Westies

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Westies Page 9

by T. J. English


  Like many volunteers, Featherstone entered the service with a gung-ho attitude. He had every reason to believe this would be his calling. His father had served in the army for eight years and seen action in Korea. His brothers Bobby and Henry had enlisted a few years before him, and another brother, Joseph, had joined the same day he had as part of the army’s “buddy plan” and been assigned to the 173rd Airborne Division.

  Within weeks after he completed basic training, Mickey was assigned to the Nhatrang headquarters of Special Forces, the elite commando unit commonly known as the Green Berets. Casualties were high among the Green Berets in 1966–67, and as a result, regular army personnel were often assigned to Special Forces compounds to serve in menial capacities. Featherstone had not gone through Green Beret training, nor would he be going on combat missions with specialized guerrilla units. But technically, he could now call himself a Green Beret.

  At first, his Special Forces designation was a source of great pride. Like other kids in his neighborhood, he’d fantasized about being a member of America’s most glamorous fighting force. He and his teenage friends spent lots of time hanging out on stoops and streetcorners along 9th and 10th avenues singing the words to the “Ballad of the Green Berets”:

  Fighting soldiers from the sky,

  Fearless men who jump and die.

  Men who mean just what they say,

  The brave men of the Green Beret.

  Silver wings upon their chests,

  These are men, America’s best,

  One hundred men we’ll test today,

  But only three win the Green Beret.

  In ’Nam, however, far from the stoops of Hell’s Kitchen, it didn’t take Featherstone long to realize his situation was not all it was cracked up to be. In Nhatrang he served as an ordnance supply specialist, spending most of his day cooped up in a warehouse or drinking at the local Playboy Club in town. Within the army’s rigid caste system, Private Featherstone was squarely at the bottom, and those higher in rank never let him forget it. “The ash and trash” was the name officers and soldiers in the field used for guys like Featherstone, stock clerks and mess-hall officers who lounged around the compound all day while the real soldiers got their asses shot off.

  Featherstone hated his assignment. He was embarrassed that he had come this far only to work as a clerk in a warehouse. In tape-recorded letters he sent home to his mother, he was vocal about his dissatisfaction. He was bored and lonely, he said. Throughout his young life he had rarely been outside his own neighborhood, much less stationed in some far-off land with strange terrain and even stranger people. On the recordings, his voice was full of paranoia and bitterness, and his mother was so disturbed by what she heard that she would later destroy the tapes in a fit of anguish.

  Mickey’s spirits rose somewhat in early 1967 when he was reassigned to D Company, 5th Special Forces Group, then based along the Mekong Delta in Cantho Province. The Delta was hot in ’67, and Featherstone was sure he’d finally get to see some action.

  In Cantho, however, his situation only got worse. Once again he was assigned to the stockroom and later to the mail room. Much of his day was spent drinking at the Alamo Lounge, the base saloon, while Mobile Guerrilla Teams fought the war he’d hoped to fight out in the bush.

  Occasionally, he got to go on chopper “milk runs” delivering mail to A and B teams out in the field. Sometimes mail got sent back with envelopes marked SEARCH, usually meaning the person had been killed in action. Featherstone would read the names on the envelopes and sometimes ask himself, Why them? Why not me?

  As his tour of duty wore on, Featherstone’s sense of guilt and displacement deepened. He drank almost every day. Sometimes, he would get so fucked-up he would have blackouts and hardly remember what had happened the night before.

  On one such occasion he was out drinking with a group of orderlies from the base hospital. “Hey,” said one of the orderlies, pointing towards Mickey. “Whaddya say we give this cherry a circumcision? He ain’t been initiated yet.”

  Barely conscious of what was happening, Featherstone was taken to his hootch and operated on by a drunken medic. He woke up the next morning with his prick wrapped in gauze and covered with adhesive tape.

  A few days later, Mickey’s brother Joseph got a weekend pass from the Airborne Rangers and came to see him in Cantho. They hadn’t been together since basic training, so they immediately went into the city to celebrate. After a night of drinking they wound up at a local whorehouse. Mickey was led into a makeshift bedroom. When he got a hard-on he experienced incredible pain. He pulled down his pants and saw that his incision had ripped open—his prick was covered with blood.

