"Anyway," Ingemanson went on, shaking himself out of his reverie with a satisfied smile, "we spoke about his scores. They're a little skewed, like yours."
"All in favor of the flyers, I suppose."
"Actually, he's too hard on flyers," Ingemanson admitted. "I guess it's hard to measure up with what that man's done over his career, but that's no excuse. I told him he's got to measure the candidates against each other, not against his own image of what the perfect lieutenant colonel-selectee is."
"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