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Show naked in his backyard. Both Ace and Jack had "chosen" early retirement, leaving him with few supporters at the top and several critics. Still, he thought, one had only to look at the course of his career, the treaties he had negotiated in Palau and Micronesia, the speeches he had written, briefs delivered, awards won, junior officers trained, to see he was the best judge advocate general the Navy had ever seen. His good friend, Karl Kaup, had made Flag the year before, a year early, and was now the head of Charleston Naval Base. They would talk on the phone in the afternoon, Karl assuring him all would be well, his Naval Academy ring gently knocking against the phone. When he was passed over the second time, the final time, he was devastated. Recently, I asked my parents about that summer, what they remembered, how they felt about it. Both responded that it was a great trip, a wonderful time in our lives, the trip, in fact, my dad had always envisioned. My mother remembered laughing across the country as the Winnie fell apart and the rains came down. The frivolity they described sounded very similar in tone to their early adventures in India and Pakistan, and it made me wish I had been in their Winnebago. When I mentioned that the journal I kept during those months suggested things were not quite wonderful, my dad responded by saying that it was because I was so negative then, that I didn't want to be there, that I wrecked it. Several years ago, a decade after my father retired from the military, my mother made him a scrapbook documenting his Naval career that began with the letter containing his first set of orders sending them to the Philippines and ended with the pictures taken at his 210 |