Robert J. Kuntz

Kuntz

When I was 13, I did an extra-credit science project on ant behavior. I spent a lot of time watching the sidewalk ant mounds around our apartment and eventually met Rob on his porch in the apartment in front. ... After that, Rob nicknamed me "lurker." I spent days studying the ants.

 I quickly joined Rob's gaming group and took my first adventures in Greyhawk, Boot Hill, Tractics, naval miniatures, Diplomacy, and a host of other games, including Rob's Tolkien campaign, where I played Gothmog, the second Nazgûl, and stupidly sent armored orcs into... what's the Elven forest? Lothlorien maybe? I no longer recall, but I had no idea what I was doing at first. The Goodfellow brothers and Kuntz had a huge laugh ragging me on about it... I think even Joe "Fish" Fischer (creator of the Ranger class) razzed me for it. 

Our group included some of the highest academic achievers in our high school: Jimmy Goodfellow and Tom Christenson, as well as older gamers from town like Tom Champney (RIP) and visiting game designers like Mark Ratner of (ICE's) Space Opera fame. But I spent the Summer in Tucson, and when I returned, the group had disbanded.

When I turned 15, my friend Tim Jiardini told me Rob had moved across the school park to live above Brian Blume (of TSR VP and Boot Hill fame). We started gaming with Rob again. Eventually, Jimmy Goodfellow joined us whenever he was on leave from whichever Ivy League school he was excelling at. I believe he went from Yale to Oxford.

--- A little backstory---

Another development in between: I was taken to court to be taken away from my mother for truancy (I attended less than half of my Freshman year school days). I was bored, tired of correcting my teachers, who taught from textbooks that were 5 years old the day they were printed, while I read many more current periodicals and books. I lived in the public library, so for every new topic, I researched beyond our textbooks. I also researched the Wisconsin Statutes on my truancy case.

When the Juvi DA told me to sign the consent decree and swear I would attend, I remarked that in a binding contract, both parties must benefit. He replied, "I'm getting an education." I replied, "I'm not." He had to fill in that I was due an appropriate education—I don't recall the exact wording. But I then found a psychotherapist who gave me an IQ test to prove I was a gifted student. And then I got lucky. The presiding juvi court judge died of a heart attack, and the regular judge filling in hated the Juvi DA.

So the juvi DA presented me as a juvenile delinquent, but I had no such record. This did reduce my mother to tears, though. He sounded absolutely threatening and absolutely sure of himself. Next, my lawyer had me present my architectural drafting to the judge as an example of my work, during which the JDA went over to my mother and apologized.

The judge quickly determined that the closest alternative education option for a gifted student was too far away and granted me the right to drop out of high school at 14. The JDA had also questioned whether it was responsible for a single mother to be studying art, so upon granting my freedom, the judge told a story. He'd sent a guy to prison who rehabilitated through an art program and sent the judge a piece that was now worth $20,000 since the guy became in demand in the Chicago art scene.

One man's fatal heart attack is another man's luck.

---

So I had all the free time I wasn't giving to my boyfriend from 15-21, or to work, to game and party with Kuntz, who was living off royalties from Dieties and Demigods. We traded adventures continuously. I have no idea how many thousands of hours I've gamed with Kuntz over the years, but it was much more play than many of us ever accumulate.

I was also a night owl, so when Rob and half of Jane's Bar came to the after-bar-hours party at his house, I'd come over. I'd been partying since 13, which wasn't atypical in our ultra-rich resort town in the 70s. A lot of us were hippies at our core. So nobody from Jane's ever said, "Wait! What's this kid doing here?" So when I turned 17, they all thought I'd turned 18, the legal drinking age at that time. That let me become a regular at Jane's Bar at 17. Yes, I was breaking the law and kept my mouth shut. But I was never carded in a WI bar until I was in Madison post-Navy, and the drinking age had been upped to 21.

Apart from gaming, my friendship with Kuntz was founded upon mutual respect. We both loved to party and play pool. We could both hold our liquor and had sharp wits; I could talk my way out of fights, with a very strong track record (I have failed twice, but those are other stories), and Rob's dexterity was shockingly fast. He could end a fight quickly, if not suddenly. Between us, we could play pool all night at a rough bar and feel entirely safe.

An example of the type of game Rob and I would play at his house parties: We'd bump into each other in the hallway where you could clearly hear people conversing in the kitchen, front room, and living room, and then we'd have a conversation with each other composed of and incorporating the subjects of and tidbits from all these conversations. I was used to multitasking in the Navy, but Rob always took a humorous approach, which enthused me to get quite clever, and we'd go for quite some time before devolving into laughter.

Rob was also a master tactician. As kids, he and his brother, Terry, would frequently defeat armies of adult Napoleonic players. That's why Gary respected Rob's gaming/combat prowess. He was masterful at tactics, among other things, like never mapping yet finding his way back out of a deep Greyhawk Castle level from memory.

As for Rob's well-known habit of occasionally lying, my father was a much better liar than Rob, and I got along with him by learning to ignore his bullshit. As a result, I'm both pretty good at detecting lies while also being inured to them. And frankly, growing up, it became clear that lying among humans is a social sport. Hell, I could get half my high school teachers and administrators to lie to me within minutes of an encounter.

That is why I'll invite anyone who doubts my military record to contact my fellow Operations Specialists on my Facebook friends list to verify my claims. (Loren Miller, Bill Kunz, and Michael Giglio would all happily give me a veracity reference, and I'll eventually post my discharge and the evals that escaped the flood a few years back.) I invite this level of scrutiny because I'm going to make some claims about Gary and Rob that will require you to ask yourself whether I'm a credible source. And I want to make it clear that I am committed to accuracy and open to correction.

---

I'm going to recount some of my 33 years of close friendship with Rob, with occasional interruptions from stories about Gary, the Navy, IT work, bipolar disorder, and so on. My best suggestion is to use the subject tags on the right to navigate.

---

But let's step back to Rob living above Brian Blume... We spent an entire summer having raucous after-bar-hour parties, and Brian never complained once! Rob told me he believed his royalties were being significantly boosted, and Blume was quiet because "they" didn't want him to testify in the lawsuit crediting D&D to Arneson and/or Gygax. So Rob has written positively about Arneson now, but he was certainly in the Gygax camp circa the Greyhawk Project (1978-1983) and didn't come to Arneson's aid.

Second, why couldn't Arneson's team subpoena him if they had chosen to? So Rob's suspicions were unfounded, except to show where he was positioning himself.

---

Also, I've been told Rob is now a bigot by a couple of sources, but I'd like to be clear: had he ever acted as such in front of me, he would've never gotten away with it. So if this is now true, he either hid it well for 33 years, or something about his mental state has shifted. And believe me, growing up with a mother who co-founded our county's National Organization for Women (where she met Rose Estes, IIRC), and being gay, I pick up on even subtle bigotry quite well.

End of Enlistment Options

The Rotation

Operations Specialists (OS) aren't really meant for onshore work, so our rotation was 5 years at sea and 2 years onshore, and I was just finishing my 5 years at sea when OS Senior Chief Connell showed up—he was now the detailer who decides where all E-1 through E-6 OSs go for their next orders—and he threw the entire book of orders open in front of me and told me I could have any order in it I qualify for...

You have to understand that getting new orders normally works like this: you call your detailer, plead your case based on your evals and accomplishments, beg if you must, and then you get whatever the detailer gives you. If he's pressed to fill a billet, you're likely going there. This is not a long conversation. So to have the book thrown open before you was an extreme privilege!

A billet for the Pentagon war room was in there. I asked Connell what I'd be doing, and he didn't know anything, but we could both agree that Captains probably serve coffee to Admirals in there, so who knows. Only one thing was certain: it would look pretty impressive on a resume!

Same as NORAD, there was an opening for an OS under the Cheyenne Mountains. Again, I had no idea what I'd be doing, but it would look impressive on a resume.

About a decade later, one of the big TV networks ran a special where their cameras were the first ever allowed into NORAD. It revealed 2 OSs sitting at 2 Naval Tactical Data Systems tracking "space debris," among many other unspoken things, I'm sure.

While I thought about it, Connell penciled me in for NORAD.

Or, as it turns out, your detailer can waive the 5/2 rule, and I could have gone right back to sea for another 4 years on board the newest Aegis Cruiser, also gaining AIC and ATACO training. AICs are Air Intercept Controllers who controlled fighter and bomber aircraft like F-14s and F-18s back then. ATACO stands for Air Tactical Action Controller Officer, and they control helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft hunting subs, dropping sonar buoys, and so on.

I want to stress something I've pointed out before: If Top Gun were real, an AIC would have been constantly directing every one of those Navy pilots. That would have ruined the movie and prevented much of the out-of-the-chain-of-command flying that happened.

Other positions included flying around the country as Navy Security, bringing back AWOL sailors, like in the early Jack Nicholson movie; I forget the title. Whatever I took, the re-enlistment bonus for an OS was $20,000 in 1988 dollars (approximately $56,162 today).

If I weren't gay, I would have probably gone back to sea. (A First Class opted for the NORAD position because he was within 1 rank of their E-5 request.) But I'd just survived 5 years of my youth tightly in the closet. I decided I'd best hit college and live OUT. I'd proved I could  "man up" with the best of them; I'd earned my freedom to be me in October of 1988.

I was discharged Honorable with a preferred re-enlistment code of RER-1.

