

### Not Quite A Hero

by

Timothy D. Tober

PUBLISHED BY:

Timothy D, Tober

Not Quite A Hero

Copyright © 2010 by Timothy D. Tober

### Hello friend. The events that take place and the people you are going to read about in this book, are real and completely true. I have changed the names, including those of the respective locations that are focused on in various areas of this story. The purpose being to protect the privacy of the innocent.

### Any likeness to any real person or place is strictly coincidental.

For:

Destynee & Bailey

Special thanks to "Chasn"

Not Quite A Hero

### Part 1

Big things were happening in the year 1985, but not just for me. The song "We Are The World" was topping the billboard charts and "Crack Cocaine" was just beginning to hit the streets.

A beverage named "New Coke" was being introduced to the public and failed to capture the taste buds of the loyal consumers of it's world famous predecessor, "Coca Cola." After a great deal of public outcry, "New Coke" was subsequently replaced with "Coke Classic."

The "Rock & Roll Hall of Fame" opened it's doors that year also.

I was 16 years old that summer, and I had finally lost my virginity to an older woman. A few months later I had earned my driving privileges and was issued a drivers license. I guess you could say that big things were happening everywhere that year, and I, well I thought I was ready for anything.

Two significant events in my life, that changed the course of my destiny, happened once school resumed from summer break. One of my best friends, Byron, had accidentally shot himself with a rifle and my other best friend Adam, had tried to shoot the school principal on the exact same day.

To some, including myself, 2 shootings in a single day was not really much of a news story, if you live in a very bad part of a larger metropolitan city. However, we lived in a small Midwestern town with a population of 4611 people, where literally, not much of anything ever happened.

These two particular incidents were purely coincidental and neither were connected to the other, making it a bizarre day for many of us that remember it.

I had gone to lunch during a normal school day, like any other day, riding in the front seat of Adams car, Greg our other friend from school was in the back seat.

Adam was acting out of sorts. I had been friends with him for a year or so and I knew that when he was in one of his dark moods that it was probably best to let him work through it on his own.

We returned to the school parking lot where we sat in the car and smoked cigarettes not really saying anything.

Suddenly, Adam turned and looked at me and kind of toward Greg in the back seat and said, "I am going to shoot the school principal, Mister Haynes."

Nobody laughed, we all just sat there.

Then, Adam started the car and drove around the lot and back onto the street. He parked his car on the street facing west, directly between the high school and the police station, that was only a half a block or less away.

Adam jumped out of the car. I quickly followed and Greg was right behind me. I was talking to Adam, trying to reason with him as he fumbled with his keys trying to open the trunk of his 1970's sedan. He was acting methodically, like he had been hypnotized or something.

He was beginning to make me nervous. Things were happening in slow motion now and by the time I reached the back of the vehicle, I saw Adam close the trunk with his left hand and then noticed he had a deer rifle in his right.

I'm not an expert on guns, however I had seen this particular model of rifle before, in a couple different places actually. Most notably were the old television westerns that were on when I was a kid.

Adam was holding a Winchester model .30 .30 in his hands.

The world famous Winchester is a bit shorter rifle that was easier for cowboys to carry on their horses. This particular rifle that Adam was currently holding, was one his Grandfather had given to him. I had seen and shot it myself, whenever we had gone shooting on Adams grandfathers property.

"Hey brother, come on the joke is over put it down!" I yelled.

We were all looking around because even though it was a small town, someone was going to see this and call the cops, I thought to myself.

Adam did not say a word. He crossed the street and quickly walked toward the front entrance to our high school.

Because tragedies like the Columbine shooting, etc. had not happened yet, most schools had no need for metal detectors or policeman in place inside their doors. Nobody was shooting anyone, not where I went to school at least.

Adam walked right into the front door of the school with Greg and I right on his heals, pleading with him to reconsider what he was about to do. My heart was beating so hard inside my chest that I wondered at that time if it was possible for a 16 year old kid who was otherwise pretty healthy, to have a heart attack.

It was too late to escape without being seen because we had walked right past the biology class and the teacher had seen Adam with a rifle and had immediately called the local police. Once he had gotten around the corner, the ladies that worked in the front office had seen the student as well.

At the point where Adam was raising the gun I sprang into action and snatched the rifle out of his hands. I had tears of shear terror flowing down my cheeks but I didn't care because, it was not the time to be macho.

I spun around and quickly handed the rifle to Greg who sprang out the doors with it. This time it was Adam and I chasing Greg in the opposite direction. It was like some relay race where the rifle had become the baton.

We got to the car and Greg threw the rifle into the trunk, immediately after Adam had opened it. Then we screamed at Adam to get out of there.

I looked around in total disbelief because the police were just starting to run to their cars at the police station. My friend got about 2 blocks away and they caught him.

Since I was one of his only friends, I ended up going to the hearing with him to be there for his parents who wondering what the hell was going on. You see, I really liked Adams mom and dad, even if he didn't.

When he would only agree to talk to me behind closed doors, Adam and I went into a conference room. He just sat there and stared off into space. I finally asked him what he wanted me to do and he spun around from the window he was looking out of and for just a moment in time, I thought I saw the devil or one of his minions in my friend.

They were putting Adam away for a while into a juvenile boys home. We didn't know when or if we would ever see Adam again.

Meanwhile, Adams parents insisted that I drive his car home so that my parents would not have to drive the 10 miles into town to pick me up at the courthouse.

I was not going to get a car from my parents, that was a fact. I rarely if ever was going to get to use my parents vehicle as well. When Adams parents wanted me to take Adams car, I was ecstatic.

I left the courthouse at dusk and began driving home. My dad was really strict when it came to his children going places or doing things. It was as if he had to be in control of everything all the time. I knew he was not going to let me drive that car as much as I wanted to drive it so I was going to take advantage of the situation and stop at my friend Daves house which was right on the way home.

"Besides." I thought to myself, "Dad isn't going to know what time I actually left the courthouse so I can go show Dave the car, he isn't going to know shit."

As I was approaching a small bridge just on the edge of town heading west, I decided to do what most young boys do when they have a throaty V-8 under the hood, I pushed the accelerator all the way to the floorboards.

The car snapped forward like it had been released from an enormous slingshot. My heart was racing as I watched the accelerator needle climb higher and higher.

I reached that bridge doing about 75 miles per hour and saw something in my peripheral vision out of my left eye.

A Minnesota State Trooper was right beside me, passing me on the bridge.

Thinking he was pulling in front of me to pull me over, I quickly slammed on the brakes but not hard enough to put the car into a skid and slowed down very quickly. To my bewilderment, the patrol car kept going. I thought it odd that he would be on that country back road in the first place.

With my heart racing inside my chest, I decided to maintain the posted speed limit and get my ass home before that cop finished what he was doing and came back for me. I didn't have a job so getting a ticket would have been the absolute worst case scenario at my house. My dad would have flipped out!

### Part 2

When I got home the first thing my dad said to me was; "You're giving that car back."

There was no point in arguing so I tried to reason with him as best I could. He was having none of it and that was the end of it. I had learned that he had called Adams dad back to see what time I had left also and so I thought of seeing that cop as a stroke of luck. Had I gone to Byrons on my way home like I'd planned, and visited with my friend, my dad would have been extremely angry.

About 30 minutes later the telephone hanging on our wall, rang. When my sister told me it was for me, I was surprised because I never got any phone calls. When I did, I usually made it a real short call, because we had a five minutes on the phone rule, implemented in our home by my dad.

It was Adams dad calling me. My stomach fell as if I was on a ride at the carnival. I was sure right then that the cop that had passed me must have gotten the plate number when he drove around me going 45 miles per hour over the speed limit, on the bridge.

Much to my relief that was not the reason that Adams dad was calling.

He told me there had been a shooting on the same county road on lived on. He didn't know exactly where it was because he had heard bits and pieces on a police scanner. He was asking me if I knew who the people were that lived by a driveway with some old cement pillars at the end.

Suddenly a wave of sadness washed over me. I immediately began thinking about Mister Mullein, a local farmer that I had worked for in summers past. He was an old man without very good vision. I imagined him cleaning his gun and having an accident.

I was going to have to wait and find out what happened though, because my dad was not about to let me drive my friends car down the road to check it out.

When I got to school the next day, the buzz around the lockers was not about Adam as much as I thought it was going to be. Kids were also talking a lot about what had happened to Byron, the friend who I was going to visit before seeing that cop.

It turns out, that cop was on his way to Byrons house because my friend had accidentally shot himself with a smaller caliber rifle than the Winchester that had nearly been used to kill our principal earlier in the afternoon.

Byron survived the gunshot wound to his stomach, and eventually Adam came home. But something was telling me that things were never going to be the same after that, not for anyone.

### Part 3

Within a week or so of Adam going away and Byron getting hurt, I was sitting in class and my friend Alex was sitting in front of me in his desk. I was bored which was nothing new. I had a cigarette lighter because I was already addicted to nicotine and I smoked cigarettes daily.

I kept flicking the wheel on that lighter and making it spark. I was holding it a little too close to Alex's head and the next thing I knew there was a small blue flame crawling over the back of Alex's hair. I didn't know that he used hair spray in his hair and it was easily ignited.

Sadly, I didn't act as quickly as I should have because admittedly I was hypnotized by the pretty blue flame.

When I did realize what was happening right before my eyes, it was too late. His hair had begun to melt and I tried to slap at the back of his head in an effort to put out the flames I had just lit.

Alex turned around and sternly told me under his breath to "Quit Fucking around with a lighter by my hair!"

He had no idea that the damage had been done already, but he was about to find out.

The entire classroom filled up with the horrid stench of burnt hair, and the next thing I knew, my classmates were complaining about the smell.

The teacher looked up from his book and sniffed the air.

"Who is burning matches, Tober?"

I looked at him as innocent as a child caught in the cookie jar and tried to dramatically plead my case for harassment. Everyone laughed when I asked; "why when something happens am I the first person you look to Mister Smith?"

"Because, mister Tober, every time something happens it's usually you that's behind it." He said.

The classroom laughed at what the teacher said, and I had no defense because I was a bit of a rebel without a cause, and an overall bad student.

The bell rang shortly after and when we walked past mister Smith on the way out of class, he saw Alex's hair and when he realized that he had been burned he went crazy. He kept me after class and started screaming at me about how I could have killed him and on and on.

Sadly enough, I was so immature in those days that I didn't see what the big deal was.

I was ultimately suspended from school for about a week. Worse than that was the fact that his mother called mine and after the talk those two furious mothers had, I thought for sure I was a dead man. My dad was furious also, but he had stopped physically punishing me about 2 years before so I ended up having to listen to a lecture and got yelled at by my dad but in the end it wasn't as bad as it could have been.

### Part 4

School was basically a nightmare for me. Some of that was my fault and some of it wasn't. After a while, I began acting out more and more in an attempt to get attention.

There was a week during the school year that students were encouraged to participate in some crazy days fun and dress according to a different theme for every day of that week. One day was 50's day and kids could dress like they did in that era, country western day and so on. This went on like that all week until Friday, which was "Punk Day."

The year before I had taken bar soap and used it to make my hair into a Mohawk for punk day. It was a big hit and I loved the attention. Then my dad surprised me by telling me that when he was younger he and his friends had gone to the barbershop and gotten Mohawk haircuts.

The light bulb came on above my head because coincidentally, my dad had been complaining about the length of my hair and telling me I needed a haircut. I asked him if he would pay for me to get it cut at the barbershop that Friday and he agreed, not knowing it was punk day, or what my future plans were.

That Friday came and I skipped class to run downtown and take up a chair at the local barbershop on main street. I told the barber that I wanted a Mohawk and that my dad was going to come by after school and pay for it. The barber looked me straight in the eyes and asked if I was a Tober and I said I was indeed. Then he simply shook his head back and forth and said; "no way, I know your dad and I'm not doing it." he said.

"I will take full responsibility," I said.

The barber looked at me and said, "full responsibility huh?"

Then he proceeded to give me a haircut that our little school, the kids going to school there and the staff had not seen before. It was different times then, things were moving at a slower pace.

I had pierced my ear in the seventh grade and had taken a lot of heat for that back then, but this stunt I was pulling as a Junior, was going to put me on the map. I became sort of famous for all the wrong reasons. However looking back on it now, I realize I was nothing more than a big fish in a tiny pond.

My picture ended up in the yearbook and I suddenly had all the attention I had craved all the years I had been going to school in that little town.

Things happened a lot faster than I expected them to after that. It seems that since I was bold enough to have a shaved head and looked like a hoodlum, that I was to be blamed for everything that was vandalized, stolen etc. from that day on. And that is exactly what happened, friend.

I was blamed for a stolen camera that the school staff and principal went as far as to have my prints taken to see if any were on the stolen camera they had mysteriously found. When they found nothing and had no evidence to pin the theft on me, it seemed like the police and the school principal were irritated, like I had gotten one over on them or something.

I was accused of several other things that I had nothing to do with over the next couple of weeks. What I didn't know was that the school wanted me gone in a bad way and they were going to see to it that I was removed from the system and would not be a problem for anyone any more.

Things continued in this fashion until I was finally accused of something that I could prove I didn't do.

I was called into the principals office from the classroom over a loudspeaker. This was the way they contacted students, in the days before email and text messaging. The worst part was, everyone knew when you were being called to the office, so it was fuel for the rumor mill and great material for the hecklers. I would slink out the door on my way down to the office to accept my fate, again and again.

