Company Command
As a young Captain, I was fortunate enough to be selected for company command in Italy. I would become the 56th Signal Company Commander in Livorno, Italy responsible for one of the 17 sites in the world that processed autodin traffic. The site location would be the famed Coltano site is where Marconi first linked Canada, Ireland, and Italy via radio transmission.
The traffic that was processed by the 56th Signal company was some of the most sensitive traffic in the world. This traffic included nuclear, spy, and diplomatic traffic. The site was very secure and advanced that I could best describe as everything you might see in a Mission Impossible movie times 100. My company operated out of building D on the image below.
Let me give you some examples:
- Single road to site. Everything cut down when you got close to the site and the ground leveled so security could see everything. You were not sneaking in and hiding in folds in the ground or behind bushes.
- Security consisted of US contingent consisted of approximately 16 military police with M-16s and a similarly sized Italian contingent of Carabinieri with attack dogs and machine guns. The The US police reported to me.
- Double concertina barrier topped with rolls of barbed wire like you would see in a prison. You can see the barrier in the image above.
- Two bulletproof checkpoints manned by the US military police. Both were intentionally constrained and hardened spaces to limited traffic flow. The first was at the main gate and there wasa secondary checkpoint in route to building D – the autodin data center.
- Three or four foot thick bank vault door with time locks.
- Thermite grenades everywhere. We were not shredding anything. We would rapidly melt everything while the security slowed down the attackers.
- A backup power system that consisted of about 100 car batteries hooked up in a hardened room.
- Everything was encrypted in seven different symmetric encryption keys. The keys were flown in monthly. You had to have all seven keys to decrypt anything.
- Radio transmission was satellite using frequency hopping spread spectrum radios of the data encrypted seven times.
The company performed superbly and I grew as a leader and technologist. We placed in the top five in worldwide maintenance awards competitions, operated continually and securely around the clock without a service interruption or incident, and with minimal disciplinary issues. It was my first experience with alternate work arrangements as I had shift workers and four day work weeks. While these arrangements require a different leadership and managerial approach, it was very effective. As commander, I strove to work every shift monthly so that I knew my soldiers well.
This was also my first assignment working extensively with warrant officers. All of the warrant officers I served with were very technically competent. Some of them struggled with the physical and leadership components of their job but I was there to help them through mentoring or putting them on remedial PT. As you might imagine, they REALLY did not like remedial PT and especially so because I had them do it with the other soldiers but there are consequences to failing a PT test. Command is not a popularity contest and you harden yourself to criticism if you know leading by example is a core principle.
It is always hard to lose soldiers when you are in command and I lost two soldiers. One died in a car accident as a passenger with a drunk driver. The other died in an accidental drug overdose. I knew both well and they were both excellent soldiers. As a commander, I spoke at their funerals and regrettably it is something I have had to do throughout my career.
I worked for two battalion commanders. The first was LTC Cruz who was on his second marriage and we mistook his wife as the babysitter. The mistake was ours and she was quite lovely and capable. The second battalion commander was LTC Welch who I worked for almost two years. As an aside, I was the his son’s scoutmaster as we camped throughout Italy like Boy Scouts do.
Battalion Operations Officer
Company command is highly desired position as a captain. Battalion operations officer (S-3) is the highly desired position as a major. As fate would have it, I would become the battalion operations officer as one of the most junior officers in the battalion. But I get ahead of myself.
After 18 months as company commander, it was time for me to transfer command to CPT Phil Minor. Eileen and I took two weeks off to travel to Germany and Rothenburg ob der Tauber. We had a great vacation and as we returned, I was looking forward to being the Assistant Operations Officer – a great job for a young captain. A lot had happened during that two weeks. The operations and the administration officers (S1 and S3) had an affair and both were no longer in Italy. While the job was offered to other Captains in the battalion all of whom were more senior than me, they turned the position down. I was to be the interim battalion operations officer without an assistant S-3. Little did anyone know that I would serve for a year including two deployments to Turkey.
A couple of vignettes from my time as S-3:
- One of the immediate challenges I faced was I was scheduled to brief the deputy commander of 5th Signal Command in 11 days on our deployment to Turkey. The deputy commander had a reputation of being difficult to brief. While the briefing started well, the Supply Officer had not travelled and I had to brief his portion. It was a work of fantasy dependent on numerous miracles. I was melted and at one point the deputy commander commented that in almost 30 years of service, this was the worst briefing he had ever received. Towards the end of the melting, I let him know I had been in the job 11 days. He shifted out of melting mode to mentoring mode and directed the other battalion operations officers assist me in fixing this plan and specifically the logistics portion of the plan. With their assistance, the next briefing went much better, the deployment to Southern Turkey was executed flawlessly.
- I was a difficult S3 to work for and with. The S3 office was short-staffed, I was very junior, and I had the authority to tell more senior colleagues what to do. While I was aware of these challenges, the mission had to be accomplished with has much charm as I could muster. At one point, one of the commanders told the battalion commander, with me present, that I was an <expletive>. The commander, without missing a beat, responded, yes but he is my <expletive>. It shut the conversation down.
- On our second deployment, we set up communications for the U.S. Army Southern European Task Force Commander and his staff. Their headquarters was at Chakmakli, Turkey north of Istanbul. A couple of things happened on this deployment. The Turks turned on their radar system from 8 to 5 which effectively destroyed any chance of our communication systems working. If we wanted to communicate, we were going to have to move. The SETAF commander did not want to move so we went through a daily routine of announcing the communication systems would be up at 5 pm.
Towards the end of my time as Battalion Operations Officer, Signal branch reached out to me to discuss my next assignment. Given I was already branch qualified as a captain and a major, the only options on the table were recruiting, ROTC or West Point after I completed the advanced course. Of those options, West Point seemed like the best option as I would get my Master’s degree. West Point reviewed my performance and agreed to fund my degree in exchange for three years service at West Point. I started studying for the graduate record exam (GRE).
The next chapter in my military journey is Interlude 1: The Education of Captain Carver.