1. The medical stuff disrupted the production schedule at Socotra House. This is is is first of two notes we were working on for the beginning of the next book: “A Little Traveling Music.” They are necessary to frame the real point of the narrative, which is not “Gee, look at these unique places!” but more on the idea that listening to the car radio driving downtown in the morning might have a reference to trouble that required intervention of some sort, and might actually have a memo to “Please see me”from the Boss on the desk on the Pentagon’s 4th floor.

The point is not that “Socotra House travels!” or at least the staff did travel at the behest of the people who appropriate money to do so. We never knew what or where the cash flow would direct us. Some of the places were interesting and unusual. All of them had one thing our more normal travels did not feature, which is that the destinations had sprung from an emerging “official government interest” into what was going on in these places. The cost was irrelevant, since the bills were sent elsewhere.

This First Footnote is intended to convey the accidental nature of the trips. We wish to highlight they were mostly to places you would not consider visiting if it was your time and money to pay for them.

Both these notes also attempt to help understand the motivation for writing them. There are two things to keep in mind as you ramble through this book. We do not consider this to be anything that highlights “us” as being particularly unique. There are hundreds of people riding on your paycheck who do this. Many people have visited these places and millions live in them as a condition of life. What is unique about this account is that it was done largely- exclusively for these- at your expense. All of these excursions were to places of interest to the Congress, your Navy, and the interaction between the budget and the people who keep all this various stuff afloat.

2. Here is the other other part. It was all a surprise. Imagine a morning commute in the pre-dawn that ends in a correctly-coded parking space in South Parking, the vast limestone flanks of the most powerful nation on earth at that moment. In large part, all these were unexpected or surprising. Have you planned your own trips and compiled your own “bucket list” of places you would like to see before you kick it? Those are “planned trips,” or things you might want to have aligned on a list for the next vacation.

The trips documented here are different, since they just “came up.” They are largely products of what had been on what we knew as “news.” The target trips were products that had a few moments in the evening network presentations the night before- or had the staying power to stir interest for more than a few news cycles in the week. They were stirred by someone who had the ability to get a memo on the desk of some Chairman in some Committee to sign the bottom of a request for Navy’s help in arranging travel to a place of trouble. Destinations and timing were completely up to someone else. We were just “enablers” who could whistle up a jet with crew when needed.

Those unexpected trips were intended to discover important facts to be winnowed out of the assorted truths laying about on the newsroom floors. The derived conclusions from the travel would inform policy creation and direct the flow of money. You know.
visits to trouble spots while on “Official Travel.”