Roman Wolfe's Adirondack Ordeal Part One

And they rode upon the earth,

                                    The Four Horsemen of the apocalypse,

                                    And among them we knew their names:

                                    Conquest, Pestilence, War and Death.

                                    But the most feared among them was

                                    He who was fourth and rode the pale horse.

                                           ……. Book of Revelations…….

                                    “People sleep peacefully in their beds

                                    at night only because rough men stand

                                    ready to do violence on their behalf.”

                                           ……. George Orwell…….

                                    “The only thing necessary for the

                                    triumph of evil is for good men to

                                    do nothing.”

                                           ……. Edmund Burke…….

                                    Previous books written by Bill Sheehan

                                                MARAGOLD IN FOURTH

                                                MARAGOLD IN FIFTH

                                                MARAGOLD IN SIXTH

                                                            DEDICATION

                        To Sandra Grace Sheehan and Mara, Todd, Lily and Slone Bonnewell.

                        The people who are at the particularly important center of my world.

            Roman Wolfe’s Adirondack Ordeal

                                         written by Bill Sheehan

                                                            Prologue

            WHAT I remember most during my boyhood was the fighting and the resultant bloody noses, black eyes, cuts, abrasions and bruises that were the natural consequences of my frequent physical combat.  It wasn’t that I was driven to it by a mental aberration, or meanness or a desire to inflict or receive pain.  I just couldn’t avoid it unless I constantly backed down and ran away.  But I wouldn’t back down and I certainly wouldn’t run, unless it was toward, not away from my opponent.  Fighting came to be unavoidable, so I stopped trying to avoid it.

            I was tall, skinny and had a small-boned, skeletal structure.  I guess I looked weak, vulnerable, and ripe for a bully’s exciting exploitation and the amusement.

            Bullies my own age, but especially older bullies, thought they sensed a fragile insecurity in my wish to avoid a confrontation.  Maybe they thought they saw fear and assumed that it was fear of them instead of my fear of hurting them badly.  Maybe it was just the way I looked, tall and skinny, a nerd with black glasses.  Maybe it was my clowning, jocular behavior in which I often made fun of myself for laughs.  Bullies thought they could tease me, pick on me, and push me around.  All of that could be done, but only to a point.  That point, however, was a sharp one, and the distance to that point was a short one.  Many bullies regretted trying to stretch that distance and found that they were suddenly feeling the sharp point of my anger.

            I could be comical and full of laughter, but there’s a lightly sleeping, ferociousness within me, a wild animal ferocity.  I was very aware of it and sometimes feared what I may do with it.  I’ve recognized its presence ever since I was a little, snot-nosed kid.  I called this fierce, fiery, ferocious feeling, “Wolf,” simply because, when I felt this way, my mind conjured up an image of a feral wolf, usually seen only by me, as a white, “pale” wolf.  At that time, I didn’t know why the images were of a wolf, nor why it was white.  I wouldn’t learn the significance of those two things until I was older.

            When I was older and about to have a physical confrontation, I would usually be vaguely aware of a feral, rumbling growl that only I could hear.  I’d know, then, that Wolf had taken control of my body.  At that moment, all the characteristics of a strong, healthy, cunning wolf were projected onto and into me.  I realized early that this Roamin’ Wolf lived within me, Roman Wolfe.  This wolf slept lightly, but once awakened, that feral beast wouldn’t shy from a fight, sometimes even hoping for the excitement of battle, as well as the smell and taste of blood that accompanied it.  Wolf was my combat companion, giving me an unusually intense fierceness.  Wolf and I would certainly leave you alone if you would leave me alone.  But pushing me, teasing me and bullying, beyond a certain point, brought out that wolf in me and the necessity for combat, as if it would purge my body of its tiredness, boredom and frustration with bullies.  Unfortunately, at times, due to my youth, recklessness and carelessness were also involved with my suddenly ferocious, combative response to bullies.  Usually the trouble started with name-calling, then pushing.  Unfortunately, my expression showed how bored I was with the bully and made matters worse my youth certainly wasn’t the smartest time in my life.

            Roman is an unusual first name, and that was the first thing about me to get laughed at.  It set me apart, made me different.  To be different when you’re young means attracting attention to the abnormality.  Perceived abnormality attracts immediate attention, teasing, and dislike.  But I kind of liked my name.  It conjured up images of the Roman Empire and Roman soldiers who were tough, strong, battle-tested warriors.  I explained my own like for my name, but bullies thought it was a pretense, a sham and a glaring point of exposed vulnerability, but they were wrong, and I was persistent.

            I could joke and laugh like any young boy, and like most average-looking, young boys I was shy with girls, though maybe more so than other boys my age because I knew that most girls sensed something violent and scary about me. The opposite of a bully’s perceptions.  Girls intuitively sensed a strangeness in me that made them furrow their brows in suspicion at such a skinny boy with such piercing eyes that showed little fear and would change from joyful glee to dark and dangerous hostility in an instant.  Also was the fact that my facial expressions must have shown my attraction, caring and concern for girls, yet, I almost always raised up shields, like Roman soldiers’ shields, to keep them away and to keep my feelings for them and about them, hidden.  In many ways I felt that I was lucky not to be handsome.  That trait only attracted attention, which I wanted to avoid.  Mostly I was a loner and just wanted to be left alone with my handful of friends, my thoughts, and my privacy.

            Around male bullies, my shields came down and the eyes behind each shield would be in a focused glare, so narrowly focused that it felt as if spears were emerging from my eyes, aimed directly at the bully.  There was also a feeling of recklessness within me.  It was a silent, uncaring, reckless attitude about injury that came over me when I or my friends were being teased by bullies.  There was an obvious challenge in my fearless eyes, accompanied by a sarcastic grin, that got me into many fights that, perhaps, I could have avoided.  Purposefully, my eyes showed no detectable fear.  When fear was there, it was minor and well hidden.  My lips would usually spread into a grin that, coupled with my staring silence, mocked my adversaries, making them feel foolish, thus assuring a confrontation.  But when I did talk to a bully, he usually became a miser with his own words.  Before a fight he would speak slowly, deliberately and carefully, as if his words were hard-earned money not to be wasted on trivialities.  But mostly, I willingly irritated and infuriated bullies because I absolutely wouldn’t back down, or back up, or even side-step away from them.

            Sometimes I could change even more radically when threatened, like a warrior disguised inside a jester’s costume.  I would remain silent, set my jaw rigid and solid like a steel vice, then focus my intensity on the advancing threat.  Somehow, I knew ahead of time when there would be no acceptable way to avoid combat, when no amount of talk would placate the threat, and when physical confrontation was imminent.  Rarely was I wrong to believe it was Roamin’ Wolf’s influence.  However, that does not mean that I always fought with every bully.  A bully, I learned early, was usually cautious about protecting his reputation.  Normally, a bully’s reputation is gained by fighting smaller, weaker, less skilled opponents.  But I purposely tried to give the impression that I didn’t care about the size of the bully, his strength, or his skills.  I tried to show no fear though I was fearful and wouldn’t back down unless doing so would protect a friend, or if the odds against me looked insurmountable.  I did, however, usually leave an opening, a way out for the bully so that he could “save face,” keep his reputation intact, speak some courageously threatening words, and still avoid physical confrontation.  I did fight a lot, but many bullies were willing to avoid confrontation, if given a way to save their rugged reputations.  Giving them a way to “save face” would keep their reputations intact without working up a sweat, or risking injury, or possibly being defeated and losing that valued reputation.

            I used to seriously think about my fights, especially the ones where I got beat up.  When I was real young I tried hard to avoid all fighting, not because of fear, but because I knew that I had something in me that could deal-out punishment, as well as take it, and accept it.  But it didn’t take me long to learn that no matter how many adults said it, and wished it, walking away from a fight usually only accomplished a temporary delay to the fight.  The persistent bully and most are very persistent could always find me somewhere, sometime and walking or running away only postponed what seemed inevitable to me.  So, I stood my ground and waited.  Also, there was normally no such thing as “quit” in me.  The bully might beat me up, but the bully would take a lot of punishment doing it, and that is exactly what kept many bullies at bay, the knowledge that they would take punishment themselves, risk injury and look bad amongst their friends was an advantage that I used to avoid some fights.

            I must admit, however, that I sometimes wondered about my mental state.  Why, for instance, was I the kind of person who usually moved toward danger and not away from it, like 99.9% of the world’s population?  Maybe I look like a nut, feel like a nut, smell like a nut, taste like a nut and think like a nut.  So, I guess I was nuts.

            My “no quitting” code developed early.  I was only about eight years old when I’d been in enough neighborhood and school fights so that even most older boys didn’t pick on me or challenge me.  It wasn’t because I won all my fights either, because I certainly didn’t.  Rather it was a deep seated need in me not to quit, not to give up, not to walk or run away, and not to surrender even though I was bruised, bloodied, exhausted and every muscle in me ached.  The neighborhood toughs learned this lesson when I kept coming at them, taking the punishment stoically and returning it as brutally as I could.  I forced myself to do this even with stronger, older boys.  Most of the young toughs were not steadfast in their desire to risk injury, and degrade their reputations with a long, time-consuming, battle that would leave both combatants bloody.  Even if the bully wins the fight, if he’s injured, especially if he’s bleeding, his reputation is very much at risk.  Then other kids might think: “Damn!  He’s not as tough as he thinks he is,” or “Wow!  He’s not as tough as I thought he was.”

            But my ultimate weapon, when I did lose the fight, when I was knocked down and so tired, and sore, or bleeding, that I couldn’t continue, was that I’d get up look at my opponent, his jaw hanging open and gasping for air, and say to him, “You win today.  Rematch.  Tomorrow.”  And when I saw this opponent the next day, I’d drop whatever I was doing and fight the kid all over again.  And if I lost the fight again, I’d stare at my opponent again and utter those same words, “You win today.  Rematch.  Tomorrow.”  And true to my word, when I saw the kid the next day, I’d press on with the fight until I had finally won, or until the kid apologized for whatever he said or did to start the fight, or until the bully was so demoralized that he quit and walked away.  It got to the point, eventually, where bullies didn’t want to fight me because they knew that the fighting wouldn’t end.  If they beat me up the first time, I would just continue the fight the next day, and the next, and the next, until I beat them or made them quit.  My opponents often became demoralized and discouraged by my masochistic persistence, my indomitable determination, my high threshold of pain and the stubborn pride that wouldn’t allow me to give up.  I had a fierce and often foolish determination to keep taking punishment, until it was my turn to do the punishing.

            Each fight, win or lose, brought something good because I got better and better with each fight.  With each defeat and each victory, I learned more about fighting skills, what worked and what didn’t, and even more about myself and how others felt or said about me. My friends thought I was a little crazy, weird; my enemies thought I was insane, a mental case.  I also learned about my own intense resolve to win, not to quit, and to stand-up for myself in spite of the punishment that I may have to take.  I learned that most bullies don’t really want to fight, they just want to look big in the eyes of their friends and to bask in their adoration.  That meant that their resolve to win almost certainly wasn’t nearly as great as my own determination to win.  I also learned that my friends might be right, perhaps I was a little crazy and weird when it came to fighting, but I can’t deny that my style worked to my advantage.

            By the time I reached high school, my knuckles, wrists, forearms and knees all had multiple, but minor blemishes that was my opinion of them.  My friends, especially the girls, grimaced when they focused on them.  To me those injuries were minor blemishes but to others, some of those blemishes looked like scars.  The worst scar was on his upper lip, beneath my nose.  That scar came from an exceptionally large and angry football player.  It happened like this. One of my friends made a snide comment about the loss of a football game and didn’t know that a football player was behind him.  I saw the football player spin my friend around and cock his large right hand preparing to punch the boy.  I pushed my friend out of the way, tried to block the punch, but only deflected its force into my upper lip.  The scar ran from my right nostril to the center of his upper lip.  It had healed nicely but due to its whiteness it was very noticeable.  I broke the nose of the football player with one sudden, hammer-fist to his face.  Blood spurted out of the super-jock’s nose and poured off his lips and chin, then through both of his cupped hands that he had raised to his face.  The sight of his own blood ended the fight immediately.  While all the observers were stunned into silence and wide-eyed stares of disbelief, I grabbed my friend by the upper arm and quickly walked away from the scene.  I thought, “Damn, that guy is big,” as I took a quick look over my shoulder to see if we were being chased.

            The gash on my upper lip stood out brightly when I looked into the mirror to shave or to comb my hair.  However, the scar didn’t appear ugly to me, but rather I took pride in it, especially knowing that I had saved a friend from worse punishment though I did forcefully tell the dunce to look around and see who’s listening before he defames the school football team or one of it players.

            The next day, I, almost literally, got the shit kicked out of me by members of the varsity football team, which included Mr. Big Bloody Nose.  After I got up off the floor of the locker room, I limped to the sink, looked into the mirror that was above the sink, and washed my dirty, bruised face and arms.  I stared into the mirror, again, and saw that I had a fast-growing lump on my forehead, a swollen left eye, a cut lip, a reopened cut under my nose plus abrasions and bruises forming on my arms, neck and face.  I washed the blood away and applied pressure with a paper towel until the bleeding stopped.  My legs were sore and ached badly, so I knew they were seriously bruised from being kicked.  I looked at my nose and grinned the grin hurt.  I felt my nose.  When I realized that my nose wasn’t broken or bloody, I grinned wider and said to myself, “Screw you guys!  And, hey, look, you jerks.  I don’t have a bloody nose like your big, asshole friend.”

            While in the nurse’s office, I decided that my “no quit” philosophy of fighting wasn’t fool proof.  As a matter of fact, to challenge Mr. Big Bloody Nose to another fight would mean a fight with those same teammates.  If I persisted with a “no quit” fight rule, I’d be getting my ass kicked every day.  In this particular case my “no quit” rule wasn’t only not fool proof but would prove I was a fool if I persisted.  So, I took my beating without retaliation and considered it a valuable lesson in humility and in intelligent decision-making.  But I did always wonder, and never found the answer to: Why Wolf didn’t come to me that day.  Must have been out to lunch, “wolfing” down his food and too busy to help me, I thought.  Maybe Wolf just didn’t help when I was acting like a damn idiot.

            One morning, while combing my hair, I saw the scar on my upper lip.  The memory of how I got it flashed vividly and accurately through my mind.  It was like I had taken a video tape of the incident and the whole thing was as clear as if it was just happening.  When I put my comb away, I found myself looking down at my knuckles, wrists and forearms.  When I focused on a particular scar, immediately the incident appeared in my memory as vividly as if watching a video tape of the fight.  But that wasn’t all that happened.  I also found myself being able to taste parts of the fight, like the blood from a split lip and the dirt and dust that entered my mouth when I was being kicked while on the ground.  I recalled smells accurately, too, mostly the smell of sweat, and cologne, and bad breath.  I could even feel the fight, the pain, the sore muscles, the heavy breathing from exhaustion.  I heard the sound of fists and shoes colliding with flesh.  And all of these things had a face, the face of the person who gave me the upper lip scar.  Getting beat up by members of the varsity football team seemed a lot less funny now, so I gave it some serious thought.  That’s when keeping a “fight diary” occurred to him.

