(The Panzer to the left of the old ANCC Flagpole that fronted the Club House for a gazllion years and which had a jaunty nautical flair.)

Mr. Sluggo called out of the blue yesterday morning and said: “You wanna get a drink after work?”

I said, “Sure. I’d like to have a couple Grey Goose martinis and work on my string theory.”

“You are a dick, Vic. See you after work.”

Normally I am pretty hard over about going to Willow as first preference for post-work recreation. The Panzer knows the way to get home after traffic has abated a bit, and I am comfortable in navigating from there to Big Pink in the dark. I am leery about driving around elsewhere because I don’t see that well after dark, and that makes the summer a lot easier for embarking on swell ideas.

That made it easier to agree, since I am still working out the dismissal of Liz-with-an-S. I talked to her about her departure from the Willow bar staff, and she said it was “creative differences,” and she “wanted to spend more time with her family.” That is what we usually call it here in DC. Whatever. I think it is shoddy treatment and have yet to work it out in my mind.

So, it is not a Boycott, and it is just a phonecall that came at the right time. I have admired Mr. Sluggo for a lot of years. He was maintenance officer in the fighter squadron I joined out in Japan in the fairy-tale year of 1978, the last one in which we were not in a war, real or by surrogate, with Iran.

I laugh sometimes when that part of my service is called “Cold War.” Cripe, we have been butting heads harder and lost more people against the Mercedes Mullahs than we did to the Russians. I sort a miss the old ones. Vadlimir Putin makes me long for the Old Bolshies.

Anyway, I am closer to the Club than Mr. Sluggo is, but I wanted to see the place at the last light and see what they were doing with the transformation of the campus.

(The former Club House. My old locker was under the white structure in the middle distance. The Grill was to the left, and the Members smoking lounge was to the right.)

The Army-Navy Country Club has been around for a long time- it was established in 1924 by military officers of the two Services, most of them assigned to either the Service Secretariats at the Munitions Building or Main Navy, or the original Joint Staff in the Old Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House.

The officers liked that clubby thing. They established the Army-Navy Club, appropriately at Farragut Square downtown, but it was an urban thing, two blocks from the White House. There was a Bethesda-based country club that offered tennis and golf and aquatics- we met some of the great-grandchildren during a surreal County Club Swim meet reciprocal in a club we never could have afforded to join one summer long ago- but the pressure to add a golf facility resulted in a huge schism in the officer community.

See, there is not much money in what soldiers and sailors do, but there is enormous respect for protocol and privilege. Some of the rebels who railed against the downtown club wanted the organization to construct a golf course. Older Veterans (who remember, were still just grumpy Old Men then, not tombstones) didn’t want to spend the money.

Hence, the rebels quit the club en masse, purchased an old farmhouse on an agricultural property in a freedman’s village in down-at-the-heels Arlington, and got to work building a golf course. There is still bad blood between the clubs, and there is nothing better than watching the confusion of out-of-towners arriving at one club for a function that is actually being held at the other.

(The original ANCC Club House. The center unit was the original farmhouse and it was tinkered with for 75 years. Ballroom was to the rear of the center module, roof deck and the locker rooms beneath the long addition to the right.)

That is what I occupied myself with waiting for Mr. Sluggo. The old clubhouse was a hodgepodge of additions and re-modelings over most of a century.  The former Freedman’s village is getting a complete make-over outside the gate. The old clubhouse, the one where Ike and Chester Nimitz used to hang out, is almost gone.

I would tell you more about that, and what Mr. Sluggo and I did after we hooked up in the eerie silence of the magnificent new clubhouse.

Apparently food and beverage service was not available due to employee comp time, and we were among the ten percent who never get the word, like the House and Senate.

I happened to have stopped at the Class Six store that weekend and the bottle of vodka was going to go to the farm eventually and happened to still be in the trunk, but unfortunately, I am running out of time. I am working with sadists who have scheduled a 0800 meeting in the wilds of Fairfax County this morning, and I am not going to finish the pot of coffee, much less a tale of a resurrected organization and a fighter pilot and a spook toasting the new year in a still bracing winter breeze in the parking lot.

(The new Club House. There is a lot to the left where members can drink unobtrusively when food and Beverage Service is curtailed.)

The view from the place is extraordinary. The one from the old Club House was horrible due to the placement of the outdoor deck’s vision of the National Mall, and the fireworks. Should have been better. The new Club House fixes it.

(Believe it or not, the earthworks discernable on the right are what remain of Fort Richardson, a part of the Civil War defenses of Washington that the Corps of Engineers turned into the 9th Green of the ANCC golf course in the 1920s. It was constructed by active soldiers at taxpayer expense for “training.” Which it was, I suppose. All photos Socotra.)

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com