Men Of Dishonor

After terrorists hijacked planes and flew them into the World Trade Center on September 11, the United States government scrambled to restore the nation’s sense of security. It eventually dispatched thousands of soldiers to the country’s airports, and for travelers, the sight of armed guards restored at least a perception of order.

Jane Cook, a part-time soldier with a National Guard unit in southwest Missouri, was one of the first members of her unit to answer the government’s call for volunteers to provide security at Kansas City International airport. Cook saw it as a chance to shake off the helplessness she had felt ever since Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. That explosion had injured her sister. The September 11 attacks brought back all the same feelings.

But during her two months in Kansas City, Cook came under a different kind of attack. She began her duties on November 27, with a training session in Jefferson City that lasted several hours. The next day she reported to the front line, standing guard at an airport gate with a 9 mm pistol and forty rounds of ammunition on her belt. She had no problems with the passengers, though they grumbled when forced to part with their tweezers or more lethal-looking hair clips. She got along fine with the baggage screeners, though she was watching to make sure they stopped every bag on the X-ray machine and conducted thorough random passenger checks.

Cook’s battle was with other members of the Missouri National Guard, some of whom clearly did not want her there because she was black. She noticed that some of the white soldiers ignored the black sergeant who was in charge of her twelve-hour shift. Other discrimination was more subtle. “If you are a person of race, you can sense when somebody [who is a racist] is around you,” says Cook, who asked that her real name not be used for this article. “You can taste it. You can smell it. It’s weird.”

In the airport’s break room, she once heard a guardsman from her unit say, “We’re going to get the niggers out of here. They don’t belong here.” That same guardsman complained about Cook, saying she had made inappropriate sexual comments about the bulletproof vests being too tight for her breasts (something Cook admits she said privately to a roommate in the Guard’s airport break room). Cook believes this soldier filed complaints against her so she would be removed from airport duty. “He had a problem with me ever since I came into that unit,” Cook says.

She can tally other slights. Cook and the only other black female on her shift roomed together at the Chase Suite hotel, and their room was significantly smaller than the rooms assigned to white soldiers. Some of the white guardsmen dated baggage screeners and were not disciplined for the breach of policy, Cook says. She, however, earned a written rebuke when a screener brought flowers to her hotel room unsolicited. After five write-ups (one when, against objections from a senior officer, she insisted on calling police to investigate a sword in a traveler’s trunk), Cook’s commander relieved her from duty and sent her home. Taken separately, the incidents might have seemed small; together, Cook feels they add up to racism. Cook’s feelings about the Guard have changed. She dreads her next weekend of drills.

“I wasn’t treated right,” Cook says. “A lot of people weren’t treated right.”

The Missouri National Guard has a documented problem with race, created in part by a volatile mix of Guard members from the predominately white rural parts of the state and blacks from the cities. In 2000, a survey found that the Guard failed to promote minorities to leadership positions at the same rates as white men, and 10 percent of the Guard members said they had observed racial discrimination. The results of that survey were widely publicized in Jefferson City, where the Missouri National Guard has its headquarters, and in the Columbia Tribune, and they were posted on the Guard’s Web site, along with a promise from then-Adjutant General John Havens that the organization would “improve communications and address many of the adverse perceptions.”

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Havens also tapped Army Chief of Staff Colonel Dennis Shull to recommend long-term changes. But little seems to be changing. And last September 20, when Governor Bob Holden chose Shull to replace Havens as head of the Guard, he may have made the problem worse.

Now adjutant general, Dennis Shull has spent 31 years in the Missouri National Guard. In 1971, he enlisted as a military policeman in the 1139th Military Police Company at Lone Jack. He joined the officers’ ranks four years later, after being commissioned as a second lieutenant of artillery. From there Shull climbed the chain of command, leading a company, then a battalion, then a brigade. He joined the command staff at headquarters in 1994 as assistant chief of staff over plans, operations and training. From there it was a short couple of steps to Army Chief of Staff under Havens in 1999.

Shull was easily confirmed last month by the Missouri Senate. Lieutenant Governor Joe Maxwell noted that Shull was an “outstanding soldier,” whom Maxwell would choose as his own commander if the lieutenant governor were in combat.

Shull takes over at a time when the Guard’s profile has seldom been higher. In uniform at the state’s airports, handling security at the Olympics, patrolling Iraq’s no-fly zone — Missouri’s state militia hasn’t been this busy since the disastrous floods of 1993. Of the 8,200 members of the Army National Guard and the 2,700 members of the Air National Guard, 1,400 soldiers and airmen have been activated to full-time duty, trading their auto-mechanic coveralls or high-school-principal slacks or attorney-tailoring for camouflage or blue uniforms.

On September 28, 2001, Holden mobilized 400 Guard members to help with security at Missouri’s airports. On October 1, the Pentagon called the Guard’s 1138th Military Police Company to active duty in support of Operation Noble Eagle, the homeland defense mission; its members would patrol the perimeter and man the gate at Fort Leonard Wood. A month later, the 2175th Military Police Company joined those on active duty to help secure the Callaway Nuclear Plant and the nuclear reactor at the University of Missouri-Columbia. On November 9, the Guard assigned 46 more soldiers to airport-security detail through the holiday season. On November 29, the 148 members of the 1139th Military Police Company reported for homeland-security duty at Fort Riley in Kansas.

The importance of the Missouri National Guard is expected to increase. Its members are the likely candidates to work on cyber security and perform other yet-to-be-determined duties in the country’s war on terrorism. Tim Daniel, Missouri’s new homeland-security advisor, tells the Pitch there is talk within the U.S. Department of Defense about adding to the Guard’s numbers. “I know the Guard’s role and size is being reconsidered very strongly.”

Though labeled as Missouri’s National Guard, the militia’s members are paid through the Department of Defense. Its 1,200 full-time members’ salaries and ranks are equivalent to their counterparts in the regular Army and Air Force; between training exercises for “weekend warriors,” the full-time soldiers devote their time to running the Guard. Part-time — or “M-day” — soldiers show up at their local armories one weekend a month and devote two weeks each summer to training for natural disasters or war. They usually are allowed to choose their posts so they can serve close to home. Full-time soldiers are assigned positions based on where they are needed or other factors.

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Captain James Tate’s assignment to the Fulton Armory, southeast of Columbia, was clearly driven by other factors.

Tate is black. He took over command of the 175th Military Police Battalion at Fulton in April 1999.

That’s when a sergeant named Toni Settle reportedly made a comment that would reverberate far beyond the cavernous Fulton armory: “I’m not going to work for a fucking nigger.”

Sergeant Tim Kempker, a white Guardsman with a low tolerance for racist banter, overheard her. Kempker, who went to church, played golf and bowled with white officers, knew the good-old-boy mentality of his fellow guardsmen. Kempker was bowling when he heard that Tate would be his new boss. He remembers that his bowling partners, all of whom outranked him, told him to take Tate to lunch. “As long as you like fried chicken and watermelon, you won’t have any problems,” one said.

Kempker says he had heard Settle make similar comments before. According to documents he would later file in a formal complaint, Kempker claimed that, during a June 1998 training exercise in South Dakota, she had called a black soldier a “lazy fucking nigger.” Kempker had reported the slur to a higher-ranking officer. (To Kempker’s knowledge, the officer did nothing about it.) Kempker also warned Settle not to say those things in the future and let it go.

This time, Kempker promised himself he’d pursue it further. His first call was to Lieutenant Colonel Bruce Pearre, who attended Kempker’s church and taught his children’s Sunday school. Kempker says Pearre advised him not to report the incident to Tate, that “there was no reason for him to know.” Guard policy, however, demands that racial slurs be investigated and that timely action be taken.

Kempker then took his complaint about Settle to then-Lieutenant Colonel Mike Jameson, who has since been promoted to colonel and is the Missouri Guard’s chief of staff. Jameson had been considering transferring Settle to Jefferson City to work for him there. Kempker thought that getting her out of the Fulton office might be a good idea. But Jameson called Settle the next day to ask her whether she had made the comment — and revealed Kempker as the tattletale. A May 21, 1999, screaming match between Settle and Kempker finally brought the matter to Tate’s attention about a month after the comment was made. The Pitch was unable to locate Settle; the allegations against her are recorded in copies of documents Kempker and Tate kept as the Guard’s investigation into the matter progressed.

