by Mark Donahue
The Army would have given Lester even more medals, had they not found out that he had been a mere schoolboy when he enlisted while on a trip to France. As a result, Lester’s heroics were kept as quiet as possible once the Army learned the truth. Further, Lester’s career in the military was officially over as soon as he returned home. Because of the silence the Army imposed on Lester’s records, he returned to Phoenix with no one except his parents knowing of his exploits. It was as if it had never happened.
Depressed and confused that the Army no longer wanted him and his hometown had forgotten about him, he decided to “hit the road” again for a while to find out what he wanted to do with his life. At first his father thought that what Lester needed was a good job in the mine, but seeing the look in his son’s eyes, he knew Lester was not ready to settle down. Despite his mother’s tears, Lester left Phoenix in early 1919 and made his way to California. For the next three years he traveled across the country from coast to coast, usually riding the rails until the need for a soft bed and a hot meal made him stop in a city or town and do odd jobs to earn some cash.
On several occasions, Lester ran into men he had served with in the Army. He was sometimes embarrassed by their adulation as they recalled his heroics in Germany and France. Once in the Kansas City bus station, Lester ran into a former corporal he had pulled from a burning supply truck the Germans had machine-gunned outside Paris.
“Sarge! It’s me, Maloney! You remember, Corporal Maloney. How the hell you been?” a short, red-haired young man said, as he grabbed Lester’s hand and shook it like it was a water pump handle. “Honey, this is the sergeant I told you about who saved my life. If it wasn’t for sarge here, I’d be a buried bag of bones layin’ in some shallow grave back in France.”
“Hi, corporal.” Lester said sheepishly. “Hi ma’am, nice to make your acquaintance.” Without saying a word, Maloney’s wife, clearly in the last months of what had been a difficult pregnancy, rose to her tiptoes, and kissed Lester on the cheek.
“Sergeant, I can’t tell how many times my Donnie talks about you and how you saved his life, and how you were the best soldier he ever saw. It’s a real pleasure to meet you.”
“Well, it’s nice to meet you too, ma’am, but I’m afraid Donnie here may exaggerate just a bit. He was the one who was the good soldier; you should be real proud of him. You tell that young-un’ of yours when it comes, that Donnie here was a real hero and his sergeant said so.”
Seeing Corporal Maloney swell with pride in front of his wife at hearing what he said made Lester feel good, even though the truth was Maloney was about a no count a soldier as Lester had commanded in those days. But it didn’t matter now, especially seeing how his wife looked at him. After some more idle chatter, Lester said he had a bus to catch and said good-bye. Later that night, Lester slept off some bad muscatel in an abandoned warehouse near the bus station and began what was to become a five-day bender.
After three years on the road, Lester returned to Phoenix to find his father had died six months before, and his mother had moved to Seattle to be with his younger brother who was an attorney in a shipping company. He wrote his mother several times, but he was never sure if his brother ever gave her the letters since he disapproved of what Lester had done with his life. He never heard from his mother again. She died in 1926. Lester found out about it in 1929.
Back in Phoenix, Lester tried to find a trade that he could get into but nothing stuck. He worked in a lumber mill, a quarry, drove a truck, dug ditches, even worked in a hospital as an orderly, but he would soon become bored and leave every job. But no matter what he did, Lester had two qualities that made employers sorry to see him go. First of all, he was a tireless worker, and secondly, he seemed to command the respect of the people with whom he worked. He had an almost effortless ability to lead and direct people. Even his superiors were often prone to listen to his suggestions, and they used his leadership abilities to get other employees to get their work done.
Lester could have continued his hand-to-mouth existence for an indefinite period if it had not been for Officer Nick Quinn of the Phoenix police department. Quinn was a notorious cop with a mean streak that was often taken out on the drunks that congregated near the warehouse district of downtown Phoenix.
