tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83308222313909633802024-02-19T23:16:31.686-08:00Personal SagaA Collection
of Short Stories
and other
MeandersDavidMichaelSmithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15137593188998037668noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330822231390963380.post-54111509775453407322008-07-03T12:55:00.000-07:002008-07-03T12:56:35.370-07:00Business as unusual.<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:180%;">Lisa No Legs</span><br />A Short Story<br /></div><br />Everyone in the room should have been, like the central characters in a Japanese tea ceremony, well steeped in the formal requirements of the moment. Phil noticed that indeed, on the surface, everything seemed calm and normal. Underneath his Armani jacket, though, a thin pool of hot, slippery sweat had formed; other lagoons of perspiration appeared in the palm of each hand as he settled himself into the conference room chair. His sense of unease was vague and peripheral, akin to an early morning fog waiting to thicken and overwhelm a coastline.<br /><br />As head writer of the creative and content treatment compressed between his fingers, it was his task to make that morning's presentation to the prospective client. He had been through the motions of this task countless times in the past, on each occasion putting forth the distillation of his ideas for a promotional video which a would-be client wished to create for one of their new products. Today, as always, he would be expected to embrace the concepts contained within the proposal like a good parent, proudly claiming ownership of their lustrous brilliance, convincing the always dubious prospect that he and his fellow video production company associates were unquestionably the ones who could breath life into the upcoming sales campaign. The ideas were, after all, allegedly the output of his ostensibly hyperactive cerebral cortex. Under the circumstances though, he felt more like a father who, after abandoning his child on the day of its birth, returns for the youngster's high school graduation, worthy of claiming no more credit for his offspring's development than is due the repository of a good gene pool.<br /><br />Phil squirmed from one side of his seat to the other, shifting weight from hip to hip, crossing and uncrossing his legs, in a series of unsuccessful attempts at looking casual and in control. Good posturing, he knew, would be poor compensation for his lack of preparation. Instead of fulfilling his customary duties in the days before this critical meeting, he had wandered about the corridors of the production company for which he worked in the sort of anguish that had, in recent months, become the defining characteristic of his persona. People increasingly noted his exceptional listlessness, his slight air of disconnection from the events around him, punctuated by periodic outbursts of visceral hostility. Some thought it just another of those dangerous, sullen moods he so often wandered through, dragging everyone else along with him. His humors of late were particularly rancid, however, and had spawned a new phrase around the office; people spoke of being "Phil-laid" whenever forced to be with him, a witticism that accurately conveyed the double image of being simultaneously eviscerated and sodomized by this gloomy man. Those closest to him, which could be numbered in the ones, namely his wife, feared the new tides of his internal stormy seas would this time well up in a tsunami that might engulf and drown all those within range, including himself.<br /><br />"See Phil this morning?" one wag asked another just the day before. "I asked him how he was doing, and he went off on some tangent about, 'how do you think I'm doing when I live on a planet where I can't find a place to park a car whose monthly payments are enough to feed a small third world country for a year? How the hell you think I'm doing?' Man, does this guy ever lighten up?"<br /><br />"Yeah, and how 'bout that little scene with Mike yesterday?" the other office conversationalist enjoined, recalling another historic confrontation between Phil and the company owner. "He's supposed to be working on the proposal for that computer chip outfit. It could be the biggest production we've ever done, if Phil would, and let me quote our fearless leader, 'get his head out of his colon and back in the clouds, where a thinking ad man's brain belongs!' Maybe he's really flipped this time, ya think?"<br /><br />Who knew? For his part, Phil was mostly interested in the reruns of sitcoms played endlessly on those cable channels at the far end of the dial. His life, like the simple characters in the old black-and-white shows which induced his nightly alpha brain wave patterns, had become a chain of predictable, repetitive motions. Being a fairly competent ad man whose thoughts were primarily metaphorical, he was continually creating internal images that might help explain his mid-life predicament. My life is rather like a bicycle chain, he once told his wife, with one significant difference; unlike the chain of a bicycle which propels its vehicle forward towards a destination, the succession of events in his life was thrusting him further into middle age only. The life he had dreamed of as a young agency hotshot (had it been only twenty five years earlier?) was rapidly receding into that indistinct horizon known as "the past".<br /><br />Had he been more familiar with the inner workings of his own psyche, as familiar, say, as he was with what made people respond powerfully to an advertising campaign for a product they neither needed nor wanted, Phil might have fully recognized the specters of his unfulfilled ambitions hanging in the air like limpid ghosts, their ectoplasm smothering the bit of remaining vitality out of his already greatly diminished daily existence.<br /><br />Unfortunately, these days his mind operated like a vast, shallow reservoir, covering miles of ground, but doing so only a few inches deep. It had not always been so. A handful of years earlier, his intellect had had the qualities of a deep, clear mountain lake to which creatures came to drink from miles around. Having done little to nurture his gifts beyond scheming ways to increase his monthly bonus check, Phil's well-spring of cerebral and emotional richness had been sucked dry, leaving his insides brittle and barren.<br /><br />Still, there were enough of his once precise instincts remaining on this morning, as he sat stupefied in the brightly lit conference room, for him to discern the atmosphere of imminent doom. He was, he realized with a waft of renewed nausea, but moments away from rising in defense of a proposal he had seen only minutes before while standing with his colleagues in front of the client's corporate headquarters prior to the meeting.<br /><br />"Since you could not find it in you to write more than two tepid pages of general concept outline, I had Arlene here flesh it out over the weekend," Mike McLintock, his boss of fifteen years, had said with open contempt. "For Christ's sake, at least take a look at the goddamn thing before we go in there, will you Phil?"<br /><br />At the mention of Arlene's name, Phil's heart had immediately sunk. Young and as yet untempered by the fires of the competitive business world, Arlene was the latest on-staff producer to be hired, and Mike, a man with an imagination that extended no further than his penis or the outline for his company's next proposed ad campaign -- whichever he first found in his hand each morning -- had begun to increasingly rely upon Arlene as Phil sank ever deeper into his myopia. Had she not been like a newly born calf in Phil's eyes, wobbly and naive to the point of actually smiling sweetly at everyone throughout the entirety of the day, he would have hated her with the intensity he usually reserved for those clients who liked to improve upon his campaign ideas. As it was, he had been able to muster no more feeling towards her than a mild and distant curiosity, the sort of emotional engagement a botanist might feel for his favorite strain of moss or lichen. Phil stared at Arlene, as he had so often in recent weeks, slightly gap-jawed at the realization that such creatures of innocence still inhabit the earth, much less the advertising business.<br /><br />Returning to relative consciousness, Phil had grabbed the now ten page proposal from Arlene's hand, and looked angrily at Mike before scanning the document.<br /><br />"Shit. I can't believe this," he had begun, speaking as if Arlene were somewhere else, which was at that moment, his wish second only to the desire to be miles away himself.<br /><br />"How many of these goddamn things has she written, anyway?" Before anyone could possibly have answered, he turned his question rhetorical. "None, that's how goddamn many." With a wild gesture towards Arlene that might as easily have been directed toward a nearby bush, he continued.<br /><br />"What makes you think she's got enough experience...no, wait a minute...what makes you think she's good enough to put something this big together? And why didn't I have a chance to see it before now?"<br /><br />Mike exhaled slowly while running the palm of one hand over his extensive midsection, a habit that always preceded an angry outburst. For his part, Mike had tolerated Phil's tirades more times than he would ever desire to recall. It had been worth it, Mike thought, up until about six months ago. People can put up with a lot of grief when a progenitor of misery was also the font of great financial success. Phil's creative juices had been at the heart of the company's award-winning and client-pleasing video marketing campaigns for over a decade. Lately though, Mike thought glumly, Phil had slipped off into a reality to which he alone had access. Even with Mike, and occasionally in front of clients, he had begun to vacillate between those bouts of sullen torpor and bursts of volcanic rage to which his co-workers had been randomly subjected for years. Anyone fitting the definition of "friend" had deserted him long ago, all unwilling to weather the winds of his inclement fulminations. Worst of all, he didn't seem to have the creative edge he once did. The most he appeared capable of offering at staff meetings in recent days was a fish-eyed look bracketed by intermittent expletives.<br />"The answer to your first question is that I don't need to explain to you or anyone else why I think she's good enough, asshole", Mike had retorted, gradually working himself up to the passionate tenor needed to do combat with Phil. Because he too was infamous for his paroxysms of verbal inanities, one of the most popular office sports was standing in the hallway outside Mike's office, listening to he and Phil ignite each other's ire.<br />"But just for the record", Mike continued more heatedly, "she's good enough because she's full of energy and ideas. Kind of like you used to be, Phil."<br />Phil had felt the blood burn its way through his cheeks and ears. For an instant, he entertained the dark vision of Mike writhing on the ground in pain, the prelude to an agonizing death caused by Phil's decision to methodically remove the pen from his top shirt pocket and insert it into one of Mike's wall-eyes, preferably the left one which never seemed to focus on anything. He tried to imagine precisely how much force would be required to firmly imbed the instrument deeply into his employer's frontal lobe. Or more accurately, he thought, the piece of protoplasm that passed for his bosses' brain, based on its shape and size, certainly not on its performance. Using that criterion, he thought wryly, Mike's gray matter was of little more use than an ordinary kitchen appliance; maybe less, since it wasn't capable of rudimentary functions, such as keeping perishables cold or producing a good piece of toast. Lobotomy-by-pen, he thought further; could start a new trend in relationship termination.<br />Unable to conjure the rancor necessary for a double murder, (although as harmless as a throw rug, Arlene would have to be strangled on the spot, eliminating the only witness to his justifiable homicide) Phil merely cocked his head to one side and loudly propelled air through both nostrils.<br />"As for your second question," Mike went on, "I tried calling you several times over the weekend. Do you ever check your goddamn voice mail?"<br />"I wasn't around this weekend." Phil's response sounded weak and silly to him, a stark contrast to the acidic malevolence he felt sitting in the well of his throat. If I were a snake, he silently conjured, I would inject you both with venom, then slowly swallow and digest the evidence of my crime. For a moment, he was distracted by thoughts of admiration for Mother Nature; how dispassionately and ingeniously she had equipped some of her denizens for the tasks of dispatching enemies or securing supper.<br />Sitting now with these myriad dismal reminiscences of that earlier encounter, awaiting the impending arrival of the client entourage, Phil wished he had been less consumed with the impulsive urgings of that pre-meeting encounter. Perhaps it would have been more fruitful had he instead paid closer attention to the contents of the mutated, mutilated proposal he now slowly laid on the table and pushed away from him, as if it were a bag containing a weeks' worth of biological contaminants from a hospital's operating theater. For there, staring back at him with unblinking mercilessness was the wellspring of the rapidly accumulating estuaries of perspiration gathering at telltale locations across his body.<br />He became aware that he must be exuding a distinct and odious odor; his sweat was of the clammy variety associated with animal fear. It occurred to him that had his prehistoric ancestors been faced with this situation, they would have chosen flight over fight. He knew instinctively that dismembering a large beast in hand to hand combat would have been a less arduous and bloody task than the thirty minute assignment which stretched before him.<br /><br />Hoping that perhaps somehow the words had magically rearranged themselves on the page, he read once more the opening lines of the proposal, wanting to be certain that his situation was as tenuous as he feared. Phil's lips moved as he scanned through the opening paragraphs, evidence of his whimsy that giving utterance to the verbiage on the paper would perhaps act as an incantation which could alter his predicament. When he reached the portion of the proposal where his wordsmithing ended and Arlene's artless craft began, another large stone of fear dropped slowly down through his chest into his stomach, working its way diligently towards the tangle of his intestinal track. Each time Phil reread Arlene's unforgivable marketing mortal sin, he pondered anew the latent benefits of bolting from the room, hopping into his car, hitting the interstate highway heading south, and never looking back. This option might have actually held promise had he not realized that for him to stand at this moment was to flirt with the distinct possibility of fainting. He envisioned the client entering the room as he lay unconsciously sprawled across the large conference room table, end up, face down, while all silently studied him like an animal who has just been bagged on safari.<br /><br />How could the situation have degenerated to his feeling light-headed enough to lose consciousness? Could it really be the effects of the insignificant blather on this small piece of paper? Or should he have had more for breakfast than a mound of sugar swimming in a double espresso? The thought then came to him that there was tragically little difference between his early morning libations and the tome he held in his liquid fingers; both offered little sustenance or substance, each a pretender at fulfillment.<br /><br />As he lowered the page, Phil tried to think the situation through once more; perhaps if he could grasp the sociological implications of his dilemma, he might devise a plan of escape; or at least a plausible excuse. His philosophical ruminations barely embarked upon, a flurry of clothing and briefcases, accompanied by the distinct aroma of Obsession, the perfume of choice for today's advancing corporate woman, punctured the room, consigning his attempt at developing a survival strategy to a still-born death. Here came "The Clients", Phil realized, always distinguishable by the slight sneer at the edge of their tightly pursed mouths whenever greeting a would-be vendor such as his worm-like self.<br /><br />Leading the pack of predators as they entered the room was the personification of Phil's fear, the head of Unitel Corporation's marketing department, one Ms. Lisa Prowess; (he knew if she were the character in a short story, the author would be forced to give her another name; the reader would never accept such an obvious synchronism of name and primary personality characteristic. Implausability is the grist of real life, not fiction, he knew.)<br /><br />Phil had met Lisa only once before, during the initial pitch he and Mike had made two weeks earlier; the encounter had been sufficient to convince him that Ms. Prowess precisely represented those estrogen-borne traits which sent spasms of flaccidness running through the groins of every man with whom she had a professional relationship. He suspected that whenever men within the department discussed the formidable Ms. Prowess, they tried bravely and vainly to avoid being subsumed by the aura of power so accurately conveyed via her last name. By using pedestrian pejoratives such as "bitch" and "ball buster", they hoped to break the spell of her control over them, to demean her stature, relegating her to the Cro-Magnon status of woman as mere child bearer; but in their heart-of-hearts, these men recognized that their sneering condemnations were mere noxious vapors, gaseous maledictions which did nothing to dispel the reality of the magnetism emitted by Ms. Lisa Prowess. She had long held the unchallenged, if unofficial, title of "Most Foreboding Middle Manager" within the company. Phil appreciated these realities without being privy to their details; their murky, ill-defined outline filled the room with a presence which made the promised agonies of the next few minutes that much more pronounced.<br /><br />Lisa Prowess carried herself into the room with the élan of a Chief Executive Officer who has just digested several subordinates for breakfast. She was self-constructed with that curious blend of feminine allure and cool professionalism that Phil had never quit been able to define. He immediately conceded to women of her carefully crafted design as being essentially enigmatic. Although projecting an aura of unequivocal sexuality, each component of their demeanor includes the opaque message that they are not to be trivialized as simple objects of lasciviousness. Phil observed with appreciative wonderment the ability such women have to make him feel passionately carnal at the same instant they are broadcasting warnings of danger in extremis. This must be akin to what the male counterpart of the Black Widow spider feels, he thought, just prior to conjugation followed by decapitation.<br /><br />Considerably more than the categorical representative of the genus Femme Fatale, Lisa Prowess was a indeed a singular presence. Somehow she managed to house eyes that were at once steely and mischievous. As well-manicured as she was puissant, she consistently evoked a heady mixture of intoxication and diffidence from her male associates.<br /><br />With the unrehearsed elegance of a yearling, she tossed back the sprawl of shoulder-length red hair which had become one of her many hallmarks, fully revealing an inscrutable, tantalizing face; this, while pulling out the vacant chair next to Phil. As she sat, she motioned with imperial grandeur for all to roost. Jesus, thought Phil, why did she have to pick the place right next to me? As he considered the likelihood that she might take advantage of his proximity to inflict physical harm should he disenchant her with his presentation, she began speaking with the soft intonations of understated command that distinguishes those who are in charge from those who are not.<br /><br />"Good morning, everyone. Nice to see you Mike, Phil, Arlene. You know my associates, Jim, Bob and Dave..." Hmm, the infamous office eunuchs, mused Phil. Mutterings around the table acknowledged Lisa's salutations without risking the consequences of interrupting her.<br /><br />"Well then, let's get right down to the business at hand, shall we?" Nodding affirmations all around paid yet additional homage to Lisa's so far unchallenged role as chieftain of the gathered clan. Mike, who enjoyed a self-perception as one well accustomed to dealing with "women in business", made the first (and, as it turned out, last) move to take control of the assemblage. "As you know, Mr. Prowess, we have..."<br /><br />"I'm certain you have a great deal to tell us, Mike," Lisa cut him off at the verb, "and we're quite anxious to hear the details of your creative treatment." Was it the regal "we" she used, wondered Phil? Or was she including her quizzical associates who arrayed themselves quietly as shadow creatures along the remaining length of table on Lisa's opposite side?<br /><br />"Did you get all the information you needed from Bob here in order to write your creative treatment?" she inquired, gesturing towards one of her companions as one might point to a newly acquired puppy. For a moment, Phil thought she might actually reach over and pat Bob on the head.<br /><br />Phil had known his employer long enough to recognize the faint hint of annoyance which glinted momentarily in his eyes. If Lisa Prowess noticed, she showed no inclination to seek rapprochement. Impressed with her extraordinary ability to mold others, less by intimidation than with the sheer understated energies of her personality, Phil watched Lisa Prowess with slightly open-mouthed regard; he was, therefore, caught completely off-guard by the sudden realization that her limpid gaze was aimed in his direction; her question had been put to him, not Mike. "And how is the Creative Director feeling this morning? Awake enough to be... creative, I hope."<br /><br />Her icy self-control contrasted so sharply with the menacing warmth of her smile that Phil was unable to suppress an involuntary shiver. He felt rather like the time in sixth-grade when his teacher, Mrs. Blotchet, had caught him absent-mindedly stroking his genitals in a prepubescent game of pocket pool in the back of the classroom. Then, as now, he wished he possessed the power to make himself invisible. "Ahh, umm, yes Lisa, I think...you're going to find my...our...the proposal to be quite exciting."<br /><br />Lisa Prowess continued to star at him, now in silence; her slight smile of condescension suspended the room in a freeze frame of time and space. She seemed to be looking at him -- no, looking through him -- as if he were apprenticing a great Chess master and had just made a transparent observation about the opening movement of the Queen's pawn. Phil had the odd sensation of being tissue thin. For a instant he held the image of himself as one of those cartoon characters who is run over by a steam roller. The absurd imagery gave way to a picture of someone striking a match and setting him afire; he saw himself dissolve in a flash of flame and smoke, a piece of human rice paper with less substance than a hologram. With feelings of such abiding inadequacy taking hold so early in the meeting, he wondered how great the odds were against his surviving the coming minutes with even a modicum of human dignity. Mercifully, Lisa broke the trance which enveloped the room. "I'm certain we're all going to be very pleased, Phil. Please begin."<br /><br />Mystics use a variety of terms to describe what happened to Phil next. Some speak of having a unitive experience, others talk of a feeling of transcendence; still others allude to their moment of clarity. At the sound of Lisa's command and as suddenly as the stellar implosion that creates a black hole, Phil simultaneously came to several realizations. He knew he would not only survive this terrible moment; he would walk away from it thoroughly satisfied and at peace, perhaps triumphant as well. Although he wondered vaguely why he felt so deeply reassured, he knew the source of his serenity was likely to remain forever one of the mysteries of his existence. The oddest constituent of his enlightenment was the absolute prescience he felt regarding the remainder of the meeting; Phil knew he knew how it would unfold, without being able to invoke the details in any meaningful way. Most importantly of all, he sensed he was immersed in a situation of superb irony, circumstances within which currents of creative observation that had years earlier become dry, dusty stream beds, were being fully replenished by free-flowing torrents of fluid inspiration. God parted the Red Sea for Moses. Phil had the impression that, for him, the miracle of inundation was taking place.<br /><br />Curiously, he was able to embrace his role as observer and participant without the slightest fear of injury. His anguish of the previous moments had been a baptism leading to the birth of a new being, one impervious to harm. Phil noted that his heart calmed to the slow, steady rhythms of an athlete in his prime. The perspiration which had been coalescing into molten pools secreted along his body miraculously evaporated, canteens of moisture unable to survive the burning clarity of his revelations. His mouth, a heretofore dry cavern devoid of saliva, became abruptly fluid, lubricated for the task of elucidation ahead. Had his blood pressure been monitored at that exact moment, the observing medical professional would have been astonished at its sudden plunge. This is going to be fun, thought Phil; no, more than fun. The remainder of the meeting promised to provide the sort of merriment which had been missing from his life for years. The precise reasons as to why this should be so continued to remain just at the edge of his consciousness, but he relished the prospect of participating in the drama about to materialize.<br /><br />As the first modulations of his voice radiated with fresh self-assurance, reverberating from the far wall at the other end of the conference table, Phil could feel a shift of energies in the room. All these profound universes of change had taken place between the end of Lisa's last sentence, and the utterance he was just beginning, a subjective time lapse of perhaps two seconds or less.<br /><br />"Lisa, it's been a tremendously rewarding experience putting this proposal together for you. We were so fired up by the possibilities inherent in this campaign, that we broke with precedence, and worked on the proposal as a company-wide collaborative effort. Arlene, here, in fact, is the real genius behind what we've come up with. And so, I think it's only proper that she share with you the genesis of her creative approach. Then I can answer any questions you might have."<br /><br />The brilliance of this maneuver made Phil nearly swoon for the second time that morning. Not only had he daintily removed himself from the hook, he had re-baited it with Arlene while appearing to be gracious and modest. Once again, the atmosphere in the room became heightened with the portent of immanent slaughter. Mike's expression took on the stony qualities of intended inscrutability which Phil recognized as the clear indicator of seething rage that roiled within his boss when situations were both out of his control and beyond his comprehension. Arlene's expression, written in the large letters of the innocent child, was one of dumbfounded pleasure and excitement. She perceived this as her moment in the sun, and a tiny surge of pity passed through Phil's heart as he considered the eagerness with which the lamb is led to slaughter in the full light of day. "Oh, really, Phil", Arlene sputtered, "I wasn't...you were...I mean, it was your idea; I just...fleshed it out a little."<br /><br />Every move now hydraulically smooth, Phil turned slowly to face Lisa, a gesture of pretended deference. As their eyes met, they exchanged the glance of silent alliance that binds co-conspirators into a cohesive unit of treachery. She too was settling in to enjoy the dance of duplicity being choreographed on her behalf at Phil's behest. Leaning back in her chair, she cradled chin in hand, one finger extended to her cheekbone in the age-old posture of undiluted evaluation. There was no need for her to speak; she had temporarily relinquished authorship to Phil in the manner of a creative writing instructor who wishes to see how well a prized student can compose his first flight of fancy on paper.<br /><br />With his quarry stalked into a blind ravine, Phil moved in for the next stunning blow, delivering a sweet soporific that could not have been more soothing had he fired it into Arlene's rump from a tranquilizer gun. "Now, Arlene, you're being much too modest. You spent a lot of time working on the proposal over the weekend, and I think it's only fair that you get what you deserve." Phil's thinly veiled double entendre caused everyone to shift in their chairs as if following a director's "action!" cue. All present pondered the subterranean implications of receiving one's own just deserts.<br /><br />His prevision of the predation to come was infectious. The gathering was increasingly taking on the aura of a Roman amphitheater prior to the moment when the air would be split by the agonized screams of those being claimed as protein by ravished lions. Adding credence to this similitude, Lisa hungrily licked her lips before saying, "Phil's right, my dear. This is no time for false modesty. Please, let's get on with it. Time and money and all that, you know?" She winked at Phil in an exaggerated gesture of what seemed, at first glance, to be nothing more than disingenuous levity.<br /><br />With that gesture, however, Phil took note of another momentous turning point in the morning's episodic melodrama. Not wishing to lose the recent gift of his composure, he refused to give the phenomenon complete conscious exposition. Only his loins registered a slight but unambiguous tremor, an involuntary consequence of the subtle sexual overtones which Phil suddenly realized were contained in the movement of Lisa's nictitating membrane in his direction. Or was this perception merely the treasonous voice of his male member, that appendage which had so often betrayed him with bad advice in times past? He had lost count of the occasions on which such urgings had led him into the sort of messy bogs where paleontologists find the fossils of animals with brains too small to save them from folly. Beware the Trojan Horse, thought Phil, turning his attentions fully to Arlene before his embryonic cupidity could betray him.<br /><br />Arlene, meanwhile, looked pained and laborious in her indecision about whether to sit or stand. How curious it is, observed Phil as he dispassionately beheld her quandary, that our response to a situation is often the precise opposite of what the circumstances call for; in this case, Arlene was paralyzed by the need to perform. She could not force her voluntary nervous system to instruct her musculature to produce the simplest of movements. The deer-in-the-headlights syndrome, considered Phil.<br /><br />After several agonizing moments in which those sitting close to Arlene considered helping her to her feet as if she were an invalid about to begin an intensive session of physical therapy, the young woman cleared her throat. This transfer of phlegm from lungs to esophagus seemed to break the logjam of her immobility. Her body slowly acknowledged the commands being sent to her legs by a feverish brain. Having mastered the necessary mechanics to successfully perform the feat of standing without assistance, it appeared that her overheated cerebellum was unable to forthrightly handle another function any time soon. She stood in a frozen imitation of the prey which has resigned itself to the predator. When the tension had once again risen to a palpable level beyond human tolerance, she picked up her copy of the proposal, and began to read aloud. Voice quivering with unbridled terror, Arlene resembled a child reading a composition in front of a gathering of derisive classmates.<br /><br />Abruptly, Phil realized what had become of his multitude of symptoms when they had been dispelled by the miracle of his awakening moments ago; apparently, all his fear had been transmitted directly through the ether into Arlene, as if by means of an invisible catheter. Phil looked at her with the eyes of a soldier who, upon examining the recently deceased body of a fallen comrade, can muster no more compassionate a rejoinder than, "better you than me." Barely audible, Arlene began to read;<br /><br />Objective<br /><br />To produce a 5 to 8 minute video presentation which will be used to market the features and benefits of Unitel's new SZ670 data processor.<br /><br />As he heard the few words of the proposal which he had contributed, Phil returned to his favorite preoccupation, himself. So very Phil-like those first few words, he thought after hearing the brief "objective". It was pointed, precise, and predictable, just the way clients always liked proposals to begin. Belaboring the obvious, he knew after years of doing so, was one of the most commendable practices within the marketing and advertising world, which made great commotion about originality while always embracing the predictable. Arlene read on, gaining a bit of composure and modulation as she warmed to her task.<br /><br />Method<br /><br />Because the new SZ670 data processor's main sales feature is the increased speed with which it allows the end user to utilize his or her computer, we recommend that we create a dramatization which illustrates the comparisons between two users -- one who enjoys the advantages of the SZ670 and one who doesn't.<br /><br />Still vintage Phil, Phil thought, despite the run-on sentence structure. The Frankenstein of Arlene's creation was about to show its first bolts and sutures. Phil could empathically feel the muscles in Arlene's neck and upper back tighten in a vise grip along her entire vertebral structure. Pain radiated like canals of poison through her head, he knew, as she began to read the ideas she had grafted onto his original work. Her fear was born of an ignorance of what was to come. Had she realized what the next few minutes held for her, she would have collapsed in a paroxysm of symptoms requiring immediate hospitalization. She read on.<br /><br />The part of the non-SZ670 user will be played by a male actor, who will be portrayed as today's typical office computer user -- dressed for success and ready to take on the day's tasks in his in-basket.<br /><br />The part of the SZ670 user will be played by a female actress. She will also personify today's typical, upwardly mobile woman in business. That is, she will be competent, yet sexy. She knows how, in other words, to use all her gifts -- from her brain to her delightful, fully feminine figure.<br /><br />Many of the survivors of the atomic explosion over Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945, say they vividly remember the moment just before the explosion. Many recall a great stillness, as if everyone had halted their conversations and taken a in-breath together, while birds stopped singing, dogs ceased to bark, and everyone looked skyward before the flash of primal energy that consumed their city.<br /><br />Such was the moment at hand in the conference room. An eternity of silent anticipation metamorphosed within each person present. Phil was certain he heard glass breaking in another room; or was it a baby crying in the distance? These were but psychological phantoms, the feeble offerings of Phil's mind as it searched for some way to frame the pending detonation.<br /><br />Had there been time to consider the history which led to this crossroads of human emotion, Phil was probably the best equipped person in the room to appreciate the severity of the seismic pressures of centuries of oppression about to be unleashed. In the manner of a mother teaching her child not to play with snakes, his wife had schooled him repeatedly in how to avoid being bitten by the issue of sexual exploitation in the market place.<br /><br />As a catch phrase, "women in business" had become a ubiquitous term in the English speaking world of the late 20th Century. One's particular perspective of the phenomenon depended entirely on the biological plumbing and culturation of the definer. Many men, perhaps most (especially those in business themselves) thought of "women in business" as a burdensome nightmare from which they might awaken some morning, discovering once again a world where men were men and women brought condiments into the room with questions such as, "coffee or tea, sir? One lump or two?"<br /><br />Phil believed that even the most liberal of males secretly harbored this fantasy. They might vehemently deny it were they confronted with such an accusation, but in bawdy gatherings of male bonding, the idea was likely to be touted at least once as a tendril which guaranteed the connection of male camaraderie and companionship, if not necessarily a topic for serious conversation.<br /><br />At the other end of evolution-according-to-Phil, females of the Homo Sapien variety were generally divided into two warring camps; those who militantly held to their right to draw as much blood in the marketplace as any of their male counterparts, and those who thought that if God had intended women to work for a living, he would not have given the nation the Republican Party.<br /><br />To be certain, membership in the latter group of woman did not suggest an automatic alliance with conservative men. The eons of female deference to their male masters may still have existed in Third World enclaves, but it been effectively eradicated from the mainstream of First World life. Regardless of their stripes, as liberated wielders of power in commerce, or supposed toadies who followed the literal interpretations of scripture, women were increasingly in agreement that their new status was far preferable to the days when bras were set aflame in public. Women had been making steady, if grudgingly granted gains in the capitalist system since at least the mid 1970s. As a result, many men found themselves suffering under the regime of a female supervisor (such as Lisa Prowess) or female business owner. Alliances were fragile but real. An elaborate set of unwritten edicts had become part of the cultural lore regarding this first time sociological occurrence. One's testosterone might secretly boil in the midst of the loss of the hunter's dominance, but one learned to do what one must in order to survive, believed Phil.<br /><br />He had come to understand each of these subtle legislation's and became a master practitioner at the bar of pretended equality in the workplace. The depth of his comprehension regarding the taboo of perceived sexism was at the heart of his angst earlier that day. For he had dreaded the consequences of reading aloud Arlene's naive role modeling to the quintessential business woman, Ms. Lisa Prowess. Said dread was also the fodder for his epiphany upon realizing he could turn the conference tables, as it were, crafting the ultimately insulting situation for a woman like Lisa, while positing himself as a sympathetic comrade in arms.<br /><br />And now the over-ripe fruit had fallen from the tree; a woman in business had suggested to another woman in business that women in business were still, effectively, mere objects of sexuality. It was as if, with one sentence, Arlene had attempted to negate all feminist advances of the past four decades, and had done so before one of the high priestesses of equality.<br /><br />All eyes, except Arlene's, were fixed on Lisa Prowess, her face contorted into a tightened mask of rage. Perhaps this is the way the surface of Mount St. Helen's looked, considered Phil, just before it spewed several square miles of dirt into the upper atmosphere in May 1980. Lisa sprang to her feet, a great feline leaping at its victim on the Serengeti Plains of Free Enterprise.<br /><br />"Not only do I find it personally distasteful, young lady, that you should think it necessary for a woman to be portrayed as needing any more than her professional competence in the work place," Lisa hissed between taut lips, " but as a professional woman, I am astonished...shocked...dismayed...and goddamned angry as hell that you, a woman yourself...albeit it young and inexperienced...should harbor such illusory stereotypes about woman! We no longer need to show our legs...or any other portion of out anatomy...in order to do as well, or better than, our male counterparts!"<br /><br />While impressed that she had managed this succinct diatribe within a single breath, Phil suspected she was practiced at delivering such erudite orations. Turning to look at Arlene, he thought he might have to leap across the table and slap her firmly on the back in order to re-start her breathing. Her face fixed firmly in horror, Arlene's eyes looked downward, bulging from their sockets as if she were caught in the vacuum of deep space.<br />Would she respond meekly to Lisa's tirade? Would she sit down in subdued silence, letting one of the more sagacious males from her office determine the appropriate follow up to Lisa's pronouncement? Or would her head simply explode, the result of the accumulating pressures of terminal embarrassment, spraying the surroundings with brains and blood?<br /><br />What actually happened next surprised Phil, who considered himself a hardened veteran who was inured to the vagaries of the advertising and marketing business. As a flood of tears began flowing profusely from her still-protruding eyes, Arlene raised her head and with a voice whose smoothness contrasted with the rest of her lack of poise, said softly, "How long has it been since you've taken a close look at yourself, Miss Prowess?" Clutching the sodden and crumpled papers of the proposal in one hand, she raised them high above her head as if they had become helium filled and might carry her to the ceiling.