Joining the task force was his idea, he said. He was going to do something with his police career before he was too old to bother.
“After Vietnam, I just didn’t strive at much of anything,” he said. “I was just so glad to be alive it was enough for a long time. Ordinary police work seemed peaceful after the war. Just living without the daily fear of someone trying to kill me.”
So Fred Gil found himself in the task force, but he didn’t want to lead anyone anywhere.
The tallest of them, Ernie Salgado, was their weapons expert. Like Fred Gil he was an ex-Marine who had been in Vietnam at the beginning of the Tet offensive, and in Da Nang with the 7th Marines. He had been an infantry squad leader and had seen his share of combat during his thirteen months over there. He often wondered if the canyons at night would make him flash to Nam.
Ernie Salgado hailed from Marfa, Texas, population 2,600. It was mostly a Mexican town with some whites and no blacks. He had lived with anti-Mexican sentiment most of his life and decided to settle in San Diego after being stationed there in the Marines. But even with five years of police service, city life was still not completely comfortable. He was the only one of them who didn’t like to join the beer busts after work. He might sip a brew if the peer pressure got to be too much, when they ragged him endlessly about Marfa, Texas. Where, they said, your ordinary evening was spent watching cement harden. He made the mistake of telling them about his hometown one night after he’d had about one and a half cans of suds, which loosened his tongue. He would endure Marfa jokes from that night on.
Ernie Salgado had a long face, with a jutting chin and protruding overbite. Wisecracks about his teeth and jaw would come to get on his nerves more than the gags about Marfa, Texas.
Joe Castillo had a lithe athletic build and was the kind of young cop the groupies might ogle. And did he ever appreciate that. He was twenty-five years old and by his own reckoning was still in the “black glove” phase. That is, the period of street adjustment when young policemen feel the enormous weight of the new shield on their chests. When some cops quite literally find it imperative to buy and wear black leather gloves, and would probably carry a riding crop if the department would approve.
Joe Castillo was a poor report-writer and had some fear of Manny Lopez’ reputation for being the kind of sergeant who was strict on reports. Still, the task force seemed like it might be a stepping-stone to some good plainclothes job.
Maybe he wasn’t a bookworm, but anything physical was his cup of tea, he figured. Like Fred Gil he spoke lousy Spanish, but in the beginning he thought: What the hell, how much Spanish do you need to jump out of trees, or whatever, onto the heads of a bunch of Tijuana junkies and kick their strung-out asses? Joe Castillo was extraordinarily macho.
In the months to come, when the camaraderie was to take a few unexpected twists and turns, Joe Castillo frequently gave vent to frustration and rage. He was wont to say to his colleagues: “You don’t like it? Let’s step outside!”
Unfortunately, it sometimes caused hoots of laughter from all hands when Joe Castillo would momentarily forget that they were already outside.
Carlos Chacon finds himself suddenly confronted by horror. His sister is being attacked by three men. They force her to the ground. One of the assailants is trying to stab her. Carlos goes for them. One of them raises a long knife. Carlos Chacon runs forward but he’s too late. The knife is plunged into the belly of his sister, who begins screaming. The scream is for pain, for help, and a cry of outrage at being murdered.
He’s screaming too, so loud he can’t hear her anymore. He lunges at the heap of bodies. He pulls the knife from his sister’s heaving belly. It sucks from her guts and splatters blood all over their faces. There’s a lot of blood.
Now he is the assailant and the three men are fighting for their lives. He’s relentless, without pity. They scream. He holds the heavy knife. The knife feels like … justice. He slashes the throat of the man who stabbed his sister. The man cannot even cry out. He just looks at Carlos in horror and accepts his fate. Carlos is big, weighing well over two hundred pounds. He is twenty-three years old. The second assailant is no match for him. He plunges the knife into the throat of the man. Up to the hilt. The man does not even try to scream. The third assailant gets away. Carlos’ rage is unspeakable, worse than anything he has ever experienced.
He wakes up. The dream is one of many that recur. He dreams of violence a lot.
“My mother was a real wetback,” Carlos Chacon liked to say.
