Vic Socotra

17 October 2008

Small Circle of Friends

Soviet DELTA III Launching SLBMs

I have not been out of the Tunnel Eight very much in the evening of late. Things were so nuts in the office starting in early summer that I felt lucky to get home and walk the long block with my Heavy Hands swinging, cook some dinner and go to bed.

Following the antics on the campaign trail and the end of the baseball season were enough to provide diversion, and by the time the Government managed to spend the last of their Fiscal Year 2008 bucks, I was just plain worn out.

We worked most of the weekends, so the end of summer passed almost without notice. It has been unseasonably warm here in the bottom lands by the placid Potomac, and so it came as a bit of a shock that the big Fall classified symposium out at Westfields was upon us, and all sorts of old pals were in town for the event.

It is a great opportunity to network with the other Bandits, and get a candid view from Government about what sort of challenges have to be met in the odd symbiotic relationship between industry and government in the Military Industrial Complex.

Most of us retired Spooks have continued in the business after retirement, and the Symposium is a brief truce in the wars between the companies over contracts. We share a fellowship forged in the Cold War, and made an effort to scoop up those of us who were together in the Pacific twenty-five years ago, when the Red Bear was strong.

It was quite a turn-out. There were nine or ten of us who had served in a little pressure-cooker of a command that monitored the activities of the Red Banner Pacific Ocean Fleet, and the status of the nuclear weapons they had pointed at us.

Our focus were the two major operating bases at Petropavlovsk, where the front-line boomers were home-ported, and the major Fleet operating facility at Vladivostok. Of course, it was a global problem, and we were part of a network that had wired the ocean for sound, and flew surveillance from outposts on the perimeter of the Soviet empire from Adak to Reykja vik.

One of us is still in the government. His presentation in the afternoon was a sensation. The old Cold Warriors in the audience were agog at his account of what the Russians called “Stability-2008,” a major combined-arms exercise that put on display their full spectrum of military capabilities. Ground, air, naval and strategic forces all did their thing with great panache. It was the talk of the bar.

See, the Russians are back.

The Capital City Brewery is no longer a smoky place. They went tobacco-free a couple months ago to accommodate the new, more healthy generation. My pal was having an Amber Waves and I was sipping a lager.

He leaned over and said “The Russians are everywhere. Everywhere. They are coming back to Aden. They have a task force in the Med. They flew heavy bombers to Venezuela last month. They are back in Cuba. They are awash in oil money, and they are spending it in a big way.”

“I’m sorry I missed the presentation. Was it like the old days?”

“You bet. Almost line for line. Ground exercises in the field with Byelorussian forces. Submarine emergency dispersal from the Kola Peninsula and Petropavlovsk. Tu-95M strategic bombers launching cruise missiles. Simulated strategic nuclear exchange with a long-distance ballistic missile launch from a bomber in the European arctic to the broad ocean area of the western Pacific. It was just the way it was when we were Lieutenants and it looked like they were ten feet tall.”

“That must have been a shot of Viagra for the old Spooks,” I said. “I heard that the Russians just bailed out the government of Iceland. Does that mean they are going to be flying Backfire bombers out of the former US Navy base at Keflavik? That was the base that enabled us to slam the door on them at the Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap.”

Of course we did not say it that way. We spoke in acronyms and nicknames that are quite impenetrable to the average citizen. BEARS and GIUK and SLBM and ALCM are things and places I had ceased to worry about years ago. It is a specialized language, and much too Inside Baseball jargon for anyone to understand who was not part of the brother-and-sisterhood.

Women were just being integrated into the Cold War “total force” back then, and there were some things that had not completely been worked out in the relations between the sexes, and that added to the general chaos.

“Don’t know,” said my pal gravely. “But clearly taking Iceland out of the strategic picture, and deploying their navy to all the choke-points where oil and goods have to transit complicates our response.”

“So what are we supposed to do? We are a little tapped out at the moment, if you hadn’t noticed.”

“Watch the price of oil,” said my pal thoughtfully. “I don’t know what the price-point is when all this becomes unsustainable for Mr. Putin.”

“It dropped below $70 bucks a barrel today,” I said. “Is that where it is?”

“Maybe. I have some of my analysts looking at it.” The stack of greenback on the bar swindled over time, and we gathered up a dozen of the old fossils and wandered down the block to an Italian restaurant run by Sammy the Syrian.

He got out when the Soviets still had submarines in Tartus, though he never saw them. The merriment around the table went on through the salad and main course, fueled by memories of the madness that went on in the twenty-four hour a day watch centers. I sat between Vinnie, who I worked for at sea and ashore three times, and Chris who just returned from Baghdad last year.

I won’t bore you with the table talk, except to mention that a one-act play about it could incorporate the best elements of Animal House combined with a dollop of Slouching Towards Armageddon.

Sammy was disappointed that we did not order more wine, nor s tudy the dessert cart. We are getting on in years, after all.

We parted on the concrete at Shirlington, some headed for hotels, others for late flights across oceans and continents. I played a mix CD in the Hubrismobile on the way back to Big Pink. An old Phil Ochs song happened to pop up in the queue:

“Riding down the highway, yes, my back is getting stiff
Thirteen cars are piled up, they're hanging on a cliff.
Maybe we should pull them back with our towing chain
But we gotta move and we might get sued and it looks like it's gonna rain
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.”

Everything old is new again, I guess. I poured a nightcap when I got back to Tunnel Eight, and turned on the television to see the demise of the Red Sox in their series with the Rays.

It was more than a little remarkable. The Sox rebounded from a seven-run deficit in the seventh to win, 8-7. It was a miraculous rally, since only the 1929 Philadelphia A’s had ever overcome that big a lead.

Shaking my head in amazement, I wandered through the place shutting things down, wondering about the price point of oil, and whose heavy bombers were going to be in Iceland.

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