Tag Archives: army

My Run-In With the Klan in the Mid1980s

Politics, Relationships, , , , , , , ,
The protest is getting out of hand
The protest is getting out of hand (image from in game screen shot of City of Heroes)

It was shortly after West Point, and I was stationed at Fort Knox, Kentucky. One weekend I had time off, so a few soldiers and I decided we were going to take a trip to Nashville for a concert that was taking place there. This was in the middle of the 1980s during a period of time when the United States was starting to regain some of its image around the world, as much of the 1970s was spent recovering from the disastrous Vietnam War era. Reagan was president, the Soviet Union still had years until it collapsed, Star Wars had finished its original trilogy, the Cosby Show taught us values from someone who still had a lot of respect throughout the country, and there was a sense that things in the future were going to be improving because so many technologies appeared to be in our headlights, like microwaves, cell phones, the Internet and some device called a Rubik’s Cube.

So we hopped into my Mercury Capri, all five of us, and made our trip south. In case you’ve never taken the trip by car before, it’s a really nice drive through beautiful country.

Anyway, somewhere around the border of Kentucky and Tennessee (to be honest, I don’t remember which side of the border when this happened), we came to a huge intersection that was kind of bogged down with traffic. It felt kind of out of the ordinary because traffic had been moving so smoothly only moments before. And then I discovered why.

On all four corners of the intersection were people dressed in white robes handing out pamphlets to people in their cars. For some reason, this spectacle seemed to slow traffic down to a standstill. It took me a couple of moments to realize what was happening, but traffic was moving slowly because each driver was having somewhat of an impassioned conversation with whatever person in robes showed up alongside that driver’s car. Unfortunately, I couldn’t hear any of their conversations, but part of me to this day hopes that the words exchanged were not friendly, but I honestly don’t know any of those details.

This was the Ku Klux Klan handing out their pamphlets to the people who were driving through their county.

Now, I’d never seen one of those people before in real life. Sure, I’d heard all of the stories about them, watched films of some of their notorious deeds in the past and knew that since the early days of this country they represented some of the most vile sentiments people could possibly have. But seeing them in person, I had no clue what their intentions might be, or even how much of the past history the group made was part of what they might be doing on that particular day.

Then I reached the position where they were located. They were blocking traffic, one person standing in front of a car to make sure you had to stop while another came over to the window to speak and offer their pamphlets. I was kind of oblivious to what was really going on, but the person who came to my window knocked on it and gestured for me to roll down the window. Somewhat curious, I did.

Okay, two things are important to this story. First, the person who knocked on my window was a female Klan member. Second, well, I should have probably mentioned a little bit more about the group of people in my car.

There were five soldiers in my car, tightly packed into it. The guy in the middle back seat was white, and so was I. The guy sitting next to me and the two men seated near the doors in the backseat were all African-Americans. Every person in the car was a seasoned veteran and currently serving in the Army.

So I rolled down my window, and I was not known for holding back on anything I had to say, so the first thing out of my mouth was: “So, they’re letting women into the Klan now?”

The woman stared at me for a second and responded with: “Women have been in the Klan for years.”

On instinct, I said: “Wow, how progressive of them. I guess they let anyone into it these days.”

To that, the guy seated next to me crouched over to the window and said. “That’s so cool. How long until I get to join?”

And I think that’s the moment that she realized the car was packed with a mixture of people she was probably not all that comfortable with seeing. The two guys in the backseat yelled out: “Can I have a pamphlet?” and “What time are your meetings, cause most of my mornings and afternoons are kind of busy these days with Army shit?”

The woman turned to her partner who was blocking my car and pointed to the car, I guess trying to figure out what she should do. I helped them make a quicker decision instead.

I said: “If he doesn’t move, I’m running his ass over.”

The guy in front of my car motioned for one of other partners, kind of trying to motion him over to the car or at least to assist him in blocking the car. Now, I don’t know what they were intending to do, but let’s put things into perspective. We were all trained killers and even without guns could do some serious damage to someone if we needed to, so if they would have stopped us and forced us out of the car, even if they were armed, the chances are there would have been three fewer Klan members alive that day.

I also noticed that one of the guys in the backseat, a part time power lifter who people used to call “The Tank” (which is someone ironic because he was an armored division officer) had his hand on the door handle and was about to step out and start an encounter that wouldn’t end well for anyone. In my rear view mirror, I could see the whole group was already transitioning into the “fight” of fight and flight mode.

