Suddenly a husky voice cried out from among Sigler’s work team.
"Put him down!"
Others joined in.
"Let him be! Don't you dare take him away!" someone shouted at the circling guards.
"Let’s get him back!" cried another to the prisoners gathered behind.
In an instant men snatched up picks and shovels and loose bricks and converged on the guards. Two men grabbed each of Sigler's arms and held fast. The guards swung their nightsticks and discharged their pepper spray but could not dislodge the prisoners' grip. A pair of men in orange coveralls leveled their long–handled shovels like lances and jabbed at the guards holding Sigler's shoulders until they let go.
The guards were already in retreat when a burst of machine–gun fire raked the skirmish line. The shovelers fell backward. Instantly every prisoner in the brickyard hit the deck while the guards retreated empty–handed into the no–man's–land and swung the gate shut behind them.
Nearly a full minute elapsed before the first prisoner crawled slowly to his feet and advanced to the aid of the fallen shovelers. Others followed and soon scores of men arrived on the scene from every corner of the brickyard. Seething with suppressed rage, I joined them in hoisting Sigler's body onto our massed shoulders and hauling it toward the main gate. A minute or two later, others did the same with the remains of a dead shoveler.
It was not yet quitting time, but none of us lifted another brick that day. We had only one thing on our minds and that was to bear Sigler's body and that of the fallen shoveler back into camp for all to see.
CHAPTER 14
"In a state worthy of the name there is no liberty. The people want to exercise power but what on earth would they do with it if it were given to them?"
—V.I. Lenin
TUESDAY, MARCH 19
We did not succeed in carrying Sigler and the dead shoveler out of the recycling site on our shoulders. No sooner did we leave the site’s main gate than we were surrounded by a detachment of Tommy gunners from Jack Whiting's security detail. While they trained their submachine guns on us, a squad of warders seized the corpses and made away with them in a jeep.
The march back to the barracks was as grim as the one a week before, when we had returned to work after our one–day strike. Once again, a troop truck with a rear–facing, .50 caliber machine gun headed the column and once again the armed escort had been doubled. As before, an advance security detail met us outside the camp and led us within range of marksmen posted in the watchtowers. We viewed the firepower arrayed against us and asked ourselves whether such heavy security had been planned all along or whether it was just another example of the Wart’s uncanny prescience.
I felt confused and demoralized by the setbacks we had suffered since the strike. The Warden's false promises, the increased quotas, the reduced rations, the murder of Sigler and of the shoveler who tried to recover his body, and now the doubled escort all pointed toward a shift back toward the bloody days of William Barry.
On our return to camp we assembled on the parade ground to be escorted in shifts to the mess hall. The first whisperings about a new strike arose at dinner.
The consensus among the prisoners was that the Wart had singled out Sigler for assassination because he could not permit someone who had withstood the worst that the system could inflict to walk out of Kamas a free man. The Wart's assertion that Sigler had brought the shooting upon himself by threatening a guard was preposterous. Everyone even remotely acquainted with Sigler knew that he was a devout Christian, non–violent and respectful of camp authority and its rules. Being only a few months short of finishing his eight–year term, he had no conceivable motive to make trouble or escape.
In our eyes, the only acceptable response to Sigler’s murder was to stop work until Whiting and the guards who fired on us were suspended or dismissed. This time promises would not be enough. Sentiment favoring a new strike spread quickly. In Barracks C–14 we heard impassioned pleas from one visitor after another:
"Brothers! How much longer are we going to go on slaving away, taking our wages in bullets? No more! Tomorrow morning, nobody goes to work!"
Barracks after barracks, the message made the rounds. Some even attached notes to rocks and threw them over the wall to Division 2, where political prisoners from Canada, Mexico, China, Russia, the Middle East, and a variety of other countries languished together with their American counterparts. Many of the foreigners still harbored hopes of being repatriated in bilateral prisoner exchanges, yet they, too, took the risk of supporting another strike.
The next morning's events unfolded identically to the events of Tuesday the week before. Prisoners reported for breakfast but stayed in their barracks when the time came to assemble for work. Again the bosses looked on in frustration.
About an hour after work was to have started I was on my way to the latrines. Through the Division 3 gate I saw a phalanx of warders and armed escort troops massing outside. They wore helmets and light body armor but carried no weapons more lethal than nightsticks.
Suddenly the gate opened and the attackers fanned out, sending a ten–man squad to assault each of the barracks near the gate. I ran forward to watch. Their method was simple: they sent eight men into a barracks and kept two outside the door. Six of the inside men moved in pairs from bunk to bunk, grabbing prisoners and dragging them to the doorway, where the two remaining inside men shoved them into the waiting arms of the pair outside. Once outdoors, the prisoners were escorted to the parade ground.
Although the prisoners gave only passive resistance, clinging to bedposts and going limp once dislodged, the work proved slow and tedious for the security men. With each barracks holding about a hundred prisoners, the warders and troops soon became exhausted. More than that, many of the prisoners they succeeded in evicting slipped away quietly from the parade ground and took refuge in other barracks or in the mess hall or the latrines.
