In the Piedmont of Virginia the dawn mimicked dream nicely. It mingled with the warmth of decent coffee. Low gray skies, dark things flitting across the limited view from under the dark green awning of canvas surrounded by the rich green of pasture grass. The birds in the bright dark colors of night echoed the threads of dream thoughts in the night, bright in their flicker of motion against a still ambiguous sky.

Waking, like the view across the south field, had been the same. Memories sparked with brightly colored images of places familiar in their time to me, but also to family long in their silent graves. My small part consisted only of looking at groups of stern Cubans working near Roosevelt’s Canal, cut across Panama’s portion of the Continental Divide after someone gifted it to the locals. The deepness of the Culebra Cut slashed through the highlands, working as before, yet controlled by others.

Standing on a dock in Port au Prince one afternoon, disembarking refugees who attempted to flee to Florida, now returned under the watchful eye of the Port Captain and his attaché assistants. This morning, the city ravaged by earthquake centered on Saint-Louis de Sud, there are more than three hundred dead and a month-long state of emergency declared.

Flipping to another memory, flicking like the dark outline of thought. The one from 1979, mixing bright youth and gray steel. Our ship, accompanied by watchful escorts from the Group, focused on the problem in Iran, where the American Embassy had been seized by militants and hostages taken.

One of our little group of specialists was distracted from the problem which had generated our presence in the vast pale unbroken blue of the Indian Ocean. Absent direct action, Frank spent his time tracking the sparse and laconic reports of Soviet long-range aviation movements provided by NSA and made a pronouncement. “The Russians are going in,” he said at one morning meeting, that day’s coffee still scalding. We were initially confused as a group, since our focus was on Iran. Instead, the Russians of that day were going into Afghanistan.

An old pal had traveled there when it was not a place of politics, but simply a place of wonder and strange wild men on horseback with guns.

I followed the Russian operations there for a decade, a backdrop to other flickers. Thankful our people were not the ones responsible for battling to keep the passes open and the poppy crops secure until that poignant moment on the bridge when the last of the Soviet tanks crossed out, going home. I was thankful we had not been there for a decade until that morning after the horror in Manhattan and the offices near mine in the Pentagon were destroyed. And discovered an elite team of highly skilled Americans had embarked on a lightning campaign to topple the Taliban, twenty years ago. And now our exit will be as memorable and poignant as the one handed to the Kremlin.

There is talk of an embassy evacuation as dramatic as the one from a city in Vietnam that changed its name. I had to give a speech there one, of congratulations to the new rulers on the twentieth anniversary of their triumph, not my idea, but a useful prop in another narrative.

Another fumbled grasp at the remote control, and another memory of a system mobilized to fight a dread disease in 2002. We called it “SARS” and did what our leader Dr. Fauci told us to do.

Perhaps we will do that again. Another fumble with the remote. Dawn was full up, yet still cloaked in dream. The strength of the sun began to lighten the gray and bring warmth again to the greenery. Plus ca change, I thought. The more things change…plus c’est la même chose.

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
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