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“So tell me,” said the rotund man in sweat pants, “are you a spy?”  In other circumstances surely a laughable question, but he was an army officer and this was an army base.  I had wandered into this area looking for a campsite.  I made the mistake of assuming the Army would put a fence up around areas they didn’t want people wandering into.  I had ridden down an unmarked road, then stood around surveying an open area for campsites.  When some uniformed men ambled through the area, I waited for them, hoping to ask if camping was permitted so near the army base.  I had to wait a long time, for they walked slowly and not directly towards me.

Thinking of the wait, I responded with some annoyance: “If I was a spy, I would come here at night and not walk around in the open.”  “In fact,” said the officer, “this is just what I would expect from a spy, to walk around in the open.”  What could I say?

“Do you have a passport?” asked the officer.  When his subordinates had so skillfully apprehended me, they took care to separate me from my bike.  I explained that my passport was on my bike.  While we waited for my bike to be retrieved, we discussed ground hockey, a game my two interrogators were playing before they had the opportunity to play interrogation with me.

I asked what I hoped were un-spy-like questions about ground hockey.  “You don’t know much about ground hockey,” summed up one of the officers.  My effort to cloak my intelligence and set them off the scent had evidently been successful.

A soldier rode up on my bike.  I hate it when other people ride my bike.  A quick look at the mismatched straps on my bags indicated someone had taken the liberty to search it.  I retrieved my passport and examined the searched bag for missing items.

“Do you have any drugs?” he asked.  I launched into a long list of anti-diarrheal, anti-biotic, anti-histamine and other useful travel drugs.  “No, no no,” he smiled sympathetically at my naivety.  I assured him I had none of those drugs.  “Are you sure?” prodded the officer, “shall I put it through the X-ray?”  Where he had an x-ray and what made him think it would be of any help in finding drugs is beyond me.  As you wish, I told him.

I was being interrogated on an ant mound.  Huge ants ran up my legs and I had to brush them off and stomp my feet.  “Step away from that area,” kindly ordered the lower-ranking officer.

“Can I see that book?” asked the man in the sweats.  I had taken my journal out of my bag to see if my favorite pen was still attached to it.  I handed it over.  “It’s a bad habit, you know, to read other people’s diaries, but I’m just doing my job,” he said as he glanced cursorily at a few of the pages, searching for a legible section.  My terrible handwriting seemed to lessen his commitment to duty.  “Your handwriting is very poor,” he informed me, and handed the book back.  I craftily avoided telling him how I had slaved at spy school to develop my incomprehensible chicken scratch.

The passport and photocopies came back.  “If you want to camp somewhere, ask if it is a civilian area first,” the officer advised me, “if they catch you at night it won’t be like this, they’ll just throw you in the brig.”  “I really hope you are not a spy,” he continued.  “Now, I have a copy of your passport, so I can catch you next time.  This man will show you out,” he finished and rejoined the game of ground hockey, of which I was so poorly informed.

Even though they had foolishly led me into the center of camp, they took care to lead me out the way I came, through brush and down windy trails.  They wanted to keep the main gate of the the camp secret-at least until I rode by it the next day on the main road.  I returned to Pete and Drew more than an hour later than I was supposed to meet them.

Overall, I couldn’t have hoped for a better interrogation experience.  Everyone was friendly, even with the occasional jab or hard question thrown in. Perhaps they were paranoid, perhaps eager to exercise their authority.  I’m just glad they didn’t actually think I was a spy.  Even for adults, games are often preferable to doing the real thing.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 29th, 2008 at 4:38 am and is filed under Jim's Posts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.