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In 1964, in the midst of the project, my boss, a wonderfully brilliant and talented woman from Ceylon named Nagiswari Rajahratnam, died suddenly of a brain tumor and I was selected/elected (by the other members of the team) to take her place on a temporary basis. As time went on, and my work load began to get to me and, noting that Nagiswari had been making $1500 a month, I asked for a raise, so I could quit one of my other jobs.

The project manager, a mathematics professor, first advised me to be patient. "Wait until you get your Ph.D.," he counseled, "then you will find your financial difficulties will ease."

But I persisted, arguing that I was near the end of my rope with exhaustion and that we were expecting yet another child. He countered again and again by urging me to have patience, acting as though I were a troublesome child. Finally he asked, somewhat resignedly, since I wasn't just going away in deference to his sage recommendation, "O.K. Exactly how much money do you think you are worth."

"Well, I said, "Mrs. Rajahratnam was making $1500 a month, and since I am doing her job more than half time, I figure its worth half that, or $750 a month."

"What?!" he exploded, "Why I can get a new Ph.D. for that! You can't make that kind of money anywhere!"

Now it was my turn to explode. I had heard from fellow students that jobs in "industry," as opposed to academia, tended to pay a great deal more. I told him angrily that he was wrong, that there were many jobs in the Twin City area that would pay me that much, many companies that would be glad to get a man with my background, used to hard work. Understand that I was twenty eight years old at the time and had been working since I was ten.

Unused to such impertinence from a mere student he challenged me huffily, "O.K. You go out and try to get a job for that kind of money. If you succeed in getting an offer, I will raise your salary to that level." He said it like he was dead certain that I would fail.

As it turned out, he wasn't far off, but for reasons he could never have guessed. The first thing I did was apply at an employment agency. The jerk who ran the first agency I went to, a retired military officer, said that I shouldn't get my hopes up. I didn't have much experience as a professional, especially outside of the University, and that potential employers would be turned off by my beard and somewhat unconventional dress. However, as fortune would have it, another math graduate student, Rod Larson, heard of my quest and informed his superiors that I might be a good prospect to fill an open position for research scientist in the military products group. He added that I was one of the best students in the math department and, while lacking experience in the field, knew how to work long and hard hours. So, they called me. Even with that kind of entrance, I almost didn't get the job. The people who interviewed me didn't care about my experience or my appearance. What they noted were that my grades were TOO GOOD! I had graduated from the University of Wisconsin summa cum laude with three majors, and my record as a graduate student was very near the top of the class. They feared I was yet another academic wonder who couldn't tie his shoe laces. What did the trick was a question asked me by one of the interviewers, a senior manager named Dave who had come up through engineering. Near the end of the interview, when he was about to nix me, he asked, as an afterthought, had I ever built anything, made anything? The question was posed insultingly, as if he were sure I never had.

I responded that I had once made an eight inch reflecting telescope, grinding the mirror myself. In case you don't know, a telescope mirror is made by moving one circular piece of glass over another, with a fine powder in between. The motion is sort of the "wax on, wax off" motion popularized in the movie The Karate Kid, only all in one direction. It takes many hundreds of hours to grind, since each pass removes only a microscopic portion from each chunk of glass. The one on the top slowly becomes convex, the one on the bottom concave. In addition, you have to pass through a sequence of gradually finer grinding powders, although the coarsest is finer than talcum powder. I had to send the "finished" mirror off to a specialty house for the last two steps, that of depositing a thin layer of aluminum to make it into a mirror and the changing the curvature of the mirror from spherical to ellipsoidal to make it focus properly. These had to be done by experts.

So, I was offered the job. Although I had only asked for $750, in order to meet the challenge of the director of the University project, to my surprise, they offered me $900 a month! Later I was told that this amount was considered low, that usually research scientists started at several hundred dollars a month more. But, it sure wasn't low to me! After discussing the issue briefly with my wife, I gave notice on my other jobs and became a research scientist in the defense industry.

I also needed a security clearance, since much of the work was classified and the U.S. had already become involved in the "conflict" in Viet Nam, a tiny obscure Asian nation that no more than 13% of U.S. citizens could identify as a country at that time, much less properly place on a map. This was no problem, however, since I had been a spy (for the U.S.) at an earlier time in my life, but that is another story...

Although myself a bit skeptical of how I would do in such an unfamiliar setting...my only previous industrial experience had been a three month stint with Martin-Marietta for NASA on project Gemini over the summer between my undergraduate and graduate school training...I nonetheless prospered. I really enjoyed using my knowledge to design algorithms and write papers that actually resulted in tangible objects...although in fact, as a research scientist, my work was still quite removed from things I got to see and touch, just not as far away as academic research. This was to change, but not until later.

So, at first, my work was enormously successful, in that our marketing arm could use it, and me, to get research contracts from the government. I came up with a number of bright ideas that impressed both my superiors and those above them. I got frequent raises. They were still a bit embarrassed at hiring me for so "little." In addition, the sales people liked to take me along on trips as their "eccentric" scientist...remember the beard and weird clothing...colorful suits and ties that didn't quite match...to give scholarly presentations before they embarked on their hard sales pitches. Eventually, I got to be a featured presenter, called upon at the spur of the moment to give presentations to pentagon generals and other bigwigs or to participate in the quarterly reports to the board of directors. I was really uncomfortable with military people at first, reflecting earlier difficulties I had in my own military "career"...but, that is another story...

Then one day, when my boss, Charles Johnson, had gotten me out of bed early to make an unscheduled presentation to a group of generals, I confided to him my unease with these folks.

He laughed and replied, "You think YOU'RE uneasy. Today, when you are going through your pitch, try to make eye contact with these big shots! I'll bet you a dollar to a doughnut that you can't. They are TERRIFIED that you are going to ask them some question that they can not answer." You know what? He won that bet...hands down.