She had four children in the Republic of Mexico when she was still a young girl. She crossed into Texas by way of the Rio Grande—hence, a real wetback. But she had only three children with her on that crossing. Her husband gave one of them away, a daughter. Carlos’ mother would eventually have four more daughters and two more sons. She would raise nine children and think about the one left in Mexico.
She settled in Brownsville, Texas, close to her native land, and got a job washing and ironing for American G.I.’s. She met and married a man named Chacon. Among her children was Carlos, who always wanted to become a policeman.
“I was delivered into this world by a cop,” he said. “When my father was in jail. I never met my father.”
Carlos Chacon was one of three task force members who spoke good Spanish, growing up as he did with Spanish as the language of life, and dream, and fantasy. His mother took her children and migrated to the San Diego area.
“I always appreciated the Richard Pryor joke”—he grins, showing wolfish white incisors—“where the kid says, ‘That’s my mom you’re beating up,’ and the man says, ‘That’s my woman, kid.’”
His mother lived with a man named Geronimo who used to beat her regularly, and Carlos as well. But the boy inherited some size from the father he never met. Carlos was growing quite large and finally Geronimo found himself overmatched. He was beaten by the boy.
When Carlos went to sleep that night, having just successfully conquered a man he so feared, he dreamed of violence. He was awakened in the middle of the night uncertain whether he was still dreaming. The face of Geronimo was grinning at him. Leering, really. Geronimo began wiggling his crooked finger for the boy to come. Geronimo was holding a machete. Carlos leaped screaming from bed and grabbed a metal bar he had lately kept beside his bed for protection. Geronimo was a bully and a coward. He fled cursing, taking his machete with him.
Geronimo blessedly left their lives for some time and the children settled down a bit, but one day he returned. He tried to resume where he left off, by beating Carlos’ mother yet again. But now Carlos was a tenth-grader.
“This time I beat him up bad,” Carlos Chacon remembered. “I was so big by then I was looking straight down at him. It was in the room where I used to hear my mother screaming.”
They lived in Otai, near Chula Vista. It was a gang-ridden Mexican neighborhood. The people distrusted police, but Carlos did not. “The police came and they sided with me. I beat him bad.”
The eyes of Carlos Chacon were not something to forget. He had well-shaped expressive brows, a low forehead, wavy black hair parted in the middle. He talked with his hands, a Mexican trait. But the eyes, well, they were so liquid as to be flowing. Perhaps Valentino had eyes like this, Son-of-the-Sheik eyes which can look startled, fiery and more, while he shows the lupine, very white incisors.
“My mom is the greatest ironer in the world,” he liked to brag when he joined the Chula Vista reserve police.
She did her son’s police uniforms just as she had done the uniforms of American G.I.’s many years earlier in Brownsville, Texas. He had the sharpest military creases of any cop in San Diego County, reserve or regular. He also had a six-inch Colt Python, .357 magnum.
He was twenty years old then, and like all the other young police reservists he was trying to master pistol shooting. Dry firing an hour a day was nearly as good as firing a hundred rounds on the target range, they told him. And who could afford a hundred rounds of prac
tice ammo? To dry fire, one simply aims at a spot on the wall, small enough to simulate a bull’s-eye at twenty-five yards. It is to condition the eye, mind and hand to a slow, gradual trigger squeeze, and not to jerk involuntarily while anticipating the kick of a handgun during actual firing.
Carlos had a best friend at that time. The friend’s name was Michael Clarence Jackson. He was a high school classmate and they did everything together. Michael was black, but he had a lot in common with Carlos Chacon. For one thing, neither had known a father. Carlos once thought he was going to get to see his father for the first time, but the old man died just before the planned visit, cheating Carlos to the end.
They fantasized: Michael about going to law school and being a judge, Carlos about becoming a police chief.
Michael also loved the .357 Colt Python and Carlos let him dry fire it whenever he liked. The action on the .357 magnum was satin-smooth. Carlos ordinarily opened the cylinder and threw the rounds into a box just before the dry firing sessions.
