P.T.A.

The government-shutdown was well into its third week. There in Paul’s apartment were three of the toughest and deadliest people in America. Normally they would be down at the closest bar but the cost of tap-beer had gotten too expensive, so they were hunkered up with a case of Pabst and a bag of chips.

                Paul was by almost anyone’s guess, one of the finest long range shots in the world. He also could take apart and use any know weapon ever made. In the past he might have been called a soldier-of-fortune but fate and several bullets had taken away his quick reflexes, as well as losing parts of his left leg and arm to an IED. He could still shoot but he was useless on any mission that demanded he be able to run more than two hundred feet.

Lisa was, by her own estimation, past the time of her life where she wanted to be off in the jungles and deserts of the world. Oh, she could still beat the hell out of any person who came within twenty feet of where she was standing. She held enough black-belts to open a men’s wear warehouse, but she had lost the kill urge that had kept her sharp and alive all these years.

Bill was pretty tough himself.  If Lisa hadn’t been in the room he probably would have been able to take any one who cared to start a fight. Using his hands wasn’t his specialty though. Rather anything with a blade. Swords, machetes, and knives of all lengths were what he liked to handle.

The reason they were close enough to drink together was that they worked for a company that provided training to the U.S. armed forces. Seals, rangers, and troops that wore berets of any color had passed through their more than able hands. Six years ago they would have been ashamed to admit that they were training troops to fight rather than to be doing the fighting themselves, but people in their profession aged faster than others. Not to mention that all of them had been shot at least twice and Paul’s encounter with an IED in the mid-east had ruined his chance for the man-of-the year award from Combat magazine.

The result of all of this was that they and a number of their comrades who were tired of getting shot every month or so had formed a company that trained others to do what they were the best at. In the beginning it had been a pretty sweet deal. Their reputations had made it easy to get work. Every branch of America’s military had jumped at the chance to expose their men and women to the expertise of these fighters. They moved from base to base running highly specialized courses. If there was a way to kill, maim, or disable someone they knew it and had used it in the field.

The one enemy that they hadn’t faced in the past was the one that had eaten away their profits, and the style of living that they were starting to get used to. The budget of the government. Oh the generals still wanted to have them train their fighters, they just couldn’t afford to hire them. The clip board auditors wanted to know why they couldn’t just use their own men to train the fighting forces. It was becoming harder and harder to find work and they had even taken work in other countries to train the U.S. army’s fighters.

Now even that had been stopped because of the government’s shut down. Their last contract had been all set. They were about to pack up their gear and head off to Afghanistan to train several special forces camp in the type of stealth fighting that they had used in the last time that America had had boots on the ground in that place. Of course back then the Russians had been fighting and the U.S. presence wasn’t legal but they had been there none the less.

Today, however, the only fighting they were interested in was what was going on between the White-House and the congress.  For the umpteenth time Bill was suggesting that he take a ride down to D.C. and remove the larynx of a few congressmen to shorten the constant debates that were holding up the approval of the army’s ability to pay them. Lisa was getting a little worried because the more he drank the more Bill seemed to believe that it might be a good idea.

Partially to take Bill’s mind off of mayhem and partially because she wanted to see what the other guys thought about it she brought up the latest story about that girl who had been shot by the Taliban. She said, “Talk about courage, have you been reading about that girl who was shot and survived a Taliban attack.”

Paul replied, “Yea, she’s one tough cookie. They shot her and she’s still out there talking about how girls should be going to school. I’d be happy to have her in any unit I commanded in the past or even today.”

Bill put down his beer and said, “I don’t think she be up for shooting people. I detect a bit of the pacifist in the way she talks, not that I blame her. I was still playing high school football when she was lying in a hospital bed fighting for her life.

“She’s right though. Education is really important for the folks out there and especially in those places where they have been blowing up the schools for women. I wish I could have been there when that big brave man shot an defenseless young girl for trying to learn how to read the words ‘Please don’t kill me.’”

Paul added, “Me too. I’d feel a lot better working as a school crossing guard over there, than swilling beer right here.”

