Jill Morgenthaler - The Courage to Take Command

Copyright 2015 by Colonel Jill Morgenthaler. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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To Wendy and Joyce, the lessons began with you.

To Neal and Jamie, you are the best!

To Kerry, through tsunami, earthquake, flood, and pestilence, you have always been next to me.
What an adventure!

I am humbled by the small army that aided me in producing this book: Sharon Morgenthaler started me on this adventure. David Horbovetz saw the book in me. Rita Emmett showed me the way. Maureen Cunningham would not let me quit. Rachel Krausman and Christopher Polinski helped me capture my stories. Jenna Glatzer, book saver, provided the editing.

Lynn Johnston, the best literary agent ever, showed patience and forbearance as she turned a soldier into an author.

Casey Ebro and the team at McGraw-Hill, thank you for the courage in publishing the book.

My undying gratitude to the great Soldiers, Sailors, Marines, Airmen, and Coastguardsmen that I have served with over the years and across continents.

My Story

There arent many kids who get to say that one of their parents is a spy. Its the stuff of television shows and movies and games kids play with each other. But for my father, it was a career. He was an infantry officer who conducted military intelligence operations for the United States Marines at the Pentagon. I thought his job was the coolest thing ever.

He would disappear on secret missions that he never told the family about. Even my mother didnt know where her husband was going or what he was doing when he got there, and she was supposed to just deal with that kind of uncertainty until he showed up again. For her, Im sure it was nerve-racking. Although I missed my father when he was gone, I didnt worryI was too naive to realize the dangers involved, and young enough to have a very romanticized view of what spy work was all about.

I imagined him as one of the dashing heroes on my favorite TV shows and movies: The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Wild Wild West, Get Smart, and of course James Bond. More likely, my dad was doing research and analysis, but in my mind, he was calculating angles so a bullet would ricochet off a bottle and whiz right past a villains ear, scaring him into spilling the secret code needed to defuse a bomb about to go off in a theater.

There were, of course, pluses and minuses for me with a Marine officer for a dad. The first minus was that he missed my birth because he was off fighting in the Korean War. Luckily, I dont remember that. What I do remember is that I had a sheltered life growing up on military bases. All our needs were covered, and we didnt socialize with nonmilitary kids.

Many military wives wore their husbands rank, and bases were well segregatedofficers with officers, enlisted men with enlisted men. Our housing was separated according to this hierarchy, so I could only socialize with other kids whose fathers were around the same rank as my fathers, and it translated to a certain snobbery. The wives of colonels looked down on the wives of majors, and so on. My parents werent like that, though. I remember going to the beauty parlor after my father had been promoted to major, and the ladies in the shop asked me who my mother was.

Joyce Harvey Morgenthaler, I told them.

Shes the nicest woman here! one of the beauticians exclaimed. She never treats us badly because our husbands are enlisted.

The other ladies nodded. I was very proud of my mother that day, and it taught me something about the kind of person I wanted to bethe kind who would make people want to speak enthusiastically about me behind my back.

I was never much of a girly girl growing up in the 1950s and 1960s. Luckily, both my parents were feminists and never expected me to conform to societys rules for girls. But as parents, their gender roles were pretty standard: He barked out the orders that she followed, and if I wanted emotional support, Id better talk to my mom, because my dad wouldnt put up with any feelings. Suck it up was the general theme.

Daughters of Marines dont cry! he would tell me. Later, it became Daughters of Marine colonels dont cry!

And Dad was never wrong.

Except that one time.

I was about 14, and we were sitting at the dining room table for dinner, with the television in the background showing the rerun of a boxing match. Later, my dad mentioned the winner of the matchexcept he named the wrong guy.