It Ain't (Going to be) Easy Being Green - Especially for this Green

I don't know about you, but on a rare occasion I encounter a person that I have an instant negative visceral reaction to.  It’s somewhat hard to describe exactly, but you know them when you see them.  There is something about their stature, their body language and their look, that just sets you, almost from the second you lay eyes on them, in a position of near hatred.  You simply "don't like them", it’s in their eyes, or something, and you just have this physical reaction that is very instinctual.  And sometimes, and you don't realize it at the time, what you are seeing, in part is a reflection of yourself, and a trait about yourself that you really loath, that this person exhibits outwardly.  For me this has happened only 2 or 3 times in my life.  The first time was in middle school, during that lovely age of adolescence that we all wish we could forget (on some level), where there was a fellow male student, who I just simply didn't like.  And he didn't much care for me either.  Being the quintessential "nerd" at this age, you could say he was a bit of a bully, but that is really not so much the case (after-all, after two physical altercations, I had the better hand in the end).  But this post is not really about him, it is about a much more poignant, and presently relevant, such example of this in my life, my encounter with Gerry Green (given this news:  https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2014/10/30/update-ex-warrior-training-center-boss-wore-unearned-ranger-sapper-tabs/).

To tell the story of this encounter, I have to begin with the fact that this is, literally, a war story.  You see on Valentine’s Day 2003 (the day before my wife’s birthday), I was notified that I was to be mobilized in support of the invasion of Iraq.  Not to make this take too long, but in quick succession, I went from Graduate Student at the University of Missouri-Rolla/Company Commander of the 955th Engineer Company at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, to OIC of the cross-levels from 955th to the 389th Engineer Battalion, to mobilizing soldier and incoming Company Construction Officer/XO of A Company, 389th Engineer Battalion (Combat Heavy) in Iowa City, Iowa, and, not so finally, to mobilization/advanced party leader for the Company back to Fort Leonard Wood for deployment train-up and “validation”.  So, more simply, I was yanked out of command and had my personal/professional life fully disrupted.  Only to become second fiddle but the key linchpin behind the company operations as we got to, and then executed, at Fort Leonard Wood, for a bunch of people I barely knew and was going to lead for the next year in combat.  It is in this state of being, that I first encountered Captain (CPT) Gerry Green of C Company, 203d Engineer Battalion.

Like the 389th, the 203d Engineer Battalion (Combat Heavy) was being mobilized in support of what was to be called Operation Iraqi Freedom (at this point we were still using Operation Enduring Freedom).  The 203d was our “sister battalion” and mirrored us in almost every way, save one point, the 389th was an Army Reserve unit and the 203d was from the Missouri Army National Guard (MOARNG).  To the lay person, the Army Reserve (AR) and the National Guard (NG) are oft used interchangeably, but they are really two different things (even though they compose our Army’s “reserve components”).  The Army Reserve is a federal force, not ever used for state duty, while the National Guard is a state force that can be federalized, as needed.  This distinction will become important later in the story, but the point here is we were both the same kind of unit in terms of capabilities and the fact that everyone in them (except a skant few) were part-time soldiers, and we were sent to Fort Leonard Wood to execute the same pre-deployment train-up at the same time and essentially locked into the same everything for the next year.  “Joined at the hip” isn’t far off the mark as a way to explain our two units.  So, returning to my encounter with CPT Green, as a fellow Captain (as we were both at that time) it was nearly inevitable that we would encounter each other along the way.

So, there we were.  I first set eyes on him (CPT Green) in the parking lots around Nutter Field House and/or Abrams Theater when both battalions were being gathered for a set of briefings or other related activities that were being done enmasse with both battalions in order to do a single blast of information.  CPT Green was in front of his company being quintessentially “Hooah!”  Hooah is defined rather broadly (just Google it, you will find more than a thousand uses for the word), but in this sense I mean the overzealous state of being that seems to inhabit the soul of all Army personnel at some level, where in you are centered wholly and completely on being akin to Audie Murphy and devoutly a soldier.  But in this instance, he was up in front of his formation, barking about the upcoming deployment, the nature of war, engaging in physical exercise (yes, most often in the front leaning rest), and just taking the meaning of "Army" to the mass of his company.  Now I am not shy about PT, and I am a very motivated and dedicated officer, in my estimation (not perfect, but none of us are), but this bespoke a very different leader than I.  Green was exhibiting what I often detest in some parts of Army culture; bone head brawn and loud motivation over malleable brain power and force used wisely.  I have seen platoon leaders like this, I have seen many NCOs that have resorted to this, and a few CPTs and above that used this technique.  My normal response when I see this, has always been think that this is a sign of a weak leader; someone who is “faking the funk”, someone that simply has to do something to overcome his lack of capabilities or other defect, and someone that may very well have something to hide.  And when I see someone with a Ranger tab and/or Sapper tab, and a raft of schools engaging in this behavior, it makes me think he/she has lost a little bit of perspective.  Now this wasn’t at a PT (physical training) run/session, it wasn’t because the topic of the briefing or activity lent itself to this response, it wasn’t because his company deserved a tongue lashing or a group punishment (from what I knew), it was because he wanted to “motivate” them in his version of the world.  Having been a Company Commander, I know that your head can often get full of the fact that you are in-charge and frankly can choose to do with your company what you want to do, within the confines of meeting your mission objectives.  But you also are playing with 170 plus souls/people, and you have to respect that too.  Simply put, I didn’t like what I saw; not one iota.  As a peer, however, and not being in his chain of command, it was just a “wow, look at that guy” moment that set me in that emotional/reaction state that I cited above, visceral as it was.

