It was automatic on my part. I snapped to attention and replied, “YES, SIR! UNDERSTOOD, SIR! MY APOLOGIES, SIR!”
“DISMISSED, LIEUTENANT!”
Shit! I grabbed my stuff and moved off down the side aisle, past Marilyn and Professor Rhineburg and out through the door, followed closely by the captain. There was quite a stir around us as the audience turned and murmured as I left. The captain pointed me towards a corner and started chewing my ass ragged. Okay, I should have just kept my mouth shut. I knew that. Still, that asshole, whoever he was, pissed me off. I stayed silent and at attention while Captain Summers worked me over. If it was up to him, I don’t think I was going to make First Lieutenant in this century.
I was still standing rigidly at attention, which involves keeping your eyes pointed straight ahead, but there’s still a trick to using your peripheral vision, and my eyes popped wide open when I saw what was coming. From over the captain’s right shoulder I saw Professor Rhineburg and Marilyn coming, along with a small woman in a white Navy uniform. As soon as I saw the eagles on her shoulder, I interrupted the captain by barking out, “ATTEN-HUT!” as loudly as I could.
The captain was as startled as I was, and stopped in mid-harangue and after turning to see what I was up to, snapped to attention himself. The Naval captain, who seriously outranked an Army captain, softly said, “As you were,” and both Captain Summers and I went to parade rest. “That was a very interesting response you gave in there, Lieutenant,” she commented.
“My apologies, ma’am. No excuse.”
“Oh, don’t worry about it. At ease, the both of you.”
Once I went to an ease position, I had a chance to look at the captain more closely, and my eyes bugged out again. The naval captain was Grace Hopper, ‘Amazing Grace’, one of the founding fathers of computer science and programming, and damn near the only woman to ever have a warship named after her! An Arleigh Burke class destroyer was named after her after her death. Right now she was still only a captain; in the Eighties she would be promoted to rear admiral and end up the longest serving naval officer in history.
I just stared at her, my mouth open. She saw this and said, “What’s on your mind, son?”
“You’re Grace Hopper!”
“Captain Grace Hopper, if you don’t mind,” she replied dryly, glancing over at my professor, who was chuckling.
“Yes, ma’am, sorry, ma’am.”
“As I said a moment ago, you made a nice presentation. Don’t worry about that jackass, Carnsword. He still thinks Joe Stalin was seriously misunderstood and that communism is the wave of the future.”
I glanced at my captain, and muttered, “Good Lord!”
She shook my hand and said, “I just wanted to say it was a nice job there, especially at the end. I loved it!” She turned to Professor Rhineburg and said, “John, it was good to see you again. You did well with him.” She turned to go.
I had to do it. “Excuse me, ma’am, can I ask you a favor?”
“Eh, what?”
“Can I get a picture with you? Please?” Christ, a picture with Grace Hopper! I’d plead for this on my knees! “Captain? Can you take a picture for me? I’ll pay for the film!”
I towered over the woman, who must have already been in her seventies, but she smiled and stood next to me, and Captain Summers took two pictures, one of her and me, and one adding in Professor Rhineburg. Marilyn declined to get in the shot.
Afterwards, his anger at me forgotten, Captain Summers asked me, “Just who is that captain? She’s older than God, for Christ’s sake!”
I tried to explain, but fell back on, “Captain, she’s one of the people who invented computers. Imagine if we were living a hundred years ago and you had a chance to get your photo taken with Thomas Edison. Wouldn’t you do it?”
“Her? You’re kidding me!”
“Captain, someday they’re going to name a ship after her. No disrespect sir, but I don’t think they’re going to name any regiments after you or me.”
He laughed. “Name a ship after a woman? Get serious!”
“Why not? They named a Polaris submarine after Edison, and he wasn’t even in the Navy or the Army!”
Captain Summers laughed at this, and excused himself from lunch, which was just fine with me. After chewing me out, I knew Marilyn well enough that she wouldn’t want to eat with him. The remaining three of us, Marilyn, Professor Rhineburg, and myself, went into the restaurant for lunch. Once there, Marilyn, who I could tell was still stewing, said, “Who was that… that… that jerk!?” I smiled to myself. If it hadn’t been for the professor, she would have said asshole.
The professor smiled and said, “Arnold Carnsword. He teaches applied mathematics at Harvard or Yale, one of the Ivies, anyway. He won a Fields Medal a few years ago.”
Marilyn looked confused at that, so I explained. “It’s sort of like the Nobel Prize in math, but they only give it out every four years.”
Professor Rhineburg nodded in agreement. “He’s really quite good. I suspect that if you hadn’t worn your uniform, he would have been quite congratulatory. As it stands, I am sure the American Mathematical Society will get a scurrilous letter about the Army’s infiltration of the pristine halls of science. Forget about him. He’s a left wing kook.”
That only slightly mollified Marilyn, but the saying about not beating a dead horse was not invented with her in mind. “Still, he’s a jerk! And how come that captain was all over you? You were right!”
I smiled at that. “It doesn’t matter how right I was. I was wrong and the captain knew it. Hell, I knew it, too.”
“What do you mean, you were wrong?”
“When I wear this uniform, I represent the Army and the 82nd Airborne. We answer to civilians, even civilian jerks. I was out of line.”
“No you weren’t!” she said, defending me.
I shrugged. I didn’t think we would ever see eye to eye on some things. “If it had been one of my men who got into a beef with a civilian, I’d be all over him, and the standard for officers is even higher. I screwed up. You’ll probably be married to the world’s oldest second lieutenant by the time I’m out of the Army.”
“I don’t think it was that serious,” commented the professor. “This will blow over.”
“Not when Captain Summers finishes writing me up for insubordination, which is entirely possible. Then again, he could just let my captain know, which will hitch a lousy OER on me.” The looks of confusion made me explain, “Officer Efficiency Report, my yearly grade, so to speak.”
“Well, he was still a jerk!” said Marilyn.
I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “Next time I get in an argument, I’ll turn you loose instead.”
Being an American soldier or sailor can involve a strange dichotomy between ideals and reality at times. We fight, and sometimes die, to uphold our country’s freedoms and rights, but often have to legally give up those rights in order to do so. With the exception of the Viet Nam War, most of our fellow citizens accord us a tremendous level of respect, but hold us to ludicrously high standards and mix that respect with a certain level of disdain. They love having us around in wartime, and want to keep us out of sight and out of mind the rest of the time. As the saying goes, we catch bullets so civilians don’t have to. It’s probably always been like that.
After lunch, I decided to head back upstairs and change out of my uniform. I was sick and tired of math and the Army for the day. Maybe I could change into some civvies and we could do the tourist thing on the Mall. I would have loved to have seen the Wall, otherwise known as the Viet Nam War Memorial, but it hadn’t been even thought of yet. I remember the first time I did see it, I cried at the waste of it all.