<br /><br />Her whispered delivery began to gain volume and cadence. "I mean, my God, you were my inspiration for this! Look at yourself, why don't you. You are...". She lowered the page containing the defamatory statement so that she could read it verbatim again. "...You are 'competent, yet sexy.' And it's you who knows how to 'use all her gifts -- from her brain to her delightful, fully feminine figure.'"<br /><br />Arlene first lowered the disheveled document to the table, then her disheveled self to the chair, and sobbed quietly without restraint. Mike had hidden his face in his hands, slumping in his chair with the body language of one who has just received a terminal diagnosis. Phil considered the likelihood that his boss might require cardio pulmonary resuscitation sometime before noon that day, and swore a silent oath it wouldn't be his mouth which would affix itself across Mike's gaping, flaccid maw should the emergency arise. All others at the table tried to pretend that unoccupied portions of the room held their interest. Everyone except Phil and Lisa.<br /><br />What distinguishes the great actresses of the stage from the merely proficient ones is their ability to control all aspects of their outward bearing. The audience, while under the spell of these mavens of melodrama, sees only what they are permitted to observe. Although she must have felt as if she had been bludgeoned by a truncheon, the only telltale symptom of distress Phil could detect in Lisa was a slight irregularity and shallowness to her breathing. She stood as poised as a Madonna, the tips of her fingers slightly in contact with the table top, her torso balanced evenly over both of her exceptionally long legs. Phil looked down and noticed how smooth they appeared under her stockings.<br /><br />All available air was siphoned from the room as Lisa drew in a loud breath. Debate would ensue for weeks afterwards whether her pursed lips represented a wry smile or merely a banal, frozen tic of contempt. With the menacing understatement of a headmistress, she softly crooned, "You have a great deal to learn, Arlene, and I'm certain that this mornings painful, public lesson will not be one that you will soon forget. In view of your inexperience and probable good intentions, I think it only fair that I accept your unintended blunder as a clumsy attempt at a compliment."<br /><br />Phil took a deep, exhilarating breath of his own that penetrated to the bottom of his lungs. This, he thought, was the privilege of witnessing an accomplished artisan at close range. Had he been laying on the scaffolding next to Michelangelo as he painted the Sistine chapel, he could not have been more profoundly in awe of the stalwart genius unfolding only a few feet away from him. He was momentarily seized by an impulse to fling himself at Lisa's feet and, while wrapped around her legs, to beg her to permit him an apprenticeship under her tutelage. Only the thinnest of social membranes separated him from performance of this unseemly act. Had Lisa turned her attentions to him at that moment, he would have dissolved like salt sprinkled into the sea. As it was, she continued to fix her stare squarely on her antagonist, preparing to dispatch Arlene with one final, deftly dealt blow.<br /><br />With the same ethereal grace she had exhibited when entering the room, Lisa descended without a sound into her chair. An animal at home in her lair, thought Phil, every movement calculated to mesmerize and disengage. Placing one hand on the polished surface of the table, she began to drum her fingernails. Phil looked at her hand and, for the first time, noticed that he nails were manicured in a manner that must have required hours of meticulous grooming. Completing his imagery of her as savage beast, he imagined her cleaning herself with a few slow strokes of her own tongue. He quickly banished these imaginings, fearful that the small beads of sweat appearing on his upper lip might be harbingers of a return to his pre-enlightenment condition of bodily dew.<br /><br />When she spoke again, it was in the crisp, unhurried manner with which a superior dismisses her subordinates. "Nonetheless, I think it best we dispense with hearing the rest of your proposal today. However, I expect you to expunge the sexist references from your proposal, and we'll meet back here again day after tomorrow, at 8 AM, to consider your full... amended...presentation."<br /><br />The relief felt by everyone, except Arlene, was palpable. Small rumblings of agreement were muttered around the table, and Mike fairly burbled with enthusiastic acquiescence. "You're quire right, Lisa. We can make the necessary changes right away, and have a fresh proposal ready for you in 48 hours."<br /><br />An electric thrill of excitement passed through Phil as Lisa slowly crossed her legs, and turned her attentions once again to him. Smooth, long, perfectly sculptured legs, he heard a voice say in his head. Slightly raising one eyebrow, she leaned forward as if preparing to share a confidence with him. Lowering her voice, she ran her eyes up and down Phil's body with the appraising scrutiny of one who is deciding whether or not to purchase a new garment. An apt analogy, realized Phil; had he gone but slightly more limp, he might have easily been placed on a hanger and hung in a nearby closet.<br /><br />Bringing her eyes back to his, she leaned closer still, reached out, and placed her hand on top of his extended forearm. Every tiny hair on his flesh rose with the resultant chill. Noting his reaction with evident satisfaction, she spoke again. "Perhaps you should stop being so modest yourself, Phil. I'd be willing to bet that there's more of you in this first draft than you're taking credit for. Isn't that so?"<br /><br />Had he ever been in more danger than he was at this moment, he could not recall it. Lisa was unaccustomed to being disagreed with; yet, to do so would place him back where he had begun the morning. No, no, in much more compromising a posture than that; for in addition to having to admit his authorship of the sin of sexism, he would be admitting to shifting blame to his guileless co-worker. Yet, was there an alternative to these unappealing options which he had not yet considered?<br /><br />In the same fashion as his earlier regeneration, realization sprang full born into his consciousness. Every lurid detail of the current situation exploded into crystalline clarity in the center of his forehead; could it be that his entire existence had been a preparation for this single moment of salacious truth? He knew the exact answer Lisa anticipated, and fully embraced its consequences. The erstwhile elusive source of irony contained in the day's events was at last laid bare, revealing itself to be no more complex that an elementary school math equation. One plus one was, as always, about to yield the magic number of two. "I guess there's not much point in trying to get anything by you, Lisa."<br /><br />His response had oozed forth as a low rumble, forcing the others present to move imperceptibly closer so they might share this intimacy. One exception was Arlene, whose weeping ceased as if on command at the conclusion of Phil's sentence. A rancid expression of unabashed hatred spread across her countenance, a desert storm clouding her soft features with the imprint of newly acquired cynicism.<br /><br />Phil and Lisa Prowess were unaware of these varied reactions; all others had ceased to exist except themselves. Should Phil have noticed Arlene, he would have dismissed her as easily as a playwright who, upon complete utilization of a character, peremptorily drops her from the last scene in his play.<br /><br />"Please, accept my apology, and my assurance, that we never meant to demean the status of women in the proposed video", Phil purred to Lisa. "As you have so eloquently pointed out, today's professional woman need no longer be portrayed by means of the old stereotypes. You have my personal commitment that the woman in our proposal will represent your product with all the dignity and asexuality today's professional women deserve."<br /><br />With an audacity reminiscent of his sordid youth, Phil ended his recitation with an exaggerated wink, the shadow of Lisa's earlier gesture. This, combined with his cryptic comment about just deserts, his second of the morning, should have been enough to insure him a terrible fate. Yet he felt not a hint of fear. Honed to surgical sharpness, his instincts assured him he was providing Lisa with the titillation and thinly disguised artifice she desired. As if to confirm these insights, as she slowly pulled her arm back and sat upright, Phil became aware that her breathing had become more rapid and irregular; each breath seemed to have its origins in her upper frame rather than in the diaphragm. This created the odd effect of an unevenly heaving chest moving back and forth within inches of Phil's hands. Her breasts seemed to be responding to an invisible tidal force, two identical waves swelling sporadically to full crescendo before crashing against the rocky shore of her clothing, then falling back into the ocean of her body.<br /><br />Summoning every scintilla of remaining will, Phil forced his eyes away from this wonder of human oceanography. His was the Herculean task of concentration required by one who has vowed to read a good book while standing in the midst of a great battlefield where two armies are fully engaged.<br /><br />Lisa's tongue, activated once more, spread a thin sheen of moisture over both lips. If she were to had him a sword commanding that he throw himself upon it, he would have flung himself at the blade with enthusiasm. Instead, her fingers extended towards him holding a business card which had materialized as if by slight of hand. "I have absolute faith in your abilities, Philip, and I want to help you in any what I can."<br /><br />Phil reached for the card reverentially, the holy wafer of his fantasies. Holding the sacred icon closer, he scanned its contents. On the back, he saw a single phone number written in ink. "That's my home number, Phil. I have the next couple of days off, so I won't be in the office. Let's get together and work on this. I'll expect to hear from you tonight."<br /><br />Lisa Prowess unfolded her legs and stood. Scanning the room once, she made a final evaluation of each attendee. Then walking briskly to the door, entourage in tow, she disappeared down the hallway, the soft hint of derisive laughter floating back over her shoulder.DavidMichaelSmithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15137593188998037668noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330822231390963380.post-1155969704376249402008-07-02T11:27:00.000-07:002008-10-13T14:59:22.780-07:00Phil learns proper cutlery etiquette.<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:180%;" >Grass Man</span><br /></span></div><br />The company First Sergeant, as a humiliation, had designed a procedure for removing crabgrass from the company lawn by means of a teaspoon. Thing of it is, Phil discovered, the teaspoon is an excellent utensil for burrowing under the tenacious roots of each Digitaria Ischaemum or Digitaria Sanguinalis. Better still, Phil found the work relaxing, even meditative, except for the leg cramps, so when no officers or noncoms were passing by, he laid almost prone on his side with his head cradled in one hand, as he developed a picking rhythm with the other. Tip of the spoon into the soft, red Georgia clay, a quick, brutal thrust under the plant, flick, once, twice, maybe thrice, and one representative of the many species of flora which man has designated as undesirable flies into the air.<br /><br />On another in a series of impossibly hot Dixie summer afternoons, the lawn in front of the Company C headquarters, a part of Ft. Gordon’s U.S. Army Signal Center and School to which Phil had been assigned upon his return from a year in South Vietnam, was strewn with Phil’s handiwork. The carcasses of his victims lay randomly wherever they had fallen to the assault of his utensil. He was about to begin an offensive on yet another green underdog, when a shadow cast itself across the site of his latest planned attack.<br /><br />“The fuck you doing?”<br /><br />Phil shields his eyes and sees a grinning giant standing with the sun to its back. Phil momentarily considers the possibility that some sort of reverse Jack and the Beanstalk story is unfolding in which the leviathan has climbed down a great stalk of crabgrass to avenge his photosynthetic friends. Such fanciful imagining had become more frequent over the past couple of years during which Phil had become a steady respirator of another plant species that many Vietnam veterans and other rebels looked quite favorably upon, Cannabis Sativa.<br /><br />“Fuck’s it look like?”<br /><br />The titan continues to grin, and Phil’s mind switches to the last Batman comic he read. The Joker. The army has enlisted the Joker. The giddy laugh now emitting from the behemoth makes the idea more credible.<br /><br />“Looks to me like you’ve gotten on the Sarge’s bad side.” Another enormous smile, rows of unblemished porcelain. He can just make out two gleaming blue eyes and a crop of closely cut blond hair. Are there Nordic Goliaths roaming the base? Phil decides the Brobdingnagian’s comment is not meant to deride, so he stands and extends his hand.<br /><br />“I <span style="font-style: italic;">am</span> the Sarge’s bad side. Private -- E-1 -- Phil Ailill, specializing in plant life destruction.”<br /><br />Big Boy emits a boisterous laugh that is to become one of the few delights of Phil’s remaining time as a Government Issue Joe.<br /><br />“Well, you’re doing a hell of a job, there, private. Wanna go rabbit and get a beer? You must be thirsty after all that killing. Name’s Bill. Corporal – E-3 – Bill Nita.”<br /><br />The giant places one meaty manus on Phil’s left shoulder while grasping his right hand with the other paw. He squeezes all the blood out of Phil’s rotator cuff and fingers at the same time. It is a duel gesture of acceptance, affection and protection to which, second only to the man’s grin, Phil will turn to as refuge many times in the months ahead. If only he wouldn’t clutch with quite so much torque.<br /><br />“Sarge will have me drawn and quartered. I’m already at the top of his shit list. Let’s head out after formation at 6.”<br /><br />Phil finds his own reasonableness an annoying anomaly. He prides himself on unbridled recalcitrance ever since the night he was arrested in ‘Nam for curfew violation. When the giant shakes his head in agreement, a surge of adrenalin forces a new assessment from his mouth before his brain can exercise editorial control.<br /><br />“Fuck ‘em. What’s he gonna do, send me to ‘Nam?”<br /><br />This bromidic sarcasm had become standard esculent amongst his generation of soldiers. It seemed the perfect coverall for any and every form of planned insubordination. The giant’s smile releases itself, and a grayness passes across his face.<br /><br />“You been, huh?”<br /><br />“I’ve been. You?”<br /><br />“Not yet. Waiting on orders.”<br /><br />Phil stares hard at his new acquaintance. For a terrifying instant, he sees the giant’s face drained of life, heaped atop a pile of other corpses under a jungle canopy. He’s forced to look away, not soon enough to stifle full communication of his terror to his companion. Again, the reassuring shoulder clasp.<br /><br />“Hey, don’t worry about it, man. Long as I know I get to come back and attack grass, I’ve got something to live for, right?”<br /><br />Phil manages one of those theatrical smiles of assurance he’s come to hate, the ones that mean the opposite of their alleged intent.<br /><br />“I know a guy who lives off base with his wife,” the gargantuan offers. “We can hook a ride with him to one of those swill halls in town. But, really, man, let’s wait till after formation. I don’t want to think that the first time we met I got you jammed up more than you already are.”<br /><br />ƒ<br /><br />Phil always took point, with Bill forming the rest of their two-man platoon of din and destruction. Their default roles were simple: Phil started trouble, Bill put an end to it. Even limited by Phil’s 180 pounds of mouth only, as long as he was backed by Bill’s 280 pounds of muscle stacked 6-feet 4-inches high, there were no situations that arose wherein this pairing of irresponsibleness didn’t work well. Phil at least made a cursory attempt at keeping the antagonists to a manageable number, since he was completely without merit during the course of an altercation, other than his ability to goad opponents with a heavy stream of provocative taunts. The heavy bone crushing was always left to Bill. Upon occasion, Phil managed to create chaos even his friend couldn’t handle, usually after Phil’s consumption of impossible amounts of ethanol, which his metabolism could never process quickly enough to keep up with the speed of his bending elbow.<br /><br />This is one of those nights.<br /><br />Phil had often wondered if blue laws were so named because they made his alcoholism impossible to practice everyday of the week. His sense of history was like that – Phil-centric. In the world outside Phil’s reality, blue laws were first enacted in the Puritan colonies in the 17th century as a way of enforcing certain moral codes, disallowing commerce on Sundays. In the century to follow, such codes spread throughout the colonies – including Georgia – and were extended to include the sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages. The name actually evolved as a derogatory reference to the starched uprights who followed such codes. Blue laws were adhered to by bluenoses.<br /><br />Phil liked to keep his nose red, and when Georgia bars closed promptly at midnight each Saturday, he and other dedicated dilettantes and bona fide boozers, mostly his fellow soldiers, headed northeast from the Augusta area for the short jaunt to the South Carolina state line. A caravan of careening cars of every vintage could be seen late every Saturday raising dust along Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway, like an invader’s convoy, crossing the Savannah River for the more libertine, seedy environs of western South Caroline. Phil and Bill were often at the head of this profligate motorcade, already wild-eyed and beyond boistous, ready to commence their weekly two state crime spree. Their favorite haunt, aptly named Pandora’s Box, had nothing to do with Greek mythology and everything to do with deranged debauchery.<br /><br />As its name suggested, Pandora’s Box exuded a crotch-like aroma that seemed the perfect complement to the high-pitched screeching spewing from an array of speakers placed non-strategically around the barroom. Had the decibel levels been less than that required to ensure permanent damage to the auricular nerves, the cacophony might have been identifiable loosely as music. There was no hearing of this maelstrom; it was felt, mostly as a vibratory pain starting in the head and moving throughout the body. While such sensory pandemonium made conversation impossible, combined with the bar’s low-light motif, it was the perfect environment for being subsumed into a total loss of self. The paucity of light also helped disguise the layers of accumulated filth that would reveal the true griminess of the place in the full light of day. A visitor could seek temporary refuge from this afferent bombardment by slipping into the restroom, assaulted there by the overarching odor of urine and vomit.<br /><br />It was Phil’s favorite place on the planet.<br /><br />A refuge is often thought of as a place where sanctuary is possible in a contemplative atmosphere where stress is reduced and damaged nerves can heal. A solo flute echoing through the burial chambers of the Great Pyramid of Giza; men intoning Gregorian chant in a secluded monastery; shafts of soft sunlight permeating a garden, the air filled with the gentle tremolo of birds. For Phil, the opposite was true. Vietnam had transformed him into an adrenalin junkie. Incomprehensible noise, explosions, acceleration and sudden impacts were the tissue that tied him to existence. Were his physical being capable of surviving, he would have been most at home as the test subject at an annual convention of anarchists demonstrating the effects of their latest guerilla tactics on the human body, sitting along the rim of Hawaii’s Halema‘uma‘u crater awaiting a pyroclastic flow, or stuffed into a barrel about to enter the hydraulics of Niagara Falls. On this, and every Saturday night, due to the restrictive terms of his contract with the US Army, Pandora’s Box would have to do.<br /><br />The only disruption, albeit a consistent one, to Phil’s weekly indulgence in persistent over-stimulation was his lack of the coin of the realm. A private’s salary was a stingy stipend, and Phil often found himself coming up short just when he felt his sinews tightening in a way that assured him he was still alive. Bill was generous enough to augment Phil’s bottomless thirst for alcohol when he could, but his corporal’s salary often, too, gave out at critical moment’s in the midst of Phil’s voracity. The crucial factor was the positioning of a given Saturday’s debauch in relation to payday, which came, sadly, but once a month. The further the two adventurers got from seeing the rumpled face of the company paymaster, the more likely they were to have only shrugging shoulders as a response to a bartender’s extended open palm. The last Saturday of the month was the worst, for payday was at least a tantalizing, excruciating stretch into the following Monday, if not longer.<br /><br />This is the last Saturday of the month.<br /><br />Bill looked across the table at Phil’s face with the anticipation of a child about to witness the detonation of his first M-80. He felt a mixture of dread and wonder as he watched the subterranean currents within his friend slowly burble towards the surface. They had consumed the last beer either could afford, and Bill knew they could equally ill-afford to hang out longer at the Box, or Phil’s unpredictability would soon turn him mustang. It would be hooves and horseshit aplenty before the body count could even begin. Bill inhaled deeply in preparation for his attempt to shout above the din.<br /><br />“Sget outta here, man!”<br /><br />Phil raised his head and turned it to one side. His chest swelled, as if trying to expel overly long compressed quantities of bile.<br /><br />“Fuck this place! Fuck it!”<br /><br />Phil propelled himself from his chair like he might be expecting to gain altitude, perhaps wishing to jettison himself from the room over the bobbing heads of the assemblage. Without warning, he veered to that side of the room closest to the tiny kitchen where the Box produced varying forms of grease saturated dishes customers used as part of their prolonged attempts at suicide by toxic consumption. Bill sensed imminent danger, but was blocked from Phil by a phalanx of party goers. He stretched a long arm in Phil’s direction, able only to grasp air. Phil was stealthily snaking his way to the small slit that connected the kitchen with the bar, a tiny shelf with heating lamps where the one nonplussed waitress could retrieve victuals for selected members of the gyrating throng who packed the joint. At the moment, two orders of burgers with fries were awaiting her servile ministrations. Bill could make out Phil’s expression of delighted lunacy as he reached for the switch that controlled the heating lamps. With a quick flick of a finger, Phil flipped off the lights.<br /><br />Survivors of car accidents or other near death experiences universally tell of compressed time as the defining characteristic of their flirtation with the Angel of Death. This slow motion effect now saturated Bill’ perception, forever to stamp his memory of the minutes to follow as if a lifetime had been squeezed into the space of a sub-atomic particle. The other component of observation he noticed was a sense of absolute disembodiment. He had no legs to move with, nor arms with which to push. He could no longer hear the raucousness of the room. His breathing had stopped, for there was no awareness of “body,” so there were no lungs. The only window to consciousness was vision, and it had widened to include almost everything peripheral. To complete the surreality, only two people in the room were in motion – Phil and his newly emerged pursuer.<br /><br />Phil was two feet beyond the spot where the light switch protruded from the wall. As he attempted to gain traction and speed for the front door of the Box, a bouncer had appeared, apparently from a parallel dimension where he laid in wait for such occurrences, and was now within striking distance of the unsuspecting Phil. Bill watched with impotent horror as the bouncer’s arm came up and swung in a perfect arc across the top of Phil’s scull. It could have been nothing more than a rebuking slap to the apex of Phil’s cranium, had not the bouncer’s arm extended into a thick, 2-foot long wooden truncheon. There was a loud crack, and a spurt of bright red hematic fluid flew up from the middle of Phil’s pate. Phil’s impish countenance was as suddenly replaced with a look of surprise and dysphoria.<br /><br />As quickly as the time/space continuum had congealed into moments of agonizing listlessness, it now expanded into a frenzy of seismic activity. Those closest to the action screamed and began to move away in unison, a field of human wheat blowing in a summer’s breeze. The bashing bouncer was joined by another steroidal creature, each man roughly lifting Phil’s limp carcass off the barroom floor, hauling him like a combat casualty from the field of battle. The tips of Phil’s shoes carved two crevasses of cleanliness across the grimy floor as he was dragged away, all three men disappearing through a nearby door that Bill had never noticed, till now. It was one of those portals intended to remain undetectable until its dark purpose was required, and Bill knew instinctively what awaited his wounded comrade on its other side.<br /><br />A third brute had appeared to guard the door, but Bill shoved him aside, giving the ogre an opportunity to asses his chances. One look at Bill’ raised hams, and the troll backed into the protective anonymity of the crowd. Bill kicked the door open, and froze in place. The pistol that had been rammed inside Phil’s mouth swung towards the commotion at the door and pointed itself directly at Bill’s face. He wondered if Ft. Gordon had enough neurosurgeons on standby to work simultaneously on two recently shattered heads. The thought of lying next to Phil as they both had dead brain tissue removed was oddly soothing.<br /><br />“You come in here looking for trouble, motherfucker, and you found it!”<br /><br />The gorilla with the gun was holding Phil in a chair with his other hand. Phil didn’t look much like Phil, his face and shirt soaked in the red juice of life. Somehow, he managed a tiny smile. Bill slowly raised his arms into the air.<br /><br />“No, man, no! We’re cool here, man. I just came in to take my friend home, that’s all man. We cool…we cool. All right? I know he’s a stupid motherfucker, and he shouldn’t of turned your light off, but you got him good, man. He’s learned his lesson, right Phil? You learned your lesson, right man, right?”<br /><br />Bill knew the longer he talked, the less likely a round was going to get squeezed down the barrel of that pistol.<br /><br />“Yeah, Bill, sure, I learned my lesson. Never fuck with assholes.”<br /><br />When Phil grinned, his teeth were obscured by accumulated crimson. He looked like a battered boxer at the end of 10 rounds of mismatch. Bill buried his face in his hands, refusing to take in what was to follow. Pistol packer slowly lowered the gun, turned to Phil, and let out a small chuckle. The pistol smashed across Phil’s face, and the sound of his nose cartilage shattering and two teeth being torn from their lodgings could probably be heard outside the room.<br /><br />“Your friend here’s got a mighty big mouth.”<br /><br />Pistol packer was addressing Bill, as one of his sycophants handed him a wash rag to clean his hands of Phil’s coagulate. Mercifully, Bill noted, the pistol was exchanged for the towel.<br /><br />“Got a big nose, too, that he likes sticking in places it don’t belong. But I think with the improvements I’ve made, he ain’t goona be using his big mouth…or his big nose…for a long time.”<br /><br />Penitentiary humor. The owner or manager or whatever he was, as well as his four lieutenants, had enough scars and tattoos in evidence to make it obvious that they had done time in places where this sort of bravura was considered hilarious. They cackled at the boss’s vapid idea of a witty one-liner. Phil was going in and out of consciousness. Bill slowly lowered his arms.<br /><br />“Get this monkey outta here,” the gorilla said. “Don’t never bring him back. I see you two in here again, you’re gonna wind up at the bottom of the Savannah.”<br /><br />“Yeah, sure, no problem.” Bill cautiously made his way to the bleeding heap that was his friend. Phil felt himself dropping into the void.<br /><br />Leaving Pandora’s Box was cinematic. The Red Sea mob parted for Bill’s Moses, as he carried the unconscious Phil across the room. It seemed as though Phil’s blood covered the interior of the entire bar. Certainly it oozed with gusto onto Bill, as he cradled his friend’s unrecognizable head, and Phil was already awash from stem to stern in the stuff. Bill walked slowly to the door, trying to remember that household tip regarding the removal of blood stains. The results of this carnage would require an industrial strength application of whatever it was. A clothes burning bond fire would probably be best.<br /><br />ƒ<br /><br />Tiny flashes of white light, while the world spins by at immeasurable speed. Blackness and lacuna. More lights, these of varying color and symmetry.<br /><br />“Just lie still, little brother. We’re gonna get you fixed up.” Bill’s voice echoes from several miles distance.<br /><br />No visions now, only pain. The sensation of rising gorge, a taste of acidic, effulgent emetic.<br /><br />“Goddamn it, not in the fucking car!” Why does Bill’s voice smell like vomit?<br /><br />Tires digging to a gravely stop. Voices in some sort of contest, one trying to layer itself atop the other. Hands everywhere, on his legs, under his arms and neck. The merciful sensory deprivation, once again, of falling into the depths of a well.<br /><br />The light is white and bright. This must be the tunnel, comes the thought. Uncle Bob is here to welcome me to the Other Side! This dream is brought into question by Uncle Bob’s stern rebuke.<br /><br />“Yer a fuckin mess, private. A disgrace to the uniform. What happened?”<br /><br />Don’t they know everything here already? And why is he bringing up that old canard about official clothing having some sort of significance? Are they as stupid up here as they are down there? Uncle Bob comes into focus. He’s wearing a white coat, like a good angel should, but sprouting from the top is a military shirt with captain’s bars. Oh, dear God Almighty Father, I’ve been sent to Army heaven, Phil thinks, as his panic rises. Maybe that’s what happens when you die while still in the ranks. Remanded to a place of the eternal stint, no discharge allowed because you didn’t finish your contract on terra firma.<br /><br />“Like I said, sir, he fell.”<br /><br />They must have shot them both. How else could he hear Bill’s voice?<br /><br />“Kind of a magic fall. Like that bullet that took Kennedy out.” Uncle Bob has developed a wry sense of the absurd since his demise.<br /><br />Phil tries to speak, and the neuralgia of missing teeth and a swollen proboscis causes a spasm of nausea. These compete with the agony at the apex of his head. “I still have a body, I’m still alive, this isn’t Uncle Bob, I am in deep ship,” all dawn at once.<br /><br />“Fell on concrete, sir. Did kind of a swan dive.”<br /><br />The “s” words have a little whistle to them. He has been transformed into a wounded bulbul. He feels a tenderness and endearment for himself, another innocent avian blasted from the sky. Uncle Bob seems unmoved by these sentiments, staring back with a mask of icy unconcern.<br /><br />“If I get a police report, or a civilian complaint, that contradicts your account…gentlemen…” – his gaze draws Bill into the indictment – “…I will be speaking with your commanding officer. “<br /><br />He makes a few more pen marks on Phil’s chart for dramatic punctuation.<br /><br />“Till then, I’ve sown you up, Private Ailill, so you and your buddy can get the hell outta here.”<br /><br />Why do they always have to put so much emphasis on the word “private?” I know I’m at the bottom of the pecking order, low man on the totem pole, blah, blah, Phil thinks. Always got to rub it in, though. It they carried a salt shaker, they could apply some sodium for maximum effect.<br /><br />ƒ<br /><br />If there was a place on Phil’s head that didn’t throb with excruciation, he couldn’t find it. It would be at least a week before the base dentist could see him. There was little point in resisting the inevitable; whenever he opened his mouth, he looked like one of those local inbred crackers who lose their teeth as part of their daily non-hygiene program. Besides, the broken nose had turned into a spectacular rainbow of colors and had swollen to softball dimensions, and most people’s eyes grew wide with amazement as they were inexorably drawn to the sight of this grotesque vision. His nose resembled more a gigantic pustule or tumor than a device designed for air intake. When Phil rolled over in his sleep and this bulbous growth came into contact with the pillow, the resulting sensations were an immediate entrée into his own private planetarium. Stars exploded across his brain, and the boys in the barracks had become tempted to tape his mouth shut in order to spare themselves his squeals of nocturnal torment. Pity prevailed, for everyone knew that such a strategy would result in Phil’s asphyxiation. Phil had become a mouth breather, as there was no possibility that atmosphere could pass through the tangle of mangled tissue once identifiable as nostrils.<br /><br />That was the good news.<br /><br />The ledger of Phil’s military misery had expanded exponentially since that memorable night in the womb of Pandora’s Box. No official complaints had been filed, but an informal stream of grandiose tales had made their way across the vast expanse of Ft. Gordon. Each assumed a scope of legendary proportions. By the time the story filtered back to company headquarters, Phil and Bill’s misadventure has assumed the trappings of an epic poem on the scale of Beowulf. To the enlisted men, Phil was a majestic hero. To the brass, he had assumed a mantel of malevolence normally reserved for a classic antagonist, not unlike Beelzebub, the prince of demons himself.<br /><br />Phil was therefore surprised only by the timing of his excoriation by the company commander. Usually the captain from Alabama’s backwoods was precise and surgical when administering humiliations to the young malcontent. Public floggings were his favorite, and Phil had lived through countless company formations during which he was the primary recipient of Captain Baker’s fulminations, always delivered within millimeters of Phil’s countenance. This time, apparently, the captain simply could not contain himself and wait for a communal execution. Upon hearing the rumors behind the news while sipping suds at the base NCO club, he underwent an instant permutation, leaving his humanity behind to emerge as unmodulated electricity. Such shapeshifting was made possible by the white hot loathing that he had developed over the last few months, ever since the insubordinate Private Ailill had emerged as the bane of his army career.<br /><br />On a moonless night less than a week after the Incident, as Phil euphemistically referred to it, Phil had one again thrown himself into the mercy of his bunk. Moments after finally dropping to sleep amidst his latest round of agony, Phil felt the foot of his bed rise in seeming defiance of gravity. Before having time to adjust to this defiance of physics, his body became a projectile, catapulted like a medieval missile from a torsion-powered ballista. He landed, of all unpleasant places, flat on his face. Bleeding anew, he rolled over to find the distorted mask of the captain, replete with sour beer breath, inches from the inflamed tissue of his muzzle.<br /><br />“Fell, did ya? Right into a good pistol whippin’, swat I hear!”<br /><br />Phil became mesmerized by the small dollops of spittle that darted his way from the captain’s flapping beak. He recalled those Asian raptors he had seen photos of in National Geographic, and imagined that at any moment, the captain’s longing to devour him would overcome the man turned bird of prey, and he would begin gnawing at the center of his face. He remembered the article that went with the NG photos, about the “sky burial” of Tibetan Buddhists who dismembered their dead before giving the pieces over to the local buzzards on a mountain top. The thought of being digested by the redneck perched above him sent another spasm of wretchedness through Phil’s being. These meanders were abruptly interrupted as the captain clenched a fistful of Phil’s t-shirt, and lifted him to a standing position. It made Phil feel like a tissue puppet in the hands of a deranged four year old.<br /><br />“Yew and yer stupid friend are on report! Article 15’s for the two of yew. “<br /><br />Startled that there was enough space left between them to sustain the maneuver, Phil recoiled as the captain leaned in closer. Had Phil blinked, his lashes would have touched his commander’s grimacing visage.<br /><br />“Guess yew know what that means, hey, shit fer brains?”<br /><br />ƒ<br /><br />Phil looks up from his tool, wipes away streams of sweat with his sleeve, and stares at Bill, who is pretending deep engrossment in his work to avoid having to speak to his companion.<br /><br />“Hey, I already told you. I am fucking sorry, okay? What more do you want from me, man?”<br /><br />Bill continued to stare icily at the ground beneath his fingers.<br /><br />“Look at it this way, pal; you didn’t have to wait till you got back to learn this new skill, one that will serve you well when you get out and must become a productive membrane of society.”<br /><br />Despite his effort to retain a stoical expression, Bill’s face begins to soften. Phil is certain he notices the beginnings of a smile at each end of his friend’s pursed lips. Phil reaches over and lightly punches Bill in the upper arm, a gesture he has learned never to overdue, unless he wants a crippling blow in return.<br /><br />“You’re a grass man now, pal. Yeah, a real class…grass man…”<br /><br /><br />---DavidMichaelSmithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15137593188998037668noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330822231390963380.post-63530591046174020022008-06-27T14:37:00.001-07:002008-06-27T14:37:55.038-07:00<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">Eat Too Much And Die </span></span><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:85%;">Based on several true stories</span><br />"LT" is Luba, a camp survivor.<br />"JR" is one of the children she saved.<br /></div><br />LT:<br />Were the Allies really coming? During the first week of April, we knew everything was about to change. The sound of gunfire, air raid sirens and bomb explosions moving closer and closer seemed to tell us that the end of the war might be near, at least for Bergen-Belsen. The SS guards became strangely civil to us. I suppose they wanted to have us tell the Allies how good they had been to us during the final days. One of the SS officers, the one whose finger I had bandaged, told me he would make sure that the children got all the food they could eat, and he found a big pot for me to carry the food in, right out in the open. He filled it with bread, as well as meat and sugar which we had seen none of during our entire time in the camp, with the exception of the one time I got some horse meat for us to eat.<br /><br />A few days later, we noticed other changes with the SS as well, and there were rumors floating around the camp that a plan was afoot to poison our food, maybe even to blow us up in the barracks while we slept.<br /><br />JR:<br />In the days leading up to the Liberation, the SS guards started to wear white bands around their arms, a sign of their willingness to surrender without a fight. And they were not wearing guns anymore.<br /><br />LT:<br />The day before we were liberated, April 15, 1945, British troops were outside the camp. We learned later that the camp Commandant, Josef Kramer, had made a deal with them to wait three days outside the camp before entering in order to avoid any fighting. The SS, he promised, would surrender without any problems. The allies smelled a rat and sent in a spy who found out that all the food in the kitchen that day had been poisoned. The SS wanted the extra time to poison us rather than see us set free. The Allied spy also found dynamite under many of the barracks. The decision was made to come into the camp without further hesitation.<br />On the day of the Liberation, I walked to the kitchen as usual, but it was abandoned; there was not one soul there. I left without taking any of the small amounts of food laying around. If the rumors about poisoned food were true, I did not want to take a chance with the children. On my way back to the barracks, I heard a loud speaker in the distance coming closer and closer. It was blaring out several messages over and over again in several languages. I will never forget the words I heard.<br /><br />"You are free. You are free", the voice said again and again, in German, Polish, Russian, English, French, maybe Dutch, as well. "The SS are gone. No one will harm you any longer. Food and other help is on the way. Your are free; you are free!" My first thoughts were of the children, and I ran as fast as my legs would take me to the barracks to tell them the news. The Allies were here! We were free!