RAY

Ray was a classmate of mine at West Point. We two hardly knew each other there, although everyone knew of Ray. From Mississippi, he was outrageous in an environment where no one else dared be outrageous. Then we were in the same classes at the Infantry and Airborne schools.

Six years later we were in school together again, this time in the "Career Course" of the Infantry School. Also, we both sang in the choir at the Post Chapel. Ray was the bass section leader and I the tenor section leader. I had accepted that job when I was asked to do it, though I didn't really consider myself a tenor and certainly couldn't give guidance or assistance to the other tenors. A few weeks later I was astonished to receive a check - my pay as section leader. I endorsed it and put it in the collection plate, somewhat embarrassed to have gotten it at all.

Toward the end of the course, one of the wives wrote a humorous graduation song to that classic Alma Mater tune often known as "High Above Cayuga's Waters" and asked me to form a barbershop quartet and perform it at the graduation dinner dance. I enlisted Ray and a couple of other friends for the quartet.

One thing about quartets, I discovered, is that each member relies so much on the other three on every chord, and works so hard at achieving the correct harmony on each chord, that everyone either gets really close or it doesn't work. This time it worked fairly well and a friendship was cemented.

A few years later Ray and I were classmates again, this time at the Command and General Staff College. After that Ray was sent to Viet Nam and I went to the Defense Language Institute to study Russian for a year. As it happened, Ray's wife, Kay Lou, and their five kids ended up a few miles away in Pacific Grove, California. The reason Kay Lou decided to go there was because her parents lived on Seventeen Mile Drive, the locale of Pebble Beach and some of the most beautiful seashore in the world. She found a house just outside the gate to Seventeen Mile Drive and could be at her folks' in about five minutes.

We spent a lot of time with Kay Lou during the year, since she was alone with her five kids, two of whom were 1-year old twins. She needed all the support she could get. Shortly after Ray left for Viet Nam, one of his friends, a helicopter pilot named Hank, showed up at Kay Lou's house just in time for lunch one day. Kay Lou, who was serving peanut butter sandwiches and strained carrots, nonetheless invited the unexpected Hank to stay for lunch. He accepted.

After lunch he asked Kay Lou to drive him to the airport; he too was enroute to Viet Nam. As they walked out to the car he handed her the keys to his Corvette and said he would be back in a year. Would she please drive it at least once a week to keep the battery charged and the engine oiled? Kay Lou already had two cars, a Toyota and a Datsun, and she could only drive one at a time. Ray would be home in slightly less than a year, so how she would get the car back to Hank was an interesting question. The Corvette only had two bucket seats and she couldn't go anywhere without at least the twins along. The whole thing was highly impractical. Hank, though, was leaving at that moment for Viet Nam and didn't have time to make any other arrangements. Classic forward-looking bachelor. Kay Lou said she would take care of the car.

She called me a couple of days later and told me the situation. She said she would be happy to loan me the Datsun for the rest of the year. I suggested that whereas the Datsun, a hatchback, was very practical for her and the kids, the Corvette wasn't. Why didn't she loan me the 'vette instead? No, she couldn't, because it was Hank's and he had left it with her.

I never could make the Datsun run. Most mornings I couldn't even start it. If I got it started in the morning, it wouldn't start in the afternoon so I could get home. Once Kay Lou came by and started it instantly while I watched. I did exactly what she had done and it wouldn't start. Once again I suggested the 'vette without success.

After a few weeks, Kay Lou was feeling guilty about the lack of driving the Corvette had gotten. Actually it hadn't gotten any. She bundled up the twins and put them in the right-hand seat, got in and turned the key. The 485cc engine roared to life like a B-52. The twins screamed in terror. It took her over half an hour to calm them down. She called me and told him that if I could get the Datsun over to her house she would let me take the Corvette. I got it started.

The Corvette wasn't nearly as impressive as I had hoped. It was gold with some black trim and was almost ugly. It sounded great, though. The boiling engine sound carried so far that Ceda could hear me coming home every night when I was still a half-mile away. It sucked down gas like a drunk with a government check. It took a quart of oil with every tank of gas. I didn't care. I was enjoying driving it.

I cleaned all the bachelor trash out of the 'vette, washed and waxed it (it was still an ugly gold), fixed all the little things that were broken and took it to the Chevy dealer for a going over. After a few months I had it in tiptop shape.

One day I got a frantic call from Kay Lou who said that Hank had shown up on R&R totally unexpectedly and wanted his car. He was furious with her for loaning it to someone he hardly knew and vowed to make some other storage arrangements at the end of his week in the States. "Be ready for him, Palmer, he's mad," she told me.

As it happened, I had just washed it and still hadn't given up trying to make it shine. I decided that in the 15 minutes it would take Hank to get there I would try to get another coat of wax on it. It was the least I could do for 6 months of driving it.