There is controversy as to how it happened. Young men playing quick draw? Carlos said he was dry firing. If so, he obviously didn’t look at his target, only at the beautiful Python. He squeezed off an imaginary round. A real round exploded from the Python’s muzzle.
Carlos Chacon remembers the next part vividly. Michael fell to his knees, his chest smashed open. He wasn’t making any noise at first.
“I’m sorry!” Carlos Chacon cried to his friend. “I’m sorry!”
Michael never answered. Finally he started moaning. The moaning sound is what made Carlos run to a telephone.
“He’s dead,” a deputy sheriff said to Carlos Chacon at the hospital. And that was it. An accidental shooting.
Carlos went with the coroner to the home of the dead boy who had dreamed of being a judge. Carlos insisted on telling Michael’s mother himself. He kept saying, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” until the black woman swept him into her arms and then they both held each other and cried.
Carlos Chacon had another dream. It was a straightforward dream, virtually devoid of symbol. In the dream Carlos sits on the edge of very dark woods. Michael comes out of the woods to greet his friend. He says, “How you doin? Everything’s great with me!” They talk about trivial things and Michael goes back into the woods. The dream is not unpleasant, but it recurs. It is always exactly the same.
Despite the accidental shooting of Michael Clarence Jackson, Carlos Chacon was accepted by the San Diego Police Department two years later. He was still a rookie when asked by Dick Snider and Manny Lopez to join the border squad. He enthusiastically accepted.
Carlos Chacon would name his first son Michael, for his slain friend. But he still loved guns. And Carlos Chacon still had lots of violent dreams.
THE OUTSIDERS
ROBBIE HURT WAS TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD, STILL A PROBATIONARY policeman with less than a year on the department. At first he hadn’t known if he’d like it when he was assigned to Southern Division. It was isolated, geographically cut from uptown San Diego by the towns of National City and Chula Vista. On the other hand there were only eight to twelve men on a shift. This meant he wasn’t just a badge number, as some of his academy classmates complained of being, those who were assigned uptown at central headquarters. There were certainly no lieutenants like Dick Snider uptown.
“He was very easy to be around if you were a working cop,” Robbie Hurt said. “Uptown you didn’t talk to supervisors like you could talk to him. And then he asked me to take a little walk with him.”
One night before the task force was formed, Robbie Hurt and Dick Snider took off their uniform shirts and Sam Brownes, and with their service revolvers tucked in their belts they took a stroll up to Deadman’s Canyon.
Dick Snider was very outspoken, Robbie Hurt remembered. He was opinionated; he was frustrated. The rookie cop stood with his tall lieutenant and watched him gazing off at the Tijuana night lights and listened to him talk about his obsessive dream of ridding the canyons of bandits.
“The aliens have no one in their corner,” his lieutenant told him. “Imagine these peaceful people coming through these canyons. They only wanna feed their families. Imagine the fear and the abuse they suffer down there.”
It was tremendously flattering for a rookie cop to be spoken to like this, to hear the dream, to be asked his opinion.
Robbie Hurt had lived in Oakland, where he was raised by a grandmother, and he had attended the University of California at Berkeley for one year. He had been in San Diego for four years, working at the North Island Naval Air Station and for the U.S. Post Office. He had gotten married and one day when career plans seemed tenuous and confused, he applied for the San Diego Police Department.
Robbie found police work to his liking and, since he had studied English at Berkeley, was a good report-writer, but he hadn’t had time to distinguish himself in his brief police career when his lieutenant seemed to see something in him. He impressed Dick Snider when he found a discarded wallet on one of those nights while they prowled the perimeter of the canyons. It was later determined to be part of the loot in the murder of an alien. Finally his lieutenant told him what was on his mind.
“I’m thinking about getting a group a guys together to patrol these hills and handle this thing,” Dick Snider confided as they stood on a hilltop overlooking Deadman’s Canyon, on a misty summer night when the lanterns glowed murky just across the imaginary line. In the district with a grand revolutionary name: Colonia Libertad—home of smugglers, addicts, bandits and the hopeless poor.
