Psychic Warrior

by David Morehouse

  I stopped writing my mother and father. All I could think of to say was that I loved them; nothing else seemed important enough to write about. They called once in a while, but they were hurt; I’d all but abandoned them. Debbie tried to explain to them that I was, in her opinion, still in desperate need of help, but I don’t think they yet realized how far gone I was. And as for Debbie, I hadn’t taken her out on a date in a year or more; we just stopped expecting that of each other. She found new friends, and I lost myself in the ether world. I read books on the subject; I kept notes and a detailed journal of every experience and nightmare I encountered. Involved in my explorations of the unknown, I no longer had time for people who couldn’t appreciate that.

  Cathy and Ashley Joyner, my closest friends from the Ranger battalion days, whom I loved as if they were my brother and sister, were little more than a memory to me. When I’d left the Ranger battalion—it seemed centuries ago—Ashley had had a beautiful knife custom-made for me, and I treasured it. The single most stunning thing about it was a scrimshawed handshake on the handle, the eternal affirmation of two friends. On the knife’s hand-made oak case was the famous Theodore Roosevelt quote that reads, in part, “It is not the critic who counts. Not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena. Whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood. Who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again.” I put the knife away; it reminded me too painfully of what I had been.

  Debbie had always maintained that she could endure almost anything if I would remain faithful and attend church meetings, at least for the sake of setting an example to the children. But I abandoned the church, and it soon abandoned me. My last encounter with it was in a sacrament meeting one summer day in 1989. It’s a custom in the Mormon church for members to speak periodically to the congregation on some topic set by the bishop. The topics are generally simple, in keeping with traditional belief, and members’ talks are supposed to be testimonial, informative, and uplifting. Debbie and I were asked to speak.

  Debbie gave a wonderful presentation. I, on the other hand, concluded that the congregation had been fed religious pabulum for too long. I ignored the assigned topic and substituted one of my own: “Temples—Beyond Ritual.” My talk dealt with issues of dimensionality, astronomy, other worlds and beings, who God really was, and what motivated His dealings with us. I challenged the congregation to expand their minds, to reach beyond the books and spoon-fed teachings of the church, to be more than they’d ever imagined.

  I think they thought I was insane. When I gave the concluding “Amen,” maybe five people in a congregation of two hundred said it with me. At the time, I was furious. I thought the reaction was a perfect example of organized religion: don’t challenge yourself, don’t ask questions, just sit in the pews and breathe; God will reward you for it. I thought of Hamlet, Act III, Scene ii: “Some must watch, while some must sleep; So runs the world away.” Run away, little sheep, and be safe in your little world; I haven’t time for you any longer. I did not return.

  It was the fall of 1990. Mel was getting ready to retire in a couple of months and I wanted to give him something to remember me by. I convinced Debbie to let me dip into savings, and I bought him a canoe. He needed something to fish from, something he could use to get away from it all. I found a place in Alexandria that sold them; by the time I’d learned everything there was to learn, and asked every question I could, the salesman had eleven canoes laid out in the front yard of the place. I sat in every one at least five times. I did some mock paddling, much to the amusement of the salesman and the people who were there to price yachts. I even picked each one up and carried it around the yard a couple of times. The salesman must have thought I was a basket case by the time I pointed at a canoe and said the magic words: “I want that one!” He had the paperwork done and the canoe strapped to my car so fast I thought I’d just bought a Big Mac.

  It was worth all the work to see Mel’s face when I dropped off the canoe. It was like Christmas, and he was twelve again. Edith, God love her, was naturally concerned about where the damned boat would go until the movers came to pack. Mel, of course, had a number of ideas he was more than willing to share with her. I left them standing at the curb in heavy negotiations, and I drove home with a big smile on my face.

  It was Friday, time for the weekly staff meeting. Everyone trickled into the back room and plopped down, waiting for Levy to arrive. I always sat next to Mel; when the meeting got boring I could count on him to have two or three pages of drawings and doodles to glance at. It was amazing what the guy could create when he was bored. Too bad Levy wouldn’t let him do beadwork during the meetings.

  In meetings, Carol and Judy were their usual sarcastic selves. Pratt and Paul might have been asleep, but their eyes were always open and following whoever was speaking. However, if you asked either one a question about the meeting two minutes after it adjourned, they wouldn’t have a clue what you were talking about. It’s a knack, I guess.

  Kathleen was always attentive and punctual. She even took notes, like one of those little girls I always hated in grade school, pretty, intelligent, teacher’s pet. Lyn was like Kathleen, except that he was a guy, which made it worse.

  Levy finally showed up, a diet soda in hand. “Are we all here?” Which is what he always asked, though he never got an answer. “Good! I have a few administrative announcements. First, someone has been taking sodas from the fridge and neglecting to pay for them. Whoever it is needs to put about twelve dollars in the soda kitty. Just get it done and nothing else need be said about it.”

  I elbowed Mel and whispered, “Pay up, asshole.”

  He just grinned. I don’t think I ever saw a soda in his hand.