<br /><br />JR:<br />The allies came rushing in with two tanks only because their troops were not fully prepared to come in, and they wanted to make certain the SS would not poison us or blow us up.<br /><br />I had a hell of a time getting to the fence because I couldn't walk very well, I was so weak from typhus. I crawled to the fence. Myself and several of the other children were gathered at the fence looking out on the main road of the camp. The camp had a wide main road that went through it, that could be seen from all the different camps.<br /><br />There was a loud speaker that was making a series of announcements about the fact that we are being liberated. They were saying that everybody should be calm and we were not to worry, not to fear, that we would be getting good food very soon and that we should not eat the food that was given to us from the camp because it is all poisoned. The voice said not to drink or eat anything until we saw a person in an Allied uniform giving it out.<br /><br />As I was standing at the fence watching these tanks come in, there was a man in the Canadian army right there on the first tank. The tank had stopped abruptly because these soldiers had not expected to find children, and they were shocked. I suppose this soldier, a captain, was even more surprised when he called out to us in Dutch, and we answered him in our language, his language as well. He was a Dutch man who had fled to Canada and joined the army. Here he was, looking at children from his own country.<br /><br />His name was Montesanis, and he asked if I had ever heard that name because he thought that his wife and children were somewhere in our camp. None of us knew anything about the possible whereabouts of his family. We told him about the location of the general camp where it was likely to find such people as he described, if they were there. I do not think he ever found them.<br /><br />An hour or two later the camp was flooded with British soldiers. We were overcome with emotion. Luba was jumping up and down with joy with her girlfriends and with some of the children. Everybody was very happy. I mean it was an unbelievable experience.<br /><br />I have all my life been a God fearing person. At this moment, I saw an image -- I will not say it was God -- but I saw an image of an old bearded man.<br />"Don't stay with this," the vision of the old man said. "Turn the page and move on with your life."<br /><br />I lay on the ground and wept.<br /><br />LT:<br />The Canadian captain who was a Dutchman came to the barracks, and we talked about what had happened over the previous few months, with one of the children translating for us. The captain pulled a small chain from around his neck and presented me with a mezuzah.<br />"This has kept me alive the entire time I've been in uniform", he said. "It has kept evil away from me, and I want you to have it. Wear it, and it will keep you safe and healthy."<br />He kissed me, and lifted me up off the ground by the waist. We were all so happy. At the same time, I could tell that this man and the other soldiers were horrified at the sight of all the corpses laying around the streets of the camp. The SS had forced prisoners to bury as many bodies as possible before the Allies came, but there were too many to dispose of before the British troops came in. There were many, many unburied dead.<br /><br />JR:<br />Corpses were piled right across the street from our barracks, across the alleyway. When you went out of the door from the barracks you would immediately look at all the bodies that were piled up there. Nude, by the way, because before the dead were picked up from each barracks and thrown into a wheel barrow for removal to the open pits used as grave sites, they were stripped of their clothes. And, you know, it was just a routine to take these bodies and throw them in there.<br /><br />LT:<br />Several days after the Liberation, the British soldiers rounded up members of the SS and made them do the job that we Jews had been doing, that is burying all of the bodies that were laying there. They brought people in from the surrounding villages and forced them to watch.<br /><br />From what I remember the SS were the same as when the shoe was on the other foot. They screamed and cried and begged for mercy just like we Jews had done.<br /><br />It didn't make me feel in any particular way. I was numb. It was just the same thing I had seen before except now it was the SS that were doing it and it was not so apparent that it was the SS because none of them were wearing any shirts or jackets. They were all in their pants and naked from the waist up because the British, wishing to make their humiliation complete, had stripped them of their uniforms. They had no dignity left, they were not such big shots anymore, just people who were afraid, and for good reason.<br /><br />Many of the women had sticks, and they were hitting the SS and carrying on. They were having fun, but I didn't particularly see it as a happy scene. I would have been happy just to see them shot. But this particular turnabout, I didn't spend too much time watching it.<br /><br />One SS guard, an older man perhaps in his 60s, looked pale as he threw our dead into the ditch. He turned to me and said, "I cannot do this. I am hungry and tired."<br />I had some old bread still in my pocket from one of my trips to the kitchen.<br />"Untersturmführer, are you hungry?" I asked.<br />"Oh, yes!" he said.<br />"Here!", I said, thrusting the hard crust at him. "Eat this!"<br />"Das Kind", he said, "I cannot eat this." Never in all my years of unpleasant dealings with the Germans had any of them used the endearment "child" in reference to a Jew.<br />"Why not?" I asked. "This is what you gave us to eat. Why can't you eat it?"<br />He did not answer as tears welled up in his eyes. Was this cruel of me? Perhaps, but we had been mistreated by the SS for so long, it was natural to take some pleasure from their discomfort. My bad feelings for them did not last. It is easy to feel sympathy for any human when you see them suffer, even a member of the Allgemeine SS. Three days after the Liberation, a man in civilian clothes came to me with a letter. "I helped you once," it read. "Now please help me. I need civilian clothes so I can escape." It was from the SS guard who had told me I reminded him of his wife, the one who allowed me through the gate separating the men's camp from the women's camp. The one who knew I was taking food to the children each day and who did nothing to stop me.<br /><br />Why not? I thought. Yes, he was an SS guard, a German, a man from a country which had tried to kill every Jew in Europe, but he was still a human being who needed help, and he had made it possible for me to keep the children alive week after week in those final days of the war. But I would have to be careful. If any of the other survivors knew what I was doing, they would probably kill me for helping a German.<br /><br />I had some idea what size clothes he wore, and I found the things he needed amongst some of the survivors. We were free to move around as we wished, so I went to where he was hiding in a public toilet in the town outside the camp. I had a bundle with some bread, a tin of canned meat, and the clothes he requested. From outside the little building, I called out, "It's Luba; I've brought the things you need, plus a little food. Good luck. I hope you make it. I will never forget you. You saved the children."<br /><br />There was no reply. I put the package on the ground outside the door and left.<br />---<br /><br />After all we had been through, who would think that food would now become a problem? For some prisoners, the large amounts of rich foods available from the British were more than a problem; they were fatal.<br /><br />JR:<br />There was an argument among some of the British army medical people whether to slowly feed us or to just give us whatever we could handle. The minute the Allies came in, their people gave us all the food we wanted, and there was an understandable tendency to eat too much of the kind of rich foods our bodies had not had in them for months.<br /><br />LT:<br />The British soldiers were wonderful. They brought us chocolates and all sort of other foods. Many survivors, whose bodies had not been used to digesting much food, stuffed themselves with all that the British offered them, our liberators thinking they were doing a kindness to us. What should have happened, of course, is that the survivors should have slowly gotten used to eating good food. For my part, I would not allow the children to indulge themselves in this way, and some of the other women in the camp cursed me, saying I was being cruel by depriving the children of the good food that was available at last. But I knew their starved bodies needed to go slowly, and I am sure some of them would have died had I not insisted they eat little portions of only certain foods until they grew stronger. Each day, I would increase what each child was allowed to eat, a little bit more soup or meat today than the day before.<br /><br />We got more than food as well. Much more; the British brought in nurses, doctors, and many others to help us. They moved us to the barracks where the SS had lived. What a difference. They had comfortable beds, with real sheets, clean sheets, and towels. They gave us soap and shampoo. The British wanted to bring everyone together so they could figure out how to get us to our homes, so more children were trucked in from surrounding camps -- Poles, Russians, Hungarians, French and others, some with their mothers, many orphans. The British soldiers made swings and other play things for the children. They brought busses into the camp and took us for rides around the countryside. It was a wonderful, exhilarating time.<br /><br />JR:<br />We were all busy kids, busy being spoiled by these wonderful liberators. Everybody had their own soldier, their own buddy. Your buddy would come in the morning and hang out and give you chocolate and take you around in the jeep and try to do the things that kids liked to do.<br /><br />In my case, because I was one of the older children, a Dutch soldier took me in his jeep and we went to Buchenwald. I can't remember what exactly for, some kind of official business. It was a three day trip back and forth. We stopped at farms along the way, and the soldier would take his gun out and force the German farmers to feed us. All the liberating soldiers were very angry at how we had been treated, and they were very rough with the Germans.<br /><br />When we returned, Luba and the children had been moved into the barracks once occupied by the SS. These quarters were better than any of us had ever lived in during our entire lives. We all came from modest backgrounds, having lived in tiny apartments in Amsterdam, and this was a luxury building. There were clean sheets. There were beautiful kitchens with clean stoves, radios in the wall. The SS certainly knew how to take care of its own.<br /><br />LT:<br />The children laughed, cried, talked and played a great deal. We were in shock that we had made it, that the SS were gone. At the same time, there was a lot of apprehension about what was next. Where would we go? How would we get home, those of us who thought there still might be such a place for us after all these years? I began to realize that my time with these wonderful children would eventually come to an end, something I never thought about before the Liberation. While I was happy that they would be reunited with their families, my heart was heavy because I knew that parting with them would be very painful. So much of our experience in the camps had to do with loss, and here I was about to experience loss again, one of the greatest losses of my life.<br /><br />JR:<br />Germany surrendered on May 6, just three weeks after our liberation. That is something I remember very well, because I was so curious about what happened to Hitler. I can still see the face of the solider I asked.<br />"Do you know what happened to Hitler?" I pleaded.<br />"He committed suicide," he answered.<br />That was when I truly believed it was all over with at last.<br /><br />It was right around this time, I think, that the Allied soldiers gathered us all together. They thought we would enjoy watching them burn the camp barracks to the ground. There has never been a more satisfying fire, I don't suppose, for any of us. The soldiers did it, they said, because the buildings were infested with lice and disease. I think they also did it as another way to make us happy.<br /><br />We stood by silently and watched these lice-infested old buildings go up in flames and smoke. It was a way of both demonstrating to us that the evil was truly over, but it was also a matter of hygiene. Few of us seem able to remember events from our early childhood. But life in a concentration camp has a way of making strong impressions. One of the children who stood and watched the burning of the barracks was a five year old boy named Ronnie Abaham. Ronnie grew up to become a well-known painter. In the early 1990s, he presented me with an oil painting that depicts that day the barracks were burned. In it, you can see so much of the pain and darkness we all took with us from that place.<br /><br />LT:<br />Once the barracks were gone, the children had received medical attention, clothes, and food, and the authorities began to look for their relatives, I knew it would not be long before we would be separated. I was determined to stay with them as long as possible, and the children let the Allied authorities know they wanted their Schwester Luba around too. Before we knew for certain when the day would come when they would return to Holland, the decision was made that I could accompany them back to their homeland. This way, they would feel secure with an adult they had come to trust and love, up until the time they could be reunited with family.<br /><br />JR:<br />Luba now had more time than before when every moment of her day was spent taking care of all the children. She still took care of us, making sure the kitchen prepared the right food for us. She still wanted to be our mother. But the overall management of the kids was now in the hands of the Allies. Especially the Dutch among these Allied troops, and there were quite a few of these. Because we children were Dutch, the Dutch soldiers and other officials felt, I guess, especially responsible for us. They were very hands on about their management of the kids.<br /><br />As far as all the children were concerned, Luba was still the adult we looked to as our primary caretaker. I don't think the Dutch authorities saw it quite that way.<br /><br />About four weeks after the Liberation, a Dutchman whose name I think was Tienis came to us and said, "I'm trying to get a plane for you to get you kids back to Holland. Would you like that?"<br /><br />Naturally, we all said yes because that was where we expected maybe to find our families. The next day, the Dutchman returned and said we were all going in a military plane leaving the next day at ten o'clock in the morning.<br /><br />LT:<br />When the day of the trip back to Holland arrived, I was unsure what to do. Should I return with the children or say goodbye? If I did not go with them, where would I go? If I did go with them, what would I do in a strange country where I did not speak the language or understand the customs? The children had crowded around me each day, crying, begging me to travel with them back to their homeland. They told me that if I didn't like it in Holland, I could always return to Poland. Like anyone who loves their birthplace, they were certain I too would fall in love with Holland and want to remain there.<br /><br />Finally, I decided to go, even though I did not get a very warm reaction from the Dutch authorities who now took charge of the situation. Hermina was to stay behind and care for another group of children who had been brought to the camp after the Liberation. The Diamond Children and I were told that nurses from Holland would accompanied us on the plane ride.<br /><br />The plane we flew on made the flight a terrifying experience. It was not a passenger plane, but rather a troop transport, so we were strapped into harnesses along the sides of the plane, and some of the children were hysterical the entire journey. Many were so sick to their stomachs that the entire plane smelled of vomit. The noise of the engines was so loud, you could hardly hear someone speaking even if they tried to yell above the din. The children clung to me throughout the trip, rejecting any attempts at comforting them from the nurses or soldiers who were with us. None of the children knew for certain whether they would be reunited with their parents or other loved ones. The only thing they know for certain is that they were leaving the Nazis behind and were finally heading back to their homeland.<br /><br />We landed in Eindhoven in the south of Holland, not far from the border with Belgium, although most of the children were from the Amsterdam area. There were a few relatives waiting there who had learned that the children were on their way, but most of the children were still unsure who if anyone from their family was still alive. A military truck came and took us from the plane. They placed us all temporarily in an old school house. They gave us some blankets, and we had to make do with sleeping on cots.<br /><br />This was not a comfortable time for me, for the Dutch were not warm to me, which I found surprising in view of the role I played in saving the lives of so many of their children. Because of the language barrier, there were few words exchanged between the authorities and me when they came to claim a child. There would be a "thank you", and that was about it. While some of the British soldiers who were Jews could communicate with me by speaking Yiddish, I did not find one Dutch official who could speak to me in that language. The children were doing a lot of chattering, so I assume they were trying to explain who I was to the Dutch officials, and how I had become their "Schwester Luba", begging them not to separate us.<br /><br />JR:<br />It is true that the reception Luba received was a cool one, but in retrospect, you cannot be angry. First of all, the Dutch were overwhelmed with the number of people that came back so quickly. Second of all, a lot of the people returning from the camps, as well as the people back at home, had been fighting for their lives, so everyone had a fierce attitude. Everyone was emotionally drained, and not very cooperative. If you said to them, "Get up tomorrow morning at six", they would give you an argument about that because they were all used to fighting every inch of the way. There was a wildness about almost everyone that you could see in their eyes.<br /><br />These kinds of events don't unfold like they do in a storybook.. Sure, people were glad the war was over, but I think it had been so long since anyone had felt joy or gratitude that they did not know how to feel these things right away.<br />Everyone in Holland had just had a horrible experience with the occupation. And frankly, some of them may not have even liked Jews, that is another factor. The war was over, but some things never change.<br /><br />LT:<br />After being in their country for a couple of days, the Dutch authorities found a translator for me, and I was finally able to communicate with the adults. They formally invited me to stay in the Netherlands, showing me a large, government-owned house that they said I could live in for free for the rest of my life if I wished. My first thought was that, while this was a kind and generous offer, what would I do alone in a strange country where I did not speak the language? The children were leaving me, one by one, and staying there would only remind me every day of their loss to me. I thanked the Dutch, but declined their offer. Some of the older children who had been reunited with their families came back to visit me, bringing me food, trying again and again to talk me into remaining in Holland. But I had no interest in staying in this strange, uncomfortable land.<br /><br />While they may not have been overly expressive in their thanks to me, the Dutch authorities also gave me a document, a piece of paper that recognized my part in saving the children. It said that should I ask for it, the government or any of the people of Holland would give me any kind of help that I might ask for.<br /><br />JR:<br />There were so many urgent problems that were facing us, and the situation became somewhat confused. Luba decided she wanted to go back. She seemed lost because the whole reception was a lot less ideal than we had envisioned. We always thought when we came back that the Prime Minister or the Queen would be waiting to welcome us. It would take a long time before people calmed down enough to become reflective about what had happened to them and to their fellow countrymen, children included.<br /><br />At first, I was told that I could not return to Amsterdam right away because the bridges between Eindhoven and there were still out. But after two weeks or so, it was my turn to leave. I never really had much of a chance to say goodbye to Luba. Everything was happening so fast.<br /><br />LT:<br />Although the older children could identify the younger ones, they were still the most difficult to place, and I ended up with some of the babies as the last of the children for me to take care of. As some of the children were processed for return to their families, their parents or other relatives often had had to come for them at night when they were asleep, so anxious were they over being separated from me. Daytime separations were often filled with tears and hysteria. This was understandable when you consider what we had been through and how I had become the central source of security for them over the past few months. When Jack finally left for a relocation center in Amsterdam, my heart sank. This was one of the worst days of my life up to that point.<br /><br />After the last child left, I thought at first about joining my sister in Argentina. Then I considered that there were still many displaced children back in Bergen-Belsen, and I told the Dutch authorities I wanted to return there. I received some documents from the government that would allow me to travel from their country to wherever I chose to go. I felt completely lost, worse than I had ever felt during my days in the ghetto or in either camp. That may be difficult to imagine, but these children had come to mean so much to me that when the last one was gone, I felt as if my life had ended. I found myself wishing I had never been born, a thought that never crossed my mind during all the hard times in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. Some of the older children would not end their campaign of trying to convince both me and the Dutch authorities that I should stay in their country, but my mind was made up.<br />---<br /><br /><br />I was told that I must catch an unscheduled flight that would land first in Nuremberg, Germany, and then fly on to Bergen-Belsen. At the time, of course, I had no idea that many infamous Nazis would be tried in Nuremberg, including the former commandant of Bergen-Belsen, Josef Kramer. He would be found guilty of war crimes and hanged.<br /><br />The Dutch captain who gave me the mezuzah on the day of our Liberation took me to the little military airport at Eindhoven. Since we had no idea when the plane would pass through, the captain was kind enough to make a make-shift bed for me by taking out the back seat of his car and putting the cushions on the floor of the small building that served as a terminal. That way, I could sleep but would be ready whenever the flight became available. He waited with me, and about 11:00 PM that night which was sometime in late spring of 1945, we learned that a flight would soon land that could take me on my way.<br /><br />When the plane arrived, the captain walked up to me and asked for my passport. I had none, and he was very surprised at this. The officer told me to give the captain the document which the Dutch officials had given me in Eindhoven. When he read what the government people had written, that I had saved fifty-two of their children, he put his arm around me and said, "You can fly wherever you want that this plane goes. I will take you with me anywhere you want to go -- London, if you like!"<br /><br />When I arrived in Nuremberg, a woman soldier met me at the airport there, and we traveled many hours by car, arriving at Bergen-Belsen mid-morning. It was an incredible scene when we got there, something I had no reason to expect. Somehow, Hermina and the group of ninety-five children she was looking after had gotten word that I was returning. The car had to move slowly because the streets were clogged with flowers and children. I was stunned to see these children lining the streets and cheering me. They had tied flowers everywhere along my route. They were singing songs, and calling out, "Schwester Luba, Schwester Luba!" It was a real contrast to the greeting I had gotten in Holland, and it made me feel loved at a time when I really need it.<br /><br />Some of these other children had been brought to me by the Germans in the final days before the Liberation. Others came to me in the days after the Liberation. The British would bring them to me whenever they found a stray Jewish child. They were from all over Europe, and the authorities were having no luck in locating their families. Or worse, they soon discovered that this or that child had not surviving family, that they were one of the millions of orphans who had survived the horrors of Hitler's Reich.<br /><br />The question became one that has been with the Jewish people for thousands of years: where could they go? As if in answer to our prayers that these beautiful little ones too might find a place to call home, the government of Sweden announced that they were willing to take them in and find them homes. Hermina and I decided that this group of children also needed a loving escort. We would travel to Sweden, where I could meet another of the great loves of my life. Someday, I will tell you that one, too.DavidMichaelSmithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15137593188998037668noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330822231390963380.post-25213546238685512652008-06-27T14:30:00.000-07:002008-06-27T14:32:30.340-07:00<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">War</span><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Gordian Knot</span></span><br /></div><br /><div style="text-align: center;">War does not determine who is right, only who is left.<br /><div style="text-align: right;">Bertrand Russell<br /></div></div><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">In Greek legend, the Gordian knot was the name given to an intricate knot used by Gordius to secure his oxcart. Gordius, who was a poor peasant, arrived with his wife in a public square of Phrygia in an oxcart. An oracle had informed the populace that their future king would come riding in a wagon. Seeing Gordius, the people made him king. In gratitude, Gordius dedicated his oxcart to Zeus, tying it up with a peculiar knot. An oracle foretold that he who untied the knot would rule all of Asia. According to a later legend, Alexander the Great cut the knot with his sword. From that time, "cutting the Gordian knot" came to mean solving a difficult problem.</span><br /><br /><br />At the time that this account is being written, I am fully sixty years beyond my high school graduation in the late spring of 1941. Just a few months after I graduated in June of that year, the Japanese would forever imprint December 7th on our national consciousness with their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called it "a date that will live in infamy" because the attack hurled the Unites States headlong into the Second World War. Until then we had been trying as best we could to stay out of the conflict. Now the Japanese had forced us into the fray.<br /><br />My family didn't care for FDR very much. Long before the war years, Hampton Watch Works in Canton was torn down as part of the FDR Administration's efforts to get the country going during the Depression. My grandfather thought that was a bad idea, telling us that such old factories were works of art and should never have been razed. Granddad also told us that FDR backed the unions, and that since they were pretty much Russian sponsored, in his mind anyone associated with them was dangerous. Leon Trotsky was attacked with an ice-axe in his office in Mexico City on August 20th, 1940 by one of Stalin's followers, dying the next day, and that made big news in the states. My grandfather thought that if FDR weren't in the White House, none of those sorts of sordid things would have taken place.<br /><br />Still, when your country goes to war, you forget partisanship and everybody closes ranks. That is exactly what happened that day when the Japanese hit us so hard in Hawaii. It happened on a Sunday. I walked into our little neighborhood store, Bardashes, and an announcer was on the radio with the shocking news that many men had been killed at Pearl Harbor, and that our Pacific fleet had been severely crippled.<br /><br />"The Japanese aircrews achieved complete surprise when they hit our American ships and military installations on Oahu shortly before 8:00 AM," the announcer said. "They attacked military airfields at the same time they hit the fleet anchored in Pearl Harbor."<br /><br />At that moment, I knew that everything had changed, that all my plans were going to have to be put on hold because my country was going to need me to help fight a war, a war of the just against the unjust. What young, patriotic fellow would not entertain such thoughts? Little did I know then what terrible lessons I would learn about war and its consequences over the next four years.<br /><br />***<br /><br />All of us young people were caught up in patriotic fervor. I don’t remember their names after all these years, but two young fellows, twins from our local church, were on the USS Arizona, and were among the approximately 1,100 men who died when the ship went to the bottom of Pearl Harbor after being hit by Japanese bombs. These kinds of events tend to grip people in a fever of anger, sadness and resolve. Right away, some of my friends began making plans for, or actually enlisting in, one branch or another of the military.<br /><br />Waiting to get drafted seemed like a mistake to me, since then I would have no choice about which branch of the service in which I would serve. My dream was to become a pilot, so in the summer of 1942 I enlisted in the Army Air Force. This was before the days of a separate branch of the service known as the Air Force, and if you wanted to fly you had to do so as a member of the USAAF. A couple of my friends, Lowell Dean and Earl Clark, had already enlisted in the Army Air Force. That was further incentive for me to select that branch. Being two years older than the rest of us who hung out together, Lowell signed up first. He had worked at Republic Steel in Canton, and when he enlisted, he headed off to cadet school to become a pilot. He was the guy we all dreamed of becoming when we got a little older, and we all thought that somehow we might be rejoined overseas.<br /><br />Signing up for military service on my own also allowed me to take advantage of a delayed enlistment program, so I could squeeze in a little bit of college before having to go off to war. I was able to attend school from September through the beginning of winter break in December at Kenyon College, a private liberal arts school in central Ohio. The college president at the time, Floyd Chambers, was a close friend of Hap Arnold, the commanding general of the US Army Air Force, so my association with that branch of the service was a plus while I studied at Kenyon. To make ends meet as a student, I waited tables in Pearce Hall and did all sorts of other odd jobs to help pay for my education. Kenyon was a fine Episcopalian school of three hundred boys in those days, and would eventually become the alma mater of such luminaries Paul Newman Jonathan Winters.<br /><br />It was while waiting for the train that would take me to basic training at Camp Shelby in Mississippi in January 1943, that I had my first taste of alcohol. This may be unimaginable to the young people of today, but my background as a member of the Church of God kept me a teetotaler until I was fully 19 years of age. Along with all my fellow recruits, I was awaiting my train to depart, and out of a combination of boredom and curiosity, I drank a fair quantity of wine. I don't think I have ever been as sick as I was on that long train journey to Biloxi, Mississippi, riding in a glorified cattle wagon deep into Dixie. It would seem to make sense that such an experience would deter me from imbibing ever again, but unfortunately I drank again on more than one occasion during my time in the military, until a death in the family brought me to my senses. But that part of my story comes a bit later.<br /><br />Upon arrival at Kessler Air Field, we stumbled off the train in a daze, with the drill instructors hollering a barrage of directions and commands. When we arrived at our barracks, I remember suffering through a few rounds of good natured harassment from some of the local boys, who claimed they were less than thrilled at sharing a living space with a bunch of "damn Yankees". From that moment on, for the next month-and-a-half, life was a blur of early morning exercise routines, long marches with heavy packs, bad meals, rifle range practice, and the ever popular obstacle course. I had never climbed a wall before then -- who had, I suppose -- so one of my buddies showed me how to do it. I used to wonder how many walls I would be required to climb as a pilot, but I kept my skepticism to myself. We were all 18, 19 years old, and able to take on the physical challenges quite readily, even if we did complain a lot.<br /><br />Basic training lasted for about six weeks. It's a longer regimen in today's military, but they were anxious to get us trained and into action then, so they accelerated the training process. In mid-February, I left leaner and meaner, a private in the United States Army Air Force. My goal still was to follow in Lowell Dean's footsteps as a cadet, which would have advanced me to the officer's ranks. God had other plans for me, however, and I soon discovered that my eyesight was not the perfect 20/20 vision required for cadet school, despite my attempt to improve my condition by consuming vast quantities of carrot juice. By mid-March, I was back in Kenyon College, with my father pressing me hard to pursue a career in meteorology.<br /><br />"It would be an interesting career," he told me, "and it'll most likely keep you safe and out of combat."<br /><br />The entire arrangement was less than satisfactory as far as I was concerned. I didn't want to avoid combat, and I wasn't that interested in the difference between cumulus and cirrus clouds. If I wasn't going to make it as a pilot, I was ready to settle for the next best thing. I told my father, much to his displeasure, that I was going to sign up for radio school. This would assure me a spot in one of the Flying Fortresses built by Boeing, which were pounding the Germans day after day, slowly destroying their ability to make war. I might not get to pilot one of the great planes, but I'd be a member of one of the crews that were already legendary for their dangerous heroics over the skies of Europe.<br /><br />Radio school proved difficult to get into as well, and my first stop was gunnery school in Yuma, Arizona in the summer of 1943. Here we were immersed mostly in the workings of the 50-caliber machine gun, the basic weapon of defense on board the various B-17 Flying Fortresses. And immersion is certainly what we underwent. During the six week training course, we disassembled and reassembled that weapon countless times, until I could literally do it blindfolded. The 50-caliber is a very accurate and powerful weapon. The rounds they fire are quite large, able to penetrate the metal of the various fighter planes, especially the Messerschmitts, which the German Luftwaffe sent up to meet our constant sorties of bombers.<br /><br />Of course, it wouldn't have done us much good to know only how to take apart and put back together these weapons, so we spent an equally large amount of time firing them, often at drone targets that were dragged far behind an aircraft so that even the best shot among us would have a difficult time hitting the plane that was pulling the target along. Each trainee was issued a series of bullets painted a particular color in order to measure our individual accuracy on the targets. Our weapons were situated in the center of the plane, an area generally referred to as the waist, and we alternated firing first out of one side of the aircraft, then the other. We also had a go at the tail gunner position, which was explained to us as being both a vulnerable place to be -- I'm not sure that there was really a not-vulnerable place to be aboard a B-17 -- as well as a place where the gunner had the best chance of hitting his target. That was because the fighters liked to come in from the rear, a tactic the Luftwaffe didn't begin to perfect until the waning days of the war.<br /><br />Other training activities gave the place a sort of amusement park atmosphere. We shot sheet so that we could learn about the physics of leading a target that was in motion while we were also moving. This involved driving around a two-mile track sitting in the back of a moving truck while targets were propelled through the air for us to shoot at. In the abstract, this may sound like it's not too difficult. In practical terms, it was extraordinarily difficult, and a gunner was usually awarded a Silver Star if he actually managed to shoot down an enemy plane in the midst of all the noise and confusion of a bombing run. As a waist gunner, fighters were flying by you at such rapid speeds that it was difficult to get a bead on them before they had come and gone.<br /><br />We also practiced our night vision, so that shooting at things became a constant activity, both day and night. None of us had any sense of the real horrors of shooting at, and being shot back at, by flesh and blood human beings like ourselves, men performing what they thought was their patriotic duty, while trying to stay alive to return to their families. There would be no amusement park atmosphere to that reality when the time came.<br /> <br />My orders finally came through for radio school, and within a month after graduating from gunnery school, I was on my way to Scott Field in East St. Louis for a course in radio operations that lasted about ten weeks. As with the weapons I had become so accustomed to, here we were required to take apart and rebuild the crystal radio sets found aboard the B-17s we would be flying in, and to do so again and again and yet again. <br /><br />***<br /><br />As briefly mentioned earlier, I drank alcohol with much too much abandon during my days in the Army Air Force. Perhaps I was trying to make up for lost time; more probably I was just trying to be "one of the boys". We all knew that once we got overseas, there should be none of that. We knew we would be leaving on missions every morning at 1:00 or 2:00 AM, and you can't have the mental and emotional acuity that aerial combat requires, regardless what time of day or night it takes place, if you're nursing a hangover. We were expected to discontinue our indulgences once we were assigned to our units in Europe. Some of us followed that road, others did not. I don't want to put myself in the position of judging my fellows, but from what I observed, those of us who decided to stop once we got assigned as a crew member made the better choice. Having the chance to see five or six men in a room, everybody passed out, with one or two guys sleeping in the bathtub, was enough to convince me that I wanted no part of that kind of partying. Everything seemed upside down and inside out on such occasions, and I preferred going to a USO (United Service Organizations) Club to possibly meet some nice girl or a group of people that I could soberly socialize with. I remember listening to some of my fellow servicemen trying to piece together the details of their drunken conquests. Usually, they had been so much under the influence of alcohol that they couldn't recall what they had been drinking -- scotch, bourbon, who knew, what did it matter? They would simply drink until they vomited, then start drinking again. Equally, they had no idea what the girl they were with looked like, much less what they did or did not do while with her. Where is the romance in this? There is none. Certainly I subscribe to the idea of living today to the fullest, but not at the expense of tomorrow. Of course, there was a great deal of emptiness being in the service separated from one's family and other loved ones. There was also the fear of what was to come in combat. I suppose that's why so many threw themselves into drinking with such gusto.<br /><br />Unfortunately, I resumed the habit of drinking again after my harrowing experiences in combat were at an end. One morning not too long before I was slated for discharge in Lincoln, Nebraska, some of my friends had a hard time waking me because of my previous night's imbibing. They were trying to get me up to tell me that my grandfather Williamson had died. This news was so unnerving that I didn't drink another drop of alcohol for eleven years after that day, October 10, 1945. While my drinking, of course, had nothing to do with my grandfather's death, I felt somehow unavailable to him because I had been intoxicated the night of his death. He had always been there for me, and the drinking episode left me with a tremendous sense of guilt.