position in retail fashion sales. Lele currently works as an assistant manager for a nationwide retail chain, having risen from a salesclerk after graduation.

  But she had a problem and called me for advice. Her current store manager is not very competent. She makes a lot of professional mistakes that ultimately reflect on her staff. In comparison to Lele's previous manager, this boss is much less efficient, and Lele does not see the situation improving. Although she would like to stay with the company, Lele does not want to remain working for her current manager.

  “How can I get out of this?” she wanted to know, seeking a graceful way to be transferred. If she couldn't find any, she was prepared to resign.

  I suggested she look at the problem in a different way. “Maybe it's better to ask, ‘What can I get out of the situation?’”

  Obviously, Lele's position is not ideal. But she should consider her entry-level job an apprenticeship, as she knows the stages of the company's career ladder she will have to climb as she gains experience: assistant manager to associate manager to full store manager. The current job, while often frustrating, gives her the chance to work hard, show her competence, and to learn everything about retail management she can while the actual responsibility of management rests on someone else's shoulders.

  Before coming to me for advice, she had raised the issue of her dissatisfaction with a higher-level manager in hopes of being transferred to a different store. But she had been far too tentative in her comments about the problem out of a sense of loyalty to her store manager. The discussion was inconclusive and left Lele even more frustrated. Her reticence and sense of professional isolation are typical, I think, of many young women who lack the cohesive social bonds of clubs and after-hours sports camaraderie that their men colleagues often enjoy. On the golf course and the racquetball court, for example, these men receive informal but invaluable feedback on their job performance. But young women often lack such support networks.

  Regardless, I told her, now was the time to find out the specific professional skills she needs to acquire before promotion to associate manager. I told her not to miss this opportunity by continuing to remain reticent. Go back to that senior manager (or other knowledgeable people in the store) and ask him to help you learn the business. Don't worry about your mixed feelings toward to your current boss. Just focus on the work, the daily tasks, the myriad skills that go into your profession.

  The important lesson here is that young women can act in their own self-interest while remaining loyal to their organizations and their values, if they discuss the professional situation dispassionately and without personal reference to others involved.

  As a young WAC lieutenant, of course, I was yet to learn these lessons. In fact, I wasn't sure what my professional goals were. And the WAC Branch assignment officers weren't much help. The conclusion of my two-year minimum service obligation was approaching, and as much as I enjoyed the New England lobsters and winter snowfalls, I was seriously considering leaving the Army unless I got a more challenging assignment. The branch suggested a transfer that would have freed me from my administrative job a few months early, but then I asked if the new job would require training. I had requested a course in personnel management because at least that training would indicate that the subsequent assignment would be more demanding. But the new job required no special training.

  “I'm not interested.”

  Next came an enticing proposal to be interviewed for an assignment as the junior aide to the Commander-in-Chief-Pacific. “It's in Honolulu, Lieutenant,” the captain at Branch told me on the phone.

  Now that did sound exciting. “What about training?” I asked.

  “Not necessary.”

  “Why did they pick me?”

  “Well,” the captain said in a confidential tone, “they saw you in the LSD file.”

  “What's that?”

  She explained that the Little Sexy Doll file contained just the photo of junior WAC officers—no records of professional attributes—a system that was sometimes used to choose women for prestigious positions as aides to senior officers solely on the basis of their looks. I was not interested in the job. And I was also disappointed that the Women's Army Corps enabled such an obvious assault on professionalism. How were the men leading the Army ever going to take us seriously if we undermined ourselves in this way?

  This period was one of those low points in which one either leaves the Army to start over or one digs in and tries to make the best of choices that are imperfect. I simply did not see how any future in the Army would work out, but I thought I had to pursue two alternatives simultaneously: one, see what the civilian world had to offer; two, press on to examine where the Army might lead. If I had known then just how deeply and how rapidly the Army was going to be transformed in the coming years, I would not have felt the anguish I did in my final months at Fort Devens. But I didn't own a crystal ball. The future was uncertain, and uncertainty often creates negative emotions. But I've since come to understand that just because uncertainty about the future—especially our professional future—makes us feel uncomfortable, these negative feelings do not mean the future itself is bleak. That too is important information for a potential leader considering major decisions that will impact one's career. Learn to be comfortable with uncertainty.

  Exercising my options, I went to Boston, and bought a good civilian suit to wear at a job interview for a corporate administrative position. Alternatively, if I decided to enter law school, I knew that after two years of the Army I had the discipline to make it through.

  But I wasn't ready to leave the Army. Despite my impatience to receive more responsibility, I had made friends at Fort Devens; there was camaraderie, a shared sense of duty that had become passé in the cynical civilian world. In the end, I decided to remain in the Army.

