Where I Am

While Navybride is the goddess of our little life inside the white picket fence, I usually find myself outside said fence, responsible for bringing provisions inside that boundary of my homeplace. Although in a past life I had an entire blog dedicated to the subject, my most recent work as a fly on the wall at some of the highest levels of the executive branch require me to keep the trust of certain equally highly-placed officials. Yet I can't help contrasting the start of 2009 with the start of 2010. And, I must confess, it feels as if I am peering over the edge of a very tall cliff.

I went through college on a ROTC scholarship - the Navy paid my way through four years of school if, in exchange, I would agree to serve at least four years as an officer on active duty. To reduce the buy-in cost and convince people to try it out who would otherwise turn it down, the government offered those students who were selected for the program in essence a free year of college education...one did not incur a commitment to serve in the military until starting one's second year of college.

So in the 2000-2001 school year I did my first year in Navy ROTC. I left and got a summer job like most college kids did, and came back to start my second year of school. We had the first ROTC class of the year on the first Tuesday of the school term. At the end of the class they asked if anyone wanted to leave, reminding us that this was our final chance to do so. They passed out the paperwork wherein we acknowledged a commitment to serve in the military. One by one my classmates and I signed and dated - Tuesday, September 11, 2001. We left the classroom building on the second floor and walked down the stairs. As we walked down the stairs, some classmate of one of my buddies came running up the stairs to meet him "Hey man, you're not going to believe this...some idiot just crashed a plane into the World Trade Center." Everyone thought early on that it was a small, single-engine aircraft that crashed. We laughed at the idea that someone could be so negligent as to crash an aircraft into an office building. Eight years later, no one's laughing anymore.

I sailed the seven seas for four years, from two warships home ported in Norfolk, Virginia. In April 2008 I transferred to Washington DC for duties as the Secretary of the Navy's White House Liaison. Formally on the staff of the Secretary of the Navy, my real goal was to represent my boss on Pennsylvania Avenue. My colleagues and I were, for the most part, flies on the wall...glorified coat-check attendants, "Which way to the men's room?" answerers, and protocol bodies. It was the experience of a lifetime, to be sure. With the Bush Administration out of office, I have some liberty to write now about my experiences there, even though still not a lot. One of my jobs was to write the President's condolence letters to families of the fallen. With no cameras to benefit, just me and him in the room, I saw President Bush get emotional on more than one occasion as he signed correspondence.

November 2008 came, and change came to America. The Obama Administration announced its intention to use its military liaison officers in a different way. The White House is actually a very small place. There's not a lot of room in the house proper. In the West Wing are the offices of the government - all the political stuff. In the East Wing are the offices of the state - the White House Military Office, the Foreign Service Liaison, and the Office of the First Lady. In order to allow the political office to triple in size (both staffing and office space), "excess" bodies were pushed out of the building, some to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the other side of 16th Street, but most back to The Pentagon in Arlington and State Department headquarters in Foggy Bottom.

At the same time, President Obama asked Dr. Robert Gates to remain in office as Secretary of Defense. Dr. Gates, in turn, asked each of his service secretaries to stay with him in office until qualified successors could be confirmed and sworn in. Dr. Donald Winter, the Secretary of the Navy, accepted the request and turned to his senior staffers - his personal JAG, personal PAO, speechwriter, and a handful of other O6s waiting around for the next flag officer selection board to convene. Assuming Dr. Winter would be leaving office in January, all of them had pegged their rotation dates for their next assignment to January 2009. When it's a personal request from the Secretary of the Navy, somehow the Navy bureaucracy found a way to shuffle people around to allow those same senior staffers to stay on an extra few months.

All stayed except the speechwriter, who was leaving the Pentagon for an assignment overseas in Her Majesty's Court at Saint James, to be speechwriter to the United States' Ambassador to the United Kingdom. Since he was going "outside the lifelines" as we say, he wasn't able to adjust his rotation date. To make a short story long, on the same day I washed up in the Pentagon unemployed, the Secretary of the Navy found himself in need of a speechwriter. The Secretary's Chief of Staff, a Marine Corps Brigadier General, called me in: "Congratulations, you're the Secretary of the Navy's new speechwriter. This is your take-home assignment. You're briefing the Secretary of the Navy on your first draft of this speech tomorrow morning at 0700. Now go home and enjoy your last night of freedom."

And I was off to the races.