Luckily for me, and him most likely, we really didn’t have to interact on any level for most of the pre-deployment training all the way up through our parallel paths to Baghdad, Iraq.  Sure we would pass and see each other on the way to or at chow, or we might catch a glimpse at a church service (although other than two times, one being Christmas and the other that I'll discuss later, I don’t recall seeing him as a regular church attendee), but neither of us typically had to give the other the time of day, and we really had no reason to talk.  He was interviewed in 2008 at the Combined Arms Center, so you can get a sense of his missions and his take on things if you go to the following link:  http://cgsc.cdmhost.com/cdm/singleitem/collection/p4013coll13/id/819/rec/15.  You will note I don’t show up in his interview, and I wouldn’t say I should have.  I probably am a small blot on his radar, in any event.  That said, I found his recollection of his missions actually understated his impact and what his Company did, which, I am not fully surprised about as I will now get into.

As I stated above, we were bound to run into each other.  On February 3rd, 2004 I was appointed to a task that was bound to put us face to face; little did I know.  On this magic date, I was assigned what is called a "Report of Survey" for some damage that happened to a 5-ton dump truck in B Company, 389th EN BN.  In contemporary Army parlance this is called a "FLIPL" (Financial Liability Investigation of Property Loss) and from that title you get a better idea of what I did; essentially I was the Army's insurance adjuster in this case.  What brought CPT Green and I together was that the vehicle that struck the B/389^th’s vehicle, came from none other than C Company, 203d EN BN.  So from this date, until I closed the case on 14 March 2004, there was need to interact with personnel in his company, and on occasion him.  I won’t go into the details of the investigation (the packet as I look back on it, was pretty thick), but there are some salient points.  First, after interviewing the driver of the vehicle that was damaged, it was clear that I needed to talk to several people in CPT Green’s company, and given the fact that I was from the other Battalion requesting to be in his company area, didn’t sit well, from the Battalion leadership down.

And there was good reason for the jaded eyes:  who wants anyone to be pointing blame from outside “the family” about something that happened that is going to incur liability to someone in “the family”.  But, as I learned in my interactions with him, Gerry, when it came to his peers or superiors, was a man of few words; and begrudgingly he let me speak to his Motor Sergeant and related personnel that were present on BIAP (the Baghdad International Airport) where our basecamps were located, literally across the street from one another.  As the investigation bore out, there simply wasn’t much that I could glean at BIAP in the motor pool/his company area, and there was a lack of attention to this area of his company generally (I couldn’t get pre or post 5988-Es for the truck responsible for the damage and the licensing and vehicle training program was poor), which didn’t surprise me given my observations earlier and my surmising that maintenance wasn’t an area that this kind of officer particularly spent time on.  So I arranged a trip to the basecamp in the Al-Rustimaya neighborhood of Baghdad (aka. Camp Muleskinner) where the balance of C Company, 203d was located.  I went about my business and as able to do some interviews and looked at the site of the accident pursuant to the investigation I was doing.  I also, while I was there, took-in the effort that his Company was leading pertaining to building barracks for the follow-on forces that were to replace us in Baghdad (reading his interview transcript, above, you will see that he notes this).

