“Mr. Crystal, our superiors don’t want a national debate to be ignited on this pet issue of yours. They don’t want people thinking about things that way. And so, now you are here.”
“I just bet they don’t, sir. Unlike me, they have a concealed agenda to protect.”
“Don’t what, Mr. Crystal?”
“They don’t want people to think.”
“Oh, and, by the way, if I might ask, what would you do with Northrup-Grummond, Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, Bechtel, KBR and their like, if you had yer way? Close ‘em down an’ furlough their couple of million-plus employees? That wouldn’t be popular, Mr. Alva A. Crystal.”
“Well, Sir, what they support in the Middle East, to say nothing of Central Asia and throughout Africa – none of it is exactly cricket, legitimate, being based on a very high dung-heap of scapegoating, conniving, unsupported claims and damnable lies and the like, in lieu of proper prosecutions and legal proofs of guilt or intent or even identity…”
“Diplomacy? Commerce, Sir?”
“Some of what they do, and are authorized to do, would still be needed for their proper mission of national defense. And the illegal, possibly larger part of their operations and so-called ‘services’ could be switched over to lead the twenty-first century resurgence of useful American domestic manufacturing – re-employing untold millions at a higher wage.”
“Hmmmm… And, well, I am obligated to tell you this, too: Unless you are willing, Mr. Alva A. Crystal, to recant and renounce your campaign, or whatever it is you care to call it…”
“I will lose my pension, is that about right?”
“You might. The Board of Grievances in the Pentagon will review your interview here and rule, Mr. Crystal.
“Now, before I pull out your affidavit to sign, acknowledging and renouncing your disrespect, let me bring in the designated witness who will implicate you.”
With this, he got up from his chair and walked to the door of the cell. Opening it, he admitted the designated witness – none other than ex-General A. Franklin Montmoracy (ret.), USAF. (“No, Monty!” Alva screamed silently and, in a minute, knew for certain.).
General Montmoracy almost imperceptibly nodded toward Colonel Alva, without smiling in the least, and, when asked if this man was the person indicated in the warrant, Mr. Alva A. Crystal, answered audibly, “Oh, yes, that’s him.”
And without any further ado, Montmoracy exchanged an indistinguishable few words in a huddle with the interviewing officer, both saluted, and he walked briskly out.
“Say, you’re lucky,” the junior officer said. “You’re given a choice!” And with that, Colonel Crystal was handed the “Affidavit of Agreement” and a pen and, unobserved, signed it and marked the second box – Decline.
LII
Uneasy Aftermath
Colonel Alva Crystal USAF (ret.) was released on his own recognizance, the “obstruction of justice” and related charges still pending indefinitely.
When he got home, delivered by taxi, Colby’s red Buick was gone without even a note of explanation.
He sat down alone within the engulfing hollows of his house on the wicker couch in the parlor somewhat now inaptly called a love seat, . He couldn’t remember ever having sat there. Irony loomed. The utter silence resounded in his ears, his head still spinning with dread and the unreality.
After half an hour, he was starting to feel oppressively fearful and sorry for himself, but getting somewhat hungry. There was always peanut butter on crackers to be had. Maybe with butter to honor Felicia. Dang! He had destroyed that! But, no, he realized his greater need of another’s presence. So, he called Ludmilla to come over and fix him a tuna on toast and share his woes.
The faithful older one was at home as usual and arrived in twenty minutes, a welcome relief. They sat down together at table, and he shared with her all that had happened – or seemed to have happened – and his discordant thoughts.
“You are right,” she consoled. “I know you can find a job and save your house. Oh, I am so sorry, Alva.”
“I can’t just let them bulldoze everyone with unjustified evil, the off-the-top scamming of trillions for the wicked fairy tales they sell as they continue to wham flat nearly every American worker and taxpayer.”
“Of course not. No, they can’t. You must alert them all, he comforted himself, even if they already deep down know something is badly missing, as you have said. God help us all, if there is even one who truly cares.”
