Even faced with incredibly short notice and the amount of planning that needed to be crammed into the few hours between notification and the Chief’s briefing, Dixon’s staff could not shake this legacy. The conference room was all but spit shined and set up under the watchful eye of the Division sergeant major. For every staff officer who was crunching numbers, gathering intelligence, or assessing the feasibility of various courses of action, there was another of equal rank running about making sure the route the Chief would take to division headquarters was policed, checking that projectors and such were functioning, and other such foolishness. Scott never cared much for that sort of thing, and he always took great pains to make his thoughts on the subject known. But such was the nature of the beast that now, even at a time when issues such as national unity and civil war hung in the balance, the men and women who would determine if their nation remained a united one were unable to make the adjustment overnight.

Off to one side Bob Felden watched his staff go through their paces with the eye of a Broadway producer. That analogy was far nearer the mark than Scott cared for. Like all participants at such staged events, each of the primary staff officers and their deputies, brigade commanders and their operations officers, and selected support and combat support battalion commanders were in their assigned seats, arranged in accordance with Army protocol. Poulengy sat center stage at the head of the table, listening to the operational plan that Scott Dixon, seated to his left, had pulled together.

Everything about the plan had Dixon’s signature on it. Like many commanders who had once been operations officers themselves, Scott could not simply pass his guidance on to his planning staff and leave them be. When it came to those operations that really mattered, Scott was in the thick of it, ably assisted by his G-3 and one of a handful of school trained planning officers known throughout the Army as “Jedi Knights.” Though the curriculum at Leavenworth’s School for Advanced Military Studies did not dwell on the domestic employment of the United States Army, Major Matt Kawalchek, the G-3 Plans Officer, rose to the occasion. Step by step Kawalchek took Poulengy through the phases that would move the 4th Armored Division from its peacetime garrison north, through three states, and into Idaho, ready to do battle if and when that was necessary.