Finally, after a couple of years of this, I was propelled, against my wishes into management. Charlie was being promoted and they needed someone to fill his position. At first I flatly refused. I liked being a scientist. But with the job came more money, significantly faster advancement and other perks and my wife and I were now raising six children as well as helping out another woman and her daughter...who were living with us...it was a bitch being an unwed mother in those days...even more than now. The kicker was when they promised me they would not interfere in my management style, as yet undeveloped, or to try to guide me on how to handle my workers. I was fairly popular with my co-workers and wanted to stay that way.

So I prospered as a manager as well. During my first year my group landed over thirteen million dollars of contract money. And, that was, before Bill Gates, when thirteen million dollars was a lot of money. Some of my management ideas, which were slightly unconventional, were later adopted company-wide, I am told. For example, I instructed my workers, whom I thought were working too hard, getting stale, to take a half day off, at their choice, sometime each week. Although I actually had to order two of them to do so...they said they wouldn't know what to do with the time...I responded like a drill sergeant "Take a shit, fuck your wife, watch daytime television, but you WILL take every Wednesday morning off!"...it eventually became a very popular and productive idea. It gave each of them a much needed breather to relax a little and refresh the mind.

Then the fog of doom began to creep in. Never all that comfortable with the military and weapons research, as the war in Viet Nam started escalating, I had deeper and deeper doubts about what I was doing for a living, no matter how much we needed the money. Besides, I was beginning to experiment with psychedelic drugs and associate with more and more people involved in the antiwar movement and other countercultural tendencies...but those, too, are other stories...

Still, as far as I knew, none of my work was being used to actually harm people, instead being used in nuclear submarines, smart bombs and other exotic weapons of war the I, like everyone else, hoped and felt would never be used, but were a necessary deterrent against the Soviet Union. Then, one day a small group of men from the ordinance group came to visit me for a consultation. These were the people that were actually building weapons of war. Honeywell had been secretly (although one of my friends, Army Davidov, eventually exposed them...in the Honeywell project...a local movement aimed to put a harsh light on military procurement) manufacturing cluster bombs. These are grapefruit size bombs that consist of an explosive core surrounded by a shell of steel ball bearings imbedded in soft metal. They are meant to explode in the air, spreading their killing missiles (the ball bearings) in every direction. The ordinance people informed me that the U.S. was dropping these ghastly weapons in ten-ton loads in the jungles of Viet Nam. However, unlike the "conventional" kind of cluster bomb, these did not immediately detonate, but rather buried themselves in shallow holes over an oval about four hundred yards long and a hundred yards wide. In the center of this collection of lethality, dropped by parachute and sitting on a small tripod, was a combination infrared and motion detector. When a sufficiently large "warm" mass was detected moving in the vicinity, these honeys would pop up to a height of about six to ten feet, and explode, "eliminating," "terminating," or otherwise "neutralizing" the target. You see, people in ordinance weren't engaged in killing human beings, but every imaginable euphemism ever invented to disguise this action.

What they wanted me to do was use the expertise of our group, based on theoretical work I had done at an earlier time, to devise a way for this detector to count the large, warm targets and when the number exceeded forty or so...kabloom! When I objected that I felt this was a simply monstrous use of technology, they countered with a sweet anecdote about saving the boy wandering through the jungle with his ox from "being hurt." Only "bad guys" would be massed in such numbers in the jungle and, after all, it WAS our business to help our military deal with such people.

I wasn't convinced. Through my contacts in the antiwar movement and various other more surreptitious channels, I knew that, at that very time, the U.S. was in the middle of an operation called Project Phoenix, which entailed uprooting, and chasing into the jungle, entire villages felt to be either real or potential Viet Cong collaborators. I had nightmares of hundreds of Vietnamese civilians along with their children and their oxen being mutilated and killed by weapons that I helped make! Adolph Eichman, who was once only a notorious and detested Nazi monster, whose actions I could hardly comprehend, suddenly became a soul brother! My God, what was I doing!

Finally, the next week, while I was still stalling ordinance and wrestling with my conscience, the moment of truth came, although in a form I surely had not anticipated. One day, Charlie asked me to stay a little late and meet him and "some others" in the main conference room. When I got there, after being seated at the head of the long conference table, I was confronted with a gathering of my boss, his boss, Bill Sackett, already just one step below vice president, and a number of managers at my level and above, some of whom I knew, many of whom I did not. Expecting the worst...that they had found out about my subversive activities or weird life style or something...I was instead astonished to discover that the purpose of this meeting was to ask me if I would "lead their management team." As I sat their hardly believing my ears, I was told that they had, collectively, come to the conclusion that I would some day be the President of Honeywell and that they, all of them, wanted to ride my coattails. I don't know whether I hid my bewilderment or not. The rest of the meeting is just a blur.

When I returned home that night to my household, which had already become a hippy style commune (yet another story), it took me only a short time to convince my wife and friends that it was time for me to retire at the tender age of twenty nine. Not only had being the President of Honeywell...or any other large corporation...never been a on my lifelong wish list, but the thought of contributing further to a war effort in which I could not believe, with work that I had already done...the thought actually horrified me. They readily agreed, all of them. Not one person dissented.

So, the next day, I went to work, destroyed all my notes on the algorithm that would have been used on the cluster bomb project and gave my notice. I explained quite clearly my reasons, and got an unexpectedly large amount of agreement and sympathy for what I was doing from my coworkers. Charles Johnson and Bill Sacket, who went on to become Senior Vice Presidents at Honeywell, told me later that they used me anecdotally for years as an example of how talent is not enough to produce success..."desire" also being a necessary ingredient. Swell!

There were other ironies, but they will have to wait for another telling...

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