An Army Intelligence Warrant Officer Vol I
Three readers have requested a summary of my experiences. This starts the series.
I have always been a quick study, which for those needing fancy names to prop themselves up call “autodidact.” I’ve also been interested in everything except shopping as long as I can remember.
In high school I saw no need to study, so I didn’t. I spent my first year in a junior college because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. I finally decided to pursue music, which got strange at times. In the 1960s the dorms were segregated into male and female, no mingling. I don’t know where I was going with that, but I’ll leave it in for now.
But I get beyond myself. In junior college I began to notice something unusual. I could detect patterns where few others could. I also had an anthropology teacher as my advisor and signed up for Anthro 101 to make him happy.
I eventually saw the film A Beautiful Mind, about the psychotic professor. I recognized myself immediately. Nash was me; I was Nash, just without the hallucinations.
Other People are different from me???
As time went on, I began to learn that not everyone didn’t need to study, and that not everyone was a quick study. This puzzled me because, as with most people, I looked in the mirror and saw “normal.” Whatever that meant. I wrote a critique of the Footnotes to Das Kapital, entitled “Engel’s Angles on Marx’ Marks.” The teacher was not amused.
On to a four-year institution in Western Maryland. I would pursue a dual degree in Spanish and Music and get a certification that would allow me to teach. I majored in beer, and somehow my senior year managed to need only one course to graduate. My first semester on campus I enrolled in a senior-level course in Spanish. We studied Don Quixote and La Vida es Sueño. In the original medieval Spanish. It was also offered as a graduate course. I was the only one in the room without a degree in Spanish. I learned to look before leaping. I just never learned it well. This was the point where life began taking on a surreal quality.
I was home free. Until I had to take my final education course, teaching music in elementary school. I still can hear the professor’s voice as she dressed me down. “I’ve seen you chewing gum. Well, anybody who would chew gum would also smoke. And anyone who would smoke would also drink. And anyone who would drink would do drugs. And we don’t need drug addicts teaching our young kids.” I literally looked from side to side seeking flying monkeys.
Winning the Lottery
When I was in college, I won the draft lottery. I talked to a recruiter about Officer Candidate School and was handed forms to complete. When I asked to submit them as soon as possible I learned that there was no need, OCS enrollment never closed. I should have known better. I was already on the hook, he had me. My eyesight wouldn’t qualify me for anything in the Air Force, and the Navy wasn’t recruiting. I wasn’t crazy enough to become a Marine. Army was my only choice.
He had lied. What a shock! He didn’t need to waste a precious OCS slot on me since I was already his. I kept pressing him to get me into OCS, until he finally admitted that OCS enrollment was closed. I asked about going into intelligence; he told me there were no enlisted personnel in intelligence. Why I believed him is a mystery. He thought becoming a clerk-typist would be best. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Somewhere in here I should probably note that in my senior year, I dated four women, all red heads. I’m still married to one of them fifty years later.
I asked for an audition with the Army Chorus. I got one and passed. I had trained with Bill Smith, long-time soloist with the Marine Band and lifelong friend of Bob Merrill. They went separate ways. I passed the audition with flying colors, to learn that the next opening for a baritone was three years in the future. By then I’d be either finished with my enlistment or dead in Viet Nam.
Greenland, Here I Come
When asked where I wanted to be stationed overseas, I said, “Greenland.” I wound up at clerk-typist school, which was self-paced. I completed the first half of the course the first day, then took the final exam for that half on day two. I was used to typing on an old LC Smith business machine and could reach upward of 110 words per minute on it. On the old manuals I flew; when I typed, most of my fellow classmates eventually wound-up sobbing in tears. I completed the second half of the course on day three and took the final on day four. I then watched as the six classes before ours got orders for Viet Nam, and the six classes after ours receive their orders for the same destination. My class went to Germany, where I was assigned to the European Army Chorus.