Like C Company 203d EN BN, my company has the task to build "Baghdad Barracks", at a nearby base, right on the very edge of Sadr City, at Camp War Eagle.  While I had delegated the Contracting Officer Representative (COR) responsibilities to a sharp NCO (SFC Troy Sievert, a true professional) unlike he, I was overall in-charge of the basecamp development at War Eagle and thus kept close tabs on the ongoing efforts.  I was somewhat shocked to see some of the differences between how Gerry’s buildings were being constructed and those I was overseeing.  For one, while I was there, his contractor was placing the second floor concrete deck on one of the 4 barracks that were in progress.  Our contractor had used similar methods as we use in the United States to place these decks in the barracks:  mixing the concrete in a mixer, using a concrete pump, vibrating the concrete in place and screeding/floating the deck in a pace to keep ahead of it setting.  In this case, however, I saw what I can only call a "regressive" technique, wherein the concrete was literally mixed in holes in the ground, carried by buckets to a trough that was dumped into and then hoisted to the roof deck, and then wheel barrowed or bucketed into place.  Iraqi men, working like ants, were all over the site.  Now, I will say, that this is not a technically inappropriate way to do this, and it can be successful, albeit from an era or two ago (and given the over-design inherent in these barracks there wasn’t a safety concern), but the thing that puzzled me most was I didn't see one quality control person checking to make sure that their concrete was being mixed correctly, that it was placed in a timely enough manner to make sure it was workable, and so forth, and I didn't see a US troop doing any level of quality assurance on this effort.  During my visit, although I didn't link-up in any way with him, CPT Green had visited the site, given what his soldiers told me.  This simply got me to wondering about him and his technical know-how and only reinforced that he was a tabbed out glorified infantry officer that was an Engineer by virtue of Army branching only.  I found this interesting, as I look back on it, in light of the monograph that he published related to work at CGSC (http://www.amazon.com/Professional-Military-Education-Todays-Captains/dp/1288306733).

So at this point I had done most of the on-the-ground work to determine the proximate cause of damage and worked out my findings and recommendations to the appointing authority.  The soldier in C Company, whom I was recommending be held accountable, had the opportunity to rebut my findings and recommendations, and he wisely did so (interestingly, as related to the NG and AR divide, one of the rebuttal points was that as a Reserve Officer I was trying to hold a NG soldier responsible because I was trying to force a State NG member to pay for damage to a Federal vehicle that was most likely going to go back to the states; note that the 389th ended up leaving its vehicles as stay-behind equipment, later used by NG, AR and Active soldiers).  This rebuttal process involved a couple back and forths to C Company, and during said visits, the soldier was often accompanied by an NCO, which I saw as a good thing overall, but there was a strong distrust that was behind it, and that wasn’t hidden from me.  After the rebuttal was done, I noted that I had forgotten to get one signature from the soldier, wherein he acknowledged his right to rebut and that he had taken that opportunity.  Not wanting to have an incomplete packet and wanting to ensure that his acknowledgement of his rights and his election to exercise them was properly recorded, I stopped in one last time to C Company’s command post (CP) in order to simply get the soldier to sign the applicable document right after chow one evening in March, as I was closing the effort.  And this is when and where I have the most poignant memory of Gerry Green that has been seared in my mind.

After asking the company charge of quarters (CQ) to call down to the platoon to see if the soldier was available, he did so and the platoon confirmed that the soldier in question would be promptly there.  I stood by while he made his way to the CP.  He arrived in a few minutes, absent an NCO, and I began to explain to him what I was asking him to sign, and so forth.  As I was in the midst of this, in came CPT Green, in a hurried state, with an absolute glare of disgust on his face.  Given the expression, I stopped explaining and addressed Gerry indicating what was up to and why I was speaking to his soldier.  To this Gerry stated, “Do what you have to do and get out of here.”  I tried to ease the obvious tension and said something to lighten the mood to only receive in return a retort from CPT Green of “Do what have to do, and get the #$%& out of here.”  So I finished with the soldier, who signed the document and he quickly departed after asking if there was anything else.  As I gathered the paperwork, the soldier having left the CP, Gerry quipped, “How un-professional”.  I don’t recall my response, if any, other than a look back at him trying to be conciliatory/showing a willingness give an explanation, and only got “get the #$%& out of my AO” or something to that effect.  I promptly departed at that point.

For those that know me, and even those that don’t really well, know that I take my professionalism fairly seriously.  Thus his assault on that professionalism was fairly memorable.  While his is not the only one, I will say it was probably the first that seared into my mind in such a meaningful way.  This really ticked me off, as the only real thing that one might have found “un-professional” was my lack of insisting that an NCO be present with the soldier or my impromptu drop in that may have resulted in that NCO’s absence in that particular instance.  And to that point, my reason for being there was the opposite of being unprofessional, in this light, as I was doing my part to “take care of the soldier” by ensuring his proper acknowledgement of his rights and his exercise thereof.  I also took great issue with his (CPT Green’s) pompous attitude and reproving assault on my character; which wasn’t helped by my general dislike of him as I has sized him up at that point.  So that evening in Baghdad in March 2004 stood out in my life as an unfinished, incomplete moment that needed resolution at some future point.

