Colonel Crystal's Parallel Universe

by Hufferd, James;

  There were other types, too, the parasites and sleepwalkers to whom nothing seemed to register, but they still functioned.

  As always, he was aware that there were even more types, harder to pinpoint – and he had processed and deployed and sent them both to perform and taste death – both giving and receiving the delectable madness several times a month. But, as always before, he couldn’t keep his mind focused on listing anymore. Too damned exhausting.

  XLIV

  Constable Buddy Mack

  Colonel Alva never imagined he could expect help, or protection, or any modicum of fairness, from the town constable, a tough, native-born ex-Marine sergeant named Buddy Mack (stationed two years on Okinawa, one at Boeblingen, Germany). But the unrelenting pelting of his residence with graffiti and trash was finally more than he could stand. So, he drove the mile down to the modest town hall and walked the unlit corridor to the Constable’s office.

  Constable Mack, on the phone when he arrived, slowly wheeled around, waved and motioned for him to have a seat in the wooden folding chair beside his desk.

  Seeming not unfriendly, Constable Mack assured him that, of course, he and his small group of part-time deputies would help clean up the yard and keep watch to determine who might be responsible, for Colonel Alva Crystal or any other citizen.

  When Crystal had thanked him, shaken his hand, and was heading out the door, Buddy Mack cleared his throat and asked him if he thought America bore any responsibility to the rest of the world.

  “Absolutely,” he answered. “And we owe it to our own citizens, just as importantly, to concentrate our military firepower and financing on simply defending the people and territory of the United States, in more penny-wise fashion; not on trying to run the rest of the world. And stop trying to deceive everybody as to the facts. Because, we won’t have a need to anymore if we’re wise. Yes, I think we owe all of that.” (“Arrogant smart-ass” he thought of himself,)

  Constable Mack stood and considered for a minute, his chin cradled on his hand.

  “You know,” he said, “you may be a little over the top. I’ve heard you can be a bit obsessive about all this. But, you know, I can’t say I disagree with you. Except, what do you mean by ‘deceive’?”

  Colonel Crystal turned all the way back around and took a slight step forward. “Take ISIS, for starters,” he said. “High-ranking Department of Defense officials have actually admitted and issued documents which stated, that U.S. foreign policy supported – presumably initiated, judging from the sources of similar organizations in the past – the very foundation and role of that monster, and our tax dollars quietly continue to support it. Ask the Russians. They got hammered rhetorically by us for blowing away a lot of the ISIS-related cells in Syria. Then, before that, there was al-Qaeda, founded by the CIA three decades earlier and still supported as an asset by the U.S. to be blamed for whatever nasty shit goes on. Units of al-Qaida are part of openly U.S. allied terrorist units in Syria right now.”

  “OK. I’ve got it. You’re a pistol! I’ll have to check all that out online. Just keep your head down for a little while.”

  Colonel Alva flashed a cautious grin. “Thanks! I’ll try hard not to be a nuisance.”

  XLV

  Tom Posey

  He did a couple more radio interviews that afternoon, one arranged and done by himself without ex-General Montmoracy. He’d found they weren’t hard to arrange on alternative media. Then, around supper time, he sat down and wrote what could be called a screed – with likely too much pushed forward too plainly too quickly – for a selected limited-readership alternative paper. The harder he worked, the less time he found to consider possible implications for himself.

  Chagrined, he called Frank Montmoracy and asked him point blank why he had faded into the background.

  He could almost hear Montmoracy’s smirky smile through the phone wires as he savored the question. “Because you’re doing such a bang-up job of it, bucko. I’m in awe!” he answered, less than helpfully. Except that he hadn’t denied it.

  At this point, Colonel Alva could do nothing more than shake his head and reconsider the consequences so far, in terms of achieving results.

  * * *

  Following two more days of dogged, determined activity, Colonel Crystal was visited quite unexpectedly by his best friend from Iraq days, a tall, reticent Ohio farm-boy, and active Air Force Colonel Tom Posey, now based at the Pentagon.

