Dateline: IcelandAir Flight 633 from Reykjavik to Boston Logan, 1 February 2005
I gotta admit: I am doing very well on my BFA schedule given the travel of the last five days. I had my plan going into this multi-stage, multi-time zone, multi-lingual, multinational trip, and by God I kept it—to my complete amazement!
My plan on Friday was to get the last section of Chapter 3 done (10 of 18), which I did, just before dinner and my two-hours of presentation and Q&A with the MIT National Security Seminar XXI.
On Saturday my plan was to organize section 11 of 18, or the first of Chapter 4's three parts. I did this, just barely, over the course of listening to all the lectures on Saturday at Airlie House in Warrenton VA. I sort of have a mental breakdown during that last session before dinner, when I was unable to figure out a compelling narrative for the section, but I finally decided, just before the cocktail hour began (which may have had something to do with my sense of urgency), that I was trying to be too damn clever and I should just come up with some basic 4-part outline (which I did, and then it was Miller Time). After dinner I co-lead a discussion group with a very interesting and talented East Asian scholar by the name of Tom Christensen from Princeton, and then I and my four beer coupons headed over to the Airlie House on-site pub, where I hung out debating acquisitions with an Air Force one-star (who had seen the brief about a year earlier, also at Airlie) and a retired USAF colonel now in PA&E in the Pentagon (Programming Analysis and Evaluation). It was a fascinating discussion, the kind that's almost an education unto itself, so I felt it was important to simply take advantage, plus they were both such cool kids to speak with that I simply couldn't resist.
I slept late Sunday morning (meaning I didn't get up at 0600) and then spent the last lecture session of the seminar finishing up my section's organization and getting about 500 words down. Then I participated in the seminar faculty's plenary session (i.e., you all sit on stage and answer questions) and that was okay (I liked hearing the students effortlessly use Core and Gap terminology), but then it hit me: I had forgotten my paper tickets to Denmark at home!
My host, the Copenhagen-based Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS), had FEDEX'd them to me back in mid-December and I put them in a special box (apparently marked PUT RIGHT OUT OF YOUR MIND!), whey they sit still. I was just so focused on getting everything set for my trip in terms of my writing materials, passport, etc., that I completely forgot about the paper tix, my excuse being I haven't used any for several years.
Well, this was just the latest in a very long string of screw-ups committed by me. Last week I blanked out when dropping off Em at a knitting lesson off-island during a snow storm and didn't even notice, much less wait for my daughter to discover, that the store/school was closed! So I drove off, amiably chatting over the phone with a Danish journalist interviewing me and poor Em was stranded to the point of going to a neighboring house and asking to use the phone.
Next up was my "brilliant" decision the night before I flew out Friday morning. I decided I would clean up the garage for spouse Vonne, because it was all full of melted snow and the usual crap you deal with after a blizzard, so I pulled out both cars, organized the place and swept out all the debris and water, and then switched the cars in the garage because I was taking the van to Logan and leaving Vonne the SUV Pilot for driving on the still snowy roads. My bad decision was to back the two cars in, which seemed like a nice gesture for some reason but really was disastrously stupid because of the way I've hung our many bikes from the ceiling. Up shot, the next morn when Vonne drives out with the kids to school, one bike, that apparently got pushed out of whack slightly when I backed in, managed to pop the back window on the Pilot and punch a tiny hole in it, which—of course—immediately segued into a complete fracture on the way to school so that by the time Vonne had everyone dropped off, there was no back window, just a lot of crunching glass every between our house and school, as every bump along the way shattered the glass more!
That's how you spend $400 fast (of course, just under our deductible; then again, our insurance doesn't cover a writer expending all his brainpower on his book), plus delight your wife, plus leave your children safer and better off when you're traveling abroad. Really, almost a trifecta of genius!
I now have a theory: there is only so much IQ anyone has, and it's really quite fungible but limited. So, the more brainpower I pour into the book, the less I have left over for my daily life, meaning the longer I go on this book, the bigger menace to family, society and myself that I become. If I went over 200k, I am almost positive it would cost somebody their life or leave me permanently impaired as a human.
Then again, judging by my growing stupidity in my daily life, this book should be nothing less than pure brilliance!
At least that's my theory . . ..
Anyway, I have Vonne call my point of contact and direct host in Copenhagen, a very personable and competent young researcher named Henrik Breitenbauch, the co-editor of Raeson who interviewed me a while back and arranged this whole trip as a result of that first interaction and his ongoing interest in my work. He called SAS, Scandanavian Airlines, the national carrier of Denmark, and found out I should just report early at the Dulles counter and fill out a lost ticket form and pay $100 as a fine of sorts. Naturally, this made me feel even dumber (actually, only $100 dumber), and I was a bit pissed since all I had to do to get my ticket back was show up and flash my ID, just like with a G.D. e-ticket! I mean, really!
