V 1 N. 31 Sometimes You Get Into Stuff When You Are Not Even Trying

 

My Affair with L’Affaire Maschino

Dayton, Ohio, 1977

by George Brose

 

            Sometimes we walk on the periphery of important events without knowing it.  Other times we wet our feet and still others we become totally immersed.  This story is about the second level of circumstance.

 

            First I have to tell how my life and the other persons’ lives came to merge for a brief time.  Marie and I married in Germany in 1970, when I was still in the US Army, and a year later we found ourselves expecting a child and moved to her home town in Northwest Quebec where socialized medicine made having a child financially feasible.  We had a nice life in Noranda Quebec, despite the raging winters and hordes of mosquitoes in the summers.   We made lots of friends in fellow teachers, Quebec Separatists, runners, and the like.  One of our good friends were a French/English couple Ovide and Wynanne Bastien.  In early 1973, the Bastien moved to Chile to experience the democratically elected Socialist government of Salvador Allende.  We remained in correspondence with them and they both eventually had to flee the country after the CIA led coup d’etat that resulted in hundreds if not thousands of people being tortured, killed, or disappeared.  While they remained in Santiago after the coup, the Bastien were involved in hiding people who were being sought after by the Pinochet regime.  At the same time Ovide wrote a book about the involvement of the Catholic church and its support of the Pinochet gang.  Wynanne smuggled the manuscript out of the country, even though she was in the early stages of a very delicate pregnancy.  She had had several previous miscarriages.  But she managed to get past the authorities on her own while carrying the baby and  the manuscript of Ovide’s book which would later be published as Le Coup Divin (The Divine Coup) which condemned the Church.   Ovide was able to leave Chile before the book was published. 

 

            By 1976 I had run out of options to stay in Quebec and continue to teach and coach without getting more educational certification.  So Marie and I and our two young children Marie Dominique and Jacques Andre moved to Muncie, Indiana where I had been accepted to study Exercise Physiology at Ball State University’s renowned Human Performance Lab. 

 

            While in Indiana, we continued to be in contact with our Quebec friends through phone calls, Christmas cards, and the occasional trips back to Canada.  The Bastien had moved down to Montreal and Ovide was now teaching economics at Concordia University, and Wynanne was raising a bunch of kids at home.  

 

            Shift forward a few years to about 1978.  One summer evening in Muncie, I received a phone call from Ovide saying he was planning to be in Dayton, Ohio,  my hometown, and would he and a couple of other guys be able  to meet me there and perhaps spend a couple of nights at my parents’ house?   He knew my parents from their visits up to Northwest Quebec when we all had lived there. 

 

            “No problem,  I’ll see you tomorrow in Dayton.”  I drove over alone, leaving Marie and the children behind in Muncie, about 100 miles from Dayton.  When I got to my parents’ home there was a message to meet Ovide in downtown Dayton at a hamburger joint in the arts district.  I drove down to the place and found Ovide and two other men waiting patiently in the parking lot.  He introduced them to me, one being a Denis Maschino and the other a journalist from Agence Presse France (AFP).   They cut to the chase and told me why they were in Dayton. 

 

            Denis Maschino, a French citizen, was a student of Ovide’s at Concordia.  He had lived in Algeria, the son of a French diplomat and had met and married his wife Dalila, an Algerien citizen from a very well placed family.  Her brother was chief of the Algerian secret police.  Being a Moslem-Catholic union in a strongly Moslem country was not something that was easily accepted by Dalila’s family.     The young couple had to flee the country.   France was too close to Algeria, so they came to Canada where French was spoken in Quebec.  Their marriage had occurred in 1975, and they had been living peacefully but also cautiously in the Montreal area.  However Dalia’s family was not about to give up on this seeming disregard for her culture. 

 

            In a short time Dalila’s sister and husband moved to Montreal as well and connected with her and Denis.  However Denis was very suspect of the intentions of the sister and brother-in-law.  He would never allow Dalila to be alone with them.  But after several years of this cat and mouse game, Denis let his guard down and when the relatives came to visit one time without her guardian present, she was drugged and taken to Dorval airport in Montreal and put on a private plane and flown back to Algeria.  It was correctly assumed by Denis that Dalila’s family would finagle a divorce and marry her off to a ‘respectable’ Algerian.  He was correct in his thinking. 

 

            My first question to Ovide, Denis, and the French journalist was,  “Why the hell are you bringing this affair to my attention in Dayton, Ohio?”

 

            The French journalist answered that query immediately.   “Because the plane that flew into Montreal to bring the kidnapped Dalila out of Canada, came from a small airport near Dayton.”

 

            My response,  “Holy freakin’ tamales !”  or something close to that. 

 

            It seems that the papers that were filed by the crew when they arrived at Montreal indicated that the plane had  from Wilmington, Ohio about 30 miles southeast of Dayton.  It was at a former Ohio National Guard airbase now converted to a private airport.  The trio who had come to see me in Dayton wanted to go down to Wilmington and snoop around and find out what was going on at that former airbase.  They had the name of the pilot of the aircraft and intended to ‘interview’ him.    They were also quite concerned that they might be being followed by Algerian security. 

 

            That said, I brought them up to my parents’ home in a blue collar neighborhood in southeast Dayton and told them some story that didn’t quite jibe with the truth.  Okay, I lied.  I just told my dear parents that the lads were doing some research and didn’t have a lot of funding.   So the four of us slept downstairs on the living floor and pretended we were researching.  Actually Maschino did not want to stay in the house and possibly draw attention to them so he took the car several blocks away and slept in it.  I stayed up all night watching to see if there was any suspicious activity on our street.  My dad was not big on weapons, but he did have a 12 gauge shotgun in the basement, but I couldn’t find any shells near it.  Interpret that as you wish.

 

            The sun rose and Denis returned, and in the afternoon the three of them drove down to Wilmington to see what they could see.  When they came back late that night they informed me that they had met the pilot, but he didn’t want to be interviewed.   He was quite shocked that they knew who he was and had come 800 miles to talk to him.  By prowling several bars around Wilmington they had also found several people who occasionally worked at the airport.  They would get called when there was a shipment to be loaded.  This happened sporadically, not on any fixed schedule.  What they were loading could be anything from Mercedes Benz cars,  to sheep and guns.  You name it.  It was going mainly to the Middle East and they were paid cash under the table.

 

            In a separate incident several years later I learned that Bob, a hoodlum high school acquaintance, had gotten into some trouble running guns out of that same Wilmington airport.  I wasn’t shocked.      Hoodlum Bob is another story entirely which I may recount someday.  He was a reform school dropout who also could run a decent 440 yards in track and on relays would intimidate other runners by telling them before their turn to run on a relay that he could have them severally injured by some of his ‘friends’ if they didn’t move over when he was passing them.  They knew Bob meant it.  Bob could be counted on to run well on relays, and he didn’t need performance enhancing drugs (PEDs). 

 

            That is about all that went down with the visit of my three ‘friends’ from Montreal.   When they went back to Montreal, the story continued.  The kidnapping had become public in France, a cause celebre , and many folks from the Left Bank were staging protests about the abduction.  Jean Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir were among the leaders protesting “L’Affaire Maschino” in the streets of Paris.

 

            The Pierre Trudeau led government in Canada preferred to sweep the story under the table, because at the time, Algeria was a major supplier of oil to the Canadian nation.   The Alberta tar sands were not yet being exploited at home. 

 

            What would happen to Dalila and Denis?  Would there be a fairy tale ending?

 

            By 1988, I crossed paths with Denis Maschino a second time.  We were back in the Montreal area, and I was in the process of getting coaching certification in Canada.  You had to go through several stages of training, and in the basic one which dealt with all sports, I was in a class and the role was called, and I heard ‘Denis Maschino’ called on the attendance list.  Wow, ten years ago I had met this guy under very different circumstances.  He was there to begin his coaching certification in Karate or some other martial art.  I asked him what was going on in his life and he said he had remarried.  All the time we talked he seemed a bit evasive.  We chatted a bit more and never reconnected. 

