Combat

by Stephen Coonts

  “Which is himself,” Norman added.

  “Probably so,” Ingemanson said, with a touch of humor in his eyes. He looked at Norman, and the humor disappeared. “The difference is, Slammer is measuring the candidates against a rigid yardstick—himself, or at least his own image of himself. On the other hand, you—in my humble nonvoting opinion—are not measuring the candidates at all. You’re chipping away at them, finding and removing every flaw in every candidate until you come up with a chopped-up thing at the end. You’re not creating anything here, Colonel—you’re destroying.”

  Norman was a little stunned by Ingemanson’s words. He was right on, of course—that was exactly Norman’s plan of attack on this board: Start with a perfect candidate, a perfect “10,” then whittle away at their perfection until reaching the bottom-line man or woman. When Ingemanson put it the way he did, it did sound somewhat defeatist, destructive—but so what? There were no guidelines. What right did he have to say all this?

  “Pardon me, sir,” Norman said, “but I’m not quite clear on this. You don’t approve of the way I’m rating the candidates?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying at all, Colonel,” Ingemanson said. “And I didn’t try to correct Slammer either—not that I could even if I tried. I’m making an unofficial, off-the-record but learned opinion, on a little of the psychology behind the scoring if you will. I have no authority for any of this except for my experience on promotion boards and the fact that I’m a two-star general and you have to sit and listen to me.” He smiled, trying to punctuate his attempt at humor, but Weir wasn’t biting. “I’m just pointing out to you what I see.”

  “You think I’m destroying these candidates?”

  “I’m saying that perhaps your attitude toward most of the candidates, and toward the flyers in particular, shows that maybe you’re gunning them down instead of measuring them,” Ingemanson said. “But as you said, there’s no specific procedure for scoring the candidates. Do it any way as you see fit.”

  “Permission to speak openly, sir?”

  “For Pete’s sake, Colonel … yes, yes, please speak openly.”

  “This is a little odd, General,” Norman said woodenly. “One moment you criticize my approach to scoring the candidates, and the next moment you’re telling me to go ahead and do it any way I want.”

  “As I said in my opening remarks, Colonel Weir—this is your Air Force, and it’s your turn to shape its future,” Ingemanson said sincerely. “We chose you for the board: you, with your background and history and experience and attitudes and all that other emotional and personal baggage. The Secretary of the Air Force gave you mostly nonspecific guidelines for how to proceed. The rest is up to you. We get characters like you and we get characters like Slammer Ponce working side by side, deciding the future.”

  “One tight-ass, one hard-ass—is that what you’re saying?”

  “Two completely different perspectives,” Ingemanson said, not daring to get dragged into that most elegant, truthful observation. “My job is to make sure you are being fair, equitable, and open-minded. As long as you are, you’re in charge—I’m only the referee, the old man what’s in charge. I give you the shape of one man’s opinion, like Eric Sevareid used to say. End of discussion.” Ingemanson glanced at his watch, a silent way of telling Norman to get the hell out of his office before the headache brewing between his eyes grew any worse. “Have a nice day, Colonel.”

  Norman got to his feet, stood at attention until Ingemanson—with an exasperated roll of his eyes—formally dismissed him, and walked out. He thought he had just been chewed out, but Ingemanson did it so gently, so smoothly, so affably, that Norman was simply left wondering, replaying the general’s words over and over in his head until he reached the panel deliberation room.

  The other panel members were already seated, with Ponce at his usual place, his unlit cigar clenched in his teeth. “Gawd, Norm, you’re late, and you look a little tight,” Ponce observed loudly. “Had a wild weekend, Norm?”

  “I finished my taxes and ran a ten-K run in less than forty minutes. How was your weekend?”

  “I creamed the general’s ass in three rounds of golf, won a hundred bucks, met a cute senorita, and spent most of yesterday learning how to cook Mexican food buck naked,” Ponce replied. The rest of the room exploded in laughter and applause. “But shit, I don’t have my taxes done. What kind of loser am I?” They got to work amidst a lot of chatter and broad smiles—everyone but Norman.

