WestPac Murderers

Blue skies, warships in the harbor—bells, engines, clangs, horns, scent of diesel fuel, the rasps of claxons, tang of the ocean’s ebb and flow—and standing inside the sally port of the brig, the Westpac Murderers who, every couple of months, appeared at our facility. Chained together, hands and arms. And legs. Ball and chain. Like the gangs we saw in movies set in Alabama and Florida and Texas.

I woke yesterday thinking of long-gone days, youth, the USMC, my time serving at the brig, 32nd Street Naval Station, San Diego.

The Westpac Murderers arrived from Okinawa and we screened them before shipping them on to Portsmouth Naval Prison. Convicted by courts-martial, the worst of the worst: murderers among our troops in Vietnam.

Most of the regular prisoners inhabited our brig for hating the Navy, going over the hill to get away, disobeying orders; but these Westpac prisoners toted a different import. Most of the murderers were Marines. Rarely a Corpsman or a Seabee.

The first time the murderers appeared in the sally port, ball-and-chained and surly, I was working the brig’s isolation row which contained cells with a wall-mounted metal rack and thin mattress for sleeping, a washbasin and toilet.

We locked tough guys, rabble-rousers, rule-breakers on the isolation row and certain Westpac Murderers.

32nd Street Naval Station, photo courtesy of Wikipedia

That initial time, we confined two of them there. Deemed dangerous and a threat to good order, they spent their time locked in, no windows, one overhead light, let out once a day to shower and once a day for a few minutes of exercise.

My duty at the time consisted of pacing from one end of the long, thin row and back again, listening to echoes of my footsteps on the concrete deck and the metal walls of the cells, watching the reflection of the overhead lights bounce off the deck, smelling the chow when it arrived, as well as the faint scent of feces from the heads. And watching the prisoners.

Three times a day a detainee delivered a tray of chow to each of my Westpac Murderers, set the big silver tray on the deck, then stepped back. Sometimes, I’d take a good gander at the slabs of ham, the fried spuds, the white bread.

An hour or so later, the delivery prisoner would return and pick up the empty tray, or sometimes not so empty, depending on whether the chow could be stomached.

The smoking lamp was never lit on the isolation row. But one evening I caught drifts of tobacco smoke coming from the direction of one of the murderer’s cells.

I couldn’t sneak up on the offending convict. He flushed his tobacco down the toilet before I could capture him. And I couldn’t make accusations without evidence.

I wondered where the contraband smokes came from. Another con? One of the other three Marines who stood duty on the isolation row?

Every shift I watched, and finally hit a lick. When the delivery con picked up an empty tray from the cell, I noticed three unfiltered cigarettes had appeared on the deck just inside the hatch, against the bulkhead.

Blogger Ken Rodgers, photo courtesy of Betty Rodgers,

Ebullient, I yanked the delivery prisoner out of the hatch and reached in to grab the smokes when the big black hand of that Murderer Marine reached down and touched the back of mine. As I looked at him as if he were an enemy I might need to kill, he whispered, “Hey, brother, have a heart.”

We stared into each other’s eyes for what seemed like minutes, me in my half-crouch and he leaning over, our hands meeting over those Camels or Lucky Strikes or Pall Malls.

For years I’ve thought about that experience and scolded myself for the decision I made, for letting that convict keep those cigarettes.

Later I eased over to the screening department where they stored records on all the convicts. I talked the duty NCO into letting me read that murderer’s file. He was convicted of tossing some Vietnamese prisoners out of a helicopter during a soiree above rice paddies not far from Danang. The Marines in the chopper had been questioning the prisoners about NVA movements.

I wondered as I read the file why they conducted the interrogation in a CH-46 instead of in a company or a battalion command post. But I knew the answer to that. In my experience, one of the means employed to make a Viet Cong talk was to drag him—or her—through the treetops while suspended on a cable hung from a helicopter. I’d witnessed that. Or if you had a couple of prisoners, just toss one out a hundred feet up in the air and after he—or she—careened through the air on a very short journey to die on the deck below, the survivor would usually tell you anything you wanted to know.

Then I wondered about my convict on the isolation row, if he’d thrown the Viet Cong out the door under orders, or if he threw him out for other reasons, and then I thought about how war offers all kinds of reasons to kill people we wouldn’t kill under other circumstances.