            I started my “fight diary” and started listing the approximate ages, height, and weight of all the persons that I had a fight with.  With care I wrote about how the fight started, what me and my opponent’s strengths and weakness were, what the outcome of the fight was and how I could have ended the fight sooner, if I ever fought that person again.  I wrote about my injuries, if there were any, and how they were caused and how to prevent them next time.  I added as much detail as I could, even when and where the fights occurred.  I wrote random thoughts about tastes, smells, soreness, injuries and my personal feelings about the fight.  Each entry got more and more meticulous and, what initially started as a strange idea, became one of my most valuable combat preparation tools.

            Then, as one thing led to another, in a chain of events, I realized that my scars were like a warrior’s tattoos.  They were a fleshy record of my battles.  At that time, I was self-taught, but soon it occurred to me that that wasn’t enough for my growing warrior spirit.  I moved on to formal martial arts training and became an avid follower and practitioner of a Japanese form of martial arts, originating on the island of Okinawa worked in a restaurant, washing dishes, to pay for the lessons.  To me, learning a martial art style was a natural extension of keeping my “fight diary.”  Martial arts was a way to vastly improve my self-defense knowledge, but also a way to understand my developing warrior spirit and how to control it.

            It was at my martial arts dojo (school) that I picked up the nickname “Wolf” because of my fierce competitive sparring style, which my karate friends said made me appear as if I was hungrily stalking my opponent, like a wolf.  They also said that my fierce determination to learn and master my chosen style of martial arts gave them the feeling that I was learning karate by devouring it in large chunks, as if I was a starving wolf devouring chunks of meat.

            After high school I joined the Marines and almost everything about my little world changed drastically.

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                                                            Chapter 1

                                                Haunting Faces

            Blood and Death.  It was time for both, I informed the psychiatrist, as I spoke to him of some of my experiences in Nam.

            The enemy was out there somewhere, waiting for us.  I could literally smell them.  I could almost always smell them.  It was the smell of the food that the Vietnamese ate, a rotten, spoiled, rancid smell that became body odor.  The musty vegetation smells of the Vietnam jungles couldn’t mask their body odor they said the same thing about us Americans.

            A crescent moon shone in the night, not offering much light.  But darkness was my friend, always my ally.  It cloaked me as I stalked the enemy, making it so much easier to kill him from behind a veil of darkness.  Sometimes the canopy of jungle foliage was so thick

that, in the middle of the day, it was like a moonless midnight.  That dark, shadowy, gloom was my best friend and the worst of all enemies for my enemy.

            A black, odorless stain covers my entire face, neck, arms and hands.  I am a black snake in the night, silently slithering through the fetid, sulfurous, jungle vegetation.  I am like a black viper crawling over black velvet cloth, undetectable and lethal.

            My body is a weapon of silent death, like a viper inching its way through nearly impenetrable thickets of vegetation, and ankle-high, prickly, wait-a-minute vines that impede my movement, but can not stop me.  I also ignore the sharp-bladed grasses as they slice into my hands, arms and face.  My eyes are constantly searching, my ears homing-in on any unnatural jungle noises.  I move very slowly, cautiously, ghost-like, through the tangled undergrowth, bamboo stands, and man-sized elephant grass.  Stop.  Very watchful and quietly, I part the vegetation in front of me.  I search.  Listen.  Wait patiently.  I continue and death crawls toward the enemy; slowly and patiently.  I smell his body odor, and something else, cigarette smoke?  The Fourth Horseman has come for some of the enemy, one at a time.

            I don’t see the enemy clearly yet, just a shadow within a shadow, blanketed in darkness.  A subtle noise.  His uniform must have brushed against a tree or vine.  Then a louder noise as his hand slaps at the ever-present mosquitoes.  I lock on his position, then remove my blade from its inverted shoulder sheath.  I grin as I crawl like a silent fog over the damp ground.  Stop.  I see the enemy sentry now.  I see his dark silhouette, then notice exposed skin on his hands and on the back of his neck..  So careless he is as he slaps another mosquito on his neck, making noise as well as making his hands and arms visible, again.  He is facing away from me now, so I don’t see his face, but I know it will look fragile and boyish.  That’s the way most of this small-sized enemy looks, even the mature men.  But this sentry is much too careless.  Inexperienced, no doubt, because the enemy forces so many teenage boys to fight this war.  Age doesn’t matter to me though a young boy’s bullet kills just like a man’s bullet kills.  Death stalks this sentry and soon I’ll feel his warm blood gushing over my hands and arms, like warm syrup.  My hands and arms will be like a demonic artist’s canvas, stained horribly with the blood of this sentry, who, if allowed to live, might kill some of my fellow Americans.  I’ve, regretfully but necessarily, become an artist at taking enemy lives, young or old, if they are a threat to Americans.

            I clench my teeth onto the black-coated, Parkerized blade.  No moon light will reflect off its deadly steel.  I smell the smoke.  I slowly raise my head and detect a small, red glow coming from the tip of his cigarette.  So foolish of him.

            So many ways to kill.  It seems so easy now.  But not long ago it was so very difficult.  Focus, I tell myself.  I’m closer, much closer to him now.  He still faces away from me, a stroke of luck for me and a faster, painless death for him.  Only ten feet away now.  Little light; no sound but insects, especially those ubiquitous mosquitoes.  I see that he is a lone sentry instead of a team.  He looks unusually short . . . no, he’s sitting on a fallen tree trunk.

            My teeth bite harder on the back of the blackened blade.  I take a slow, deep breath.  I allow no clue that death approaches him.  Only eight feet away.  I’m careful; very patient, moving only inches at a time, but ready to spring at him if I need to.  I rarely need to.  Just eight feet to the end of his life.  I inch forward, closer and closer to him.  No noise.  No warning.

            Six feet away now.  I see his small head with short black hair, his frail, spindly neck and body.  Such a pale neck.  My eyes focus on it intently, like a moth attracted to bright light.

            He wears a light-weight uniform that won’t hinder my blade’s penetration.  His Russian designed AK-47 rifle leans up against the fallen tree trunk.  His hands are empty, except for a cigarette that still glows red in the darkness, like a beacon.  Such carelessness surprises me.  I scan the nearby jungle.  There are noises from his fellow soldiers, but they are low and muffled, and not too close.  This is an NVA (North Vietnamese Army) camp.  This is a lone sentry.  I kill only lone sentries.  No one will hear his life expire, but me.

            I’m four feet away from him and he has no sense of my nearness.  Very slowly, quietly, and carefully I rise to my knees, muscles taut.  I spring and lunge one giant step toward him.  My cupped left hand, fingers held tightly together, covers both his nose and mouth.  I pull his head back towards me.  He falls backwards off the tree trunk, off balance, helpless, flailing his arms and legs.  Instinctively he reaches up with both of his hands to grab my left hand.  That’s when my right hand violently drives the blade into his kidney area.  He’s not strong.  He can’t pry my hand away from his mouth and nose.  His hands drop.  His attempted scream dies quietly, muffled against my tightly cupped hand.  Shock and internal hemorrhage begin immediately.  I twist the ten-inch Ka-Bar combat knife forcefully inside the wound, causing severe shock.  His body goes limp against me.  I withdraw the blade quickly and hear the soft, sucking sound as it exits the fatal wound.  He’s still alive.  My left hand pulls his chin up farther, exposing the entire neck area.  I place the blade on the left side of his neck under his left ear then slash deeply into his neck, from left to right.  The left side carotid artery and the front jugular vein are severed completely.

            Blood spurts, like a crimson fountain, out of the carotid artery and jugular vein onto my hands, warming them with sticky wetness.  The smell of copper assaults my nose.  Streams of blood continue to erupt from the artery, with each of his final heart beats, making a mild hissing noise that quickly grows weaker with each geyser of blood.  The severed ends of the carotid artery look like the opening of a full-blown balloon when the air is allowed to gush out, the severed ends vibrating rapidly.  Now I clamp my hand over the severed artery to silence what little noise there is.

            In wartime, “sympathy” can be a deadly weakness.  I silently drag his light body into a thicket to conceal it.  I don’t want him found until morning.  I have more killing to do before the morning sun vanquishes my dark, private world of blood and death.  I wipe my hands and knife on my pants, then sheath the blade and crawl onward, stalking the next enemy, ending his life.  I’m constantly smelling, seeing, feeling, hearing the enemy and even accidentally tasting his blood when it spurts and sprays into the air.  My heightened senses become flooded with blood as it indelibly stains my psyche.  By the time daylight chases the darkness away more of the enemy will die and I’ll have another night’s mission accomplished during the lethal siege at Khe-Sanh.

            In the morning, when I’m safely back within our defensive perimeter, I wonder why I joined the Marines.  Sometimes I wish that I hadn’t.  When I’m moody, I often wish that I’d never been to Vietnam and never heard about South Vietnam’s guerrilla warfare troops, called VC─Viet Cong─and the NVA─North Vietnam Army, but I was thankful for being alive and able to get on the “Freedom Bird” that flew me back to the States.

            The name “Vietcong” is a shortened form of the Vietnamese words “Viet Congsan,” meaning “Vietnamese Communists.” It’s difficult to remember that your fighting communism because paramount in your mind is “survival.”  Most of us just called them “VC” or “Charlie” when we were being polite.  Since we weren’t often polite, we frequently called them “slope-heads” “slant-eyes,” “zips,” and “gooks.”  It was a way of dehumanizing them, a way of making them sub-human so that it was easier to kill them.  It’s difficult to kill someone, especially young teenagers, when you sit down and talk to them, eat with them, or admire them.  It’s difficult to kill when you know that that person is someone’s father, husband, son, uncle and that they have the full spectrum of human feelings that you do.  So in order to kill them you have to be very angry and/or think of them as lower, despicable human forms.  I’m not proud of the vile name-calling or the killing.  It was a thoroughly useless war that brought out the worst in almost everyone who participated.  It happened to me.

            The NVA had us pinned down for a seventy-seven-day siege at Khe-Sanh during the early months of 1968.  We had hardly any sleep.  We were all so afraid of dying that eating was a terrifying experience because we had to take our hands off our rifles, or whatever weapon we had.  A weapon was like the air; without it we faced certain death.  Our weapons became our gods and saviors.  We never went anywhere without them, and we took care of them as if they were our beloved children.

            During the heat of the day, our heads would literally bake inside the traditional Kevlar pot helmets.  So most or us wore our green cloth hats, called “boonie hats,” or we wore no hat at all.  The NVA loved that. They had snipers on any high ground or in any available trees with Russian weapons comparable to Uncle Sam’s but usually better, especially the AK-47 rifle.  The NVA snipers could blow your head right off your neck.  It’s an awful sight seeing a friend shot like that.  It’s like watching a melon being hit with a sledgehammer.  Many Marines died at Khe-Sanh, in many different ways, but a sniper’s headshot might have been the worst way.  Such a headshot left nothing but a butchered stump on the dead man’s shoulders.  It certainly left an unforgettable image for anyone who witnessed it.  But at least it was immediate death.  No pain; just eternal oblivion.  You think of the victim’s facial features and you remember his smile or his eyes or maybe his nose.  Then you see him after an NVA sniper puts a rifle bullet through his head.  The bullet penetrates the skull leaving an entry hole about the size of a nickel, but upon impact and penetration of the skull, the bullet flattens-out and seems to explode as it gouges its way through the soft mass of brain tissue.  When the misshapen bullet exits, it rips off most of a man’s head as it sends shards of hairy bone, a fountain of blood and clumps of brain matter in all directions, usually onto the uniforms of nearby soldiers.  When shot like that, the guy is dead before he ever hits the ground.  You are forced to become an unwilling witness as a geyser of blood erupts from his neck as he crashes to the ground, his life’s blood forming an ever growing pool, like a crimson halo, as his heart keeps pumping blood to the brain which is not there.

            I personally witnessed a soldier shot through the forehead by a sniper.  The bullet went in at a forty-five-degree angle and ripped off three-fourths of his head.  I could see straight through his open mouth and out the back of his head.  Gruesome.

            At first you want to vomit when you see something like that, but after seeing it a few times you get used to it, like a surgeon gets used to cut flesh and the resulting blood flow.  Your mind vividly remembers that tortured face, or whatever is left of it, and you can never forget it.  You try to lock it up in some dark, secure chamber inside your brain, but, like a determined prisoner, it wants to escape, so it can haunt you.  It will.  It does.

            When the war ends, you bring that “haunting” home.  I did.  That’s why I’ve started seeing a psychiatrist.  I can’t seem to escape the images and the pain.  They torture me unmercifully.  I get deeply sad and sometimes cry unexpectedly.  I never thought I’d ever need to go to a psychiatrist, probably like so many people who said they never thought they’d ever write to Dear Abby but did.

            At first, even though I was told that the psychiatrist would help me, I still felt uncomfortable with him.  I’m not used to revealing my inner feelings, even to friends, and especially not to a stranger who’s a psychiatrist.  Our first meeting was awkward.  He asked a few simple questions, to lay the groundwork for his later probing.  At least, it appeared that way to me.  To his simple questions, I gave him short, concise answers, yes or no answers, if possible.  I didn’t volunteer much information, so after those initial, probing questions were complete, he and I just looked at each other.  I suppose that I was to feel uncomfortable by the silence and start talking, but I like silence and hadn’t decided yet if I liked him, or even trusted him.  When the silence got boring, I looked out the only window in the room, over his desk.  It was a cool autumn day, with a sunny, almost cloud-free sky of cobalt blue.

            My thoughts were interrupted by his stentorian voice.  “You are a very reticent person,” he said, then qualified his statement with, “You need to talk to me if I’m to help you.”

            I looked away from the window, at him, and replied, “I don’t really think I’m a reticent person.  I’m more of a taciturn person.  There’s a fine difference between being reticent and taciturn.  Being reticent is being silent because you choose to do so.  You can be a very talkative person and still, in some situations, choose to be silent, reticent.  I’m more taciturn because I’m silent by nature, I seek solace, quiet.  Being silent or quiet is a natural part of me.  It’s just the way I am and it’s not a choice with me.  So, yes, I am by nature silent and not prone to being chatty.”

            “Do you see any advantages in being . . . ah . . . taciturn?  Is it a defense mechanism so that you don’t reveal too much about yourself?”

            “No.  Once again, you are talking about a reticent person.  A person who doesn’t want to reveal information about himself would choose not to talk, or not to talk too much.  It’s a choice that he’s making.  A taciturn person, like me, is not making a choice.  I don’t talk much, not from choice, but because I, by my nature, find comfort in silence or minimal verbal communication.  But there is an advantage to being taciturn.  Do you know what ‘think linking’ is?”

            “Sounds like hooking thoughts together, but I don’t understand what your point is.”

            “Yeah, hooking or linking thoughts together is basically it.  ‘Think-linking’ is just a concise chain of thoughts that leads to insights, which lead to a valued conclusion.  Let’s use our topic of silence and talkativeness.  Start with the premise: The more a person talks, the more he reveals about himself.  Then continue with the “think-links” like this: the more he reveals about himself, the more strengths, and weaknesses he reveals.  The more weaknesses he reveals, the more he makes himself vulnerable and open to attack.  The more vulnerable to attack he is, the weaker his defense will be.  The weaker his defense, the more danger he’s in.  The more danger he’s in, the more careful and paranoid he’ll act.  The more careful and paranoid he is, the quieter and more secretive he’ll be.  So, a careful person is, by necessity, a quiet or silent, introspective person.  Thus, a taciturn person avoids unnecessary vulnerability, weakness, danger and attack.  So a taciturn person is lucky because he avoids vulnerability, weakness, danger and attack due to his naturally quiet manner, whereas a reticent person chooses to be quiet, to avoid those same four negatives.  See what I mean?”

