seafood

Brisbane to Auckland

It's true that people are the most interesting things on the planet. This is always so; sometimes two people will meet an barely an exchange of ideas worth talking about will take place. But sometimes when you meet someone and you begin to talk to them it's like a floodgate has been opened - interesting stuff just flows from their mouths and into your ears.

I met such a person on my way to Auckland. Sitting in seat 69A (yeah!) I decided I'd introduce myself to the man sitting in 69C. After having introduced himself as Bill we exchanged the bare essentials - destination, place of origin, reason for flying. Bill was a tall, powerfully built but extremely friendly Californian.

Our conversation started off reasonably sedately - we talked a bit about Australian beer - but it was only when we started talking about Airline safety that things got really interesting. I remarked that I'd always found it funny that Qantas hadn't cashed in more on the comments made by Dustin Hoffman's character in the movie Rainman - if you recall he was autistic and could remember every single accident each airline had had; except of course for Qantas - no plane of its fleet had never had an accident. Bill offered the explanation that it was a very profitable airline and that it probably had a whole lot of money to spend on maintenance. It was at that point in the conversation that I dropped the catalyst question into the mix.

"So are the U.S. airlines still suffering economically?" I asked. "Oh yeah, one of them has filed for bankruptcy for the second time this year just recently," he replied.

Shortly afterwards he told me that he'd been in the Persian Gulf when September 11th happened, as part of the navy presence there. He explained how they'd been ordered to fire off many of their Tomahawk missiles almost straight away. I learned the most fascinating facts about how they were deployed.

Firstly, there are a variety of different Tomahawk missiles - high explosive, napalm, ones filled with bomblets and of course some with nuclear capability. The one containing bomblets would actually open a tiny pair of bay doors and dispense smaller explosive devices on the target. I'd heard of them before - apparently many of these didn't explode on impact and had the potential to maim well after initial deployment. They're the new land mines I suppose.

But what's even more interesting is that even the Captain of the ship
doesn't know the type of each Tomahawk. This information is classified and only known to people further up the chain of command. This sounds like an extremely effective means of hiding one's capabilities from one's adversaries.

Another funny thing that was classified about the ship was its top speed - 30 knots unclassified and who knows what speed otherwise. I can't help thinking that even though the Captain of the ship doesn't know how fast the ship can go, one who's been in command for a while can get a reasonable idea. At some point in any decent combat filled career a Captain is sure to get an order to make haste to a given location to engage with the enemy. And he's probably likely to be given a required time of arrival so that he can coordinate with other
allied units. It just so might be the case that he has to scramble and it's in this situation that he's got it made. In such a situation command is unlikely to provide a time later than one that they know the Captain is capable of meeting. The rest is physics: speed equals distance divided by time.

Later I discovered that Bill is now part of the sheriff's department. Even later I discovered that he is a correctional officer, that is, he works in a jail. He described that although he's not out on the street his job is harder than theirs. His reasoning is that they're allowed firearms, tasers, pepper spray all manner of other whiz-bangery, while he and his colleagues have only batons and their unarmed combat skills to help them.

But then he corrected himself. Apparently they had recently been issued with tasers. For those of you who don't know these devices are used to disrupt the nervous signals from the brain to the rest of the body via electric shock. I've read about them before; they are part of a increasing arsenal of non-lethal weaponry.

The term non-lethal makes them sound a lot more friendly than they really are. Bill knows this first hand - as part of his training in their use he was required to be subject to the 50000 volt dose of shock they dealt out. One terminal was place on his shoulder, the other on his foot. He was then given the standard shock of five seconds. He said it was one of the most horrible experiences he has ever endured and that it took him a full minute and a half before he regained even the vestiges of cognitive function again.

I really liked Bill. It was hard not to. He approached life in a straightforward and open-minded manner. He never once gave me the impression that he found anything I had to say anything less than fascinating. But I felt he assimilated his training a little too thoroughly. With respect to his description of how the taser was used he kept calling inmates of the jail "the subject" and a person such as himself "the officer". I am no stranger to formal language - I use it every day, but in his case I felt that it had the effect of de-personalising the people in his charge, making them something akin to cattle to be tended and taken care of. It didn't sound like he empathised with them.

Things that mildly shocked me but did not phase him at all kept creeping in the conversation. He mentioned that their were a lot of mentally challenged inmates and that even they, for whom is was difficult for one to have anything resembling a human connection, respected the taser.

"It's a great tool," he'd say. "All we have to do is place the red dot on them and they'll cease being disruptive and put their hands behind their backs. They'll even say they're sorry."

Surely this is apology under duress, a submission of one's will to a force one knows they simply cannot contend with. In fact the whole system that Bill was part of did not seem to even attempt to understand things from the prisoners' point of view. They had broken the laws of the U.S. It was as simple as that. It did not seem that there was any need to understand the culture and environment that had shaped the inmates into the people they were.

A weapon as powerful and effective as the taser scares me. The potential for abuse is acute. Should it fall into the hands of an officer that is unprofessional, who delights in tormenting those in his care, it is a horrible thing. There is no arguing with it.