And several future points, after that night, were present.  The first came on Easter that year, where having come back from an in-theater edition of the Engineer Captains Career Course (ECCC), I was a bit buoyant in my typical optimistic attitude.  The moment wasn’t exactly perfect, but at the end of Easter services (one of the two times I saw him there), I made a point to say to him “Happy Easter” as he walked toward me.  Instead of replying, he simply pretended I didn’t exist and walked right past without an utterance.  The second opportunity came in late April, when all of those that had been a part of building “Baghdad Barracks” were called into the Brigade HQ to do an After Action Review (aka critique) on the design and construction of the identical buildings that were built on Basecamps throughout town.  Gerry and I were there, and as we sat and discussed this, I was my fairly normal self:  engaged in the conversation, providing feedback, and giving suggestions for improvement.  Gerry?  He was silent, not a word.  And his facial expression, any time I looked his way, was either showing boredom and disdain for his taking part in the session or demonstrating disgust and haughtiness at suggestions being offered, especially when I spoke.  Several times we looked directly at each other and I was trying to indicate my desire for him to either concur or provide a different viewpoint and there was never a response.  After the session was complete, before we could touch base, he was gone from the Brigade AO.  I must admit that I wasn’t trying very hard to reconcile with him, but then again, I wasn’t trying to be an ass either (he was frankly doing that well enough for both of us), and offering a door for us to meet out our differences.  After hearing from one of his fellow peers in the 203d (a female Captain who was in the ECCC with me), I am not fully surprised.  She described him as “intense” and not one that made efforts, even in their “family circle”, to make friends among peers.  So by the time we left, and left on this note, I had just gave up on making the wheel complete.

That said, it wasn’t complete.  At one point, while living in Northern Virginia, I saw him again.  Jackie and I, as a part of a trip to Potomac Mills shopping center, stopped into Chick-fil-A to eat one evening in Woodbridge.  And after getting food, we sat down, and across the room was Gerry and his family.  I am fairly sure if he saw me he was doing the same thing I did in reaction to this sighting; more or less pretend he didn’t exist.  I mentioned to Jackie about him but it did make me wonder what had gotten him from Missouri to Virginia.  Thanks to AKO, Google, and a number of other open source items, I was able to do a virtual catch-up on what he had been up to.  After Company Command, it seems he got into the Active Guard Reserve (AGR) program and had spent the vast majority of his time in various staff jobs.  At some point he opted to become a strategic planner (which is a Functional Area outside of the Engineer Branch) and after working at the MOARNG Headquarters (HQ), made his way to the National Guard Bureau (NGB) in Washington.  At the time was a fellow major (this must have been in the fall/early winter of 2011).  In late 2012 or early 2013, I did a follow-up on him when I was just being promoted to Lieutenant Colonel (LTC), and was somewhat gleeful to find that I now outranked him (even though he had been in full-time service and I was a part-time reservist).  Simply put I couldn’t really ever quite shake him from my mind, and this Spring I did a search again and noted that earlier this year he had gotten promoted to LTC and was still in town.  At one juncture I was going to ask a fellow hockey buddy of mine who works at NGB to check into him, but with the things that happened in my life since May, I had actually had nearly forgotten about him.  Then I read an article about him in last Monday’s Army Times.

In short, after reading this, I posted to Twitter the following, which I think sums it up rather well:  “Personal history here, when I read this I was blown away.  #justification #karma http://www.armytimes.com/article/20141030/NEWS/310300044”.  My emotional state at that time, and even now, is just one of burgeoning pride, joyful adulation, an “I told you so” type of gleeful contentment, at his being relieved and “caught” in his lie; one that I could only have truly guessed at in terms of magnitude of fabrication and “faking of the funk” that sensed from the get-go.  Not only was he “that type” (see above), he was a fake “that type” that had been, if these allegations are fully true, perpetuating a false persona for more than a decade.  And thinking back on this, even as I explained my feelings to my spouse as I reacted (simply saying “Wow!” several times over), it all makes sense.  His bluster at his subordinates, his unwillingness to connect with his peers (in my case and based on the other 203d officer I mentioned), and his near meek silence in group settings with superiors and others, was a protection mechanism from the truth coming out.

For those that have been near or involved with a “relief for cause” scenario, you know that the public reason is typically just the “straw that broke the camel’s back” reason for the action (unless it’s a simply egregious failure or heinous crime unto itself).  Illegally wearing a decoration isn’t an offense, in other words, that put soldiers in harm’s way, or potentially/actually causes serious damage to government property or the image of the overall military/USA.  So there is typically more to the story.  I am not sure who “turned him in” (there is some interesting comment feeds that suggest an E-6 NCO did, but I am not sure what I make of that), but his being relieved based on evidence of “sufficient misconduct” is certainly not just about the badges, it’s probably that someone, like me, saw through the façade and was in a position to finally put the charade to an end.  Part of me feels guilt at not confronting him and assailing myself to his charge against me.  But more of me simply relishes the fact that the person who so poignantly called me unprofessional, was never a professional in the first place; and now, especially, has no ground to stand on in impugning my character.  They say what comes around goes around and that you reap what you sow.  I am just glad that someone finally separated the wheat from the chaff here, and my ability to identify the chaff was more than justified in the case of soon to be, I am sure, Mr. Gerald H. Green.