I sang whatever part was needed, played keyboard, upright bass, melodic percussion, viola, organ, whatever. I had failed second semester French in junior high school because I couldn’t handle grammar-translation approach. I wanted to talk and listen. Unfortunately, I was better at speaking and understanding than the teacher. Anyway, I sang backup for one of the Ames Brothers’ European Tour, wrote and arranged and got a broker to sell my songs and arrangements. This is covered in my semi-autobiographical novel, Did You Ever See A Leg Grow? (https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0872Q6D3M)
Two of my better pieces were “Dancing Dream,” sold off to some group in Scandinavia, and “Winter of Our Disco Tent,” sold off to somebody else.
After repeated problems with surgeries, I graduated basic training in time for Christmas break. Went to my fiancé’s home to ask for her hand in marriage, and more than 50 years later we’re still together. Keeping this all in-order is difficult.
So, I arrived already speaking French and Spanish. I quickly picked up German, Portuguese (it’s a dialect of Spanish) and Italian (another Romance language). I got to where I could understand most Western European languages, whether Romance or Germanic. I also wound up being certified for federal court translations in a bunch of languages I couldn’t identify.
Still, I kept detecting patterns where few others did.
Somewhere along the way I learned about systems and constants. Pretty simple, when you think about it. A system is a group of “things” that come together, at least briefly, and interact, producing results. There are constants in everything, especially conscious systems. A conscious system, such as an animal, needs to acquire resources and use them to its will. Using them to its will typically meant transforming them in a certain manner, producing something that could be exchanged for something else. Few systems can be 100% self-sufficient, so the “things” need outside help. Ultimately this became known as a business model – what you do that brings resources.
“We make cars and sell them at a profit” is a business model.
Outsourcing is not a dirty word
How you go about it is an operations model. I learned while still in elementary school that if you didn’t do something well enough to have other people pay you to do it for them, then it wasn’t really part of your core business. So, you hired other people who did it for a living to do it for you. That’s called outsourcing. What functions you retain and what functions you outsource are always different for every business. But they are there. That, and how the business is structured, constitute your operations model.
If you think you don’t outsource, think again. Do you generate your own electricity? Do you grow your own crops and transform them into food? Do you sew your own clothes? Largely, you outsource those functions.
Eventually I learned that outsourcing and offshoring are different things.
When I first worked with a major auto rental company, I thought it probably made money by renting cars. It didn’t. At the time, it made money by selling renters mostly useless things, such as rental phones, extra insurance and overpriced gasoline if they returned it less than full. When I pointed out to the executives that this is what they did, they were shocked. Then I knocked them over. “Your site managers spend almost all of their time reviewing details of trivial purchases. Your measurement and compensation system drives them to waste money finding a way to have some other office pay for repairs to cars that are owned by other offices. So, you will have a car towed halfway across country rather than replace a single part.”
When the COO heard this, he announced that henceforth there would be no more of that, and that in the future the offices would no longer audit every bill, just those that exceeded the 90% value by transaction volume. An IT type had an immediate psychotic break, and we had to await an ambulance before continuing. The next month the corporation increased its bottom line by two percentage points. It kept increasing until the company was actually profitable and was sold off.
All systems, including businesses and organizations have to produce something. It was obvious what a colonial power and its foreign colonies did. The colonies produced commodities (bulk food, minerals, lumber, whatever) and sent them to its owner, which transformed them into more complex things of value, that were in turn sold back to the colony. We have been a colony of China since the 1990s.
Staying on Track is Hard
Back to the Army Intelligence Warrant Officer, because that came to define my life.
Christmas 1972 I flew home from Germany to the US and married. Fate decided I would travel on one plane on the return and my wife on another. On arrival, I was ordered to report to Personnel. I had two choices: move to Munich as liaison with the Olympic Committee, or to Berlin for some mystery assignment. I had been to Berlin and would dig ditches to get back.
You know how much I enjoy your autobiographical stuff so just here to underscore it.
(And to say I have no words sufficient to thank you for that recommendation you posted.)
Realizing we see the world differently from others takes a while. My husband had that odd memory where he could remember what he'd eaten for every meal, etc. I hope your red-headed spouse copes.
My husband was an MP in Vietnam and your war experience tracks with how chaotic it was. Music as a gift that permitted you to go to Berlin rather than Vietnam is an interesting insight into how the Pentagon thinks.