In my quest to add my Army Achievement Medal to my file to count for promotion points for November, I dealt with personnel both on the Battalion and Company levels. I'm talking about our clerks, here.
At the Battalion, the "clerk" is the same rank as me, and has been here long enough that I recall (perhaps incorrectly) that he was a SPC when I was a SPC. (Could be more False Memory Syndrome, though.) Being a clerk is his primary MOS (job) in the Army. He should know his stuff.
At the Company, our current clerk is a relative newcomer to the unit (okay, she's been here for about a year, I guess, but everyone's a relative newcomer to me). She has been in the orderly room for about a month. She is a Korean linguist by trade. She does know her stuff.
She wound up helping me about as much as I had to help myself in order to get the BN clerk to take my paperwork. His claim of "I don't even know if we have an example for that memo" was shot down by the fact that she had just submitted one for herself that morning (and I later saw it on his desk).
She also paid me what I thought was a great compliment: "SGT [pseudosoldier] is one of the two best NCOs we have. He and SGT Silverback are really great." Not only the blanket statement first sentence, but comparing me to Silverback is pretty damn cool.
What's great about Silverback is that he cares for his soldiers. He is tactically and technically proficient. And he doesn't take any crap from higher. (Actually, his greatest drawback is that in not taking crap, he winds up pissing people off. Burns some bridges.) There are many many worse things than being compared to the gorilla.