  The day was spent on what was called “resolving the gray area.” In the course of deliberations, many candidates had a score that permitted them to be promoted, but there weren’t enough slots to promote them all. So every candidate with a potentially promotable score had to be rescored until there were no more tie scores remaining. Naturally, when the candidates were rescored, there were candidates with tie scores again. Those had to be rescored, then the promotable candidates lumped together again and rescored yet again until enough candidates were chosen to fill the slots available.

  In deliberating the final phase of rescoring the “gray area,” panel members were allowed to discuss the rationale behind their scores with each other. It was the phase that Norman most dreaded, and at the same time most anticipated—a possible head-to-head, peer-to-peer confrontation with Harry Ponce.

  It was time, Norman thought, for the Slammer to get slammed.

  “Norm, what in blue blazes are you thinking?” Ponce exploded as the final short stack of personnel jackets were passed around the table. “You torpedoed Waller again. Your rating pushes him out of the box. Mind tellin’ me why?”

  “Every other candidate in that stack has Air Command and Staff College done in residence or by correspondence, except him,” Norman replied. He didn’t have to scan the jacket—he knew exactly which candidate it was, knew that Ponce would want to go to war over him. “His PME printout says he ordered the course a second time after failing to finish it within a year. Now why do you think he deserves to get a promotion when all the others completed that course?”

  “Because Waller has been assigned to a fighter wing in Europe for the past three years.”

  “So?”

  “Jesus, Norm, open your eyes,” Ponce retorted. “The Soviet Union is doin’ a free fall. The Berlin Wall came down and Russia’s number one ally, East Germany, virtually disappears off the map overnight. A Soviet premier kicks the bucket every goddamned year, the Baltic states want to become nonaligned nations, and the Soviet economy is in meltdown. Everyone expects the Russkies to either implode or break out and fight any day now.”

  “I still don’t get it.”

  “Fighter pilots stationed in Europe are practically sleeping in their cockpits because they have so many alert scrambles and restricted alert postures,” Ponce explained, “and Waller leads the league in sorties. He volunteers for every mission, every deployment, every training mission, every shadow tasking. He’s his wing’s go-to guy. He’s practically taken over his squadron already. His last OER went all the way up to USAFE headquarters. He flew one-fifth of all his squadron’s sorties in the Sandbox, and still served as ops officer and as acting squadron commander when his boss got grounded after an accident. He deserves to get a promotion.”

  “But if he gets a promotion, he’ll be unavailable for a command position because he hasn’t completed ACSC—hasn’t even officially started it, in fact,” Norman pointed out. “And he’s been in his present assignment for almost four years—that means he’s ready for reassignment. If he gets reassigned he’ll have to wait at least a year, maybe two years, for an ACSC residence slot. He’ll get passed up by officers junior to him even if he maintains a spotless record. A promotion now will only hurt him.”

  “What the hell kind of screwed-up logic is that, Weir?” Ponce shouted. But Norman felt good, because he could see that the little lightbulb over Ponce’s head came on. He was getting through to the supercolonel.

  “You know why, Colonel,” Norman said conf
idently. “If he doesn’t get promoted, he’ll have a better chance of staying in his present assignment—in fact, I’d put money on it, if he’s the acting squadron commander. He’s a kick-ass major now—no one can touch him. He’s certainly top of the list in his wing for ACSC. As soon as he gets back from Saudi Arabia, he’ll go. When he graduates from ACSC in residence, he’ll have all the squares filled and then some. He’ll be a shooin for promotion next year.”

  “But he’ll miss his primary zone,” Ponce said dejectedly. He knew Norman was right, but he still wanted to do everything he could to reward this outstanding candidate. “His next board will be an above-the-primary-zone board, and he’ll be lumped in with the has-beens. Here’s a guy who works his butt off for his unit. Who deserves it more than him?”

  “The officers who took a little extra time in professional career development and got their education requirements filled,” Norman replied. “I’m not saying Waller’s not a top guy. But he obviously knew what he had to do to be competitive—after all, he’s taken the course twice, and he still didn’t do it: That’s not a well-rounded candidate in my book. The other candidates have pulled for their units too, but they also took time to get the theoretical and educational training in. Four other guys in that stack finished ACSC, and two of them have been selected to go in residence already. They’re the ones that deserve a promotion.”

