It’s the “Dark Night of the Soul” for our anti-hero. Resigned from Annapolis. Resigned from Exxon. Rejected by my family. Living on rapidly dwindling savings. No direction forward. Devoid of all ambition.
Burnt. Out.
You’ll remember that my head was always in the sky. From the “two-twos” at the Caracas airport as a little grunt. To the (promised) semester at the Air Force Academy as an exchange student. Doh! That Captain Hodory yanked away like Lucy and Charlie Brown’s football.
The USNA Superintendent and Commandant saw that spark, when they offered to pack me off to Cape Kennedy down in Florida for the summer. The sci-fi posters in my window office at Exxon.
Well, here I am. Watching the original Star Trek on cable in my little apartment a few blocks north of the University of Texas campus. First time watching Star Trek. Hell, practically the first time watching TV, period.
“Now, isn’t this interesting – a new kind of freedom. In your head. Spirit. Tie me down with worries and debts all you like. My brain is free – free as a bird.”
Can you see the wheels starting to spin up? Like that hyperspace drive on the Battlestar Galactica. Grinding years of data. Augmented by visual stimulation from Star Trek. The NASA Shuttle. The US Navy. Exxon. UT Austin engineering.
I get all the orbital elements on the planets from an astronomy almanac. Pencil. Paper… Hey, there’s an idea. The Solar System and the planets. I think I see a pattern there.
I draw a loop. It’s one segment of a wave. Like an ocean wave. I put the planets on it. They move with the wave. I experiment with different wavelengths. Find the sweet spot.
When you peg the planets to the wave, their motion up and down defines their orbital plane in the celestial sphere. Their motion back and forth defines the ellipticity of the orbit.
I take that loop. Draw a series of patterns with it. Adjust them. Expand them. I match these patterns to the Schrodinger Electron Cloud Plots. I have a new model for the atom now.
“Wow. Is that cool or what?”
I throw together a bunch of applications, based on Star Wars tech. A faster-than-light X-Fighter. A light saber. Anti-gravity. Illustrate everything. Fluff it up with some engineering words.
Assemble everything into a formal manuscript, A Journal of 21st Century Technology. Send it off to a bunch of publishers. To NASA. While I’m waiting to hear back from the publishers, I get a response from NASA.
Deep breath!
“Your manuscript was reviewed by both an engineer and a scientist. Although their interests and backgrounds are different, they both agreed that your concepts about the Unified Field Theory appear to be so profound as to be years ahead of the scientific thinking in the areas in which you delved.”
Beat.
Ummm. . . What’s a Unified Field Theory? I’d never heard of that. Didn’t have the first inkling. Wouldn’t actually, for many years to come. Turns out, it’s the combination of the four fundamental forces of nature in a single set of equations. Gravity. Electrostatics. The weak nuclear force. The strong nuclear force.
O-kay. Still doesn’t mean diddly. Wouldn’t mean squat to me for a good 20+ years.
That’s as far as I got at the time. All I wanted was to make some cash. I sent NASA’s letter to TAB Books, one of the publishers I’d written to. Kim Tabor called me a month later. “Sorry. It’s too advanced for our readers.” She was in tears. They had sent it out to experts for evaluation and everything. Bummer.
NOTE: I met Kim Tabor again some ten years later. She was an acquisitions editor at McGraw-Hill by that time. She remembered me right off the bat.
Ms. Tabor became the editor for my two textbooks, Retrofitting for Energy Conservation (the very first textbook on energy conservation from a major publisher) and Electrical Design Guide for Commercial Buildings (how to use energy efficiently in buildings, still in print to this very day)
I shopped the Star Wars manuscript around town to different science groups on and off campus. No luck. DARPA. The U.S. Navy. Many others. “Sorry, Charlie. We don’t want Tuna with good taste. We want tuna that tastes good.”
