thedrifter
07-26-09, 08:49 AM
My Battle with a Marine for Air Supremacy
By J. Todd Foster
Editor / Bristol Herald Courier
Published: July 26, 2009
In the eight years since 9/11, I avoided flying until last Sunday. That experience on Delta Airlines validated my choice to stay grounded.
Publisher Carl Esposito and I flew from Tri-Cities Regional Airport to Atlanta for a flight to Los Angeles. The trip was the culmination of a four-month fellowship through the University of Southern California’s Knight Digital Media Center – a leading think-tank on New Media.
We arrived at Tri-Cities just before 5:30 a.m. and then learned our plane was broken and would need to be replaced. An hour later we boarded a different plane but got socked in by fog. The opening of the conference was at noon Sunday, and we were going to be cutting it close anyway.
We were late. Our 37-minute flight to Atlanta was delayed by 90 minutes, causing us to miss our Atlanta connection. If that was not bad enough, the lone flight attendant on the Tri-Cities-to-Atlanta flight yelled at us passengers because one of us had the audacity to ask what was happening as we sat on the tarmac.
This young lady started waving her arms and yelling, “Our job is to get you there in one piece! We’ll take off when the captain says it’s safe.”
“Wow,” I told the third-grade school teacher sitting across the aisle from me, a woman heading to Jamaica for her honeymoon. “Tell your new husband it could be worse: He could have married HERyesterday.”
I now know that the flight three days later from Los Angeles to Atlanta would leave me with a fond memory of this animated flight attendant.
The 757 coming home was packed with not a single seat open. I knew there was going to be trouble when an intoxicated young Marine approached us on the plane and was singing off key. He took the middle seat between me and the publisher and passed out before we had lifted off.
Had he just passed out, that would have been fine. Great, in fact. But this Marine spent half the flight using my publisher as a pillow and the other half flailing his arms wildly. After the right arm on this 6-foot-2, 210-pound Marine hit me in the head twice and then knocked off my eyeglasses, I began defending myself.
Every time he so much as flinched, I would plant my left elbow in this rib cage and block him from ever raising his right arm. He never got it higher than shoulder level the rest of the four-hour flight.
I called over a flight attendant. “This is going to be a problem,” I told the attendant, whose name was Brian.
“Can I offer you a complimentary beer?” he asked.
“Brian, no offense, but I’ve just spent seven hours at a microbrewery waiting for my flight. Another beer is probably not going to help defuse this situation. … But just out of curiosity, what kind do you have?”
I settled on the Leinenkugel Sunset Wheat.
The complimentary beer saved me $5 – or half the price of the average beer in Los Angeles. (I had my first $19 margarita while in the City of Angels, too. And it was a smallish glass. Funny thing, L.A. has the same brand of tequila we do. Then again, hotel parking was $47 a night, which is why we took the shuttle to the Westin Bonaventure.)
I clutched my Sunset Wheat with both hands because the Marine most certainly would have knocked it over had I merely set it on the tray table. Between sips, I fended off his flails. Let’s just say he put the “armed” in “forces.”
This young guy, probably 19, had spent the day drinking at a strip club, I would later overhear a group of Marines boast after we landed in Atlanta.
Before any reader accuses me of being anti-military, let me stop you: Don’t even go there. This guy could have wound up in the brig with assault and public intoxication convictions had I wanted to push the issue. But I was torn over the need to defend myself and by my patriotism and admiration for what he was about to be asked to do; I knew this kid was heading to Iraq to defend my liberty.
First though, I had to defend my well-being. I wondered what the nasty flight attendant on my Tri-Cities-to-Atlanta puddle jump would have done with this guy? My guess is she would have dragged him from his seat and stuck his head in the lavatory toilet.
The flight attendants on this 757, however, were AWOL and seemingly powerless since there wasn’t an empty seat on the plane and this guy couldn’t have been moved anyway because he was unconscious.
At one point, I asked a flight attendant to summon the air marshal. “Sir, we can’t discuss security protocol on the airplane,” she said.
“In other words,” I said, “there is no air marshal on this flight.”
At various times during the redeye flight, the Marine in seat 33B, between me and my boss, would get hot and then rip open his shirt, exposing his dog tags. He once reached up and stole my air vent. I took it back; the flight was stifling.
When I would block his right arm, he sometimes would do a cross-over move with his left. Keep in mind, this man had no idea what he was doing. His moves were involuntary. But after I elbowed him hard in the ribs, he muttered a 12-letter phrase with the first six letters “mother.”
