Fahrenheit 32

Fire trucks fight fires. Why don’t ice cream trucks fight ice cream? I bet that’s Mayor Bloomberg’s dream; a whole cadre of converted ice cream trucks whizzing down Manhattan streets and those of the other borough; sirens playing off-key versions of Old MacDonald’ looking for desserts to seize.

We’ve got a bakery in progress at the corner of Lexington and 42nd.

That’s a four alarmer.

If this catches on, like smoking bans, small towns will have volunteer ice cream men. They’ll hang out at the gingerbread house and help old ladies by getting pies out of their trees. They’d be assisted by teen-aged dessert Explorers. Some of these teens will fight boredom by baking cakes; just so they can have a call to respond to.

Parenting

You’ve heard of helicopter parents? Always hovering over their children? My mom was the opposite. I told her I was joining the Army. “That’s nice. Don’t get shot. Come back in four years.”

Now my youngest cousin is in an aviation battalion in the National Guard. They got activated to go to Afghanistan. My aunt and another private’s mother went along with the unit. They rented a condo in Kandahar and pestered theirs kids’ platoon sergeant. “Why did Jones get promoted to spec 4 before my Peterson?”

They pestered the mess sergeant. “T-rats again? My boy deserves better.”

“Moooom.” Their sons would protest.

“We’re not just Army moms. We’re helicopter parents.”

“You don’t know how right you are.”

One of the Apache pilots gave serious thought to letting a stray missile hit their townhouse.

More Ruxpin

Eddy Ruxpin admitted to selling secrets to the Russians.  He wanted to sell Alaska back to them.  He really did, in his mind.  But the reality is that he was one delusional young man.  I never thought I’d be writing this, but here is the whole story.  From the beginning.  Dead drops.  Tundra.  Cyanide. Taiga.  Secret codes. The Pipeline. Invisible ink.  Northern Lights. Microfilm.  Firing recoiless rifles at avalanches.

Alaska from the birth of the earth.  Gold, black gold, earthquakes and volcanoes.  Continental Drift.  Aurora Borealis.  Flora and fauna.

The land bridge.  Vitus Bering.  The Russians.  Expansion.  Exploration.  Industrial Revolution.  Capitalism and Socialism.  The Civil War.  Karl Marx.  William Seward.  John Wilkes Booth.  The Klondike.  Jack London.  Henry Ford.  World War II.  The Cold War.  Statehood. Lee Harvey Oswald.

The Spy Who Wasn’t

Let’s see what’s cookin’ in Oppenheimer’s bitchin’ kitchen. Let’s see what cookin’ in Oppenhiemer’s bitchin’ kitchen. It might be seafood. He was talking ‘bout fission. Watcha drinkin’, Lincoln? Is that a barium frappe or some other radioactive crap? I think I’ll have a Manhattan… Project. Whatcha thinkin’, Lincoln? Find these thoughts confining? Remember! Every mushroom cloud has a silver lining.

Eddy Ruxpin thinks he is a secret agent man; an ersatz Aldrich Ames selling secrets to Japan. But he is more like a real life Walter Mitty and the way this whole thing ends is a real pity.

JD Anaconda is a puzzling gent. He isn’t proud to be a Grenada vet. But he’s a hawk not a dove. When he hits the bottle, he dreams of ‘Nam and glorious guerilla battles. An electronic warrior, he used his head. Planned to get out and go back to school. But he met a Mystic gal instead. Wedding bells would soon toll. Now he writes word games for the New London Day. His cryptography training is starting to pay.

Why do some people deceive themselves? Is it good or is it bad or is it something else? Is reality not good enough that we have to bluff ourselves?

Ruxpin is a squid on a submarine. Decompresses by smoking Stroh’s and drinking pot. The drills they have at sea are frighteningly grim. They never know down there if the Cold War’s getting hot. They go through a launch sequence right to the end never knowing if the balloon went up or if it was just a drill. Locked down in a nuclear powered prison at the bottom of the sea. For Ruxpin it’s no thrill.

Drinking Boone’s Farm and watching Platoon, envelopes Anaconda within an ethanol cocoon. That isn’t Memorex in the VCR; those are memories. Oh yeah, those scenes are his. JD wasn’t infantry; he was a rear echelon guy. That’s not good for his mystique, he’d cry. Yet, he never fired a shot in anger. Truth was that he was a chairborne Ranger.

Why do some people disease themselves by pretending to be someone who they’re not? Reality bites; it may not be up to snuff. But it’s all we got.

Ruxpin screens the Falcon and The Snowman. Dreams that he was played by Timothy Hutton. Dead drops and disguises. Code Names, chalk marks on the street. Invisible ink revealed by applying heat. He writes a phony manual on acquiring a sonar fix on pages and pages of phony code. But it’s all smoke and dagger tricks. One day they inspect his bunk in the barracks. His CPO sees his handiwork. He starts to explode.

They call NCIS for an investigation. NCIS takes Ruxpin in for interrogation. Someone calls for JD, who isn’t in the navy. But he has the skills to decode. 48 hours in a soundproof basement cell two tins of Skoal were enough tell. Ruxpin’s notes are nothing to decipher, that’s Anaconda tells the navy lifer overseeing the case. Ruxpin breaks down; admits it was a hoax. His twisted mind plays sick jokes. He’s dishonorably discharged and sent home to upstate New York; somewhere near Rome.

Why do some people deceive themselves? Is it good or is it bad or is it something else? Is reality not good enough that we have to bluff ourselves?

Thus endeth the story except for a sad coda. Ruxpin wasn’t Ruxpin since I don’t know, nineteen eighty-four. He ends things by drinking Prestone and soda. The spy who wasn’t was no more.

Daydreams are all fine and good as long as you don’t cross over that invisible line, Anaconda would flash back to events that didn’t really happen, but he could always stop that 100 MPH tape. Ruxpin didn’t have that control and it put him in a deep hole. Try to hold on to reality or you might end up in a tragedy.

Why do some people disease themselves by pretending to be someone who they’re not? Reality bites; it may not be up to snuff. But it’s all we got.

Dicky Nixon thought he was Lincoln…

GeneCrimes

Troopers Jhonny Diaz and Ed Hickey sat in a late model Crown Vic. They were GeneCrimes best. Today their job was to arrest fourteen-year old Ryan Rivers. Waiting outside of Ryan’s high school, Diaz and Hickey hoped that no one got to the kid first. They wanted the collar. It would turn out to be a good day.