After 9/11, I was contacted to be convinced to re-enlist as an Intelligence Specialist. By then, the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy created gay witch hunts. I'd survived my 5 years with gay porn in my locker, and there wasn't one locker inspection the entire time. I just couldn't imagine that freedom under the new policy, from everything I'd heard.

Hell, in plenty of foreign ports and even in downtown Norfolk, our home port, I went to plenty of gay bars but remained celibate. I never really understood how Naval Investigative Services didn't know about me. Other gay guys I knew on the Tico had been busted and drummed out of the Navy with an Other Than Honorable discharge for being gay. But frankly, it seemed to me that the more senior you were, or the more integral you were to the ship's operations, the less likely you were to be outed.

There were other guys on Tico who knew I was gay, mostly because they were gay, and we all trusted each other and could appreciate that we were not alone. Of course, my best friends knew: Kunz from my division, Quartermaster Nardone, and Alyea down in Engineering. Alyea begged me not to tell Everett. Ev was a short, thick-necked, gentleman redneck from Richmond, Virginia, just minus all the prejudice. And I judged him right, but for a moment there...

After I told Ev, he immediately turned away, and I thought he was winding up a haymaker. But he turned back with a very gentlemanly statement of fact: "Eric, my daddy raised me to value that a friend is a friend no matter what." And that was the end of it. Not all rednecks are complete hicks. Ev went on to become a successful painter, especially in portraits.

After I got home, a couple of Aegis contracting companies contacted me and offered very good money to come work for them. Several of my fellow OSs, like Botinelli, already were. In fact, one of them would get a bonus if they hired me.

Looking back, it often feels like I should have re-enlisted. My fellow OSs thought I was a lifer (I role-played one convincingly?), but I would've never made it 20 years as a gay male back then.

In the end, I am so utterly glad I chose to get out and move to Tucson to be around my mother because she died 3 years later of a sudden aneurysm. I value those 3 years so dearly! Oh, and I was there for my grandmother's last two years, too.

Oh, and on my way out of the Navy, we were getting a new division officer, who said, "I hear you're great at your job, so how about you write your last eval?" Of course I took him up on it. I even gave myself one negative comment, to be fair.

---

A note on Bill Kunz: Bill was from Oshkosh, WI, where my father lived, and Bill's father worked in the art department at Kimberly-Clark, a major paper mill, while my stepmother worked in accounting, and they knew each other. I've been DMing Bill on Mondays recently. Bill got the Ticonderoga by being top of his class, so it was a coincidence rather than a geographic recruiting factor. It's a very small world.

---

I'd like to point out that my life has found me in both wonderful places and dreadful places while I was undiagnosed with bipolar disorder. Now we can look back and understand the highs and lows. But no, not everything was always so stellar.

I Was Almost Busted

 During the last months of my five years, I was nearly busted down in rank.

Marty Larson was a First Class Petty Officer (E-6), while I was an E-5. I wouldn't normally disparage a shipmate, but he later dishonored himself by getting caught stealing from other guys' lockers in berthing, and the Navy canned him. But at the time, he wanted to qualify as an Identification Supervisor, and as both the Division Training Petty Officer and the TIC he worked under, I determined he was a train wreck, so I refused to qualify him. An example of professional rank overbearing military rank.

A few days later, I was busy laying a new track on the chart table specifically for the Captain. Larson stepped up to me and told me to go clean the passageway. I hadn't cleaned anything outside of all hands "evolutions," as they called big hauling, refueling, and replenishing jobs and such, in two years, so I went over to the Seaman lounging at the end of the surface alley to assign them the work and went back to laying this track. After a while, Larson came back over and forcefully told me, "No! I told YOU to go clean the passageway." (I hadn't cleaned anything in around 2 years).

The Mistake

Unfortunately, I responded, "Fuck off, Larson." Annnnnd unfortunately, my entire chain of command was having an impromptu pow-wow right behind us, within earshot. My Leading Petty Officer, Senior Chief, CICO (CIC officer), Department Head (Lt. Commander), XO, and CO were there. From the XO down, each dropped a disciplinary chit on me, including Larson.

Now, you can only go to the Executive Officer's Inquiry (XOI), which precedes Captain's Mast, for one disciplinary problem on one chit. There cannot be duplicate chits. Still, I had to work to get each of them to drop their chit, except for Larson, who claimed he couldn't drop his in the face of those witnesses and still be taken seriously as a First Class Petty Officer. I stepped closer to him and whispered, "It's OK, Marty, nobody takes you seriously now."

The command has 90 days from the chit date to bring it to XOI. On day 90, they announced XOI, and Larson finally took pleasure in telling me, "Strike below, get into your dress blues and report to XOI."

I was done for. I'd spent nearly five years trying to walk a perfect line, and I'd gotten too full of myself.

But I had a secret weapon.

And here's where I need to be a little vague: a few months earlier, a senior Radioman distributed the ship's drug-test results message to all the ship's department heads, which was wrong. First, the XO must sign off on the message; only then is it distributed. So they retrieved the distributed message, got the XO's authorization, and redistributed it. My close friend Radioman Everett (RIP—who I'd served with on mess duty) noticed something fishy: the first message implicated a senior member of the ship's personnel, but his name was missing from the second. Then Ev promptly copied the first message to his closest friends. I felt I had nothing to lose, so I prepared to request a closed XOI (all must leave except the XO and the ship's Master-at-Arms), slide that evidence across the table to the XO, and point out that nobody's perfect.

Our Master-at-Arms was Master Chief Radioman McCormick. A quirk of our new watch rotation schedule was that the Captain assigned a Radioman to sit in Combat Information Center (CIC) to communicate with the guys in Radio and change any frequencies we might need to "kick" for being too "dirty." This was normally the job of the Leading Petty Officer of the Watch in CIC (an E-6).

Not only was the Radioman unnecessary, but MCRM McCormick didn't have enough Radiomen to cover this new watch position. Fortunately, the Master Chief covered the position during my watch rotation. He saw how I operated in CIC, and during dull watches, a bunch of us would chat and tell stories over an internal circuit we invited him to; he rewarded us by sharing his salty stories. That's how I knew that after 29 years of service, the Master Chief was getting out instead of taking his full 30. As he put it, "I always told my wife I'd get out when it stopped being fun."

Everett had also been telling McCormick Shook and Everett stories for a couple of years because Mark and I had amazing adventures both onboard the ship and on liberty. That probably helped me here, too.

So, on my way to strike below and get into my dress blues as commanded by Larson, Master Chief McCormick was rolling up the passageway to XOI, and he stopped me:

"Shook, I was told to gather the paperwork for your XOI, but I gotta tell ya, I can't find it."
With my rank on the line, I was completely confused, so I asked, still in my stupor, "What does that mean?"

"It means no XOI for you," he said, winking, and continued his casual saunter up the passageway like a man well in control of his world.

I was still stunned, standing in that passageway with my adrenaline slowly evaporating for quite some time before it finally sank in...

I returned to CIC, where Larson basically bull-rushed me, bellowing, "I told you to strike below —"

"No, Larson," I interrupted, "there's no XOI for me today," giving him no other information and leaving him mystified as I walked away with an even louder yet unspoken, "Fuck you, Larson."

I was untouchable.

Oh, and once again, your real shipmates will protect you when they know how real you are. My best advice to anyone on a ship: know your network and treat your shipmates straightforwardly, and as if you already owe them a favor.

Shipmate is a sacred word in Navy terms.

Force Track Supervisor/Tactical Information Coordinator

 It wasn't long before I became a Force Track Supervisor (FTS)/Tactical Information Coordinator (TIC). My trainers, Loren Miller and Peter Bottinelli, were both senior TICs, and all I had to do was emulate them to succeed. No sensible person ever stands alone while trying to be their best.

The TIC oversaw what we called the Big Picture: the quality and accuracy of all the ship's gathered information about the surrounding world. An FTS is likewise responsible for the entire force's Big Picture, overseeing all the TICs on other ships and similar positions flying in AWACS or E-2Cs.

Anytime we operated with other units, we became the FTS because we were the senior/most experienced Aegis cruiser.

You earn the FTC/TIC position because your analysis when advising officers is always on point, and you can command guys who are among the smartest on their ships. You also supervise all the Operations Specialists in your Combat Information Center (CIC) who contribute to the picture from the IDS down to the surface tracker, including some officers. So you can see why the TIC position earned the nickname "The Octopus." It requires an insane level of multitasking to control the entire picture and all its data sources.

It probably helps to know that you have military rank on your arm, but you also have professional rank, which reflects how much subject-matter authority you carry in the eyes of the crew, and for my last 2 years I was the senior TIC on the Tico, and therefore technically the senior FTC in the Navy.

I eventually wrote a TIC/FTC training manual that circulated in the wardroom (among officers). Then the Captain entered the document into the Navy's archives.

Professional Rank in Action

To give an example of the professional rank a senior TIC carries, I was just coming on watch one evening when the TAO was getting ready to go to general quarters to shoot down two unidentified aircraft coming out of Iraq and following the west coast of the Persian Gulf (we were there to convoy oil tankers through the Straits of Hormuz in '88). I immediately recognized their flight profile because 7-8 hours before, on the previous watch, two French Mirages flew into Iraq on that same flight path but transmitted, "squawked," the proper encrypted ID codes all NATO units identify with. On a TIC's word alone, we potentially avoided an international incident.

A counterexample of what can happen when officers do not listen to advice started when one of our top officers misspoke one word; while I can't tell you what happened, the resulting incident sent us back to the States and caused our sister ship, the USS Vincennes (CG-48), to replace us on station in the Straits of Hormuz. Subsequently, they mistakenly shot down an Iranian Airbus, killing 260-some people.