  I was promoted to captain, and learned of a potentially interesting assignment. Army recruiting command had regional positions for WAC officer recruiters open in Buffalo, Syracuse, and Concord, New Hampshire. It was an independent style of working, making the rounds of college campuses. The New Hampshire office also covered eastern Vermont and Maine, beautiful country.

  And, deep down, I always hoped the Army would work out for me. I accepted the recruiting assignment and moved to Concord in June 1971. My boss at the recruiting main station was Major Robert Smith, an Infantry officer who knew the service well. He was an energetic leader who wanted the transition to the All-Volunteer Army, which was rumbling toward us faster than anyone had imagined, to proceed as smoothly as possible. But WAC officer recruiting had not been going well.

  “We hope that you will make mission,” the major told me. “The officer you're replacing started strong but has had a slow year.”

  “Making mission” was one of those ubiquitous Army recruiting catchphrases. The phrase meant recruiting a minimum number of WAC officers from a rather large number of campuses. After looking at my district's demographics and the colleges in the area, I simply knew, There's no way I can't
make mission.

  But when I made my first college visit, I discovered that the recruiting brochures meant to attract college seniors to the Army listed a pay scale of only $223 a month, a figure years out of date, and certainly not competitive with civilian salaries of that time. No college graduate would be interested in that kind of pay. Later that winter, after I had replaced the old brochures, my first campus appointments in Maine coincided with the season's worst blizzards. I found myself driving the underpowered government sedan with no power steering (and a tiny steering wheel) through whiteouts, smack dab into fender-deep snow-drifts. Farmers kindly pulled my car out of the snowbanks with their tractors. I had been at the job several months and I could count the number of recruitments on one hand.

  At that stage, needless to say, I was not enjoying my work as a WAC recruiter. I'd be twenty-six before my Army obligation ended. Would there be a life for me outside the Army? Driving my lonely rounds across the bleak tundra of northern New England, stretching my limited per diem at bargain motels to save money, I felt mounting unease. But I persisted. My parents had taught me to complete an obligation once I'd accepted it. And that was what I intended to do.

  Then one snowy January afternoon at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, I met with some seniors who seemed interested. They'd read all the official material, but obviously needed a kicker to clinch the deal.

  “If you join the Army,” I told them honestly, “you'll meet a lot of good-looking guys.” Then I looked out the stained glass windows of the student union at the drifting snow. “And we'll train you in a nice warm climate.”

  Eventually several enlisted. After this victory, my standard approach was not just to give facts, but also offer a glimpse of the type of life the Army created for women.

  Within a few months, persistence began to pay off. I recruited women at almost every campus I visited. Not only did I make mission, but I was recruiting so many that I was filling more training “seats” than my district was allocated and Branch gave me a ceiling. But I kept recruiting because so many women wanted to join the Army. Instead of turning them away, I called my colleagues in other districts and offered them my approved applicants for their credit and their seats. They were more than pleased to accept them on their books.

  One contributor to this success was Sara Zuretti, a runner-up in the Miss New Hampshire contest, whom I had recruited in her last year at a local university. She was a January graduate and had six months to wait before beginning the Basic Course. But I convinced Branch to swear her in as a second lieutenant and let her wear her uniform while accompanying me on my campus tours. Sara also was a real hit in a local TV publicity blitz we launched promoting the All-Volunteer Army. When she met the governor of New Hampshire in her well-tailored green uniform, the people in our public affairs office joked she'd gotten so much airtime that she'd land his job in the next election. I couldn't have been happier.

  I suppose this is the kind of pleasure a successful salesperson derives from a job well done. But for me, there was more. I had persisted for over two years, learning the apprenticeship of an entry-level officer under sometimes tedious conditions. But now I was perfectly happy to complete the recruiting assignment and I looked forward to my next Army job.

  In my last year of that assignment, our recruiting station at the Federal Building in Concord received an impossibly complex manpower survey, one of the bureaucratic legacies of some earlier Pentagon dynasty. The crux of the report was to document how all the civilians and soldiers had used their time during the previous year, divided into labyrinthine blocks of one-quarter hour. The survey would have been laughable had our future budget and allocation of people not depended on completing every box, subparagraph, and column of numbers in the multipage document. The task remained incomplete for several weeks, casting a pall like an unexploded bomb over all who wanted to avoid dealing with it. One morning when Sergeant Major Calais stopped by my cubicle to see me, he warned, “It may be you that has to do it, Captain.”

  “Oh no, Sergeant Major,” I said adamantly. “I've got to make mission, and I don't know a thing about manpower surveys.”

  He suggested he knew a civil servant who might help if I got stuck with the job.

  But about a week before the dreaded report was due, Major Smith reassigned the survey to me. “You're going to have to do this. We don't have much time. But we will give you all the help you need.”

