>I'm not sure anyone would want to be disdainful to a General.
Me, me! Over here. And I actually was sort of once. I had to go to a meeting in the Pentagon a few years back and ended up lost in SecDef row, where the average officer grade is flag rank. I had gone into an office block to ask directions and as I was leaving a guy in front of me stood and waited for me to open the door for him. He had either three or four stars, and I calmly opened the door, went through and let it swing shut behind me. For all I know or care that guy is still waiting for someone to massage his ego and open the door for him like a good little toady.
I was raised in the tradition that purple-suiters work for brown-suiters. Blue-suiters are AF, white-suiters are Navy, green-suiters are Army, purple-suiters are generic military, while brown-suiters are civilians.
I once worked for a really despicable blue-suiter who knew absolutely nothing about our organization, its ways of work, its mores, nothing, and he was intent on changing all of them so he could leave his mark on the organization when he rotated out two years hence. The animosity with the brown-suiters increased to the point where he called in me and the managers who worked with me and ordered us to respect him. Needless to say we all saluted smartly and moved out without respecting him at all.
He ended up being riffed as a major, even though he had previously won the Lace Sijan Award, one of the most prestigious awards available to a company-grade officer in the AF. So far as I know he was the only recipient of the Sijan award not to make colonel. A richly deserved fate in this man's case.