In the fall of 1933, Quinn was in the process of beating to death a drinking buddy of Lester’s when Lester came around the corner and saw the last of what was over twenty blows with a billy club to his friend’s skull. Dead after the first five blows, Quinn was insane with rage that the drunk had mouthed off to him and was ready to bring down yet another blow when Lester grabbed his arm and broke it at the elbow over his knee in a move that was as quick as it was effective. At over six foot four and a muscular 195 pounds, Lester had seen the five foot ten, 225-pound Quinn in action before and decided his days of bullying and murder were over.
As Quinn screamed in agony with a compound fracture of his left arm, he reached for his holstered pistol with his right. Moving deliberately yet with the decisiveness of an athlete, Lester kicked Quinn in the side of the head, reached down, grabbed his pistol, took hold of the barrel end, and drove the hand grip down on Quinn’s broken arm again and again. The sound that emanated from Quinn was no longer a scream. It was a high-pitched wail that made him sound like a schoolgirl. A very vicious schoolgirl.
Lester dropped the pistol in a nearby trash can and calmly left the scene walking past a group of men who patted him on the back as he disappeared into the Phoenix summer night. Within three days of the incident, Lester was arrested and was initially charged with the murder of the drunk as well as assault with a deadly weapon on Quinn, who tried to convince his superiors that Lester was the killer. After checking with witnesses, it was clear Lester had not killed the drunk. But he was charged with assault, although many Phoenix cops knew of Quinn’s reputation and were silently happy when Quinn had his mangled arm amputated a week after Lester’s attack and was sent to prison for second-degree murder.
Lester was sentenced to six years in federal prison on the assault charge but was released after four for good behavior. During his jail time, Lester read voraciously and not only received his high school diploma, but also credit for several college courses. Literature, history, and philosophy were particularly interesting to Lester, and while other inmates listened to the radio, watched old movies, or played cards every night, Lester read. For the first time he realized what he had lost by quitting school at such an early age. He envied his brother and how his life had always revolved around books. He even inquired about completing college and getting a law degree but was told as a convicted felon no state bar would accept him.
Upon his release in November 1940, Lester was the cliché of the older and wiser man. But that wisdom did little for his ability to find a decent job. Nearly forty and an ex-con, he soon gave up on finding a career and eventually returned to Phoenix and a life filled with minimum wage jobs, some petty crime, a well-used library card, and a valuable coming to grips with himself as a man.
For several years prior to meeting Rolle, Lester had assumed a leadership role over a group of twenty to twenty-five homeless men who lived in the deserted warehouses of downtown Phoenix. Lester’s leadership of the men was neither sought, nor necessarily recognized by him. He simply did what came naturally, and over time he began to feel a responsibility to the men and did what he could to help them with their precarious lives.
From the time Lester first saw Rolle on the ground behind the bus station surrounded by his men three days earlier, he didn’t trust him. Even when Rolle tried to play to Lester’s ego and offered him a bonus for managing his men, Lester knew there was more to the story than Rolle was telling. But most of all, Lester felt responsible for the deaths of the three men who had been mutilated by the Germans. While these men’s lives were worthless by society’s standards, they were Lester’s friends, and he saw no difference between them and the men he had
led into battle years before.
He was also curious about what was happening at the Jasper, and he felt compelled to see his mission to its conclusion, even if that meant facing the same fate as his three friends.
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Taking advantage of the total darkness, Lester decided to make his move. His plan was to extricate himself from the shaft behind the large wood doors and move to his right against the cavern walls. He would make his way to the back of the now-damaged office area where he had met with Rolle hours before. The risk was that some of the guards may have been assigned to remain in the cavern, but Lester felt that was unlikely. Anyway, it was a chance he had to take.
Trying to find the footholds he had used as a boy to climb the rocks on the right side of the huge wooden door, he stumbled several times. The weight of the weapons he carried made it awkward for him to balance on the rocks. After finding the gap between the door and the rocks, he found he had a bigger problem. Literally. He wouldn’t fit. While a five feet one, 100-pound boy had slithered through the opening, a six foot four, 170 pound man could not. His plans now useless, Lester cussed under his breath and tried to think of another option. His biggest concern was fatigue. He was fading, and knew if he stayed where he was much longer, he would get increasingly sore and might even fall asleep.