I ran out of money. Got booted out of my apartment. Lived in the Audi Fox. Got the windows bashed in. Had to abandon my wonderful forest green car a block from the bus station in downtown Austin. Hopped on a Greyhound. On the long ride – you guessed it, heading out west. . .
Suddenly I realized that all this time I owed what little freedom I had to that marvel of engineering, the Audi Fox. It was my one loyal friend through it all. My R2D2. More!
Rest in peace, little buddy. I’ll keep you in my heart always.
I ended up homeless. Sleeping on the streets. On park benches. In Minneapolis. (Fortunately, it was summertime.)
I kept my Kelty backpack with all my worldly belongings in a locker at the Greyhound Bus terminal. Cleaned up in their washroom. The insides of my Vasque Backpacking Boots rotted out. Summer peaked. It was hot as HELL outside. I was hungry. Desperate.
Then the Salvation Army gave me a room. A bath. Put clean clothes on my back. Food. Counseling at a group meeting.
I made my way over to the local Army recruiting office. Took the ASVAB battery of tests. Got the highest score they’d ever recorded. They gave me a choice of job and duty station.
“You name it. We’ll get it for you.”
I chose 93E weather observer. White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, the heart and soul of the military space effort. Tell me. Is America the goddamn mother fucking greatest place on earth, or what?!
I called Mom. She wired me some money to take the bus back home until I had to report for Basic Training at Fort Jackson.
She wouldn’t let me stay in the house. I had to camp out on the community campgrounds. She put me to work fixing things around the house. I wonder what Brother John was thinking all this time? Nothing good, I’m quite sure.
I know what Mom was thinking: Get this dude in shape before the Army chews him up alive.
Basic was a blast. M16s. PT every morning. Decent chow. The old shoulder injury from the surfboard chasing down Susan Poag in Daytona Beach still nagged. So my Drill Sergeant (a gung-ho Black dude) gave Platoon Guide to somebody else. Fine with me.
Once my Drill Sergeant told me, “You have the greasiest skin of any white kid I’ve ever known.” These days that would be considered racist. Not back then. Everybody was green. There WERE no races. Just soldiers. Which was a liberating kind of freedom. Thanks, sarge.
We learned tank silhouettes. How to strip down the M16. Firing on the rifle range. Marching. It was fall. Cool. Crisp. I do so love the military. . .
Then. My knees started to act up. Got them looked at. “Sorry, buddy. We’ll have to put you on physical therapy and recycle you to the next class.”
No way, Jose.
I took a fist full of aspirins and passed the damn running test. At Fort Ben Harrison, my next stop, I was in a couple of weeks of physical therapy. Learned exercises to keep the knees on spec. Been doing them faithfully ever since.
At Chanute Air Force Base, where we did our 93E weather tech training, I was made Platoon Leader. Wore a red braid on my shoulder. I was a PFC at this point. Made Specialist Fourth Class after we graduated.
My Annapolis aversion to marching people around? Not a problem. At one point I was marching my Army platoon to classes. It was cold. Snowing. The Air Force platoon in front of us on the runway was going SOOooo slow. . .
I gave the guys (and gals) “DOUBLE TIME” and we ran on by those slackers.
94E Weather Observer is actually one of the toughest MOS’s in the Army. (That’s’ Army speak for Military Occupational Specialty.) Several of the people in my class had bachelor’s degrees. Zajaz was agriculture. Beuchel. Smart folks. Good folks.
It’s too bad things went south for all of us later on. For them. For me. This time it wasn’t just me getting into trouble, though. I drug a whole bunch of folks down with me.
We’re fixing to get into some deep sh*t now, folks. From here on out to the present day that crap just keeps on building up. That’s why I’m writing this book. I don’t much mind getting the tarnation beat out of ME. But when it involves other folks? That gets me mad.
You do NOT want to get me mad. When you do, you get a scorched earth epic like this thrown in your effing face.