My first speech was a commemoration of the 1000th OHIO class ballistic submarine patrol. USS WYOMING was returning to Naval Submarine Base King's Bay, Georgia, and the Secretary was going to speak in Georgia (ironically, his first event was in my home state), along with the Governor of Georgia, a holy host of bigwigs from the military and from industry, both of Georgia's senators, and the U.S. Congressman who represented that part of the state. Dr. Winter had his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Rochester, and in our half-hour first briefing on the speech, he mentioned that he wanted to touch the idea of deterrence theory - the idea that the potential introduction of nuclear weapons tends to reduce and mollify conflict worldwide.

I was thrilled. I had had an entire class in deterrence theory as an undergraduate at Georgetown. I even had some of my old notes. I set to writing, even proud of myself for eating my lunch one-handed as I typed furiously with the other. By 1600 I zipped off the speech draft to go home with the Secretary in his take-home bag. I strutted out of the office, convinced that the U.S. Government had gotten its money's worth in sending me to school to learn about deterrence theory, that I could come back to write about it as a speechwriter. The next morning came and I just knew I had written a masterpiece. I breezed in the office and plopped down at the Secretary's conference table. He cleared his throat and adjusted his glasses to glare at me. "You have fundamentally misunderstood deterrence theory."

And I could feel the wind whooshing out of my sails, like in the larger-than-life portrait of the epic battle between USS Constitution and HMS Guerriere that hung behind the Secretary's mahogany desk. I was sure that I was going to get fired, that one of these days he was going to tell me when I came back tomorrow, to be sure and bring my commission with me - that he wanted to correct the error of his predecessor in forwarding it to the President on my behalf. He did say many quotable quotes to me, such as "Seriously, quit wasting my time!" and the most colorful thing anyone has ever said to me "Well I tried to read what you wrote, but then I got to the second paragraph, and I just had to give up." He verbally beat me daily. And despite being daily convinced that THIS was the day the ax was going to fall, it never did.

At the end of my first month writing, I began one of the most complex, and the most rewarding speeches I ever wrote. On April 22, 2008, Lance Corporal Jonathan Haerter of 1st Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, Camp Lejeune North Carolina was relieving Corporal Jonathan Yale of 2nd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, Camp Lejeune North Carolina in Al Anbar Province, Iraq. The two Marines were the exterior perimeter of a security checkpoint on the road from Ramadi to Baghdad. Yale and his fellow Marines were scheduled to leave Iraq in just 3 days, and Yale was showing Haerter the ropes. On that morning, a suicide bomber in a dump truck filled with 2000 pounds of explosives attempted to crash through the security checkpoint.

Yale and Haerter jumped in front of the dump truck, firing their automatic rifles into the engine block. They destroyed the engine and stopped the driver, but as he lost consciousness he detonated the dead-man's switch attached to the explosives in his truck. The explosives blew up anyway, but hundreds of yards away from the checkpoint instead of inside it. By jumping in front of a dump truck, the two Marines had the lives of fifty fellow Marines back inside the checkpoint...at the expense of their own. Dr. Winter would be presenting the Navy Cross, the Navy's highest combat award, posthumously to the two Marines. The duty of writing his 15-minute remarks fell to me.

The Secretary informed me that there would be a thousand people at this ceremony, held February 20th 2009 at the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico, Virginia, but that his real "audience" would be the six people who were these Marines' widows and parents. To that end, my orders were to make the remarks personal, about the difference these men made in their communities, and the kind of spirit that would motivate these men to join the Marine Corps in 2006, when the economic bubble was at its maximum rate of expansion and the American success in Iraq slouched toward its nadir. I called high school football coaches, and Boy Scout leaders, and English teachers, and principals. I talked to old girlfriends, to a guy one loaned his car to the night before he left for Recruit Training in Parris Island, South Carolina. And in the end, I wrote about two men, two boys really, one 21 and the other 20, who "could have had many other opportunities in life, yet chose to leave these things behind and answer instead the calling of their country."

I got to attend that Navy Cross presentation ceremony last February. While milling about in dress blues before the ceremony began, I ran into my buddy Dan Bartlett, who signed on that dotted line with me seven Septembers before. "Dan, what are you doing here?!?" I inquired. "I was Jonathan Yale's platoon commander in Iraq." He said some other choice words about his anguish at losing one of his Marines only three days before returning to the United States. But those words are not suitable for public consumption - and can really only be understood by someone who has heard machine gun rounds whizzing over their head while curses rain down on you in the Arabic language. The military really is a small place.

