“Those assignments are all filled for the next three years,” the officer said.
So I asked MILPERCEN what kind of assignment they had in mind for me next. They offered three staff jobs outside my specialty, including an assignment as an imagery analyst.
I had no interest in any of these, but, in the Army, you either went where you were assigned, or you got out. As much as I regretted this option, I had to face reality. “What is the earliest date I can retire?” I asked the MILPERCEN officer.
“Don't worry,” he said. “We'll find you the right job. What kind of assignment would you like?”
“I'd like to command a recruiting battalion,” I said, realizing the request might seem unusual. But I'd always loved recruiting and recognized its importance to the Army's future.
“That's impossible,” the officer said. “We have a shortage of field-grade officers in MI and we have to keep them in the branch.”
It looked as if my Army service would end after twenty years.
But a week later, that MILPERCEN officer called back to ask if I was still interested in commanding a recruiting battalion. “We're underrepresented in women and minorities, so we would like to put your name on the slate to compete for a battalion, if you're still interested.”
“I'm still interested.”
It looked as if I might be staying in the Army after all.
I was selected for command of that battalion and worked harder than I ever have before or since. And while I commanded the battalion, I was promoted to full colonel, chosen to attend the Army War College, and selected to command the 703rd Military Intelligence Brigade in Hawaii.
Reflecting on those roller-coaster years, one important lesson becomes obvious. When I began to be treated in an unjust manner during my battalion slating, I took a stand. Although this action undoubtedly antagonized my first brigade commander, Colonel Simerly, what I had done did not harm me in the eyes of those Army leaders who understood the true dynamics of the situation. And the fact that I served in Augsburg under difficult circumstances with quiet self-discipline undoubtedly did not go unnoticed.
The reason I go into detail about these matters is to make it clear that no one can spend a thirty-two-year career completely free of conflict. And often that conflict poses crippling threats to one's career. We cannot control when those conflicts will arise and which military seniors or executive supervisors they will involve. But we can control our reaction to these serious differences.
One habit of self-discipline that I have cultivated is to maintain a sense of humor upon which I could draw during times of tension, even if only internally. Putting the relationship with the troublesome supervisor in perspective is also another successful tactic: Even though he might seem to loom large at the time, remember that you have literally scores of additional professional relationships that give balance to his one negative viewpoint.
6
Loyalty and Ethics
As I've noted, there were several times in my Army career when an unexpected phone call brought fortuitous news: my early promotion to major and my later selection to battalion command. In late 1979 I also got a call from a friend announcing that I had been selected to attend the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
I was working at my desk in the National Security Agency one Friday morning when the phone rang.
“Congratulations, Claudia,” my friend said.
“What for?” I asked, puzzled at his tone.
“You're going to CGSC. I just read the list in The Army Times.”
Attending the Command and General Staff College was considered an important milestone in a young field-grade Army officer's career. Moreover, those majors and lieutenant colonels who did not attend CGSC stood very little chance of commanding a battalion, of reaching the rank of full colonel, or of later being considered for promotion to general officer. Since I started work at the NSA, a succession of assignment officers had told me that I was in the top third of my peer group. Now I had confirmation that my persistence and hard work had in fact been recognized.
I was glad to be attending the college because CGSC had long been an Army tradition. Although Infantry, Armor, and Artillery officers formed the majority of each class, a much smaller percentage of officers from the other Army branches, from the Reserve components, other services, a few U.S. government civilians, and officers known as Allied Officers from abroad rounded out the student body.
The Command and General Staff College was an integral part of the Army's professional development system. And we knew that the Army was an honorable institution that had weathered the harshly disillusioning years of the Vietnam War and was struggling to rebuild itself on a foundation of professional excellence, discipline, and integrity. These were all Army attributes that had suffered during the long conflict in Indochina, as they had throughout the American government, including the national security system.
I wanted to play my part, however small it might prove to be, in the Army's recovery from Vietnam. Working with my peers at CGSC to increase our level of professionalism presented one such small opportunity to meet that responsibility.
Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, on the wooded limestone banks of the Missouri River near Kansas City, was an old frontier post, dating from the Indian Wars of the 1820s, and probably best known to civilians as the site of the nearby U.S. penitentiary. The Army had established the School of Application of Infantry and Cavalry at the fort in 1881 to educate officers on modern tactics. But early in the twentieth century, a more formal and complex curriculum, based on the European general staff model, was created with the establishment of the General Service and Staff College, which later evolved into the CGSC. The mission of the college was to form future leaders by educating them through a rigorous program that followed the case-method study technique common to many business graduate programs.
My class assembled to begin the course in early August 1980. There was a lot of discussion generated because this was the college's centennial year. I was one of only fifteen women out of 983 total students. (In the class of 2001, there are ninety-one women out of a total of 1,054 students.) But I'd long grown accustomed to being in the minority in that regard. The class was divided into sections, each containing approximately sixty students. The women and forty-eight Allied Officers were distributed evenly among the sections, which were further broken down into work groups and two-officer teams of tablemates. I was in Section 12. My tablemate was an Egyptian Army lieutenant colonel named Abdel Siam, a soft-spoken, kindly man with a halting command of English, who had the distinction of having been taken prisoner of war by the Israelis twice in the same war. Despite his gentle manner, Lieutenant Colonel Siam held several decorations for valor and had experience as a combat leader.
