San Antonio Spurs. But the I-love-myself wall typical of most accomplished career officers was conspicuous in its absence. Neither her college degree nor her master’s in hospital services was displayed, nor any of her many awards. Instead, her success was implied by mementos that mattered more to her: a flag from the company she’d led at Fort Sam and a collection of commander’s coins given to her by superior officers, part of the Army tradition of quietly recognizing contributions that didn’t quite rise to commendation level.
She schooled him for 45 minutes, then abruptly shifted gears. “Tell me about your family,” she said. “Tell me who you are.” She listened intently as he talked about his wife and kids for another fifteen. When he finished, she walked him across the hall and introduced him to the brigade commander, repeating his life story word for word. He walked away feeling like he mattered.
She’d teach him more at thrice-weekly meetings with the rest of the company commanders. This was the nuts and bolts of her command, sitting in her office with her protégés, weighing the plights of individual soldiers against the needs of Walter Reed. They managed a potential controversy when a rash of people, from colonels on down, misused special credit cards they’d been given for travel expenses. They developed a strategy for getting the docs to satisfy their physical fitness requirements, curing a long-standing headache at Walter Reed.
Bigger lessons came when they addressed the case-by-case discipline problems. A JAG officer attended those meetings too, typically bringing with her an armload of litigation files detailing everything from hot checks to bar fights. Karen had the final say on whether to prosecute. Once again, soldiers’ careers were in her hands. One time the charge was cocaine possession. A soldier had treated himself to a small party in the barracks, then jumped out a window and broken his leg. If he’d had a higher rank, he’d have been kicked out immediately. But he was just a kid, and his company commander, Captain Diana King, didn’t know what to do. Karen didn’t hesitate.
“What does his sergeant suggest?” Karen asked.
“She said to give him a second chance.”
“Then that’s what we do,” Karen replied. “You have to trust the people under you. The Army trains them to do the right thing. So put your faith in the Army.”
But faith’s just a concept until it’s tested. In early 2000 Karen learned she’d been passed over for promotion to lieutenant colonel, and the news hurt. Her colleagues reasoned she was a victim of bad numbers, that if more spots had been open that year, she would have gotten the nod. Still, Schomburg, King, and the rest of her company commanders were shocked. They sent her flowers. Karen tried to hide the disappointment and instead pressed on. More days in paradise. That summer she transferred across the Walter Reed campus to the North Atlantic Regional Medical Command, where she’d be the secretary of the general’s staff for Major General Harold Timboe. He was in charge of every Army hospital from Maine to Wisconsin and down to North Carolina, and Karen was his gatekeeper, responsible for every bit of information that went in and out of his office. She nailed the assignment. When she came up for promotion again the next year, she got the bump, a rarity for someone who’d been passed over already.
Every officer has her own idea about how to mark a promotion. Some do it quietly in their offices; others simply show up for work wearing their new rank. Karen intended to celebrate. In July, some sixty friends and colleagues gathered for a formal ceremony in the grand foyer of Walter Reed’s historic Building One, where General Timboe pinned a lieutenant colonel’s silver oak leaf to the epaulet of her crisp dress greens. As passersby noticed who was getting the honor, the crowd grew to more than a hundred, most of whom then followed her upstairs to a reception in the Eisenhower Suite.
Karen insisted that the real treat that morning was the strawberry cake she’d ordered for the occasion. “You’ve got to have a great cake when you’re promoted,” she said, “because that’s all that anyone will remember.” On that point she was wrong. The buzz at the reception was about her new assignment to be the medical branch representative to the deputy chief of staff for Army personnel. She was going to the Pentagon.
As her start date approached, Karen liked to joke that the Pentagon wasn’t necessarily a step up. “They make colonels fetch coffee over there,” she said. “What are they going to do to a little lieutenant colonel like me?” Her girlfriends teased back that she probably wouldn’t even be there long, that she’d fall in love with some high-ranking old fart, finally remarry, and retire. But in truth, everything about the move thrilled her. She’d vet officers’ promotion packets and commendation reviews for all Army med officers, then make necessary changes as she escorted the paperwork through the highest echelons of the system, taking it from the deputy chief of staff, Lieutenant General Timothy Maude, to the secretary of the Army, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the secretary of defense, the White House, and finally the Senate. And she’d be working out of brand-new digs. The Pentagon was in the middle of a billion-dollar, twenty-year renovation, its first true overhaul since opening, in 1943. General Maude’s command had just moved into the first fully restored space, sprawling second-floor offices on the west side of the building that stretched from the outer E ring inside to the B, covering more than an acre. To ensure that she arrived in appropriate style, the instant her new, improved paycheck came in, Karen bought a navy-blue Mercedes-Benz.
When she showed up in August, she made fast friends with Major Sherry Sargent, who analyzed reports on enlisted units’ readiness. Since they handled sensitive files, their