And many had to be on the physical training field by 6:00
a.m.
Those families who hadn't been able to make other arrangements brought their sleeping children to the field in their cars, locked them in while performing PT, then drove the kids to a baby-sitter. Still, those on rotating shifts faced the problem of finding in-home care. There were very few baby-sitters, either American or German, willing to take children at 10:30
p.m.
from parents about to begin the Mids shift.
I began to investigate the battalion establishing its own around-the-clock child care center that would be open seven days a week. Our brigade commander, Colonel Ed Tivol, identified a nearby pre-World War II Luftwaffe building that might be suitable. But then our battalion ran into an absolute wall of Army and Department of Defense regulations governing the structure and facilities of child care centers. And the Army engineers we'd consulted on the project said they couldn't bring the building up to standard.
By the time I left Augsburg, the only progress I'd been able to make was to slightly increase the number of American homes certified to provide care. And my sole satisfaction was knowing that we had explored a new possibility and had furthered the body of knowledge surrounding requirements for child care in anticipation of some future innovation. And this helped soldiers understand that lack of adequate child care was not their fault, but was due to deficiencies in support to working families.
We cannot say, “Serve in the Army for minimal pay. Have families. Be good parents. Work long hours,” and then expect that there will not be friction and stress borne by both the soldier and the institution.
For me, the failure taught two lessons: It's better to have tried than not, and I would try again at the next opportunity.
In the spring of 1990, I was sitting in my sunny office in the recruiting battalion headquarters in San Antonio when I got a phone call from Brigadier General Larry Runyon. He had been the deputy commander of Field Station Korea, who, with Colonel Charles Black (“the Prince of Darkness”), had been so influential in shaping my future in Military Intelligence.
“Claudia,” he said, “you've been selected to command a brigade.”
I felt like shouting in triumph. This meant I would not have to retire, as I had thought a year earlier in Germany. As a result of seeking additional command time with the recruiting battalion, my record as a leader was more competitive. I had been selected for promotion to full colonel, to attend the War College, and, with this telephone call, I learned, I was to command a brigade.
I smiled as I realized I would now have to take the Army's mandatory Pre-Command Course for the third time. But the minor irritation at having to repeat the course yet again was far outweighed by the joy of knowing I'd been selected for brigade command—one of twenty such assignments in Military Intelligence—after twenty-one years as an officer. I suddenly recalled late one afternoon in Colonel Black's car driving back from Seoul to Pyongtaek during a long day of meetings and impromptu inspections at the field station during which he had asked a series of questions that immediately helped the junior officers make sense of what needed to be done to accomplish the mission.
“Sir,” I'd asked, “how do you know how to
do
all this?”
“The first twenty-six years are the hardest.”
Now it looked as if my own Army service would probably extend that long.
In July 1991, I took command of the 703rd Military Intelligence Brigade at Kunia on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. Kunia was adjacent to Schofield Barracks and Wheeler Army Air Field of Pearl Harbor fame. Beyond my brigade of three battalions totaling about 1,200 soldiers, the station had joint facilities for U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, and Department of Defense civilian strategic intelligence functions.
Built soon after the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the main facility, “the tunnel,” was a 300,000-square-foot concrete building between two low hills that had been bulldozed over with earth and planted with pineapples as camouflage. Originally intended as an underground aircraft factory, the tunnel was now a high-security intelligence center at which my brigade was the host organization. I was now a full colonel, the senior officer at the station.
Although our work was so sensitive that we did not openly acknowledge the mission of the facility, everyone knew about us. Among some, the Kunia station was called “the used-car lot” due to the huge asphalt parking area next to the green hillside, which was filled with parked vehicles around the clock.
When I arrived at Kunia, I held a series of meetings with my brigade staff officers, the battalion commanders, company commanders, the brigade command sergeant major, and the brigade NCOs down to the sergeants leading squads. As I had in Augsburg on a smaller scale, I posed the basic question about the organization, “What's good, what's bad, and what shouldn't I touch because I'll just screw it up?”
I also told them I believed loyalty flowed in both directions. “If you've got a problem with the way I command the brigade, let me know. Don't just bad-mouth me behind my back. That doesn't accomplish anything.”
I also believed in candor as an aspect of loyalty. “Tell me your real view. I'm not interested in yes-men or -women. But try to keep the bad news within the brigade until we've had a chance to address the issues. Grumbling and spreading rumors works for misfits, not for soldiers pulling their weight.”
I asked them to have the courage to trust me and their leaders, to serve selflessly. “Remember you're not alone. You are working for your company, battalion, brigade, INSCOM, the Army, and your country. We will support you.
“I'm going to walk the operations floor during all the shifts,” I continued. “Don't get worked up. I'm not looking over your shoulder, but I have to get a firsthand sense of how we're meeting our mission.”
In these staff orientation briefings, we discussed ways to protect soldiers' break time to the degree possible, even during stressful operational surges when the tendency was to remain on duty. SIGINT required a soldier's concentration; a stressed-out zombie could not do the job properly. Additionally, we decided to conduct awards and promotions ceremonies on the 11:00
p.m.
–7:00
a.m.
Mids shift so that soldiers permanently assigned to that duty would feel more personally connected to the brigade and also to avoid interrupting their daytime sleep period.
When these purely military matters were introduced, I met with the civilian wives, husbands, and older children of my soldiers in order to get some sense of their morale. It was futile to improve conditions for soldiers on the station if they faced insurmountable difficulties in their off-duty lives.
As at Augsburg, most of the soldiers worked rotating shifts. And I had an even higher proportion of dual-career military couples. With the incredibly high cost of living in Hawaii (30 percent above the Mainland), private child care was beyond the reach of most of my soldiers. This led to even greater personal disruption in their lives. Depending on their shift schedules, couples with small children often ran dangerously short on sleep, as one of the parents had to remain awake to mind the children while the other was on duty. The situation was simply not acceptable.
They should not have had to make that choice. I was determined to establish an Army child care facility on the station itself so that these soldiers could be relieved of the cost and anxiety of this pressing problem and devote their full attention to their duties.
I discussed my intention with Brigadier General Michael M. Schneider, Deputy Commanding General, INSCOM, at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and with Lieutenant General Johnny Corns, Commander, U.S. Army, Pacific. From my very first meeting on this matter with General Corns, a concerned, decisive leader, I could see he intended to help.
“Colonel,” he said, “I'll put my staff to work on this.”
The general's staff quickly discovered that they had an unfilled but funded civilian child care “slot.” By shaking the bureaucratic woodwork, the staff also found funding for another child care slot. They filled these positions with Helen Stine and Debbie Hewitt, two women who had long experience in the Department of Defense child care system.
They energetically approached the problem of providing affordable, around-the-clock child care for my brigade. One of the first things Helen and Debbie learned by rereading the complex Department of Defense regulations was that a child care facility need not meet all the expensive building standards if the parents worked within ten minutes of the center itself. Also, since the requirement was for a custodial, not a developmental, program, the proposed center would not require expensive staffing.
This information was a real breakthrough. Chief Warrant Officer Hope Bean and Lieutenant Colonel David Pagano identified an unused cinder block building near the tunnel entrance as the ideal candidate for our proposed child care center. With continuing staff support from U.S. Army, Pacific, the brigade launched into the detailed planning to move from concept to reality, never an easy matter in any large bureaucratic organization.
One unintended but beneficial consequence of this was that the soldiers recognized their leaders were working hard to solve the problem. So, at every Friday brigade staff meeting in our headquarters auditorium, we discussed the progress (or lack thereof) on the child care center after purely operational matters had been dealt with. Soon, groups of off-duty soldiers were attending these meetings, listening to key staff members, Lieutenant Colonels Gary Royster, the Operations officer and later a battalion commander, David Pagano, the Logistics officer, and Kay D'Enbeau, the Resource Management officer. The soldiers, I knew, would carry the word back to their peers that the brigade leaders were addressing this difficult issue.