I grabbed both his wrists, shoved them into his chest and yelled: “I am an air marshal! As soon as we touch down, I’m placing you under arrest under the authority of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security!”
(Please don’t accuse me of impersonating a federal officer and imply I committed a crime when, in fact, I embraced the Marine Corps’ unofficial mantra: Adapt, Improvise, Overcome.)
The Marine blinked twice and finally looked me in the eye for the first time in three hours. He had come to for a moment and looked worried.
“I’m sorry, sir! I’m not doing it on purpose, sir!” he said. No matter how wasted this guy was, he was always polite.
“I don’t care,” I shot back. “Stop sleeping on my boss and stop hitting me in the head. Pass out in the upright position like your seat is supposed to be in. I don’t want to dislike you, and I certainly don’t want you arrested. But you can’t drink this much and get on an airplane. It doesn’t reflect well on your branch of service.”
“U.S. Marine Corps, sir!” he said.
“Have you been to Iraq?” I asked.
“Not yet, sir!” he said.
“Look, I and every American appreciate what you are doing for this country. I don’t want you arrested. But you can’t hit me. It’s bad enough that I can’t dare fall to sleep for fear of being pummeled. Now just stop it, and I’ll ignore this.”
The Marine passed out again, but his arms stopped flailing. Forty-five minutes later, as I left the plane, I looked at him and he glanced back at me with concern: He really believed I was an air marshal.
And I’m glad. Because an air marshal would not have done what I had contemplated earlier: to take a Sharpie and write “Don’t ask, don’t tell” on his bare chest.
The sheepish Marine staggered to his feet after the plane pulled up to the jetway. He gave me a five-minute head start off the plane, and I disappeared with my publisher into the throng that is the Atlanta airport.
I pray he survives his tour in Iraq. I also hope he’s a better shot than he is a drinker.
J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier and can be reached at jfoster@bristolnews.com or 276-645-2513.
Note to anonymous reader
I received a letter last week from an anonymous reader demanding I apologize for the phrase “turd on a stick” – written nearly a year ago but recently republished in a yard-sale column that ran in our publication Mountain Empire. The phrase was a direct quote from my late father. There are three guarantees in life: death, taxes and the fact I will never apologize for quoting my dead dad.
Ellie
By J. Todd Foster
Editor / Bristol Herald Courier
Published: July 26, 2009
In the eight years since 9/11, I avoided flying until last Sunday. That experience on Delta Airlines validated my choice to stay grounded.
Publisher Carl Esposito and I flew from Tri-Cities Regional Airport to Atlanta for a flight to Los Angeles. The trip was the culmination of a four-month fellowship through the University of Southern California’s Knight Digital Media Center – a leading think-tank on New Media.
We arrived at Tri-Cities just before 5:30 a.m. and then learned our plane was broken and would need to be replaced. An hour later we boarded a different plane but got socked in by fog. The opening of the conference was at noon Sunday, and we were going to be cutting it close anyway.
We were late. Our 37-minute flight to Atlanta was delayed by 90 minutes, causing us to miss our Atlanta connection. If that was not bad enough, the lone flight attendant on the Tri-Cities-to-Atlanta flight yelled at us passengers because one of us had the audacity to ask what was happening as we sat on the tarmac.
This young lady started waving her arms and yelling, “Our job is to get you there in one piece! We’ll take off when the captain says it’s safe.”
“Wow,” I told the third-grade school teacher sitting across the aisle from me, a woman heading to Jamaica for her honeymoon. “Tell your new husband it could be worse: He could have married HERyesterday.”
I now know that the flight three days later from Los Angeles to Atlanta would leave me with a fond memory of this animated flight attendant.
The 757 coming home was packed with not a single seat open. I knew there was going to be trouble when an intoxicated young Marine approached us on the plane and was singing off key. He took the middle seat between me and the publisher and passed out before we had lifted off.
Had he just passed out, that would have been fine. Great, in fact. But this Marine spent half the flight using my publisher as a pillow and the other half flailing his arms wildly. After the right arm on this 6-foot-2, 210-pound Marine hit me in the head twice and then knocked off my eyeglasses, I began defending myself.
Every time he so much as flinched, I would plant my left elbow in this rib cage and block him from ever raising his right arm. He never got it higher than shoulder level the rest of the four-hour flight.
I called over a flight attendant. “This is going to be a problem,” I told the attendant, whose name was Brian.
“Can I offer you a complimentary beer?” he asked.