But whining was no good, because I had committed the original sin, so I paid.
Good news was I wrote another 1,000 words in the cab to Dulles, plus another thousand while waiting for the counter to open. Then I did another k waiting for boarding, so I was 3,500 in before takeoff and feeling very good about the content. Once in the air, I ate the food (it was a United partner flight) and vaguely had on "Mr. 3,000," the Bernie Mac (always good) movie going on in the seatback in front of me. Breaking for dinner, I powered through from 6pm to roughly 9:30 and finished at just over 6,000. Not happy with the clipped ending, but I was too tired to care.
At that point, we were only about 3 hours from landing in Copenhagen at 7am local time the next morning (Monday), so I powered down, popped an Ambien (the world's greatest sleeping pill), and managed almost two hours before being awakened for "breakfast" at midnight my time.
Vonne and I got Ambien for China, and it is the best by far. Need a prescription, but it's considered very safe because it gets out of your system very fast. The best thing is, it definitely gets you down within about 20 minutes, but no matter how little you sleep on it, you wake up feeling pretty darn good.
And it worked this time just as well.
Landing at 7am, I got through the usual drill and found Henrik (a slightly taller, better looking, and just-as-smart and better-read younger version of myself—not that I was intimidated though I couldn't help but be impressed) waiting for me. Henrik has that annoying habit of some Europeans: being just as good as an American in anything you can name AND managing to do it a second language (including much of his really good analytical writing). To my delight right at the moment, though, Henrik's most pertinent skill was that he really knows how to host someone, showing great hospitality and consideration throughout. I, in return, committed myself to putting on a really good show so as to pay him back in turn for his grace and good planning throughout.
So Henrik hails a cab, gets me to the hotel (the d'Angleterre: a classic Old World sort of luxury hotel that apparently all the rock and movie stars stay at when visiting Copenhagen), where I shower and change into my suit. Then he takes me on a really cool walking tour of downtown Copenhagen (one very beautiful city) on this gorgeous balmy and brilliantly sunny late January morning.
First stop is a department store with a good collection of nice touristy stuff, so I get a great CD collection of all Hans Christen Andersen's fairy tales, plus a book of the same, plus a nice replica of the famous Little Mermaid statue located on the waterfront. Then we hit a well-known amber jewelry store (the classic local precious stone of sorts), and I got earrings and necklace crosses for spouse and kids.
Then we make our way to the original Borsen building, meaning the stock exchange that was used going all the way back to the mid-1600s. Borsen is still the name of the business newspaper in town, the Danish equivalent of the Wall Street Journal, which had run a full-page color ad with a giant picture of me (the one from the old AP profile from last spring) announcing the talk in advance (Henrik was nice enough to clip me a paper copy). Borsen was my paying host (actually, the Borsen Executive Club), meaning they covered all my travel costs. Borsen thus co-hosted the talk with the DIIS. It was a full-house scene of about 200 people, and a Danish TV network taped me (just for clips), so I was double-wired with remote mikes, which certainly straightened up my tired slouch.
But really, you could feel the excitement in the room, so I got pretty psyched and totally forgot about my fatigue and lack of sleep. The hall was gorgeous (I'll post pictures in a day or two) in that museumy-sort-of-way, and the sound system was really clear, which made my delivery much easier. Huge screen and a strong projector, so I was set.
To my complete surprise, my delivery was really good. Giving the talk Friday helped a lot, but the truth was, I always give as good as I get, and the audience was really attentive and strong in the sense of "this is a big deal" that it gave off. As Henrik informed me later, the Danes are really serious about peacekeeping and developmental aid, so hearing someone from the States' defense community make a pitch like PNM was really exciting.
I have no idea how long I went, but the audience was with me from start to finish. Following the talk, I took the stage with the editor-in-chief of Borsen, who was visibly pleased by my performance. I took about 30 minutes of questions (all very solid), and I was better in the responses than I was in the brief, which is really rare for me, but again, if was just me feeding off the audience.
Once done, a short reception, then I taped about 15 minutes of Q&A with the local version of Ted Koppel, who was, like everyone I met there, awfully damn sharp in terms of the subject matter and his eloquence in English. Continuing my amazement, I was even better in the interview there, I was just so juiced from the previous two hours and was simply running on adrenaline. Plus, when really professional people take you very seriously, you tend to respond.
Then a quick interview with a Borsen columnist.
Then Henrik and I stroll back to the hotel, where we drop off gear, I decompress for 30 minutes, and then we head out at 3:30 for a long walking tour of the rest of downtown Copenhagen, to include one amazing Protestant church full of statuary, and Copenhagen U. Henrik's command of history is nothing less than amazing, and he's just a great conversationalist.
