It is early Saturday. I have been a slug-a-bed and ooze out of there to make coffee just before 7:00. I congratulate myself. I am starting to tell the time in civilian. The coffee bubbles and there are a couple dozen e-mails in my queue this rainy Saturday. I’m a little behind and there is an important one to answer first, a note from someone who might be able to employ me when all this settles out. When it is done I sip the strong dark coffee sweetened with honey.

The eight o’clock news tell me it’s the anniversary of the Battle at Lexington (8 dead colonials, one Brit wounded) and the attack in 1861 on Massachusetts troops heading to save Washington by the good citizens of Baltimore. That probably isn’t one of the reasons they call it the Charm City. They never have viewed Washington as really necessary for anything.

I type and look at my words, wondering if what I conjure on the keyboard is the actual depiction of life, if mr predictions of the future are what will really occur. I think and act as though I had some real role in my fate, my destiny. I wonder if there is free will, or if this is all pre-destined. The future is an interesting place. In one of today’s futures I am spending the morning knee-deep in garbage after I realize I have thrown my car keys down the trash chute from the fifth floor, bright brass echoing down the metal conduit in booming horror. Adreniline coursing through my veins as I plunge my hands into the slime. In another future I am going to raise two fingers at a rug auction honchoed by a white chap from Zimbabwe who left with his carpets when that nation was still Rhodesia. I will buy a tribal rug in red vegetable-dyed hues and a signed Persian rug of intricate design while the rest of the bidders were asleep at the switch. Auction adrenaline coursing through my veins.

A trip to the Commissary could loom. Is that what I am going to do? Am I the one in the produce section fingering the Roma tomatoes and poking melons, adrenaline barely detectable? I could live to do all these things if what the Doctor at Bethesda said on Friday morning are true. I need to think on that and ponder. Retirement physical is complete. A releif, another pothole avoided on the road to the future.

The radio crackles in the background. From Iraq comes the word that two US Army sergeants found $635 million in US currency in an exclusive district favored by the Baathist Party insiders. I hope they had at least a moment of thinking what it might be like before they turned it in. The current situation brings to mind the state of things in Germany after the fall, what Thomas Pynchon described as “In the Zone” in Gravity’s Rainbow. Things disappearing. People disappearing. Whole governments disappearing and sergeants rooting about in the wreckage.

I am going to write a story this morning, I am just edging around to it obliquely, I tell myself. You know how my mind works. I open another note of lesser importance, saving one that will require actual thought. This one is semi-political polemic of the ilk I get from some of my service buddy friends. This one interests me because of the dual nature of the subjects, military readiness, the war and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, former ranking minority member of the House Intelligence Committee and now Minority Leader of the Democrats. I read with some interest as classical music turns to the words of Scott Simon, broadcasting from Baghdad. He says the power is out and the Iraqis are unhappy with that, but he feels safe driving around the capital.

As I listened I read the words castigating the Democrats on the Hill. I get a lot of right-wing stuff from my association with the military, but the older I get the less I know about anything and can’t get quite as angry as I used to. My buddy was incensed by the assertion from Ms Pelosi that the military success in Iraq was due to the careful planning of the Clinton Administration. The comment had been made at a “support the troops” media event, which was more than a little bizarre. Someone in the thoroughly pragmatic leadership of the Congress realized it was important to show the folks back home that they were engaged on a topic with which they had absolutely nothing to do except debate appropriations. I recalled the political debacle that Tom Daschle walked into when there was a similar Congressional rally in support of the Pledge of Allegiance, after a California Judge ruled it was unconstitutional due to its reference to God. Daschle put his left hand over his heart, the wrong one, hand not heart, that is, and had the bad luck to be right in front of Trent Lott who hadn’t melted down yet. Center stage for the cameras, a phalanx of right hands correctly over hearts behind him to provide the delicious contrast. It was a media festival of embarrassment. I wrote back:

“I agree that Ms Pelosi’s remarks are delusional political bunk, but the one thing you can say about the Clinton administration is that they may have under-funded us, but they were so terrified by their lack of knowledge and credibility that they LEFT US ALONE to make military decisions about provide-equip-and-train issues.”

I started to warm to the task. “The famous Barry McCaffery story is a case in point.” I asserted. “Barry is an aggressive self-promoter. He turned the reported snub by a junior White House Staffer who sniffed: “I don’t talk to military”) into an embarrassing media storm. The Clintons were chagrinned, and to correct the problem, the President made McCaffery an official jogging buddy and then a four-star- and then Drug Czar. That story is the perfect paradigm for the Clinton years. Barry could do whatever he wanted but never got the resources to do much at SOUTHCOM or at the ODCP. The Administration also got so badly burned on the Gays-in-the-military thing that they never again tried to impose their will on the Pentagon.”

I also mentioned that I had to stand up for Bill Perry, who was a hell of a SECDEF in the middle between Academic Aspin and asleep-at-the-switch William Cohen.

In closing, I thundered “Don Rumsfeld, God bless him, was under no similar feelings of inadequacy regarding the military. He had been a Navy pilot himself before he was Secretary the first time and had stature and credibility and no fear. The town and the institutions were gunning for him in the first hundred days of his return. When he showed up he thought we were all Clintonistas. Some of the problems and tensions have come with the fact that the Chiefs and the Chairman bridled at not being trusted and being put back under civilian control.”

My counter-battery polemic vented, I cooked a couple eggs and some potatoes and drank some more coffee. I couldn’t delay it any longer. The delicious feel of two whole days off, the security condition lowered enough that I was not expected to be at my desk on Saturday morning, was sliding into the realization that I had Things To Do. Now it is time to go to work, get the story out. I started to type. I got through a line or two and realized I couldn’t do it. This would be a morning without the focus I needed. I should have risen earlier. I decided I could finish it later.

I could take in a bit of the rug auction to which I had been invited. I looped my car keys around one knuckle and picked up a cell phone, two letters to go in the mail, the recycle-able trash, in one bag, two bottles that didn’t quite fit under my arm and the garbage I had accumulated over the course of the week. Then I walked out of the apartment and down the hall to throw my keys away.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra