When I left my home in Spanaway, Washington, to travel to Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, to attend the Ordnance Officer Advanced Course, I didn’t know what the future would bring me. I was only certain of one thing. I was certain that I would receive a follow-on assignment from Aberdeen Proving Ground to somewhere other than Fort Lewis, Washington. Where would my next assignment be? I had no clue. But I was certain it would not be at Fort Lewis, Washington. It was very likely that the Army would send me overseas. The question was where? I had a pretty good idea. But you never can tell. The Army has a bad habit of doing things that you least expect. For example, when I first came into the Army, I was supposed to go to Germany after I finished my initial training. Well, boys and girls, if you’ve read some of my very early stories, you know exactly how that turned out. If you didn’t read some of my early stories, you can go back and check out one of those early ones here. I asked the commander of the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) detachment at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, to call in a favor with the assignments branch in Washington, DC. Basically, I asked him to see if they would put me on the short list for an assignment to Korea. While I was at Aberdeen Proving Ground, I was performing exceptionally well in my course. I was ranked number two in the class academically and number one in the class for physical fitness standards. It didn’t take long for the school Commandant and other military brass to take notice. At one point, an assignments liaison officer from Washington, DC met with all of the former commanders in my class. Essentially, there were three of us that had previously commanded prior to attending the advanced course. When I had my one-on-one briefing with the assignments officer, he asked me if I wanted to go to Korea. I thought to myself, “So, the skids must already be greased.” I replied, “Yes sir.” His next question was, “Would you like a command sponsored position?” Again, I replied, “Yes sir.” And I thought, “Wow! This is even better than I had hoped for.” I was trying to make it easy for these guys. I wanted to take my family with me to Korea. And I wanted to make sure that I could stay there as long as possible after I got there. Well, you know how everybody gets busy and forgets about things and time flies by and nothing happens. Well, that’s pretty much what happened with me. Pretty soon I looked at a calendar and realized that I only had three weeks left before it was time to leave and I didn’t have any orders, I didn’t have any concurrent travel assignment paperwork for my dependents, I didn’t have any passports, I didn’t have any orders or authorization for shipment of household goods, I didn’t have any orders or authorization for storage of household goods, basically, I didn’t have shit. I was at that proverbial point where you look at yourself in a mirror and say, “Self, you’re up shit creek in a leaky canoe with no paddle. You’re listing hard to port, and you’re taking on shit, fast.” The bottom line is that, unless you learned shit-walking 102 in college, which is the second course that you have to take after water-walking 101, there is a strong possibility that you’re not coming back from shit creek. It’s also at this point that you learn really quickly how to tap dance and jump through hoops at the same time. Cuz you just might have to perform as if you were in the circus. Phone calls simply are not going to cut it to fix your problem. What are you going to do? The only thing you can do. You’re going to take your vaudeville circus act on the road. You’re going to stand on everybody’s desk and perform your tap dance and hoop jumping routine to get your problem solved. Except that every time you go to somebody’s office, you find out that there’s always one more office that you have to go to in order to get your problem solved. Finally, when you find the magic office that can solve your problem, the only way you can get into that office is by appointment. That means you have to call. Now remember, when I started this whole diatribe, I indicated that I really only had about three weeks to get everything done. What I neglected to mention was that included getting passports made for my dependents as well. Okay. No big deal. Except, my dependents were on the other side of the country in Washington state. I was attempting to get passports made in Maryland. That meant getting the passport paperwork sent to them for signatures and passport pictures and getting the paperwork sent back to me so that I could get the paperwork processed for the passports. The same thing had to be done for the visas. Great. Then, I was given the next piece of good news. The passport processing lady tells me that it’s only going to take six weeks. Okay, great lady. Only one minor little problem. I have three weeks. Well, actually, now it’s about two weeks. Cuz some amount of time has been eaten with all of that back and forth for paperwork processing and such. So, you’re going to have to take that six weeks and squeeze it ever so slightly so that it fits into two weeks. Do you think you can do that? That would be a really neat trick. I’ve heard about people that are really good with time management. But let me tell you, that would be some bodacious time management. I think they would have to rewrite the book on time management to accommodate you. Well, at the end of the day, that lady got it done. I don’t know how. I don’t even want to know how. But she got it done. It seemed like she made time stand still in order to get all of my paperwork processed so that my family and I could be reassigned to Korea. When I was handed all of my orders and my family’s passports, all I could do was marvel that the lady made time stand still. I may have had to tap dance and jump through hoops in order to avoid an exercise in futility, but it was worth it in the end.
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