A UK Intel Operative, a Russian Woman, and the Sickest I’ve Ever Been

“Look, Randy,” I explained as we walked into our makeshift command center in Balad, Iraq, “we’ve never integrated foreign partners—even the UK—into something like this before. I think you know we’re all behind this in the Task Force, but this one particular organization working with us? They don’t want to play. In fact, they’ve intimated that they may pull their people out if we bring you on board. I think they’re worried that you’re going to steal all their secrets or whatever. So, when we go in here for our first meeting with them, I need you to make nice and put them at ease.”

“Right,” he replied.

I eventually came to realize that “right” really meant, I hear you, but I’m going to do my thing anyway. It was kind of like when someone from Alabama tells you, “Well, bless your heart.”

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He called himself Randy*, and referred to himself as “the token Brit.” He wasn’t wrong. He was the only Brit—and indeed the only foreign partner—working in a particularly sensitive element of the National Special Operations Task Force headquartered in Balad. At the time I was in charge of a special project I’ll call the Combined Studies Group, or CSG, for the sake of this story, because that’s nothing close to its real name or function.

While most of our partners were enthusiastic about expanding the team to include the Brits, one organization—let’s call them “Stonewall”—was not. In fact, Stonewall threatened to pull out of the CSG if we added a foreign partner. I regarded this as a typical overreaction and, to be honest, wouldn’t have minded in the slightest. Given that Stonewall never wanted to be part of the Combined Studies Group in the first place and were not great partners once they were forced to join, it didn’t surprise me that they were trying to use this as an excuse to withdraw. As far as I was concerned, good riddance—I expected more cooperation and utility from the Brits than I ever got from being “Stonewalled.”

However, Stonewall’s senior representative on the ground—who wasn’t part of the CSG—had a very good working relationship with our commanding general. So, protocols were put in place, cooler heads prevailed, and we were all expected to find a way to get along.

At our first meeting with Stonewall—who, as mentioned, didn’t want to be there to begin with and definitely didn’t want to partner with the Brits—and despite what I thought was a pretty clear admonition from me, Randy kicked things off with:

“Hi, I’m Randy, the token Brit, and I’m here to steal all of your secrets.”

The Stonewall reps were not amused, but I couldn’t help bursting out laughing.

Randy was the perfect pick for this assignment. He was old—way older than almost anyone else in the CSG, except perhaps our DIA rep. He was definitely older than me. He had completed a full career as an enlisted intelligence operative and then switched over to the officer corps. I was never entirely sure if he was officially a major or if he just wore the rank for the increased credibility. Either way, it didn’t really matter.

Although the UK is our closest ally, we don’t share everything—nor do they. Even in our facility, there were systems marked NOFORN, meaning “not for foreign nationals”—not even for Brits. Randy couldn’t use NOFORN systems or view NOFORN products.

Well, two could play that game.

Randy made up his own labels that said “YESFORN” for the U.S. systems he was allowed to use. On his UK systems, he slapped a handwritten sticker that said “NOYANK.” It was at that moment that I realized we were going to be good friends.

Randy and I developed a close working relationship and friendship during our time together in the Task Force. After that deployment, he returned to the UK, and I went back to Fort Bragg. A few months later, I deployed again to the same location and for the same role. During this second CSG deployment (my third overall to Iraq), Randy contacted me via email and asked if I’d be willing to come to the UK to speak at an event at the intelligence center in Hereford.

I told him I’d love to—but I was confident there was no way the Task Force would let me go from Iraq to the UK for a week in the middle of a deployment. But Randy made some calls. The people he called made some calls. And before I knew it, I was in the UK.

General Order (GO) #1 for US units operating in the Central Command Theater (which included Iraq) forbade alcohol consumption. Interestingly, this rule didn’t apply to Europeans, who brought beer over by the pallet load. I remember U.S. soldiers on the Bagram flightline guarding pallets of beer they weren’t allowed to drink, waiting for the Brits to come take them away. I can only imagine what those soldiers were thinking, standing in the heat guarding beer they’d never taste.

But the UK wasn’t in the CENTCOM AOR, so when I visited, Randy obligingly took me sightseeing around Wales. I posed with various alcoholic beverages for photos to troll my Task Force coworkers (who were still in Iraq and therefore still subject to GO #1).