At two on the dot, the final bell rand. Teenagers streamed out of the building. Diaz pointed at a lanky kid, “That him?”

“Yup,” said Hickey.

“Never forget 12-12-12!’

The pair of cops walked up to a school bus Rivers was waiting in line to enter. “Come here. We’d like to talk to you.”

The cops talked with their hands. First they frisked the kid, then cuffed and stuffed him into the back of their cruiser. His crime? A genetic deficiency.

Two mass murders in two years rattled the state. The people wanted the carnage stopped whatever the price. The Constitutional Public Safety Department dissected the shootings from every conceivable angle. The chief medical examiner called in Sanford Watts. Watts was a geneticist from the state university’s medical school. Geneticists had been used to solve crimes before. DNA evidence went mainstream years ago. But this was a step in an entirely new direction.

Guillaime Barbier delivered Budweiser. Sometimes he stole cases of the suds. Little Brother, the security cams at work caught him. The distributorship fired him and he went postal. Shot up the warehouse like he was in a Western. Then he turned the gun on himself.

Jared D’Orlando was a withdrawn loner with an apocalyptic mom. She had an arsenal. He liked FPS games. Had he been born twenty years earlier and played Mortal Kombat, he wouldn’t have had the balls to turn a local elementary school into a live action X Box game. But he went on a spree raining lead upon flesh and bones. The body count was more than a score. Most of his victims were little kids. Never forget 12-12-12!

Watts examined DNA samples from Barbier and D’Orlando as well as other massacrists like Colin Ferguson, James Huberty, William Calley, and Jared Holmes among others. 90% of them carried an extremely rare variant of the warrior gene that Watts dubbed the “commando gene.” A statistically significant percentage of those with the commando gene committed violent crimes against persons.

A decision was made behind closed doors. It was Executive Order 13-009. The public would have approved (never forget 12-12-12,) but the Constitution wouldn’t. So double-oh-nine was all hush hush. GeneCrimes was formed.

Rivers Ryan had the commando gene and a date with a holding cell. Diaz and Hickey had bagged their quarry and brought him into a sally port at One Public Safety Plaza in New Jerusalem. They were star so they didn’t have to do any paperwork. Junior troopers were stuck with that drudgery. They’d come up with some trumped up charge that would allow them to hold the kid. It was Miller Time. But before they could head out for a celebratory beer, Major Eckert corralled them. Eckert was in charge of GeneCrimes. “Boys, I need a favor.”

“Governor Ned’s in a tight primary race. Judge Horan’s opposition research folks have caught wind of double-oh-nine and our whole operation. Any word of this gets out and we’re in serious trouble. Never forget 12-12-12!”

That was GeneCrimes’ unofficial motto; the date of the D’Orlando shootings. Eckert went on. Apparently a bounty hunter named Chevy Burby found out about double-oh-nine and is feed info to Horan’s people. He needs to be silenced.” The major drew his index finger horizontally across his neck in a throat cutting gesture. “You Puerto Ricans are good with knives, Diaz. A Colombian necktie would send the right message.” Diaz was a cop wannabe since he was eight. And he got his dream job. Hickey couldn’t do anything with a soils science degree and joined the force soon after college. They both became loyal foot soldiers and were malleable by the higher ups. They knew their stuff, but they’d always follow orders.

GeneCrimes couldn’t just pull people off the street and test them for the commando gene. But they could test the inmates in the Constitutional Corrections Facilities. So they did. No one gave a shit about their rights. Carriers had paroles denied, time tacked on to sentences for phony infractions. “Inhumane!” some argued internally. But there was no cure for the commando gene. You had to keep these people off the streets. Never forget 12-12-12!

Male blood relatives of carriers in the prison system were put on a list. First, the ones who had visiting privileges. Then, officials asked inmates for names of family members. These were prioritized by age and other factors. For example, Joel Ryan’s son, Rivers was young and lived in an old Swamp Yankee mill town with terrible schools and less t look forward to after that. He was a high-risk carrier. Five teams of two agents roamed the state checking off names from the list.

Diaz & Hickey were the stars, but the duo of Rob Aselton and Philip Decker weren’t far behind. They had only one less collar on the big whiteboard in GeneCrimes’ basement HQ. Law enforcement was in Decker’s blood. His dad worked homicide for years. His mom’s dad drove a paddy wagon almost a century ago. Peter, his older brother was Border Patrol. Paul, his younger brother, was a correction’s officer. Philip was close to Paul. They lived nearby and their kids were close in age. They’d grill together and watch roller ball on Paul’s HD big screen. After several beers one night, Philip mentioned his new assignment in passing. Paul didn’t pry. Philip didn’t let slip all the details. Nevertheless, Paul got the gist. Carriers of the commando gene were singled out for special treatment. Never forget 12-12-12!

Paul Decker patrolled Cellblock C at Constitutional Max. One of the inmates was Omar Foreman. Hired muscle on the outside, he’d done good time and was up for parole. It was denied. He did not know why. Decker and Foreman were friendly, well, as friendly as Cos and inmates can be. Foreman tells Decker his woes. Decker offers a possible explanation as t why the parole board shitcanned his request. Never forget 12-12-12!

Two weeks later, there was a jailbreak. Foreman was a free man, fugitive, on the run. There was a price on his head; $250,000. It was a different world from the one he left 14 years earlier. Smart phones. Barely any pay phones. Smoking bans. Homeland Security. Chevy Burby.
Burby was literally a human bloodhound. A bounty hunter, he was able to track his prey by scent. A strange cocktail of Angel dust, meth, and coke heightened his sense of smell. Foreman was able to elude the authorities, but he could only escape the nose of Shane Burby for so long. The bounty hunter caught up with him trying to board a Chinatown bus at Union Station. He hauled him into his Monte Carlo SS. 454 cubic inches of power were under the hood. They hauled balls through surface streets and onto I-95.

“Shit, man. I ain’t going back into the system. They’ll never let me out alive.”

“Tough shit, Omar. I’d bring in my mother for 250K. That’s the price on your head.”

“Dead or alive?”

“Dead or alive.”

