THE RV WAS PARKED INSIDE A MOUSE-INFESTED hangar at the edge of a horse pasture. It was a 38-footer-a plausible amount of space for Luis "Lue" Elizondo, his wife, Jen, and their two German shepherds, Hercules and Paris. But this was no KOA, with handy sewer and water lines.
The drinking water from the spigot made them both sick before they realized it was best left to the livestock. Every week or so, Elizondo humped out the 20-gallon black-water tank to dump into the sewage tank they'd put in the ground. There was no air conditioning, and flies were incessant. It was, in other words, not the kind of arrangement you'd expect for the star of a newly launched History Channel show.
Still, Elizondo figured it wasn't so bad, trudging across the pasture, sidestepping horse patties. This was 2018, more than a decade after he'd served as a counterintelligence officer in Afghanistan under far more precarious conditions. Here in rural Southern California, the hazards were entirely of the mind. Elizondo had to embrace his decision to forgo his corner office at the Pentagon, with its steady and reliable paycheck; he had to avoid giving mental energy to vindictive employees within the Department of Defense who were furious about his departure and his new life in the public eye. In a nation both ravenous for and divided by conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, he had to block out threats and character attacks emanating from the nether regions of the internet. And he had to reassure Jen when she was perturbed with him, which was often, because more than two decades into their marriage she felt obligated to point out the ways in which their circumstances had taken challenging turns. Such as, most people don't live 15 feet from their own waste.
This story is from the May - June 2023 edition of Popular Mechanics US.
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This story is from the May - June 2023 edition of Popular Mechanics US.
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