  That amounted to three typists and two crusty civilian budget specialists from the Army Reserve center. “Just make sure the numbers total accurately,” one advised me. But there were literally thousands of figures that had to be added. On the next to last day of the ordeal, which promised to be a long one, Major Smith put on his coat and hat to head home for dinner with his family. He paused before my desk, noting the heaps of legal pads and half-completed budget forms, and the three typists pounding away furiously.

  “It's a real nightmare, isn't it?”

  It certainly was. But we completed the job. I felt good about getting it done even though it had literally been dumped in my lap. There is an Army tradition of giving junior officers quick reaction challenges, and it probably didn't matter that I was a woman. My persistence in completing the irksome, bureaucratic labor of the manpower study raised my stock in Major Smith's estimation.

  A few months later, toward the end of my assignment in Concord, a colonel from the recruiting district visited the station. Major Smith had spoken to him positively about my work.

  “You've been here two years, Captain?” the colonel asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It's time for you to command a company.”

  I thought he was a mind reader because that was exactly the next assignment I was hoping for. But I told him I didn't see any way I could go from an obscure job in recruiting to company command without some interim step.

  “No, Captain,” he insisted. “It is time for you to command a company.”

  “I'll never know how much of a role Major Smith played in all this—perhaps because of my diligence in making the WAC officer recruiting objectives and completing the manpower survey— but the colonel apparently put in a good word about my work with the WAC staff advisor to First U.S. Army, Lieutenant Colonel Doris Caldwell. In June 1973, I received orders to report back to Fort McClellan to take command of a company.

  The United States had officially withdrawn combat forces from Vietnam, but we kept a large covert paramilitary presence in Indochina, waiting to see when the communists would renew their long war of “national liberation.” In principle, the North Vietnamese had repatriated all living American prisoners of war, although many doubted that all of our missing in action had died. Like many others, I kept a copper bracelet with the name of a missing-in-action American, a young Army helicopter pilot who never returned. But at least American troops were no longer dying each night on the CBS Evening News, and the nation's political and emotional wounds could begin to heal. As I would learn, however, that process in the Army would take a while.

  When I arrived back at Fort McClellan that summer, the post was buzzing with activity. The Army's “draw down” from its high Vietnam War troop levels had returned hundreds of thousands of young draftees with up to a year remaining in uniform from Southeast Asia to America. Fort McClellan, like other stateside posts, had absorbed its share of these soldiers, some of whom were directionless and undisciplined, and others who had never made it overseas. Many had acquired drug habits in Vietnam or elsewhere in the Army. They'd been assigned to Fort McClellan because the post had one of the better drug and alcohol treatment programs in the Army.

  Simultaneously, the Army was racing to finish preparations for the All-Volunteer Force, as the draft had officially ended on June 30, 1973. The Women's Army Corps was straining to expand its ranks almost 80 percent in order to provide officers and enlisted women to fill the thousands of jobs that the Army Chief of Staff's personnel planners in the Pentagon envisioned would be otherwise unfilled in
the All-Volunteer Army. That meant the WAC officer-training program at Fort McClellan would have to expand and additional enlisted women Basic Training courses would be established at Fort Jackson, South Carolina.

  I hoped to be assigned command of a training company. But when my Basic Course friends Captains Sara Parsons and Lenita Sterry and I arrived for assignment interviews at the office of Lieutenant Colonel Virginia L. Heseman, the WAC School Commandant, the colonel saw Sara and Lenita before me. They both received training companies.

  “I'm assigning you command of Staff and Faculty Company, Claudia,” Colonel Heseman said.

  I didn't hide my disappointment. To me, this seemed like performing a support function rather than the primary mission of the training center. I envisioned clerks and supply corporals issuing endless disposition forms, counting mountains of sheets and pillowcases, making sure the fans were turning and the toilets flushing in the three-story cinder block barracks where the instructors were housed. This was hardly the kind of company command I had envisioned.

  “Is it because my brass isn't shiny enough, ma'am?” I asked rather despairingly. I had just arrived the day before, and my cord uniform was not as flawlessly pressed as those worn by everyone around me, hardly a good example for the commanding officer of a training company.

  Colonel Heseman smiled. “I've given you this assignment for a reason and it has nothing to do with your insignia. I believe you'll find this a very challenging command.”

  When I reported to my office in a small building near the big concrete barracks in the WAC Training Battalion Area, I quickly learned what kind of challenges Colonel Heseman had in mind. My first sergeant, Betty J. Benson, a career WAC and one of the wisest soldiers I've ever served with—who had just been the first WAC graduate of the Army's prestigious Sergeants Major Academy—presented me the company roster. Of the 230 soldiers assigned to me, one third were men. And more were reporting for duty to the company weekly. The practice prohibiting women officers from commanding men had just been changed. My predecessor, Captain Mary Morgan (who would go on to retire in 1998 as a brigadier general), had been the first woman officer to command a significant number of men, and I would be the second. The proportion of men in my company would rise to over one half by the end of my two-year command.