  “Well of course they had time to do ACSC—they’re ground-pounders,” Ponce shot back.

  The remark hit a nerve in Norman’s head that sent a thrill of anger through his body. “Excuse me?”

  “They’re ground-pounders—support personnel,” Ponce said, completely ignorant of Norman’s shocked, quickly darkening expression. “They go home every night at seventeen hundred hours and they don’t come to work until oh-seven-thirty. If they work on weekends, it’s because there’s a deployment or they want face time. They don’t have to pull ’round-the-clock strip alert or fly four scrambles a day or emergency dispersals.”

  “Hey, Colonel, I’ve done plenty of all those things,” Norman retorted angrily. “I’ve manned mobility lines seventy-two hours straight, processing the airmen at the end of the line who’ve been up working all night because all the flyers insisted on going first. I’ve worked lots of weekends in-processing new wing commanders who don’t want to be bothered with paperwork or who want to get their TDY money as soon as they hit the base or their precious teak furniture from Thailand got a scratch on it during the move and they want to sue the movers. Just because you’re a flyer doesn’t mean you got the corner on dedication to duty.”

  Ponce glared at Norman, muttered something under his breath, and chomped on his cigar. Norman steeled himself for round two, but it didn’t happen. “Fine, fine,” Ponce said finally, turning away from Norman. “Vote the way you damned want.”

  Resolving the “gray area” candidates took an entire workday and a little bit of the evening, but they finished. The next morning seemed to come much too quickly. But it started a little differently—because General Ingemanson himself rolled a small file cabinet into the room. He carried a platter of breakfast burritos and other hot sandwiches from the dining hall atop the file cabinet.

  “Good morning, good morning, folks,” he said gaily. “I know you all worked real hard yesterday, and I didn’t see most of you in the Club this morning, so I figured you probably skipped breakfast, so I brought it for you. Take a couple, grab some coffee, and get ready for the next evolution.” Hungry full birds fairly leaped for the food.

  When everyone was seated a few moments later, General Ingemanson stepped up to the head of the room, and said, “Okay, gang, let’s begin. Since you worked hard yesterday to finish up your gray area candidates, you’re a little ahead of the game, so I have a treat for you today.

  “As you may or may not know, once a promotion board is seated, the Military Personnel Center and the Pentagon can pretty much use and abuse you any way they choose, which means they can use you for any other personnel or promotion tasks they wish. One such task is below-the-zone promotions. We’re going to take two hundred majors who are two years below their primary promotion zone, score them, then combine them with the other selected candidates, resolve the gray areas, and pass their names along for promotion along with the others. This panel gets one hundred jackets.”

  “Shit-hot,” Harry Ponce exclaimed. “We get our hands on the best of the best of the best.”

  “I don’t fully understand, sir,” Norman said, raising a hand almost as if he were in grade school. “What’s the purpose of such a drastic promotion? Why do those officers get chosen so far ahead of their peers? It doesn’t make sense to me. What did they do to deserve such attention?”

  “As in all promotion boards, Colonel,” Ingemanson replied, “the needs of the Air Force determine how and why officers get promoted. In this case, the powers that be determined that there should be a handful of individuals that represent the absolute best and most dedicated of the breed.”

  “But I still don’t …”

  “Generally, below-the-zone promotions are incentives for motivated officers to do even better,” Ingemanson interrupted. “If you know that the Air Force will pick a handful above the rest, for those who care about things like that, it’s their chance to work a little harder to make their jacket stand out. It’s been my experience that generally the BTZ guys become the leaders in every organization.”

  “That’s to be expected, I suppose,” Norman said. “You give one person a gold star when everyone else gets silver stars, and the one with the gold star will start behaving like a standout, whether he really is or not. Classic group psychology. Is this what we want to do? Is this the message we want to send young officers in the Air Force?”

