My Friend (yes, I have at least one)

In case you haven't figured it out, I don't have many friends. I hate most everybody, and our weird military lifestyle makes it difficult to stay in contact with anyone for more than maybe a year. And a year is a pretty long time in this world.

However, I've managed to stay in contact with one friend from the tour I did at Major High Silly Command here before Iraq. We'll call her MC.

MC is a couple years younger than I am. She's an Iraq veteran, and associated with the CA community, although as an intel weasel, not a 38-type CA dork. Her tour was OIF I (the initial invasion).

She currently works in some strange and probably frightening capacity as an intelligence-type contractor in the greater DC area. One of the people quietly manning the wall between us and the screaming hordes.

MC is a person in whom our country has a very significant level of confidence. You know those strange security clearances 17 levels above Top Secret? She has all those.

So you might not want to be aware that she is the World's Worst Motorist. In the two years since she left Tampa, she's managed to rack up so many minor accidents that she's been stripped of any hope of holding a driver's license until she's probably 30. This is someone who we've decided we can trust with pretty much any national security issue you can imagine. However, we cannot trust her to drive to Kwik E Mart.

It's SO BAD that her fiance has been notified that his insurance company intends to drop him immediately following the wedding, since that implied MC will be in close proximity to his motor vehicles.

Anyway, MC is great. She makes me laugh, and she's taken care of me a couple of times when I've pretty much slipped off the edge. She threw my "heading to Iraq" party (a story I'm NOT publicly sharing, but suffice it to say it was epic). And she came to Ft. Bragg before I headed downrange and helped me get my head screwed on straight. She remembered Abby's Mom and sent gifts in the days following her surgery. And she's got a great Dad. I'm sure her Mom is great, too, but I've only met her Dad (for a weekend festival of gun-buying that could be its own story).

So, here's my shout-out to MC. And should you ever find yourself driving around Our Nation's Capitol, and should you see a short chick with long, dark hair and about 750 security badges, and should she be driving...dive for cover.

And did I mention she was once a Hooters Girl? Crazy world.