As Lester sat in the cool darkness and utter silence, time seemed to bend and waft. He wasn’t sure how long he sat or if he had even dozed off when he heard the sound of gravel hitting the floor of the pitch-black tunnel.
Jerked to attention, Lester at first assumed the sound was caused by a pebble being loosened by a mouse or scorpion up near the top of the air shaft and trickling down into the tunnel. Not moving and staring into the darkness, Lester heard nothing for another five minutes.
Finally, given an achy left leg cramp, Lester was about to rise and force himself up one of the air shafts when more pebbles began to trickle into the tunnel. Suddenly, the trickle became a torrent, followed by the sound of a body careening down the same shaft that Lester had descended hours before.
Remaining motionless, Lester strained to see or hear some kind of movement, but the darkness and silence were total. Whoever had entered the tunnel was also utterly silent. With only thirty feet separating Lester from the shaft and the person now at the bottom of it, Lester knew he had the advantage. He knew his newly arrived visitor was there, but whoever had just slid down into absolute darkness didn’t know Lester was there. Further, whoever was there surely didn’t know where he had landed. Was he all the way down the shaft or only resting on a ledge with hundreds of feet of air below him? Was he wedged in a crevice? Was he in a tunnel filled with Mojave rattlers? Whoever this man was, Lester was impressed. To slide into an abyss, be able to maintain his composure, and not turn on a flashlight or even move, was a discipline that Lester admired.
Afraid to even raise his rifle for fear of the sound it might create, Lester decided to wait out his guest. For another ten minutes, a game of nerves prevailed in the tunnel with Lester’s muscles aching from their immobility. Despite the coolness in the tunnel, perspiration began to run down Lester’s face, and he could feel his blue work shirt become saturated with sweat.
Then, without warning, the tunnel was filled with more pebbles coming from the shaft. As the sound of falling pebbles grew louder, Lester took the opportunity to come to one knee and place his rifle in a firing position. Within seconds the sound of a second and then a third body cascading down the shaft hit Lester’s ears, and the muffled grunts of the bodies as they plowed into each other reverberated in the shaft.
Now prepared to fire into the darkness aiming only at sound, Lester was given a much better target when one of the guards flipped on his flashlight. Like a beacon on a ship, Lester fired twelve rounds at the light, which was smashed out after the second shot. Moving from the left side of the tunnel to the right after firing his deadly volley, Lester crouched in silence, the acrid smell of the spent gun powder burning his nostrils. Thirty seconds after his shots, Lester heard a gurgling sound emanating from where the light had been, and he instinctively reacted by firing another six rounds. No longer waiting, Lester ran toward where he had fired. As he neared where the light had been, he turned on his flashlight and saw three German guards bathed in blood.
The guard lying on top of the other two had been nearly cut in half at the waist by three of the fifty caliber rifle shots. The second guard, eyes opened in death, had what appeared to be two wounds in the upper chest. The third guard on the bottom of the pile was the one Lester had shot in the back hours before. Obviously, the two guards had pushed their already dead comrade down to determine if anyone was waiting below in the shaft. There was.
Behind him, Lester heard the sound of voices and running feet from the main cavern. Realizing that more guards were coming, he decided that despite his fatigue, it was time to exit the tunnel via one of the air shafts. Running past the shaft the three dead guards had emerged from, he decided it was likely at least one more guard may be waiting for him at the top of that shaft. Moving toward other shafts a hundred and fifty feet deeper into the tunnel, he reached the second of three air shafts that would eventually lead him up to the top of the mine.