He went to work right after lunch and Ludmilla’s visit, firing off inquiries to a couple of dozen potential employers he knew, many of them old Air Force acquaintances and friends now active in the private sector. And when he didn’t hear back right away from any of them, he began to divine the problem. Scarcely anyone would run the risk, even if so inclined, to help him now. And it would take a sizable income to keep up payments on the house alone.
* * *
For a week, he indulged in more reading and writing, and in preparing for an upcoming broadcast interview, this time stressing the vast separation of interest and will between the controlling CFR/war industry-corporate-financial élite and the more truly patriotic American people as a flashpoint for forcing a restoration of American sanity via decided opinion and the ballot box – as per the ending of the erstwhile Vietnam mess. This time would be harder.
The now-definitively Ex-Colonel received in the daily post his routine mass-mailed invitation to the Southeast Regional Commander Wing Annual Reunion of Air Force Officer Veterans to be held this year on August 14 at the Legion Hall and Parade Ground in Americus, Georgia, and started to rehearse to himself how things might go if he decided to attend.
He could easily imagine two scenarios. In the first, he would be politely ignored and avoided, with perhaps some jocular recognition from the podium or the head table during the toasts and speakers’ remarks. In the second, there would be heated attacks hurled, even smears concerning his attempts to wean minds away from a robust offensive military and clandestine adventuring as “required” on a global scale. They would attempt to link him with the Russians. And would the Russians belligerently dominate the world scene if we adopted a Defense-Only military? Not likely, because they, with a single overseas base compared to our 700-plus, no comparable infrastructure, and a comparatively anemic economy – and seeing how our thrust for world domination dragged us down – wouldn’t attempt it. Nor would any other power, seeing us, with the world’s leading economy, divided internally, provoking great instability and restlessness.
He decided it best to steer clear of the annual gathering and avoid unnecessary repercussions. He considered requesting a speaking slot or sending a letter to be circulated or read from the lectern but was fearful that such an approach would only serve to further solidify the gung-ho, sentiments of the ubiquitous neocons and their determined backers.
How to best proceed to deal with his own unresolved plight, too, had grown into a serious conundrum.
LIII
Drastic Fallout
Three weeks after that fateful day at Tyndale AFB, ex-Colonel Crystal received a letter from the Office of Adjudication at the Pentagon, notifying him that his pension was suspended forthwith pending final resolution within eighteen months.
Fine! No income on the horizon for the next year and a half!
But there was another letter amid the pile of assorted ads and solicitations, from Roberts Cross-shipping, a trans-shipment outfit in Cross City he had written to. He was invited to come in and interview for a position in the loading dock pool, ironically, on the same date as the Commander Wing Reunion in Americus he was still toying with attending.
Well, he thought, while it wouldn’t pay all the bills, it was at least be fairly anonymous, in that a back and two arms are all they were looking for, and it was something – a start.
That same day, early in the evening, he started to notice for the first time that an inordinate amount of his hair had begun to come out in chunks in the show
er and sink, leaving patches of his scalp, along the old hairline, unaccustomedly not only hairless, but itchy and puffy.
And, at almost the same instant, some of his teeth were beginning to loosen – not ache really — just loosen. Then, over the next few days, he lost three teeth together on the lower right, while those remaining began to ache dully, his skin and gums started itching and turning tender. And he started suffering morning bouts of nausea.
High time to go to the doctor, he thought. And now, before the end of the month when his insurance would run out.
But what could a doctor do for him? Potassium iodide, he’d heard, was an antidote for radiation. He’d google it. Sucking in his breath, he admitted to himself what was happening – precisely what his instincts had screamed at him to run from knowing.
Then, he had another wild idea – could the United States Air Force be sued? Certainly. And Mr. Lawrence, Will Goldsby’s lawyer, certainly owed him one. It would be at best a long shot, but still… At least, his brain was still firing neurons.
He could only hope that Felicia was faring better.