About 5pm Henrik steered me to a very nice modern hotel where we drank coffee and chatted another 90 minutes about all sorts of subjects, revealing clearly to me just what kindred souls we are in terms of the way we think and express ourselves. I had that rarest of feelings for me: envying this young man's future journeys as his thoughts mature even more. Actually, for his late 20s, Henrik is way ahead of where I was at that point in my life, so I'm guessing he'll surpass me with ease over the years, which should be very interesting to watch. That's how much he impressed me: by the end of the day I found myself thinking that if The New Rule Sets Project ever takes off, I would really like to hire this guy and make him my intellectual double.
And I gotta admit, that felt kinda weird, making me realize: 1) I'm no longer the youngest smartest kid around and 2) I will eventually, like anyone else, move from being mentee to mentor. People did that for me in the past (and still do), and I've gotta start repaying the system back, something I would really welcome doing with someone of Henrik's obvious talents and passion for the work (he is finishing his PhD diss. which is horizontal in the extreme—another reason I like him).
Eventually we retire to a very nice restaurant for dinner with his boss, a Danish naval commander (very peacekeeping experienced), another researcher who's in very deep with the UN's peacekeeping office), and a fourth researcher whose specialty I can't recall right now, but it was similar to the rest (again, the Danes take international peacekeeping stuff very seriously, so lotsa research on it).
These guys all spoke English very well, knew everything on their side of the Atlantic plus everything on mine. It was a four-hour meal, reminding me why I always like coming to Europe. Great food and the best red wine I think I've ever had (I usually hate it, but this stuff was really fine—personally picked by Henrik, naturally).
Lotsa good conversation, and I was surprised to hear from the one researcher who's deep in the UN peacekeeping office that PNM was a big hit there. He said that the book was all that everyone's been talking about there for about two months now. I was a bit perplexed, since I'm not known as a big fan of the UN. His reply: everything you say about the future, the map, the focus on peacekeeping, etc., it's all just very exciting and gratifying for people in the UN peacekeeping office to see in a popular book written by someone associated with influential thinking in the Pentagon.
Henrik and I walked back to the hotel and I sacked out about 11pm, setting my cell phone for a 9am local wake-up alarm (3 am our time back in Portsmouth). I was amazed to actually slept 9 and a half hours (thanks again to Ambien) and wake up feeling very good. Nice room-service breakfast and Henrik drops in and we head to the airport in a cab at 11am. We part at security with me promising him a job if I make it big post-War College and he shows up in America with his finished doctorate looking for employment. His parting gift is his recent pub where he analyzes PNM and the U.S. National Security Strategy, arguing that it actually dovetails with the European and UN focus on humanitarian relief ops inside the Gap since the end of the Cold War.
Oh, and Henrik gives me a copy of: 1) today's Borsen, which has both an editorial on my vision and presented a big story (with an amazingly unattractive action shot of me talking where I'm sure the photographer was working hard to make me look both scary and crazy) on page 21 on my talk; and 2) today's Jyllands-Posten, which has the full-page interview I gave last week by phone, along with a very large color photo of me (again, the AP photo).
On my first flight (Copenhagen to Reykjavik), I work all my notes for tomorrow's writing (section 2 of Chapter 4, or 12 of 18) while listening to dance music. Then I wander around the Reykjavik airport, which is very stark and beautiful in that Nordic way, and find myself seriously considering bringing the family there for our summer vacation (the place is a New Zealand/Lord of the Rings-like wonderland in the warm summer months, replete with nearly endless days of sunlight). I settle down and finish my reviewing, generating a boat load of pink sticky notes, which I spend the first chunk of the second flight organizing before penning this.
On the second flight I also rewrite the ending to section 1 of Chapter 4, ending up with a word total of almost 6,300. I'm now in the vicinity of 81-82,000 words total for the book, with 7 of the 18 sections yet to go, plus all the short chapter intros I have planned. Mark keeps laughing whenever we talk about the length of the book. He told me when I wrote up the proposal that I would obviously deliver a book well north of 100k, no matter what I may have promised. "Fool me once …," he seems to be saying.
All in all, a great trip. Really interesting times and good talks at both the MIT thing in Virginia and the DIIS event in Copenhagen, plus it was just really cool to finally visit Copenhagen with such a gracious host. Frankly, all I knew about Copenhagen and Denmark prior to this was the Danny Kaye movie on Hans Christian Andersen plus World War II history (underground, occupation, etc., oh . . . and the peacekeeping and environmentalism). Now it's a real place to me.
But the big thing is that I kept my writing schedule throughout and I'm happy with the output. If I don't manage that, it doesn't matter how neat the trip is.
11 sections down, 7 to go, and still right on sked to finish on Valentine's Day, where I begin making this all up to my spouse.
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