| 23 October 2006 What's Going On I was able to find out everything I needed to know over the weekend, even if the games ran late. I had to carefully screen the information, since the body count is mounting, and I did not want to think about anniversaries. It was better to keep my thoughts away from what happened on this date in Beirut twenty-three years ago. It only upsets me. Better to concentrate on the present, since there was nothing I could have done then to save all those kids, American and French. In two decades of service after the attack, I tried to understand what was going on and tell people about the cliff we were speeding toward. We have to know our enemies to defeat them. Without understanding, we risk making everyone the enemy. We seem to be doing a pretty good job at it. I couldn't fix the problem, and try to understand smaller things now. The football game I cared about was a little scary but turned out well. The local television station chose not to carry it, since they seem to be xenophobic. I could have gone to one of the sports bars that features all the games, all the time, but had things to do. I had to listen to it on the satellite radio station of the adversary. The commercial messages featured ads for different strains of corn and agricultural implements. The announcers said things that were calculated to wound me. But it turned out all right. Baseball was a mixed bag, since in Game One the Tiger batters seemed leaden, and the Cardinals were lively and pumped up. Kenny Rogers came on in Game Two and dominated the visitors, and they are traveling to St. Louis today for the next two in the best-of-seven. Visiting? Shoot, all of us are visiting. No one lives in Detroit anymore. I don't know what I was thinking. I wandered off from the Motor City thirty-odd years ago to find out what was going on. I was surprised to find that the more I learned, the less I knew. Living in the world of Spooks was simultaneously enlightening and opaque, just like the human heart. I was on my way overseas once when I was informed that I was the program manager for something highly classified and intensely sensitive. I was to create a control system to document each step, and each individual who had a role in it, with countersigns and witnesses. I had to keep the documents in a special safe, along with the operational materials we generated. I was pretty organized about it, quite proud, actually. When the deed was done, I was ordered to collect signatures acknowledging termination, shred the operational materials, and then sign one myself and destroy everything. When the last document dropped from the bottom of the cross-cut shredder into confetti into the plastic bag under the shredder, I wondered about the whole thing, and then went to lunch. One of my mentors growing up in the Community was a quite a character. He brought a youthful joy in the system, and did not take it with the same solemn gravity that most of the gray faced Spooks did. He was in the business because he enjoyed it, and found the paradoxes of the secrets world entertaining. Trying to figure it out, he told me, was like peeling an onion. Every layer contained a story to explain away the one beneath it. You could never tell when you had arrived at the middle. Everyone thought they had, or at least agreed to believe it. I worked in a place one time that was an official secret. There was an installation out front that provided cover for its existence, and people who actually worked inside it who did not know that its real function was. Or perhaps I was one of them. I could not tell how close to the middle of the onion I was, except to know that it was further than some of the others in the cafeteria. I also knew that there were people who were there to listen to what was said at the tables, and I had the suspicion that there were others watching them, too. Cuba Gooding told Tom Cruise to “follow the money,” or maybe it was Deep Throat to Bob Woodward. Whoever said it first, they were, well, on the money. I wound up in the latter part of my career as a financial apparatchik. We built the program that funded all manner of things. Sometimes the budget lines were just euphemisms for things that were better not talked about, and the people that conducted the activity in question had to come and talk to us to make sure we understood how important it was that they could continue, undisturbed and unpublicized. I think there might have been six or seven people who knew everything, and were actually at the middle of the onion. I never was, though I was close enough to know who might have been there. Eventually I gave up attempting to figure it all out. I assumed that someone, someday, would order them to collect signatures and then shred everything, and forget that what they had done, though it is hard to forget why they did it. I happened to be in Moscow a few years ago. It was not long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the various bureaus were looking for funding to keep their places going. I was not working at my craft at the moment, but part of an educational exchange delegation. We were visiting the Baumann Aviation Institute, where the Soviets trained some top-flight aviation engineers. The physical science lab was a trip. They had one of the Big Dog FLANKER fighter-jets looming in the middle of the hangar without the skin, just the skeleton. There were other aircraft-related structures, scattered around the floor, including an olive-drab cockpit assembly that I recognized as having come from an American FB-111. The names of the aircrew were still painted on what had been the canopy rail. I asked about it, and one of the Russians smiled. "We had friends," he said, "and ways to acqire things." I took a picture to capture the names, and the Russians did not flinch. They didn't seem to mind if I knew what had gone on. But it did not occur to me to file a report when I got back. It was a squishy matter. I do not know if the men flying the aircraft when it was lost were the ones whose names were painted on it. I assume they got out safely, since the compartment seemed undamaged. I don't know if they were captured or rescued. I assume the Air Force knows, and there has been endless discussion about the ones who did not come back, and Congressional testimony and joint recovery teams. But there were some files in the milk crate that we got at the Bureau when we had the Casualty Watch overnight, when the civil servants who handled such matters went home. The files in the crate were still open, the whereabouts of sailors unknown. Or they were thick files that contained problems. One widow would not take her husband's remains back from the Joint Casualty Identification lab in Hawaii. The Vietnamese had returned a box of bones, and positive identification had been made on the dental records. The widow said it wasn't him. She said the medical report said that the bones, which had been charred, displayed "well-healed fractures" of the tibia and fibula. She said it couldn't be her husband. He had never broken his leg bones, and if he had, it would have been during the ejection when he was shot down in 1973. It was just weeks before all the POWs were released in Operation Homecoming. His leg could not have healed that fast, and that meant that he had been alive after the other prisoners went home. It couldn't have happened the way they said it did, and she was not going to bury a lie. She was a woman of courage, but I don't think she got justice. There apparently had been some misunderstanding about the status of prisoners in the Paris Peace Talks that everyone was so desperate to conclude. We moved on. By the time I had temporary custody of the milk crate, the Government was maintaining that Agent Orange exposure really wasn't responsible for strange illnesses that the veterans had, Ameican and Vietnamese. The Beirut Barracks bombing had caused us to pull out of Lebanon abruptly, not knowing much about the road we were already walking down. We are pretty good about finding our missing these days, and that should be a comfort to the families in this bloody month overseas. It really isn't over when the dead are buried. It is not until everyone that knew something is gone. If we keep out mouths shut, the next generation has a chance to forget. I know that much about what is going on. Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |