Emotional Rescue

Forgive me if I am a little weepy today......but news of our supreme leader barry hussein visiting Kenya have made me nostalgic.

29 years ago this very week I was on my way back to Diego Garcia after a successful 15 days leave in Bayridge for the reopening of the Statue of Liberty......

There is no commercial airline permitted to serve Diego, so you have to fly in military aircraft..... Which means you sit parachute style along the walls of the plane with pallets of cargo....no windows...... And you have to ask permission to use the head.

My flight plan took me from Newark to Norfolk, to Banger Maine, to Rota Spain then to Siggonella Sicily and then to Nairobi.......5 flights over 30 plus hours....layovers as they unloaded and loaded pallets onto the plane....and we weren't allowed to get off.........upon arriving in Kenya we were told there was a problem with the plane and we had to disembark while it was fixed......we were in civilian clothes of course, but we were greeted by machine gun toting stymies and escorted to a private room in the airport..... Not allowed to mingle with the general public..... But they had a small service bar.....so I had a few quasi chilled bottles of "Tusker" beer....as the afternoon wore on, we were told they could not fix the plane until later that night.... And since the Kenyan military could not secure the runway after dark, we would have to spend the night. ( there was a civil war going on at the time. Isn't there always ? )

So.....the State Department picked the 8 passengers and 6 crew members up and took us to the Hilton.....we gad to share rooms....I can't remember my roommates name, but he was fm Oklahoma or Nebraska........ "Do not leave your rooms for any reason, you will be captured and taken hostage....order room service and we will be back to get you at 5:00 a.m."

Well......suffice to say that 18 seconds after the State Department left our room, I was in the next elevator...... I convinced my roommate to come downstairs for a drink in the lobby.....and then to hit a few other Hotel Bars on the strip....( I didn't want to get captured alone)......and so we drank our Tusker Beer and talked about College Football, and i imagined I was in the same watering holes as Hemingway in snows of Killiminjaro.....back from a wild game hunt where I shot a rhinoceros and 2 wilderbeast...... And the next morning we boarded our plane with machine gun escort and flew to Athens and finally Diego.

Who knows..... Maybe barry Hussein's dad was cooking the family dog for dinner in the hills by the airport..... Or in the kitchen of the Hilton for that matter.

Anyway....... Maybe he'll get caught in the crossfire of the civil war..... I'm sure it's still going on