Loud

So I sent in a scan of my Medicare card. I worried that this evidence of my senior citizenship, coupled with my membership in the “weaker sex”, the one we’re supposedly rescuing in Afghanistan, would raise questions about my fitness for missions “outside the wire” of a Forward Operating Base (FOB, pronounced “fob”) in eastern Afghanistan only a few miles from the tribal areas of Pakistan. But no, I got my requested embed - proof of neither fitness nor heroism required (something my male colleagues had never revealed). In the end, my age and gender were no handicap. As Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple knows, people will say almost anything to an old lady they assume to be stupid.