Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.
No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands . . .
Will no one tell me what she sings?—
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago.
-The Solitary Reaper
William Wordsworth
Thinking it's time for another topic besides the election, after noting this morning that while Bay County predictably went 70% for Trump on Tuesday, Steuben County NY, where I'm sitting right now, also went 69.5% for the Orange One. Turns out this place is no more enlightened than the panhandle of Florida, once you get outside the confines of this little enclave of educated, well-traveled folks in Corning. This red wave of intolerance and tribalism has swamped the entire country, regardless of who occupies the White House.
Anniversaries that end in a zero hold more significance for us in this base ten world. Maybe that's why I find myself these days thinking back to where I was thirty years ago right about now, in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, flying jets and drinking coffee and sleeping a lot during Operation Desert Shield.
That's my jet, 83031, likely getting ready to take off on a combat air patrol up along the Iraqi border. Note the flat spots on the backs of the wing tanks--this shot (which I found on the internet) would've been taken fairly late in the game, when we started resorting to the cheaper drop tanks because our F-15 brethren from Eglin and Bitburg kept jettisoning their wing tanks every time anyone shot at them, and we were running out. Waste not . . .
The CAP missions during Shield were stultifying. Climb to the northwest to one of the racetrack patterns arrayed along the border. Relieve the prior two-ship. Turn "hot" toward the border while Rev peeled off "cold" toward the south. Fly north for two minutes watching the occasional blip on the radar that represented an Iraqi fighter on the other side of the border, watching us. Turn cold and run south for two minutes, taking the reprieve as a chance to read mail from home or pee. Watch Rev whiz by to the north on his hot leg, making sure we did not collide. Turn hot again. Rinse and repeat. For three hours.
Back at the base there was little to do other than read books, make small talk in the alert barn, or work on the next day's schedule. And sleep. We all slept a lot.
We also drank, on those rare occasions when some spouse or parent sent a Listerine bottle or two filled with Jim Beam.
Most of the talk focused on when we'd get to go home, back in November of 1990. There was the rumor that Holloman AFB's F-15s were coming to relieve us, so we'd be back in Virginia by Christmas. That never made much sense to me--Holloman flew old, broken-down A models, technological dinosaurs, while we flew top-of-the-line Cs with every bell and whistle. Would the Air Force really send us back to the states because we were grumpy, and leave an inferior weapons system to guard the border?
"I heard they're going to leave our jets here, and we'll go home and fly theirs."
Desperate, and kind of stupid in retrospect. We weren't going anywhere.
One afternoon I was in the flightline mess hall, looking for a place to plop down with my tray of green beans, salisbury steak, and apple crumble. I spotted a place across from Captain Leonard, and slid onto the bench of his picnic table.
Captain Leonard apparently had no first name, no callsign; he was always just "Captain Leonard". He seemed too old to be a captain, and a little sallow and soft with his thin mustache and salt-and-pepper hair. Leonard was a KC-135 pilot who, as penance for some unarticulated sin, had been sent to Dhahran to work in the mission planning cell, the windowless bunker where other pale creatures toiled through the night on "breaking the frag", the process of deciphering the phonebook-sized printout of daily instructions from Riyadh that needed to be turned into a flying and alert schedule. Leonard didn't even get to wear a flight suit--his pilot wings looked shiny and out-of-place on the desert BDUs he wore to the office each day.
On this particular morning the discussion at the table was of an enlisted couple who had been caught in flagrante delicto overnight behind a supply tent. The fact that our troops were shagging one another was common knowledge on the base. The SPs used to ride out into the perimeter dunes at night, shut off the engine and turn on their NVGs, and suddenly the hills were alive with images of coupling. It was like a pornographic movie where all the actors were covered in luminescent goo, I'm told.
All of this copulating was strictly forbidden, of course, but it was a rule that was more in place to remind everyone to keep their romance on the down-low than to catch actual offenders.
Hence, it was a topic of great interest when we learned these two were being sent home as punishment for their succumbing to lust. That was the rule--get caught having sex, and you were on the next C-141 heading back across the pond.
And that was when Captain Leonard, poor sad Captain Leonard, had the flash of insight that must have illuminated Einstein himself when he figured out that time, space, and energy were all part of the same unified system:
"So, all we have to do is find someone willing to have sex with us, find a public place to consummate the transaction, and we both go home. Do I have that right?"
"Yep, I reckon so. That's what happened to those two."
"And if all of us here on the base were to pick a day, pick a time, pick a partner, and all walk out onto the flightline, drop trow, and start shagging away, they'd have to send us all home?"
There it was, brilliant at the time. We were a little addled after several months in the desert, I'll admit.
All we had to do is find a way to coordinate for everyone on the base to agree on a time, and like a great flash mob burst into action two-by-two (although I imagine a menage-a-trois would result in the same discipline) to earn us all a one-way-ticket out of this desert hell hole and back to civilization.
Over the next several lunches Captain Leonard became obsessed with his new project. The color returned to his face. He even smiled a little as he spoke. We had to find a way to spread the word without the grown-ups figuring it out. What about the guys who couldn't find a partner? Would onanistic stimulation suffice? Would they be willing to bat for the other team just once, if it meant the chance to go home and watch the war on TV?
"We're thinking too small, Donkey." (that was me at the time) What if we spread the gospel along the front, slipped a note to the poor shmucks marching out of the transports and charter jets to ride up to the front and sit in some foxhole in the middle of nowhere. What if they joined the plot?
And what if the Iraqis got wind of it? Maybe they have the same rule. Maybe we could stop an entire war from happening with a single, mass sexual act."
Alas, like many would-be messiahs, Captain Leonard was long on ideas but short on follow-through. Every day at lunch he'd sit down with a new detail about how we would pull this off, how to formulate the rules of the movement, how we would handle the media frenzy, etc., etc.
But in the end no one actually had sex, except the same folks who were ducking behind revetments and sand dunes for a quickie when no one was looking. There was no mass movement to use the act of physical love to keep a war from happening. There was only poor Captain Leonard, singing his song of resistance and salacious defiance to whoever might care to listen.
And eventually that war did happen, and all the bonking in the cool desert evenings stopped because folks were too afraid to venture out without a gas mask, what with the nightly Scud alerts and occasional attacks. I'm sure there is a fetish involving gas masks and charcoal lined chem suits; It just could not compete with the stress and boredom and moments of terror once the shooting started.
In the end, we all got to go home, every one of the thousands stationed at Dhahran. I just wonder if we could've done it a little sooner, with a bit of follow-through and lustful pluck.
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