“Then kill me. I’m dead anyways. Might as well make it official.”
“No can do. I’d lose my license. “
“Awwwww, let me tell you my story. You wouldn’t believe the crazy shit going down. A few months back, they bring in some docs to test us. They won’t tell us what for. Then I got to my parole hearing. I served good time! But they denied me. I was talking to one of the guards and he said they was lookin’ for some commando gene and if you have it, they ain’t letting you out. ‘Whaaat?’ I says. He says some mad scientist located some gene that says whether or not you a threat to go postal. Shit! I remember some preacher who visited us at the Hotel Graybar. He said that either you a saint or a sinner and you can’t change that no matter what you do. Only a cracker would think that you don’t have, whatchoocallit, free will. He should go to the hood. Tell some of the mofuckers I grew up wit’ they can’t do what they want.”
Burby was listening to the rant. “This is all very interesting, Omar. But I’m trying to figure out how to spend $250,000.”
“It’s not just inmates, man. They starting to pick cats up off the street. It’s un Constitutional. If I was a lawyer, I’d sue Ned Dumont for this shit. Make enough to buy an island, too.”
“Dumont, huh? Normally he’s a bleeding heart. Makes it hard for my biz. I’ve been wanting a piece of him.”
Thus, a plan was hatched. Burby turned Foreman in and collected a quarter of a million. He promised Omar that he could get him out again and soon. Meanwhile he planned to blow the lid off this scandal. He also got his hands on The List somehow and started smuggling some dudes on the list over the border into New Moscow. (That’s what they called New York after Russian Gangsters became the de facto rulers and the elected officials became puppets.)
Alas, Eckert was right. Burby was burly, but Diaz was quick with a knife. It was easy to hunt down the bounty hunter. His particular drug regimen was well known in certain circles and few pushers had the inventory to allow him to one stop shop. A big dude was hard to put down, but Trooper Jhonny prevailed and gave him a Colombian necktie; just like the major ordered. Never forget 12-12-12!
Two days after Diaz and Hickey picked up Ryan Rivers, his mother went to the local PD to report him missing. The desk officer entered his name into the computer and it said to contact the Constitutional Public Safety Department. Soon after, two men in black arrived to talk to Mrs. Ryan. Never forget 12-12-12!
About the same time, Diaz and Hickey were at GeneCrimes HQ to get a new name off the list. Never forget 12-12-12!

Hot Dog and a Sheikh

The Timeline

Some guys like George got sent to the desert early.  They wound up at FOB Bastogne in An-Nariyuh.  I was part of a group that flew over with sensitive equipment.  We wound up at a water treatment plant or some sort of infrastructure industrial site for King Fahd International Airport.  We stayed there until the rest of the battalion arrived and we moved into the Tent City.  That meant more supervision and we resented that a bit.  We were desert veterans while the rest of the battalion were a bunch of cherries.

We were on tenterhooks for a while.  At the time, we weren’t sure whether or not Saddam would keep rolling past Kuwait into Saudi Arabia.  The 101^st was light.  We had no armor.  If the Republican Guard rolled in, we might be a mere speed bump for them to roll over.  But the Iraqis dug in and stayed put.  Eventually a sort of normalcy set in at the Tent City.  There were three brigades in the 101^st.  Parachute Infantry Regiments, they were called.  This was despite the fact that the Division used helicopters and no longer jumped out of perfectly good airplanes.  I don’t recall the name of the other two, but one brigade was called the Rakkasans.  Regardless, each of the brigades had a team from our battalion assigned to them.  There was a platoon of Golfs from Alpha Company, a squad of GSRs from Bravo, some interros, some CI guys, and other support personnel and staff.  TCAE was part of the battalion HQ and we set up in the battalion area. 

The mess tent was across the road and the motor pool was about a quarter of a mile away; just past an MP checkpoint.  The MPs had a pole to block vehicles and they stopped everyone, pedestrian or driver and they had to give the password of the day.  There was some fear of local terrorists attacking us.  One time, Bond fell out of a run and arrived at the gate after everyone else.  No one thought to give him the word of the day.  They detained him for a while until one of us came buy and vouched for him.  The guy was wearing a gray t-shirt that said “Army” and was obviously American.  Irvine was creative and would give the password in a funny sentence.  One time, it was Tartar and he talked to the guard about tar turds. 

Chief Joseph wasn’t an Indian.  He was the BMO or Battalion Motor Officer and he lived in the motor pool; like he was Coach Gruden at the practice facilities.  There was a giant radar next to the motor pool.  It had a warning sign warning people to steer clear of it because the microwave radiation might fry your nuts.  It didn’t say so in so many words, but that was the message.  The sign wasn’t translated into Arabic, so native beware.

Eventually, the battalion itself would go out into the field on FTXs.  Mostly, these consisted of jumps.  These were not jumps in the airborne sense.  They consisted of setting up the TOC then tearing it down and moving it to another location.  Usually, there was some captain timing us with a stopwatch.

Brad and I got assigned to the Jump TOC along with Page and Ladison.  The TOC consisted of TCAE and S-3 or Operations.  The jump TOC was a smaller version of the TOC that would move to the new location first, set up operations and operate while the main TOC was in transit.  Got it?  Good.  We did a few jump TOC exercises.  One of them involved carrying all of our gear while we were on foot.  My rucksack felt like it was full of boulders.  Captain Cesar Moreira was in charge of us.  He had a Big Ten education in zoology, but somehow fell into military intelligence.  I think he wanted to get away from Tent City from time to time and used Jump TOC as an excuse.  

This was how things stood in the fall of 1990.  This phase of operations was called Desert Shield.  We were there to defend Saudi Arabia while negations went on to try and peacefully remove Iraq from Kuwait.  Christmas saw a lot of gifts from family and regular Americans who sent stuff to us.  I remember that UConn basketball was starting to obtain national prominence so some aunt sent me some swag.  My godmother taught elementary school, so I’d get letters from those kids, as well.  Page and I saw Bob Hope.  He came to Tent City in late December.  I didn’t see much of the show.  Bob’s cue card guy blocked my view. 

Exiles in Babylon

In January of 1991, gears shifted and Desert Storm started. You might have seen the air war on CNN. You saw more than we did. Once Desert Storm started, the XVIII Airborne Corps went n motion and shifted west. This was Schwarzkopf’s Hail Mary Play. Like I said, we had no tanks or any armored vehicles. Those heavy units stayed to the east near the Persian Gulf and would do the frontal assault against T-72s going in reverse. Meanwhile we’d sweep in from the west in a flanking movement.

It was time to tear down and move out. to the Iraqi border. The jump TOC would fly there. So we left and headed to the airfield to wait for a flight. We waited and waited. Someone had a radio and we listened to CNN for a play by play of the air war. This was a first time a war was broadcast live on TV. Eventually, the wait for a flight was too long. It was like trying to travel on a holiday. So we drove to the border by way of Riyadh. The drive took a couple of days. This was when Iraq was firing SCUDS and we had a SCUD scare outside of the capital so we drove for a while in MOPP gear. I cannot sleep while riding in a vehicle, so I started to hallucinate.

