Thinking Outside The Box With Blondes

We as a nation probably spend tens of millions of dollars on brainstorming sessions and Shaman-like experts and gurus that attempt to enhance our ability to think creatively. As Dexter Filkins relates in his excellent book The Forever War (2008), the human spirit and imagination really has no limit or boundary to thinking about unique solutions to complex and difficult problems. In some respects, we are a nation and profession of outside-the-box thinkers. We are good at it - individually, collectively, and without the need for enhanced facilitation. One has to grin with amusement at the following story that probably came from a group of 19-year old kids setting around and talking over a box of Pop-Tarts without the aid and wisdom of a $250 per hour facilitator.

In the morning, the captain and I had walked down a road lined with craters. We'd walked slowly, checking for wires, animal carcasses, loose dirt. Bomb stuff. It was a sweltering morning in Ramadi, with the mist of the Euphrates infiltrating our lungs.

Later on, sitting in a walkway of one of Saddam's palaces, the captain started telling stories. We hadn't spent much time together but we'd walked this road and survived, so the air around us for the moment was light and full of trust. We were both from Florida.

"So we came up with this great way to search villages," the captain told me. He pushed his knife into an MRE.

"We've got this girl here in the company - blonde, she's hot," the captain said. "This is when we were up in Mosul. We had to search all these villages for guns. Those villages are awful up there. So we went into this village and put the blonde girl we had on top of one of the Bradleys. We just rolled in and put her up there and took off her helmet and let her hair spill out."

"So she's standing there on top of the Bradley, blonde hair and everything, and we called out on the loudspeaker, "This woman is for sale. Blonde woman for sale!" And I'll be damned if every Iraqi male in that village wasn't gathered around the Bradley in about two minutes. You know the Iraqis are crazy for blondes. Crazy for them. They don't have any here."

The captain started eating a strawberry Pop-Tart.

"So she's standing up there on the Bradley, and we'd have an auction. Highest bid gets the blonde! They're going crazy, the Iraqis, offering their goats, trucks, all their money. Children. Everything. I'm standing up there, saying, "Nope, not enough! Not enough!" And they're bidding more. One of the guys had his hands on the big machine gun just in case it got out of control. The Iraqis were wild. Just staring at her."

"So we're up there having the auction, and during the auction I sent our guys around back into the houses to look for guns. We're having the auction and all the Iraqis are at the auction yelling for the blonde while our guys are collecting the guns from the houses. It was totally quiet in the houses, just the women in there. We got a huge pile of guns. Searched the whole village. No problem."

What happened with the auction? I asked him.

"We just shut it down. Told them the bids weren't high enough." The captain laughed. "The Iraqis were pissed off but it was okay."

I was laughing and the captain got quiet for a second.

"We did that in three villages. Worked every time. We got reprimanded. Somebody found out about it. They didn't like it," he said, chewing on his Pop-Tart. "I thought it was brilliant myself. Smartest thing we ever did."