In my opinion, Colonel Simerly also found it useful to pit his officers against each other, to keep them off balance, rather than try to form a cohesive team. He convened the four battalion commanders (three men and me), and warned us bluntly, “I have to spread my ratings.” This was an uncomfortable, one-sided discussion because the Officer Efficiency Reports would have a critical impact on our future careers. We all knew that the Army expected him to distribute his ratings recommendations over a roughly diamond-shaped hierarchy with no more than one in the top block.
But I felt it was inappropriate for him to emphasize the “block check” of the rating rather than the standards against which he would judge our performance. In effect, he was inviting us to lobby for ourselves, to make our personal case to him why each deserved that top rating.
It was not the task of professional officers, however, to put themselves forward to win their commander's favor. I did not intend to do so. Rather, I would do my job to the best of my ability and try not to think about OERs. In this regard, none of the other battalion commanders had an obvious advantage, but the colonel did apparently see me—someone who had complained about the slating changes—as a likely candidate for his average rating. I knew I was the odd “man” out in Colonel Simerly's mind.
Still, the Army had given me this battalion to command, and once I formed the productive partnership with Command Sergeant Major Gant, we concentrated on the mission. It was a job I knew fairly well, having served in the brigade as assistant operations officer and later operations officer from 1981 to 1984.
To deal with the stress, I maintained the discipline of regular running. And I was pleased that many of the battalion staff officers and NCOs followed my example and ran as the Army advocated. Several months into my command, I'd often see groups of lean young officers and NCOs running for the sheer pleasure of the exercise.
But my professional relationship with Colonel Simerly never improved. Despite the fact that my battalion always accomplished its intelligence mission and met all Army training requirements, I sensed an undercurrent of dissatisfaction. I learned to keep silent and not rise to any bait. When I realized his discontent was more personally than professionally directed, I focused on accomplishing the battalion's mission and making certain our soldiers had the best quality of life possible. Still, Colonel Simerly's reaction to my performance ran hot and cold. This unpredictability was an unpleasant factor in my life for a year.
One of the most egregious incidents between us happened about nine months into my command. The 3rd Operations Battalion had a small, remote site in Schleswig-Holstein in the far north of West Germany, close to the East German border. The inspection of the site was a big event for the soldiers involved because both their battalion and brigade commanders were coming at the same time.
But I had long been concerned about the isolation these young soldiers had to endure in this bleak, windswept countryside near the Baltic. They were far from any other American unit, and their main recreation was beer drinking at the local village Gasthaus. This might seem innocent enough, but German beer has much higher alcohol content than American beer, and is also often served in big one-liter steins. The unit's first sergeant, Becky Hibbs, had told me she was worried that some of the soldiers were showing signs of drinking problems, a situation of which Colonel Simerly was well aware.
The night after our inspection, the colonel, First Sergeant Hibbs, all the troops who were not on duty, and I went to the local Gasthaus for dinner. The food was excellent, as one might expect. And behind the bar, there were several embossed mugs and plaques revealing that some of our soldiers had become champions in local drinking competitions. These were events in which the last person literally standing after hours of swilling beer was the winner. Colonel Simerly thought this was a splendid achievement. I began discussing the problem of chronic drinking, night after night, with the young NCOs at the long plank table.
But the colonel, who was enjoying the beer himself that night, loudly interrupted me. “Claudia,” he said, “I don't agree with you at all about cutting back on these soldiers' beer. After all, they don't have much else to do up here.”
I was dumbfounded. First, I was the battalion commander and he was publicly undermining my authority, something an Army leader should never do. Secondly, that was a terrible message to give those soldiers, who certainly needed no further encouragement.
But after he spoke out, I saw a hard glint in his eye. I believe he wanted me to start an argument in front of these soldiers. Instead, I remained silent.
Driving back to the quarters, First Sergeant Hibbs told me, “Ma'am, I couldn't believe that Colonel Simerly spoke to you that way.”
“Don't worry, First Sergeant,” I assured her. “Everything will be fine with the battalion. And don't worry about me, either. I'm tough.”
This was true enough. I continued to focus on my job. But as Colonel Simerly had warned us, he spread out his Officer Efficiency Reports, forming a pyramid with a narrow point. In my OER, he skillfully damned me with faint praise, precluding any recourse on my part to have the rating removed based on more objective evidence of my performance. By the end of that year, I was fairly sure I no longer had a good chance for promotion, attending the Army War College, or selection for brigade command.
Although Colonel Edwin Tivol, my new brigade commander, and I had a positive professional relationship and he wrote favorable OERs on my performance, I thought the damage of Simerly's ratings had already been done. One cold gray afternoon in the winter of 1988 when I was nearing the end of my battalion command and thinking longingly of a warm-climate assignment, I called the Military Personnel Center to enquire about openings at the NATO Defense College in Naples, Italy.
“Those assignments are all filled for the next three years,” the officer said.
So I asked MILPERCEN what kind of assignment they had in mind for me next. They offered three staff jobs outside my specialty, including an assignment as an imagery analyst.
I had no interest in any of these, but, in the Army, you either went where you were assigned, or you got out. As much as I regretted this option, I had to face reality. “What is the earliest date I can retire?” I asked the MILPERCEN officer.
“Don't worry,” he said. “We'll find you the right job. What kind of assignment would you like?”
“I'd like to command a recruiting battalion,” I said, realizing the request might seem unusual. But I'd always loved recruiting and recognized its importance to the Army's future.
“That's impossible,” the officer said. “We have a shortage of field-grade officers in MI and we have to keep them in the branch.”
It looked as if my Army service would end after twenty years.
But a week later, that MILPERCEN officer called back to ask if I was still interested in commanding a recruiting battalion. “We're underrepresented in women and minorities, so we would like to put your name on the slate to compete for a battalion, if you're still interested.”
