When I was a young E-5 going through Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning Georgia, many of us took to randomly pinning a Second Lieutenant’s gold bar inside of our OCS helmet liner to remind us why we were enduring the mind games and physical hardships. When things got difficult during the day, we’d sneak a peek at the gold bar for inspiration, and hope we didn’t get caught. Having a gold bar inside one’s helmet liner was a Class One Honor violation and could have resulted in immediate expulsion. Why we played with such fire, I can’t remember.

When I graduated from OCS after fourteen weeks I pinned a silver bar inside my Battle Dress Uniform cap and continued to soldier. I figured no one outside of OCS would be checking so no one would be the wiser. After many months of schooling I found myself in Germany as the Platoon Leader of the last US Nike Hercules nuclear air defense unit, and custodian of a still classified number of nuclear warheads. It was a low stress job. Yeah, right. Okay, it was a high stress job, and I found myself looking inside my hat on more than one occasion, wondering if I really wanted to stay in and deal with constant stress. When the army finally promoted me to First Lieutenant, I was quite shocked to find that my personal secret was no secret. The Battery Commander, Captain Lloyd, removed the silver bar from inside my hat and moved it to the outside, then, much to my shock and awe, took his own captain’s rank and pinned it on the inside of my hat. My little personal ritual was apparently public knowledge, and now I would have to continue it at least until I made Captain.

Years later, when I was promoted to Captain, I was working at Brigade headquarters and assumed the senior officers on Brigade staff were unaware of my “next rank” ritual. The Brigade S-3 surprised me by handing me a gold Major’s oak leaf to pin inside my cap. I was once again stunned. As the years rolled by I always kept the oak leaf inside my cap, and only occasionally did someone notice and ask about it. If asked, I would explain casually and would receive, almost universally, a positive response, a smile or some witty remark like, “maybe you should put a different rank in there and see if you get promoted below the zone.”

I was frocked to Major in India, and actually never had a real promotion ceremony. By the time my actual promotion date came around, I was working my first tour at DIA and everyone already thought I was a Major, even though in fact I had been a promotable Captain allowed by the Army to wear Major’s rank. Since I had no promotion ceremony, I used the day of my promotion to change the rank inside my hat to a silver oak leaf, the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

Oddly enough, when it was time for me to be promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, I had no military officers in my chain of command available for a ceremony. It was something of a joke around my office on Army Staff, that I was technically already a Lieutenant Colonel, but had no one to officiate a ceremony, so continued to wear my Major’s oak leaves. When a new Colonel arrived several weeks later he was incensed to find that no one had been able to help me find a senior officer available to pin my new rank on me. We immediately had a promotion ceremony, promotion party, and changing of the “next rank.”

I had a Colonel’s eagle pinned inside my hat the entire time I was a Lieutenant Colonel, and often thought back to the days in OCS when having rank there could have ended my career before it really started. The rank was a source of inspiration, a sign of how far I’d come, and a reminder that nothing is gained without risk. By the time I was halfway through my years as a Lieutenant Colonel I found myself in Colombo, Sri Lanka in the position of Defense and Army Attache. I had a car and driver and tended to go from one covered portico into the car to another portico and into a building. Only when I visited the Sri Lankan army in the field, or when I travelled around the Maldives in uniform, did I wear a hat. Since I seldom wore a hat, I seldom had cause to look inside it which means I seldom saw the eagle and didn’t think much about it. That is one of the reasons I was shocked to find one day that the Army, cursed with malfunctioning computers or desperately seeking crazy guys like me, chose to announce that I would be promoted to Colonel. I couldn’t fathom it. I was being promoted to Colonel when so many officers who I believed (and still believe) were better than me, were not. It was difficult to deal with.

My promotion date fell during the period I would be on leave after leaving Sri Lanka, so I asked the Commander of the Sri Lankan Army if he would do me the honor the day before I left country. While technically my promotion should have been given by a Senior Officer of the United States Army, I decided to make do with what I had. It was a wonderful ceremony in the Army Commander’s office, with an official (Sri Lankan) Army photographer, followed by a Sri Lankan reception. I got on the plane the next day and got busy with moving back to the United States, settling in and getting on with life.

Soon my leave was over and I was at Senior Service College (the Industrial College of the Armed Forces) wearing civilian coat and tie on most days, and Class B greens the rest. I didn’t wear a field cap at all and didn’t get around to putting the “next rank” inside. In truth, I thought about pinning a silver star inside, but it just seemed pretentious and disrespectful in a way that none of the earlier ranks had. I pinned Colonel inside because I never in a million years thought I’d be one, I certainly wasn’t going to pretend there was any chance I’d stay in the army long enough to be a general.

Many of you have probably already figured out what just hit me today. I have remained true to my “next rank” tradition my entire career. My retirement ceremony is three weeks from tomorrow and I have been displaying my “next rank,” that of a civilian (none, for those of you who are slow) inside my hat since the day I made Colonel. Hooah!

I mean, super!.

Tags: army, rank, ritual, soldier

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 6th, 2008 at 9:43 pm and is filed under Life, The Multiverse, Everything. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.