Men Of Dishonor

After terrorists hijacked planes and flew them into the World Trade Center on September 11, the United States government scrambled to restore the nation's sense of security. It eventually dispatched thousands of soldiers to the country's airports, and for travelers, the sight of armed guards restored at least a perception of order.

Jane Cook, a part-time soldier with a National Guard unit in southwest Missouri, was one of the first members of her unit to answer the government's call for volunteers to provide security at Kansas City International airport. Cook saw it as a chance to shake off the helplessness she had felt ever since Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. That explosion had injured her sister. The September 11 attacks brought back all the same feelings.

But during her two months in Kansas City, Cook came under a different kind of attack. She began her duties on November 27, with a training session in Jefferson City that lasted several hours. The next day she reported to the front line, standing guard at an airport gate with a 9 mm pistol and forty rounds of ammunition on her belt. She had no problems with the passengers, though they grumbled when forced to part with their tweezers or more lethal-looking hair clips. She got along fine with the baggage screeners, though she was watching to make sure they stopped every bag on the X-ray machine and conducted thorough random passenger checks.

Cook's battle was with other members of the Missouri National Guard, some of whom clearly did not want her there because she was black. She noticed that some of the white soldiers ignored the black sergeant who was in charge of her twelve-hour shift. Other discrimination was more subtle. "If you are a person of race, you can sense when somebody [who is a racist] is around you," says Cook, who asked that her real name not be used for this article. "You can taste it. You can smell it. It's weird."

In the airport's break room, she once heard a guardsman from her unit say, "We're going to get the niggers out of here. They don't belong here." That same guardsman complained about Cook, saying she had made inappropriate sexual comments about the bulletproof vests being too tight for her breasts (something Cook admits she said privately to a roommate in the Guard's airport break room). Cook believes this soldier filed complaints against her so she would be removed from airport duty. "He had a problem with me ever since I came into that unit," Cook says.

She can tally other slights. Cook and the only other black female on her shift roomed together at the Chase Suite hotel, and their room was significantly smaller than the rooms assigned to white soldiers. Some of the white guardsmen dated baggage screeners and were not disciplined for the breach of policy, Cook says. She, however, earned a written rebuke when a screener brought flowers to her hotel room unsolicited. After five write-ups (one when, against objections from a senior officer, she insisted on calling police to investigate a sword in a traveler's trunk), Cook's commander relieved her from duty and sent her home. Taken separately, the incidents might have seemed small; together, Cook feels they add up to racism. Cook's feelings about the Guard have changed. She dreads her next weekend of drills.

"I wasn't treated right," Cook says. "A lot of people weren't treated right."

The Missouri National Guard has a documented problem with race, created in part by a volatile mix of Guard members from the predominately white rural parts of the state and blacks from the cities. In 2000, a survey found that the Guard failed to promote minorities to leadership positions at the same rates as white men, and 10 percent of the Guard members said they had observed racial discrimination. The results of that survey were widely publicized in Jefferson City, where the Missouri National Guard has its headquarters, and in the Columbia Tribune, and they were posted on the Guard's Web site, along with a promise from then-Adjutant General John Havens that the organization would "improve communications and address many of the adverse perceptions."

Havens also tapped Army Chief of Staff Colonel Dennis Shull to recommend long-term changes. But little seems to be changing. And last September 20, when Governor Bob Holden chose Shull to replace Havens as head of the Guard, he may have made the problem worse.

Now adjutant general, Dennis Shull has spent 31 years in the Missouri National Guard. In 1971, he enlisted as a military policeman in the 1139th Military Police Company at Lone Jack. He joined the officers' ranks four years later, after being commissioned as a second lieutenant of artillery. From there Shull climbed the chain of command, leading a company, then a battalion, then a brigade. He joined the command staff at headquarters in 1994 as assistant chief of staff over plans, operations and training. From there it was a short couple of steps to Army Chief of Staff under Havens in 1999.

Shull was easily confirmed last month by the Missouri Senate. Lieutenant Governor Joe Maxwell noted that Shull was an "outstanding soldier," whom Maxwell would choose as his own commander if the lieutenant governor were in combat.