<br /><br />If there is a purpose to all things, this event served to clarify the minor role that alcohol would play in the rest of my life. While I allow myself an occasional drink before dinner, or some wine with my evening meal, I never would allow myself again to become so intoxicated that I could not be available to family or friends who might need me for one reason or another. If a child or grandchild needed my help, but I was too inebriated to lend assistance, what would this say about my character as a man? Not much. In terms of my life as a Christian, I feel I must always be available to my loved ones, and cocktails cannot be allowed to get in the way of that duty. My sense is that we are all charged with maintaining the God given gift of our health so that we can be ready to assist others when the need arises. We are created to have a full life and that means maintaining some sense of holiness at the center of ourselves. Alcohol takes away the chance to experience that center, the well spring from which all real happiness flows. <br /><br />Happiness is not a goal in itself. If I approach my day with the goal of making myself happy, well, lots of luck. On the other hand, if I am determined to go out today and perform what I know are right actions, happiness comes along all on its own. My experience is that when alcohol starts putting an edge on me that tells me I'm feeling good, I'd better stop, because it's a false euphoria that very soon will lead to feeling very bad, or to being AWOL from life, if I'm not careful.<br /><br />***<br /><br /> When I finished radio school, I went into what was called "transition", a time in which nine men are brought together to begin their flight training and to learn how to work as a team, the crew of a B-17. After completing gunnery school, I had been promoted to sergeant, which is three strips up. As I joined my crew, I was promoted to staff sergeant, or E6, which was three stripes up and one down. When we got into combat, I would receive my final promotion to E7, three stripes up and two stripes down, or technical sergeant.<br /> <br />Bigg's Field in El Paso, Texas, was one of several state-side staging areas where crews were assembled and trained. It was there that I first met the group of men with whom I was to share a difficult destiny, one which would prove fatal for some, and life changing for the rest of us. The names and faces of these men, all really no more than kids at the time, will remain with me forever. Sam Rodgers, from Parkersburg, West Virginia, was our pilot; the co-pilot's chair was occupied by Al Hoylt from Atlanta, Georgia; Warren Williams, our navigator, was from Rochester, New York; Charlie Loft, the engineer, was from St. Louis, Missouri; Ralph Lashell, the bombardier, was from Newport, Kentucky; Abe Asoul, was from Oakland, California; George Berbridge, the tail gunner, was from Columbia, Missouri; and I, of course, was the radio man and sometime operator of a 50-caliber machine gun near the waist of the plane.<br /> <br />In many respects, we trained ourselves, because every crew member had received extensive training in his particular job before arriving in El Paso, so the real purpose of this stage of our preparation was to get us to operate smoothly as a team. That was not an easy task. Everyone in the crew came from a more or less ordinary, middle class background, but we each had very distinctive personalities. Warren Williams, the navigator, was a pretty classy guy whom I kept in touch with for many years after the war, probably because I related to him more than I did to anybody else in the crew. Sam and several of the other crew members would go out and really tear up the town when we were off duty. Sam's mother had died when he was really young like myself, but he was an excellent pilot, despite the fact that he enjoyed sowing some wild oats. Charlie Loft and I never got along, and would sometimes engage each other in fist fights in the back of the plane while we were airborne. For the life of me, I cannot recall today exactly what all the antipathy was about, but we certainly did have a volatile relationship. I do remember that Charlie thought very well of himself, thinking he had some kind of special status amongst the crew because he had a strong relationship with Sam. I suppose that rubbed me the wrong way. At age 23, Charlie was the old man in our crew. I had recently turned 20. Of course, we had to count on each other whether we liked it or not. Fortunately, our mutual dislike for one another never got in the way of our performing our duties.<br /><br />It was in El Paso, over a six month training period, that we got our first chance to learn all about a B-17. The plane we flew in there wasn't the actual machine we would fly when we reached Europe, but was rather a training aircraft. Planes were transported from the states by ship. Nobody flew over. I suppose they didn't want to take the chance of losing an expensive airplane and crew on an oceanic crossing by air.<br /><br />As this part of our training got underway, I was anxious, like the rest of the crew, to get into the fight. By the time training was winding down, I had a chance to think more clearly and wonder just what it was I had gotten myself into. I was soon to find out. The first indication of what was to come materialized when I received word that Lowell Dean had been shot down January 19th 1944. That certainly was sobering. Lowell was initially in Tunis, Tunisia flying with the 15th Air Force and then was transferred to Naples. He was shot down and killed over Italy just before the invasion of a fifteen-mile stretch of Italian beach near the prewar resort towns of Anzio and Nettuno. We didn't know about his death at that time because there was no way to confirm whether he was missing or killed in action. But he never returned.<br /><br />***<br /><br />After our training in El Paso, we were shipped overseas, with some of the crews flying over and others, like ours, slated to travel by ship. To this day I have no idea why they transported some of us by air and some by water, but I do know that I wish I had been assigned to airborne transport. My orders sent me out of New York on a large British ship, the name of which I have mercifully forgotten. What I cannot forget is the painful passage that took eight days which seemed more like eight weeks. To maximize space, most of the people on board were we air force crew members on our way to combat, while the others on board were members of the boat's crew. With this method, bunks were always in use. We rotated, getting a bed for eight hours, then spending sixteen hours on the deck. It was a very uncomfortable way to travel. And while the British are wonderful people, and of course were our allies, they have some simply awful ideas about food. We were served a lot of mutton, a meat that puts out a foul odor and doesn't taste much better than it smells. Few of us kept a meal down during the entire passage.<br /><br />When we finally mercifully docked at Edinburgh, Scotland, I think we had each lost about ten pounds. There was no time to feel sorry for ourselves because, before we knew it, we were on a train bound for a receiving station called Stone. As anyone who has served in the military will tell you, there is an old axiom that in four words summarizes much of the service experience -- "hurry up and wait". So it was for us as we waited for our orders. Time seemed to drag on and on, and I have no accurate recollection of just how long we were there with nothing to do but wait and wonder what combat would be like.<br /><br />By this time, October 1944, the Germans were under a great deal of pressure from constant Allied bombing raids. We had advanced our air strikes over all of Germany. Our bombers were systematically destroying everything that the Germans could use to continue their war effort; trains and train depots, oil refineries, air strips, ammunition depots, and boat docks. But the bombing didn't stop there. There was, no doubt, a military oriented target wherever a bomb site was chosen, but a great deal else was being destroyed along with military targets. Entire cities were leveled, either by bombs or the fire storms they caused, or a combination of the two. The carpet bombing of Dresden, for example, with incendiaries that created a fire storm that asphyxiated or incinerated 130,000 people, is one of the more infamous examples of the consequences of our intense air campaign against Germany during the last days of the war.<br /><br />Finally our orders came, and our crew was assigned to the 94th Bomb Group, part of the 8th Army Air Force's Fourth Wing. We were attached to the 332nd squadron of that Wing, under the command of Colonel Sidney Carter, and we were given our plane which would fly on missions over Germany. We promptly gave her a name -- Piccadilly Lilly. Now it seemed that events began to unfold at a quicker pace. We were briefed by our commander, who gave us an overview of the missions we would be flying and how the rotations would work. One thing that was not mentioned, during the briefing or at any other time, was how many flights were being lost from anti-aircraft flak and fighter attacks. The attrition rate was extremely high, but what was the point of talking about something so terrifying that no one had any control over? We learned that aerial gunners were in short supply, and that volunteers were being accepted from any branch of the service. Again, the reason was obvious without necessarily having to talk about it; aerial gunners were being killed or wounded in large numbers, and men were needed to replace them.<br /><br />There was some effort made to compensate for the dangers we faced every time we took to the air. While on the ground, we were served meals in what was known as "combat mess". That meant that we ate off real china, and that our tables were waited on by a couple of enlisted men who tried hard to cater to our needs every time we ate a meal. Combat mess was a nice gesture, but the reality of imminent death was immediately at hand as soon as we left all the niceties behind on the ground.<br /><br />Our living quarters were comfortable but modest. We lived in Quonset huts, each one containing a small stove for heat. The fuel we burned in them, the wooden paste boards used to ship bombs to us, was a constant reminder of why we were there. We were grateful for the wood, though, of which there was always a steady supply. Uncounted thousands of bombs were dropped every day, so there was always plenty of crating to burn. It was quite cold when we awoke in the middle of the night to fly off to a mission, and the first thing we did upon awakening was to stoke up those little stoves. We slept in an open barracks arrangement, so privacy was a luxury none of us would enjoy until and if we got back to the states alive.<br /><br />Separate Quonset huts contained our showers and toilets, with others set aside to round out our little community's needs, one as a make shift chapel, another as an operations center. Large hangers served as between mission storage and maintenance locations for our planes, and a few parties were held in these big structures as well. Each plane had a crew chief, responsible for a team of mechanics who kept the nuts and bolts tight and, most importantly, the four engines in top operating condition. The airfield near the hangers was laid out in the middle of a farm. The idea was to make the place indistinguishable from ordinary farming country, so that from the air all that would be in evidence was a crop of wheat or rye or whatever it was the local farmers were planting that season. The real harvest from these particular fields was a daily diet of explosive power that my crew and I were about to join in serving to the Germans.<br /><br />***<br /><br /> The only people I know of who get up at one or two o'clock in the morning are farmers, monks, and B-17 bomber crews. I'm not sure that even farmers get up quite that early. Monks rise in their monasteries to pray; we rolled out of bed to drop thousands of tons of explosive devices on our fellow human beings. Some days we might get to sleep in as late as 3:00 AM, but any way you slice it, we were getting up in the middle of the night to go to work killing people. The British bombers, part of the RAF, the Royal Air Force, returned from their missions at dawn, right around the time that we Yanks were taking off for the daylight bombing runs. How it worked out this way, I don't know, although it was understood by all involved that we were participating in the more dangerous of the missions, in that it was a lot easier for the Germans to see and shoot us down in daylight hours.<br /><br />Most of us headed for the mess hall for some mud thick coffee and a hearty breakfast after we were awakened. The engineer and the gunners, including those who manned the waist, tail, ball and turret guns, had to report to the plane first to put the 50-calibers into place.<br /> <br />After breakfast, a select few of us were briefed on the day's mission. The radio operator, which in our crew was me, was the only enlisted man that went with the pilot, co pilot, navigator, and bombardier to the operations hut for the briefing, which included getting a primary and secondary target assignment and, in my case, the radio codes for the day. The secondary targets, by the way, were given to us as alternatives in case weather or other factors made it impossible for us to go after the main target. At about 4:00 AM, or as they say in military time, 0400, trucks took us out to the airfield where we boarded our aircraft. Now began another of those "hurry up and wait" periods, as we sat in our places inside the plane, waiting for everyone to get assembled so that we could take off in formation. There are film and still photographic records, as well as artist's renderings of these formations, but I submit that none of these do justice to the enormity of those enterprises as I remember them.<br /> <br />All four engines of our aircraft were roaring as we waited for all the other planes to get ready. The plane's brakes were locked, so the entire machine rocked from side to side as the power of the engines dispersed through the frame of the aircraft, making it feel as though it would tear apart while we were standing in place. When the command came over the radio telling us it was time to go, the pilot slowly released the brakes, and we began to roll down the runway, following the marker beacons positioned along the tarmac to direct us toward our takeoff position. As we were waved off by a signalman on the ground, we gathered speed, until finally achieving lift, we rose into a cold English morning sky, usually just as the sun was making the eastern horizon pink with the first glow of sunrise. It was just as likely, however, that the end of the runway wasn't visible, due to the foggy conditions often associated with a northern British Isles winter morning.<br /> <br />Anyone who has flown on one of today's behemoth commercial jetliners has undoubtedly marveled at the seeming magic of aerodynamics. It defies appearances that such enormous, heavy machinery can ever become airborne. So it always seemed to me with our Flying Fortresses. We were loaded with thousands of pounds of bombs. We might be carrying six one-thousand pound bombs for a given mission, sixty one-hundred pound bombs, or some variation thereof. There was a logic behind how each device was used, whether it was intended to penetrate and destroy large buildings, such as an oil refinery, or simple meant to destroy a railroad track and the cars that rode on it.<br /> <br />If visibility was good, an observer would have noted the RAF bombers returning from their night sorties, while as many as five hundred to one thousand of our American bombers were getting airborne. We rose slowly in a spiral until we reached ten-thousand feet altitude. This took about an hour, and there was nothing to do but huddle in your flight suit trying to stay warm. Radio silence was imperative, so there was no chatter between planes or between the planes and the ground operations.<br /> <br />Mine was the best seat in the house, so to speak, right behind the bomb bay. There was a cat walk that passed over the bomb bay which allowed access to the front of the aircraft where the pilot, co-pilot and engineer were located. There was a small tunnel that led to the navigator and bombardier, also in forward the area of the plane. I thought of my spot as best because it had the most room to move around in and because there was a window permitting me to take in whatever was going on around the plane. I learned quickly that this wasn't always desirable, particularly when flak was exploding all around use.<br /><br />Because of the continued need for radio silence throughout the mission, there wasn't much for me to do. At one time, there was a 50-caliber machine gun in a turret above the section of the plane where I sat, used when the aircraft was under attack by fighters. By the time I arrived on the scene, this gun had been removed because there was a tendency of the gunner to shoot off the tail of the plane which would have been directly in the gunner's sights when he swiveled the turret to face fighters coming in from the rear. Who knows how many B-17's lost their stabilizers in this manner, finding themselves spinning toward the ground out of control? There was still a 50-caliber machine gun that fired from the left waist area of the plane, and it was this weapon that I manned when the occasions presented themselves, which was every time we went on a mission.<br /><br />Once every plane reached ten-thousand feet, we created our formations and headed off to the primary targets for the day's mission while slowly increasing our altitude. It was at this point in the flight that the phenomenon of "prop wash" became a factor. Flying in formation meant, of course, that planes were wing to wing and nose to tail. With several B-17's flying just in front of you, the air turbulence created by the propellers of their four great engines was substantial, and it shook the plane's behind it something terrible. I thought for certain we were going to find ourselves rocked right out of the sky that very first morning. Instead, it was just another opportunity to let go of the morning's breakfast.<br /><br />The very first mission of the Piccadilly Lilly took us over Nuremberg in central Germany, a city destined to become the site of one of the world's most well known war crimes trials. I don't recall the size of the ordinance we carried that day or the nature of the target. Weather conditions were always problematical, the single biggest factor that determined the success or failure of a mission. We flew over our targets between twenty-three and twenty-five thousand feet in altitude, and because radar had not been perfected yet, the bombardier had to rely on a simple Norton siting device, sort of akin to looking into the crosshairs or a siting scope on a rifle. I will never forget how cold it was at those altitudes. We had sheep skin lined flight jackets, but the cold just cut right to the bone. We wore oxygen masks, since breathable air is a bit thin between four and five miles up.<br /> <br />Normally it took about six hours to arrive at our targets, so the Germans became accustomed to being hit most days around noon. As I looked out the side of the plane, I could see hundreds of B-17's stretching off as far as the eye could see. At this late stage of the war, every bombing run was a maximum effort aimed at pummeling the Germans into surrender, sooner rather than later. While our ground forces pushed towards Berlin, and the Russians rushed in from the east, we in the air were reducing the rest of the nation to rubble. In some cities, such as Cologne, nothing was left standing except part of the cathedral.<br /> <br />As we approached the European mainland, our fighter planes joined us for a portion of the run. It was their job to see to it that the enemy fighters didn't stop us from reaching our targets, so I had many chances to watch "dog fights" all around us. These fighter pilots were valiant, fearless men, and I will always be grateful to them for fending off the Luftwaffe planes that would surely have taken many more of us out of action had not our boys been there to protect us. Their fuel capacity was limited, so they were only able to accompany us part of the way before being forced to turn back to their bases. By the time we began getting nearer to our targets, always somewhere deep in Germany, we were on our own.<br /><br />If weather was the primary variable to a successful mission, fighter planes and antiaircraft fire ran a close second. Once our fighters turned back, we had to fend off the German Messerschmitts ourselves, and they got better and better about picking us off by approaching us from the rear. If we made it through this gauntlet, the next big hurdle was the antiaircraft batteries on the ground.<br /><br />One of the theories that governed our operations was that there was safety in numbers, that we had a better chance of making it through the critical moments of mission if we could drop our bombs and then get back again into a tight formation, flying almost wing tip to wing tip. As a consequence, we made the run at our targets in a box like pattern, making a couple of sharp right turns until we were ready to make a pass over the target. The further back in the formation we were, the greater was the chance that our plane would take a direct, perhaps fatal, hit of flak. That's because the antiaircraft gunners on the ground would shoot in a square grid, filling in an imaginary box with fire, slowly perfecting their aim. By the time the last planes flew through this unseen box, the boys on the ground had gotten very good at filling it in with live rounds. They could see the explosions of their previous shots, and slowly zeroed in on us while we tried to maintain approach discipline over the target.<br /><br />To look out the window and start thinking about getting hit was to invite pure terror. The sky was pocked with explosions of flak, and it just seemed miraculous that a plane could fly through the stuff without getting knocked out of the sky. It was my job to confirm to the captain that our load of bombs had been successfully released over the target. On that first mission over Nuremberg, for some reason I couldn't raise Sam on the intercom, so I decided to move back to a headset in the waist area of the ship and call the captain from there. Without thinking, I made my move without an oxygen mask, and the next thing I knew, I was falling face forward into the ball turret. I woke up several minutes later by the waist gun where one of my crew members had dragged me. No sooner had I come around than I noticed that we were being jolted by flak that was exploding all around us. When we returned to the airfield that day, I had my first opportunity to walk around the aircraft and put my fingers in the countless holes that the flak made in the body of the plane. Each evening, there were more holes from that day's run.<br /><br />***<br /><br /> The crew of the Piccadilly Lil flew twenty-two missions, only one of them with any sort of major incident. It has been too many years ago to recall which exact mission it was, but I believe it was somewhere around the eighteenth or nineteenth time we had taken to the sky when we ran into trouble over Bremen, Germany. We lost one of our four engines and Sam couldn't stop the prop from windmilling, the motion of a propeller on an engine that's not running caused by the rush of oncoming air. When a prop windmills, the plane loses a lot of speed, forcing the pilot to drop the craft to tree top level in order to avoid becoming a sitting duck for any fighter planes in the area. With their newly perfected tactic of coming in at our bombers from the rear, blasting away with their 20-millimeter canons, we were especially vulnerable to these fighters as we flew at a greatly reduced speed. Even under optimal conditions, the guys would get rattled when the German's used this tactic, particularly the tail gunners and the ball turret gunners. There were so many fighters coming at you, who do you pick to stop before they can get you?<br /><br />While admittedly better than being picked off by one of these fighters, watching the German countryside pass below us as we whizzed along no more than two-hundred feet above the ground was a heart pounding experience. That time, we were lucky, making it back, as the expression goes, on a wing and a prayer. More likely, a whole bunch of prayers. It took us hours longer than usual to make the return flight, every bit of it just barely off the ground and, during the crossing of the English Channel, close enough to the water, or so it seemed, to churn up foam. Our fuel ran extremely low, so this was another headache throughout the entire ordeal of the return home. The engine's turbochargers only operated at higher altitudes, and we used up much more fuel than usual, an irony considering that we were running on three engines at a vastly reduced speed. As daylight faded into darkness, I tried to raise our base on the radio so they could light up the field for us, but I had no luck doing so.<br /> <br />As we approached the field, Sam had to make an educated guess about the landing because he had no lights to tell him exactly where the landing strip was. We made an initial pass over the field, and as I looked out the window, I looked up into the control tower. We were indeed close to the ground. Only God and Sam know how we avoided crashing, but somehow Sam -- and God -- brought us in safely.<br /><br />***<br /><br />On mission number twenty-three, over a small town called Hoff, about halfway between Munich and Berlin, we weren't so lucky. This was the last time Piccadilly Lil would ever take to the skies. We had been told during the briefing that morning that this one should be a cake walk, an easy mission. Our target was the marshalling yards, or rail yards, in Hoff and resistance would be minimal. But the Germans must have been ready for us because it seemed as though they knew we were coming. Our plane was, on that day, April 8, 1945, in what was called the deputy lead position in the formation, which meant simply that we were the third plane in our particular formation to pass over the target. That put us in one of the more unenviable spots in the invisible box, a place where the antiaircraft boys on the ground could hone in on us by using the planes that went before us as reference points.<br /><br />Almost the instant after we let loose our load of bombs on the target, Ralph Lashell, the bombardier, could see a explosions of smoke coming toward us, and called out over the intercom.<br /><br />"Flak at twelve o'clock!" he yelled.<br /><br />That meant the fire was straight in front of us, and all the gunner on the ground had to do was stay on that same line and he would hit us for certain. And hit us he certainly did. There was a tremendous jolt, and when I looked through the window, I could see that one of the engines on the starboard side of the plane was on fire. Without warning, a piece of flak exploded inside the plane very near to me, and I was instantly blinded in my left eye. The next few moments were filled with noise, smoke, and confusion. I remember praying that, just as with our previous mission, Sam could maneuver the aircraft to a lower altitude, and we could limp home. This time, however, the Piccadilly Lil was mortally wounded, and we began to fall like a stone. There are a critical few minutes after one of these large aircraft begins to fall out of the sky before the plane goes into a spin that makes it impossible for anyone to abandon ship.<br /><br />Somehow, in the midst of all the chaos, I managed to locate and don my parachute. We didn't wear them during the ordinary course of a flight; they were too cumbersome. Perhaps even more interesting, none of us had ever received any training in how to jump out of an airplane. I guess unlike parachute troops whose job it was to jump out of airplanes, because our job was to stay in the plane, they didn't want us thinking too much about what it might be like to leap from our craft while it was crippled and rapidly descending from 25,000 feet. And so, my first time parachuting out of a plane would be from a craft that was on fire and nosing toward the ground while I was blinded in one eye.<br /><br />Everything was in turmoil, but I suppose these are the circumstances that test the true mettle of a man. We were very fortunate to have Sam Rodgers at the helm that day, because he stayed with the plane long enough to keep it steady enough for most of the rest of us to get out. His heroism would cost him his life. An alarm buzzer had been steadily sounding from the moment we were hit, and I remember Sam hollering over the intercom.<br /><br />"Abandon ship, abandon ship!"<br /><br />I immediately kicked out the escape door near the waist of the aircraft. George and Eddie were nearby, prepared to jump, so I yelled to Sam over the intercom that we were bailing out. First, I took one good, hard look out the open door, and was stunned at how far away the ground looked. It was going to be a long way down.<br /><br />I was the first one out the door, followed by Eddie then George. Al, Charlie, Ralph, and Warren all jumped out the front hatch. A total of seven of us made it out of the plane that day that I know of. The pilot, Sam Rodgers and the ball turret gunner, Kurt, were the only ones left on the plane as best I know. Of course, I will never know with absolute certitude. Sam was probably trapped when the Piccadilly Lil went into a spin. Kurt may have been injured or killed by the flak before he had a chance to escape.<br /><br />***<br /><br /> All the noise and commotion of a moment ago was suddenly replaced by silence. I noted with an almost casual interest as I began to tumble end over end that there were a few cumulus clouds, little white puffy billows, hanging in the air. Naturally, I was frightened, but a strange calm came over me. The little bit of instruction we had been given to deal with these circumstances advised us to count off ten full seconds before pulling the parachute's rip cord. This is because, when the chute pops open, it lurches back up into the air, and it could catch on the tail assembly of the plane. My guess is that this data was gathered the hard way during earlier missions.<br /> <br />My silent counting seemed to go on forever. One thousand one; one thousand two; one thousand three. All the time, somersaulting, so that the sky and the ground kept alternating in front of my one functioning eye. At last it was time to pull the rip cord, and with a tremendous thump that I thought might dislocate both shoulders, my chute exploded open. Then I found myself swaying from side to side, occasionally looking down to see how fast the ground was coming up on me. A great many things went through my mind, but one thought predominated all others. I kept wondering if my dad was awake yet back in the States, where it was at least six hours earlier there. He usually rose at around 6:00 AM, so I thought it entirely possible that he was just getting out of bed. This idea comforted me because I knew that the first thing my dad did in the morning was to drop down onto his knees to pray. If he was praying at that moment, he was probably praying for me. And at that moment, I certainly needed every prayer I could get.<br /><br />***<br /><br /> Peering over my shoulder, I watched with sadness and horror as the Piccadilly Lil spiraled into the ground and disintegrated with a tremendous impact. Now I began to pray that the good Lord would help us, sparing those of us that made it out of the plane. I usually keep my cool pretty well, so I wasn't a basket case, but I was very much on the alert. I was thinking of what I had been trained to do under these circumstances. All of a sudden, the reality of all we had been through during our various training sessions came home to me. As young men in our late teens, few of us ever really thought we would have to put that training to use, but here we were, about to be captured by the enemy, maybe injured or interrogated and who knew what else.<br /><br />Reality was rushing through my mind as rapidly as the ground was rising toward me feet. Another sobering actuality was the sound of small arms fire. Someone was firing rifles and pistols, and it seemed logical to me that there were Germans on the ground trying to kill those of us descending by parachute from airplanes that had just bombed their town. Ours was only one of several B-17's to get shot down that day, as indeed the Germans were anticipating our arrival, I'm not certain how. They had their own forms of intelligence, of course, and on this day it apparently had paid off for them.<br /><br />Since I couldn't see evidence of anyone shooting at me, I figured that perhaps some or our forward crew members, the men who had escaped from the door nearest the nose of the plane, were taking the small arms fire. Maybe they had jumped sooner than George, Eddie and me, and they were already on the ground. As I swayed roughly from side to side, I wondered what the impact would be like when I hit the ground. It promised to provide a dreadful jarring, and in the next moment, I was proved correct. When my feet impacted the earth, I thought my hips were going to jam up through my shoulders. The instinct to survive must have provided my body with what it needed to quickly shake off the effects of the landing, because in the next moment I was curling up my parachute so I could hide it as best I could, despite the fact that I had come down in an open field. <br /><br />Eddie and George had landed not far from me, and I noticed that perhaps one hundred yards or so beyond us was a small stand of woods. Without stopping to say a word to one another, Eddie, George and I broke into a ran for the trees, hoping they might provide cover. When we reached the woods, I was astonished at how different they were from any stand of tress I had ever seen before. There was simply no foliage of any kind on the ground. It was as if some great hungry beast had devoured everything except the trees themselves. This wasn't far from the truth. Apparently, Europeans have been in search of firewood for so many generations, that many of their forests are like this, devoid of combustible materials that have long ago gone up in smoke. It was a strange sensation, to stand surrounded by pine trees that grew out of a forest carpet which had the appearance of a well-swept floor in a building.<br /><br />Beyond the small forest, we could see rolling hills. The countryside was truly beautiful, but topographical aesthetics was the last thing on our minds at this moment. George, who had managed to get himself demoted to private after countless drinking bouts and fist fights between missions, was beside himself with fear. His one concern was how we were going to get out of there before we were captured. He had lost his sidearm, a .45-caliber pistol, and hadn't taken the time to bury his parachute before bolting for cover. Standing with Eddie and me in the little patch of woods, he was hysterical, especially when we heard the unmistakable sounds of an angry mob approaching us. All of our imaginations began to wrap themselves around the possibilities of what a group of out of control people would do to the men responsible for bombing and burning them out of house and home. Our target, in fact, was right in the middle of Hoff, and that is where this bunch of worked up people was coming from, all yelling and screaming things in German, the meanings of which we could surmise well enough.<br /><br />Eddie always carried two pistols, his Army issued .45 and a smaller .32-caliber pistol he carried around in his boot. The .32 is a bit of a pea shooter and not much good for combat, but Eddie handed it to George just to shut him up, which didn't seem to work very well. I tried to calm George down as we all rummaged through our packs, looking for anything that might assist us in an escape. George became increasingly emotional. I'd heard about what people acted like when having a nervous breakdown, and George's actions seemed to fit the definition.<br /><br />"What are we going to do, huh? What the hell are we going to do?" he kept asking over and over again.<br /><br />"Let's just stop for a minute here and collect ourselves," I suggested.<br /><br />I suggested further that we bow our heads and say a prayer that the good Lord would get us out of this. My prayer was sincere, but I also hoped that this might settle George down a bit.<br /><br />"We're going to be captured," I said. "That's pretty obvious. The trick is to not let that mob get their hands on us."<br /><br />There was little doubt they would have torn us apart. We had been warned many times in our briefings that if we were shot down, we should do all in our power to surrender to anybody in a uniform, and in World War II Germany, there were plenty of those folks around. I just hoped one would find us before the villagers did.<br /><br />I offered that we crouch down in the corner of the woods so we could see exactly who was coming, keeping a sharp eye out for any German army or Luftwaffe personnel. We lay on our bellies, looking all around us, pistols in hand. I could hear George continuing to babble incoherently next to me. Suddenly, he erupted, screaming at the top of his lungs.<br /><br />"Here's a guy coming after us!" he yelled. "Let's shoot him. Let's shoot him!"<br /> <br />Well, first of all, we were too far away to shoot anybody. You can take a .45-caliber pistol and, unless you're a couple of feet away from what you want to hit, you're likely to miss it. George, of course, had a little .32, which isn’t accurate or big enough to do much more than make somebody in an angry crowd even madder. Eddie and I had to resort to threats before George would relent.<br /> <br />"We're going to surrender," I told him between clenched teeth, "and we'll shoot you before we let you go and shoot anybody else."<br /><br />“Are you crazy?!" Eddie chimed in. "You go shooting at somebody, and you'll get us killed for sure."<br /><br />This got through to George a little, and realizing that we meant what we said, he shut up. At that moment, a man appeared above us, holding a rifle and barking orders at us in German. None of us spoke the language, but it wasn't necessary to be a linguist to get the gist of what he wanted. He waved his weapon at us, a signal for us to lay down our sidearms and to stand up. As we complied, I noticed with great relief that he wore the distinctive uniform and insignia of a member of the German Luftwaffe. Apparently, soldiers from their air force had taken to manning the antiaircraft guns during these last days of the war. Eddie, George and I exchanged nervous glances. It was official; we were American prisoners of war, deep inside enemy territory.<br /><br />***<br /> <br /> We gingerly handed the young man our pistols. Gesturing for us to once again lay down flat on our stomachs, he frisked us to make certain we carried no other weapons. The crowd of civilians got ominously close, and we all jumped several inches off the ground when the Luftwaffe enlisted man fired his rifle into the air. We immediately looked up to check on one another. There had been stories we'd heard about American flyers being shot when taken prisoner, and our first thought when we heard the rifle report was that one of us had been executed. What the fellow apparently had in mind was a show of authority to the crowd.<br /> <br />"These men are my prisoners," his shot signified, "and no one is to touch them!"<br /><br />Which was just fine by us, because right after he fired that single round, the crowd of about two hundred men appeared. Some of them sported shabby outfits with "USSR" printed in bold white letters across their backs. These were Russian POWs whom the Germans used for field hand work as slave laborers on their farms. My sense from their expressions was that they disliked us as much as the did the Germans. I don't remember seeing one woman in the entire gathering. Some members of the mob began shouting at the Luftwaffe soldier, and he shouted back. This sort of animated exchange went on for several minutes, and it's likely that the crowd wanted to do us in on the spot. But the soldier held firm, letting everyone know that we were his prisoners, and that was that.<br />With the noisy crowd in tow, our captor marched us single file to a big white building that appeared to serve as a dwelling for many of the village elderly and children. My guess is that it was some sort of shelter, either a permanent one or a place they evacuated people to before the bombs started falling. Not much took place there with us that I can recall. I suppose the young man contacted his superiors in some way to let them know he had three American POWs in hand, but my memories of what happened there have faded. We were soon on the march again, this time walking alongside a highway, one of the Autobahns that Hitler built to get his troops from one end of the country to the other.<br /><br />After a time we arrived at a village, no more than perhaps twenty homes, and our captor was met my the town mayor, or Bürgermeister. We were taken into a garage, and there on the floor were Al Holt, the co pilot of the Piccadilly Lil, and Ralph Lashell, our bombardier. Al's face was twisted with pain; Ralph didn't move at all. Running over to our compatriots, we gave them a quick inspection. Al immediately directed us to help Ralph, who we noticed was bleeding profusely from a large wound in his leg.<br /><br />"Help Ralph first," he said. "I'll be okay."<br /><br />Eddie and I immediately applied a makeshift tourniquet to stem the flow of blood from Ralph's leg wound. George was still not capable of much because his fear had completely taken him over. Upon closer inspection, we saw that a far more serious bullet wound was evident in Ralph's neck, and another hole was evident through his hand. We will never know for certain what actually happened, but it seemed that he had been shot execution style. I don't know enough about ballistics to know whether the shot came from the front or the rear, but I assume one of the angry villagers shot him from the back. They just plugged him. Eddie tried to give him artificial respiration to help him breath, but this was of no help to his neck wound which required the attentions of a doctor.