Here is another story from “Radioman: Twenty-Five Years in the Marine Corps” that didn’t make the final edit. The book is available on Amazon.
“Booze” joined me as my assistant Air Officer after I had been in Iraq with 7th Marines for about 2 months of a 14 month tour. I had been getting my butt kicked and was literally getting 3 hours of sleep a night. I don’t think his ‘stay’ in Iraq was well defined and suspected he was a little uneasy about that. He was a reservist Huey pilot from Alaska and showed up ready to help. One of those guys that is so easy to get along with, you sometimes wonder if something is wrong with him. Not a typical Marine aviator. I didn’t know the full story but Booze didn’t drink. Hence the callsign that labeled him as a drinker.
Booze worked 6 am to 6 pm. I worked the reciprocal. We would overlap for 30 minutes of turn over then I would go work on other duties in the back of the Combat Operations Center (COC) for a couple of hours before going to bed. Booze and I had to share the same work email account. We worked out a system with personal folders. If a personal email came in while the other was on duty, you simply filed it in the appropriate folder.
On a quiet night about 5 months later, an email came in from Booze’s monitor saying he should expect orders back home in the next couple of weeks. I hadn’t heard anything about this from Booze or from HQ. Brilliance struck! A couple of cut and pastes, a couple of address swaps and there was a passible email in Booze’s inbox apologizing but informing him he would be there the rest of the year. My plan was to conduct our turn over in the morning, go work in the back of the COC for 20 minutes to let him peruse his inbox. Then I would let him know it was a joke and show him where the real email was.
We conducted our usual turn over that morning and I went to the back of the COC to work. After 15-20 minutes, I went to check on how things were going and Booze was gone. I worked a little longer than I planned and was really dragging so I went to get some lunch and go to bed. I had forgotten my joke. When I came in that evening, I could tell immediately that Booze was distraught. Oh crap! I had never told him about my joke. He had bought it hook, line, and sinker! I apologized profusely and explained what I had done. Immediately Booze’s jovial self returned. He was a little unhappy about my joke but the relief of getting orders home totally eclipsed any hard feelings. He almost bounced out of the COC to go get dinner and call his wife. That’s when I realized Booze’s unintentional revenge! He hadn’t gotten a single thing done all day! Further, he had contacted every senior officer he could think of to ask for help. I headed down to my boss’ office. I steeled myself, then knocked to go in. My boss, the Regimental Operations Officer, was a Lt Col and a very busy man. I felt like such an idiot for wasting his time with stupid stuff like this. I explained and apologized profusely. He laughed and told me how many times Booze had stopped in that day with different ideas and complaints about his situation. Then he chided me for not letting him know, we could have had fun with that for weeks! He closed by telling me I better go apologize to the Executive Officer (XO), Booze had been in his office several times too. So down the hall I went, steeling myself again for a dressing down from the XO. The XO had given me multiple ass chewings but that is for another story. Waiting outside his office, I felt like a kid in trouble, listening to dad pull up in the driveway, just waiting for his licking. The XO gave me the same treatment my boss had! Wow, dodged another bullet! Until he told me I better call the Air Officer at Division. I called the Division Air O and he laughed his deep rumbling laugh then sorta chewed my ass for not telling him, he could have strung it out for weeks! But I better check ‘sent items’ on the email because Booze was going to email I Marine Expeditionary Force (Division’s higher headquarters). So the night went. I emailed and called so many senior officers to apologize. They all replied that I should have let them know because we could have made it a long con. I was lucky on so many counts, the most important being that it was a quiet night in Iraq. I was worked trying to get my daily duties done and clean up the mess I had instigated and Booze had spread from Iraq to Alaska.
Years later, I was relaying this story to a friend when he told me he had done a similar con on a pain in the arse young Captain. He had let a lot of people in on the joke. The con had gone along swimmingly until the XO’s wife called it off. The young Captain’s wife called her for advice on selling their house and getting ready to move while her husband was deployed. Ouch! Yeah, that went a little too far. Hey, are we stressed enough? Lets screw with each other to induce more stress! Suck it up buttercup, gotta be hard!