*Ø* Blogmanac | That Baghdad truck driver was one tough mutha

I've been thinking, and you know that's always a dangerous thing.

A few years ago, when George Bush the First was President of the USA, I worked for Sydney Children's Hospital as its media officer. I’m embarrassed to use the term 'public relations manager' so I won't.

My boss at the time, the Clinical Director, was a great guy, an American who was a member of the same club as the Prez. When my boss found out that Daddy George was coming to Sydney, he asked me to invite him to visit the hospital. This I did.

To my unending delight, we duly received a reply that the First Lady (quaint term for a politician's wife!), Barbara Bush, would be happy to visit. Not the First Gentleman, unfortunately. I pretty much expected that at least one of them would. No one ever refuses an invitation to visit a children’s hospital – not footballers, not actors, not politicians – as long as the hospital’s PR officer can absolutely assure them that the poor sick kiddies will benefit by seeing them, and a wide range of media will be present.

If you’re sober on the bus, you’re not on the bus
The schedule was set down for about 9 a.m. on New Year's morning (not my doing, no way Jose), and preparations commenced for Such a Wonderful Thing. This was in about September or October.

The morning of January 1st saw me, dressed in a suit and carrying a black briefcase, on a 5.00 a.m. bus headed from my suburb, along the still-dark streets and across town, to the hospital. There I would try to manage the media that would certainly show up to see lots of sick kids pretend to talk to Mrs Bush, and vice versa. All but the actually dying children had been rehearsed for months, and we knew that by now they could fake sincerity like professionals. So could the doctors and nurses and clerical staff. I was pretty sure Mrs Bush could as well, because she had more practice at it than all of us put together. Hell, we were just a pack of dumb Aussies. However, we would do our best to look as sophisticated as Americans.

I was on the first bus of the year. I was scrubbed, my shoes were polished, and my hair wet and combed. Apart from the morose driver, I was the only one awake on the bus, which was half full of homeward-bound drunken teenagers, not to mention their vomit, piss, chips packets and rolling bottles. Significantly, I was the one who looked a tad out of place. It was, after all, still New Year's Eve, more or less. And boy, didn't I have a Barbara Bush resentment, even way back then – years before I knew about her sons – for making me go to bed at about 9.30 p.m. while Sydney partied as Sydney can. Awwww, Mum!!

Secret Service drongos
However, my early blooming Bush resentments are not the point of this ramble. The point I’m battling to make is that for about eight or ten weeks before Barbara Bush arrived, we had carloads of American Secret Service guys coming day after day to the hospital to make sure no deranged Australian from ‘Down Under’ would kill the First Lady from ‘Up On Top’. I'm struggling here for an American term to describe these gentlemen, so I'll use an Australian one: they were a bloody mob of drongos. Each brick-built one of them. They fairly scintillated with neanderthality. Glowed with dumb.

This is fair dinkum: get this – these bulky men really wore trench coats, in the heat of an Aussie summer! So they would look like real agents, I suppose. And they really did wear sunglasses indoors and talk into little bitty microphones in their lapels. It's as though Ed Wood was in charge of the Secret Service Wardrobe Department. Fortunately, I don't think any of them noticed the hospital staff snickering behind our hands the whole time, nor heard what was being said about these try-hard Maxwell Smarts. I doubt they would have got it anyway. They had terminal cool where God intended people to have self-consciousness.

Their conversation was incredible. Two of them told me they had seen a brawl in a pub down at Darling Harbour the night before, and were really impressed with Australian manhood for that. They thought it was great. Apparently the Secret Service, the duty of which is to protect the President, isn't drawn from the deep end of the American gene pool. One certainly hopes not.

The Big McSearch
For a couple of hilarious months, the goon squad scrambled over the hospital. We had meetings – us, the goons, the President’s wife’s media managers’ media managers’ appointments secretaries, all the officials. The SS guys (is that what I should call them, now that the White House has a problem with being openly fascist?) searched the whole hospital week after week: they searched the lobby (foyer), they searched the elevators (lifts), they searched the bathrooms (toilets).

They tried to search the nurses, all of whom told them that they regretted that they had to wash their hair on Saturday night, and I think the SS guys probably thought that hand-snickering was the Down Under variant of flirtation.

The American taxpayer must have forked out squillions to protect a rather nice old lady from rampaging Australians. We dumb Aussies were impressed. Even in those days, we dumb Aussies were impressed with any American with a gun. This was a time in which you could stride up to the Prime Minister of Australia, poke a finger in his sunken chest and call him a deadshit, and his unshaven bodyguard not only would be 20 metres down the road chatting up a sheila, if he did happen to hear what you said to the PM he would shout “Yeahhh!!”.

The point being?
My point? I know, I know, I’d better get to it quickly. My point’s this: the Americans can protect anything. They invented security. Security is America’s middle name.

You gonna tell me that a quarter of a million Yank soldiers in Iraq – armed to the teeth and backed up by trillions of US war dollars – can’t stop a little truckload of explosives from blowing up the UN Headquarters in Baghdad? They can’t block off the streets for 100 metres around, say, the UN HQ, the US Embassy, a couple of hospitals and the new Baghdad Starbucks?

I see ... I see.

That driver must have been one Sylvester Stallone bloke, for a towelhead.