Smith'n Flamingo

18 Oct 03-riverside at Billy Creek

from: The Gonzo Literati

Any of us who have gone the gamut of really having expensive automobiles or things in them that certainly needed protecting have probably been raked over the coals with automobile security alarms...those things that shriek when sparrows hiccup, won't shut off because the controller battery is discharged, cost a fortune and any competent thief can outwit in a nanosecond.

But the solution is here. My car is guarded by Smith'n, the pink gawky plastic flamingo and since his arrival on the scene, not a soul has ventured within spitting distance of this luring, obviously treasure laden 1980 blue smoke choking VW van.

Flamingo technology has actually been around for a while. Guess it's safe now to reveal this well-kept military secret of the Vietnam theater...now that we've repeated the same insanity of attempting to shove the massively dysfunctional American way of life down another third world country's throat and found out they have guns, grenades and minds of their own....(imagine that...the Vietnamese and the Iraqis...hell even the Afghans..... thinking they can do it their way.)

We were using trained German Shepards on patrol in the jungle against the Viet Cong....back there in Vietnam...back then in 1969.....(a time I'd just as soon not remember....but do) Damned guard dogs kept disappearing. We'd send the dog out...rustle, rustle, rustle as it sniffed through the fronds. Then blank silence. Few moments later the smell of roasting meat on the night jungle air. Next day we'd find their camp, fire still smoldering and a thank you note for dinner.

That's when we started using flamingos. These are actually vicious and ruthless birds...contrary to the diabolical misrepresentation the environmentalists, Audubon society and commercial television have attached to them.

The advantage of vicious trained war- patrol flamingos is that, while dogs are earthbound ( we call them "two dimensional warfare units" because they only travel in a two dimensional plane)...flamingos fly (hence their classification as "three-dimensional surveillance devices")...something most of the commanding generals in Iraq don't even know because its so carefully guarded as a warfare secret.

The Vietnamese were built low to the ground and preoccupied with building tunnels...underground stuff. They never looked up. That's why the flamingos worked so well. They would fly overhead or perch in trees and use those goofy eyeballs to detect enemy movement....all completely unnoticed by the enemy.

This is where I became such a crucial element in our war effort against these vicious rice farmers. The problem with flamingo intelligence data is that it's not interpretable to the average homosapien. They communicate telepathically. That's why the CIA recruited me..actually abducted me...from a beer bar called the Broken Drum in Boulder at the tail end of the wild 60's...where I was widely known for ( among myriad other cryptic and ill fitting talents) my uncanny ability to think like a flamingo.

We were an overnight disaster to the North Vietnamese...flamingos flying everywhere...they have uncanny night vision...relaying their data to me in Danang...and of course, we all know the rest...this is how we won the war in Vietnam.

We did win the war in Vietnam, right? Which is why Vietnam is now a property of the United States and has Monday Night football, right? Just like we're winning the war in Iraq, right? I thought so.

Just before North Vietnam buckled and Ho Chi Minh turned himself in to Richard Nixon, we discovered that these flamingos were fighters. Those weird curved beaks were vicious and those long dangly legs could shred even the most tenacious of enemies. We had just started training flamingo attack battalions when the war ended.

And that's how Smith'n came to guard my van...now my domicile...as I venture forth on nomadic wheels into the desperate and dangerous beyond...to Phoenix and other enemy infested reaches.

When the issue of security came up in putting together this "turtle-home on wheels" (my third, actually) I had another Vietnam flashback and knew in an instant the best traveling partner anyone could enlist would be a vicious, war-trained plastic pink flamingo.

Smith'n perches in the passenger seat, casting his menacing synthetic eye about the parking lots of Home Depot and City Market, strafing the concrete tarmac for invisible enemy lurking, coveting my french-press coffee maker, my fair-trade dark french beans, my 1962 boy scout first aid kit (with original band aids in tact).

We would be winning the war in Iraq if we were using flamingos. Of course, as you know, we can't, because there are no trees in Iraq and the Iraqis would smell cheat and blow these pink feathered menaces to bits with their CIA financed U.S. manufactured hand held surface to air missiles.

But I sleep safe...under the dazzling yellow narrow leaf cottonwoods along the Uncompahgre, under the pinion and juniper forests of the red desert, next to the tall cactus of the Mojave soon...because in my window is a vicious pink plastic flamingo and a sign to strike the fear of gaud in any marauder....it says....."This vehicle is protected my Smith'n Flamingo".