(Author’s Note: We could recount some of the horrific news this morning. There is the case of the murders in Idaho, three young women and a boyfriend stabbed to death with perpetrator unknown. Or about reports of what it is like to live in a 21st-floor condo in Kiev, Ukraine. A unit without energy due to Russian missile strikes on the power grid. Winter has arrived there, cold and stark without the pumps to press water- and heat- upward. Past broken glass windows toward the sky. It is gong to be a heck of a winter there, and for all the residents of Europe. The manifestations of Europe’s crisis are deep. Some mutter it is the Fall of the West. Loss of indigenous populations in France, Germany and Spain have resulted in massive immigration from former colonial possessions that is the reverse of the spread of Europe to the world. It is passing away now. Urban areas now overwhelmingly answer the call to prayers from towers at the new mosques. It is considered inappropriate to dwell on something happening now in Europe with what is beginning here in America. So we will veer off into an account of the recent past in which this had not yet begun.

To avoid the controversy of today, we return to events that were lived by people we knew and still respect.

Above is the image Vice Admiral Earl F. “Rex” Rectanus selected as his official portrait. He has been gone now for nearly a quarter century. We mentioned yesterday that his life and times- the parts he chose to share, anyway- composed a remarkable narrative of how parts of our national Intelligence Community (IC) came to be. We started with mention of his partner Jinny Martin yesterday, since we will get bogged down in bureaucracy in war and peace in Rex’s story. She was awesome!)

– Vic

We started yesterday with an account of the three good friends who helped make an ancient war come as alive as they were. All gone now, of course, with some of the events they lived some 80 years in the past. This morning’s outing for the Socotra House Writer’s Section includes some of the memories from 2009, when the Old Guard at Arlington National Cemetery put him to rest. There was snow coming back then, but nothing would forestall the honor guard from doing their duty.

Times being what they were for manpower and weather, it was a wait between his passing for the funeral, since the Old Guard was pretty busy then. On the whole, things were in about as good shape as we could hope. Murphy’s Funeral Home handles a lot of the Arlington trade, and we have friends there. They called one afternoon as they were preparing Rex for his trip to eternity. The family had provided his dress Blues with decorations and badges of service. There was one deficit: the plain white dress shirt had not made the journey. So, one secret kept for years was that when Rex went to earth, he went clad in one of our shirts. It fit.

The Admiral had things pretty well organized. He was an organize man and had done an obit for himself thoughtfully with a 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 was 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 looked a little like 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 “Rex” fit nicely, derived from the Latin term for “King”.

Rex Rectanus.

When he left us, the Admiral was 83. His sketch has all the details so we won’t recount them here. He was from Pittsburgh, and joined the Naval Reserve in 1942, the year of the battle of Midway in the big Pacific War. Our pal Mac Showers had just reported to Pearl Harbor in February of 1942 and was part of the “intelligence preparation of the battle-space” for that portion of the fight. Both young men so they both had vivid recollections of what it was like to respond to crisis. Rex 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 some of us were born.

He served on active duty until 1976- the year Splash wandered into a recruiting office in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and decided to run away from the Midwest and join the haze-gray underway circus.

Rex had a spectacular career for an intelligence officer, a member of the small cadre of what the Navy calls “Restricted Line” officers welcome to serve but not eligible for Command at Sea. He was the first restricted line officer to make three stars, and accomplished that with service as 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 we first talked to him in 1986. He was a legend for other reasons to those in the Navy’s Personnel Office (NMPC-4411) which was then still located on the hill in Arlington above the Pentagon- and the Cemetery. His legendary status was mostly limited to us Spooks, and by that time his commanding presence 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 us, not that we weren’t respectful. An Admiral is an admiral, after all, active or retired.

Anyway, that may have been the first time we talked to him, about stationary at first, but it certainly was not the last.

The issue that took a great deal more time than writing paper was the matter of a Missing Man. Rex wanted to bring Jack Graf home, not that anyone could find the body, and trust us, a lot of people looked. The consensus was the opinion that Rex thought that if Jack was going to stay lost out there in the SE Asian jungle, at a minimum he would ensure that he was not forgotten. There was more to the story, of course, with that part being access to the former Soviet archives that were briefly open after the end of the Cold War. But that is part of the larger mystery we did not talk about openly.

It was a near thing, since a lot of folks were prepared to just forget about the whole thing. Not Rex, though. We will have to tell you about it, since one of us got to carry some of the bags on his trip. His companion- not wife, due to complexities of life- was another good pal named Virginia “Jinny” Martin, whose husband had been head of the Naval Investigation Service (NCIS & their TV show came later).

Yesterday, we mentioned the impact of Barney’s pesky will in a brief treatment of Jinny’s story, since the terms meant they could only spend a limited amount of time in the castle Jinny and Barney had constructed, alternating residence between the condo in Naples, Florida that Rex owned and San Diego’s North County. Barney had written a will that specified the marital residence in Rancho Sante Fe would pass to his brother in the event she re-married, so it added an element of complexity to their otherwise placid relationship.

The picture of the horses? Those were the last working horses in the US Army, the ones who pull the caissons with the caskets neatly draped in the Flag of the United States. That is one of the components of the great unification of the American armed forces that occurred in 1947. Minor to most citizens, but important to the veteran community. The Old Guard is there for all of us.

The challenge in this case was resolution of another. Rex felt responsible for rectifying the matter of our Missing Man, LCDR Jack Graf. Jack had come up through the ranks as a photo interpreter before gaining his commission. He had been admitted to the greatest secrets of his time, the operations of imaging satellites that visited the Soviet Union daily. That made the story one that was a family matter, since Loma’s Uncle had designed the system that transmitted pictures of the ballistic missile submarine bases that could generate a flood of missiles to begin the end of the world if someone decided to do it.

What is sort of odd is that the matter is still alive, even if the participants, except for our pal Admiral Tom Brooks have all passed. But we agreed that Rex had a long shadow, and while we doubt we can solve anything about a case nearly fifty years old, we will attempt to tell the tale in the way it unfolded into the world in which we live. And the institutions that now determine what information comes to us from the skies above.

Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com