Editor’s note: Mac would have been happy this morning, and I am trusting that somewhere he is. The Iowa Hawkeyes knocked off my Michigan Wolverines in a tiresome reprise of some games back in the 1980s. People are still rioting in the Pacific Northwest, though I honestly can’t imagine why. Maybe it is something else they are pissed off about. The football game made me cast memory back to the only day of the year that Mac and I disagreed about anything, which was Big Ten football, and his certain knowledge that the Hawkeyes would always play the boys from Ann Arbor hard, and sometimes come away with unexpected victory. It always made me a little dyspeptic, but that is life. mac had certainly seen enough of it to be entitled to his own view of it, and I was always happy to take notes.

– Vic

Mid-way

(Mac and the Lovely Bea at the Willow Bar. Photo Socotra.)

It was June of one of the better years, 2011, which is to say after the Great Recession and before the Great Ennui. At Willow that afternoon, the mood was upbeat. Jar-head Ray, you will be happy to know, was back from foot surgery, and was prepared to make up for lost time at the bar.

“It wasn’t a big deal,” he said. “Just middle aged stuff- bone spurs and crap. What’s up with you?”

“A lot,” I said, as Old Jim took a healthy swig of Budweiser. “And if this middle age, we are all going to live to be 120.”

“I don’t really care,” said Ray with his crooked smile.

“I know,” I said. “That is why qw re taking such good care of ourselves.”

Jake was down the bar collecting a bet from The Greek and Jeff, two Spooks I knew from days on the Task Force, and with whom I used to see on the weekly secure VTC between the Pentagon and Kabul. The Greek has been hunting Osama bin Laden for a long time, even before the attack on the Towers, and it was time to settle a bet made long ago. They appeared to be doing so in earnest.

I shook The Greek’s hand and asked what the bet had been. “Whether Osama would be killed in Afghanistan or not.”

“So you picked Afghanistan?” The Greek nodded.

“That was the smart money.”

Jake smiled. “I got the rest of the world,” and took a sip of his victory beer.

“But didn’t they drag his body back to Afghanistan for identification?”

“A triviality,” said Jake. “He sleeps with the fishes now.”

“You didn’t write this morning,” said Mac.

“Well,” I said defensively. “I did, but I didn’t publish. I was freaked out by the tornadoes in Massachusetts. The footage of the one you saw on the television that tried to suck the Connecticut River dry could have been shot from the house where our pals Bonds-and-Donna. There were hysterical people from DC, Michigan, Chicago, Florida and Colorado trying to figure out what happened. I was right there two weeks ago.”

“Are they all right?”

“Yeah, Bonds checked in later in the morning. It was a relief. He wrote one of the funniest notes I have seen in a while about it, but the twister couldn’t have been more than a few hundred yards from his house. There is something going on this season.”

“Last one this violent was back in ’36, when I was just eighteen,” said Mac. “These things are cyclical, but there are a lot more people living in the path of the storms than there were then.”

I nodded and took a refreshing sip of wine. “Then, I was trying to craft an account of what is going on with my parents in the Little Village By the Bay out of some phone conversations with my sister Annook, but in the end it wasn’t that interesting or funny and she does it better herself anyway. She is living the 36-hour day nightmare in person.”

“Well, I am sure she will get to telling the story,” said Mac, finishing his ginger ale. “I am parched from the heat wave, and it is my first time out since the season changed.” He looked up at Big Jim and asked for a Bloody Mary as he poured Happy Hour White into my tulip glass.

“A Bloody Mary?” I asked in surprise. “Are you back off the wagon?”

“No,” said Mac quickly. “Sorry, a Virgin Mary. Still have to watch the medication. It is just good to be out again.”

Tracy O’Grady, Executive Chef and co-owner (with Kate Jansen, the best goddamn pastry maker in town) came down the bar in a joint appearance to press the flesh with the regulars. Deborah the Ops Officer was bustling around, doing her best den-mother thing with the rest of the staff, and the lovely Elizibeth-with-an-S was hustling to serve the throng out on the patio, which was either basking in the brilliant lowering sun or huddling in the artificial shade of the orange Willow umbrellas.

She was focused, but I wanted to ensure that she knew that Mac was at the bar, since he is a babe magnet. She stopped long enough for me to get a picture as she delivered an astonishing new appetizer Tracy brought back from the restaurant convention in Chicago:

“It is sherry and tomato steamed mussels with speck ham, sweet garlic, fennel with ravioli and Basil,” she said. “It is not bad.”

“What is spec ham?” I asked. “It is always a gastronomic learning experience here at Willow.”

Tracy smiled. “It is very thinly sliced ham, like prosciutto. But unlike prosciutto, it’s smoked. And it’s cured in a very interesting way. It is like prosciutto but less mushy and more flavorful. The Italians call it “Denominazione di origine protetta” or ‘protected origin designation’ for the Alto Adige region of Italy, which is almost the south Tyrolean mountains. It is de-boned raw and marinated for two weeks in brine flavored with black pepper, pimento, garlic, a little sugar and juniper berries. Then it’s dried and lightly smoked for two or three more weeks and hung in a cool place for four to five months.”

In Spain the ham hangs from the rafters and the smoke from the bar continued the process.” I took a deep swig of my happy hour white.

Mac smiled. “I think I will go with the fish and chips from the Neighborhood Bar Menu,” he said. “I don’t want to eat back at the Madison dining room tonight. Been there too much lately since I felt low.”

“There is nothing more amazing in presentation than what Tracy does,” I said, reaching for a napkin and taking out a pen. “Now, where were we? We were going to finish the Pueblo damage assessment story.”

Mac nodded. “The assessment took about three months to complete. We assembled an inventory of everything we thought they might have had onboard when they were captured. The we reviewed it for what was disclosed about our collection priorities and capabilities. The idiots at NAVFOR-Japan in Yokosuka had ensured that everything we were interested in was in the inventory, in detail. All of it was compromised. Codes, machines and the complete intelligence library of everything in the Pacific. That included Vietnam, by the way, and we were still in the thick of combat then.”

“Was there any suspicion that the Russians put the North Koreans up to attack in order to get the KW-7 coding machines?”

“Oh, my no. It wasn’t until they caught that bastard john Walker that we knew that they had the keymat material to go along with the enciphering machines. It was sort of like when Admiral Dan Gallery’s people captured the U-boat 505 and we got the codes and the Enigma code machines with the new rotor they added for extra security. We had to assume that the crew did what they were supposed to and destroyed the enciphering machines and the keying material. We didn’t actually get to interview the crew until they were released the next year. So, the total damage was never released in one package, nor the fact that it meant the Russians were able to read our classified traffic as soon as we sent it. It was a security bust as big as the one that took down the Germans and the Japanese. Glad we did not have to fight them with that disadvantage.”

I was scribbling frantically on the napkin in front of me.

“OK. That was the Board of Inquiry they held out at the Amphib base in Coronado, right? My pal The Left Coast Lawyer used to skate out of his JO job on the cruiser on the 32nd Street waterfront and attend the hearings as a highly interested observer.”

“Vice Admiral Harold Bowen was the President of the Board. He was Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence as a tin-can sailor. That was unusual. Dick Bates was his Special Security Officer, sent out there in case any codeword material came up in testimony.”

“Did they ask any of you to testify?” I asked.

(San Diego Union photo of VADM Bowen signing the report of the Pueblo Board of Inquiry. Photo San Diego Union from Official US Navy source.)

“No,” said Mac dryly. He fished in the pocket of his Aloha shirt for a ancient scrap of newspaper and pushed it across the bar. “I looked in my binders and found this story. It is the picture of the Admiral signing out the Board’s report. He wanted Bucher court-marshaled. SECNAV Chafee reviewed the recommendation and ruled that no one would be punished. He said that the Pueblo officers “have suffered enough” and that the inability to anticipate the attack reflected a general failure in the Navy command structure.”

“So everyone was responsible and no one was.”

“You got it,” he said with a thin smile. “It was a bit like the Pearl Harbor attack. Like Admiral Kimmel, a lot of people never forgave Pueblo’s skipper Lloyd Bucher. They felt that he surrendered his ship without a fight. He could have been as big a hero as Lawrence, they felt, but instead he decided to give up the ship.”

At that very moment, the lovely Bea arrived, just a few minutes ahead of Jon-with-no-H. I waved her over to meet the Admiral. “Bea, I would like you to meet the last of the Midway Code-breakers, Admiral Mac. He was part of the team that broke the codes to enable the great victory at Midway in 1942. The anniversary is coming up on June fourth.”

Bea turned on that dazzling smile. “I had an Uncle who was there. He landed in Normandy.”

Mac just smiled. Like I say, he is a babe magnet.

(Mac with fish and chips. Photo Socotra.)

Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com