            Dr. Shell stared at me and said, “But you don’t need to worry about any of those things in my office.”

            “I know.  But my natural silence was making you uncomfortable, so I decided to get us started on the right footing by describing ‘think-links,’ which is something I like to do in silence.  So now you don’t have to feel uncomfortable anymore.  I’ll be more talkative now so that you can relax.” I was teasing him.

            Dr. Shell’s eyes bulged out and he furrowed his brow.  I think he knew that he had been had; that I had turned the table on him and did to him what he usually does to his patients.  For a moment he remained quiet, just looking at me, question marks appearing in his expressions.  And I also think that this bit of silly chicanery broke the ice in our relationship and made us feel more comfortable with each other.

            My psychiatrist is an easy-going kind of guy.  He sits quietly in his plush, tilt-back, dark-brown leather chair that rests upon wheels.  His office is small, but comfortable and nice looking.  It’s about fifteen by twenty-five feet long, with dark tiled floor and pale green walls.  Beside his desk and chair there is another chair and a couch, with the same material and color as his chair.  The couch is too soft.  My ass sinks right into it, so I sit in the chair.  There’s a mahogany coffee table in the space between the chair and couch and the doctor’s desk.  One wall is all mahogany bookshelves, professional books mostly.  Two other walls have nature-type pictures.  There’s a Boston fern on the windowsill by his desk; a clock and calendar on the wall over his desk.

            He’s now quite easy to talk to . . . I guess he’d have to be to have a job like that.  He has blue eyes and looks as if he’s in his mid-forties.  He’s about five feet nine inches tall and about one-hundred eighty or ninety pounds.  He’s got a stocky, solid build; could have been a wrestler with a nice, low center of gravity.  He has a head of thinning, salt and pepper hair, plus a thick, graying beard and mustache that make him look like the stereotype of a psychiatrist, complete with suit and tie.

            What a contrast we both make.  We were almost opposites as far as body build, with me being six feet two inches tall, one-hundred eighty-five pounds and thin.  I am about fifteen years younger than he is.  My hair is dark brown, as well as my eyes. I’m clean shaven.  And, since this is an early Saturday morning appointment, I’m not in my usual dress clothes with tie and jacket.  Instead, I had on my Timberland, insulated and waterproof boots, a pair of J.C. Penney jeans and a reddish, plaid, flannel shirt.  My new blue, nylon jacket was hanging over a chair in the waiting room.

            I told the doctor that I see too many haunting, dead faces.  I told him that sometimes, in Nam, we didn’t have time to evacuate the dead bodies and as we retreated from the enemy, the eyes in those bodies seemed to follow me, like one of those trick paintings.  I could feel those eyes desperately pleading with me to help them, to at least bury them, and to tell their wives, girlfriends, and families that they loved them very much.  I see those lifeless, open mouths and glazed eyes and think that I actually see their dead, bluish lips moving.  It tortures me, I told him.  Even if I didn’t look back as I retreated from the advancing NVA, I could sense my dead comrades’ eyes burning into the back of my neck, especially when I knew that sometimes these NVA and the VC soldiers would carve up the bodies into a hideous sight by plucking out the eyeballs, cutting off lips and noses, and even emasculating the corpses by severing a dead soldier’s penis and testes, then place them on the tip of a sharpened pole and driving the other sharpened end of the pole into the ground, between the corpse’s legs, as a sign of mockery.  Or the genitals were shoved into the soldier’s mouth.  It’s horrifying to know that, sometimes, that type of abomination occurs before the soldier is dead.

            I told the doctor that I once found a dead soldier in the jungle.  The soldier was naked, lying on his back, across a large, fallen tree.  His legs were all shot up.  He must have been in a firefight and his buddies couldn’t get to him.  The VC got hold of him, bayoneted his hands and feet to the tree, then cut off his cock and balls, stuffed them into his mouth and rammed them down his throat.  The VC probably stood in front of him laughing as he slowly suffocated on his own manhood.  It was such a horrible sight, a haunting sight, the soldier’s eyes wide open, bulging with fear, his lips and cheeks contorted in agony.

            Dr. Shell stared a me as though he had been shocked, I guess most of his patients are more the mundane type, with classical or traditional problems that don’t disturb him.

            I informed the doctor that war makes legal killers of soldiers, me included.  But the kind of butchery I had just described to him was beyond my understanding, beyond my acceptance.  I told him that I had heard stories of our own guys doing stuff like that, too, including mutilations, rapes, killing women and children and that they were probably true.  War, I said to him, turns undisciplined men into horrible beasts, or it lets out the horrible beast that was already there, but hidden.

            I also informed the doctor that experiences like this, in Nam, brought out a deeper darkness in my attitude toward life, but that darkness wasn’t solely created by my experiences in Nam.  I had always seemed to have them, but to a lesser degree.  I told him that I felt a darkness within me, a sadness, an expectation, and a comfort with the idea of my own death.  Since my late teens, I told him, I’ve felt that I would die prematurely; in particular, before the age of fifty ─ actually, no matter how long a person lives, the moment of death is probably still an unwanted surprise.  Then I admitted, with a mischievous smile, that I truly hate surprises, so if death came as a surprise, then my death would have to wait, especially since there’s not much that surprises me anymore.  And, if Death asked me when he could take me, I guess I’d have to be sarcastic and say, “Surprise me.”  I grinned at the doctor who wore a confused expression concerning my sincerity and seriousness.  I’m like that, sometimes.

            Another rogue thought invaded my brain, compliments of Woody Allen: “I’m not afraid to die,” he once said, “I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

            I continued telling the doctor that I not only see the faces of my dead buddies, I also see the faces of all the NVA and VC enemy soldiers that I’d killed sometimes what I saw was just the back of their head.

            So many of those faces, I said, looked so young.  Many of those faces looked like young teenagers.  I was killing children, the enemies’ children, who were made to fight even at such a young age.  Most of the time I couldn’t tell the men from the boys.  Full grown Vietnamese men are often no taller, and frequently more slender, than American boys.  If you see them from the rear, you can’t tell if it’s a man or a boy.  But I won’t kid you, though, because killing them wouldn’t have made any difference to me.  If that boy had a weapon and that weapon was being used to kill American soldiers, then I’d kill the boy.  I just wish that children could be kept out of war.  Give them a chance to enjoy life, to grow up.  Yes, I killed them silently and quickly; no agony, no prolonged suffering and no butchery or torture, unless you consider silently killing with a knife a form of butchery.  Some people do think that way, even in war.  But I made an effort not to be sadistic, although, even to myself, that statement sounds ironic, hypocritical and a bold-faced lie.

            The average age of an American soldier arriving in Vietnam, after boot camp, was 19 years old.  They looked like men, tall in stature, even stout, and compared to the Vietnamese men and boys, the Americans were giants.

            I was on a roll now and the doctor didn’t have to prod me to keep me talking not too damn taciturn now.  I said to him, “Maybe I’m just as bad as the enemy.  I don’t know.  It gets so confusing sometimes.  I killed to stay alive, to help my buddies stay alive and to help my country in a cause that I initially thought to be honorable and just.  My mind has now put all those dead American faces into a mental album and each night the album opens and I see all those dead faces, their open mouths with moving lips, their dead eyes pleading for their lives, and the corpses’ bloody fingers pointing to me in anger, screaming, “Save us, Wolfe!  For God’s sake, save us!”  God?  Now there’s the ultimate futile, superstitious cry for help.”

            I confided in the doctor even more when I told him, “Most days I feel better than bad, but there are those days where I feel worse than good.  On those days the fires of hate burn within me, and there is no cool, waterfall of goodness in sight that will quench those flames whose flickering, scorching fingers want to consume, in a conflagration of wrath, those who cross me.  In Nam those flaming fingers of rage were felt almost daily.  But now, in civilian life, I finally feel goodness and happiness dominating my daily routines, their origins primarily come from my wife and daughter, and partly from my career, as well as some understanding friends and relatives.  Solace, privacy and meditation help, also.  It used to be that I very much feared that my past would always ruin the present and then kill my future.  But now I’m a husband, a father and a teacher.  I like that very much.  It has given me much happiness.”

            Luckily, I lived to be honorably discharged from the Marines in late 1968.  But sometimes I feel as if the dead soldiers are really the lucky ones.  Maybe death is the only way I’ll ever be free of their haunting faces.

            I was “honorably” discharged.  “Can you see the irony in that?” I asked the doctor.  “I turned into a legalized killer, then I was told that I was doing the ‘honorable’ thing for my country.  Then I get discharged with honor.  What a shitty joke,” I said with a slightly raised voice.  “Was it honorable to kill?  Was it really?  Bullshit!  I killed not for honor, but to stay alive, and to keep as many of my friends alive as I could.  And I certainly wasn’t fearless.  I was scared of dying.  But I figured that the more of the enemy I killed, the better chance we all had to stay alive, right?” ─The doctor just nodded at me.  “I would go out into the night to kill the VC and the NVA before they got a chance to kill me and my friends.  My survival instincts told me to kill-or-be-killed.  There is really no ‘honor’ in killing, just a need, an obligation, a duty to survive so I can kill, again, in order to survive and be able to kill again.  I must also face the reality that I killed with particular weapons because I was damn good at it and I knew that it was also a good psychological warfare tactic that would scare the guts out of the enemy.

            I seldom limit myself to linear thinking.  Weapons don’t have to be the things we normally consider as weapons.  If you think about it carefully and escape the traditional mind-set, you’ll realize that weapons are everywhere and not difficult to find.  The metal band of a watch worn over the knuckles will easily tear an opponent’s facial flesh.  The holed, leather strap of a watch can be used as a whip that will strike the face of an opponent with, not only the watch, but with the buckle.  A ball-point pen or a pencil can be used as a dagger to wound someone or, if stabbed into the eye, to kill.  A belt, or shoelaces make an impromptu garrote.  The lenses from a pair of glasses can be used to slash flesh and even the bows from a pair of glasses can be used like an ice pick.  A rubbery, squeeze change-holder can be palmed to make the fist more solid.  A rolled magazine or newspaper can be used as a club or an eye-poker.  A set of car keys placed so they stick out from between the fingers can easily stab or rake flesh.  Credit cards can be used like knives.  Steel-toes shoes are excellent shin-bone breakers; stiff leather-soled shoes work well, too.  As silly as it sounds, a rock in a sock makes an excellent sling-club, though it can’t be used as hurriedly as other spur of the moment weapons.  A stick, twig or branch can sometimes be easily grabbed, not to be used as a club but, rather, stabbing at the opponents eyes, a screwdriver or nail are very dangerous weapons.  I could go on and on, but you get the idea about weapons being everywhere and, you’ll see them, if you can push yourself away from linear thinking.

            Then a funny thought occurred to me: I hope, for all the carpenters’ sake, that murderers don’t start using hammers to kill with because, if that occurs frequently, “hammer control laws” will be next on the agenda of all the “gun control” dolts in America.

            I gazed at the floor, then back at the doctor and said, “Killing releases very primitive thoughts and actions.  It puts into doubt our pretentious view and ideas about ourselves as refined, civilized, moral and law-abiding citizens.  It seems to me that these doubts will occur to someone with a conscience.  But why, throughout history, has mankind been so easily led into war, where killing, even mass killing, and “ungodly” torture is condoned and considered moral and advantageous?  Maybe it’s connected to human DNA and has been there since we climbed out of the primordial muck.  It must remain superficially dormant until wars, criminal activities or personal tragedies occur, then the ease of men killing each other rears its monstrous head and goes about the business of ending lives.  Of course, another obvious answer is religion.  More people have been killed, and more blood spilled for the cause of religion than all the wars of the past and present.  Even in current times more people are dying because of fanatical religious beliefs than from all the diseases in the world unless you consider religion itself as a disease, which many people do, a psychological disease of the mind.  Believe like I do, or I’ll kill you, bomb you, terrorize you.  Religion may be a much better reason for killing than any primitive DNA programming.  As Blaise Pascal said, ‘Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.’”

            “Sadly,” I said to Doc, “actually killing someone is a fairly simple task if you’re not trying to conceal it.  Taking a life is easy.  It’s the two ‘Cs’: conscience and consequences, that are extremely complex and difficult.  If you value life, then ending a life will constantly haunt your conscience, much like a ghost haunts a house.  Your conscience will often cause you to punish yourself in much more severe ways than the consequences that may be forced upon you by the verdict of a lawful society’s court system.”

            I paused, in silent thought, then looked out of the window for a few seconds. Doc remained silent, studying me.  After less than a minute I continued.  “Sometimes it’s necessary, but I see no honor in killing, just disappointment, regret and sometimes horror.  I cried a lot, in private, and silently,” I told him. “Almost every night I cried for the enemy that I killed and for my friends that were killed by the enemy.  I felt like a bottomless pit of sadness when I thought of their wives’, children’s, relative’s and friend’s pain.  No . . . there certainly was no honor, but there was plenty of gut-wrenching irony.  Just how important was that Marine base at Khe-Sanh?  Was is really worth all those lives lost in that seventy-seven day siege?  It must have been a really important base, right?  It was so important that all the Marines were ordered to abandon it shortly after the siege ended.  After all those lives lost, after all that sacrifice, all of a sudden it was no longer in the vital interest of American military operations.  How’s that for irony?  It was like mass human sacrifice for the temporary ownership of a small plot of land.  Just how important could Khe-Sanh have been if it could so quickly and easily be abandoned?” I asked as I looked at the doctor.  He said nothing, just gave me a wide-eyed stare.  His expression told me that he hadn’t heard these kinds of stories before.

            “Of course,” I added, “the military isn’t really known for it’s high IQ status.  They’re the ones that say that they give dead American heroes a ‘21-gun salute’ using only 7 rifles, not 21 rifles each rifle fired three times.  Duh!  It’s a 21 “shots” salute, not a 21 “gun” salute.  Of course, I guess they could be mathematical geniuses and multiply 7 rifles times 3 bullets fired from each rifle and come up with the product of 21.  That’s the irony of ‘military intelligence.’  It makes as much sense as over 58,000 American soldiers’ lives being wasted in Nam, and over 200,000 American soldiers who came home physically and mentally disabled.

            “Some of my commanding officers and their commanding officers often seemed to be lost in thought.  I didn’t let that fool me.  It turns out that they were lost in thought simply because it was unfamiliar territory to them.  The military is usually a place where mediocre minds are always at peak performance.  There are exceptions, of course.

            “Similar trains of thought followed.  They may be radical, perhaps unpatriotic thoughts, but this is American, right?  I can have such thoughts.  The Military?  In many ways, it’s the most glaring, but necessary disfigurement in the structure of any democracy.  The military is like a disease, in a nation, that asks it youth, mainly teenagers, to take refuge in the secure confines of man’s most primitive, ape-like instincts: kill to survive, kill to promote the superiority of ideas, cultures, traditions, even religious opinions.  Kill to prove personal superiority and national power.

            “In the military, I was to find that “thinking” and “questioning” or even asking for an explanation were not just frowned upon, but hated with a passion you simply do not question military authority, your superiors, or your country’s national interests.  So, taking unquestioned orders, obeying them without thought is considered the most honorable thing to do.  Taking military orders without thought, is similar to religion’s demand for “blind, unreasoned, faith.”

            “Respect is not usually “earned” in the military, it’s “demanded” of you.  Fear of the punishable consequences is the tool used to gain respect . . . but it’s a false respect, not a genuine one.

