(Mac holds the newspaper with his story in The Community Section. Photo Socotra.)
I am sitting here at the breakfast table in Big Pink, looking out over the pool and the Culpeper Gardens Assisted Living Facility. The eight-story building with the exposed concrete beams serves as a red brick metaphor to my mornings as the sun creeps down its flanks.
It drew my thoughts to Mac’s article in the local base rag, which he showed me at the luncheon yesterday. One thing led to another, as it does on a Saturday, when the mind can wander a bit. There are two or three strands of a story going through my mind, and I am not sure which one to pursue.
The delightful uncertainty of a morning without the office in it makes me feel a but weightless. Pursue one path I must, and with alacrity: I need to get my act organized and ready to take on the road to the Little Village By The Bay.
The house up there is sold, I think, a good thing, and the bad thing is that the house is still full, and must be emptied by next week.
In order to do so, I need to get a manuscript to lay out, write an article about the Spring Meeting of our little professional association- where I saw Mac- and edit the seventy photos while wobbling around on my weak pin and cane.
After the social hour, I got to sit next to my 92-year-old buddy Mac, who had an article done about the long sad sweet story of his wife Billie’s abduction by the ravages of the cruelest of diseases- Alzheimer’s.
The article is by Sharon Walker, of the Henderson-Meyer PAO shop, and starts out this way:
“This is really a love story, and it even has an attractive fairy tale quality to it: Beautiful, talented young people come together, make a Family and travel the world courtesy of the U.S. Navy.
Mac is from Iowa, and Sarah Vivian Gilliland, “a Virginia girl,” married in June 1948, after he proved his mettle in World War II. She was an airline stewardess and a registered nurse.
Nowadays, retired Rear Adm. Mac lives alone in what he calls his bachelor pad. His beloved wife, nicknamed “Billie” by her parents who expected a boy, died in 2002 of complications from Alzheimer’s disease.
“You don’t die of Alzheimer’s,” Showers explained. “You die with Alzheimer’s.”
I read the rest of the article with interest when I got back to the office, since Mac has been my mentor on the long and painful journey with Raven and Big Mama.
That fed back into a reverie of what needs to be done next week 800 miles away, and how I am going to get there to do it. Crap.
When we parted, Mac vowed he go back to his bachelor pad at the Madison, make some popcorn and catch up on his mail. I suggested that he might want to venture out to Willow that evening, since it would be the last time to talk until I got back, and God only knows when that is going to be.
(The Joint Staff J2 with Office of Naval Intelligence Sailors. Photo Socotra.)
The Luncheon was brisk and efficient. The Professionals were honoring Tony with the annual Red Tie award, a tribute to the bad old days of the conflict across the world ocean with the Soviets. Once a year, in association with the Canada-UK-US maritime conference (“CANUKUS”), the analysts of Naval Intelligence would gather to have lunch and say what they could about what they did professionally in public.
To advertise discretely their membership in the Spook Fraternity, the members of the Professionals wore distinctive red neckties, embroidered with the Star and Anchor of the Red Banner Soviet Fleet. There were several of the ties in evidence, most in pretty good shape considering the years they have been hanging on the tie rack in the closets of their owners.
Full-time Spookdom only last so long, and is really a young person’s game. After retirement, Tony took on fund-raising for the Foundation that RADM Sumner “Shap” Shapiro established to do good works for the community. That is mostly the award of scholarships to the kids of active duty and civilian intelligence professionals. He raised over $50 grand down through the years on the annual golf tournament he held out in the Shenandoah Valley.
I was seated next to Mac, and Tony and his wife were across the table from me. Tony looked frail, and I thought of my Dad.
In the old days, there was a lot of wink-wink, nudge-nudge to be done at these luncheons. Not so much, anymore, now that we are a little between peer-competitors on the waves. Not that there won’t be some coming excitement with our Chinese pals and those industrious Indians.
Chairman Jake did his usual masterful self-effacing job in herding the agenda along, and President Terry was at her radiant brassy best. Jake asked Dave to give a run-down on the Foundation’s health, Nels rose to update the joint essay contest with the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, and gave a nod to AFCEA’s intelligence director, Steve, who was seated with some of the usual suspects at a corner table. Mark addressed the awards cycles, and JTodd negotiated the tricky shoal waters of his assumption of the management of the golf tournament that Tony managed for a couple decades.
The current Intelligence Officer to The Joint Staff (J2) is an old pal, and the first woman to serve in the job. Liz-with-a-Z is on the two-star list and I am betting she will have a Combat Support Agency directorship in her future. The daughter of a full Admiral, she is also the granddaughter of a Rear Admiral. Liz-with-Z has a Blue-and-gold Navy pedigree, but she walked the length of the Appalachian Trail (almost 2,200 miles!) before coming into the Navy, getting a unique perspective on the worlds of Mind and Nature.
She delivered some remarks on what the OPINTEL game is like these days, and what the Chairman expects in the Age of the 24 Hour News Cycle. Unfortunately, the specifics are not for attribution, so you are just going to have to wish that you had been there.
So that is another strand wrapped in the first one, the curse of those you love having their minds stolen, and then back in the Bluesmobile to realize how much I despise the clog of traffic that is Tysons Corner, even at mid-day. Construction everywhere, endless cycles of the traffic lights. Unbelievable.
I made some desultory progress at the office and then at five wobbled over to Willow. Mac was already there, having pushed his high-speed walker (breaks, chrome trim, speed-load basket) over from the Madison. I slid my cane under the bar, wondering if a walker was really the ultimate answer to my current impaired locomotion.
My younger son came by for a beer, and it being Friday, Tracy had a special on the menu to continue the tradition of the Lenten Fish Fry. The special was a double Willow Burger with caramelized onions and cheese on a roll baked by Kate Jansen. I was not hungry, lunch so recently in the rear view mirror, but it was fun to watch him tuck into it.
He passed a career milestone this week. He sat for his Warfare Qualification Board, and passed with flying colors. That means he will be entitled to wear the gold pin announcing to the cognoscenti hat he is a certified, board-reviewed professional. I had one of the pins, which I got as part of the dress-up we did for the wedding in Toronto last year in dress white uniforms.
I was subsequently been informed that it is not authorized for display by those of us who retired prior to the establishment of the device (and the Corps of Information Dominance to which it connotes membership) and I thought it might be nice for a pin that I wore to be the first one he does. Mac was gracious enough to present it. It was awesome.
“That is three generations of Naval Intelligence,” I said.
“Plus a couple in between,” laughed Mac.
(Liz-with-an-S, Tinkerbelle and Serena. Photo Socotra.)
The girls behind the bar laughed, and posed to mark the occasion.
So, that being about as much in a day as my aching knee could handle, I motored home and crashed early. This morning an associate forwarded a book review from the Wall Street Journal. It purports to be the inside story on a sensitive intelligence operation conducted on the High Seas that occurred when the Admiral was in the Pacific.
None of us wants to get in trouble with the government, so I can’t comment on it- safer that way- but the lead paragraph states that someone- apparently in a position to know- passed a note to the Soviet Embassy informing them that the CIA and the Navy were trying to recover something that was extremely valuable to them. It was signed “A Well Wisher.”
Having been immersed recently in the accounts of the establishment of the National Security State, the Red Scare, the VENONA decryption and Alger Hiss’s treachery lately, I am intrigued by the fact that someone in the government as late as the mid-1970s was still rooting for the Other Side.
I am not surprised. But like I said earlier, the strands are perfectly logical in my mind, and yet utterly unrelated.
Or are they?
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com