I Get Pointed Out by Connell

When Senior Chief Connell left the Tico, he became the Detailer who decides where all E-1 through E-6 Operations Specialists go for their next orders. Our 3rd Captain asked Connell who he should come to in CIC now, and Connell unfortunately told him, "Shook," me. At that point, I should have been honored, so I followed Connell's direction even though I didn't appreciate that Captain*. I did, however, respect the rank and the privilege to advise him more closely. 

So the Captain came to me with the classified version of the Vincennes investigation report to ask for my analysis of it, and while a version of the report was made public, I cannot actually break everything down and explain whose fault it actually was because the conclusion of the public report was that nobody did anything wrong. And I seriously disagree. I just can't explain it without referring to classified information.

This was, in fact, part of the curse we OSs lived with on the ship: standing in the chow line, knowing everything about the operation we were on but unable to utter a word about it outside CIC. Or even now, when classified information has been made public. Chiming in would confirm the information and break my oath under my security clearance.

Some stories, however revealing, simply cannot be told.


* As for why I did not respect our 3rd Captain, in his change of command ceremony, he said that "from now on USS Ticonderoga was going to have to earn her reputation rather than having it handed to her on a silver platter" (paraphrased). For years, our crew had to be operationally top-notch, always on operations, and remain polished in appearance so we could be in a combat zone one week and in a port giving tours the next. Every crew member resented this man from day one.

Force Identification Supervisor & Libya '86

 Background

Libya's leader, Qaddafi, an ally of the USSR during the still-unresolved Cold War, aggressively claimed Libyan domain over all of the Gulf of Sidra, violating international law, which set every nation's territorial waters at 12 nautical miles. He also bombed a Berlin disco, killing several U.S. service members. Reagan sent a 3-carrier battle group to the Gulf in response.

Force Identification Supervisor

It didn't take long for me to become the general quarters GQ Identification Supervisor (IDS), so I was the Force Identification Supervisor during combat operations in Libya, the Gulf of Sidra, in the spring of '86 for a 3-carrier battle group. The Admiral ran the show from about 20' away from me. Meanwhile, those 3 carriers and their defending ships sat at the northwest corner of the Gulf, while we were about 2/3rds down into the Gulf, roughly North of Sirte. During this time, I also served as the Positive Identification and Radar Advisory Zone (PIRAZ) Operator, further asserting control over all contacts, including commercial aircraft. (We let commercial aircraft fly during the many weeks we sat on watch in the Gulf.)

The desert's hot, sand-laden air filled the atmosphere above the Gulf, stretching all the way up into Italy. This created a duct where radar and radio signals could bounce off this dense, low ceiling and extend over long distances, bending over the horizon. This made sensors effective over much longer distances, creating a more dangerous combat zone.

The ducting also created mystical holy days when my radiotelephone frequency picked up harmonic bleedthrough* and one could hear both the Catholic church bells of the Vatican and the Islamic call to prayer of Libya intermingling in the background of our military transmissions. The contrast was emphatic.

We Saved an F-14 Pilot

One watch, Qaddafi launched two missiles in our direction. I picked them up immediately, and ID'd them as hostile. They kept climbing in altitude, so they couldn't be surface-to-surface missiles. Nope. They were aiming for the F-14 flying around his Combat Air Patrol station north of us. We called the ship controlling that F-14, but they weren't!

Our two Air Intercept Controllers (AIC)—the guys you would have constantly heard in the ear of every Top Gun fighter pilot if it hadn't been a Hollywood movie—got on AIC radio channels 1 and 20 and worked their way inward, finally finding him on channel 11 to give him the one-word command: "SCRAM!" Meaning: drop out of the sky immediately, which he did. This forced the missiles to burn their remaining fuel, altering their trajectory so steeply that they fell harmlessly into the ocean.

A couple of seconds late on that missile ID could have been catastrophic for that pilot.

F-18s and Corvettes

A few days later, their corvette (very small but fast) boats loaded with surface-to-surface cruise missiles were hunting for us. Our Air Intercept Controllers worked with a couple of F-18 Marine pilots and took them out.

One of the F-18 pilots said he was taking small-arms fire from survivors in the water and requested release of weaponry several times, but the Admiral denied it each time. So, yes, the adrenaline-charged, dogged service member stereotype exists, but so do very rational Admirals asserting rules of engagement that comply with international conventions. Now, if they were shooting, shooting back would have been a legal defense. But as the Admiral could see, they were at our mercy now in the balance of power. He wouldn't expend more weaponry than necessary to neutralize the primary threat.

Bombing Libya

Then, on 15 April, 1986, we coordinated the bombing of the entire Libyan coastline. Libya reported 34 casualties after we had taken out every coastal missile station and every radar, fire control, and electronic warfare site. 34 was probably the smallest believable number Libya dared come up with. But they're the only source of casualty reporting, naturally. Not that I don't like the idea of keeping the number as small as possible. I just know this number insults their uncounted service members who died for their country.

Other Events

We lost an FB-111 Air Force bomber. We all listened to the pilot's cool, calm voice over the radio: "Sorry, guys, just can't make it." They went down "feet wet", lost at sea.

Our sister ship, USS Yorktown (CG-48), took out a Corvette up by the carriers with a cruise missile, which made headlines stateside, but which I'm highly skeptical of and cannot explain without using classified information.

I always express it as, "Technically, I'm a combat vet."

For our combat operations, we were awarded the Armed Forces Expeditionary and Navy Expeditionary combat medals, which would also qualify us for membership in the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and the American Legion—not that I ever have registered with either group. I enlisted, yes, but I'm not normally much of a group joiner. And the men of our "War on Terror," namely Iraq and Iran—now, they've seen combat, or guys serving on ships involved in Hormuz or the Red Sea this last year (2026)— they've shot how many missiles and drones down?

The truth of the matter is that I've never been in a bloody trench fighting with bayonets and bullets, yet one misstep by an IDS and you could get 360 of your shipmates killed, or 268 civilians in an Airbus misidentified and killed, as happened with our sister ship, USS Vincennes (CG-50). [Disclaimer: Had they listened to their IDS, Petty Officer Anderson, whom I'd previously served with on the Tico, the incident never would have happened.]

Also, I'm a little jealous of today's Operations Specialists because they get to control drones, not just plan missions for them.

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* "Harmonic bleedthrough occurs when a radio transmitter unintentionally radiates radio frequency (RF) energy at harmonics—integer multiples—of its intended operating frequency (the fundamental)."

3rd Class Petty Officer to 2nd Class Petty Officer

When I returned to the Combat Information Center (CIC) from mess duty, I noticed that whenever the phone rang in CIC, everyone veered away, so I started answering every call and resolving each one to the caller's satisfaction. It didn't take long for me to become one of the go-to guys in CIC if you wanted to get things done. I also caught the attention of freshly minted Chief (E-7) Connell. He took me under his wing and trained me in everything not in the books.

First Class (E-6) Connell had become the man the ship sent out to coordinate with every unit possible on their interface with the Aegis System, effectively showboating the Ticonderoga's new technology. For instance, we offered NASA downrange telemetry on the space shuttle that they didn't have at the time. So while Connell had only just become a Chief, he held immense professional rank (unspoken rank in contrast to military rank) among the ship's highest officers, so much so that when the CO needed CIC's advice, he went to Connell, even though our 36-man division had a Senior Chief and Master Chief above him in military rank.

In short, Connell was a brilliant mentor to have and learn from. I consider that, in part, I was his brainchild. He seemed gruff but always relaxed, and his speech patterns were shaped by his time as an Air Intercept Controller (AIC), controlling aircraft. My patterns shifted similarly; as OSs, we'd been taught to speak a specific way over our military radio frequencies. But I patterned mine off of his because he had it right; using a deeper, crisp, metered voice asserted control more firmly. So I even changed my tone to mimic his effect.

My first accolade: I was picked for General Quarters (GQ) Surface Tracker. That's when you know you're considered the best among your peers at a CIC station. Then I moved over to the air side as an air tracker and, after a period, was assigned GQ there as well.

After a year, I made Petty Officer Second Class on time with another near-perfect score and was promoted to Identification Supervisor (IDS) on the air side. My chief responsibility there was identifying any baddies. (More on this next post.)

The division rapidly began losing the plankowners—OSs who had been with the ship in the drydock before it was even launched or had gone through its sea trials—and with them, their expertise. But this knowledge remained resident in me. Also as a result, I gradually picked up five collateral duties: Chart Petty Officer (PO); Naval Warfare Publications Library Custodian; Training PO; Supply PO; and CIC Cryptology Custodian, and I also managed our PC and peripherals. Honestly, I effectively lived in CIC even in port. Guys jokingly called it my living room.

I took over as Supply PO while still a 3rd Class PO (E-4), and I think they assigned it as a kind of poison pill, or I was just lucky as fuck! Because of a shortage of Storekeepers in the Navy, Supply POs from each division filled in for a 3-month stint running the front counter in the supply department, and I was up first.

During those 3 months, I served every division on the ship, sourcing items in short supply, expediting orders, and more. Even after my stint, I stayed in the shipwide supply network, and we traded information as much as goods. Plus I now had someone to vouch for me in every division, and I'd earned a great deal of favor.

