MacDougal

I've written a bit about MacDougal here, and looking back, a lot of it is negative, so I want to set the record straight on the guy.

MacDougal was an exceptional agent back in his day. He did a lot of stuff during the Cold War that kept this country on top. He's still a crack shot with just about any type of gun, even more deadly with a sniper rifle. He's a smart guy, learns fast and processes information quickly. But he's a terrible decision maker and has poor instincts, but at the same time trusts his judgment and his instincts above anything else. Plus, the world has passed him by.

See, back in his day, things were fairly clear. There were "good guys" and "bad guys", and allegiances didn't change that much. Nowadays things change on a whim; our enemies one day are our allies the next. But MacDougal still sees things in black and white, and it got to the point where, skillset notwithstanding, he was no longer an effective field agent, so he was assigned to a desk.

I was assigned to MacDougal when I first started out (they've since scrapped the "buddy system"), and he likes to remind me that he taught me everything I know. In reality, though... he taught me everything he knows, which was considerable, but not overwhelming, and I've learned a lot more since then, including the fact that most of what he taught me was wrong. It took me a while to figure that out, but I wasn't left with a great first impression anyway. On our first mission together, he left me alone in Magadan to score with some Tatiana. That's where he picked up the aforementioned gonorrhea. I finished the mission myself, which he claimed was his "plan all along", because it provided me with an "excellent learning experience". A few weeks later he was on a healthy dose of antibiotics, so that's karma for you.

So he's a questionable decision maker. He's also a bit of a bumbler, not as severe or comedic as Mr. Magoo, but if there's something to be done with any level of complexity, it's 50/50 he's going to screw it up. I'm not going to delve into the problems we've had... but I could write pages and pages about his misadventures... "MacDougal hotwires a boat", "MacDougal navigates the streets of Murmansk", "MacDougal is unable to find the Baykonur Cosmodrome, despite having accurate coordinates and a working GPS."

One of the last straws (I'm not sure that there was an official "last straw") was the PK mission. There's been more than one PK mission, but this one is "the" PK mission. We were supposed to be working with a group called Code 7, a group that a one point we were very much working against. During a meeting at one of Code 7's hideouts, one of their ops came into the room and "spooked" MacDougal. The two had met before years ago and had been on opposite sides. MacDougal "lost his cool" and shot the guy in the leg. This resulted in a hasty exit from the company of Code 7, and a prolonged chase through the city, ending only after we hopped on a boat and hid in the harbor for a few hours.

One could understand if, in the heat of the moment, a quick decision had to be made, and he capped the wrong guy. But we'd been briefed about everyone in their organization, from the top down, and we knew the guy was going to be there. We also knew that these guys were legitimately going to be working with us, so there was no need to fear them. Sometimes the intel you get is wrong, and you use your instincts... problems arise when you don't have any instincts. It's like Zero Effect: "There aren't evil guys and innocent guys. It's just... It's just... It's just a bunch of guys." He couldn't figure that out, so he shot guys in the leg. OK, he shot a guy in the leg. But he endangered more than one mission, and so they pulled him from active duty.

So now he's head of field support. It's actually a promotion in an organizational chart way, but he's not too happy with it. He stops by a lot to talk about my missions, offering not-very-useful advise, like when your Mom would tell you to "wear your jacket" when it was cold out. And his people skills are terrible, because he's horrible at carrying on a conversation, can't function in groups, and he's pushing fifty (if not there already), and he tries to act like he's twenty. One night a few years ago we were out at the Owl & Thistle, and we were talking about the movie "Elf". And then someone mentioned that their old landlord looked just like James Caan, and then we got to talking about landlords and rent and houses and things of that sort, and MacDougal was just sort of sitting there silent for about twenty minutes. And then there was this little lull in the conversation, and MacDougal says, "Hey hey... did you guys see that movie, Elf?" OK, that was twenty minutes ago, but maybe he's got something to add, so we're like "Yeah." And he said, "That was a pretty good movie, huh?" And that's it. Sometimes it's just painful to watch him interact in a social setting.

Like a couple of weeks ago, I'm sitting in Keith's office (he's one of the tech guys), and he's got Beastie Boys coming out of his speakers. MacDougal pokes his head into the office, listens for a second, then does some sort of Bulworth "throw your hands in the air" dance and asks, "You down with O.P.P.?". I was just going to go along with it, adding the requisite response "Yeah, you know me!" but Keith just sighed and said, "This is Paul's Boutique." MacDougal said he'd never heard of them, but the name sounded less like a rap group and more like a hair salon. Around this point Keith decided to ignore him and focus on the video feed we were looking at.

Anyway, that's MacDougal. I guess I didn't help change the way he's portrayed in the journal. Oh well. He is what he is.