Jumping in the Way Back machine to tell you a story from a long time ago, in the BC (Before COVID) times. This might be the start of a new series I’m calling “WAR(?)” but I haven’t decided yet. So this is either number one of a couple or this is a flash in the pan. Anyway, buy my books.
As a cadet at the Air Force Academy, you get force fed the Cadet Honor Code from day one. If you were to walk around the Zoo during Basic Cadet Training over the summer, you could easily stumble across a group of Doolie hopefuls screaming: “SIR! THE CADET HONOR CODE IS AS FOLLOWS! WE WILL NOT LIE, STEAL, OR CHEAT, NOR TOLERATE AMONG US ANYONE WHO DOES! FURTHERMORE, I RESOLVE TO DO MY DUTY AND TO LIVE HONORABLY! SO HELP ME GOD!” The basics will possibly be in the front-leaning rest, probably shouting in unison, and most definitely wondering what life would be like if they went to State University instead.
Abiding by the Honor Code is a requirement for success at USAFA, and forms a great moral code for living your day to day life as a military officer. Really, I think the Honor Code is a great guideline for everyone. There are, however, limitations in the real world.
Refusing to Lie, Steal, or Cheat doesn’t necessarily help you in military operations. Deception is a fundamental strategy in war, just ask anybody who read the CliffsNotes on Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Stealing from the enemy is highly encouraged, especially when you can steal their equipment wholesale and sell it to a partner nation to equip their military. And cheating? Well, if you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’. The bad guys are trying to win this firefight? It would be a shame if the good guys called in a BUFF and let them Winchester. Now the bad guys position, and everything nearby, is a series of smoldering craters. Was it fair? No, but that’s the point.
I never found myself in a firefight, requesting the help of an overhead regime-change machine. Instead, my deployment experience was a lot of paperwork in an air conditioned office, although my second tour at Al Udeid in Qatar had me traveling all over the Middle East inspecting contractor run sites with a team of Air Force inspectors. We flew all over the subcontinent, combed through contractor records and watched employees repair vehicles, store bombs, and a myriad of other tasks to ensure the supplies heading into the fight against ISIL were ready to go.
Since my subject matter expertise was in contract management, I had a team of Non-Commissioned Officers to act as Subject Matter Experts (SME) on the actual work the contractors were doing. These SMEs inspected the contractor’s work and reported their findings to me, which I then compiled into a report and sent to our headquarters back in Virginia.
One of those SMEs was a Technical Sergeant we called “Grumpy Cat” on account of his resting countenance resembling the cat of internet meme-lore. His job was to inspect the pre-positioned stocks of base building materials the U.S. Military had scattered around the region. Despite his apparent disposition, Grumpy Cat was actually a really nice guy. Getting along well was really important as our unit was small, only about a dozen, and we frequently went on trips in smaller teams. Imagine going on a 9-hour (one way) road trip through the blankest scenery imaginable with someone you can’t stand.
Through a quirk of Middle-Eastern politics, most of the Gulf Cooperation Council states were blockading Qatar for “supporting terrorism.” In return, Qatar accused everyone else in the GCC of “supporting terrorism.” Whether any of it was true was far above my 1st Lieutenant paygrade. All I knew was that our forty-five minute flight between Doha in Qatar and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates turned into a nine-hour ordeal.
In order to skirt the blockade and carry out our business, my team and I would fly first to a neutral country, sit through a layover, then continue on our way. Luckily enough, a couple of our contractor-operated sites were in these neutral countries. If we planned our site visits efficiently, we weren’t too affected by the blockade. This being a function of the U.S. Government meant we almost never were able to plan these trips efficiently.
Flying inefficiently around the Middle East provided ample opportunity for lying. My team and I were flying commercial flights, and although these were ostensibly friendly nations, we weren’t keen on letting everyone know we were a group of U.S. military. Everyone was accusing everyone else of supporting terrorists organizations, so we figured somebody might be telling the truth. Best to keep a low profile.
When a curious fellow passenger on my flights asked what I did for a living, I lied. Usually I would tell them I was in Construction Management. Sometimes I would tell them I was a journalist. Once, I told them I was a librarian. One lie stayed consistent: I always said I was Canadian.
