Word: pentagonal
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...average Pentagon officer, unless born to paper-pushing routine, is apt to be a dissatisfied man. In the brassbound Pentagon, there are more admirals than ensigns, more generals than second lieutenants. The most common rank is lieutenant colonel or (in the Navy) commander. Before he was ordered to the Pentagon, a typical lieutenant colonel might have been commanding an antiaircraft battalion in Germany, with 31 officers and 723 men under his command, along with several million dollars' worth of guns and equipment...
...Pentagon, he becomes an anonymous cog in, say, the Reserve Components Branch of the Organization & Training Division in the office of the Assistant Chief of Staff for Operations. He exchanges his comfortable rent-free house in Germany for a six-room row house in Arlington County which he has to buy for $23,000 because no houses are available for rent. His $632-a-month salary barely covers his expenses (some captains have to drive taxicabs at night to make ends meet). In the Pentagon he finds that a lieutenant colonel rates lower than one of his own first lieutenants...
...Pentagon vocabulary closely resembles plain English, but must be learned. "Implement" means do, "formalize" means write it down, and "finalize" means finish it. Cynics devise more irreverent definitions...
...endlessly flowing paper is controlled by colored tags and big "buck-slips." Congressional letters, of which the Pentagon gets about 300 a day, get a yellow "expedite" tag; an "urgent" tag is red, and one "rush-rush" marker is known as "the green hornet." An expert use of the buckslip-a small routing slip on which higher authority checks off directions such as "for action," "please brief for me," etc. -is an essential Pentagon skill. The classic story is one of a newly arrived Navy commander, snowed under with accumulating papers, who stumped over to an old hand behind...
...File That Wasn't There. Absurdities to the civilian eye sometimes have a certain wild bureaucratic logic, such as the file in the basement called "the file of non-filed files"-a list of files that have been sent somewhere else. The Pentagon explains that it saves searching for a file that isn't there...