Have you ever felt so absolutely sick of your job that you just wanted to get up and walk away from your desk – for good? It’s generally the stuff of an Office-Space-esque fantasy vice reality.
If you’re an active duty service member, the notion of ‘take this job and shove it’ has slightly more significant implications. Service members who get up and walk away aren’t just ditching a job, they’re deserting from their military posts. The era of the all-volunteer force has made desertions a fairly rare phenomenon, but there are still a few thousand service members who have deserted since 9/11.
In what may be a serious deterrent against deserters in the future, the U.S. Air Force just brought in an Airman who had been missing from his post…for nearly 35 years.
In a bizarro case that’s just the latest to make 2018 seem like the year the Cold War returned, we have the story of Capt. William Howard Hughes Jr., an Air Force Operational Test and Evaluation Center staff member who worked on classified planning and analysis of NATO command surveillance systems. Hughes disappeared on July 25, 1983, slipping into the obscurity of working for the state of California until he was apprehended earlier this week.
According to news reports, Hughes claims he was so depressed by his work that he just left. And it took the Air Force nearly 35 years to find him.
Hughes had recently returned from an overseas assignment in Western Europe, but was living in New Mexico when he deserted. He allegedly withdrew $28,500 from his bank account before disappearing. Which goes to show if you do plan to walk off the job, you’d better have some decent liquidity or access to some Cold War satellite secrets you can share with your friends (note: Hughes isn’t accused of espionage, and it’s hard to believe he would have flown under the radar for this long if he had….but you never know).
It’s a story that’s made for a Paul Harvey follow-up. For now, we still don’t know the rest of the story. And unfortunately as with most great stories coming out of the military intelligence community, we don’t have a guarantee that we’ll get it.
But for those of us dreaming of a life outside of the confines of military service, keep in mind Hughes seems to have simply traded one government master for another. After assuming the perfect 1980s spy alias of ‘Barry O’Beirne’ Hughes took on a job with the University of California, crunching numbers university’s health benefits program.