Eventually, we ended up at Randy’s local pub, where one of the locals challenged me with, “Americans can’t handle their cider.” With the pride of America at stake, I rose to the challenge—and, unfortunately, proved him right.

I kept it together at the pub and even managed to down a couple of shots of whiskey, but when we got back to Randy’s house—a lovely renovated 16th-century (?) farmhouse—I made the mistake of drinking wine with Randy and his wife over dinner. Thoroughly inebriated, I made my way upstairs to the guest room and somehow got myself ready for bed.

Everything was fine until the next morning.

I woke up early, queasy, and definitely hungover. I wasn’t much of a drinker at that point in my life and had been in Iraq where I wasn’t drinking anything at all. I got my uniform ready, brushed my teeth, and headed to the kitchen, where Randy was already awake, cooking breakfast.

“G’morning, Chollie,” (his pronunciation of “Charlie” always sounded like “Chollie” to me), “fancy some breakfast?” he asked with a grin, stirring a pan of sausages.

Delicious as they surely were, the smell was the final straw. I felt the pub local’s prophecy coming true. My stomach turned, and I tried to get out of the house through the living room door—it was locked. I sprinted for the front door, struck my head on a low light fixture (I guess people were a lot shorter in the 16th century?), and stumbled onto the driveway… where everything came out: cider, wine, beer, steak, the works.

The driveway was still wet from the rain, and I added my own puddles to the mix. Randy stood in the doorway, still stirring the sausages, grinning broadly. “What’s the matter, mate?” he asked, as if he didn’t know.

Just as I started to feel better, Randy’s dog came over, sniffed the mess… and began to lap it up…

…which made me retch again.

I took a catnap in the car as Randy drove me to the briefing venue. When he introduced me to the audience, he explained they should go easy on me because “Chollie had a little too much cider last night.” The audience murmured understandingly. After all, everyone knows that the Yanks can handle their cider.

Despite being badly hungover, dehydrated, and (now) hungry for those sausages, I managed to get through the briefing and the Q&A. The Brits were polite, asked thoughtful questions, and by that afternoon I had recovered enough to enjoy the rest of my short UK visit. The next morning, Randy drove me to the airport, and I caught a military flight back to Iraq, none the worse for wear after my cider-gone-wrong experience.

Now, I was pretty sick after all that cider—but that was nothing compared to what happened the next time I visited the UK.

And that is where the story gets really interesting.

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Fast-forward a few years to my time as a grad student at Yale. In my first year there I was invited to a college in Ireland to give a presentation about a paper I wrote on improving the DIME (diplomatic, information, military, and economic) process. My wife and I decided to make it a family trip and bring the kids to see the “motherland.” Since we were in the neighborhood, we figured we’d hop over to London to visit Randy. We booked a modest hotel in the heart of the city and coordinated dinner plans with Randy.

“Nothing but Russians in that part of the city, mate,” he warned matter-of-factly when we told him where we were staying. “Lots of prostitutes.” Good to know, thanks bro.

We took a nausea-inducing ferry ride from Ireland, then a train to London, then a cab to the hotel. That part was easy. But checking in? Not so much.

The young blonde woman at reception—clearly Eastern European—was in way over her head. Based on my conversation with Randy, I assumed she was Russian. I hadn’t met many Russians before, so I couldn’t quite place the accent, but her English was extraordinarily poor. What should have been a simple “Here’s my name, here’s my card, where’s my room?” turned into a drawn-out pantomime. We might’ve been better off with pointee-talkee sheets.

Things were going so badly I began to worry we were at the wrong hotel. Eventually, though, she produced our key. Maybe our American accents were too much for her command of the Queen’s English, but this woman simply could not speak English.

Remember that. It’s important later.

As it turned out, our room was on the main floor, a short distance from the reception desk. We knew the room was going to be small, but this was on a whole other level. The room had a dresser, upon which an old but functional TV rested, and two tiny twin beds separated by a nightstand. That was it. There wasn’t even a closet. With the four of us and our luggage, there was hardly any space to move around. We turned on the TV to give the kids something to do while we got the room set up, and the girls settled on a channel that was broadcasting and American Ninja Warrior marathon.

