Building The Strength Of The Corps: The Chief Of The VII Corps Personnel Operations Center In Desert Storm

Gene Thornton grew up in Middletown, Delaware, with her father, a banker, and her mother, a schoolteacher. In high school she enjoyed drama, and she was a drama major at Washington College, graduating in 1972. While working full-time as a waitress, she saw a billboard illustrating job opportunities for women in the Army. At the same time, one of her sorority sisters was getting married, and her father was LTG Cooksey. At the wedding, she met LTG Don Rosenblum, who was a Colonel at the time and was working on a project integrating women into leadership positions in the Army. She received a direct commission in January 1973 and branched Adjutant General, wanting to do Public Affairs. In 1974, she met her future husband Don Jagger, USMA 70, on REFORGER ‘74 (Return of Forces to Germany). She was assigned to 1st Infantry Division, and for REFORGER they deployed troops to Germany to link up with their forward deployed 1st Brigade. She had attended the Defense Information School and was assigned to the 1ID Public Affairs Office (she was the first woman assigned to the 1ID). For a period, she worked at Ft. Indiantown Gap, helping resettle Vietnamese refugees. In October 1976, she married Don, who was commanding B / 1-18 Infantry. They spent the first nine months of their marriage apart; he was in Germany, and she was in Korea serving as the S1 for the 304th Signal Battalion, another unit that did not want her because she was a woman. Returning from Korea, she became Chief of Personnel Records in the AG Company at Ft. Riley, where she faced overt sexual harassment. After her time at Ft. Riley, she was assigned to West Point in 1980, serving in the Commandant’s Office until 1983, when she transferred to admissions. Her husband was selected to teach History at West Point. Working in the Commandant’s Office, one of her assignments was reviewing files for prospective Tactical Officers. She also was responsible for reviewing minority admissions packets. She was selected for the Commandant’s Office to be a role model for the women Cadets. This was the first assignment where she felt that she was wanted because she was a woman. Even so, she felt friction between her and her “Old Grad” peers. When she received a “3 Block” on her OER, she went to the G1 and her research showed that across the board, all the women assigned to West Point were rated lower than their male counterparts. Following her assignment at West Point, she returned to Korea, where she was the S1 for the Maintenance Brigade. She then reported for a stint at the Pentagon, where she worked for Colin Powell and Caspar Weinberger. She and her husband then reported to Germany, where he was assigned to 2nd Battalion, 30th Infantry, a mechanized unit, while she commanded the 177th Personnel Services Company. From that assignment, she eventually transferred to the VII Corps Office of the Secretary of the General Staff. Before Desert Storm, she moved to the Corps Adjutant General’s Office and was responsible for building strength in the Corps (up to 125,000 Soldiers deployed). In the Desert, 1LT Amy Hone and her AG Platoon joined the Corps AG staff and provided needed assistance running casualty operations. In the desert, her greatest concern was building up the Corps and integrating people across the various units, and her biggest challenge was casualty reporting. She describes flying to each unit to ensure they were reporting casualties correctly. Eventually, she had to track Enemy Prisoners of War, acknowledging that “we didn’t expect all those prisoners.” After the war, her husband served as an Inspector General, and she went to DCSPER (Deputy Chief of Staff for Personnel), where she helped orchestrate the drawdown (SERB – Selective Early Retirement Board). Her next assignment was commanding the 22nd Personnel Battalion at Ft. Lewis, Washington. She then returned to the Pentagon in an assignment to DCSOPS as the Chief of Public Affairs for Strategic Planning before serving as DCSPER. She retired as a full Colonel. Throughout most of her career, she was the first woman in each assignment. At the end of the interview, she reflects on what her service means to her, noting that her “service means the world to me,” but she “felt pressure to do well.”