At nite, I could see trees. I was missing the desert for the trees. By the time we got to our destination, the rest of the battalion was there. That is how long we were waiting at the airfield. Now that the war was afoot, I remember all of our vehicles had upside down Vees on them. This was also the Arab number seven. Oddly enough, they don’t use Arab numerals in Arabia. This was to prevent friendly planes from shooting at us.

We didn’t set up tents up north. We just put our cots next to one of the deuce and a half’s. We also had to burn our own shit. I still have a picture of myself doing this. It is one of my few war photos. You had to get the right mixture of mogas and diesel to do it right. Some would take pride in their recipe like they were barbeque pit masters. They made another jump TOC. Or maybe it was called 311th MI Battalion (Forward.) I was a part of this as well.

At one point, a Catholic chaplain passed through. I was an a la carte Catholic at the time and Mass was rarely on the menu, but I wasn’t taking any chances before I set foot into Iraq. You know what they say about atheists and foxholes and all that.

We had kerchiefs and goggles to protect us from the sand. The ground war was getting underway. I almost missed my ride. I forget why that happened, but they were pissed at me. It would have been a serious offense, but I hopped into the Humvee on time. We weren’t part of the first wave, but we crossed the border a day later or so. I recall driving by a SCUD that was downed by a PATRIOT missile. We drove through a Martian landscape (in both senses of the word, it was Martian) then stopped to bivouac. At this point, we heard that they called a cease-fire. Col Riccadelli was pissed. He was with us because he wanted to be the forward most battalion commander and he wanted glory. He missed out on ‘Nam by joining ROTC and this was his chance. He felt that we should have marched on Baghdad. I was filthy and wouldn’t have minded a dip in the Euphrates myself. In the intervening twenty years, I’ve wavered back and forth on whether the colonel was right. He probably was. HW surely would have handled a Saddamless Iraq better than his son did.

Cease Fire!

We spent twenty days in Iraq before they sent us back to Tent City. We had a lot of work ahead of us before we could go home. We had to clean our vehicles so they could pass USDA inspection before they were shipped stateside. They didn’t want any Saudi flora or fauna to come back. No prizes of war were allowed, although some folks tried. Many took sand back. At one point in the motor pool, SFC Irvine asked what I was thinking.

“Echo Tango Suitcase” was what I said. I didn’t mean it personally, but he thought that I was pissed at him. Eventually we reconciled. And I did ETS.

We flew back to the states in April. The flight took three legs. We flew commercial. The Air Force didn’t have enough planes to fly all of us back. First we landed in Rome to refuel, and then it was on to New York. I actually fell asleep on this leg. They were showing Dick Tracy as the in flight movie. I woke up for a few seconds and found the bright colors jarring, so I closed my eyes again. We landed at JFK and they let us off the plane. We were sequestered in a military only area. The men’s room had a lot of military graffiti in it. It was cool. Now it was on to the Campbell Army Airfield. Before we landed, they played that Lee Greenwood song “God Bless The USA.” Yeah, it’s jingoistic, tear-jerking pabulum, but my eyes did well up. I was happy to finally be on US soil and I ran on the tarmac away from the plane. It was sweeter for the married guys who had family to greet them, but I was happy as a clam to be back. It was only seven months, but it seemed like a lifetime.

They let us loose for a week or two. I went home to see my family and friends. Will Hickey had kept in touch with my during my Army days, so I went with him to a party that the Wig’s older brother was holding in Wethersfield. Will had shaved his head during the war. That was his way of showing solidarity and supporting the troops. Folks there were thrilled to see a genuine veteran. Someone asked me if I knew Don Custer; a friend of there’s who was on the Reserves and called up as an MP. Shit. There were only half a million troops over in Southwest Asia.

After I got back to Kentucky, HHOC had a big formation on Monday morning. The XO gave a big speech about doing some “Nitnoid” bullshit. (I think nitnoid was a term he used to avoid profane language, but he wasn’t fooling me.) It was all busywork, cleaning stuff and straightening out the camo nets. At that point, I asked for terminal leave. I had enough leave saved up where I could get out of the army two months early. And I got one over on the government. Right before I left, I felt a pain in my gut that wouldn’t go away. I tried sleeping. That didn’t wok. I was still up at 4:30 when I diagnosed myself with appendicitis. I got into my Cavalier and Chevroleted over to the base hospital. Sure enough, I need to get my appendix removed. Uncle Sam picked up my medical tab.

I almost went back to Kentucky and reenlisted in July. That’s how indecisive I am.

It’s like my Army career had a perfect progression. School training followed by on-the-job training culminating in the war. I didn’t stick around for much of an after action review, though and missed out on some stories from the frontline guys from Alpha and Bravo.
What was Greg’s last name? I left my car at his house. He was a homeboy and played in a local band. Butch Epstein called him a “drummer trapped in a soldier’s body” while were guarding that ammo dump. What was TF-160 up to that week?

Greg went home for some family emergency. And I think Strahan got to leave in the middle of the war to go to WOC school. Greg came back, though. Another guy who went home for a funeral or something was Ray Custudio. He lived on some Pacific island, but they flew him west instead of eat, which would have been shorter. Was he a Golf?

Here’s some stuff about camp life. The 101st was a covering force. I forget exactly what this means. I caught dysentery soon after we got to Saudi. I think it was the milk. Did you know Gamma Globulin shots made birth control ineffective? That might explain some of the pregnancies. IIRC, we originally did laundry in those plastic pans. They weren’t gov’t issue, but we got them somehow. Maybe Captain Thomas picked them up when he went into town in his SUV. I think they let him wear civvies while in towns. All you had to do was add water and detergent, rinse, and they’d dry in 15 minutes. But I think we eventually sent our clothes out.

You couldn’t smoke in Tent City, IIRC. You had to go across the street. Some Warrant Officer liked to yank Grover’s chain by walking around with an unlit cigarette. I think he was in charge of the radio mechanics.

The Saudis would check the mail for any incoming contraband, but they weren’t perfect. Chief Danio’s son subscribed to Playboy and somehow an issue got forwarded to her. I have no idea what happened to it. I don’t think I looked through it. Desert Shield was also my introduction to bottled water. Eventually we were supposed to have running water in tent City, but it wasn’t the highest priority project.

