From Here to Eternity

If our soldiers are not overburdened with money, it is not because they have a distaste for riches. --Sun Tzu, 500 B.C.

Around the 4th Infantry Division noncommissioned officers' club at Fort Lewis, Wash. last winter, the word was out: "See Coogan if you want to go overseas," maybe to a cushy assignment in Paris. Sergeant First Class William Coogan, at 38 a sharp-looking, 14-year regular with a good record, had the expert and ready assistance of Specialist Fifth Class George B. Huller, at 23 a six-year man with an equally fine record, on duty as a personnel clerk at division headquarters. Theirs was the job of filling in the names when Pentagon orders called for overseas billets by classification, and Huller's initials were all that was needed to make the orders effective. Coogan collected $10 to $200 from each would-be overseas soldier, and Huller did the paperwork, juggling classifications and assignments to send the customer where he wanted to go.

The Coogan-Huller travel service flourished, added a "travel now--pay later" system for men who looked like good credit risks, experimented with a "group-payment plan" when seven G.I.s promised $185 to get a buddy to Korea. In six months, the red-faced Army admitted last week, Coogan-Huller cleared $1,750 from ten soldiers, in all shipped at least 18 to chosen places abroad, had four customers ready to travel when the word-of-mouth ad campaign reached one ear too many.

In a general court-martial, Huller pleaded guilty of graft, had his three-year hard-labor sentence reduced to a year and a half and a bad-conduct discharge. But Coogan, ever the operator even in the stockade awaiting trial, was caught trying to tamper with one of the witnesses, slapped with 15 years' hard labor and a dishonorable discharge. The system out of which the sergeant and the specialist made a flourishing business, said the Army hopefully, had been forever thwarted by a new assignment system, controlled directly from Washington.

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