The guards and warders kept up the eviction work for two hours but succeeded in emptying less than a third of the barracks in Division 3. For the balance of the day, the rest of us kept to our bunks, coming out only to use the latrines and to visit the mess hall. Our methods seemed to have succeeded.
On the second morning of the strike, the phalanx returned before dawn with reinforcements and with Colonel Tracy at their head. He and his squad leaders went as before from barracks to barracks, waking everyone with rough shouts from portable bullhorns.
Ours was one of the first barracks graced by a visit from the Colonel. He entered in his neatly pressed black uniform and peaked hat, unarmed but backed by a retinue of eight junior officers and guards. Even in the dim pre–dawn light, I could see that his face was flushed with anger and that he was hell–bent to have his way with us.
"Listen here!" he bellowed. "How long do you prisoners intend to go on with this slacking? The mess hall and these cozy bunks of yours are only for men who work!"
He pointed to a prisoner who sat on a nearby bunk while lacing his boots. Then he pointed in turn to several other prisoners who were not yet fully dressed.
"You there! Outside! And you, too! And you and you and you!"
He waved for his attendants to seize the men and take them outside. This time the captives were hustled onto a truck and held there at gunpoint.
Someone shouted from the back of the darkened room.
"Come and get us if you have the guts, you swine!"
"Find that man and make sure he spends the next week in the isolator, Lieutenant!" Tracy ordered. "Now which of you are going to work and which of you are going to the camp jail?"
No one moved.
"All right, Lieutenant, fill the truck!"
With that, Tracy turned on his heel and left. His men succeeded in dragging a few dozen more onto the truck but suffered a humiliating setback when most of them escaped in a rush when the truck door was left too lightly guarded. The guards dragged off just enough prisoners to refill the truck before giving up the battle
for Barracks C–14.
Once they left us, I ran over to watch the evacuation of Pete Murphy’s barracks. There Tracy and his henchmen were having more success, hustling one prisoner after another into the waiting truck.
But Murphy was not one to accept defeat lightly.
"If it's work or jail, I pick jail! Here, take me first!" he insisted.
Other voices cried out in support.
"I pick jail, too!" one exclaimed. "Save room on the truck for me!"
Within moments, the entire barracks exploded in a chant, "We want jail! We want jail!" and surged forward, overwhelming the doorkeepers.
Colonel Tracy, still blocking the doorway, was forced to scramble outside to avoid being crushed in the stampede. His face filled with disgust at being so close to the foul–smelling and disrespectful prisoners. As I watched him brush the dust off his uniform it seemed to me that the irony of Murphy’s gesture had been utterly lost on him.
Barely an hour later, Tracy ordered the trucks to depart. The operation ended after making off with fewer than 200 prisoners. Our spirits soared as we watched the gate close behind the last of the guards. Within minutes, however, Tracy announced over the loudspeaker that those who were jailed would remain in jail until the rest of us went back to work. Then he added that all of us would be put on bread and water at once. This crude attempt to divide us hit home with some of the men. Within moments I felt an odd tingling at the back of my neck.
It was D’Amato glowering at me from the barracks door.
"Satisfied?" he snarled.
That night I received a summons to visit Glenn Reineke at his barracks just after lights out. When I arrived, Gary Toth met me at the door and took me back through the semi–darkness to Reineke's bunk. The Major was writing in a notebook by the light of a single stubby candle.
"Sorry for asking you to come over so late, Paul. But I thought it might be better for you if we met more discreetly."
"You're probably right," I replied, relieved that he had sensed my reluctance to stand out in the crowd. "How can I help?"
"Something has come up and I need a hand from someone whose judgment I can trust."
"Happy to oblige," I said uneasily. "As long as it doesn’t involve any throat–slitting."
"Not this time," Reineke replied with a half smile. "It’s about Alec Sigler. Did you know Sigler left a widow in Heber?"
I said I’d heard.
"She doesn't know yet that he’s dead. I'd like you to tell her."
I didn't know whether he was joking or had lost his marbles.
"Would a letter do or should I visit her at home?"
Reineke chuckled.
"A letter would be fine. And in case you're wondering how to send it to her, you’ll be using the same method Sigler used to smuggle his own messages to her."
"It sounds risky," I replied.
"Possibly," he answered. "But having a connection to the outside could be valuable to someone who intends to get out of here someday."
"All right, tell me what I have to do," I said with reluctance.
Reineke went on to reveal the details of how Alec Sigler would conceal a written message in the cylindrical hole of an ordinary brick fragment, seal each end of the hole with mud and drop it along the shoulder of the road on his way back from the recycling site. His wife did something similar by rolling her paper message into a spindle and tucking it into a hollowed stick of a certain size to be tossed over the fence into the brickyard. Reineke drew me a map of the spots in the brickyard and along the road to the recycling site where the messages were left. Some thirty minutes later, after learning these and other details, I was ready to begin my clandestine correspondence with the widow of a man I had never met.
"I'll need some paper and something to write with," I told him.
He gave me a manila envelope with a dozen sheets of blank copy paper and a cheap ballpoint pen. I stuffed the envelope into my coveralls.
