the District of Arizona, but the total lack of formal contacts between Schlanger and the military in that district.
Strait's situation is far different. His nominal custodian, unlike Schlanger's, has enlisted the aid and directed the activities of armed forces personnel in California in his dealings with Strait. Indeed, in the course of Strait's enlistment, virtually every face-to-face contact between him and the military has taken place in California. In the face of this record, to say that Strait's custodian is amenable to process only in Indianaor wherever the Army chooses to locate its recordkeeping center, see n. 3, infrawould be to exalt fiction over reality.
In a closely parallel case the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that an unattached reserve officer who lived in New Yorkand whose application for discharge as a conscientious objector was processed in New York could properly file for habeas corpus in New York, even though the commanding officer of the reservists was in Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. Arlen v. Laird, 451 F. 2d 684. The court held that the only contacts the serviceman had had with his commanding officer were through the officers he dealt with in New York. Those contacts, it concluded, were sufficient to give the *345 commanding officer "presence" in New York. It concluded:
"Quite unlike a commanding officer who is responsible for the day to day control of his subordinates, the commanding officer of the Center is the head of a basically administrative organization that merely keeps the records of unattached reservists. To give the