Tempo from Hell – An Ode to Military Humor

If you have read some of my most recent posts, you know that I have been writing about my exploits and experiences after arriving at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, and being assigned to the Joint Interoperability Test Center (JITC) at Fort Huachuca.  My most recent post took you (the reader) down memory lane.  Perhaps your memory doesn’t work as well as it used to.  That’s okay.  That post was about your body’s warning signs that old age is starting to creep in.  I know, I know.  I took you there once before.  But then, I took you there again.  No.  It wasn’t because I wanted to beat a dead horse.  Maybe some people take great pleasure in beating dead horses or other dead critters or people.  But I don’t.  And I don’t encourage that sort of thing.  Besides, if you really want blood and gore, you have to beat a living critter.  There are plenty of boxing movies on TV where the boxing hero is in a cold storage locker beating up dead animal carcasses, but the only blood and gore is on his (our boxing hero’s) hands.  Go figure.  Anyway, enough about that morbid stuff.  Cuz the point of that whole post was that people get old and lose their vim and vigor and athletic youth.  Yes.  It happens to everybody.  Even the greatest of athletic superstars.  It just happens to some sooner than others.  However, the post today will take us back to a story I told very recently.  It happened so recently that you may even remember it.  It was a story about an ill-fated camping trip that occurred at Riggs Flat Lake located along the top of the Pinaleno Mountains near Safford, Arizona.  That camping trip was ill-fated for our 1990 Ford Tempo from hell.  Let me tell you a little bit about that Ford Tempo from hell.  When I was living in Taegu, South Korea, I had purchased a Hyundai Crown 4-door sedan with a four-on-the-floor stick shift (manual transmission).  Here is the thing: my wife could not drive a stick.  But I loved that Hyundai Crown.  It was in cherry condition inside and out.  It was preowned by a doctor who was the sole owner of that car before me.  It had plastic seat covers and floor liners to protect the interior.  Over the plastic seat covers, there were these wooden, top-of-the-line seat covers made with these interwoven pieces of wood that you sat on.  The pieces of wood were round and shaped like a barrel and kind of massaged you while you sat on them.  And the car had very low mileage.  But here’s the other thing: that car was not manufactured to American standards.  Thus, I could not take it back to the United States when I rotated back to the states.  Since my wife’s arguments trump mine, and her argument was that she couldn’t drive stick, strike one against me.  The fact that the car that I already had could not be exported to the United States was strike two against me.  My wife told me to get rid of the Hyundai and get her a car that she could drive.  Her logic was that she needed to go shopping and that she needed to haul the kids around and that I could ride the bus.  Guess who lost?  Well, let’s just say that if you guessed my wife, you guessed wrong.  The PX car sales people were offering a really good deal on the 1990 Ford Tempo for purchase in Korea and export back to the United States.  That was perfect.  Since we needed the car in country.  My wife pick the color of car that she wanted and we purchased a 1990 Ford Tempo so that we could take delivery as soon as it arrived in Taegu.  I already had a buyer lined up for my Hyundai Crown 4-door sedan.  The buyer was a colleague that I worked with at the 19^th Support Command Headquarters in Taegu, South Korea.  I didn’t tell the guy how much I paid for it, and I listed the car for $300 more than what I had paid for it.  He paid me my full asking price after he saw it and took it on a test drive.  That worked out pretty well for me.  The Ford Tempo didn’t give us any problems in Korea.  Maybe that should’ve been my warning.  Cuz as soon as we got to Arizona, we started to have all sorts of problems with the Tempo from hell.  I told you about one problem already.  I understand that women can be hard on brakes.  But that damn Tempo didn’t even have 20,000 miles on it when we had that brake failure on the way to our camping trip at Riggs Flat Lake at the top of the Pinaleno Mountains 70 or so miles away from Ft Huachuca in Safford, Arizona.  Could that brake failure have been chalked up to overuse?  Possibly.  But I seriously doubt it.  That Ford was earning its name: “Found on the Road Dead.”  But I had a new set of brakes put in the car and put that issue behind me and chalked it up to bad luck.  Bad luck, my ass.  That Tempo earned its title as the Tempo from hell.  Anyway, time passed and I got complacent.  Fast-forward to the days following my visit to the orthopedic doctor.  I picked up my TTY orders to go to Fort Bliss, Texas, to get MRIs of my knees and back at Beaumont Army Medical Center.  We all got into the Ford Tempo and decided to take a road trip in that car instead of my red Chevy van.  Big mistake.  Did I say big?  Oh no.  Oh no, not at all.  Huge mistake.  Colossal, even.  That was the magnitude of the mistake.  Why?  We were out on Interstate 10 headed East toward Texas.  We had just passed Willcox, Arizona, and we had left it about ten miles behind.  We were coming up to the exit for “The Thing” (famous tourist trap back then)  Suddenly, good old reliable (our Ford Tempo) just died.  Oh, it had plenty of juice.  The battery worked fine.  So did the starter.  I could smell gas, so that wasn’t the problem.  Or was it?  We were about 200 yards away from the off-ramp for the exit, and it started to thunder and lightning.  It does that in Arizona during the monsoon season.  It also tends to rain a lot during the monsoon season, so we knew the rain wasn’t far behind.  I told my wife to get in and steer and put the car in neutral and I told the kids to get out and follow behind me while I push the car up under the underpass.  Cell phones weren’t a thing back then, so we couldn’t just call anybody.  And I sure as hell wasn’t going to try to walk anywhere for help.  No sirree.  Not in the desert.  We were just going to wait this out.  Well, after about two hours of waiting, I tried to start that Tempo from hell again, and it started.  What the hell?  So, I backed the sonofabitch up and my family and I took the exit and headed back to Willcox, Arizona.  I sure as hell wasn’t going to try to make it any further on the way to Texas and get stranded.  I looked for the Ford dealer when I got to Willcox.  By the time I pulled into the lot at the Ford dealer, they were getting ready to close for the day.  I did manage to talk to the service manager and I described the problem that we had experienced.  He told me it was probably the electronic fuel pump that had started to go out on the vehicle.  I said, “What the hell?!?  So soon?  The damn thing has only got 21,000 miles on it.  Should that be a problem already?”  The service manager replied, “Well, you just may have gotten a bad one.  It happens.  I’ll order one for you.  It should be here tomorrow afternoon from Tucson.  I can get you on the road by the following morning.  And Ford will pick up the cost under warranty.”  “Gee, that’s great.  But who is going to pick up the tab for my hotel bill?  I am on orders to go to Fort Bliss, Texas.  I am not authorized any stops.  The service manager said that he would talk with his general manager and get the hotel bill covered by Ford.  Well, Ford was true to their word.  They got the car fixed, and we got back on the road, but that Tempo from hell already had strike two against it in what became another exercise in futility.

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