  Featherstone felt like crying. The frustration and humiliation of his entire tour of duty welled up inside him. He came to ’Nam to be a war hero, to follow in his father’s footsteps as a dedicated soldier. But the whole thing was a bust. Not only was he treated like shit and given bullshit duties, but now here he was in some two-bit blow-job joint in Cantho with a dick that would probably be scarred for life.

  After that, Mickey didn’t seem to give a shit. He had frequent disciplinary problems. Once, he stole a jeep from the compound and drove into town for a night of debauchery, missing the next morning’s flag-raising ceremony. The company commander docked his pay and reduced his rank, but it was all perfunctory. No one seemed to care much. It wasn’t like Mickey was one of the army’s most prized commodities. On the contrary. Private Featherstone was just one of the faceless thousands in ’Nam who got stuck in the most menial of jobs, had friends die in combat, was harangued and humiliated by supervisors, then abruptly released stateside to sort it all out.

  Long before he gunned down Linwood Willis in front of the Leprechaun Bar in September of 1970, Mickey’s life had degenerated into a succession of violent, drunken episodes. Ever since his return to Hell’s Kitchen, he’d fallen into a routine of sleeping during the day and drinking through the night and into the early hours of the next morning. He seemed to have no interests, no personality, no ambition. He withdrew from his family and friends.

  In the neighborhood saloons, Mickey usually sat at the end of the bar and drank alone. He viewed everyone with suspicion. Of the barflies he spent most of his time boozing with, he used to say, “I hate the people. They hang on you with their faces.” He took any imagined slight as a fullfledged insult, and he’d lash out with a pent-up fury that shocked people who’d known him as a kid.

  Not that Mickey was any saint before he joined the service. Like any kid growing up in Hell’s Kitchen, he’d seen his share of violence. At age ten he threw his chair at a teacher who smacked him in the head for sleeping in class. Young Featherstone was dragged into Children’s Court, but the charges were eventually dropped. As punishment, he was assigned to a “600” school for kids with discipline problems. But those who knew him best—his family and close personal friends—remembered Mickey as a shy, slightly skittish kid with a quiet disposition.

  There was, however, a lack of supervision around the Featherstone household that made it possible for Mickey and his brothers to roam the streets at all hours of the day and night. Many people figured it was only a matter of time before Mickey started to get into trouble, just like so many other kids who roamed these same streets before him.

  Some folks looked at Mickey’s mother, Dorothy Boyle, and figured the Featherstone kids never had a chance. Dottie, as she was known to her friends, had married Charlie Featherstone in the late 1930s. By most accounts, the elder Featherstone, who sometimes worked as a longshoreman, was a drunk and a louse who beat his wife regularly. Eventually he deserted Dottie, leaving her with little or no money and six children to raise.

  She then struck up a relationship with Charlie Boyle, a military man. They were unable to find Featherstone, who was still her legal husband, so proper divorce papers were never filed. Dottie and Charlie Boyle entered into a common-law marriage and had three children of their own, the youngest of whom was Mi
ckey.

  Boyle was a mild-mannered presence around the house, at the time a modest five-room railroad flat located at 43rd Street and 10th Avenue. Along with working long hours at his job as a guard in a veterans’ hospital in the Bronx, there was the strain of trying to raise nine children while not even legally married. Often Boyle withdrew into himself, leaving the disciplining of the children to their mother.

  The fact that they had to keep the Featherstone name while their actual father’s name was Boyle always bothered Mickey and his two older brothers, Henry and Joseph. That, along with the fact they often had to wear hand-me-down clothes, made for a lot of teasing at school and in the neighborhood. They fought a lot with neighborhood kids and with their various half-brothers and half-sisters. Mickey, it seemed, was always running away from these skirmishes, leaving his brothers to fight his neighborhood battles for him.