  In his manners and presentation, Tom Posey was simplicity itself, nonjudgmental, sober, no-nonsense. Colonel Alva remembered Tom telling him that growing up in rural western Ohio, garlic was considered a vaguely suspicious flavoring, somehow un-American. Yet, he had not had a friend he’d so bonded or identified with since early childhood, even though their respective takes on the world were fundamentally different.

  Crystal, had been known to party a bit, and occasionally more than that, and had grown worldly and aloof, rarely as forthright then as he had become since. Tom Posey was quiet and, almost endearingly, religious, loyal, and unquestioningly devoted to what he considered duty – a thoroughly decent man, but not a critical thinker, as far as anyone knew. A bit lanky, but not husky, he was deceptively strong. There was no man better to have on your side in a jam, Colonel Crystal had concluded. Hence, though they would probably never view the world quite eye-to-eye on matters involving principle, Alva was delighted to see him.

  Tom arrived just before noon, visibly less affected by the first glimmers of aging than his host. Alva tossed burgers on the grill and they downed a brew or two, then he took Tom south a few miles in his boat, down the Gulf shore, to his sunny isle in the lee of the cove.

  Lying back on the tall, soft grass of the little lost paradise brought back memories of the time they shared their R&R time in the protected Green Zone of central Baghdad and relaxed and swapped close-up impressions on the manicured grass of a small “nature” plaza surrounded by brown stone buildings, protected by a hidden sniper somewhere, as they watched heavy clouds roll overhead and commented on their shapes. Both the stark contrasts and even the vague similarities between the two experiences stunned them both.

  Relaxing there in the grove, waves almost washing their toes, but recalling that now far-off remembered time in the Green Zone, they played a few lightning rounds of “21” again, as they had (now without their “swaller” of gin after each round) – a game in which each successively added one, two, or three to the cumulative score, until the loser reached 21. Now, after the first couple of goes, it all felt too insipid, too empty.

  Alva finally broke the spell of their nostalgia. “You don’t know how good it is to see you. But I don’t imagine you came just to reminisce.”

  “You’re right. Of course. As you may have guessed, I came here to try to shake you awake.”

  “Shake me awake?” Colonel Crystal had been thinking more or less in those terms as applied to his friend – perhaps his best friend.

  “To dissuade you from your, let me emphasize, doomed course. Doomed and fatal. It’s not going to solve the country’s problems.”

  “Right. Obviously, a defense-only military won’t solve all the country’s problems, but it will move us about a hundred thousand miles in that direction, with a lot of momentum toward the rest. But, fatal, you think?”

  “Yes, fatal. What prompted me to come is, I saw your name on a memo.” He pulled a carefully-folded photocopy out of his shirt pocket and handed it to Alva. “I had to break protocol. It could cost me my job that I made and shared a copy of it. By the way, I’d trade my high-salary Pentagon-based life any day for what you’ve got here. It’s humble, but easy, and I would hate for you to lose it. All of it.”

  Colonel Crystal scanned it, his eyes stopping at a particularly ominous phrase.

  Looking sobered, he concurred: “Yeah.”

  “Look, they have all the weapons, Alva. And they get nervous.”

  “Well, I can’t exactly ask you to join me in my dereliction…”

>   Tom slowly shook his head. “No.”

  “But you do know I’m right? That the military of this country is being grossly misused and abused, and…”

  “You’re right. I’ve listened to some of your radio presentations. You’re very good, and come across as highly dangerous to them.”

  At that revelation, Alva was slightly stunned. “You agree with me?”

  “Yup. Virtually everybody who is anybody in the military for six months, at least mind-wise, would know you are basically correct. Though, I haven’t put it together, or seen it laid out, the way you did. So, I’m not sure in point of detail. But…”

  “So, what are you trying to tell me?”