They say in screenwriting, especially in dialog, that every statement is like a bullet. You have to make it count. Either you advance the story, give some insight into the character or – preferably – both. Cut everything else. From here on out things move pretty damn fast.
If you were upset by the paucity of verbiage up to this point, you’ll be positively apoplectic henceforth (Hey, I’m schizophrenic. I do NOT have to adhere to the usual etiquette of writers, much less all the melancholy puddle of barfing similes in your typical autobiography.)
So, it’s silver spurs to the belly of this beast. “Giddy up!”
Mr. Bill arrives at White Sands Missile Range with his Army duffel bag. Nothing else. Not even any civvies other than the clothes I had on my back when I showed up for Basic Training. Why not? Because I haven’t been back home to Texas and, in fact, I’m not welcome there.
You wanted freedom, Bud – well, you got it. (You gotta love Mom, how well she handled this reprobate of a son she has.)
WSMR is a remote installation. Middle of the desert. Tumbleweeds and rattlesnakes. Tucked between two mountain ranges, the Organ mountains to the west and Ruidoso and Cloudcroft to the east.
I was a high plains drifter, although I never ventured beyond the post to visit the White Sands National Monument. Or the Trinity Site, where the A-bombs were tested. The Apache Ski snow resort. Nobody asked me. Nobody told me. So, Mr. Nobody didn’t go.
I’m not even sure if I was aware of the local attractions. Probably not.
My roommate in the barracks was E4 Ken Barkman. Not quite a hippie (he drove a motorcycle but also had a – van), but still a good soldier. He was to become my co-conspirator but then a victim.
Later on, when everybody else in the barracks was throwing hate words and fastballs at my groin, Ken – well, was just – quiet. I thank you for that, even if I only now just realized it. I didn’t deserve your silence. Still don’t.
As in all modern adventures, this one started with a Honda 750 Shadow (my new wheels, just like Ken’s) and an Apple IIE computer.
This was pretty close to the very first computer you could own. No on-board RAM. Everything was stored on a big 256K floppy disk on an external hard drive. Your Apple watch has 1000 times the computing power and storage capacity.
But, hey – back then? I had real POWER at my disposal.
I was attached to the Headquarters Company, but 93 Echos worked for the Atmospheric Sciences Laboratory (ASL). LTC Ellis was the head of ASL. I met him once. (Which was once too many. Enough for him to become the next villain of this sordid tale.)
Our duty place was C-Station, run by Dave Novlan, the lead forecaster. He was a civilian as were all the other forecasters under him. There was a small group of us 93Es under a sergeant.
In the middle of the post was an outside museum of – you guessed it, missiles. Nazi V-2 rockets (brought there from Peenemunde after the war along with hundreds of Nazi rocket scientists and all their equipment, literally with whole trainloads of people and equipment – the rail cars included: Operation Paperclip).
Strangely enough, I never even visited that museum, either. Or maybe not so strangely, knowing me. I had only ONE thing on my mind for the next two years.
“Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to advance the project that NASA thought so highly of.”
That meant zeroing in on the one real chuck of beef in the whole manuscript, the Solar System model. Everything else was built on that – first the electron model, then all the Star Wars engineering applications.
The problem is that I had work to do. Weather observers send up balloons and then track them on a rusty old portable World War II-era radar. At C-Station, we worked shifts at the forecasting desk, sorting weather maps, taking observations. Jotting down the wind speed. Cloud cover. Temperature. Humidity.
WSMR was a MISSILE RANGE. They shot off MISSILES downrange to measure performance, so the aerospace engineer types needed to know all about the wind speed and other conditions at altitude. (The Space Shuttle Colombia landed there, right before I arrived.)
I liked the work well enough. But I had a MISSION to do. So, I volunteered to take the graveyard shift. Remained on the 10 PM – 6 AM shift for close to two years. That gave me lots of quiet, quality time at nights to work on my Big Theory.
I input all the solar system data, trying to improve my model. Our dorm room was full of computer printouts, my dot matrix printer, and the Apple II E computer. (By the time all this was over with; well, I’ll just say I’ve never owned another Mac.)
The thing about the graveyard shift is that when I returned at 6 AM, everybody else was just waking up. Cleaning their rooms. Polishing the hallway floor. Breakfast in the Mess Hall across the post. Morning formation. PT sometimes (group exercise).
I had to participate in all that. Then I’d manage a few hours sleep, until the afternoon when the work day was over. Dinner. NOISY barracks. So, at best, I got maybe six broken hours of sleep. Sure, you get two 24-hour days off a week, but you never adjust to the regular day.
They used to call me The Professor around the barracks. It was good fun. Until, well – until it wasn’t. At which point I became the Great Satan.
The Downfall started innocently enough. I went to the High Energy Laser Project (HELSTAF, President Reagan’s trillion-dollar “Star Wars space laser,” as he called it) a few miles north of the installation with a scientist from ASL, Mark Hines.
I suppose word got around about my research and my sergeant volunteered me. (I NEVER volunteer. Not after two years at Annapolis where volunteering led to nothing but grief.) The more likely reason is that I already had a Top Secret clearance, on account of Annapolis.
WSMR was a high-security installation, but HELSTAF was the ultimate in security.
HELSTAF. You can google images of the place. A giant dome in the middle of the desert. Large parking lot out back, full of cars. Inside – well, where are all the damn people that belong to those cars? Never saw anybody.
Very strange. Exactly who and where are they spending those trillion dollars? (Later on, when I went full schizo, this was ample fodder for many a conspiracy theory – Roswell was only a couple of miles away off White Sands Proving Ground as it was known back then.)
Our job, Mr. Hines and I, was to measure the particle count in the laser room. You’re expecting a high-tech lab with giant computers? Scientists in white lab coats and thick glasses?
Sorry, just a bunch of gigantic mirrors. Lenses. A wall of computers, sure, but no scientists. No clutter. No nothing.
So, LASER. ROOM. When a laser HITS a particle of dust it EXPLODES. Consequently, dust is very bad. Motes of dust. Drifting in the air. Your normal room is thick with the stuff. Bad idea, for a trillion-dollar space laser.
We had a big heavy gizmo on wheels that was pretty much just a huge vacuum cleaner. Technically, it was a “particle counter,” and literally measured the particles of dust in the air. (Yes, this is me, a government worker, spending an entire day for a mundane job.)
So, we fired up the monster. Took readings. Then Spec 4 Clark lugged it to another spot. Fired it up for more readings. And so forth. (All the while, I was studying this place, recording everything in my boilerplate brain for future reference.)
I mean, really, people. This place was a tomb. Or perhaps it was just under construction, dummy… Still.
They never had anything to show for that trillion dollars (equal to $3 trillion in 2023 dollars). No space laser, for sure. What the HELL did they spend all that cash value on? Think: the Pentagon’s infamous $1000 toilets and multiply that by three million.
Anyway. 40 years later, it occurred to me (better late than never, right?) – all the UFO crazies said the Roswell UFO was brought to Wright Patterson Air Force Base outside Dayton, Ohio. That’s 1500 miles away.
White Sands was, like, 5 miles away. They’d just developed the Atom Bomb down the road at Alamogordo. That whole damn area was sworn to secrecy until hell freezes over.
And they bring the flying saucer to – where? (I hope you’re getting the gist here – schizophrenics have a lethal affinity for conspiracy theories, especially if they involve aliens and UFOs and nefarious military organizations. X Files? In other words, Mr. Bill is slowly, inevitably, going. Over. The. Wall.)
Please note: this thoughts did not occur at the time, but some 20+ years later, after I had was expelled with extreme malice from the University of Texas a semester short of a Ph.D. Yeah, I was pissed off – you will be, too.
Anyway, back to 1984. We’re a-fixing to meet Big Brother.