You see, "snipes" worked below the waterline — engineers and electricians like my buddy Keith, with whom I did mess duty — and they weren't afraid to get dirty because they were men, serious men; whereas those of us working in the superstructure, above the waterline, were "twidgets", soft geeks, basically, who play with dials and knobs. But I had so many positive interactions with our snipes that they respected me more than they normally would a twidget.

This was especially true after the day they came up to CIC with the engineering report for the TAO and stood around waiting for his attention when one of them ran out of coffee in his huge, enclosed mug. One of our guys offered him our coffee, but he turned it down as almost certainly too weak, so they told them to use Shook's (my) strong pot on the top burner. The engineer sputtered upon drinking it! You see, I had five 5 5lb cans of espresso from Naples and would make a pot with a filter almost entirely filled with espresso. (I love bitter tastes). That got me further street cred.

Mind you, I only needed 5 hours of sleep back then, but watch rotation was 6 hours on, 6 hours off, endlessly while haze grey and underway, plus all my collateral duties. So, yes, I drank true mud!

Also, when we were in home port, all of CIC's equipment was down, and classified-everything was locked up tight, so shipmates asked us to give tours of CIC so their visiting loved ones would know why they were so proud and fortunate to be on board the Tico. Over time, I became the tour guide everyone wanted, including my co-workers, who nearly all hated giving tours. I had a pretty colorful routine down, and I knew all the answers to everyone's questions because I had elicited them 95% of the time through how I delivered.

I was also assigned a new in-port duty as ship's roving patrol. They liked to give OSs this duty because we were already cleared for high levels of classification, so we could enter any compartment, and the added background checks made us very trustworthy hands in which to put the ship's security. So every third day in port I'd strap on a .45 and tour the entire ship. Again, this got me around to all the other departments.

All I can say is it felt great to be tight with the whole crew, and it benefitted our division in complicated ways and made me into a bit of a "fixer."

I was known for fixing anything I took ownership of, and I took on everything I could; I became an ardent multitasker.

Early Service on Board the Tico, Fire, Crime, and Well-placed Knives

First Days

The day I first entered Combat Information Center (CIC), the ship had just returned from its first Mediterranean cruise, during which it provided Naval Gunfire Support, shelling Beirut, Lebanon, and during which all the division's Seamen were made 3rd Class Petty Officers. They were all dog-tired of cleaning duties and exhausted from the 6-month cruise, so a lot was coming my way. They also tried to haze me with the traditional foolery, like, "Go to engineering and get me a bucket of steam," or, "Get me 50' of gig line." The gig line runs from your shirt's button panel through the edge of your belt buckle and continues to line up with the edge of your fly...

I didn't get tripped up on the haze. It was gentle. And unfortunately for any of the guys who might've thought they were really giving me the shaft by assigning me the nastiest cleaning duties, I'm an only child, so I grew up entertaining myself. I'm very good at turning any job I'm given into an art form, even cleaning shitters. In the process, my mind enters an enjoyable trance state. So no job was too dirty for me.

Mess Decks Duty: Kitchen & Fire

After a couple of months, I was sent to the 3 months of kitchen duty every seaman does on board. I started on the night shift in the kitchen.

On September 8th, 1984, at sea, in the early AM hours, the call to General Quarters (GQ) went over the ship's 1MC (loudspeaker to every space on the ship). I kept my face looking down at the kitchen deck so my profuse tears wouldn't drip onto the 30 pounds of onions I was cutting. I looked up when GQ was called to suddenly see smoke roiling across the kitchen ceiling. Had I not been cutting onions, I would've been the first to notice it. However, we were quite lucky: Boatswain's Mate Kaiser stepped out onto the starboard bridge wing for a smoke and noticed an orange glow on the ocean beside the ship!

Also key to our survival, our other Petty Officer Kaiser from Engineering took charge of the firefight and, given the emergency, chose to hit the glowing metal wall in the helo bay with a solid hose of water, which you're never supposed to do because the metal could slag everywhere. But if he hadn't, the fire had already spread from the uptake (smokestack) it started in to within feet of our fuel lines on one side and within feet of an ammo bay on the other...

Meanwhile, a bunch of us Operations Specialists (OS) were gathered around our chart table, coming up with puns such as "First and Formidable," our ship's motto, became "USS Ticonderoga, First and Flammable," and then there was "First Aegis Cruiser? No. "First ashes cruiser." Later, we were used to clear fire-adjacent compartments that were outgassing from the overheated gear they contained. We did it holding our breath.

For the record, you spend most of Navy boot camp with a Company Commander yelling in your ears about how a misplaced eyelet on a shoestring can get all our shipmates killed, and eventually you become a believer. Well, that fire that almost killed us all? Some guy forgot a couple of cleaning rags in that uptake because he wasn't paying attention to detail!

---

Mess Decks Duty: Scullery

Next, I served in the scullery washing pots, pans, and cooking utensils. The other guy in the scullery was a bully who had recently been knocked down to E-1 after he won a fight with a shipmate in a single blow.

This was a typical early duty. Much of the crew pegged me as some kind of affluent city slicker, out of place on the street, soft, and perhaps spoiled. So they took joy in giving me challenging tasks, like pairing me in a 5' space with a bastard who was notoriously touchy.

Working with this guy was like walking on eggshells, and he threatened me enough times to really piss me off. But I have a lifelong policy of never hitting first, so I did not skillet him, even while knowing with certainty that everyone would believe it was self-defense.

Instead, he'd been slowly reading an Agatha Christie mystery novel for more than 3 weeks, but was nearing the end. These are relatively short novels. So he was a terribly slow reader but liked mysteries, so I gave him one. He kept the book in the scullery, so I scanned the last pages to find out who did it, then ripped them out. A couple of days later he was furious, but never suspected me.

Our next port call was Portsmouth, England, where he broke into the base commander's private residence and raped his wife. Our nation was more than happy to leave him there to be dealt with under English law. Afterward, my fellow mess deck buddies spread the Agatha frustration story around the ship, and you can be sure many of the guys believed I had provided the last straw that pushed him over the edge.

We'll never know, but nonetheless, this gave me considerable street cred.

---

Mess Decks Duty: The Mess

Three of us were assigned to our last month of duty in the mess, where everyone from E-1 to E-6 eats. My two compatriots, Mark Everett (RIP) and Keith Alyea, became two of my best friends on the ship and close lifelong friends. I still talk to Keith every month and have often visited him in Indianapolis.

The problem with working the mess was that OS1 Conway was our supervisor and fashioned himself a dogged stickler. He never liked to pass us on his first cleaning inspection after each meal. For example, we lost break time re-cleaning the entire drink line for a single minor defect. So I came up with the idea of giving Conway a glaring but easily fixable error every time. For example, our first try was leaving a knife under the drink line; he found it, berated all of us, and that was it. We removed the knife. Done. We kept repeating the formula, and he never caught on.

---

I returned to duty in Combat Information Center with solid connections to and street cred with shipmates outside my division.

The Aegis System

Combat Information Center

I'll give you a short tour of the first Aegis System Combat Information Center and some of our capabilities at the time. Not only do all our combat ships now have Aegis, but so do many of our allies, like Japan. In fact, Aegis was recently incorporated into our anti-ballistic missile continental defense.

At the heart of Aegis is the Spy-1A radar. It revolutionized anti-air warfare. Previously, ships could track as many air contacts as a couple of guys could track by manually correlating symbols in the tactical data system overlay with blips on the air radar beneath it. Then the Naval Tactical Data Systems (NTDS) on one ship would link that picture (of symbols) to other ships, aircraft, subs, and land units. So a task force's air picture could easily grow to 50-100 contacts. But any one unit would track maybe a couple of handfuls at once. Furthermore, to target one of those air contacts, a combat ship would have 2-4 illuminators. These are radar dishes that stay focused on one target the entire time your missile is on its way. So, prior to the Ticonderoga, a ship could have four missiles in the air at once.

We also had a conventional air radar, the SPS-49. It rotated a lobe of energy 360 degrees, as you've seen in all the old movies. The Spy-1A, by contrast, was composed of four octagons (arrays), each covering slightly more than 90 degrees (1/4 of the horizon) and containing 1028 individual radar antennae, for a total of 4,096 beams of energy the computer could control. And since the Spy radar illuminates and automatically tracks targets, we could technically have all our missiles in the air at once.

With beam assignment, we could do all kinds of neat things I can't actually talk about for obvious reasons. But I can say we could track many hundreds of contacts simultaneously. We could make our radar signature extremely hard for enemies to detect (for electronic warfare purposes). It's also very hard to jam (overwhelm its sensitivity with energy). And every one of those octagons could assign all its beams to an area 15' away and roast an entire cow in less than 1 second if it were hanging there.

The hatchway into the Combat Information Center (CIC)is key-coded because the routine handling of classified materials makes the CIC a SCIF (sensitive compartmented information facility). As you enter, you step up onto the false deckplates beneath which all the electronics cabling runs. If underway, the compartment is dark but lit by a thousand indicators and screens. The compartment consists of an air "ally" and a surface "ally," connected at the front of the house by 4 large screen displays: 2 for when the Admiral and staff embark, and 2 for the Tactical Action Officer and Commanding Officer (when present).

Here are pics of exterior octagonal arrays, what a lit, modern air ally looks like, and a pic of the front of the house,

 

At the heart of CIC are the Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) consoles:

The console on the left is an NTDS. All the red lights on the left are on the Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) box. Almost all aircraft transmit ("squawk") identifying codes. US and NATO squawk in an encrypted mode. Commercial aircraft all squawk 1200 in Mode 3. You can see the standard radar scope, which lets you select any of our radars to display, plus the tracking-symbology overlay. The front of the house only sees the symbology. The console has a comms panel and about a couple hundred buttons beyond our level of detail here. At the very least, weapons release happens from an NTDS console.