RUMINT was big. Nothing better to do in the desert than speculate. Browne was good at this. He’d also complain,“If only we were one year older, we’d have got out.” Hey! I was a year older than you guys. Some guys did get out in time like some CI guy they called Jam for Jean Marie and that Quickfix guy who liked cows. There were rumors that once the Seventh Corps came in we’d go home. I remember some other rumors like a bored guy on patrol killing a camel with an anti-tank weapon. All that was left were hooves. And supposedly some Marine took a dump on the floor of the King’s mosque.

The Zenith laptops had a basic suite of office software, if I remember correctly. They had a word processor, spreadsheet program, and database. It was tough keeping them and other electronics cool. We got other new equipment while we were out there. I recall civilian trainers being with us while the air war started. They had masks, but no weapons. There were also civilian maintenance guys. I remember one who was a Dead ringer for Jerry Garcia.

Riccadelli and McBryar visited me in the hospital after I had my appendix removed. They knew I was getting out and asked me what I wanted to do. I didn’t really know, but I wanted to go to UConn and major in engineering. I thought that I could learn about the equipment we were using in the Army and how to design or repair it. I kind of wanted to design my own program where I was an expert in SIGINT. But the UConn experience wasn’t good. I tried to take too many hard classes all at once. One was Chem 101. It had a lab on Friday morning. Big Mistake. Thursday nite was like Friday or Saturday nite at UConn. It was the big going out nite. Too, the classes were in giant lecture halls and my Physics prof was talking way above us “P sub naught” might have meant something to me, if he explained it to us first.

Better Than Perfect

When did my twenties end? Did they end when I turned thirty? Did they end a year later when I turned thirty-one? Well, I considered it an end of an era when I finally graduated college not much after my thirtieth birthday. Around that time another significant baseball game took place. I was leaving 1000 Asylum one Sunday at 4 and got into my Cavalier and turned on the radio. I heard the last out to David Wells’s perfect game. John Sterling compared Wells to Homer… Homer Simpson, in contrast to a more patrician looking David Cone. Oddly enough, Cone would pitch a perfecto a year or two later.

1998 was a bittersweet year for baseball. There was a Titanic home run race in the NL between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Folks would show up at BP just to watch Big Mac launch balls into the stands. Turns out that they were using steroids, most likely. I didn’t know at the time or didn’t care. I think that Jose Canseco was suspected of being a user, but most fans figured it was football players who were the big users. I thought ‘roids were bad. The Hickey’s had a kid in their neighborhood named Ken Braithwaite who used them. He killed himself one Christmas Eve by eating a bullet at his father’s garage. But it turns out he had bigger problems then that. He was using heroin as well and his parents were gong through an ugly divorce. One put out a contract on the other.

The Dodgers traded Mike Piazza in a pure salary dump. The O’Malley’s had sold the team to Fox and Piazza wanted to much money. Then again, the team would turn around in the off-season and sign Kevin Brown for the GDP of a small country.

I’m not sure why I was following the Yankees. Was it an inferiority complex? The Red Sox were rather humdrum at that point and New York had crept back up from the abyss. Also, Baseball Prospectus came out around then; a worthy successor to Bill James’s Abstracts and that lit the baseball fires underneath my ass. My friend Bob Plante got a job with WPOP after attending the Connecticut School of Broadcasting, so I may have been listening to the station for moral support. Baseball was always a radio game to me.

What was more tainted? Was it the home run race or was it Well’s perfect game on a chilly afternoon? Wells was hung-over when he pitched it. It might not have even been the best pitching performance that month. Two weeks earlier, Kerry Wood struck out 20 batters in a game. He blew out his arm. He was still around earlier this year, but what a career his might have been.

Hospital Insecurity

I stopped going to UConn in 1993. I pretended that I was still going, but I didn’t. I’d drive out to some park and listen to the radio. Then I’d come back home like I spent all day on campus in lecture halls and labs and libraries. Not sure why I did that. My dad died the previous November. Maybe I was depressed. Anyways, my mom found out and I had to get a job. That was tough. The Cold War was over. Pratt and Whitney would have been an option most of the time, but they were laying off. This was the Peace Dividend. I answered an ad for vacuum cleaner sales? Why, don’t ask me. I knew nothing about the product. We didn’t have carpeting in the Army. If I were selling floor buffers, that would have made more sense.
Kirby was the brand of Vacuum cleaner. It was manufactured in America, by the Scott Fetzer Company. Scott Fetzer was owned by Berkshire Hathaway, which was owned by Warren Buffett, It was Made n America, unlike Electrolux, which was made by some Scandinavian bastards. This is a point we tried to emphasize. Times were tough, so folks were in a protectionist mood. Kirby did steal some foreign ideas. We had a company songbook like we were part of some Japanese conglomerate.

“Kirby Will Shine Tonight.” Was one of the tunes we would sing in the morning before going out on sales calls. We also had “Tales From The Field” where one of the guys who actually sold one of these machines would motivate us with his story about how he sealed the deal. I lasted a month. Supposedly, you would earn a salary on top of your commissions if you did enough “shows” or appointments, but they made it nigh impossible to get your foot into enough doors. They gave you a price they wanted you to sell the vacuum cleaner for, but you could go down. Like a car salesman, you’d use the old ploy. “Let me call my boss.”

“Mary, I got some good news, for you. I can knock $200 off the price if you sign on the dotted line tonite.”
Mary was always the name of our notional customer when we practiced demonstrations. We’d turn the vacuum cleaner on, do a little patch of floor and show her all the dirt that came up.

“See, Mary? See all this dirt!”
It was a quality machine, but it was expensive. We’d get warm leads from a couple of telemarketers and go to their houses. But there weren’t enough to go around, One of the ones I got was far some lady who was on welfare. Didn’t they screen these potential clients?
I wound up on the van crew. We’d go into some subdivision armed with gift baskets to use as bait to get us into the house. The van crew was a bunch of rock and rollers with one foot in the grave. They were guys in their thirties who were all devotees to booze and grass and maybe harder stuff. Bruce was one of them. He lived in a motel. He liked it, but it looked like a hellish existence. Another guy was named Don Eldridge. He lived with his sister and would spend most of his nites and weekends in a drug haze. There was an Eldridge Street in town, so I pretended in my mind that he was actually shabby gentility. These were the guys that actually made sales of vacuum cleaners and they were in dire straits.
One time, we were in West Hartford, going door to door like Fuller Brush men. I found a mark. A strange looking dude who was interested in the Kirby. He said that he repaired computers and it would come in handy to get rid of electronics dust. A very friendly guy was he. But things got weird. He told me that he was a Scanner. I had no clue what he was taking about. He freaked me out when he said it was just like the movie. He could read my mind and had telekinetic powers. The glazed look in his eyes told me that he wasn’t trying to bullshit me and believed this stuff. I almost beat feet right then, but I composed myself enough to grab the demonstrator model. You lost it. You bought it.
Kirby was a low rent version of Glengarry Glen Ross. They even had a sales contest. The prize was a vacation at Jack Tar Resort.