At one weekly meeting I recall asking the staff, “What's the latest thing they say we
can't
do?”
Another week we fought the battle of electric wall outlets. Then the campaign continued on the height of bathroom partitions, followed by the famous Battle of the Toy Sanitizing Facility.
One difficult roadblock we had to meet head-on concerned the outside play area, which the Department of Defense insisted had to be rubber-padded rather than grass or asphalt. “I'm just trying to remember,” someone asked, hoping to lighten the moment, “did we have rubber padding in the backyard when we grew up?”
As these frustrating questions arose and we addressed them one by one, the number of platoon and company first sergeants attending the weekly staff meetings increased. Clearly they were passing the word back to their soldiers: The brigade leadership considers this an important issue.
And we kept “working the problem,” as Army parlance has it, for a full eight months. Beyond building standards, there was the vexing issue of funding. The brigade did not want to charge parents for child care, so we struggled to develop a barter system through which soldiers would trade time working at the center for hours of care.
But there was concern about fair equivalency: Was an hour spent during the day when there were forty children ranging from babies to preschoolers equal to a late-night hour when twenty babies and toddlers slept in cribs? Further, soldiers paying back the time they owed the center had to work around their duty schedules, but everyone needed to sleep eight hours, and we all had PT and other training. Many soldiers also moon-lighted off-duty to survive financially. One afternoon I saw a soldier from the brigade working at the PX garage.
“Is this your second job?” I asked.
“No, ma'am,” he said. “It's my third.”
Those were the days when military pay was so low that many of the married couples with children among the junior enlisted ranks qualified for food stamps.
Throughout the effort to create the child care center, I projected the doggedly optimistic assurance that we would succeed. Again, one of the responsibilities of the leader or coach is to inspire the team. Had I voiced the pessimism I sometimes felt, the junior officers might have given in to their own doubts. But I never indicated in any way that we might fail. And I knew from experience that no younger officer would tell the colonel commanding the brigade, “This can't be done.”
Finally, our stubborn effort paid off. In June 1992, the brigade child care center opened with an official ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by our staff, soldier parents, and staff officers from U.S. Army, Pacific, and Schofield Barracks. The center was the first free military around-the-clock facility open seven days a week. As I visited the center with Brigadier General Ray Roe, Commander of the Army's Community and Family Support Center, we noted the bright, freshly painted walls—the effort of volunteer parents—and the “surplus” furniture some of the more inventive senior NCOs had delivered.
“The actual larceny involved,” I assured another officer, “was very minor.”
In fact, the parents had sewn curtains, held car washes to raise money, and donated baby bottles, car seats, toys, and disposable diapers. Creating the center was a true community effort.
And it functioned almost flawlessly for over a year. It would be nice to report that the center continued in operation, but it was a very high maintenance effort that would never run on automatic. Unfortunately, after my very energetic and innovative brigade staff and the equally energetic senior NCOs in the battalions and I moved on to other assignments, the child care center could not be sustained. The work of juggling volunteer schedules was just too demanding. But the soldiers knew that their children were a brigade priority.
My motives were not purely altruistic. The availability of quality child care directly related to the problem of retaining trained soldiers in the Army. In the 1990s, the civilian economy was booming, and most of my soldiers, who had high-technology or other marketable skills, did not have to put up with the long hours, low pay, and the dislocation of moving their families every two years. Military Intelligence soldiers were very well trained: Some linguists received over a year of intense special training. And the required clearance process for each soldier could cost tens of thousands of dollars. It was essential that the Army not suffer an unnecessary continual hemorrhage of these valuable soldiers due to circumstances such as poor child care, which we could make an effort to improve.