| 04 September 2006 Detailing When I was in the flesh-peddling business at the Bureau of Personnel we had a civilian secretary named Millie. She had been with the Bureau since it was an Office in the Bureau of Navigation, which is a long time indeed, and she had been with the little tribe of intelligence folks as long as it had been a formal community. She was already gray and wraithlike when I first heard of her as an Ensign, since she physically processed the orders that were initiated by the "detailers" who brokered the orders. She knew the stress of the office, and considered us to be extensions of her children who were grown and gone. It was a small shop; the Captain handled the relations with the Director of Naval Intelligence and his willful staff, and dealt with the egos of the senior officers. The Lieutenant Commander who sat across the aisle from him in the office on the ground floor of the Eight Wing ran the half of the community that was his rank and below, and did the scut-work of complying with the community management apparatus in Op-01, the office that ran accessions and schools, planning for promotion zones, Statutory Boards and Administrative process. A more junior Lieutenant Commander spent a year cleaning up after his senior comrade as the placement officer, guarding the interests of the Agencies and Commands, so that he/she was jaded enough to slide into the Junior Officer detailing slot when the time came. It was an interesting assignment, to a degree, and quite complex. Flesh-peddling also kept you on your toes, since people seemed to care a great deal about their lives and careers. Millie watched the whole thing from her desk by the door, where she sat across from the Yeoman who tried to keep up. There was a routine level of pandemonium on the ground floor, and it was good that we were there, since it made suicide by jumping out the window just about impossible. There were always officers "just stopping by" when in Washington to curry favor. There were frantic and sometimes paranoid phone calls from around the world in the deployed units and embassies. Early in the day, as early as 0500, there were calls from Europe and the Med. Before that sometimes the disoriented call from Arabia, or a watch center in Korea. Late in the day it was the Pacific Fleet on the phone. Honestly, that global enterprise never slept. The Bureau had tried to automate the order-writing process to keep pace with the changing times. We still called things by their old names- the "slate" of assignments was just that, a tablet-sized rack that held narrow slips of cardboard with jobs and names "penciled-in." But the computer had arrived in the early eighties, funded, I expect, by the Reagan defense buildup that was losing steam by the middle of the decade. Strict accountability was necessary. Millie provided the context from the old days. During the days of Vietnam and the Draft, the Service was not as relentlessly careerist as it was with the All-volunteer Force. Some of the officers assigned to the Bureau managed to beat the system and order themselves to graduate school as their obligated time expired. At least one enterprising young man had orders cut to report to his home, there to await a regular paycheck for doing precisely nothing. I admired his ingenuity immensely, and sometimes wished I had the same option. The idea that Millie could actually make it happen was appealing, as I pressed a telephone against my bruised ear, attempting to listen sympathetically to some anguished tale of the needs of spouse and kids and dogs while trying to fill a job in Korea. Millie knew everyone in the great sand-colored brick building on the hill. Others called it Federal Building Number 2, and those of us who labored there called it the Navy Annex, where the Henderson Hall of the ten-fingered five-story monstrosity held the contrarian Marine Corps Headquarters. The entrance overlooked a peaceful knoll in Arlington Cemetery, where the residents seemed to have all the time in the world. Whatever you needed, Millie could provide. She was human, of course. She would get frustrated when a new software update on the Officer Assignment Information System would be posted to the mainframe in the data processing wing. It would take her as much as a week to figure out the bugs in the system, the ones that permitted her to get around the necessary approval safeguards. It was an awesome power and she did not take it lightly. She wouldn't initiate anything on her own. But if convinced of the justness of the cause, she could write the most extraordinary of clauses into the orders. "Detach within 24 hours" was one of my favorites, imaging the consequences of that provision when the orders showed up on the Ship's message board in some distant sea, half the allotted time already gone in transmission of the paper. Mostly we were above reproach. But I discovered that you could do literally anything if it appeared to be in the interest of the Service. We made a Captain disappear overnight when a minor peccadillo appeared on a periodic security investigation- nothing criminal, of course, just potentially messy and embarrassing to the Service. “For the good of the Navy” was another useful phrase. Normally we allowed higher pay-grades to determine what that might mean, but there was a certain iron core of justice that burned in all of us. No one was going to get all the good deals. The underdogs and officers who had done the hard and thankless jobs were supposed to get a break, once in a while, a good job or a quota for a coveted school falling out the sky. Now, there are some delicate matters that remain. Perhaps some things should just be allowed to be buried in the dead past, just as Millie is now. But they say that Federal Building Number Two itself will be bulldozed to earth, to make space for the expanding legion of the Dead