to operate the shunt that drained fluid off Saundra’s brain so she wouldn’t have to live at the hospital. Each morning they went through an elaborate ritual of rolling Saundra’s arms and legs in their hands so her muscles wouldn’t atrophy. Their modest house off-base filled with state-of-the-art medical equipment, like a feeding apparatus and a monitor to alert them when Saundra stopped breathing.
George stayed at home with Saundra so that Karen could meet the increasing demands of being an officer. She was given a company command, placed in charge of the training of a couple hundred new Army med specialists, and the hours were brutal. She’d meet her soldiers for physical fitness training each morning at five, work on their paperwork and career planning during the day, and then be back with them until they bedded down at ten.
She still gave every minute to Saundra she could. Through that fall and winter, they were a familiar sight at Fort Sam, the cheerful captain pushing her sick daughter across a courtyard or sitting with her in the bleachers watching Karen’s soldiers play basketball.
But the docs’ prognosis was accurate. Saundra died in April, two months after her first birthday. The experience proved too much for mother and father. The laughter wasn’t coming back. They divorced barely a year later, just as Karen was leaving to become chief of personnel for the 67th Evacuation Hospital, at Würzburg, Germany.
The army classified Karen's job as 70F, but the closest that got to glamorous was its Army med moniker, foxtrot. She was a hospital administrator. A paper pusher. But if the duties were low in drama, their effect was not. Her focus was personnel, and the matters she dealt with—promotions, commendations, station assignments for families with two Army parents—were at the heart of a soldier’s Army experience. A form that was filled out incorrectly or that languished too long in some superior’s inbox would be the kind of completely predictable, explainable snafu that could drive a soldier out of the service. In a bureaucracy the size of the Army’s, those kinds of problems would be fixed only by a personnel officer who cared, and Karen did. More to the point, in a top-down hierarchy, a soldier is always at the mercy of the person above him. One person’s bad day will become a bad day for everyone who depends on him.
But nobody ever saw Karen have a bad day. When she was back at Fort Sam in the mid-nineties, working in the inspector general’s office on investigations into matters like the quality of patient care, her old colleagues in HR knew when she was coming to visit because she’d start singing “Hey Baby, Que Paso” as she walked down the hall, then dance with one of the captains once she got through the door. Her frequent morning announcement, “Here we are, another day in paradise,” had no bitter edge, since she was the co-worker who regularly brought boxes of warm doughnuts in for the office. And she was funny. When a hard-ass colonel would create a fuss about some otherwise meaningless glitch, like an upside-down slide in a PowerPoint presentation, her standard explanation, “It’s a black thing, sir. You wouldn’t understand,” would bust up the room.
She could pull that off because she was good at her job, and the Army took note. In 1997 she was transferred back to Walter Reed, the Army’s flagship hospital, where she was named brigade executive officer and deputy brigade commander. It was a huge responsibility. Walter Reed is a unique beast. The seven companies stationed there, which include the hospital’s doctors, nurses, and staff, number up to seven hundred soldiers each, nearly five times the size of a normal company. Typical Army companies would be grouped into battalions, whose commanders would manage the company commanders and report to the brigade executive officer. But some of the companies at Walter Reed were already close to battalion size, so that level was skipped, and the company commanders reported directly to Karen. Thus her dual title and, essentially, two full-time jobs: She had to manage the brigade staff, as well as the day-to-day health, welfare, and discipline of every one of the 2,600 soldiers at Walter Reed.
The pressure didn’t faze her. She recognized quickly that maintaining soldier discipline would prove to be the sticking point. Another Army med peculiarity is that much of the manpower comes from doctors and nurses who outrank the young captains who command their companies. They can be difficult people to order around. If Karen was going to continue her string of successes at Walter Reed, she’d have to teach her company commanders how to lead.
One of them was Augie Schomburg. He was a 32-year-old Army med officer when he took charge of Bravo Company in July 1999, a captain so green he only learned of his promotion the day before he arrived at Walter Reed. He’d been there ten minutes when Karen called him into her office. She shut the door behind him and invited him to sit down. Then she went to work on him.
“This is not a standard company,” she explained. “More than half your soldiers are lieutenant colonels and colonels. You’ve got docs doing Senate-funded cancer research, high-profile, politically connected people. Setting the tone here will be about the art of influence. You’ve got to demonstrate good leadership. And you’ll do that by showing the same level of respect to everyone, from the lowest civilian staffer to the highest-ranking surgeon, even though he might not be able to put on his uniform correctly, which he probably won’t.”
Schomburg took it in, not entirely sure what she meant. But he started to understand as he looked around the room. She had an impressive corner office overlooking the rose garden. Her dark cherrywood desk was uncluttered, with just a short stack of that day’s business, a bowl of chocolates, and some doodads revealing her love for the