“Brian, no offense, but I’ve just spent seven hours at a microbrewery waiting for my flight. Another beer is probably not going to help defuse this situation. … But just out of curiosity, what kind do you have?”
I settled on the Leinenkugel Sunset Wheat.
The complimentary beer saved me $5 – or half the price of the average beer in Los Angeles. (I had my first $19 margarita while in the City of Angels, too. And it was a smallish glass. Funny thing, L.A. has the same brand of tequila we do. Then again, hotel parking was $47 a night, which is why we took the shuttle to the Westin Bonaventure.)
I clutched my Sunset Wheat with both hands because the Marine most certainly would have knocked it over had I merely set it on the tray table. Between sips, I fended off his flails. Let’s just say he put the “armed” in “forces.”
This young guy, probably 19, had spent the day drinking at a strip club, I would later overhear a group of Marines boast after we landed in Atlanta.
Before any reader accuses me of being anti-military, let me stop you: Don’t even go there. This guy could have wound up in the brig with assault and public intoxication convictions had I wanted to push the issue. But I was torn over the need to defend myself and by my patriotism and admiration for what he was about to be asked to do; I knew this kid was heading to Iraq to defend my liberty.
First though, I had to defend my well-being. I wondered what the nasty flight attendant on my Tri-Cities-to-Atlanta puddle jump would have done with this guy? My guess is she would have dragged him from his seat and stuck his head in the lavatory toilet.
The flight attendants on this 757, however, were AWOL and seemingly powerless since there wasn’t an empty seat on the plane and this guy couldn’t have been moved anyway because he was unconscious.
At one point, I asked a flight attendant to summon the air marshal. “Sir, we can’t discuss security protocol on the airplane,” she said.
“In other words,” I said, “there is no air marshal on this flight.”
At various times during the redeye flight, the Marine in seat 33B, between me and my boss, would get hot and then rip open his shirt, exposing his dog tags. He once reached up and stole my air vent. I took it back; the flight was stifling.
When I would block his right arm, he sometimes would do a cross-over move with his left. Keep in mind, this man had no idea what he was doing. His moves were involuntary. But after I elbowed him hard in the ribs, he muttered a 12-letter phrase with the first six letters “mother.”
I grabbed both his wrists, shoved them into his chest and yelled: “I am an air marshal! As soon as we touch down, I’m placing you under arrest under the authority of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security!”
(Please don’t accuse me of impersonating a federal officer and imply I committed a crime when, in fact, I embraced the Marine Corps’ unofficial mantra: Adapt, Improvise, Overcome.)
The Marine blinked twice and finally looked me in the eye for the first time in three hours. He had come to for a moment and looked worried.
“I’m sorry, sir! I’m not doing it on purpose, sir!” he said. No matter how wasted this guy was, he was always polite.
“I don’t care,” I shot back. “Stop sleeping on my boss and stop hitting me in the head. Pass out in the upright position like your seat is supposed to be in. I don’t want to dislike you, and I certainly don’t want you arrested. But you can’t drink this much and get on an airplane. It doesn’t reflect well on your branch of service.”
“U.S. Marine Corps, sir!” he said.
“Have you been to Iraq?” I asked.
“Not yet, sir!” he said.
“Look, I and every American appreciate what you are doing for this country. I don’t want you arrested. But you can’t hit me. It’s bad enough that I can’t dare fall to sleep for fear of being pummeled. Now just stop it, and I’ll ignore this.”
The Marine passed out again, but his arms stopped flailing. Forty-five minutes later, as I left the plane, I looked at him and he glanced back at me with concern: He really believed I was an air marshal.
And I’m glad. Because an air marshal would not have done what I had contemplated earlier: to take a Sharpie and write “Don’t ask, don’t tell” on his bare chest.
The sheepish Marine staggered to his feet after the plane pulled up to the jetway. He gave me a five-minute head start off the plane, and I disappeared with my publisher into the throng that is the Atlanta airport.
I pray he survives his tour in Iraq. I also hope he’s a better shot than he is a drinker.
J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier and can be reached at jfoster@bristolnews.com or 276-645-2513.
Note to anonymous reader
I received a letter last week from an anonymous reader demanding I apologize for the phrase “turd on a stick” – written nearly a year ago but recently republished in a yard-sale column that ran in our publication Mountain Empire. The phrase was a direct quote from my late father. There are three guarantees in life: death, taxes and the fact I will never apologize for quoting my dead dad.
Ellie