Tales of Pork

The US used to have a base outside of Tripoli, obviously, if my father was involved - nasty stuff was present.  The base had been there since the end of World War II.  And it seems that there was a certain young officer in the Libyan Army whom was attempting to breech the base perimeter either for the sake of gaining arms or cause an international incident.

What is one to do?  The US Government under Lynden B. Johnson was committed to not offending host countries, but here was a situation where a loose cannon officer was trying to cause an incident and rightfully, even by treaty should be shot for his attempts to scale the wire..

Of course, he did get the incident he sought, just only not quite the way he thought it would go.

Father ordered the water trucks filled with the deep fry fat (hot pork grease) from the NCO club and then driven out to the fence the radicals were gathering near for their morning - "go ahead and blow me off this wire with a fire hose" routine.

The group rushed the fence, a translator warned them of what would happen and they dared the pumpers to make them unclean.

Yeah, a certain young Lieutenant Gaddafi was completely hosed down and left standing covered in pork fat.

Father had a very great laugh over that one.  Of course, officially he was reprimanded by the US State Department, as the Department of Defense promoted him at the same time.

As an aside to this tale, father expressed complete satisfaction at having taken a situation and defused it without the taking of human life.  Since the wire was now even unclean, no one attempted to scale it again.....