For those that are interested my Dad was a Diplomatic Courier and published 10 years worth of personal letters traveling the world in the Navy and then as a Courier from 1956-1966.
“DEAR MOM” is a book told through 591 letters to my parents while living throughout the world.
The letters seen here are transcriptions of all letters I wrote to my parents for ten years following college graduation. They record my daily life in surprising detail from Navy Officer Candidate School until resigning from the U.S. Foreign Service in Viet Nam. This was a decade of practically non-stop travel throughout most of the world – some 4 million miles.
I'm already laughing at the story before the adventure begins, where your dad was trying to meet up with someone via car, on the GW bridge. It's amazing how we take for granted the ease by which we can now coordinate meetups. The days of, "I'll meet you at the GW Bridge at noon" certainly lead to many missed connections, or in your dad's case, pulling a 180 across 4 lanes of traffic. I'm really going to enjoy this book.
My aunt was a courier in Brussels in the 90s/2000s! I visited her when I was backpacking and she gave me the low down. It was pretty funny, really boring job but she had to get security clearance, get hand to hand and firearm training. It came up because she was giving me a ride somewhere and when I first got in her car she was like “now be careful, there’s a gun here, here, here, there, there, under the seat between the seats behind the seats, in the glove box” just all over the place!!!
This is a generous gift of stories that help provide a glimpse into a world that maintains a certain cinematic quality. I look forward to reading this book. Thanks for sharing and thank your pop for these snapshots.
My aunt opened an unlicensed orphanage in northern Ivory Coast after WWII, and she had the Queen of the Netherland as a donor. Every year around Christmas the Dutch diplomatic mail service would come, heavily armed and very serious, to deliver boxes of sweet treats for the children.
You should write down your aunt’s story, get a lit agent, and start knocking on publishers’ doors. After publishing, tell the agent to shop it to Hollywood.
The whole story is crazy, they were 2 women, and they couldn’t get the papers to open the orphanage, so they legally adopted the kids, one woman adopting the girls and the other one the boys (the idea is to let them inter-marry if they wanted to).
I don’t know how safe it is to give the google keywords to find the place.
Honestly even with "75% travel" I'm surprised they're struggling so much to find people. Seems like a lot of people want to travel, and would love to spend part of their 20s doing so.
Would be interesting to know just how dangerous it is though, particularly for relatively low pay. The article covers some plane crashes, but doesn't really explore the question in detail.
Depending on how strenuous the clearing agency is, a lot of people are knocked out for seemingly banal reasons. I work with people who have to have clearances for various projects and people have been knocked off of those teams for:
- Being a dual citizen (and, far worse, holding a passport from the other country) even if they were born citizens of the US and the other country
- Having traveled to several countries, like China or Russia, for reasons other than a short tourism stay
- Being married to a non-US-citizen, even a permanent resident
- Owing a lot of money on student loans
- Parents being born in or citizens of the "wrong" country
- Psychiatric or psychology counseling for certain conditions
- A history of regular gambling
From what I can tell, the investigators want someone who was born in the US to parents whose ancestry can both be traced to the Mayflower and who does nothing except stay at home and read National Geographic while sitting by the fire next to an equally-suitable spouse.
They are looking for indicators someone is at risk bribery. Sure, just because you have dual citizenship doesn’t mean you’re not loyal, but it flag someone who might be.
Combine that with the cost of even applying (having to travel to DC, etc), time away from family/friends and the low wages... easy to see how this would only attract a small dedicated set of people.
Not going to lie though, it would be really interesting to do a tour just to see how it all works.
Maybe my perception is tainted by the contemporary narrative but it seems Americans have dramatically turned inward over the past 15-20 years. Yesteryear, even when snooty Europhiles were lambasted, most Americans respected world travel, especially for work. It fit into the traditional American story of traveling to the frontier to make your living, leaving your comfort zone.
These days people do all they can to stay put, eschewing travel or relocation, both internationally and domestically. The dearth of truck drivers also seems to reflect this cultural shift.
By my calculation the number of overseas departures relative to population has steadily increased: 6.3% in 1997, 8.5% in 2007, 9.2% in 2017. (Those numbers exclude Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean.) And only 2008, 2009, and 2010 saw a YTD drop. However, according to this article (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-d-chalmers/the-great-...) the percentage of unique travelers is decreasing (or did decrease) per year. That is, an increasingly selective cohort is traveling more.
There's also the question of what percentage of citizens traveling are immigrants. The number of foreign born citizens has been steadily increasing over the above time period.
The MMGY Global's report, mentioned in the article, is $3k. I'm not that invested in my post (not to the tune of $3k) so I can't actually look at the data myself.[1]
I suspect you may be right and that my impressions are wrong; but it's not at all clear-cut.
[1] Especially more recent data as numbers during the Great Recession may have been anomalous.
> Seems like a lot of people want to travel, and would love to spend part of their 20s doing so.
I think a lot of people in their 20s want vacation travel, but business travel loses its lustre quite rapidly. The extremely odd subset of the population that legitimately enjoys business travel usually ends up in consulting which is more rewarding and has a better career progression.
Yeah, there's plenty of open positions that the State Department needs people for, but they can't actually accept applications for those positions because of the current Administration's hiring freeze:
> Employing 103 couriers at 12 hubs around the world, the DCS boasts a delivery success rate that would be the envy of FedEx and UPS.
