It was groundhog day at Tuzla Airbase. Three months into our operations at the MND North headquarters and every minute of everyday was the same. We worked half-day schedules, yeah that's right, 12 hour shifts with no days off. There were two hundred of us there playing solitaire and Doom on our networked computers. The CG was an asshole and banging some chick (alleged by none other than the Sergeant Major of the Army who was going down for banging some other chick not his wife). That was the proximate cause of our CG's "early retirement." But I digress.
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So the joker that was working the VIP/protocol operation comes by my office and asks me if I wanted to work the First Lady visit. It was either that or drive a ten penny nail into my eye so of course I said yes. Good he says, I need an escort officer for Chelsea. Cool, she's pretty nice. The women and children of Srbrenica were coming to tell Hillary about the experience of seeing their men herded off by the Bosnian Serbs, aided and abetted by the Dutch Army, and later finding out that all the men and teenage boys had been murdered and buried in a not so deep hole. My job was to escort Chelsea to lunch at our messhall and entertain the kids there. Sure, no problem. There would other chaperones and translators as well.
We waited and waited like it was our first prom. The First Lady arrived and was herded off in another direction while Chelsea showed up all smiles and met and talked to the kids like they were real people. It was nice to see. We ate lunch and talked small talk. She was the president's kid after all and I could see my career pass before my eyes if I really stepped on it.
The remarkable thing was that these kids had lost all of the males in their families: fathers, brothers, uncles and grandfathers. The guests were mostly young girls and they were eating and joking around and acting pretty normal and stuff. They'd been through hell and were doing better than their moms.
At some point we were killing time and we got a call from the first Lady's advance woman. She was frantic going ape shit and yelling over the phone that we were late and somebody was going to pay. I've been screamed at by marine corps gunnery sergeants so I was having none of her shit. Besides, I had made it from enlisted e-nothing in two services to major and had an MA from Columbia. I "advised" Chelsea that it was time to go so we sauntered over to the headquarters building herding cats (small children that were cute, but didn't speak English). The advance girl was having a conniption, "THE FIRST LADY WILL NOT BE KEPT WAITING," but I was pretty much protected by Chelsea who said that she was having fun talking to the kids and not watching the clock.
Do you think during our conversation at the "dining facility," Chelsea might have mentioned that she was shot at? Do you? When rounds hit the ground they make an unforgettable sound. It gets registered in the reptilian part of your brain and you'll always remember it. Dream about it in fact.
Later on in the afternoon I said goodbye to Chelsea and whispered in her ear "good luck in November" and she thanked me. I whispered because I was a lone Democrat in a sea of asshole conservatives.
I was impressed by Hillary, because at one point I was walking down the hall towards my office when Hillary and our commanding general turned the corner. I tried to become invisible since our CG was the jealous type that craved all of the attention and you could really regret running afoul of this jerk. So he tried to pass by without so much as a nod, but Hillary stopped him and asked who I was. He introduced us and off they went. I was one of his senior staff officers who arrived in Bosnia before he or the chief of staff did. He was pissed, but it wasn't my fault.
Later on I received two photographs of her with her auto-pen signature on them. I used them to torment my ultra-conservative, right-wing christian father. I hung it in his house next time I visited. That got a laugh.
Oh yeah. There were no shots fired when Hillary came to Bosnia. We never received ANY SNIPER FIRE the entire time I was there and I arrived in December before Christmas and the rest of the 1st Armored Division arrived. On our advance recon in November I had walked around Tuzla with my UN escort, a drunk from Norway. He wore a UN beret and went out without so much as a pocket knife. I was completely unmolested as we walked the streets. I was stared at because I was wearing all of my battle rattle while people were sitting at outdoor cafes drinking coffee and people watching.
The only fire we ever took was from the idiots that about once a week shot off rounds into the clearing barrel outside of the headquarters building. Then there was the German liaison officer that actually fired a round through the floor of the operations center. He was showing off his 9mm to some of our staff guys. It was three rows back from where I was sitting and that gunshot really got people's attention. They sent him home soon after (that's probably why he did it, now that I think about it).
Anyway, Hillary lied, but her apologists are saying that it was due to candidate fatigue or she was telling a war story. That's funny, I never lied and told anybody that we received sniper fire. Even I'm not that stupid. It would have been way too easy to verify, since the CNN house was right outside the main gate and they filmed everything.
Too bad too, 'cuz her campaign was going so well.