            “The officers seem to think they are eloquent, gifted orators with tenth grade vocabularies.  They talk, they give orders, and you obey.  One would think that most military officers, like most politicians, contrary to Darwin’s theory of evolution, evolved from parrots, not simian ancestors.  And like parrots, their bird-brains allow them to proudly recite the words of others their superiors?─they “parrot” their superiors just as those higher ranked superiors “parrot” their own higher ranked superiors. Shit always flows downhill and, in the military, gravity has an extra strong pull on the bowels.

            “My heart aches when I think of all those dead parrots young enlisted men and women, as well as young officers who were not old enough, not experienced enough and not thoughtful enough to know better myself included but died with honor and courage in such irrationally motivated wars as Korea, Vietnam and Iraq.  Most shameful for me, personally, is the fact that, at that very young age, I, too, was a parrot, fooled by politicians, military gurus and biased news coverage, all of whom had nothing to sacrifice except the lives of unknown teenagers from anonymous families, in unheard of  regions of America.  The most ironic thought of all, however, is that, basically, the military is a recognized and authorized dictatorship that guards our democracy.  That thought, like a giant octopus, wraps its tentacles around my testicles and squeezes tightly.  I’m probably supposed to feel guilt and shame for my dreadful, unpatriotic thoughts; the thoughts that originate from analytical thinking, answers that come from reasonable questioning, original, not “parroted” ideas, and a complete lack of confidence in people or institutions who use ‘blind faith’ and ‘fear’ as the foundations for their beliefs.

            “After being discharged I spent a year-and-a-half working and trying to decide what I wanted to do with my life.  I was confused and depressed, but I was only having the nightmares once or twice a week.  I could handle that all right.  After a few months I thought I had myself straightened around, so in the spring of 1970 I decided to go to college using the GI Bill, even though college was still a place where my Purple Heart and Navy Cross medals would be spit upon, if I showed them to anyone.

            “Fortunately, I was so damn busy during those four years trying to become a teacher that the horrors of Vietnam were buried deeply within the core of my mind like rotten apple seeds.  Sometimes I even fooled myself into thinking that I had put them out of my mind completely.  I was very wrong about that.  I had simply buried them, and now, like nightmarish vampires, they have risen from their mental grave and taken control of my life, sucking energy out of me, leaving me drained and discouraged.  So, I needed to visit a psychiatrist, you doctor, to help me find the figurative wooden stake that will kill the horrific memories and my ever-present guilt.

            “I’ll lay it on the line,” I told the doctor.  “I go into deep depressions.  When these engulfing depressions occur, I almost always think of suicide.  Luckily, I think of my wife and daughter, and the pain that my suicide would create for them.  That helps me to stop thinking about actually doing it, but it doesn’t stop me from thinking about it.  You know the funny thing, if there can ever be a funny thing about suicide,”  I  paused for him to respond, but he didn’t, so I continued.  “I don’t think of using a knife to kill myself.  I usually think of some sort of poison, a pill overdose, a bullet in the head, or even exhaust fumes from my truck.  I’ll tell you something else, Doc.  I think I know why I don’t think of using my blade to commit suicide.  It’s because I feel safe when I have my blade with me.  It was my razor-edged savior in Vietnam.  My blade saved my life, and others, along with my knowledge of karate.  To me, my blade is an instrument of life, not death, because it kept me, and others, alive.  It’s intended to save my life, not take my life, not destroy my life.  How’s that for symbolic, amateur psychology, Doc?”

            He still didn’t respond, though his eyes offered sympathy.  He wanted me to get it all out into the open, to flush myself of all the crap that had been building up inside of me.

            “Doc, sometimes I get confused very easily.  I wanted to show my Ka-Bar combat knife to my uncle, so I unbuttoned the shirt button nearest my belly button, then reached up toward my left armpit.  I did it so casually, like reaching into a pocket for my car keys?  It was so natural for me to do it, even after being away from Vietnam for so long.  We were talking about Vietnam and I wanted to show him the instrument that I used most in the jungles.  I was anticipating that he’d be interested and excited, but I certainly wasn’t thinking straight, or I would have seen the fear in his eyes.  Anyway, when I pulled the blade out of my shirt, I looked at it and not at him.  Finally, when I saw his wide eyes, gaping mouth and heard his heavy breathing, I realized that what I had done looked very much like I was going to attack him.  I had no intention of doing that, but he didn’t know my intentions.  I wasn’t thinking normally, clearly.  I wasn’t thinking how my actions would look to him, any more than I think about breathing.

            “I saw my uncle glance at the door, looking for the quickest way to escape, then his eyes were glued to the knife.  When it sluggishly dawned on me what my actions looked like, the excitement turned to supreme embarrassment.  I realized that he was now afraid of me and what I might do.  Hell!  He had every right to feel that way.  I must have really been in a stupor.  Here I was, a person having problems with depression, talking to him about killing, then all of a sudden, I pull out a concealed knife from under my shirt.  I was a real jackass for not anticipating his fear and alarm at my actions.  All I could do then was talk fast; try to explain.  So, I told him, in my most sincere voice, that I didn’t mean to scare him and that I wouldn’t hurt him.  I did finally convince him that all I was trying to do was show him the blade that I used in Vietnam.  When I put the knife away, I could read the tremendous relief on my uncle’s face.  I’m so used to the blade being there that it was like reaching to take a pen out of my shirt pocket.  That’s the kind of thing I mean when I say that I get confused easily.”

            Doc showed me a mild smile and nodded his head, then said, “Boys need their toys?”

            When I heard that phrase, I became irritated.  I said, “Doc, can I tell you what I think about the phrase you just used: Boys need their toys?”

            “Sure,” Doc responded, then added, “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

            “I was offended.  That phrase is mostly used by women as a disparaging remark about the immaturity of men, and I find it very irritating, especially coming from a man.  Perhaps it’s something that you haven’t had the need to give much thought, but I think you should.  Women often say that: ‘Men are just little boys that still need their toys.’  It’s irritating to hear you repeat that ‘male-bashing,’ typically feminine phrase.  It’s not only insulting, but intellectually childish on the part of females.  I’ve heard it said so many times that it makes me sick to think about the lack of respect that it implicitly implies.  The next time you hear someone say that it almost certainly will be a woman.  I usually give a sarcastic reply such as ‘Women are just little girls who need their toys, too, and their toys are new clothes, jewelry, make-up and a plethora of bathroom and grooming supplies, all used as a substitute, in adult life, for playing with their childhood dolls.’  ‘Boys need their toys’ is a rude insult, layered with contempt that no man should allow to go unquestioned or unchallenged.  I’m sorry to act as if I’m reprimanding you, but it’s a shameful phrase, whether it’s said by a male or a female.  Enough said about that.

            “I came to you because I realized I was having odd thoughts and dreams and needed help.  Pulling that knife out of my shirt and scaring my uncle is proof of that.  It was an odd, unthinking thing to do, but that’s one of the reasons I need to see you, Doc.  Odd thoughts, odd actions, and the guilt from unforgettable faces that haunt me like pernicious ghosts in the night.

            Doc said, “You told me that you were called Wolf by almost all your Marine friends.  That’s not odd since your last name if Wolfe.  I suppose there was another meaning there, right?”

            Oh, yeah.  Sure.  The reference is to the animal wolf.  You know, like stalking its prey at night; fierce, silent, cunning, and deadly.  Just like my karate friends used to call me Wolf.

            “OK.  Another question.  How did you learn how to handle a knife like you did in the jungle?”

            I explained that when I went to combat school, I had to learn a lot of soldiering skills, especially survival skills and rifle skills.  I was interested and learned fast in those three months before I was shipped out to Vietnam.  But in the final month of combat school we were all asked to choose one particular weapon that we’d like to become an expert with.  It could be explosives, pistols, rifles, .50 caliber machine guns, grenade launchers, or any other weapon the army had on hand.  They wanted some of the guys to have a specialty in some area of combat.  I surprised everyone and chose the Marine Ka-Bar knife, night stalking and silent killing with only a blade, though I also learned how to use a garrote.  Come to think of it, I used a silenced .22 caliber pistol once.  It had a special advanced silencer called a “hush-puppy.”  It was called that because it was originally designed to use when silently killing enemy sentry dogs.  One night in Nam, I brought it out with me, when I went stalking, to see how it worked on a human sentry.  I got within a few feet of the sentry and shot him in the head.  A .22 caliber bullet isn’t usually powerful enough to exit the skull, so when it enters, the bullet bounces off the inner cranial walls mixing and shredding the brain’s gray matter similar to the small steel ball bearing that mixes the paint in a spray-paint can.  That sentry died instantly.  The problem was, when he fell, his body made a noise as it hit the ground.  Some of his fellow soldiers came to investigate, saw that he’d been assassinated, then sprayed the jungle with rifle bullets.  I narrowly escaped and vowed not to use that technique again.  I’d stick to the knife where I can grab the enemy, kill him, then gently lower his body to the ground and carry it to a hiding place, if possible.  No noise.  Also, the pistol, with the silencer, was too bulky and awkward to carry.

            “To get back to my explanation about boot camp, from then on, I was placed in a small group of soldiers who were taught knife fighting skills, including stalking and the silent killing of enemy sentries.  It was also a psychological warfare tool.  In the morning when all or most of the sentries were found dead, with their throats cut, that would terrify the enemy.  Then they’d become superstitious, nervous, and afraid of the night.  Thoughts and fantastic visions of unstoppable phantoms stalking them in the night would keep many an enemy from sleeping.  After a few nights without sleep, or at least, disturbed sleep, that enemy would be careless and sluggish, from sleep deprivation.  That made him even more prone to being killed by being careless, like making too much noise and giving away his position, smoking at night where the smell and the red glow of the cigarette could be detected.  I can’t tell you, Doc, how many enemy sentries I found and killed by seeing the red glow of their cigarette and/or the smell of cigarette smoke.  Just yawning or stretching would give away their position and make it so much more likely that they would be killed.

            “Also, I joined the Marines with a good knowledge of martial arts skills, specifically Isshin Ryu karate.  I was already a black belt so the martial arts skills and knife fighting, and stalking skills blended together naturally.  I ended up being ranked at the top of my class in knife fighting proficiency.  The only persons better than I was were the three instructors, and they each complimented me by telling me that they’d hate to have to fight me. I think they exaggerated, of course, because at that stage of my skills, they were all much better than I was.  They said they could probably best me with the knife, but they didn’t know if they could defend themselves well with the added complexity of having to fight someone who was also a black belt in martial arts.

            “I didn’t really consider myself an expert in karate, but, to them, I was an expert by comparison.  I was smart enough to know that they were too damn good for me with a knife, but it was nice of them to compliment me.”

            I was glad to see the Doc smile.  Hopefully, it meant that he was feeling at ease and didn’t consider me a whacked-out misfit.  His eyes and face grew curious and he asked me how I carried the knife under my shirt and how I got it out of my shirt so fast.

            I unbuttoned my shirt and showed him the harness that I made so I could carry the knife under my left armpit with the handle hanging downward.  I showed him that the harness was very similar to a cop’s shoulder holster, but much more compact, slim and light.  I buttoned my shirt back up, then demonstrated the process of extracting the knife.  I placed my hands on my thighs and relaxed.  Abruptly, I unbutton the shirt button closest to my belt, reached into my shirt and unsnapped the handle strap.  The handle of the knife fell silently into my hand and I pulled it out of my shirt.  Apprehensive about my actions, I immediately replaced the knife into its sheath and buttoned my shirt.  Then I told him that in Nam I wore the upside-down knife harness on the outside of my jungle, camouflage uniform, there being no need to conceal it in actual combat.

            “I see how that process could really scare someone.  It does have a frightening effect, even on me, and I knew what was going to happen,” Doc stated.

            I noticed a bit of discomfort in the creases of skin around his eyes and mouth.  I asked, “Would you prefer that I didn’t wear the knife when I visit your office?”

            “Yes.  Actually, I would appreciate that.”

            “I won’t wear it to my future appointments.”

            “So, how’s your wife feel about the concealed knife?” he asked next.

            “Well, she doesn’t much care for it, I admit.  But she much prefers the knife to a gun.  She’s kind of wimpy about guns.  She says I have to forget about Nam and what I did there, and that the knife is not needed because of my martial arts training.  But I like the feel of it there, you know?”

            “You wear it all the time?” Doc asked as his forehead frowned.

            “Oh.  No, I don’t.  I only wear it when I’m not working, and I wouldn’t even have had it on today if it hadn’t been a Saturday appointment.  I never wear it to work, of course.  I wanted to, at first, but my wife talked me out of it, thank goodness.  She was dead right on that issue.  I admit that.  It would have been very upsetting to everyone in school, children, adults, and parents, if they knew that I had a concealed knife under the left armpit of my shirt, covered by my sport coat.  Does make for an unusual vision, doesn’t it?” I said with uncomfortable laughter in my voice.  “Hell, I’d probably get fired for being a dangerous psycho.  Anyway, the knife would only call attention to what I was in the Marines, in Nam, and who’d want to have a teacher like that in their school . . . especially with children?”

            “You like teaching?”

            “Oh, yeah.  I like the kids.  Like being around them, helping them grow and learn.  It’s very satisfying, it really is.  They’re the future, right?  They are our country’s most precious resource, those developing minds.  I feel like I’m helping to make a better future for all of us when I help my students.  I certainly wouldn’t want to jeopardize my job as an elementary school teacher.  I should tell you, though, that I don’t very often get depressed in my classroom, with my students.  They take my mind away from the sources of my depression.

            “The real problem is that when I get depressed, outside the classroom, it can get intense and last a day or two, and that sort of thing is killing my marriage.  I love my wife and daughter very much and I don’t want to leave them or get a divorce.  But I think I’m headed in that direction unless you can help me.  Sometimes the only thing that stands in the way of me committing suicide is my daughter, Grace, and my wife, Samantha.  Grace is such a beautiful eight-year-old girl.  She can melt my heart with love just by winking and smiling at me.  I adore her and knowing that she loves me helps me a lot.  What more could a father ask for, right?  And my wife, Sam, is usually patient and understanding, but I know that, sometimes, my behavior gets on her nerves, and rightly so.”

            The doctor steered the conversation back to Vietnam, back to 1968, during the more than two-month siege at Khe-Sanh.  He figured that was the beginning, the source and core of my mental pain; the cancer that needed cutting out before it claimed my entire body and life.  I think my depression problems came long before Nam, but I said nothing.  Any help I could get would be a welcome relief.

            It wasn’t a pretty story to tell, certainly not for the squeamish.  He nodded and his eyes told me to continue.  So, I started by telling him that, “My whole Marine platoon, and a few others, were besieged by the NVA ─ North Vietnamese Army.  They had us surrounded, with no way out.  The ground fire was so heavy that our helicopters couldn’t even land long enough to evacuate the dead and wounded.  The NVA had us encircled, like being in a noose, and each day they were making that noose smaller and smaller.  They were the hangman, and we were his victims with the noose around our necks getting tighter and tighter.  Eventually, if the NVA kept at it, the trapdoor would open under our feet and we’d all die of broken necks and/or strangulation.