The last time I was called into that office I didn't know what they wanted to see me about that particular time because I had been keeping my nose clean for quite a few days. A record for me actually!

I went into the principals office and immediately noticed his fat face was all red and he was huffing and puffing. He actually looked a great deal more angry than I ever remembered seeing him before that morning.

He starts yelling at me about calling his wife on the phone and making rude comments and threatening her the night before.

I told him that was impossible and he called me a liar.

Standing up from the chair I began yelling at him that in my house the phone was right where my dad could see it and we weren't allowed to make unauthorized calls because it was a business phone. I told him my dad was sitting on the couch that evening in plain view of the phone and I had never been on it once.

Mister Haynes was not expecting this retort and got even more angry.

He stood up and with an open palm he slammed his hand into my chest and knocked me back against the chair and the wall. What happened next set the course for the next 7 years of my life.

I completely blacked out and flew into a rage. Like some kind of animal, I climbed over his desk and put my small hands around the fat throat of Mister Haynes and I tried like hell to choke the fucking life out of that man. Good thing for him that either I was not big enough or he was simply too fat for me to choke.

Things happened in slow motion for a few minutes after.

He had this glass globe type thing that was always full of M&M candy. I threw it against the wall and was amazed at the sight of hundreds of colorful little candies spread all over his office. I screamed some obscenities at him before turning and walking out of his office and slamming the door so hard the glass window on it broke.

As you can imagine, the office secretaries were frightened. I had a "rap sheet" that was extremely long that included fighting, property damage, arson and a few other wonderful bits of information that literally made some of my teachers and other school staff, fear me.

After leaving the school property, I spent the rest of the day at a small lake in town, thinking hard about running away from home. I knew that I was in really deep trouble this time and had no idea where I was going to live because I was absolutely certain I was getting kicked out of my house now. What I didn't know then was that the police were driving around the small town looking for me.

I made the decision to face my old man straight up and take whatever consequences came along with my decisions. I was in pretty good physical condition by then, from picking rocks in fields, to chopping and stacking wood and throwing hay bales around on a wagon. I had been in enough fights and had been beaten bloody by dad enough times in the past that I was thinking I was ready to fight back now if he got physical.

When I made my way back to the school and stepped onto the bus that afternoon, I had no way of knowing right then that the police were looking for me. I was only 16 years old and I was wanted by the cops on assault charges already.

Riding the bus home I began to realize that my life was rolling down the wrong track like a runaway freight train and it was picking up speed by the minute now. I had butterflies in my stomach, not the good kind either.

### Part 5

The bus dropped me off at home and as I started to walk up the short driveway I noticed a really shiny black and chrome motorcycle parked next to my mothers car and immediately the bad butterflies were replaced by good butterflies.

I immediately recognized that Honda as belonging to my eldest brother, who lived out of state. There was no way in hell I could ever forget that bike because of what my dad had done just one summer before.

Ralphie, is a nickname I like to use for my dad. He was not the worst dad in the world and was not the best either.

One thing Ralphie did enjoy in life was his over the fucking top practical jokes. I not so affectionately started to refer to these "jokes' as lessons because they never made me laugh and I would never pull some of the shit he pulled on his kids, on anyone. Not even if I didn't like someone!

The worst one for me was the motorcycle joke.

The summer before this, I had come home from school like any other day. The difference on this one particular day was that my dad was waiting for me at the crossroads just a hundred yards from our driveway where the bus let me off every day. He never ever waited for me in his vehicle because my dad was not big on laziness.

My heart started to slam against my chest. My old man had been sober for about a year now, and sometimes he just got pissed off about the littlest things. I worried that he was so pissed about something I did that he couldn't even wait for me to walk the hundred yards home before he wanted to get to me. He was always threatening me, so my paranoia was justifiable, however I could not think of anything he could be that furious about.

"What the fuck is he smiling about?" I thought. Nervousness was beginning to be replaced by terror as I thought perhaps he had lost it. My dad was never smiley and happy.

"How was school?' He asked.

"This is a trap!" I thought to myself.

I made small talk with him and we drove the short distance back to the house and as we pulled in the driveway, I could see this brand new, beautiful Honda motorcycle sitting on the grass by the worn cement sidewalk that led into our back door entrance of my parents house.

Ralphie starts telling me this wildly concocted story about how he had bought this motorcycle for me and I only had a permit but next year when I got my license I could drive it to school, and on and on.

Now listen friend, you have to understand something. I grew up poor but my dad was just beginning to get his new antique refinishing business up and running successfully. Because of that reason, I really believed him.

In those few precious moments that I looked at every inch of that beautiful brand spanking new bike with less than a thousand miles on the speedometer, I forgave Ralphie for everything bad he had ever done in the past.

Suddenly, the fact that he had dropped me off in a dark cemetery once and left me there to teach me a lesson when I was only 5 years old didn't even matter anymore. I instantly forgave him for all the unnecessary beat downs, I forgave him for telling me he bought me a go kart when I was like 10 years old and finding out it was nothing more than a little red riding lawnmower when we went to pick it up.

I forgave my dad for not coming to my football games and for the one game he did attend where he ended up passing me a note from up in the bleachers via my little brother that said, "Waterboy." Yes friend, all was forgiven instantly, all in the name of two wheels, shiny black paint and chrome pipes!

My status at school was about to be elevated to the highest level it had ever been. This one gift from my otherwise usually hateful dad was the greatest single moment I had ever experienced in my life up to that point. As embarrassing as it sounds now, I actually cried tears of joy.

Ralphie finishes the wild story about how he bought the machine at a yard sale, I deserve it, blah blah blah.

"Go up into the house and get your helmet that I got for you and take it for a spin, but you can never ride it without a helmet" He says to me. Making really fall for the whole story.

When I walked into the back door of my parents house, I saw my brother and my Aunt from out of town sitting at the dining table visiting with my mom. They each had a motorcycle jacket hanging on the chair behind them and there were 2 black helmets sitting on the counter top.

My brother looked at me and said, "did you see my new bike?"

Just then Ralphie comes in the back door laughing like he thought it was the funniest thing he had ever seen or heard in his life.

I seriously contemplated a murder suicide plot after that. I was fucked up from the entire incident and according to several different shrinks and counselors, I was always going to be on some level.

One year later I would walk up the same driveway under much different circumstances and see the same motorcycle sitting almost in the same place, the difference this time was that I knew the bike was not mine. One other thing that immediately made feel better was that I knew my older brother was going to have my back if Ralphie lost it and tried to beat on me for getting in trouble at school again.

It was almost surreal when my dad came stomping up the back steps and into the house. I was talking to my brother when Ralphie starts screaming at me that I was kicked out of school permanently and the police were looking for me.

The following Monday, myself and Ralphie had to have a meeting with all the heads of the school departments, the police, superintendent and anybody else who was anybody was in that meeting. They all voted unanimously to have me expelled permanently and furthermore, stipulated I would be arrested for trespassing if I ever stepped foot on school property for any reason whatsoever. I was not even allowed to attend high school football games.

I am not going to assume that he was happy, but I can say with total certainty that my mother was easily a hundred times more angry with me than Ralphie was. I was told by my dad that I would not be living at home and not be in school or without a job. I didn't realize until months later why he was not as pissed off as he could have been.

My plan, like all 16 year old kids who think they know everything, was to go and just get me one of those job thingy's that other people had and talked about. Yep, I was pretty much that naive in those days, friend.

### Part 6

I didn't own a vehicle and we lived 10 miles from town. I failed to take these facts into consideration when attempting to find a job. My mom worked and my dad was busy with his own business. He told me he would give me a job working in his brand new shop, helping him refinish antique furniture.

For almost a year I worked in that shop busting my ass for 45 dollars a week because in all fairness, he was deducting rent, food, utilities etc. from my check. The main advantage that I gained while working for my father was the connections I made in the small town.

There was a bank president from one of the local banks in town, the same bank where my parents had maintained accounts for several years. He and his wife loved antiques and they had several of them. They started coming to my dads refinishing shop that was located next to our house, to deliver the antiques they wanted re-done.

His wife was usually with him and they were extremely kind people who always treated me with respect whenever I had occasion to deal with them, usually when my dad was away from the shop. He saw me working hard every time he came to the shop and he told me that it was going to make me successful.

I didn't know if they realized I was supposed to be in school and that I had gotten expelled or not, but I was not about to tell them voluntarily if they didn't.

Working for Ralphie taught me a great many things. The biggest and most important lesson I learned was that my dad was never going to pat me on the back or say "hey great job," no matter how much I did, or hard I worked to try and please him. For better or worse, I learned how to work hard and keep my mouth shut most of the time. I also learned how to be punctual, because if you were ever late for work in Ralphie's shop, God help you!

Things had settled into a nightmare routine for me for a few months before something bad happened again. I had been 16 years old and had my license for about 3 months when I accidentally ran over our little cocker-poo. We had a family dog named Charlie and he was pretty much my best friend in life.

He was about 2 years old and I had taken my moms car, with permission of course, to the bar that was only a few miles away, to get toilet paper of all things. I pulled out of the driveway and thought I had hit a chunk of snow and drove off. I had seen Charlie in the rear view, but he was sitting on his haunches looking at me as I drove away.

Charlie was such an awesome dog but he had a bad habit of chasing the car down the driveway. We thought we had broken him of it by keeping him in the house, but that particular night he was outside when we left.

I got back from the bar and went back into the house to visit with our Aunt who had been visiting from out of state and after a while I realized something was not right. I asked if Charlie was in the house and no one had seen him. He would always bark and let you know if he got left outside, but we had not heard a peep out of him. My Aunt opened the back door and there he was, laying on the back porch.

Something was wrong with him, he couldn't walk. When I tried to pick him up he screamed, but there was no blood on his fur anywhere. I thought of the image of him staring at me from the rear view mirror and me thinking I had run over a chunk of ice that had fallen off the car and I almost vomited.

I told everyone that I was sure I had hit him with the car on my way to get toilet paper. Then I brought the little guy downstairs into my room in the basement and made him as comfortable as I possibly could. I sat with him and softly stroked his head and cried. I just kept telling Charlie I was sorry and sobbed all night.

The next day, my dad shocked the family by taking the little dog to the vet. When they returned they had news I was not ready for. His hip was broken.

They told my parents that he could possibly heal on his own or he could have surgery, but either way, there was no guarantee that Charlie would ever walk right again. They got him antibiotics and we nursed him back to health as a family because we all loved that little dog.

He healed better than you can imagine, until he got really old, then his arthritis would bother him and he would limp a little bit when he walked. That little dog was as tough as a horse and became an inspiration to me in many things.

### Part 7

Spring came not long after and I was still making 45 bucks a week after deductions in my dads shop. One thing I probably should have exploited more was the fact that if was kicking in on the rent and the bills, which I was, then a few things should have been a little different around my house, but they weren't.

One night, while my parents were out of town, I was thinking about what my dad had said about want ting to sell his pickup truck when he got back. He had said he wanted 1800 dollars for it.

I wanted a vehicle really bad, I really hated asking my mom for her car because Ralphie would complain so much to her that it was just easier for her to say no.

That particular night, my older sister had gotten me a six pack of beer as per my request and I was all buzzed up from it. I just picked up the phone and dialed the president of the bank. It was 9 pm and he answered right away.

Within minutes he told me to be at the bank in the morning and he would draw up the paperwork. No co-signer, no money down or financial statements needed. He was doing based on what he had seen every time he had been to the shop.

I called a guy I worked for doing some wood cutting in the past, he was an insurance agent also. In minutes I had full coverage insurance on my truck that I didn't even own yet. I went to the bank and got a loan for 3 thousand dollars to cover the additional expenses of insurance and a car stereo.

When my dad got home from the trip out of state he had taken, I handed him an envelope with a stack of cash, loan papers on his Chevy and insurance papers drawn up in my name. This, I was convinced, would be the proudest day of his life. I was wrong.

The opposite happened. He got absolutely bitter and really angry with me and at the bank because he had struggled and been turned down so many times before at the same bank for a loan. He never once took into consideration that I had earned it. Instead, he accused me of riding on his coattails of hard work and I resented him for it.

I got the truck though, and along with it a lecture about how I was not going to be able to afford it and so on. I thought I was somehow going to manage and so I never gave much thought to the fact that when my savings ran out, I was not going to have enough money every month to pay my new bills.

Reminiscent of a few other things in my life, I decided I would just deal with that waterfall of shit as soon as I was about to go over it, so to speak. Besides, all that mattered now was that I had some wheels of my own. Ralphie was losing control and oh how he did not like that.

The snow was melted, the rivers were running wild and so was the rebel blood in my veins. I was going to be a big party guy now that I had some wheels that could take me to said parties. I had not gotten to do much of anything before I had my own vehicle so I was excited to spread my wings.

One party was the span of my partying for that spring and summer.

I had gone to a party that some old classmates who were still in school were throwing. I had not seen people since getting kicked out some months before so people were asking me questions and I was showing off my truck, etc., I had not seen Adam since he nearly shot the principal and he was at the party I was attending that fateful night.

We started talking about stuff and I realized he was even more bummed out about something than he had been before. I went to chase him into the woods at that party after getting really drunk and that's when the trouble began.

Max, another mutual friend of mine and Adams was calling out to Adam from behind me. Max and I always fought, physically punching each other sometimes. That night he was slurring and screaming for Adam who just needed to be alone. I turned around and told Max not to worry about it and said some other choice words.

When I turned back around to look for Adam, that was when Max attacked me from behind. He punched me in the back of my skull and we went to the ground in a scuffle.

I was so drunk but I clearly remember going to my truck and reaching under the front seat for the iron bar that was used to take the lug nuts off the wheels of a flat tire. My intention was to hit Max square in the back of his skull with it, and the only reason I didn't was because my friend Mike saw what was happening and stopped it.

The next thing I remember was being beaten bloody with that same tire wrench by some bikers that were friends of Adams mom. It seemed I had fucked with the wrong kid at the wrong party that night. They threw me into my truck and poured liquor and beer all over me and sent me on my way.

I drove back to town, on my way to my eldest sisters house to get help. I didn't make it.

What happened next was, I ended up driving through and subsequently tearing up this mans yard and ruining his beautifully manicured lawn. Then, I tried to find my way out of his yard and eventually backed up into the steep ditch on the other side of the road, backwards and facing the wrong direction.

I got out, bloody and beaten to a pulp and flagged a car down. I made it to my sisters house in town against the advice of the passing motorist who rescued me, to go to the hospital and once I got there I passed out.

When I woke up, my mom was standing over me and she was yelling that I was in so much trouble and so on. She said the sheriff was looking for me and I thought to myself, "Jesus Christ, again?"

The police had found my truck and impounded it as well as phoning my mom and dad to tell them I was not with the vehicle and it looked like I had fled the scene. The cops were about to charge me with a DUI, criminal trespass and destruction of private property, leaving the scene of an accident, open bottle charges for all the empty alcohol containers, destruction of federal property for the mailbox and probably some other charges.

Because of the ass beating I had received at the party, biker style, the police let me off. They wanted me to go to the hospital but I told them I deserved what I got for being so irresponsible and so on. By telling them exactly what they wanted to hear, they took pity upon me that night.

The cop told me to make it right with the owner of the yard the next day.

I never went back to the guys place and resumed things back at home. My truck was damaged but not nearly as bad as my ego. The broken ribs and collarbone were healing, the bruises went away but the incident was still fresh in my mind when I got a phone call a few weeks later.

Apparently the guy had been waiting for me to call him about the landscaping charges he wanted reimbursed for and to pay for his mailbox. The guys voice was all gravelly and I couldn't understand what he was saying. I seriously thought it was one of my friends who had heard about it and was messing with me. I scolded him on the phone, told him it was real funny and hung up.

Again, the phone rings. It's that guy again, he is screaming in some sick guttural sounding attempt to get my attention on the phone. It worked because all the sudden I realized who this guy was, it was the man whose yard I had driven through.

We set up a time to meet and I drove to his house the next day.

I arrive at the guys house and start to see the damage I had done to his grass. Then a man rolls out the door in a wheelchair. He was scarred all over his shirtless torso, he had one eye and could barely talk.

"You have to fucking be shitting me!" I say to myself. I could not ever remember feeling more like an asshole than I did in that moment!

To really drive the knife of guilt in deeper, his wife comes outside carrying a small child who she informs me is their Grandchild and I woke the baby that night and so on and her husband is a war vet and by this point I want to fucking kill myself because I feel so damn bad about everything.

We settled on an amount of money that was going to wipe my savings account just about completely clean. I figured that it was a small price to pay considering the list of criminal charges I was facing if I didn't pay him.

I was still working for Ralphie and was thinking about how my older brother had made it out. I decided I was going to follow in brothers footsteps and join the Army Reserves. I figured I could handle one weekend of every month. So, I drove down to Cambridge and walked into an Army recruiting office in a small strip mall.

They saw me coming and one of the recruiters almost tripped over himself to greet me at the door. He spun tall tales of how exciting life in the military was and how it was a new army and blah blah fucking blah. It was lies, all of it. I got fooled, like so many others do into thinking that recruiter was my friend and wanted what was best for me.

He got me tested in, signed up and all that was left was to get my parents to sign the emancipation proclamation and on my 17th birthday I was going to be a legal adult in the military. I met some resistance with my folks but they had seen how it helped my brother and so they signed. I think Ralphie was sad to be losing his 45 hour per week slave.

### Part 8

The only other event worth noting that took place before I left for boot camp was a guy scaring me worse than any horror picture at the theater ever could, and a car accident I was involved in with my younger brother.

He was visiting a friend of his less than 2 miles away and I was working in Ralphie's shop one day with my mom when he called and asked if someone could pick him up.

Knowing I could use a break, because my mom is really awesome like that, she asked me if I wanted to run over to his friends house and pick him up. I was delighted to do so just for the chance to get out of the shop, even if it was only for less than half an hour.

Mom had asked me how much gas I had in my truck and I laughed because I never had gas in my tank. She told me I could take her car to go and retrieve little brother.

When I got to my brothers friends house, the kids moms boyfriend, Kevin, started asking me all kinds of questions about my impending military career. He was a real fucking jerkoff about it as well. He began telling me that if that drill sergeant told me I had to suck his dick then I would have to. He told me all kinds of stories but I was too horrified at the thought of having a penis in my mouth to really care about anything else he said.

I'm not going to sit here and sugar coat it for my book, friend. I am here to tell you that I was so homophobic that I felt like I was going to throw up. As that man talked I was beginning to feel more fear and anxiety in myself than I ever felt in my life before. He started telling me that it was a big military secret and how everyone knew about it and he kept going and made the story even more colorful as he could visibly see how bad it was bothering me.

He told me that because I was so young, I was basically fucked. After he was finished terrifying me and making me re-think every moment of the past few months, I was seriously considering making a call to my recruiter and telling him the deal was off and I was not going anywhere. I never made the call because frankly, t was too fuckin late, my parents had signed the paperwork and whether I liked it or not, I belonged to the government of the United States.

I ended up hating that fucking asshole, Kevin, and so did everyone else after a while. Go figure.

When I went to pull out of there, I spun the tires on the dirt road for a couple of different reasons. The biggest reason being that I was only 16 years old and that was how I drove sometimes, but the second reason was because I wanted to get away from Kevin really bad. I wasn't even sure if my brother should be hanging out over there with a guy like that hanging around, but that's about as far as I ever thought about it.

I had of been making a mental list of sorts, like a wannabe Santa Clause, keeping tabs on who was naughty and who was nice to me. My plan was to come back from basic training and deal with each and every one of them personally, and Kevin was going to the top of the list.

Little brother and I were driving down the dirt road towards my parents house when we came to a crossroads where there was too much vegetation growing up to see around the corner. I crept forward a bit more trying to see if anyone was coming, but it was a dirt road in the country so I was not too concerned about there being any other traffic.

I whipped the car around the corner and barely had time to scream like my brother did when we saw the Chevrolet pickup truck coming straight at us in the wrong lane.

Everything happened as you would expect in a head on collision. The car was completely totaled, my brother and I were hurt but not life threatening. I looked up at the guy who had hit us and realized it was the same guy who run my sisters favorite dog in the world over with the same truck just a couple years before.

I still think because of the state of mind that I was in right then, that some lady who arrived on the scene, a lady had I never met before, probably saved my life. It was not because she gave medical attention however, it was because she stopped me from doing something I was going to regret for the rest of my life.

The thing of it is, I wanted blood when I saw who had hit our vehicle.

It was almost as if bells were being rung in my skull every time I made a realization about the man standing before me. He had killed my sisters dog, he had tried to get my young friend and I to spend the night at his house with him one night when we were at a small bar., he was buying us games of pool and dinner and so on, then I found out later he was a child molester.

Yes I think it would be fair to say that there was quite a history between this guy and me. I wanted him dead and I had to do it before Ralphie saw what I had done to moms car because Ralphie was going to kill me and well, shit rolls downhill as they say.

He tried to run around his vehicle and get away from me. He threatened to call the sheriff and all that did was do more to enrage me than I was before. It was that stranger, a nice lady who was able to reason with me and convince me I was in shock and bleeding from the head. She told me I was possibly doing more damage to myself if I didn't sit down and wait for the ambulance. I ended up listening to her advice and never saw the man again after that. Probably a good thing, I strongly believe in my heart that if I had caught him my life would be a whole different right now than it turned out.

Things sort of began a downhill fall after that. Because I had full coverage insurance, my insurance company was trying to settle with me for a ridiculous amount of money. I believe their initial offer was 500 dollars and my medical bills paid. The car was worth 10 times that amount, so my dad got on the phone and dealt with all of that.

Silly me, I had somehow gotten the idea in my head that since he was responsible for the crack in my kneecap, that I was entitled to some compensation. Well that may have been true, but let's not forget that little Timmy had signed his life away to the Army and so there was going to be no court date, no settlement check or compensation. Nothing.

Because I was so afraid that the military would not let me in, I decided to drop any possibility of a lawsuit and just focus on my new career. I didn't want the Army to know I had a busted knee 45 days or so before I was supposed to ship out to basic training because they may have denied me entry.

In the end, I got a broken knee, a busted open head, and little brother got a couple fat lips. There was no compensation checks, no physical therapy or medical follow up. They cut my dad a check for the car and as far as that asshole that hit us, I never did see him again. Probably divine intervention when you think about it.

### Part 9

My recruiter was pulling into our driveway to pick me up right on time. I had been standing at the big picture window looking out at the road when I saw him pull into the driveway. This was going to be mt second trip to the "MEPPS" center. A place where they process all kinds of military personnel from every branch of armed services.

I went down into the dining area of the hotel to eat dinner and that was when I met some other guys who were shipping out too. They were all going into a different branch so when the Army was represented we pretty had them all covered from Marines to Air Force.

They found out it was my 17th birthday and they insisted on taking me out to a strip club. I payed my hotel roommate approximately 20 bucks for use of his papers so I could get into the bar. He was not going out so he didn't need them, I just needed to make absolutely sure I still had them when I returned.

We got into a skanky little strip club and started getting wasted. It was a little easier back then, because the drinking age was only 19 so even though I looked all of 17 the server didn't argue with military papers saying I was older.

That's about all I remember of that. Somehow we made it back to the hotel and kept on partying. When I got up the next morning, I was nearly broke and my head hurt worse than anything. I was sure I was still drunk when I went down and tried like hell to eat breakfast.

The buzz around the table that I had chosen to sit down to that morning, was about the crazy fucks that had been partying the night before and had somehow caught the canopy over the entrance to the hotel on fire, but I don't remember that. Sure enough, when I went out to the front of the hotel to look, I noticed that the canopy indeed had a huge burn hole in the center of it.

When they finished with all the medical stuff, vaccines, physical, blood work and so on, I finally boarded a plane en route to Columbus, Georgia. It was my first time flying on a plane, I pretty scared, but I was in the Army now and I had to be a tough guy now, even though I had only been 17 for one day.

### Part 10

After flying into Atlanta and eventually getting to Columbus, I ended that part of my journey by taking a bus to military receiving facility for new recruits. That place was nice, it had shiny new floors and all around nice facilities to use for eating, showering, sleeping etc.

We didn't do hardly anything for the first 3 days and the food was so good I was never going to leave the Army if that's how things were. I was so stupid, I fell for the whole mind game trap, hook line and sinker.

Exactly 36 hours after we had gotten to the temporary receiving facility, I was just lying on my bunk and thinking how easy basic training was and wondering what everyone had been talking about when they said it was so hard.

Right about then the doors to our barracks flew open and some drill instructors we had never seen before burst in and began screaming so hard I thought the building was on fire. It actually took most of us a minute or more to fully absorb what was happening.

"Get your lazy asses out, now!" They screamed.

It was all beginning to slow down and their voices were becoming distorted as men grabbed their things and scrambled out of the barracks. I was not sure what exactly was happening so I just grabbed my gear and followed some other guys who ran out the front door and got into formation.

We had been taught how to line up and briefly did some marching, but for the most part we didn't know what to do or where to go and that made the instructors furious.

They were going from man to man and screaming so loud in our ears, that their spittle was flying from their beet red faces and hitting some of us more unfortunate souls. I'm telling you, I had never seen human beings act like this. I had seen Ralphie furious with me and sometimes even my mom, hell, I had pissed off my siblings pretty bad before also, but I am telling you that nothing in the world compares to a bunch of angry drill instructors who just graduated a thirteen week course of recruits, only to have to begin anew with our stupid asses!

I was not sure if it was a joke or the real thing because everyone at the receiving center was so mice, even the instructors there. It's all part of the training process. The depending on the branch and your military occupational status, or M.O.S as it is commonly referred to as, the military will break you. Yo can be a tough guy bad ass all day long, but they will find your weakness, it's a fact that has been recognized for centuries. But when they put you back together, you likely won't get broken again.

They packed us into cattle truck trailers. That is how we were going to be carted around for the next 13 weeks of our lives. If you were claustrophobic, too fucking bad for you because the way they packed us in those trucks was tighter than a bunch of sardines all lined up head to tail in a rectangular can with mustard sauce.

I started to panic, I was a bit fearful of tight places where I was unable to move as it was. To make things so much worse for us, the civilian drivers of these truck and trailer combinations were either the craziest bastards on the road, or they were simply instructed by the drill Sergeants to scare the life out of us when they drove us to and from some of the different training areas, or ranges as they were called.

The thing that scared me the most was that some of the drivers were so wild that I was immediately convinced that we were going to tip over and subsequently crash in those truck trailers and get trapped inside and then I would surely lose my mind. Of all the things I ever feared in my life or my military training, those cattle trucks were the most frightening thing I ever had to get over. Oddly enough, after all I had been through and would go through in the next 13 weeks, those transport trucks were what almost ended up being the end of me.

We finally stopped moving and I did not even have time to think before the doors burst open on the trailers and we were herded out like cattle by dozens more instructors. They were all screaming and acting so crazy that I just got into a line of people that seemed to be just standing there and when I realized they were not being screamed at I sort of slipped into line and stood still.

Welcome to Bravo company!

### Part 11

Things went from a nightmare to the point of my brain simply trying to shut down from the shock of it all. We were marched to our respective company barracks and that is when things went into hell mode.

"Listen up you fucking pieces of shit, take everything out of your duffel and dump it on the ground!"

We did as we were told. Then, the instructors went crazy again. They started screaming at us saying we were all in trouble because we had dumped all of our gear on the ground. Then one of the D.I.'s or drill instructor as they insisted on being referred to as, went to the front of our formation and said;

"I want the oldest, youngest, tallest, shortest, fattest and skinniest of you fucking maggots to come up front right now!" I fit at least two of those criteria, shortest and definitely youngest, so I made my way to the front where the others were waiting. Once we were on display in front of the rest of the platoon, the D.I said;.

"Take a good look at these assholes because they're fucked!

That was how things went from that day on.

It was a bad first night in the barracks. I was not prejudice and still to this day, I still never have been. The thing of it was, I had never seen people from other races and cultures before I joined the military because I lived in a very small town. Most of the guys that were in training with me were African American or some other race or nationality it seemed and I was not sure how to act around them.

If that sounds ridiculous to you friend, then you probably grew up in a racially diverse setting. I was naive to say the least, I had barely lost my virginity before arriving for basic, I didn't know that people of color were no different than me, save for their beliefs and traditions. That fact alone, most likely saved my life or at the very least, saved me from an almost guaranteed beat down.

My bunk mate was a white guy named John. His last name was almost the same as mine, so we shared bunk beds by default. He was a cool guy and just as I was starting to get to know him, he was tragically injured. Right afterward, he was gone from our barracks completely.

It was the only the second Sunday since basic had started. We were just starting to settle into a routine and for most of us, the idea of just saying fuck it and crying ourselves to sleep was finally beginning to wane.

Everyone has a job to do, sometimes more than one. Mine, along with my now friend and bunk mate John, was to mop and wax, then buff the old green floors in the barracks. We lived upstairs, so that was our floor, along with the steps that went up

John and I were getting really good at it by the second week. I guess we were naturals or something, because we really impressed one of the instructors with our work every day, but it didn't seem that difficult for us. We worked well as a team.

All these years later, as I can recall almost anything with my extraordinary memory, I get frustrated because I can't remember why we thought that waxing the steps was a good idea. I want to say that it was because they looked really bad and we were trying to impress the instructors, but at the same time I don't know what we were thinking. No other person in the barracks that day had said anything about it being a not so good idea.

John had opted to attend church services that the Army provided elsewhere. I don't think it was the fear of riding in the cattle trucks that kept me from attending though. For the rest of us less spiritual souls, Sundays were a few hours of break from the constant screaming and mind fucking that the instructors are famous for.

I was standing right outside the front door of our World War 1 training barracks. These buildings were old and had been around for a few years and a few wars too. They were not like the new and clean facility that we spent the first 3 days in, these were old and just unappealing so whenever we were allowed outside, most of us didn't hesitate to go.

We could stand out front, but there was a small square area that we had to remain in. I was just standing around when I heard someone say the truck for church had pulled up. I yelled for John and he came running from the 2nd floor of the top level of the barracks.

I watched in sheer horror and disbelief as John hit the freshly waxed steps and I swear I saw his foot actually slip in slow motion. I was watching a nightmare unfold before me, but I was awake, not dreaming. John was a big boy, over 6 feet tall and he was not a skinny little guy either. When he fell and began unnaturally tumbling down the steps in front of me, it sounded like a bunch of bulls had escaped and were stampeding through the barracks.

Everything was dead silent for a couple of seconds before John, laying at the bottom of the steps, began to scream like something was killing him. When I was finally able to move, I looked down and saw my friends neck, it was broken and his head was twisted around in an impossible position.

That was it, he was taken away by ambulance and we were told to carry on as if nothing had ever happened. But it did happen, because I saw the whole thing and to this day and up to and including the day I go to my grave, I will feel like I own half of that tragedy. After all, it was partially my handiwork on those steps too.

I can't help but wonder what the fuck we were thinking putting wax on those steps, but you see friend, in the Army you don't ask questions. You just do as you're told without questioning authority.

After John left, I had no bunk mate anymore. I was already the shortest and youngest of hundreds of men, but now my bed stuck out on the barracks floor like a big red thumb also, because it had an unmade top

.

At less than 5 feet, 4 inches tall and weighing in at a whopping 140 pounds, I was always made to do everything first. My company Squad leaders and D.I.'s motto was, if the little baby could do it then any of those grown men could do it too. They called me the baby because as you can see on the cover of this book that displays my actual Army photo on it, I looked even younger than I was.

It would be rather nice to be able to honestly say that things got better or that I got used to being in the spotlight and ultimately, I ended up making the best of it, but that's just not true. Okay, it might be a little bit true.

### Part 12

There were a total of three instructors per company platoon. I was in Bravo Company, the 2nd of five total company platoons that were in our Brigade.

In my experience, there was one full blown psychopath for every set of three drill instructors in our Brigade. I will refer to ours as Sergeant Psycho because the man acted as if he didn't have a stable brain cell working in his skull anymore.

There was something else about him, the man hated me more than any single human being hated another. I know this as fact because I looked into the mans eyes and saw the hatred in him so deeply rooted that I knew it went far beyond me. I reminded him of someone he hated, but when he realized I was too young to have graduated high school he asked me if I had quit. I told him I had been expelled and that's when he began choking me.

I stood my ground, they were not supposed to hit us or abuse us in any way so I thought it would last a few seconds before he would either let go or the other instructor told him to. That's not what happened at all.

Sergeant Psycho choked me until I just about blacked out and then he finally let go. I tried so hard to stay standing, oh I wanted to show him how fucking bad ass I was becoming. I couldn't do it though, he had choked me so long my knees buckled and I lay on the ground gasping for air.

He was telling the other guys that if they said a word to anyone about it, and he got his instructor status taken away that the other instructors would make it hell on all of them in his absence.

It was a lesson in trust. He was convinced we were going to war and he wanted to make sure he could trust any of us in a combat situation. Sergeant Psycho was always talking about the 1988 Olympic games and saying that was when we were going to war. He appeared on all levels to believe everything he was saying.

I was not a religious kid. I had been to church before but never really had a path. I am here to tell you, I prayed to God every night to either kill me, him, or make something happen that would take that man out of my life.

He was always finding things wrong with everything I did. To be quite honest, I didn't have a lot of facial hair when I went to basic training. I tried to go one day without shaving, I don't know why I did it, I just did. That, as it turned out, was one giant mistake.

Every day until he was busted down to supply sergeant, that crazy ass instructor made me shave with no water or shave cream in a small mirror standing in front of our platoon of 50 men.

That was bad enough, but it got worse every day because he made me use the same razor and when it got dull it just ripped the hair out of my face. I never cried, but I wanted to. It hurt so bad.

I actually thought I was going to change the Army when I got there, make a difference and all that. The motto for the Army back then was: "Be all you can be."

With a psychopath that hates you in your face every day those thoughts of wanting to "be all I could be," turned into thoughts of "when we get live ammunition finally, I am going to shoot this motherfucker right in the face!"

I am not going to lie, I thought about it nights as I lie awake fighting off those fucking tears. I would have little imaginative visions of watching him gasp for air after I shot him with my M-16 rifle. I fought those tears off night after night because of that psycho.

Sometimes I would go down into the bathroom and splash water on my face because I was determined not to cry, that would just surly add to my never ending misery if someone saw me crying.

As mentioned earlier, that drill instructor was busted down for something he did that was unrelated to me. It was like my prayers had been answered. Sort of.

This was the Army, friend. They stick together and he had a pal, another psycho we will call drill sergeant happy just for fun. Well he told happy about me and that he had gotten stripped of his instructor hat and status. As you might imagine happy was not too kind. The only bright light at the end of this tunnel was that happy was the D.I. For the company next to me, but not mine.

His torture was limited somewhat, because he couldn't always be around, but his presence was always known. Once you get marked, like I was, you were marked for the entire duration of basic training.

Our food was prepared by civilian cooks. They were some of the nicest ladies in the world and I had a crush on one of them. She was a beautiful African American woman and she was taller than I was and quite a bit bigger too.

She was always calling me baby, but not like the D.I.'s and some of the other guys called me baby. When she said it with her southern, Georgia accent, I swear, it was like just for a second, it was all gone and it was just her and I. Then of course I would snap right the hell back into reality because of the boot lottery.

"The Boot Lottery" was a term that myself and a couple guys I had made friends with had come up with.

The way chow and the boot lottery worked was, we would have to go through a small obstacle course, three times a day every day before you could go into the building and get your food. When you had a tray of whatever food you chose, you took it into the small dining area.

As you sat down to eat, instructors were walking around kicking peoples chair and saying "you're done," at which point you had better get up and dump your tray and run out the door. They were feeding hundreds of guys in this little building so we had to eat as fast as possible. It was sickening how much food got wasted.

If you pissed someone off with any kind of authority, you were going to go hungry for a few days. Otherwise it was just random selection, sometimes you would sit and get to eat everything and other times you sat down and got right back up and ran out because you got the boot.

I got to the point of being able to shove an entire pork chop or small steak in my mouth and run out the door, eating it as I ran, somehow not choking. Like I said, when you're marked it's bad for you.

### Part 13

My first break came when some new guys arrived about 2 weeks late. I am telling you what, we were upstairs of our barracks and we were watching the new guys get brutally tortured. All the instructors were outside and busy, so we were able to talk freely amongst ourselves for the first time since we had arrived.

There was a tall African American guy in the group of 5 guys, I would soon find out his name was, Barry. When the drill instructors said, "beat your faces!", meaning they needed to start doing push ups, Barry starting punching his face but not hard. They all had the same scared look on their faces that we had when we had first arrived.

I think it was like a mental stress release or something, but when I saw Barry punching himself in the face like that, I laughed so hard I was almost choking like sergeant psycho was squeezing my throat again!

Days later I felt really guilty, but at the time those guys were going through their induction process, I was laughing my ass off and loving every minute of it. I wasn't the only one either.

That's when someone in their 20's suddenly blurted out that he wanted to quit basic training the first few days. It was like someone had opened the floodgates of truth. One by one, guys that were older, bigger and tougher than me started to confess that they were afraid and some admitted they had cried secretly or had wanted to.

I don't know if you can imagine the impact that moment had on me, but it was completely life altering. I was amongst my equals finally.

Then someone shouted, "how do you think Tober felt, he's the company baby!"

My mind was spinning with a perfect mixture of excitement, joy, relief and a wave of other emotions. I finally had earned some respect from the older men I shared the upper floor of the barracks with and I got addicted to it straight away. My personal agenda was about to change dramatically because of the way those guys suddenly began treating me from then on.

We went back to watching the routine which was coming to an end. There was a buzz in the air about who was going to fill my empty bunk. Imagine how shitty I felt when it ended up being Barry, that was my new bunk mate.

He was a super cool guy, he helped me make up my bedding better and tighter, because I was marked, so the D.I.'s would always make me do everything twice, even if I did it right the first time. Since Barry could somehow make the blanket so tight you could bounce coins off of it, the D.I.'s finally stopped tossing my bed mattress on the floor every day as they did inspection.

They wanted me to quit on a "psychiatric medical discharge," meaning that the drill instructors thought I was too young to be there and wanted me gone, end of story. Since you can't just quit basic training, you have to have a legitimate medical or criminal reason, like a mental breakdown, in order to get discharged.

I was in too fucking deep by that point. Let me tell you, two weeks seems like a short amount of time to me now, but that amount of time in a place like that felt like six months! Besides, I was not going to return back to my home town a disgrace. I was determined that they were not going to break my mind.

Helping me make my bedding wasn't the only thing Barry did for me, he was one of the greatest influences on my young impressionable mind at that time. In a perfect world, I would have kept in touch with that man and I would have taken the opportunity to tell him that he made me a better person, just for knowing him.

He taught me a little bit about his culture and told me his father had been killed by a member of the Ku Klux Klan, a well known white supremest group. I was intrigued by him because he was so forgiving and had no hate in his heart that was visible to those of us who were around him a great deal of the time.

Once him and I had gotten better acquainted, I told Barry about watching him on the first day and laughing at him until I had tears in my eyes, because of the way he was punching himself in the face, and he laughed too. He never harbored an ounce of resentment toward me about it and because of that and so many other experiences I had with African American men and women, I was totally confused about all the racial slurs I had heard growing up in small town U.S.A.

To be honest, no African American man or woman ever called me a pussy bitch, told me to quit and go home, or said any other rude thing to me during those first couple of weeks of pure hell or for the thirteen weeks after. The instructors weren't even overly crazy toward me. I can't say the same for some white people.

"I'm just saying..."

### Part 14

We ran for several miles every morning before chow. The Senior Drill Instructor for our Battalion, was an ex paratrooper and for some reason he was addicted to running. I believe he was running marathons in his off time or something. At any rate, we ran more than any other Battalion in our Brigade.

I hated running because I was a smoker, well former smoker when I arrived at boot camp, because the thing of it was, we were not allowed to have cigarettes. In fact we were not allowed to have; soda, beer, magazines, candy bars and pretty much anything else you can think of.

