11 January 2010
 
Questions

(Navy Officer's White Shirt)
 
There are always more questions than one would like, and some answers that one might not expect. All this happened a long time ago, after all, and with the passage of time comes distance. Emotions can fade, after all, though in the case of Rex his passion never flagged.
 
I am stuck this morning, and won’t bother you with the First Draft of my line of investigation. Several things have been nagging at me. For example, the fact that a pal had dinner with Rex and VADM Zumwalt in Saigon six months after Rex left country, and only a month after Jack Graf was shot down is suggestive. Jack knew all sorts of things that people in the field were not supposed to know.
 
Of course, any speculation in that direction could be just flat wrong, and since the man who had relieved Rex in Vietnam as the NAVFOR Intelligence Officer is still alive, I suppose it behooves me to ask the question of someone who was actually there.
 
I don’t know if there is something that would raise emotion in that regard, and maybe there is truth there or maybe it is like talking to my Dad, who doesn’t know know me with any precision. It has been a long time, after all. I will have to ask the questions while there is time.
 
That is not true about one of the operations that was in progress when Rex took over on July 22, 1971, and that one is raising some emotions  that I am going to avoid altogether.
 
It would be more entertaining to enter into the story again with Rex as a  fresh-caught Rear Admiral, Lower Half. In those days, Navay Admiral were automatically issued wo-star insignia, which drove the other services completely crazy.
 
It took years of legislation to bring us to heel in a uniform rank structure, since Rex, upon his frocking ceremony, immediately leapt in precedence over every Brigadier in the Pentagon, two immediate stars to their hard-earned one. If you don’t think that didn’t fry a lot of Air Force and Army generals, you do not know much about human nature.
 
Anyway, in addition to a land war entering into a critical phase, an immensely sensitive operation (or three) in progress in the Pacific, and the Soviet Bear swimming out to further reaches of the sea armed to the teeth with thermonuclear weapons, you can imagine where the matter of the DNI car and driver stood in the great scheme of things.
 
I need to ask some more questions about that, but I think you know that the car was pretty high up on the list.
 
Rex handled the grerat controversy with delicacy as he did everything in his career. His EA, Ted, told me the background, and we will get to that after a few more questions. It was about a bitter war fought in the Pentagon about whether intelligence was information, and whether a single officer ought to have control over all of it.
 
Stop me if you have heard this one, since the war is continuing in the Pentagon as I type this morning.
 
Rex handled the great struggle with subtlety and grace. He said, in his biographical sketch, that he was  named  “Director, Naval Intelligence Division, Office of the Chief of Naval Operations,” with “additional duty as Commander Naval Intelligence Command and direct Assistant for Intelligence to the Chief of Naval Operations.”
 
Wyman Packard’s authoritative and frustrating history of the first hundred years of Naval Intelligence hints at the dimensions of the struggle. But we will have to ask a few questions first.
 
In an odd note, while standing on the balcony here at Big Pink, located just across the street from the complex that was the First NSA, and the First DIA, and the ONI ADP section, I was having a last cigarette before dropping my real life and going to work.
 
Death Junior walked out of the building on the salt-whitened sidewalk by the pool.
 
“138 days until the pool opens,” I called down.
 
She looked up and smiled. She works at the funeral home that is handling Rex’s arrangement, and she asked for a favor, shouting up.
 
She said that Rex was going to be buried in the full formal uniform of a Vice Admiral. He saved his Blues, of course, but like most of us, no uniform white shirt.
 
I have one or two left in approximately the right size. I told her I could take care of the deficiency, no questions asked.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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