  “Something you must already know, deep down. They’ll never let you get away with it, Alva; that is, you’ll never be able to set what little we have as an honest intelligentsia in this country, and most of the tuned-in common people, in opposition to the war-planning faction. It’s necessary, they would probably have to say, through crocodile tears, to prop up the economy.

  “Of course, they would say you’re out of your mind – not just disgruntled, but raving mad – that you know nothing. OK, it’s really not that simple. But I do think you’re basically right. That’s their whole circulatory system, as well as their dirty undies, for anyone brave enough to see – and they’re not going to let it be widely displayed and discussed then broken up by unified public pressure being put on them. I’m here to tell you, you don’t have the chance of a frog in a blender!”

  “And you’re on their side?”

  “Of course not. But they have the goods on us all. They have a ton of ways. It’s like everyone is held in line, like iron filings by a magnet.”

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “Don’t be an idiot, Alva. Look, you could have a job like mine – or, at least, be well provided right here on your most generous lifetime pension. Look, I want you to keep on tickin’, Crystal-man. You’re too good a stud to off yourself.”

  Colonel Alva was not much amused or pleased. “I guess it doesn’t make much sense for me to ask you if your life really means more than the meaning of your life, does it?”

  “Alva, I know what you’re saying. But all I’m asking you is to make peace with reality. The way this country is being held together – involving the deception and heinous misuse and abuse of the military, as you put it, yes – is how it’s kept running – as much bitching and hand-wringing as that brings. Its great flaw is channeled politically where the real conflict is kept protected, blunted and aimed time and again in partisan fashion at the wrong objects. People know now it won’t hold together without at least the reluctant assent on something, anything of basically all participants. For lack of anything else, nostalgic patriotism, the military, as counter-rational as that is.” “So, what they (the real insiders) tell us is not swallowed exactly as reality, but more like a trick play. Pretty much everybody feels they must go along, like it or not. And, in their hearts, most really don’t. But we’re pretty much all scared to object, in most instances. People seem to be deathly afraid to question it, because it’s so entrenched.

  And because, what would happen if that whole set-up was just yanked away suddenly? Who can really say? It’s become our M.O. I don’t like the way it’s all set up much, either, as I said, but I’ll keep my life and my wife, thank you. Because there’s no other real choice. And desperados only die, and I mean dead.”

  Colonel Crystal sighed, resigned. “I got it.”

  By now, they were climbing back into the boat and the day was ending.

  Alva was starting to think how to word a petition.

  XLVI

  What Sort of a Codicil?

  On the way back to what its mortgage-strapped owner called the “Crystal compound” in the boat, Colonel (now, as it turned out, General) Posey raised an objection, “But what about all the strife between Islamic sects in the Middle East? Isn’t a strong U.S. military presence needed to police that, at least direct traffic? Shouldn’t we at least contribute that much?”

  Ex-Colonel Alva shook his head. “Tom, do you think they would even be at each other’s throats now the way they are if we’d never gotten ourselves militarily involved there?”

  “I guess that remains an unknown. I know they were, at least to a certain extent before, though.”

  “So, have we beaten down the flames by killing a bunch of their people?”

  “No, I guess we haven’t.”

  “And, for that matter, would groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS not exist – regardless of the official story – if, as evidence clearly shows, our super-smart “intelligence” agencies hadn’t established, or didn’t continue to support them?”

  “No, not those two, anyway.”

  “And do you think groups we, for the most part, secretly created, support, and control are likely to attack us without our permission or even encouragement, or – God help us – collaboration?

  “That wouldn’t make too much sense, I guess.”

  He paused, looking straight into Tom’s blue eyes, then continued, “Now let me ask you this: Do you suppose we’re dug in over there for the sake of the American people, who are paying the bills? Or for the sake of the multinationals and banks, who generally don’t want to give enough back to the common wealth even to cover their own assessed taxes?”

