“Yep. The wife gets me to Las Vegas. I step into the bar to have a quiet drink. And who do I meet? A damn Canadian.”

I have to admit that my own thought processes were drowning in alcohol by this point. After all, I hadn’t wanted it to be too obvious that I was trying to get the General drunk. And his story was such a radically different concept that I was having a hard time getting my head around it. And there was really nothing like hard proof to any of this. So I tried a different approach.

“General, I’m not disbelieving anything you just said. You seem like a nice guy and all. So I don’t think you’d lie to a stranger just for laughs. But it seems to me that if Canada had a super jetfighter like you claim, we’d be a world superpower. Instead, you are. What’s up with that?”

The General shook his head. “You don’t understand how this works. In order for a country to project power in the world, it has to have the ability to create forward bases of some sort. America does it in a couple of ways. We have aircraft carriers, which are really small floating cities. We can move them all over the world.

“We also have forward bases like Diego Garcia where we can store supplies and from which we can deploy troops. And troops is the important factor here. Canada isn’t big enough to be able to build the requisite aircraft carriers and man them. They also don’t have the troops to man large forward bases.

“No, with Canada’s population limitation, what you now have is a fantastic defensive capability. If there was ever a serious shooting war between us, we’d probably still win with sheer weight of numbers. Massive amounts of armor would cross the border and most Canadian cities under siege or control within the first day. After all, most large Canadian cities are within 100 miles of the border.

“But what we don’t know is what bombing capabilities your planes have. We’ve never, ever seen that. That scares the bejeezus out of our planners. We just don’t know what you guys are technically capable of.”

I thought about all this for a while. I was about to say something when the General said something that convinced me.

“Listen,” he said. “Everybody thinks that we went to war in Iraq for the oil, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. If it was oil we wanted, there’s a whole lot of it a few miles of our border in Alberta. Given your small population, and therefore small army, we would normally be able to do that job in a long weekend. You’re right there and we’d have next to nothing for supply problems. Hell. Half of Alberta would be welcoming us with open arms. What do you think made the world superpower go half way around the world for oil rather than taking a few steps north?”

I asked him if he wasn’t going to get into trouble for talking about this stuff.

“Yeah, if anybody knew I’d told you. But I’m a soldier. I’m trained to handle trouble. There’s nothing I can’t…oh, crap.”

The General’s eyes were locked on the door behind me. If there was such a thing as fearful resignation, it was all over his face. I was sure I was going to see MPs or men in dark suits talking into their sleeves.

“Lawrence!”

“Yes, Martha?”

“What are you doing here? You know we have tickets to see Jersey Boys. Have you been drinking?”

“Yes, dear. I mean, no. Wait. I…”

The brave, troubled man just wilted before my eyes. Martha led him out. I finished my drink and went out into the Vegas evening a little poorer, a little drunker, and a lot more curious about things that weren’t as they seemed.