of Arlington Cemetery. So, let me put it like this: imagine a young and highly motivated officer, one of a long line of such officers who were confronted with an unpleasant task. It might have been something like a requirement to reduce the number of personnel in a particular grade to “keep the pyramid on glide-slope.” It would have amounted to a requirement to throw some officers off active duty, send them home, as it were. Obviously, the super-performers were off the table. The Service needed to keep the best and brightest. Then there were the good solid officers who showed up for work, did their best, endured the deployments, and saluted the flag. They constituted the bulk of the community. They were good solid citizens who were called "the pack." They were the middle of the Bell Curve, and of course there was the remainder who made up the "pack-minus." In other circumstances, they could have been either of the above categories, but they had somehow drifted on the breakers of Navy life. Maybe they were just stupid, or perhaps they were good people who had encountered one of the little Napoleons who sometimes got a chance at Squadron or Ship command. Perhaps they were just not cut out for this life. Privately, I considered that you only had a career until you encountered the asshole who would write the piece of paper killing yours. Only one officer in all the military goes out on top, never having been de-selected for anything. That was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Everyone one else had something to bitch about, some bastard who had stood in their way. So, imagine an officer having to examine the records of those officers who failed to select for Lieutenant, the lowest grade for which there was an actual promotion board, and for which the rate of opportunity was 95%. It was a non-event for the overwhelming majority of officers, a sort of training exercise for the later and harder boards where the selection rate might be much less than half, and disappointment was an integral part of transitioning to something else. At least that first selection board was a non-event for those who made the grade. The Junior Officer Detailer had to call up the handful of officers that failed to select and chat about their future, of which there was precisely none. Most of them just wanted to get out. They were near the end of their obligation anyway, and had they the power, would have cheerfully written orders to go home and collect a paycheck for the rest of their time. But there was always one who didn't think that way. Wounded ego and pride dictated that they fight the system for justice. I appreciated the sentiment, even if I despaired of the extra work, trying to find a mechanism by which they could earn a favorable piece of paper before their second (and last) look by the selection board before they were sent home. I did not have the heart to ever tell the full truth, though as a general practice, I found the truth, however unpleasant, to be immeasurably preferable to lying. Lies are devilishly hard to keep straight over time. Truth is a constant, and easily remembered. Imagine for a moment that one of those assignments officers worked as best he could with a young officer who burned with passion to be vindicated. Imagine that the Detailer could tell him the truth, though he did not, that even if he was fixed enough to make the next higher grade, the malicious paper trail had already wounded him mortally for the grade beyond that. It was not fair, but that is the way it is for everyone except the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Imagine the bluster and fulmination over the phone, and imagine that the regulations precluded change-of-station orders that might fix the situation. Imagine two piles of paper on a desk in front of an open window, when smoking was still permitted in Federal Office Buildings, a full ashtray, and a phone with an ear-piece that never cooled from the contact with the human ear. Imagine Millie at her desk over the lunch hour, when anyone sane would race out of the office to be away from the phones. Imagine the contents of the piles of paper. Two or three good officers had to be sent home to make the numbers work. One problem child had to be kept, in order to mount a feckless attempt at vindication that would never come. Imagine that someone asked a hypothetical question in the still air, something along the lines of "Could separation orders be issued, out of the blue, without review?" Millie looked up with that expression she wore when one of her children asked something stupid. "Of course," she said. “Within 24 Hours?” I can imagine her look of scorn. Of course. I have often wondered, hypothetically, what she said when the lawyers came a year or more later, hypothetically, of course. The paper records of the matter would have been long gone, thoroughly digitized into a complete string of zeros. There would have been nothing on her face, since the Sphinx would have been more communicative. She might have said “The computer system would not permit such a thing. It is hard enough to make it do what it is supposed to do. Anything else would be quite impossible. It must have been a system glitch.” I certainly never heard any such thing, though by the time I might have, I would have been in the south of France, wondering what might happen, now that the Berlin Wall was down. There was a lot to think about then, considering that the terrorists had already declared war on us. But we were certainly not thinking about that. I still think about the government, though not as much as I once did. Whenever I wonder why things work the way they do, I always remember Millie. God bless the civilians of the General Schedule who are the first bastion of our democracy. Millie could do anything, if she was asked. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |