God Bless the U.S.A. -- by Lee Greenwood

While teaching part-time, David was diligently attempting to immigrate to US. With limited financial resources and short supply of social contacts, the only way David figured he could get back on his feet in the transportation industry was by emailing people like a spammer and hoping one or two email would get through to someone who might be interested in utilizing his skills and experiences.

One day he received a call from a gentleman named Richard Westwood from Houston. It turned out that Richard Westwood worked with David before, although it had been more than 10 years ago. As David remembered and for reasons not completely understandable to David, Richard Westwood liked to call himself as "Bud". He asked if David was interested in helping him to obtain a patent in the transportation industry as an expert witness. If the trial experience became a mutually satisfactory one, then they can work together on more important projects. They briefly chatted about the old days working together in Waste Recycling, Inc. between 1992 and 1994 from different branch offices of the same parent company. That was the time when cold war was considered as "just over" after the United States won a dominant victory in the first Gulf War against Iraq, with the support of the USSR and almost the entire world.

Since the war was so quickly over and the casualty was so low on the US side, also because it was fought with high tech gadgets and TV screens watched live by many people for the first time in history, some people in US started calling it a "Nintendo war". Soldiers returning from that war were so warmly welcomed, prompting some newspaper columnists to write: "this is really unfair for those Vietnam veterans, who fought so many arduous years to find themselves being spit on upon returning, while these Gulf War veterans only needed to fight such a short period of time to receive such a warm welcome." Some other media quickly came to the aid of the US military saying, the Iraqi army was not as bad as they seemed on the Nintendo machine or TV. Iraq actually had the 4th largest army in the world before the 1991 Gulf war. Consider Iraq was not far removed from its war with Iran but the US military was certainly far away from its nationwide military mobilization decades ago, the statistics of the "4th largest army" about Iraq could be true. But in the public eyes, the war must have not been dramatic enough to give the triumphant president another term to the White House. Nor did Collin Powell later follow the footsteps of many winning generals in the past, such as George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Zackary Taylor, Ulysses Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower, to become president, although he was mentioned as a presidential possibility several years later.

How could this "4th largest army" in the world stand against the other side with two super powers? Winning that war was easy and America was at its unprecedented glorious status unrivaled even by Rome and Great Britain.

After the end of that Gulf War the world decided there was no need for a cold war any more. Both the Russia and the USA decided to sign several treaties mandating each side to destroy certain amount of midrange missiles each year, so there would be less and less intercontinental warheads pointing at each other among nations.

For US, many of those midrange missiles were the Minuteman models scattered around the country. Waste Recycling was hired as the environmental consulting firm by US Army Corps of Engineers and US Air Force to sample pesticides and herbicides around the missile silos, before those lands could be returned to civilian use. Bud was a project manager from the Minnesota office and David was an entry level environmental scientist from the Cincinnati office, who was really doing a job of an environmental technician. Soil sampling was very easy, and the tasks mainly consisted of using different tools, such as: augers and hand-held power drills, to dig up some dirt and then to put them into 8 oz jars. Afterwards, samples needed to be labeled in certain ways for record keeping and shipments to the labs. There were many missile sites to sample because there were many "minuteman II" missiles to decommission around Ellsworth Air Force Base (AFB) in South Dakota and Whiteman AFB near a place called Knob Noster Missouri.

Since it was a governmental job, therefore one environmental sampler digging up the dirt is not good enough without somebody else watching. Accompanying each environmental scientist, each crew consisted of a field manager from Waste Recycling, Inc., and a representative from US Army Corps of Engineer. Then there were a large entourage of inspection team randomly roaming from crew to crew to "sample" the work of the environmental samplers and insert themselves into photo opportunities. Back then, Bud was a project manager as a member of the "photo and speech" team going from site to site.

Besides the usual "how's it going" and "nice weather Hah?", the only significant exchange between David and Bud in those days was this: When stopping near one missile silo, Bud came to David and whispered to him: "David, because I am the stupid, so-called, quote, whatever you want to call it, project manager, I have to pretend that I am training younger employees how to do things. Here, you hold your hand drill this way, so there would be no chance for the diesel fuel to drip into the soil and contaminate the sample. I know, I know. . . the chance of contamination is negligent and there is nothing dripping out, but I got to pretend that I am doing something here". David was deeply moved by the humbleness and honesty of this project manager and said: "oh, that's perfectly all right, please feel free to . . .hmm". David stuttered because he couldn't speak the entire sentences of English without pauses in those years. Bud smiled and completed his sentence for him quickly, which David thought was with a trace of sarcasm, "You mean feel free to point out things? Good! Alright!" Then he went back to his pack of "photo and speech people" and they moved right along.

During the time they worked together, David and Bud mingled with rest of their co-workers and took site seeing field trips as field geologists do. At the end of the project, Bud as a team leader, sent off people to places and got them dispursed

In the past 10 years, Bud and David had both left the environmental industry, one forced and the other at his own choice. With his professional experiences and a wealth of connections, Bud had apparently gone through a much more affluent path than what David had been through. He opened 15 restaurants with the fairly well known national chain "Burrito House", in Houston, Texas area. Now that he had made enough money to retire, he was merely toying with the ideas of becoming an inventor to associate his name with certain patented technologies that can change the course of human history, or at least GPS/GIS applications and vehicles in transportations.