rlfj: Blog

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.

It seems I got 47 & 48 mostly right. Parts of 48 are still messed up in the formatting, but the webmaster and I are working on them.

I got quite a few readers who wrote about their experiences with the Army, mostly along the line that they remembered these things well. The shot line brought back a lot of memories to people, generally not in a good way! A lot of the memories were the type where you look back after twenty to thirty years and laugh, but at the time they were a royal pain in the ass! I think you’ll find that in any field.

I think I have the major errors and screwups in my story corrected, but there will also be some minor items that people will notice. For instance, a number of people said that the Airborne doesn’t say HOO-RAH but says AIRBORNE! I fixed that, along with a reference to an Interstate section that didn’t exist in 1977. Another thing I have seen is that every few years the Army (and the Navy; I hear about it from my son, twenty-plus years in the Navy and Reserve) seems to change things just for the sake of changing things! What was the purpose of changing the Division Readiness Force to the Division Ready Brigade? Same people doing the same things. Well, I’m sure the people who think these things up are much wiser than I am, and they have to be better paid than I am!

I was surprised by the number of readers who recalled Grace Hopper and had either met her or heard her speak. Truly fascinating woman. She really was one of the giants.

Well, we’re taking a break from Grim Reaper and going back to Carl Buckman. I am going to be putting out two chapters every few days. Book 4 is relatively short, fourteen chapters, so it should be up in two or three weeks.

There are some formatting errors in 47 and 48. I am checking with the Webmaster to fix this, and if necessary will repost the chapters with fixes.

Carl is now officially in the Army, which I never was, so I had to find myself some expert editing. Into the breach stepped an airborne trained helo pilot with experience around the time when Carl was supposed to be serving. Another one of my editors happened to be an artillery officer from the 82nd Airborne. These guys were Godsends! They did a great job editing and fixing some of my errors. Some were relatively minor, some were considerably larger, all would have detracted from the story. This has been fascinating in so many ways, and I have really learned a lot about airborne life that I would have never gotten elsewhere. I think I was able to fix everything, but any errors are mine and mine alone!

On a personal note, much of my family history is similar to Carl’s. I was talking to my brother over Thanksgiving (who is nowhere near as nutty as Hamilton) and he is a bit of a family historian and a genius. “Did anybody in our family own slaves?” The answer surprised me to a certain extent. Yes! Between 1750 (when we first arrived in America) and 1846, there were eight wills probated and six enslaved individuals were mentioned as property. That suggests to me that some of these individuals were passed down through more than one generation. They were all house slaves, as opposed to field slaves; as Carl mentioned, north central Maryland is not suitable for the big cash crops that used field slaves. I’m not saying this was a good thing. I consider slavery detestable. On the other hand, I am not here to pass judgment on my ancestors two centuries ago.

Enjoy!