by Miles Harvey
By the time of his arrest, the teenager lived in a sturdy house in Ridgefield Park, a New York suburb on the banks of the Hackensack River. It was a pretty town with tree-lined streets, quaint slate sidewalks, and one of the longest-running continuous Fourth of July parades in the country. Bland’s life there, however, appears to have been less than all-American. His mother’s second husband “was both verbally and physically abusive to him,” according to Bland’s lawyers in a later case.8 No matter how bad his home life was, though, it could not have seemed worse to him than the prospect of prison. I don’t imagine he slept well in the police lockup that night.
But in Bayonne Municipal Court the next day, Bland got a lucky break—the first of many he would receive in his dealings with the law. Prosecutors amended the charge to the lesser offense of unlawful taking of a motor vehicle. He pleaded guilty and was given a hundred-dollar fine. After reclaiming his personal effects—$1.25 in cash, keys, a wristwatch, and a comb—Gilbert Bland emerged into the muggy Meadowlands air, a free man.9
How had he managed to get off with such a light sentence? In plotting my map, this is one of those places where I have trouble making sense of the terrain. Public records do not indicate why the charge was reduced, and when I tracked down retired judge Harvey L. Birne, who was on the bench that day, he had no recollection of either the case or the defendant. “It’s more than thirty years ago,” sighed Birne, who is now in private legal practice.
He was, however, willing to venture a guess about what happened: “If there wasn’t a good proof of intent to steal—if it was just joyriding or taking of a friend’s car—[prosecutors] would downgrade it. If it’s a downright theft, to my experience, they wouldn’t downgrade it The sentence seemed quite low. I would imagine it was a minor case and first offense.”
That makes sense. Yet I can’t help but wonder whether a much different scenario played out in court that day—one that would have had a lasting impact on Bland’s life. My suspicions are based on a single tantalizing fact: just over a week after Gilbert Bland walked out of jail in Bayonne, he walked into the base at Fort Dix, New Jersey, for induction into the U.S. Army. These two incidents may be unrelated—but then again they may not. New Jersey law enforcement sources told me that, during the Vietnam era, local prosecutors and judges were sometimes known to offer young defendants a deal. It went roughly like this: Son, you’re going to serve time no matter what. You can serve it either in jail, wasting away your youth, or in the military, defending your country. It’s your choice: join the U.S. Army or join the New Jersey penal system.
Was Bland offered such a deal? Apparently so, according to one source who knew him in the past. The source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Bland himself had always insisted that the threat of jail was what drove him to the Army. Further—though hardly conclusive—support for this version of events comes from government documents. Although privacy laws prevent the military from disclosing whether a soldier signed up or was drafted, Bland’s attorneys in a later case maintained their client had “enlisted in the United States Army.” Bland’s Army serial number, obtained from law enforcement records, also indicates that he was an enlistee. Yet the notion of a gung ho Gilbert Bland joining the military out of patriotism alone strikes me as out of character. He never seemed to be much of a joiner in anything, much less in the horror of Vietnam, and his political views were decidedly left-leaning, according to people who knew him later. It seems more likely that he was coerced to enlist, whether for economic, familial, or legal reasons.
For his part, Judge Birne claimed no memory of a deal with Bland (or anyone else) in which enlistment was offered as an alternative to prison—“not that I object to the proposition.” If there was any special treatment, he said, it would have been because Bland was already Army-bound when he appeared in court. “If I knew he was going in [to the military] definitely,” said Birne, “then perhaps we would have eased the pain and let him go.”
But regardless of whether it led directly to his tour in the Army, the episode appears to have been a critical one for Bland. Arrested for the first time, he had learned an important lesson about how the judicial system could be manipulated to his advantage. He would not forget it. But there was another big lesson he had not learned. He had not been dissuaded from stealing things.
