Tales From My Past - Condemned

Time was, I used to work for the US Government as a contractor. I deployed military medical systems across the country and across the globe. I got to go to England, Japan, and Germany on the taxpayer's dime, so thank you very much, those who paid their taxes. But for every time I got to go to a different country, I paid for it with a trip to places like Beaufort, SC, or O'Fallon IL. Uncle Sugar giveth, Uncle Sugar taketh away...
   This tale, however, is about a building. A creaky, condemned building that was my office for quite a while. It had been built during World War I - seriously - when Brooks AFB was brand-new,and had a twenty-year life span. Which would put the building's demise some time during the Depression. The one in the 1930's, not the one now. But the Army Air Corps didn't tear it down, and neither did the Air Force. In the decades between the Great War and my time there, it had been a mess hall, a morgue, a place to store office furniture, temporary living quarters, a supply depot, and even a youth center.
   It had been condemned since the late 80's as a place unsuitable for habitation, a twenty-year building that had lasted seventy years. That didn't stop commanders from claiming it as soon as it was empty, however, including the commander of our element. The place was crumbling, literally, and was not level, not plumb, and it was wracked. Not a straight line in the place. The windows didn't shut properly so it was drafty in the winter and hot in the summer. One conference room was the worst, as we measured an eleven-inch difference in the height from one corner to the diagonally opposite corner. You could lay a pencil on the high side of the conference table and it would roll down and shoot off the far side as if someone had thrown it. I'm sure it was full of mold and whatever you get from corpses in a morgue, and there were for certain mice, rats, possums, skunks, and armadillos all vying for space under the building. Ah, good times, good times...
   At long last our commander surrendered the place and we moved to better quarters. The Engineer Corps did something amazing to this building to finally put it out of its misery. They got six guys with chainsaws and took one side of the building away. I watched them do it, the engineers sawed the back half of the building off, to make it completely unsuitable for habitation, and to make it so that no one would try to squat. But it gets better.
   Fast forward to six months later. I've gotten another job, working for an insurance company, and I came back to Brooks to visit the old team. We went by our old place, the one they'd sawn in half. The Engineer Corps had salted the earth. They had torn up the curbs and put entirely new ones in, they'd torn up the parking lot and put in grass, they'd torn up the sewer lines, the water lines, the electric transformer, and the gas lines. They dug up the foundation posts and hauled the cement away. They even re-numbered the street address, made it appear that there had never been any structure there in the first place. They erased the building.
   That's ruthless efficiency right there. Admirable and yet a little disturbing at the same time. Makes you realize that with the right motivation and the right people in charge, almost anything can get done.