29 July 2003

The rains came again last night. They swept over the metro region after the commute was done for me, and the only thing they did was rob me of the lengthening shadows by the pool. I listened to the rain through the open door to the balcony, feeling the humidity flow into the room. The mail contained a couple credit card statements and the latest Newsweek. The Hussein boys were on the cover, a jolly picture of Uday and Qusay in better times. Uday still had his close-cropped hair and beard, Kusay with the moustache just like Daddy's. Both of them share his Dad's eyes, Tikiriti eyes, dark and and deep.

The special operations guys were calling the former number two and three targets of importance in Iraq "Beevis and Butthead," after the twisted cartoon characters. I liked the term, and laughed when I first heard it. Most of the original story was wrong, I read in the article. The villa in Mosul where they were killed was not a hardened bunker, nor were they particularly heavily armed at the end, and there was only one bodyguard with them. The last one firing a weapon was a 14-year old grandson of Saddam, Quasay's son. He died alone, while the other three died in the bathroom.

The death pictures were displayed in little boxes at the bottom of page 24. Only the faces were displayed, lcearly with the intent to demonstrate that this generation of the Hussein dynasty was not coming back. I was prepared to believe that it was them, though both the boys were the worse for wear and had abandoned the western style look. Their beards were thick and wild. Beevis seems to have lost what remained of his hair and Butthead had gone positively native. Apparently military authorities decided the pictures were not specific enough and had the morticians do their best on the corpses. Showcased next to the you-are-here Che Guevara images were two eerie shots of the Boys the next day, carefully groomed and waxed, with artificial tans. They looked pretty relaxed, considering.

In a deviation from Muslim practice, Beevis and Butthead are being held in a freezer pending release of the bodies to the next-of-kin. Task Force 20 would like it to be their Dad, who has got to running pretty ragged today. Several of his personal security detail were rolled up over the weekend, and Task Force 20 scooped up another one overnight. They say that Dad is much beter at life on the run than his sons were, more disciplined. He moves frequently, never staying at the same place for long and not repeating his pattern of movement. He has been reported in the Tikrit area, and in villages up north. Astonishing hubris, lingering at the scene of the crime. I should think that will end in the near term. The Boys were worth $30 million in bounty, fifteen mil apiece. It was self-paying, too, since they reportedly had a hundred million in petty cash at the house. The bounty on Dad is $25 mil, and we can pay that out of the same fund, if necessary.

I therefore believe it is just a matter of time before the Saddam era is over. I hope so, anyway. With his demise may come a respite from the attacks on our occupying forces. Given the rumors about the number of his body doubles, they will probably have him waxed up as shiny as a new Ford when they display him. I doubt if he wishes to be taken alive.

SARS died, too. The Chinese report the last twelve patients are now symptom free, the last infectious patient reported back on the 5th of July. Is it gone, or will it come back? We don't know. It may not be present in people anymore, but it is clearly still in the animal species from whence it came. Twenty-one days is the period from onset to confirmed seriological evidence. So I suppose that is the good news, the only trick is to wait and see if it returns with flu season in the Fall, or wait for the next little microbe to jump species.

And of course Bob Hope is dead of pneumonia. He made his century mark, and was alert and aware of the outpouring of admiration at the celebration of his centennial. I saw the news of his passing as I waited to go into the Deputy's office yesterday morning. I was distracted during the meeting, since the CNN continued to play in the background right through the meeting. Actually, the Deputy was watching, too. The clips of the last century of shows ran while the audio played interviews with Red Buttons, Mickey Rooney and Phyllis Diller about their times with the review. Bob would have been pushing fifty when I was born, and the Korea War and all the rest still in front of him. I got a couple e-mails about his visits to III Corps in Vietnam, and to the ships of the Fleet at sea. They were intensely personal accounts, not altogether flattering about the impact of Hollywood on the war. But these were stories by young officers who had to manage the circus associated with the show, or provide security for it against the enemy, and the presence of the great entertainer and his entourage must have been a colossal pain in the ass.

I was deployed one time on Midway, one of those interminable cruises that had no fixed conclusion. We were just out there and didn't know when, or if, we would leave our station in the Northern Arabian Sea. We had been out of sight of land for fifty or sixty days, remarkable in those days, and found our rhythm. We launched airplanes twelve hours a day and recovered them and then the other carrier would cover the next twelve. I would rise around 0400 to prepare for the morning's first launch events, and work through the early afternoon. My partner would relive me and I would bake in the sun for a couple hours and then eat, watch the movie and sleep until it started again. If the air conditioning kept working, which it did not necessarily, it was a complete and self-contained haze-gray universe. It was pushing Thanksgiving, the Filipino mess specialists had decorated the dirty-shirt wardroom with punch- out paper turkeys and Pilgrim hats. Then we head that a USO troop was going to fly out to boost our morale. It was not the Bob Hope traveling circus, though he was still heading out to spend the holidays with the troops. I think it was the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.

I saw a couple of the girls down in the wardroom. They were wide-eyed after the carrier landing, and surrounded by a escorts and minders. In those days there were no women at sea, and the look and sound of a female voice was something alien in the vast steel universe. I looked at them, dumbstruck. I had forgotten how much of life we were missing, how desperately I desired the company of someone who was not wearing a flight suit or puffing a Marlboro around a bushy mustache. I was almost paralyzed with a sense of loss, knowing that I would not be able to exchange more than an idle pleasantry with our fair visitors, and that the hope for anything else at all was months away. I took to my bunk and did not rouse out of my funk for a week or more.

I don't know what the bulk of the troops thought about it, or what the guys thought about the hoopla that Bob Hope brought with him. I remember my Boss on my first ship had a picture of the Bob Hope Review when the circus came to the USS Oriskany to build his morale. The whole crew was there to entertain the "O" Boat, Jerry Colona and the band and old Ski Nose himself. But Bob isn't in the picture, or any of the other personalities. This is a picture of the young Ann Margaret, stunning in her beauty. The Boss kept the picture in his desk in the office and we would look at it. The picture was taken from just about the front row, no mistaking the fact that the Boss was able to wangle himself down there. The most distinctive feature might have been the wild look as Ann swirled her hair, or it might have been the fact that her tight glittery skirt was hiked up a little. Or it might have been the fact that she wasn't wearing any panties.

Now that was a show.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra