Smith and Caruthers

Major Beyers left in October 2003 along with Major Tyke Smith. Smith was the Executive Officer of the IAC in charge of all the office details – procuring computers and office equipment, phones, etc., and also supervised Bill Kaminsky in his recruiting and managing of our interpreters. Smith in his day job was a Christian Missionary. He didn’t drink and stayed in his room whenever we had parties so that he could have “plausible deniability” should we get busted. He was a nice guy and straight arrow. But he also had some quirks, one of which was that he is the only member of the IAC that doesn’t regularly keep in touch with the rest of us. Smith lived in a 2-person bedroom with Kaminsky on the second floor. He left in November. So I moved upstairs to live with Bill in a two man room. I left Kenny downstairs with Enzo and our new Latvian, Kaspar Uztics. They all smoked and the place had a constant haze whenever you walked in. Kaspar replaced Mareks Skangalis, our first Latvian (more later). He was a ham radio buff and the entire third floor deck was honeycombed with a spider web of guy wires and antenna wires. He didn’t say much, but was a nice guy. He came around the end of my tour.

Jeff Caruthers, aka “Top”. The alias is given to the highest ranking sergeant in a unit. Carruthers was a master sergeant. I was a staff sergeant, two ranks below him. But Colonel Edwards and Captain Beyers wanted me to be the NCOIC, and he graciously didn’t mind. So I had an NCO that outranked me working for me. He was African-American, in his 50’s, was actually DRAFTED into the Army in the early 1970’s. Think Scatman Caruthers. He was an electrical genius (worked for the State Department setting up communications and security devices at embassies) and a history buff. He had an Army generator brought to the house and wired it to the house's electrical system. Whenever we had a power outage, he just cranked up the generator. He read a lot of history, but got a lot wrong when he was telling someone about an historical event. I gave up trying to correct him. He was definitely “old school”. We had members of the IAC from Great Britain, Italy, Netherlands, South Korea, Poland, Latvia, and Ukraine. Who didn’t he trust? The Brits. Called them Lobsterbacks, the term used by the Puritans in Massachusetts during the revolution. He was constantly admonishing us to “watch perfidious Albion”. He meant it. He served Colonel Edwards his morning cup of coffee in his bedroom in the morning. He also mis-pronounced everyone’s name. He just couldn’t get it right. It was the butt of many of our jokes. At 57 or so, he was naturally slowing up. Sometimes we grew impatient waiting for him to gear up for a mission. But he was fearless. After numerous military missions to garden spots like Liberia, not much phased him. He had total contempt for Africa and Africans and bristled at ever being called, “African-American”. He left in January 2004 and not a moment too soon. He was getting very cranky and couldn’t seem to break his foul mood. We kind of avoided him that last couple of weeks that he was there. Today, he's back at the State Department. We keep in touch.