<br /><br />What happened next has remained with me as a poignant memory. The guys had always ribbed me because I went to chapel whenever possible. My faith in the Lord was obvious to everyone, but they thought it made me an easy target to poke fun at when we were in training and back at the base. Yet the first sentiment that came to mind as Ralph lay dying was devotional. Al turned to me and seemed to speak for the group.<br /><br />"Lowell, have a prayer with Ralph," he said solemnly. "He's dying, I'm sure of it. And have a prayer with all of us."<br /><br />Naturally, I complied. Moments later, Ralph drew a final, deep breath and died. The young Luftwaffe soldier who had captured Eddie, George and me in the field barked something to the villagers, and several of them reached down and picked up Ralph's lifeless body and carried it away. We never found out what kind of burial he received. We all stood about for a few minutes in a state of shock. A couple of other Germans picked Al up, who had suffered some flak wounds and a broken pelvis, and we followed them and the Bürgermeister out of the garage toward an adjoining house, probably the mayor's home. My watch was gone, and I had lost all track of time, although it was still daylight at this point. <br /><br />The next stage of our capture had us being shoved into the back of a Ford truck outside the Bürgermeister's house. Imagine that, a Ford. I wondered when I saw that truck, what was the war all about?. The Germans made us hoist Al into the back of the vehicle with us, and I was beginning to get really worried about his condition. None of us had yet received any medical attention, including me. The Germans gave me a towel to clean up my eye, but that was all. Thankfully, my eyesight returned the following day, and there were no aftereffects.<br /><br />Bouncing along in the back of the truck, we had no idea where we were being taken, and our imaginations ran through a series of grim possibilities, especially after witnessing Ralph's demise. His fate, however, was the unhappy result of his having encountered angry civilians before he was able, like the rest of us, to surrender to someone in the German military. As if to tempt fate further, the truck drove right through the middle of Hoff, the object of our bombing raid, which was still aflame from the attack. Civilians who were trying to deal with the fires recognized us as American airmen who had bombed their city that very afternoon, and they began following the truck, screaming insults at us and waving their fists in the air.<br /><br />At the far end of the city there was a hill. The truck stopped at its base and we were ordered to disembark and start climbing. Still carrying Al, we climbed about halfway up the hill toward a building that we would learn was being used as a hospital of sorts for French POWs. The townspeople formed a taunting gauntlet, shouting and spitting at us as from both sides of the road as we passed. I'm certain the only thing that prevented them from dragging us away and killing us outright was our Luftwaffe captor who kept hollering commands, occasionally shoving one or more of them back with his rifle.<br /><br />At the makeshift hospital we were ordered to leave Al amongst the other wounded POWs. I was given a bit of dressing for my eye injury, and then we were made to move on to the top of the hill. It was the last time we saw Al, and I never have seen him since or learned what happened to him after that moment, although he may have died there, because his wounds were serious and I doubt he was able to receive the care his condition warranted. Trudging to the top of the hill, we saw at its crest a Bastille-like structure which probably had been there since the Middle Ages, its stone edifice towering above the landscape. The sun was just beginning to set, so all that had occurred to us had taken place within the span of a few hours. It seemed to me as if we had been captured weeks earlier.<br /><br />***<br /><br /> The "castle" was as damp and cold as an old graveyard. We were placed in a large room in the lower portion of the building with other men I recognized from our unit, Warren Williams, our navigator, among them. One by one, we were interrogated in a separate small room by a German who spoke curiously "Americanized" English. All of us adhered to the Geneva Convention standard of giving only our name, rank, serial number, but that didn't stop our inquisitor from trying a number of ploys to loosen our tongues. One of them, in which he blurted out details about our units, our personnel, and our mission, was meant to make us think the Germans already knew all about us, so what difference did it make it we corroborated information that was common knowledge? Surprisingly, the fellow did seem to know a great deal about us, which is what made me conclude that they were well prepared for our raid, the reason why they had been so successful at shooting so many of us out of the sky that day.<br /><br />The interrogator's glib tactic didn't work, and we all kept our counsel. Back with the group after we had both been questioned, Warren had a strange look on his face.<br /><br />"What's going on, Warren," I asked. "Is everything okay?"<br /><br />"I know that guy, Lowell," he replied. "He's from Rochester. I'll bet the bastard is one of the American born Germans who returned to the Fatherland so he could become a good little Nazi. And when they found out he spoke real good English, they put him in charge of giving us the third degree!"<br /><br />We tucked this information away for safe keeping, and years later after the war, Warren discovered through his association with the American Legion, that the man was trying to sneak back into the United States. Warren blew the whilst on the guy, and that was the end of that immigration attempt.<br /> <br />Darkness had fallen right after we reached our stone prison, and we settled in for our first night in captivity. It was a singular feeling of isolation and gloominess. We were each left with our own thoughts in the blackness of the cells in which we were being held. No one could fall asleep, and my thoughts kept returning again and again to my dad. I was haunted by the idea that he would hear I was missing in action and wouldn't know if I was alive or dead.<br /> <br />Without preamble, a small group of us was rousted up in the middle of the night and packed, once again, into the back of a truck. Only about twenty of us were moved at this time, and I never learned why only a few of us were selected or what method was used to choose one man over another. This time our transportation was a military vehicle of some kind, and we traveled the rest of the night across a variety of roads, sometimes swaying back and forth at high speeds. More than once, I was convinced we weren't going to make it through that ride without the truck turning over, spilling us and our German guards across the pavement.<br /><br />At dawn, we arrived at what was unmistakably a Luftwaffe air base. The place was impeccable. Modern, clean buildings were in evidence, and everywhere we looked, young Nazi airmen were busy doing precisely what we did at our base -- coming to and from briefings and missions and otherwise carrying on the duties of airmen at war. What was different here was that these men didn't fly great bombers like ours; this was a Luftwaffe fighter base, and the plane most clearly in evidence on their airfields was the dreaded Messerschmitt Bf 109, a craft we were accustomed to seeing coming at us with the business end of a 20-millimeter cannon blasting away. Like our own base, this one was well camouflaged, made as much as possible to not be seen from the air.<br /> <br />The buildings were extraordinary, silent testimonials to the German penchant for efficient engineering. I found the architecture of them very impressive, especially when compared to the dismal Quonset huts we utilized at our base. We were moved into what looked like the reception area of a large building that could have been the administration building on a college campus. We remained in this place for several hours, under the careful scrutiny of two armed guards.<br /> <br />For the next leg of our journey, we were taken to a nearby train yard and placed aboard rail cars. As usual, no one considered it necessary to tell us where we were going. We would find out in due course, and no one except our interrogator from the previous evening had spoken a word of English to us. For me, this train ride was the most terrifying part of the moving about. All I could think of were the bands of roving American P-47 Thunderbolt fighters, as well as the B-17 bombers, who found rail lines and rail cars an irresistible target in our Allied efforts to destroy the German infrastructure. Dying from a strafing attack by our own forces seemed to me a particularly pointless, ironic way to die. What a tremendous relief it was to look up whenever we heard the sound of a fighter and see that it was a German plane! I had never imagined that I would be happy to see an enemy aircraft rather than one of our own, but this was only one of many surprises that my experience as a POW held in store for me.<br /><br />***<br /><br /> It took us several days to travel across the German countryside. One night around midnight our train stopped on a bridge near Ravensburg because an Allied bombing raid was taking place against the Messerschmitt plant in that city where the infamous ME-109's were built. As we sat on the tracks inside the train car, I prayed that the RAF bombers wouldn't also find the bridge we sat on another enticing target. We could clearly hear the air raid sirens in the distance, as well as the unmistakable sounds of exploding bombs.<br /><br />From Ravensburg we went on the next day to Munich. Here we caught sight of a breeding farm for humans where Hitler's Aryan "physicians" worked at increasing the genetic stock of their "master race." I saw many blond young ladies, extended bellies, walking around outside the place, so it didn't take a genius to figure out what the intent of the place was, but I didn't learn for certain until after the war that girls stayed at this farm, willingly or otherwise, to have children for the Fatherland. The matter of the biological father was arranged by the state.<br /><br />That night, we stopped outside Munich and were allowed off the train to sleep in an old barn. The smell of manure was pungent, but it was good to get off the train for a few hours. We spread newspapers over the horse apples and suffered through the cold night without bedding or blankets. The same two guards who had routed us out of sleep at the little castle in Hoff had remained with us during the entire journey. I find myself wishing on occasion that I could find those two men and throw my arms around them in gratitude for how well they treated us. They truly were as kind and considerate as the circumstances would permit. I hope they survived the war and were reunited with their families.<br /><br />Finally late one morning a day or two later, our destination was revealed to us; we were ordained for internment at a POW camp designated as Stalag 7A. This camp, one of many in the Stalag system, was built shortly after the beginning of World War II, in September 1939, established as a POW camp officially called Stammlager, or Stalag, VIIA. Located north of the small city of Moosburg in southern Germany, Stalag 7A was originally designed to hold 10,000 prisoners. By the time I got there at the end of the war, some 80,000 Allied soldiers, mostly French and Soviet citizens, were crammed into it. The portion of the camp that held we Americans was also occupied by British and French POWs. There were New Zealanders, Australians and South Africans in the camp as well, all prisoners from the North Africa campaign.<br /><br />Many of the POWs who had been there for an extended period were forced to work in industrial, agricultural and other businesses outside the camp all over Bavaria, south of the Danube River. My brief but poignant stay of thirty days wouldn't permit me to experience this aspect of camp life, thank God. The conditions in the camp itself were loathsome. It only took a few hours of residency to end up covered in lice and fleas. Food availability ran between scarce and none. There was no regular mess. If it was a good day, we got a little food in the morning, maybe a small piece of stale black bread and a thin, watery soup. From what I have read about other camps in the Stalag system, this one was a particular cesspool. How those prisoners who had been there for weeks, months, or even years managed to survive, I shall never fathom.<br /><br />In our section of the camp, there was one water faucet for 8,000 people. The latrines were disgusting beyond belief, since most of the prisoners suffered from chronic diarrhea. Because there were so many prisoners beyond what the camp was originally designed to hold, most of us slept in tents, with so many of us squeezed into each tent that there was no room to stretch out when we slept. When someone became ill, they simply got sick all over the person laying next to them. On an average day, the guards got us up early, somewhere around five, with reveille. We fell out and the guards took a head count every morning without fail.<br /><br />The number of administrative and guard personnel had increased at Stalag 7A over the course of the war to about 2,000. The Lagerkommandant, of camp commandant, a man by the name of Oberst Otto Burger, occasionally came through the camp to check on things, and I always got the impression that he was appalled at how we had to live. However, there simply wasn't much he could do about it. There were no resources available to make life any better for us, or for his own men, for that matter.<br /> <br />The guards were professional soldiers, and most of them treated us quite well too. There were some among them who were maniacal Nazis, but not many. Not that they understood us as we taunted them in English, but sometimes we would razz the ones we knew as the fanatics.<br /><br />"Wait till Uncle Joe and his boys get here," we would tell them, referring to the advancing Russian troops of Joseph Stalin. "Then we'll see how good your blood oath is."<br /><br />We were referring to the vow that some of the more dedicated Nazi's supposedly had taken not to return home alive, but to kill as many of the enemy as they could, no matter how hopeless their situation became, then to die at their posts. It was this handful of zealots that made us nervous about what would happen when the German war effort finally collapsed and we were trapped with no means to defend ourselves against a few crazed National Socialists. At the other end of the spectrum, one guard told me that his family had been killed in a bombing, yet he seemed to harbor no hatred for we airmen whose job it had been to drop bombs on his people. Their generally good treatment of us was probably a combination of things. The discipline of army training, some human compassion, perhaps, and certainly the knowledge that the war was winding down very much not in their favor. They know it was likely their actions would be judged sometime in the near future.<br /><br />Much of the time during the day, I hung out in the compound where the Polish prisoners were held because there were many former singers and musicians from the Teatr Wielki opera house in Warsaw, Poland, including the impresario of the Opera Narodowa. They were wonderful people, and it was consoling to surround myself with others who loved music as much or more than I. Most of them spoke English and we would talk for hours about our favorite compositions and performances. Most of these fine people had been there three, four, or even five years, from the days immediately following the German invasion of Poland in 1939. One fourteen year old youngster had come to the camp when he was nine years old. It was inconceivable to me what it must have been like to grow up in such a hellish place.<br /><br />Conversing with them was my only relief from the filth, hunger and boredom, and they were very gracious and patient, in view of how long they had endured the horrible camp conditions. My sense was that they enjoyed the conversational escapes as much as I did. Occasionally, the musicians who had been fortunate enough to bring their instruments with them, or somehow acquired an instrument after they were imprisoned, put on small performances. These were special moments that introduced elements of humanity into the daily survival grind that characterized life in Stalag 7A.<br /><br />The Russian POWs, who were not subject to restrictions placed on prisoners from nations that were members of the International Red Cross, were made to work on farms as forced laborers in the surrounding countryside. This supposed humiliation gave them access to precious food stuffs that the rest of us could never get our hands on, and they were able to smuggle these previous items into the camp from their farm labors. Potatoes and bread were the most common food commodities they trafficked in. The single most valuable currency the rest of us had to deal with was cigarettes which came in fits and spurts to those soldiers, like ours, whose countries were members of the IRC. At any given time of the day, it was common to see hundreds of small columns of smoke rising from around the camp where prisoners had built small fires to roast potatoes or cook other smuggled food they had bartered for. The old timers in the camp had become excellent tinsmiths, fashioning small cooking utensils out of old cans and other discarded pieces of metal.<br /><br />The preoccupation of many modern day Americans with weight loss often brings back memories to me of how quickly we shed pounds in the camp. It doesn't take too many days of little or no food and the bad water that causes diarrhea to become a shadow of one's former self. The Germans didn't seem to have a lot of food either, and I noticed how unhealthy many of the guards looked as well.<br />As the month of April wore on, a sense that the Germans couldn't hold out much longer began to sweep through the camp. There was talk about what would happen once the guards realized all was lost. Would they be given orders to exterminate all prisoners? We learned later that indeed the SS had developed plans to move into POW and labor camps across the country to kill all those being held prisoner before they could be liberated. It was intelligence about this plan that, when it reached General George S. Patton, prompted him to rush a single armored vehicle ahead of his advancing troops to get to Stalag 7A before the SS had a chance to carry out their ghastly plans. One armored vehicle to face down any German who dared get in the way.<br /><br />***<br /> <br />On the morning of April 29, 1945, the whole mess came to a head. The fragile structure of life around the camp simply fell apart. When we woke up that morning, all the camp guards were gone. There were two columns of people moving along the road outside the front gate, one headed east, the other going west. The Russians were advancing rapidly from the east, and after the Germans betrayed their pact with Stalin and invaded Russia in 1942, many Germans knew reprisals were inevitable, so they wanted to get as far away from the advancing Russian army as possible. It was the "Uncle Joe and his boys" phenomenon unfolding that we had taunted the crazy guards about. I have no idea who the people were heading east, or why they would choose walking towards the Russians rather than the advancing Western Allies. Maybe they were Russian nationals we had already escaped from some other camp, I don't know.<br /> <br />Late that morning, the single armored vehicle sent by Patton entered the camp, under the command of a fellow by the name of Tom Gibbons, who came in and immediately raised the American flag. Tom's account of these events can be found in Tom Brocow's book, "The Greatest Generation." There was only Tom and three other GI's on board the armored vehicle, sent on this special mission to thwart the SS from killing us all. The vehicle was designed to travel at high speeds, and they had come to us well in advance of Patton's army, a very brave thing to do. At first, I found it inconceivable that just four guys would come crashing into the camp, and I looked all around for the rest of the army. They weren't there.<br /><br />Euphoria spread like a grass fire through the camp. People were yelling, crying, laughing and just generally carrying on. I buttonholed one of the American soldiers, asking him if there was any way he could get a note I had written into the hands of someone at the Red Cross who would, in turn, get it to my father so he would know I was alive. He looked at me a bit dumbfounded; I suppose thousands of other fellows in the camp wanted, as badly as I, to let their loved ones know they were okay. Later I would learn that when I was shot down, the Army sent word to my home that I was officially MIA, missing in action. My sister, Donna, was home by herself when the telegram arrived. She rushed to a small restaurant where my dad always ate lunch during the week, and collapsed in tears when she found dad because she knew that Lowell Dean, and then Earl Clark, had been missing in action, then discovered to have been KIA, killed in action. When Earl was shot down, his parachute didn't open.<br /> <br />About a week or so after we were liberated, my sister was home alone again when another telegram arrived telling my family that I was alive and would be coming home soon. Once again she ran to the restaurant, and when she loudly announced the contents of the telegram to our dad, the whole place exploded with congratulations. It was decided on the spot that when I got home, everyone there would come back to the restaurant for a celebration, which is exactly what happened.<br /> <br />But on that crisp, cold, wonderful mid-spring morning, that joyous event lay in the future. Our first concern was getting something to eat. Officers from the compound where they had been held within the camp tried to establish some semblance of order, commanding us to stand fast in the camp, because if we wandered too far afield, we were taking a chance that units of the SS or Hitler Youth would find and kill us. Hunger was so overwhelming for some that they disregarded these orders, especially when rumors spread about the availability of chickens, pigs and other edible livestock on nearby farms. Some of those men were indeed caught and killed by still armed groups of the SS and Hitler Youth.<br /><br />A few of us actually found a chicken who was unfortunate enough to wander into the camp during the confusion of Liberation. Not long afterwards, someone found a pig who had also wandered off from a nearby hog farm into our hungry haunt. We had no means of cooking anything at that point, so while it may sound unappetizing to someone who is eating regularly, we were ready to eat raw, bloody animal flesh, and that is exactly what some of us did.<br /><br />We were forced to remain in the camp like this for more than a week. The initial excitement was replaced by frustration, but no one grumbled too much because we knew it was only a matter of time before Patton's army could arrange for our shipment out of there. At last, we were rounded up and moved to a local airfield. The little grass runway outside the village was jammed with hundreds of small planes which high ranking Nazi's had flown into the area to give themselves up to American occupiers rather than face Russian captors who were seizing the eastern portion of Germany. When we arrived, planes were still landing, and a crush of souvenir hunters would surround each aircraft after it came to a halt and was abandoned. There are no doubt Luger pistols, Iron Crosses, and other pieces of Nazi memorabilia in drawers across America today that were acquired from that tiny airfield.<br /><br />***<br /><br /> From the chaos, order finally emerged, and we were flown to Paris on C 47's, the military version of a twin engine DC-3, one of the safest planes ever built. It was the most exciting airplane ride of my life. We arrived in the capital city of France, which had been liberated nine months earlier. We all looked fairly shabby after our time in the Stalag, so new clothes were in order after a thorough delousing. The Parisians welcomed us with open arms, and we were put up as guests of the French people in various hotels around the city. I was housed in a local hotel and like everyone else's, my attention turned to food. We spent the next three days eating, bathing, sleeping and making certain that our families had been informed of our whereabouts. There was a place we could go and sign in and get $50 dollars walking around money, and we felt like rich men.<br /> <br />The days that followed our Parisian experience are a blur to me. I cannot recall how we got there, whether we traveled by train or plane, but our next stop was LaHarve, France, outside of which we ended up in a place called Camp Lucky Strike. Cigarettes were several decades away from being demonized as nicotine delivery devices that caused cancer, so it was considered a most American thing to do, naming a camp after a popular brand of smokes. I think there was also a Camp Chesterfield.<br /> <br />There were thousands of us in these camps awaiting repatriation. Our charming stay in Paris was replaced by a daily grind of standing in one long line after another, hour after hour. In the morning, it began with a seemingly endless stay in the breakfast chow line. By the time we finally got to eat, it was time to stand in line for the second meal of the day. I didn't have to worry about chow lines for too long, however; I became violently ill with dysentery. This alternated with intractable constipation. Within days of arriving at the camp, I ended up in the 77th Field Hospital where I remained for thirty days, the same amount of time I had spent in Stalag 7A. The nurses hooked me up to an IV to keep me from dehydrating, and every three hours or so I had to stick my backside in the air for another shot of penicillin. The placed was filled with guys who had the same problem. I guess the digestive system gets out of whack after going from no food, to plenty of good food, to army food, which is in a category by itself.<br /> <br />During my stay in the hospital, I lost track of Eddie and George. Once I got back on my feet, I was able to enjoy a few days visiting the countryside around LaHarve with some of the other guys. Having a chance to mingle with ordinary people, especially of the female variety, was a great pleasure. It takes having an experience like the one we underwent as POW's, albeit a relatively short one, to make the simple pleasures of live so meaningful. Having a decent meal, engaging in casual conversation, walking along a country road before sunset; it was wonderful to be alive, the survivor or a war that had claimed millions of lives, was still claiming lives in concentration camps where people were dying as a result of the extended abuses they had suffered at the hands of the Nazi's.<br /><br />***<br /><br />We sailed home across the Atlantic on a ship called the Admiral Mail. What a contrast this Coast Guard vessel was to the British vessel that had brought me to Europe. For one thing, there wasn't one piece of mutton on board. Best of all, of course, was the direction in which we were heading -- back to the United States. A well-known movie star of our day sailed with us, returning home from his tour of duty. Victor Mature had starred in movies like One Million BC and Song of the Islands before the war, and would go on to further stardom in such films as Cry of the City and Kiss of Death when he resumed his career in the late 1940's.<br /><br />We docked in Boston Harbor eight days after setting sail from France, and the place was alive with about four hundred screaming girls, all there to see Mr. Mature. Unfortunately, there were none waiting for me. But it was June, the beginning of summer, and I was alive, and young, and on my way home to see my family. I felt nothing but pure joy and gratitude the day I walked onto that dock to begin a sixty day leave.<br /><br />Up until the dropping of the two atomic bombs on Japan, there were plans in the works for a massive invasion of Japan by American forces, and there was no reason to suspect that I wouldn't return to combat over the skies of Asia. When the Japanese Emperor Hirohito accepted the unconditional surrender of his people on August 14, 1945, it was all over. I was discharged about six weeks later from Lincoln Army Base in Nebraska. For me, and for uncounted millions of people around the world, World War II was at an end.<br /> <br />My country was very generous with regards to the recognition I was given for my time in the service. I received a number of medals and citations, including the Distinguished Flying Cross with three oak leaf clusters. This medal is awarded to any officer or enlisted man of the armed forces of the United States "who shall have distinguished himself by heroism or extraordinary achievement while participating in an aerial flight". I really don't think I did anything heroic. My biggest achievement was surviving, but I accepted the honor with gratitude. In addition to that medal, I was given a Purple Heart for the wound I suffered to my eye the day we were shot down, as well as a Meritorious Service Medal, a Presidential Unit Citation, a Good Conduct medal, and the Army Air Force World War II Victory Medal. Of course, I don't want to forget about my Caterpillar Club membership, awarded by the Irving Aeroshoot Company, manufacturer of the parachutes we used, to those whose lives were saved by one of their parachutes.<br /><br />***<br /><br /> When I returned home safely, I never talked with anyone about my experiences, and no one pressed me for the story. There was a sense back then that so many people had not returned home alive, the rest of us shouldn't make too big a deal about our supposed heroics because we had been given the ultimate reward -- getting out with an intact skin. It wasn't until many years later that I had any inclination to talk about my war experiences. Enough time passes, I suppose, for us to become reflective about such life changing events, and members of my family were increasingly curious about what took place then. It was the only period of my life that I had not talked extensively about, and my wife, children and close friends wanted to know more. Gradually, I relented, and I'm glad I did because it has allowed me to think through, out loud, the deeper significance of all that occurred.<br /> Putting this chapter in the book, then, isn't meant to impress future generations of my family with my heroics. A complete history of my life cannot be told without including what happened to me between 1941 and 1945. More important, to me, is the fact that my ideas about war and its glories were so dramatically altered by my experiences that I wanted to pass along what I learned, for what it's worth. Simply stated, it is this: war is a waste. It solves nothing, and leaves far more unsolved problems in its wake than were there before it took place. The lives that were lost or destroyed during World War II can never be accurately calculated. <br /> <br />I was as enthusiastic as any young man about doing my duty before I went overseas, fighting for my country, all of those noble, naive motives. I wanted to do something worthwhile in my life. But the experience of actually going to war allowed me to see that the war portion of my life, in and of itself, only had meaning in terms of how it made me determined to do something with the rest of my life. My dad used to tell me, when I was excited about cramming so many experiences into my young life before I joined the service, that I should take it easy. There would be plenty of time to do many things, he told me. As I was falling out of the sky after jumping from the mortally wounded Piccadilly Lilly, and as I sat in Stalag 7A wondering what would unfold, I used to think about what my dad said. Would I live long enough to accomplish all I wanted to do, to have all the experiences I dreamed of having? I saw firsthand that life can be very short. We who returned were the fortunate few. For that we should feel nothing but gratitude and humility.<br /> <br />Self-effacement is one quality there is far too little of when it comes to our personal and collective reflections on past wars. It is irksome to me now to watch certain politicians who have impressive war records use their experiences like some sort of resume that they can use to advance their ambitions. Part of the package of service to country should be humility as well as pride. As long as there is human ambition, I suppose we will hear about the heroics of those former warriors who want to impress the voting public with how wonderfully well they served their country, and thereby deserve the votes of their fellow citizens.<br /> <br />Real heroes have always been self deprecating rather than self promoting. Take, for example Joe Foss, who shot down twenty-six planes in the early days of the Second World War before most of us ever went into the service, tying Eddie Rickenbacker's World War I record. He received the Congressional Medal of Honor. When he got home, he said the real heroes were the ones who didn't make it back. Then there was Mitchell Page, who single handedly wiped out a machine gun nest on Guadalcanal, saving the lives of scores of his fellow GI's. He too returned home a humble man who saw his fallen compatriots as the real heroes.<br /> <br />I have been to two reunions organized by the 94th Bomb Group. I was reluctant to go because the guys sit around and tell a bunch of war stories, but I wanted to see the fellows again, at least one more time. One reunion was held in Dayton, Ohio, in the 1980's sometime. Dorothy's mother lived there, Wright Field is there, and it's also where Dorothy started in show business performing at the Officer's Club in the Vera Hotel, so we both had history in Dayton that drew us back there as much as the reunion. The second get together was in Tucson, not far from our home near Phoenix. Eddie was there. It was the first time I had seen him since the war. He warned me ahead of time not to discuss anything in front of his wife about the crazy partying we did when we were younger. George had died some years before, so I never had an opportunity to see him after we were separated once we left Stalag 7A. Our former commanding officer was there, and it was a delight to see him. It was obvious that he was attracted to Dorothy -- what sane man wouldn't be -- because he wouldn't leave her alone the entire time we were there.<br /><br />"I don't remember seeing you in the Offices' Club," he said to me. <br />"Well, no, I was a sergeant. You guys wouldn't let me in there," I laughed. "I suppose if I had had Dorothy with me in those days, you would have let me in!"<br /><br />***<br /><br />It is important to me to emphasize that, in the final analysis, I have concluded that war isn't worth a darn. It doesn't solve any problems. When we returned from the battlefronts of World War II, our former enemies became our new friends and allies, and our old allies became our new enemies in a so-called Cold War that went on for decades, creating yet more suffering around the world. We returned from this enormous effort to beat the Germans and the Japanese, and there's just as darn many problems as when we suited up and went, probably more complicated problems than the ones that led to World War II.<br /><br />From one perspective, wars -- hot or Cold -- doesn't deserve to be talked about, at least not if it's to glorify them. The important question becomes: How do we end war in a way that we don't have to have anymore of them at all? That deserves a lot of conversation. It would be a conversation about how to change some dark aspect of human nature, and it's a conversation that is long overdue. Most men with combat experience come to this conclusion. Who better to turn to for a comprehensive understanding of the consequences of war than old warriors? At least the ones who don't want to finesse their experiences into a way to feather their caps and further their ambitions.<br /><br />On August 9, 1945, Captain Fred Boch piloted The Great Artiste, a plane carrying electronic measuring instruments to gather data after his own plane, the Bockscar, which he wasn't piloting that day, dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. I met him by chance at an American Legion meeting that another old warrior, former fighter pilot Bruce Porter, a veteran of the Asian Theater, invited me to. I'm not usually one for going to American Legion meetings for all the reasons I've stated here. But I'm very glad I went to that particular meeting, because having a chance to talk about these ideas with Fred was an invaluable experience.<br /><br />When I was introduced to Fred, he struck me as being different than any military man I'd ever been around. We discussed his education at the University of Chicago which was, ironically, the birth place of the fledgling American program to build an atomic bomb program. We talked about how he was affected the day he watched the "Fat Man" atomic bomb explode over Nagasaki. A science reporter for the New York Times, William L. Laurence, was onboard Fred's plane that day, and later wrote about the explosion in his award-winning book Dawn Over Zero.<br /><br />"We watched a giant pillar of purple fire, 10,000 feet high, shoot upward like a meteor coming from the earth instead of from outer space. It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes," he wrote. "Even as we watched, a giant mushroom came shooting out of the top to 45,000 feet, a mushroom top that was even more alive than the pillar, seething and boiling in a white fury of creamy foam, a thousand geysers rolled into one. It kept struggling in an elemental fury, like a creature in the act of breaking the bonds that held it down."<br />It was a creature that Fred Boch regretted every having a part in unleashing. The Japanese didn't surrender right after we dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so Fred found himself on another mission just a day later over Tokyo. His plane dropped a 10,000 pound conventional bomb on the Toyota plant in that city. Years later, he told me, he wrote a letter of apology to the then mayor of Nagasaki, saying that the atomic bomb should never have been dropped. He had visited the city, and felt compelled to write the letter upon his return to the United States after the visit. The mayor wrote him back, saying he was sorry that he did not know at the time that Fred was visiting, for he would have wanted to meet him. The mayor then thanked Fred for his healing sentiments. Soon thereafter, Fred also wrote a letter to Toyota expressing his regret for the bombing he took part in on August 10. He received a letter from the company which informed him that the day of that air raid, everyone was evacuated from the plant in time, and no one died. Fred was so very relieved and grateful to receive that information.<br /><br />Fred had come to the conclusion that all men are brothers, and that if we are to accept what Jesus Christ came here to teach us, there is no excuse for taking human life. While he believed in honoring the men and women who made great sacrifices during warfare, he did not think war should be celebrated. Fred had come to embrace the brotherhood of man. Both Dorothy and I were greatly influenced by this great, wonderful man. I share his conclusions, as a direct result of my experience dropping bombs on the German people. Who were these Germans that I should have found it so easy to kill them? Hitler and his henchmen were criminals beyond measure, but I'm certain that many of those who died in our raids were just ordinary people. There is little doubt that the Piccadilly Lilly killed many during the course of her twenty-three missions. I was a part of that, and so I feel I must spend the remainder of my life helping convince others of the utter futility of war.<br /><br />The experience is the same in the microcosm as well as the macrocosm. I remember once declaring a war of sorts in my old neighborhood with some kids who were goofing around and annoying me. I took them on, and because there was only a couple of them, I was able to run them off after giving one kid a pretty good shellacking. But then, about five nights later, they tracked me down, and a bunch of them jumped me. When they were through with me, I was just blood from end to the other. Let me tell you, I didn't do that anymore because while you may beat up one guy, he's going to come back with ten others. And I don't think that big wars are any different than little occasions like that. They end up at the same kind of the place after all is said and done.<br /><br />For me, the challenge of the human race is to figure out how to untie the Gordian knots, of which war is the most problematical. I don't have the answer; only that war is not it. I suspect that forgiveness, rather than an endless cycle of revenge and self-righteousness, is the key element in any equation that eventually leads to the end of war. To help move me along this path, I visited the town of Moosburg in 1993, and tried to let go whatever resentment I may have held in my heart for what happened to me when I was a prisoner.<br /><br />Returning to Germany was a very emotional experience because, as I sat with an old German friend and his wife in Cologne after the visit to the camp, he talked at some length about the devastation our bombers caused in his city. He seemed to harbor no ill will towards me as we sat quietly in a restaurant overlooking the city, rebuilt from the ashes of those air raids. The entire city had been completely demolished from to the kinds of bombing raids that I participated in. In fact, my crew and I pulled a mission in Cologne. I was one of the guys that created that devastation. Here was a man that I now loved, having had a chance to meet him. I should have loved him during the war, sight unseen, because that is the kind of love that Jesus tried so hard to teach us about.