She wrote back saying she planned to bring the commanding general to my area when their schedules permitted.
That night, I called Joe, as I had been doing every night. He and I have been together since we were kids, and he's never been afraid to tell me if I'm screwing something up—but usually in a way that makes me laugh. He's my best friend.
He had retired in March, but for several years, he had worked on the commandant's staff at the Pentagon, and he still had friends who fed him information about me, a battalion commander at Parris Island.
Why was that odd?
There was absolutely no reason for a battalion commander to be talked about at the Pentagon—unless I had been accused of some heinous crime. The decision whether to fire me should be a local decision, something handled by my immediate command.
Joe and I realized that Colonel Haas was probably looking for any excuse he could get to fire me. Colonel Haas acted as if the command-climate survey was a capital offense, despite all of the holes we had poked into the legitimacy of the results and the methodology used to administer it. It wasn't genuine.
“You need to request mast,” Joe said. “Now.”
“You've tried working through Colonel Haas. You tried writing an article to bring the issues to the attention of the Marine Corps. You heard from the commanding general that he was supporting you. Request mast.”
In other words, Joe thought I should fill out a formal request to meet with Brigadier General Williams in person to discuss the problems I was having with Colonel Haas.
In my prior conversations with Brigadier General Williams, I had been very circumspect about my relationship with Colonel Haas. While he had tried to engage me in conversation about the problems I had experienced, I didn't want to be unprofessional and bad-mouth my boss with his boss, so I hadn't dimed out Colonel Haas to the commanding general. Without any invitation or information from me, he had approached me way back in January and said, “I hear things are going badly with your boss,” and I gave him noncommittal answers, rather than specifics. His exact words to me had been, “It's my job to mentor colonels.” And since he kept telling me I had his support, I figured he knew what was going on.
But Joe said, “You have to tell him everything that's happening, so he knows. Request mast now.”
At about that time, I started having multiple sclerosis (MS) symptoms. I knew it was stress-related, and the symptoms scared me. I had had neurological symptoms before, but nothing I ever worried about after I received the initial diagnosis. The symptoms had never affected my work or my daily runs or any other aspect of my life, really, other than a vague wondering of what the future would look like. I was first diagnosed in 2001, and had experienced a few flare-ups but nothing significant.
According to the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, multiple sclerosis “is an unpredictable, often disabling disease of the central nervous system that disrupts the flow of information within the brain, and between the brain and body.”1
Some people lose their vision; some people lose feeling in their limbs; some people lose their ability to reason; some people lose their ability to walk. But I was under a doctor's care, and none of these issues fit into my diagnosis.
My MS diagnosis and symptoms shouldn't have mattered at all, except that I'd never had to bring it up to my boss before. And I'd never had it used against me as a possible reason to fire me.
But heat and stress are well known to cause flare-ups, and I noticed in March that about ten minutes into a run, I would lose all feeling in the left side of my body. I couldn't control my trajectory, so I would find myself running from the sidewalk into the street, like I was losing my balance. It was terrifying.
Doctors determine whether you have MS by doing a brain scan and looking for lesions on the brain and spinal cord. The lesions are a sign of damage to the myelin shaft covering the synapsis, and they will show up as ghostly white spots on MRI brain scans. I knew what I was experiencing was a bad sign, so, in April, I went to the neurologist and said, “I can't run in a straight line.”
After doing an MRI, the neurologist reported that I did indeed have some new active lesions on my brain.
I knew my symptoms were legitimate, and I was worried. As they age, most people with relapsing-remitting MS start developing symptoms or having exacerbations at more frequent rates, with shorter periods of recovery in between. Over time, the body loses its ability to recover, resulting in permanent damage, often resulting in an inability to walk. The neurologist put me back on medication and recommended that I be placed on limited duty for six months to see if I would recover from my symptoms. Being assigned to limited duty was a blow to my ego because it meant that I was officially nondeployable, and I worried my symptoms would prevent me from being able to continue to participate in all of the training at the battalion.
Guess who had to sign my limited-duty form?
Colonel Haas.
I took it to his office, but he wasn't there, so I emailed him. At that point, he didn't know I had MS. Nobody needed to know. I hiked every hike. I ran PT and had achieved perfect scores on the physical- and combat-fitness tests for years. I worked overtime and beyond. I didn't want there to be any question that I wasn't up