  Levy continued. “Second, if you use the unit car to run to DIA for classes”—he stared at Kathleen and Pratt, who were the only ones taking classes at the Defense Intelligence Agency—“I’d appreciate it if you filled up the tank before returning the car for some unsuspecting soul to get in and try to run to headquarters only to have to hike to a gas station because some uncaring person or persons left it empty! Third, David is now operational. Fourth, we are expected to be at Dr. Compton’s retirement next week. If you—”

  “Hold on there!” I said. “Can we please go back to Item Number Three? Did you say I’m operational?”

  Mel didn’t plan on missing the chance to harpoon me. “That’s what the man said—didn’t you take notes? I think we should give Dave another month or two of training, Bill. I can’t believe an operational viewer wouldn’t take any notes; you took notes, didn’t you, Kathleen?” She held up her paper, snickering. “See! Kathleen took notes.”

  “All right, all right! Let’s get back to business,” Levy said. He rambled on for another hour, but I didn’t care; I was an operational viewer. No more training targets; from now on it was the real thing, and it counted.

  I’d been running operational targets since about two hours after Levy’s announcement, but Mel never got to monitor me on an operational mission. He’d left quietly that same day, though he stopped by now and then while he used up his leave and packed up his household. Six weeks later he was gone. He dropped in to say a final good-bye while I was out of the office on an errand, and when I called his quarters, the phone had been disconnected. I drove over there, hoping to catch him on his way out, but the door was locked and his truck was gone. In seventeen hours he’d be starting a new life.

  I tried to be happy for him. It took me a long time to get used to his absence, though. Kathleen and Lyn were good people, and I was close to them, but never as close as I was to Mel.

  In the next few weeks, Levy announced that he too was retiring, which came as a shock. Who would be his replacement? What would our unit be like without his supervision? It was during this time that a colonel from DIA showed up at the office. I was called in to the office that afternoon.

&
nbsp; “David, this is Colonel Welch from DIA. He has something he’d like to talk to you about.”

  I started sweating bullets.

  Welch adjusted himself in Levy’s broken-down guest chair. “Something’s come up and we need to talk to you about your future at DIA.”

  I was sure he was going to tell me that because of my nightmares I’d have to leave the program. I couldn’t believe Levy would abandon me like this and let me go after I’d been through so much for the unit.

  “You’ve been selected for promotion to major, and for attendance at the army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.” He offered me his hand. “Congratulations!”

  I was shocked. What did this mean? “Thank you, sir, but I’m not sure I want this. I mean, the Leavenworth thing. Can’t I just get promoted and stay on here?”

  Welch was obviously taken aback by this. “What the hell do you mean?”

  Levy tried to jump to my rescue. “I’m sure what Captain Morehouse means is that he just needs some time for this to settle in. That’s all.”

  “No, that’s not it at all,” I objected. “I don’t want to leave here and go to Fort Leavenworth for CGSC. You can give the slot to somebody else, and I’ll take the nonresident course.”

  “Are you dumb or just plain stupid? The army’s trying to tell you something by giving you this. There are young men and women out there who would die to be offered a resident position at CGSC, and you want to throw it away for a bunch of fucking freaks?”

  Levy’s eyebrows went up. “Excuse me, Colonel—”

  Welch cut him off. “You hold your water, Bill. I’m talking to this boy—who, for starters, obviously doesn’t know what he’s gotten himself into. What’s worse is he doesn’t understand what’s being handed to him on a silver platter. Listen up, Morehouse! You are not going to throw this chance away, especially not for an assignment to this unit. Piss and moan all you want, but if you think you aren’t going to CGSC, just try to stay here and I’ll see to it that your ass is moved. This is a fucked-up operation and it isn’t being refunded or restaffed. You are an infantry officer in an intelligence officer’s billet. You stand out like a pimple on a baby’s ass. People know you’re here—people you used to work for. They think you’re being held against your will, and they want you back in the infantry. Because I know and like them, I’ll spare them the misery of being told their boy wants to stay. You get the fuck out of here. You are going where the army needs you most. Now get!”

  “Yes, sir!” I was out the door before he got off another salvo, but Levy had to endure another ten minutes of the guy. I’d never seen Welch before that day and I never saw him again, but the wheels were in motion for me to leave the unit. It would take some time—maybe as long as a year—but I was going to leave Sun Streak.

  One of my most interesting operational targets involved the search for Marine Lieutenant Colonel Higgins, the United Nations observer taken hostage in Lebanon. Our attempt to determine his location and condition for DIA’s customers was one of the most complex missions we’d ever worked. Each of us did eight to ten search sessions; Higgins was being moved often, but we found him over and over and passed the information along. Nothing ever came of it-that is to say, nobody ever launched a rescue operation. It was difficult for members of the unit to tap into Higgins and feel his suffering and his worsening physical and emotional condition day after day without any relief in sight. Several people had real trouble living Higgins’s pain so as to turn in intelligence that was never acted on. I understood their distress, and I tried to explain the army’s reasoning. Nobody was going to launch a rescue operation and risk lives on no basis except information from remote viewers. It would be insane to risk lives in reliance on our intelligence product alone; things just weren’t done that way. The information we produced was intended to augment and balance more solid, reliable, conventionally acquired data. If two or more “collection assets” could have confirmed our findings, I’m certain the rescue would have taken place.