And then, it occurred to him that he could, at very least, drag himself up to Family Medical Center, there in Steinhatchee, check out their free clinic, and ask the doctor on duty about antidotes to radioactive exposure.
So many things on his mind – emergency wellness alarms, at least long-term loss of his monthly pension and income, including military health, dental, and even death benefits. Impending probable loss of his house, yard, and boat launch, loss of funds to pay his creditors, not to mention pending additional charges, and likely for him, the biggest loss of all, his all-important distinctive dissident voice to warn of the robbers, poisoners, and plunderers who were “representing” and systematically – maybe even deliberately – bleeding his country to death. Everything.
At least, they had not incarcerated him – yet.
His head reeling and thoughts swirling crazily, he stepped out the back door to get to his car, missed the last wooden step down to the walk, turned his right ankle, and felt his whole femur, two inches higher, crumble with a soft crackling sound, spilling him onto the ground, muddy from overnight rain. He passed out momentarily from blinding repetitive surges of pain.
LIV
Writing on the Wall
Colonel Crystal’s neighbor, Peleg Johnson, looking out a window, saw him tumble when his leg crumbled, out of the corner of his eye. Rushing to help as best he could, he first confronted a familiar-looking protester headed for the Colonel’s big adobe house, likely intent on more defacement, still an almost daily occurrence.
As Colonel Alva was starting to come around, groaning involuntarily from the pain, he saw Peleg struggling to hold back the vaguely-known young man from rushing to kick his downed dreaded demon full on in the gut. Fearful, the ex-Colonel tried to get to his feet and slumped back down again. As the attacker attempted to wrench himself free and make a lunge, Peleg Johnson managed to tackle him. As they struggled on the ground, the desperado pulled his cell phone from his shirt pocket and frantically clicked a number.
In less than a minute, it seemed, the constable, Buddy Mack, pulled up in his white squad car. The desperate stranger, managing to pull away from Peleg Johnson’s hold on his arm, ran up to the constable, stepping out of his car, a mere twenty feet from the Colonel’s back entrance.
Colonel Alva swooned and passed out, and dreamed he was back in Iraq and surrounded, along with a fellow officer he couldn’t quite place, on a roadway amidst a fleeing crowd of hundreds of perplexed and uncertain village people and peasants of all ages. As they glanced around, clearly at the mercy of the crowd, they kept their eyes peeled for weapons or Islamic fanatics, of which they didn’t spot any.
For their part, the Iraqi locals were carefully watching the two Americans like hawks, hoping against hope they wouldn’t raise their automatic weapons and blow away row upon row of these innocent, displaced extended families in retreat.
And though it was a dream, Colonel Crystal could recall flashes of awareness and recognition going off in his head.
Then he awoke and saw Buddy Mack almost yelling at the young attacker he called “Lester” with the Crystals’ neighbor, Peleg Johnson, standing to one side. Lester was trying to convince the constable that Colonel Crystal had run at him and threatened him with bodily harm at the outskirts of his yard, and he had thrown him to the ground as he retreated to ascend his back steps. Now, Peleg was waving an arm and most uncharacteristically interrupting to attempt to set the record straight.
Constable Mack turned and walked over to the Colonel, now pulling himself very gingerly to his feet, and asked him what had happened.
“I don’t know, Sir,” Colonel Crystal answered weakly. “I just tumbled off the step coming out to get in my car. I think my leg snapped when I landed on it wrong. I don’t know where this yahoo came from. But he might have been causing at least a good part of the vandalism I came to talk to you about the other day.”
The constable thought for only a couple of seconds, and declared, “I have to go along with the Colonel on this.”
He made a sudden move toward the youth, who was trying to slink away. “Lester,” he shouted with authority, “get in the car. You’re coming with me. And you get in, too, Colonel Crystal. I’m taking you to the Medical Center. Thank you, Mr. Johnson!”
“And now, I can’t even work, again thanks to them. Great!” the ex-Colonel sighed to himself.