I hated the war in Vietnam. The mud, the rain, the leeches, the snakes. The lack of sleep, people shooting at you, you shooting back. The fear. And there is never a resolution, one war leads to the next and the next and the next.

I know! I know! Hitler was a monstrous hombre and maybe that war was indeed the good war but In Korea and Vietnam, we just fought to maintain the status quo and in the meantime, lots of deaths and all the aftermath we still struggle with and nothing has really changed. We fight wars and kill and then, in many, many cases, turn around and trade dollars for yen and swap cotton for computer parts with our former enemies.

Before that convict showed up on the isolation row, I hadn’t analyzed how I really felt about what we do as humans when it comes to organized killing. How I was trapped between war and peace, duty and rebellion. For fifty plus years I’ve fretted about this stuff. I’m pretty loyal, and when I agree to something, like an enlistment in the Marine Corps, I am very serious about holding up my end of the bargain.

When that man’s hand touched mine and he looked me in the eye, it rocked me back on my metaphorical heels. Why was I messing with him? Why mess with anybody like we did back then in the brig, in the Corps, in the war? Why? Why lock men up for killing folks when what you do in war is kill people?

It confused me. And still does.

A Call for Assistance

There are women across the country, like I MARRIED THE WAR’s Carman Hinson, fighting for their loved ones who live with the trauma of war. Carman’s life changed forever when her husband Courtney was attached to a Green Beret team whose sole mission was to hunt down terrorists and liberate the people of Afghanistan and Iraq.

After four deployments, Courtney came home suffering from undiagnosed severe PTSD and TBI in addition to injuries suffered in a parachute accident.

“I have come to realize as his wife and caregiver,” Carman says, “that I’m not able to fix him at all. His constant survivor guilt, the effects of war, his nightmares, are always haunting him. In my experience, I’ve recognized that when a combat vet starts to withdraw and isolate themselves, bad things can start to happen. They can go into a downward spiral really fast and I knew that I had to prevent that.”

Our nation has barely begun to recognize the vital role that these spouses play. In I MARRIED THE WAR, a documentary film which investigates the lives of eleven women like Carman, we learn how these spouses fight for their marriages, their families, and their husbands, veterans of WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The eleven wives of I MARRIED THE WAR

I am writing about this to ask you to join us by supporting the final stages of this film’s production. IMTW has the potential to help thousands—if not millions—of spouse and family members who have experienced the aftereffects of war. We learn that war doesn’t end when the fighting stops.

Your donation will help us to complete post production, the place where the editor, music composer, audio engineer and other experts do their finishing magic to bring the story to the screen. The ITMW team will make the final trailer, produce DVDs, and prepare for film festivals. Your support is crucial to our effort to bring this film down the last mile and into the public arena.

You can learn more and make your contribution on our Indiegogo page at https://igg.me/at/IMTW If you can’t give but want to help tell this story, please share our Indiegogo page with friends, family and colleagues. With more people aware of this cause, we’ll be one step closer to reaching our goal of educating military spouses that they are not alone and help is available. You will be a part of educating the world about the hidden costs of war.

Thank you.

On Agent Orange, sugar, bikers and the VA

Today I went into the local VA Medical Center to have a precancerous growth hacked off my face. Waiting for the scalpel-wielding physician’s assistant to call me in, I sat and watched a parade of veterans move back and forth down the aisles. The VA here in Boise serves a population of over ninety-four thousand veterans. The location is set in beautiful juniper and ash tree-studded meadows and ridges that rise above the main part of Boise town. Some of the buildings look like ante-bellum architecture one might see back east. Big, imposing, red brick buildings that soar up and over the city. The setting belies the facility’s purpose.

As Betty and I walked into the center to check in, I noticed the variety of men and women waiting to be cared for…is that the right word, cared for? It seems such a weak concept, cared for, for dealing with medical problems of folks involved in the business of defending and killing. Yet I am going to use that word, because I think it fits the milieu of Clara Barton and Florence Nightingale and Walt Whitman that has arisen in the wake of two hundred years of military mayhem that has become a populations-wide, Clausewitzian assault on humanity.

