I was a fugitive from the NCIS (conclusion)

Like all Navy bases, we had done a thorough environmental survey of the base property, and we had identified a small number of spill and dump sites that we were in the process of cleaning up. We gave each site a name. Some were just descriptive, like “maintenance garage parking lot” or “building 13”, and some were a bit more fanciful, like “the blackberry patch”. I reported on our progress cleaning these sites regularly to EPA, and we had press releases about them and regular well-attended public meetings for the neighboring community. 

The accusation they were following up on, the NCIS agents said, was that in addition to the list of six or eight contaminated sites that the public knew about, I was keeping a secret second list of other sites, that were never mentioned to EPA or the public. 

They showed me the evidence that was provided with by the accuser: a note in my handwriting, describing half a dozen contaminated sites in the kind of language we regularly use, but with descriptions that not only didn’t match anything we had told the public about, but which I didn’t recognize at all. 

It wasn’t hard for me to guess who had made the accusation–my document organizer. She had stumbled upon this note among the boxes and crates of reports, and convinced herself that she had found proof that we (or at least, I) were keeping deadly secrets about environmental contamination from the public. No wonder she had been acting so weird around me! She wasn’t lonesome, she saw herself as a crime-bustin’ reporter hot on a case! And I wasn’t a prospect, I was a SUSPECT!

I thought about this as I read through the list, trying to remember when I had written it and what it meant, when I saw a contamination site whose descriptive name I remembered, because it struck me as being so idyllic and picturesque, like a vacation destination. The name was “Hideaway Pond”, and it was one of the cleanup sites at a different Navy base. I took the investigators over to our Public Affairs office, where we dug up some of the public brochures about that base’s cleanup projects. All of the sites on the handwritten list were described there (phew!). I must have been taking notes at some meeting about their cleanup, and whoever had found those notes assumed I was writing about my own base.

This seemed to satisfy the agents that their work could be satisfactorily concluded, and they said they had one last question before they would be out of my hair forever: about four years earlier, one of my staff was writing up a report of a base inspection, in which they had said they found an old chemical drum out in a field, and I had edited that report, replacing the word “old” with “rusty”, and could I please tell them why I had made that change? 

I sort of remembered the report, but I didn’t have to rely on my memory because of the copious notes I had always taken. I eventually tracked down the message where I had suggested to drafter of the report that he ought to call it a rusty drum, because it was true (I said that in the message), and because it gave a more accurate picture of the situation out in that field. All those years of taking reams of notes, vindicated in one easy question!

I asked them if they would now exonerate me, but they said that their rules forbade them to pronounce me innocent and unjustly accused. They would be saying in their report that they found no evidence that I had engaged in any criminal wrongdoing, and hopefully I would be content with that. Having no other option, I was.

AND I NEVER SAW THEM AGAIN. 

The story has an epilog. I was told later that the document organizer had apparently decided that the Navy was colluding in my coverup of my secret contaminated sites, and had been stopped at our base’s gate trying to smuggle out boxes of my office’s documents, perhaps to break the story to the world. I don’t know what happened to her after that, but at the time I uncharitably felt that it served her right for suspecting me of being a criminal, instead of just hitting on me like a normal decent person would have done.

Thanks for reading!
Dorn
7/24/2019