Bad Luck in Panama

It has been over 22 years since I left Panama. I was stationed there when I served 4 years in the U.S. Army. Three years of my time was in the 536th Engineer Battalion in Ft. Kobbe Panama. It was not a good time.

I recently got to talking about it with some friends and I realized it was mostly a tale of woe. I spent 3 years being moderately to severely unhappy, stressed out, and depressed. There were a few good times, but only a few with the time spaced out far between them.

I arrived in Panama in December of 1987. I was assigned to a unit with 23 other Lieutenants, and I was the youngest Lieutenant for almost a year, because there was a long gap between the time I arrived and the next Lieutenant arrived. There was a tradition of hazing the junior Lieutenant. This treatment usually only lasted a couple of months at the longest, so for me to have to deal with it for a year was unusual. The problem with this situation is that the hazing was by the other Lieutenants. For anyone not familiar with the military, you might not understand what it is like. There is a rank structure, and this is strictly enforced, and in reality, it is a caste structure. You do not associate with those in the ranks below you. It's called Fraternization, and the reason you do not do it is because they are supposed to obey your orders, and if they feel like they are your friend, they will feel like they may not have to do what you say. By the same token, you cannot suck up to or befriend those in the ranks above you. This means you have one group of people to befriend, those that are at your rank. This situation was destroyed for me because those people were effectively my enemies by virtue of the fact that they were hazing me. So I had no one in the military that I could count as my friend.

There was an additional tradition that was part of the hazing of the junior lieutenant. There was a travelling trophy, a model castle that the junior lieutenant was required to bring to all social functions. This model was required to be improved by each recipient prior to passing it on to the next new lieutenant. The damned thing was about 2 feet wide and a foot tall, a scale model of the castle each engineering officer wore on their lapels. The wooden base was a piece of plywood about 2 feet deep and 3 feet wide. The lieutenant before me encased the castle in a plexiglas cover, making the thing even more unwieldy and impossible to carry. My improvement, done before the second function I took it to was to remove it from the plexiglas. Everyone complained that this was not an improvement, but I only had to ask if they wanted to carry it around in the massive plexiglas dome to get them to shut up. Eventually, the hazing surrounding the object because so severe that I stopped bringing it to the functions and basically told anyone that complained to shove it up their ass. This worked so well that I took the castle out to the parking lot of my apartment building and destroyed it with a sledge hammer and tossed it into the dumpster. When I told my wife this story recently, she said it sounded like that scene from the movie Office Space where they destroy the copier. This was before rap music, though it did feel good to be a gangster.

I was newly married when I joined the Army and my wife had a little dog named Spunky that she loved. Panama was a three year accompanied tour, and the way it worked was that the service member went down first and when they had gotten a place to live, they could then send for their spouse. We thought this was going to be a short process. With pets, you travelled down with them but they put them in the pound under quarantine for 60 or 90 days, I can't remember how long. The temperature in Panama was 90 to 95 degrees in the shade, and the pound had open air kennels with concrete cages. It was miserable. The dog was freaked out and looked forward to having me visit as the only relief from this stressful and uncomfortable situation. Within the first week, my unit told me that I was going on a deployment to Chirique province of Panama where they were building a road in the mountains in a coffee growing region. I would be gone for two months. I could not bring my wife down until I got back from the deployment and I could not stay to help our dog deal with his captivity. Off I went.

Eventually, I back, got a house, and brought my wife down. She was miserable there. She was 19, had never been out of the country, could not speak the language, and could not get a job due to the U.S. Panama treaty that forbid it. She was immediately bored to death, and I was putting in 12 hour days and exhausted. I would come home and she would pounce on me (not in a good way), either wanting to complain about how bored she was, or wanting to go out on the town. I was way too tired to handle that.

I got sent out in the field again, this time for 3 months, and my wife did not handle the separation well. Eventually, I got back and the finances and the car were both not doing well by then. This was also during the era that the Panamanians started to rebel against their dictator, Manuel Noriega. It became more dangerous to get to and from work, and we were ordered to stay at home after duty hours. It just kept getting worst locally. They kept shortening the tours until eventually, they changed it to 1 year unaccompanied tours. This meant that people could not bring their families, but I still had my wife there, and they did not shorten my tour. However, some of the people that came down after me had their tours shortened and I started seeing people come and go in the time that I was there, while I still had months left on my tour. Finally, it became so dangerous and stressful that I decided to move my wife back to the U.S. at my own expense. While I was up in the States, relocating her, they changed the rules and finally sent all the remaining families home. If I had waited another week or two, they would have moved my wife at the Army's expense.

