Cotton is High

A third of the way through the last, best month of summer. If we grew cotton here, it would be high. It isn’t some places. The draught is on some of the land and down south the wet is stripping the soil away. These are crazy times, and sometimes I feel I can’t stand it.

The real best month of the year in Washington is September, with the crowds gone and the days golden and a little melancholy.

But by then the Congress will be back in town and traffic will be awful and they will be expecting me to work. In the meantime, when things are supposed to be a little relaxed, there is so much to do, and none of it generates a penny in revenue.

Consequently, I had to hit the computer early, half listening to the murmur of the BBC from London . Judy Swallow has been reading the news, and I like the sound of her vowels. But her presence means that the regular anchor is on vacation someplace interesting.

I hope Dan Damon is getting some rest. He was reporting from Israel and the Gaza Strip last I heard, and anyone would need a break after that. Anchors need a break. I still have not absorbed the news of the death of urbane Peter Jennings, and I lit up a cigarette and thought about it. He wasn’t seventy yet, and I watched the smoke curl up around my fingers, wondering.

I need some time to think, but it doesn’t look like that is going to happen any time soon. Studs Turkel was being interviewed about his newest book when the American voices came on the radio. He is a couple hundred years old, and remembers Al Capone as a living human being. He says he wants to live, just out of curiosity.

I don’t blame him.  Instead, I am scrambling to find a picture of an Admiral that someone needs for some project. The Admiral is old now, older than everyone he served with, the last icon of a generation. I was looking for an old picture and it is in the archives some place, a picture of the grand old man as a Lieutenant, eyes bright, tropical skies over his khaki shoulder, a slight ironic smile that showed he knew just how the Japanese were brought low, and the Pacific was an American lake once again.

I scanned and clipped the photo, and then moved on. I heard Judy say that the Iranians seem to be committed to getting The Bomb, and there is apparently nothing we can do to dissuade them. Everyone wants to be in the nuclear club, not realizing that when they get there the problems only get worse

I threw a couple vegetable sausages in the general direction of the frying pan and poured another cup of dark rich coffee. Maybe I could get more neurons to fire, maybe my fingers would stop stumbling over the keys.

If I could get the article done I can make the deadline for the Quarterly, trying to convey the inexorable progress of the cotton growing in this little town. I tried to make sense of it again:

“ Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld has selected a defense industry executive and one of his own senior aides to be the next secretaries of the Navy and Air Force, respectively . . . “

This was big news, or at least it is to people who have to sell things to the Departments they head. There is half a trillion dollars in the Pentagon, and I wanted to shine a light on where it is stacked. I typed furiously, thinking I could get this piece to fit with the chaotic activity in the Intelligence Community.

“ Insiders say Donald C. Winter, who heads Northrop Grumman Mission Systems in Reston gets the nod for SECNAV while Michael W. Wynne is the pick for Air Force secretary . . . both candidates are being vetted now, and face Senate confirmation, which will run into the confirmation battle over Justice Johnson for the Supreme Court . . . there could be other landmines . . . “

Landmines indeed. Improvised explosive devices, I thought, and that tripped another thought. I had an e-mail and a lead on something explosive from Iraq . I thought hard about what it might be. I clicked off the newsletter article and looked through the messages from last week.

I sighed. I don’t know why I took on another job as the archivist and bottle-washer of the Association. I need to make up my mind if I am a busy executive or a retired fart puttering in the gardens of memory.

Speaking of which, there were two trips I need to organize for the Customer, one to the special facility west of here and the other to the headquarters, located in a reasonable facsimile of the Temple of Ramses itself in New Jersey .

I hate going up there. It is the perfect distance to be inconvenient. I glanced at the calendar. Nothing this week, except for an appointment with the people I dislike at one of the Agencies up the road, and then I found the e-mail from last week, the one from Iraq.

It was about The Problem. I felt bad answering it so late, but the Improvised Explosive Device problem is a hard one. My friend had lived hundreds of hours in a row since it was sent, investigating the aftermath of the explosions, most of them awake, adrenalin firing, and when he got home from the scene of slaughter, he waited to see if there was something incoming toward the Conex Box where he lived.

Sometimes I think about it. Not the waiting part; there is nothing incoming in Arlington. It is pleasant enough to live at poolside at Big Pink. But in the dream I am rolling along a broad road with no civilians, dusty brown concrete structures on either side under a blue sky darkened with haze. Sometimes I wake up at night, breathless, thinking that I have driven past an innocuous bit of concrete and suddenly the world goes red and the noise was so big that it was suddenly silent, and I felt the flesh ripped away from my bones, blown out what might have been a window and accelerating into a bright goddamn light that could have been the sun.

Then my breath slowly returns to normal, but I know it is happening somewhere. Not nuclear, but at the individual level, what the hell is the difference? I have got to do something about it, and yet I feel I am swimming in molasses. The guys at the Labs seem to know something, but it is an engineering problem for them. Not an elegant one with one pristine solution. There are many kinds of explosives and triggers. Defeating them is not a one-size-fits all problem.

It is not an elegant solution, and hence unsatisfying to the orderly engineering mind.

It’s messy, really. There was a white paper that George-the- wireless-guru did a month or so ago, a proposal to create a box that directs energy in a novel fashion to produce more power where it is needed. It produces more jamming power, among other things, and less interference to civilian applications.

The thought is that this approach keeps the IED from triggering, but unfortunately lets the Bad Guys get away, improvise, and use the same infernal device again. 

The new proposal the labs guys have features a controlled trigger that can activate the IED on command. The note said that it would be at a safe distance, of course, but I thought it might be nice to have it go off in the arms of the guy who was carrying it to the road.

I mashed a button, and the concept flew off through a server farm to land in the late afternoon in Iraq . Maybe I could get something back that would scream for the capability and I could wave it around here. The Army has so far been unable to sign a contract that permits rapid development. They are chained in regulations as pervasive as Joseph Stalin’s Kremlin.

According to the news, they are too busy investigating where their Four Stars are behaving inappropriately. I think people behaving badly should be punished, of course, and have always been thankful that I am too small a fish for anyone to come after seriously.

I looked at the screen. The Admiral’s picture was gone, the trips were on the calendar and I had a checklist to follow, if I could find the customer. They are frantic, too. The calls to the airlines and to Amtrak could wait till later in the day. I have no idea what I can make of the IED problem today, but I will try something, and there is something awful happening in the new office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Some old scores are being settled, and I need to understand how and why. It is going to be a busy day. I would rather pour myself a julep and watch the cotton grow. Then I smelled the sausages burning in the fry pan.

Maybe next year. According to the clock, the working day is just about ready to start.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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