The people who staff the VA Medical Center do seem to genuinely care for and about the men and women who shuffle down the tile-floored halls. There are still a lot of World War War II vets around here, their skin like parchment, their walks slowed, canes and wheelchairs, and the Korean War Veterans are hard to distinguish from the WWII people, and then there is my group, the Vietnam era guys and then the younger women and men. I noticed a lot of young veterans there today, a big man in manure-stained cowboy boots and large straw hat, a red and white checked shirt that stretched around his hard muscles, and a young man with a high and tight Marine Corps-style haircut, his hair the color of a carrot. It looked dyed. His arms covered with tinted hieroglyphics, tattoos, that I didn’t really try to cipher. What I read are the eyes. The eyes are the tunnel to the heart. Enter through the eyes and you can crawl right into the guts of a man. This man’s gut sang the song of IEDs and napalm.

One man I noticed as I sat waiting for the knife looked like a Vietnam veteran. Dressed like a biker, lots of leather, lots of hair, he could barely shamble, as if the messages that went from his brain to his legs were being interdicted, like columns of men moving in the night , getting chewed up by artillery fire, mortar fire, ambushes. His difficulty getting around didn’t seem to bother him, though, as he struggled down the corridor chatting on his cell phone.

I wondered what had caused his troubles. A piece of shrapnel from a North Vietnamese 152 mm shell landing too close, an AK-47 round snapped off from a sniper’s spider trap, just nicking the bones in his spine. Maybe he wrecked his Harley and damaged his back, maybe it was work related and had nothing to do with the military and the only reason he was getting treatment at the VA was because, like me, he has a Purple Heart from some other wound. Maybe he had prostate cancer and it was eating up his bones, Agent Orange and all that.

I wonder about Agent Orange. It is suspected that Agent Orange is at the root of a dozen or so cancers, but there is no hard proof, as I understand it, that Agent Orange causes any of the maladies that we go to the VA to have treated. So, when I looked at these men, I wondered what role Agent Orange had in their difficulties.

I remembered the one time I know I got sprayed with that stuff. It was in 1968. Early morning, I was up and on watch. A plane streaked over the base and the surrounding landscape, spraying some kind of liquid. I wondered what it was. Now I know, or I think I know. And from the VA’s point of view, all of that is a moot point. By definition, I have been sprayed.

One of the subject ailments related to Agent Orange is diabetes. I am in the stages of pre-diabetes, but diabetes is part of my genetic makeup, and I love to eat sugar and I am a non-consuming alcoholic who consumed heavily for over twenty years. So is my pre-diabetes a result of Agent Orange or my ancestry and my behavior? I don’t know the answer to that and I don’t think anyone else does.

So, with those thoughts in mind, I wondered about all these men who come here from my era with all these problems. A lot of us were crazy after we came back from the war; drank, smoked, over-ate and ate the wrong things. Some of us consumed a lot of drugs, didn’t do physical exercise. So what causes all these problems, us or Agent Orange, or a combination?

Nevertheless, it is very interesting to me that we, as a society, have decided to pony up and fund the care these folks, including me, receive at the Veteran’s Admin hospital. As if we, our nation, see that the cost to be paid for the service they gave is ongoing. That we owe it to them.

The sheer number of men and women in the facility this morning is amazing to me. All these people, all these problems, and this is just a spot, a dot, a miniscule hint of all the people out there, all the people now fighting who will come home with problems, mental and physical, who will then trust that we take care of them.

This Veteran’s Medical Center is a symbol of the cost of the lifestyle we choose to keep. Sushi tonight, a movie at the art house, this weekend a rock and roll concert, a poetry reading, “Restrepo” from the video-on-demand queue, next week a camping trip in a state funded park, the private schools for the kids, the wide streets, the nights we live without worrying about mortar rounds crashing through the roofs of our houses, no IED detonating, spraying thousands of nails and screws and bolts around, decapitating our children on the way to school.

Sometimes, I wonder when I am sitting around the house, laughing at something one of my friends said, sometimes, I get a pang of guilt. What part of the cost am I paying for these men, these women who go off four and five times during their enlistments to these hot and freezing landscapes? Me, sitting around writing blogs, making movies, living off my retirement account, my social security, my motor home, my trips to California. What part of the cost am I bearing to keep the violence off the streets in my town? No invasions, no terrorists, no enemy slinking between the buildings down on Main Street.

What is the cost of all this? Sitting in the VA waiting to get a pre-cancer that may have been caused by Agent Orange hacked off my face, waiting to get cared for, I get a glimpse.