 Aloha, welcome to Figments, The Power of Imagination. I'm Dan Lee, and I go by Fig as I hope you know. The concept of The Power of Imagination is to share somebody's figment and entertain you. We usually do that and inspire you to chase your own dreams. And it's kind of like a most interesting person in the world search. And if you go back and look at our YouTube playlist or the playlist on Think Tech Hawaii's website, you're gonna find some very interesting folks. And I've got one today, I promise. I'd like to introduce Captain, US Navy Retired, Carlton Kramer. Carlton, aloha, brother. Aloha, and yaway. Good to see you, Fig. Hey, good to see you. Thanks for joining us. Carlton's current job is as the Dean of the College of Security Studies at the Daniel K. Inway Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies. If you don't know anything about it, Google it and tune in for a later episode of The Power of Imagination, where I hope to have Admiral Peake do him a tau-tau, the current director, talking about how many things he's fixed for my time as director in a place that does amazing work. But Carlton, we're not talking about DKI, PCSS today. We're talking about your very interesting life. Do you think of it that way? Do you look back and go, oh, that was interesting? Well, I know it was different. I know it was different. And yeah, in hindsight, very interesting. Yeah, it started differently than from your average naval officer because you grew up in a different environment in the Pacific, right? I did, I did. I grew up in the Marshall Islands. And if you drew a straight line between Australia and Hawaii, it's about halfway. And when I first moved to the Marshall Islands, it was still a trust territory of the United Nations. It had not yet gained independence. How about that? Why were you there? Did you just do, were you shipwrecked or a long Gilgames Islands sort of thing? What's the dealio? Well, my father was with MIT, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. And he was involved in the atomic testing that the United States conducted in the Pacific in the late fifties. And as a result of his work with MIT and in that program, we ended up going out to the Marshall Islands. And you spent most of your time. There are kind of a son of the sea thing here. We got a picture of you as, with some navigation device that sailors used. I used a GPS and a neutral map system as a fighter pod. But what are you doing there? Well, that is a, boy, that picture brings back memories. 1971, we are on a 41 foot sailboat and we are transiting from Taiwan to Guam. And I was the navigator. I was 12 years old and I used a plastic sextant, a stopwatch and an Almanac. And that's me taking a sunset during the day. And you apparently got to your destination. So good job. Well, we felt lucky and this is going to sound strange, but we felt lucky if our triangulation was six to eight miles. Really? We felt pretty good if we got that. When you're on a sailboat on the open ocean, bouncing up and down, it's really hard to get much more accurate than that. So it seems to me you have to pick a destination island that's at least eight miles across. So that you are within the cone of confusion and maybe allow a little less to it because you'll see it visually. But did you ever get lost at sea? I mean, were you really saying where the heck am I? I think the honest answers, no. We generally knew where we were, but again, when we thought we were within a day and a half or two days of landfall, we posted a watch because we weren't actually sure when landfall would be. So we were cautious in that regard. Because it's not just the distance and direction, it's the time. And yeah, I can imagine it's pretty complex stuff. But you also spent quite a bit of your youth in Hawaii. I think ninth and 11th grades you told me and Hawaii is home now, but you had some roots here earlier. That's true. And the connection was sort of twofold. When I was living in the Marshall Islands, whenever we got off our island, we came to Hawaii, we came to Oahu. And so I was in and out of Hawaii in the early 60s for a long time, sort of as a tourist. And then a little bit later on, I did go to school here, you're right. It was ninth grade and 11th grade. And I almost graduated from high school, not quite, but I almost made it. And then a little later on in life, I came back and worked for a bit in Hawaii as well. You did you enter university early or how did you almost graduate from high school? My experience was I barely graduated from high school. So how does one almost graduate from high school? I actually flew from the Marshall Islands to California on my 18th birthday. And I was gonna be a wild and crazy young man. Couldn't get a job. Or didn't try very hard. So I ended up in school. I did a two quarters at Cal Poly, which is a technical school, did well with the grade. So I went to UC Santa Barbara, made an