Tate, now 35, had grown up in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and had become a police officer while attending Arkansas State University. He crossed the state line to join the 1137th Military Police Company in Kennett, Missouri, and rose to become its captain in 1994. The next year, the company was chosen for a nine-month tour in Germany in support of the peacekeeping effort in Bosnia. It went well. Tate’s unit received an Army Superior Unit award and earned a visit from Adjutant General Havens. Havens offered Tate a full-time job in Jefferson City when his tour was over.

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Havens asked Tate to help diversify a very white organization. “Havens knew it was an issue and, to his credit, he took the lead on trying to do something about it,” Tate says.

Havens asked Tate to recruit more minorities from Missouri’s urban areas. Tate coordinated projects in St. Louis and Kansas City, where Guard members used trucks and bulldozers to help neighborhood residents clean up trash. “We were hoping people would say, ‘The Guard’s a good organization. I want to belong to them.'”

But Havens’ diversity initiative was not embraced by all the leaders under his command, Tate says. “The general and a couple other folks were the only ones talking about it,” he explains. The two officers between Tate and the general, however, were sending a different message — Tate says his supervisors mocked ideas that might have made a difference. He remembers working with Mayor Emanuel Cleaver, who asked about the possibility of reopening an old armory near 18th and Vine. Tate says that his commanding officer shot down the idea, saying, “We don’t want to put an armory down there. We put an armory down there, it would be an all-black armory.”

Tate ran into more problems when it came time for his 1998 job evaluation. Tate’s white supervisor gave him a low mark for how he supervised his subordinates. There was just one problem: Tate had no subordinates. Tate filed an equal-opportunity complaint naming three of his commanding officers, whom he believed had worked together to sabotage his chances for promotion. An outside investigator didn’t find enough evidence to substantiate Tate’s complaint. In an attempt to defuse the situation, Shull, who was the Guard’s chief of staff, assigned Tate to command the Fulton Armory.

After learning that Settle had said she wasn’t “going to work for a fucking nigger,” Tate reported it to his boss, Lieutenant Colonel Carl Nurnberg, the battalion commander.

Nurnberg suggested disciplinary measures for Settle — but he also wanted to reprimand Kempker and Master Sergeant Jack Raetz, another witness, for not coming forward sooner.

Tate remembers telling Nurnberg, “Sir, you’re sending the wrong message. You’re going after the people who blew the whistle here.”

If Nurnberg’s decision stood, Tate figured no one would ever report a racist comment again. He appealed Nurnberg’s decision to Colonel Julius Fraley and requested a full equal-opportunity investigation.

On getting the appeal from Tate, Fraley deferred to Shull. As chief of staff, Shull was the officer in charge of all the full-time officers, and the incident involved full-timers.

Tate also took his concerns to Shull, who told him a full investigation would be made.

Though Shull would later claim to have kept the investigation at arm’s length, people who were involved say he coordinated it, that he decided how the investigation would proceed, hired the court reporter to conduct the Fulton interviews, appointed an investigating officer and approved the disciplinary steps, including the reprimands of Kempker and Raetz. “Dennis called the shots,” says Ted Wilson, who was the Guard’s director of human resources at the time and has since retired. “Whatever happened with Tate was Dennis Shull’s decision, period.”

Shull declined the Pitch‘s request for an interview.

Shull’s investigation included interviews with most of the staff at the Fulton armory. Settle countered the charges, saying she was the victim of sexual harassment, that the office banter around the Fulton armory was often sexually charged. Kempker admits the discussions around the armory tended toward the blue. He and the other full-time soldiers routinely gathered in Settle’s office because it contained the copier, the mailboxes and the coffee machine. But Kempker denies that Settle was harassed, saying she initiated the conversations about sex. Kempker says he asked Settle several times if the ribbing ever bothered her. She said it didn’t.

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Shull had the results of the investigation turned over to Fraley for a decision. With guidance from the judge advocate’s office, Fraley handed out reprimands, including one to Kempker for sexual harassment.

But Shull then reversed his order and asked Fraley to act only on the initial incident. “He personally called my home and said set [the investigation] aside,” Fraley says. “I was told to act as if there was no investigation … and I did.”

Like Nurnberg, Fraley ordered reprimands not just for Settle but also for Kempker and Raetz.

“I’m in total disbelief,” Tate says. “They stood up for me. They stood up for what was right, and the organization was about to screw them over.”