Just to the lower right of the radar screen is the trackball, which is one reason I was so quick on the console: I used to leave the top scores on Centipede machines before the Navy, which used trackballs.

Typically, an Operations Specialist starts as a surface tracker and works their way to air tracker; then, on the air side, they become the Identification Supervisor (IDS) and, then ideally make it to Tactical Information Coordinator (TIC).  However, on the Ticonderoga, we were always the senior Aegis platform and the most advanced ship wherever we went when there wasn't another Aegis sister ship. Therefore, the TIC on Tico was responsible for every detail of "The Big Picture" (all the data and symbology) for "own ship," and was elevated to Force Track Coordinator (FTC), responsible for the entire operational force's big picture. Likewise, the IDS becomes the Force Identification Supervisor.
So you had to be near-perfect to serve as a TIC or IDS because we were top of the line.

You knew you were considered the best at a position when you were assigned to sit it for general quarters, AKA "battle stations."

But back to the beginning...

The Titanic and the Open Ocean, Ruminations

Navy Flashbacks 

I only gasp now, after 36 years, at the expanse and depth of the Atlantic Ocean, which I crossed several times in the Navy.

Once, while crossing eastward to England, we came upon a research vessel with a deployed platform, and we had to delete all logs and data about it because they were still in the early months of the Titanic's discovery on the ocean floor, and they wanted to protect their find from treasure hunters, I would suppose. We complied.

The ocean route that is shortest to England steams along the exact same line of latitude now as it did then. But even though we often traveled common tracks, over my 5 years I crossed many deep oceans and seas where you wouldn't see a surface contact/ship for days.

You'd step out on deck and imagine you were in a lifeboat instead of a ship, with the horizon everywhere. And I always knew the current water depth, both because I was the Combat Information Center's (CIC) Chart Petty Officer who corrected and updated every chart before we used it and because we maintained our ship's navigational plot in CIC to ensure concurrence with the Quartermaster's plot on the bridge. But the depth never bothered me then.

Now? I had to stop watching Professor T on PBS because the episode was about treachery on the open ocean, and I was suddenly struck by the depth and expanse, and a shiver ran up my spine.

And to put a finer point on this: when I came aboard the Tico, and Lawson went AWOL, I was technically replacing the Operations Specialist (Norton) who went missing on the aft lookout. He either fell overboard, jumped, or was pushed. The seas were calm, so falling overboard was unlikely. It's possible he jumped, committing suicide out of job stress, but unlikely. He had supposedly been a loan shark. So there could have been a murderer on board. And since most of his loans were to guys I shared a berthing space with...

Every ship has yearly casualties of one sort or another.

Navy Schools and Orders

Hiding my shock at being assigned Company Master-at-Arms (MAA), it was necessary that I address the men while also having no idea what to say, so I paused — a long, pregnant pause risking the impression I froze — so I started boringly recapping how each of the previous MAAs had failed us as a unit. Then I identified my job as getting us ALL through the next 15 weeks smoothly and successfully. Then I explained how all my orders would come from my role as MAA, as required by duty, and never from me personally. My only role was to see us successful, not shout orders or demean fellow shipmates. I explained that I worked for them, but I also would never beg them to follow orders. I would give orders bluntly. Then I established a standard of fairness and drilled in the point that it’s beneficial to follow someone without ego invested in their rank. If anyone ever had a question about an order, I’d be happy to explain it in the evening before (barracks) “lights out.”

Then, after the Commander left, I privately let the gossip chain know that, to appease the Commander and reassure him I had a hold on the unit, I’d be “dressing down” men in front of him from time to time. (Dressing down: furiously and thoroughly bitching out a guy in the stereotypical military way. Also, something that never happened to me in my 4.5 years on board the ship.)

I role-played what I’d consider an ideal MAA, and it worked!

---

Plenty of alcohol flowed at the on-base Shifting Sands enlisted club tucked into this side of the Atlantic seaboard’s dunes. It had a huge music-video screen, and it was all guys. It really tested my celibacy because my gaydar would easily ping on several guys a night, not to mention how obvious it had become to me which good-looking guys in our class of 40 were at least bi. We were all just out of boot camp, in top physical condition, and randy as hell. But you could never be certain who was actually part of our Naval Investigative Services (NIS). So I remained a very good boy.

The MAA takes the last top bunk in the barracks for surveillance purposes. I came back sloshed one night and was kicking back and throwing my blanket open over me when the urge demanded I sit up straight, and instead of getting down, I hurled into my blanket, and the waves of hurling began where I first folded my blanket in half, hurled, folded it into a quarter. And maybe a fold later, I dropped it and jumped down onto it. The squish was terrifying. But surprisingly, clean. I got my small box of detergent, rinsed the blanket in a laundry room sink, put it in the washer, and woke up to, “Hey, Shook, someone put a whole box of detergent in the laundry machine, and the guys are cleaning up the two feet of bubbles that came up from the floor drain.”

By then, I’d saved so many guys’ hides as MAA; they could plainly see I was missing a blanket, but they were already cleaning up my mess without orders, out of mutual respect.

---

Orders

I maintained the highest score in our class, resulting in a 98.7% average. This mattered because the orders for your first ship depended on it.

Everyone filled out a dream sheet where you declared 2 billets (assignments/orders) you wanted. I declared either anything ported in Hong Kong or an Aegis Cruiser, of which there were only two at that time: CG-47, at sea, and CG-48, which I believe was in the shipyard, recently fully crewed and gearing up for sea trials before commissioning. Then we found out the orders for our two classes were being cut at the same time as the two classes ahead of us, bringing the total to 160 men. As it turned out, I still had the top score among the 160.

I was assigned to the USS Ticonderoga (CG-47), “First Aegis Cruiser” (AKA Tico), which later was important because whenever we were in a unit with even our future sister ships, we were the senior, most advanced unit in the Navy (and on the face of the Earth), which meant our roles in the Combat Information Center (CIC) rose to command over the entire regional force. So, for instance, of all the units linking data together, we were responsible for the data’s accuracy, coordination, and frequencies —the whole link, the “Big Picture.”

Before leaving OS “A” school, the command met with the three of us scoring highest and offered us “accelerated advancement”: for extending our enlistments by one year, we’d get guaranteed advancement to Third Class Petty Officer (E-4) on time. It was easy to say yes, given I’d just gotten the Tico, literally the most powerful weapon on the face of the Earth. And at 5 years, it would only be 6 months until I'd hit E-6, the fastest possible.

Recall, my goals were to score high, place well, and make rank as rapidly as possible. I’d just hit all three.

Next, I was off to Moorestown, New Jersey, for 5 weeks of Aegis training with officers and even a new division Senior Chief. I don't recall my score, but it was the top score, so I distinguished myself as a Seaman among several senior personnel I'd work with for years. 

Why I Chose Navy Over TSR

As the Blume-Gygax war heated up, my relationship eventually headed for rough waters. Over years, I’d figured out my boyfriend was about 30% gay and 70% straight. We had been close friends who grew as close as you can be. But he came from a large, religious family. I was always wondering why nobody had noticed that such a good-looking guy wasn’t dating women, but the prejudice at the time protected us straight-acting guys, no questions asked.

I wanted to live an openly gay life. And I thought about fighting for my love, but every scenario I ran felt like I’d be creating a pure hell for him. I loved him so much; I couldn’t do that to him. So I tried to distance myself from him gradually, which is very hard in such a small town. I’d merely turned our relationship into sexual encounters instead of spending quality time basking in each other’s presence.

Leaving my lover to a better life than we'd forge together was the deciding factor.

Before choosing the Navy, I thought about college on my GED. I wrote an essay for entry into St. John’s in Santa Fe, toured the college, and discovered the program was a perfect fit. And I learned I could fund it at 30,000+ per year in 1983 dollars. Other students assured me my essay was strong enough to get in, but there was no realistic way to afford it, and I didn’t want a debt the size of a house at 25. That debt would determine what jobs I’d be forced to take. College was out for now.

I grew up a wargamer. I wanted to make sure I saw the world in my youth, not bet I’d be healthy enough to do so at 67, and I wanted a steady paycheck with solid workplace rules and training. And I’d been thinking about the Navy since I won my case to drop out of school before the legal age. A story I’ll later tell in full.

Truth is, growing up as a hippy kid, post-Vietnam, the military was considered an ignorant choice in which you become cannon fodder. So I talked to every Navy veteran I could find. I decided to count on scoring high, placing high, earning rank quickly, and staying in the closet tightly for 4 years, after which I would be an out gay veteran. And that was my Navy experience in a nutshell. I had a very positive experience and bucked the typical intellectual nightmare military story. I had an amazing adventure that was better than I ever imagined.

—-

First of all, the Navy pays more than any other branch and promotes faster than any other branch. So I refused my ex-Marine father’s insistence that I look at the Marines. So I went to the Navy MEPS station in Milwaukee for the entrance exam, interview, and physical.

The night before, I got tremendously drunk, heard “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me” by Culture Club for the first time, and took my next morning exam either hungover or still drunk, depending on how you measure. I obtained 97 out of 99 possible points on my ASVAB entry exam, which decides what ratings (jobs) you’re eligible for. I had decided that I was going to be an Operations Specialist (OS) who works in the ship’s brain, the Combat Information Center, advising officers, tracking all contact and intelligence information, releasing weapons, and controlling aircraft. In fact, a typical civilian job an OS might be a shoo-in for would be an Air Traffic Controller. I was in a high-tension rating requiring technical perfection.