“I was thrilled to have a lieutenant confiding in me,” Robbie Hurt said. “I was floored when he asked me to join the task force. A plainclothes job while still on probation!”
“That job was the beginning of the end of us,” Yolanda Hurt recalled. “It took a while to see how he was affected by it. Not in any way I’d expected. But in other ways. He was more affected by the experience than any of them, including Manny Lopez.”
Yolie Hurt was a year younger than Robbie and they’d been married five and a half years when Dick Snider’s experiment began. “We met when I was eighteen,” she said, “and we got married the next year. So we grew up together … or did we both grow up?”
A tall, slim young woman, rather attractive, and more so the more you were around her. It didn’t take the other cop wives long to figure out that she was absolutely genuine, very easy to take, and possibly ten years more mature than her husband.
The experiment was exciting for all the wives at first. These were not your cotillion-trained Junior Leaguers with orthodontic smiles. These were young cop wives, and their husbands, with the exception of Robbie Hurt, were of Mexican descent, several from broken homes, most from relatively poor backgrounds. Yolie Hurt had never in her life been farther than Los Angeles.
She met Robbie when he was in the Navy. Almost instantly her Mexican mother took a liking to him. She called him mi hijo even before they married. Yolie didn’t like Robbie very much in the beginning, but he was mad about her and told her that repeatedly, and told her mother and sisters and brothers. And he bought her flowers and opened the car door for her. He was a happy, charming young fellow in those days, and didn’t appear to have a moody side.
Robbie was a product of a broken home and she pitied him for not having had the parental love she had always known. Yolie, who was always a hyperactive worker, was only too glad to work all the harder for him after they married. She brought home a good paycheck. She kept an immaculate house, as did the other task force wives. Sparkling homes, clean babies and a steady civil-service paycheck being a symbolic leg up into the middle class for all these children of the working class. She also managed the money, did the laundry, cooked the meals. She and Robbie remained childless, and he became a kind of surrogate child.
“I spoiled Robbie bad,” she says. “When I look back I just don’t know how I did that to him.”
Yolie had gone to the same high school as Robbie’s police academy classmate a
nd fellow squad member, Carlos Chacon. When the experiment began, she and Robbie spent many hours talking about it. She learned of terrible things the bandits did to aliens, and how this squad of cops was going to do something that had never been attempted before. There was something else, something that Yolie was uniquely equipped to understand: Robbie Hurt, almost from the beginning, was feeling like an outsider.
“The jokes they tell in Spanish,” Robbie complained to her. “I never know if they’re about me. Then I have to have them explained.”
“That’s a little thing,” she’d tell him.
“It’s not so little,” he’d answer.
And as the days passed, the others, some of whom at first spoke very poor Spanish, began boning up. They had to learn how the Tijuana cholos talked. It was to become critical that they learn.
“I’m sure that talking Spanish makes them feel … closer,” Yolie Hurt told her husband. “It’s kind of … endearing for them.”
The wives of Tony Puente, Renee Camacho, Fred Gil and Manny Lopez were white. Carlos Chacon’s wife was of Filipino descent. The wives of Eddie Cervantes, Ernie Salgado and Joe Castillo were the only ones of Mexican descent. Yolie Hurt was from mixed parentage: her mother was Mexican, her father black, and physically she was a blend of both. She understood culture clash and how it feels not to precisely belong among whites, blacks or Mexicans.
Robbie was proud of the fact that he was a good writer. “At least I can do the best reports,” he said to her. “They come to me for help with their reports.”
“Those Mexican cops haven’t had much in their lives,” Yolie told him. “You got to be patient. This is real exciting for them.” Robbie Hurt’s young wife had no idea as yet how exciting it was going to get.
Except for Dick Snider, Robbie was the only one of the original officers on the task force whom they called an O.T.M., which was how the U.S. Border Patrol labeled aliens who were “other than Mexican.” He was the only one not to understand Spanish, since Dick Snider did speak the language. There were forty black cops on the department. There were eight black sergeants and one lieutenant, so the blacks were only slightly better represented than the Mexican-Americans.
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