He was a pushy little bastard, too! On his birthday back in October he had asked about getting a tattoo or an earring, and he brought it up again. He didn't have anything particular in mind, just asking, but I decided to shut that idea down real fucking quick! "You get no tattoos that don't say U.S. Army, and no extra holes in your body that the Good Lord didn't issue as original equipment! YOU GOT THAT STRAIGHT?!", I thundered at him. He just laughed at me and scooted out of the room.
"You think that was clear enough?", I asked his mother.
"Probably not.", she said with a smile.
"I think I'll show him a rerun of Heartbreak Ridge, where Clint Eastwood rips an earring out of a recruit's ear. Maybe that will get through." My wife rolled her eyes at that. "Wait until your daughters get in on the act, and want their belly buttons pierced?"
"My daughters are good girls and would never do that.", she replied, rather primly.
I snorted. "Yeah, well my daughters would do it and then lie to us!" On my first go, Maggie had not only gotten her belly button pierced, she also got a 'tramp stamp' at the base of her back. I don't have a problem with the piercings so much as the tattoos. They don't enhance the scenery, as far as I am concerned, and just wait until you're a grandmother and weigh fifty pounds more, and your grandkids want to know why you have a tattoo on your ass.
On the plus side, Charlie was fundamentally a good kid. He was still in the Boy Scouts, although I had my doubts whether he would make Eagle. I could see him doing the Explorer routine like I had done, or just staying in the Scouts and goofing off and going camping with them. Then again, Marilyn had caught him looking through my latest issue of Playboy, so I figured he might also develop a totally different interest to take up his time. Well, you can't get into trouble just chasing girls; you only get into trouble when you catch one!
I remember when he asked me what 'overly developed' meant. He had been looking at a copy of The National Enquirer, which struck me as rather odd. Certainly neither Marilyn nor I ever read it, so I asked him, and he said he got it from the Parkers. I could imagine Lurlene reading it, and rolled my eyes. "So, what's it mean?"
"What does what mean?"
"It says that Mom is overly developed. What's that mean?"
"WHAT?" I went over to him and grabbed the 'newspaper' from him and looked at the page he was reading. It was reportedly an article on Congressmen with good-looking wives or girlfriends. There was a picture of Marilyn and me at the Kennedy Center, me in my tux and Marilyn in a black evening gown. That had been a few weeks ago, and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, which I supported generously, was having a Tchaikovsky night. The photo made me pay attention, since Marilyn's dress had been somewhat low cut, though not untasteful. This shot, maybe because of the angle, or maybe because they doctored it, showed an awful lot of very healthy cleavage.
Charlie was pointing at the words. "See, it says that Mom is pretty but overly developed."
Marilyn came out at that moment to find us looking at the picture. I was trying to keep from laughing, working my jaw to keep steady. Marilyn took a look at the Enquirer as Charlie asked again. I glanced at her and stifled a grin, and replied, "Let's just say that it means your mother still looks good in a swimsuit." Marilyn looked daggers at me. I guess that's not something a father is supposed to tell his son.
Suddenly a light went off in Charlie's head. His eyes opened wide and he gave a loud, "Ohhhh!" Then he looked at Marilyn, and his eyes glanced at her chest for just a split second, and then darted away, and he repeated, "Ohhhh!"
"CHARLIE!", she protested.
"Get out of here.", I said, swatting him with the paper. He grabbed it and laughed, and ran out of the kitchen.
I was silently laughing at my wife, while she stewed at me. "What do you have to say?", she demanded.
"Who? Me? Nothing, nothing at all! Would you rather I explained to him that it meant his Mom has big tits!?"
"Behave!" I was sent packing from the kitchen, but she had a smile on her face, too. I figured I'd talk to her about this later that evening, much later, in our bedroom.
Back in Washington we had all sorts of fun on the Armed Service Committee. For one thing, the latest round of the BRAC system was happening in 1995. BRAC stood for Base Realignment And Closure. During World War II and the Cold War the various armed services had built bases all over the place, and as a result we had huge numbers of very expensive bases. Since nobody would allow a base in their district to be closed ("It's strategically important to defend [fill in the blank]") but everybody thought that somebody else's base should be closed ("It's an outrageous duplication and wasteful spending to defend [fill in the blank]"), they came up with a system. An independent commission would come up with a list of bases to be shrunk or closed. The list could be voted yes or no, but could not be modified. It gave everybody political cover when things started closing.
I had seen this up close and personal on my first go. When Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome was put on the list in 1993, the uproar had been deafening, and the locals all screamed that their base was a critical part of the nation's defense. Instead, they argued, shutter that wasteful and duplicative base north of us, Plattsburgh Air Force Base! Well, the Commission promised they would look at Plattsburgh and the people in Utica and Rome went away happy. Nobody was happy when a few months later the Commission recommended both bases be closed!
Closing bases is a very painful thing. In addition to whatever soldiers or airmen or sailors or Marines are stationed there, you usually have lots of locals working at a base, as well as businesses who sell stuff to the base. It is a major source of income. On the other hand, military spending by its very nature is inherently wasteful. If you want to do well spending government money, a better investment is infrastructure or research or something. You'll waste less and hire more. I remember that when Griffiss shut down it was very painful for a few years. Lefleur Homes wasn't selling very many homes in the Rome area when you could buy an existing structure for fifty cents on the dollar. Still, the area came back even stronger.
Anyway, the latest round of BRAC was ongoing, and looked to be as contentious as the earlier ones. We still had too much military for the budget and the threat. The Soviet Union was no more. They hadn't been able to control Afghanistan, which was a major reason they had collapsed in 1989, and now the U.S. was the undisputed and sole superpower left. Furthermore, the military we had was the finest in the world. Just a fraction of our force had been enough to whip Saddam Hussein in a matter of days.
It was too big and too expensive to maintain an army and a navy at the levels we had built up to during the Cold War. The process had started under George Bush and accelerated under Bill Clinton. Congress and the Pentagon hated it, but it needed to be done. By the time the Republicans took back control of Congress in 1994, the Army had shrunk from 18 divisions down to 12, and the National Guard had from 10 down to 8. The Navy was equally shrunk, from almost 600 ships at the time of the collapse of the Berlin Wall down to about 400 at the time the Republicans took control. The Air Force and Marines were equally slimmed down.