MY FINGER IS RUNNING OVER ONE OF THOSE THINGS (or at least a reproduction of it) right now. It is titled Map to illustrate an exploration of the country, lying between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains, on the line of the Nebraska or Platte River. By Lieut. J. C. Frémont, of the Corps of Topographical Engineers. The Pathfinder drafted it, with the help of Preuss, to illustrate his report on the journey of 1842, his first great expedition of the West. My fingertip is lightly retracing the course of that trip, beginning at the point where the North Fork and South Fork of the Platte River break apart in what is now Nebraska, then gliding west to Fort Laramie in present-day Wyoming, and continuing on to the South Pass, the Oregon Trail’s principal route through the Rockies. From there I run my finger north into the Wind River Range, drawn in dramatic hachure-style relief. This was where Frémont concluded the westward leg of his journey with typical bravura, scaling what he had determined to be the “loftiest peak of the Rocky Mountains” and planting a specially designed American flag on its summit.10 The mountain, it turned out, was not even close to being the tallest, but it was the symbolism that mattered. The climb became a rallying point for Manifest Destiny and helped make the Pathfinder’s a household name.
Frémont’s heroics, however, are not the reason I am now leaning over this map. Just the opposite, in fact. As I move my finger south, then east, following the expedition’s return route, I am looking for a place where a dark and self-destructive side of the Pathfinder’s personality emerged, a place that closely corresponds with the one I am trying to plot on my map of Gilbert Bland. Yes, here it is now—right where the Sweetwater River and North Fork of the Platte converge, a point southwest of present-day Casper, Wyoming. Don’t bother looking for this spot on a modern map, because it’s no longer there. In its place is something called the Pathfinder Reservoir—an odd double homage to John Charles Frémont, both memorializing his accomplishments and literally blotting out the site of one of his greatest blunders. This was where Frémont did something “stupid” and “foolhardy” (in the words of Preuss), something that risked not only the success of his expedition but his entire future.11
You see, that was another reason I chose the Pathfinder as my guide: he reminded me a lot of Bland. Perhaps it was a matter not so much of common personality traits but of a shared emptiness—an emotional vacuum that both men seem to have spent their lives trying to fill. Like Bland, Frémont came from a broken home, in which his father was taken from him at a young age. The Pathfinder was the illegitimate child of a married Virginia society woman and her lover, the mysterious Charles Fremon, who, according to the varying accounts, taught French, gave lessons in swordsmanship, was a “dancing master,” and/or did “occasional upholstering.”1213 Fremon ran off with the boy’s mother—leaving her shamed and penniless—then died when John Charles was only five years old. Soon after, this young boy, like Bland, began dabbling in imaginary creatures. Early in life he re-created himself by adding a t to the end of his name, as well as an accent on the e. “No one ever knew why,” wrote John Moring in Men with Sand: Great Explorers of the North American West.14
But Andrew Rolle, author of John Charles Frémont: Character as Destiny, was willing to offer some clues. In his 1991 biography Rolle used “psychiatric techniques … to seek a better understanding of the man.”15 He attributed much of the Pathfinder’s adult behavior to a “fragmented sense of selfhood” stemming from the separation from his father.16 “Because Frémont’s formative years of childhood were obscured by long shadows,” concluded Rolle, “he fashioned an image of himself based in large measure upon fantasy.”17
That image, of course, was of a flamboyant adven
turer. But in private the Pathfinder had a strikingly different demeanor.18 “In fact,” wrote Rolle, “even while on his expeditions, some of Frémont’s contemporaries used the terms bland and gentlemanly as well as quiet and retiring about him.” The italics are Rolle’s—but the words sound like those used time and again to describe the map thief. And, like Bland, Frémont was a loner with a decidedly antiauthoritarian streak that often led him to break rules.
Frémont and Bland, however, were polar opposites in at least one important respect: the Pathfinder’s life was as conspicuous as the map thief was silent and anonymous. But this, too, was to my advantage. It occurred to me that, like the best wilderness guides, Frémont might serve as my interpreter. I began studying his life, hoping that it would give me perspective on Bland’s. This process, which took weeks, has led me to where I am now—at my desk, listening, once again, to the strange song of an old map, my finger tapping down on a spot that no longer exists.