  Ponce and some of the others rolled their eyes at that comment. Ingemanson smiled patiently and responded, “It sounds like a never-ending ‘chicken-or-the-egg’ argument, Colonel, which we won’t get into here. I prefer to think of this as an opportunity to reward an officer whose qualities, leadership, and professionalism rise above the others. That’s your task.

  “Now, I must inform you that some of these jackets are marked ‘classified,’” General Ingemanson went on. “There is nothing in these files more classified than ‘NOFORN’ and ‘CONFIDENTIAL,’ but be aware that these files do carry a security classification over and above a normal everyday personnel file. The files may contain pointers to other, more sensitive documents.

  “Bottom line is, that factoid is none of your concern. You evaluate each candidate by the physical content of the file that you hold in your hands. You won’t be given access to any other documents or records. You should not try to speculate on anything in the file that is not on a standard promotion board evaluation checklist. In other words, just because a candidate has annotations and pointers regarding classified records doesn’t mean his file should be weighed any heavier than someone else, or because a candidate doesn’t have any such annotations shouldn’t count against him. Base your decisions on the content of the files alone. Got it?” Everyone nodded, even Norman, although he appeared as perplexed as before.

  “Now, to save time, we do below-the-primary-zone selections a little differently,” Ingemanson went on. “Everyone goes through the pile and gives a yes or no opinion of the candidate. The candidate needs four of seven ‘yes’ votes to go on to round two. This helps thin out the lineup so you can concentrate on the best possible candidates in a shorter period of time. Round two is precisely like a normal scoring routine—minimum six, maximum ten points, in half-point increments. Once we go through and score everyone, we’ll resolve the gray areas, then put those candidates in with the other candidates, then rescore and resolve until we have our selectees. We should be finished by tomorrow. We present the entire list to the board on Thursday, get final approval, and sign the list Friday morning and send it off to the Pentagon. We’re on the home stretch, boys. Any questions?”

  “So what you’re saying, sir,”
Norman observed, “is that these below-the-zone selectees could displace selectees that we’ve already chosen? That doesn’t seem fair.”

  “That’s a statement, not a question, Colonel,” Ingemanson said. There was a slight ripple of laughter, but most of the panel members just wanted Norman to shut up. “You’re right, of course, Colonel. The BTZ selectees will be so identified, and when their OSRs are compared with the other selectees, you panel members will be instructed that a BTZ selectee must really have an outstanding record in order to bump an in-the-primary-zone or above-the-primary-zone selectee. As you may or may not know, BTZ selectees usually represent less than three percent of all selectees, and it is not unusual for a board to select no BTZ candidates for promotion. But again, that’s up to you. No more questions? Comments? Jokes?” Ingemanson did not give anyone a chance to reply. “Good. Have fun, get to work.”

  The Officer Selection Reports began their circulation around the table, each member receiving a stack of about fifteen. Norman was irked by having to do this chore, but he was intrigued as well. These guys must be really good, he thought, to be chosen for promotion so far ahead of their peers.

  But upon opening his first folder, he was disappointed again. The photograph he saw was of a chunky guy with narrow, tense-looking blue eyes, a crooked nose, irregular cheeks and forehead, thin blond hair cut too short, uneven helmet-battered ears, a thick neck underneath a shirt that appeared too small for him, and a square but meaty jaw. He wore senior navigator’s wings atop two and a half rows of ribbons—one of the smallest numbers of ribbons Norman had seen in six days of scrutinizing personnel files. The uniform devices appeared to be on straight, but the Class A uniform blouse looked as if it had a little white hanger rash on the shoulders, as if it had hung in the closet too long and had just been taken out for the photograph.

  He was ready to vote “no” on this guy right away, but he didn’t want to pass the folder too early, so he glanced at the Officer Effectiveness Reports. What in hell were they thinking—this guy wasn’t anywhere ready to be promoted two years ahead of his peers! He had only been to two assignments in eight years, not including training schools. Up until recently, he was a line navigator—an instructor, yes, but still basically a line officer, virtually the same as a second lieutenant fresh out of tech school. Sure, he had won a bunch of trophies at the Strategic Air Command Giant Voice Bombing and Navigation Competition, and several raters had called him “the best bombardier in the nation, maybe the world.”