This one particular morning, was not like all the others, because I was getting less and less winded during every grueling morning run. I happened to look over to my right, (versus towards the ground gasping for air) and noticed a small little building. My heart raced when I saw the sign that said Mini P.X.

P.X. is short for Post Exchange which is basically a little Army store that has razors and shave cream, cigarettes, beer, candy bars, magazines and soda, things like that. The Mini P.X.'s were in different locations on base and we had been running right by them the entire time.

We were not allowed to visit the P.X. Or any of the mini's. When I saw how close this one particular one was in proximity to my barracks I began to plot either the dumbest and most insane, or, the most brilliant plan in the world, in an effort to get some of the guys off my back and earn their respect one way or another.

I decided I was going to pay the guys that were on fire watch not to say anything when they saw me leave. Fire watch was a duty everyone took turns pulling, where you simply walked around the floor and looked for fire, enemies or anything else. Everyone has everyone's back, so to speak.

The instructors went home to their families at night, save for one who had to pull overnight duty in the drill instructors main office located central of several barracks buildings.

My plan was to sneak out in the middle of the night, run over to the 24 hour P.X., buy as much stuff as I could carry and go back to the barracks without getting caught by Military Police or worse one of the psychopathic instructors.

The first time I went to the P.X., and made it back without getting busted, it was like having a syringe full of adrenaline injected directly into my jugular vein. Of this as well, I was now addicted. It was like a drug, the thrill and fear of getting caught every time I went was what drove me to go more and more. Well that and the money I was making.

Several of us took up smoking at night when everyone was asleep. I would go into the shower room and run the hot water at first, because not that many guys were behind it. Soon, a bunch of us were sitting by the open window of my bed and blowing our smoke out.

I am not exaggerating the numbers when I tell you that I paid 1 dollar for a pack of 20 cigarettes and I could sell each of those single cigarettes for one dollar each. My profit margins on candy bars was double and so on. I was buying beer for a dollar a can and selling it for 5 at first, but I was always worried about getting checked for I.D., and having them see I was not 19 so I stopped selling beer.

In order to smoke in the barracks or eat candy bars there were rules. I insisted all wrappers were flushed down the toilet and so on, so as to not ruin it for everyone and my roommates upstairs did exactly that because I had them all bought out for cigarettes or something else. My biggest problem was stashing all that stuff without the D.I.'s or someone else discovering it.

Every man has a weakness, you just have to find it. If he has a family at home and he sends all of his military checks home to them, you can offer him money to keep quiet about the unauthorized smoking and contraband.

If he was a heavy set fellow, chances are a handful of candy bars keeps him quiet for a while. Dirty magazines for the horny guy and so on. I never met a man on fire watch I couldn't buy off to keep quiet.

Those guys thought I had a lot of guts to pull that stunt off as many times as I did. To be honest, I was only ever able to get a few guys to go with me one time each and they said they could never do it again. The reason being is that the consequences were severe for breaking rules, especially something involving sneaking through the woods. I never ever once considered that an M.P., probably would have shot me on site if he saw me creeping through the woods.

One of the items they would let us have was a camera. I didn't own one personally, because it was easier to trade a smoke or two for the use of someone else camera with a roll of whatever kind of film it required, thrown in. I was taking all kinds of pictures, especially of the contraband that I was smuggling. By the time I had developed more than a dozen rolls of film, I had 35 millimeter rolls, the 110 cartridges and the Kodak disks that were popular for a short time with some folks.

There was this one day when the instructors were in a big meeting or something, because they weren't there and were not supposed to return for a while. I called in some debts from couple guys who owed me for cigs or candy and asked one of them to watch the door and the other to take a picture of me wearing one of the drill instructors hats and sitting at the desk in their office. Just to be even more brave, or stupid, I had him snap photos of me with my feet up on the instructors desk like I owned it.

Sometimes fear paralyzes people and they do nothing, other times it is the driving force behind our actions as was the case for me. The more risk, the more fun it became.

### Part 15

There was this one guy named Lopez, he was a private just like me who didn't want anyone having any fun. He was a real dedicated type of fella who took basic training just a bit too seriously. I don't know if he was dealing with missing his family, if he was just an asshole naturally or if I just said the wrong thing on the wrong day, but one day I pissed Lopez off really bad.

We were several weeks in at this point, and squad leaders had been assigned and fired one by one. I believe it was all part of the process. Anyway, Lopez lived downstairs so I didn't see him as often as some of the other guys, which simply meant I didn't know his as well as some of the other guys.

One day we were all outside and the instructor left and told Lopez he was temporarily in charge. They did that all the time and always left someone in charge. This particular day, Lopez for reasons I can't define, decides we should be doing some jumping jacks and some other physical activity while we waited for the instructor to return.

Let me tell you, we were all pretty sick of the constant physical conditioning we had to endure so whenever we had five fucking minutes to enjoy, we wanted to enjoy them. Not Lopez though, he wanted to be some kind of kiss ass or hero or whatever. I made a comment about it and the next thing I knew he was screaming for everyone to make a circle around us.

He started screaming in my face and I looked around and everyone was circled around us just waiting in angst to see what was going to happen next. Lopez shoved me a couple times but the guy would have killed me if I tried to fight him. He was bigger, in better shape and older than I, not to mention he looked like he was fully capable of handling himself in a fight. I just didn't want to fight him, for one specific reason, the stockade.

I was terrified of going to military prison. In fact, I was terrified to go into any prison and fighting among ourselves was a sure fire way to get a few days in a place you didn't want to be. I told him we were on the same side and when he looked at me with squinted eyes and said he would not have my back in a combat situation, he lost a lot of respect from the other guys. His little tantrum blew up in his face because at the end of the day, all differences aside, we had to have each others backs no matter what.

Just a few days after that happened, I was upstairs by my bed and was smoking a cigarette when someone came up behind me and scared me so bad I nearly jumped out the Goddamn window! I turned around to see who it was and my damn heart stopped beating for more than a second, I know it did!

Standing behind me with a look of indifference on his face was Lopez. He knelt down beside me and asked if he could have a cigarette. I figured it was a setup and that I was already busted, so I obliged him and he shocked me by lighting it up and taking one puff after another off of it.

We sat in silence, just puffing and blowing the smoke out the window. The light from the streetlamp outside my window, illuminated enough of his face, that I could see tears streaming down his cheeks.

I have to admit, I was a lot confused. Just the other day he was all mister Army man, unstoppable and wanting to beat my ass for having a smart mouth, the next he was breaking the rules and crying.

Eventually he began to tell me a horrible story. The story was about his wife leaving him for another man while Lopez was in basic training. To make things even worse, she left him for his best friend. It was the first of many times in my life that I would not be all too sad that I didn't have a girlfriend.

When someone got one of those letters, it was called a Jody Letter. The nickname was originated from the idea being that any man who takes your stuff or your girl while you are in boot camp is called a Jody. There were plenty of Jody Letters in boot camp and I imagine there will be for the rest of time.

Any other letter a recruit received from home was worth a thousand times it's weight in gold. Basic training in a completely different state than the one you had come from was a lonely scary place sometimes. It was amazing what a little shred of contact from the otherwise isolated outside world could do, good and bad.

Letters weren't the only things that people sent. Once in a while someones family would try and send them a care package and maybe, just maybe depending on who was in charge that particular day, meant we might get a taste.

This one guy in particular, Jimmy Moore was his name, he was a pretty heavy set guy who was always bouncing around and getting everyone in trouble, not to mention he chewed tobacco which was not smart. He was always getting stuff sent from home and the instructors began getting really angry when they told him to tell them to cease and the stuff just kept coming.

There was this one time in particular, they fucked with that fat sonofabitch really bad. Jim's parents kept sending him boxes of candy bars, these one particular kind, called spud bars. I don't know if you have ever had one but in my humble opinion they taste disgusting but to each their own. Well Jimmy Moore loved those spud bars so much, he actually was going to go into the office at night and see if he could find where they were stashed.

We would not let him of course, because every time that fat ass got into trouble, it was us who had to pay the price, not Jimmy. We eventually had to threaten the man with a blanket party if he didn't give up the quest for those stupid nasty spud bars. I was selling him chewing tobacco and some other candy bars, but he was obsessed and only wanted that one particular kind of candy.

A blanket party, is when your fellow trainees throw a blanket over your body while you're sleeping and punch and kick the hell out of you. Usually administered to someone who is getting everyone in trouble by their actions alone.

When the second box of 36 spud bars arrived in the mail for Jimmy, the instructor started yelling at him again about his family sending that stuff, so the instructor made us all take one. Everyone got a spud bar but Jimmy. I simply stashed mine away without anyone seeing me do it, and then gave it to Jimmy later that night. He wept.

It sounds like nonsense perhaps to some, but the truth was, any little piece of home that you could capture there, was totally life changing when you did.

### Part 16

I think the funnest and best part of all my training were the things that rolled and the things that went boom. I loved the tanks and the weapons were every young mans dream come true. We just never got to fire as many as we wanted.

Whenever we trained there was a different course set up in the Georgia woods somewhere that was designed and built for that specific training module. Gun range, grenade range, and so on.

Two of the worst experiences I ever had happened one night and into the next morning. We doing night recon, walking through some dark wooded areas when a flare popped off high in the sky. It was a night flare for lighting up the dark sky temporarily. Once you popped one of the extremely bright flares off into the night sky, you would have a clear view of the surroundings.

We were instructed to hit the ground immediately when one of those flares were fired. That night I did exactly that, just dropping to the ground instantly. A very small twig that was sticking up, jammed itself into my eyeball and my head exploded with pain.

I could not say anything because we were being stalked in a combat training module, so I laid there and tried not to scream in pain.

The next morning, one of my friends looked at me and said; "holy shit Tober, you need to go to sick call.

When you got sick, or were injured severely enough to require medical attention, you had to go on what's referred to as sick call. If you went, you had better have something wrong with you or you were going to do so much extra physical training that you would be sick when they were done with you. Worse yet, if you went, you were sure to get heckled by the other guys.

I didn't want to go to sick call and I was not going to. My friend said my eyeball was bloody and that I didn't have a choice but to go. I was trying to hold out and be tough, but my friends better judgment won over and when he told the drill instructor, I was told to show him my eyeball and he immediately insisted that I go to sick call. Having the instructor tell you that you have to go is better than going on your own.

When I got to sick call they put a purple liquid in my eye and ran some kind of tests. Afterward the doctor told me I was going to be fine, it was a scratch on my eyeball that was not going to affect my vision. He told me I was lucky and for reasons only I could understand I started laughing, because lately I had been feeling anything but lucky.

To tell you the truth, I was shocked at how many guys were reporting to sick call the morning that I had gone. Some of those guys had legitimate reasons for going, but I suspected there were some guys that just wanted to get out of training and that was the only reason they were there.

When everyone was finished we were all loaded into the back of a military transport truck, different from the cattle trucks we were accustomed to being hauled around in. I was excited about that and so I started passing out cigarettes to the guys. Most of them were from a different company platoon than mine and had not even thought about doing a midnight smoke run. I made some new friends real quick.

In case I was not very clear about this before, I was totally addicted to the attention and adrenaline rush that was a direct result of my clandestine smuggling operation. Sentences like: "Tober, you are a crazy mother fucker," never got old whenever I heard them, no matter how many times those guys said it.

We arrived at the training range for that day unaware of any of the events that had taken place in our absence. I was just sitting up in the bleachers listening to a sergeant talk about biological warfare and the different chemicals that one might encounter in a combat situation.

I heard a loud popping noise, followed by a loud hissing sound. The noise reminded me a little bit of a car tire that I leaking air. Then there were more of the popping sounds and more hissing. I looked left, then right. I looked straight ahead and everywhere around me, guys were putting on gas masks.

The guys at the range that gotten there that morning must have had their masks down by their feet or I simply didn't notice them, either way I didn't get issued a mask when I arrived at C.S. Riot Gas training that morning!

I still had no idea what was happening. I saw lots of guys putting something on their faces and I thought to myself, "is that a fucking gas mask that guy has on his face?"

Nothing was happening to me yet. Elsewhere behind me and down on the ground I heard guys screaming from where I was sitting in the far back row of the aluminum outdoor bleachers.

Panic starts to knock on my door, I still don't fully comprehend what is happening in that moment until the very first bit of riot gas reaches me. Within seconds my eyes are burning like someone threw broken glass in them. My nose started to run in a way that was so unnatural the fear of dying took over all other emotions and thought processes.

My mouth began to drool saliva like a baby and I was unable to breathe.

"Oh God, they don't realize I never got a mask, they are going to kill me!" I thought to myself.

Every part of me said run. I jumped off the bleachers to the ground and rolled around in the red Georgia clay, writhing in pain, vomiting and crying. I had lost my M-16 at this point, one of the biggest mistakes you can ever make as a new recruit or seasoned veteran. Lucky for me, someone was watching my back and found and retrieved my rifle before the instructor did.

Finally I am able to get to my hands and knees and begin crawling. The place is complete chaos, there is a fog of gas everywhere and instructors were literally running around with these gas sticks, that had canisters of tear gas on the end and they can wave one in your face and chase you around with it.

It was really hard to hear what the instructors were saying through their masks at first because I still didn't have a clue as to what was happening to me. I was sure that I had inhaled too much of the toxic fog and that without a doubt I was near death. It was so hard to breathe and unnatural amounts of saliva, tears and snot were running out of my face all at once.