They all raised their bottles in salute to the young girl. Then Lisa asked, “I wonder how much a ticket to Pakistan costs?”

Paul asked, “Why planning to take a trip during our down time?”

Lisa paused and then said, “I was just thinking out loud about what Bill said. He’s right they are just defenseless girls trying to learn enough to make it in this world. Over here we go to school and complain when the air-conditioning doesn’t work, or the teacher is boring. Over there they are getting shot just for getting on the bus.”

Paul picked up a folder and said, “You do know that Pakistan is right next door to Afghanistan where we were supposed to be setting up to teach next month, don’t you?”

Bill had just taken another sip of his beer, “Yea so what?”

Paul said, “I just happened to remember that the Pentagon already gave us the tickets for the trip. We may not have any money to conduct the classes, but we have the paper to get there along with all of our stuff.”

Lisa said, “Wait a minute, you’re not suggesting that we go over there without clearance are you?”

Paul shrugged his shoulders and Bill put down his beer.

Bill looked over at her and said, “Why? You got something better to do?”

Lisa sat back on the couch and said, “You two are nuts. What if we go over there and then those guys in the suits decide that the army can’t use us? We’d be stuck with no money to get back.”

Paul answered, “Yea but think about the air miles. Besides I was never really in this for the money. I’ve got plenty of that stashed away from the old days.”

Bill was rubbing his hands together as he said, “We’ll have to call the rest of the guys to see if they‘re in for this stunt.”

Twenty-four hours later thirteen members of their company and a whole passel of crates were on their way to Afghanistan. The crates wee relabeled PTA. They knew it stood for Primary Terrorist Abatement, the title of the course they were scheduled to teach, but they hoped that the authorities would mistake it for the parent teacher’s organization.

This was going to be a different mission than they had ever tried to take on in the past. First, they had all agreed that if they were trying to honor the courage of that young girl they couldn’t go in there with guns blazing. They would be armed to the teeth but they would try to use non-lethal weapons first.

Second, they would be on their own without a country to back them if anything went wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time for that approach for some of them but they knew if they got caught no one would stand up and get them out. Not to mention that their work for the Pentagon would be over the first time any official got word of this.

Finally, they were making up the mission plan as they went along. They would land in Afghanistan and have to start to gather transportation on their own. Normally the government would handle all the administration stuff for them, but Lisa was sure that contacts she had made in the past would help them out.

They landed in Kandahar and Lisa was right. There were five trucks and two jeeps waiting for them on the runway. The customs official who was with the trucks embraced Lisa and also the wide screen TV that she had brought with her. He and the other men with him who off loaded several cases of whisky drove away in one of the trucks as he team got their crates off the plane and into the trucks. They left the airport through a conveniently unlocked gate. 

They drove southeast until they got to a border crossing check point. It just happened that on both sides of the gate men who had been trained by several members of the team in the past just happen to take a break at the same time and happened to leave their posts un-manned.

They were in Pakistan with only a loosely defined mission and no political cover what-so-ever. They knew where they wanted to set up and it was pure luck that one of the team had a sister-in-law who still had relatives in the Swat District. They drove all day and all night to get to where they hoped to set up in Pakhtunkhwa Province.  It was four hundred miles of “What-the hell” roads, but they made it without losing any of the trucks, and less than a quarter of their bribe stash.

A day later they had met with dozens of the locals and all of the folks running the schools in the province. They had passed out all of the school supplies they had brought with them and arranged to monitor and guard all of the schools and most of the routes that the students traveled to get to school.

For the next two weeks they tasered, gassed, and immobilized dozens of the Taliban operatives in the region. Most were taken as they tried to intimidate the locals into closing their schools. None of the Taliban was killed, although several suffered serious injuries when they tried to grab Lisa, who was disguised as a young school girl. One it appeared would never have children of his own.

Paul got a message near the end of the two week period from one of the people back in the states telling him that the shut-down had ended and the army expected the company to conduct its Afghanistan classes in two weeks’ time. They had by this time captured nearly fifty Taliban operatives, so they started back to Afghanistan with their guests tied up neatly in the backs of two of the trucks.