<br /><br />One of the recurring missions of our national life should be to help the people of the world, not to add immeasurably to their suffering. We should be constantly accessing how we can assist others, because we have so much to give. How do we help the people of Iraq, of Israel, or wherever people are in need? How do we respond appropriately wherever need is perceived? We sang a song so well in Sunday school, "Jesus Loves The Little Children", all the little children of the world, not just American children. Red, yellow, black and white, they are all precious in the sight of Jesus. Loving all the little children of the world; now that is church. <br /><br />When I was dropping bombs on people, I had lost my understanding of what I had sung as a boy. I should have stayed home, or gone as a missionary, figuring out how to help the German people, not how to kill them. I don't think bombers or tanks or missiles or anything other kind of weapon helps anyone. They are designed for one thing; to create death and havoc, which don't fit into the message of Jesus as far as I can figure it.<br /><br />Forgiveness, then, is the key. I don't see how else we can survive unless we learn how to let go and let God, how to forgive one another their trespasses, as we would have our trespasses forgiven.DavidMichaelSmithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15137593188998037668noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330822231390963380.post-82554462936806363792008-06-24T15:46:00.000-07:002008-07-02T11:26:36.965-07:00<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:180%;">The 4th of July<br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:85%;">What does the national day of freedom<br />mean to someone inside the walls of a prison<br />who was unjustly convicted?<br />Be certain that its connotations<br />are vastly different from this vantage point.</span><br /></div><br />The bright orange sun warms the cold concrete cell quickly on this July 4th morning. By 8 AM, the chilly cement that is my home has become unbearably hot and humid. The emotional turmoil that this holiday fosters deep within me begins as soon as my eyes open. These feelings are unwelcome, but they come anyway, like so many aspects of prison life, uninvited but unavoidable. The sensations remind me of those of war veterans I've heard about who have suffered the amputation of a limb. These men disclose that often they get the sensation of pain or itching in an arm or leg which no longer exists.<br /><br />My emotions work in much the same manner, emotions that I thought I amputated long ago as a means of adapting to my circumstances. Yet, like the unbidden spirits who tormented Ebinezer Scrooge on the Christmas Eve of his reckoning, these phantoms return to torment me about freedoms lost, perhaps never to be regained again, ghosts that cause me to feel the fullness of their presence at the most inconvenient of times and places.<br /><br />I remember my last 4th of July in free society before this nightmare began. It was 1990, and it seems as if it happened on another planet during some other lifetime. As I sit on my bunk and reminisce, tears begin to flow freely and involuntarily, because it is a hint of the joy of the past that constitutes the main ingredient of this present pain. That Independence Day represented the quintessential joining of positive emotions and material progress in my life. My youngest son, Jerome, and I traveled by car from Los Angeles to Seattle, Washington during my two week vacation. It was memorable because it gave me an opportunity to spend an unlimited amount of time with my 14 year old son. His mother and I had divorced five years earlier, and the time Jerome and I had been able to spend together was one of the casualties of the split. The spirit of the trip was first captured when we loaded the car in L.A. at my ex-wife's home. My son and I agreed to an equal number of jazz and rap cassette tapes which we placed in my car's console. As we got onto the I-405 freeway in L.A., he would only listen to rap tapes and I to jazz. However, two weeks later, as we approached L.A. through the San Fernando Valley, he was consistently listening to Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and I had come to appreciate M.C. Hammer and The<br />Fresh Prince.<br /><br />On July 3rd, on our way through Oregon, we stopped at my friend, David Michael Smith's, home in Portland. The plan was for our two families to spend the holiday together and proceed by car to Seattle for the International Alcoholic Anonymous Convention, an event held in a different city every five years. This was one of those once-in-a-lifetime moments, and David and I were thrilled to be attending a convention that would feature workshops and speakers from around the world. To share in the recovery experience of so many sober people would be, we knew, an unparalleled experience.<br />David and I had been close friends for over a decade at that point. Our first six years of friendship were spent in the radio industry in Portland, he as an on-air newsman and I as a disc jockey on the city's most popular AM station at that time, KEX. In the tradition of many broadcasters everywhere, David and I both had learned how to celebrate life to the extreme. We had freely indulged ourselves with beer, whiskey and cocaine during our off-hours, enjoying one another's company as we imbibed. Then, as they are wont to do, events caught up with us and, at approximately the same time while living in separate states, David and I concluded that the only way to continue with life as we dreamed it should be was to get sober. David got the message before I did, corresponding to the birth of his daughter, Devon, in 1984. I have always been a slow learner, and apparently needed a couple of failed relationships and a career which I balanced on the edge of an abyss for a few years to finally get the message.<br /><br />By the summer of 1990, my friend and I were both celebrating several continuous years of sobriety. Our reunion after five years in which I lived in LA-LA land (Hollywood) was a real festive event in a deeply personal way. It was at once a reunion, a rebirth, and a victory celebration. There is no better stimulus for revelry than having survived a near-death experience, which would be, I think my friend would agree, the most accurate way to describe our drinking and drugging bouts.<br /><br />On the evening of the 4th, my son and I sat in the living room of Nannette Troutman, another friend, looking out at the Willamette River and watching an impressive fireworks display. Nannette had been partners with David's wife, Sam, in one of Portland's largest talent and modeling agencies. Before I left the Northwest for a return to southern California (one in a series of fateful decisions that would eventually lead me to the dreary place where I now reside), the Troutman/Downey Agency represented me as an actor/model, and had secured work for me in a series of TV commercials entitled "Today's Chevrolet" which ran during the 1985-90 football seasons. I had received a number of welcome residual checks from that couple of days work, and often had toyed with the idea of pursuing a full time acting and/or modeling career. It became one of those ideas we get that come and go before we take time to bring them to fruition.<br /><br />The next day, David, Jerome and I made a leisurely drive north to Seattle where we spent four additional days of joy, celebration and social networking with other recovering addicts and alcoholics. I cannot remember a happier time in my adult life. I was financially secure and successful. I was clean and sober. My three sons were nearly grown, and my youngest seemed to be no worse for the wear, despite the ravaging of my messy divorce. My appeal to the opposite sex was on the megawatt level and my social life was fulfilling. How differently I would have felt that holiday weekend had I known that I had less than six months of freedom left, much less the enormous prosperity I was experiencing at every level of my life.<br /><br />On this sweltering July 4th morning eight years later, I sit sweating profusely in an 8-foot by 12-foot cell trying to extinguish the pain and the memories which won't be intimidated away. I am seriously contemplating the words of Nathan Hale who, in a moment of revolutionary fervor during the agonizing birth of America, cried out, "Give me Liberty, or give me Death!" I am truly shocked to discover how true that phrase resonates to the very depths of my being. I stand and yell those oft-repeated words as loudly as the circumstances will allow without attracting the wrath of the guards. However, my next door neighbor obviously hears my cry for freedom and responds, "Right On, Brother!"<br /><br />Today, on this day which most American's take for granted as the bellwether of their freedom, I am questioning the very essence of the concept of incarceration and the deprivation of one person's freedom by other men. Guilt or innocence notwithstanding, who among us has earned the "right" to incarcerate another? By what authority, privilege, or right of passage? I am assured by the powers-that-be that the "people" have reserved such a right to themselves, and have invested it in a few men of authority who are charged to exercise this right. It is within the people's purview, I am told, to protect themselves. But, I must ask in response, who are they being protected from? Themselves? Their fellow citizens? Or is the answer to this question so profoundly disturbing that most of the nation's fat and lazy populace today is unwilling to ask it, content to let others carry on the dirty work of imprisoning and tormenting their fellows, sight unseen?<br /><br />The assumed right to judge and imprison another human being seems to imply, at the very least, that it is grounded in some form of moral code. There must be the force of "moral authority", if you will. And so I ask again, upon what does late 20th/early 21st Century America base such authority? This is, after all, the same country which virtually eliminated an entire race and culture of native Americans through trickery, thievery and murder. I must presume that the words ascribed to Jesus when he came upon a group of "righteous" men about to stone a prostitute do not apply to modern America. What was it he said? "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone".<br /><br />If what happened to countless native American tribes doesn't lend clarity enough to my point, let's add more grist to the mill. For example, the government of the United States is the same government which forcefully took the western third of the North American continent from Mexico, based upon a trumped-up war because the Mexican government had displayed the nerve to disagree with the American institution of slavery.<br /><br />This is the same country which only freed their slaves a little over 130 years ago, but legally continued to segregate those former slaves from the rest of the population until the late 1960s.<br /><br />This is a country which routinely spends far more for weapons of war than education of the young or the feeding and care of poor children. Weapons manufacturing and exporting around the globe is the single greatest source of income from this same "righteous" government.<br /><br />This is the same country which spent untold billions of dollars napalming and otherwise bombarding the peoples of southeast Asia who had the gall to attempt their own revolutions against a variety of colonial yokes.<br /><br />This is the very same nation which incarcerates a greater percentage of its population than any other so-called "civilized" country. <br /><br />This is also the country with the greatest gap between the haves and have-nots, a gap that is increasing with such geometric proportions that there is a literally frantic effort underway to build more prisons, getting the cages ready that will be needed to ensnare those who eventually will refuse to allow the rich to get richer, building their empires on the skulls of the masses of oppressed peoples who man their factories, flip their burgers, wash their cars, mow their lawns, and play nanny to their children while they, the moneyed class, frolic in the sun with their latest toys -- endless piles houses, boats, resorts, luxury cars, computers and lord knows what other forms of distraction for their empty lives. The top 2% of the populous still owns 95%-plus of the wealth.<br /><br />Do tell me, then; from whence derives this moral authority to judge others? Upon what foundation other than race and economic status does this supposed authority rest? Certainly not on any system of morality or spirituality of which I have ever read.<br /><br />In ancient times, God supposedly directly appointed the wise men of the world, men such as Solomon, Abraham, David and a long line of biblical judges based upon the sole qualification that they were truly righteous men who led exemplary lives. Alas, we are not blessed today with such wise, morally righteous men. Need I point out that this stops none of the shameless men-of-power today who manipulate the machinery of government, law and business to their own ends? Let those who have eyes to see, see; let those who have ears to hear, hear.<br /><br />In our time, judges and prosecutors are elected or appointed political pawns, doing the bidding of their masters, creating portfolios of self-promotion that will allow them to further their careers on the heaped up bodies of the indigent and ignorant. Guilt or innocence matters little if at all. Like the warriors who roamed the jungles of Vietnam, these soldiers of the system know that what matters is a hefty body count, not justice. And those bodies fir for sacrifice are to be found not in the boardrooms but in the ghettos. This is the origin of the old joke justice is actually "just-us", because from down here at the bottom of the socio-economic scale, the view is clear: justice is far from blind. It is for the rich alone, "just-us" who can afford to foot the inflated bills, the lawyers and their perks, the bribes for judges, prison guards, and all the rest of the minions who man the walls that keep the filthy masses separated from the rest of society. Rather than an objective process designed "for all", it is a selective process of slaughter exercised day in day out, by the haves against the have-nots. Today's judges and prosecutors are routinely bought, bullied and bribed into keeping the streets clear of anyone who does not have a clearly defined role the play in the economic game. By becoming fodder for the penal system, the nation's poor assume their place in the economic scheme of things. I ask the reader again: where is the moral authority required for the power these men hold over life and death?<br /><br />Whenever I have raised this issue since my incarceration, I have repeatedly been pointed towards the criminal justice system as the source of this moral authority. Yet no sane or sophisticated man should dare make that assertion in public for fear of ridicule. This is the stuff of grade school civics classes, not the real world of bones and blood. Any one remotely associated with the criminal justice system knows that justice goes to the highest bidder. This is common knowledge in every criminal defense law firm in America. White America was outraged that O.J. Simpson "got away with murder". Innocence or guilt aside, the only point that mattered in that trail, that matters in any trial, is the money. O.J. had the resources to buy the best, so he beat the rap, despite all the odds. Usually, it goes the other way, with poor black defendants being swept away by the system because they don't have the financial resources to buy their way out. White America seethes with anger when the same game works on behalf of a black man. Too bad. It's your system, you built it to work that way. The only way to stop other O.J's from winning is to make certain that only white people have all the money. And I know there is as much effort put into that becoming a reality as ever, perhaps more now than in the early years of the civil rights movement.<br /><br />For further proof of my contention, look at how the jury system in America works. Most Americans might be stunned to learn that a "jury of one's peers" was actually an invention designed to protect the gentry of medieval England from the filthy, unlanded masses. By building this convenience into the system, their lord and ladyships were assured that they would be judged by other nobles, not by the rabble.<br /><br />The jury system relies upon a generally uninformed electorate who would have a difficult time spelling "reasonable doubt" much less understanding its implications as the standard of proof at trial. Juries today are selected solely from the list of registered voters in a given county. Statistics suggest this method allows for juries to be made up of people who represent less than 20% of the total population, very much in keeping with the original English intent behind assuring one a "jury of their peers". Race and economic class distinctions adversely impact the formation of juries that are truly reflective of the diverse faces which make up America. Those earning higher incomes tend to vote more than lower income people, so the voter registration roles from which juries are selected are comprised of these higher income people who can identify hardly at all with the lives of those who they are asked to hold judgment over.<br /><br />Thus, juries are generally made up of middle class whites. Conversely, prison populations are generally comprised of poor, blacks, Mexicans and between 10%-20% whites. Therefore any moral authority attributed to the jury system has been undermined by race, class distinctions, lack of education, and limited access to resources, especially of the green variety. Experienced criminal trial attorneys will quickly confirm for anyone willing to listen that a well paid, skilled attorney can readily convince most juries of just about anything, without regard to trivial issues like actual guilt or innocence. Such attorneys cost a great deal of money. One of my sons was informed by a prominent attorney in Los Angeles, for example, that my case was very transparent, that I don't belong in prison. The solution? $100,000, pure and simple. If I can raise one hundred grand, I can "buy" the justice that will otherwise be denied me. Where can I, or most others in prison, find $100,000?<br /><br />The changing attitude towards actual innocence is another vexing characteristic of America's prison system which no one wants to talk about. I've been told that in the early days of our republic, it was axiomatic that "it is better to free one hundred guilty men than send one innocent man to jail." This is probably historical hyperbole, but an ideal to strive for if not one to be reinstated. Those who understand how the system works will officially admit that conservatively, between one and two percent of all prison inmates are legally innocent. More than one in 100 adults in the United States is in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly $50 billion a year and the federal government $5 billion more. With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in both the number and percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving far-more-populous China a distant second, according to a study by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States.<br /><br />In a country where the national prison population stands at roughly 2.3 million citizens (and growing), that represents approximately 23,000 innocent persons incarcerated illegally in America! Think about that for a moment. I tend to be more skeptical than not, and believe the real figure is much closer to ten percent of the total prison population, or 230,000 thousand innocent persons, people who have done nothing wrong, but who are too poor or uneducated to prove it, rotting unjustly behind bars as you read this sentence.<br /><br />However, in terms of the moral foundation upon which the system supposedly rests, what difference does it make whether the number of innocent men and women in prison is closer to 23,000 or 230,000? One person wasting away under such an unjust system is one person too many. The system has essentially violated its moral contract with the citizenry. Almost weekly now some television news program or newspaper headline recounts for us the sad story of another miserable human being illegally deprived of their liberty for decades who finally is discovered to be, usually by some happenstance, innocent of the crime for which they stand convicted. Never once have I seen such a story told in which the criminal justice officials involved have had the decency to even say, "We're sorry. We made a terrible mistake. Hope you'll forgive us for depriving you of two decades of your live."<br /><br />Where is the moral authority in such a justice system?<br /> <br />90% of the criminal defendants who are actually guilty routinely plea bargain their way down to charges which have absolutely no relationship to the crime. Even the innocent often plea bargain when the odds seem overwhelming. Prison (the dead end of the criminal justice system) serves no purpose other than being the money-making industry it has grown into. Let me assure any and all comers that, from here where I have been for nearly a decade, these institutions lack all sense of moral authority and social relevance. The society as a whole would be better served by putting inmates on a deserted island with no resources. The outcome would be essentially the same.<br /><br />The governmental agency which oversees this dismal failure in the State of California is called the Department Of Corrections. What an extraordinary misnomer. The system incarcerates millions in the name of "correction", then systematically removes all of the necessary resources needed for rehabilitation, in the name of punishment. What "correction" is involved in putting many of society's most dysfunctional men and women -- the addicted, the drunk, the mentally ill, the ignorant -- into one location where they are thrown together with no consideration for what is to follow once they are placed here? The concept is warped by definition, a legacy from the dark ages which flies in the face of common sense when closely examined.<br /><br />But no one wishes to closely examine this mess for fear of what they will find. And so, America's deepest, darkest, most afflicted secret continues to fester, like an unlanced boil, waiting for the inevitable systemic infection that will inevitably come, spreading its way beyond the walls of the prisons, no longer confinable, until the disease created in these deadly test tubes consumes the entire society.<br /><br />I should like to invite the disbeliever to visit virtually any prison in America, and observe the men and women who run these institutions, as further anecdotal proof of my contentions. This sad collection of humanity are the dregs of our society, often no more well educated than those they are paid to cage. Civil servants with little training, and certainly no expertise in penology, this sorry lot suffers from low self esteem at the least, and often from severe emotional disturbances that make them thoroughly unfit for the tasks they are called upon to perform. Prison "corrections" officials are not tested on issues of ethics, philosophy, administration, moral principles, comparative religious values or any subject related to the moral authority they loudly proclaim and attempt to flaunt every day on the job. Yet they are allowed to make critical life and death decisions day in and day out, without oversight or insight. This is not only an abuse of power, but of the supposed moral authority that gives them the right to function in the first place, assuming that that moral authority exists, which I contend it does not.<br /><br />The current political climate of a decided and sharp turn to the Right has created a class of classic political prisoners in America. In the 1960s, the title was first claimed by many in the prison system. Today, in states like California, the label is an accurate description of the people who are kept in prison in no relationship to the time prescribed for the crime or their behavior during incarceration. Former California Governor Pete Wilson routinely rescinded all parole dates awarded by the commissioners on the Board Of Prison Terms. During his administration, parole rates dropped from approximately 50% to less than 1%. The Governor's wholesale denial of parole to eligible prisoners was supported by no moral principle or authority. Political climate summed up the parameters of his<br />authority.<br /><br />If the required moral authority necessary to deprive an individual of his liberty is not found in the judicial system, the corrections department or in the elected officials, where is it hidden?<br /><br />Can we assume that it is within the society itself which created and empowered all of these social structures? Is it within a society where children have turned inward and now murder their own parents, teachers and schoolmates in an almost routine manner? Can the society deny that it created these children through the movies, music, home life and social environment in which they were raised? Wouldn't a wise, moral society assume the necessary responsibility for such atrocities rather than simply reduce the legal age at which these kids can be sentenced to death? This is especially significant (and hypocritical) in a society which increasingly calls for individual responsibility.<br /><br />A truly wise and just society, one based upon firm moral principles, would feed and educate all of its children before buying another weapon of mass destruction. A society that denies its own children of their birthright in the name of profits is a society with no moral authority or compass. Somewhere within the history of wholesale genocide against Native Americans, of the enslavement and then racial segregation of Africans, of economic corruption, of social and economic Darwinism, and of the routine exploitation and abuse of the poor, America has forfeited all claims to moral authority.<br /><br />On this anniversary celebration of American liberty and freedom, as a prisoner, I can feel only the kind of disgust one experiences when listening to someone lie to their face. America's celebration of liberty is a myth at best, a terrible farce and tragedy at worst. Not only do I lack the motivation to celebrate a freedom which has never existed, I feel no compulsion to assist or cooperate with those who deny freedom to me and others in the name of a bankrupt moral authority. I have been fortunate enough to experience life and a sense of relative freedom for many years before arriving here. I have traveled and enjoyed the natural beauty of this country. I have enjoyed a wonderful home life and the love of family and the respect of friends. I have been blessed to have earned enough money to afford many luxuries. I have consumed conspicuously, and tasted the difference between real life and life-in-prison. Life in prison is a denial of the life force, of all that we aspire to, as we reach for our higher nature. Therefore, on this holiday I loudly proclaim, "Give me liberty, or give me death, by any means necessary."DavidMichaelSmithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15137593188998037668noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330822231390963380.post-73872497989116021812008-06-24T11:36:00.000-07:002008-06-24T14:48:58.998-07:00<div style="text-align: center; font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Another Smoke<br /></span></div><br />"Hey, man, how you doin'?"<br /><br />I attempt to whisper as softly as possible, unwilling to break the spell of fearful introspection which has enveloped the plane's gloomy occupants. Bill Bleeker, the friend who joined me in a drunken enlistment spree, sits across the aisle, three rows up. He turns and squints the two bloodshot slits above his nose.<br /><br />"Forget it, man," he replies. " We'll be there soon, and you look like shit. Get some sleep."<br /><br />Yeah. Feel like shit too. Shit. That's the organic matter I most closely identify with at the moment. An unwanted substance about to be recycled, that's me. All of us. Flotsam, the stuff we have become over the last few weeks of combat training. Join the Army. See the world. Be human, get trained to become shit.<br /><br />Close your eyes, Private. This is getting you nowhere. I drift away, vague images of Carol the Screamer filling the void. There is often no sense of self when we dream, but when Carol is there, wailing in ecstasy, clawing the skin away in furrows along my back, there is a most definite subject/object reality about the vision. Jolting awake, banging my head on the seat in front of me, I thank Carol for providing stimulation strong enough to reach out beyond its originating space and time. Any kind of company, even the phantom of past pleasures, is welcome at 38,000 feet above a blackened expanse of endless ocean. Where is the real Carol at this moment? I wonder. No matter. I have the Carol I need, now and forever safely tucked into the dark corners of my libido, ready to come alive at the firing of a few neurons. Jesus, maybe I really am crazy. Well, fuck it. What are they gonna do, send me to 'Nam?<br /><br />There is suddenly a stomach wrenching blast of turbulence, like hitting a pot hole in the sky. The seat belt sign goes on, an insistent beep also announcing that it's time to cinch one's anatomy firmly into the saddle. After all, who wants to die on the way to such a fascinating tour? Miss all the fun? Not on your life! Join the Army. See the world. Murder people from a backwards culture. There you go again, head. Shut up, listen up; el captain has got some important intelligence.<br /><br />"Yeah, you boys need to fasten yer seat belts; we're hittin' a little bad air on our approach to Ton Son Nhut. Good news is, though, shouldn't delay us much; we'll still be on the ground in about 25 minutes."<br /><br />I don't want to hear the bad news, if there is any. There is.<br /><br />"We got reports of enemy activity in the vicinity of the landing field tonight, gentlemen, so this is gonna be an interesting introduction for ya to lovely Southeast Asia. Hang in there, guys; I've done these night landings before under fire. It'll be fine. Light up, if you got 'em."<br /><br />Under fire? I hold my breath, waiting for him to whistle a chorus or two from "Twelve O'clock High", but there is only the sound of the jet engines again, eating oxygen in their mindless effort to propel us into the vacuum of a tropical night. Although meant to encourage the legal type of smoky inhalation, I take the captain at his word and, bumpy ride or not, unbuckle my seat belt and wobble back towards the head. Bill, with whom I enlisted three months ago after watching too many Audey Murphy movies, had suggested the perfect addict's strategy for handling the endless hours of boredom and fear that lay ahead. Both of us secreted a small bag of marijuana on board. He now turns and offers a wry smile of conspiratorial camaraderie as I head to the back of the aircraft.<br /><br />Once locked in its tiny confines, I fumble with the cigarette papers, fish the pouch of illicit plant life from inside my shirt, and begin to carefully spread it evenly over the inner surface of the single exposed smoking paper. Another thermal and, as the plane drops a few feet, the pot on its way down to the paper stays where it was, momentarily suspended in mid-air, until it falls and scatters along the floor.<br /><br />Goddamn it, captain, keep this thing bee-lined 'till I lick this baby shut. Don't want to waste any, even though I've heard some of the best boo in the world is cultivated in the jungles of Nam and Cambodia.<br /><br />The plane settles down a bit, I slurp the paper's thin sheen of glue, roll it into a cylinder, close and secure the bag of weed, and light up. After taking the first shallow hit or two, designed to get the joint going, I commence the serious business of atmospheric ingestion. Sucking in two lungs full, I hold it, hold it, hold it. Cough, sputter, sputter, as the lung's alveolus try to reject the latest coating of toxic tars. Immediately, I feel the unmistakable alterations, as cannabis sativa begins to circulate from lungs to brain, transforming the plexus taking place between countless nerves throughout my perceptual system. Eyes closed, drifting, drifting away, as light as the cloud of smoke now hanging in the cubicle's air.<br /><br />Bang! Bang! The pounding on the door's exterior causes the THC to be supplemented by an enormous spurt of adrenaline. <br /><br />"Soldier, what the hell you doin' in there? Yer supposed to be in yer seat!"<br /><br />It's the ape-man, Sergeant Major Bobby Lee Baker, escapee from 18th century Alabama, a throwback no matter what the method of measurement.<br /><br />"Yeah, uh, have'n a little trouble with my stomach, Sarge; be out in justa minute."<br /><br />This is closer to the truth that I would like. The combination of erratic motion, drug, and fear has spawned spasms of nausea. I fight back my gorge, and take another long drag on the tube of THC. Ahh, that's better. Dousing the lighted end, I carefully store the roach in the open pack of straights in my fatigue shirt pocket. After all, who knows how long it'll take to find a new supply in-country? As I stand, drug drenched blood seeps from my fetid brain, and I nearly loose consciousness. Steadying myself with both hands, I look in the mirror. After the tiny snakes of light cease their writhing, I focus on the image staring back at me. How is it possible to look this worn out at age 19? What will I look like in another year? If I'm still breathing, that is. Fuck it, there goes the head again. Shut up, head again. Thinking leads only to more fear, and I'm already treading in a sea of dread; no need to channel into another tributary.<br /><br />Straighten up the fatigues, wet down the hair, and hope that peckerwood Baker is already back in his seat. Otherwise, he's in for a free high when I open the door and he gets a face full of smoke, undoubtedly the first induced exhilaration of his life not associated with berating others or swilling corn squeezings. I inch the door open and peek around its edge. Good. The leather-hearted bastard has returned to the front of the plane, probably as frightened as the rest of us by the jarring ride.<br /><br />Staggering along the aisle, I try to balance myself with handholds along the tops of the seats. Another unevenly heated pocket of upper atmosphere causes the aircraft to lurch up and to the right, and I loose my balance. Reaching for a piece of plane, I instead end up with a handful of sweating skull.<br /><br />"Hey, watch it, asshole".<br /><br />The voice belongs to the skull, and I pull back my paw as if it's touched a bed of burning coals.<br /><br />"Sorry, man".<br /><br />"Fuck you!"<br /><br />"Fuck you, too!"<br /><br />Confrontation completed with the usual verbal debasements, I drag myself forward, finally reaching my seat. Stanley McGill from Sweetwater, Rhode Island, who has been coma-like the entire trip, except when I waken him up to let me in and out of my window seat, stirs as I tap his shoulder.<br /><br />"Lemme in, Stan."<br /><br />"Goddamn it,, how many times you gonna wake me up? You got a bladder problem or somethin'? Piss in a cup next time, will ya?"<br /><br />"Just let me by and do us all a favor and pass out again, will you McG?"<br /><br />The closer we get to hell, the more strident the communications, if such exchanges can correctly be considered real interaction. More like the energy passed between two hundred shaven cats in a bag, about to be dropped into the river.<br /><br />Peering out the window provides the same black canvass for the imagination that has been there for many hours. As I stare, I see bodies with protruding bones, pools of blood, swarms of flies, villages on fire. Please head, please. Stop. I don't want to go through this before I have to go through this. Eyelids heavy, I drift, then drop into the nothingness, where there is no war, no you, no me...<br /><br />"...and no smoking, as we make our final approach to beautiful, tropical Ton Son Nhut airbase, gentlemen. We're on our final approach."<br /><br />Groggily, I recognize the captain's voice. Oh God, this is it. No time left, not even enough to make another perception shifting trip to the bathroom. Gripping both armrests, I unconsciously sink my fingers, claw-like, deep into the fabric. McGill's face is pale, almost luminous. Angelic in its other worldliness, I think, except for the tiny telltale dots of perspiration forming on his upper lip. This is the human face of terror, not likely to be much different than what I'll see again and again over the next twelve months. Our eyes meet. We are looking into a mirror, my face a simulacrum of his. My death grip loosens long enough for me to self-consciously wipe away the beads of sweat under my nose.<br /><br />"Gentlemen, it shouldn't be too hard to locate the airstrip. Those of you on the right side of the aircraft will notice the flashes of light."<br /><br />Lucky me, to have been assigned a window seat on the plane's right side. Indeed, I see the bursts of explosive light, as the Chinese made Rocket Propelled Grenades impact the ground. Their randomness, intermingled with the symmetry of the air field's landing lights, create an abstract pattern that gives me something to observe besides the mounting feelings of heart-pounding, gut-wrenching alarm that's welling into my throat.<br /><br />"Okay, boys, hang on. I'm gonna bring us in on a combat landing maneuver. Keeps us from being too handy a target. Just relax."<br /><br />He's got to be kidding. No, he's insane. Yes, that's it; we're all insane, madmen, landing in a giant asylum of death. Fuck you, head, fuck you. Oh Jesus, I feel sick again. Please head, do something constructive for a change, and don't let me vomit until we land.<br /><br />The explosions on the ground are now accompanied by air bursts. Even looking at the field lights, it's difficult to gauge where the sky stops and the earth begins. Without warning, the giant jet arches its tail, and we are headed straight down, nose first. Sweet Mary Mother of God, a combat landing. Memory kicks in. We were told about these. Instead of a steady descent, the aircraft positions itself almost directly above the field, drops nose first, pulling up at the last possible moment for a landing. A maneuver that sounds, looks, and feels aerodynamically improbable. What else to expect from a mad man, piloting an airborne loony bin of other mad men?<br /><br />The flashes of combustive light are on a vertical axis. A warmth and calmness seeps through my body. These are the final moments of my life; I have crossed the threshold, from an unbearable, vibrant and life-confirming fear, to the irresistible serenity and surrender of the embrace of death.<br /><br />As violently as it nosed down, the aircraft rights itself, and we feel the wheels impact the macadam. Explosions can be heard and felt, as well as seen, all around the plane. The engines reverse throttle; I cannot comprehend how we are not being hit by the countless explosions, no more than a second or two apart. The plane is taxiing off the main runway. Again, the incongruity, the contrast of the bellicose with the benign, further loosens our grip on reality. How can we be slowly taxiing, as if about to disembark at some familiar state-side airport terminal, while all around us, the world is being shattered by pieces of hot metal meant to tear us apart? We brake to a stop. Leather-heart is on his feet, bellowing.<br /><br />"All right, ladies. We're under fire, in case you hadn't noticed. Grab yer gear and get ready to de-part this aircraft, in an orderly, single line!"<br /><br />Doors burst open at the front and rear of the plane. I'm on my feet, still choking back the nausea. Like a link in an inanimate chain, I am propelled toward the door by the motion of the men on both sides of me along the aisle. At the door, every sense organ comes under assault. Humid, putrid air envelopes the skin; the stench of composting jungle and spent mortars crawl up the nostrils; the concussions of in-coming rounds mix with the Sergeant's urgent commands reverberating in the ears, as flashes of light sear the eyes.<br /><br />Somewhere in the rice paddies, no more than a few hundred yards away, the thoughts of the Viet Cong who have arranged this reception, emanate through the ether. "Welcome to Southeast Asia, you dumb, ugly bastards! ", the thought forms seem to say. "We have one full year to kill you, and we're sure going to give it the old college try!" Or clichés equivalent to that idea in Vietnamese.<br /><br />Buses appear from the darkness like black whales with wheels. The windows are covered with wire mesh. Are these designed to keep bullets out or inmates in? We scurry aboard, voluntarily compressing ourselves into seats measurably smaller and more uncomfortable than the one's just abandoned.<br /><br />"Move it! Move it! Move it! Unless yer lookin' to get an ass full of shrapnel, let's go, let's go!"<br /><br />Shakespeare he is not, but leather-face always has a succinct way of bringing to bear a point of information. We are rolling across the tarmac again, inside the bellies of the diesel beasts that are taking us we know not where, somewhere, we hope, away from the living ordinance.<br /><br />"There are flack jackets and helmets under yer seats, ladies. Now'd be a good time to put 'em on."<br /><br />Who can quarrel with such sound logic? Within moments, we are encased in the gear designed to protect our heads and upper torsos from near misses of detonated bits of metal. Lifting the lip of my helmet enough to glance around, I see faces sculpted in facades of what might be permanent trepidation. If we don't find refuge soon, someone is sure to die of fright. The bus slams to a halt. Before anyone could possibly have moved, leather-heart is screaming again.<br /><br />"Don't just sit there! Get off the bus and into the bunker. Move, move, move!"<br /><br />For an instant, all our recently instilled military reactions are forgotten, and the scramble for the door is like the flight of a frightened crowd headed for the exit of a burning building.<br /><br />"Single file, you men, or you'll answer to me in the morning, in which case, you'll wish the VC took you out tonight!"