            “Militarily, the place was nearly indefensible.  Whoever selected that spot for the Marine base must have been a military moron.  That Marine base was on low land, surrounded by higher ground from which the NVA could shoot down on us and bomb us with mortars at their leisure.  Since time immemorial, military strategists have always known that the best defense is always conducted from higher ground so that the enemy has to struggle up hill to get to you.  That struggle slows them down making them easier targets, it tires them and makes them careless, it demoralizes them, especially if their first attempt to over-run you are not successful.  But some idiot decided to build the base on low ground, surrounded by hills that gave the enemy a great advantage.  A lot of guys died because of someone’s stupidity.

            “After a few weeks, we were low on food, were getting little sleep, and the corpses kept accumulating with nowhere to put them, except in stacks, like firewood.  The smell of the putrefying corpses was nauseating and morale shattering.

            Rescue helicopters couldn’t come to our aid because of the intense rifle and machine gun attacks on them as they hovered over the camp.  So after nearly two months of the siege, I went to the Colonel and suggested that I take a small group of  four to six  men and that each night we’d sneak close to the enemy defenses and kill sentries with knives, one at a time.  I figured that this would cause such intense psychological terror to the NVA that they would either attack in force or retreat.  We couldn’t hold out much longer, anyway, so either way we had nothing to lose and everything to gain.  It was tough getting volunteers, but finally five other Marines realized that we’d all die within a week if we didn’t act.  We’d already been pinned down for ten weeks and half our soldiers were dead or wounded already.  A Mohawk Indian guy said he volunteered because we couldn’t bury the dead bodies and the smell was so bad it was about to suffocate him.  He said he might as well go out and kill some commies.  You know how that is.  Some people hide their fears behind a mask of jokes.  He wasn’t from my group, but everybody called this Indian, Hawkeye.  I never asked if it was his real name or a nickname.  He joked a lot, but he was a really tough guy; had the warrior spirit in full bloom just underneath that thin layer of humor.

            “We killed the NVA at night and every night for about a week.  Unfortunately, all the night stalkers were killed except for me and Hawkeye.  One of them was captured alive and was tortured during the night so that we could all hear his screams.  Hawkeye and I kept going out at night, anyway, though we had to be extra careful, and sometimes came back after a few hours with no kills they were wary of us by then.  Hawkeye and I had excellent night vision, probably what kept us alive and not the others.  I think Hawkeye got his name or nickname from that fact.  That’s just a guess.  At the time we weren’t close friends, but he’s one of the few people that I remember from Nam.  He was reliable and had great courage.  But mostly I try really hard to forget the names, faces and places . . . and the awful smells that contaminate my mind.

            “Humans, unlike animals, seem to have a natural fear of the dark.  You ask most people what sense they think is most important and ninety-nine percent will say it’s their sense of sight.  You take their eyesight away from them and they get scared and uncomfortable (me too).  That’s what nighttime does to people, it takes their sense of sight away from them and their sense of comfort, security and self-confidence vanishes, also, and that causes them to panic.  I don’t care how brave most people are during the daytime, at night a vast majority of them are afraid to be in the dark.  That’s how we terrorized the NVA into not tightening the strangle-hold that they had built around us.  They were so scared at night, knowing we were killing them silently and unseen that they became nervous, jittery, couldn’t sleep and, at dusk, carelessly argued about who had sentry duty. I assumed that that was what they were arguing about, since I don’t speak Vietnamese.  But I do know that I smiled with great satisfaction.  Even more pleasing was the times when they started shooting each other.  You know, like a noise in the dark might cause one of them to shoot, or spray bullets at the noise, then one of their own soldiers is dead after having just taken a leak away from the camp.  But sometimes those shots, especially the spray of bullets, went out into the jungle and killed an American.  At one point the enemy was in such a panic that they were shooting at almost any sound.  That’s how three of the other volunteers got killed.  The other one, like I said, was careless, made too much noise, got caught in the act and was tortured.  But the enemy killed three times as many of their own men, from fear and terror.    Soon the NVA got smarter and assigned two sentries for each location.  Hawkeye and I couldn’t stalk and kill successfully when that happened, so we came up with another plan.  When Hawkeye and couldn’t get close to them anymore, we threw stones into their camp, which had the effect of terrorizing them even more.  But we made sure we were well hidden and protected because then the enemy shot in the direction that they thought the noises came from.  One time, though, we threw clusters of rocks at a sentry post and the soldiers in their own camp killed those sentries, thinking that the camp was being attacked by a small group of American Marines.

            “Hawkeye and I made it without any serious injuries, but when we killed enemy sentries and came back to camp with blood soaking our clothes, faces and hands, it had an unsettling effect on our own guys.  That’s one of my problems, Doc.  I still feel the warm, sticky blood on my hands, at times, and sometimes when I look at my hands, I even see red and smell the copper odor that blood sometimes has.  It looks and smells so real.  At times like that my whole body shakes uncontrollably and the tension seems like it will tear me apart.”

            I realized that my eyes had filled with tears at the memory of my dead comrades, especially those four brave soldiers who died because they followed me out into the night to kill the enemy.  I told the Doc that those four guys sacrificed their lives so that the other soldiers could survive that hellish siege.  I told him that intense emotions well-up inside of me like a dormant volcano suddenly erupting.  I stated that tears often stream down my face whenever I think of them, and as my hands wipe across my face, like windshield wiper blades, to remove the warm wetness, another stream of teardrops quickly takes their place.  I get choked up; can’t talk.  My mouth goes dry, and the lump in my throat seems so big that it will cut off the air to my lungs.  I feel a panic as if I’m about to suffocate.  I wondered, then, what the doctor saw and felt when he looked into the horrors hidden in my moist eyes.

            “God-damn-it!” I shouted. Doc nearly jumped out of his seat.  “I’d gladly flush those medals down the toilet to get those guys back, alive.  They were the real heroes, you know.  Those guys meant so much to me.  I see their faces at night, almost every night, and I wake up crying, with my pillowcase damp.  I’d literally give an arm or leg if I could have all those guys back, alive and well, and with their families and friends.  All I have left of them is bad memories of how they died by following me.  I can’t even remember their names, but their faces are vivid pictures framed in my mind.

            “Doc.  Did you ever look into the eyes of a dying man?  Have you ever seen the face of a person who dies as you are looking at them?”  Doc shook his head to indicate that he hadn’t.  “Well I’ll tell you about it, then.  They look numb, terrified, scared; there eyes pleading for help.  And just before they die, their pupils grow really large and become somewhat transparent.  That’s when you see their agony, just before their whole face slackens in death, while their eyes stare at you without hope.  You look into their black pupils, like looking into a haunting abyss, and as their eyes glaze over at the moment of death, their agony transfers to you.  They don’t mean for it to happen that way, it just does.  Each time you see that happen, it’s like someone placing a large rock into your backpack.  If you see a lot of deaths, you carry a lot of dead weight.  But it’s not your back that breaks, Doc, it’s your mind.”  I paused, then looked at Doc, shrugged my shoulders, and stated, “Guess that’s why I’m here, huh?”

            Doc nodded his head in the affirmative, then said, “Please continue.”

            “I went to symbolically visit my dead comrades at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.  I saw thousands of names chiseled in the polished, black marble.  It’s a nice monument designed by Maya Ying Lin; a breathtaking monument to over fifty-eight thousand of our heroes.  They certainly were heroes to be proud of and to be remembered.

            “The Three Soldiers Statue, by Frederick Hart, is also a superb tribute.  Vietnam veterans often refer to this statue as the ‘keepers of the names.’  Both the ‘wall’ and the ‘statue’ are stunning; with their power to elicit intense emotions and memories.  Together, they are a monumentally private experience.  You’ve got to see the monument with your own tearful eyes and feel the names with your own broken heart.  I doubt that you can walk away from either one without a sense of being overwhelmed, especially if you imagine that you see your own name chiseled into the wall.”

            I remember asking the doctor to help me save myself from the horrid memories that I had of Nam.  I also remember thinking of my dead comrades’ eyes as they begged me to help them live.  That’s when the doctor explained to me that my most primary instincts for survival had controlled my actions in Vietnam.  He said that these instincts were clearly the dominant forces controlling my behavior.  They forced me to kill in order to stay alive, and they unquestionably overwhelmed any logical or emotional arguments that I may have had about the wrongness of the war and of the killings that I did.  While in Vietnam, these “wrongness” arguments were submerged, concealed, and suppressed so that they didn’t interfere with the primary instinct for survival.  But, now, he said, I am not in a survival situation.  Now survival is secondary, almost taken for granted, and my thoughts about the wrongness of the war, and of the killings that I did, have surfaced.  Furthermore, he stated that the memories of the killing in Vietnam are so vivid, they can’t be submerged, nor concealed any longer by mental subterfuge.  Therefore, I have a grand conflict going on inside my head.  I needed to kill to stay alive in Vietnam, but now I feel guilty about my participation in that war, and more importantly, I feel a tremendous guilt for having taken so many lives.  And since I was an expert who had killed many times, then every person I killed has increased the weight my guilt until I now sat before him, like Atlas trying to hold up the world and finding the load much too heavy to bear.  It sounded reasonable, I guess.

            The doctor then ejaculated some non-sense about his suspecting that I may have volunteered for all those dangerous hand-to-hand nighttime combat missions because, subconsciously, I was trying to kill myself.  He said it was a disguised way of committing suicide, honorably, on the battlefield  He explained that if I was killed during battle, then I would have secretly committed suicide, while being considered a hero by everyone else because of my apparent bravery during a battle with the NVA troops.  However, this subconscious plan didn’t work, he said, because I really was an expert in the deadly technique of nighttime stalking and silent killing.  Thus, he said, the enemy never could help me by killing me, thereby helping me to fulfill my own death wish.

            I told him that I thought the “suicide” part of his analysis was pure bullshit, though I did think about it, later, but that I wasn’t in the mood to argue with him about it.  I had survived by killing, by being a better killer than my enemy, by being an expert among amateurs.  Hell, if I wanted to commit suicide I could just step into the enemy camp and yell, “Hey!  You bunch of assholes!  You all look like runt-assed, foul-smelling gooks!”

            We looked at each other.  I grinned.  He didn’t.  He looked serious, as if searching my face for some answer, some clue.  I don’t know if he found anything.

            He didn’t wish to argue either, not now, anyway.  He continued by saying that he believed that I may also be suffering from PTSD, which means “post-traumatic stress disorder.”  PTSD, he said, gets worse with time, not better.  He said that I was already demonstrating some of the PTSD major symptoms, the flashbacks; the visual pictures of traumatic combat situations, the nightmares which seriously disturb my ability to sleep and get the rest that my body desperately needs, the alienation, which makes me opposed to some kinds of authority and prevents me from allowing myself to be emotionally close to anyone so that, if they die, it would be as if a stranger died and, thus, only cause me minimal grief.  Then he said there’s evidence of psychic numbing, which means that, in some ways, my sense of morality was damaged in Vietnam.  He explained that I became an emotionless killer, outwardly calm, but inwardly I had led a life of extreme violence and now tremendous guilt was bearing down on me.  He went on to say that Vietnam vets have an abnormally high, but easily understandable suicide rate.  Those that don’t kill themselves try to lose themselves in an unstable life of wandering.  They have an inability to settle down, mentally or physically, they often attempt to drown their guilt and sorrow with alcohol and drugs.  One-third of all male, homeless adults living on the streets are Vietnam vets, he added, to my surprise.

            To complicate matters, he informed me that he received my blood-test results from the hospital laboratory.  Apparently, there’s a chemical called “serotonin” that’s made in the brain, the lack of which is very strongly associated with clinical depression.  The laboratory tests he said, indicated that I had an imbalance of this chemical, which is also significantly contributing to the cause of my depression episodes.  He went on the say that the other causes for my depression are, naturally, related to my Vietnam experiences and all these things, cumulatively, are seriously affecting my mental health, which in turn, is affecting my relationship with my wife and daughter, and putting extreme stress on my marital and family relationships, as well as with my teaching career.  Doc also told me that the cure would take time and that he would need to see me once or twice every week.  He said he knew that he could help me, but that I’d have to give him time and try not to be impatient.  He advised me that, sometimes, what matters most in sustaining a good relationship, whether it’s with him, my family or with my close friends and relatives, is not so much what you give to that good relationship as much as what you are willing to give up to keep it

            I thanked him and told him that whatever he could do for me certainly would be appreciated because I was tired of being chin-deep in my own personal and psychological cesspool.  Then I asked him when we could get started.  He said that we had already started and now we needed to continue our talks regularly.  Because of holidays and other conflicts, it was decided that we wouldn’t be able to meet again for a few weeks.  Doc made me an appointment for November 30th, then asked me to keep a diary of my moods and feelings so he could read it and we could discuss what had happened during those weeks.  I hoped that I could handle my personal problems for that long.  I thought positively and told myself that I could make it.  But I was quite sure that the mere “power of positive thinking” couldn’t correct a chemical imbalance.

            Before I left his office, he wrote-out a prescription for me to take two capsules─25 mg each a day of an anti-depressant medication called Pamelor.

            After we said good-bye to each other, I put on my coat and headed to my truck.  I’d get the prescription filled on the way home and start taking the pills right away.  I felt really good, hope replaced hopelessness. It seemed strange to feel that good.  Feeling good had become an alien feeling; something I hadn’t felt much of lately but wanted desperately.  Perhaps, I thought, there was a light at the end of the tunnel after all.

            As I exited the building and walked across the parking lot, I felt my lips stretching into a smile, which is also something that I hadn’t been able to do in a very long time.

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                                                            Chapter 2

                                                      ****

                                                              The Visit

            There was no school on Wednesday, November 11th, due to Veteran’s Day.  That’s always a sad day for me because I remember all my buddies who were either killed, physically maimed, or psychologically injured.  The sadness, however, lost some of its severity due to the fact that this day allows my whole family to be together.  My wife, Samantha, is also a teacher, and also had the day off.  I explained to Grace just what Veteran’s Day meant to me, but being a kid, she was just excited to have a day off from school.  It turned out to be a happy family day for the three of us.  We played together and went out to lunch together.

            Friday-the-thirteenth arrived.  After school Sam and I came home as soon as possible so we could get her van loaded with the suitcases that were packed the night before.  When the school bus brought Grace home we took care of a few last minute items like making sure that Grace went to the bathroom since she had a bladder the size of a thimble and usually needed to stop frequently for bathroom breaks, locked the doors and windows, then got into the van and started driving the two and a half hour trip from our home near Rochester, New York, to Chemung, which is near Elmira, New York.

            It’s usually a boring trip, especially since I’ve been driving the same route for many years.  Although boring, we made it safely to Sam’s parent’s house.  Actually, it was a quick, easy trip with no land mines in the road and no mortar or rifle fire to contend with, and only one restroom stop for Grace.

            Just before we get to my in-law’s house there’s a short stretch of road that goes through a thickly wooded area.  The overlapping tree branches form a canopy over the road.  The branches, now defoliated, extend out over the top of the road, like a dome.  Normally, in summer, this would be a pleasantly shaded drive-through, but Nam changed that for me.  It reminded me of the triple canopy jungles in central Nam.  With the bare branches, it was also a stark reminder of the defoliating affects that the chemical, Agent Orange, had on the Nam jungles.  It’s at this stretch of road that Grace likes to sing a song about teddy bears having a picnic in the woods.  It’s a cute song.  Sometimes Sam and I also start singing, and we all have a good laugh just as grandma’s and grandpa’s house comes into view.

