rlfj: Blog

When I wrote this section I knew I was pushing the limits on what could possibly happen. If one of my advisers or editors said, “That’s impossible.”, I would go in a different direction. If they said, “That’s unlikely.”, I might not. These last few chapters I pushed the limit on unlikely. “The jumps would probably have been made from American Air Force planes.” “Ammo is rarely issued except on the ground.” “The jumpmaster usually does it this way.” Etc., etc., etc. Probably, rarely, usually - that means there is a small but finite chance of something occurring. I pushed the limits all the way around!

I’ve gotten a lot of information on how Carl can beat the case against him. I also got a lot of info on how the general has overstepped his bounds in a legal sense. There was some interesting legal information on who has jurisdiction and authority at various points. There were huge numbers of people reporting they knew family or friends who had been railroaded on something or other at some point.

For those who wanted Carl to stay in the Army, fight the charges, win, and go on to ever greater glory - sorry, that would never have happened. Leaving aside the fact that nobody actually wanted this mess to go to trial, even ultimate vindication would have ended Carl’s career. As he commented, he was marched off in handcuffs in front of his men. When a promotion board sits, they are examining officers they have never met or heard of. Negatives far outweigh the positives. The first thing they do is look for reasons not to promote somebody, and only then do they look for reasons to promote somebody. Alexander the Great couldn’t be promoted after an episode like this. Carl would have spent the remainder of his career as a captain, never having done his R&D stint or going to CGS, and assigned as Assistant Housing Officer at an army reserve base in Nome, Alaska, until he either resigned, was passed over enough times to get chucked out of the Army, or drank himself to death. Better to go out this way. So ends Carl’s short but illustrious career, not so much with a bang as with a whimper.

And so ends Book 4. What new fields are there for Carl Buckman to conquer? Or will he just spend the rest of his life goofing off? That would be pretty easy to write about, since my wife says all I ever do is goof off! Write what you know about!

I got a lot of emails about Chapter 59. There were several specific themes to the responses. One subset of reader wanted Carl to arrange violent paybacks to everyone involved (Hawkins, the sergeant, Fairfax, etc.) Sorry, not going to happen. We’ll meet some of these people again, down the road, both the good guys and the bad. Besides, if he wanted to do something to them, he’d do it himself, not hire killers. Another subset wanted him to sue everybody and make this all public and bring down the military. Again, not going to happen. If you haven’t figured it by now, whatever Carl personally feels, he’s not going to the press or push for court martials. The whole reason he did what he did with killing the four narcos was to get his men back without anybody knowing they were there, and trials negate that. A third group thinks that Special Operations and the CIA are about to recruit him. Why, I can’t imagine, since as far as they’re concerned, he is nothing but a busted-up company-grade officer who is good at the stock market.

Perhaps the most interesting subset was a group of readers who haven’t figured out where the story is coming from or heading to. By this, I mean the readers who want Carl to behave radically different. He’s been given a chance to go back in time, and he needs to do everything differently! He should have a new wife (preferably a supermodel or something of the sort), stay in the army and become a super Ninja general or something, along with being wealthier than Midas. Why go back and do the same thing over again (remarry the obviously imperfect Marilyn)? This group says that the entire point of the story should be escapist fiction, and over the top is better.

I never looked at this project as simply escapist fiction. Why go back in time and find and marry Marilyn again? Maybe he simply loves his wife! The escapist part is the fact that he has money now. Other than meeting her again, almost everything he’s done to this point has been different. I’m not changing my plans for this group of readers. There are plenty of do-over stories like that out there already.

On a different matter, there was a question about whether nurses wear wrist watches (which I have one of the nurses in 59 doing.) The reason was, don’t they have to take them off all the time for sterile purposes? Good question. I googled this & the answer was that most nurses wear a wristwatch, but make sure it’s waterproof and really cheap, in case it gets yucked upon. Some wear them upside down on their lapels, but that seems more English than American. I’m leaving the scene as is. Good question, though!

In any case, we are taking a break from Carl Buckman and returning to Grim Reaper for a few weeks. Enjoy!

A couple of things to blog about with this chapter. First off, a couple of readers have complained I have had Carl do the impossible. No officer would have ever have jumped his paratroopers from airplanes they had never trained on; Wilcox, Donovan, & Buckman would have all stood their ground and refused; Hawkins would have been court-martialed on the spot, etc. I have pushed the story too far.

Well, maybe yes, maybe no. It was curious that when I was having some military people review this portion of the story this really didn’t come up too much. Pretty much everybody agreed that there were plenty of idiot generals who would think nothing of ordering a drop like this, as well as the upcoming events. More than a few military people wrote about when they were in the military, and they remembered some REMF (Rear Echelon Mother Fucker) screwing things up royally and then trying to cover it all up. Quite a few said they remembered dangerous and impossible orders they got where they just had to suck it up and do it anyway. They all agreed that I was pushing the envelope, and that a good hanging party should be in the future for all involved.

Curiously, only two readers commented that Carl has now committed murder, and one reader hopes he goes to jail. (Boy, talk about a party-pooper!) We’ll have to see about that. Chapters 58 and 59 are all about the cover-up.

A second item to discuss is the title of the chapter - The Anabasis of Xenophon. For the readers who don’t know military history, let me give a quick rundown. Following the Peloponnesian War there were large numbers of unemployed Greek mercenaries on the Mediterranean arms market, highly employable heavy infantry. Approximately 10,000 Greek soldiers were hired in 401 BC by Cyrus the Younger of Persia, a rival to his brother Artaxerxes II for the Persian throne. After marching 1,000+ miles into what is now Iraq, Cyrus managed to get killed in battle, leaving his mercenaries trapped in the middle of Persia. The Persians, no fans of the Greeks following their losses in the Greco-Persian Wars years before, managed to kill off most of the Greek officer corps. The Greeks, now led by Xenophon, marched 400 miles to Trebizond on the Black Sea, pretty much fighting all the way and living off the land. From there they sailed home.

Back home, Xenophon wrote a book, the Anabasis, about the entire trip. Technically, in Greek, anabasis means ‘march from the sea’ and would only cover the first half of the trip. The katabasis or ‘march to the sea’ is the return trip. The book earned Xenophon fame through the ages and ranks with Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War among ancient histories. Ultimately it showed the hollowness of the Persian Empire and was one of the reasons that Alexander the Great figured he could conquer Persia.

In case you were wondering, I didn’t blog anything on the last chapters, since I didn’t have anything earth shattering to say. According to my wife, I rarely do. That’s another issue…

I heard from somebody that there was another warship named after a woman. The USS Higbee (DD-806), a Gearing class destroyer, was active from 1944-1979. She was named after Chief Nurse Lenah S. Higbee, Superintendent of the US Navy Nurse Corps during World War I. I remember hearing of the Higbee but never knew she was named after a woman.

A few readers raised questions about whether it was possible or legal to rush Carl through to higher rank as fast as I am doing it. The answer is that was possible, just unlikely. CGSC is open to promotable captains (3 years service or more). However, “below the zone” promotions are allowed, generally in the case of really outstanding officers. We may assume Carl will fall in such a category.

Time In Grade refers to how long an officer is at a certain rank before he is considered promotable to a higher rank. This is something constantly changing. Currently you need a minimum of 18 months at 2LT to be considered for 1LT, and 24 months minimum at 1LT to be considered for CPT, which is pretty much how fast Carl moved up. However, that has changed over the years. During WW2 the wait for 1LT was as low as 6 months, the need for officers was so great. In the late 70s, the times were 24 months and 24 months, and quite a few officers, even the good ones, waited longer. During peacetime the wait goes up, in wartime the Time In Grade requirement drops. “Bloody wars and sickly seasons” - indeed!

The other element in promotions is the process itself. A promotion board sits on a periodic basis and reviews all the promotable candidates. Your performance, the OER Carl mentions, is a primary element at this point. Just because you have Time In Grade doesn’t guarantee a promotion. In fact, the general rule is that if you have been passed over (not picked for promotion) twice already, you are no longer even eligible for promotion. At some point in the future you will be separated from the service, involuntarily retired. That’s why a good OER is so important.

Mind you, this is just the briefest introduction to the system. The official army instructions on officer promotion are 64 pages long (as of the time I wrote the story) and written in the finest military bureaucratese. When the bullets start flying, a lot of this stuff gets short-circuited, and the survivors of the Darwinian process called combat can move up quickly. Assuming you live through the selection process…

When I commented that I wanted accuracy in my stuff, I never expected where some of that was going to end. One thing I said at the time was that you could never tell what little detail would stick in people’s minds. Sometimes it’s a really major item (“that unit didn’t exist in 1978”) and sometimes it’s really minor, but it’s always important. I find it fascinating the things I have learned writing this story.

The latest case in point - In chapter 55, Marilyn undid Carl’s pants; buttons or zipper? I get an email back saying; wrong, combat uniforms had button flies, since it’s much easier to sew a button back on in the field or in combat conditions than it is to sew in a zipper. It is certainly something I never thought about before, and it makes sense. But is it completely accurate?

Answer - Maybe. I checked with several of my military advisers and the answers were a mix of yes and no. It seems as if by the 1970s you could get fatigues with either buttons or zippers, and nobody seemed to care. (Dress uniforms would have been zippers.) Some people had both types of pants. The regular dress code for an officer in the 82nd would have been fatigues, not a dress uniform, and while I didn’t state what he was wearing, Class As would have been unusual. I found this really quite interesting, and not at all silly or trivial. I would have never thought about buttons in combat, but it sure makes sense when you think about it. Thanks to everybody on this one.

Uniforms can be a really silly thing at times. My son enlisted in the Navy just about the time they came out with the ‘aquaflage’ uniform, a digital camouflage uniform. The armed services need camouflage uniforms, right? The Navy is an armed service, right? So now, instead of wearing khakis, they had these ridiculous bright blue camouflage uniforms known as ‘blueberries’. The jokes were endless - Al Qaeda can’t find them now if they fall overboard, etc. Somebody even painted an F-18 in this color scheme. Nobody could quite figure out who they’re supposed to be hiding from, anyway. If you’re stationed on a ship and want to hide, then dress up like an electrical conduit and you’ll fit right in. If you’re on land in a hostile place, the first thing they give you is Marine or Army camos. Millions of dollars were spent on this, and morale decreased. The blueberries were discontinued in 2019.

Not much to blog about. Enjoy! Thanks!

Some interesting comments from readers about Chapter 51. Specifically, did the 9-1-1 system exist in 1978, or do I have an error in the story? I verified my recollections from the time by googling it, and found several sources, not just Wikipedia.

The 911 system actually started in 1968. Coverage was very sparse and spotty in those early days, and nobody really knew what to do with it, but the phone company (Ma Bell) reserved that number for emergency services. The FBI, for instance, wanted no part of it, since they didn’t want to handle the nation’s emergency calls. It started with a few small towns and cities implementing it piecemeal, with phones ringing into police stations and fire houses, and then it grew. It was nothing like the regional systems we have now, that tie together counties and metropolitan areas through emergency dispatch systems. Still, by 1978, the time of the wedding, it was a well-known and understood number.

Writing these stories is always fascinating.