My Take on October 6

Since Tam has blogged below about October 6 I'll do the same. As she noted, we met on October 6, 1983, at an Egyptian Military Day Party. (Actually I'd met her before since I had regular contact with the Egyptian Military Attache's office, and she was a receptionist/secretary there despite having a Master's Degree in Middle East studies. But we didn't know each other except in a vague, "is the colonel in?" sort of way.) October 6 is a day with a lot of resonance for old Egypt hands. As Tam noted, it's the anniversary of the October 1973 war, which is celebrated in Egypt as the war that made peace with Israel feasible by showing Egyptians could regain some of their lost land. In 1981, at the Military Day Parade, Anwar Sadat was assassinated, but despite that, the date remained Egyptian Military Day, and only two years after Sadat's assassination, at the 1983 party celebrating the tenth anniversary of the "crossing" (of the Suez Canal), Tam and I talked for a while, she offered me a ride home, I offered to buy her dinner (the long-departed Blue Nile Restaurant, one of the earliest Ethiopian Restaurants in DC), and we dated for some months before she dumped me. I eventually got even: I married her. As she noted, October 6, 1993, ten years after that meeting at Fort McNair and 20 after the "crossing," was our first full day in Tunis on our honeymoon. This was, I believe, the day of our "STEAK!" story, told here on our old family website. So October 6 was a day with many resonances for us.

Having mentioned the "crossing" several times, which is how the Egyptians always referred to 1973, I need to quote one of those wonderful Egyptian jokes that, however, requires a lot of explanation since it involves several languages. "Crossing" in Arabic is al-'Ubur; it was the triumph that caught Israel off guard and began the war. But Israel recovered and sent a force across the Canal to the western side that cut off one of the two Egyptian field Armies in a salient known as Deversoir. Someone came up with this brilliant couplet:

Bonjour, al-'Ubur;
Bonsoir, Deversoir.

I wish I'd said that.

[And I suppose I've just confirmed the famous exchange when Oscar Wilde said, "I wish I'd said that," and Whistler responded, "You will, Oscar, you will."]



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