Generally Speaking (7 page)

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.

Historically, almost no men had served at the WAC Center and School before 1970, aside from an occasional cook or the chaplain on permanent duty. And most of the men in my company were far different from those who had served in the past. One of the first duties of a new commander is to inspect the company's barracks.

“Ma'am,” First Sergeant Benson cautioned, “you can't just walk into the men's barracks. It's too dangerous. We have to get MPs to accompany us.”

I looked at her doubtfully. But the first sergeant explained that the cooks, administration clerks, and supply specialists living in the men's barracks, located across the post in the Headquarters Company's area of the U.S. Army Garrison, were dominated by a small, violent, antiauthoritarian clique who had so far managed to flaunt their disregard for basic military courtesy and discipline. They blatantly used drugs in the barracks, brought in women from the nearby town of Anniston, and held all-night parties. Racial tension compounded this already serious discipline problem, with fierce antagonism separating blacks, whites, and Hispanics. Fistfights occurred almost nightly in the barracks, which were more like a cell block than Army housing. The majority of the men were not rebellious, but they were easily dominated by the bad apples, and were understandably afraid of them.

As I sat alone in my office reviewing the situation that first afternoon, I felt a sense of deep unease, but I also recognized that my senior officers had in fact given me the most demanding command because they thought I could handle it. There was going to be a test of wills. Either I was going to reimpose Army order through the application of leadership and discipline or that mob was going to usurp my legitimate authority. And I did not intend
that
to happen.

Colonel Mary E. Clarke, commander of the WAC Center and School, came to my company on the day I was scheduled to make a courtesy call on her. She was an inspiring leader who did not stand on ceremony. She strode directly into my small office and informally suggested, “Let's take a walk around your company area.”

As we walked, she asked what I saw as the company's immediate priorities. I told her about the state of discipline and an issue my battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Harrison, had brought to my attention: a problem in the supply system.

Given the rapid expansion at the Center and School, tons of barracks and office furniture, ranging from bunks and dressers to desks, tables, fans, and typewriters, had simply been dumped on the ground floors of our barracks. We now faced dusty, jumbled heaps of equipment and furniture, much of it obsolete or broken. Most of it should have been junked as unusable surplus, and the worthwhile pieces either retained or sent to units that needed them. But the property books that Staff Sergeant Macon, my supply sergeant, had inherited were virtually useless. Few of the entries matched the stenciled serial numbers or faded and torn decals on the desks and mimeograph machines. A property book in the Army, however, was a sacred document, and it was also legally binding. If I had blindly signed those books on taking command, I would have been responsible for thousands of dollars of property that might or might not have been in the area. Fortunately, I hadn't signed. Despite good intentions, Staff Sergeant Macon had not been able to prod any of his contacts in the three property book offices into helping him cut this Gordian knot.

I explained some of this to Colonel Clarke. She listened patiently for a moment, and then nodded decisively. “Take care of the problem as you see best, Claudia. I'll back you up with assistance visits by teams from the Director of Logistics.”

Even though I really didn't care about the difference between a single and a double pedestal desk, I tackled the supply situation first because I recognized that in the military if you don't have accountability for property, you don't have authority. And I was not going to abdicate my responsibility as company commander by signing off on property books I knew were inaccurate. Had I done so, word would have quickly spread among the men and women in the company that I was a leader who didn't maintain Army standards. I learned another valuable leadership lesson: One's authority is undermined by lack of adherence to institutional values.

But once it was clear that I was serious about straightening up the mess, Staff Sergeant Macon became less discouraged. First Sergeant Benson helped by getting enough soldiers in to provide the heavy lifting. For several sweaty weeks in the Alabama summer sun, we moved that mountain of junk out of the barracks and rearranged it into coherent foothills, which could then be identified and inventoried. The result was a truck convoy to the civilian salvage broker, a small, neat stack of usable equipment at our own supply room, and three correct company property books, which I duly signed after closely inspecting each serial number decal.

At the end of that year, a major in the WAC Center received the Legion of Merit, a high Army decoration, for “solving” the logistics problem at Fort McClellan. On the surface, this episode was about fixing a company's property management problems and the resulting cleanup of related supply functions. But to me, the exercise was not entirely about logistics. It was about leadership and integrity, and establishing a healthy command climate.

But I faced challenges with the company that were much more intractable than the supply situation. On any given day, it was likely for the mess hall to be short-staffed because men would be Absent Without Leave (AWOL).

One morning when one of the cooks failed to report for duty, First Sergeant Benson called his home and spoke to his wife.

“I just shot him,” the woman announced. “He's fooling around with another woman. He's been stealing meat from the mess hall and tires from the motor pool.”

“Did you call the ambulance?” Benson asked.

“He's out in the backyard. I called the police.”

The cook lived and returned to duty. The wife was never charged.

Some of the cooks were drunks and gamblers who insisted on taking their pay in cash rather than in direct bank deposit, so that their wives in town couldn't get their hands on it. First Sergeant Benson did her best to intervene and was often successful in making sure the women at least had some food money for their families. But every payday we could count on a minor crisis in the mess hall when some cooks went on a bender and were reported AWOL.

If First Sergeant Benson couldn't locate them at the usual after-hours clubs or sleeping it off, she began calling the local hospitals and jails. The police were generally understanding about minor drunk and disorderly charges, since Fort McClellan was a major local industry. But the sheriff's deputies would not release my arrested soldiers to my control until I came back “with a man.” So I began taking my executive officer to escort the soldiers back to the post where they faced their Article 15 (company punishment), a step below court-martial. We never resorted to physical violence.