Did some grunt work for JobPro. Working in an ice cream factory was the worst. Hood had a plant in Suffield that seemed so… Soviet. It should have been called Ice Cream Works #17. I worked there one day and they asked me if I wanted to come back. I screamed. I went home, drank a 40 of Crazy Horse Ale, then went out with the Wig and his brother and caused a scene at some chain casual dining place.
Finally, I got a job with First Security. It felt like ‘Nam. My brother worked for First at UTRC. It was a cushy job. Sit at the front desk during off hours and monitor folks coming in and out. I wound up at Saint Francis Hospital. Wacko Jon Dacko ran the account. You couldn’t relax.
It was a big place in a notsonice section of Hartford. When I got there, two gangs were in a war: the Latin Kings and Los Solidos or The Solids. Dacko warned me about this like I was a suburban kid who couldn’t hang. Hey! I was a grizzled vet and still young enough that nothing scared me.
My first day, I was trained by Tommy Harrington. It was 2nd shift. I was Unit 5. Harrington was a relief sergeant. Jake Fortier was Unit 3 or the shift sergeant for second shift. Unit 5 was a rover and had keys to the whole hospital; including the morgue. So we started out by doing fire safety checks. Ostensibly, we were supposed to check the safety on various units, but most guards went through the motions. Then again, the whole point might have been to show our face on the wards. 2-2 had some nasty characters as patients. Street people with habits. 2-2 sticks out in my mind because after we walked that floor we went down the stairs and went outside through an alarmed fire door.

“Signal 9 2-2. Disregard the point.”
That’s what we would radio in to the control room. An alarm went off when we opened the fire door and we had to tell them to disregard it.

One time, a Puerto Rican girl was missing after she went swimming in the Farmington River. The Stateys sent out a diving team and they couldn’t find her body. Eventually, her extended family found her limp corpse, brought it to the ER, and proceeded to riot. I think that I had just pulled a double shift when I got a call from Owen asking for all hands on deck. I drove my Cavalier from Ellington to Hartford in 15 minutes.
Marcus Camby starred at UMass, but he was from Hartford. He got drafted into the NBA. The nite before his first training camp, he and his homies were partying at some after hours place. A fight broke out; someone had to go to the ER and the fracas continued in the waiting room. I was supervising that nite, but it wasn’t my proudest moment. I wasn’t able to maintain order. Fortunately, HPD swarmed the hospital and things calmed down.
Oksana Baiul, the figure skater, wrapped her car around a tree one icy nite. She was still in her teens at the times. She went to the ER. She was loaded and some lab tech leaked her tox results to the press. They got fired. It was the middle of the nite, so I didn’t feel like waking up Dacko or Lucette by paging them, but I should have.
There were labor pains during the building of the Patient Care Tower. Some felt that Saint Francis wasn’t hiring enough minority contractors when they were constructing a new building where the old helipad used to be. So they jumped into the pit. The pit was where the foundation was being laid. We got beaucoup OT during this stretch.
There were gangland shootings frequently. We were afraid of some of these bangers finishing business, so we aliased victims. One time, someone gave a patient Gilbert Bane as an alias. Gilbane was the general contractor on the PCT. It was a lame joke. I was supervising a weekend shift once when a gunshot kid came to the ER. I dubbed him Earl Weaver after the old Orioles manager.
Unit 7 was where the action was; the ER. A lot of that post’s work involved restraining patients. It wasn’t the most humane thing, but I could understand it. One time, some plainclothes cop brought in some kid who was a low-level crack dealer. The kid put some rocks in his mouth and wouldn’t spit them out. He refused to. So the cop brought him to the ER to get him to spit it up. They called in a bunch of us to help out. O’Neil was there, so was Dacko. I was there, too but I got called away for an alarm elsewhere. I’m glad that happened. Right after I amscrayed, the kid ingested the crack and had a massive fatal heart attack right there.
Most of the ER duty was more mundane. We’d restrain junkies and alkies in C-side. They dreamed of going to the Institute of living. At least the frequent fliers did. But beds there were scarce. We had to use universal precautions against blood borne pathogens. Thanks to the HIV virus, blood was poison. Usually this meant latex gloves, but sometimes we had a spitter on our hands and that meant donning masks. Sometimes we had tourists. Like the time the Allman Brothers Band were playing at the Meadows. Some dude had too many shrooms and they brought him to the ER to sleep them off. An HPD cop brought in a six-toed junkie and he was raising a ruckus.