They chased me with those tear gas sticks and finally let up when the instructor that had told me to report to sick call that morning realized I had just gotten to the range and had no mask. For just a second, I think that instructor actually felt sorry for me because my eyeball was still blood red from getting scratched and I was now suffering from a riot gas overdose.

I think it's safe to say that the level of respect toward me and the other guys who didn't have a mask that morning was bumped up a notch. We all had to go through the gas chamber at the end of the day without our masks on, but it was honestly not even half as bad, because the gas they used in the sticks outdoors was way stronger. I know because they told us it was.

### Part 17

I was making too much money. I was actually getting a paycheck, but making a lot of money on the side. I was sending all that money home to my mom who was depositing in the bank just like she had done for her other son, my older brother who had just recently completed basic training in the same exact place I was, Fort Benning.

My mom became suspicious. Then Ralphie got wind of the extra funds and he went into Ralphie mode and immediately accused me of stealing weapons and selling them or something. I told them about my operation and said that I had quit now. They lectured me and my parents were also disappointed I think.

I didn't quit though. I just started saving cash, exactly the opposite of what we were told by the drill instructors to do. It got harder and harder to hide all that cash and honestly I left a few hundred dollars worth of my smallest bills stashed somewhere in the barracks for the next guy to find.

When I got caught with almost a thousand dollars and the instructors asked me about it, I told them that my parents were spending my money out of my account from the money that I was sending home, so I was saving my checks.

The instructors took pity on me and subsequently held my money in an envelope in the office safe until I graduated, then they simply gave it back without saying a word. The next month which is when we got paid, I cashed the check at the little table and then added some of that money to the envelope. We were allowed to carry some cash.

"I'm sorry Mom and Dad, you never stole anything, especially from me. I just needed to cover my ass!"

### Part 18

.Things are moving along pretty smoothly for me now. There is one guy who begins to wet his bed at night because he wants out of the Army so bad. I begin to feel better because of him, even stronger somehow.

One day, that same guy eats a mushroom that he finds on the ground, in the woods of Georgia. I was not really all that shocked when he got poisoned from it and was in sick call for days.

He never got out of boot camp and one of the guys started calling him Klinger, after the character on the television show MASH who was always trying to get out of the Army on a section 8.

One day at chow, this African American instructor who is a foot and a half taller than me, sees me in the chow hall. I don't believe he had ever seen me before because he was in Echo Company, which was quite a ways away, but had transferred to Alpha Company right next to my barracks that day.

Drill Sergeant McConnell was very intimidating if he wanted to be, but when he looked at me that first time, he was struck by my youth. He also said I reminded him of the little boy on an old television show called Gentle Ben. He said I looked just like that kid and he started calling me Ben every day after that.

One night, he was on overnight office duty and he was walking down the sidewalk and tripped. Some of us were standing around talking and some dumb ass laughed out loud. Drill sergeant McConnell was absolutely furious. He made everyone do pushups but me. I was scared man, because you don't want that kind of favoritism.

He asked me if he should let the guys up and I said yes. When he left, some of those guys started saying some nasty things to me about that instructor and how he was babying me and so on. I was paranoid that I was going to get a blanket party so I went to talk to the instructor the next day.

I told drill sergeant McConnell that the guys thought I was an "instructors pet" and that I feared retribution. He told me not to worry and a few days later, he staged a scene that made it look like he was flipping out on me. Only he and I knew the truth. As he was getting in my face down on the ground where he had me doing pushups, he winked at me to let me know he understood my plight. It worked and I didn't get a beating in my sleep.

### Part 19

We did a community service day. That meant that we were split up into smaller groups and sent off to various places in the local community to work for the local businesses one day, at no cost to the prospective employer.

In a bizarre twist, on that particular day, I would be the one buying the cigarettes, not selling them. I wouldn't be obtaining them from the Mini P.X., either, rather from an odd and unlikely source. They were cheaper than mine also, at 3 cigarettes for a dollar, I really thought I was getting a bargain!

Some of the guys were sent off to super easy jobs and came back bragging at the end of the day. Others were sent to the fast food places in town to flip burgers. There was a variety of jobs and we didn't have the luxury of choosing where we wanted to go. If you were really unlucky that day, then you had to walk along the road or in the parks and pick up trash, all day!

Me? Well me and some of my buddies fell somewhere in between. There was a military museum in the community, off base, that we were taken to that was closed for the winter season.

It was the first place outside of boot camp that I would become afraid for my life.

Things started out a little awkwardly for everyone. The men that were in charge of us were soldiers also, but they appeared to be some sort of maintenance men for the museum. They were ranked higher than us by several stripes and one of the men had a combat patch as well.

It didn't make sense that these men were stationed in an old museum. It was almost as if they were put there as a punishment for something they had done elsewhere.

They were not prepared for us and didn't really know what to have us do for work, so we rearranged a few displays as instructed then the two men who had been talking amongst themselves suddenly told us to follow them.

It was a huge military museum, and one I would like to visit again now that I am older and could appreciate it, but back then, the museum itself was not really that interesting to me. What interested me the most were the areas of the museum that were off limits to everyone, including the two guys in charge of us for the day.

We followed the men down into the basement of the huge museum. There was so much property down there that it would take hours to find your way through the maze of military equipment and statues and son on. So much in fact that if you weren't familiar with the area and got lost down in that basement maze of crates and boxes and other things, you could potentially be lost for hours, maybe even days.

The two men took us into a room somewhere in the maze that was furnished with some modern chairs arranged in a semi circle around a medium sized round wooden table. On the table was an ashtray with cigarette butts in it, a local newspaper and some unknown magazine. It looked like the men had created a makeshift break room area in that basement room, where they smoked cigarettes and read.

As he took a pack of Marlboro cigarettes out of his pocket, the man with the combat patch asked us if we smoked.

One of the guys in our group must have assumed it was a trap because he immediately said, "no, we aren't allowed to smoke in boot camp."

We all just sort of looked at each other, then the combat vet broke the silence.

"Oh bullshit, you ain't on base here son!' The man said as he held out the pack, offering us a cigarette.

I wasn't afraid of much, but not because I was brave, I was just young and not very wise. I stepped forward and took the cigarette and lit it up. Two of the guys that were with me also took a cigarette.

Then, as if we were stuck in some surreal parallel universe making a bad movie, the combat vet looks at us and says, "the first one is always free boys, the next one id gonna cost ya!" Then he reared his head back and laughed wildly. It was like he was a drug dealer in the city park or something.

The other guy had been searching around for something while we were enjoying a cigarette without being paranoid or looking around every second to make sure we weren't seen. It was nice and I didn't want it to end. Suddenly he drags a big cardboard box over to the table and the combat vet yells, "great idea!"

His idea of a great idea was to have us polish display swords. It didn't look like a lot of fun and as it turns out, it wasn't fun at all. In fact, it got frightening.

"Tell you what boys, I will sell you my cigarettes. You give me a dollar every time the three of you want a smoke and I will set you up with one apiece. I have enough to go all day long," he said grinning.

It sounded a lot more like he was telling us we were going to buy his cigarettes, not asking. Then I looked into into his eyes and everything changed. I know a psychopath when I see one, even then I could spot them easily.

This guy was crazy, there was no doubt in my mind about that.

As we tried to make the display swords glean again, I noticed that they were very dull, not like a regular sharp edged sword. That was when the combat vet sees me looking at the edge of the blade and says; "if you were thinking about using that sword on someone, it won't do you any good."

I was totally shocked, because I was not anywhere near thinking of using a sword on anyone and never would I unless it was solely to defend a life..

"This guy is a fuckin nut job," I said to myself.

Then he jumps up and snatches up a different sword from somewhere close by where he was sitting.

I believe these were reproduction Marine Corp swords, because we weren't using or training with swords and never did later on in our training, either.

Taking the sword in one hand, and the newspaper in the other, the combat vet starts to slice through the newspaper with ease, to show the four of us trainees that his sword is sharp enough to inflict lethal injuries on someone.

He proceeds to narrow his eyes and begin telling us a story that was worse than any book or scary movie I would ever read or see. This combat vet had served in Vietnam. His job was a tunnel rat. He told us stories that you can't make up even with the sickest imagination in the world.

Then he began to get visibly angry as he relived each nightmare in vivid detail. It was like a Pandora's box had been opened and we didn't want to see what was inside.

"Hey, where the fuck did that other guy go?" I thought to myself, after noticing the normal guy had disappeared and left us with captain Insane.

If the next 20 minutes or so was a hoax, it fooled all four of us completely, but I am telling you, I have relived those moments in my mind thousands of times over the years, and like I said, I really do not think this guy was faking it or just trying to look crazy. He really was.

After he wiped some tears out of his eyes, he lit another cigarette and looked at us. His voice began to tremble as he said; "I could kill all four of you and get away with it."

Nobody said a word.

The man had a specific look on his face that reminded me of what other instructors earlier in our training had described to us as The Thousand Yard Stare.

It was a way of defining a look in the eyes of some combat veterans that represented some unspeakable horror they had lived through that has negatively altered that individuals mind and perception of the world forever.

He went on to explain that he had accrued some type of immunity buffer with the law because of specific combat operations he had been a part of when he was a soldier in Vietnam. That seemed a bit far fetched to me, he was essentially saying he had a license to kill whoever he wanted to. I was not about to call the man a liar.

My friends were scared too, but we were all thinking along the same lines. We all talked about it later and admitted we had all considered jumping on him and taking the sharp sword away.

The guy kept scaring us for the rest of the time we were there.

When the other guy finally came back into the room to get us, the combat vet just walked out like he had not spent the last few hours of the day, selling us cigarettes and forcing stories into our minds. Stories that eventually turned to nightmares that haunted me as I slept.

"Jesus, you guys, how many cigarettes did you buy?" He asked.

The large ashtray was overflowing with cigarette butts. Nobody had dared interrupt that combat vet in the middle of him reliving one horrific nightmare after another to ask him where the garbage can was.

I assure you that once we got back to our company barracks and started sharing our stories with other members of our platoon, ours was voted as the worst of all the community service jobs that day.

We didn't disagree with that vote.

### Part 20

The Army was generous about one thing, time off during the holiday season. Namely, Christmas and New Years.

I weighed out my options and decided that truthfully, if I returned home to Minnesota for a two week vacation from training, that I was not going to return and finish, thus rendering my status as absent without leave. I would be a deserter and technically faced the death penalty if convicted of deserting.

The risk was just too great. I liked playing the game, even when the stakes were high, but death was permanent and so I decided I would spend my vacation on base.

My training was scheduled to end on the 2nd day of February, 1986.

I had a month to go so I thought, "how bad could it be, it's Christmas vacation. I doubt they will make us do anything at all." As it turned out, that thought was anything but accurate.

The instructors that were there for Christmas break were angry. No, you know what friend? They were absolutely livid, they were ready to make us suffer for keeping them away from their families because we didn't want to go home and see ours. They were even mad at the poor guys who didn't even have a family!

We all had to be moved to one barracks temporarily because there was only 1-3 guys from each platoon staying behind. It felt awkward, almost like I was leaving home away from home, away from home.

The second day of vacation we had to shovel a a huge dump truck load of tiny rocks into large metal trash cans and carry them to a specific place some 20 yards away and dump them into a pile. When we were finished and thought that we were exhausted, the instructor told us to move it all back again. Only after I laid down and closed my eyes to sleep in a strangers bunk that night, did I really know what exhausted meant!

I had found places in the barracks to stash my cigarettes. The instructors never frisked us so I usually carried them with me at all times. Every soldier in basic training when I went, was allowed to have a disposable lighter.

There were several reasons, but one of the biggest was the camouflage sticks we used for our facial paint. It was made from a hard waxy substance and nearly impossible to apply without heating it with a flame first to soften it.

As you can probably imagine, there was always someone getting the skin on their face burned because they heated the giant green crayon up too hot.

I had just returned from sneaking out and having a cigarette, because it was easily done during break. The fact that almost the entire base had left for Christmas, made it possible to smoke almost anywhere. We were not so restricted to our barracks either, and for once were finally allowed to use the soda and candy vending machines.

Was I being lazy that day? It was Christmas Eve, December 24th

Perhaps, or was I just careless, maybe even forgetful?

Every time I smoked a cigarette I made it a point to wash my hands and rinse my mouth out with mouthwash right after I finished. Every time but that morning.

Drill Sergeant Wolfe was as tall as I was and weighed less. He came into the barracks for the first time that morning and walked through the barracks and began to personally inspect everyone visually. I began to get nervous right away, because I had a full pack of Newport menthol cigarettes in my right front bottom shirt pocket.

I had switched to menthol because I was having trouble running whenever I smoked anything else.

When instructor Wolfe stopped directly in front of me, I realized he had a guy following him with a clipboard. It was kind of a strange sight and I was unsure what was going to happen next, I just knew it was going to be bad.

"I smell smoke!" He yelled, sniffing the air like a dog. (Or wolf, if you will.)

Then he started patting me down without warning and when he felt the pack of cigarettes in my shirt pocket he transformed into the angriest little man I had ever seen in my life. I had thus far seen some angry guys, so that statement is saying a lot.

Apparently Wolfe owned the Army and nobody had bothered to tell me. He was screaming about me bringing contraband onto "his" base and into "his" barracks in "his' fucking Army!

I won't lie, I wanted to laugh right in his little tiny Goddamn face. I was fully ready to fight him if he tried anything like choking me like sergeant psycho had before.

He had other plans for me. He took me into the office and told me to empty my pockets. When he found the pack, he took me up to Battalion Headquarters. At that point, I knew I was in some deep shit.

