James A. McClure

My career in the Navy probably included more time at the Pentagon than at sea. The Pentagon, legendary nerve center of the world’s largest military establishment, is known by such nicknames as the “puzzle palace.”

As a reserve public affairs officer in the 1970s and 80s, I went to the Pentagon for my annual active duty every third or fourth year because that’s where public affairs officers are needed – and where they go if they wish to advance.

The Pentagon is the world’s largest office building with more than 6 million square feet and 30,000 people. It’s practically a self-contained city with a shopping mall, bus terminal and subway station. The building dominates the landscape, though I once encountered a Washington cab driver who was unable to find it.

The Pentagon is a typically functional, no-frills government office building. Its unique architecture is confusing at first but there’s a system to it: Five sides, five floors, five concentric “rings” separated by air shafts. It’s easy to figure out that Room 2B315 is on the second floor of the B ring, and the best way to get there is to take Corridor 3 across the radius of the building instead of walking around the B ring.

The first time I worked in the Pentagon I came across an exterior wall at one end of the building, and looked out the window to see a pipe discharging viscous matter into a dumpster. This was where classified documents were shredded and converted to pulp, I was told. Aha, the output of the building! I figured there was a loading dock at the other end where paper was delivered.

Even though it’s a military headquarters, the Pentagon is not particularly warlike. Many of the people there are civilian employees. If you see people engaged in intense conversation in the cafeteria they probably are talking about their pensions and not about nuking the bad guys.

It’s more egalitarian than a military base, perhaps because there are so many high-ranking officers that the customary perks of rank are impractical. Nobody salutes inside the building and everybody works in a spartan office or cubicle. Generals and admirals probably have a private lunchroom somewhere, but everybody else stands in line at the cafeteria. The relatively modest trappings must be disappointing for senior officers who are treated as deities on the average military base.

I wound up parking in a Pentagon lot so distant it may have been in another state. As I trudged across the acres of North Parking I could feel my white summer uniform wilting in the Washington humidity. By the time I reached the building, I looked like a Good Humor Man who’d been mugged. I was particularly demoralized one morning when I encountered a group of Marines in exercise gear who were running around the building. Only three more laps, guys!

Even though the Pentagon is considered a temple of bureaucracy, the organizations where I worked were very efficient, sometimes more so than my corporation in Chicago. As a staff organization, the Navy Office of Information had relatively few layers of management with ready access to our admiral.

Getting the approval of other organizations entailed a process known as “chopping” (a slang term that may have had its origins in ancient China). We would attach a cover sheet to the document listing the organizations whose approval we needed. Then I’d walk the document to each office to get their “chop,” usually from an officer on duty who was authorized to sign off for his group. This required some shoe leather, but I once got approval on a letter for the Secretary of the Navy in a day. Today they probably do this even faster by email.

An open-air courtyard at the center of the building is an inviting park with trees, grass, food stands and occasional band concerts. At lunchtime my colleagues and I would eat hot dogs and make idle wagers about the number of Soviet missiles targeted on our particular park bench.

In one tour of reserve duty I worked on a special project in a makeshift task force office on the lower level of the building. The windowless office was crowded and I sat next to a commander who recently had been the skipper of a nuclear missile submarine. At lunch one day, I asked him how it felt to go from the prestige of commanding a capital ship to being an ordinary working stiff in the Pentagon. “It’s certainly a drop in status,” he said. “But I get to go home at night.”

Another story from my Navy days…

The hour before dawn usually is a quiet time aboard ship. On this morning all hands are on deck for underway replenishment, the regular delivery of fuel and supplies that sustains our tiny minesweeper on a two-month patrol off the Vietnamese coast. This is our lifeline for fuel, food, ammunition, spare parts and different movies. If we’re lucky there’s mail from home by way of the Philippines and an aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin.

We’re on course for a scheduled rendezvous with a seagoing gas station and supermarket known as an oiler. On the crowded bridge, we track the oiler on radar and establish voice radio contact. Both ships are darkened under wartime conditions, and we don’t see the other ship until floodlights are turned on when we’re a few hundred yards apart. On the deck below, men turn up dungaree jacket collars against a light rain and tropic night chill, and put on orange lifejackets and battered hard hats. The deck force is rigging cargo gear while the engine room gang prepares for refueling.

It’s called underway replenishment because both ships are moving. Once the oiler is in sight we approach the larger ship from behind to pull alongside. The oiler’s stern looms over us, higher than our bridge, as we batter through the big ship’s wake and along the grey cliff of her side to move into position 50 feet away.