Complaints within the Guard are supposed to follow a chain of command, meaning Shull should have been one of the final decision-makers in Tate’s complaint process. His involvement in its early stages raised questions about whether he had violated Guard policy.

Tate decided to take his concerns outside the Guard — a decision he calls “career-ending.”

On November 1, 1999, he sat down with W.T. Edmonson, head of the Jefferson City NAACP. Edmonson already knew the story — Kempker had told him.

Edmonson wrote a letter to then-Governor Mel Carnahan. The governor in turn contacted Havens, demanding action. And Havens charged Shull with conducting a new investigation as if the previous inquiry had never happened. But that wasn’t good enough for Tate. He filed another equal-opportunity complaint against Fraley and Nurnberg, whom he believed had condoned racist behavior by punishing Kempker and Raetz.

In April 2000, a Guard general recommended that Fraley, Nurnberg, Pearre and House be stripped of their supervisory powers. Settle was fined $50 and demoted — though that demotion was delayed six months, which gave her time to retire first. A parallel investigation by the National Guard Bureau in the Department of Defense upheld Tate’s allegations of discrimination.

Fraley can only speculate about why Shull then dissociated himself from the investigation. “He was trying to align himself for future advancement,” Fraley says of Shull. “He really made at least [four] people fall guys.”

In the aftermath, Havens brought in an outside firm to assess attitudes within the Guard. Bob Chandler, who conducted the survey for the Virginia-based Systems Support and Research Associates, remembers the enthusiasm with which 3,100 Guard members took the survey and 80 participated in focus groups in the fall of 2000. “They were eager to take the survey. They were glad to see us coming,” says Chandler, who is black. “It wasn’t the good old boys looking at the good old boys themselves again.”

Chandler’s survey and focus groups quantified what Tate and Kempker already knew: that the Guard had a problem handling racial issues. People who didn’t receive promotions didn’t understand why they had been passed over — commanders were vague about the reasons, leaving blacks to figure it was because they were black and women to conclude it was because they were women. Chandler’s survey didn’t say whether those assumptions were correct, but the results suggested that the Guard’s leadership had been inept, he says. “The command had processes and procedures in place in the area of promotion, but they weren’t being followed.”

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After the release of the survey results a year ago, Adjutant General Havens acknowledged his organization’s problem in a letter to Guard members and to the public. “I do not see today’s results as the conclusion of anything but as a powerful tool to be used in facing the continuing challenge of having the Guard be representative of our fine state,” Havens wrote.

He boosted recruitment efforts in urban areas. He implemented diversity training for the command staff. He hired Tate to staff the equal-opportunity office and moved him to Kansas City. Now a major, Tate is the highest ranking full-time officer to hold the position of equal-opportunity advisor, which indicates that the Guard has officially placed a new importance on the equal-opportunity office.

Havens’ actions earned him recognition by the NAACP, which presented an award to him last July.

Still, not much has changed.

Lawrence Rucker Jr. wanted to get “back to the blue” when he started applying for positions at the National Guard air base in St. Joseph. “I started missing the military,” he says.

Rucker had joined the Air Force straight out of Southeast High School in 1987. Leaving the service in 1990 was a mistake, he realizes. By now, he would be looking into early retirement and financial security. Instead, he bounced from menial job to menial job over the next ten years, assembling car seats, delivering Coke to grocery stores and putting cheese in macaroni boxes at Springfield’s Kraft Foods plant. Then in May 1999 a friend suggested he join the Guard. It offered extra money and a chance to “stair step” his way back into the military. He signed up and took the second step just three months later: a full-time job as a recruiting assistant for the Missouri Army National Guard.

At the Grandview strip-mall storefront draped in camouflage netting and hung with inspiring posters (“Adventure is closer than you think”), Rucker touted the advantages of joining the Guard: extra income, college tuition assistance and a chance to fire a few hundred rounds with a machine gun. He was good at it.

Among the letters on his wall is one from Dennis Shull, who was then the Guard’s chief of staff. “Thank you for your outstanding efforts in referring three individuals for enlistment into the Missouri Army National Guard!” Shull wrote to Rucker. “I strongly encourage you to continue to tell our story at every available opportunity and share with others your formula for successful recruiting.”