  That was one of the first things everybody noticed about Mickey when he came back from ’Nam. He didn’t run from fights anymore.

  His first major altercation took place within days of his return from overseas duty. Four guys jumped him after an argument in a bar on 9th Avenue. One of them used a baseball bat to break his nose and knock a few of his teeth out.

  One month later, again on 9th Avenue, a would-be robber confronted him with a .22-caliber target pistol. Rather than give up what little change he had, Mickey defended himself with a garbage-can lid. The robber fired and hit him in the arm. The next day Mickey was discharged from the hospital with the bullet still embedded near his left elbow.

  Featherstone was small but not stupid; he quickly learned from these and other scuffles that it didn’t make much sense to hang out in Hell’s Kitchen without some kind of protection. In most street battles where it was one-on-one, Mickey was able to hold his own, even though he was almost always smaller and lighter than his opponent. But since few neighborhood fights were one-on-one (there were usually friends or relatives involved), an “equalizer” was often called for.

  The first time Featherstone used a gun in a neighborhood altercation was on the night of September 26, 1968. He had been drinking at the Market Diner on 43rd Street and 11th Avenue, just down the block from his parents’ apartment building. A kid from New Jersey named John Riley, his brother Jimmy Riley, and a friend of theirs came into the bar section of the diner.

  “Got a cigarette?” John Riley asked Featherstone.

  Mickey had seen the Riley brothers around the neighborhood before. They were big, muscular guys who were always trying to intimidate people. He hated their swagger and their loud Jersey accents.

  “Nah,” replied Mickey. “Not for you.”

  “Whaddya call those?” said Riley, pointing towards a pack of Kools Mickey had resting on the bar.

  “Those is New York cigarettes,” shrugged Mickey, “not Jersey cigarettes.”

  A few neighborhood onlookers laughed. Riley reached over and slapped Featherstone across the face.

  Mickey’s brother Henry and a neighborhood kid named Tommy McElroy—Jimmy Mac’s cousin—were also in the bar. When the fight began, they helped move it outside to the parking lot, where it was now going to be the Riley brothers and their friend against the Featherstone brothers and Tommy McElroy. Just as the rumble got started, the cops arrived and broke things up. They escorted the Riley brothers to the Lincoln Tunnel, where they were told to take their white Cadillac home to New Jersey.

  Thirty minutes later the Rileys returned to the Market Diner and the whole scene was replayed. This time, as the cops led them to their Caddy, John Riley told Featherstone they were going to be back again—with weapons.

  Everyone told Mickey to go home. As a U.S. soldier out on a weekend pass, he had the most to lose if someone got arrested.

  Featherstone lay on the couch at his parents’ apartment and wondered if he’d done the right thing. There was probably going to be a fight, he thought, and it would be disgraceful if people knew he’d walked away from it. Plus, it was the Riley brothers, who had been bullying people in his neighborhood for months.

  His head was spinning from the booze he’d drunk that night and from all of the bad thoughts that kept passing through his mind, causing the usual agitation and paranoia. Then the phone rang.

  “Mickey,” said a voice on the line. “The Rileys are back with a tire iron, an ax, and every fuckin’ thing.”

  Featherstone grabbed a hunting rifle that his father had in a closet, headed out the door and down West 43rd Street.

  When he got to the diner, he hid in a grassy area that straddled the parking lot. There was an old-fashioned Western showdown going on. He saw Tommy McElroy, his brother Henry, and his half-brother Bobby. In front of them was John Riley holding a tire jack, standing under a streetlight. The other Riley, Jimmy, was holding the jack handle. Another guy was standing behind him with an ax handle.

  Mickey fired once and hit the Rileys’ car. He fired a second time and hit John Riley in the arm.

  With his rifle pointed at the New Jersey boys, Featherstone rose from the ground and approached. He walked over to John Riley, who had been hit but was still standing, and smacked him across the face with the butt of the rifle. After Riley went down, Tommy McElroy picked up the tire jack and started hitting Riley on the head with it. Henry walked over to the other Riley and punched him in the face. “Don’t ever fuck with a Featherstone,” he said.