The curriculum centered on classroom lectures and tactical exercises known as “problems,” which might last a morning, or continue for several days. Some of them involved relatively simple map exercises in which work groups had to deploy hypothetical forces in either defensive or offensive operations. Other problems were more elaborate, pitting teams of opponents against each other on wide, three-dimensional tabletop terrain models, over which we maneuvered miniature tanks and artillery pieces, all the while observed by the instructor umpires who had given the requirements of the particular battle scenario and assigned us our objectives and restrictions. This classroom war-gaming bore no resemblance to playing toy soldier because we realized our instructors' silent scrutiny and after-action reviews reflected their interest in finding new solutions to old tactical problems and gaining insights into new techniques under development in the field and now displayed in our performance of these exercises. They were interested as much in why as in what we did and continually quizzed us on our intent.
A major purpose of these exercises was to help an officer to think beyond traditional branch limits. For example, an Infantry major might have acquired a great deal of experience commanding a rifle company in the ju
ngles of Vietnam as a captain, but knew little about positioning an armored cavalry troop for a desert defense. I, as a Military Intelligence officer specializing in strategic cryptology, had no firsthand experience of tactics. Yet I had to take my turn with my section mates, one day role-playing as the G-3 operations officer of an infantry division, the next, struggling to understand the ammunition shortages a field artillery battalion might face in protracted mobile combat.
Although the college was meant to offer a well-rounded curriculum, with adequate independent study time and intramural sports such as basketball, running, and soccer, there was a steady regimen of testing and written exercises, much more rigorous than earlier service schools I had attended. And the faculty always stressed that we write in “clear, concise English.”
Unfortunately, the spoken and written English of my pleasant Egyptian tablemate, Lieutenant Colonel Siam, was neither clear nor concise. I realized he had not been chosen to attend the college as an Allied Officer, one of three Egyptians to do so that year, based on his command of English. Rather, he was walking, talking testimony to the fact that the United States and Egypt had mended fences since President Anwar Sadat had made peace with Israel and sent the massive Soviet military assistance mission packing. Lieutenant Colonel Siam also proved to be a popular officer at CGSC because he readily shared what he knew about the tactics involving Soviet-built T-72 main battle tanks and BMP armored personnel carriers and associated Soviet Army battle doctrine. This was an invaluable addition to class discussion, and everyone loved to hear this detailed lore, especially because many of the officers had trained for years to face such Soviet forces in the Fulda Gap in Germany. However, he had a propensity for pointing to the red-tinted portions of the map indicating East Bloc forces and saying “We.” When he did so, the class rowdies would begin to boo and hiss.
“No, Colonel Siam,” I would whisper. “You say ‘They.’”
Lieutenant Colonel Siam would often find it convenient to leave the classroom for one of his five periodic daily prayers, which he had informed us were the solemn duty of every devout Muslim. He also told us he would meet with other Muslim officers in a quiet room in the building where they would spread their prayer rugs, perform their ablutions, and face Mecca. But some in the work group began to complain to our leader, a laconic Armor major named Chuck Piker, that Lieutenant Colonel Siam's self-summoning to prayer invariably coincided with some demanding task in the classroom. “We think he's just smokin' and jokin' until it's time for lunch or the end of class,” they said.
Chuck Piker, who'd served in the Infantry in Vietnam, was not one to observe diplomatic nuance. The next time Lieutenant Colonel Siam announced he was leaving to perform one of his mandatory daily prayers, Chuck Piker stood up and pointed to the front of the classroom where a chalkboard could serve as a screen. “You knock out those prayers right here,” he ordered. Unflustered, Lieutenant Colonel Siam did not again attempt to escape class under the guise of religious devotion.
He had no escape from the inevitable classroom tests and quizzes. Early in the semester, he turned to me with a sweet, rather sheepish smile that had replaced the tangled frown through which he had regarded the test paper before him on the table.
“Claudia,” he whispered, “you give me the answers.”
I looked up in surprise. The instructors had been very clear about the inflexible honor code that was part of the long tradition of the Command and General Staff College. Our orientation had emphasized the absolute necessity of integrity as a basic principle of military discipline. And that principle was centered on trust and self-discipline. Professional soldiers—both officers and NCOs—had to trust each other. Their word had to be based on a core of honor. We did not have time to check up on each other in our profession. We could not tolerate those who lied or cheated.
Now this naive foreign officer was asking me to break the honor code right here in the classroom. “Colonel Siam,” I said, “that's called cheating.”
His face broke into a radiant smile because I had enriched his vocabulary. “Cheating,” he said, testing the new word. “Okay, Claudia, let me cheat from you.”
“No,” I insisted. “That would not be right.”
“Why not, Claudia?” he asked, crestfallen. “You come to my country and you need water, I give it to you. You need food, I give it to you, whatever I have. I open my house for you to sleep. I come to your country, you give me answers.”
