Thurbage: Military Secrets

With the Americans busy in Vietnam and elsewhere, I see that a certain vital fact has been overlooked (Lippman and Cronkite have been strangely silent.) The Medical and Military Maps in Time Magazine are drawn by the same person!

Think about that. There is, in fact, very little difference between them. This startling revelation came to me when I was appraising what appeared to be a Viet Cong attack on a road north of Dag Ho. On closer examination I was astonished to find that it actually depicted an aneuryism in the aorta of a small, male hamster. Imagine the confusion in the Pentagon as two, three and fourstar generals (they are graded on the same system as vintage brandy) gather around the latest edition of Time to plot their strategy.

Assume that they turn by mistake to a map of varicose veins in the mature marmoset. Seven squadrons of jets strafing the spleen, supply drops in the gall bladder, naplam in the colon.

Equally devastating is the thought that a surgeon might mislay an X-ray and extract an appendix while referring to a map of the Dominican crisis.

"Bazooka nurse."

"Bazooka."

"Rebel HQ nurse."

"Rebel HQ."

"What's the OAS reading?"

New Zealand might send a token force to a ruptured pancreas somewhere.

We have all had time to savour the new library. To be frisked as we leave. To admire its rooms, which are merely refrigerator trays with dunlopillo ceilings. We have all waded through mud to enter the impressive glass doors— after trying them all to see which one was open. We have stowed our bags in the filing cabinets and climbed miles of stairs. For some reason the Lobby reminds me of a Turkish bath. I keep expecting a hairy Adriatic to thrust a hot towel into my hands and whisk me away to a cavernous steam room where a large woman with goitre crackles my vertebrae as I lie on a marble slab chatting. But for me the library is much the same really. I still go to sleep invariably. I have been evicted three times for eating ice-cream sundaes in the study hall. I still owe ten shillings.

It is rather frightening to note that a boycott of lunch counters started in the New York State University three days after Alister Taylor arrived in the self same city. Heigh-ho.