 

            Later I met Ovide Bastien on another occasion and he told me the story.  After years of living in social isolation in Algeria with her new husband,  Dalila had gone with her family to Switzerland or France for a ski holiday.  When they let their guard down, Dalila fled and came to Canada to be with Denis.   She did not know he had remarried, and eventually she returned to France.  She continued her education and now is a professor of feminist studies at a university in France.  And thus you may conclude that life does not always have that fairy tale ending.

V 1 N. 30 The Ongoing Saga of the Canadian American Family in Beijing

 

A recent story that appeared in The Guardian reminded me of some of my past transgressions while spending three years in the US Army.  The story I’m referring to is about an 86 years old French woman who was arrested recently for an immigration infraction.  Apparently she came to the US on a 90 day tourist visa to marry an American soldier she had met in the 1950’s.  Both she and her new American  husband had had previous marriages, and after those marriages had ended, they re-connected, gotten together,  hitched up and were living in Alabama.  (French woman in Alabama?  That is grist for a William Faulkner novel.) But when her new husband died, and she stayed past her visa, the ICE Capades came skating in  and threw her 86 year old bones into a holding tank in Louisiana.  The center could have been anywhere, but God, that’s where  Mike Johnson is from.  Could it be any worse?  Why didn’t they just send her back to France?   Oh, that’s right there are French speakers in Louisiana.  But if I were Cajun these days, I wouldn’t be speaking that lingo in public.  After all those guys’ great-great grandpas and grandmas all came from what is now Canada and used to be called Acadians.  ICE dudes might think they’re some kind of ‘ferriners’  Especially when they play zydeco music.

 

After having served two years in the Peace Corps from 1965 to 1967 in Tanzania and Kenya I was asked to serve my country some more by going into the Army.  In joining the Peace Corps in 1965, I had mistakenly assumed that the Viet Nam war would be over by 1968, but I was so wrong.  How could the mighty US of A not have been able to subdue that little country with all the armaments at its disposal and dropping more bombs on it than we had dropped on Germany twenty-five years earlier?  My answer to that is a question.  How much chance do you think China would have trying to conquer Eastern Kentucky and taking over the moonshining business?   No chance whatsoever.

I was also not thinking of another battlefield in Europe, where something called The Cold War was being fought.  Besides all those guys in Viet Nam trying to save people from the Domino Effect of Communism, there were a lot of guys in Europe wearing fatigues and short haircuts.  No, kids, I’m not talking about Domino’s Pizza delivery drivers.  I’m talking about American soldiers and  the war that never really came to blows.  That’s why they called it the Cold War.  At it’s height from about 1960 to 1989, the US had as many as 300,000 troops stationed in Europe on any given day,  hoping the Russians would not try to invade those ‘friendly’ nations.  We had basically divided up Europe with the Commies into two zones of ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’ and let nothing cross those lines without cutting a lot of red tape, the exception being a few ballet dancers in tights.  To help maintain that realm of co-existence I was asked to get a short haircut and wear army green.  God it was 1968, long hair, the Beatles, flower children, peace and love. That was my sacrifice for my country.  

Today’s army is populated with guys and gals who want to be there.  By the end of the Viet Nam war, which we lost, the Army had learned that it wasn’t going to be easy running a show with people who didn’t want to be in their organization.   So they dreamed up the all-volunteer army.  In my time there were a few men who were career soldiers.  We called them ‘lifers’.  The rest of us were putting in time but not really interested except to know how many days it was until we were getting out.  When you were down to a couple of months you became a ‘short timer’.   When you woke up each  morning you yelled, “Short” to let your buddies know you were almost there.   In those last weeks, you would get called in by your commanding officer (CO) and given a re-enlistment  speech.  He would offer you a bonus to re-up for another two or three years.  The bonus was usually about enough to by a new car.  Did you ever try to drive a big Oldsmobile or Pontiac through small towns in Germany?  You scraped the corners off of a lot of buildings.  American car companies would deliver those cars to you in Europe.  It must have been financially worth the effort by the car companies to put a sales staff over there. 

