Patrols of the Imagination
The Greatest Beer Run Ever: A Memoir of Friendship, Loyalty, and War“Patrols of the Imagination” names the fictitious patrol accounts entered in the police ledgers at the barracks. The phrase turns routine record-keeping into a quiet joke about the distance between what the official reports claimed and what the guards actually did. Its qualification matters: the guards used it laughingly, but Francis (Frank) McGahern never did.
The Ledgers and the Daily Routine
Patrols began within a tightly ordered morning routine. After the inspection in the dayroom, the day’s assignments were written into one of the large ledgers, and the guards set out on their separate rounds. The orderly remained in charge of the dayroom. In bad weather, the guards might stay there, watch the rain, and, after a few hours, sign themselves back in and write an account of a patrol they had not made.
The phrase gathers this particular practice into a memorable label, but the narrator makes clear that invention was not confined to stormy days. Most accounts entered in the ledgers were fictitious in both good weather and bad. The reports gave the appearance of regular observation even when the patrol had not taken place as recorded.
Work Beyond the Report
Some guards used the time assigned to patrols for work on their own plots: gardens, conacre, or turf-cutting on Gloria Bog. The official duty thus overlapped with the practical demands of rural life. The ledger preserved a formal account of police activity; the guards’ actual hours could be spent tending land or cutting turf instead.
There were occasions when the records were more closely scrutinized. A monthly inspection by the superintendent, or the fear of a surprise inspection, prompted the guards to observe and report their patrols properly. Even then, the narrator suggests, invention could still enter the accounts: little ever happened on the potholed roads. The expression therefore points not simply to deliberate fabrication but to the thinness of the routine being documented, and to the paperwork that made uneventful roads appear continuously patrolled.
The Joke and Its Limits
“Patrols of the Imagination” was the guards’ laughing name for the invented reports, a piece of shared language that exposed the practice without formally challenging it. The narrator’s account preserves the humor, but also draws a line around it: the phrase belonged to the guards’ informal understanding, not to the sergeant’s own vocabulary. His refusal to use it distinguishes his authority from their collective joke.
As the narrator grew older, he sometimes helped write the reports while lingering in the dayroom when his father was away. The expression consequently belongs not only to an observation about police paperwork but to a remembered routine in which the child gradually became a participant. The ledgers recorded patrols; the phrase remembered the gap between those records and the lives that produced them.