“Hey man. Can you keep it down?” The concert kid said. He looked a little like Curtis from the old Ameritrade ads.
“You at the concert tonite?” asked the cop.
“Yeah.”
“Goddam hippie.”
Another time, it was a snowy day and classes at most of the area schools were cancelled. A couple of West Hartford kids got into one of their parent’s liquor cabinets. It may have been their first taste. They got hammered and went outside to make snow angels. One kid passed out. The other one freaked out and called 911. I was 7 that nite and when I got to C-side, they were there with the street people. I think that scared them straight. The more sober one was drooling so much that the EMTS put a mask on him. His partner in wine threw up in front of me.
That was gross. But I once saw the innards of a stabbing victim hanging out of his body. Even grosser was this teenaged girl. She tried to kill herself on her birthday by drinking antifreeze. The doctor and nurse pumped her stomach as we held her down. They stuck a rubber hose up her nose and poured some charcoal solution into her. I held the girl down, but I could not hold down the meal I just ate in the café.
Sometimes we had to restrain more than the limbs. One time, there was a head banger in C-side. Raul was the tech on duty and he rode his motorcycle to work that day. With his blessing, we corkscrewed Raul’s helmet on the guy’s head.
“KNDE 871 Clear at x hundred hours (or x thirty hours.)”
That was our radio call sign. But it took me a while to figure it out. O’Neil or whoever was in the control room usually mumbled it.
Let me tell you who was who. Unit 1 was the captain. Jon Dacko was the captain the whole time that I was at Saint Francis. 1S was Lucette. She was the Security Director and a hospital employee. 1A was the lieutenant. First it was Eric Letendre, and then Jake got promoted. 2, 3, and 4 were the shift supervisors. 5 was the rover with the keys and the tour wand. 6 guarded the main entrance. 7 was in the emergency room. He was assisted by 7A in the evenings. 7A had to remain in the waiting room. 8 guarded the ER driveway and handed out tokens for the ER parking lot. You wound up hanging out with the ambulance crew. They thought they were God’s gift to the world. Pam Paseka, my partner in deli, worked for one of the ambulance companies. She never said boo to me. I waited five years and she never did. I would have talked to her if she did, but I’m shy or snobby like that. I want others to approach me, not vice versa. 9 drove the patrol SUV. The thing broke down constantly. It wasn’t meant to be driven 24/7. I crashed it once responding to a signal 16. 10 and 11 patrolled 1000 Asylum Avenue. Unit 9 would sometimes escort ladies to their car, especially at nite. We weren’t supposed to accept tips, but one time two old biddies kept insisting that I take a sawbuck from them. Who was I to argue? I told Eric Letendre about this. He told me that he’d pretend I didn’t tell him and never mention anything like that again. Around this time, some relief sergeant named Torres on 3rd got fired. A few days later, I was driving around in the Explorer with Eric. Some lady from Medical Records was riding with us over to 1000 Asylum. I forget her name, but she was tight with us because she had to go down into the bowels of that building on occasion during the nite and it was spooky. She asked why Torres was fired. Letendre said, “He was accepting gratuities from escortees.”
I almost lost my shit. If I had a dip of Skoal between my cheek and gum, I swallowed it then.

10 was a 9 to 5 Mon thru Friday guy; Sergeant Winston Gordon. 12 was in another building at 140 Woodland. 13 was downtown where some nursing students lived.
14 was at the Cancer Center. 15 guarded the entrance from the parking garage. 18 was on 4-6 in the maternity ward. 19 was at the entrance to Building 6 across Woodland Street from A-Lot. A lot of folks didn’t like Post 19 because it was boring. I didn’t mind it because I could dip Skoal and people pretty much left you alone. 20 was at the Nursing School. 21 was a rover. 22 and 23 escorted visiting nurses throughout the city. Later on, there was post 27 in the new Patient Care Tower. There was also a post in the PG. That one sucked. I flipped out one day when I couldn’t get a visitor to move his car out of the way of the entrance. There wasn’t enough oxygen in there on a hot day and I was running on fumes. Anyone else would have been fired, but Dacko liked me, I guess. We also had a couple of German Shepherds and their handlers.
It was a frustrating job. We had responsibility, but no authority. We weren’t armed; which was probably a good thing. The pay was low and it wasn’t a cool slacker job like bar backing, or working in a pizzeria, bookstore or coffeehouse. We were The Man, but we weren’t. Even Environmental Services (what they euphemistically called the janitors) were in a higher caste.
You know what made it feel like ‘Nam? The hours. We had a standby system. If someone booked off or called in sick, #1 standby from the previous shift would have to pull a double. If someone else booked off, #2 would have to stay and so on. Sometimes you felt like you lived at the hospital. They wouldn’t let you sleep there, though, like an intern and I recall at least one guy crashing his car after a double shift.
All of this would have a cascading effect. Someone would quit (sometimes midshift) and some kid would get stuck covering for him. He’d say, “Fuck this! I can work at Mickey D’s instead.” And he’d quit. The rest of us would turn into zombies. I think that this was around the time I discovered coffee.
I started working for First Security in August of 1993. I started on second shift. “No one starts on first shift.” That’s what Dacko told me. Of course, a few weeks later, some new hire wound up on first shift. In September, I was trained one Saturday on the use of handcuffs and restraints. My friend got married the nite before and I was massively hung-over. Eventually, I wound up on first shift and even got promoted to relief sergeant. There was a lot of turnover at the hospital. Many officers would only last for a month or less. Others left to become correctional officers. We had some cop wannabes, but it was tough to get on to a town’s police force. There was a lot of competition. But the prisons were hiring a lot back then. I almost joined the DOC myself. So, it was easy to get seniority on the security department. And I was one of the smartest guys there. The job didn’t exactly attract wizards. But I wasn’t a leader of men and had trouble instilling confidence in people so my promotion wasn’t easy to come by. Lucette didn’t like the fact that I had trouble making eye contact.
To blow off steam, I’d have a few drinks with The Wig. I must have really got drunk one time, because I volunteered to go to third shift. I didn’t like first shift. Too many people around and too much office politics. But third? It was in the middle of the nite. During the winter, I never saw the sun. Eventually, I went back to school fulltime and worked Post 11 on weekends. The Wig actually inspired me. He went back to school. I figured that if he could do it, so could I. He wound up an internship short of getting his business degree. But I stayed the course and got a BA in Econ.
Post 11 was chill. No one was at 1000 Asylum on the weekends except some IT guy. I did a lot of my econ homework and read a lot of other books while on duty. I did have to do Mail Rounds on Saturday. That meant escorting the mailman around the building so I could unlock doors and he could deliver. We had this fat postman who reeked of mold or mildew. I could never quite place the smell, having lost a lot of my sense of smell over in the Dirty East. I could also never figure out how a guy who walked so much kept that physique. Finally, I had the security job that I wanted. Bill James wrote his Baseball Abstracts in a similar situation. I did write a short story on Post 18. I should have done more, but I can’t turn back the clock. I lucked out and got a job right after I graduated from ECSU. Did I like working at the hospital? Not really, but it had some fun moments; especially on the weekends when we could explore strange corners of the hospital.
I told you about Captain Dacko and a few others. Let me tell you about some of the rest of the people. Bev Greenaway was the diabetic Barbadian control room queen. She worked from 6 to 2 in the control room. This was a windowless cell that had phones, radios, alarms, and security cameras. When she got excited, she would speak in patois and was difficult to understand. Chris Beebe was the TO or training officer. I remember when they had a dedication ceremony for the new Patient Care Tower. “Seven Amazing Stories” is what they called it. It was a really frustrating day for him because he was in charge of that special detail. I was in pain from standing on a floor all day that was as hard as diamonds. Chris looked defeated as he dragged on a cigarette after the ceremony was over. They didn’t have a TO when I started. Tommy Harrington was the guy who trained me. He was an 11B in the National Guard. Later, he became a volunteer fireman. In addition to cop wannabes, we had a lot of firemen.
Dacko was an ex-cop from Donora, Pennsylvania. He was related to Scott Zolak and went to high school with Ken Griffey, Senior. There were rumors that he was a cokehead. I’m not sure how true those were. Someone said that Sergeant Gordon was his connection, but people like to make shit up. Dacko was heavyset, quick to anger, and would sometimes call you five times in five minutes while you were off duty. It was like he was George Steinbrenner while I was Billy Martin.
Eric Letendre was the lieutenant when I started. He came up through the ranks and used to be a canine handler. Later, he left to do undercover work as a plant in a plant. That was part of First Security’s Investigative Services Division. But it wasn’t for him. It is hard to be a rat. He worked from six at nite to two in the morning, but I’m not sure what he did other than write the schedule. That was a gargantuan task in and of itself.
Jake Fortier was unit 3 and was later promoted to 1A. He liked to drive around the campus in his POV and surveil surreptiously.
Brian Harvill was Unit 2. When I first met him, I thought that he looked familiar but I couldn’t place him. Turns out that he was a year ahead of me in high school. He was friends with Joel Greene who tended bar at Elmo’s.

