I couldn’t tell exactly where the conversation was going.
But one thing was becoming increasingly clear:
A Romanian prison cell was likely in my future.
And it was entirely the guys in Naples’ fault.
At least, that’s how I saw it.
“Just rent a car,” they’d said. “It’s an easy drive.”
This, from a couple dudes who’d spent the previous five years traveling all over Eastern Europe.
They were fully accustomed to the region’s maniac drivers.
I was not so accustomed.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I should first mention that I’d volunteered for this.
The Eurasia Partnership Dive Exercise.
It was a NATO thing, co-sponsored by the U.S. Sixth Fleet and Romanian Navy.
Sixth Fleet headquarters was in Naples, Italy, where sat the two lieutenant commanders charged with planning the exercise.
Both were aviators. My kind of guys.
But while they owned the planning, the responsibility for execution fell to their reserve counterparts.
A bunch of weekend warriors hanging out two days a month at Naval Station Great Lakes, Illinois.
I was one of those weekend warriors.
And when the call went out for an Officer in Charge of Eurasia Partnership Dive, I took one look around my cubicle and decided a month in Romania was preferable to the corporate drudgery.
Even though I knew nothing about diving.
“Doesn’t matter,” the guys in Naples said. “Your job is to herd the cats. Our guys on Grasp will take care of the rest.”
Grasp was a U.S. rescue and salvage ship in the Black Sea. There was an entire Navy dive team on board.
The cats consisted of Explosive Ordnance Disposal, or EOD, divers from Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Ukraine, Georgia, and Azerbaijan.
It was a pretty high-profile thing, given the importance of our relationships with Black and Caspian Sea countries.
It didn’t matter that the EOD guys were thugs.
Professionals, but thugs.
Which made me wonder why anybody thought it was a good idea to put a reservist in charge.
And why diving?
That, it turned out, was easier to explain.
While most, but not all, of the exercise participants shared Russian as a common language, everyone spoke the same language underwater.
The sign language of diving is apparently universal.
Everyone communicated just fine with each other in the water.
So, the plan was for all participants to converge upon the Mihail Kogălniceanu Air Base just inland from Constanta, Romania, on the Black Sea.
It was where the Romanian Air Force used to keep its MiG-29s.
The EOD guys were all flying or driving directly to the base via military transport.
I, on the other hand, would be flying commercially to Bucharest, then driving the two and a half hours to the coast.
The very thought of the drive stressed me out.
Have you ever driven around lost in a foreign country?
I have, and it sucks.
And there was high potential to get lost in Bucharest.
Humans have lived there since the Palaeolithic era. Some of the roads are centuries-old, paved-over oxcart paths laid out with no discernible rhyme or reason.
I intended to take my Garmin GPS, but who knew if it would work in Romania?
So, I fell back on my aviation training, and conducted an exhaustive map study of the various routes from the Bucharest airport, through the city, and then on to Constanta.
It wasn’t perfect, but it would have to do.
The flight across the Atlantic was uneventful, and I made my connection in Munich with plenty of time.
I arrived in Bucharest sleep-deprived, but not miserably so.
I hit an ATM and grabbed a hundred bucks’ worth of Romanian leu. Then I found the rental car place, checked out my crappy Dacia, and hit the road.
It was about two o’clock on a Friday afternoon.
Luckily, my GPS was working.
I made it into the city, having navigated a half-dozen, six-lanes-deep roundabouts.
So far, so good, I thought.
Then I hit a stretch of mostly open road connecting two residential areas.
I was driving along, beginning to relax.
Then, all of a sudden, this girl walks out into the intersection right in front of me.
I had a green light, so I hadn’t even thought to slow down.
I swerved hard into the next lane to avoid the girl, thankful there was no oncoming traffic.
As I did so, she literally leapt back onto the sidewalk behind her and began waving her arms and cursing at me.
I assume she was cursing, that is.
I maneuvered back into my lane, breathing hard, trying to get my heart rate back under control.
A moment later, there were flashing lights behind me, along with that weee-awww, weee-awww sound of European sirens.
The cops.
What the hell? I thought. I had a green light!
Of course, there was no place to pull over.
I was on one of those ancient, paved-over oxcart paths with no shoulder.
So, I slowed down, put on my hazards, and began leading the Romanian police on a low-speed chase, looking for a place to get off the road.
When I finally found one, I hadn’t even come to a complete stop before the two cops were out of their car and on either side of mine.
And they were pisssssed.
They started yelling at me in stereo in Romanian.
English? I asked.
Espanol? they answered.
When I replied no, one of them suddenly knew passable English.
“Papers!” he said, just like in the movies.
I handed him my passport, which he waved off, getting even more pissed.
“Papers!” he said again.
You mean, like, license and registration? I thought.
“It’s a rental,” I offered as I reached across the front seat into the glove compartment.
I handed him every scrap of paper I could find in there.
He took it all and nodded to his partner on the other side of my car. Then they walked back to their squad car and stood in front of it.
I could see them talking in my rearview mirror. And they were clearly still agitated.
And I wasn’t entirely sure why.
I thought I’d done a pretty heroic job of not running over that girl back at the intersection.
They clearly thought otherwise.
For the next half hour, they continued to walk back and forth between their car and mine, stopping at my window each pass to yell at me in Romanian and ask for more papers.
Sensing things were going south, I finally said, “I don’t understand exactly what I’ve done. But if you intend to detain me any further, I need you to inform my Embassy that you’re holding a U.S. Naval Officer.”
And then I handed the cop closest to me my military I.D. card.
He took it, turned it over in his hand a few times, examining both sides.
Then he said a few things to his partner in Romanian before handing me back my I.D.
“Get out of here,” he said.
And I did. As quickly as possible.
Thankfully, the remaining drive to Constanta was uneventful.
When I finally got to the base, I made a beeline for the Navy Senior Chief who was serving as the Assistant Officer in Charge of the exercise.
“Senior!” I said, “you’re not gonna frickin’ believe what happened to me.”
The Senior Chief, also a reservist, was a Russian linguist and semi-renowned Sovietologist who worked for the State Department when he wasn’t playing weekend warrior.
He’d spent loads of time in Russia and Eastern Europe.
When I finished telling him my story, he said, matter-of-factly, “You know, twenty bucks would have made that whole thing go away.”
Huh?
“They were shaking you down,” he said. “They just wanted your money.”
Are you kidding me?
Rat bastards!
“Next time,” he continued, “just tell ‘em you’re sorry and suggest that you pay a small fine. Twenty bucks usually does the trick.”
Well, shit, I thought.
Welcome to Romania.
And thanks again to my friends in Naples.
Yeah, that was some easy drive.
You friggin’ jerks.