Good Sunday morning.
As we eat breakfast, the advance party of the Taliban have entered Kabul, and is installing Keurig hookahs and prayer rugs. It’s over.
Inside our command building, the intelligence boys and girls are burning all paper goods, including Kleenex, paper towels, lottery tickets and toilet paper, sending smoke from the embassy’s chimneys.
In the inner offices, the select troops are, I assure you, preparing to destroy all the laptops, including Hunter Biden’s.
In a small comedic way, I know a little about this process.
Somewhere in my book, I may have told this story, but today, in light of these alarming events, it bears telling again.
In 1954 after two years in Tokyo, as a typist and officer’s assistant, I was reassigned to go home. Reassignments are always scary. I could have been dispatched to Minot Air Base in North Dakota, where only a cyclone fence breaks the wind coming down from Moscow.
Or perhaps, the worst news, Keesler Air Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, famous for its cook school, and where every morning the first thing one does is scrape the green mold from one’s boots.
I was lucky. Because I had forged a friendship with my duty officer, I flew home first class on a TWA four engine plane to Hamilton Air Force Base overlooking San Francisco.
“It’s the country club of bases,” he assured me.
“Think palm trees and California girls, with a view of Alcatraz.”
He was right about most of that, including Alcatraz, except my new job was in the OAL-OID building, a huge cement blockhouse with no windows to see the now defunct Alcatraz prison.
Why no windows? I soon found out.
On one of those windowless days where I spent eight hours typing boring memorandums, a major stuck his head in the door. I snapped to attention.
“Are you a typist.”
“I am sir, I was trained at …”
“Good, what’s your name?”
“Devine, sir, I was trained …”
“Good,” he cut again, “Follow me.”
I followed him as we walked down the long green hall, through an electronic door and past a seated guard. I realized I was in that part of the building that “dare not speak its name.”
I was given stacks of letters that needed “to be retyped.” I’ll say they did. That was the least important part of my job from that moment on.
Then came the important part. Each day, after the officers went home, I was given a large rolling gray canvas cart that I would take through six offices, emptying important waste baskets into said cart. I had become a janitor with security clearance.
When this was completed, a very large African American MP, name plate-De Pass, white helmet and sidearm, followed me down the green halls, but was not allowed to enter the offices with me.
Sgt. De Pass took me down an elevator to a long outside walk, surrounded by barbed wire topped cyclone fence, to a metal furnace, where he instructed me in its operation.
A 6-year-old could have done it.
1. Dump in material
2. Close door
3. Press button
4. A light told me when it was done
High-class janitor.
Then De Pass stepped back and had his cigarette break. He offered me one. I accepted.
I wasn’t sure it was allowed, but he had a gun.
There we stood, burning classified trash while having a Chesterfield. Your tax dollars in action.
Hamilton Air Force Base is gone now. It’s a high-class family neighborhood, but you can’t grow anything there because the soil is tainted. Your tax dollars in action.
De Pass, the basket and furnace are gone as well. Oh yes, Alcatraz is still there.
J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.
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