They hadn’t needed any of their stash of bribe material while they were in Pakhtunkhwa. There they had been welcomed wherever they went. But back on the road they needed to convince a number of officials and military check points that they should be allowed to pass without any record of their passing. It took longer to get back to the border than it had to leave, but three days later here they were. The same men who had let them through before just happened to be manning the check point when they arrived. The Pakistani guards looked into the two trucks and thanked the team for removing some of the garbage from their country.

Back at the airport their friends were there to welcome them. The paperwork had been produced to show that they would arrive in country two days later. They paid for a storage hanger at the airport and prepared a special package for the U.S. commander. 

A day later the two star general in charge of the U.S. troops in Afghanistan received a frantic call from the airport manager at Kandahar.  They had found a delivery addressed to him and he had to collect it right away. They wouldn’t say what it was but he was advised to bring several trucks and a lot of armed men.

When his convoy arrived it was directed to the hangar that the teaching team had bought. Inside they found a mock-up of a school room. At each desk was a man dressed in the traditional English school girl uniform. They were secured to the desks and each desk had a dossier that described what the man had done to terrorize the people of Pakistan, including when he had been captured and where, along with witness statements as to his crimes. In the front of the “classroom” was a blackboard with the words “Please teach me to read,” written in several languages.

The general was unable to find out who had brought his “gift” to the airport. The only thing that was abundantly clear was that he couldn’t leave it at the airport or in fact in Afghanistan.  

He arranged for a military aircraft to transport his gift to a lovely island paradise in the Caribbean. There the former school girl terrorizes could try to explain why they arrived dressed in women’s clothing.

The next day the teaching team arrived at Kandahar airport. According to the paperwork they and their equipment had just come in on a heavy duty private aircraft. Actually they had come straight from the bar where they and the airport manager had spent the night drinking and celebrating the improvement in the schools of Pakistan.

Phar T’Les

He was sure that there was something there when he first realized that a healthy diet with lots of fiber caused an increase in gas in the intestinal track. His girlfriend had gone on the healthy life style band wagon and he was forced to join her or be left behind. A part of her healthy life style included a lot of the physical activity that he was learning to love. It wasn’t the kind of activity that involved a lot of equipment or hours of running in the great outdoors. But it could be practiced in almost any room of the house, and they had tried it in almost every room. Although the back deck of the house he rented was a little scary, but they had waited until after midnight so there were fewer neighbors awake.

He was just finishing his chemistry degree and had a job lined up in a town some two hundred miles away. She still had two more years left and wasn’t about to leave just to keep him company. It was what some would have called serendipity that he decided to try to do something about the excess gas he seemed to be generating. After a little research he discovered that activated charcoal was the main ingredient in most of the gas relief products on the market.

He realized that most people found the idea of eating charcoal unappetizing. In fact no matter what the packaging, the product was used by only a few of the bravest souls. He was finished with his class work and had the summer off before he started the job, so he decided to see what he could come up with. He thought that the main problem was the idea of eating charcoal, so he decided from the start that he wouldn’t use the product’s actual contents as a selling point.

It had to be delivered in a capsule form. There were plenty of those on the market so it wasn’t a problem to get a cheap supply. As he sat there looking at the clear capsule he realized that he could still see inside the capsule, which meant that a user would still be facing the idea of eating charcoal. That wasn’t going to be good for sales. He made a note to make the capsules opaque. He knew that the charcoal inside the capsules wouldn’t actually be in contact with the user until the capsules dissolved in the person’s stomach. That meant that the user would only taste the capsule and not the charcoal.

He took one of the capsules and placed it in his mouth. There wasn’t much taste to it but what there was certainly wouldn’t be called appealing. He wrote another note to make the capsules more flavorful. As he looked down at the paper he sub-noted that since it was supposed to improve the person’s odor perhaps a mint flavoring might be a good try.

He had the makings of the product and he thought that he could probably manufacture it for a reasonable cost, but why would people buy it. There were other products already on the market that could do the same thing. Also, they were being marketed by companies with far larger budgets to promote their products. How could he get people to buy his pills instead?