  If it’s any comfort, our unit determined that Higgins had been dead for many hours before his body was displayed on video: He died of a broken spirit and a broken heart, not from the hanging. His brutal captors, frustrated by his sudden death, hanged his body in a show of defiance, doing their best to capitalize on their error. Higgins was of no use to them dead; he was a bargaining chip they’d failed to keep. If it’s any further consolation, he is in a far better place than this world. He is happy, busy, and eternal. Seven remote viewers confirmed that.

  Another operational mission took place over the nine days immediately following the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103, which detonated over Lockerbie, Scotland. It was a frosty morning when we received the mission tasking. Only we could provide immediate feedback while the search crews and investigators slowly pieced the events together.

  I watched an old acquaintance, a man we all called Tiny, die as I relived the event for Sun Streak. We worked the mission twice a day, each day presenting detailed sketches of the two explosive devices and two methods of detonation. Judy and Lyn and I sketched the primary explosive device months before the investigators announced their findings. We diagrammed the electronic device, the tape player and radio that contained the explosives. We identified the site of the explosion as the aircraft’s left front cargo hold days before that was announced. We tracked the builders of the device to the point of transfer and even farther, to the place of assembly. We provided descriptions, phonetic spellings of names, and sketches of houses and meeting places for the terrorists. -

  The secondary device was hand carried aboard the aircraft by an Iranian woman on a suicide mission. She had lost loved ones on the airliner the United States shot down in the Gulf, and she was willing to die to avenge them. Her high explosives were camouflaged as commercially wrapped chocolate bars, which she was to have detonated if the automatic device failed. She sat very near the point of detonation, on the left side of the aircraft.

  In the most painful of all the sessions, Lyn described being in the airliner just before detonation. In his phantom form he was, of course, not seen. However, the instant the bomb detonated, he stood in the presence of dozens of quickened souls wondering what had happened to them. Lyn wept as one small child approached him in the ether and asked him where her mommy was and what had happened to them all. Lyn had the tools to return; they did not.

  During the War on Drugs, Sun Streak was called upon to determine whether certain ships were carrying illegal narcotics. In the ether, viewers boarded ships to pinpoint the illegal cargo, piercing bulkheads to find packages of marijuana and cocaine. We found the sites of planned open-water drops, and located buried base and paste on islands throughout the Caribbean. From the ether, we hunted Pablo Escobar and other drug kingpins, accessing their minds to reveal elements of their plans that could not have been obtained by any other means. Eventually, some members of Sun Streak were moved into the Counter Narcotics Joint Task Force headquarters in Florida, where they worked for nearly a year. The commander of the CNJTF sent DIA a memo saying that the remote viewers had saved the task force millions of dollars on search and seizure operations. The viewers were a tremendous success and a new power tool in law enforcement. However, this glory was short-lived. Things were heating up in the Gulf region. Central Command, a multi-service command whose specified theaters of operation include the Persian Gulf, spent considerable time on planning and in briefing Washington and the Pentagon on the escalating tensions, there. Several weeks later Saddam Hussein’s army invaded Kuwait and held its ground despite international demands that they leave immediately. In a relatively short period of time, funding, weapons, and observation platforms such as helicopters and observation aircraft all began to be diverted to the rapidly escalating situation in Kuwait. Emphasis on the drug wars by the Department of Defense and the White House understandably began to drift eastward into the Central Command region.

  I’d been an operational viewer for near
ly a year when I left Sun Streak, on the day of the Iraqi invasion. I was on my way to Command and General Staff College, with a one-year stop in a strategic deception unit. Levy departed several weeks after me.

  I never went back to Sun Streak, but I heard that the successes of the drug wars breathed new life into the program. Two new remote-viewing trainees were brought in, as was a new program manager to replace Levy. It looked as if everything was going to be fine. I hoped I’d be able to come back someday. Perhaps DIA would unlock the potential of the program and let it help all of mankind.

  I’d been gone from Sun Streak for about three months when I began having trouble with the nightmares again. I thought it was because I wasn’t spending time in the ether. I couldn’t focus on anything; I felt disconnected and empty. My head spun with images I’d seen in the unit; swamped by waves of emotion, I wept openly and often. I was slowly disintegrating emotionally, physically, and spiritually. Bitter and lost in a world that neither understood nor cared what I’d been through, I talked to myself and sketched the images that poured from my mind. I needed “hands-on” help, an intervention by someone who knew the ether. But Kathleen was gone, Mel was gone, Levy was gone—all the people who spoke the language of the ether were gone. I turned into a hermit, never venturing out of my office building during the day. On weekends, I seldom left the house or shaved. Afraid of sleeping, I stayed awake for long periods, and every night I played the television and radio together, trying to drown out the noise and the images that swamped my mind. I needed to be under the control of the unit again; I needed the ether; I needed friends who understood what was happening to me.