Instead, I gunned the engine and just lurched forward. The woman at my window jumped back and the guy directly in front of me saw me coming and literally dived to the side of the road. The other guy that was heading towards the car also jumped back, realizing that I was flooring it and had no intentions of remembering my car had a brake pedal.

So we continued driving until I stopped a few miles out so the adrenaline could subside. One of the guys n the back yelled: “Let’s go back and fuck them up!”

But we didn’t. We continued on and made it in time for the concert we went to see. A good time was had by all.

That was my one and only encounter with the Klan. But I never forgot it.

What I Talk About When I Talk About Drinking

Memoirs, Relationships, Writing, , , , , , , , ,
This is me during my drinking days in the Army
This is me during my drinking days in the Army

During the late 1980s, going into the 1990s, I was in the U.S. Army, and all things considered, I probably had somewhat of a drinking problem. This was the latter part of the era of drinking before people started getting serious about the ramifications of the problem, meaning that we started enforcing drunk driving laws (unlike the past where we swept things under the rug) and Alcohol Anonymous was no longer just a light at the end of tunnels that no one would ever travel through. To understand my perspective on the whole situation, let’s visit the late 1980s and let me share a bit of a story with you.

You see, back then I drank a lot. Every night. It was almost a ritual of service at that time. Work hard during the day and then get plastered at night. Wake up the next day, run PT (most likely throwing up alongside the other soldiers who were all suffering hangovers) and then by the time evening came along, we’d go out and do it again. THAT was pretty much a part of the military lifestyle back then.

I think the apex of this whole situation occurred when a colleague and I decided to take a trip to the Canary Islands. On the plane, we both got plastered, and then when we got to the hotel, we got smashed. And then for the next week, well, I know I had a really good time because I have pictures of me and a lot of very beautiful women cavorting together, but to be honest, I have figments of memories of what actually happened during that week long trip. All I remember was being greeted at the airport on the way back by my fellow GIs, and they had brought beer with them, so we got obliterated on the trip home, too.

A couple of weeks later, I was driving my car back to post (in Germany), and I was extremely inebriated. Some friends were in the car behind me, and they drove up behind me, hitting my bumper and then trying to push my car forward with their own acceleration. I was at an intersection, and as they pushed me forward, or tried to do so as I held down on the brakes, I suddenly sobered up. I was probably still quite drunk, but right at that moment, it suddenly dawned on me that there were other people on this street, that if I just gave in to the fun, who knows what damage (or lives) could have been affected.

Driving home slowly (the other car rushed by me and continued on towards the post), something came over me that made me realize something was wrong. I just was too drunk to really figure out what it was.

The next day was Saturday, so I didn’t have to be at work for a few days, but instead of my usual routine, I decided to skip the club that night. Instead, I sat at home and read a book. My fellow party buddies thought something was wrong, but the next night, I skipped partying again and did something else (don’t remember what it was at the moment but I do know it didn’t involve drinking).

A few days later, I sat down at my computer (one of the early ones…this was the 1980s) and started writing my first novel. In case you’re wondering, it was Innocent Until Proven Guilty, and it was the first work I completed where there was absolutely no alcohol involved. Shortly after that, I began work on my second novel, Loser.

I was reading an article today in Salon, about how alcohol is targeted at women through intricate manipulation and advertising, but I’ll have to be honest that when I was drinking, it just seemed like the thing to be doing. There were no great football beer ads that i remember during this time. Sure, there was peer pressure, but I’ve never been all that susceptible to that sort of thing. For me, all there ever really was involved the “you have to be old enough to drink it” mindset so that when I hit that age, I started imbibing because it felt like a chronological ritual of growing up.

I’ll admit that when I quit partying, it wasn’t the end of alcohol for me; that would come years later, but it did change things for me because that pleasure I received of getting smashed no longer seemed to be of interest to me.

What used to fascinate me was how many of those tests in books I would take that indicated I was most definitely an alcoholic. Do you often drink to excess? I sure did. Do you wake up the next day and not remember moments of the night before? I woke up one morning and couldn’t remember much of what happened the entire week before. Do you ever blackout? When didn’t I? Do you often crave alcohol? And that’s kind of where it breaks off for me, because to be honest, I’ve never craved alcohol. Actually, kind of hate it the more I think about it. I liked the buzz I got, but to be honest, I wasn’t all that excited about the buzz either. I drank back then because it was something to do. I really didn’t like my life back then, and it seemed like a good crutch to fill in the gaps of what was going on and not going on. I’m one of those kinds of guys who never really has romantic relationships, even when I was in the middle of a romantic relationship (if that makes sense). So, drinking filled a void that I basically needed to fill with something.