It was there, on August 24, 1842, in what the biographer Allan Nevins called a moment of “reckless impetuosity,” that Frémont decided to load the mission’s precious records and scientific equipment into an experimental rubber boat and, without any advance scouting, run the swollen rapids of the Platte.19 There was only the flimsiest scientific justification for the effort; the Pathfinder seems to have been mostly interested in seeking thrills. He found them. Pushing off from shore with five other men—three of whom could not swim—he was soon battered out of control downstream. At one point Charles Preuss waded ashore with the expedition’s chronometer and tried to walk with the precious longitude-measuring instrument to safety. Unable to traverse the rocks, the mapmaker had to climb back in the boat, which was now in a more perilous position than ever. “To go back,” Frémont wrote in his report on the expedition, “was impossible; before us, the cataract was a sheet of foam; and shut up in the chasm by the rocks, which, in some places, seemed almost to meet overhead, the roar of the water was deafening We cleared rock after rock, and shot fall after fall, our little boat seeming to play with the cataract.”20
DETAIL FROM THE TITLE PAGE OF A 1617 ATLAS BY PIETER VAN DEN KEERE.
One more rock loomed ahead, hidden from view beneath the foam. This was the inevitable one, the one with the Pathfinder’s name on it, the one that would flip the boat, nearly killing Frémont and his men and causing them to lose their sextant, their large telescope, two of their compasses, most of their food and clothing, and a journal containing important weather and cartographic data. But it could have done worse harm, that last rock. It spared not only his life but most of the scientific records. Had those observations disappeared beneath the rushing waters, Frémont’s career might have sunk with them. Yet as that underwater boulder drew near, the Pathfinder was not thinking about any possible disasters. When he recalled the event later, he remembered only the glorious feeling of being “flushed with success, and familiar with the danger.”21
I suspect some similar emotion was rushing through Gilbert Bland’s mind when, according to the FBI, he crept out of the University of Rochester library, carrying a stolen copy of this same Frémont-Preuss map. The alleged incident took place on October 10, 1994—fairly early in his crime spree. But perhaps, like the Pathfinder on that river 152 years earlier, he already felt there was no going back. And maybe that was exactly what he craved: the rush of being pulled along by an overpowering current, of closing in on catastrophe at each turn, of defying the odds, of feeling intensely alive. Flushed with success, and familiar with danger—we’ve all known this particular joy at one time or another. Some people get it from rock climbing, skydiving, bungee jumping, or any of the other sports that allow us to flirt with our own funerals; others find it in more common pursuits, from speeding on highways or soaring on roller coasters to betting on horses or cheating on spouses. But while most of us require only the occasional taste of peril, others are addicted to it. The Pathfinder, for example, seemed to learn nothing from his near-disaster on the Platte. He sought out similar situations time and time again, both in his professional life (where, in 1848, his insistence on trying to cross the Rockies in midwinter left ten men dead and forced others to resort to cannibalism) and in his personal life (where his land speculation deals and other risky ventures left him penniless at his death in 1890). His biographer Andrew Rolle once again traced this behavior back to the loss of his father in boyhood:
Bereft of two nurturing parents who could understand his needs, Frémont repeatedly, as we have seen, acted as though he wanted to validate his illegitimacy and lack of a complete family during childhood.…22 Child psychoanalysts, after studying hundreds of patients, have established the presence of unresolved bereavement stemming from loss of a parent in childhood. These modern clinicians have found that serious emotional impairment occurs throughout the lives of such patients.
Recent findings regarding early separation and loss are thus crucial to understanding that later seemingly inexplicable conduct which often expresses a disguised repetition of early sadness. In such cases outbursts against authority are frequent. Also, persons who repeatedly place themselves in dangerous circumstances may be attempting to work their way back mentally to an unresolved conflict.
