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Major H. Richard Miller, Jr., his tunic unbuttoned and necktie pulled down, sat at the desk of the chief of the Office of Organizational Analysis with his leg resting on an open drawer of the ornate desk.
There was a glass dark with whiskey on the desk and a capped plastic vial of medicine issued by the pharmacy of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
He knew what the label on the medicine vial warned about taking alcohol after taking “one or two tablets as necessary for pain,” but he picked up the vial and read it again anyway.
“When it doubt, do both,” he said aloud.
He pried the lid open, shook out two white tablets, and put them in his mouth. Then he picked up the whiskey glass, raised it, and said, “Mud in your eye, Seymour, you little shit. Vaya con Dios, buddy.”
Then he drank half of it and set the glass on the desk.
He looked at the whiskey glass for a moment, then picked it up again and drained it.
The instant he set the glass very carefully on the green blotter of the desk pad, a light flashed on one of the telephones on the desk. He looked at it, wondered if he could ignore it, then reached for it.
“Miller,” he said.
“Major, there are two gentlemen to see you,” Mr. Agnes Forbison said.
“This is a really bad time. Is this important?”
“I think you’d better see them.”
“Give me ninety seconds,” Miller said.
He put the telephone back in its cradle, then, wincing with the pain, lifted his leg off the open drawer and carefully lowered it onto the floor. He then put the whiskey glass and the bottle of Famous Grouse into the drawer, then closed it.
Again wincing with the pain it caused, he shifted his body so that he could get the vial of painkillers into his trousers pocket. Finally, he pulled up his necktie and buttoned his uniform tunic.
Almost immediately, there was a discreet knock at the office door.
“Come!”
Sergeant Major John K. Davidson and Corporal Lester Bradley, USMC, marched into the office, stopped twelve inches from the desk, and saluted.
“Good evening, sir!” Davidson barked.
Miller—in perhaps a Pavlovian reflex—returned the salute.
“Jack, it’s been a bad day and I’m not drunk enough to be amused. What’s on your mind?”
“Sir, the sergeant major has come to enlist.”
“What?”
“Sir, I have a permission to enlist note from my daddy,” Davidson said.
He took a half step forward, laid a small sheet of paper on the desk, then stepped back and resumed the position of attention.
Miller picked up the piece of paper, saw it was general officer’s notepaper, and read it.
* * *
6 August 2005
Chief
Office of Organizational Analysis