After a long, tough day on the job, Mark Hines and I got back to ASL. I had mentioned my NASA research. He asked to see the manuscript. I showed it to him. He liked it! Suggested I talk to LTC Ellis, the head of ASL. And, to a fault, I always do what people suggest.
I had a meeting with the good colonel. Showed him my research. Not interested. Then, upon my return to the barracks, I realized I’d left behind my little business card album/holder/folder (see-through pockets, 3 per page where you slide business cards).
Cards from the dozens of organizations I’d contacted about my NASA research after I got that amazing letter from NASA. UT labs. DARPA. The US Navy. The Israeli Embassy in Washington DC. Many others.
I don’t even know why I kept the damn business cards. Nobody was interested.
I asked LTC Ellis to return the album/holder/folder. He refused. I insisted. He STILL refused. I’m not sure if I ever returned the damn thing. Whatever. I let it go. Got back to my research, which by now had evolved into analyses of the motion of each planet relative to a new celestial plane.
I know what you’re thinking. This guy is wrapped up in a as magnificent an obsession as the HELSTAF space laser herself. Hey, that’s okay. You’re in good company. VERY good company, as we’ll see later. However. Just so you keep on reading, I’ll spill the baked beans.
The Titus-Bode Law helped discover the planet Uranus. It predicts the rough ratio of the planets’ orbits around the sun. There was a space missing. They found Uranus there. So, ONE law made TWO people forever famous after discovering ONE planet.
Do that math, if you can.
Well, my model assembles all the planets into a single model. There are nine planets times six orbital elements each equals 54 unknowns. My rough model was able to reduce this down to just two elements per planet. It eliminates 42 unknowns. (This process is formally called “regularization,” coming up with new models that eliminate unknowns in a solution. Not that I knew this at the time.)
Just like you sixty seconds ago for you, I had no idea what I was doing. I was solving a baffling puzzle. A fascinating puzzle. And I was close. Very close.
The data in my new computer printouts was no longer random. The motion of each planet was an oblong circle around its point on the curve. Regular motion around a single point is a simple function: radius of circle and time rate of motion.
Moreover. And here’s the fun part.
My model explains the retrograde rotation of Venus and Uranus (they rotate opposite to the direction of the other planets), the ring systems around Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune AND – here’s the kick-ass mind-blow: Earth’s moon is right there. Front and center. In direct harmony with the Earth. Right in the middle of the goddamn waveform that explains all of the aforementioned planetary motion.
(No known theory explains the moon’s motion in this way – not even now, in 2023.)
So. Take a deep breath. Relax. Remember what happened to Galileo? When he said the solar system rotated around the Sun and not Earth? He spent the last decade of his life confined in his house, by order of the Church.
And Copernicus? The dude who came up with the sun-centered heliocentric model? He was so afraid of repercussions that he didn’t publish his work until after his death. And here I am with a slick model that implies everything really does revolve around EARTH?
Ouch.
But, hey. Nobody knows any of this yet. Certainly not me. I don’t know squat. It wasn’t until I took Victor Szebehely’s Regularization class at the University of Texas at Austin in 1997 (15 years from now) that I knew what I was doing.
Dr. Z was the top worker in Celestial Mechanics of the modern era. That was the last class he ever taught. If I hadn’t taken this class, you wouldn’t be reading this right now.
And – to really blow your socks off, get this: that Regularization class was the most advanced class in the Celestial Mechanics program. It would take me 3 years of graduate classes in orbital and celestial mechanics AFTER Dr. Z’s class to understand even a FRACTON of what he was lecturing about. And yet.
And yet.
I did follow the “regularization” part. Dr. Z knew that. He gave me an A in the class, after I presented this research as my class project. He said, “All you need to do is solve for the time function and you’ll get your name lit up in lights.”
However – you’re dreading what comes after my “howevers,” as well you should: Dr. Z passed away a few months later, right after I started grad school. My new advisor HATED that research. The Graduate Advisor later wouldn’t even let me use that class for credit toward my Master’s Degree.
