#the battles are class sometimes but also cannot imagine living next to a stadium like

[muk-it-up]

Anyway, as a native, the galar gym circuit is overrated <3

[comicgeekscomicgeek]

Their Hero Academia –The Sports Festival: Bonus Round!

Their Hero Academia – Chapter 38: The Sports Festival Part 11: End Credits

Presenting the next raw and unedited chapter of my on-going, next-gen, My Hero Academia fic, Their Hero Academia!

Earlier chapters can be found here

If ever there was going to be a day for Villains to get up to something, Izuku thought, this would have been it.  Some of the highest ranked Heroes in the country were in the VIP box at the Sports Festival stadium, and he knew many more were also in the audience in the stands. In the box with him were Ochaco, Kacchan and Eijiro, Shoto and Momo, Tenya and Mei, Pony, and Tetsutetsu.  Tetsutetsu could have been in the teacher’s box with Itsuka, but with Minoru working, he had volunteered to accompany Pony.

Izuku was glad that Mirio had agreed to take watch in the Agency today, so that he could attend. Mom was here too, in the teacher’s box with Dad.  Some of his other friends were in the stands too, like Hitoshi and Camie and Mashiro and Toru.  Others were working or watching on TV at home.  

Down in front of them, his youngest daughter, Mako, sat on the floor with Kacchan’s youngest, Tai. The two were only a few months apart in age and had been good friends pretty much their entire lives.  His middle daughter, Hana, stood in the back of the room, barely looking up from her cellphone.  He should probably have said something, but that was an uphill battle and he wasn’t really interested in fighting it today.  

“Big Sister’s going to win!” Tai said.

“Nuh-uh!” Mako countered, crossing her arms.  “You’re wrong, Tai!  Toshi’s going to win!”

“Nuh-uh!”

“Uh-huh!”

“Nuh-uh!”

“Uh-huh!”

“Hey.”  Before Izuku could speak up, Kacchan had, bending down next to the two five year olds.  He put a hand on each of their shoulders.  “What did I tell you, Tai?”

The little blond looked up at his dad, thinking for a moment.  “That… it doesn’t matter who wins, so long as everybody does their best?”

“Right,” Kacchan said, giving both children a smile.  “So it’s okay to want Katsumi or Toshi to win.  But you shouldn’t fight about it, okay?”

“Okay,” Tai said.

“Okay,” Mako added.  

“Good,” Kacchan said, before returning to his seat.

Ochaco turned her head to look at Kacchan.  “That was some pretty Plus Ultra parenting, Katsuki,” she said.  They were pretty lucky overall.  Mako was about as well-behaved as you could expect from a five year old girl and Toshi had been an incredibly stress free child to raise (except for the part when his Quirk had come in and they’d had to tie him to his bed to keep him from floating off in his sleep).  Hana was their biggest problem and even that was more teenage moodiness than anything.

“Of course it was,” Kacchan said.  “I’m good at everything.  Why wouldn’t I be good at parenting?”

“Very manly pareting, Bakubabe,” Eijiro said, sitting on Kacchan’s left, next to Izuku.

Izuku laughed at that. Some things never changed.

“You just keep on believing that,” Shoto said, sitting on the other side of Kacchan.

“What’s that supposed to mean, IcyHot?”

“I think you know what it means.”

“Oh, it is good to see you both!”  A new voice interrupted them and from behind, huge arms wrapped themselves around Shoto and Kacchan.  

“You?” Kacchan growled, trying to slip out of the big man’s grasp.  “What’re you doing here?  You kid doesn’t even go to this school!”

Inasa just laughed. “Are you kidding?” he asked.  “I love U.A.!”

“Oh.  Yoarashi.  How… good… to see you.”  Shoto was trying to look pleased, but failing miserably at it. Inasa didn’t notice though.  He never did.  No matter how much Kacchan or Shoto tried to express their displeasure with him, he just assumed they were friends.

Not surprising that he’d gotten an invitation, though.  He was the Number Five Hero currently, even if he wasn’t a U.A. graduate.

“Besides,” Inasa added, “my son really wanted to see his girlfriend compete!  How could I say no?”

“Someone’s dating that psychotic cyclone you call a kid?” Kacchan asked.

“Yes!” Inasa bellow. “I haven’t met her yet, but he talks about her constantly!  I believe her name is Mika!”

Pony perked up at that. “Oh!  Then you must be Shinji’s dad!  Come sit by me!  We should talk… especially since Minny doesn’t know about him yet.”

“If you are all done,” Tenya said, standing, arms chopping through the air, “the Festival is about to start!  May I suggest you all pay our children and their classmates the attention they deserve?”

Izuku settled in, taking Ochaco’s hand in his.  Something told him this was going to be an amazing show.

***

“So anyway,” Eijiro said, “I decided to do one of those DNA ancestry things, ‘cause, you know, I only really know about one of my moms for bio family.  Turns out somebody with the same bio-dad as me did too!  I’ve got a half-brother out there somewhere!”

“Bro!” Tetsutetsu piped up, from the other end of the row.  “That’s so weird! I did the same thing, and it turns out I’ve got a half-brother too!  What a coincidence!  That’s just freaky!”

Izuku watched as Kacchan looked between his husband and Tetsutetsu.  He’d known his friend long enough to see the war going on behind his eyes. He was considering whether or not to say anything and what he’d have to deal with if he did.   There was a quiet, tense moment in the room.

“Yeah,” Kacchan added eventually, “really flipping weird.”

Pony gave her former classmate a funny look.  “Maybe… you two are brothers?” she tried.

Tetsutetsu laughed hard at that, slapping a hand against his knee.  “Oh, that’s a good one, Pony!  Can you imagine that, Eijiro?”

Eijiro laughed just as loud. “Real good one,” he agreed. “We’re a lot alike, Pony, but brothers? Nah.  That’s just silly.”

“But…” Pony began.

Kacchan locked eyes with her.  “Just let it go.”

“Guys,” Izuku interrupted, “look!”

Below, on the obstacle course, one of his son’s classmates, Isamu Haimawari, was racing across the finish line, with several of the others not far behind.  It wans’t long before they crossed.  As each of their kids crossed the finish line, cheers went up from the parents.

“So that’s the kid Izumi was talking about,” Shoto said.  “Pretty impressive speed.”

“Strange,” Tenya said. “His Quirk reminds me of something my brother once told me, but I cannot place where…”

“Fast guy, that’s for sure,” Mei agreed.  “Bet he could use some better gear though…”

“Not everything requires additional gear, Mei, useful though it may be.”

“You take that back right now, Tenya, or you’re sleeping on the couch.”

“I…” Tenya sputtered. “…Yes, dear.”

“Quite the display of teamwork,” Momo noted.

“I noticed that too,” Izuku agreed.  “They combined mobility-based Quirks with offensive power, letting them watch each other’s backs while still moving forward.  Not a one hundred percent one to one match, but I think they mostly compensated pretty well…  Might have been a little better to align both Twins with someone with Quirk with more of a projectile Quirk to clear the way, but…”

Ochaco gave his hand a squeeze.  “Deku?” she said.  “You’re muttering.”

He felt a little bit of a blush spread to his cheeks.  “Oops. Sorry.”

“Once a dweeb, always a dweeb,” Kacchan said.  He shook his head.  “The team-up thing had to be Toshi’s idea.  Your kid’s always thinking about other people.”

Izuku felt a stirring of pride.  That did sound like Toshi.  Ever since he was little, he’d always been looking out for his friends and sisters. “Yeah, you’re probably right. Good strategy… but I think they’re in for an earful from Aizawa over it.”

Hana actually looked up from her phone for a minute.  “Dork actually came up with a pretty good plan.  Surprising.”

***

As Quirkball got underway, Shoto leaned over so he could look around Kacchan.  “You know,” he said, “I heard a rumor about this year’s Hero Class.”

Izuku turned his attention away from the field for a moment.  He hadn’t heard any rumors, but he also admitted that sometimes, he was a little disconnected from things.  An unfortunate happenstance created by some of the distance that came with being the Number One Hero.  “Oh?” he asked.  “What’s that?”

He could have sworn he was something in Shoto’s eyes, but decided it was just his imagination.  “I have heard that one of the kids in this year’s crop of Hero students is secretly Deku’s child.”

Instantly, he felt Ochaco’s grip on his hand grow tighter.   “What?” she asked.  Despite having no reason to, Izuku suddenly felt in great fear for his life.

“Oh, yes,” Shoto said, his voice even and unchanging.  “Just a rumor of course, but it seems quite plausible.”

He paused for a moment, then went on.  “My money is on the girl with the purple hair and horns.”

There was a silent moment, before it was broken by Pony’s braying laughter.  Ochaco’s grip on his hand relaxed slightly and he could feel circulation return to his fingers.

“Shoto,” Ochaco growled, “that was terrible!”

“I’ve been trying to work on my jokes,” he replied.

Next to Shoto, Momo was burying her head in her hands.  She finally looked up.   “I must apologize for him…”

Izuku waved it off, a smile tugging on his lips as he thought back to his first Sports Festival and the accusations Shoto had hurled at him then.  He might not have been All Might’s love child, but Toshinori had become his father in every way that counted a few years later.  Something that hadn’t gone uncommented on by Shoto at the time either.

“Leave the comedy to somebody with a sense of humor, IcyHot,” Kacchan growled.  “’cause you sure ain’t funny.”

“Be nice, Bakubabe,” Eijiro said, giving Kacchan a playful punch in the arm.  

“It was only a joke, Bakugo,” Shoto said.  “No reason to… explode.”

“Was that a fucking pun?!”

“Bakugo!” Tenya shouted. “Control your language!  There are children present!”

***

Izuku was impressed with what he had seen so far.  As a parent, of course, he was most focused on Toshi, but all the students who had made it through the first two rounds had done amazingly.  Lots of General Studies students who’d made it through the first round too, which was always good, even if only one of them had made it to the Tournament round.   Kocho was definitely skilled; he wondered how she wasn’t in the Hero Course to begin with.  Maybe he’d talk to Dad about it later.  What he’d seen so far was pretty impressive.  It was ultimately the faculty’s decision, but the word from a seasoned Pro Hero like him would go pretty far.

It was when Izumi and Katsumi came up to fight that things got tense.

“Okay,” he said.  “We knew this was going to happen.  Everybody relax.  Remember, the kids are all friends and this is just a friendly competition.”

Nevertheless, he could see Shoto and Kacchan were shooting each other uneasy glances already and not a single blow had been thrown.

Eijiro leaned forward in his seat.  “Is she… giving up?”  

“Why would she not want to fight Izumi?” Shoto asked, rubbing his chin.

“…I’m sure she has her reasons,” Momo said, and Izuku was glad for it.  Shoto was… not good at interpreting relationships.  It was enough of a dodge that none of them had to explain it to him.

“How unsportsmanlike!” Tenya yelled.  “She is doing Izumi a great dishonor!”

Kacchan leaned forward to. “C’mon, kid.  Remember what I taught you…”

Fortunately for all involved, it looked like Katsumi was going to fight after all.  

“All right!” Eijiro yelled, jumping up from his seat.  “Kick her ass, Honey!”

That got him a horrified look from Momo.  “Eijiro! How could you say something like that?!”

Eijiro plopped back down in his seat, looking embarrassed.  “Sorry,” he said.  “I got carried away.”

“I can’t look!” Inasa lamented, hand over his eyes.  “The children of two of my best friends!  How can I decide who to root for?!”

“Root for my daughter!” Kacchan growled.  “You all better be rooting for her!  It’s her first fight!”

“It’s Izumi’s too,” Shoto corrected him.  

“Shut up, IcyHot! She’s gonna kick your kid’s ass!”

“I doubt that.”

“You wanna bet?!”