Once in boot camp at Great Lakes Naval Station, I was sitting on the deck (floor) waiting for my turn on the indoor track, watching our Company Commander Daniels yelling at a passed-out Seaman to get up off the track and run, when a guy next to me marveled at how high my ASVAB score was on my “hard card” record I had laid on the deck. My fellow Company members started to laugh, and all held up their cards, and they all had perfect 99s. As it turned out, I was one of two OSs in a 40-man boot camp company full of guys going into the Navy's nuclear program. Hell, every night during free time, my bunkmate taught me about complexity theory (AKA chaos theory or fractals) during our 8 weeks, which later got me an A in an honors college class on that topic.

I almost didn't make it out of boot camp. I couldn't make the last running test, which would have been bad for our Company. Even though it was obvious they had banded all of us high-scoring nerds together, knowing our lack of physical progress would put us last in any such competition, there were specific benchmarks a full company had to pass. Navy boot camp is all about not making a small mistake that'll get all of your shipmates killed, and team building, because it takes a crew to keep so much metal afloat. So I took one for the team.

The night before, I had the Company rifleman on watch hit my ankle with a rifle-butt until I was pretty sure it was damaged, and then reported to the base doc the next morning with a chipped bone that gave me enough time to get up to speed and pass. When I reported back to the Company, our Commander told me that, "If all recruits were like you, Shook, we wouldn't need boot camps." High praise indeed.

Of note, before we left boot camp, our sister company lost a member to suicide. Even Navy boot camp is not easy. But for anyone wondering, it's almost all mental fuckery.

---

Next, 16 weeks of OS "A" School in Dam Neck, VA.

On the bus ride into this unfortunately named location, I was reading the signs. Commander Bitchoff and Lt. Commander Dickover ran the base; Petty Officer Derringer ran the shooting range; and I later learned the Commander's receptionist was Mrs. Callbreath. I shit you not. It was one of those surreal days where you ask, "Really?" (A Mr. Ash handed me my mother's cremated remains decades later.)

One reason I picked OS was that I liked the idea of advising leaders, but I've never wanted to lead in the hot seat. Sadly, that's not how rank works!

By the end of our first week, I had distinguished myself with a 100 on the test, and our Company Commander had been through appointing 3 Masters-at-Arms—the guy who maintains Company discipline, assigns duties, and is responsible for order and cleaning. So after the first three didn't work out, he picked me...

Maps and Exit to Navy with Postscript

 I guess I could have quickly released a Greyhawk module to grab some income, but I was more interested in driving Starstrands to dimensionally create a nexus between game systems, broadening the fantasy. And frankly, this should have been a multi-person job. But Gary put out enough modules to keep me in map money.

So I did the maps for Dungeonlands, Land Beyond the Magic Mirror, Mordenkainen's Fantastic Adventure, and The Maze of Xaene, which never saw print until Rob sold The Maze of Zayene to Necromancer Games.

Mind you, we were all still trading ideas. For instance, Gary incorporated our ideas into Dungeonlands. I came up with a "Hangman Tree" that flailed PCs with bodies when approaching to loot them; Gary kept the name and gave it his twist, and Rob had a hat with a monster living in it, which most likely inspired the Executioner's Hood. And while uncredited, I wrote the Happy Hunting Ground section of Maze of Xaene/Zayene.

I also explained to Gary that any kid with a transparent sheet of red could photocopy a non-photo blue map. That's why we shifted Mordenkainen's map to a darker, non-non-photo blue. And I changed the grid style to separate it from walls and objects. And while curtains had previously been hand-drawn, I drafted them instead. Effectively, I shifted my maps from hand-drawn to clean lines because maps are a tool best served by clear definition. At least, that was my mindset then.

I'll cover why I chose to join the Navy in another post, but in March of '83 I entered the Navy's delayed entry program with an enlistment date of November 3rd. I moved my mother to Tucson to be with her mothers and sisters. And in the meantime, I took a loan from my father and lived with Jeff Leason in Lake Geneva.

During this time, wanting to encourage Rob and Gary to get started on Greyhawk Castle, I began drafting its maps, which Paul Stormberg's Collector's Trove sold decades later.

Postscript

I'd like to add that I've consciously held back on detailing more about the Blume-Gygax war because it still upsets me strongly, and I just haven't been in a rehashing mood.

Money, God Level Play - Tidbits

 Money, Money, Money

Immediately after Rob and I signed the contract to split royalties with Gary, Gary slapped his quarterly royalties check down on our side of his desk and said, "There's money out there in them thar hills!"

The check was for over 257k in 1982 dollars, equivalent to $889,374 in today's dollars.

Our contracts were generous splits of Gary's very high 10% of cover. As I recall, most royalties are given as a % of net or gross. But TSR stopped paying royalties roughly at the advent of Advanced D&D (1e), except to the authors of the OD&D books. For instance, James Ward and Rob Kuntz received about 4% of the cover on the AD&D volume, Deities and Demigods. Ward greatly expanded the OD&D supplement Gods, Demigods, and Heroes, which he and Rob co-authored. So Ward received around 3/4 of the split, IIRC.

Rob's roughly 1% was around 20k, which may have been quarterly or yearly. But at the time, he lived above Brian Blume (TSR VP, author of Boot Hill, and major early investor in TSR) and his wife, who had endured an entire summer of Jane's Bar after-hours parties at Rob's, above them. And Rob thought he was being overpaid those royalties. In his mind, Blume's tolerance and seemingly excessive pay meant they were keeping him fat, dumb, and happy so he wouldn't come forward to testify in Dave Arneson's case vs TSR for royalties as co-creator of OD&D.

I thought this was unlikely since Arneson's lawyers could call him at any time and he'd be forced to testify. And why didn't they call on him? Was it because Rob was still a kid when witnessing those events? And why didn't Blume ever complain? Those parties were raucous, loud, and attended by everyone from millionaires to bikers, hippies, and Playboy bunnies.

Also of note: Rob had sold his OD&D Greyhawk supplement rights to Gary while still underage; otherwise, he would've had royalties from at least all Greyhawk products and possibly a small piece of AD&D. 

Someone once pointed out to Rob that he could go to court to reclaim those rights because he wasn't yet 18 when he signed them over. Rob took no action. In a sense, it would've been like going after one's father. And the egos of Rob and Gary did frequently clash, but that must have been a step too far. Plus, Rob has never chased more money than he needs to live comfortably. It's the hippy side of him.

---

God Level Play

Early in the Greyhawk project, Gary told us he'd received a lot of mail from players who wanted rules for god-level play. And I don't recall his reasoning, but Gary absolutely hated the idea while I loved it! So imagine my surprise when he said the demand was so high that he wanted to get it done. But it was put on the back burner, after the Castle, City, and Starstrands and more. So we'd cogitate about it now and again down at Jane's Bar, while getting soused. Which is probably why I remember almost none of it.

Years later, circa 1990, when Rob had moved to Tucson, where I was living with my mother post-Navy — we were European on the Nelson side about living with family — I DMed Rob at the god level.

The most interesting thing happened. Rob, perhaps one of the boldest adventurers in the history of at least the early game, and certainly for years in mine, became so cautious that one could say he was being timid. His character sheet read like a wishlist of almighty powers. This indicated, since he was a demigod, that all the other major and some minor gods in his pantheon were even more awesome in power than he. And very accurately, Rob understood the real game was entirely social at that level, and played accordingly. Every god could pretty much nuke another god on some crippling level, or they simply wouldn't be Gods.

Gary's First Assignment for Me

The Greyhawk Project - Module #1

In our first meeting between Gary, Rob, and me at his Sheridan Springs Road office, I pointed out that a recent module had all the interior art placed in the top half of the module for no functional reason. As the conversation evolved, Gary pointed out that it took 6-9 months to get a module from writing to print.

Frankly, at that rate, how long would it take to publish 100 levels of Greyhawk Castle and Greyhawk City--also a large endeavor... Gary then asked me to effectively project-manage our first project through the process. We didn't even know what project management was at the time. But had I known, I would have credited myself as such during layout.

Rob approved of Gary's use of Robert's Tharizdun... I don't recall Rob's spelling, but I believe it was different. And Gary wrote The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun (WG4) over the weekend (Sat/Sun). In fact, I would suggest the module's writing gained much of its coldness from the stimulants required for that form of imaginative jaunt.

Gary gave me the manuscript to edit. I apparently was changing too much, so we had his secretary, Andrea Olson-Barnas, "edit" it. Of course, now we all know Gary was famous for refusing to be more than proofread. At the time, I had no reason to suspect that. Friendship delivers much different messages than working together.

Having read the manuscript. I suggested we use my mother for all the art so we could place an impassive, psychologically insidious scene on the cover, skipping the tradition of putting an action scene on it. Gary liked the idea. So Gary, my mother (Karen Ann Nelson), and I met to discuss the design and agreed that the quickest approach would be watercolor; then we picked the cover color.

Some people online have said the color we chose was "haunting," "sickly," or "uneasy," and they're absolutely right. That's exactly what we were going for.

Gary was happy to both play with and push the boundaries of D&D. I think he enjoyed once again being directly part of what is essentially the product's wrapping, matching the look to the feel.

