It Loses Something In the Translation

Airman First Class Marvin L. Jones, 21, stationed at the Ramstein, U.S.A.F. base in West Germany, likes to think of himself as having a wild-blue-yonder sense of humor. When his girl back home in Colorado wrote she wasn't going to visit him this summer, he wrote and told her he was so desolate that he was going to defect. The next letter she would get would be from the Kremlin, he added with gleeful literary pique. Har-de-har-har.

So Jones took off on a 23-day sightseeing tour that included Moscow. When he hit the Big Onion, naturally, the airman dashed off another note, saying, "Here I am, and I'm thinking of joining the Workers' Party," sealed it and stuck it in a mailbox. His chuckles lasted all the way to the Rumanian border, where Soviet border guards, muttering about "passport irregularities," whisked him off his tour bus and back to Kiev. There he was slapped into a guarded hotel room and visited by three suave but hopeful Soviet agents, who, it seemed, read other people's mail. Now, if he really wanted to defect . . .

But it was just a joke, Jones explained, you know, yuk, yuk? Around 3 a.m. the following morning, the Reds finally got the point, though they didn't think it was very funny. Neither did Jones by the time he got back to Ramstein, having been cross-examined at the U.S. embassy in Vienna, and again in Frankfurt by a mysterious team identified only as "Western intelligence." After two days in the post hospital for "extreme nervousness," Jones had the Air Force Office of Special Investigation at work on him last week. And, girls being girls, no one could say whether his sweetie in Colorado was laughing or crying.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.