appointment with the chancellor. I wanted to enroll at UC Santa Barbara. They asked me for my SATs. I said, what's an SAT? But when I told him my story, he just looked at me and he said, okay, you're in. And so that's how I got into university. Well, again, we have different experience because they asked for my SATs and they said, no, no, no, this number is too small. This must be another test. I said, no, that is the number. So you attended university and what did you major in? What was your undergraduate degree in? I majored in political science and history and with a minor in economics. And I found at the end of that experience, I wasn't particularly employable. So I decided to continue my school and I went to law school. Well, here are paths converged because I was a political science major as well. And it was good enough to get into pilot training but I wouldn't run for office. So it was good enough for you to get into law school. Were you drawn to the law for a long time before this or was that a figment too to be a lawyer? I actually, as I got done with my university schooling and was looking around, my observation was that a law degree in and of itself was kind of cool but it also from my perspective opened options and gave me options. And so part of the rationale for going to law school was I thought it would open up avenues for me of some kind. I didn't know what they were but it seemed to me that that was a good ticket to have. And so off I went to law school. So as a first year law student, if somebody said what kind of a lawyer you're gonna be would it have been at that point, a Navy Jag which he did become but was that already in your mind or did that take a while to develop? It took a while to develop. At the time I would have told you business, corporate lawyer of some kind. You know, they have to wear suits, right? That would have been a deal breaker for me, man. So I had vague notions of being in a business world, being a high-powered lawyer but those notions faded and I went into the Navy Jag Corps. And was that a snap decision? I mean, and why the Navy because you're a child of the sea? It was not a snap decision. I entered the reserves in law school and so I did have a connection to the Navy but the program I was in gave me a lot of flexibility. I could basically do what I wanted to do. And what happened in my case is I graduated from law school. I was very fortunate to secure a clerkship at the Supreme Court of Hawaii. And so that brought me back to Hawaii for a year, writing law and researching for at the time Justice Nakamura. It was a phenomenal experience. It sounds incredible for a young inter, wow. It was, but I have to admit I was a little bit antsy after a year of writing and researching. And basically I went active with my Navy connection. I was in the reserves and I decided to go out. So you were in the reserves doing part-time Navy stuff and then you transitioned to full-time active duty Navy Jag before they were glamorized in movies and on TV. So that had to be a big step to go full-time and you're expecting exciting stuff. But I know from my experience in the Air Force with some of the great attorneys who worked for me that you kind of go through a probation period. Not really, but where you do relatively mundane stuff prosecution, defense, did you do all that? All those kind of bones making jobs as a new Navy Jag? The short answer is yes, you know your Jag core. You go in, you're a litigator and you're a litigator on both sides. You do it for the prosecution, you do it for the defense. You spend time working with sailors on what I would call broadly family law issues taking care of our service. All the stuff and you know those for our civilian viewers the UCMJ is really a very robust legal construct and it's not the same as civil law but the protections are pretty good and a defense attorney, a Jag or any of the services really is obligated to provide the best defense possible free of command influence. And I think by and large they do, would you agree? I would, absolutely. But after you do your initial years in the courtroom and working for the service members you then branch out into what we call the staff judge advocate world. And this is where you're advising commanders. In my case, it was short duty first followed by C duty and that opens up a whole new world of what we might call operational law. Okay, we'll get to that in a second. This is, we just showed the picture of young Carlton Kramer looking very sharp, Mr. And working with troops, we've got another picture of a sailor who's asked you to administer the oath of office on his enlistment and there is a close connection between our Jags and the troops in those early jobs, right? There absolutely is. And, you know, I think the average bear probably doesn't want an encounter with a lawyer but I'll tell you, the Navy Jags in terms of what they do taking care of the men and