IN THE CHAPTERS OF LIFE’S BOOK…
(…certain friends make these a great read…)
An old friend passed away yesterday after a long bout of illness. We were the last two of five “dust brothers”, Stan, Roy, Joe, Erwin, and me…from our days in the Negev Desert of southern Israel.
We had been a small group there doing our collective best to keep the track of a major airbase construction project’s costs under some semblance of order, if not control, which kept us at odds with the project’s management and the government’s watchdogs overseeing it (a fast-track project under the aegis of the Camp David accords). Thus our efforts were mostly viewed as nit-picking obstructionism delaying those fast-track objectives, and we were soon tagged as the “Costs Junta”…which is what drew us so closely together.
Experienced pros that we all were, we were determined to do our utmost to keep things on the up and up, no matter what. We sensed that there were unknown considerations underlying such abnormal negatives we were receiving from our superiors but just couldn’t put our fingers on them. Besides, since we were just staff “field grunts” such things were way beyond our pay grades, so we shrugged it all off and just kept doing what needed to be done, saving whatever frustrations we might have for our daily sundowner “cocktail hour”, to complain and grouse about why things were the way they were…when they shouldn’t be. It was a great puzzlement, so to compensate for it those sessions soon had us conjuring up all sorts of wild theories about corruption conspiracies at the highest levels, and making up the most hilarious and ridiculous scenarios for them. It was a way for us to vent our frustrations.
Our friend Erwin, whom we nick-named – Genghis Khan -, was a GAO forensic cost accountant who, when it came to such matters, had a mind like a friendly razor, leaving the rest of us amazed at his laser-like ability to zero in on any nuggets of reality buried under the mass of misdirecting data and numbers being fed to us. It was only much, much later that we discovered that, far from being a case of corruption, the project had been used as an elaborate cover scheme, to funnel sub-par materials through it for the IDF’s construction of a full scale replica of Saddam Hussein’s brand new nuclear reactor…further out in the desert beyond our airbase site (and because of that…were able to practice and refine the attack plan which later successfully blew it away…the day before it was due to become active).
At the time, of course, none of us knew that, so we kept up with our arguments and debates about it. While normally a very laid-back guy, and about as high-pressure as a bicycle pump, which is what drew me to him, Erwin could just as readily engage in the most heated debates about anything under the sun…his and “Capt” Joe’s often being the most extreme …requiring the rest of us to intervene by distracting them both with calls for another round of beer, or proclaiming the most salacious tales about our most recent forays in the wide open night life of Eilat, down by the shores of Aqaba.
Well, they’re all gone, Stan, Roy, Joe, and now Erwin. They were all chapters in our life’s book…the kind of certain friends that make these a great read; but, it’s kind of hard to enjoy it when you realize…you are the only one left to read those chapters. As I once explained in an earlier issue…it makes us feel like one of those lone pine trees left standing…in a patch of clear-cut forest.
Such are the inevitabilities of life.
CENTURION