“I'm still interested.”
It looked as if I might be staying in the Army after all.
I was selected for command of that battalion and worked harder than I ever have before or since. And while I commanded the battalion, I was promoted to full colonel, chosen to attend the Army War College, and selected to command the 703rd Military Intelligence Brigade in Hawaii.
Reflecting on those roller-coaster years, one important lesson becomes obvious. When I began to be treated in an unjust manner during my battalion slating, I took a stand. Although this action undoubtedly antagonized my first brigade commander, Colonel Simerly, what I had done did not harm me in the eyes of those Army leaders who understood the true dynamics of the situation. And the fact that I served in Augsburg under difficult circumstances with quiet self-discipline undoubtedly did not go unnoticed.
The reason I go into detail about these matters is to make it clear that no one can spend a thirty-two-year career completely free of conflict. And often that conflict poses crippling threats to one's career. We cannot control when those conflicts will arise and which military seniors or executive supervisors they will involve. But we can control our reaction to these serious differences.
One habit of self-discipline that I have cultivated is to maintain a sense of humor upon which I could draw during times of tension, even if only internally. Putting the relationship with the troublesome supervisor in perspective is also another successful tactic: Even though he might seem to loom large at the time, remember that you have literally scores of additional professional relationships that give balance to his one negative viewpoint.
Loyalty and Ethics
A
s I've noted, there were several times in my Army career when an unexpected phone call brought fortuitous news: my early promotion to major and my later selection to battalion command. In late 1979 I also got a call from a friend announcing that I had been selected to attend the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
I was working at my desk in the National Security Agency one Friday morning when the phone rang.
“Congratulations, Claudia,” my friend said.
“What for?” I asked, puzzled at his tone.
“You're going to CGSC. I just read the list in
The Army Times.”
Attending the Command and General Staff College was considered an important milestone in a young field-grade Army officer's career. Moreover, those majors and lieutenant colonels who did not attend CGSC stood very little chance of commanding a battalion, of reaching the rank of full colonel, or of later being considered for promotion to general officer. Since I started work at the NSA, a succession of assignment officers had told me that I was in the top third of my peer group. Now I had confirmation that my persistence and hard work had in fact been recognized.
I was glad to be attending the college because CGSC had long been an Army tradition. Although Infantry, Armor, and Artillery officers formed the majority of each class, a much smaller percentage of officers from the other Army branches, from the Reserve components, other services, a few U.S. government civilians, and officers known as Allied Officers from abroad rounded out the student body.
The Command and General Staff College was an integral part of the Army's professional development system. And we knew that the Army was an honorable institution that had weathered the harshly disillusioning years of the Vietnam War and was struggling to rebuild itself on a foundation of professional excellence, discipline, and integrity. These were all Army attributes that had suffered during the long conflict in Indochina, as they had throughout the American government, including the national security system.
I wanted to play my part, however small it might prove to be, in the Army's recovery from Vietnam. Working with my peers at CGSC to increase our level of professionalism presented one such small opportunity to meet that responsibility.
Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, on the wooded limestone banks of the Missouri River near Kansas City, was an old frontier post, dating from the Indian Wars of the 1820s, and probably best known to civilians as the site of the nearby U.S. penitentiary. The Army had established the School of Application of Infantry and Cavalry at the fort in 1881 to educate officers on modern tactics. But early in the twentieth century, a more formal and complex curriculum, based on the European general staff model, was created with the establishment of the General Service and Staff College, which later evolved into the CGSC. The mission of the college was to form future leaders by educating them through a rigorous program that followed the case-method study technique common to many business graduate programs.
My class assembled to begin the course in early August 1980. There was a lot of discussion generated because this was the college's centennial year. I was one of only fifteen women out of 983 total students. (In the class of 2001, there are ninety-one women out of a total of 1,054 students.) But I'd long grown accustomed to being in the minority in that regard. The class was divided into sections, each containing approximately sixty students. The women and forty-eight Allied Officers were distributed evenly among the sections, which were further broken down into work groups and two-officer teams of tablemates. I was in Section 12. My tablemate was an Egyptian Army lieutenant colonel named Abdel Siam, a soft-spoken, kindly man with a halting command of English, who had the distinction of having been taken prisoner of war by the Israelis twice in the same war. Despite his gentle manner, Lieutenant Colonel Siam held several decorations for valor and had experience as a combat leader.
The curriculum centered on classroom lectures and tactical exercises known as “problems,” which might last a morning, or continue for several days. Some of them involved relatively simple map exercises in which work groups had to deploy hypothetical forces in either defensive or offensive operations. Other problems were more elaborate, pitting teams of opponents against each other on wide, three-dimensional tabletop terrain models, over which we maneuvered miniature tanks and artillery pieces, all the while observed by the instructor umpires who had given the requirements of the particular battle scenario and assigned us our objectives and restrictions. This classroom war-gaming bore no resemblance to playing toy soldier because we realized our instructors' silent scrutiny and after-action reviews reflected their interest in finding new solutions to old tactical problems and gaining insights into new techniques under development in the field and now displayed in our performance of these exercises. They were interested as much in why as in what we did and continually quizzed us on our intent.
A major purpose of these exercises was to help an officer to think beyond traditional branch limits. For example, an Infantry major might have acquired a great deal of experience commanding a rifle company in the jungles of Vietnam as a captain, but knew little about positioning an armored cavalry troop for a desert defense. I, as a Military Intelligence officer specializing in strategic cryptology, had no firsthand experience of tactics. Yet I had to take my turn with my section mates, one day role-playing as the G-3 operations officer of an infantry division, the next, struggling to understand the ammunition shortages a field artillery battalion might face in protracted mobile combat.