Generally Speaking by Claudia J. Kennedy Page A

looks. I was not interested in the job. And I was also disappointed that the Women's Army Corps enabled such an obvious assault on professionalism. How were the men leading the Army ever going to take us seriously if we undermined ourselves in this way?
    This period was one of those low points in which one either leaves the Army to start over or one digs in and tries to make the best of choices that are imperfect. I simply did not see how any future in the Army would work out, but I thought I had to pursue two alternatives simultaneously: one, see what the civilian world had to offer; two, press on to examine where the Army might lead. If I had known then just how deeply and how rapidly the Army was going to be transformed in the coming years, I would not have felt the anguish I did in my final months at Fort Devens. But I didn't own a crystal ball. The future was uncertain, and uncertainty often creates negative emotions. But I've since come to understand that just because uncertainty about the future—especially our professional future—makes us feel uncomfortable, these negative feelings do not mean the future itself is bleak. That too is important information for a potential leader considering major decisions that will impact one's career. Learn to be comfortable with uncertainty.
    Exercising my options, I went to Boston, and bought a good civilian suit to wear at a job interview for a corporate administrative position. Alternatively, if I decided to enter law school, I knew that after two years of the Army I had the discipline to make it through.
    But I wasn't ready to leave the Army. Despite my impatience to receive more responsibility, I had made friends at Fort Devens; there was camaraderie, a shared sense of duty that had become passé in the cynical civilian world. In the end, I decided to remain in the Army.
    I was promoted to captain, and learned of a potentially interesting assignment. Army recruiting command had regional positions for WAC officer recruiters open in Buffalo, Syracuse, and Concord, New Hampshire. It was an independent style of working, making the rounds of college campuses. The New Hampshire office also covered eastern Vermont and Maine, beautiful country.
    And, deep down, I always hoped the Army would work out for me. I accepted the recruiting assignment and moved to Concord in June 1971. My boss at the recruiting main station was Major Robert Smith, an Infantry officer who knew the service well. He was an energetic leader who wanted the transition to the All-Volunteer Army, which was rumbling toward us faster than anyone had imagined, to proceed as smoothly as possible. But WAC officer recruiting had not been going well.
    “We hope that you will make mission,” the major told me. “The officer you're replacing started strong but has had a slow year.”
    “Making mission” was one of those ubiquitous Army recruiting catchphrases. The phrase meant recruiting a minimum number of WAC officers from a rather large number of campuses. After looking at my district's demographics and the colleges in the area, I simply knew,
There's no way I can't make mission.
    But when I made my first college visit, I discovered that the recruiting brochures meant to attract college seniors to the Army listed a pay scale of only $223 a month, a figure years out of date, and certainly not competitive with civilian salaries of that time. No college graduate would be interested in that kind of pay. Later that winter, after I had replaced the old brochures, my first campus appointments in Maine coincided with the season's worst blizzards. I found myself driving the underpowered government sedan with no power steering (and a tiny steering wheel) through whiteouts, smack dab into fender-deep snow-drifts. Farmers kindly pulled my car out of the snowbanks with their tractors. I had been at the job several months and I could count the number of recruitments on one hand.
    At that stage, needless to say, I was not enjoying