“Shoto… Kacchan…” Izuku began, getting up just in case he had to separate them.  This was going to be tense.

***

“Oh, that’s going be awkward,” Izuku said, as they watched Toshi and Sora Iida take the field to fight each other.  

“Look at our baby!” Mei yelled, wrapping her arms around Tenya.  “I’m so proud of her!  She’s gonna kick his ass!”

Tenya frowned.  “Mei, while the spirit of competition should be embraced, you can at least be civil about it…”

The pink-haired inventor shrugged.  “I said what I said.”

“We haven’t really talked about the fact that the kids are dating, have we?” Ochaco asked.  “How’re you holding up with both of yours dating, Tenya?”

Izuku was certain he saw a slight twitch to Tenya’s left eye.  Tenya lived what was, to all outside appearances, a very stressful life, with his mad scientist wife and equally excitable children, but he seemed very content and always spoke glowingly of them all.  Perhaps the chaos was welcome in his otherwise structured and ordered life.

“It has been… challenging,” Tenya said after a moment, “to realize just how much they are growing. I trust Toshi to be a perfect gentleman, of course, and I am trying to think kindly of Takuma.”

“Better not let Mina hear you say that,” Izuku replied.  “But I appreciate the vote of confidence.  Assuming they don’t break up over this, I know Toshi will treat Sora right.”

He admitted, he’d been surprised when Toshi had told them about it.  Their son had always gotten along fine with all of the other kids, male or female, but had always seemed a bit nervous around female attention. Granted, a lot of that had come from Mika Mineta, who would make just about anybody nervous…

“Well, at least Sora’s first Sports Festival will not go like mine did,” Tenya said.  Finding out his brother had been brutally assaulted… Yeah, that probably colored his memories some.

“Well, it was when I first started thinking about you, Tenny,” Mei told him.  “So it ain’t all bad.”

Tenya blushed at that. “There is also that,” he agreed.

“We should get together some time, though,” Izuku said.  “See if Mina and Hanta want to come.  Get together with the kids.”

“Oh, that’s a great idea, Deku!” Ochaco said.  “It’ll be like a quintuple date!  Mina will love it!”

There was that twitch of Tenya’s again…

“Toshi’s doing better than I did too,” Izuku said.  “No broken bones!  And he’s really picked up some of Gran’s style…”

***

“Oh, you should have seen her, honey!” Pony said into her phone.  “She was amazing!  Yes, love you too.  We’ll watch it together tonight!”

There were a lot of words to describe Mika Mineta’s first fight in the Tournament, but Izuku wasn’t exactly sure that “amazing” was one of them.  She’d certainly outwitted her opponent, but it was hard to exactly call it a “clean” win.  All was fair game, he supposed, but some of the things that had come out of her mouth…

Inasa grinned broadly. “I see what my son sees in her! Such a lively young lady!”

Pony hung up the phone. “Minny has a big blind spot where Mika is concerned,” she said.  “But I’m not sure it’s big enough for this.  That is going to be a very awkward conversation.”

Next to her, Tetsutetsu just laughed.  “She really does take after him, doesn’t she?  You really turned that guy around, Pony.”

The horned-woman shrugged at that.  “Minny just needed somebody who wasn’t going to immediately reject him.  Maybe he kind of tricked me the first time, but he proved he was a sweetheart underneath it.  …And also really good with his hands and tongue and other things.”

Kacchan looked like he was going to explode.  “I could have gone my whole life without hearing that.”

Pony frowned and carried on like she hadn’t heard him,  “But Mika spends a lot of her time thinking about boys.  And girls.  And everything and everyone in-between.  I worry it might get her into trouble someday.”

“She’s not nearly as bad as he was,” Momo said, from the other end of the row of chairs.  If anyone was certified to speak up on it, it would be her.  Momo had been the target of Minoru’s unwanted attentions and worse more than anyone.  “Mika’s got her problems, but at least she’s not a lawsuit waiting to happen.”

Ochaco nodded along. “No offense, Pony, but before he met you, he was, well, I don’t think any of us liked him very much.”

“I know,” she said. “He told me all of this, when we started to get serious.”

“Pretty manly of him, owning up to everything,” Eijiro admitted.

“You’re still planning on giving her an offer, right, Tenya?” Pony asked, big eyes hopeful and wide.

“I am,” Tenya agreed. “I will do my best to give her some more rigorous discipline, but I can make no promises.”

Pony nodded at that. “I hate to do anything to dampen her spirit, but she’s going to need to buckle down eventually.  Even Minny figured that one out.”

“Your kid’s a freak,” Kacchan said, drawing an angry squawk from Pony and stares of disapproval from everyone else.  “But she’s fighting with everything she’s got.  That’s something to be proud of.”

Leave it to Kacchan to get straight to the point…

***

“Who the hell is this kid?” Kacchan growled, as they watched Isamu Haimawari dodge more of Izumi’s attacks.  He waved a hand in the vague direction of the arena.  “Skills like that don’t just come out of nowhere! Who’s been teaching him?!”

Izuku put a hand on his chin, watching as the young man zipped around the ring.  “I’m sure I’ve read about something with that kind of Quirk before,” he said.  “Not a Pro-Hero though, but then where?  Maybe a Vigilante?  I didn’t really follow those, but sometimes they were pretty hard to ignore…”

Where had he seen a Quirk like that before?  High mobility, yes, but also some kind of adhesion?  And some kind of repulsive force?  Very versatile, that was for sure.  And it was easy to see why Toshi spoke so highly of Haimawari. Without wanting to brag too much… their kids all had quite the advantage and leg up over a lot of the other students. That he was competing on their level was a testament to his dedication.

But it definitely meant he’d had someone training him, someone who knew what they were doing.

Either way, the kid looked like he was going to go far.  Izuku was impressed, to be sure.  And it was looking like the bookies were going to be mad at him again…

“I could swear, I remember my brother mentioning the name Haimawari once or twice too,” Tenya said.

Izuku looked over at Shoto and Momo.  Both of them were leaning forward slightly, holding hands, tension radiating off of both of them.  He didn’t blame them.  Izumi’s childhood illness after her exposure to…   No, not the time or the place to be reflecting on it.  But he couldn’t begrudge them their concern.  She’d nearly died as a child and still suffered lingering effects.  She’d done amazing well so far, making it to the Top Eight finalists.  And even after collapsing after fighting Katsumi, she’d managed to get back in the fight.

That girl had real courage, that was for sure.

“C’mon on, Izumi,” Momo said quietly, “you can do this…”

Which was when Haimawari barreled into Izzy, sending them both tumbling until she came to rest with her head just outside the ring.

Shoto was on his feet in an instant.  “That rat bastard!  I’ll kill him!  How dare he lay a hand on her!”

Momo was on her feet too, equally agitated, but her face lined with worry.  “Is she…?”

There was a breathless moment as they all waited to see what had happened to Izumi, broken only when Haimawari helped her to her feet.

“What a fight!” Insana yelled, so loudly and suddenly that it nearly jolted Pony out of her seat.

“Such a manly display!” Eijiro and Tetsutetsu both shouted, both jumping out of their seats, their body language nearly identicial.

“She didn’t pass out!” Momo yelled, relief blooding into her voice.  “She’s all right!  She’s all right!”   Tears filled her eyes as she pulled Shoto into a tight hug.

“She did good,” Shoto agreed, quietly.  He wasn’t nearly as emotional as his wife, but for someone who had known him as long as Izuku had, he was just as relieved and nearly on the verge of tears himself.

“I thought…” Momo went on, “I thought, when she wanted to keep fighting, that we were making the wrong choice letting her.  I guess I missed just how strong she is.”

“We both did,” Shoto agreed. “I talked you into it… but I wasn’t nearly as sure as I sounded.  Guess we’ve raised a pretty remarkable young Hero.”

They sure had, Izuku thought.  They sure had.

***

The results were in. Toshi sharing Third Place with Koharu Kocho, Mika Mineta in Second, and Isamu Haimawari in First.  

“<She did it!>” Pony yelled, jumping up and down excitedly, possibly unaware she’d slipped back into using English.  “<Second place!  Did you see, Tetsu?  Did you see?>”

“We saw, Pony,” Tetsutetsu said.  “We saw! Don’t worry!”

Inasa let out a laugh. “Amazing!  What a fantastic upset this year!  Where else but U.A.?!”

“Yay, Toshi!” Mako said, dancing happily.  Next to her, Tai was cheering too.  Izuku looked over and he was pretty sure he even saw Hana crack a smile.

“I don’t flippin’ believe it,” Kacchan growled.  “This is one for the record books.”

“Believe it, Kacchan,” Izuku said.  “You know as well I do anything can happen at the Sports Festival.”

Up to and including maybe him breaking his rule about scouting highly placed finishers…

[hottytoddynews]

The sun beams down on a mosque in Sanaa, Yemen. Photo by Paul Crutcher

“There’s a guy here who says he went to Ole Miss,” Mark said.

Mark was a Department of Defense (DoD) civilian employee stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, in 2013. Mark Shafer, retired submarine driver. A burly, bearded, blunt and highly efficient man with the unblinking stare of a wolf, who moved planes, vehicles, equipment and personnel in and out of country by day and told the most hilarious stories of antics on the high seas your stomach muscles could stand around a blazing fire by night, all while savoring a cigar in the cool mountain air of almost 8,000 feet up.

“His name is Tripp,” Mark said.

“Tripp,” I repeated. “Well, of course it would be Tripp,” I thought to myself. “It’s Mississippi. We go in for names like Tripp.”

I found Tripp later and knew he was “Mississippi” before he spoke. Another big man like Mark. Big sideburns. Big hair. A big chest and even bigger legs. Walked all wide-legged, as if he’d just dismounted a horse after a long day’s ride.

And that smile. Jesus. You can’t describe it. Ear-to-ear? No. Doesn’t cut it. It was bigger than that. It was bigger than anything else he possessed. Bigger than his laugh. Bigger than his face even. It leapt out at you like an attacking big cat in one of those nature shows.

And those deep green eyes came at you with the big smile and just held you in place, the cat to its prey. When he did speak, I had to suppress a laugh. Not because he sounded funny, but because he sounded “home.” I had been away from home since joining the FBI in 1997. On occasional visits to Oxford and Holly Springs, I always noticed how strange the voices were to my forgetful ear. The longer vowels, the bouncing syllables, the doubled-up inflections when a single spike of a note would have killed the word and moved on, like they do in the North, where the sense of hurry is ever-present.

I soon saw that Tripp McCullar was a very busy fellow as an Army Green Beret at the Embassy, with duties that kept him hopping from dawn into the night. But Tripp was never in a hurry, and that big smile was never diminished. Watching Tripp in action, I often recalled the admonition of a beloved firearms instructor at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia, who said, “Smooth is fast.”

“Let’s say you got a hot date with you in your pickup truck,” the instructor would tell a class of New Agent Trainees as he schooled them on how not to pull a trigger. “You got a cup o’ dip sittin’ on the dashboard. You got a speed bump comin’ up. You go over that speed bump fast, you gonna spill that cup all over your date’s lap. You’re done. So you take it smooth.” 

Tripp never spilled the dip. Tripp was smooth.

A marketplace in Sanaa’s Old City, the oldest inhabited city in the world. Photo by Paul Crutcher

Well, there was that one time. Tripp and I were the honored guests of a tribal sheikh in Yemen. There we were, sitting cross-legged on the gorgeous carpets in the sheikh’s home as our host served us big round plates of freshly baked flat bread oozing with wild Yemeni honey, the best in the world. As a Green Beret, Tripp had needed to learn more than one foreign language. Before tackling Arabic, he had taken on Turkish, and sometimes he got the two tongues twisted.