"Keep it in a safe place and return what you don't need. And don't let anybody see you what you’re doing. Whiting's stoolies are on high alert. If you suspect anybody is watching you, tell Gary or me, then keep clear of them. There's going to be a night soon when they’ll get what’s coming to them."
Reineke rose from his bunk in a way that made clear he was ready for me to leave. But before I did, I couldn't resist asking him for news about the strike.
"Has the Warden responded to our demands yet?" I asked.
"There’s not going to be a response," Reineke replied calmly. "They're out to crush us."
His words hit me like a blast of arctic air. Like many of the new prisoners, my decision to strike had been an emotional one. From the beginning, I had assumed that the work stoppage would be settled quickly and that a settlement would bring at least minor concessions from the camp bosses.
"What now?" I asked.
"Same as before. We refuse to work."
"That's all?"
Reineke was silent for a moment.
"Until someone comes up with a better idea."
I thanked him and made my way back to the barracks.
The next morning was the third day of the strike. I could sense that some of the weaker prisoners had begun to waver after hearing that they would no longer receive full rations. Even the hardiest of men could not maintain his strength on punishment rations. At roll call the word spread that the threat of jail and loss of rations had proven too onerous for our brothers in Division 2. Their section leaders had already notified the Warden of their capitulation.
In Division 3, each prisoner watched his neighbor for signs of what was to come, much as we had when the first strike broke out a week before. Anxious prisoners milled about the mess hall doors and the edges of the parade ground to catch any last–minute signs of flagging resolve. But, as before, when the siren blew, it was clear that Division 3 had decided to continue the strike. No one set foot on the parade ground.
I watched from the barracks door as I had the previous Tuesday and saw the normal complement of warders and escort troops waiting for us to line up by work group. As before, they waited thirty minutes before they withdrew to the perimeter. But instead of leaving us in peace, within ten minutes the largest–ever phalanx of officers, guards, and escort troops massed outside the gates. At their head was a company of warders in plastic helmets and body armor.
I estimated the entire force at 300 men, which meant that the Warden must have drafted additional troops from State Security units all along the Wasatch Front. There were also at least two dozen empty troop trucks, each escorted by armed infantry. This time the bosses had come fully equipped to achieve their objective of breaking the strike once and for all.
The troops used the same tactics as the previous morning, moving against the barracks in squads of ten and removing anyone who did not agree to line up for work. The trucks filled quickly with strikers and carted them off to the camp jail in Division 4. There the trucks remained just long enough to unload before returning for more strikers. By my calculation, within an hour the jail must have exceeded its official capacity of 500.
By the time the shock troops reached Barracks C–14, they seemed to sense that they were winning the battle and moved at a more leisurely pace, pausing to bait and harass us as they went.
Colonel Tracy seemed to be in a particularly expansive mood. He entered our barracks in a fresh uniform and imposing peaked hat, backed by a retinue of nine or ten hulking guards. He sat down on one of the low bunks nearest the door, ignoring the gaunt and forlorn old prisoner who squatted next to him on the bed. Tracy elbowed the old man aside and sat with arms akimbo so that no space at all was left for the miserable prisoner.
"Come on, old friend, move over a bit, eh? Can't you see I'm a colonel?"
Three or four other black–uniformed officers followed his lead, displacing the occupants of nearby bunks and appearing every bit as uncomfortable with their proximity to the foul–smelling prisoners as the latter were with being shoved a
side. Tracy then grabbed his quaking neighbor by the elbow and thrust him into the arms of waiting guards, who ran him out of the barracks as if on rails. The other officers followed suit, though carefully so as not to soil their uniforms.
When they reached my row of bunks, I saw no point in clinging to a bedpost or otherwise resisting the trip out to the truck. I rose as my captors approached and offered them both arms to escort me outside. It was an almost dignified journey down the aisle and out into the yard to join the other strikers.
But to my surprise no truck waited for us there. A load of prisoners roared by, then another, before I noticed that all the trucks were heading for the gate while none was returning. The camp jail, it seemed, was full.
The guards escorted the rest of us on foot to the parade ground. About 2,500 of us squatted side by side, the great majority of whom had surrendered rather than go to jail. Of the thousand or so who had refused to work, most were presumably behind bars.
The guards warned us to remain seated on the ground until the Warden addressed us over the loudspeaker system. Before long we heard his voice.
"This is the Warden speaking. Your elected leaders have now informed me that the illegal strike is at an end. All of you will report for work immediately. Guards, assemble the prisoners in columns for departure to their job sites. That is all."
The strike had broken on its third day. We gained nothing by it.
CHAPTER 15
"The task of Soviet corrective labor policy is the transformation of the nastiest human material into worthwhile, fully useful, active and conscientious builders of socialism."
—I.L. Averbakh, Stalinist–era penal theorist
FRIDAY, MARCH 22
After the Warden announced the end of the strike, the troops assembled those of us who remained on the parade ground into columns and marched us off to work. Guards with attack dogs harassed us all the way.
At the recycling site we worked slowly and steadily to avoid any pretext for the warders to harass us. With Alec Sigler's death still fresh in our minds, we also took pains not to approach the perimeter wire. When anyone stopped working or dropped a load, the warders showed no mercy with their truncheons.
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