11 December 2009
 
Rex


 
I have the official photo and the bio. I have formatted them, and placed them in the archive for publication in the Spring, when I lurch again into the hard copy of the Quarterly. A version is posted to the web portal.
 
The date has been set for the interment, and it is a bit of a wait for the funeral, since the Old Guard at Arlington are pretty busy right now, but on the whole, things are in about as good shape as you could hope, and February will be along soon enough.
 
The Admiral was meticulous, and had things pretty well organized before the awful train of event that took him away. He had an obit already done for himself, fill-in-the-blank for the great unknown parts (Tab “A”), and a biographical sketch for the stuff that was unlikely to change (Tab “B”).
 
The official portrait is on the latter, the one with all the gold showing on the black sleeve, the hands carefully placed over the combination cover with the extra thick flag-officer braid on the visor.
 
He looks a little stage and movie star Rex Harrison in the portrait, and between the natural good looks and the angular consonants of his family name, the nickname was a natural.
 
Rex Rectanus.
 
When he left us, the Admiral was 83. His sketch has all the details, though I won’t recount them here. He was from Pittsburgh, and joined the Naval Reserve the year of the battle of Midway in the big War. He was commissioned an Ensign just after the war in Europe was done, and the month before the mushroom clouds ended the conflict in the Far East.
 
He started out as a deck officer, in minesweepers, and converted over to the Intelligence designator in 1951, the year I was born.
 
He served on active duty until 1976- the year I wandered in to a recruiting office in Grand Rapids and decided to run away from the Midwest and join the haze-gray underway circus.
 
He had a spectacular career, for an intelligence officer. As far as I can tell, he is the first restricted line officer to make three stars. He was the intelligence officer to the legendary Bud Zumwalt, both in Vietnam and back here in the more subtle war zone of Washington.
 
He had retired from investment banking by the time I first talked to him, in 1986. He was a still a minor legend in the Intelligence Assignments Office, which was still on the hill in Arlington above the Pentagon. Our desks were not far from the base of the Air Force Memorial is today, though we were there first.

Rex's legendary status was mostly limited to us Spooks, and by that time had mostly devolved to being known for calling up and requesting three-star stationary when he ran low.
 
They had to explain the whole thing to me, after the first phone call. Not that I wasn’t respectful. An Admiral is an admiral, after all, active or retired.
 
Anyway, that may have been the first time I talked to him, but it certainly was not the last.
 
He wanted to bring Jack home, not that anyone could find the body, and trust me, a lot of people looked. I think Rex thought that if Jack was going to stay lost out there in the jungle, at a minimum he would ensure that he was not forgotten.
 
It was a near thing, since a lot of folks were prepared to just forget about the whole thing. Not Rex, though. I’ll have to tell you about that tomorrow, since I got to carry some of the bags, and it was an interesting trip.

Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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