“This is great BAL,” he told the sheikh with emphasis, using the Turkish word for “honey” instead of the Arabic one. The trouble was, the way Tripp pronounced it, with his Mississippi drawl, “BAL” came out a lot closer to “BOL,” which is the Arabic word for “urine.” The sheikh and his entourage roared laughing and had to push themselves away from the feast to dry their eyes. When I told Tripp what he had said, his red face looked like the lights on a Christmas tree next to his big green eyes.

“Boy, you’re a long way from Oxford,” I whispered into Tripp’s ear.

Sanaa, Yemen and small-town Mississippi have more in common than some might think. Photo by Paul Crutcher

Tripp immediately gave me a gift that day when we met in the hall of the Embassy in Sanaa. It was an Ole Miss lanyard, the kind you attach to your Embassy security badge and show to the guards when you enter through the gates. Red and blue with the big “M” and the cursive “Ole Miss” repeated down the strand. I never took it off while on duty at the Embassy. I carried it home with me to Virginia in 2015. I took it back to the Middle East on a tour in Oman later that year, on another one in Saudi Arabia, and then back again to the U.S.  I still wear it today. I’ll wear it for as long as I am working anywhere.

Tripp graduated from Ole Miss in 1997. I finished in 1983. I never asked, but it seemed like he had grown up needing to work. He had a job at the Oxford Airport. He had a job as a “house boy” at an Ole Miss sorority, where you got your meals for free. He made money playing gigs in a band in Oxford.

I didn’t need to work. I played the guitar for fun. I served as a “house boy” for fun.

Tripp was a soldier – and a soldier’s soldier at that. He had been places and done things most people could not relate to, including me. I never served. Tripp had that quiet confidence about him, “something conservative and guarded,” as Tom Clancy put it in “Rainbow Six.” I always admired men like that and wished I had been one of them. The guys who walk into a room and seem to have all the answers, even when they don’t. The guys men follow into battle.

Photo by Paul Crutcher

Despite the difference in our ages, and the differences in who we were and how we got to where we were, we bonded over two things we had in common: Ole Miss and our shared love of the Arabic language and culture. “Man,” Tripp said to me once, “what are the chances of two dudes from Ole Miss meeting up in Yemen and both speaking Arabic?” I admitted they were small. 

But then again, maybe not. The thing is, both Mississippi and Arabia are tribal. In Mississippi, it matters who your mother and father were. You’re not just you. You’re so-and-so’s boy or girl. It matters if you have children. In the Arab world, a man is called “Abu,” which means “father of.” A woman is called “Om,” which means “mother of.” Tripp’s mother died in 2009. He used to tell me about what a beautiful lady she was.

It matters what family you come from. “McCullar? Ohhh. He’s from the Batesville McCullars.”

It matters where you worship. It matters that you grew up saying “sir” and “ma’am,” and that your children have grown up saying “sir” and “ma’am,” too. Old people aren’t “old.” They’re “elders.” There’s a respect which abides in that word, and that cannot be removed.

In Yemen, in Arabia, those things matter, too.

Paul Crutcher in 2014

Tripp turned me on to a movie made in the early 2000s called “A New Day in Old Sanaa.” We watched it one night at the Embassy. It’s a love story about a well-off boy from the Old City of Sanaa, which is said to have been built by Noah’s grandson and parts of which pre-date Moses. He sees a peasant girl dancing alone in a dimly-lit street one night from his window high above the gingerbread facades. The boy is engaged to a girl from his social class, a beautiful and proper girl with a dowry and a name. He wants to leave it all and run away with the dancer, and he promises the dancer he will come for her, but in the end he conforms and honors family and tradition, the unspoken, unseen things he can’t escape.

As I watched the movie, I thought of Faulkner’s line from “Light in August,” where Byron Bunch says, “A man will talk about how he’d like to escape from living folks. But it’s the dead folks that do him damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don’t try to hold him that he can’t escape from.”

Tripp and I talked for hours around fires, playing Led Zeppelin tunes on beat-up old acoustic guitars, and remembering places that were part of our Oxford pasts: The Hoka Café, The Gin, Taylor Grocery, and Vaught-Hemingway Stadium. Even the Oxford Airport where Tripp worked was also a fixation of mine, and one of my earliest memories.

My grandfather, J.D. Williams, was in his last years as Chancellor at Ole Miss when I was just a few years old in the 1960s. I remember visits to “J.D. and Nana” (his wife, Ruth Williams) at the old Chancellor’s House just off Sorority Row. I loved getting to stay up at night in my bedroom at the Chancellor’s House and watch the Airport beacon slice the big black sky in wide, sweeping beams of faded light, circling back on itself, repeating and dying again. I used to look at that beacon and imagine all the far-off places J.D. had been. J.D. was always traveling. Like Bilbo Baggins in “The Lord of the Rings,” he was always off on another adventure. It was from him that I got my wanderlust, my desire for the open road that led to Germany, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Yemen, and, like the Airport beacon circling back on itself, to Ole Miss and Tripp McCullar.

Tripp married late, and, of course, when he did marry, he married a girl from a foreign land, a shockingly beautiful girl he met while on tour in another one of the ancient world’s inscrutable capitals, a place where history is measured in millennia, and everything else is just details.

I’ll never forget watching Tripp’s massive frame bolting through a heavy Embassy door and into the Yemeni night. He had just received word that his wife was going into labor. She delivered twins. A couple of years later, Tripp posted his daughter’s picture on Facebook, and someone who knew his mother commented on how the girl looked just like her, especially the swept-back mane of hair. He agreed. 

Tripp is now with the National Security Council at the White House.

“Om Tripp” is smiling down, brother.

Paul Crutcher is a Supervisory Special Agent with the FBI living and working in Virginia. He was in Yemen from 2013 – 2015.

The post Top Stories of 2017: Two Ole Miss Alumni Forge Bond in Faraway Yemen appeared first on HottyToddy.com.

[hottytoddynews]

The sun beams down on a mosque in Sanaa, Yemen. Photo by Paul Crutcher

“There’s a guy here who says he went to Ole Miss,” Mark said.