I wrote earlier about some calamities I experienced on the job, but I was never as defeated as the Saturday when some lady died and her family proceeded to tear up a ward. We were warned that people sometimes grieve differently, but this was dangerous. We had to call the cops up to assist. There wasn’t much else I could do.
Shaka Zulu wasn’t a security officer, although he once grabbed one guy’s hat and wore it. He was a frequent flier and holder of the longest arrest record in Hartford history. It was all minor stuff like disturbing the peace and being drunk and disorderly. If being an obnoxious drunk was criminal, he was the Moriarity or John Gotti of the North End. He wouldn’t seek treatment in the ER. He’d just come by on a cold nite and crash. Looked a little like Redd Foxx. Shaka annoyed the hell out of staff and visitors and patients, but we found him amusing. We had to kick him out before the day shift arrived. Another guy like that was Homer. He was the king canner of Hartford. Eventually, he sobered up and bought a van. And he really did live in it down by the river. For him, this was the high life.

Joe Zordan was Unit 20 during the day. He had a feud with the second shift guy, some oldster named Goodkofsky who Joe insisted on calling Goof Offsky. It got bad enough, not bad enough for them to fire Joe, but bad enough for Zordan to get exiled to third shift.
Another character we had to deal with was Mr. Welch. He was the Post Inspector. He was an old guy who worked for First Security. He kind of reminded me of Command Sergeant Major McBryar. First had various other accounts in the Hartford area and he would visit those as well as Saint Francis, but he loved to write people up. For petty violations. And sometimes, a visit by him could end your career. Like Owen, for example. Owen was this older guy who worked post 12 part-time. It was one of those satellite posts. He had his nice little fiefdom. The building would close at seven or eight in the evening and he would lock up, return to headquarters and turn in his radio and keys. He usually changed into civvies before driving back to HQ. Well, one day, Mr. Welch showed up at his post at 7:58 and Owen was wearing jeans and sandals. They fired his ass.
Bruce Lincoln was a guy who worked third shift. He wore a bulletproof vest. He never washed it and he smelled worse than my friend, the Saturday mailman. We called him stinkin’ Lincoln. One time, I was supervising first shift on a summer Saturday and would be relieving Lincoln, who was supervising third. I went to 125 Riverside Drive with The Wig. I was gonna have a drink or two, and then be home safely in bed by midnite. While I was there, I ran into Lincoln and Cole, another third shifter. They had to go in in a few hours and they were hammered. They wanted me to join them for shots. Uh uh. I was afraid that I was going to arrive at the hospital in the morning only to find nothing but a smoldering ruins. Lincoln was the guy who crashed his truck after pulling a double.
O’Neil was eventually promoted to sergeant on third shift. But he hit a guy. That was a no-no. He was canned.
I was always courteous and polite and gave good directions. Customer service was one of the things they wanted out of us. I was just indecisive. At least I wasn’t as indecisive as Ted. He was my doppelganger and NYPD Blue fan. Like me, he used to be an Army linguist. He was also a longhaired vegetarian who was Keith Doberman to Owen’s Rush Limbaugh. Sometimes, when Owen’s shift was over, he’d gab about politalks with whoever was in the control room. I’m not sure what t Ted was doing at Saint Francis. He seemed out of place. He wanted to become a sergeant. The pay was better. He whined and whined and eventually got promoted. But his own troops complained about how he took forever too respond to alarms and other stuff Ted was doing. They brought in Tim Howard, the ADM to break the news to him that it wasn’t working out and they let him go.
As for major triumphs, I did manage to work for First for close to five years without getting fired. That was quite a feat. I came close once towards the end when my relief didn’t show up one Saturday nite and I was all set to go to a stag.
A typical shift started with roll call. They wanted us in fifteen minutes early for roll call. We weren’t paid for this and someone could have probably filed a complaint to the Labor Department about this but such is life. Jake Fortier was good at this because he had a droll delivery. He’d warn us to be on the lookout for various outpatients, usually from the dialysis unit who would wander the halls and steal things. Or the fired doctor who was a gun nut and had an ex-wife who worked in the ER. Then it was on to your post. Usually, standbys got to choose their own post, and there were always standbys, so you wound up on post 8 or 19 freezing or sweating your ass off. You got two breaks. A shift; one short 15 minute one and one for a meal. Usually you rotated post halfway through the shift. After eight hours you were done. Unless you weren’t finished with writing your reports. We wrote a lot of reports like we were real instead of rental cops. You couldn’t take a shit without having to write it up. Some guys couldn’t write their way out of a wet bag. It’s not like they often had to. The restraint reports were prefilled and you just had to circle different items and put in a date and time. The rest of us lapsed into a dry reportese: “At the above date and time, yada, yadier, yadiest.” And we referred to our selves in the third person like “this writer” or “this officer” like we were Rickey Henderson. The supervisor always stayed late. Shannon Conover was Unit 4 when I started at Saint Francis and he took forever to finish his paperwork. He looked a little like Stephen Colbert. I don’t think he could hack the job, but it took a special person to hack the job.
We had a secretary. I think that here entire job consisted of ordering lunch (we ate a lot of Chinese) and typing these reports into a computer. I worked most weekends, but I got some off for reserve duty. I didn’t like the Reserves as much as I enjoyed active duty. Less camaraderie and it was an older crew. More lifers and half of them had civilian jobs with various governments, be they fed, state, or local.