            My mother-in-law and father-in-law met us at the door, as they usually do, with beaming smiles.  Sam and I carried the two suitcases and an overnight bag into the house while Grace showered her grandparents with hugs and kisses.  We all sat down to eat sukiyaki, which my mother-in-law had hot and ready to eat.  She knew it’s one of my favorite meals, so she served me a large amount, over rice.  She’s a great lady, so loving and caring, so much so that I feel closer to her than I did to my own long-absent and now deceased mother.

            My father-in-law is nice, in his own way, but usually doesn’t show any strong emotions.  He’s kind of grumpy, at times, but on the whole he’s a pretty good guy; certainly, nicer than my own father was to me.

            The big news around the area that day was that there had been an escape from the Elmira Correctional Facility.  Not technically an escape from the facility itself, but an escape while being transferred in a State Trooper car to the Attica prison in upstate, western New York.  It happened about eleven o’clock in the morning that day; too late to make it into the morning newspapers.  It was getting a lot of coverage on the TV and radio, though, in the evening news.         My in-laws informed Sam and I that witnesses had seen a powerfully built, fortyish, long-haired, full-bearded and mustached man waving a white handkerchief at the north-bound State Trooper car that was carrying a young prisoner named Lester Gibson.  The bearded man was walking south with a much younger, slimmer, clean-shaven, short-haired man.  The young man was hopping on one leg as if the other leg was broken or badly hurt.  The young man’s arm was around the older man’s neck, and the older man had his arm around the younger man’s waist.  Both men’s hair was messed up with dirt and blood on their faces, as if they’d had an accident.  My father-in-law said that the troopers stopped their car to assist the two men and were caught totally unaware by the ruse.  Authorities are guessing that each man had a concealed weapon, and that they used them to quietly take control of the troopers and their car.  The Troopers’ car was found a couple of hours later, a few miles away, on a seldom used, dirt road.

            Police investigators said there were no signs of a struggle between the men and the two troopers.  One trooper was found dead with a bullet wound to his chest, and the other trooper was in critical condition at a local hospital with a bullet wound to the stomach.  Both troopers were found lying in a ditch, next to their car, which was parked on the shoulder of the dirt road.  Passing motorists couldn’t see the bodies from either direction because the ditch was so deep.  Luckily for the unconscious trooper, one motorist passed the trooper car once on the way up the road and again, about an hour later, on the way back down the road.  He became suspicious, got out of his car and looked around.  That’s how he discovered the bodies.  The wounded trooper would have certainly died if his body hadn’t been discovered for another couple of hours.

            Dad said that the young prisoner was just a kid, only seventeen or eighteen years old.  His name is Lester Gibson, but he was gone, of course.  Fresh tire tracks were found near the trooper car where another vehicle had peeled out quickly.  All the evidence led the local police officials and local troopers to believe that the escape was carefully planned to assist the young prisoner’s escape from police custody.

            I finished my sukiyaki over rice and was quite full, so I turned down an offer for more.  Grace had finished her meal and had gone into the living room to watch TV after having become thoroughly bored by the story.  I was glad she’d left because I’d become curious and wanted to ask a few detailed questions.

            Looking at my father-in-law, I asked, “What crime was this Gibson kid being sent to Attica for?”  I paused and waited for Dad’s reply.  He looked at Mom and they both had disgusted looks on their faces as they looked back at Sam and me.

            Dad lowered his voice, so Grace wouldn’t hear, then leaned across the table a little so that I could hear him whisper.  The kitchen light shone off his bald head as he said, “That animal was found guilty of the rape and strangulation death of a ten-year-old girl.”

            Sam and I looked at each other, both of us thinking of Grace who was only eight years old.  The thought sent a chilling fear up my spine and the muscles in my right hand twitched as it instinctively reached for the blade, in its sheath, located under my left armpit.  I stopped my hand in mid-motion.  Any loving father would understand my reaction.  Then I asked, “Do the police have any leads?”

            “Wait a minute,” Dad whispered, “I’ve got more details about this Gibson fellow that they couldn’t mention on the TV or radio.”

            Mom stood up immediately and left the table.  As she walked by Sam, Mom tapped her on the shoulder, as if giving Sam a signal to leave the table and follow her into the living room.  Sam shrugged politely and stayed seated; eyes glued to her father.

            I knew then that Dad’s information would be more than the ordinary kind of detailed, repugnant information, so I prepared myself, mentally.  Under the table, I placed a reassuring hand on Sam’s thigh and squeezed it gently.  She placed a hand on top of mine.

            Dad wiped his brow, licked his lips, then looked me straight in the eye and said, “Joe told me this stuff.  Bobby told him.  It’s straight from the official files.”

            Joe is a close friend of Dad’s. They both worked for, and retired from, the U.S. Post Office in Elmira.  Joe’s son, Bobby, is an Elmira police officer.  Bobby had all the intimate details on Lester Gibson’s crimes, even a psychological report indicating that he was a bed-wetter until his early teens.

            Dad proceeded, “Christ,” he whispered, “Gibson kept the poor girl tied up and blindfolded for nearly a month after he kidnapped her.  Kept her in some cabin way out in the woods where there was no one around for miles.  The coroner’s report said that the poor kid had cuts, scrapes and bruises all over her body.  She’d been beaten several times.  Can you believe that?  Gibson’s a monster, that’s what he is.  He needs killing is what I say.  The girl lost an awful lot of weight.  Either she wouldn’t eat or she was practically starved to death.”  Dad paused to shake his head sadly.  I noticed how hard Sam was squeezing my hand, rage making her hand on mine feel like a tightening vice.

            Dad’s gaze traveled from me to Sam.  His face blushed red.  Anger, I thought.  Dad seemed speechless for a few seconds, just looking at his daughter.  “It’s disgusting,” he said as he looked intently at Sam.  “Maybe you better leave for this part,” he said to Sam.

            Sam sat frozen to her chair, rigid, “Tell us,” is all she said to her father, as she stared intently at him.

            Dad looked back at me, seemingly grateful not to have to look into his own daughter’s eyes.  From the tone of his hesitant words and the look in his eyes, I could tell that he was about to say something that a father wouldn’t want to talk about and would be embarrassed to mention in front of his daughter.

            “The coroner’s report quotes the medical examiner’s report which said that traces of dried semen were found on and in the girl’s body.  The semen was found . . .”  Dad’s voice crackled as his throat tightened up.  He stopped, cleared his throat and swallowed hard, then continued.  “They found dried semen and blood around the girl’s virginal and anal areas.” Dad paused again and I knew his next word would be “mouth.”  Before Dad said the word “mouth,” he looked up at me with tears in his eyes, an expression of rage on his face and scarlet skin due to embarrassment.  After the pause to collect his thoughts and control his emotions, he looked again at Sam.  I knew that he wanted Sam to leave.  I turned to Sam, squeezed her thigh and whispered that I would tell her what was said, later.  Sam reluctantly rose and went into the living room to be seated with her mom and Grace as they watched TV.

            Dad’s eyes didn’t follow her.  He was staring at the tabletop, directly under his chin.  “Thanks for getting her to leave.  The medical examiner’s report also states that there’s no question that the girl was raped, sodomized and forced to have oral and anal sex.”  His voice was chocked up as he stated, “And that isn’t the worst of it.  Just before she died, he must have made her . . .”  Dad’s voice came to a dead stop.  His eyes became moist, which is something very unusual because Dad wasn’t one to show hardly any emotion at all.  I’d never seen him cry.  He had to be thinking about Grace.  He was choked-up with emotion that he swept his tongue across his parched lips before swallowing hard to remove the emotional lump from his throat.  He looked down at the table, again, then continued.  “When they found the poor girl, she even had semen around her mouth.  It wasn’t completely dry yet.  They found . . . they found . . .”  Dad cleared his throat again.  I didn’t know why he stopped this time.  He’d already told me that the girl was forced to have oral sex.  What else could he say about it?  I couldn’t figure out what made him pause, even with Sam gone from the table.  But Dad’s next sentence shocked me like I had seldom been shocked before.  Dad said, “They found traces of feces in the semen that was around her mouth.”

            I was jolted into speechlessness at the realization of what must have happened to the poor girl.  I could feel my back press hard against the back of my chair and was thankful that Sam wasn’t there.  My stomach felt queasy.  Dad and I stared at each other with mutual looks of horror and disgust.  He followed my right hand as I, once again, unconsciously reached for the blade that was tucked under my left armpit, the Marine’s ten-inch Ka-Bar, the exact one that I carried in Nam.

            I whispered, “The humiliation, torture and pain she went through must have been extreme, unbearable,” I whispered to Dad.

            “He wants killin’.  He needs killin’.  When he’s caught and sent to prison, I surely hope the inmates find out what he did and shank him, after they abuse and humiliate him.”

            I agreed with Dad, but no words formed, and I remained silent.  My thoughts were about cutting off his penis, then slashing his belly so he could watch his guts spill onto the floor and die a slow, painful death, while looking in horror at his uncoiling, purplish intestines.

            Neither of us spoke for a few seconds as revulsion washed over us like a waterfall of human sewage.

            I thought of the physical and mental torture that the poor girl must have gone through.  Tears cascaded down my cheeks, plummeting onto my shirt.  I looked at Sam, but, thankfully, she was talking to her mom while Grace watched TV.  Dad and I both composed ourselves and wiped the tears away.

            Dad said, “They were moving the monster from some jail that’s down state, near New York City, I think.  The Troopers stopped overnight at the Elmira Correctional Prison.  The next morning, the troopers were bringing him to Attica, the maximum-security prison up near Buffalo.”

            I hadn’t expected Dad to continue, so it surprised me when he said, “The medical examiner also found that the semen samples indicate more than one blood type.  There were at least two men, maybe more who abused her.”

            Then Dad was quiet, so quiet that I could hear Mom talking to Grace about some knitting project that she was working on.  I heard the TV but couldn’t make sense of the voices.  I looked at Sam and found her staring at me.

            Then suddenly Dad started again, still leaning over the table, close to me.  He whispered, “The police got an anonymous tip from a hunter who wouldn’t identify himself.  The cops checked it out and raided the cabin.  Young Gibson was just packing things together, getting ready to get away.  Christ Almighty!” he stated through clenched teeth.  “They just missed saving that girl by only a matter of minutes.  Her body wasn’t even cold yet.  Just a few minutes, probably less than half an hour and she could have been saved from that monster.  He just used her, over and over, for his own sadistic sexual pleasure, then strangled her.  From what Bobby says, the Gibson kid gave up easily, no struggle, just a taunting smile.  Then he confessed.  Said he was alone, no one else involved, which we know, now, wasn’t true.  But the cops couldn’t prove otherwise; couldn’t even find young Gibson’s father and brother.  They had disappeared.  So Gibson was the only one convicted, even though it’s strongly suspected that his father and older brother may have been involved with both the rape and the escape.

            “Any solid leads?” I asked.

            “Bobby just told Joe that it’s suspected that the Gibson kid and his two accomplices, who most certainly are his father and older brother, must have left this area as fast as they could.  I guess that’s to be expected.  Be pretty stupid of them to stick around while the cops are swarming like bees on a honeycomb.  The Elmira cops and the State Troopers are notifying all the area police departments to be on the look out for them, although they don’t know what kind of vehicle they’re driving, nor have they had time to compile full descriptions of the older and younger man that the witnesses saw.  They have shown police artist’s drawing of the two older Gibsons and a picture of Lester Gibson on TV and have given physical descriptions.  They’re asking the public to help if any of the Gibsons are seen.  Christ!  From what they say, I don’t think the bastard is big enough to even play in any little league sport, even though, age-wise, Lester’s nearly an adult.  A tiny, frail-looking fellow, apparently.  Kind of effeminate looking.”

            I felt as if I was becoming a human volcano.  It was as if the angry lava was surging from my toes to my head, hot, burning anger.  I knew that I would maim, then kill anyone, anyone at all who did that to my daughter or wife.  Sam knew me well enough to know that I would do it without even flinching.  But I don’t think that Mom and Dad knew it.  They weren’t really aware of the details of my Nam experiences, nor of my visits to the psychiatrist.  I think they suspected something, though.  They were, perhaps, just too polite to ask for fear of embarrassing me or Sam.

            They knew about the knife that I carried.  Mom disliked it, Sam tolerated it and Dad understood it.  Dad was a World War Two veteran who saw action in Italy.  He knew the horrors of war and of killing.  I think I understood Dad, too.  I believe that he, too, would kill anyone that raped any member of his family.  The only difference between us would be the way we would kill.  Now Dad would probably stick his double-barreled, twelve-gauge shotgun into the guy’s mouth and pull the trigger.  He’s a tough old bird.  I’d stand back to back with him any day as we fought the encircling enemy.  Now, me?  I wouldn’t be so generous with giving the rapist such a quick death.  As I said before, I’d probably cut the rapist’s cock off, hand it to him, then slash his lower belly and let his guts spill onto the floor, at his feet.  Or, perhaps, I’d tie him to a chair with his own intestines.  Then he could bleed to death slowly with his penis in his hand.

            Dad and I moved to the living room, where Grace was laughing loudly at something funny that happened on the TV.  We all grinned and smiled with her, thankful that we were all together and safe at grandpa’s and grandma’s house.  There was something warm and secure about their home in the country.  The dirt roads and the forests blocked-out the smells, as well as the stress, noises and visions of harried city life.

            The sound of Grace’s laughter was so beautiful and so comforting that it seemed to trigger a welcomed change in our topic, and we started smiling and talking about Dad’s birthday.  We teased him a little about ‘dinosaur hunting trips’ and he jokingly told us to get lost and leave him in peace.

            I picked up my Spenser novel by Robert B. Parker and started reading.  Sam and Mom were talking about Thanksgiving dinner, while dad read his Outdoor Life magazine.  Grace continued to watch and giggle at her TV show.  Sam and Mom were huddled together in leisurely conversation.

            But the living room was only peaceful for a few minutes when the TV show was interrupted in order to show a picture and give a physical description of Lester Gibson.  Dad was right about Lester Gibson’s size.  According to the report he was Caucasian, five feet four inches tall, about one-hundred ten or twenty pounds, very slender, small-boned, no facial hair, and had short brown hair.  But it was his eyes that first caught my attention.  His eyes looked glazed, unfocused, like someone in a rage while on drugs.  Those sinister eyes affected his whole facial expression, radiating their evil influence across his entire face, like polluted water poisoning the earth.  He looked like a person in constant emotional pain, with an overwhelming need to vent some of that rage by inflicting pain on other people, especially helpless children, since his stature left him lacking the ability to confront adults, even female adults.  The report was over in thirty seconds. Grace appeared oblivious to its information and went back to watching her TV show.

            Lester looked like a pathetic young man.  A cruel and menacing meanness saturated his face and probably originated from early and constant childhood abuse and suffering.  He looked like the type of kid that went through life with no real friends except, possibly, the ugly faces of rage, resentment, and bitterness.  He was the type of kid that even dogs didn’t want to play with, unless he was wearing a pork-chop around his neck.  A more unkind thought ripped a path through my mind like a bolt of lightening slicing through the sky: Lester was such a lonely kid that his dad probably had to cut holes in his pant’s pockets just so Lester would have something to play with.  But even that must have eventually gotten “out-of-hand.”  Black humor.

            The look in Lester Gibson’s eyes lingered and haunted my thoughts.  I thought of the “pucker factor” that those eyes must have caused in the children that Gibson had abused.  It was foolish to think that that ten-year-old girl was the only one whom he had abused, or even the youngest one, for that matter.