Fortunately, writing kind of fills that void now. The “thrill” of drinking was the ability to turn off my mind and allow this other sense to overwhelm me. Believe it or not, I get that (and more) from writing. I take myself to another world, and I get to live in that world during the time that I’m writing. It helps me to forget that my current life kind of sucks. Sorry, but it does. I still don’t have romantic relationships, and that part of me has never changed. So, I spend a great deal of time trying to find some way of filling the gaps that basically never get filled.

When I got out of the service, I didn’t quit drinking completely, although I became more of a social drinker. My friend Kat would drink from time to time, so I would drink with her. When we parted ways, I basically just stopped drinking completely because like I said before, it never really gave me anything that I was lacking anywhere else.

And that’s been years for me now. A friend of mine visited me for a week a few weeks ago, and when we were at the store shopping for groceries, she asked me if I wanted any alcohol, and it never even crossed my mind that I might be interested. Alcohol has no value in my daily life, and it’s not something I seek out. At one time, I was going to start drinking red wine, but only because I heard that it had certain heart benefits. Never did get around to buying any though.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that I suspect that alcohol serves a purpose for everyone that consumes it, and what’s important is finding if that purpose is strong enough and whether or not it can be replaced with something else. For me, writing served as my alternative. But then, I’ve never been addicted, even though I can’t even begin to tell you how many people over the years said I must have a problem because of how I answered some of those questions. One person I know who is an alcoholic thinks I have some kind of strength to stop as I did, but I never saw it that way. I have my own vices and my own things that need to be dealt with (we all do). Alcohol just doesn’t seem to be one of them. Others, unfortunately, can’t say the same thing.

 

The Village That All of Korea Forgot…a legospaceman ghost story

Writing, , , , , ,

It was late in the Summer of 1988 when I was assigned to an Army counterintelligence field office in South Korea. However, it was during a field exercise during the Team Spirit wargames that this particular incident occurred.

As a field agent, it was part of my job to interview soldiers and civilians who had information that might be of interest to military and national security. From time to time, the information was of use, but most of the time this information tended to be incorrect, misunderstandings of insignificance. However, from time to time, information came my way that tended on the bizarre, and all one could do was investigate and hope to explain away the situation in some reasonable manner. This brings us back to the Team Spirit Exercise of 1988.

As members of the intelligence group operating in South Korea, it was our job during these exercises to concentrate our efforts against the US troops that were going to be arriving from the states. However, because we were stationed in South Korea, it was also part of our job to investigate any real world situations that happened to come our way. It was surprising how many of these would happen during one of these war maneuvers.

There were four agent stationed back at the field office to handle the investigations that were already ongoing. I was personally assigned a private as a counterintelligence (CI) assistant and one Korean Augmentee to the US Army (KATUSA) translator. We were working on covert surveillance missions for Team Spirit missions when a call came over the radio from headquarters to report to one of the 2nd Infantry Division Infantry comanies concerning a possible breach of security.

I took Corporal Yu (my KATUSA) and Private Bottoms (my driver and assistant) with me to investigate the situation. Once there, I proceeded to initiate an investigation (the results and content of which are not significant to the story). However, while conversing with one of the platoon sergeants of this unit to gain some background information on the circumstances, a sergeant first class reported to me something that struck me as great interest at the time.

“Sir,” he said, “I don’t know if it means anything, but one of my squad leaders reported a pretty strange occurrence while on maneuvers near the ******* region.” (the actual location is not important, although it was located quite some distance from the demilitarized zone, as most military maneuvers would not be located close to the border with North Korea) I asked him to elaborate. “Well, we were traveling to this hill trying to seek higher ground for a fifty position when one of the locals stopped us and told us we were traveling on sacred ground.”

“Sacred ground?” I said. “This is Korea, not an Indian reservation.”

“I know it sounds strange, sir,” he continued, “but the locals were serious, and they didn’t want our guys to continue heading up the hill.”

“So, what happened?”

“Well, my guy decided to chance it anyway. That was when of the locals told him that the place was haunted.”

This revelation surprised me. Coming from a private or some green lieutenant, this might be expected, but this was someone who was wearing a combat patch from Vietnam. This guy wore an expert infantryman badge, and he didn’t look like the kind of guy who would accept a ghost story as any type of answer. However, that was what he was telling me. “So, what happened then?”

He smiled. “The damn bastard came back down and reported it to me.”

“So, why are you telling me this?” I said.

His smile grew even deeper. “Well, who else was I supposed to tell?”