I was almost finished wiping the polish off when Hank drove up, scowling and red around the neck. Before Hank got out of his rental car he sat and watched me for a couple of minutes. I waved to him, finished wiping down the car, and went over to greet him.

"Hank," I said, "I have a box of your stuff that I cleaned out of the car. I'll get it for you before you leave. I want to show you a few things I've done to the car. The one thing I haven't been able to fix, and the Chevy dealer couldn't fix it either, even though I've paid them twice to do it, is the arm rest on the driver's side door. I'm sorry about that but I've tried everything I could to fix it."

Hank was visibly impressed with the appearance of the car (someone had to like it.) He declined to take the box of his stuff, saying that he didn't even remember what it was and had no use for it this week. He drove off without a harsh word. A week later he returned and tossed me the keys before returning to Viet Nam.

About 8 months into his one-year tour in Viet Nam, Ray was badly wounded. Ironically, it was in the same area where I had spent a year earlier and where I couldn't even find a war to fight. Things had changed. Ray found a war there and he was med-evaced home with eight wounds, including one which nearly destroyed his left hand. He was brought back to Letterman General Hospital just north of San Francisco, close enough for his family to visit him regularly. Before long he was offered government quarters at a nearby Air Force base, and Kay Lou eventually took the kids and moved there to be just a few miles from the hospital.

Before she moved, though, she went through weeks of commuting. First she found places for the older kids to stay where they could continue to attend their schools. What to do with twins, now two (you know "terrible two", times two)? Ceda immediately offered to take them, solving that problem, so Amy and Alex moved in with Ceda, me and the kids for a couple of weeks. Ray and Kay Lou were very grateful.

All went well with Ray and Kay Loy after that. Ray recovered well and became one of the Army's senior computer specialists, made colonel and was launched on a long and rewarding career managing large computer projects. The kids all grew up to be fine citizens, which is all you really want. End of story. Well, not quite.

When I was about to retire from the Army, I got a call from Ray. "What are you going to do after you retire?" Ray wanted to know.

I didn't exactly know. I had a job offer which had come about in a very unusual way. My class from the Russian Institute sponsored a reunion for all graduates in the Washington area. I formed a committee of my Russian Institute classmates and had them plan the affair. All the guidance I gave them was that I wanted it to be special, not just a dinner and some boring after dinner speaker.

We put on a very nice affair. Everyone was met at the door by class wives dressed in Russian attire with bread and salt, the traditional Russian welcome. The menu was entirely Russian, at least as Russian as the officer's club could manage. Several musicians from earlier classes led everyone in singing traditional Russian songs. It was special.

I actually had only a small role in this. Indeed, I had an unusual conflict. I had been selected for an all star soccer team which was playing the Washington Diplomats professional team at the same time in a packed stadium about 12 miles away. I couldn't miss that, so as soon as I had everyone seated at their tables for dinner I left and went to play soccer. I had hoped to grab some dinner when I returned, but as soon as I walked back in, everyone was pounding me on the back telling me what a special event it had been. One of them even made me a job offer.

So when Ray called, I told him that I had a job offer which I might take, but, in any case, I would need a job somewhere since I was about to have three kids in college at the same time. Ray told me to call someone named Frank at a company known as Braddock, Dunn and McDonald.

I actually knew that company, but it was now called BDM. I knew it from a contract it had to write and conduct training exercises for the National Military Command Center. The exercise writers always needed to have me translate incoming exercise messages "from the Soviet Union" on the Hotline into Russian for them. I was uninterested in writing exercises in retirement. I was even less interested in conducting them, since that usually happened between midnight and 6 the next morning on a Saturday night. I didn't know that the contract was just one of hundreds of BDM contracts and that there were lots of other, more interesting things I could do there. I told Ray that he had no interest in working at BDM. Ray called back again and again until I agreed to go see Frank. I called and made an appointment for an interview.

I was astonished at the interview process. I was interviewed by three managers for 45 minutes each, then by Frank, and, with a lunch thrown in, was at BDM for over 5 hours. As I was leaving, Frank made me an offer. This was totally unexpected. I knew that offers were normally made in writing and that they came days to weeks after the interview, if at all. I was fairly sure that it was against company policy to do it this way. Still, I just said I would think about it. I called a couple of friends who worked at BDM and found out that working all night wasn't unheard of, and might even be considered routine. I drove by the company on weekends and checked the parking lots. They were always at least partially full. No way was I going to work there. I let the offer ride, though. No use burning any bridges.

When I got my retirement orders I called the Russian Institute grad who had made me the first offer at the party and asked when I should come to work. I would be retired on 1 January and would be ready to work the next day. The answer was that they were a little shy of contract money at the moment and would be ready for me in maybe three or four months. I thought about all those college tuitions, called Frank and accepted the offer at BDM.

Frank was a wonderful guy to work for. Like some retired military men, though, he had a tendency to tell "war stories." Every meeting in Frank's office lasted twice or three times as long as necessary because of the obligatory war stories.