            In Nam, we Marines used the term “pucker factor” to describe how our asshole sphincter muscles would pucker-up when we got terrified of dying, before, during or after a battle.  It’s an involuntary body reaction that really does happen.  It sounds funny, but you can certainly be very thankful if you’ve never had to experience it.  It only comes when you’re scared out of your mind; on the verge of death or think that you are.

            A couple hours later I took my pills while I was in the bathroom.  I remember thinking that I’d been taking them for almost a week, and I thought that I detected a noticeably positive change in my moods.  The doctor said it would take about a week to notice the effect.  They made me feel better, less agitated, less nervous.  That good feeling gave me hope and I welcomed it because I knew that a man without hope is an emotional cripple.

            The next day, Saturday, November 14th, was a beautifully cold, clear, sunny morning.  Mom made oatmeal and we poured Dad’s homemade maple syrup onto it.  There’s just no other maple syrup that can match it.  I’ve had Canadian, New York and Vermont maple syrup, and a few others, but they don’t even come close in flavor to Dad’s homemade syrup.  It’s absolutely the best maple syrup on this planet, and that’s no exaggeration.

            After breakfast, while I was shaving, Grace came into the bathroom to watch me.  She liked to watch me shave, especially if I gave her a handful of my foamy shaving cream.  She was giggling as she played with the shaving cream.  I was half watching her and half shaving when she looked up at me and asked, “Daddy, would you take me for a walk in the woods this morning?”  Her face was delightfully radiant and alive with color, as if the sun were smiling at me.  I could feel the comforting warmth of her smile.  Her eyes sparkled with love and admiration for me, a great reward for being a good father.

            I almost always took her for walks in the woods when we were at Mom’s and Dad’s house for the weekend, unless the weather was bad, or unless it was deer hunting season.  Then I remembered that this was the weekend before deer hunting season began, so I said, “Sure, Sweetheart.  We can go about ten o’clock, especially since it’s such a sunny day.”

            After shaving I read my Spenser novel and at precisely ten o’clock Grace came up to me all excited and said, “Come on, Dad.  Come on.  It’s time to go.”  She was waving her arms and jumping up and down with excitement as she talked.  Her shoulder-length, brown hair was bobbing up and down with the vertical motions of her body, her pearl-white teeth shone brightly between lips that were curved in laughter and excitement.  Her brown eyes seemed, once again, to sparkle, like two twinkling, bright stars in the nighttime sky.  I put Spenser away until later.  We bundled up warmly because, although there was no snow, we could tell, from Dad’s outside thermometer, that the temperature was only slightly above freezing.  We got our boots, gloves, coats, scarves and hats on.  We were so warm now that we were both desperate to get outside.  We shouted to everyone, “See you later alligator!” and departed.

            As we stood in the driveway, I said, “Well, Sweetheart, which way should we go?  Over the hill to the pond, or down the road to the creek?”  I pointed to each place as I named them, my extended arms making me look like a human, Christian cross.

            “Let’s go to the creek, Daddy,” Grace replied.  “We can throw stones in it and then go to that old cabin in the woods.  Then maybe we can stay in the woods and walk up that hill that we went up before, and leave signs to help us find our way back,” she added, excitedly.  She liked to pretend that we were adventurers, explorers who were blazing a trail into the wild, untamed forests of Chemung, New York.  She sure was cute.  Almost every day she added clusters of precious moments and memories to my life.

            Grace’s cheeks were nearly red, from the chilly air by the time we completed the walk to the creek, but she didn’t behave as if she was uncomfortable, so we continued.  When we reached the creek, I looked through the naked trees and saw no one at the cabin, no car or truck, and no smoke coming out of the chimney.  In five years of coming here, I’d only once seen anybody at this old, derelict hunting cabin.

            We threw stones into the creek, then we threw rocks into the deeper part of the creek to see who could make the biggest splash.  I won because I picked up a large stone that Grace couldn’t lift and threw it into the pool.  I cheated, but the resulting splash went up about six or eight feet.  Grace and I laughed and shouted and when we heard our echo we laughed and shouted even louder to hear our voices answered by the echo of ourselves.  Our uninhibited silliness was fun.

            Then we had a little-splash contest.  I picked up a tiny pebble and threw it into the pool.  It splashed up only about two or three inches.  Then Grace laughed teasingly at me as she threw a teeny, tiny pebble toward the water.  It was so small that I couldn’t’ even see it going through the air, but I did see the ring of water where it hit, barely making a perceptible splash and watery ring.

            Then I picked up a pebble about the size of a grain of sand and threw it towards the water.  We watched as it made a tiny splash and rings in the water.  “Ha,” I said, “my little splash tied yours, so there’s no winner.”

            “Daddy.  Wait,” Grace said as she bent down to pick up an even tinier pebble.  She stood up, looked at me mischievously and threw the pebble towards the water.  “See, Daddy,” she said with excitement, “Mine beat yours.  It hardly splashed at all.”  She pointed at me, laughed, and stated, “I really got you good that time.  I win!  You lose!”  She laughed louder, then grabbed my hand and pulled me away. I knew, however, that she didn’t throw anything into the water.  I allowed her to trick me. She was having too much fun for me to argue, even in jest.

            She said, “Come on, Daddy.  Follow me.”  She pulled me forward as she headed into the woods from the edge of the dirt road where we had been standing, looking down at the creek.  We had gone this way many times before.  I followed her and cautioned her not to step into the creek’s chilly waters.  We followed the winding creek into the woods about two-hundred feet.  Then we stopped at another of our well-known pools, where, during the spring, we caught crayfish, to Grace’s boisterous and laughing delight.  I had my back to the cabin, which was only about seventy feet away.  We were both squatting next to a pool, concentrating on stirring up the icy water with sticks that we had just picked up.  My ears filled with the loud gurgling of the creek water as it tumbled like an acrobat over and around the rocks jutting from its bed.  We were protected from what little wind there was, now that we were well into the woods, but I could hear the wind blowing over the tops of the tall trees, making noises that, at nighttime, might have seemed scary to the uninitiated.

            The word “scary” set my mind on edge.  It provided a spark that flared in my mind.  I felt that something was wrong.  The hairs on the back of my neck stood out like pine needles.  Suddenly I had this awful, but familiar feeling growing rapidly in the pit of my stomach.  I felt a cold chill rising up my spine, then settling like a block of ice at the base of my skull.  It was as if I was in Nam again and the VC or NVA were closing in on me.  Grace was still looking at the water and stirring the pool with her stick when the urge to whirl around and face the danger became so strong that I picked up a rock for a weapon.  I was too heavily and securely dressed to reach by blade quickly.  I sprang to an upright position and whirled around with my right hand cocked to throw the rock or use it as a hammer.

            Two large men stood no more than twenty feet away from us.  Their menacing eyes harbored about as much friendliness as you might expect to see in the eyes of a rabid dog.

            “Now that not a very frien’ly greetin’,” the older man said.

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                                                            Chapter 3

                                                                 ****

                                                        The Kidnapping

            I could hear Grace make a fearful moan behind me.  I tossed the rock down as I faced the two men, then gently took Grace’s hand and pulled her close to me.  Grace stood by my right hip, slightly in back of me, with her left hand clutching the lower back of my coat and her right hand grasping the right side of my coat, near my hip.  I could feel her fear.  She was trembling while clutching at my coat.

            “What yuh be doin’ here?” the full-bearded, mustached man said.  His stare was malevolent, his voice was a deep bass, with a ferocious quality to it, as if a threatened, full-grown grizzly bear was talking.  He was definitely full-grown, a mountain of a man.  He appeared to be about six feet eight inches tall, close to three hundred pounds, some of it bulging over his belt; most of it pure muscle and had eyes that looked as deadly as a shark’s.  He looked like he was in his mid-forties, radiated an aura of power and unquestioned authority.  He also had the strange habit of sucking air through a gap in his front teeth.  I assumed that the habit was formed by constantly trying to dislodge food particles from between those brownish-yellow, stained teeth.  The color of his teeth was quickly explained when he spit a gob of chewing tobacco juice out of his mouth.  His full beard had brownish drool on it from having just spit tobacco juice.  It reminded me of diarrhea.  It gave him a disgustingly comical appearance, as if he had just walked off the pages of Roald Dahl’s book, The Twits.

            Standing next to the mountain man was another tall, slimmer, and much younger man who was not nearly as tall or as large as the older man.  Their eyes, noses, jaws and general facial structure looked similar, also, so I figured that they were father and son.  The younger man just stared intently as he stood with both arms akimbo, apparently quite content to let the older man do all the talking while he experimented with a variety of supposedly evil stares and facial expressions. A movie star wanna-be, maybe.

            All of a sudden, I realized who both men might be, although I tried not to let it show in my facial expression. I thought the older man fit the description of the full-bearded man whom witnesses said they saw helping a younger man along the roadway just before the two New York State Troopers were shot.  I hoped I wasn’t correct, but that hope was dashed when I saw part of the bumper of their car behind the cabin, as if the car was intentionally hidden from any roadside view.  If they owned the cabin, why would they park the car in back of the cabin instead of at the parking area in front of the cabin?  If I was right, then there should be three of them.  These two, however, definitely had something to hide.  Innocent people don’t act so threateningly.

            Holy shit, I thought, how was I going to get us out of this mess, especially if they were who I thought they were?  I couldn’t get to my knives easily they were under my heavy coat and if I attack, using karate, one of them could easily grab Grace and the fight would be over all too quickly and easily, simply by threatening to do her harm..  I decided to try to bluff my way out of this predicament.

            I smiled as if we were friendly neighbors, then said, “My daughter and I are just out for a walk.  We sometimes walk down this creek.  We’re sorry if we disturbed you with our laughing and shouting.  We didn’t know anyone was here.  We’ll just move on, so we aren’t disturbing you,” I continued, while trying to maintain my smile and friendly tone of voice.  “We’re expected home for lunch pretty soon, anyway.  Have a nice day.”  I gave a good-bye wave of my hand.

            Casually, I took Grace’s petite hand in mine and started to walk away, toward the road and toward my in-law’s house.  At the same time, the younger man growled, “Jus’ a second!  What’s the latest news ‘round here?  We ‘aven’t ‘eard the news in a few days.  Is there anything goin’ on that we should know ‘bout?”

            I turned slowly and absorbed the younger man’s dimensions more closely.  The sound of his voice left no doubt in my mind that he and the older man were father and son and that somewhere in the cabin there would be a third person named Lester Gibson.  The younger man was about six feet two inches, my height, but he looked to be about fifteen or twenty pounds heavier than I; about two-hundred pounds.  He was about twenty-five years old, a few days growth of beard, that didn’t cover long, narrow scars on both cheeks.  They looked like knife scars to me.  He also chewed tobacco and had the same cheek bulge and stained teeth as the older man.  His voice wasn’t as deep, a baritone, but was similar to the older man’s voice.  The younger man also had a rugged, malevolent look about him, just like the older man.  Their stares bore down on my shoulders like anvils.

            I noticed that Grace’s grip on me had loosened, so she must have calmed down a little.

            I had to maintain my composure.  I figured that if I told them that there was nothing going on that they would know for sure that I was onto them.  They at least had a car radio, I guessed, so they would know that there was a manhunt for them.  So, I said, “Well, the only thing I know about is that some prisoner escaped while being transported to Attica Prison from the Elmira Correctional Facility.”  I didn’t want to give them too much information or they would wonder why I was so stupid as not to suspect them.  That would make them immediately suspicious and instantly they’d know that I was lying and that I knew exactly who they were.  I just said, “We are…my daughter and I, from the Rochester area and just down here for the weekend, so I really don’t know much about the local news.”

            I waved to them, again, turned and started walking away with Grace.  Every step seemed to take an eternity, like walking slowly over a red-hot bed of coals.  I kept Grace in front of me and my back towards the two men.

            “Stop!” was the next word that I heard after only having taken a few steps away from them.  The word was said with a bass, deep-throated growl, so I knew it was the older man talking.  I thought about running.  We had a few steps head-start on them. But then I heard a noise that crippled my thoughts of running.  And before I turned around, I heard a second, similar noise, like the dull crack of a twig.  I turned to look and whatever shred of hope there was for bluffing and running my way out of this situation had evaporated as Grace and I stared into two pistol barrels, both with hammers cocked and trigger fingers slightly squeezing each trigger.

            Later, I found out that I was correct in my assessment of them.  The older man was Jake Gibson, a habitual troublemaker with a list of escalating crimes as long as his legs.  He appeared to be a man so full of rage and cruelty that it was nearly impossible for him to glean much pleasure from life.  And what pleasure he did get was derived by making others unhappy by inflicting pain on them.  He reminded me of a super-bully who took pleasure from meanness, cruelty and humiliating others with his arrogance and physical prowess.

            Jake’s sons were no different.  The younger man was Tom Gibson, a notorious bully and enthusiastic fire-starter, who, only a few years ago, tried to set the school principal’s car on fire after the principal reprimanded him for his incorrigible bullying behaviors towards his peers.  And, like his father, he was well on his way down the path walked by seasoned criminals.

            Now I was positive that Lester was hidden inside the cabin.  Lester had obviously shown that he, too, was headed down the same path.  He just had to be sneakier, trickier because of his lack of physical prowess though he seemed to be better educated.  At least he didn’t talk like a backwoods hick.

            If my knowledge of handguns was still accurate, then Jake had a Smith and Wesson .357 magnum pointed at my chest and Tom had his Colt .38 caliber aimed at Grace.  Apparently, Jake and Tom had their handguns concealed in their belts, under the front portion of their coats, where they were quite easy to get to.

            Jake said, “Unless yuh an’ the girlie wants ta die right where yuh be standin’, yuh bes’ git o’er here right quick.”

            From the tone of his voice there was no mistaking just how serious he was, so Grace and I walked back to the cabin with them.  Just as I had suspected, we met little Lester Gibson; all of about five feet four inches tall and one-hundred ten or twenty pounds of him.  Grace held on to me more tightly now.  My eyes locked onto Lester.  The sight of him stirred up an intense, roiling rage in my guts.  He looked to be more like fifteen years old, instead of seventeen or eighteen.  He had soft, delicate, effeminate facial features and from these observations, my deduction was that, in school, some of the boys must have teased him by calling him Leslie instead of Lester or, perhaps, Les, and many girls must have rejected him just as quickly.  He probably hated girls who teased him more than the boys because a boy didn’t have to attract boys to be considered manly, but boys did have to attract girls in order to be considered as having normal masculinity. There are exceptions, of course.  Constant rejection from girls would cause a much deeper emotional pain in him, assuming that he’s heterosexual.  I opined that he also hated himself for not being big and strong looking like his father and brother.  Of course, these are all just hasty first impressions, conjectures, and assumptions on my part, but I would bet that he was now a confirmed misogynist.  And if I was correct, then all the pain of constant rejection probably caused him to want to punish and control girls and women to make them feel the pain that they made him feel.  And, I thought, he punishes and controls girls and women now, through a supreme act of sexual violence, he rapes them.  With his small stature, he probably plays it safe by only raping girls and small women.  It would be much too humiliating to try to rape a woman who ended up over-powering him.  Yes, I thought, I had him sized-up, or, in his case, sized-down.