I declined the re-enlistment option as I had bought a very used DKW German car for $40, drove it two years, broke a drive shaft a week before going home, and sold it as is for $50.   The only car in my life that I ever made money on, a ten dollar profit.  That DKW was the precursor of the Audi, but it had a long way to go to get to that level of vehicular transport.  My DKW which  the German public referred to as Das Krankenhaus Wartet, meaning the Hospital is Waiting, had a three cylinder, aluminum block, two stroke engine.  You had to add oil as well as gasoline into the fuel tank when you filled up.  Then you had to shake the car to mix it.  It still blew a lot of smoke out the exhaust, and I had to clean the spark plugs after every two fill ups.  It also had a standard transmission but no clutch pedal.  To shift you had to ease up on the accelerator.  Took a bit of practice.  Just like learning to live in another culture.

Well, to my opening point about the French lady being arrested.  By my second year in Germany, my life had evolved to the point of getting married to a French lady of Canadian origin, a Quebecoise to be precise.  We had met briefly in Tanzania five years earlier and had carried on a torrid correspondence, to the point she had visited me once in Germany in 1969, and we decided that we would get married a year later there in Germany. 

 

 My ‘job’ in the army was working as an area analyst for a PSYOPs unit. There were more mundane sides to that job, but I won't go into them at this point,  apart from keeping my Jeep clean and the ash and trash detail.   I had a mate in the unit named Jack, another ex-Peace Corps Volunteer.  He had a German wife, Ina who I'd introduced him to a year before.   Jack was the only Arabic linguist in the military in Europe at that time.  I spoke Swahili  and  German, but our usefulness to the forces was limited by whom we were hooked up with.  I think the rationale was that we might be giving away our country’s secrets while talking in our sleep.   In  Jack’s case it was particularly bad because we were there during the Black September uprising in Jordan and were supposed to go in to help evacuate Americans while King Hussein of Jordan was trying to kill off as many Palestinian refugees as he could in his country.  And you thought Israel was the first to try to rid itself of Palestinians?  This eventually led to the Munich Olympics fiasco two years later when the Black September movement kidnapped four or five Israeli athletes, and they were all killed by the Germans while trying to rescue them.    The reaction of our CO was to hide our Arabic linguist, so no other army units might get him transferred to their unit, because of his language skills.  Our CO made him go on leave and basically hide in Europe, but to phone in everyday to see if he should come back in case he was needed by our unit.   What the army ended up doing was sending in a couple of M.A.S.H. units to provide medical support and get some good publicity for its ‘humanitarian action’.  However not having someone versed in the culture, the field hospitals had painted big red crosses on their tents and nobody knew what they were.  No one came for medical help.   Should have been re-painted with Red Crescents in the Middle East.   Jack could have told them that.

 

Okay, what does all this have to do with the old French lady getting bottled up in an ICE detention center?   Well, the co-incidence is back in 1989 when my family by then with two teenagers was returning from a year of teaching in China, we  all entered the US and Marie applied to renew her Green Card to be able to live in the States with her American husband and American children.   Not knowing she had to remain in the US while that renewal was being processed, she went to Canada to visit some of her family members and upon returning to the US, she was denied re-entry, because she had left the country.  The irony of all this was it happened on the day the Berlin Wall came down and everybody was crying about the end of Communism and the new freedom in Europe.   It took almost a year for that Green Card to be processed and our family was kept apart, one kid staying with me in the US and the other staying with Marie in Canada. 

It all boils down to the whims of nationalism and politics and who is in charge at the moment.   You Americans,  don't forget to vote this November.   'Nough said.