We took about an hour picking the color, going through hundreds of color swatches until we found the one that worked. And how did it? As a form of purple, it's related to royalty. It's a cool color; it is somewhat impassive, sickly, of course. We later matched it to the cover's void-faced, stone statuary and somewhat ambiguous background. More uncertainty. How else should one begin the entropic approach to the Ender of Everything? Tell me which fight should have been depicted instead that would do the appropriate work? Ring the right bells?

Fact is, the cover is a tell when you think about it. There's something mysterious about this one. Something different. Search for it. Find it.

My mother was done in a few days. I completed all the maps in a week. Going into a trance state, inking 2'x3' vellum maps always felt good. I was paid $150/page, as shown in the contracts sold at auction by Paul Stormberg's Collector's Trove.

Next stop: pre-press, where I worked directly with Ruth Hodges—my mother's college friend, whom David Sutherland had hired. It was very good that I was down there with her because not everything fit in the 32 pages we were given.

Luckily, I remembered a piece of paper hanging at someone's desk in the Production Department area that listed the pricing for every eight more pages and the price for a second "cover," which would be cheaper and more convenient since we only needed room for 4 pages of maps. So I called Gary at home at about 8 or 9 PM, described the situation, and he authorized the double cover.

That's how we went from writing to ready for printing in 2 weeks, not 6+ months. Proof-of-concept complete. Greyhawk had a green light all the way.

There was one minor problem. Upon printing, the interior art came out dark. Reason? Ruth simply hadn't known to shift the gamma for capturing art done in graphite. But I was just now looking at my pristine copy (probably a knock-off I paid way too much for!), and I find the darkened features of the drawings have a kind of charm that somehow fits the module's darkness.

In any case, Gary remunerated me by forgiving an earlier advance.

A couple of side notes:

- Ruth Hodges later married historical wargamer and maybe the 2nd or 3rd employee of the RPGA, Bill Hoyer.

- In one of those trance states, working on the maps, I stuck the full blade of an Exacto knife horizontally beneath the skin of my left hand's lower left mound, beneath the thumb, and it just hung there, over the work, not bleeding... so it did bleed a little when pulled it out, but after some wound care I went right back to work.  But first I got stoned.

HEY! It was still the 70's until 1983, OK?  Everybody knows how decades actually work.

As I worked, I heard a small voice behind me whispering my last name over and over, "Shook... Shook.." With a shrill quiver running up my back, I spun around, and from my slightly opened bedroom door, two little red eyes stared out at me. I stepped backward into my table, then froze in utter fear before realizing the two red eyes were the "ON" and "FM" indicators on my radio, and the "Shook... Shook" was the "shock... shock.." Peter Gabriel sings in "Shock the Monkey, which was charting that year, in 1982.

Question: Why was I using an Exacto blade?

To key the locations on the maps alphanumerically, back then I needed Pre-press to print them all out, then apply beeswax to the back of the sheets so I could cut out the letters, level them, and stick them to the vellum.

An Introduction to my TSR Experience - Roaming Around Stories Yet to Be Fleshed Out

During my teen years, when I wasn't trading adventures with Kuntz and others, I hung out at the Dungeon Hobby Shop. A couple of my childhood friends worked there, namely Tim Jiardini, Neal Christensen, and Jeff Leason. At night, I bussed tables at the Playboy Club, where I raked in the tips.

Much later, fast-forwarding to the Greyhawk Project, after Rob suggested I'd be a good addition to the team, Gary and his bodyguard, Jim Johnson(?), had brunch in the Playboy Club Living Room with me as a formality. All the bunnies kept coming over to say hi to me and chat a bit. All the bunnies liked me. I was gay, so I was even made privy to all their "girl talk," and I'd also been a faultless busser for all of them at one time or another. Gary loved being introduced to them all. And then, at after-bar-hours parties, some would come through he hadn't met yet, and a couple, being so close to Chicago, had been in spreads in the magazine.

That all the bunnies liked me, and knowing me to be judgment-free on the issues of sex and love, welded me to Gary as someone he could tell about his experiences in his second childhood. But it is at this point that I say nothing more on that topic, as it was all clearly spoken of in utter confidence.

I really knew two Garys: the famous game designer, and my neighbor whose divorce from Mary I've secretly never approved of. But I will finish on this topic by stating unequivocably that Gary's second childhood was a great success and that nobody was ever damaged by it if we ignore the divorce.

I'll come back to my gaming days with Kuntz in future posts, as I knew Rob like a brother and I naturally have a lot to say about him. But for now I should paint his status at TSR.

Gary was like the father Rob never had, and there was father-son ego-driven strife between them. Rob's player character in Greyhawk had been the solo adventuring, lawful-evil Robilar, and this matched how most at TSR would characterize him: as a rogue to be wary of! Of note: most nerds and geeks at TSR would consider themselves lawful good, and for the record, I'm a pragmatic realist, so I tend toward lawful neutral.

Rob was an unparalleled and unconventional tactician and strategist in nearly any wargame. As a teen, he and his brother, Terry, routinely crushed adult opponents from all the major Midwest cities in Napoleonic wargames. Rob could venture down 10 dungeon levels and come right back out, never mapping. And, of course, Rob had been Gary's co-DM of Greyhawk. Gary clearly admired Rob's intellect.

The Production Department did not like him. Period. Also, Gary bringing me in was kind of an insult to them, since I was a high school dropout. (I'll explain this escapade in a future post.) In their eyes, I was so unqualified that I reminded them of my friend, Jean Wells. Gary had liked her ideas and hired her. She should have been further trained or groomed, but TSR lacked the capacity to train anyone. Worse still, our contract split royalties with Gary, a highly coveted position to be in.

My first Greyhawk assignment was to turn Stephen Marsh's 6-page description of Starstrands into a semi-plane resource book. I suggested we use its web structure to dimensionally connect its radial strands to all the other TSR RPG system worlds, and a few other places. Boot Hill gating in from one, instituting a kingdom derived from its values, Gamma World from another, Nazis from Earth on another, and so on.

Gary loved the idea, but it was going to take some doing, so Gary came up with the idea of hiring me at TSR, half-time in the Hobby Shop Shipping department, half-time in the RPGA.

But there were two factions at TSR: The Gygax faction and the nepotistic Blume faction. Everyone in the company knew of and was forcibly part of this growing division that would push Gary out long after I grew frustrated and entered the Navy.

The Blumes issued a new rule: employees could no longer wear beards. Frank Mentzer looked funny without one. But their next rule, issued while Gary was in Hollywood working on the D&D cartoon, was that any work created off-hours by any TSR employee would belong to TSR.

I was the fifth RPGA employee, but this basically eliminated me. For several weeks, I started taking long lunches at Jane's Bar. I immediately held back at least 3/4s of my ideas going into Eye of the Bog, and never finished it.

Then Rob and I were asked to a meeting with Harold Johnson, where Rob mentioned our plans for Starstrands, and when Harold asked how we planned to pull that off, I quickly said no work had taken place yet, divorcing TSR from any claim to owning Starstrands.

I did happen to stay after hours and rearrange all of shipping, setting it up the way the girls had always wanted. But a manager took credit for it right in front of my face.

So there's the outline of my challenges working with TSR, setting the stage for how I would do things.

Oh! And my mother's college friend who graduated top of her class but had spent 3 months trying to get employed but couldn't get hired- I brought her in to show Dave Sutherland her portfolio, and he hired her on the spot. This proved fortuitous for me in the future war.

From here on out, I'll be fleshing out all the specifics.

A Gary Gygax Story

Sometime in 82, I had come into the corporate office of TSR on Silver Springs during the Greyhawk Project, but I'd made a bet that my soles were tough enough to walk Lake Geneva without shoes the whole summer, including through our bar alleys (big resort town) covered with bottle glass shards. So I was barefoot at the receptionist, who refused to let me in for that reason, so I asked her to call Gary and waited while I watched a sad exchange between her, two concerned parents, and a young D&D fan.

This boy's parents had driven 300 miles off their summer vacation route so Jr. could meet Gary. But Gary had "important" meetings scheduled and couldn't come out. They stood there, saddened, discussing in hushed tones what to do while the receptionist ushered me in (sans shoes, corporate? Pffffft!)

Luckily, Gary's office had a private, windowed parking-lot entrance, so when I entered his office, I could point out the downtrodden family walking slowly to their car.

Gary, surprised, leaped out of his chair and ran out there, finger up, "Ho there!"

I will never forget all the emotions. The relief on the parents' faces, their sudden upright postures, and the kid, stunned by Gary's presence, beaming from side to side!

Every time I tell this story, I tear up just a little.

It was beautiful, and it said everything about Gary as just a guy.

He would do anything for a fan. These were his people, and he was grateful for having them, and he understood who he would be without them.

Years later, at the brokerage, I gained top honors in customer service because just watching Gary's kindness that day told me everything I needed to know about real, lasting customer service. Service to one's fellow beings who could just as well be you. I went on to teach customer service using this story to open every class, and because of that, I was promoted to sole tech trainer for the entire 2800-person firm.

How many of us gamers owe our jobs and careers to Gary's impetus? 

I thanked Gary at a Lake Geneva convention hosted by Troll Lords somewhat before he passed, and the last time I conversed with him.

Our/Kuntz's Gaming Group

In the summer before 7th grade, in '76, my mother and I moved from 1003 Main, across the street from Library Park, to 1008 Wisconsin St., kitty-corner from the Jr. High. [Of note: Library Park is where the masterful hand of Paul Stormberg is overseeing the installation of the Gary Gygax memorial granite gaming table at the moment.]

