We’re all naturally inclined to certain things.
The oversized, gregarious kid plays left tackle and eventually sells cars.
The captain of the robotics team goes to MIT and then works for SpaceX.
The skinny, cerebral kid runs cross country and becomes a neurosurgeon.
The student council president pledges Sigma Chai and goes on to a career in government, law, or white-collar crime.
The kid running the lemonade stand, fretting inflation’s impact on the cost of plastic cups, becomes the CFO of a venture-backed start-up.
And the uptight, reasonably well-spoken kid who hates to have his hair messed up is made a Navy protocol officer.
Never fails.
At least, it’s never failed for me.
I’ve never asked for it.
But I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been made the protocol officer.
I’m like C3PO, apparently.
The protocol droid, whether I want to be or not.
And I certainly didn’t want to be this time.
Hell, I didn’t even want to be in Kuwait in the first place.
That’s not to say I objected to being deployed.
Quite the contrary.
It beat the shit out of being a corporate guy.
But, when I found out I was going to some weirdo, maritime security unit to be a full-time watch officer, I figured there had to be a better use of my time.
And there was.
I’d reached out to a SEAL officer with whom I’d worked at the Naval Academy.
He’d been the commander of Naval Special Warfare Group Two in a previous tour, based in Little Creek, Virginia.
He introduced me to the then-current Commander of Group Two and let him know I had orders to the Middle East.
“Maybe you could use him,” my former colleague suggested.
The current Commander, a SEAL Captain, invited me to a meeting at his office in the Group Two compound.
It was brief.
“I’ll put you on a plane tomorrow,” he said. “We can always use air ops guys.”
Undisclosed location, of course.
I wouldn’t be kicking down doors, but I’d be directly supporting the guys who did.
Sweet! I thought.
Not a bad way to earn a living.
I went straight to the commanding officer, or CO, of the maritime security unit to which I’d been assigned.
The SpecWar guys say they could use me, I told him.
And all I needed was his permission to have my orders re-written for Special Warfare Command.
“Listen,” he said. “That sounds totally badass. But I have no idea what we’ll be up against when we get to Kuwait.”
Uh-oh. I saw where this was going.
“So, why would I surrender a resource if I didn’t have to?” he asked.
I was the resource.
And, I admit, I appreciated the CO’s logic.
I also appreciated that I would be bored out of my skull in the ensuing ten months, manning the watch in some shitty, over-air-conditioned trailer at Kuwait Naval Base.
And, indeed, I was.
Seven days a week, I woke up, worked out, killed about a dozen cockroaches on the floor of the bathroom I shared with an adjoining room, took a shower, had the chicken cordon bleu at the dining facility, and then went on watch.
And, on the way to watch, I passed the same, pockmarked, stone wall at the far end of the courtyard around which officers’ quarters was arranged.
There was a line of starburst-shaped indentations in the wall, about shoulder-high, that ran its entire length.
What’s that? I asked one of our Kuwaiti liaison officers one day.
He said it was where Saddam’s forces had lined up captured Kuwaiti Naval Officers on August 2, 1990, and executed them.
The Kuwaitis had left the wall unrepaired as something of a memorial.
A touch macabre, I thought.
But a useful reminder of why we were there.
I’ll you why I wasn’t there.
To be a goddamned protocol officer.
But, of course, that’s exactly what happened.
About halfway through our tour, the CO was scheduled to have his change of command ceremony.
It’s an elaborate, tradition-laden affair in which the Mantle of Command is passed from one officer to another.
Changes of command are a big deal in the military, and rightfully so.
Command carries enormous responsibility.
I had no objection whatsoever to the CO’s having a proper ceremony.
I’m a sucker for tradition, after all.
But I had no desire to be the event planner, master of ceremonies, and general cat-herder charged with organizing and executing the event.
Which is what a protocol officer does.
I gently suggested to the CO that perhaps another officer was better equipped to accept the tremendous honor to serve as his protocol officer than I.
But thanks for thinking of me, I said.
He wasn’t having it.
“Nope,” he said. “I don’t trust anyone else to get this right.”
The C3PO thing was screwing me. Again.
The CO had the admin officer draw up a formal designation letter, whereby I was officially dubbed the protocol officer.
Fantastic.
So, then I had to go to work putting this damn ceremony together.
Luckily, given the long history and various regulations surrounding such an event, it was a pretty straightforward task.
Until I got to the invitations.
Can’t we just email them? I asked the CO.
Nothing doing, he said. This was likely the only change of command ceremony he’d get in his career, and he wanted to do it right.
That meant old-school, cardstock, glossy-print, paper invitations.
And how in the hell was I supposed to get those in the middle of the desert?
I eventually found someone back in Norfolk willing to air mail us invitations, provided we designed them.
Again, this was a pretty straightforward task.
Service Etiquette, the protocol officer’s Bible, dictated the format and content of change of command invitations.
Nonetheless, I decided to add my own, personal flourish to dress them up a bit.
The ceremony was to be held at Camp Patriot, a joint command that resided within the confines of the Mohammed Al-Ahmad Kuwait Naval Base.
Both American and Kuwaiti officers were to be invited.
So, beneath the base’s English spelling, I had the name printed in Arabic.
I got the idea from the flight suit nametags every aviator bought when he went to the Middle East.
Someone had figured out it would be cool to have your name written in Arabic beneath your wings on your nametag.
And so everyone did it. Including me.
Of course, the Arabic could have said, “This guy’s a jackass,” but no one knew. And no one cared.
Because it looked cool.
Anyway.
I got the invitations and showed them to the CO. He thought they looked great.
So then I worked with the U.S. Naval Attaché to get them addressed and delivered to all the right Kuwaiti officers.
Everything was going great.
Then, a few days later, the attaché burst into the CO’s office, distraught.
“Your change of command invitations . . . You’ve offended the Kuwaitis!” he exclaimed.
Offended the Kuwaitis?
Apparently, the name of the base wasn’t spelled correctly in Arabic, and the Kuwaitis had taken it as a slight.
Google hadn’t gotten the Arabic translation entirely correct.
Shocking.
But it wasn’t that bad, I thought.
The error was tantamount to referring to someone named James as the less formal, more familiar Jim.
No big deal, right?
Well, there was more to it than that, the attaché explained.
There’s a thin line between peoples’ perceptions of liberators and occupiers.
While the Kuwaitis remained grateful for what we’d done for them back in 1991, some felt we had overstayed our welcome.
And this whole change of command snafu apparently served to feed that fire.
“You need to get new invitations out—now,” the attaché concluded.
So, I jumped through my ass and spent an obscene amount of taxpayer money to have new invitations overnighted to the base.
The change of command ceremony otherwise went off without a hitch.
The Kuwaitis took their seats in the front row.
They ate plenty of cake and drank plenty of tea.
And reminded us how generous they were for hosting us on their base.
Crisis averted.
Sorry I almost caused an international incident there, CO.
Of course, you could have avoided the whole thing had you let me deploy with the SEALs.
And you sure as shit didn’t have to make me
Your stupid protocol officer.
Even though I do hate it
When my hair gets messed up.