It was not far from the barracks we were staying in, and when we arrived there was another guy there who was wearing black rimmed glasses and looked intelligent. He was at the large reception desk reading a small book. He looked up as we walked in and Wolfe told him that he had caught a criminal.

The smart looking man asked Wolfe if he wanted him to call the Military Police and Wolfe declined, telling the man that they were going to "deal with it in house." I didn't know what that meant, but I assumed it was going to be bad.

Wolfe asked the man what he thought my punishment should be. He immediately made it known that he wanted nothing to do with whatever Wolfe was planning.

I was getting nervous because the Army takes assault on a fellow soldier very seriously. I didn't want to have to put my training to the test and fight my way out of there, but I was prepared to do just that. The only problem was, doing so meant going to the stockade no matter what.

Wolfe started to rant and rave and scream at me. Again, he was going on about his army this and His Army that. I looked at the clock and wondered if he was going to let me go to chow.

He finished his temper tantrum and I became very suspicious when he told me I could go to the mess hall and eat, then return right back there to Battalion HQ after lunch.

Some of the other guys I had been smoking with sat down next to me and started asking me what had happened. I just wanted to eat and get my punishment over with, but those guys were being assholes. They kept asking me what happened and what should they do and where should they get rid of the cigarettes they had.

Just then, Wolfe walks into the mess hall and sees these two dumb asses talking to me with their heads low, like they didn't want anyone to overhear what they were saying. Wolfe was onto them like a detective to a hot lead on a crime.

He sprinted over to my table and told me I was done eating, then started patting down the two guys that had been acting suspiciously while talking to me. I walked away, pissed off that they got me kicked out of there before I could enjoy what was possibly going to be my last good meal for a while.

"Thanks a lot you fucking assholes!" I said under my breath as I walked by.

Then my stomach dropped as I heard Wolfe scream; "what the fuck is this in my mess hall?!" I didn't even need to turn around and look on my way out the door, because I knew Wolfe found cigarettes on each of the two trainees.

I was back at the headquarters office waiting for Wolfe. The man who was there before, was still in the same place he was when I left. He had not gone to the mess hall to eat, because he had ordered a pizza from Dominoes instead.

"Please ask me if I want a piece," I thought.

Like the man was able to read my mind, he looks over at me and says; "look, I would offer you a piece of this, but Wolfe would be pissed if he saw you eating when you're in so much trouble already."

I assured the man I was fine. We made small talk, waiting for Wolfe and I asked him what he was reading. It turns out he was reading Plato. He said he wanted to study for college courses that he took at night. I had figured he was intelligent, but the guy was motivated as well. The Army was a full time job, adding college onto that at night seemed remarkable to me.

Wolfe busts through the door making a grand spectacle of himself. I know he had a Napoleon Complex, but he was getting ridiculous. I wanted to fight him, I really did.

After a very brief interrogation, I admitted to Wolfe that it was indeed me that had gone to the Mini PX and gotten the contraband in the first place. I told him that I had given those guys the cigarettes to hold for me.

My hope was that he would let those other guys off with a lighter punishment, I would get mine and be the little hero back at the temporary barracks. Plus, I would have a great story to tell the guys from my platoon when they got back.

Wolfe made those two guys do pushups and situps and another exercise called cherry pickers, in a combination of physical torture that he aptly referred to as; the The Triangle Punishment. They were not allowed to stop until they each had vomited one time.

When it came time for my punishment, Wolfe gave me three choices.

He asked me if I wanted a military write up called an Article 15, an ass kicking outside by him, or if I wanted to eat the pack of cigarettes he caught me with.

I didn't even hesitate and I think it unnerved the man when I said coldly, "i would like the ass kicking Drill Sergeant Wolfe!"

That asshole didn't live up to the choices he had given me and opted to make me eat the pack instead.

"I chewed tobacco when I was younger, how bad could it be?" I thought.

The college guy sat there and ate his pizza and read his book as Wolfe opened the brand new pack. I don't think either of us thought Wolfe was really going to make me eat the cigarettes.

He instructed me to take a handful of the cigarettes out and then told me to put them in my mouth.

"Now bite down and chew!" He yelled.

I did what I was told, and my mouth was filled with rolling paper and menthol tobacco. I could not breathe, it was more disgusting than anything I could have ever prepared myself for. I was having a hard time breathing and spit them out into a small trash can right next to the water cooler.

Thinking that was the end of it, I was startled and jumped slightly when Wolfe screamed at me.

"Who told you to spit it out?" He bellowed.

His voice was unnaturally large for a little man.

That psychotic fucker Wolfe, made me eat an entire mouthful of tobacco and paper after that. I mean, chew it up, swallow it and wash it down with water before going outside and having a violent vomiting session.

I was freaking out, shaking and ready to vomit at any second for hours after that.

They kept me there for two full days. The two men took turns going home and coming back. The literally would not let me sleep and made me answer the phones and clean the toilet every few hours.

I asked the the smart guy why he was doing this to me and he said he was just following orders.

On the second night, they finally and completely broke me.

Wolfe was making me read Plato from the smart guy's college books and asking me to explain it. I would do my best to explain what I thought the great man was talking about in the book but I was so lost, I didn't have a clue.

Then he asked the smart guy if I was right and when he said no, I had to read it again. I finally cracked and began sobbing uncontrollably. I am without doubt, that I had just experienced my first and certainly not my last, full on mental breakdown.

Then, like the sun had risen on an otherwise darkened place, Wolfe told me I could go and I never saw him again.

### Part 21

No doubt, I was glad to be rid of Wolfe. I have never hated anyone more than I hated that man after he made me sick for days with those cigarettes. I couldn't go far from the toilet for a few days and that's all I am going to say about that, friend.

Just when you think you've seen everything, a ghost appears to show you that anything is possible.

I was going to chow one day when I noticed a man in a wheelchair. He looked familiar but there was something different about him that I could not pin point right away. Then I realized he had longer hair than the rest of us.

Like a ghost appearing before me, I suddenly recognized John, my bunk mate from months back who had fallen down the steps. I was glad to see him because I was sure after seeing him on the ground that day that he was going to die from his injuries.

"John, it's Tober, do you remember me?" I asked.

He turned around in the wheelchair and his face lit up as he recognized me instantly. I asked him when he had gotten there and he said it was during the time I was being punished. He told me he never thought in a million years it was me that everyone was talking about, being tortured up at HQ.

I asked him why he was still there and he told me it was because of military red tape and I wanted to vomit.

He had been waiting, paralyzed from the waist down to get discharged and sent home. I didn't understand it and I never will. He didn't want to be there anymore. The accident happened back in the beginning of September and it was now the end of December with no idea of when he would be released.

That was probably the worst moment for me. Of all the terrible shit I saw, John being stuck there in that wheelchair for that long, made the rest of my training seem like nothing by comparison.

### Part 22

I trained harder than ever before and got stronger by the day, mentally and physically.

As our training came to an end, I looked back on a time that I would never have thought I could live through. The two extra weeks I stayed for Christmas, made my boot camp 15 weeks long, 2 weeks longer than the standard 13 weeks of training everyone else had gone through.

Fortunately for me I had captured a great deal of those moments on film.

Close to the end of boot camp, every company platoon had a contest against each other for things like, best looking floors, best looking land beautification and so on. My drill instructor wanted to win the floor competition worse than anyone, so he asked me if I wanted to go into Columbus and get some different wax. Non military issue stuff that he was willing to pay for out of pocket.

He also looked at me and told me to grab all the rolls of film I had. He said I could get it developed at the one hour photo. I was falling for every bit of it.

Once all my film was developed, I paid for it and we returned to our barracks. The instructor was making small talk the whole time. It was beginning to worry me a bit.

He told me to follow him into the office, so I did.

"Sit down private Tober," he says in his deep African American voice.

He reached out and asked me for the pictures.

I was so nervous as he took them from me.

"Pepsi?" He asked.

He didn't wait for me to answer, he just handed me a warm Pepsi from a drawer in his desk.

"Can't stand em cold out of the machine, he said. "How about you private?"

I didn't say anything. I was too worried about how many guys I had taken pictures of that were smoking or eating candy bars or whatever else they weren't supposed to be doing. I was going to be a dead man.

"Drink your soda," he said.

My instructor sat there and looked through the photos and when he got to the one of me with his hat on, he sad; "oh I really like this one." Then just kept on flipping through every roll of film that had been developed.

Honestly friend, I believe my life started flashing right before my very eyes as the fear of what was going to happen to me when he showed the pictures to those guys. Then, most assuredly punished all of us.

I was fully prepared to tell him that I had gotten caught with and had eaten a pack of cigarettes, minus the filters of course, and that I hoped he would consider that as he punished me. However, before I could even finish thinking up exactly what I wanted to say and deciding the best way to say it, he smiled at me and said, "what, did you think I joined the army as a sergeant? I was a private once too."

That was it. He never even told the other guys that he knew about all of it.

In a way, I think it was an undeniable fact that simply had to be addressed, in that I was a marked boy too young to be there and had to take extraordinary measures to survive and ultimately succeed. In my opinion, they recognized that and looked the other way on some of the things they obviously knew about and said nothing. At least once they saw I was mentally and physically sound enough to face the challenge of making it to graduation.

I felt really ashamed and guilty when I worked so hard and did not win the barracks floor competition after all was said and done. That drill instructor never said a word me about that failure either.

### Part 23

"Can you believe we fuckin made it, we graduate tomorrow!" Someone screamed.

The day before graduation had arrived. The instructors met with us and told us how proud they were and gave a sign off speech. Then, the final order of barracks business was to tell all the guys where they were going next.

I knew where I was going next, because I was returning home. My career as a full time Army soldier in training was about to end and my part time soldier job was about to begin. I was never more happy about anything than I was about choosing not to go full time Army. I would have lived in regret if I had.

As dusk approached, we were just finishing up packing our gear, cleaning the barracks and getting everything ready for the next wave of brand new recruits to come and start living their own nightmare that is boot camp.

The last instructor was telling us that if we had family that was in town to attend graduation ceremonies, those trainees could go down the street a mile to where there were Taxi Cabs waiting to take them to their respective hotels, however everyone had to be back at the barracks at 0500 hours, or 5 AM.

He told us if we didn't have family waiting, we were to stay at the barracks.

I had enough of the rules and regulations because we were privates now, not trainees. I had planned to sneak out, when the D.I. made it easy for me.

"Listen up, I have a family at home too. I want you guys to stay put. I ain't gonna stay here and babysit all night now, you're on the honor system." He said.

Then he left.

I convinced an Eskimo Indian from Alaska, a younger dude from Las Vegas, and one other guy to go with me and get a cab.

We walked right out, then ran the whole way to where there were literally more cabs in one spot than I had ever seen before. So we just picked one and jumped in.

My buddy from Vegas surprises everyone by blurting out; "take us to the enlisted man's club."

I didn't know what that meant, but he was from Vegas man, so I thought it was a nightclub I never heard of..

That club he was referring to was for enlisted personnel in the Army only. I felt like a real idiot.

The man at the door took our ID's and looked at me and said; "no drinking!"

I said "okay," then we just walked in and made our way to an empty table towards the back.

It was pretty busy in there and there was a lot of smoke from cigarettes and cigars.

After we were all settled, Vegas, stands up and exclaims; "first round is on me fellas!" Then he goes up to the bar.

When he returned he had drinks for everyone. The party had begun.

I am a stocky fellow, and I am not super human, but listen, I am not weak either. I saw a guy in the club going around arm wrestling people and I was not yet wasted but buzzed up. I go over and arm wrestle the guy and win. Then I go sit back down and he comes over a few minutes later, accusing me of cheating.

Thinking about our current situation, the fact that I was underage and drinking, plus not to mention we were not supposed to be off base and so on, I decided to throw water on the flames that one time, instead of the usual gas I would normally have tossed.

I gave the guy a rematch and acted like he beat me, just to avoid future problems.

"Hey, if you ever pick up and read this book, you will know it's you, I want you to know that I let you win the second time, you blond haired asshole."

We proceeded to get wasted drunk. I mean, puking out the back of the Taxi Cab Station Wagon window while driving down the street, drunk.

The cabbie told us; "I don't care if you fall out of the cab, just don't puke in it!"

Vegas had him stop at a liquor store and we brought some bottles back to the barracks and drank with the guys there as well, until I passed out.

I woke up the next morning, completely wasted and could barely stand straight up without falling over during graduation ceremony. At one point I was sure I was going to puke as we were being graduated from boot camp and released to begin our new lives.

### Part 24

When I stepped off that plane after arriving at the Minneapolis airport, I felt rejuvenated and alive like I had never felt before. I had left home 15 weeks earlier on my 17th birthday as a mere boy, a punk who thought he knew everything and had the world by the balls. I was now returning as a man.

I didn't really have a plan of action, I was just planning on enjoying myself, I know that.

Ralphie had other plans for me.

After a couple days of being home, there was no way on earth I was going back to work out in that shop refinishing furniture, I had intended on getting a job elsewhere.

The friends and former classmates I had left behind were just about to graduate from high school the same year I graduated from boot camp. I didn't have a plethora of friends in school, but there were a few people that I wanted to look up after I got home.

I began filling out and turning in job applications all over town. It wasn't long before I had a part time job at the local grocery store. My plan was to get my own place, but first I had some partying to do!