I was contacted by my unit about the situation. I was told that all I had to do was come back down and outprocess. The personnel officer asked me if I wanted to go to the upcoming Bolivian deployment, which was going to be about 4 months. I told him that sounded like a horrible idea, and if I had a choice, my decision would be no way. So I cut my leave (vacation) in the states short, and returned to Panama.

During my time away, the Battalion Commander, LTC Evans, changed command with a new commander. I had not met him yet. I can't remember his name, now. When I returned to the unit, I was taken in to his office. By this time, I had been passed over for promotion. For many years since the draw down after the end of the Viet Nam War, promotion from Lieutenant to Captain was virtually automatic. Only about 3% did not make it, and you had to screw up spectacularly to be in that group. In my year group, it was the first time they changed the rules. They were drawing down the forces again, and 1/3 of my year group was not promoted. I never expected to stay in the Army, I always intended to serve my 4 years and get out. As a result, I did not do any of the things people did that were trying to make a stellar career out of the Army. I did not max out my PT (physical training) tests, I even turned down some awards when I was told that I could not submit my troops for the awards. My evaluations were done the old fashioned way, which was to give low ratings to new lieutenants, and raise them up slowly, showing that you were improving. This old method preserved the Senior Rater's Profile, which was supposed to show a bell curve of rating scores given out. The only way that could occur was if some people got low scores, and these were reserved for the junior lieutenants. I never fought this system, because I felt it didn't matter and it didn't apply to me. By the time I returned to Panama to outprocess, I had already been passed over for Captain.

The new commander immediately told me that I was declared mission essential for the Bolivian deployment and my tour was involuntarily extended back out to the original 3 years. I fought with him, earning me his disrespect and animosity, but not changing his position any. He never did satisfactorily answer my question about how I could be passed over for promotion, but indispensable to the military at the same time. I was soon on a plane to Bolivia.

Bolivia was a shit hole. We stayed in an impoverished and remote region, a high plains desert. Our camp was at about 12,500 feet altitude, and we took some kind of experimental drug to relieve the effects of altitude. You had to drive or take a train from the capitol to the area we were, which took 12 or 24 hours. There were no flights in or out of the area, the altitude was too high. The mail took about 4 weeks to get back to the states. We had moral calls home. This was pre-internet days, so this consisted of a satellite link back to a ham radio operator in the states. He would connect you with your family via regular telephone lines. You had to say "over" after each sentence, or they didn't flip the switch and you couldn't hear the other person. Each night, everyone got in line for the phone, first come first served, and we had about 4 hours before they shut it down. By the time dinner was over, the line was 4 hours long. If you got in to talk to your wife, everyone in line close to you got to hear the conversation, which was usually shouted. I only tried a couple of times, and my wife was never there when I called (this was pre-cell phones, too). I did not receive any mail from my wife while I was there.

I took up smoking, just as a way to say Fuck You to everyone and the military in general. I never enjoyed it, and no one really cared, so it wasn't as if my gesture of defiance hurt anyone but myself. The task force commander was Major Cain, and to be honest, I really liked him. It was hard to stay mad at him for probably being instrumental in getting me extended. Finally, the Battalion Commander came down for a visit. At some point, he was meeting with me, and he told me that he heard that I was doing a good job and was not slacking off due to my situation. He promised me that when I got back to Panama, he would shorten my tour to that point in time and let me leave. This was sort of like prison where your sentence is reduced to time served.

However, when Bolivia was finally over and I got back to Panama, I was again involuntarily extended at the unit. This time it was because there was some new motor pool maintenance software that had to be started up and I was supposed to be perfect for the job.

So I finally got to a real phone line back to the States and made my first call back to my wife in four months. She was not happy to hear from me. During the short phone conversation, she told me that something had happened and that I would probably want a divorce. Then she refused to go any further. She said she would not discuss it over the phone. This was worse than actually being told something concrete that I could deal with. I had no idea what the problem was, which meant I was free to imagine all sorts of things.

