Somewhat towards the end of the book, I attempt to atone for an almost 40-year old personal slight by slipping a reference to a popular country singer, and his popular song of the time. In the parlance of the genre, I done him wrong. He almost certainly won’t remember, but a debt is a debt to be repaid, even after all this time.
In the mid-1980’s, I was assigned to teach mathematics (the alternative version is torture) to West Point cadets; you know, the easy stuff like differential and integral calculus, probability and statistics, and differential equations. (You can understand why the alternative version is so widely popular.)
For some reason, every evening an officer from one of the academic departments was assigned as academic duty officer and one evening, I drew that assignment. I can’t remember what the duties were – probably something to do with defending the free world from whatever the current threat of the moment was, but that night country legend, Larry Gatlin, was performing in concert at West Point. He may only have been a country superstar at that point, but he was (and is) just about my favorite singer so, completely forsaking my sworn vows of Duty, Honor, Country, I skipped out of where I was supposed to be just after the concert began and slipped into a conveniently empty seat in a dark auditorium.
The concert was going great, and because of the darkness, nobody noticed me. I was in uniform but that wasn’t too unusual, given the setting. Although the Duty Officer arm brassard that I neglected to take off was just a bit incriminating.
About halfway through the concert, ol’ Larry came off the stage and started moving into the audience, depositing himself into the other conveniently empty seat right next to mine. He seemed intent on starting a conversation.
I froze. I envisioned my meteoric climb to career mediocrity coming to a screeching halt. My only hope was that the darkness would continue to obscure me enough to provide some reasonable doubt at my impending court martial, and that’s when the spotlight hit us.
Lacking a better strategy, and in no condition to come up with one, I continued staring rigidly ahead, never acknowledging Larry. I don’t know what he thought about that, but he quickly figured out that the audience meet-and-greet was going nowhere, so he headed back to the stage, mercifully with spotlight in tow.
Luckily, nothing ever came of this. The commies apparently never realized how strategically vulnerable we were and the authorities at West Point either didn’t discover my crime or weren’t convinced that court martial and 20 years of hard labor at Leavenworth were appropriate punishments – or weren’t worth the effort.
So this is just between Larry and me. I really like ‘American With A Remington’ and it fits really well into the story, so please accept my shout out as a debt repaid. Fair enough?
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