Satire: Major B.S. to lead travel agents in POW rescue mission

Major B.S. to lead travel agents in POW rescue mission

On August 22, retired British SAS officer Major Jeremy Billycock-Smythe
announced that his adventure travel firm was offering guided tank tours to
battlefields around the world, starting with the former Soviet republic of
Chechnya.

Unfortunately for the first intake of war-zone tourists, they were all captured and put into a prisoner-of-war camp.

But Major Billycock-Smythe, a former British army officer escaped and fled
to Australia to re-establish his Trojan Horse Tours.
And yesterday, wearing jungle fatigues, camouflage paint and flanked by some of Australia's finest travel agents, he announced: "We are going back in to get them."

Words have often spoken louder than actions for Major Billycock-Smythe, who prefers to be called Major BS.
This time, he said, he was serious.
"I take my duty of care very seriously. Those people might have started out
as paying clients but we developed a great camaraderie on the battlefield.
They became my chums and they trusted me. I owe them this."

Major B.S., six foot two, is an imposing figure who has fought in six wars on three continents.
Admittedly, all were as a mercenary, after he left the SAS in strained
circumstances which he refuses to discuss — and the sides which employed him lost all six times but he puts those defeats down to other people's incompetence, not his own.

Before leading the tour group to Chechnya, Major BS said he would stake his reputation that vacationers would be safe, adding, "I haven't lost a
civilian yet, only large groups of soldiers and never a white one."

He brought with him to the press conference yesterday a letter smuggled out of a prisoner-of-war camp by an international aid worker.
It was from one of captured tourists and outlined the filth and squalor the
captured tourists tolerate daily, the deprivation they suffer, the lack of
food in their camp and the scarcity of clean drinking water, sanitary
products and medicine.
Written with a smuggled eye-liner and obviously scrawled desperately, it
finished up with: "Please get us out. Someone. Anyone. Please. Oh God, please.
"PS: Wish you were here, Major B.S."

The Trojan Horse Tour principal was clearly moved by the letter.
His handlebar moustache twitched and tears ran down his cheeks as he said: "We are going back to get all of them out, I promise you. It is obvious
they miss me."

Major B.S. said he had been overwhelmed by the support of fellow travel agents who, in the face of a PR body blow to the tourism industry, had
contributed personnel to the rescue force.

They sat behind him at yesterday's press conference, conspicuous only by their silence and their very un-rescue-force-like attire: suits, ties and
business dresses.

"I am confident I can whip them into a fighting force second to none,"
Major B.S. said.

"We plan to go into a training camp as early as next week, and we will
leave for Chechnya as soon as possible.
"Though this, of course, is subject to seat availability for a large group
such as ourselves.
"Frankly, we have not worked out yet how we are going to get there. I don't
think the major airlines fly there from Australia so it is possible that in
order to make a connection we might have to have a week or two stopover in some God-forsaken tropical paradise or tax-free shopping haven.

"Then we have to work out how to get home.
"The Chechnyan authorities are likely to be suspicious enough when we
arrive with all those duty-free goodies. Imagine how suspicious they we
will be when we return to the airport with the rescued prisoners-of-war and
ask if there are any stand-by tickets available."

Major B.S. said he had made the rescue mission his No 1 priority.

He has put on hold plans to guide a group of adventure tourists in a canoe
trip across the Pacific Ocean in conjunction with a new Reality Television program called Row for Your Lives.

The plan was to build and row a 60-foot canoe, modelled carefully on what
the Polynesians probably used to navigate the Pacific Ocean thousands of years ago.

"Unfortunately, we haven't been able to locate the right kind of tree to
build the canoe anyway," Major B.S. said.

"The good news is that the TV cameras instead will be coming with us to Chechnya to chronicle our mission and hopefully get inside the prison camp to give viewers a glimpse of the day-to-day horror there.

"We thus hope to make a lot of money, underpin the costs of the rescue mission and have a bit left over to pay for our stopover expenses.

"We had been planning to call the program Mission Impossible, but someone said that's already been taken so my guess is that we'll just call it something like Survivor."

©July 11, 2001 John Martin. All Rights Reserved

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