  General Tom Posey didn’t answer – he just continued to survey the shoreline in rapt fascination.

  XLVII

  Shift of Focus

  “So, why is it that my own countrymen, of whatever status, would not be interested in what I find so unconscionably expensive in so many ways, while even the country as a whole and the world at large literally groan under the injustice and outrage of it, going on for so many, many years?” the ex-Colonel puzzled to himself after his latest esteemed guest, the new General, his friend Tom,, had left. “Two and two can’t be that hard to add – even if the sum is obscured by a swirling myths and fog for a hundred years..” He rolled this problem of the irresistible force and unmovable object over in his mind for several minutes, emerging with the start of a new, better formula than the usual, based this time on humanity and fairness.

  “What’s understandable to all – that can capture a whole lot more people’s rapt attention and sense of outrage?” he asked himself. Hmmmm… something… Suddenly, he knew. People would respond not to what the bizarre lashing out of the unrepresentative U.S. establishment did to others, strangers far away, savaging them, but they would respond with irresistible vigor, rage if they found out it was devouring THEM! That they were cast and treated horrendously as both the funding source and the enemy.

  “They’re not going to be so persuaded by anonymous annihilation and suffering alone – that’s as old as the world, falling indiscriminately. And if they haven’t responded to it already,” he told himself, they’re not sufficiently moved by it now, in part because it’s minimally reported, say if an American or two is killed. Or if an atrocity can be blamed on others.

  The public won’t be moved now by the brutality and obscenity of war, because the media will never show it. And it’s a million miles away. So, what could work – maybe in combination with the unjustified blood and suffering of strangers, is the shear, dead-weight loss to virtually everybody of life and liberty brought about by throwing away the common national treasure – their livelihood – to the tune of six-plus trillion dollars and counting. Money that is theirs – simply handed over to the war industries instead, used for terrorizing and killing in droves people a whole lot like them, to forge and validate weapons and the enrichment of an American aristocracy. Their (our) earned income siphoned for that, a burden no other nation – except the unfortunate ones we attack – has to bear. The amount of productive potential and common well-being thus lost to the nation is staggering, the difference between our children living better or worse than our parents, transferred for the sake of mansions and power for the well-connected and our elite’s power to enslave others.
That could do it.

  He stopped and stood back to think. So, we know who the mega-sum of money used to fund, and over-fund the imperial war machine comes from. But the question that never gets asked is, who does it go to?

  “The answer,” he smiled in a sort of grimace, “is that it goes overwhelmingly to precisely the vanishingly small, elite group at the top who profit from oil concessions, munitions and armored vehicles and planes, supply and construction of overseas bases and troops, mega-banks and investment houses collecting the enormous sums of interest we’re saddled with, etc., etc.

  The cost factor – with no return whatsoever on investment for taxpayers. That should do it. If anyone within the sound of my voice is alive, awake… Defense only military can dispense with the undue, dispensable burden of that, while retaining and better concentrating on the mission of sensibly and more than sufficiently defending the nation. They (the neocons and plutocrats) will rale against it, point the glory and the revenge, but no longer with success. It’s time we come to our senses. Excel through our merit; planet bully no more.* * *

  Now, how to write the lead, the necessary petition? “Resolved,” he began. That was the easy part. “Resolved, that picking factions of foreign groups abroad as enemies to target for destruction, while supporting other, quite similar groups or cells, while either or both may or may not have been demonstrably created by agencies of the U.S. government… blah, blah…

  “Naw! I don’t think so! Way over-wordy. Is that even a word? Ok, too complex”!

  He tried again: “Resolved that the U.S. policy of invasion and intervention in the affairs of the Middle East and elsewhere has been insupportably expensive and ineffective, costly both in terms of sacrificing U.S. taxpayers’ hard-earned, badly-needed wherewithal and income , and in human lives, ours and, even more, theirs, our designated enemies… And that the Constitution…”