women in the Navy, they do a lot and it's very rewarding. And I think it helps quite a bit. And so you did all that and now you get to what we've called operational law. And in that case, you're really the attorney for commanders who are making operational decisions. And you did that in surface units aboard ship and then ashore with aviation units, I think, right? That is right. In my case, I did my homework. In my case, I was advising a commander of a large installation and after that tour, I then was assigned to an aircraft carrier and I was the lawyer for the commanding officer of an aircraft carrier, in my case, USS Saratoga. And then after the aircraft carrier moved on to different operational jobs as well. And let me say that any commander who wants to stay a commander who keeps his Jag as a trusted confidant and gets advice. The lawyers don't make the decisions but there has to be a legal basis for them for command decisions. And that takes a good relationship between the commander and attorney. That's in peacetime. That can be about punishing a soldier, sailor, airman, or about some decision you're gonna make. But in operational law, the rubber really hits the road when you're talking about in conflict, when you're advising commanders what they shouldn't do in a combat environment, right? Yeah, absolutely. The stakes are different and in some respects higher when you get into the conflict or the kinetic environment. You can't make mistakes or you should not make mistakes. I've spent a lot of time talking about the need for strong moral underpinnings in engaging in combat operations. Our moral underpinnings come from the legal construct that we operate under. And there's somebody's command in combat. I just can't overstate the importance of the advice that Carlton wound up giving to people like Evan Woolley Moore, who I think we have a picture of you with their memorials, is one of my favorite Navy guys here. There you are getting some sort of, is that an article 15 or other punishment? You're getting from them or something good? It was one of those rare moments where there was a public acknowledgement that the lawyer was helpful on occasion. Wow, no, I'm kidding, of course. The context for that picture, I had spent a couple of years as the fleet judge advocate for Fifth Fleet, Persian Gulf. And at that timeframe, we were enforcing the oil embargo against Iraq. There were 18 countries out there. And in many respects, Fifth Fleet and myself as the lawyer sort of served as the, not sort of we did serve as the coordinating agent for that UN authorized embargo. And having done the no fly zone enforcement under UN Security Council resolutions, very complex, add in international partners and you're talking about some high end law, right? Absolutely. I was able to participate on Southern Watch. And it was hard. It was very hard because the bottom line is we were essentially engaged in combat, although we didn't call it that. But there was a lot of steel on target and everything had to be very carefully done and properly done. Yeah, and it does. And I'm gonna take a quick break here, Carlton. Well, you catch your breath and I've plugged my next figments on reality on the 27th. I'm gonna talk about national security collateral damage from my experience there. And this very germane to our discussion thus far about operational law. It turns out that the drone strike, touted to have taken out the perpetrators of the attacks that sadly killed 13 Americans and scores of Afghans was a misplaced hit and killed a family of 10 or 10 civilians in Afghanistan. So far we've gotten what I term a tepid apology out of the military leaders. And I'm going to contrast it with an approach I took in an equally tragic collateral damage where I was the commander of the forces that dropped bombs as it turned out, killed civilians. We've got to do better. We need a full accounting and we owe that to not just the American public, but the world public. So please tune in figments on reality next week, Monday, 10 a.m. 10 a.m. Why standard time? Okay, so now you get into the special ops world. Carlton, folks, this is what you've been waiting for. This is where we acknowledge that Carlton Kramer has repeatedly verified the existence of gravity. And the reason you did that, you've done now surface units, an aircraft carrier, a surface, but command with aviation and maritime responsibilities. Now you're tapped to go into the special operations world. What were the first things you thought about when you got orders to spend the soft side, the special operations forces side? Admittedly, it was exciting, but it was intimidating. I was going to a special part of the Navy, the SEAL community, the Naval Special Warfare community. And I knew that I was competent as an attorney. I was confident in my abilities, but I knew that I would be doing a lot of non-attorney stuff and I would be in a lot of different