I’m not sure if I’ve written about it here before. If I have, I can only beg your indulgence. You try writing up 4,000+ posts across more than a decade while trying not to cover the same ground too often and see how well it works for you. In any case, it’s a thought that has crept up on me repeatedly in the past few weeks, so I’m giving it voice.
I assume this particular memory keeps cropping up because of the relationship I have with my employer and planning. A few of the same themes keep coming up time and time again. To understand why it has stuck with me, though, maybe I need to take you back to the beginning.
We had all, about 30 of us, just arrived at what was then called Fort Lee on the outskirts of historic Petersburg, Virginia. By just arrived, I mean I still had boxes stacked everywhere in my apartment and the ink wasn’t yet dry on my in-processing paperwork. I’d been an employee for less than a week and the powers that be announced on Wednesday or maybe Thursday of that first week that on Saturday morning, we’d all be loading up on a tour bus and using our three-day weekend to take a group road trip.
Destination: Savannah, Georgia.
It was a well intentioned notion – taking this group of fresh new logisticians in training to observe first hand the load out of the famed 3rd Infantry Division as they prepared their equipment to leave by rail and sea in route to the then new “second Gulf War.” Folk wisdom will tell you that timing is everything. Maybe “everything” is an exaggeration, but it’s important. How I know it’s important is that while we were driving down from Virginia, the transports loaded with a division’s worth of equipment had cleared port and were out to sea. The marshalling yard was empty. The railhead was empty. The port was empty. The mighty ROROs the bosses so badly wanted us to see had sailed at first light.
With nothing else to do, we were granted a DONSA – a day of no specified activities – in beautiful Savannah. Leadership extracted a promise that we would all solemnly swear to get ourselves back to the motel before departure time the next morning. So, we did what a bunch of early 20-somethings do when cut loose in a strange town and headed for the downtown entertainment district. I have no idea how many bars we hopped in and out of. I do remember there was a carriage ride and later in the evening a booze laden ghost tour in a hearse.
I have no idea how we got back to the motel. There’s a very vague memory of an over capacity taxi, but it’s… fuzzy. The motel, well, is probably worthy of a story all its own. Seedy doesn’t even begin to describe some of the business being transacted there in the dead of night.
In retrospect, it was great fun and games – or what passes for great fun and games when you’re 24. Back then, it was a guy who had just eaten the cost to move himself to Petersburg, hadn’t been paid in six weeks, and was desperately afraid every swipe of his credit card was going to be one swipe too much. That early winter of 2003 was the closest I’ve ever come to slipping sideways into default. It was horrifying and just a little exhilarating. File that under things you do when you’re too young to know better.
Anyway, I just assume it’s that early experience that’s left me deeply distrustful of whatever best laid plans this great green machine comes up with.