In a zippered compartment of my fake alligator skin wallet there is a small plastic bag. It contains three inches of dark brown hair tied with a red bow. The hair is too brown.

            What do I mean by ‘too brown?’ Rusty’s hair was brown and grey. In the Bulgarian police photos it was matted with sweat but from the back it was dark grey. Not brown. Not dark brown.

            I asked Carla, the funeral director in Beaufort, what might change the hair color on a corpse. She never answered the email.

I asked Mr. George, the Army’s Mortuary Officer assigned to Rusty, but he didn’t know. And from the look on his face he considered it one of those Grieving Widow Questions that is best disregarded.

            I’ve had several Grieving Widow Questions since the Army chaplains from Fort Rucker showed up at the house around noon on Wednesday, January 10^th, 2018. One Caucasian male and one young Black female. A demographic duo designed to handle nearly every contingency.

Is there anyone who doesn’t know what it means when two military personnel in their dress uniforms are at your front door? I don’t think so.

After thirty-seven years of enlisted and civilian service in the Department of Defense, I doubt Rusty imagined that helping the Army fill a shit position in Eastern Europe would end with him face down in his blood for four or five days while the H.R. Specialist certified he was on duty at the installation.

Novo Selo Training Activity (NSTA) is a thirty-minute drive from the sullen barely post-Communist town of Sliven, Bulgaria.

NSTA is a tank training base used for U.S. and NATO exercises and a potential future site for a NATO missile defense system. The Bulgarians own the site and are in charge of the front gate security. This creates conflicts such as failing to notify the Army that they are hosting a field trip around the base for a group of North Korean officers or American generals flipping off the Bulgarians by cutting holes in perimeter fences for their tanks when they just don’t feel like driving to the gate.

The U.S. Army has a small contingent of personnel and for approximately the first four years NSTA operated with very little funding. New employees received a warning from the first installation Site Director, Julia Sybilla, that there was no money for office supplies. Sybilla helpfully added that that’s what their relocation incentive payments were for. (Note: Relocation or Recruitment Incentives are sporadically needed to entice federal employees to live and work in places that are hazardous, dangerous, unpleasant, isolated or all of the above. The money is not to make up for organizational shortfalls or short-sightedness.)

But Rusty ordered $783 worth of printer paper, toner, staples, folders, tape, pens, pencils, envelopes and paper clips from Amazon. Sybilla denied making this speech to new employees but then again, this is an individual who hired her husband for a summer job at NSTA allegedly translating for NATO troops. None of the IMCOM administrators in Germany seemed to notice that he didn’t speak any of the languages needed. Or that he spent his time sitting in his wife’s office during weekdays. On weekends was there to supervise their daughter while she attended a tennis camp for several weeks three hours away from NSTA. Julia and the (retired Italian) General used weekends with a government-paid translator and official government vehicle to check on la figlia and her backhand. But in her absence, she instructed Rusty and the others that their presence was mandatory at the unpopular social or sporting events. Since she was the only one authorized overtime, they were not authorized to list the hours they spent at these events.

After spending approximately a decade more time overseas than is allowed by DoD regulations, Sybilla was transferred to the Pentagon in a bespoke position. She was unqualified to be Site Director for NSTA with a background in overseeing college courses on an Army installation in Italy and graduating to the DoD version of the Welcome Wagon. But there are all those difficult and demanding years spent in combat areas and secret assignments for NATO with her husband, the (Italian) General.

Her most difficult and demanding decisions as Site Director at NSTA were personnel placement when VIPs arrived and what size cake to order for the reception.

But before there was Bulgaria, there was Parris Island where Rusty had settled nicely into his position as Fire Chief at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot. He replaced a character who spent the last two years of his tenure trying to make the Fire Department invisible and allowing other sections to cannibalize the Department’s funding. He also spent most of his shift in his office wearing only skivvies, eating cereal behind his desk and watching internet porn. When they finally convinced him it was time to retire, instead of a gold watch he decided to take home a pair of very expensive night vision goggles. They were later retrieved.

This particular Fire Department suffered an additional challenge due to the gene pool of applicants from the surrounding area. Southern first responders are historically paid much less than their Federal counterparts and the benefits are anemic compared to the all-you-can-eat buffet available to DoD civilians. And so there are two types of local employees who migrate to work for military installations: Bubba’s brother or niece or drinking buddy’s son (if Bubba is already a Fed) or hard workers who want more than their local department can provide (transfers, promotions, specializations.) The hard workers are never hired when the Bubbas control the selection process. Rusty developed a system to cut that crap when he was Regional Deputy Fire Chief for Navy Region Northwest. A point system for resume’ information, graded written aptitude tests for each position, graded interviews for the top scorers and multiple people doing the scoring without knowledge of the candidate’s name. It was a system guaranteed to piss off the firefighter union representatives wherever he went. But it worked.

Pissing off the union was something Rusty was especially good at. He would memorize labor contracts within his first week of accepting a Fire Chief job. Then he’d show up and spend the first few months listening, watching, listening and asking what was wrong and right with a department. He would hound Payroll for the last three years overtime payments and H.R. for the same period’s list of sick leave, shift swaps and FMLA time off. He’d go over timecards and log books. He’d put all these sources together and discover thousands of hours of sick leave tacked onto days off, shift swaps that weren’t completed so half of the firefighters involved would get overtime, fake family leave taken without any documentation. He submitted spreadsheets detailing tens of thousands of hours of fraudulent timecard entries and was told to mind his own business. This was from an alcoholic Fire Chief who regularly punched holes in his office door, ordered a replacement and kept the maimed plywood hidden in a first floor storage area.

I don’t want anyone to think that the military has a problem with their Fire Chiefs. It can go much higher than that. When Rusty was promoted from Assistant Fire Chief of Operations in Guantanamo Bay to be Regional Deputy Fire Chief in Keyport, Washington, the alcoholic bully refused to sign the Permanent Change of Station travel expense form.

‘That’s not coming out of my budget.’

So two years later after we visited U.S. House Representative Norm Dicks, the Defense Finance and Accounting Service sent an email to Navy Region Northwest obliquely noting that this was a claim that should have been paid. Nearly forty thousand dollars, including interest.

And the next comment from the Fire Chief to Rusty?

‘You just committed political suicide.’

But wait! There’s more. There was a Navy-wide realignment of all federal regional fire positions and everyone went up a full pay grade. (Federal civilian pay is organized in grades and within each grade are steps. Steps within a grade are advanced after acceptable performance for a specific period of time or occasionally after documented exceptional service.)

Rusty’s was the only position that was not advanced.

Although the regulations noted that deputy positions must be one pay grade below their direct supervisor, Rusty was two paygrades below. And the assistant fire chiefs he supervised were the same paygrade that he was. Rusty’s position wasn’t raised to the correct paygrade for nearly five years; just before he was due to return to the position from overseas. The change was so that his temporary replacement could take advantage of the paygrade even though he was being bumped from Rusty’s position.

Political suicide in the Navy. It doesn’t take a village. It just takes a Region.

Remember Parris Island? I thought you might. Why bring up things like timecard fraud and vengeful supervisors? Because this is the story of a man who spent most of his life trying to make his little area of the military better. And how the military wasn’t interested. And then it killed him. Deliberately. And then blamed him for dying.

Parris Island. Rusty started cleaning up the Fire Department (that’s Fire and Emergency Services to you, thank you very much) by