I stayed on as speechwriter, serving briefly as the speechwriter for Secretary Ray Mabus when he was sworn in as the 75th Secretary of the Navy in May. I joined the White House Writers' Guild, the association of professional speechwriters who have penned words for the President of the United States, when I contributed parts of President Obama's commencement address at the U.S. Naval Academy last May. I was the exclusive author of this and this. And during the time that I wrote, I enjoyed the most professionally and personally rewarding thing that I have ever done. From my anonymous seat in a cubicle of the Pentagon, I excoriated the Congress for inadequate support of the shipbuilding program. I thanked military spouses for their vital role. I encouraged students to study hard and be patriots. And I spoke to families of the fallen, as much as the breadth and depth of the loss of a loved one could ever be reduced to mere words.

But Washington is a political town, and time marches on. In politics there's always someone new to pay. And so it was with me, that my position as speechwriter yielded to be given as a political plum to someone else. I was demoted, to something akin to the junior varsity team, last fall. I had planned to do it all along, but it seemed fitting somehow that I resigned my commission as an officer in the Navy in the same month. The President accepted my resignation two weeks ago. My last day of active duty will be June 30 of this year.

If you asked me on January 2, 2009, what I would be doing in fall 2010, I would tell you that I was going to law school. But my striving toward that goal has seemed to meet disaster at every turn. I began studying for the LSAT in June 2009, at the same time that I was trying to parent a 3 month-old girl. I usually got baby duty as soon as I got home each night, so I relieved Love from 5-8 every night, and then studied for my two other Masters classes (I am about 3/4 of the way through a degree from the U.S. Naval War College) until 9 or 10 each night, and then usually started LSAT study around 10. I studied for two hours and went to bed each night around midnight, slept 5-6 hours, and got up to do it all again the next day. I was a miserable human being during that time.

I took the LSAT on September 26 2009, and was so relieved to have that behind me. I sent in my applications to all the law schools I planned on attending. Three weeks later I got my LSAT score back. I had done worse on the "real" LSAT than I had done on my very first practice test in June. Never did I imagine I would do so badly on the LSAT, and so I hadn't considered this when sending in my law school applications. The brutal reality is that only a quarter to a third of law school applications are ever read. Schools get so many, I guess, and they have to winnow it down somehow to a manageable number. So they make up some mathematical formula which is ONLY your undergraduate GPA and your LSAT score. It's an oversimplification, but everyone who scores above a certain number in the formula is automatically accepted, everyone below a certain number is automatically rejected, and only those in the middle are ever read. I'd start law school with a Masters degree and six years experience as a Surface Warfare Officer in the Navy, but no admissions committee will likely ever see that, as I doubt my LSAT score will bump me up out of the "automatically reject" category at any school I've applied. Anything can happen, but I'm not hopeful.

So I went job hunting. And I discovered firsthand what a brutal reality that is, too. In a healthy economy, there are 2-2.5 applicants for every job...there will always be some turnover, some job creation, some people hopping for better opportunities. But in this economy, there are 7 applicants for every job. I have a lot going for me, I guess...a Masters degree, six years experience in the military, a national security clearance that lets me stroll right in to the White House; but the fact is that there are still a lot of brilliant, educated, hardworking people out there too. I can lead a project...when they've cut my budget, reduced my resources, oh yeah and there are people shooting at me too. But beyond some ephemeral "leadership" skills, I struggle with feeling like I have few concrete job skills. Most of the "hot" jobs, in Washington DC at least, require a fair amount of IT skills. And that's one of the few things I know I don't even have "some" of.

So here I am in 2009. I feel like I used to do really meaningful, important things. I feel like I used to bring things of great value inside our little white picket fence from the big wide world outside it. Now I bide my time, looking for the chance to do something like that again and anxious about what will come on June 30th when I leave the Navy. Many people were optimistic to be starting 2010, if for no other reason than to put 2009 behind them. But I don't think I'm very optimistic right now. I think I'm wary and anxious. I feel like I've done everything right - gotten a good education, served my country, been a faithful person, lived an honorable life in my workplace, church, and community, and yet I'm here with little to show for it yet. Never say never - the chance to do something really meaningful could be just around the corner, but at this point, this is where I am on the second day of 2010. I hope when I look back on it on the second day of 2011, I'll laugh at how worried I was.