This ethereal dream should have died with Dr. Z. But it didn’t. Taking that class was one last shot in the dark for me. You’ll see. It panned out. I finally KNEW that I was on the right track. There was no DOUBT whatsoever that my project had merit. Four years of grief later I was STILL convinced. And 20 years after that I’m still there.
Taking one last shot in the dark.
Not to pop the balloon before the fat lady sings by sharing all this tech stuff. There’s still all sorts of drama to come – more than you could possibly imagine.
I felt it necessary to tell you that the NASA research isn’t some grandiose delusion. The symmetry of the analysis made it very clear to me at the time. NASA saw it, too. I just want you to go forward with the same conviction I had then. So you don’t think I was grandiose or schizophrenic in the classical sense.
“I may be crazy but I’m not dumb.”
For future reference: I’m rated 100% disabled by the Veterans Administration now. That sounds REALLY bad, doesn’t it? But the VA rates you relative to how you were before onset. Right now I have an absolute, extreme phobia for math. Any math. All math. An engineer who can’t do math? Yeah, that’s 100% a lost cause.
Okay. Now you know exactly what I was working on. Maybe you can even feel some of the excitement and motivation I felt. It’s elegant. Beautiful. Simple.
Still, I didn’t yet know anything about Regularization or planetary motion in the orbital mechanics sense. I was just fitting a new model to a bunch of random motions, of some abstract things called “planets.”
I mentioned my manuscript to Mark Hines, who was a physicist, to get an idea if I was wasting my time or not. Ditto with LTC Ellis. I wasn’t pushing. Shoving. Bullying. That’s not me (not at least until I get on paper, a new “freedom” I was to discover very soon).
I was a little boy who found a “two-two” and wanted Pop to tell me what the F to do with it. (As an aside, I never heard one single foul word in our house, from anybody – ever, not even as adults. Not even until the bitter end.)
I told you earlier I do NOT volunteer. I learned my lesson at Annapolis. Volunteer and you get your head shot off with a double-barrel shotgun. My one mistake was my failure to realize that other people DO volunteer.
My half-hippie roommate? E4 Ken Barkman? He hatched up the brilliant idea to write a letter to the Commanding General of WSMR, Major General (2 stars) Niles Fulwyler. Oh. My. God. He just did – what?
“Be that as it may” Ken Barkman wrote to the general, saying something like, “You just HAVE to see what this guy is working on.”
Gulp. Here we go again, folks.
The good general invited me to give a presentation to himself and the two top scientists at HELSTAF. Something about a new laser design Ken hatched up for me. (Note to self: If they ever give me the Nobel Prize for this damn sh*t, I’m going to insist that Ken is awarded it with me because without him NONE of what’s to follow would have happened.)
So, Ken and I polished our brass, put on our dress green uniforms, and went to the Headquarters building behind the giant American flag at the entrance to WSMR.
I’d prepared a poster slide show. Printed out all my planetary motion plots. Yanked a few laser ideas out of the old Star Wars how-to tech manual. We were rocking. Literally. Listening to ZZ Top in the barracks. Cranked up LOUD.
I mean, REAL LOUD. The whole damn barracks (except for me) knew where Spec 4s Clark and Barkman were going. Sharp Dressed Man. Two Rough Boys going Nationwide. They done Got Me Under Pressure but I’m a still gonna Give You My Lovin’.
The presentation went well. A couple of hours, and I got exactly what I was hoping for. God bless the United States Army. We received a letter a week or so later, “Thanks for the presentation, but it’s too theoretical.” Sounds like a rejection letter, doesn’t it?
More like a big sigh of relief.
There was no “we love your idea, come develop it at HELSTAF.” I didn’t give a hoot in hell about lasers. I was an orbits man. Space. Planets. NASA. Ken may have been disappointed, but not me. I was relieved.