Mark was a Department of Defense (DoD) civilian employee stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, in 2013. Mark Shafer, retired submarine driver. A burly, bearded, blunt and highly efficient man with the unblinking stare of a wolf, who moved planes, vehicles, equipment and personnel in and out of country by day and told the most hilarious stories of antics on the high seas your stomach muscles could stand around a blazing fire by night, all while savoring a cigar in the cool mountain air of almost 8,000 feet up.

“His name is Tripp,” Mark said.

“Tripp,” I repeated. “Well, of course it would be Tripp,” I thought to myself. “It’s Mississippi. We go in for names like Tripp.”

I found Tripp later and knew he was “Mississippi” before he spoke. Another big man like Mark. Big sideburns. Big hair. A big chest and even bigger legs. Walked all wide-legged, as if he’d just dismounted a horse after a long day’s ride.

And that smile. Jesus. You can’t describe it. Ear-to-ear? No. Doesn’t cut it. It was bigger than that. It was bigger than anything else he possessed. Bigger than his laugh. Bigger than his face even. It leapt out at you like an attacking big cat in one of those nature shows.

And those deep green eyes came at you with the big smile and just held you in place, the cat to its prey. When he did speak, I had to suppress a laugh. Not because he sounded funny, but because he sounded “home.” I had been away from home since joining the FBI in 1997. On occasional visits to Oxford and Holly Springs, I always noticed how strange the voices were to my forgetful ear. The longer vowels, the bouncing syllables, the doubled-up inflections when a single spike of a note would have killed the word and moved on, like they do in the North, where the sense of hurry is ever-present.

I soon saw that Tripp McCullar was a very busy fellow as an Army Green Beret at the Embassy, with duties that kept him hopping from dawn into the night. But Tripp was never in a hurry, and that big smile was never diminished. Watching Tripp in action, I often recalled the admonition of a beloved firearms instructor at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia, who said, “Smooth is fast.”

“Let’s say you got a hot date with you in your pickup truck,” the instructor would tell a class of New Agent Trainees as he schooled them on how not to pull a trigger. “You got a cup o’ dip sittin’ on the dashboard. You got a speed bump comin’ up. You go over that speed bump fast, you gonna spill that cup all over your date’s lap. You’re done. So you take it smooth.” 

Tripp never spilled the dip. Tripp was smooth.

A marketplace in Sanaa’s Old City, the oldest inhabited city in the world. Photo by Paul Crutcher

Well, there was that one time. Tripp and I were the honored guests of a tribal sheikh in Yemen. There we were, sitting cross-legged on the gorgeous carpets in the sheikh’s home as our host served us big round plates of freshly baked flat bread oozing with wild Yemeni honey, the best in the world. As a Green Beret, Tripp had needed to learn more than one foreign language. Before tackling Arabic, he had taken on Turkish, and sometimes he got the two tongues twisted.

“This is great BAL,” he told the sheikh with emphasis, using the Turkish word for “honey” instead of the Arabic one. The trouble was, the way Tripp pronounced it, with his Mississippi drawl, “BAL” came out a lot closer to “BOL,” which is the Arabic word for “urine.” The sheikh and his entourage roared laughing and had to push themselves away from the feast to dry their eyes. When I told Tripp what he had said, his red face looked like the lights on a Christmas tree next to his big green eyes.

“Boy, you’re a long way from Oxford,” I whispered into Tripp’s ear.

Sanaa, Yemen and small-town Mississippi have more in common than some might think. Photo by Paul Crutcher

Tripp immediately gave me a gift that day when we met in the hall of the Embassy in Sanaa. It was an Ole Miss lanyard, the kind you attach to your Embassy security badge and show to the guards when you enter through the gates. Red and blue with the big “M” and the cursive “Ole Miss” repeated down the strand. I never took it off while on duty at the Embassy. I carried it home with me to Virginia in 2015. I took it back to the Middle East on a tour in Oman later that year, on another one in Saudi Arabia, and then back again to the U.S.  I still wear it today. I’ll wear it for as long as I am working anywhere.

Tripp graduated from Ole Miss in 1997. I finished in 1983. I never asked, but it seemed like he had grown up needing to work. He had a job at the Oxford Airport. He had a job as a “house boy” at an Ole Miss sorority, where you got your meals for free. He made money playing gigs in a band in Oxford.

I didn’t need to work. I played the guitar for fun. I served as a “house boy” for fun.

Tripp was a soldier – and a soldier’s soldier at that. He had been places and done things most people could not relate to, including me. I never served. Tripp had that quiet confidence about him, “something conservative and guarded,” as Tom Clancy put it in “Rainbow Six.” I always admired men like that and wished I had been one of them. The guys who walk into a room and seem to have all the answers, even when they don’t. The guys men follow into battle.

Photo by Paul Crutcher

Despite the difference in our ages, and the differences in who we were and how we got to where we were, we bonded over two things we had in common: Ole Miss and our shared love of the Arabic language and culture. “Man,” Tripp said to me once, “what are the chances of two dudes from Ole Miss meeting up in Yemen and both speaking Arabic?” I admitted they were small. 

But then again, maybe not. The thing is, both Mississippi and Arabia are tribal. In Mississippi, it matters who your mother and father were. You’re not just you. You’re so-and-so’s boy or girl. It matters if you have children. In the Arab world, a man is called “Abu,” which means “father of.” A woman is called “Om,” which means “mother of.” Tripp’s mother died in 2009. He used to tell me about what a beautiful lady she was.

It matters what family you come from. “McCullar? Ohhh. He’s from the Batesville McCullars.”

It matters where you worship. It matters that you grew up saying “sir” and “ma’am,” and that your children have grown up saying “sir” and “ma’am,” too. Old people aren’t “old.” They’re “elders.” There’s a respect which abides in that word, and that cannot be removed.

In Yemen, in Arabia, those things matter, too.