            Lester took a posture of cockiness, of supreme arrogance.  I figured that he was so full of hot air that it should have mummified him long ago.  Actually, all three of them were so supremely arrogant and loud that when they opened their mouths, I swear that it looked to me as if they could each swallow their own egotistically swollen heads.  All three of them, combined, probably wouldn’t amount to one person of average intelligence, inbreeding maybe?  Damn!  That thought made me think of the 1972 movie Deliverance.  The three of them could have played perfect hillbilly, semi-retarded, bad guys in that movie.  There was something very primitive about them, or maybe “Neanderthal” is a better word to describe their characters, though Jake had a bit of cunning in him that wasn’t to be taken lightly.  The only redeeming characteristic, that I could think of, for an egotist is that, if you ever have to keep a secret, but are dying to tell someone, tell an egotist because they don’t talk about other people, only themselves.

            The handguns were still pointed at us as we stood by the dusty table.  “Emp’y yur pockets on the table,” came an order from Jake.  I took the spare change out of my left front pocket, along with the “Annie button” that Grace had given to me.

            Annie was a red-headed orphan girl in a movie of the same name, that Grace loved.  Sam and I bought her an Annie doll and one day a button came off the doll.  Instead of asking me to sew it back on, Grace gave the button to me and said I could keep it for good luck.  I’ve had it in my pocket for a couple of years, until now.

            But when I put the change on the table, I retained the Annie button in the bend of my left-hand fingers, where those fingers meet the palm, kind of like a magician finger-palming a coin.  I took my keys out of my right front pocket, with my right hand, setting them on the table, then, with the same hand, I removed my locking, three inch blade, pocket knife from my right, rear pocket.  The pocketknife always remained in a vertical position in the right, rear pocket because I had stitched-up the pocket giving me a two-inch vertical space in which the knife rested comfortably.  As soon as I put the blade on the table, Lester quickly grabbed it, laughed, opened it up, flashed it around in front of my eyes as if he thought he was Zorro, then closed it and stuck it in his pocket.  He smiled defiantly as he did this, his eyes darting to Jake and Tom for approval.  I said nothing to him, nor did Jake or Tom.  And lastly, I took the wallet out of my left rear pocket, with my left thumb and index finger which allowed me to keep the Annie button under firm control and concealment with the other three fingers being wrapped around it.  I placed the wallet on the table

            When I was done, Tom approached me from behind and patted my pockets to make sure they were empty.  We weren’t asked to take off our coats, thank goodness, so my Ka-Bar knife and throwing knife remained undetected.  They were our only hope now, just as in Nam the blade would have to be the tool, not only of my survival, but, more importantly to me, the tool of my daughter’s survival.  I could afford to die, I thought, but I couldn’t allow any harm to come to Grace.  Images of some of the VC and NVA I killed with a blade flashed through my mind, like a movie shown at a fast-forward speed.  I remained calm.  I knew what I had to do, I just had to wait for the right time.

            Tom picked up the articles that I had put on the table and stuck them inside his coat pocket.  Jake mumbled something and Tom tied my hands in front of me.  As Tom finished tying my hands, I told him that he had a bad case of halitosis.  “What that?” he asked.  I wrinkled-up my face for effect.  “Oh, sorry, not much education, huh?  It means really bad breath.”  His face reddened, his face show anger, his brow furrowed and then, as I had hoped, he shot a hard-right fist into my stomach.  I doubled over and fell to the floor on my knees, but not out of excruciating pain, although I pretended to gasp for breath and act hurt.  Karate exercises had made my stomach muscles rock-hard.  Since I knew that the punch was coming, and prepared for it, Tom’s punch had relatively no effect as far as pain goes, however, it did give me an excellent excuse to fall to the floor, as would a punch to my face.  This is exactly what I was hoping for.  While pretending to struggle to get up slowly, I placed the Annie button behind one of the table legs where it could hardly be noticed, except, I hoped, by the police who would probably use blood hounds that would lead them to this cabin.  They would then be very thorough in their search of the cabin for any evidence of our presence.  And when they found the Annie button, if they were smart, they would ask Sam some questions about it and the answers would lead them to the fact that we had been kidnapped and that the kidnappers might be the same people as the ones who ambushed the State Troopers.  And if, somehow, they could match the cars tread pattern with the same type of car known to be owned by one of the Gibsons, then they would have the positive information they needed to conclude that we were probably kidnapped by the Gibson clan.

            When I got up from the floor Jake held a handout in front of Tom to keep him away from me.  Then Jake told me that Grace wouldn’t have to be tied-up as long as we both cooperated.  I pretended to have trouble catching my breath but managed to say that we would cooperate.

            Lester suggested blindfolding us, but Jake yelled, “Sure, stupid!  We goin’ ta travel fer four or five hour an’ everybody dat passes us is goin’ ta see two blin’-folded people in are car.  Yeah, dat be jest what we needs ta git attention on us!”  Lester bristled at that humiliating reprimand, then turned meek and apologized over and over again.  He was a repulsive sight to look at and intensely pathetic to listen to.  Actually, all three of them were repulsive looking.  Perhaps Jake mated with Sasquatch, I thought, as I pictured that sexual union almost made me laugh, but our situation was too serious.

            Tom wanted me to sit in the back of the car and Grace to sit up front between his father and brother, as a precaution, in case I tried anything.  Once he said that to Jake, Grace started crying loudly, saying, “No! No! I want to be with my Daddy.  Don’t let them do that, Daddy.”

            I said, to Jake, in a calm voice, “If you want our cooperation you must let Grace sit by me.  You can see how frightened she is.  She just wants to sit by me.  I can keep her quiet for you and we’ll cooperate fully with you.  Actually, it’s to your advantage, too.  You’ll need to stop for gas and you won’t have to worry about us trying to escape or creating a disturbance to attract attention.”  I paused and stared at Jake to let him see the determination in my eyes.  I tried to let some doubt and fear show in my eyes, however, because I didn’t want him to detect any threatening, inner strength in me.  I’m sure they saw me as a wimp and that was an advantage for me just like it was in my frequent high school fights and a few college confrontations with bullies.  It was difficult for me to say, but I added the “clincher” by saying, “Please.”

            When Jake moved away from me, Tom took out his Colt .38, shoved it roughly under my nose and belched the halitosis-laden words, “You cooperate because if yuh don’t I blow yur fuckin’ face off.”  I could feel the coolness of the steel barrel on my upper lip and nose, but somehow I remained calm, just as I had, most times, in Nam, but it was a ferocious calm, like a predator stalking its prey.  It kept me alive and always one step ahead of the enemy.  I thought, if it worked in Nam then it’ll work here.  They wouldn’t do anything needlessly violent now.  But I also had to remember that they were beasts, madmen, and it would be damned foolish to provoke them in any way.  Patience, I thought.

            And, as if to play follow-the-leader, Lester had my jack-knife out and opened.  He waved it under Grace’s nose until Jake ordered, “Put the damn gun an’ knife away, boys, an’ let the wimp’s little girlie sits by ‘er daddy.  Hates ta admit it, but he be right.  But soons we be pas’ Sunday Rock, iffen they don’ obeys us, then Tom, yuh can ‘ave the wimp an’ Lester yuh can ‘ave the girlie.”  He stared at me, grinned, then laughed.  It was as evil a sounding laugh as I had ever heard, as if it came from the gaseous, flaming bowels of Satan, himself.  His eyes continued to stare at me for a few seconds, like drills boring through wood.

            I had the overpowering feeling that I’d seen those eyes and heard that laugh before.  It was a feeling of déjà vu.  Then I remembered the Charles Manson interview I’d seen on television.  The camera zoomed in for a close-up shot of Manson’s face.  I saw the swastika tattoo on his forehead and the pure evil in his eyes.  The brutal, maniacal glare in Manson’s eyes was the same look I now saw in Jake’s eyes, an insane, murderously satanic kind of stare.  I felt my flesh getting hot, as if being burned by twin, red-hot pokers.

            Later, I was to learn that the Sunday Rock reference stood for the Adirondack region, which, in the old days, was considered to be beyond the law, like a wild frontier ruled by the quickest gun, or the best aim, or by the edge of a knife, and mostly ruled by the most powerful, a place where “might was always right.”  It was a place where Jake could be beyond the laws of contemporary society and have to answer only to the law of nature.  And the law of nature was the survival of the fittest.  That was the second clue. The first was the fact that Grace and I knew who they were and could lead the police to them. That confirmed the fact that he planned to eventually kill the both of us.  His satanic laughter made me feel hot, as if the fiery laughter had come from the bowels of hell.

            Grace sat to my left and Tom sat to my right, in the back of the car.  Jake started driving with Lester in the passenger seat.  About an hour into the trip, as their careless conversation flowed, I learned several pieces of information about where we were headed.  First, I learned why they had been at that cabin in the woods, near my in-law’s house.  They had discovered it a few years back while hunting.  It didn’t belong to them and they knew that the aged owners were hardly ever around.  It was a relatively safe, out of the way place to hide their cache of guns and ammo and supplies, while at the same time appearing to disappear from the local area.  Now the cache was safely inside the trunk of the car.

            I learned that Jake used to be an Adirondack mountain guide.  And since he knew the wild Adirondack area even better than most other guides, he and Tom had gone, the previous summer, into the deep Adirondack wilderness and built a secret cabin near Preston Ponds, which was a remote wilderness, thickly forested and, thus, an extremely isolated area.  That was their eventual destination.  Jake believed that they could all remain indefinitely safe in that Adirondack wilderness and that they would be beyond the reach of the law; beyond Sunday Rock.

            It was mentioned that it would take about three days of canoeing and walking to get there.  The cabin by Preston Ponds was already stocked with enough food to last the winter, but Jake didn’t seem at all worried about running out of food, probably because he could live off the land easily, even in winter. It was Tom and Lester who seemed worried about enough food.  I guessed that they weren’t seasoned woodsmen like their father.

            We stopped once for gas and I could feel Tom’s handgun pressed into the ribs on my right side.  Tom and Lester asked Jake to go inside the garage to buy extra food. It was one of those pump-your-own-gas types of gas stations that sold a few items of groceries, but Jake just scowled and said, “No use takin’ no chance bein’ seen.  I jus’ pay an’ leave quick.”

            Grace was asleep, leaning against my left shoulder.  At the sound of Jake’s voice, she shivered and burrowed closer to me as if the sound of his voice triggered a fearful response even while she was sleeping.  In me, his voice had the same effect as the pain of having bone-marrow cancer.  It went deep to the core of a me and created pain that couldn’t be reached or tempered.  I was sitting directly in back of Jake and could have easily broken his neck, but Grace would be hurt, so I caged those thoughts so they wouldn’t escape into action.

            When Grace woke up and started to whimper, I was told, by Tom, to “shut her up.”  I reached over to caress her hair and rub her cheek, then whispered that I loved her very much and that I was going to get us out of this situation safely.  Then I whispered very softly that she wasn’t to mention to anyone that I had two knives on me.  I also told her that crying made these men really mad and that we would be much safer if she could stop crying.  Immediately after I asked her to stop crying, she stopped.  She was asleep, again, only a few minutes after Jake drove away from the gas station.  I stayed awake, listening and observing . . . and plotting.

            We left Chemung about 11:00 o’clock in the morning and we were supposed to reach Raquette Lake about five or six in the evening.  I learned that Raquette Lake is where Jake lived when he was being a guide.  He had a secluded cabin there, but he said that no one there knew about the cabin that he and Tom had built out of logs in the forest by Preston Ponds.

            Jake sucked air through his teeth every mile or so and it was irritating to hear it, like sandpaper scraping across a bundle of raw nerves.

            He made sure he was driving under the speed limit for fear of being stopped by a cop.  But they had already agreed that this trip might be a suicide mission for them.  That is, if they had to, they’d shoot-it-out with anyone who got in their way, whether or not it was the cops at a road block or a gas station attendant who recognized them and was foolish enough to try to stop them.  For the Gibsons, this was a “do or die” mission, escape to the forest, or die trying.  So far, they were having no problems.

            We had gone from Chemung to Binghamton on route 17E, from Binghamton to Syracuse on route 81N, and in Syracuse we got on route 90E until we got off at the Verona exit.  From there we got on Route 365E.  Then we exited to route 12N which took us to route 28N.  Finally, we traveled route 28N, drove through Old Forge and continued on to Raquette Lake where we arrived at Jake’s secluded cabin shortly before six that evening.

            I was then untied at gunpoint and allowed to carry Grace into the cabin where, thankfully, she remained sleeping on a cot while the rest of us ate canned stew, with stale bread and bottled water to drink.  I rubbed my wrists trying to ease the pain and increase the circulation where the rope had left deep, red abrasions.

            Unfortunately, the food gave Jake plenty of reason to suck air through his teeth.  With food filling the gaps in his teeth, his air-sucking became a frenzied activity that was becoming quite nerve wracking.  He got up and went over to a shelf and pulled some green string out of a very small, white, plastic container.  I didn’t realize what it was until he pulled it between his teeth to clean them.  I was, I admit, startled to see that he used dental floss, and mint flavored.  How ironic, I thought, that this huge, uncultured ogre would use dental floss.  I would have expected a knife blade or toothpick, but not dental floss.  Dental floss was part of contemporary, civilized life and Jake’s life was stuck in the distant past.  But the floss stopped his sucking noises for a while and that was a big relief.

            I saved some of the stew meat and put it on a piece of bread.  I folded the bread in half and saved it for when Grace woke up.  I knew she’d be hungry and wasn’t likely to get extra food from any of the Gibsons.  Luckily the cabin was cold, and I didn’t have to worry about the meat spoiling.  If we left without breakfast tomorrow, at least Grace would have a little to eat.  I thought it was more important for her to sleep and get her rest because tomorrow she would need all the energy and strength that a little girl of only eight years had.  It sounded like we were all going on a tiring, lengthy hike into the core of Mother Nature’s kingdom, a place where, Jake said, Grace and I were supposed to be killed and buried. Did he really mean it, or was it a terrifying scare tactic to gain complete cooperation?  The thought of it almost made me reach for my coat zipper so that I could grab my combat knife.  But I knew that, with three-to-one odds, especially in the confined area of a car, my chance of a successful escape was slim.  I felt a panic brewing inside of me that I never experienced in Nam.  It was almost overpowering.  It wasn’t caused by the fear of my own death.  Hell, due to depressions, I’d wished for that several times in the last year, and almost every week while in Nam. Was the Doc right about a subconscious death wish in me?  Primarily this panic was caused by a fear for my daughter’s life.  I thought of the ten year old girl that Lester had abused, then killed.  I thought of what must have happened to her before her death.  So it was a panic that I found nearly impossible to control, and, yet, I had to subdue it, dominate it . . . control it, harness it, and transform it into a life-saving energy that would flow down my arms and into my fists, each of which would be tightly clenched around the handle of a blade.  And this thought allowed me to finally control the panic.

            Later, at bedtime, I was tied securely to Grace’s metal cot until morning.

            I had trouble sleeping.  An hour or two had passed before I started feeling drowsy and in all that time, every ten or fifteen minutes, I heard Jake suck air through his teeth, which told me that he was also awake, unless he did it in his sleep, also.  I wished I could bash all his teeth out to stop that hideous noise.  I felt contempt for that sound and the man, and I wished that I knew what was keeping him awake and what he was thinking.  Finally, in the early morning hours, drowsiness commandeered my consciousness, taking control of me and giving me some much-needed rest.  I hoped that my sleepy, unfocused mind would think of an escape strategy that would give me the winning edge.  It often happened with me that a problem’s solution came to me once I stopped concentrating on it, when my mind was on something else.  I drifted off to sleep with the word blade softly ricocheting off the inside of my skull like a soothing, repetitive echo off granite mountain sides.

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