environments that I wasn't used to. So it occurred to me, I should get ready. And how did you set out to get ready? What did you do? Well, I had always been working out and running and I increased that back at that point in my life. And you were into martial arts when you were young. I didn't show the picture, we could show it now, right? So you can hang around with these dudes. This is Karate, very nice, very nice. But I mean, so you had some of the ingredients already. Some of the ingredients. So what I did is I thought to myself, what would be helpful? And it occurred to me that I should know how to repel out of a helicopter. I should know how to do sling load operations. Repel being going, sliding down a rope from a hovering helicopter with anybody who doesn't know that. But very cool, that's cool stuff. Yes, so I found myself at Air Assault School getting ready for my assignment to the Navy Special Warfare community. And at the same time, it occurred to me that I should know how to jump out of an airplane. I thought it would be a very awkward moment if I showed up in the SEAL community and they asked me to jump out of an airplane and I said, I don't know how. So I said I have to learn. You know, as a fighter pod, I always said I'd only jump out of an airplane if it were on fire. And I was in a couple of airplanes that were on fire and I still didn't jump out. So, you know, there's just something about leaving the comfort such as it is and safety of an airplane. You had never done any skydiving at all at this point. You're just going to go to jump school. That's the whole of it. I had never done it before. And quite frankly, I was a bit terrified. Jumping out of an airplane is not a natural act. It's an unnatural act. A bit terrified. Yeah, I'm not sure those two words go together particularly well. So, I think you went to Benning probably, right? Do they do all of the, and that's five static line jumps where you don't even have to pull a report. That's right, right? That's right. And then you started free falling, free falling. Sounds like a song because it is a song. How different was it to go out the door for the first time without the static line? Did it, did that matter to you? Did it feel different? It was exhilarating. A static line. By this time, you're not even a bit terrified. Well, I got to admit even on the first couple of free falls, I was scared. I mean, the long short of it, I was. But in very quick order, quick fashion, two things happened. I got good at it, but that wasn't so hard because gravity does 90% of the work. And I found it was quite frankly an adrenaline rush for me. I loved it. And so I started doing more and more. You loved it a lot. We talked earlier, the first time I heard years ago when we worked together at APCSS, how many jumps you had. Frankly, I didn't believe you, but I didn't believe a lot of things he said. So I just scoffed at that, but I've come to believe this. An average military parachute, it's somebody who's on jump orders, reasonable amount of time, probably gonna get what, 60, 70 free fall jumps in their career? Yeah, I think that's a pretty accurate number. Figuring, you know, they jump for pay, they jump for mission. Over time, you have to stay current, if you will, just like in flying. And how many free fall jumps do you have Captain retired, Carlton Kramer? I have 1200 free fall jumps. Unbelievable folks, 1200 times. When 60 to 70 is the norm, 1200, that is unbelievable. You must have been hooked hard. I was, I was, I was an adrenaline junkie. I plead guilty. And you jumped some as civilian as a tandem jump master where you strap somebody to your gear and they have the experience without the responsibility, I guess. I mean, they're part of the, they're dead weight is what they are, hopefully dead as a figure of speech. I did that once at the Air Force Academy when I was an Air Force based man. I loved it. Did all of your tandem passengers love it or did you have any who freaked out once they were out the door? I have, oh gosh, several hundred tandem jumps where I strapped a person to me and took them out on a jump. I think there's only one person who didn't enjoy it. And that was on a landing that person broke their ankle. But I think the other several hundred just loved it. Some people get seasick on a full-time. Isn't that, that's probably all the detail we need. Yes, sir. I couldn't stop laughing. My experience was it was so cool. I couldn't stop laughing. And, you know, someday I thought I might did again, but it isn't all fun and games. So in your jump career, you've had four real close calls. Actually three, sir, I've had three. Okay, three. Statistically what happens when you're jumping and I jump these rectangular shaped parachutes. They're called Ram Air parachutes. On average, every 350 jumps or so, you're going to have a malfunction even if you do everything right. And so over the course of my jumping