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When Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense in the first Bush administration, he came to my unit for a tour and to eat lunch.
The colonel called me in: "Look, this guy's an asshole but we gotta take him through Site III. You be his escort; you know everything that's going on anyway." Thanks, sir.
The first thing I had to do was to go through the trick on duty trying to find ten people who came from Wyoming to eat with him. I found one. By the time I was done, we had people who had lived in Wyoming at one time, people who had been to Wyoming, people who had been stationed in Wyoming...and finally we wound up with two people who could name all of the states surrounding Wyoming. I had more luck coming up with people from Idaho, and that list wasn't a whole hell of a lot longer.
So we fed Dick Cheney a lunch consisting of a salad and coffee and answered lots of questions about our involvement with Wyoming (gee sir, I lived in Thayne for a couple of years once but that's about it; Cheney didn't know where Thayne was but that's okay, the governor of Wyoming probably doesn't know where it is either). He's getting more and more pissed that we didn't have more Wyoming residents for him to eat with and swap stories of living in Casper, but there just aren't all that many Wyoming residents in the army in the first place.
Off we went into the site. Our first stop was the Morse section, which had a grand tradition of taping little paper spurs to the shoe heels of real assholes. This they did. I'm standing there watching one of my dickheads tagging one of Papa Bush's dickheads trying not to bust a gut...
Next thing you know I'm walking around the station with Dick Cheney wearing spurs, his entire entourage on the verge of dying laughing right there in the hallway, all the troops who pass him whistling "he's got spurs that jingle jangle jingle," my colonel looking like he's about ready to die of a combination of hysterical laughter, embarrassment and downright fear right there on the spot..."Jim, you have GOT to think of ANYTHING to get that man back into the Morse bay so they can get those things off his shoes. You know how much hell we're gonna pay if he sees them?" Why, yes I do, and we can tell him the expert in new codes has just arrived at work and he'll give the Secretary a briefing on his new discoveries. That worked.
We had senators and congressmen in every once in a while, and after the Cheney incident they made sure to tell us tour guides "don't take the VIP into the Morse bay, you know what happened last time you tried."
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