At some point during my time at USAFA, probably at Combat Survival Training in between my Doolie and Sophomore year, an instructor told me to “remember my ABC’s”. If I was ever traveling around in the foreign public to never, ever tell anyone I was in the military and to tell people I was either Australian, British, or Canadian. The thought was most folks who didn’t speak English as their primary language wouldn’t be able to discern the different accents. I figured my native Minnesotan accent was close enough to a Canadian one, so it was easiest to just have that one in the chamber and ready to rock when asked.
So I became a Canadian construction manager from Thunder Bay, Ontario out in Qatar working on projects for the World Cup coming up in 2022. Or I was a reporter who grew up on a farm in Alberta who moved to Toronto for college and was out in Kuwait to do a story on oil production in OPEC competing with the rise of fracking in the United States and Canada. And once I was a librarian from Saskatoon, because that is a silly name for a place, and I got to watch my inquisitor struggle with whether he believed Saskatoon was a real place or not.
During one of these trips around the GCC, Grumpy Cat and I found ourselves traveling together, just the two of us, through Oman. We landed in Salalah late in the evening during the Khareef and picked up our rental car. By the time we needed to refill on gas, it was pitch dark. Grumpy Cat pulled the rented Pathfinder into a local gas station, an oasis of light and activity on an otherwise peaceful and dark desert highway (cool wind in my hair). We parked on the outside bay of pumps, and Grumpy Cat hopped out to refuel.
While Grumpy Cat pumped gas, I got out of the SUV to stretch my legs. There was only one other car at the station, and they left about the same time I exited the vehicle. Within a minute, I saw a man in a long, white robe hustling his way toward us from the gas station building.
“Hey, Grumpy heads up,” I said, nodding in the man’s direction.
“I see him,” Grumpy Cat replied just before the man started shouting and waving at us. He sounded friendly, but I started looking around us for trouble. In each of my pockets were one of the many inexpensive knives I carried with me during the deployment. As far as concealed weaponry goes, they were less desirable than a 9mm but better than fists, and they were all we had. This was my first trip to Southern Oman, and I was not keen on getting snatched up, escorted over the border to Yemen, and given a haircut by the Houthis.
“My friends! My friends!” The local man called out excitedly. I slid a knife from my left pocket to my left hand and Grumpy Cat kept pumping gas.
“Hey buddy,” Grumpy Cat replied, his hand on the gas nozzle. “What’s up?”
“How are you, friends?”
“We’re good, man,” Grumpy Cat said cheerfully. He really was a friendly guy.
“What do you think of my English?”
“It’s pretty good,” Grumpy Cat nodded approvingly. I nodded in agreement, looking past the man and into the gas station. Was this a distraction?
“You should be proud!”
“Why’s that?” Grumpy Cat asked.
“Because I am learning your language!” The man laughed. “It is a tough language.”
“You sound pretty good at it,” Grumpy Cat said. The gas pump clicked to a loud halt as the Pathfinder’s tank reached capacity.
“Where are you from?” The man asked cheerfully.
“Canada,” I started to say, but in between the n and the second “eh,” Grumpy Cat interrupted.
“Sweden,” he blurted out. His outburst caused both me and our new local friend to look at Grumpy Cat. Confused, the local man reminded us once more to be proud of “our language” and then awkwardly bid us farewell. Grumpy Cat placed the gas nozzle back in the pump, and we both watched the local return to the gas station building. The two of us got into the Pathfinder.
“Don’t say it,” Grumpy Cat said, firing up the SUV without looking at me.
“Sweden?” I asked anyway. “Grumpy, do you know Swedish?”
“No,” Grumpy Cat sighed, shifting into drive. The Pathfinder lurched forward and we left the parking lot.
“Why Sweden?”
Checking for oncoming traffic on the deserted highway, Grumpy Cat flicked the blinker before responding. “I panicked,” he pulled out into the highway. “I just said the whitest country I could think of.”
Grumpy Cat drove us further into the dark Omani desert. “What were you going to do if he asked you to speak some Swedish?” As dark as it was, he knew I was grinning.
“I dunno,” he shrugged. “Probably do an imitation of Swedish Chef off the Muppets.”
I started laughing, and a few seconds later Grumpy Cat joined in, throwing in his best impression of the Muppet.
“Well if Sweden was so bad,” Grumpy Cat said a few miles later when we finished laughing. “What were you going to say!”
I summoned my best accent. “Dontcha know? I’m from Ontario Canada, eh!”
“That makes way more sense,” Grumpy Cat sighed. “Outsmarted by a Lieutenant. You’re not going to tell anyone are you?”
“Of course I am.”
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