There was no “crazy idea” in the good general’s letter; no “you’re an embarrassment to the uniform” (this would come soon, in very short order – as in, right now). Just, “Thank you for your effort, and good luck in your future endeavors.”
A week later I received a summons to the Mental Health Clinic on post. Huh? This is interesting. It was right across the street from our barracks. I go over. Take some psych tests. Have a nice, long chat with Captain Mark Chapin.
The good doctor said LTC Ellis had referred me for a psych evaluation. Ellis thought I was being paranoid, maybe even schizophrenic. Captain Chapin gave me a clean bill of health. He said, “LTC Ellis is just jealous you had two whole hours of face time with General Fulwyler, whom he’s hardly ever even met.”
It’s too bad Captain Chapin didn’t tell me, “You. Do. NOT. Want. To. Make. LTC Ellis. Jealous.”
Please note that LTC Ellis sending me for a psychiatric evaluation is an action of “command influence.” (Because had he called my sergeant, Dave Novlan at C Stationi, or Mark Hines they would ALL have said this guy is firing on all twelve cylinders.)
This sort of “command influence” was very common back then – probably still is – for the military (and everybody else) to use their position of authority to label their enemies and use a damnable psychiatric diagnosis to get rid of them.
It’s a very effective technique. Too bad for LTC Ellis, Annapolis had hardened me to that kind of attack. Prepared me. Wound up the toy soldier and set him in motion. Click. Clack.
“Take me to your leader.”
I brush it off. A week later, I hopped on the Shadow 750. Cruised on down to a computer shop in El Paso to load up on supplies. As soon as I arrived, the owner gave me a message.
Call the post. They said it’s urgent. “Who even knew I was coming here?” But I called. It WAS urgent. Return to the post ASAP.
So, I JUMP on the Shadow 750 and scream back to WSMR. I get hauled in by the Military Police. “LTC Ellis said you were trying to defect.”
Saayyyy – what?
A very long and uncomfortable interrogation ensued. Evidently, LTC Ellis was offended by Nathan Belkind’s Israeli Embassy business card in my card album/holder/folder. (LOL. This reminds me of my sister Leigh Erin calling a brassiere, “an over-the-shoulder boulder holder.” Texas humor, gotta love it.)
Well, I’m thinking at this point – that explains why the S.O.B. didn’t return the card album/holder/folder to me.
I got steamed at the MP Captain and his MP Sergeants crowding me. I mean, REALLY steamed.
Those cards were when I was a CIVILIAN. It’s MY goddamn research. Even the sh*t I just talked about with the general was MY damn work. Done on MY time. With MY computer. I can goddamn well do what the hell I want to do with it.
“We have rules about service members contacting foreign entities.”
That business fucking CARD was received LONG before I enlisted. Call Mr. Belkind. Do your fu*king research before you accuse me of any damn thing.
(If you’ve been paying attention, and I won’t blame you one bit if not; well, you’ll recall how being an Elton John fan got me to being discriminated against as a homosexual at Annapolis…
It’s happening again. Now I’m a despicable, deplorable JEW just because I contacted the most high-tech folks on the planet, and they actually wrote me back a nice letter – which dozens of red-blooded AMERICAN organizations did NOT do.)
And please note THIS: Mr. Belkind was to do me another giant favor (which turned into a curse, as things generally do in my life) later on.
The MP Captain accused me further, “You have Top Secret clearance.”
Which does NOT apply to any of my scientific work. Sure, if the general and his cronies at HELSTAF gave me a little office and some computer time on an Army mainframe. That’s different. But they gave me the finger and that’s goddamn that.
The MPs let me off the hook. “We’re just glad you I know the rules now.”
Fine. It was over. But it wasn’t. The Professor was no more. Now it was The Traitor. I was a persona non grata.
The Army looks after its own.
A week later I totaled the Shadow 750, may she Rest In Peace. Mechanical malfunction. Reeled off the road. Nosedived into a sand embankment.
