“You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today.” – Abraham Lincoln

3 October

From “The Human Condition: A User’s Manual,” by Arnold Kunst

We all learn some lessons in life the hard way, and while stationed in Germany with the US Army I learned the value of reading carefully a document before I signed it.

I was proud of the fact that I had earned a driver’s license in basic training. Every now and then I’d get assigned to drive for the day - it had a way of getting me out of the boring but familiar and into the somewhat distant and more or less exciting/exotic. Anyway, on this particular day I was assigned to transport the equivalent of The Diplomatic Pouch from our company to battalion headquarters 40 miles away.

Now, you need to know that we were an ordinance company. That is, we dealt with the care and feeding of weaponry. But in our case we were what was euphemistically called a “special weapons” company. That’s Army-speak for nuclear weapons. That is, our company was made up of two types of 18-wheel trucks: the one transported the nuclear weapon itself, the other the rocket. If/when the balloon went up we were to transport out payloads to some undisclosed location in the German countryside where we would liaise with the artillery guys who put the rockets together with the payloads – and then, on the President’s order, those artillery guys would execute the presidential Push Of The Button.

Anyway, as you can imagine, transporting that particular pouch was a big deal because the contents of that pouch did NOT want to fall into the hands of the wrong people. When I got that pouch I signed for it. By doing that I was now locked in: part of a paper trail.

And, you guessed it, that paper trail needed more careful attention than I gave it that day. Like, I took personal responsibility by signing for that damned pouch when I got it, but was far more intent on getting to the snack bar at the other end than getting that same paper-work signed for when I dropped it off. Mind you, when I got to battalion headquarters I did in fact leave it with the right people, but, as you can readily see, that’s not quite the same thing.

I found out all about it three days later when I was called into my my company commander’s office: my signature was the last one on record, and what did I do with The Pouch?

I eventually got off the hook, but it took three LOOOONG weeks.

Now I know: when you’re on the hook, it’s best to pay very close attention to paper-trails.