<br /><br />Right on target again. Having received leather-heart's version of disciplinary action on two prior occasions, I appraised his contention as less than far-fetched. Sergeant Major Baker had made a career out of professional cruelty. He had found his true place in the scheme of things. We make an orderly, albeit terrified, exit of the buss into a nearby bunker. When the last man has entered the damp darkness of the sandbagged cave, the shelling stops, as if on cue. A blanket of moist silence rings in my ears. The stench of defecation floats through the blackness. Someone has soiled themselves. I marvel that there are no attempts to verbally segregate and castigate the offender. We are, to a man, still too breathless with fear to speak.<br /><br />Hours are passing. I look at my watch. The plane landed only fifteen minutes earlier. I find myself remembering the summer of my eleventh year. Then too, time had dilated, and it seemed that I would forever ride my bike to the swimming pool, one day of sunshine filled bliss following another into an eternity of youth-filled fun and irresponsibility. If time expands during such times of joy, how can it be that this agony is having the same effect on its passage? Perhaps it is the intensity of any extreme experience, good or ill, that creates this illusion.<br /><br />"Ah-right, listen up. Looks like Charlie's finished with his little welcoming party. I want you men to file outta here, quietly, and follow me to your temporary billets. Each of you will receive your separate assignments and travel orders tomorrow morning after formation at 0800 hours."<br /><br />With the sudden release of tension comes the overwhelming urge for a smoke. Tobacco will be a poor substitute for that substance which my nervous system craves. Frantically, I try and devise a strategy for sneaking away to light up a joint. As we move across open ground towards the barracks, I notice a small rise to my right. Offering just enough of a hill to hide a man sitting in a crouch on its opposite side, the hill appears as a divinely offered apparition. Will I be able to muster the courage needed to steal into the night of an unknown and decidedly hostile place? The urgings of habituated synapses tell me "yes!".<br /><br />The barracks are dark and dank, not much different than the bunker. The spectral outlines of the room's layout reveal the standard design which has characterized every US Army barracks since World War II. I find a bunk, crawl in and begin the wait. From all around me come the sounds of nervous coughing, bodies restlessly twisting and turning. I decide to make my move. No one will know that instead of heading into the latrine to empty my bladder, I'm aimed for the hill to fill my lungs with smoke that will replenish my bloodstream with the soothing balm of drug induced relaxation.<br /><br />At the crest of the hill, I stop and turn towards the barracks. The issuance of no movement or sound convince me that my first night's foray in-country will go unobserved. The ground is as damp as the air as I settle into a posture sure to help me blend into the contours of the landscape. Everything is readied. A single paper, the bag of depleted weed, a pack of matches. Slowly, lovingly, I lace the paper with pot, a farmer about to seed the field of his consciousness with a potent seed. Joint prepared, I lift a lighted match to its tip, trying to cover its light as much as possible, remembering the stories of men taken out by a single bullet as they announced their exact location to the enemy by means of a tiny pinpoint of light. It was in World War II that the idea of "three on a match" became a very bad idea. With a single, masterful inhalation, the deed is done, match quickly extinguished, and I settle back for my reward.<br /><br />If I too strenuously force a stream of smoke into my lungs here, I'll cough and sputter unwanted attentions my way, so I gingerly suck a modest amount of smoke into the deepest chambers of my lungs. Just as the load arrives at its subterranean destination, headlights leap across the crest of the hill, and I emit an involuntary puff of smoke accompanied by a small scream, the sound of prey cornered by the hunter. The jeep screeches to within a few feet and abruptly stops in a cloud of dust. On its side, I read the large lettering: Military Police, it announces ominously. For the second time in as many hours, I dissolve into the hapless lack or resistance of one who is about to die. One thought rattles back and forth, from one side of my head to the other.<br /><br />"Your first night in Vietnam, and your going to be arrested."<br /><br />The jeep disgorges four of the largest men I have ever seen, each sporting the unmistakable "MP" armbands and helmets. Inspired by the sudden and irrevocable certainty of my demise, I raise the joint to my lips for one last drag in hopes of being as medicated as possible against the terrible moments that lie just ahead, the nightmare of incarceration in a military prison in the middle of a war zone, the asylum within the asylum.<br /><br />"Hey, buddy, don't Bogart that joint! We'd like to have a smoke, if you don't mind fronting us a few hits."<br /><br />This must be a special kind of torment cultivated by the tedium and boredom of too much time spent enforcing arbitrary laws in a place where law and order have obviously broken down long ago, if ever they were in force. Have a few laughs watching the poor newly arrived bastard relax as he thinks he's not going to jail after all, then beating him into submission with wooden batons before hauling him off to a tin can somewhere in the nearby jungle.<br /><br />The ranking NCO senses my confusion, evidenced by my exhibition of total paralysis. A three-up, one-down stripped Sergeant, he smiles the first grin I have ever received from a non-com.<br /><br />"So-K, buddy. We ain't gonna bust ya fer smokin' a little weed in the Nam. Hell, man, just about everybody smokes the shit over here; we just wanna share what ya got there. We ran out earlier tonight, and can't get off base to buy more till tomorrow..."<br /> <br />No words will come, but I manage to extend my arm, joint in hand, towards the Sarge. He takes the doobie, and there is glad-handing and back slapping all around. It's all hail-fellow-well-met as the sacred weed is passed in the usual informal ritual. We introduce ourselves, and I am promised that the favor will be returned before I'm shipped out for permanent assignment, somewhere in the land of Ho Chi Minh. Oh, sure, you'll pay me back. I'm satisfied not to be busted. I don't care if I see any of you again. At this moment, I am unaware that indeed, in the middle of the following night, my four new-found friends will return and slip an inaugural bag of powerful Cambodian pot into my hands, with a whispered, "Thanks for taking care of us last night. Good luck. Stay low and alive, man," before disappearing again in their jeep. The surreal will become the norm, the unusual an every moment occurrence in the weeks and months to come. In fact, in ways that will never come fully into focus even decades later, all of life will be different from this night onwards.<br /><br />On this night, I grope my way back to the barracks, listening to the satisfied laughter of the four MP's above the roar of their jeep. Once the shock and fear finally abate a bit, I may get three or four hours rest. Who can sleep, though, after the startling events of the past few hours? What if the VC come back and lob a few more rounds, this time into the barracks, just to make their earlier welcome complete? In fact, this place is famous for uneasy nights. The 90th Replacement Battalion it's called, the place many of us spend our first and last nights in Vietnam. One building over, there is a barracks full of soldiers who will be hopping aboard a Freedom Bird, heading home tomorrow morning, if they live until then. Charley not only likes to scare the hell out of new arrivals; it's great sport to kill a few of us on our last evening before returning home. A jaded sense of humor with a well-honed sense of irony, this enemy of ours.<br /><br />I sink into a restless sleep peopled by vague and unfamiliar shapes, sounds and odors. At sunrise, I realize I'm right; sleep offers no true rest here. For the next year, the slightest shifting of the wind will awaken each of us. For some, the full respite of sleep will never return. Pulling on my fatigues, I think the thought that will be the first to cross my mind each morning in the endless months to come.<br /><br />"What the hell; guess I'll have another smoke."DavidMichaelSmithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15137593188998037668noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330822231390963380.post-15759694156640939062008-06-14T13:47:00.000-07:002008-06-19T13:49:55.039-07:00<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: bold;font-size:130%;" >Not-So-Nutty Professor<br /></span><br /><div style="text-align: left;">Professor Stephen Schneider’s Stanford University office looks as if it might implode if one more book is added to its already voluminous contents. Every shelf is filled. Piles of precariously balanced publications rise like man-made stalagmites from the floor. My camera crew staggers around the stacks and columns, somehow managing to set in place the gear needed for the interview. When at last we begin, the professor, a member of the university’s Department of Biological Sciences and a Senior Fellow with the Stanford Institute for International Studies, speaks with the conviction born of a man who has done his research. As the author of eight books on various aspects of global climate change, he knows his subject matter by heart.<br /><br />“If I speak in front of a group of say, 500 people, I ask how many have ever had a fire in their house,” he says, staring intently into the camera. “Usually, a few hands go up. Then I ask how many have fire insurance. Every hand raises. “Why is it, then.’ I ask, ‘that you are willing to gamble with the planet’s one life support system when the odds are much greater that it will suffer the consequences of global warming than the chance that your house will burn down?’”<br /><br />The professor has an unusual talent for an academician. He knows how to translate complex scientific data into terms that laymen can grasp. More than that, he has the ability to motivate his listeners to eschew despair for constructive action. On two aspects of the topic, he is uncompromising. First, the debate is over, he says. Or at least it should be.<br /><br />“My colleagues are amazed when they hear someone say, ‘I don’t believe in global warming.’ Their reaction is the same as mine. ‘What do you mean you don’t believe? This isn’t a matter of belief, it’s a matter of evidence.’”<br /><br />Then there is the matter of what the evidence reveals. Professor Schneider says this part of the debate is also no longer debatable.<br /><br />“Global warming is the collective result of billions of individual decisions to use the atmosphere as an un-priced sewer to dump our wastes.”<br /><br />There are, of course, “natural” factors that come into play in the rise of the earth’s atmospheric temperature by an average of 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the past few decades. Clearly, modernization is the primary culprit. The January 2007 conclusions of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change confirm both of Schneider’s contentions. The Convention’s web site (http://unfccc.int/2860.php) makes it clear.<br /><br />“Against the background of the most conclusive scientific evidence to date that the warming of the climate system is unequivocal and accelerating, the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Yvo de Boer, calls for speedy and decisive international action to combat the phenomenon.”<br /><br />A tad more bureaucratic in language than that used by Professor Schneider, but unambiguous. Instead of a mere 10 rise in average global temperatures, the Convention predicts increases between 30 degrees and 100 degrees. Those searching for hard data beyond the anecdotal can glean the troubling facts from the Convention’s scientific and verifiable documentation.<br /><br />As dreary as it all sounds, Professor Schneider says there is reason for hope. While we cannot put the carbon and other greenhouse gas genies back into their industrial bottles, we can slow the rate of change.<br /><br />“We can invent our way out of this problem exactly the way we invented our way into it. There will be new jobs and new businesses, if we have the collective political will to act.”<br /><br />It is not inconsistent to address climate change and to improve the economic prospects of people everywhere, according to Schneider. The key words in the professor’s optimism are “political will.” As we all wait increasingly breathlessly for a political sea change, glaciers continue to melt, the oceans continue to rise, and storms grow more intense. All this as the planet moves closer each day to recalling our invitation to remain in stewardship.<br /><br /></div></div>DavidMichaelSmithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15137593188998037668noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330822231390963380.post-8686592952195735482008-06-06T09:35:00.000-07:002008-06-06T09:42:53.746-07:00<span style="font-size:130%;"><br /></span><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;">Welcome Abroad</span><br /><span style="font-size:85%;">A Subjectively True Story<br />by<br />David Michael Smith</span><br /></div><br />My week of diving done in the Sea of Cortez, I leave the boat in Loreto, about half way up the Baja Peninsula, for no other reason than it might prove interesting to travel through the desert on a Third World bus. <br /> <br />It is a dilapidated affair, a battered vehicle which may or may not have looked better when it was new twenty-five years earlier. Years of traversing the scorching peninsula give the bus a sagging, tired appearance. The driver looks no better. At least everyone has a seat, and there are no chickens on board.<br /><br />Gulping a quart of mineral water just before departing proves an unwise survival strategy, despite the early heat of the day; we are hardly out of sight of the city limits before my need for a rest room becomes pressing. Attempting to occupy my mind with other matters proves entirely futile. (Why do we call them "rest rooms"? I rarely retire there because of fatigue.) As I look towards the back of the bus, I see that there is no handle on the bathroom door, only a place for a key to be inserted. Oh, fine. Now I must ask the driver in my non-Spanish Spanish for a key to the crapper. <br /><br />Distended bladders afford great motivation, however, and I reel down the aisle, emboldened by discomfort. My attempt at communication -- a series of grunts, hand gestures and the words "bãnos" and "gratias" -- at first bring only a searing look of disgust from the driver. Apparently only gringos, unlike the local stock who have learned how to manage every precious drop of bodily fluids, are weak enough in their physical constitution so as to require relief on a bus ride through the desert. After an agonizing moment in which I am convinced the driver will affect further ignorance and shrug me away, he grudgingly reaches into his pocket and extracts a bundle of keys, fumbling for the specific tool of access to my salvation.<br /> <br />I press my way to the rear of the swaying bus, teetering on the ragged edge of a panic brought on by now blinding pain. Visibly fumbling, I insert the key into the door and tug. Nothing. The lock is bent and jammed from years of use and abuse. My first thought is that the door will not open, not now, not ever. From a far rear seat, a young man looks on impassively, vaguely curious how this slight diversion from heat and boredom will play itself out. I am in too much discomfort to consider the broader implications of cross-cultural embarrassment, but become instantly haunted by visions of my reduction to uncontrolled urination in the aisle, huddled in the midst of a crowd of indignant citizens who stare unbelievably at my exposed and soggy member. <br /><br />Worse fates enter my imagination. I consider the potential sensations and repercussions evolving from a ruptured bladder. Moaning and capacious from the exploded viscera, I am taken from the bus, passed to the front over the heads of passengers standing shoulder to shoulder in the aisle, rushed to a local animal hospital where lack of sterile conditions leads to my quiet death. My bloated body is secretly buried in the desert. Were I to live, I would forevermore be required to wear a little plastic bag under my cloths which would gather an involuntary reservoir of piss throughout each day of the remainder of my wretched existence. Other people could excuse themselves to "go to the John". I would be required to frequently and secretly change pouches, like a mechanical device whose fluids and filters must be attended to after a certain mileage. <br /> <br />As these and other terrors mount in my floating brain, the door suddenly yields, and... ¡I'm in!<br /> <br />Gratefully returning the key to the driver, then slumping into my seat as every eye on the bus turns towards me in idle loathing, I try to shrink into an unobservable lump, hoping to enjoy the remainder of an uneventful trip. Almost immediately, I can feel the tiny sensation of pressure and pain beginning to build once more. Within the half-hour, the entire process must be repeated. I shoulder my way to the front of the bus, and again confront the mouth breather who drives it. With all the disdain he can muster, he hands me the key, holding it between the two fingers of an extended hand, as if he were having me dispose of a dead rodent.<br /> <br />The crisis has escalated in record time, and I am forced to sprint to the rear of the careening vehicle. I insert the key again. Once more, I am met with immobility. Did an unseen trickster weld the door shut while I was occupied at the front of the bus? Frantically, I begin pulling and tugging, trying various body postures in order to gain maximum advantage over the twisted metal. After several minutes of wrestling, sweating, and quiet swearing, the door mercifully yields once more. Inside the cramped and stuffy room, the temperature must be in excess of 110 degrees. For a moment I consider staying here for the rest of the trip, but realize I will require resuscitation should I remain here longer than necessary to complete the task at hand, or in hand, as it were. Instead, I decide to keep the key. <br /><br />Within minutes of this ill-fated resolve, we stop at the small town of Insurréction. Two burley police officers hop aboard and slowly saunter up and down the aisle, evidently looking for some hardened criminal. As my pulse synchronizes with my racing thoughts, I attempt to maintain a passive, indifferent expression. Has the driver betrayed me, somehow radioing ahead to the authorities that a gringo has stolen the key to his bathroom? Will I be carted off to a bug infested jail, electrodes attached to my groin, shocks indiscriminately administered to my most private anatomical parts until I confess that I've absconded to the back of the bus with the only available bathroom key, perhaps intending to skulk it across the border as an anthropological memento of my visit to Old Mexico? Or perhaps, I surmise, because of the nature of my crime, a rubber band will be tightly installed around the external portion of my urinary tract, there to remain until I internally erupt in a gigantic explosion of accumulated pee, a variation of my earlier fantasy, this one also leading to an unmarked grave amongst the cacti. <br /> <br />The officers wander back and forth. I cannot keep my eyes off their side arms, which appear massive enough to seek revenge against a large army of English speaking key thieves, payback for the Alamo and decades of other perceived cultural injustices. Slowly, the officers and their guns walk off the bus and disappear into the fetid ether as mysteriously as they emerged. I waste no time running down the aisle to quickly return the key to the driver, grateful that an international biological incident has been narrowly averted.<br /> <br />At the next stop, the town of Constitutíon, I notice two intensely pale young women, one just beginning to gray at the temples, the other a sandy blond, waiting in the small terminal to board the bus. Their distinctly northern European faces bear no evidence of ever having been touched by cosmetics. Their eyes are clear and bright and, even from a distance, convey a sense of mission. Everything about them -- buttoned down collars, precisely pressed, drab dresses, tightly-bunned hair, quiet, measured mannerisms -- harkens to a long gone, no frills era when boys and girls went on chaperoned dates. They chat amiably with those around them so that, despite their Anglo appearance, it is evident they speak fluent Spanish. They are assigned seats directly behind me and, sensing my hunger to speak to someone in my only tongue, the mostly dark haired one leans toward my ear.<br /> <br />"Where are you heading?" <br /> <br />The bus has but one final destination, so despite the fact that the answer is obvious, my need to communicate forces me to dutifully fill in the blank.<br /> <br />"La Paz. How 'bout you?"<br /> <br />"We're headed there too. We live there, and make this trip once a week so we can see our friends in Constitutíon. I'm Joan. And this is Jill," she says, indicating her slightly younger companion. I soon learn that Joan and Jill came up the hill to fetch a pail of Catholics; they are Christian missionaries from some mysterious, unnamed, non-denominational sect devoted to spreading the non-Roman Catholic biblical word to the masses of Mexico. <br /> <br />Joan has the aura of an older sister and it is soon apparent that Jill defers to her as such. Jill's eyes are more inquisitive than those of her stoical companion, her manner softer, less hardened than the elder proselytizer. I detect a slight and pleasantly innocent sexual tension between us, though I'm certain she would ardently deny the existence of such an energy, consciously unaware of its playful presence in the air between us.<br /> <br />In the midst of the small talk, Jill suddenly shares an unsolicited intimacy. "It's been so unseasonably hot here this June," she tells me, "that after we shower at the end of the day, we wrap ourselves in bathrobes while we're still wet, and then lie down and let the one small fan in our room blow cool air on us." <br /> <br />My eyes enlarge slightly, and a small bead of perspiration begins its journey down my nose, as this image of a proper fundamentalist Christian evangelist, hair undone, sprawled out in body clinging, sweat and shower soaked underwear, takes full form in my mind, till now lumpish with the vapors of the day. <br /> <br />As casually as I can structure the gesture, I wipe away the tell-tale bead now hanging precariously from the tip of my nozzle. For a moment, I cannot breathe, but simply wheeze my respiratory response to this titillating vision of a languid, liquid strategy for dissipating the tropical heat.<br /> <br />"Oh! Uh huh...", I squeak.<br /> <br />It is the only rejoinder I can manage. There are deep, unexplored currents in this young woman and I eye her for culpability. Is this the overture of a repressed coquette desperate to break the bonds of Old Testament subjugations taken too much to heart? Is her humid testimony intended to elicit a lurid signal of my desire to assist in these afternoon bathings? Unblinking and ingenuous, she stares back warmly. Her guileless comportment somehow suggests a curiosity that may someday propel her beyond the limits of an exclusionary world view. For the time being, this secret is held dear, a barely visible sheen in the recesses of her eyes.<br /> <br />We continue to chat congenially, we three, as the blistering macadam passes underneath, Joan dominating most of the conversation as I ask questions about the religious teachings of their sect. It's all garden variety bible thumping as far as I can glean, and I try to keep my heart unfettered by judgment, probing their belief system for the love I pray is at the foundation of their devotions and duties. They inquire about my activities in Mexico, and I give them a synopsis of the Sea Watch adventures. I learn that summer began this very day, June 21, at 9:48 a.m. Joan carries an obscure little book filled with such idle fancies. <br /> <br />I learn that Mexico wanted to sell the Baja Peninsula to the U.S. in the mid 1800s, but that southern congressman, fearful a new non-slave state would be added to the Union, voted against the purchase. This from a book Jill is reading that offers "a brief history of Mexico". As I look out over the garbage strewn desert along the road, I wonder what Las Vegas-like fate might have befallen this region had it slipped into our hands more than a century earlier. Jill's book tells me too that the peninsula was victimized by pirates in the early days of the New World, especially by the infamous Englishman Sir Francis Drake. To this day, Mexican mothers threaten their disobedient broods with kidnappings by "El Drako", a sort of Mexican boogie man who carts off unruly children who are never heard from again. <br /> <br />The impulse to bring the conversation back to religion, specifically the credo of my companions, is one I cannot resist, despite the realization I'm likely to uncover some prejudicial unpleasantness. They keep to the high road, and I temporarily avoid asking about hell fire and damnation. Seeing yet another opportunity to avoid having to speak my pidgin Spanish, I ask the ladies to negotiate a ticket for me from La Paz to Cabo when we arrive at the La Paz bus station. They agree and, in return for their kindness, I ask that they allow me to buy them lunch upon our arrival. At first, they politely decline, but after my continued assurances that I am basically harmless and well intentioned, they acquiesce. I do my best to keep all thoughts of cool afternoon showers and wet bathrobes from taking cohesive shape in my libidinous imagination. <br /> <br />The bus finally clatters and coughs into a sweltering La Paz. It is 104°, the air thick with sunlit exhaust from pre-siesta cars, motorbikes, buses and trucks, an ultraviolet atmospheric condition which no doubt prevailed on the surface of Venus just prior to its non-habitability. We head for a small beanery across the street from the bus terminal. Until this moment, I have been superficially dispassionate while listening to the Girls of the Gospels explain the tenets of their religion. In the main, it seems loving and uplifting, but we have yet to explore its dark underbelly. Over the midday meal I drop all pretense of casual inquiry and initiate a full court press. I wish to learn the ultimate fate of those of us who are not "Christian". <br /> <br />My companions sit upright and stiffen as they resist giving an immediate and forthright explanation of their belief in this matter, choosing rather to walk gingerly along the edges of this issue. As I move in for the informational kill, they softly inform me in the manner of a physician who carries the unhappy news of a patient's fatal malady, that those of us who don't embrace God the way the ladies say we should cannot dwell in the eternal presence of the lord. <br /> <br />"Where do the rest of us go?," I ask incredulously. <br /> <br />Just above a whisper, Joan replies, "There's only one other place..." <br /> <br />As blood rises to my already sun-baked face, I discover myself sitting again in the dreary, familiar place reserved for the infidel by the True Believer.<br /> <br />"Well, ladies, I think you ought to know", I inform them, "that you've just been fed by a Buddhist."<br /> <br />Attempting to remain non-plused, Joan feints curiosity. "Oh. And what's the Buddhist view in this matter?"<br /> <br />Tight lipped and demure, they listen as I explain that, from where I sit, there are as many roads to Rome as there are travelers. "We each discover our own way to the center of things. A rain forest dweller's way to God is different, but worth no less than that of a devout Christian, Buddhist, Muslim...or pantheist. God's too big to fit into one religion."<br /> <br />An awkward silence falls over the table, the hiss of a small television across the room the only sound permeating the charged atmosphere. Mexico has just lost a world cup soccer match to rival Ireland, and the announcer is screaming like a mortally wounded animal. <br /> <br />I raise my watch arm. "Well, ladies, I can see by Micky's little hand that it's time for me to catch my bus..." We are saved from further inabilities to bridge the gap of intolerance by the mercies of the clock. Perhaps this is the intended function of time; it allows us the interludes we need to grow through our varied prejudices, our unwillingness to accept the unknowable nature things.<br /> <br />Still, there is something in Jill's eyes that says, "I want to know more." Before we part, she writes their names and addresses on a small piece of paper. I promise to write. <br /> <br />As I watch my former companions walk deeper into the intolerably bright streets of La Paz, assured of their own rectitude, I am weighted down by luggage and an aching heart. Within moments, I am boarding the bus for the next leg of my adventure. As I mount the steps, a small piece of paper drops from my hand and is caught by the late afternoon breeze, floating over the bus towards the vast and empty desert.DavidMichaelSmithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15137593188998037668noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330822231390963380.post-18757451070493540562008-06-03T11:11:00.000-07:002008-06-16T17:41:15.200-07:00<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:180%;">The Void of the Incarcerated</span><br /></div><span style="font-size:85%;">What happens to a human being<br />when he or she is systematically stripped of<br />all that identifies them as human?<br />They become the living dead.<br />Here are a few observations<br />from the grave known as Old Folsom Prison<br />from an old friend named Vern Robinson<br />who has disappeared into<br />The Void<br /></span><br /> Prison is like the living envision death; no one wants to be here, and no one understands what it is like to be here until they get here, regardless of how much they may have read about prison life, or how many prison movies they may have seen. On the other hand, perhaps death is a step above this kind of involuntary limbo. There are some here who eventually chose death as a way out of the madness of incarceration, despite the uncertainties which lie beyond the grave. At some point, the worst that could await a man on the other side of life seems better than the suffocation of life behind prison walls.<br /><br />Although there are other situations in which men find themselves held against their will, prison life creates a singular type of melancholia. During times of war, men are forced to take up arms and slaughter one another, often against their will if not their better judgment. But there is usually an end in sight, however tenuous, to military service. Not so in today's prison system, at least for "lifers" like myself, men who harbor little illusion that, barring some dramatic and miraculous awakening of the general populace to what horrors have been created here in their name, we will remain here for the balance of our days on earth.<br /><br />Recently I viewed a program on television called "Hard Time", a show which chronicled the evolution of prisons and prison life since early Roman times. One common feature of all prisons, regardless of their locations or cultural origins, is the isolation experienced by the inmates. A psychological expert on penology who was interviewed for the program claimed that, "it is a fact that isolation causes severe emotional and mental problems".<br /><br />I witness the reality of that abstract psychological observation every day of my life along the tiers and in the prison yard here, as well as in the landscape of my interior life. Isolation is the ultimate form of deprivation. Each day that passes for a man or woman in isolation is another day during which they move further and further away from their human identity. The "emotional and mental" problems that result are actually symptomatic of the devolution of a person away from the higher functions of their cerebral cortex in a relentless march into the shadowy world of the limbic brain, a place of reaction and fear, akin more to the life lived by a lizard than that of a human.<br /><br />Imagine what happens, for example, when an entire population of males is kept from any but the most cursory of contact with the opposite sex, if one can view the contact we have with female guards here as anything similar to a true form of connection between people. On the contrary, what little intercourse (and, of course, I use the word sardonically, in its social rather than its sexual context) we have with these women is quite dehumanizing and brutal, for they feel it is their duty to "out macho" even the most primitive of the male guards, in order to demonstrate their toughness. Not only are we deprived of the ordinary sexual release that men and women provide for one another in a relationship, we go for years at a time with no form of touching whatsoever. If the reader knows anything at all about the healing power of the human touch, then he or she can begin to conjure the consequences of its denial over vast stretches of times. Emotions back up like clogged sewers when there are no tender ministrations to provide release.<br /><br />Voluntary celibacy, often associated with some spiritual or philosophical goal, can be uplifting if the practitioner is of sufficient strength, discipline and aspiration. That this practice requires the skills of a special, more evolved human than mere mortals is easily verified by witnessing the experience of countless priests and nuns within the Roman Catholic Church who, as we have had sadly verified for us again and again over the past few years in hair-raising media stories, were unable to live up to their vows. Scores of accounts of priest pedophiles and emotionally deranged nuns have moved from the tabloids to the front pages of the morning newspapers in recent times.<br /><br />Imagine then, the seismic forces pent-up in a population of men who abstain only because they are forced to do so, and imagine further the eventual, inevitable explosions that occur when there is no longer any room left for the energies to be squeezed and suppressed into. The trauma of involuntary celibacy then begins to exhibit itself in strange mannerisms, obsessions and belief systems behind these walls. "Queens", those openly homosexual men who flaunt their feminine characteristics, exert a strong, in many cases controlling, influence on certain inmates, especially the young and impressionable. I recently met a likable young man who has been continuously incarcerated since he was 12 years old. He is now 22. His exclusive sexual experience has been with "pretty boys", gay men who are either forcibly turned-out or who volunteer to satisfy the sexual hungers of those who have no conventional outlets. His first adolescent sexual encounter was with just such a man while he was first institutionalized. That is all he has known. The only female body he has ever seen unclothed was in the pages of a girlie magazine.<br /><br />Which is why these magazines are such a big business in prison. When inmates are not acting out their sexual frenzy with other men here, they are preoccupied with masturbation. To many inside these walls, self abuse becomes highly addictive, and some men are known to perform this act a dozen or more times a day. Conceive, if you can, the terrible sexual frustration that must be experienced in order to turn to such an addiction. There is never any real sense of satisfaction that results from these fantasy encounters. Why else would a man do such a thing again and again, day after day, unless he were striving for pleasure, for a connection, he could not attain?<br /><br />The young man mentioned earlier strives mightily to compensate for these effronteries to his manhood by being overly aggressive, a real macho guy in the gang world in which he has risen to a position of leadership. He honestly believes he is not a homosexual. In fact, he passionately argues that point of view on a regular basis. To him, "the punk is the one on the bottom". He is willing, eager in fact, to back his contention with both fists. All his protestations don't change the reality of his situation, nor alleviate the continual emotional and mental trauma of a young man who has been forced into a lifestyle he hates. I suspect from observing him that he hates himself most of all. What do you suppose he thinks and feels about other human beings when he cannot possibly like himself?<br /> <br />There can be little wonder that violence is always under the surface of isolation and deprivation which define our lives here. Everyone is always angry. When a man laughs in prison (a sound heard often here, day and night), it is more the cackle of a deranged hyena than the mirthful sound of a human experiencing true joy or levity. These demented chortles are exaggerated, out of all proportion to the supposed source of the humor. Some observers might view this as a defining characteristic of the unsophisticated, the uneducated, the crude. Lower class folks, or perhaps for complete accuracy I should use the term "under class" people, generally exhibit loud, crude, tasteless behavior when amused. I suspect this is so because there is so much accumulated gloom and anger to escape from that they over compensate by means of such colorful displays. The contrast can be startling to the uninitiated. Close your eyes, and envision several thousand caged animals that are seething with rage, but who continually break out into long series of whoops, hollers, and overdone guffaws. This cacophony, along with a selected assortment of other noises like radios and televisions, as well as a collection of screams, profanities, and noises of varying ethnic significance, are a constant backdrop to life here. And the noise is endless, often around the clock, with no regard to the effect it may have on anyone at the receiving end of this aural mayhem.<br /><br />The vile stew that is anger begins to brew when the sentence begins, and continues to boil and churn as an increasing amount of heat is applied to it every day. Even the guilty, who should perhaps theoretically feel more remorse than anger, seethe with rage. Because regardless of whether or not you've done the crime, prison is not conducive to repentance, remorse, and certainly not rehabilitation. This is perhaps the cruelest irony of all which your tax dollars hemorrhage away each day to support. If a man were to truly seek redemption and renewal here, it is he who is most likely to become buffeted by the greatest storms of ire, for renewal is the most elusive of states to achieve while in the bowels of this terrible system. Every rule, every person -- from the lowest paid guard on up to the warden -- are set in an intractable determination to frustrate the most sincere of desires and efforts that an inmate might make to initiate positive change in their lives.<br /><br />As for the wrongly accused, the innocent, of which there are countless thousands within these walls, resentment and irateness are the stuff of everyday life. How else could a man maintain a modicum of sanity were he not to resist the unjustness of his incarceration with his anger? Anger, in turn, leads to a unique and terrifying brand of etiquette and social regulation. What everyday people on the outside consider normal becomes twisted, inverted and perverse in prison. Common courtesy, while also diminishing in the outside world I'm told, is virtually invisible behind bars. Quite the contrary, in fact, when courtesy is exhibited by an inmate, his fellows interpret this as an indication of weakness and fear. The axiom here is that "strong men speak when they please, not necessarily when they are spoken to". I leave the admonishments of the New Testament to better men than I. In this place, if you "turn the other cheek", you're liable to get it slashed open with a shank in short order. The display of such "Christian" sentiments is like an open invitation for the predators, of which there are many in prison, to fall fully upon their prey.<br /><br />Here, an ordinary question is usually received with a blank stare if the man at the receiving end of the inquiry isn't in the mood to answer. A naive newcomer who persists in pursuing a response may be shocked when he is bluntly told to "fuck off". If he is lucky enough to survive his own effrontery, that is. If the man being pushed is angry enough, he might respond with violence, without every uttering a word. I work closely with a colleague at my prison job in the library. He is serving three consecutive life-without-parole sentences and, as you might suspect with that sort of time ahead of him, isn't often in the mood for conversation, casual or otherwise. More days than not, we work together in utter, stark silence. When I started my life sentence nearly a decade ago, the silence bothered me; now it is welcome. I don't wish to socialize with him any more than he does with me. After all, what would the normal pleasantries of life mean to us?<br /><br />"Hello, how are you today?"<br /><br />"Oh, just fine, thanks! And you!?"<br /><br />"Terrific! How 'bout that great breakfast this morning?! I can hardly wait to see what's for lunch!"<br /><br />I think that sort of banter is pointless enough on the outside, but at least it's reasonable to expect that an "ordinary" person will be of the disposition to allow the exchange of such banalities. Not so in this place. Talk, when you're engaged in some form of work you don't wish to do and elbow to elbow with people you don't wish to be with, is worse than cheap; it's meaningless, an unsoothing, unwanted invasion of the institutionally imposed isolation that, after a period of time, becomes a bizarre sort of defense mechanism.