Denis Lehane: A roadworthy jeep is ‘life or death’
I got the surprise of my life, the other night, when I spotted what looked like an old jeep of mine on the television.
It was a whole world away. In some war-ravaged part of the globe.
I saw it being used for purposes other than carrying a round bale of straw or ferrying a few calves from A to B. It was being used to launch a missile!
I saw it on the nine o’clock news!
Some Major General was sitting out on the back of the battered yoke. And while chomping on a cigar, was blowing about his military might.
He was talking through an interpreter, so I couldn’t get a fix on where exactly he hailed from.
Needless to say, it looked like a long way from Co Cork.
Whether he was a good guy, or a bad guy, I couldn’t tell. He was all bravado, as gunfire sounded.
He pointed to the blue sky and then the old jeep, with the suggestion that he would be launching hell from the back of it, to gain the upper hand against the other side.
But alas for him and his brigade, what he didn’t know was that my old jeep was on its last legs, it had gotten the road in the first place because it had failed to pass the road test here.
Failed with style, if truth be told.
I could hardly make it up the Geata Bán empty, never mind speed around some exotic location laden down with heavy artillery.
If the Major General was depending on the likes of my old jeep to launch anything, he was presuming too much.
That jeep of mine had a list of faults longer than the line of badges the General was proudly displaying. The springs were missing leaves galore.
Countless bolts, needed to keep the body afloat, were also absent.
Power was lacking in every department, and to top it all, the driver’s seat was painfully lacking in padding.
So, not only was it incapable of winning a war, but of protecting the General’s rear end to any proper degree.
He was lost for sure, with my old jeep on his side.
But, oblivious to its failings in the motoring department, once the interview was complete, off over the sand dunes he went and into the desert proper.
The Major General behind the wheel, no doubt beginning to feel a pain developing in his rear, his band of mercenary comrades hanging out over the back.
Of course, some might argue that perhaps all the faults of my jeep had been rectified in some desert garage, where first-class mechanics are employed. That it was made roadworthy long before a missile launcher was welded to the back.
Well, I doubt that. For in a country with nothing but murder and mayhem, I’d say a road worthiness certificate is a long ways down the list.
No. My old jeep, contrary to the rules and regulations of the Road Traffic Act here in Ireland, would, I felt, let the militia down at a pivotal moment.
Yes, when heading up a sand dune, similar in gradient to the Geata Bán, whether in pursuit or in retreat, my jeep would stall, and the campaign would come to a sudden and abrupt halt.
The General would be shot where he sat, his days of cigar-chewing, and gung ho military action would be at an end.
There would, I felt, be no happy ending for a group waging war with a battered, worn-out old jeep once used on an Irish farm.