Rucker, 33, is telling a different story now. Rucker thinks his race played a part in his mistreatment by the Air Guard.

Eager to advance, Rucker began applying for jobs at the 139th Airlift Wing in St. Joseph in early 2000. Rucker was after a full Guard position with benefits and relished the chance to trade his Army green for the coveted blue of the Air Guard.

What the base didn’t offer was a job in his field. Rucker had trained in inventory control and warehousing but got a job as a bio-environmental technician, making sure shops had the right safety equipment and that Guard members were taking proper safety precautions.

He started in January 2001 and moved his wife and two sons to base housing at Fort Leavenworth, a perk he was allowed because of his full Guard status. But until he received the necessary training, there was little real work Rucker could do. He shadowed other people from the office. He retrieved the mail. And he counted the days until he could go for training at Fort Brooks in San Antonio, Texas. “I wanted to learn what the hell I needed to learn so I can get another stripe on my sleeve,” he says.

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Six days before Rucker’s scheduled April 21 trip to San Antonio, his father checked into the Kansas City Veterans Affairs hospital with a brain tumor. Despite the extenuating circumstances, Rucker’s bosses ordered him to Texas. “You’re going to school. Let your brothers and sisters take care of it,” they told him. (Rucker has siblings, but he says they were not as close to their father as Rucker or as financially able to step in.)

“My dad is by himself,” was all Rucker could think about on the long drive to Texas.

Rucker reported to school, checked into his dorm room, went to class. At lunch on the second day, he visited the base legal office to ask whether he could make power-of-attorney arrangements from Texas — his father had a mortgage and other responsibilities that were going untended. “Somebody had to pay those bills,” Rucker says. After Rucker told his instructor the whole story, the officer sent him home.

A week later, Rucker’s boss told him he was being investigated for disobeying a direct order to go to training school. He was being fired. Rucker’s boss brought in another black airman to witness the exchange — a move Rucker thinks was meant to counter any sense that his dismissal was racially motivated.

Rucker filed an equal-opportunity complaint June 11, 2001, pointing out that other Guard members at that base were allowed to delay their training whereas Rucker was not. “Those members are white, and I’m black,” he wrote in his complaint.

Rucker’s complaint found a sympathetic ear in staff judge advocate Captain Giorgio Ra’Shadd, who was given the case to review. “Twenty-seven other people got out of going to training for … kids’ graduation from high school, stuff like this,” Ra’Shadd tells the Pitch. “This guy’s dad was in the hospital. Of the 27 other people, he’s the only black one.”

Rucker kept his job, but when his recruiter position reopened in October, he jumped at the chance to reclaim it. “You already know people don’t like you,” Rucker says. “Why would I want to stay there?”

By then, Ra’Shadd, who is also black, had been fired himself.

Ra’Shadd was born in Guam, a U.S. territory dominated by the U.S. military. Twenty-two miles long and 30 miles wide, the Pacific island was captured by the Japanese during World War II and retaken by U.S. Marines. With the Air Force to the north and the Navy to the south, Guam has six military bases “and not a whole lot of anything else,” Ra’Shadd says. “You either end up working for the government, or you end up joining the military when you grow up.”

Ra’Shadd, impressed by the vibrations of bombers flying in over the blue water, chose the Air Force. As a young man, Ra’Shadd balanced his military service with night school. He came to the states in 1995 and joined the Army Reserve. When he interviewed for the position with the Missouri National Guard, he brought a résumé that included a law degree from Topeka’s Washburn University and a uniform full of medals from service with the Air Force and the Reserve, including ribbons for his service overseas and his skill as a marksman and two Army achievement medals.

Ra’Shadd says he immediately felt uncomfortable working for the Missouri National Guard. During the tour of the Ike Skelton National Guard Training Site, a colleague warned him not to think of the black prison inmates who worked in the kitchen as his “brothers.” And he had to fight to get a computer.

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As staff judge advocate, Ra’Shadd was an in-house attorney for the National Guard — he served as a double check for officers when they wanted to fire someone. And they wanted to fire Rucker. “If you needed a squad of eight people to take a hill, he may have been the sixth person you pick, seventh person you pick, but he didn’t lie,” Ra’Shadd says. “All the charges they made up were bogus.”