A whistle blows and a shot line, a lightweight rope fired from a rifle, arcs over our ship and is caught. Heavier lines are pulled across, blocks and tackle are rigged and soon the two ships are strapped together with a trolley-like highline and a heavy fuel hose. Larger ships use winches but small ships like ours do it the old-fashioned way with a line of men digging their heels into the pitching deck to pull cargo nets of supplies and barrels of lube oil over the churning water between the two ships. Occasionally we transfer a man between ships in a specially designed chair.

On the bridge the officer of the deck focuses on holding our ship alongside the oiler, matching the larger ship’s course and speed and maintaining a 50-foot distance to keep the lines between the two ships taut. This is precision shiphandling: leaning over the bridge rail to concentrate on a rope with markings that measures the distance between the two hulls, and shouting orders down the voicepipe to the pilothouse below to correct the course one degree, two degrees, and adjust the speed of the engines a revolution or two at a time.

A telephone line has been rigged between the two ships and our captain is talking with the skipper of the oiler. Down on deck, a man signals the other ship with paddles to heave the line or pay it out. Signalmen on each ship exchange wisecracks in semaphore shorthand. Off-duty crewmen on the oiler peer down at us and wave.

Then we hear the music.

Music! High above us on the oiler’s focsle a band is playing, a combo of sailors in dungarees belting out a rock beat through a scratchy loudspeaker. They play in the rain, risking electrocution to entertain the two crews and making up for their lack of talent with raw amplification.

Centuries ago sailors on square-riggers used sea chanteys to add rhythm to the heavy work of raising sails and turning the capstan, and the oiler’s rock band does the same for us. The music breaks the tension on the bridge and brings smiles to the faces of the deck force.

Finally our tanks are full and the last cargo net has been emptied. Orders are passed for the breakaway and dripping ropes are pulled aboard. Once we are unstrapped from the oiler, the officer of the deck gives the order to turn away from the larger ship… and exhales.

The ship settles back into routine as the crew stows equipment and hoses and carries boxes of supplies below. The rain has stopped and the aroma of bacon cooking in the galley mixes with the diesel fumes from the stack. The oiler recedes from view as it continues up the coast to do it all over again, amateur musicians and all, for the next ship up the line. We will do this again ourselves in a few days. And there’s mail.

When I was young and figuring out how to use my brain, I became fascinated with logic and was intensely frustrated when I encountered things that did not make sense. Then I joined the Navy and learned that reason and logic are desirable but not strictly necessary.

My training in Officer Candidate School probably was intended to make us adaptable and resilient. We were taught to march down the right side of the street and then suddenly were ordered to march on the left. It was not uncommon for the loudspeaker to announce a change in the uniform of the day as we were running out of the barracks for the morning formation. So I learned to cope with uncertainty and concluded that capricious nonsense was normal in the Navy.

On coastal patrol in Vietnam, we were required to check the papers of every junk we boarded. The papers were written in Vietnamese. None of us could read Vietnamese but we dutifully checked the papers every time. Yep, they’ve got papers.

When I led boarding parties I was instructed to have a pistol in my hand while supervising my team. Then we got orders to fill out a form for each junk we boarded, so I had a pistol and a clipboard. This presented a dilemma: what to do with the pistol while filling out the form. Ask the Vietnamese to hold the gun while I write? Not a good idea. So we assigned two officers to each boarding party: one to hold the gun and the other to fill out the form. During my first cruise to Vietnam I read Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and understood it perfectly.

Fortunately, the Navy has people who counter official nonsense with clever pragmatism. When my reserve center had a shortage of lodging for weekend reservists, the commanding officer came up with a solution. “We found an unused building on the base that’s equipped with bunks,” he said. “We cannot use it officially as a barracks because that would require spending money we don’t have to bring the building up to code. But your guys can sleep there if they want. Just don’t call it a barracks.”

My retirement from the Naval Reserve was true to form. I submitted papers in August to retire in November. In September I was notified that as a superannuated senior officer, I would be reviewed by a continuation board and forced to retire if deemed useless to the Navy. I’m already retiring, I thought, so this doesn’t affect me. In November I officially retired: My paperwork was in order, they rang the bell and blew the bosun’s pipe, and everybody saluted. In December, however, I received a certified letter notifying me that I was AWOL for missing my reserve meeting and might be kicked out of the Navy. Finally, in January, I received a letter congratulating me that the continuation board had approved my retention in the Navy. This made no sense at all but, hey, my pension checks are arriving.