LV
Slams Down The Hammer
He lay in his hammock for a month and recuperated, enduring bouts of pain and fever, waited on, nursed, ministered to by Ludmilla, sending and receiving precious few messages, but plotting the future in elliptical ways. In a fit of melancholia one day, born of circumstance and pain-killers, he scrawled in a notebook a silly verse that kept running through his head:
The Old-Time People
The old-time people are all gone now,
Rattlety-rattlety, in their boxes lean,
Their world in black as they strive to recall the red,
the blue and green.
Nor heav’n nor hell their abode…
they may be stuck somewhere between.
Indeed, they might walk among us still,
unsuspected, felt, not heard, Unseen.
To him the mystery was, how could so very many have been robbed of their birthright of a free and prosperous country and held hostage for so long by such despicable, sinister tricks under the aegis of what was supposed to be their own government? Awareness of such a thing perfectly plain whenever you begin to think, should result in a burning anger and nationwide resolve to prevent such from ever happening in America again. During his time of scrambled tension and peaceful rest following his physical breakdown, dreaming and waking and little else, he dreamed of a national campaign taking off, with eventually millions of citizens overwhelming Congress and the White House, peacefully but relentlessly demanding a permanent, absolute, full-stop END to unprovoked overseas offensive military campaigns and legislation re-establishing a true defense only U.S .military, dedicated fully to the direct defense of our country, and that is all.
It would happen somehow, sometime… He was sure of it. “Defense only military!” He heard them cry.
Then, in his half delirium, produced by his doctor’s regimen of pills, and half euphoria brought on by fabulous hallucinations of glorious triumph and sweeping, decisive national self-salvation, he formulated an ambitious plan, at least for such time as he had left. Already having weakened from the effects of radiation, he accepted it wouldn’t be all that long before the ravages of radiation did him in. Say, a matter of weeks, a few months at the outside.
But in those weeks, perhaps, that remained, he resolved to travel by bus to every sizable population center in Florida, announcing his presence and schedule in newspaper and radio ads and with strategically-placed posters. He would speak in public plazas, with such assistance and lodging as he might solicit from loc
al peace and anti-war activists. The sequence he projected was: Tallahassee, Pensacola, St. Petersburg, Tampa, Orlando, Fort Lauderdale, and on down, hobbling on crutches for as long as would prove necessary.
Ludmilla questioned his fitness for such a journey – and she remarked that she would gladly come along if she wasn’t 81 and had the resolve he had. Although his hair was all but gone, sheaves of skin hanging here and there like so much dried parchment, gait wobbly, bones and joints achy and vulnerable, gums sore, bleeding half the time, and by now most of his teeth missing, Colonel Crystal insisted he was ready and able to go.
The receptions he got initially were better than he ever could have expected and better than any he’d ever received in his life – maybe because the objectors thought they dare not beat up a wounded warrior in front of steadily growing, cheering and chanting crowds of supporters. He thought at times it must all be a dream.
The crowds swelled to hundreds and then over a thousand as word spread of his simple, irrefutable reasoning – that the proper mission of the U.S. military was to defend the country and people from foreign attack, not the grossly-expanded sinister mission it was currently commissioned to perform. His heartfelt plea, he told all within earshot, was, “Let’s return to something much closer to the Founding Fathers’ reluctant rationale for finally authorizing a standing army – to defend the borders and populace of the United States from foreign attack and insurrection, period. The trillions of American dollars authorized over time for those other, coercive purposes could be much more productively applied or reserved to the people, who most certainly need the money.”
At his fourth stop, in Tampa, a well-known civic leader presented him a check for ten thousand dollars and disclosed that a growing national movement was arising to promote his message, assuming the name “Taxpayers for a Benevolent Military” – meaning a truly national defense-oriented military. And the gentleman further announced that the eight regional founders of the new movement or organization had taken it upon themselves to pay off his mortgage to save his house and pay his bills in perpetuity, including medical.
Colonel Crystal's Parallel Universe Page 17