Paul Crutcher in 2014

Tripp turned me on to a movie made in the early 2000s called “A New Day in Old Sanaa.” We watched it one night at the Embassy. It’s a love story about a well-off boy from the Old City of Sanaa, which is said to have been built by Noah’s grandson and parts of which pre-date Moses. He sees a peasant girl dancing alone in a dimly-lit street one night from his window high above the gingerbread facades. The boy is engaged to a girl from his social class, a beautiful and proper girl with a dowry and a name. He wants to leave it all and run away with the dancer, and he promises the dancer he will come for her, but in the end he conforms and honors family and tradition, the unspoken, unseen things he can’t escape.

As I watched the movie, I thought of Faulkner’s line from “Light in August,” where Byron Bunch says, “A man will talk about how he’d like to escape from living folks. But it’s the dead folks that do him damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don’t try to hold him that he can’t escape from.”

Tripp and I talked for hours around fires, playing Led Zeppelin tunes on beat-up old acoustic guitars, and remembering places that were part of our Oxford pasts: The Hoka Café, The Gin, Taylor Grocery, and Vaught-Hemingway Stadium. Even the Oxford Airport where Tripp worked was also a fixation of mine, and one of my earliest memories.

My grandfather, J.D. Williams, was in his last years as Chancellor at Ole Miss when I was just a few years old in the 1960s. I remember visits to “J.D. and Nana” (his wife, Ruth Williams) at the old Chancellor’s House just off Sorority Row. I loved getting to stay up at night in my bedroom at the Chancellor’s House and watch the Airport beacon slice the big black sky in wide, sweeping beams of faded light, circling back on itself, repeating and dying again. I used to look at that beacon and imagine all the far-off places J.D. had been. J.D. was always traveling. Like Bilbo Baggins in “The Lord of the Rings,” he was always off on another adventure. It was from him that I got my wanderlust, my desire for the open road that led to Germany, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Yemen, and, like the Airport beacon circling back on itself, to Ole Miss and Tripp McCullar.

Tripp married late, and, of course, when he did marry, he married a girl from a foreign land, a shockingly beautiful girl he met while on tour in another one of the ancient world’s inscrutable capitals, a place where history is measured in millennia, and everything else is just details.

I’ll never forget watching Tripp’s massive frame bolting through a heavy Embassy door and into the Yemeni night. He had just received word that his wife was going into labor. She delivered twins. A couple of years later, Tripp posted his daughter’s picture on Facebook, and someone who knew his mother commented on how the girl looked just like her, especially the swept-back mane of hair. He agreed. 

Tripp is now with the National Security Council at the White House.

“Om Tripp” is smiling down, brother.

Paul Crutcher is a Supervisory Special Agent with the FBI living and working in Virginia. He was in Yemen from 2013 – 2015.

The post In Faraway Yemen, Two Ole Miss Alumni Forge an Unforgettable Bond appeared first on HottyToddy.com.

[hottytoddynews]

The sun beams down on a mosque in Sanaa, Yemen. Photo by Paul Crutcher

“There’s a guy here who says he went to Ole Miss,” Mark said.

Mark was a Department of Defense (DoD) civilian employee stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, in 2013. Mark Shafer, retired submarine driver. A burly, bearded, blunt and highly efficient man with the unblinking stare of a wolf, who moved planes, vehicles, equipment and personnel in and out of country by day and told the most hilarious stories of antics on the high seas your stomach muscles could stand around a blazing fire by night, all while savoring a cigar in the cool mountain air of almost 8,000 feet up.

“His name is Tripp,” Mark said.

“Tripp,” I repeated. “Well, of course it would be Tripp,” I thought to myself. “It’s Mississippi. We go in for names like Tripp.”

I found Tripp later and knew he was “Mississippi” before he spoke. Another big man like Mark. Big sideburns. Big hair. A big chest and even bigger legs. Walked all wide-legged, as if he’d just dismounted a horse after a long day’s ride.

And that smile. Jesus. You can’t describe it. Ear-to-ear? No. Doesn’t cut it. It was bigger than that. It was bigger than anything else he possessed. Bigger than his laugh. Bigger than his face even. It leapt out at you like an attacking big cat in one of those nature shows.

Paul Crutcher shot this photo of Sanaa’s gingerbread houses set against the Yemeni mountains around 2008 or 2009. Photo by Paul Crutcher

And those deep green eyes came at you with the big smile and just held you in place, the cat to its prey. When he did speak, I had to suppress a laugh. Not because he sounded funny, but because he sounded “home.” I had been away from home since joining the FBI in 1997. On occasional visits to Oxford and Holly Springs, I always noticed how strange the voices were to my forgetful ear. The longer vowels, the bouncing syllables, the doubled-up inflections when a single spike of a note would have killed the word and moved on, like they do in the North, where the sense of hurry is ever-present.

I soon saw that Tripp McCullar was a very busy fellow as an Army Green Beret at the Embassy, with duties that kept him hopping from dawn into the night. But Tripp was never in a hurry, and that big smile was never diminished. Watching Tripp in action, I often recalled the admonition of a beloved firearms instructor at the FBI Academy at Quantico, Virginia, who said, “Smooth is fast.”

“Let’s say you got a hot date with you in your pickup truck,” the instructor would tell a class of New Agent Trainees as he schooled them on how not to pull a trigger. “You got a cup o’ dip sittin’ on the dashboard. You got a speed bump comin’ up. You go over that speed bump fast, you gonna spill that cup all over your date’s lap. You’re done. So you take it smooth.” 

Tripp never spilled the dip. Tripp was smooth.

A marketplace in Sanaa’s Old City, the oldest inhabited city in the world. Photo by Paul Crutcher

Well, there was that one time. Tripp and I were the honored guests of a tribal sheikh in Yemen. There we were, sitting cross-legged on the gorgeous carpets in the sheikh’s home as our host served us big round plates of freshly baked flat bread oozing with wild Yemeni honey, the best in the world. As a Green Beret, Tripp had needed to learn more than one foreign language. Before tackling Arabic, he had taken on Turkish, and sometimes he got the two tongues twisted.