The guards in the main cavern had reached the large wooden door and were calling out the names of the guards who had been sent down the shaft. Hearing nothing, they pounded the huge deadbolt that was holding fast under the onslaught of rifle butts. Finally, the major told his men to step back, and he wedged a “pineapple” grenade between the wooden slats. Pulling the pin and moving back and to the side of the door, they waited.
At the same time, Lester had found the opening he was looking for and pulled himself up into the dark shaft. Seconds later, the grenade ripped open the massive wooden door.
The sound of the blast reverberated through the narrow tunnel with such force that Lester’s left eardrum, the one facing the opening, was broken, and the pain at first made him feel as if he had been hit by flying rock. Temporarily stunned, he dropped one of the rifles he was carrying, and it skidded down the shaft and hit the rock floor below. The guards were now climbing through the remnants of the door through the smoke and dust, making their way to the back of the tunnel.
Coming to his senses, Lester ascended the shaft and immediately remembered why as a child he had always preferred the other two air shafts in which to play. This shaft was narrower and steeper than the other two, and for the first time claustrophobia gripped at him as he pushed himself through a small nearly horizontal section of the shaft that led to a steep vertical climb.
The angle he was trying to traverse forced him to pull his upper body through an opening, but in doing so, he found he did not have the room to bend his legs to allow him to push himself upward. For several seconds, with a rock firmly pressing against the small of his back, he couldn’t move either up or down the shaft. He fought the panic that had invaded his brain. He went limp and tried to relax. He took deep breaths hoping that when he again tried to move his body, he would be able to.
With his free right hand, he slid his remaining rifle off his shoulder and down toward his right leg, attempting to give himself more room to maneuver. With his left ear bleeding and ringing in pain, Lester tried to gather his strength for another attempt to pull himself up the shaft. Moving his feet like a seal’s flippers, he began to gain some traction and inched his way upward until the rock that was at the base of his spine had moved to the back of his knees. Resting for a moment, he was snapped back into action by the sound of the guards who had now found their dead comrades and knew they were not alone in the tunnel.
Inch by inch, Lester tried to make his way past the horizontal part of the shaft, but the steep angle that his once more flexible spine had navigated years before was giving his current spine a great deal of pain. He tried to roll onto his back to make the climb easier, but his movements were again impeded, this time by hi
s flashlight and the .45 still tucked in his belt. He removed those objects and let them slide down the shaft. Jettisoning those objects gave Lester just enough room to finally turn on his back. As he lay in the darkness and felt the rock touching every part of his body, he wondered if this would be how he would die, in the cool embrace of the rock where he had spent the happiest days of his life.
For several seconds, Lester lay still in the pitch dark and might have stayed longer if not for a second explosion that rocked the tunnel below him. Feeling the shock of the blast, Lester knew instinctively what had occurred. The remaining guards, whose steps Lester had heard in the tunnel, had fired a grenade up the first shaft where their now dead comrades had descended.
The reverberations of the blast made dust and gravel drop onto Lester from the top of the shaft he was occupying, and again, the panic of being crushed by a cave-in or from a grenade being launched into his shaft made him somehow move the final ten inches to put him into the vertical section of the shaft. Able to use his legs again, he felt for the footholds and handholds he had used as a boy to make his way up the still snug opening.
Twenty feet from the top of the one hundred-fifty-foot shaft, Lester heard the voices of the guards below and knew what was coming. Moving his hands and feet as fast as his aching body could command them, he scrambled up the remaining distance and brought the top half of his body out of the shaft nearly two hundred feet away from the shaft he had descended hours earlier.
As he gathered his strength to pull himself out of the black hole, a deep rumble came from below him, followed by an eruption of rock and dust that spit Lester out like a cork from a champagne bottle. Flipped onto his back by the relatively quiet blast, he had to cover his face with his hands as rocks, some the size of baseballs came raining back to earth. Within seconds a second blast sent even larger pieces of rock shooting from the hole like a geyser. Continuing to roll away from the opening, Lester finally picked himself up and ran to the far north end of the rock and sought shelter in a grouping of boulders.