Things were bad in Panama by this time. No one lived in houses or apartments off base any more. They moved all the soldiers into former family quarters. I had two roommates, two younger lieutenants that I really liked, but I just wanted out of there.

After a few days back at work, I visited the personnel office. I had served as the personnel officer for the Bolivian deployment, so by then, I knew all about the paperwork. I found out that the colonel was going to try to extend me out to my release date from the Army in order to hold on to my longer. That would have made my tour the longest in theater for years, eight months beyond the standard tour. After determining that I was in a strange state of official limbo, I realized I had to take action myself. I filled out all my transfer forms myself. I took them to the Personnel Sergeant myself. He knew my situation, and we got along pretty good. I asked him to slip the papers into the colonel's morning stack of papers to sign, and not to say anything about it. The next day, I picked up my signed paperwork and took it over to the base Personnel Office myself. Orders came down from the Department of the Army in a couple of weeks and my date was set for a couple more weeks out. As far as I knew, no one at the unit realized I was leaving. I quietly outprocessed, and since I was supposed to be down in the Motor Pool all the time (out of sight and out of mind), I was not missed while I outprocessed.

The day of my departure, the acting S1 (Personnel Officer) a First Lieutenant (Promotable) Ron Condon called me in to his office. That office is supposed to be for a Captain, and the (P) for promotable at the end of his rank meant that he was told he was going to be promoted, but the date was still out a month or two in the future. He hoped and expected that we would start saluting him and calling him sir early, which we did not, because he was a joke. Up to this point in time, each time a lieutenant left, the other lieutenants got him this commemorative plate. It was a nice wood plate that was hand carved and painted by local Cuna indians with our unit crest on it. They cost about $60 or $80 each, and the tradition was that everyone chipped in for the outgoing lieutenant's plate. So for the last 3 years, I had managed to pay for almost 30 other lieutenant's plates. Ron announced to me that the tradition had changed and that now I had to buy my own plate, which he had ordered, but was not there yet. I told him to shove the plate up his ass. He also announced to me that my leaving had taken everyone by surprise and that they had not had time to put together a going away party for me. So he wanted me back up to the Headquarters at noon for some cake and punch and a meeting with all the officers. My plane left at 1:30 and you had to be there an hour early to board, so I had no intention of showing up. I immediately got a ride over to the airfield and nervously waited for the flight to board, fully expecting someone to come in and order me out of the airport and back to the unit. I can't remember who showed up, but it was a friend who knew the score, and he came over to have a laugh with me and tell me that everyone was over at Headquarters waiting for me to show up. I didn't fully believe that I would be leaving until the plane lifted off the runway and I could see the base shrinking away behind me.

I got home and met my wife and parents at the airport. I politely asked my parents to go home and told them I would catch up to them in a few days. I went to Manhattan Kansas with my wife, where she checked us in to a hotel. We sat down to have our long awaited discussion. She admitted to me that she had been cheating multiple times. I told her I expected it would be something like that. I told her that I forgave her, and that we could blame the whole experience on Panama and the U.S. Military. I told her that we should wipe the slate clean and make a new start from this moment on. She told me she still wanted a divorce. I always wondered why she confessed if she never intended to stay in the marriage. I told her I thought we should work it out, and she told me that she would not ask for alimony or any kind of support if I would just let her go without a fight. So I agreed.

This did not stop her from calling back a couple of days later and telling me that she had been talking to her friends, who told her that she was entitled and she should ask for alimony. I informed her that I would fight the divorce if she insisted on payments from me. She dropped it.

I showed up at Fort Leonard Wood on the coldest week of the year. The temperature got to about ten below, and the wind got the wind chill down to about 25 below. I did not have sufficient cold weather gear and was freezing my ass off. I managed to freeze the brakes on my car shut when I tried to blast through some drifts in order to make it easier to leave at the end of the day. The last day before Christmas break, I was out there in the freezing wind on my back in the snow with a propane torch, trying to loosen up the frozen brake calipers.

On the way home that night, I heard on the radio that the U.S. had invaded Panama. I finally felt like it was over and I was at home.