Our accommodations also included what was literally the smallest bathroom I had ever been in. This space had clearly been converted from a closet, and not a large one. It had all of the necessary features: sink, shower, toilet, but they were almost on top of each other. There was definitely not room for more than one person at a time in there. Maneuvering my 6’5”, 235# frame in between the sink and the toilet proved to be difficult. The sink and toilet faced each other, and were so close together that I could not stand in front of the toilet to take care of business, and had to sit down to pee. In fact, I discovered that if I leaned forward slightly, I could remain fully seated on the toilet and rest my chin on the edge of the sink.

Remember this fact because it, too, is important later.

At the time, I was in the process of exploring the possibility of doing a PhD at King’s College, so the family and I made the short walk from our hotel down to the university. After our business there, we stopped off at a local Subway for lunch. I got my usual: footlong grilled chicken breast on flatbread, with
lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, and plain mustard. We ate in the restaurant and then made our way back towards our hotel. But on the walk back I started to feel… different. And It was at that moment that I realized, stopping at that Subway had been a terrible mistake.

Shortly before we returned to our room started experiencing “bubble guts,” and after considerable time abroad I knew what was coming next: everything. As in, everything I just put into my body, was about to come out.

In short order I had full-on food poisoning, the worst case I have ever experienced. Now when I say “the worst,” please understand that this is coming from a guy who spent more than 27 years in the Army and lived in Egypt for six months, the Philippines for two more, Korea for two years, and did three tours in Iraq and four in Afghanistan. And that’s on top of normal Army food. Friends, I’ve had my share of food poisoning before. But this was BAD.

Here is the time where it’s useful to remember how small that bathroom was. Well, its diminutive size turned out to be a blessing because its diminutive construction enabled everything that needed to come out of my body to flow out from both ends into either the sink or the toilet at the same time, without making a huge mess all over everything. I shut the door to the bathroom, hung one end of my body over the toilet seat and the other over the edge of the sink, and let things take their course.

As if the retching and watery bowels weren’t bad enough, I had the most painful headache I ever experienced. It was worse than that time I hit the road during a parachute drop in high winds back when I was in 5th Group and got dragged. And it wasn’t getting any better. I spent so much time in the bathroom puking, pooping, and moaning in pain that eventually my oldest daughter, Emily (9), needed to go to the bathroom while she and her younger sister were binge-watching episodes of American Ninja Warrior. “Hey Dad can I…” she began as she pushed open the door. Then she paused, witnessing her hairy, sweaty, naked father pooping and puking his guts out and smelling the unholy stench of the partially-digested remains of a half-processed Subway footlong. “Um, you know what, I’ll just hold it. Until we go back to Ireland.”

This went on for what seemed like an eternity. And then, just like that, I felt better. It seemed that once I had evacuated every bit of moisture in my body via the holes in the front and the back of it, I was cured. My headache abated, from a piercing “kill me now” savagery to more of a “forced to listen to Nickleback for three hours” dull ache. I took a shower, put my clothes back on, told Emily it was safe to come back into the bathroom, and began cleaning up.

Tidying the toilet proved easy enough, but the sink was another matter. The chunks I had blown into the basin of the sink washed down easily, but there wasn’t enough water pressure to force the mess through the curved pipe below the sink so particles kept bubbling up as the water ran. It was pretty gross, and probably definitely unsanitary. I was going to need something to force the water through the pipe. I’d have to have a plunger. And not just any plunger; the sink was very small, so a big American-sized plunger wouldn’t work. I needed one of the little ones you can use with one hand, or else I wouldn’t be able to get a good seal around the drain. But of course, there was no plunger in our room. Sighing, I realized that…

…I’d have to try the reception desk.

Now, remember who is at the reception desk? That’s right. The young, attractive blonde maybe-Russian woman who can’t speak English… like… at all. I wasn’t even going to try to communicate with her over the phone, so I walked the short distance down to the desk. Our brief and fruitless conversation went something like this:

“Hellooo,” I said in the most friendly and comprehensible manner I could, “I made a bit of a mess back in my room. Food poisoning. TOTAL disaster. Trust me you don’t want to go in there. And I’d stay away from the Subway for a while. Annnnyhoo, may I please have a plunger?”