Ra’Shadd’s second case involved the complaint of a white woman who had been passed over for promotion. Ra’Shadd told his superiors that she hadn’t been given the annual reviews to which she’d been entitled for six years, which kept her from receiving fair consideration for the promotion. Ra’Shadd thinks that wasn’t what his bosses wanted to hear.

“A couple weeks later, they fire me,” Ra’Shadd says. His supervisors accused him of defrauding the government of $400,000 by improperly claiming a disability. Ra’Shadd had indeed been on disability after suffering a concussion when a tank hatch slammed shut on his head. But he had given up the disability pay after his recovery, when he passed a physical to return to the military. Ra’Shadd was escorted from the armory on September 13 and ordered never to return. And though his truthfulness was corroborated by an investigation by the Army Criminal Investigation Division at Fort Leonard Wood, Ra’Shadd remains without his job, a hardship that has cost him his home. “They bankrupted me,” he says.

Ra’Shadd filed complaints against Shull and the other members of the command staff at the Guard’s Jefferson City headquarters.

Investigations against the Guard’s highest officers — at the time, Shull was acting adjutant general — are handled in Washington, D.C. The National Guard Bureau subsequently cleared Shull of any wrongdoing in Ra’Shadd’s case. Now, however, the Missouri Guard is bringing in an outside investigator to examine complaints Ra’Shadd made about other officers.

W.T. Edmonson of the Jefferson City NAACP wonders if Shull is entirely blameless for the Guard’s problems. In early August 2001, knowing that Havens was about to retire and Shull was a leading candidate to become the adjutant general, Edmonson and NAACP state president Mary Ratliff sent a letter to Holden expressing their concerns, then restated them in a face-to-face meeting a week later.

“We felt very strongly that an adjutant general should be appointed that had no connection to the Missouri National Guard,” Edmonson says. “We simply felt, a new broom sweeps clean.”

The opinion hadn’t changed by September 20, when Edmonson and Ratliff were visiting the Ike Skelton National Guard Training Site just east of Jefferson City, which serves as headquarters for the Guard. Their visit was another outcome of the Tate investigation: Havens had invited the NAACP to make quarterly visits to the post so they could discuss the Guard’s progress on racial issues.

Edmonson finds it suspicious that Holden chose that day to announce that Shull would be the Guard’s new leader.

The way Edmonson remembers it, the NAACP contingent was in the middle of a meeting at Guard headquarters when Havens interrupted, announcing that he had received a call from the governor. Havens said Edmonson and Ratliff were welcome to come outside for the nomination of Havens’ replacement. In the sunny quadrangle, Edmonson saw Havens, Holden, Lieutenant Governor Maxwell and Shull at a podium. Havens beckoned the NAACP representatives to join them.

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Edmonson declined. But as the NAACP’s state president, Ratliff was less inclined to snub the governor. “We had made the decision internally not to go against the governor in his decision,” Edmonson says. Ratliff joined the others at the podium and, when asked to speak, made comments generally supportive of the governor. The next morning, the Columbia Tribune labeled her remarks an “about face” under the headline “Governor names Shull to lead Missouri Guard — NAACP supports Holden’s choice.”

But Edmonson says there is a difference between expressing support for the governor and being happy about his appointee. Timing the announcement to coincide with the NAACP representatives’ visit to the post “was an intentional move on their part,” Edmondson says. “I think the governor’s staff wanted to put the appearance that the NAACP was supportive of that decision.”

“Pure fiction,” counters Holden spokesman Jerry Nachtigal. “We didn’t know that group was meeting until we were there.” More important to the timing of Shull’s nomination were the September 11 terrorist attacks, Nachtigal says. Havens already had announced his retirement, so the Guard was without a permanent leader. “The feeling was, we needed to move on this now,” Nachtigal says.

Nachtigal says the governor took Edmonson’s concerns seriously and investigated the allegations that Shull was somehow culpable in the Guard’s racial problems. “I think the governor wanted a good, well-rounded, solid candidate who was going to be sensitive to racial matters, who had a wealth of experience in the Guard,” he says.

But “all that experience in the Guard” is what’s troubling to some black Guardsmen — as well as some of their white comrades. For them, Shull’s selection sent a discouraging message.

“There are people that are disgruntled because he got that position,” says Kempker. “A lot of us have a problem.”