Oh, those parties! This time things were totally different for me than they had been just a year before. I was a tough little sonofabitch and to prove it I was arm wrestling guys and letting people punch me in my rock hard stomach. I was gaining popularity quicker than I ever imagined I could and as you can imagine, I was fast becoming addicted to all my new found attention.

That was not the only thing that changed. My home life that I had left behind was gone, everything had changed and was never going to be the same. I was okay with that too.

My job at the grocery store had been going just fine, nothing was really happening and Ralphie was not really riding my back because I told him I was saving up to move out of the house.

In the beginning of this story I told you about a kid in school whose hair I had accidentally started on fire. Well as fate would have it, we ended up working at the same grocery store. He had already been working there for a while, but I worked during the day and he had been working nights after school so we literally never saw each other until I started to take on some evening shift hours.

We had a lot of fun working together. He never held a grudge against me for ruining his hair either.

It wasn't long before Alex and I began partying all the time. He had a small wooden shed on some property his folks owned that was sort of out of the way, so we started having parties out there.

One fateful night, it happened that my youngest sister and her friend somehow ended up at the shack one night when a bunch of us were out there. My sister had told our parents she was staying at a friends house, while her friend told her parents she was staying the night at my sisters house. It was the perfect scenario for a disaster to happen.

By the time I had returned to town for cigarettes and some mix for the vodka we had, my mom was out looking for her daughter. She pulled up next to me at a convenience store and she was angry as a hornet. Mom asked me if I had seen my sister to which I lied and no.

My mom was furious and left.

When I returned to the party shed, I told my friend Alex that he was taking my sister home because I couldn't. I was too drunk to drive and I didn't want my mom seeing my vehicle. He did finally take the two girls to my parents house, and my little sister was so drunk she barely made up the driveway without falling down.

The next day when I got back to my mom and dads house, my mother told me I was kicked out. She had warned me earlier several times that if I was involved with any of my younger siblings getting drunk or was caught buying them alcohol that I would be on the street. I just didn't think I was ever going to get caught.

With no other place to go, I ended up crashing at Alex's parents house for a little while and then in the part shed for a while after that. I was sick of taking a shower at my friends house or washing up in the bathroom at work. I needed my own place and I needed it fast. I needed money also, and there was only one place to turn for that.

I was totally relieved and extremely excited when the bank refinanced my loan and borrowed me the money that I needed to put down on my first place.

It was only a couple miles down the road from my parents house and it was in the country. I knew the landlords daughter because one of my sisters used to be friends with her and I had met her dad through him. He had taken a chance on us two young guys, mainly because he knew my family.

Because my mom is a very understanding mother of 7 children, she was able to forgive me quicker than I had expected her to. She helped Alex and I out tremendously by giving us pots and pans to cook with, a dining table to eat on, a television to watch and so on. Pretty much all the furnishings and other things we had came from my mom's kitchen or elsewhere in her house.

There was one thing I wanted though. At least I thought I wanted it at the time.

In my parents antique shop, my mom had an apple doll sitting in a rocking chair. This doll was extremely old and creepy. I don't where it came from but I can tell you that it was made by hand out of a dried apple, some gray human hairs and some twigs and cloth.

I called her the apple witch.

After I placed her on top of our television set in the living room, I all but forgot about the apple witch. Then one day, I borrowed Alex's car instead of driving the truck I still had. When I got into town, the left front wheel broke off and rolled down the street.

When I got home, I never even thought to blame it on the witch.

A few days later I was visiting my eldest sister in town and she asked if I would haul an old mattress away for her and her husband because they didn't have a truck. I obliged.

The next morning as I was sleeping off a hangover, as per the usual, the maintenance man for the property where we lived, burst through my front door and began screaming something about my truck being on fire.

I immediately sprang into action and ran outside to see the mattress in the bed of my pickup truck was fully ablaze. I later figured that I must have throw a lit cigarette but out the window and it landed on the mattress and smoldered all night before finally catching on fire and burning in a huge orange ball.

That was when I began to get suspicious of the doll. I didn't do anything then, I wanted proof before I acted like a fool in front of my friends, or did something else I was going to regret.

Some more time passed and I was visiting my sister in town again. She had a kitten that she was trying to find a good home for and the little guy took a liking to me straight away. I decided he could come and live with us at the bachelor pad.

He was riding in the truck with me and he seemed to be doing just fine, until we started to get closer to my place, then he started meowing louder and louder. When I was about a quarter of a mile from my house, the kitten began running around in the cab of my truck like a wild animal.

I slowed the truck down because he was all over the place. Then I just had to stop because as I was about to pull into the driveway of my place, the little jumped behind me and scratched the back of my head. I stopped the truck and opened the door, and that's when the little dude bolted into the woods and I never saw him again.

When I walked into my place, it was really the first time that witch ever felt like an elephant in the room and I decided I had better take action. It was the weekend and we had planned the biggest party yet.

There were so many people at our party that night, we had to move a large part of the party outside on the wooden deck. It was fortunate that our neighbors liked to party as well, because that way we never had to worry about getting the cops called on us. That is, as long as we provided them with some party favors.

After getting pretty buzzed up, I went into the kitchen and grabbed a large stock pot that my mom had given me and took it out onto the porch. Then, I went and got the apple witch and placed her in the pot. Then I lit that doll on fire.

Some people say it was the apple making the noise as it burned, but myself and several others heard a woman scream. The scream was as real as the air it was piercing that night. I was sure my life was going to be fucked after that night.

Looking back on everything that's happened since I burned her, I can't help but speculate about that doll.

### Part 25

We partied our asses off in that house, we had booze, girls and even drugs in that little 2 bedroom place. I was becoming a damn good arm wrestler too! The house was trashed, the furniture my mom had given me was broken and lying all over the place. The walls had holes in them and the carpet was probably not even useable anymore.

My life was spiraling out of control like never before. Then there was the matter of me going AWOL from the Army.

I had tried to go to my monthly unit drills when I first returned home. I attended a few of them and to be frank, my superiors were a bit standoffish. In fact, nobody really talked to me and I was all but ignored. So, I stopped going to my Army Reserve weekend drills.

The bills were piling up, I stopped going to work at the grocery store altogether and still had a monthly payment for the loan on my vehicle. We owed rent and when the landlord saw the place he was going to kick us out so I decided to bolt from that scene. I started hanging out with a different friend and began having completely different adventures.

We decided to drive into the city because my friend Bryce wanted to try snorting some Cocaine and that was the only place we could get that I knew of. I was trying to be the cool older friend. I had actually snorted it once before but had no experience with the drug beyond that.

I drove us to a known drug area and asked a man for "some shit." He asked me how much I wanted and I said 20, exactly emulating what I had seen in a movie. I handed him the bill and he handed me a small rectangular shaped paper envelope. Then my friend and I drove the 100 plus miles back to his house because he wanted to wait until he was safely at his folks garage before doing any of it. I told him that was probably a good idea.

What I didn't know, because I was a total idiot, was that I had purchased Heroin, not Cocaine.

Not knowing what to do, I did what I had seen the people do the first and only other time I had snorted anything. I grabbed a small square piece of glass that said, Pink Floyd on it, (a prize he had won at the state fair) and asked my friend Bryce to find a razor blade.

When he came back into the room, I had already dumped half the contents of the cleverly folded envelope, or "bindle" as it's commonly referred to, onto the little square piece of glass. I took the razor blade and began chopping at the powdery contents. I didn't even know why I was chopping it, I had just seen someone else do it so I did what I thought was the right way to do it.

I rolled up a 20 dollar bill and snorted one of the lines I had made out of the dark powder. I was nervous because it tasted wrong, not like the stuff I had done before that made my nose and throat go numb after sorting it. This was different, it was chunky and didn't taste or smell good at all.

Bryce snorted up some of the chunky powder next and we waited.

It didn't take long before I felt like I had somehow learned to defy gravity. My head felt like it was heavy and it swiveled around. I looked at Bryce and saw his eyes roll in the back of his head. At first we thought it was the most fantastic feelings in the world. But then things began to get frightening, then terrifying!

I was getting higher and higher off the ground. It was a strange sensation, like sea sickness I would imagine. I didn't like being that high and neither did Bryce. He was screaming at me, asking me what I did to him. I was apologizing and then I vomited on his parents sofa and I don't remember much after that.

Later, I woke up in my own puke and took the rest of the drugs to a guy that I always bought pot from. He was older than I was and probably would know what the stuff was.

When he saw it and tasted it he started yelling at me, saying it was not coke it was heroin.

Then he kind of grabbed me and threw me into his refrigerator and yelled at me right in my face for giving that to shit to Bryce who was younger than me by a couple years.

I didn't even try to defend myself when he told me what it was and then flushed it down the toilet.

He never sold me another bag of weed ever again either.

Things were getting too complicated in Minnesota at that point. I wanted out and my target state was California. I had no money, no idea how to go about getting any, yet I was determined to get out of town before the Army caught up with me.

That's when I met Kenny.

Kenny was a friend of another friend of mine whose name is Nick.

We all started hanging out and talking about going to Cali. Nick had a woman who was his age and they were both minors under the age of 18. I was emancipated when I joined the Army so though I was only 17, I had a military ID that stated I was an emancipated adult. Kenny was the oldest of all of us, and the most easily manipulated.

I talked him into writing some bad checks for gas at the station and a carton of cigarettes at the grocery store one day and when the cashier took his check no questions asked, he was instantly addicted . We started going all over the place writing bad checks and living like four rock stars in a popular band, minus the instruments and groupies.

We stayed at fancy hotels, we ate great food, got drunk every day. We bought clothes and fixed up my truck a little bit too. Then I decided if I went back and got my blank checks out of the box of stuff a friend was holding for me, that we could write bad checks all the way to California.

The reason we weren't getting caught was because there were no check laws in place, there were no electronic machines linked to databases to tell them that we were repeat offenders, so we went crazy. Besides, there was nothing to worry about, simply because I was never going back to Minnesota anyway. Ever.

Luckily we had gotten some cash before heading out of town. We were not able to write another check once we got to the next state and every state after. When we got to Grants, New Mexico we were completely out of money and gas.

Sitting in the truck, I was wondering what we were going to do when I happened to spot a sign that said, Pawn. I knew what a pawn shop was because I had run away from home with my older brother for days once. We survived by him pawning a ring he had.

I turned around and opened the sliding back window that led to the covered bed where Nick was sitting with his girl and said; "hey man, we can pawn the stereo and the little television for gas money."

Two items that we had purchased with bad checks.

The pawn broker did not give me very much money for the high end portable boom box radio cassette player, or the expensive little portable black and white television set. Even though we had the receipts to show him the stuff was not stolen. Well, sort of.

Somehow, we made it the rest of the way to Arizona and when we got there, the next crazy and exciting chapter of my life would begin.

### Part 26

Arizona was much more fun than I expected it to be when we stopped there. Nick had some relatives there and they got us a job and gave us all a place to stay temporarily. That didn't last long and soon I was homeless and unemployed.

In a bizarre twist of fate, I would meet a woman and fall in love. My next plan was to call the Army base I was supposed to be reporting to once a month. I needed to get it over with, if I was going to jail, I wanted to do my time.

Provided I didn't get the death penalty for deserting.

My commanding officer told me they had placed me on Inactive Ready Reserve Status because my friend knew I had left for Arizona and told him. I forgot about my buddy Mitch.

"I still owe you one, buddy!'

I was not in any kind of trouble and because there was no base for hundreds of miles from the city I had moved to, they said I did not have to report. I had been really lucky, no doubt.

As time went on, I all but forgot about the reserves because I didn't want to think about it.

Then, the Gulf War or Operation Desert Storm as it was named, began.

I received official Government papers one day at the airport where I was working at the time, that stated I was being ordered to active duty and to report to the MEPPS center in Minneapolis.

"We just had a baby girl, I'm married, I have a great job!" I screamed into the desert air.

"This can't be fucking happening," I thought to myself as I sat in the sand, out in the desert, alone and sobbing into my hands. "I never thought they were going to call me, what am I going to do? I don't even remember how to break down and clean my rifle!"

Thoughts were racing through my skull. I considered all the possibilities, including deserting to Canada, but I was tired of running from the problems I had created for myself. It was time to step up and take responsibility for my own self and deal with whatever consequences came with it.

I made arrangements with the airlines and got a round trip ticket. I was trying to remain as optimistic as I could, but in my heart I knew what I was. I was an infantry soldier. I was trained for this moment and this moment was now my worst nightmare since boot camp.

Before I even had to leave for Minnesota, the war was over as quickly as it had begun. I was ordered to stand down by my commanding officer and my family and friends in Arizona celebrated like there was not going to be a tomorrow!

That was the second to the last time I dealt with the Army. The last time was when they issued me my Honorable Discharge after 6 long years of impossible adventures outside of the Army, and 15 life altering weeks, in.

### Part 27

Eventually, I returned to Minnesota to face the bank and the merchants I owed money to. It took several years of working 2 jobs, but I paid my dues. Eventually, I even got a loan at the same bank, but I never bounced another check.

I am no hero friend. I guess perhaps I could have been had I wised up, but kids go their own way. Sometimes they are runaway freight trains and as parents, all we are able to do is watch and try to provide some comfort or aid after the train derails. I was a punk kid who got into trouble with the law and used the Army as a way out.

The fact is, I didn't even have a high school diploma when I applied to the Army.

I had to get my G.E.D while I was in basic training. I did all of the things that I did the hard way.

Thank you for reading my story. I never exaggerated any of this, because the truth is simply better than anything I could ever imagine.

Timothy D. Tober

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