  McElroy was still whacking away at John Riley, like the jack was a golf club and Riley’s head the ball. Bobby Featherstone had to come over and punch McElroy in the face just to keep him from murdering the guy.

  By the time the cops arrived a sizable crowd had gathered and Riley was covered with blood. Mickey and his brother Henry were handcuffed to a No Parking sign.

  The next day, September 27, 1968, Mickey and Tommy McElroy were charged with aggravated assault. They were held at Rikers Island for a week until they were able to secure bail. The same day they were released, John Riley was discharged from the hospital. On his way out the door, he dropped dead from the head injury. The charge against Featherstone and McElroy was upgraded to manslaughter.

  After the Riley shooting, Mickey’s mom was hysterical. On top of everything else, she’d heard that weeks earlier Mickey had applied for another tour of duty in Vietnam. She immediately contacted Fort Dix and told Mickey’s commanding officer that there was no way her son should be allowed to go overseas again.

  No need to worry, she was told, the military didn’t want him. As part of Mickey’s request, he’d had to agree to a psychosocial evaluation by a staff psychiatrist. After a few days of interviews and tests, Featherstone was diagnosed as suffering from a nervous condition which manifested itself in severe nightmares, heavy drinking, an inability to sleep, and withdrawal from the outside world. The report concluded “… the assigning of EM [emergency medical] back to a combat area will probably bring back the difficulties that it previously created and probably with much more intensification. The experiences the young man went through while serving his one year appear to be too traumatic for even a mature, well-adjusted individual to cope with.”

  Featherstone’s request for another tour of duty was denied. While he was out on bail, what remained of his three-year military commitment was completed at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, where he served as a driver and a mail clerk. On May 13, 1969, he was given an honorable discharge.

  At the same time Mickey Featherstone was finishing his military career, the neighborhood rackets had begun to stagnate. Jimmy Coonan was currently in Sing Sing, serving time for the Canelstein/Morales shooting. Many other young gangsters were either doing time in prison or in Vietnam. Mickey Spillane was still out and about, but, in general, it was not a particularly lucrative time for Hell’s Kitchen’s criminal element. Compared to the years of the Coonan/Spillane Wars, it was relatively calm—except, of course, for the presence of Featherstone, who was fast becoming a one-man crime wave.

  In July 1969, just two months after his official discharge fr
om the service, Mickey married a young girl from the neighborhood named Juanita Arturo. Nobody came to their wedding because just about everyone thought the marriage was a bad idea. Some of Mickey’s family didn’t like the idea of his marrying a Puerto Rican. Some thought he was too volatile and immature for marriage. Others felt Juanita wasn’t the right girl, she was too “square,” too sedentary.

  Juanita was a strict Catholic who went to church every Sunday. Since Mickey was also Catholic, it was her hope that she could get him to pay more attention to his faith. This annoyed Featherstone, and it quickly became a source of contention.

  There were other difficulties, not the least of which were Juanita’s sexual hang-ups, which had been a problem since the day they were married. It was on their honeymoon that Featherstone first called his half-sister, Joan, to tell her that his new bride was terrified at the thought of having sex with him.

  “Sis,” said Mickey, “I don’t ever want you to tell anyone about this, but please get on the phone with Juanita. She’s afraid.”

  Joan was flabbergasted. The idea of someone calling from a honeymoon asking for sexual advice seemed pretty damned strange. She heard Mickey in the background talking to Juanita. “Go ahead,” he was saying, “my sister will talk to you. Don’t be embarrassed.” Then Mickey got back on the line, giggling nervously. “She really needs your help, Sis.”

  Joan did what she could. But it was obvious from talking to Juanita that she was scared to death.

  It all came crashing down just a few months after the wedding. On one of those rare occasions when Mickey came home to spend the night, he awoke from a terrible nightmare and tried to strangle Juanita in their bed. She moved out the next day, taking most of the furniture with her. Later, Mickey told doctors he’d been having a bad dream about the war, and he awoke thinking the person in bed next to him was a Vietnamese agent.

 

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