Two hours later, I wheeled the poor bike into the company area, just as they were lining up for morning formation. The Shadow was a total wreck, wires and parts sticking out every which way.
I banged up the knees a bit. Ripped the crap out of my uniform. It’s a miracle I wasn’t killed. As it was, I CRASHED the motorcycle down in front of the formation (not really, but I should have) and went to stand where I’m supposed to be in formation.
That’s one way to keep The Traitor from defecting. Wreck his wheels.
O bought a used Fiat Brava at the White Sands Federal Credit Union down the road not long after. A block off the lot the engine BLEW UP. I had it towed to the company area, then over to the Auto Craft Shop on the other side of the post.
Blown piston. Gonna have to rebuild the engine. I looked around at all the shop tools. Folks working on engines and transmissions.
“We can give you all the advice and help you need.”
Huh. I rolled up my sleeves and for the rest of my time at White Sands, I spent all my disposable income on auto parts and all my free time in the Auto Craft Shop.
If wrecking his wheels doesn’t keep him from defecting, keep him busy rebuilding them.
I never bonded with the Brava like I had done with the Audi Fox. It did become the focus of just as much trouble, but – honestly – after rebuilding the engine and the transmission from scratch I could never really get it to working very well.
(Where was my old Texas roommate Tom Alleman when I needed him?)
Life in the barracks all this time was – odd. Now that my research had been given the thumbs down by the Big Brains, there was no pizzazz associated with The Professor.
I didn’t have time, actually, to do any more work on the Big Theory because every waking hour was spent in the Auto Craft Shop. (Which I enjoyed no end. Always wanted to rebuild an engine.)
The Big Theory was done for, though. Over. Fini. I was glad. No more albatross. I can have a life. Free time. Be an auto mechanic. Be cool.
It was a still bad situation for me. No more respect from folks. Suspicion on the whole defecting accusation. The MPs were billeted in our barracks, so word got around about our confrontation.
Everybody else in the barracks worked in the ASL building with LTC Ellis. Nor was I shy about the meeting at Mental Health. The stench of mental illness must have reeked.
The stench of marijuana, too. Ken Barkman and the folks in the room next to ours (two rooms shared the same bathroom) smoked pot often in the bathroom. The quarters were so close, I probably inhaled as much as they did.
The Company Commander gave random urinalysis tests every week, and if my number ever came up for sure I’d be nailed. Like, that’s the last damn thing I need right now.
“You didn’t inhale? It was only secondhand smoke? Yeah, I have a space laser to sell to Israel, too.”
Well, you know me. My emotions are never far from the surface. Around about now there were plenty of emotions boiling. Plus. I HATE drugs. After what they did to my sisters Kelle and Leigh Erin?
Well, the last bit of camaraderie I could muster, as misdirected as it may seem – being isolated, alone, stressed out – well, you know what’s coming. Things – happen at times like that.
Ken Barkman and all my buddies for 93E school had dinner at our squad leader’s house one night. Six or eight in total, other than myself. Senior enlisted now. Our squad leader was an NCO. Broiled rattlesnake.
Our squad leader loved to cruise the tarmac on his Harley speedster, running over snakes sunning on the blacktop. Come on, try it – tastes just like chicken. Sorry, Charlie. I never liked Ronnie Bell’s snakeskin boots, neither. It’s – gross.
Playing UNO, they passed around a joint. I toked up like everybody else – that’s me, always going with the flow – but the next day when I got my head back?
I was pissed. I hate that shit. I’d lost control of my brain – my one last refuge – for a while on that crap. . . I was tired of breathing it in our barracks room. In our bathroom.
I saw all of them getting ruined like what happened to Kelle and Leigh Erin. So, I sat down at work that night. Wrote a letter to my C.O., Captain Greenmeyer. Slipped it under his door the next day after morning formation. There. It’s done. Finally, peace in the barracks.
Why do I always hope for – expect! – the best?
And get the worst.