career, I had three instances where things went horribly wrong. Please share, please share. The audience, I can tell, I feel it through the internet is dying to know about these three yikes moments. Okay, from least exciting to most terrifying. The first malfunction occurred when I was actually carrying a passenger. And we were in free fall, we deployed our main parachute and we had a malfunction. And I determined I had to cut away the main parachute and go back into free fall, pick up some speed and then deploy the reserve. And I was able to do that. And the good news is the passenger never knew. Just never knew what happened, but that was a difficult situation because we were a little bit low and moving a little bit fast. And you've got to pick up airspeed to make sure the reserve deploys properly. I assume I'm thinking through this. That's exactly right. You want a little bit of velocity there so your reserve will inflate quickly. Okay, yikes number two, what was that? Yikes number two was a big mistake on my part. I had a nice free fall, a wonderful jump. I was having so much fun that I lost track of altitude. And I was really quite low and basically ended up deploying my parachute and landing comfortably, but it was a matter of seconds where it would have been a different story. Wow, number three must be something then, if that's. Number three, that takes the brass ring, if you will. I actually jumped out of a military aircraft and to provide some perspective, when we do free fall, we want to be at several thousand feet when we start the free fall at a minimum. We went out at 950 feet, a little under a thousand feet. On purpose though, just as something you might do in a surprise insertion, right? We did it on purpose. We made the assessment that we could do it. And the key was when you came off the ramp of the aircraft, you needed a perfect exit and a perfect main parachute in order to successfully parachute at that low altitude. And I came off the ramp and had the worst malfunction of my life. I had what's called a ball of trash above me. I cut it away, deployed the reserve, and as my reserve popped open, I impacted the ground. Hard. Hard. So after all this, it's so hard that you shattered one of your legs, right? And this one, this was the one I think. Actually, sir, that was another incident. Okay, so four. You're right. So we don't have time to go into the four, the fourth one where you broke the ever living daylights out of your legs. But clearly at some point, you quit jumping because of all these mishaps. I did. Well, not exactly. I jumped for a couple of decades. I loved it, but I ended up making a decision between kids and parachuting. Yeah, here, have a dad. Here's your kids or wonderful kids or just characters, wonderful characters to be around. Would you ever jump again or is that in your past? I think I would. I think I would. Maybe when the kids are all grown up and they're no longer kids, I may take a look at it. And when they can jump with you. We are almost out of time, Carlton. I really appreciate your story. I look forward to hearing more when I get down to visit APCSS. But what's your current figment? I have to ask every guest. Surely you have something, a dream that you're eager to execute and live. What's Caroline Kramer's current figment? I think it would be to travel. And the reason is I spent my whole life traveling. I was in the marshals, my formative years I was traveling. I spent 28 years in the Navy traveling. And with APCSS, I've been traveling. I know that 36 countries in five years. So we only have time to ask you what's the first place you're going when you start traveling yet? Ooh, I'd love to go to Dubai. Dubai. One of my favorite cities. Even though you've been there many times before. I love it. It's a great city. Okay, well, we don't have time for people, for you to tell people why. So they'll have to Google and see what you loved about Dubai. Hey, Carlton, I really appreciate your time. You are one of the more interesting Navy Jags I've ever known and I've had an interesting life. And I am happy that the three, oh no, four near misses were only near misses. So thanks for joining me on Figments, The Power of Imagination. And I bid you aloha as I wrap up another episode. Folks, thanks for tuning in to Figments, The Power of Imagination where we try to inspire and entertain you. I think Carlton Kramer did both today and join me on Figments on Reality. A special thanks, as always, I can't say it enough to the folks at Think Tech who facilitate not just me, but some 20 or 30 other civilian journalists day in and day out, go to their website, find something to watch, but also find a way to donate because it's a true nonprofit and they enable a lot of content sharing from committed civilians who are trying to make the world better. So I'll see you next time on Figments on Reality and Figments, The Power of Imagination. Aloha.