To America

an Art of Dying fragment

To me, one of the highlights of working for Our Prince on the Apollo was going away on missions.

A mission is an assignment where you (usually paired with another missionaire — our term for the Sea Org missionary, which really wasn’t or isn’t a missionary at all but a messenger cum fixer cum enforcer — but not always, as in the case of observation missions) leave the ship to fly to a remote organization (that we thought of as an “org” and which officially was called “church”) which could be anywhere in the world — Europe or the U.S. or Africa or Australia, or even Sweden.

There were two reasons an organization or church earned itself a Sea Org mission: things were not going very well, and the mission was sent to fix this — this was usually the case; or things were going extremely well, and the mission was sent to find out why and how and to reinforce those actions which were found successful — occasionally.

A third reason a mission was sent was to inspect (according to the quite brilliant LRH policy of “Look don’t Listen” — i.e., trust only your eyes) and gather data from various orgs and their staff — the observation mission, obs mission for short.

Late spring 1971 I was tapped for an obs mission. I was to fly to America, visit and observe (including interviewing staff) orgs in New York, Miami…