From the beginning, I was included in meetings that Frank, the director, held for his managers. I wasn't at that level and I didn't know why I was included. All these meetings started with a war story. It was always the same one, about how Ray had been wounded. Each time Frank told the story it went a little further. It wasn't until the 6th or 7th telling that he reached the end of the story. When he did finish the whole story, I leapt to my feet and ran to my office to call Ray. The whole story went something like this.

"You know, Palmer here is a good friend of my Operations Advisor in Viet Nam, Ray Tomlinson (he pronounced Tomlinson as Tome-lee-sone in an imitation of the Vietnamese pronunciation.) Well, Tome-lee-sone was a remarkable officer who did everything I could have asked and lots of things I never thought of. For example, he didn't like the way our radios worked, or didn't work, which is more accurate, so he took them apart and fixed them and put up new antennas and stuff and before long we had communication with all the advisors in the division for the first time. He was always doing things like that, fixing things that no one else could fix and things that had never worked before.

"The division was on an operation in the Seven Mountains region of the Mekong Delta. While we were there our battalions were going through retraining in the National Training Center one or two at a time. One day, one of our battalions graduated and, after the ceremony, left on a road march back to its assigned area of operations on the Cambodian border. While it was road marching toward the border it were ambushed. It was still so close that we could hear the firing. Then the calls started coming in for artillery and air. Normally the advisors would be calling in for US support, especially air support, but we heard nothing from the advisors. Tome-lee-sone was frantically trying to reach the American advisors on radio, but no one answered. He had his Vietnamese counterpart asking the battalion what the situation was, especially with the Americans. The Vietnamese said that all the Americans had been killed.

"Tome-lee-sone told me that he needed a helicopter, that he didn't believe that all three Americans had been killed and he had to go in and find them. I let him take my helicopter and he flew directly into the middle of that ambush, landing in a hail of small arms fire, and was wounded before he hit the ground.

"Wounded two or three times already, he ran to the battalion CP, where he found one of the advisors wounded and lying out in the open taking a lot of fire from the enemy. He pulled him to a safer place. He asked this officer, the battalion senior advisor, where the other Americans were. They were with other parts of the battalion, so Tome-lee-sone set out to find them. He found them both badly wounded but alive, and dragged them back to the place where he had put the senior advisor so that he could evacuate all of them as soon as he could get a helicopter in. He was wounded a number of times while he was doing all that, but he kept going.

"He then started calling in artillery and air support from everywhere he could. He directed the artillery with great skill and vectored in air strikes, all in an effort to break the ambush, but the enemy kept firing. As long as that was going on he couldn't get any of the Americans out, including himself.

"All this time, we didn't have any other battalions in the region which were trained well enough to go in themselves. We had to put together a kluge of units from those available and others we could get airlifted in. It took nearly another 36 hours to get in and relieve the battalion. All this time, Tome-lee-sone and the other Americans were out there in the middle of that ambush, all badly wounded.

"As soon I could get in, I took out Tome-lee-sone and the other three Americans. Miraculously all had survived, although none looked as though they would live long enough to receive medical treatment. They did, though. Tome-lee-sone clearly had saved all their lives. In fact, he was the most wounded of all of them by the time I got him out. He had eight bullet holes in his body. His left hand had just about been blown away. He was a mess.

"He was med-evaced to Tan Son Nhut, and from there to the States. I went with him to Tan Son Nhut and walked out with the stretcher to the evac airplane. On the way out I said, 'Tome-lee-sone, you have eight holes in your body that you got for me and for the Americans you saved. I want you to consider me a genie in a bottle. Anytime from now on that you want something, anything that is reasonably within my power to do for you, all you have to do is ask. You have eight wishes, one for each wound in your body.'

"Over the years, Tome-lee-sone used his wishes wisely. First, he called me from Letterman General Hospital where he was recovering, and told me he wanted to get into the Computer Science Specialty Program. I told him that since he was near the bottom of his class at the Academy, he ought to pick something else. He told me I was a genie and wasn't supposed to question the wishes, just make them come true. So I did, and he went into the Computer Science field. But they assigned him to some graduate school he didn't like so he called and rubbed the lamp one more time. I had him reassigned to Texas Tech. Then, his first utilization assignment was coming up and the Army wanted to send him someplace he didn't like so he called me again, and so forth. Eventually he used all but one of his wishes and he got everything he asked me for. Palmer here is his eighth wish."

Suddenly I understood the unexpected job offer. This was the first I had ever heard of the eight wishes. I was in my office a half minute later and had Ray on the phone in another half minute. "You used your last wish for me? Why?"

Ray said, "Aw, I didn't need it. I got everything I wanted and there's nothing else Frank can do for me now. I wanted to do something for you." At that point, I couldn't talk. I mumbled something into the phone and turned my face away so no one could see the tears in my eyes.