Gust Front

CHAPTER 26 The Pentagon, VA, United States of America, Sol III 1328 EDT October 3^rd, 2004 ad

“You know, General,” said General Horner, with a characteristic antihumor frown, “I gotta wonder if this was the greatest idea.”

Taking a look around the in-processing station, General Taylor was forced to wonder the same thing. Even if Horner had said it in jest.

Shortly after the change of command structures, one of General Horner’s computer geeks pointed out that the recall program had been misdesigned. Any serious student of modern militaries could recognize that there were, of necessity, two general types of officers: warriors and paper pushers. There were a few officers, such as Jack Horner, who were superlative in both areas. But they were few and far between. Most officers were very good at one or the other, but not both.

The reason for a fighting army to have warriors in the officer ranks was obvious. But there was a viable reason for paper pushers as well. Armies float on a sea of paper. The logistic problems of Napoleonic armies had been solved, but only at the expense of constant information flow that required humans in the loop. Humans who were much more comfortable making decisions on the basis of a spreadsheet than a map. Humans who found a more efficient way to load trucks, well, exciting.

But bureaucracies are like hedges: beautiful when pampered and trimmed and ugly as hell when left to run riot. A military filled with warriors slags into a scrapheap as the warriors vie for command slots and neglect their paperwork. A military filled with paper pushers bloats out of control as the paper pushers create new empires to lord over.

The upcoming war with the Posleen was, admittedly, going to require lots and lots of bean counters. But the previous personnel policies had left it with, in both Generals Horner and Taylor’s opinion, more than enough bureaucrats at every level. What it desperately needed was leaders and warriors.

However, most of the first “crop” was… a little on the moldy side.

“What’re you in for?”

The questioner was a tall, trim man in his early seventies. He vaguely recognized the man next to him, but could not quite place the face.

The man in question took a suck off the oxygen tube in his nose and wheezed out a reply. “I got the Medal in Holland,” he croaked. The statement set off a paroxysm of coughing that trailed into laughter. “They’re gonna have their jobs cut out with me!” The laughter led to more coughing until he was turning blue.

“You gonna be okay?” asked the questioner.

“Sure,” said the emphysemic once he had reestablished control. “As long as the damn ceremony don’t go on too long. What’d they get you for? I don’t recognize you from any of the meetings.” The last was accusatory. The group consisted mostly of Medal of Honor winners. The emphysemic former paratrooper knew them all by heart and could list off the missing files along with dates of service and death. He was not so good on what he’d had for breakfast, but he was spot on for fallen comrades.

“I made it on points,” said the tall former lieutenant colonel. He’d never thought he’d be wearing Army green again; it was almost ludicrous. Hell, there were more people who wanted him offed in the Puzzle Palace than in the rest of the globe. If they ever organized, his ass was as good as dead.

The emphysemic just grunted and went back to listening to the brass drone. He thought he knew who was who, but then realized that the black guy was in charge. Hell of a world.

“Who’s the jig?” the WW II paratrooper asked and coughed for his efforts. He rattled the bottle to get it to deliver a decent amount of oxygen but it didn’t help.

His former inquisitor just laughed.

“In conclusion,” said General Taylor, “I’ll just mention a few things about where you should expect to be placed. Most of you are thinking, ‘Hell, I’ve got the Medal. They don’t dare let me get killed.’ All I can say to that is, sorry. This is the real and the bad and the scary. I can’t afford to waste warriors on bond tours and rear-area paper pushing. You can expect to be placed with Line forces and shuttled from front to front for emergency reaction forces. You are going to be the tip of the spear, always the men in the breach.

“Face it, most of you screwed up over and over again to win the awards that are on your chest.” This last brought a note of often hacking laughter from the two hundred or so in the meeting room. “If I had to be there, I couldn’t think of a better group to have at my side or behind me. So it is the least I can do for my soldiers.”

“There are,” he finished, “a lot of things going wrong in the Ground Forces today, and throughout America. Our job is to fix them. And we are going to.”