Memories Of The Bacon Man, Three Years Later

I feel brilliant. Today I have been able to shorten the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game down to just two degrees.

Here goes:

1. I had bacon with my breakfast this morning.
2. Kevin’s last name is Bacon.

Two degrees, there you go.

Every time I eat bacon I am oddly reminded of a time, coincidentally exactly three years ago, in which I was deployed to Baghdad and a certain event would recur nearly every evening.

Either myself or the members of the 206th Broadcast Operations Detachment, an Army unit I was attached to at the time, would become the nightly target of someone who called themselves the Bacon Man.

In short, the Bacon Man would run up, tap on your door and you’d hear a loud THUD, then you’d open the door and find a bowl full of bacon and a printed Photoshop job of Kevin Bacon shirtless with bacon over his nipples. It made no sense and it was funny the first few times it happened, but later on it increased in intensity — one of the guys had the window to his trailer open and in flew the bacon around midnight — and we became increasingly frustrated that we couldn’t figure out who it was.

The weird thing was, and you had to hand it to him, was that the Bacon Man would never be found right after he committed his act of bacon terrorism. You could open your door right after the thud, and you would never see him or hear him run away. It didn’t help that the living arrangement in the Green Zone was a bunch of trailers set up in rows, with concrete barriers around them making the whole thing a sort of labyrinth.

The Bacon Man was enabled by the fact that bacon was plentiful at the chow hall in the Green Zone. You had to go into the back of the chow hall into the short-order line and order up a burger, then you’d proceed through the line where you could get however much bacon you wanted to put on your burger. There was a never-ending supply of the stuff.

One night I went to the chow hall with one of the guys from the 206th, and we went to the short-order line. I got sidetracked as I met with one of my Air Force buddies, so I ended up about three spots in line behind him. As fate would have it, he ordered up a cheeseburger and made his way through the line.

I stood there and talked with my buddy for a few, ordered up a burger of my own, and looked over at the condiment section. Holy cow, the bacon was gone. But so were the ketchup packets, which I found very odd.

Let me just finish this off by saying that when I got back to my trailer, I found ketchup smeared all over my door, a bowl of bacon in the hallway and not one, but two photos of Kevin Bacon and that horrid Photoshop job.

Three years later, I still think of the antics of the Bacon Man every time I eat bacon.

Thanks for breakfast, Mom!