“This is great BAL,” he told the sheikh with emphasis, using the Turkish word for “honey” instead of the Arabic one. The trouble was, the way Tripp pronounced it, with his Mississippi drawl, “BAL” came out a lot closer to “BOL,” which is the Arabic word for “urine.” The sheikh and his entourage roared laughing and had to push themselves away from the feast to dry their eyes. When I told Tripp what he had said, his red face looked like the lights on a Christmas tree next to his big green eyes.

“Boy, you’re a long way from Oxford,” I whispered into Tripp’s ear.

Sanaa, Yemen and small-town Mississippi have more in common than some might think. Photo by Paul Crutcher

Tripp immediately gave me a gift that day when we met in the hall of the Embassy in Sanaa. It was an Ole Miss lanyard, the kind you attach to your Embassy security badge and show to the guards when you enter through the gates. Red and blue with the big “M” and the cursive “Ole Miss” repeated down the strand. I never took it off while on duty at the Embassy. I carried it home with me to Virginia in 2015. I took it back to the Middle East on a tour in Oman later that year, on another one in Saudi Arabia, and then back again to the U.S.  I still wear it today. I’ll wear it for as long as I am working anywhere.

Tripp graduated from Ole Miss in 1997. I finished in 1983. I never asked, but it seemed like he had grown up needing to work. He had a job at the Oxford Airport. He had a job as a “house boy” at an Ole Miss sorority, where you got your meals for free. He made money playing gigs in a band in Oxford.

I didn’t need to work. I played the guitar for fun. I served as a “house boy” for fun.

Tripp was a soldier – and a soldier’s soldier at that. He had been places and done things most people could not relate to, including me. I never served. Tripp had that quiet confidence about him, “something conservative and guarded,” as Tom Clancy put it in “Rainbow Six.” I always admired men like that and wished I had been one of them. The guys who walk into a room and seem to have all the answers, even when they don’t. The guys men follow into battle.

Photo by Paul Crutcher

Despite the difference in our ages, and the differences in who we were and how we got to where we were, we bonded over two things we had in common: Ole Miss and our shared love of the Arabic language and culture. “Man,” Tripp said to me once, “what are the chances of two dudes from Ole Miss meeting up in Yemen and both speaking Arabic?” I admitted they were small. 

But then again, maybe not. The thing is, both Mississippi and Arabia are tribal. In Mississippi, it matters who your mother and father were. You’re not just you. You’re so-and-so’s boy or girl. It matters if you have children. In the Arab world, a man is called “Abu,” which means “father of.” A woman is called “Om,” which means “mother of.” Tripp’s mother died in 2009. He used to tell me about what a beautiful lady she was.

It matters what family you come from. “McCullar? Ohhh. He’s from the Batesville McCullars.”

It matters where you worship. It matters that you grew up saying “sir” and “ma’am,” and that your children have grown up saying “sir” and “ma’am,” too. Old people aren’t “old.” They’re “elders.” There’s a respect which abides in that word, and that cannot be removed.

In Yemen, in Arabia, those things matter, too.

Tripp turned me on to a movie made in the early 2000s called “A New Day in Old Sanaa.” We watched it one night at the Embassy. It’s a love story about a well-off boy from the Old City of Sanaa, which is said to have been built by Noah’s grandson and parts of which pre-date Moses. He sees a peasant girl dancing alone in a dimly-lit street one night from his window high above the gingerbread facades. The boy is engaged to a girl from his social class, a beautiful and proper girl with a dowry and a name. He wants to leave it all and run away with the dancer, and he promises the dancer he will come for her, but in the end he conforms and honors family and tradition, the unspoken, unseen things he can’t escape.

Photo by Paul Crutcher

As I watched the movie, I thought of Faulkner’s line from “Light in August,” where Byron Bunch says, “A man will talk about how he’d like to escape from living folks. But it’s the dead folks that do him damage. It’s the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and don’t try to hold him that he can’t escape from.”

Tripp and I talked for hours around fires, playing Led Zeppelin tunes on beat-up old acoustic guitars, and remembering places that were part of our Oxford pasts: The Hoka Café, The Gin, Taylor Grocery, and Vaught-Hemingway Stadium. Even the Oxford Airport where Tripp worked was also a fixation of mine, and one of my earliest memories.

My grandfather, J.D. Williams, was in his last years as Chancellor at Ole Miss when I was just a few years old in the 1960s. I remember visits to “J.D. and Nana” (his wife, Ruth Williams) at the old Chancellor’s House just off Sorority Row. I loved getting to stay up at night in my bedroom at the Chancellor’s House and watch the Airport beacon slice the big black sky in wide, sweeping beams of faded light, circling back on itself, repeating and dying again. I used to look at that beacon and imagine all the far-off places J.D. had been. J.D. was always traveling. Like Bilbo Baggins in “The Lord of the Rings,” he was always off on another adventure. It was from him that I got my wanderlust, my desire for the open road that led to Germany, Saudi Arabia, Oman and Yemen, and, like the Airport beacon circling back on itself, to Ole Miss and Tripp McCullar.

Tripp married late, and, of course, when he did marry, he married a girl from a foreign land, a shockingly beautiful girl he met while on tour in another one of the ancient world’s inscrutable capitals, a place where history is measured in millennia, and everything else is just details.

I’ll never forget watching Tripp’s massive frame bolting through a heavy Embassy door and into the Yemeni night. He had just received word that his wife was going into labor. She delivered twins. A couple of years later, Tripp posted his daughter’s picture on Facebook, and someone who knew his mother commented on how the girl looked just like her, especially the swept-back mane of hair. He agreed. 

Tripp is now with the National Security Council at the White House.

“Om Tripp” is smiling down, brother.

Paul Crutcher is a Supervisory Special Agent with the FBI living and working in Virginia. He was in Yemen from 2013 – 2015.

The post In Faraway Yemen, Two Ole Miss Alumni Forge an Unforgettable Bond appeared first on HottyToddy.com.