The sky is a blanket of gray wool, cloaking Arlington in a soft, moist mist. There is no sturm and drang, though the weather channel is promising me that some of that Germanic vigor is in store for later. I am a civilian this morning, just as I was yesterday. It is a new feeling, a curious freedom, like being naked in public. I pinch myself and feel the same. Better maybe, since things are now finally resolved and the President himself, or his designee, would have to intervene to get me back. So I think I am in safe harbor unless the catastrophe comes.

I stood in a variety of lines yesterday, filling out employment forms and sitting for pictures to go on corporate badges. It was very familiar, that process of waiting, and was a comfortable echo of my time in the Service. Goodness knows, I am pleased to have a job. They say that they will pay me on the 19th of this month and that is a good thing. It is why I am doing this, after all, since in a more perfect world I would be packing my sea-chest to go ashore for good. But that is not the way of this world and so I rise to swim out into the gloom and look attentive and interested, if I can manage it.

I read the Times-did you know that Richard Coeur de Lion was crowned on this day in 1189? Or that in 1967 Nguyen Van Thieu was elected president of South Vietnam under a new constitution? I yawned, noting that Vince Lombardi died twenty-three years ago today. There will be no drama for the Redskins this season to match his times. The radio murmurs of continued problems in Iraq. The Congress is back in town, ready to stir up their usual mischief for the fall. The President and his Dream Team have some interesting challenges as we move into the campaign season. I think his war chest and no opponent in his party will enable him to position himself well. If the Democrats have a bloody primary season, the President will greet him at the end of it flush with money, tanned rested and ready for the election. I think his reelection is a pretty good bet. Though he has his challenges, doesn’t he? The deficit and steady patter of death and mayhem overseas. The Taliban is massing in the Afghan hills and Baghdad appears to be a magnet to every wild-eyed Islamism.

We were talking about that at the Capitol City Brewery last night. I was late, held beyond quitting time out at Tyson’s in a dreary discussion of corporate health-plan options. I sat down and apologized for my tardiness. Rick forgave me on the condition that I bought his beer, which I gladly agreed to do. Cap City has marvelous lagers they brew in their own gleaming copper towers. He is settling into his new job in Counter Intelligence, which used to be a discipline that peered into the Agencies and Departments for potential spies and moles, and those vulnerable to blackmail. Looking for people like Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanson. Looking for traitors, if they could find them, but mostly just looking for human weakness. There was a certain unsavory association with the old C.I. crowd. That has changed. Now they are looking for Bad Guys and things are a little more exciting and focused with real enemies to be rooted out. He is happy and engaged, though when I asked who his operators were he said they were the usual suspects from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and the Air Force Office of Special Investigation. I sighed. You have to work with what you have, I suppose.

We talked about the endgame in Iraq. I said that if you reported the casualties here in the District, even up, it would sound a lot worse than Baghdad. Our pal Joe had tried that in the Pentagon, reporting the random killings here in town when the news from Sarajevo seemed so bad, but the powers that be squashed that. It was an inconvenient reality. We agreed that the Administration was pretty good at going to war but a bit slow to figure out the end game. Maybe they get bored easily and don’t finish the Power Point presentations from the Pentagon planners. A gentleman in a Hawaiian shirt and amber-framed glasses sidled up to me and offered to trade me a beer for one of my Camel Special Light cigarettes. I gave him one and he smoked it as his story flowed out of him. He was West Point, Class of ’67. That was the class that took Vietnam on the chin. As a class, they had more casualties than the ones from the Civil War years and produced as many stars as the Wunderkinder class of 1915, when Dwight and Doug graduated from the Long Gray Line.

Bob was the guy’s name, and he had just driven eighteen hours to town to give someone a Power Point presentation on the oppression of illegal immigrants. He was a Democrat, apparently, and just back from Argentina where he had attempted to help the five northern provinces distance themselves from the debacle in Buenos Aires. He hadn’t succeeded, though he had learned a lot. He said he would never take up with an Argentine woman again and I agreed that made the whole financial meltdown a valuable experience. He stubbed out his borrowed cigarette and said Brazil was the place to meet nice women, even the working ones. You could trust them, even spent the weekend at their houses.

I made a mental note of that, just in case. Rick needled him, saying we needed to round up the illegals and make them go home. He actually knows all the issues, and being a damned good attorney he can argue any aspect he chooses. He just wanted to spool Bob up and see what would happen. He was nonplused for a moment, but a nice enough guy that he let it slide. Or maybe he wanted to mooch another cigarette. He changed the subject to ask what we thought about the Jessica Lynch controversy that asshole David Hackworth way trying to ignite. He wrote an apoplectic column about the politics of her rescue and the account of her heroism. Hackworth was the ex-Colonel who had the Heart-of-Darkness Marlon Brando meltdown later in the Vietnam war. He writes opinion pieces these days, just like me only he is a vicious son of a bitch. He said: “This was probably the first incident in US military history in which an American soldier was awarded our country’s fourth-highest ground-fighting award for being conked out and off the air throughout a fight.”

He took particular umbrage at her being awarded the Bronze Star with Combat “V” device. That is what the Colonel went after Chief of Naval Operations Mike Boorda about. Hackworth seems to have a hang-up about it. He claims a Bronze Star citation should read something like: “Moving his machine gun to a forward vantage point, he covered the advance of the infantry with a heavy volume of effective fire. Repeatedly exposing himself to a devastating small-arms automatic weapons and mortar barrage …”

Hack claims to have received a gazillion irate e-mails from the troops on the matter.”She wasn’t wounded in action, nor did she do anything to deserve a Bronze Star,” wrote one, he claimed. Another said he was going to send all his awards back to the President and tell him where he can shove them.

“Trust me,” puffed the Colonel. “The troops – past and present – are unhappy.”

Hackworth always gets me going. I put my beer down. I am not a combat guy, and reserve the opinions on bravery to those who had actually seen it. But I know that Hackworth became the most decorated soldier of his generation by getting a lot of the kids in his charge killed. I said “Jessica is lucky to be alive and God bless her. I know several of my colleagues who got the Bronze Star in the first Gulf War without ever going near the beach. I ran into one of the SEALs who was on her rescue and he was cool as a cucumber. Solid. Modest. He is a hero, no shit. I don’t know if he got a medal for it or not.

But he knew what he was doing and was armed to the teeth to do it. Jessica went to the show with her maintenance outfit, ready to fix broken vehicles. She earned the Purple Heart fairly, by any criteria, and if they gave her the Bronze Star, more power to her. I think they gave a medal to the horse that was the only Army survivor of the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Hell, I used to wear a lot of hardware on my chest that looked impressive. But in the end, all it is means is what your comrades think and how it looks in a shadowbox on the long road to the Antiques Roadshow. Bob grabbed my pack of cigarettes and fished one out.

“Bitching her out over the Bronze Star?” he said. “That is bullshit. Hackworth has a problem, and he does this stuff is to salve his own conscience. That is why he masquerades as “the voice of the front line troopers.”

“You got that right” I said. “Mikey Boorda wouldn’t have shot himself if it wasn’t for Hackworth. I don’t know how he sleeps at night.”

Rick smiled and waved for the check. Bob puffed smoke into the air and concluded the matter. “On the whole, I think I would rather be in Sao Paulo.”

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra