The Hunting Trip by III William E. Butterworth Page A

here. We even have a skeet team which competes against other governmental investigative agencies in the Baltimore-Washington area. The first sergeant will show you where the skeet range is on Saturday morning.”
    â€œSir,” the first sergeant protested, “on Saturday morning, CIC administrators in training have a barracks inspection.”
    â€œNot if they’re on the Fort Holabird Skeet Team, they don’t,” the major said. “I intend to kick the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! out of the EXPLETIVE DELETED!! Naval Intelligence Team at the Sunday shoot, and I want PFC Williams to get all the practice he can. Have him there at oh-eight-hundred.”
    [ EIGHT]
    P hil did like Fort Holabird.
    He learned a great deal in the CIC Administrator School, including how much of a threat the Soviet Union posed to the world in general and the United States specifically, and how they did so—subjects that previously had escaped his attention.
    He learned what the Counterintelligence Corps did, and, presuming he completed the training, how he would fit into the Corps.
    Put simply, there were three kinds of laborers in the CIC’s fields. At the very bottom of the totem pole were CIC administrators, and their major contribution was to prepare the final reports of CIC special agents and CIC analysts.
    His instructors impressed upon him the cardinal rules for preparing reports: One, there were to be no strikeovers, misspellings, andgrammatical errors, and, most important, reports could contain absolutely no ambiguities.
    If something can be interpreted in more than one way, it will be.
    He learned there were two kinds of people senior to ordinary CIC special agents. One of these categories was supervisory special agents, and the other was CIC analysts. It got a little confusing here, as analysts could be pure analysts (that is, neither CIC agents nor supervisory special agents) or they could not.
    Analysts analyzed what the agents had discovered in the course of their investigations, and reported their analysis to their superiors, aided and abetted by CIC administrators who prepared—not just typed—such analytical reports.
    This was an important distinction.
    Any Quartermaster Corps clerk-typist could type a report, many of them without a single strikeover, but a CIC administrator was expected not only to type a report without a single strikeover, but was also expected to inspect it for ambiguities and grammatical errors and then to seek out the author of the report and get him (or her) to fix the ambiguities and errors.
    Phil suspected this might cause problems when he “got into the field” over what was and what was not really an ambiguity.
    He also learned that the CIC—in addition to denying the Russians and the Cubans and a long list of other “un-friendlies” access to the secrets of the U.S. Army—had two other roles.
    One of these was investigating the misbehavior—usually the sexual misbehavior—of field rank and above officers and their dependents. That meant majors through generals and their dependents. Sexual shenanigans of captains, lieutenants, and noncommissioned officers and their dependents were dealt with by the Criminal Investigation Division of the Corps of Military Police.
    Phil thought preparing the special agents’ reports of the sexualshenanigans of majors and up—and their dependents, which he had learned meant their wives and offspring—might be very interesting and quietly hoped he would be assigned to a CIC detachment in some hotbed of forbidden sexual activity.
    But he thought of himself as a realist, and the reality was that he was probably not going to wind up assigned anywhere interesting, but instead wind up in someplace like Sunny Lakes, Wisconsin, preparing the reports of CIC special agents who spent their days working on complete background investigations.
    This was known somewhat disparagingly in the counterintelligence community