–total confusion. Well, that was a lot of words I just threw at her. Time to simply things.

“I want you,” I said, gesturing to the woman, “to give me,” pointing to myself, “a plunger.”

–not helping. OK fine. They probably call a plunger something different in Russian. Something with a lot of consonants.

“I,” I said again, more slowly and more loudly, as if that was going to help, “need a plunger, like for the toilet.”

–that didn’t work either. Maybe some gesturing would help.

“I,” I said, loudly and authoritatively, “want you, (pointing to her) to give me (pointing to myself), a plunger,” (vigorous one-handed up-and-down plunging motion) “for my room,” (gestures down the hallway towards my room).

There was still no reaction, so I repeated what I just said: me-you-(vigorous one handed up and down motion)-room

Slowly, very slowly, I saw comprehension sneaking into her face. We were achieving détente! Perestroika! …something! But then the receptionist’s expression went from confusion, to shock, to anger. She said nothing, but her expression let me know, in no uncertain terms, that she was NOT that kind of girl.

Realizing how that combination of gestures and words might have been received by a young woman who didn’t understand English, who was working at the reception desk of a somewhat-sketchy hotel, dealing with a foreigner who was making weird signs and pointing at her and gesturing towards his room, and remembering how Randy described this area to me initially, I backpedaled. “No… oh no, hey, I don’t want… no ‘happy endings’ or anything… look, I just want a plunger—a plunger—for my… you know what? Never mind,” I stammered.

Choosing to leave before things got any more awkward than they already were, I went down to the corner drug store and bought a bottle of aspirin, a liter of water, a pack of gum, and the cutest little one-handed European mini-plunger. When I re-entered the hotel, I held it and showed it to the receptionist. “Plunger,” I said, waving it slightly. She eyed me suspiciously but said nothing, and no spark of recognition or understanding crossed her face.

“Russians are very strange people,” I thought as I made my way back into our hotel room, as if I had ever met more than one person who MIGHT be a Russian. Anyway, the little plunger I bought was just the right size for the sink, and I had everything cleaned up in no time. A little while later, it was like the two hours I spent puking and pooping my guts out in the closet-sized lavatory of a tiny European hotel room never even happened. By the time I had everything cleaned up, Randy had texted us that he was on his way to meet us. That was great, because after what I just went through, I was pretty hungry. Besides, I think the kids had watched all of the American Ninja Warrior that they could handle.

We met Randy at a nearby McDonald’s, partly because it was convenient but mostly because I knew they had food there that my girls would actually eat. Randy showed up right on time, just like he always did. He said nothing, but I self-consciously felt like he was silently judging me for the prodigious amount of fast food I ordered. I told him what happened, complete with the accompanying hand gestures, and he laughed.

He also wondered if I tossed my cookies every time I came to the UK, or just when I was there to see him.

When we went to check out the hotel the next morning, I was thankful that the person behind the desk was a large, balding, bearded Russian man who spoke considerably better English. We took care of business and were soon on our way. One more nauseating sea voyage, and we were back in Ireland, and a few days after, we were back in the good ol’ US of A.

I have never been that sick before or since, not even that one time when I caught pneumonia in Afghanistan. Whatever was in that Subway footlong, I hope to never encounter again. But at least now I have a good story to tell at parties… but probably not during dinner. And not to Russians. They have NO sense of humor.

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*”Randy” wasn’t his real name, it’s just the name I chose to use for this story.

**This image was created by our editor, Mike Warnock, using ChatGPT. Although Mike never met him, this image is a dead ringer for “Yoon,” Randy’s replacement, AKA ‘the other Token Brit.” I’m sure we’ll have a story about Yoon in the future.

Thanks, ChatGPT, for the help with the images!

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Lieutenant Colonel (Retired) Charles Faint served 27 years in the US Army, including seven combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan with various Special Operations Forces units. He also completed operational assignments in Egypt, the Philippines, and the Republic of Korea. He is the owner of The Havok Journal and the executive director of the Second Mission Foundation. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not reflect those of the US Government or any other person or entity.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.