She resolved to demand that her husband find something to interest Hennessey, something to give him even a little interest in life. Maybe cousin Raul can think of something to help. He's mentioned that he thought very well of Patricio.
Linda's father shook Hennessey's shoulder. "Patricio, there is someone who wishes to see you."
At the insistence of his wife, the father had invited distant cousin and old family friend, Raul Parilla, to come to talk with Hennessey. He'd been there when it happened. And Patricio had always spoken of Raul with respect. Perhaps it might do some little good for his son- in-law to talk with the retired general.
Parilla remained one of a very few influential Balboans interested in giving the country an army again. Linda's father was not one of them, though the more politically minded Martina was. The fact that there was such a group was an open secret. As Parilla had told Senor Carrera, they did little more than debate about it. The group had accomplished precisely nothing yet… and it had been years.
Hennessey didn't even look up. Twirling the ice filled glass in one hand, he said, "I don't want to see anyone, Suegro. Please ask whoever it is to go away."
"You will want to see this one, Patricio. It's General Parilla. He wants to ask you for some advice. Talk to him, won't you? For me, if nothing else."
Shrugging, Hennessey agreed. Parilla had been with him that day, that counted, as did their long standing friendship. "Okay, Suegro. I'll see him."
Linda's father led Parilla out onto the porch. Hennessey stood up; though he knew the general well, and though neither was any longer in service, old habits die hard. The two shook hands and sat down. Linda's father left them there.
Parilla lit a cigarette before beginning. At his first exhalation, he said, "How have you been, Patricio… you know… since…?"
"I don't know how to answer that, Raul. Not well? Yes, that. I have not been well."
Giving a quick fraternal squeeze on the shoulder, Parilla said, "Well, man, I can understand that. I wish… but there weren't any words that day. And I have none now. Except I am so sorry."
"Yes. Me, too, Raul. But sorrow doesn't help. Nothing helps. Only that one time have I felt any better, and shooting strangers on the street is not something I can make a hobby of."
Parilla nodded understanding. Jimenez had told him the story. In the same shoes, he could not imagine feeling or acting any differently.
"I came here to ask advice, Patricio."
"Yes, so said my father-in-law. I don't know what help I could be, but if I can help…" He let the words trail off.
Parilla's mind groped back over fifteen years, to the day he had first met a much younger Hennessey, then a lieutenant leading a joint Federated States-Balboan small unit exercise at the Jungle Warfare School at Fort Tecumseh, on the southern side of Balboa. Despite having his recon party compromised, Hennessey had managed to win through in the problem, a company raid. Since Parilla had only a very basic idea of how to conduct a raid at all, he had been impressed.
"I think you can. But tell me… you never have, you know… why aren't you still with the Federated States Army? And… too… why don't you go back now? I remember; you were good. "
Hennessey nodded quietly, then paused to think about his answer.
"Well," he began, "I can't go back. They don't want me."
"Why not? It makes no sense to me, your leaving. It never has."
Hennessey sighed with pain, an old remembered ache to go along with the fresh agony. "There's nothing I can tell you that won't sound like sniveling, Raul."
"I know you are not a crybaby, Patricio."
Muscles rarely used stretched Hennessey's mouth into something like a grimace. "No. No, I'm not. You really want to know?"
Seeing that Parilla did, he continued. "Raul… you know that in the army, nearly any organization I suppose, you will often be forgiven for being wrong. What they never tell anyone is that you are very unlikely to be forgiven for being right."
Parilla looked honestly perplexed and said so.
Another deep sigh from Hennessey. "It had to do with training; my approach to it. I'm not the only one it ever happened to. You remember General Abogado? He got bounced for much the same thing, though he had some other issues, as well. In any case, let me ask a question of you, Raul. In the old Guardia, who trained the privates on a day to day basis?"
"Their sergeants and corporals mostly. Is there a better way?"
"No. None. At least given good sergeants and corporals. But that isn't the way it worked most places in the FS Army. There, oh, since time immemorial, most of the day-to-day training has been closely supervised by officers. Mostly, it doesn't work very well, either."
"No. I can't see how it could," Parilla agreed.
"Well… I did something a little different. I had been watching and experimenting with the training of individual soldiers very closely for nearly two decades. In all that time, every time someone mentioned 'individual training,' the stock solution was: "'tighten up the training schedule,' 'waste not a minute'… you know, all that rot."
"I decided to try something a little different. I made my subordinates loosen the training schedule, to leave a lot of gaps and holes for the sergeants to use. Then I made them put on the schedule certain things that had to be done by Thursday night… or else. Told them I would test for it, too."
"Well, they didn't believe I was serious. It was too different a concept. The first week I tested-had my sergeant major test, actuallythe whole damned battalion failed and so I held them over the next night until nearly midnight retesting. Next week it was about fivesixths of the battalion to just after eleven PM. Then about threefourths until ten or so. By the time six weeks rolled around I had privates going to their squad leaders and saying, 'Forsooth, Sergeant, I am in desperate need of getting laid. The only time to do that is Friday night. The only way to have Friday night off is to pass the muthafuckin colonel's test. So teach me this shit, please."
"About that time my boss got wind of it; tubby little fart of a dumb- assed tanker. 'Tuffy' was his nickname." Hennessey sneered with contempt. "Don't ask me how he got or why he deserved the nickname 'Tuffy;' the evidence was pretty thin on the ground. He was so fat he couldn't squeeze through the hatch of an armored personnel carrier without greasing his ponderous gut. Anyway, he was a clueless, stupid shit. I explained what I was doing and he told me to stop. I answered, 'No, sir. Relieve me if you want but this is starting to work pretty damned well.' Well, he wouldn't do that. But he hated it. He hated me, too, for defying him."
Parilla likewise didn't understand why Hennessey had done this, and said so.
"The trick," Hennessey answered, "was that the sergeants had for decades been conditioned to being told what to do and had had driven out of them any native initiative they might have had. They were… over-supervised, if you will. Worse, they'd grown to like not having to think or use initiative."
"But weren't you over-supervising doing it your way?"
"At first, yes," Hennessey admitted. "Clearly. But the difference between legitimate and illegitimate oversupervision is in the end game. Once I had them in the habit of finding and using time, I let them run with it. It worked… oh, quite well. We had an individual training test a few months later. They call it the MIB-Master Infantry Badge-test. The rest of the brigade shut down for three weeks to prepare for it. My battalion rolled to the field, doing any number of things that had nothing to do with the test.
"We came in the day before we had to take it. I told the boys to get a good night's sleep. We'd take the test in the morning and clean equipment the day after.
"When the smoke cleared I had something over seventy percent of my battalion max the test. This had never been done before. Normally it's just a couple of percent of any given unit that maxes. Pissed off my boss to no end."