Do they? The article never backs that up:
> Nobody at the service could remember a single lost pouch or unsuccessful delivery in the service’s modern history, though missions can be aborted for political, weather, or mechanical reasons if necessary. The service did once manage to lose a baby grand piano along the Orient Express in 1919. Evidently, the courier—David K E Bruce, later a renowned diplomat—slept beneath it on a railway platform in Bulgaria and woke to find the piano was gone.
I'd count cancelled missions as unsuccessful, just as I'd count a cancelled delivery by UPS.
Given that the Diplomatic Couriers Service must have orders of magnitude fewer packages than e.g. UPS or FedEx, it's entirely possible that those few failures are a higher failure rate than the commercial carriers.
None of that's to detract from the DCS's really cool achievements — I just dislike journalistic hyperbole.
They even carry furniture. Not unexpected given the lengths that spies go to. It reminds me of the IBM Selectric bug (apparently planted during a customs inspection).
All government communications are subject to inspection and should be disclosed as soon as possible.
Why does the State Department need to take such extreme measures and have special exemption from processes meant to detect and stop all manner of nefarious activity?
Because diplomats. The Vienna convention[0] means that they are exempt from interference by foreign governments an d their agencies. Of course, the assumption is that diplomats are not acting 'nefariously' but if it turns out they are, the host country has recourse to various options, including expulsion...
Is that all that's being transported? Communication? Those bags seem to be holding more than just text.
I'm not sure the government is actually authorized to spy, per the US Constitution. It seems that it (spying) would only be authorized as part of a military operation.
The us constitution explicitly states the powers the federal government are granted. The bill of rights guarentees that all powers not given to the federal government are guaranteed to the states and people (9th and 10th amendments)
Under Article I, Section 8, Congress has the power to declare war, raise and support Armies, provide and maintain a Navy, and organize, arm, discipline, and call forth a militia.
Using spies (human intelligence) is as basic to warfare and defense as any other weapon.
Spying on citizens is where things get murky.
And as much as many readers here may dislike the intelligence agencies, distinguishing between domestic and foreign targets in the internet age is not an easy problem to solve.
Especially considering they're damned when they go too far (e.g. Prism) and damned when they don't (9/11).
Spying and other intelligence gathering was, at the time, seen as a "necessary and proper" part of running a military. And the Constitution explicitly authorizes providing for "the common defense", explicitly authorizes the existence of military forces, and grants the power to make laws "necessary and proper" to carrying out these authorizations.
Spying and intelligence are still, in the present day, seen as a matter of national defense. NSA is explicitly under the Department of Defense, for example. CIA is civilian, but is still framed as serving a defense/national security purpose (thus Constitutionally justifiable) and scoped to be foreign-facing (domestic intelligence is primarily the FBI's province, "necessary and proper" for enforcing federal law).
Paragraph 2.1 states "2.1 Need. Accurate and timely information about the capabilities, intentions and activities of foreign powers, organizations, or persons and their agents is essential to informed decisionmaking in the areas of national defense and foreign relations. Collection of such information is a priority objective and will be pursued in a vigorous, innovative and responsible manner that is consistent with the Constitution and applicable law and respectful of the principles upon which the United States was founded."
All country's diplomatic services have a similar exempt mail/pouch system; it's a service we all extend to each other. Others leave ours alone, and we leave foreign government's alone in turn (at ports or elsewhere).
Governments are allowed and expected to keep secrets from each other; this is a way to do it out in the open.
Governments are a function of their laws. I'm not sure what you mean by, 'are allowed and expected to keep secrets from each other'.
I don't actually allow or expect my government to keep secrets. I don't think 'they' are even authorized to. If 'they' could, 'they' would not be a representative government, of, for, and by the people.
Of course governments must keep secrets. These are things like order of battle details for the military; location and other details for nuclear weapons; names and addresses of intelligence officers, informants or defectors; algorithms for decryption of foreign ciphers; and so on. However, in western democracies the secrecy is usually time limited. For example in the United Kingdom we have the 30-year rule[0] which provides for public release of confidential government documents after 30 years (and they are moving to 20 years now) which is a good compromise between transparency and the need for operational secrecy and security.
The SECRET stuff can actually be sent by the USPS. It just has to be packaged correctly, properly labeled, and you have to select the appropriate options for sending it.
I did the courier job briefly when I was working for what was then the Defense Communications Agency, and we were transmitting SECRET documents. I had the hand-carried copy, and they sent a second copy via USPS.
I even had a nifty courier badge, which was created by using a typewriter to fill out a small government form that was printed on orange card stock, and then the whole thing was laminated together. No pictures, no fingerprints, no signatures. The security agents at Washington Regional Airport sure took notice....
https://www.amazon.com/Dear-Mom-Odyssey-World-Travel-ebook/d...
“DEAR MOM” is a book told through 591 letters to my parents while living throughout the world. The letters seen here are transcriptions of all letters I wrote to my parents for ten years following college graduation. They record my daily life in surprising detail from Navy Officer Candidate School until resigning from the U.S. Foreign Service in Viet Nam. This was a decade of practically non-stop travel throughout most of the world – some 4 million miles.