In this bit of nonsense, I have included each of the NATO Phonetic Alphabet codewords …
Last November, alpha male Mike and his Zulu boyfriend Charlie took a holiday at the famous golf hotel in Lima. Wanting a break from the game, they took a drive through the delta, up into the sierra, where they heard the famous echo. In the evening they were joined by their yankee soldier friend Victor (who was in uniform) and his Papa.
They all went to the theatre where they saw Romeo and Juliet (it was an Oscar-winning performance – ‘Bravo’, they cried) and then went dancing, first the foxtrot then the tango.
Victor, who had drunk too much whiskey and was more than a kilo overweight, fell over and had to be taken off for an X-ray. The next day the happy couple left for the next leg of their trip, to Quebec, then onto India, where more adventures awaited them …
That was fun. Well done.
Thanks! It was fun doing it. It was originally a challenge to see who could include all 26 code words in as short a space as possible. I think mine came in at around 250 words.
Very good. Nice idea.
Like this! Also an excellent piece of flash fiction!
Interesting that it’s Irish whiskey
Nice one. It reminded me of the naval officer who gave his girlfriend a brooch with naval signal flags in enamel. She thought it pretty. Any signaller knew it read ‘Request permission to lie alongside.’
While in the military, I worked in telecommunications centers, we sent and received text and card data, to and from Automatic Switching Centers (ASCs), and in order to do this, we performed HJ’s. There are many acronyms that can fit, but not in the world of encrypted communications. I had thought it was in deference to Shakespeare, you know, Juliet meets Romeo, each night, at a Hotel. Where it’s actually so that your communication blackout is as brief as possible. Later, it was changed to 06:00 ZULU time, but originally it was when one Julian date ended and another started, that the HJs occurred. Cryptographic key changes, in the military are called performing a HJ, or Hotel Juliet, on all cryptographic equipment (it involved replacing one-use key cards, or paper tapes). The HJ acronym is taken from, at the hour (H) the Julian (J) Date changed it was time to change the crypto-key (when MIDNIGHT on GMT, UTC, ZULU time zone the world over, each and EVERY day, the military lives on Zulu time, and doesn’t follow Daylight Savings Time), meaning each and every day without fail, failure to do so would essentially place your ability to communicate over the cryptographic devices impossible, as it is your site and the site that you communicate with cryptographically; nothing is unencrypted, failure would cause an information blackout (until both sites get on the same key card into their respective devices or paper tape pulled through respective devices). Each device was assigned a month’s worth of keys, in advance, and one card per day per cryptographic device would be taken from COMSEC (Communications Security) safe to said device, the entire world over did HJs at midnight Zulu time. Loss of keycards/tapes meant loss of communication with the distant end, at least for that day, unless/until a courier could supply both sites with replacements. So many Juliet’s meeting at Hotels, it boggles the mind, hopefully it would be a rendezvous with Romeo. And would likely be safer than how it is now, with all the security breaches in government and corporate systems and databases, laying bare their data for adversaries and allies alike to pilfer their data.