Untitled Document

24 April 2004

Relationships

It began for me in the evening hours of April 24, 1980. It was the chill of recognition that something profoundly bad had begun, and that there might not be an end to it.

The Brits might date it differently, perhaps to the shrieking ululation of an angry mob clutching at the landing skid of the last civilized helicopter out of the Crown Colony of Aden as Yemen gained ferocious independence in 1968.

But it was 1980 for me. I was not there, in the desert, though I had been with the machines that were destroyed only two months before. I was finishing my home leave, and getting ready to launch out of Travis Air Force Base for a tour with U.S. Forces Korea. I was single and not entirely happy with that, but there was no time for anything else.

I was in San Francisco, and I was sleeping with a woman I had met in Kenya the year before. The visit was not going well. She seemed to want to take the relationship to the next level and I wanted simply to fill myself with the scent of America before I went overseas again.

She had not been my first choice to see in the last city in America before I went over the broad Pacific, not by two. But she is who I wound up with. We were discussing the state of the relationship when the news came over the little clock-radio by the bedside.

She was an interesting woman, but she was not nearly as interesting as what had happened. I explained that I had to be going. She caustically asked if there was anything I thought I was going to do about it from Korea, but I said that wasn't the point. I needed to get back to where I could do something. Anything. I had a relationship with the people who went to the desert.

She arched an eyebrow and her lips pursed. "More important than this one?"

"Well, that is an interesting topic." I said, "But I need to be going. Maybe I will see you next year when I get out of there."

I didn't of course. I had problems sorting out relationships then.

I need to get a newspaper and I needed to find out the dimensions of the disaster. The press said that an elite US military force launched a bold but doomed attempt to rescue the hostages in Tehran. I could fill in the details. I had been supposed to be there when the mission launched, and I should have been there when the successful rescue was completed. I did some of the planning and walked around some of the heavy helicopters that flew to the disaster. It had been a bold plan.

Instead, the mission ended in a fiery disaster in a desolate patch of sand in Iran that we have forever after called "Desert One."

Five Air Force men and three Marines died there, not much by today's aggressive new standards. But we lost eight aircraft and the wreckage provided marvelous video for the Revolutionary forces of the Ayatollah.

Our pride was hurt, wounded desperately.

And that, one may argue, is where the Global War on Terror began.

I thought I had joined up to stand on the ramparts against the Godless Commies who seemed to be on a roll. Saigon had fallen in ignominiously in 1975. Nicaragua and El Salvador seemed to be going down the tubes, and then it would be Mexico and then the T-72's would be rolling up Main Street in Petoskey, Michigan. So I packed my bags and went to The Show.

I just didn't know which one it was going to be. It was not America that was the paper tiger. It was the Soviet Union. And while our people hunkered down in missile silos and cruised in ballistic missile submarines waiting for the signal to launch, I would spend the next 27 years looking at angry young men with dark beards.

I was in the Indian Ocean in January 1979 when the Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. Shah of Shahs, sitter on the Peacock Throne of the Moghuls, abruptly decamped and turned the ancient land of Persia over to the looney Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

He was a character, the Ayatollah was. We did not understand his appeal, and I recall vividly scrambling to learn about the different flavors of Islam. My ignorance was that deep, and I can only extrapolate to the larger instituition. We didn't even know how properly to say the word "Shi'ite."

I was there, or near enough to take action if we had been ordered in the strange interregnum governments of Shahpur Bakhtiar and Abolhassan Bani Sadr. But they too were gone within months and the fundamentalist Shiite Muslim clerics established the scary theocracy we did not understand, and if the present is any indication, don't understand now.

On Nov. 4, 1980, I was in the middle of the Indian Ocean. President Jimmy Carter, god bless his idealism, had allowed the Shah to enter the US for medical care. That was the spark for 3,000 Iranian radicals to occupy the U.S. Embassy.

I will never forget the TV images of scores of them sitting, gluing the little strips from the shredded documents back together, and seeing some of my own work reconstructed in their hands. We have improved our technology since. Now we cross-cut the paper, when there is time.

Twenty years before that, the Marine Guard defended the Embassy in Santo Domingo from radicals with deadly fore. The were decorated for their gallantry. The Carter Administration ordered the Marines to put down their arms and surrender.

Most of the staff was held for an excruciating fourteen months.

I often wonder what would have happened if the Marines had been directed to defend the territory of the United States to the last diplomat. Maybe it would have turned out differently. I have been to Santo Domingo and no one seems to care that we defended ourselves.

We just don't seem to understand things very well. But our military seems to work better.

It is just the peace thing that we still seem to have problems with. And relationships.