Published in Mensa Magazine
July 1998

SOFTBALL: THE TRAINING GROUND FOR A WANNABE SPY

by Paul Spencer Sochaczewski © 1998

GENEVA, Switzerland

Buzz, a 19 year-old, short-of-hair and big-of-bicep Marine corporal, swung too hard and popped up to me in center field, ending the game. Our softball team of thirty-and forty-something conservationists, statisticians, and administrators (who should have obeyed the dictum that no man over forty has any business playing a sport that requires a jock strap), had beaten the U.S. Marines, once again.

How could this be? These tough young men, beer-drinking, iron-pumping and Semper Fi chanting, are hired to protect the U.S. Mission in Geneva from terrorists, and by extension, protect all of us Americans around the world.

What's happened to our warriors?

One of the benefits of a large, complex society is that people can specialise, which means that some people can hire others to be their gladiators. This, of course, makes it easy for the stay-at-home old men to send young men off to fight for democracy, God, or cheap gasoline. This cross-cultural approach, in which the men with the power engage in none of the battle while the disenfranchised get their legs blown off, often prolongs skirmishes. The Vietnam War might have ended a lot more quickly had Lyndon Johnson and Ho Chi Minh simply fought it out mano a mano, winner-take-all, thereby avoiding the messy business it turned out to be.

While the swords-for-hire boys sometimes fight real Normandy Beach-like battles, they increasingly are likely to engage in symbolic struggles; we call them sports stars. Is there a man among us who does not empathise with, and perhaps dream of emulating, Walter Mitty-like, Eric Cantona driving home a winning goal or Michael Schumacher bursting through heavy traffic to win another grand prix?

Now that we alpha males have gone sensitive, we tell anyone willing to listen that warriorship today doesn't have to be brutal -- a modern gladiator might equally stand up for the ideal of basic human rights or blow the whistle on a polluting factory.

Yet I find that there is something innately appealing in getting out of the armchair to fight a dragon. A single over the head of a Marine shortstop is as sweet a reward as the bull's ears are to a matador.

Why not go a step further and play the real game? Surely James Bond and his ilk need replacing every once in a while.
As serendipity has it, I just read in a newsletter devoted to international employment opportunities that the CIA is advertising for Clandestine Service Officers. I always thought that CIA operatives were recruited by Bogart-like men in trenchcoats who approached unwitting would-be agents in a public toilet, and whispered "We have photos of you with a woman other than your wife; would you like to do a small project for The Firm?"

But no, the CIA of 1997 publicly seeks "an elite corps" with "experience in international business or nuclear, biological or chemical warfare." And a high grade-point average.
There's a problem though. I'm over the 35 year-old age limit. But hey, I'm trying. I've bought a bunch of spy gadgets -- a tape recorder concealed in a pen, a video camera mounted in a car radio antenna, and a portable lie detector that I can attach to a phone. I even have poison blowpipe darts I got from a Borneo tribesman who traded the darts for my camera.

So what if I'm well into middle-age? Surely life experience counts. I stole second against the U.S. Marines. Didn't even have to slide.