That seemed to be the catch-all phrase for half of the information that came my way. If someone wanted to pawn off information, we were the people to pawn it off to. CID handled criminal cases, MI handled intelligence cases, and we handled anything that didn’t fit anywhere else. That included strange lights, UFOs and ghost stories. Catch-all summed it up quite nicely.

I had the platoon sergeant draw me up a map of the location we were discussing, and then I concluded the business I was at this unit to conduct. From there, I went back to where our logistical group was located. After firing off an electrical message to Seoul concerning our real investigation, I met up with my fellow agents and passed on the story of what was told to me.

Only one other agent was interested in the story; the others didn’t consider it worth their time. For the sake of identifying him for the story, I’ll just say his name was Mr. Smith (a name I’ll use considering he’s still working in this field to this day). Mr. Smith and I sat down in our tent and worked out a plan of action to see if there was anything to this ghost story.

The first phase of our investigation was to find the site. The next day I was on infiltration duty with my assistants, so Mr. Smith took the day to investigate the ******* region. When I returned from maneuvers that evening, Mr. Smith’s vehicle showed up, and he told me he was successful in finding the location. It was located at the top of a hill (he showed me on the map). There was a small village at the bottom of the hill, and several people attempted to stop him from traveling up the hill before he continued past them and found what was definitely the site described by the platoon sergeant.

Mr. Smith described the site as a series of buildings that all appeared to be abandoned for no apparent reason. He spoke excitedly about finding furniture still in the buildings, but no occupants of the buildings themselves. He said there was an eerie feeling about the place as they traveled through the ghost town. He even said that his KATUSA, Sergeant Kim, grew really nervous before they finally decided to leave and report back to camp. Sergeant Kim didn’t say what was wrong at the time, but when I spoke to him, he told me that there was something bad about that place, but he just didn’t know what it was. He refused to elaborate any further than that, which was unusual because Sergeant Kim was usually pretty upfront about everything.

The only problem with the first expedition is that no one brought a camera, so there was no proof of anything they saw. All they brought back were eerie stories of feeling they were being watched. Therefore, I decided to find the place myself.

The next day I brought Corporal Yu and one of our US Army corporals, another CI assistant, who I will call Corporal Jones (as he is now an agent himself and probably would not appreciate his real name being used), along with Private Bottoms who I always liked to have around because of his clear head in most situations. I chose Corporal Jones for this journey mainly because he was an excellent driver and had an excellent knack for getting us out of situations that weren’t always as clear cut as I would have liked. I didn’t anticipate any trouble during this fishing expedition, but I always liked having Corporal Jones as my driver whenever possible.

Using a map drawn by Mr. Smith, and the map drawn up by the platoon sergeant before, we set out the next morning to find the ghost town. The trek was quite a long one considering the fact that once one leaves the city roads in South Korea (at least back then), one quickly finds oneself traveling down dirt roads, and even roads that are no bigger than rice paddy mounds used by farmers who travel across on bicycles. Corporal Jones handled himself and our vehicle quite well, and eventually we came across a village that was located at the bottom of a very large hill/mountain.

At the forefront of this little village was a small convenience store, much like every other convenience store located throughout South Korea. It is not hard to spot these places when out in the larger cities. Almost always, there is a display of Pepsi-Cola (with printing in both English and Korean that reads Pepsi-Cola, a display that contrasts with pretty much everything else sold in these little stores) in front of a sliding door that houses multiple colored products that can be bought for daily living. Most products are warm as there is rarely electricity running these places. Usually, the family that owns the stores usually lives deeper within the store itself, as it also serves as the family home as well as the village store. As expected, the family was seated behind the sliding glass door, eating a meal of kimche. When they noticed our vehicle pull up outside of their store, the sliding glass door slowly peeled open and a young woman stepped out meekly to greet us.

Corporal Yu stepped out of the vehicle and spoke to her. He told her that we were searching for a small village that was supposed to be on top of the hill. He asked her if she knew anything about the place. She told him that there was an old school on top of the hill, but that no one went there anymore. She stared at the rest of us with suspicion and seemed nervous about speaking before Corporal Yu lied and told her that none of us spoke Korean, that she could speak to him freely and he would filter the information that came to us. Corporal Jones and I were both fluent in Korean, but Corporal Yu knew it made people speak up if they thought we weren’t.

Corporal Yu then asked her if there was ever anything strange about the place. She said that people used to get scared there, but then stopped speaking when the sliding glass door opened again and her father stepped out. Before she could say anything more, he waved her back into the store and took up a position in front of Corporal Yu. His first words in Korean were that there was nothing to see on the hill, and that we should turn around and go home.

