Page 51 - WashingtonSyCip_Bio_Excerpt_2nd_Edition

Passenger on a Ship

After boot camp in Camp Cooke, Wash was summoned for an interview. They told
him he had the highest IQ in the regiment; the military believed he was overqualified
for the infantry, and that he could be made better use of in intelligence work, so
they were sending him to language school to learn Japanese. Wash knew that some
people were also being sent there to learn Chinese, and suggested that he be shipped
directly to where Chinese was required, as he already knew the language. But the
military, having reasons that Wash was still unaware of, insisted on sending him to
the language school in Denver for Japanese lessons.

After Japanese language school, Wash was sent to the cryptography school at Vint
Hill Farms Station in Warrenton, Virginia. This station had been set up by the Army
Signal Security Agency six months after Pearl Harbor to monitor and decode enemy
communications and provide vital intelligence.

Here—in a bucolic environment known more for horses and fox hunting—Wash
learned to chase after problems on paper. It was a task for which his intuitively
analytical mind was well disposed, and, told to solve problems at their own pace,
Wash was soon arriving at solutions ahead of the others.

Once, on a furlough, Wash went to Washington, DC, to visit a good friend of his
father’s—Carlos P. Romulo (CPR), who was a member of the Philippine government-
in-exile. Wash had never met CPR before, but they hit it off. Wash found Romulo
to be warm and friendly, despite the military uniform he wore as a general. He told
Wash that the last native chicken he ate came from a SyCip farm in Bukidnon,
owned by one of Wash’s uncles. He had passed by the farm in a group that had fled
Corregidor and was making its way to Australia.

On another break, Wash paid a visit to Columbia, and Frances Cornwall went with
him to a tea dance in a Manhattan hotel. It would be one of Wash’s few brushes with
an unpleasant side of American life. Frankie recalls: “He was in uniform but that
didn’t stop a few of the dancers, obviously confused about his ethnicity, from making
hostile remarks as they passed us on the floor. Wash made no comment. I hoped that
this wasn’t a common experience for him in the service.”

Wash was doing very well in Vint Hill, but then another factor intervened just two
weeks before Wash and his batchmates were supposed to graduate from the course.

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