When I walked into the first office on the distribution list, I told them we were missing our report and please could they check and see if they had one. Being nothing but a Spec-4 (ie … dirt), I had a hard time getting anyone to listen to more than one sentence.

After doing that a couple of times, I changed my story. In the Pentagon, one validation of the very existance of an office was “being on the distribution list.” The theory is that if other people send you information, then you must be doing something useful with it. Right? Of course!

In the next office, I announced that my command was doing a study to reduce unnecessary paper use. I was checking to see how many offices could be eliminated from the distribution of this report.

The difference in the way I was treated was phenominal. I was almost immediately ushered into the office of whoever ran the place, and that person immediately got several other people looking for my report. When they couldn’t find it, they were hugely apologetic and insisted that the report was critical to their mission, the war effort, and the general salvation of mankind.

I wrote down this result in my survey notes with great seriousness. Being on the doorstep to freedom creates another kind of freedom even before you walk through the door. I’ve always wondered if the Major ever heard about that too.