Corporal Yu attempted to ask him a few more questions, but the father refused to answer anything. He was adamant about there being nothing of interest at the old school, and he refused to even discuss the possiblity of anything abnormal happening in the area. Finally, frustrated, Corporal Yu bought four Pepsis and walked back to the vehicle with the father following close behind him.

The father moved over to my open window, figuring that I was probably the one in charge of our little group. In broken English, he said that we should go home, that there was nothing for us to look for there. I responded in English, speaking slowly, asking him simple questions that basically had little merit or value other than establishing the fact that I was trying to speak to him in English. After a couple of questions that he answered quickly without thinking, I switched to Korean and asked him how long the local people have stayed away from the place because it was haunted. It was an old trick, and like usual, it worked. He responded, saying it had been several months, right before he realized he answered a question put to him in Korean. Before he could deny any further knowledge of a haunted area, I motioned for Corporal Jones to drive on and head up the hill.

The road wasn’t a simple one we had to travel. There were parts of it that were quite dangerous. But we made it, and the effort was worth it.

As described, the place was some kind of camp retreat, half school and half residences. If this was a place in the United States, I would have assumed it was a children’s camp, or some place you’d find a cult religion. But being in Korea, it was very possible that this place was some type of community that had been put together over the years.

The buildings were mostly similar in shape, almost like large doll houses. However, the first building we came across was the length of five or six of the buildings put side by side. When we entered it, we realized we were in some type of church.

There were still pews down one side of the church, but down the other side, the pews had been ripped from their housings and scattered across the floor. There was an altar on the far end of the room, almost like one would find in a down south Methodist church. There was a podium in front of the altar, but there was nothing else of religious significance in the room. It wasn’t hard to tell that this was a place used for some religious ceremony,but whether it was Christianity, Buddhism, or Satanism was difficult to tell. That was when the first feeling that something was wrong came to us.

I felt it myself, but Corporal Jones was the first to say it out loud. “I need some air,” he said as he stepped outside and we followed behind him. Once outside, he told me that the place started to feel really stuffy inside and that he had to get out. I realized I had the same feeling myself, but I was the leader of this expedition, so I pretended this revelation came as a surprise to me.

“Let’s check out some of the other buildings,” I said.

We continued going through the rest of the buildings, and with each one we discovered something different that sparked our interest. In one, there was furniture that was thrown around the place like some major fight had taken place. In the next, everything was completely in place, except that a closet door had been thrown off of its hinges. With each unit we went into, something always seemed to be different from the ones we had already seen.

We spent several hours going through the many buildings–there were over forty in total–before we finally began to feel we had seen enough of the place to justify our belief that something wasn’t right. There were two levels of buildings to this place as well; the second level was hidden around a corner of the main hill and we ended up discovering that section completely by accident. But during the entire time we were there, not a single person from the village came up to see what we were doing, even though the father from the store had to have told everyone that Americans were traveling up to the camp.

During the entire time I was there, I kept feeling that there were people watching us. Often, I stopped and looked around, convinced that someone was right behind me. But there never was.

Throughout the entire trip, we all were completely on edge, almost as if we were expecting something out of the ordinary to take place. But nothing ever did. It was like the entire place was dead to the world around it.

Finally, we finished taking several rolls of film of the place, and then we headed back down the hill to find the nearest city where we could contact local authorities to see if they knew anything about the place.

The nearest city was several clicks away, and we found a precinct of the Korean National Police. As representatives of the US forces, and card-carrying members of the KNP, we met with a Captain Pak who proceeded tot ell us that the place we visited was an old live-in school that was no longer used. When I asked why there was still furniture in the buildings, he stated that he didn’t believe that was so. When I asked him if he had ever been there, he said that neither he nor any of his staff had ever been there mainly because they just didn’t have the time to visit old sites like that. When I asked him to comment on ghost stories, he just smiled and said that he had heard reports like that, but they were just supersititions. As a joke, I asked him if he wanted to return with us to take a look at the place. He laughed and said that he couldn’t, that his job was too pressing for time. However, he did offer to invite me and my staff to coffee with the local members of the KNP. During our coffee break, I mentioned that we could have spent that time investigating the site; he just smiled and continued to order more drinks (coffee is not all they serve in Korean coffee shops). When we were ready to leave, he invited us to join him and his staff for coffee again in the future, stating that he hoped he was of assistance to us in some way.

With that, we went back to our camp site to discuss our findings with Mr. Smith. Sadly, we never had the opportunity to visit the site again.