From USACGSC I was reassigned to the Office of the Inspector General, Headquarters, Training and Doctrine Command. With the move came the househunting chores. The quarters at Fort Monroe were wonderful, but the waiting list for these quarters was over a year. We shopped the local housing market and ended up back at Fort Monroe, this time in old Wherry Housing at the end of the base. The quarters were very small, something like 900 square feet. But we did it and found our neighbors in the court to be very nice. Bonnie soon had our third child, Anne, and managed to take care of her plus Karen and Sandra while I spent the next two years out two weeks of every month doing inspections for the command.

In retrospect, I don't how Bonnie did it, with me being away and her with two young girls and a baby. But then she did similar in raising all four of the kids. God bless her. So there I was on TDY, on per diem, getting paid by the Army to eat out. I returned home from each trip understanding that while I was ready for a home cooked meal, Bonnie was ready to get out of the house. I recall from one of the earlier trips Bonnie was asking me about what I did and where I ate. As I was answering her, I could see the look in her eyes: here she was eating chicken pot pie with three kids and there I was out eating at restaurants. But Bonnie understood the dynamics and we were able to share the info. For my part I tried to make my time home valuable.

I was one of the two training inspectors for TRADOC. The other inspectors looked into areas such as facilities, personnel, combat developments, logistics, and transportation. My counterpart was JJ Mills, an Armor Officer who had served with great distinction in Vietnam and had something like 50 Air Medals. He modestly explained that he was the junior officer in the unit so they always sent him our first. JJ also had three or four helicopters shot out from under him while in Vietnam. If I say so myself, JJ and Jay were a great team. JJ was loud and assertive, intimidating as an inspector. I was the quiet one, but I was also the one that did the bulk of the "write ups," documenting the problems that JJ uncovered.

Despite the quarters that were substandard, the view from them (right out into Hampton Bay) was outstanding. We liked the Fort Monroe area - just down the road from Busch Gardens, for example. And we liked the seafood we could easily get. From Fort Monroe to my parents' home in Maryland was about a four hour drive, so we got to see a lot of them.

Dependents from Fort Monroe were bussed to a local school in Newport News; a school with not a good reputation, so we enrolled Karen and Sandra in the just-off-base Catholic school and we watched them head off for their education each day dressed in their uniforms. Bonnie would often go to the school to sign them out early, and hope that they wouldn't blurt out that the reason they were leaving early was so that we could spend some time in Busch Gardens.

Inspecting is both an art and a science. The objective at the TRADOC level was not to go somewhere and find a bunch of little "gotchas" where well-meaning people make simple mistakes, but to find areas where the command could improve its perfomance overall. JJ and I worked to keep this perspective, and our findings were mostly well-received.

On interesting aspect of how we did business at the TRADOC IG shop was that for each trip, someone was named the Project Officer or "PO." The PO had duties such as arranging the air and ground transportation, reserving hotel/motel rooms, coordinating with the local IG, and ensuring that the final report was done before we left the particular installation. It was amazing how 15 grown men could become absolutely brain dead when they were not the PO, and the poor PO would be answering every bit of trivial information that otherwise competent officers could have looked up easily. Because the PO also had the task of ensuring that the final report was assembled, he was always the one pleading and begging with the various inspectors to get their write-ups in so coming up with the final would not be an all-nighter. Remember that these reports were typed mostly in the days of the IBM Selectric with interchangeable balls, though a few installations had Lanier word processors. No spell check. No automatic formatting. Lots of white out.

JJ and I were promoted to Lieutenant Colonel about the same time another inspector was promoted to Major. We had a three-way promotion party that involved renting a cruise boat and having our party afloat to sail the waters of Hampton Bay, complete with food, beverages, and a band. It was a super time and set the standard for future promotion parties.