23 January 2010
 
Meeting Rex

(Cheap Port from the 1986 Naval Intelligence Dining In. Photo by Socotra)
 
It would have been in 1986. I was sitting in the NMPC office on the first floor of the sixth wing of the Navy Annex. I had not yet moved over to the junior assignment desk next to the window, and I was still at the one at the desk across from Millie, where she would go into her afternoon reverie after lunch with Peggy from the Surface Line Assignments shop next door.
 
I was the Placement Officer, with the largest account being the stupid Defense Intelligence Agency, which seemed to re-organize so frequently that my books never agreed with theirs, and I never was sure from week to week whether I was sending officers to valid billets or imaginary ones.
 
With DIA came the Attache Placement chores, which involved mostly Line Officers who were at the end of their useful operational shelf-lives and were interested in a cozy last assignment.
 
I remember one aviator who was interested in the ALUSNA slot in Bogata, and proudly announced that he had his own aircraft and would be happy to fly back and forth himself.
 
My associate Skip could hear everything I was doing, since our desks were so close. He caustically noted that he was probably interested in starting his own import-export business with full diplomatic immunity. Then he poured out the last of some cold coffee dregs into the spider plant in the hanging pot that a former senior detailer had brought to the office to dress things up a bit.
 
We called the plant Captain West in his honor.
 
Drew was the senior Detailer then, and one of the first men in our trade I met who had a real complex life. He took his life years later, after what seemed like a dream tour as the second-to-last CO of the Fleet Ocean Surveillance Information Facility was in his rear-view, and he was back in Fairfax will all the rest of us Washington Weenies.
 
Millie had seen it all, those of us with demons and those without, and we were all part of her little band of children. I learned early in the tour not to ever be critical of my processors in the office, and I soon saw why. I was going to be making the same sort of messy mistakes and bad judgments that everyone else did in the job.
 
Lord knows there were some great ways to get crosswise with the Navy and with the people who seemed to take a personal interest in their lives and careers.
 
Thus was it ever, as Millie could tell you in between her cheerful sabotage of the new ADP system by which the Bureau thought it could manage the workforces. It normally didn’t take her very long, and I often thought her talents were mis-used and she should have been code-breaker at NSA.
 
Officer Assignment Information System (OAIS) I think we called it, “oasis.” When Rex was the senior detailer, he had a system of metal racks that stood on the desk. They resembled the ones the typesetters use, and little strips slips of stiff paper slid into them with officer names and projected rotation dates to slide into it.
 
Bill remembers well. He had only heard of Rex when he was a lowly Lieutenant and Rex was a Commander and the Intelligence Detailer. Bill was a schemer, as all of us were, and except for the time some of us actually worked in the Bureau, we considered the Detailer to be the adversary whose sole purpose was to keep us from getting what we wanted.
 
Bill managed to avoid an assignment that Rex had slated for him in the metal rack. As we tells it, “as a Lieutenant, I got a letter signed by CDR Rex as the 1630 detailer, telling me that I would be assigned to a job that I did not think would be good for my career. I used flag officer contacts and pressure to get those proposed orders changed, first temporarily and then permanently.”
 
“That process lasted six months and I could imagine that throughout, CDR Rex had to deal with another command that wanted their billet filled and that he was having to re-juggle his entire Lieutenant slate to accommodate a troublesome string-pulling junior officer.”
 
A measure of Rex’s character was this. Bill still marvels at it. “Thus, I was surprised when, at the end of that tour, I received a phone call from the detailer’s office that I would be detailed to a job like the one that I had avoided, but in a much better location and in a much higher and career enhancing position.  At the time, it did not occur to me that that slating had been done by Rex and that it was solid evidence that he did not hold a grudge or had thought to get even with me by assigning me “as the commissary officer in Adak” in return for the trouble I had caused him and his office.”
 
Instead, Bill got plum orders to his first leadership position, one that led quickly to becoming a Commanding Officer and a follow-up assignment to the prestigious Naval War College.
 
Bill says “What better career course could a Lieutenant Commander have designed for himself?”
 
I didn’t have any of that perspective at the time. I was trying to figure out how to subvert OAIS, and keep DIA’s demand for junior officers off my back. Drew called over and told me to mash the button on his open line and talk to the Admiral. He went on to do something else, and I found myself saying:
 
“This is LCDR Socotra, how can I help you, Sir?”
 
In those days you didn’t have to say ‘Sir or Madam,” since the overwhelming flavor Admirals came in was male and vanilla.
“This is Vice Admiral Rex,” said the voice softly. “I was wondering if I could impose on you for some stationary. Three Star stationary.”
 
Unlike Bill, I had never even head of him. We did not have an intelligence Vice Admiral at the time, and the prospect didn’t seem likely at the moment. I was not running a stationary store, and there was no convenient three star officer to go ask for notepads, with the exception of ChiefNavPers himself.
 
The way he said it was interesting. It was courteous, and certainly not imperious. It was said with such a matter of serene self-assurance though, that I knew I was going to have to comply.
 
I copied down his contact information, which would have been in Florida, though that scrap of paper is as long gone as the strips that used to hold officer rotation information.
 
I didn’t talk to him again for almost twenty years, though we often talked about him, particularly when I started being Mister Vice for the Naval Intelligence Dinings-In. That was a thankless position reserved for the junior assignments officer, who had to arrange the whole thing and then be made to play the fool of a Master of Ceremonies, skewered by the DNI in his role as President of the Mess.

It became something of a tradition having me be the fool, and it went on for the next three pay-grades over seventeen years until they finally let me stop.

Rex never came to those, being in Pittsburgh and then Florida in retirement, but they were star-studded mandatory attendance affairs for the regulars and those who wanted to be such some day.
 
The order of those formal gatherings goes back a couple hundred years, and the toasts made at the end were as old in precedence as the Republic, even if not as ancient as the direction the port was passed.
 
One of the toasts was to “Our Missing Comrades,” which was sort of surreal, since there was no hot war in progress with anyone, and no one went missing except by their own volition.
 
My pal Pete explained it to me. He had been a NILO, one of a few dozen who were still on active duty as Intelligence Specialists.
 
Most of those guy were one or two-tour wonders, saw their war and got out and went home. He looked at me one year as we stood in our little tuxedo jackets with the miniature medals and the golden cummerbunds. “There is one of us who didn’t come back. They never found him, though God knows they tried. Rex was the one who sent him out to the field. He was named Jack Graf.”

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Subscribe to the RSS feed!