Stephen Coonts - Combat

Thanks to his father, Norman decided on a military career in high school. Norman’s father was drafted in the mid-sixties but thought it might be safer serving offshore in the Navy, so he enlisted and served as a jet power-plant technician on board various aircraft carriers. He returned from long Pacific and Indian Ocean cruises with incredible stories of aviation heroism and triumph, and Norman was hooked. Norman’s father also came home minus half his left arm, the result of a deck munition explosion on the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, and a Purple Heart. That became Norman’s ticket to an appointment to the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis.

But Academy life was hard. To say Norman was merely introverted was putting it mildly. Norman lived inside his own head, existing in a sterile, protected world of knowledge and reflection. Solving problems was an academic exercise, not a physical or even a leadership one. The more they made him run and do push-ups and march and drill, the more he hated it. He failed a physical-conditioning test, was dismissed with prejudice, and returned to Iowa.

His father’s almost constant niggling about wasting his appointment and dropping out of the Naval Academy — as if his father had chosen to sacrifice his arm so his son could go to Annapolis — weighed heavily on his mind. His father practically disowned his son, announcing there was no money for college and urging his son to get out and find a job. Desperate to make his father happy, Norman applied and was accepted to Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps, receiving a degree in finance and an Air Force commission, becoming an accounting and finance specialist and earning his CPA certification a few months later.

Norman loved the Air Force. It was the best of all worlds: He got respect from the folks who respected and admired accountants, and he could demand respect from most of the others because he outranked and outsmarted them. He pinned on a major’s gold oak leaves right on time, and took command of his own base accounting service center shortly thereafter.

Even his wife seemed to enjoy the life, after her initial uncertainty. Most women adopted their husband’s rank, and Norman’s wife spitshined and paraded that invisible but tangible rank every chance she got. She was “volunteered” by the higher-ranking officers’ wives for committeeships, which at first she resented. But she soon learned that she had the power to “volunteer” lower-ranking officers’ wives to serve on her committee, so only the wives of lower-ranking officers and noncommissioned officers had to do the heavy work. It was a very neat and uncomplicated system.

For Norman, the work was rewarding but not challenging. Except for manning a few mobility lines during unit deployments and a few late nights preparing for no-notice and annual base inspections, he had a forty-hour workweek and very little stress. He accepted a few unusual assignments: conducting an audit at a radar outpost on Greenland; serving on advisory staffs for some congressional staffers doing research for a bill. High-visibility, low-risk, busywork assignments. Norman loved them.

But that’s when the conflicts began closer to home. Both he and his wife were born and raised in Iowa, but Iowa had no Air Force bases, so it was guaranteed they weren’t going home except to visit. Norman’s one unaccompanied overseas PCS assignment to Korea gave her time to go home, but that was small comfort without her husband. The frequent uprooting hurt the couple unequally. Norman promised his wife they’d start a family when the cycle of assignment changes slowed down, but after fifteen years it was apparent that Norman had no real intention of starting a family.

The last straw was Norman’s latest assignment to the Pentagon to become the first director of a brand new Air Force budget oversight agency. They said it was a guaranteed four-year assignment — no more moving around. He could even retire from that assignment if he chose. His wife’s biological clock, which had been ringing loudly for the past five years, was deafening by then. But Norman said wait. It was a new shop. Lots of late nights, lots of weekends. What kind of life would that be for a family? Besides, he hinted one morning after yet another discussion about kids, wasn’t she getting a little old to be trying to raise a newborn?

She was gone by the time he returned home the next evening. That was over three years ago, and Norman hadn’t seen or spoken to her since. Her signature on the divorce papers was the last thing he ever saw that belonged to her.

Well, he told himself often, he was better off without her. He could accept better, more exotic assignments; travel the world without having to worry about always going either to Iowa in the summer or to Florida in the winter, where the in-laws stayed; and he didn’t have to listen to his ex-wife harping about how two intelligent persons should be having a better, more fulfilling — meaning “civilian”—life. Besides, as the old saying went: “If the Air Force wanted you to have a wife, they’d have issued you one.” Norman began to believe that was true.

The first day at the promotion board at the Selection Board Secretariat at the Air Force Military Personnel Center at Randolph was filled with organizational minutiae and several briefings on how the board worked, the criteria to use during the selection process, how to use the checklists and grading sheets, and an overview of the standard candidate’s personnel file. The briefings were given by Colonel Ted Fellows, chief of the Air Force Selection Board Secretariat. Fellows gave a briefing on the profile of the candidates — average length of service, geographical distribution, specialty distribution, and other tidbits of information designed to explain how these candidates were selected.

Then, the promotion board president, Major General Larry Dean Ingemanson, the commander of Tenth Air Division, stepped up before the board members and distributed the panel assignments for each board member, along with the Secretary of the Air Force’s Memorandum of Instruction, or MOI. The MOI was the set of orders handed down by the Secretary of the Air Force to the board members, informing them of who was going to receive promotions and the quotas for each, along with general guidelines on how to choose the candidates eligible for promotion.

There were three general categories of officers eligible for promotion: in-, above-, and below-the-primary zone candidates. Within each category were the specialties being considered: line officers, including flying, or rated, officers, nonrated operations officers such as security police and maintenance officers, and mission-support officers such as finance, administration, and base services; along with critical mission-support subspecialties such as Chaplain Corps, Medical Service Corps, Nurse Corps, Biomedical Sciences Corps, Dental Corps, and Judge Advocate General Corps. General Ingemanson also announced that panels could be convened for any other personnel matters that might be required by the Secretary of the Air Force.

The board members were randomly divided up into eight panels of seven members each, adjusted by the president so each panel was not overly weighted by one specialty or command. Every Air Force major command, direct reporting unit, field operating agency, and specialty seemed to be represented here: logistics, maintenance, personnel, finance, information technology, chaplains, security police, and dozens of others, including the flying specialties. Norman noticed right away that the flying or “rated” specialties were especially well represented here. At least half of all the board members were rated officers, mostly unit commanders or staff officers assigned to high-level posts at the Pentagon or major command headquarters.