But talent like that is hard to hide and Max got a call from the number one civil engineer in Washington and was offered a good spot that the big boss had picked out for him. Max came to me seeking advice; should he fight to stay or should he go on. I advised him to go, and I’m sure he is doing a bang-up job in the new spot. Before he left he said, “You know, Colonel, I think it is about time you and I got out of here.” I think he was right. I didn’t hang around too much longer either.
7. Fifteen SAMs for Geeno
As we took the belated and hesitant step of pressing the attack against North Vietnam’s symbolic experiment in industrialization, the Thai Nguyen steel complex, my buddy Geeno was notified that his next assignment in the States would take him back into research, back to the big puzzle palace. Although Geeno was one of our more aggressive leaders and gave it all he had every time, he had already gone the advanced education route to the big degree that led him to a strictly support position. Only the real-life facts of the Vietnamese operation—the Defense Department does not like to call it a pilot shortage in so many words—had allowed him to escape to the fighter pilot’s primary job of driving a machine in combat. Now, as the war heated up, he was not too pleased with the prospect of heading back into the administrative jungle. How much that thought pressed him to ov-erextend himself while he had the chance I shall never know, but he sure pulled it all out.
The personnel mill seemed to be constantly out of rig, not sending enough qualified pilots down the pipeline, or once in a great while sending too many; and there is a never-ending flow of people like Geeno who are unhappy with the friendly personnel officer and their new assignments. Some of the reasons why it works like this make sense of a sort. Others don’t.
You can’t have the same younger people fighting the battle interminably or they run out of longevity. Even if they don’t, you can only put a guy in the way of getting killed so many times before he loses his enthusiasm for the role. And besides, you get just plain tired. So you replace them with older men pulled in from some remote installation who once flew fighters or maybe never did but wear the set of feathers on the chest anyway. Now, even the most single-minded fighter pilot will admit that someone has to fill these vacated spots, but that is a lot less easy to accept when it applies to you as an individual. The real catch, however, is that it takes a different breed of cat to drive a fighter properly. For years we have shuffled our pilots into jobs that have little or nothing to do with combat, but they aren’t standardized components and they don’t convert back from a desk or a transport simply because a computer spits out a set of orders. Conversion or retraining takes time; often, it doesn’t work. Aging, too, is a factor that should not be ignored where it means that the pilot has been forced to lose the razor-edge of frequent and demanding single-seat flight. If some of our best people are lots older than they were back in Korea and still going strong, it’s usually because they have been close enough to the machines to keep their hand in, growing and aging with the machinery, learning to use to perfection every assist the system affords.
All of this is by way of trying to give you some idea of how Geeno, and too many others like him, felt as he neared the end of his tour. When I got to the base, he was the operations officer of one of the squadrons and, in conjunction with his strong and feisty squadron commander, ran about as tight a ship as can be run. Trying to get that pair to bend gracefully to a decision that offered assistance to anyone other than themselves was like ramming your head into the wall. To say they were strong-willed would be to water down the facts. They were just plain stubborn, but fortunately, they were quite often correct. One of the challenges that a combat commander faces is that of recognizing strong people and blending their smarts and their drive into a successful operation. I was able to do this in the case of Geeno and his boss quite easily, perhaps because I too have been accused by some of the learned ones of being of a somewhat hardheaded nature. Naturally I deny this, you know; we all know someone who is this way but naturally it is not us. Besides that, I made out their efficiency reports.
It is a big kick to me to see how people evaluate others on the efficiency report (ER) system that we use as a report card on our folks. If you read between the lines you can often get a fair overview of the person. If you read only the written words, you are bound to get a phony picture as the ER has become the most abused weapon in the history of military warfare. It is the manna of the promotion system, and bastardized descriptions of the performance of officers, as the promotion pendulum swings from extreme to extreme, are something to behold. If we had people who were as good and as bad as they are described in the hallowed ER files of the Pentagon, we would have no trouble winning the war with Ho Chi Minh. We could well afford to take all those who show up so badly and arm them with sticks to become a sacrifice force to walk through Laos to the North Vietnamese border. While these worthless souls paid the supreme price for failure to please their rater with their social grace, or their overcledication to some facet of their mission, the other group could walk up the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin and sway the land of Ho and perhaps that of Mao with their documented abilities to “get along well with peer, subordinate and supervisor alike under even the most demanding situations” or their “clearly superior ability to see the big picture that allows him without fail to solve any problem in the most cost effective and timely manner.” If you think that I consider this system to be a farce you are correct. The only nice thing I can say about it is that I do not have a better system up my sleeve. The problems associated with ranking such a huge group as the Air Force into a neatly catalogued mass of tickey-tackey defies true solution. The ability to hire, fire, pay, train and reward those who work directly for any given supervisor has been so completely withdrawn into the bowels of the system that if you accept the career you must accept the rating system. You don’t have to like it but you must accept it—it is all-powerful, something like James Michener’s Oro, the red god of Bora Bora.
The ER is good for a laugh once in a while. Since your fate in this business hangs on it, there can be considerable consternation if you have one coming up and you know deep down inside that you have riled the powers that be. Geeno’s boss had no problems with me, but there were those in our channels who looked upon his determination with less enthusiasm than I did. By the same token, he knew that I was the drone who prepared the actual papers that were later emblazoned with the big signature, and he knew that I would somehow or other manage to allow a peek at the finished product. Another facet of this monster that I confess I do not understand is the current vogue for not showing the report card to the man being rated. We used to, and I personally thought this gave people a fair understanding of how they stood with the guy they worked for. I hate leaving work at the end of the day with that gnawing in your stomach that indicates you don’t know how well you are pleasing the one who has so much go or no-go power over your future in the Air force. Perhaps it is difficult for some to talk frankly with those who toil for them, and to be constructive in their criticism. In that I do not personally have this problem, I am intolerant of those who do, and I would suggest another block on the form to be filled in by those with such a problem. It could just say, “I am too chicken to discuss this man’s performance to his face, yes or no.” In fact, the man being rated is not precluded from seeing the report: he can do so simply by traveling a few thousand miles to the major air command headquarters and making an appointment to review his records file. Now I ask you, is this cost effective?