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8 The USS Burrfish Fast and Loose Shore duty is often a period of rejuvenation from the rigors of sea duty. In our case it gave us much needed time to live together as a family. I welcomed the horne life equally with the challenge of Washington duty. I felt stimulated by the opportunity to contribute to the making of policy in the power center of much of the universe. Temporarily , I had laid down the sword; time would tell whether the pen was mightier. I had three weeks' leave before reporting. After two deliriously happy weeks with the family and the tender moments in first meeting the children-during which I fell asleep every time I sat down-the thought of joining the hordes looking for housing in the Washington area soon urged us to be on the move. The Bureau of Naval Personnel, better known as BuPers, overlooked the Pentagon from a small hill adjacent to the Arlington National Cemetery. We naturally opted for housing in the Arlington area and lucked into a nice house in a new subdivision called Dominion Hills. The house sold for $8,500 new; we stole it for a bit less than $13,000 four months later. (Today it can be had for $130,000. The buyer can be had, too, at that price.) Henri did a marvelous job in setting up a very warm and comfortable horne for the family. We had largely "period" furnitureorange crates and the junk used during the children's toddling stages, to be thrown in the trash for some decent stuff about the time when tuition costs prevent buying some decent stuff. Our contemporaries did the same thing, the wives making draperies, the men finishing off rumpus rooms in the basement. This latter activity, a mildly addictive disease, Captain Hyman Rickover scornfully called "pump room fever"-submariners wasting time on trivia that rightfully belonged to professional study. My new job started off as a near insurmountable challenge. I was allegedly the legal expert for BuPers on officer retirements. On-thejob training consisted of slashing through an incomprehensible thicket of ancient laws and modern court interpretations. I thought the Navy The USS Burr/ish 223 judge advocate general GAG) did those things, but BuPers needed to know how to ask him the right questions, then apply the answers so that the comptroller general would not object to spending public funds in support of those decisions. When I arrived in the office, the desk sagged under the weight of a backlog of a thousand wartime cases of officers in hospitals or at home, pending a decision on physical disability retirement and drawing full pay and allowances while waiting for the bureau to act. For that "act" I had a tough time learning my lines. One case went home with me each night to study and try to make some sense about what to recommend. Decisions on each case, after cursory review in the Navy Department, went to the president for final action. After his approval, letters of notification had to be prepared for signature by the secretary of the navy. Any error, even if made in good faith, literally required a special act of Congress to correct. It took weeks before I could complete one case a night, and several hundred new ones arrived each month. In about six weeks, however, I was able to review a case, decide the disposition, and attach a tiny memo at the top, itemizing certain carefully prepared paragraphs to use in putting the letter together. I developed with great care about fifty standard paragraphs requiring only filling in a few blanks for appropriate dates. and laws. Using my memorized paragraphs, I could soon outline about a hundred letters a day. A battery of typists then ground out the letters to go to the secretary. The laws were Civil War relics designed wholly for the longservice career regular. Disability retirement pay was 75 percent of active duty base pay for life, regardless of the degree of disability or length of service, and was not subject to reevaluation. The law was an open invitation to abuse, and several Washington attorneys specialized in appeals, generally setting fees at half the pay of their clients for the time they were able to keep them on active duty, plus a percentage of any retirement pay thereafter. The officers were predominantly reserves who had come on active duty for the emergency. They had little service, and their disabilities, often...

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