December 24, 1990

A week ago, Defense Minister Dmitri T. Yazov summoned two rogue army colonels to his office and warned that their public tirades against President Mikhail S. Gorbachev were giving the military an image problem. Secured against Marshal Yazov's rank by their membership in the Soviet Parliament, the colonels recalled later in interviews, they told their superior that they would not obey his admonition to tone down their right-wing evangelism.

At Hale & Dorr's annual meeting at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in early 1988, the law firm's managing partner singled out Blair L. Perry for his contributions over the previous 31 years. Mr. Perry was not ready to retire, and continued to practice law. But last March, almost two years to the day after that festive dinner, the same managing partner approached Mr. Perry with a very different message: this time, he was letting him go.

Over five decades, Alcoholics Anonymous has established itself as the nation's most accepted path to treating drinking problems. But in the last year, people unhappy with the organization's spiritual emphasis have spurred the growth of a secular self-help program, Rational Recovery. The program has perhaps 2,000 members at any one time, compared with a million or more members in Alcoholics Anonymous. But the California-based Rational Recovery now has meetings in 100 cities -- from Boston to Pasadena, Calif. -- up from 30 at the beginning of 1990. The four-year-old organization is affiliated with the American Humanist Association in Amherst, N.Y.

Nine days before the deadline, thousands of Californians are defying a ground-breaking state requirement that they register their military-style semiautomatic guns. Many gun owners are calling their defiance an act of political protest in the tradition of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi. "If civil disobedience was good enough for Dr. King, it's good enough for me," said Mike Wright, a member of Gun Owners React Committee, a private lobbying group.

To support the rapid American military buildup in the Persian Gulf, the Defense Department has been paying high prices to charter vessels and book space aboard regularly scheduled freighters -- sometimes twice the standard commercial rate. Some shipping experts suggest that the Government has greatly overpaid for charters, particularly in the first two months of the gulf crisis. Robert W. Kesteloot, a shipping consultant in Reston, Va., who retired in 1986 after six years as the Navy's director of strategic sealift, termed the rates that shipowners are charging the Government for chartering some of the larger vessels "mind boggling." He added, "They'd never get that in peacetime."