While I have no idea whether Rolle was right about the Pathfinder, I tend to be wary of writers who depend too heavily on pop psych generalizations about their subjects. And, since I have absolutely no professional expertise in matters of the mind, I am neither willing nor able to make any such sweeping statements about Bland. All I can safely conclude is that he, too, possessed a self-destructive attraction to danger, and that it had been with him for a long time. Perhaps it was already there on that summer night in Bayonne in 1968. If so, it would have been one more thing he had in common with John Charles Frémont—who also got in trouble at age eighteen, when he was dismissed from college for “habitual irregularity and incorrigible negligence.”23 Both Frémont and Bland would then turn to the military—in which both would use their keen intelligence to earn technology-focused assignments, and which both would eventually leave under a dark cloud (in Frémont’s case, resignation after a court-martial for “mutiny, disobedience, and conduct prejudicial to military discipline”).24 But, long before that happened, each man would head off to a place that would change his life—a place, as Frémont put it, “of strange scenes and occurrences.”25 For the Pathfinder, of course, that place was the American West. For the map thief, it was a very different sort of wilderness.
Latitude: 13.46 N. Longitude: 109.14 E. May 4, 1969
This is the way Michael Herr began Dispatches, his landmark book on the Vietnam War:
There was a map of Vietnam on the wall of my apartment in Saigon and some nights, coming back late to the city, I’d lie out on my bed and look at it, too tired to do anything more than just get my boots off.26 That map was a marvel, especially now that it wasn’t real anymore. For one thing, it was very old. It had been left there years before by another tenant, probably a Frenchman, since the map had been made in Paris. The paper had buckled in its frame after years in the wet Saigon heat, laying a kind of veil over the countries it depicted. Vietnam was divided into its older territories of Tonkin, Annam and Cochin China, and to the west past Laos and Cambodge sat Siam, a kingdom. That’s old, I’d tell visitors, that’s a really old map.
If dead ground could come back and haunt you the way dead people do, they’d have been able to mark my map CURRENT and burn the ones they’d been using since ’64, but count on it, nothing like that was going to happen. It was late ’67 now, even the most detailed maps didn’t reveal much anymore; reading them was like trying to read the faces of the Vietnamese, and that was like trying to read the wind. We knew … that for years now there had been no country here but the war.
I thought about those words often as I, too, lay in bed, trying to make sense of Vietnam, or at least the Vietnam experience of a certain Private First Class Bland. Like the regions covered on Herr’s map, the area I was trying t
o plot on mine no longer really existed. It was a place where solid facts could not be trusted and normal rules did not apply, where someone might enter as one person and leave as another person entirely. How could I hope to understand Bland’s life in a country that was no country but war? In Herr’s words, it seemed like trying to read the wind. Yet I had to try. The Vietnam conflict had a huge impact on all who took part in it—but in Bland’s case it loomed especially large. At least that’s what his lawyer would argue more than a quarter century later, when he stood up in a federal court and implied that the war had been at the root of Bland’s string of map thefts. His attorney Paul R. Thomson, Jr., claimed that his client “has a pattern of problems … largely triggered by depression, a very common problem with post-traumatic stress syndrome.”27 Not that Thomson was willing to supply me with any specifics. As usual, I would be navigating this strange landscape by dead reckoning.
THE MARINES WANT A FEW GOOD MEN. THE ARMY SIGNAL Corps wants a few smart ones. The Signal Corps is responsible for military communications, a demanding discipline as old as warfare itself. Ancient armies used drums, bells, banners, and flags to transmit intelligence, while later militaries employed lights, pistols, pyrotechnics, and homing pigeons, then the telegraph, teletype, radio, radar, and telephone. By Vietnam the Army Signal Corps was “actually ahead of the commercial phone companies at the time. They were the first to use communications satellites,” John D. Bergen, an expert on the Signal Corps, told me.