He remembered reading that people liked to know what they were buying. Products that had strange names didn’t do well as those that told the buyer what they were getting. That household cleaner with the bald guy was one of the best-selling products in its region since I had the word “clean” in its name. So he made another note that said think up name that said what it did.

He started to write down ideas of what the stuff would actually do to see what would work. “Stop your gas,” “relieve intestinal gas pressure,” “Don’t fart,” all of them told a story, but none seemed appealing. He closed his note book and decided to sleep on it.

At three in the morning he suddenly was awake. He had dreamed the answer to his question in his sleep and now his mind was telling to write it down before he forgot the answer. His body was telling him something else in the way of tremendous pressure from the cabbage and bean salad he had for diner the previous night. Since he was sleeping alone that night he let the gas go. It was loud and powerful. So strong that he got out of bed and pulled off the covers. He swore that he saw a brown haze rise from the sheets.

He went into the kitchen and brought out the notebook he was working on the night before. He started to write down what his dream-self had discovered. “Foreign promoters were more believable. If the product did something that people didn’t want to discuss disguise the product’s name. Mysterious is popular. People are used to product names that are almost unpronounceable, after all look at all the drugs on the market. Even the supplements have strange names.”

So that left him with the need to come up with a name of his product idea that was foreign and mysterious. It didn’t have to reveal what it was used for and it didn’t have to be easily pronounceable. He sat there trying to come up with some ideas. He realized it might take some time but then again he was in no hurry to return to the bedroom with the remnants of cabbage salad still in the air.

He thought about some of the mysterious things he had come across, and remembered that servant of the rich guy who adopted that orphan. He was pretty mysterious and he was foreign to boot. “What was his nationality?” he asked aloud. He didn’t know but Egyptian seemed to be about right.

How would an Egyptian talk about his activated charcoal capsules? He might ask, “What does this stuff do?” 

“Why it stops gas,” the kitchen bound creator would reply. No wait, he thought, it doesn’t stop gas it just relives some of the pressure and the charcoal absorbs some but not all of the gas.

“So there’s less gas?” the Egyptian would inquire.

“Yes,” our developer would reply.

“Is that good?” the foreign guy in the room would ask.

“It is,” our brave creator would reply. “It makes you feel better, and you pass less gas so you friends feel better.” 

“Pass less gas?” he would question.

“Yes,” our original thinker would reply. “You know you’d…”

“Oh I get it,” the man in the turban would say. “You mean I’d fart less.”

The Kitchen occupant stopped there and thought, “No that’s not right. He wouldn’t say it that way. Because he’s foreign he’d say it differently.” He sat there for a minute or two trying to phrase it like an Egyptian. He looked up and suddenly could see the large turbaned gentleman saying, “You mean I’d phar t’les.”

And there he had it all wrapped up in one big package. He would call the product “Phar T’Les.” It would tell the user what it was for without actually using the words. The words sounded foreign, and if he continued with the Egyptian theme it almost seemed to be a mysterious drug.

A week later he had convinced a member of the school’s drama club to done a turban and costume and pretend to be an Egyptian. He manufactured a digital back drop of the pyramids and wrote a semi-funny script for the actor to use that claimed to be passing on a mysterious medication favored by the pharos. 

He posted it on the internet video sharing internet site along with a web contact address. Then he created a web site for Phar T’Les and tied it to the commercial. He supposed stranger things had happened, but in less than two weeks he was flooded with requests for Phar T’Les. Two weeks after that he had called his future employers to say that he wouldn’t be joining them.

By the end of the summer break he had five of his fellow graduates working for him filling the mint flavored capsules with the activated charcoal. The art department had whipped up a really snazzy package for the capsules that included the pyramids and several camels.

Health food stores bought it up and that TV doctor who seemed to have a cure for everything even mentioned it on his TV show. A year later he married the girl who had caused it all, and while she finished her degree he finished building the plant for the product with a huge sign on the front that read, “For a home where you can Phar T’Les."