I managed to resolve this situation with the knowledge of the faculty, who recognized Lieutenant Colonel Siam's language difficulties, and allowed me to act as his unofficial tutor during quizzes. But I always wrote that I had shared answers with him on the top of each test paper on which I had done so. And I always signed that statement, so that there could be no question that I was trying to breach the honor code. In this manner, the faculty had found a way for me to be loyal both to a foreign colleague who did not want to feel excluded from his American peers and to the Army's ethics.
As one of the course requirements later that year, we were all required to write a research paper. This certainly was not a very challenging assignment; the paper only had to be about ten pages, but we were required to follow the standard format, using several sources referenced with footnotes. The instructors made it clear that we had to place any cited verbatim material from the sources within quotation marks and so identify it with our footnotes. Any lowering of this standard, they said, would be considered plagiarism, a breach of the honor code.
The faculty also told us to read the papers on our chosen topic from those written by previous sections, which were on file, so that we could see how those students had treated the material. As the assigned topics were the same for all of us, this advice made sense. I read a number of the papers and closely reviewed the source material we were all required to use. I had picked up some good insights on how to proceed when I turned to a paper written by an officer from another service. There was something about his language that seemed unusually familiar. On a hunch, I compared his paper to the sources he had used and which I had earlier read.
There were several large sections of his paper where the language had been lifted verbatim, word-for-word, paragraph-for-paragraph, from these sources without quotation marks or attribution. Nor had he made any attempt to indicate that this material was anything other than his original ideas. This was clearly a case of plagiarism, and a clumsy one at that.
My first reaction was vexation rather than outrage. I wish I didn't know this, I thought. But my dilemma was that I had, in fact, discovered a glaring example of plagiarism and I had to decide what to do with this information. It would have been so much easier if the instructors who graded the papers had discovered this themselves. But for whatever reason—probably the press of work and the blurring familiarity of the often cited passages—the offense had escaped them. Now the officer who had plagiarized and I were apparently the only two people at CGSC who knew what he had done.
And it also would have been very easy for me to let the situation remain that way. In fact, I was torn. Nobody enjoys reporting a wrongdoing, especially by one of our peers. The person caught suffers professionally, and, like it or not, the person taking the moral stance is often singled out as being overly judgmental. It certainly did not help that I was one of a small handful of women in the class, and the officer who plagiarized was a man from another service. Although I did not view this as a gender issue in any way, I could see how some might see me as being too moralistic.
We women officers were already well aware that some of our classmates, and indeed some on the faculty, tolerated our presence with ill-concealed resistance. They refused to consider the hard work and dedication that had brought us to Fort Leaven-worth and felt we were “taking a man's place” at CGSC. At the Wédnesday noon guest lecturer series, almost every speaker found something negative to say about the increasing role of women in the Army even though he could look out and clearly see fifteen women officers in the aud
ience. Sometimes afterward, we would meet in the ladies' room to discuss this situation. One of my colleagues, a tall, slender nurse, always wore her uniform with slacks rather than the skirt and kept her hair short, a conscious attempt to blend into the male-dominated environment. But most of us refused to surrender our individuality. We were both women and professional soldiers.
While some resisted our presence, others did not. Although most of our men classmates at CGSC did not consider women their peers, they in fact held a spectrum of attitudes. Some clung to the old WAC-era “separate-but-equal” mentality (which never resulted in equality), similar to the racially segregated military before the Korean War. And now, although blacks were completely integrated, many soldiers considered women almost a separate race in the Army. Other of our peers conceded that we had a limited contribution to make in a few branches, such as the Finance Corps, the Nurse Corps, and the Quartermaster Corps. By 1981, I had, however, met many other officers with a more enlightened attitude who believed that if women did well in a branch such as Military Intelligence, why shouldn't they advance in other branches such as the Signal Corps or Aviation? To me, these officers represented the best of the Army's future leaders.
But the future Army we discussed in the classroom would have to have a solid grounding of ethics. In the CGSC orientation lectures of 1980, the faculty stressed themes of professional rigor and ethical integrity. Unspoken in this message was the subtext that the Army's professional standards had fallen during the Vietnam era. After 1969, when America's stated policy was to withdraw its forces and turn the war over to our South Vietnamese allies, discipline among many U.S. units had deteriorated. Incidents of “fraggings,” in which soldiers murdered their officers or NCOs with fragmentation grenades, rose in this period, as did drug use; racial tensions and open strife became a problem. Still, American combat troops in Vietnam had to continue engaging a dangerous and dedicated enemy—Vietcong guerrillas or the North Vietnamese Army regulars often dressed in the black pajama-like garb of peasants—whom Americans could not differentiate from civilians. In some brigades strict Rules of Engagement were blurred, and the overuse of artillery and air strikes led to needless civilian casualties, an ethical nightmare that was then compounded when all the dead Vietnamese bodies found at the battle site were listed as enemy combatants, sometimes with a collusive nod and wink up the chain of command from the rifleman grunt in the jungle to the colonel in command. Many historians have indicated that, probably more than any other single factor, this reliance on body count as an indicator of success during a war of attrition—in which the traditional capture and holding of territory meant little—led to the ethical abuses and splintering of leadership that weakened the Army in Vietnam.
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