<br /><br />Indeed, the forced labor we are required to participate in week after week, month after month, year after year is one of the more powerful progenitors of anger in prison today. Few Americans appreciate the growing trend towards viewing prisoners as a captive labor force. Perhaps we have learned this lesson from the Germans who employed it with such success during the Third Reich. Like them, our overseers mandate that we perform tasks we are likely to have no interest in, and we are made to work long hours usually without compensation, token or otherwise.<br /><br />Ironically, away from our slave labor routines, talk suddenly becomes a cheap form of entertainment, a way to deal with boredom and fear. A "new fish", or any frightened man, is readily identified by the rate of his babble. New men sometimes try to impress the older cons with their patter, pretending to all variations of street savvy and insider knowledge of what prison is "really" like. To hear them blather, every new con was a millionaire criminal on the street, but at the moment happens to be just a little down on his luck.<br /><br />On the "job" and off, an inmate's anger is fed by his sense of complete helplessness. Virtually all individual freedom is taken away once we pass through the gate. The consistent lesson from all that occurs here is that one must learn to tolerate every form of intolerable debasement in order to survive. It matters not how repulsive, irritating, humiliating, insulting or abusive the behavior is which is heaped upon us by our keepers throughout the day; we are to surrender to it, no discussion. The first lesson comes when you arrive and are stripped naked and made to bend over and spread your butt cheeks wide in front of a panel of strangers, a tawdry group of malcontents who seem to resemble out-of-work truckers, cowboys and circus laborers much more than professional penologists. From the moment you arrive, the only real distinction between the ignorance and lack of education of the inmates and that of the "corrections officers" is the uniforms.<br /><br />Body odors, flatulence in a 7-foot-by-12-foot cell, loud noises of every sort (as mentioned earlier), men dressed in a pitiful parody of women, men trying pathetically to act like women, women (guards) trying to act like men, blacks who act like stereotypical niggers, Latinos who act like stereotypical greasers, and whites who accurately portray the affectations of trailer trash and Aryan race baiters -- these are just a few of the realities comprising this environment that fuel my personal anger profile. And I must tolerate all of it, minute by minute, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, without complaint or recourse. The result of this process of having to swallow every conceivable insult without resistance? One learns to detest everyone and everything, to react irrationally, most often with rage, without warning at a mere glance or ill-timed word or any number of random occurrences that ignite people here who find no other outlet for the continual debasements and dehunamization but their fury.<br /><br />Is this what prison is intended to be, a place where humans are slowly, systematically stripped of all vestiges of their species? Where men who have measurable defects are turned into unrecognizable monsters, ready to unleash their pent-up frustrations on an unsuspecting world should they ever get the chance?<br /><br />Beware America; you are creating a sub-genus of creatures who resemble humans in appearance only. If Jesus was right, remember that "as you sow, so shall you reap". Someday you will reap the whirlwind. And it will be a storm of your own making.DavidMichaelSmithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15137593188998037668noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8330822231390963380.post-89658638738461800872008-05-22T14:33:00.001-07:002008-05-27T15:06:29.707-07:00<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size:180%;">Runner</span></span><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size:130%;"><span style="font-size:130%;">A Short Story</span></span><br /></div><br />Phil once saw a fellow soldier gut shot while riding in the back of a deuce-and-a-half. They had been yelling their conversation over the rumble of the big truck's engine, delighted that the monsoon rains had finally ended another season of sogginess. Suddenly, the man's face had gone slack; he had taken a sniper's round directly into his upper intestines. What Phil recalled most clearly was that both of them were amazed how such a large hole could be exploded into the middle of a man's body without there being any pain whatsoever. They laughed about it, as both lay at the side of the road, waiting for the medic to break open a vile of morphine.<br /> "Hey! I don't need that shit!" the man with the exposed entrails had exclaimed. "I don't feel nothin'!"<br /><br />A wearied look traveled across the medic's face. "Better lie still, man, and let me get this stuff into you. It never hurts at first; it's the shock. But believe me, it's gonna hurt like hell in a minute." Within moments, the wounded G.I. was screaming his agonies across the jungle's canopy for all to hear. Just before the chopper arrived to airlift him away, his eyes assumed a moist, glassy stare, a red foam drippled down his chin, and Phil knew that he had stopped shrieking because he was dead.<br /><br />The recollection of this event was compressed into a flashed fragment of memory at precisely the moment when, almost two years later, Phil's perceptions progressed from a numbed shock to a creeping fire of pain as lumps of meat were gouged from his left buttocks and the palm of his left hand. When Malcolm, the driver of the Triumph 750 motorcycle on which Phil rode as passenger, had first let loose the clutch, rudely dropping the transmission into first gear, Phil had clung tightly to the fellow's waist; but when the clutch was popped from second into third gear, the front wheel rose up to meet the sky, and Phil was airborne, momentarily suspended like an astronaut sitting in gravitation free space, his legs still bent at the hips, extended straight out before him. Then, a lunar probe returning to earth while continuing to accelerate with the vicious velocity imposed by gravity, his flesh burrowed deep into the unforgiving macadam. Or, more accurately, it bore into him. As his posterior yielded to the road's surface, he instinctively extended his left hand in order to avoid head-to-concrete contact. All of this, spontaneously and without time for the most rudimentary form of rumination, except for the memory of his once wounded companion.<br /><br />Just before the pain rushed in like a river of sensation let loose from behind an abruptly demolished dam of insouciance, Phil registered surprise and moderate disappointment. He wondered vaguely if he too would die before the chopper arrived. His only utterance, a slurred, "...shit", as he considered the improbability of an army Medivac helicopter along the back roads of northern Florida.<br /><br />Having ridden without incident behind his new-found biker friend for several days, despite the continual reveries shared with other similarly inclined and mobilized bohemians, Phil had come to view his recent circumstances as a serialized, self-induced epoch over which the ordinary forces of nature had no sway. This brusque meeting of soft tissue with rigid roadway now opened a new chapter of vulnerability in a months-long saga of randomness and fear. For, since his return from the putrescence of Southeast Asia, he had lived in the manner of a nocturnal quadruped, doggedly avoiding his tormentors. These molesters were, to his mind, anyone with a rank higher than his own of Private First Class. This left open the possibility of harassment from virtually everyone within the armed service in which he found himself imprisoned. A prison, he often silently noted, he had built by himself, for himself at the same moment he threw away its key with a simple signature at the bottom of a set of enlistment papers.<br /><br />He had crafted one mistake and misadventure after another since that moment almost three years earlier until, here he sat, on the side of a strip of highway, small portions of both his hand and his backside smeared across the blacktop a hundred feet behind him. Staring down at where he cradled his mangled paw, he could see its entrails bulging through the freshly rent flesh, grisly organic versions of the hidden wheels and gears that do the work of every machine, regardless of how glossy or seamless its exterior disguise. Phil envisioned another ghastly scene behind him, the blood soaked insides of his backside now made involuntary inhabitants of his sweat and blood drenched outsides. He speculated silently on the malleability of flesh, wondering why it could not be fashioned like clay, a missing clump simply pressed back into service where it had been removed by a modifying sculptor from a work in progress. Was this not, after all, the way the Master Craftsman had molded his original creation? Perhaps God had made Eve out of a gob from Adam's rump, he thought; right after the poor guy's Harley ran head on into the Tree of Knowledge. With the completion of this absurd notion, Phil fell forward into blackness.<br /><br />---<br /><br /> First, nausea; then an electric bolt of pain that looped from up here to down there and back. Perception modulated between these sensations; occasionally the journey from the realm of agony to that of elliptical queasiness came to an equilibrium that gave equal caliber to the nerves which registered both perturbations. At least I'm not dead, the thought came. Unless hell was, as the nuns had once taunted him, no more than the registration of pain.<br /><br />A bandaged claw, where nerve endings screamed instantly of the exclusivity of their existence, raised itself into the air. The idea "my hand" became associated with the tormented tentacle that dangled in mid-air. A spasm of retching, and the hand was forgotten, retracted towards the horizontal torso to which it was attached, this motion causing, in turn, the body to swivel involuntarily, bringing with it another eruption of torture, a burning sensation from a lower place. "Branding iron", dawned the next cognition, and with that thought came all the rest which constitutes conscious identity.<br /><br />He knew he was a Private First Class named Phil, on the couch where his host, Malcolm, had allowed him to sleep since responding to the universal plea of an extended thumb two weeks earlier along a deserted stretch of highway in the middle of Florida's panhandle. Much had transpired since Phil had devolved from AWOL hitchhiker to the battered body laying prone on a stranger's furniture.<br /><br />How had Malcolm and the other bikers gotten him back? Probably, he mused, by splaying his limp carcass over the back of the motorcycle like a hunter's trophy after the kill. He thanked whatever gods may be for unconsciousness, realizing his measure of present discomfort must be but a pale reflection of the sensations that madly ran up and down his spine between injuries and brain during that terrible journey from accident scene to living room sofa.<br /> He tried to sit, and another excruciating surge of undiluted pain shot from his hand to his backside and back again. The throbbing in his palm was a rhythm so pronounced that he feared his heart had been transplanted there as part of some grotesque experiment while he had remained unconscious. Achingly groping around this torso with his one still functional appendage, he felt the rough outline of dried gore and torn fabric. To his horror, Phil realized that blood from the newly chiseled maw below his belt line had congealed pants with wound, as if the cloth invented by Levi Strauss had always been an integral part of his anatomy. Revulsion led to reflexive action without calculation of the consequences, and as his hand tore away the fabric from the crater's edge, it brought with it new shards of tender tissue. He screamed, and the world went dark again.<br /><br />---<br /><br /> Discomfort distorts the yardstick of time. How long he had been prone upon the couch, waking and repeating the ritual of tearing his tattered jeans away from the festering laceration, Phil did not know. Occasionally, the singularity of his distress was interrupted by the angry mask of Tina, Malcolm's wife, leering down at him through the haze of his anguish. Sometimes the voices of Malcolm and Tina floated overhead from a distant room, arguing his fate; he knew Tina considered him to be as unwelcome as she did unsavory.<br /><br />"I want his stinking ass out 'a here, Malcolm," he heard her screech. "You can't give a home to every fuckin' bum you scrap off the road!" "When he gets better, baby, I promise. You can't expect me to throw him out now. The guy's all busted up..." For the leader of a leathered motorcycle crowd, Malcolm was remarkably soft spoken. Especially when compared to the clamorous whine of Tina's utterances. Her voice always entered the atmosphere at the same taut pitch, a tightly torqued instrument sounding as if all of life's occurances overwhelemed its owner and that she wished to convey this rare gift to all within earshot. The simplist task became gargantuan when she articulated its necessity, taunting the listener to respond to her hysteria. Regardless of how innocuous its content, each sentence she invoked rose in amplification, the final word extended into a wail of wretchedness.<br /><br />"Malcolm, for Christ's sake, we're out of milk! Go get some fucking miiiilllk!", Phil had heard her yell the day before the accident. He was still in awe of her ability to transform single syllables into multiple trills. He knew it would not be long before Malcolm would sheepishly approach him with a pronouncement of eviction. Yet each time he tried to roust himself, he could not muster the steely intent needed to fight through the palpability in his hand and buttocks, because the severity of his dual injuries was equally as inspiring as Tina's lack of affection. When he peeled back the home-made bandage wraped round his hand, he could study the muscles and tendons that bulged and writhed well above the surface of the wound which regurgitated them. His attempt at cutting away the protruding meat with a pair of scissors the day before had led only to a further paroxysm of immeasurable pain. He knew his posterior wound faired no better and that, unless tended to, his pants were destined to become a permenent addition to his left hindquarter.<br /><br />"Malcolm", he croaked through cracked lips. "I can't take it anymore, man. I gotta get to a doctor."<br /><br />---<br /><br /><br /><br /> Polished metal and the smell of alcohol; everything clean, including his now professionally bandaged lesions. The young doctor studied him with a practiced apathy, long enough to inform Phil that he had been made. Which wasn't a task requiring graduate school study skills; in this, the Era of the Absent Without Official Leave Soldier, the countryside was littered with hollow-eyed young men who, while trying to hide their closely cropped hair and military field jackets, hit the road in search of escape from an armed force in thrall to the nation's most unpopular war to date. The hemorrhage of Government Issue Joe's had become, like Phil's festering wounds, a national pustule, disgorging thousands of disillusioned youngsters into the back alleys and onto the interstates of America's landscape. There were so many in recent months that in a pathetic effort to stem the gush, the army had placed a $25 bounty on the head of each missing soldier, hoping to pique the interest of the country's underpaid local law enforcement officials. The capture and return of a couple or more runners each week was at least a modest bonus for those cops bored with their usual preoccupations of rounding up petty theives, drunks and other small town roustabouts. It would be this exact humiliation that would end Phil's odyssey within a matter of days, as he was rounded up for mere lunch money by an off-duty Virginia state trooper.<br /><br />At the moment, as the physician tended to his injuries and his ignominious capture loomed in the unseen future, Phil's mind smoldered with odious memories of how his present predicament had begun. When he made the drunken decision to make a dash for freedom several weeks earlier, he had been as typically ill-prepared as the many who had gone before him. For several days prior to his unrehearsed hegira, Phil had groused continuously about his commanding officer's refusal to accept as fact Phil's off-base employment, a part-time job as a disc jockey at a local radio station. Phil clung to this vestige of civilian life like a rock climber who dangles at the end of his safety rope after falling towards the abyss.<br /><br />He had stood ramrod straight before Captain Delmar G. Gaston the day his clandestine civilian occupation had been officially unveiled. The Captain informed him that he had almost driven off the road, no doubt with glee, when he had heard the unmistakable sounds of the voice he loved to loath coming from his car radio one recent afternoon. It had been one of those flukes of fate; Gaston never deviated from his usual diet of hay seed music reminiscent of his back woods roots. For a few moments on that fateful afternoon, he had decided to see what other goober music he could find on the dial, when he had stumbled across Phil's mellifluous parlance wafting across the airwaves. Phil could but imagine the Captain's eyes focusing with the intensity of the predator, as he recognized his unmistakable Northeastern nasality, the vocal intonations of that young troublemaker who the Captain had been trying to find some excuse for filing formal charges against ever since the insolent buck had been assigned to his company. The fourth generation army officer, whose sensibilities were offended by the very existence of this snot-nosed Yankee "bouy", confronted his most despised subordinate with the assurance of a scrapper about to pounce on an opponent that weighed in at half his size.<br /> "Yew knew the rules' round here fer you took that job, private; no civilian employment off the base without permission from yer commadin' offcer. An, that's me; an, I din give you no permission, bouy. Yer ass is mine now, son..."<br /><br />Army officers were notorious for their love of closely cropped hair. But nowhere during his hitch had Phil seen such an intimately shaven pate as that which peaked the skull atop of Gaston's muscle-bound neck. In lieu of eye contact during these increasingly frequent encounters of terror and interrogation, he had elected to stare directly at his superior's hairless crown, becoming disquietingly familiar with the ridges, grooves and scars that formed the map of the captain's off-hours bar brawling career. It was to one of these familiar landmarks that Phil directed his gaze as he wheezed forth his defense.<br /> "Sir, I didn't ask permission 'cause I knew you wouldn't give it, and I needed that job, sir; I'm sorry, sir, but I really..." Phil could see the small veins in Delmar's forehead bulge as the man screamed his interruption inches from his face. "Yer sorry, awright, soldja; yer the sorriest son'fabitch I ever seed."<br /><br />Of all things about Delmar, Phil hated his Southern affectations the most. They were continual reminders of his own status as a Yankee expatriate, marooned in the environs of rural Georgia among alien beings who continued to fight a civil war they had lost a century before. The irony of having escaped without physical harm from civil strife in Viet Nam, only to be assigned to this place of emnity where hatred had been transported intact from one generation to another since the mid 1800's, did not escape Phil's acute sense of the sardonic. He knew he was hated by the residents of this region, both for who he was and for what he represented. A package deal, as it were; personal and sectarian enmity all rolled into one nightmare. <br /><br />When he had returned to the States with a full year of his hitch left to serve, it had not occurred to him that some place on the planet could be worse than where he had just spent the previous twelve months. Yet the army was always capable of out doing itself with unpleasentness, and his final assignment had indeed proven every bit as disagreeable as his previous tour of duty. Every onerous aspect about it stood symbolized before him in the person of Captain Gaston, embodied in the bad breath and spittle spewing forth from the wet cavity of Delmar's mouth, the orifice of a man who had made it part of his career profile to dismantle Phil bone by bone. In the Captain's mind, such a dissection would be but just punishment for a loathsome young man who incarnated all that was unruly about an entire generation of unwilling soldiers.<br /> "Git yer ass back to the barracks, Private, and ferget about bein' a disk jockey. Yer a fuckin' soldier, son, and that means you cain't breath unless I tell yew to. Yew got that!?"<br /> "Yeah, got it". Phil's voice was shadowed with implied sarcasm. "Yew address me as 'sir', bouy, or I'll stick yer ass in the stockade right now! Understood me, soldja?"<br /><br />Phil noted that Delmar's eyes were extended beyond their sockets. Preferring to interpret his commanding officer's last question as rhetorical, he withheld a verbal response, and simply brought his right hand up to his temple in the half-hearted imitation of a salute which Gaston had come to recognize as Phil's signature gesture: not unskillful enough to be interpreted as insubordinate, but disingenuous enough to be clearly nonmilitary.<br /><br />---<br /><br /> "Both of these injuries are a mess."<br /> The sound of the physician's voice brought him back to the present moment.<br /> "Why didn't you get them taken care of right after the accident?"<br /> "No insurance."<br /><br />This was Phil's first utterance of truth in recent memory. He chose this over contrivance because of the exhaustion associated with the continual manufacture of new lies.<br /> The doughy flesh around the care giver's eyes softened with compassion. "Listen, kid, I've got some forms to fill out. Why don't you get dressed, and I'll be back in a few minutes".<br /> Phil was staring vacantly at the floor and didn't bother to look up. He knew he had been offered an avenue of retreat, but could not muster an appropriate gesture of gratitude, another potential source of enervation. He heard the door slide shut. Taking his cue from the empty room, Phil struggled to get back into his jeans. They were stiff with dried offal, and he almost put this foot through the opening where the left hip pocket once was, rimmed now with desiccated gore. He vaguely considered the merits of a laundromat, but thought even this ordinary amenity too much a luxery for a man of his current status -- a runner with no place to hide. He limped towards the side door of the emergency clinic, stopped to make a final check of the hallway, and stepped into a nearby back street.<br /><br />The day was warm, the early fall sunshine of northern Florida belying Phil's gloomy mood. Looking back to earlier that morning when he had finally mustered the fortitude needed to lift himself from Malcolm's couch, he recalled Tina's icy facade hovered inches from his own ashen mask. "When you get patched up, why don't you keep on moving..." This came as neither a question nor a statement, rather as an inflexible demand laced with ominous implications to which Tina gave voice in her next glacial declaration. "You shouldn't stay too long in any one place; don't want the MP's to find you, huh...?" He had blinked once toward the space Tina claimed to occupy, as if he had been momentarily distracted by the retrieval of some long lost memory. Turning to Malcolm, he reached up and settled his uninjured hand on his shoulder.<br /> "Listen, man, I really appreciate all you done for me..." The sentence trailed off, Phil sensing his benefactor's anxiousness as he shifted from foot to foot, his eyes skulking from Phil to the burning ember's of his wife's silent stare.<br /> "Better get you seen, man; we shouldn't of let it go this long..."<br /> The drive to the clinic was completed in stillness, both men knowing they would never see one another again.<br /><br />---<br /><br /> Instead of returning to his barracks as ordered, Phil had done what he enjoyed doing most since his assignment to the Signal Corp school at Ft. Gordon, Georgia: deliberately disobeying the direct orders of that knuckle dragging buffoon and son of the Confederacy, Captain Delmar G. Gaston. He compounded his offense by not only leaving the base without permission, but by heading directly to the nearby radio station, into the forbidden realm of his civilian vocation of afternoon drive-time DJ. Each weekday, for the past two months, Phil had shed his army fatigues like a dried snake skin, slithering away from his mid-afternoon military duties as the maker of films which exhorted his contemporaries to drive safely when off duty by displaying for them images of the broken, decapitated bodies of traffic accident victims. After escaping this macabre task, Phil would sit contentedly amongst the albums scattered about the small radio studio from which his show was broadcast, clad in the secular attire that symbolized his recalcitrance and momentary autonomy.<br /><br />"It's sixteen minutes past the hour, 78 sultry degrees in downtown Augusta. Here's Nancy Wilson, ready to cool you down with, 'The Best is Yet To Come'." Such forms of innocuous communication with an unseen audience had become an umbilical connection between Phil and the longed-for world of noncombatant normalcy. Yet even after establishing a beachhead on this island of asylum, he could not escape the madness that had come to possess him over the past twenty-four months. Many afternoon programs were presented under the dank cloud of Phil's favorite reality killer, alcohol, consumed in measures that made him a potentially prime candidate for a scene in one of his own safety horror films. One particularly memorable shift had been completed after he swallowed a portion of what the off base drug house he frequented called "the best blotter Acid on either side of the Mississippi". How curious, Phil thought as he ingested the purple slice of paper, that the language of Madison Avenue had permeated to the darkest crags of the blossoming drug sub-culture of the early 1970's.<br /><br />That afternoon's platter spinning was the longest show ever to have aired, by Phil's accounting. He could swear that a record which normally ran under three minutes took hours to play that day. And each weather forecast or other utterance he managed to squeek over the open microphone took similarly excruciating time frames to accomplish. Often, he closed the mike uncertain if what he had said formed the most fundamental of sentences. A portion of his brain told him that he was to offer the listener the latest time/temperature update, but that part of his head connected to the headset would hear only the vaguest semblance of language, a concoction of vowels and consonants that might better have resembled man's first attempts at verbalization eons ago.<br /><br />"Da tim id fortain befur free; ant eets worm. Woof! Eaty-ate!"<br /><br />Somehow, these indiscretions went unnoticed by the station's program director, or by anyone else. Probably, Phil mused, because what happens on a tiny radio station in a backwater Georgia shit hole goes as unnoticed as everything else in a place where nobody pays much attention to anything except the price of sorghum.<br /> He was certain the night he and another liquor-sodden soldier fired up the AM/FM transmitter of the daytime only station, that trench coat clad denizens of the Federal Communications Commission would descend upon the wee hours pirate program and cart off its progenitors to a life of maximum security. Perhaps that's why he continued with such antics; any fate seemed a reasonable alternative to the one he now suffered, a string of interminable days subjected to the orb of inverse military logic.<br /><br />In that regard, the day of his unplanned departure was only slightly different than others which had preceded it. This time, instead of heading to his illicit occupation slightly inebriated, Phil was entirely intoxicated, a state not easily achieved by a young man whose recent life had set new standards for alcoholic befuddlement. The impending tragedy was further complicated by his unwitting, unfortunate mode of transport, another olive drab clad miscreant named Art Armstrong. One of Phil's talents which Captain Gaston most feared was his ability to lure others into the mire of his discontent. Phil viewed this deftness in a different light; he merely drew the attention of his already cheerless associates to their status as unimportant canon fodder. In the world according to Phil, it wasn't much of a leap to convince even the most passive reprobate that his load was as heavy as it was repellent, and should therefore be borne no more. He achieved his convincing with such panache and jaded humor that all within auditory range were susceptible to his wiles.<br /><br />So it was that day with Arty. A family man with a young wife and two toddlers, Arty had sympathetically resolved to help Phil achieve a modicum of the freedom which eluded him, the freedom Arty had already secured through his standing as father and husband. His marital chains had ironically ensured him of the privilage to procure off base housing for himself and his family, to find after-hours employment which could enhance his meager military wages and, the most coveted symbol of emancipation of all, to own and navigate his own private automobile. Arty had thrown his arms around Phil in a gush of pity during an earlier drinking spree together, and intemperately agreed to drive Phil to his radio job each afternoon. This, in an unspoken exchange for Phil's wild energies. In keeping with the old adage that the grass is always greener elsewhere, each man wanted, at least in part, what the other possessed. Phil wanted the mobility that came with Arty's position as head of household; Arty wanted to vicariously experience Phil's unabashed abandonment to all things unpredictable and most things unlawful.<br /><br />Arty's car, not much by most measures of material attainment, was a battered 1964 Bonneville convertible which Phil could not have coveted more had it been a star ship equipped with faster-than-light capabilities. It was, in fact, a perfect replica, excepting the color, of the car which Phil had stolen as a drunken teenager and from which, miraculously, he had walked away unscathed after transforming the vehicle into a heap of steaming, twisted metal and broken glass by driving it head on into a weeping willow tree at 50 miles per hour. Seeing Arty's car for the first time was, for Phil, like witnessing the reassembly of the legendary Phoenix, albeit a bird with a new paint job. He could not have been more thrilled had he been present for the First Coming.<br /><br />On the fateful day in question, however, Phil's rage blinded him to all aesthetics, including his lust for Arty's wheels. Fueled by free-flowing quantities of a local potion that less than half a century earlier the locals might have been arrested for distilling in their bath tubs, Phil was in rarefied form. Arty had never seen quite as riled, nor quite as toxic, either. This time, he thought hazily, Phil's legendary ability to absorb massive amounts of booze while remaining articulate enough to fool traffic cops, was going to drown in the flask of White Lightening which Phil was using to punctuate his tirade. For every swig he gulped, he offered the bottle to Arty, who also never met a raised container of hooch he could resist.<br /><br />"Fuck 'em! Right in the ass, Arty, that's what I say. Ram it to 'em 'till their turds pop out their eyes..." At this stage of intoxication, Phil's ability to conjure imagery became severely impaired, reduced to crude, repetitive references to human orifices and their real or fancied functions. In between every sentence, Phil made liquid noises which Arty couldn't identify as strictly human. But his judgment was also undergoing a transformation, back through each stage of sentient evolution, inevitably destined for arrival at a limbic level of consciousness, sharing a perception of reality with the planet's reptiles. It took little time for Arty to join in with his own artless representations about buggering their common unnamed enemies. <br /> "Fuckin' right, Phil. Ram 'em till they split in two...!"<br /><br />This reduced level of idea exchange continued until they were in the parking lot of WNEK, where Phil was scheduled to go on the air in fifteen minutes.<br /> "Hold up, hold up, stop the car, stop the car, man! Jesus H. Christ!" Phil seemed not to notice in the midst of his urgency that Arty had already pulled to a stop and thrown the transmission into Park. "Fuck this. I'm too drunk to go in there. Tell you what we're gonna do, Arty baby; we're gonna turn this heap of shit around, head down that long, lonesome highway, and never look back. Wadda ya think about that, fuck face...?"<br /><br />"You know, man," Arty slurred, "you got this way of makin' a guy really feel good about himself, know wad I mean? So, I'm a fuck face, drivin' a heap of shit; but I ain't so ugly, and my car don't stink so bad that you don't want me to turn around and drive you....where'd you say, ass wipe...?" "Arty, arty...come on, just figures of speech, OK, man? I'd never fuck your face...and you know I love yer heap! Anybody who drives a car that gets three gallons to the mile on yer salary is my kind of moron! Come on, big guy, think about it. Whad's there to lose? Another reveille formation? Policing the company grounds for cigarette butts? An ugly wife and two screaming kids?<br /><br />With this last remark, Arty reflexively balled his hand into a fist and, reaching up and over Phil's clumsy attempt to ward him off, buried his ham-sized hand into the side of Phil's face. Anesthetically inured beyond pain's domain, Phil shook his head once and continued undeterred. "Oh, jeez, sorry man; yeah, the bitch is a beautiful person, and those kids are really special..."<br /><br />Like uncounted others of working class origins before him, Arty had married young and without forethought. The consequences were a quarrelsome relationship with his wife and a lack of parenting skills that made it easier to complain about his noisome urchins than to engage constructively in their rearing. Phil's sardonic observation cut deeply, leaving Arty sullen, silent, and vulnerable to Phil's next prodding foray.<br /><br />"Come on, Arty, to hell with everybody. We got almost a half bottle of sauce, a full tank of gas, and I've got some pocket money." He leaned in, as if preparing to kiss Arty gently on the ear. Instead, he crooned softly, "Let's do it, Arty. I swear, man, this will be so much fuckin' fun..."<br /> Turning his face towards Phil, Arty's nose almost bumped into Phil's Grecian proboscis. Grinning widely, he placed his open hand squarely in the middle of Phil's face, and pushed him hard across the seat. As Phil crashed in a heap against the passenger side door, Arty let out a glass shattering yell, and both men collapsed into a spasm of adolescent laughter. Arty threw the car into drive and spun out of the gravel driveway, spewing a shower of small rocks in dual geysers behind both rear wheels. As they careened into the deepening dusk, they left behind a trail that reeked of overheated engine and burning rubber. A discerning nose might also have detected the lingering aroma of gin wafting in the late summer air.<br /><br />---<br /><br /> Five hours later, Arty's head throbbed with fear. As the effects of the alcohol had inexorably ebbed like a sobering tide, his mind had become increasingly inhabited by demons of remorse and regret. Images of his irate wife and inconsolable children wafted up at him from the dusky horizon that stretch beyond the end of the rural Georgia highway he had been driving along since the euphoric departure from the radio station's parking lot. Phil, meanwhile, careened to ever greater heights of inebriated bliss, as if the decision to desert his post had at last unleashed his most primal desires for freedom. Singing wildly, if rarely on key, he continued to slurp the remnants of their dwindling libations, in part to bolster Arty's flagging resolve.<br /> "...white bird must fly or she will die...!" Come on, Arty, you know the words. Hells the matter with, huh? You said nothin' for miles".<br /><br />Staring sullenly ahead, Arty gripped the steering wheel tighter, a gesture perhaps meant to steady his voice for the pronouncement he had been trying to make for more than an hour.<br /> "We gotta go back, Phil. This was a stupid idea. I got a wife and kids. And I'm due to get out in six months. Shit, man, if we turn around now, we'll be back in time for reveille tomorrow morning and..."<br /> Phil screamed his interruption. "I'm never going back, man! Never! I'm all through with that shit..."<br /><br />A long silence followed; neither man looked at the other. Without fanfare, Arty pulled over to the road's shoulder and turned off the engine. Crickets and other harbingers of a summer's night in Georgia drifted through the open car windows. In choosing the words that came next, Arty modulated his volume downward to reflect the atmosphere of the setting and to underline the depths of their opposing convictions about the continuation of their adventure.<br /><br />"Phil, listen to me. You know I dig you, man. I really like hanging out with you. You make me laugh! And I feel ..I dunno...I feel free when I'm doin' stuff with you. Like when we blasted out of town this afternoon; man, what a rush! Right then, I though, 'I'm never goin back'. Just like you. But, hey, man, the whiskey's worn off, and I got to think about my family..."<br /> Again, only the sound of crickets filled the void. When Phil failed to respond, Arty reached in front of him and opened the passenger side door.<br /><br />"I'm turnin' back, Phil. You can close yer door and get some sleep. Or you can get out here. Right now..."<br /><br />The last of the day's sunlight disappeared behind the tree line in the distance. When Phil's voice came, it too was soft and subdued, betraying no trace of the afternoon's cavorting.<br /> "Arty, I can't handle another day of it. Be good man; look me up if you ever get to Canada."<br /> He slid off the seat and closed the car door, looking out into the darkness where he would soon be walking, rather than gazing back into the blackness of where he had been. Arty dropped the transmission into drive, pulled across the road, and aimed the car to the north for the trip back to the fort.<br /><br />Phil stood in the somber silence, still refusing to look towards the retreating automobile. Only when the last sounds of Arty's car faded away did Phil turn slowly and face in the direction of the receding vehicle, now only a Doppler sound nearly absorbed by the night<br /> His voice was barely a whisper. "You fucking coward..." Tears rolled down both his cheeks, but Phil's granite expression did not change. He plunged his hands into the pockets of his army field jacket and resolutely strode into the evening's gloom.<br /><br />---<br /><br /> Could that have been only one month ago? There had been enough adventures, high and low, to have made for a year's worth of excitement. And here he was on the road again. Despite the throbbing insistence of his newly acquired wounds, Phil's determination had hardened after his four weeks on the run. He should have headed right for Canada from the start, he told himself, but that was whiskey out of the bottle. He had needed time to adjust to the idea of a lifetime of camouflage, and hanging with Malcome and his gang had given him the seasoning required to face the future as a full-time fugitive. The only certain component of the years ahead was that he would live forever outside the ordinary framework of fellowship, never revealing his identity or his past to others again. The price he would pay for his self-discharge from the army was the highest he could have paid, and he was finally willing to obligate it all if it meant not having to live another day of the military life he had come to loath. A recent collect phone call to Bill, a friend back at the base, confirmed that there was nothing to beckon him back.<br /><br />"Phil, zat you?? Where the hell you been?? Where are you?" His friend, the company clerk, had hesitated before accepting the long distance charges.<br /> "Well, I ain't there, that's where I am. What's up with you, Billy?"<br /> "Uh...not much, man. So...um...you comin' back, or what?" There was an unusual strain in his friend's inquiries. Phil wondered why Bill sounded so panicked.<br /> "Naw, don't think so. I just wanted to get some of my stuff. Do you think you could manage to box some of it up and send it to my folks place?"<br /> "Can't do that, man..."<br /> "Whadda ya mean, you can't do it?"<br /> There was static on the line, and for a moment, Phil thought Bill had hung up.<br /> "I sold it all, man..."<br /> "You...what??"<br /> "Arty said you was never comin' back. I figured you wouldn't be needin' any of yer stuff anymore...so I sold it. Got a really good price for all yer albums."<br /> "You sold my records..."<br /> "Yeah, like I said I...<br /><br />Resisting the temptation to smash the receiver back in its cradle, Phil let the phone drop from his hand. He stood motionless, staring vacantly ahead, while a small voice continued to chirp into empty space from the telephone dangling from the end of its cord. Oblivious to his surroundings, Phil spent a few moments running through a silent inventory of the personal belongings he would never see again, then walked away from the phone and his immediate past at Fort Gordon, Georgia.<br /><br />He headed straight to the first north bound highway he could find, and stuck out his thumb.DavidMichaelSmithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15137593188998037668noreply@blogger.com0