Friday, August 12, 2011

I’m Outta Here!


Early this evening, I indulged in my final BAF Surf & Turf night.  After dinner, a postprandial cigar with the boys.  I broke out the really good stuff, the top-shelf Padrons.

Tomorrow morning, I get to load my bags onto a C-17 and head out for Qatar.  There, I’ll out-process and then fly to Frankfurt for my post-deployment vacation.

My friends know I’m a geek for old rock music.  If I knew the intelligence business as well as I know my arcane rock lyrics, I’d probably be occupying the Director’s office at CIA right now.

But I don’t.  So I’ll stick to my music.  A stanza from The Ballad of Dwight Fry, from Alice Cooper’s Love It To Death LP, is running through my head:  “I was gone for all those days, but I was not all alone … I made friends with a lot of people in the danger zone.”

It wasn’t much of a danger zone here, what with the DFAC being a bigger and more persistent hazard than Taliban rockets, but I did make a lot of friends here, professionals with whom I’d gladly serve were I to head off to another war zone (which is highly unlikely, but that’s a subject for another post).

I’d like to take this opportunity to deliver a special tip of the hat to Brian (my former boss in Kabul), Spence-oire, Carmelita, Dirty Red, and a couple fine Army NCOs who demonstrated singular professionalism and leadership.  It’s been great, guys!

But I can’t end on a maudlin note, so …pop quiz time … without Googling it, who was Dwight Fry?

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