On the Madison Street side of the building at 1003 Wisconsin, Rob Kuntz lived with his mother. One afternoon, I was out studying the ant mounds in the cracks of our sidewalk for a science project, and Robert, from his front porch, invited me up to game. But because of how we met, for a long time I was nicknamed "The Lurker." LOL (It was better than my next nickname, "Princer," but that's another story, and embarrassing, but, hey, I was only 13.)

Rob was still DMing Greyhawk, and I recall initially playing a very incompetent thief who was hanged for killing a nobleman. I also played Gothmog, the second Nazgul in Rob's Tokein campaign. We played everything from Tractics (Gary Gygax's pre-D&D tank/miniatures rules) to Napoleonic miniatures, chainmail battles, and naval miniatures.

The cast of characters in the Kuntz gaming group was all patently eccentric.

The Goodfellow brothers, Joe, the older, and James, whom I later also knew from the high school debate club. In fact, James Goodfellow and Skip Williams, co-author of the 3rd edition of D&D, took 3rd in state debate as a team. Jimmy went on to graduate from Cambridge and Yale, where he was on the Law Review, and later practiced law in San Francisco, where he came out as gay. He's since passed. Just imagine a very collegiate, herringbone-attired eccentric waggling his pipe at you, who WILL debate anything, but who also parties quite hard, holding his own easily. I'll likely tell a few Jimmy-Robert stories and post his pic when I find it.

Tom Christensen was in my class and obviously gay, but he went on in life to become the top expert on the Perl programming language and has published several books on the topic. His college professor had something to do with inventing Perl. He was my 7th or 8th-grade science partner, and he began our dissection of a frog by heating the scalpel on the Bunsen burner and then burning the blade into my wrist while my attention was elsewhere. We were competitors since we were both considered the brightest guys from our separate grade schools. But I wasn't about that. Tom was smarter than I was, without a doubt, in science and math. But I had him on social skills, street smarts, breadth of experience, travel — and all the soft skills.

Joe Fisher, AKA "Fiiish," occasionally gamed with us. Joe created the D&D Ranger class. He argued it wasn't just Tolkien's Aragorn he'd taken it from, and to prove it, he had developed several variants drawn from diverse sources long before sub-classes were introduced into the game. Joe was known for wearing a well-worn, wide-rimmed leather hat.

I actually met Terry Kuntz before Rob when he was tending the 1st location of the Dungeon Hobby Shop @ 723 Williams St. (Recently the site of the Dungeon Hobby Shop Museum debacle. (More to say on that in a future post or two.) Terry taught me a Roman gladiator miniature battle game, which we played right at the counter. Remarkably, Terry is more eccentric than his brother.

Bob Burman... Always trouble. An eccentric, too. I remember him wearing a caftan like he was a backup musician for Cat Stevens (it was the 70's). He rolled a VW Bug off the highway, got thrown from the car, and it rolled over him in a snowbank, and he walked away unharmed. In a WWII campaign Kuntz ran, Bob "Burmania" Berman sent all his subs into a Japanese port, where being in shallow water eliminated them all. Anyhow, the dumbest among us--I was probably batting for second, but look at the guys in the room with me. (You can just search for "Kuntz and Burmania" and find Rob's numerous online stories about Bob.)

Tom Champney sometimes came by for miniature battles, a later manager of the Dungeon Hobby Shop when it moved to Broad and Main's SE corner. Tom was one of those fellows who would call you over, "Hey. Hey, Shhhh!" (Quietly signaling with his hands) "Come here." And then he'd say something crazy funny in your ear, like, "Don't drink the water; fish fuck in it!" He could make a person chuckle all day long. Unfortunately, Tom took his life when his game company later failed, and I was coincidentally on leave (USN) playing pool in the UW Whitewater student union with Neal Christensen and Rob Kuntz when we found out. That was a hard day.

There was a broader cast of characters coming through, but because I'm recovering from an accidental withdrawal from misordered, prescribed medication, I'm still disoriented and will have failed to mention several other players; I'll just post them later. But one of them who popped in from afar was Mark Ratner, co-author of Space Opera (Fantasy Games Unlimited, also publisher of the influential Chivalry and Sorcery FRPG rules, a fave of mine).

Ratner was a bit more reserved than the rest of us eccentrics but loved visiting. He was more sci-fi when I met him. And while his intellectual, science officer demeanor might fool you, once playing, the eccentricity was apparent.

My point is that our group of eccentrics was somewhat diverse: we had a wonderful, unpredictable energy at the dawn of D&D, and our group included published game authors who gave us industry inroads to influence rulesets. So we were all highly opinionated rules lawyers.

I First Encountered D&D in the Spring of 1974.

I First Encountered D&D in the Spring of 1974.

I sat beneath a tree on the playground, reading the sequel to A Wrinkle in Time. My 6th-grade classmate, Mike Fleming, gave me a copy of Men and Magic and asked for my thoughts.

Mike's father was a gamer friend of Gary's. On a side note, Roger Raupp was a fellow student in my class and played on the playground with a small group of us nerds.

Now, I'd like to say that in the 3-5 minutes I was given to appraise the book, I instantly understood what it was and took to it. But that's not what happened. In fact, I do not recall what I said.

It wasn't until 1976 that my mother and I moved kitty-corner to the school, and I met Rob Kuntz, who lived in the front lower apartment of the same house, where I first played OD&D with him. Our house coincidentally was right next door to what is now Gary's last residence,

Mary Gygax

I first met and became friends with Mary Gygax.

Mary, a Jehovah's Witness, often came knocking, spreading the Word around Lake Geneva. We had recently moved there, so she was among the first individuals I encountered. I was only 9, but I enjoyed our fairly regular talks about religion standing in our foyer.

For the record, I'm an atheist and have been since my parents gave me the choice, so before 7 I did not believe in God. However, my mind remained uncertain about the existence of a spiritual realm. So Mary doesn't remember that I was an atheist then, which makes sense. I hadn't yet learned to represent it strongly because I hadn't yet understood the social issues.

Nonetheless, ever since meeting Mary this way, I've advocated holding door-to-door conversations about almost any topic. Signage can easily indicate the resident's preferences on these matters. And in today's siloed world, face-to-face conversation would promote greater civility, at minimum.

My first Gen Con was 1972.

We lived at 1003 Main St., across the street from the lake and library park where Gary's memorial is to be placed, so there was a lot of foot traffic in front of our house. Among those walkers, I met a couple of 1920s flappers, one of whom danced for Al Capone before the feds raided his mansion on the lake. And I also met Edith Rogers, a short, kind, black-haired lady in her 60s, most recognizable at a distance by her long white London Fog overcoat.

I accompanied Edith on her walks, listening as she recounted the town’s history and chatting about various topics, until she mentioned that I reminded her of a young man she wanted me to meet named Ernie Gygax. So she took me down to Horticultural Hall and introduced me to the Gygaxes at Gen Con 5.

As mentioned, I already knew Mary, so Edith was our mutual friend. And when she introduced us, Gary and Mary, holding an around 1-year-old Luke in her arms, and Ernie were standing in the stables area. We all chatted cordially for a bit until Gary had to run off, being so busy with the Con. But I'd gotten into the con for free, and I found someone to play Avalon Hill's Gettysburg with for the rest of the afternoon, which was a game I knew from playing with my dad.

I never really hit it off with Ernie because he was 4 years older and in junior high, and I was in 4th grade, which is a giant gap at that age. I did meet him again a year or two later.

1003 Main St. was a 3-story Victorian cut up into 4 apartments. Above us on the second floor, Hilton and Vicki Byrd sculpted brass for a living. I'd hang out in their studio watching them sculpt for hours. Eventually they hired Ernie to polish their finished works. According to Hilton, Gary felt Ernie needed to learn a work ethic.

At the time, creating games wasn't thought of as work, but as something more likely done by lazy, childish people.

Gary's value in work should historically be noted, given his monetization of what we now call the gaming industry.

Sadly, coping with an immense amount of pain, Edith put on several layers of coats and jumped off the bridge closest to the Riviera, drowning, far too soon after we met.

Gary Gygax, Communist:

I grew up in Lake Geneva, WI, from 4th grade.

The first time I ever heard of Gary Gygax was from my Uncle Lance, the water or electric meter reader in Lake Geneva. The meter at the Gygax home required entering the basement of the dwelling, and that's where Uncle Lance saw several bearded communists gathered around a large table plotting the revolution.

It was barely the 70s, if that, and the Cold War was still in full swing.

It wasn't until a later reading that he figured out these ardent Bolsheviks were actually grown men playing with miniature soldiers. However, by that time, the rumor about communists had spread to many of the townspeople, painting Gary in a strange light even prior to D&D.

The second time I ever heard of Gary was when, still working as a cobbler to make ends meet, he confiscated my mother's 32-eyelet boots for non-payment, which probably lasted 2-3 days before she paid and he returned them to her.

Gary Was a Consummate Gentleman:

Years later, while sitting in Gary's office, I mentioned his first run-in with my mother, which I found merely amusing; however, Gary was so immediately and earnestly apologetic that I regretted mentioning it. But, yes, he did remember meeting her. We were discussing having my mother do the art for The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun, and it was the only occasion I knew of when they had met. But much more about that later.

Once articles detailing its construction are added to this rough timeline, you can filter all mentions of Tharizdun, Gygax, whatnot, using the labels on the right.