Letters to Aaron-The Hal Luebbert Story: ''America'' and Its Freedom Myths

By Hal von Luebbert

First published as the author's primal scream, "Letters to Aaron" is an autobiographical and factual story of treachery - treachery typical of the United States. Nations, tribes, and people like Hungary, the Rhade, Montagnard, and Hmong (Meo), of Vietnam and Laos, to say nothing of most of the nations in Latin America, will recognize and know it well. Nearly countless individuals, including statesmen, soldiers, and covert operatives sacrificed on the altar of corrupt capitalism would, too - were they not dead as the result.

Recruited at sixteen years of age by the CIA and trained in Iceland and Germany with the Tenth Special Forces Group, Hal Luebbert did missions in East Germany, Hungary, and Finland (i.e., the Soviet Union) before being sent to Cuba with orders to kill Fidel Castro. Disillusioned by the obvious propagandist fabrications of his superiors once having reached the island nation, Hal rejected his orders, returning on his own to the U.S., and writing a warning letter to Castro. The rest, it is said, is history. Stymied finally in its efforts to punish the renegade, the U.S. played its Ace in the Hole the Internal Revenue Service.

In 1978, the US government in its IRS avatar destroyed his business and family. In 1985, when he had recovered and remarried, they did it all again, this time driving a teenage son to three attempts at suicide. A war ensued, and when von Luebbert counterattacked federal murder attempts with electronic and personal surveillance proving massive governmental crime, a US District Court protected their federal employers by ruling his records exempted under the Freedom of Information Act by the national secrets exemption. US Senators and national media forwarded proof of federal crime like mayhem, murder, rape, and extortion to commit rape protected their masters by concealment of the evidence and personal silence.

' Remember,' 2nd President John Adams said, 'democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.' Hal von Luebbert's war has proved the fact of the one certainty for survival exists in a rapidly decaying democracy. That is to "get something" - preferably a great deal - on people high in government. If there is a mitigating factor, it is only that in a government like ours, there is always much to find.

Protected still by evidence of federal crime, together with the fact of large numbers of remaining witnesses available for subpoena, von Luebbert lives mostly in the wild in Texas and states where concealed handgun laws make it possible for him to defend himself with lethal force.

He is also a sixth degree black belt and three time national judo champion. It helps when government reverts to its true character and methods.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 7, 2006
• ISBN: 9781450098007

Hal von Luebbert

Hal von Luebbert is a retired soldier, private detective, bodyguard, and - recently - high school teacher. In 1978, the US government in its IRS avatar destroyed his business and family. In 1985, when he had recovered and remarried, they did it all again, this time driving a teenage son to three attempts at suicide. A war ensued, and when von Luebbert counterattacked federal murder attempts with electronic and personal surveillance proving massive governmental crime, a US District Court protected their federal employers by ruling his records exempted under the Freedom of Information Act by the national secrets exemption. US Senators and national media forwarded proof of federal crime like mayhem, murder, rape, and extortion to commit rape protected their masters by concealment of the evidence and personal silence. Protected still by evidence of federal crime, together with the fact of large numbers of remaining witnesses available for subpoena, von Luebbert lives mostly in the wild in Texas and states where concealed handgun laws make it possible for him to defend himself with lethal force. He is also a sixth degree black belt and three time national judo champion “Letters” is his second novel.

Book preview

Letters to Aaron—The Hal Luebbert Story

America and Its Freedom Myths

Hal von Luebbert

Copyright © 2004, 2006 by Hal von Luebbert.

Title page by Hal von Luebbert.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to: JudoKnightErrant Enterprises, 2101 E. Trant Road, #305, Kingsville, Texas 78363.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data von Luebbert, Hal Letters to Aaron – the Hal Luebbert Story – First Edition Registration Number Tzu-207-845

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

31287

Contents

PREFACE

PROLOGUE

-ONE

-TWO

-THREE

-FOUR

-FIVE

-SIX

-SEVEN

-EIGHT

-NINE

-TEN

EPILOGUE

He who fights with monsters ought take care lest he become a monster, and he who looks into the Abyss ought realize that the Abyss looks into him, too. Friederich Nietzsche

There is no teacher but the enemy . . . Only the enemy will show you where you are weak. Only the enemy can show you where he is strong. And only he will tell you the rules of the game. Only he will tell you what you can do and cannot do. Orson Scott Card—Ender’s Game

To speak of atrocious crimes in mild language is treasonous to virtue. Edmund Burke

Government is not reason. Government is not eloquence. It is force. And, like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master. George Washington

1.jpg

PREFACE

This book chronicles a learning process, the behavioral and educational journey from societally induced stupidity and naiveté to the tactical understanding of a survivalist. It has been twenty-six years in the making. There are several reasons for that, the foremost being that for most of that time, I was all but relentlessly engaged in a veritable war with the United States government. I was simply given no time for respite, much less to write. My enemy intended it that way, of course.

That’s a microcosm, by the way—and you’re going to hear that word here several times, so let’s define it and see what I mean. A microcosm, the dictionary says is: the universe in miniature; anything regarded as being a universe in miniature. My life and I have been a miniature of the life of my nation and its people. You, if you are mature and bright enough to realize it, are fighting a war; to be sure, a miniature compared to the gauntlet of harassment government ran me through, but a struggle to survive government just like mine.

Just to write my story has taken nine years, that due the fact that at first I just couldn’t handle it. To think again about what happened and to recall certain of the things I saw and heard is—What’s the word? I can’t find one. Maybe it will suffice to say that when I have been writing, sleep that night is often possible only under the self-hypnosis I learned in my effort to keep my sanity during the struggle. For a time, I could not write at all, for with each new attempt at telling my story, the frustration, fury and bitterness of the years I struggled under the arrogant and vicious yoke of federal tyranny would get the better of me, and my words would become an angry torrent, simply a primal scream.

But that, I knew, wouldn’t do. The people who call themselves Americans— totally ignoring the rest of the hemisphere—live encapsulated in a cocoon provided them by technological advances like climate-controlled environments, space age medicine, and behaviorally mind-numbing, propagandist media. In the ivory tower of virtual reality the United States has become for most of its citizens, reality is merely something to be altered according to taste and preference, and one simply adjusts his condition and state using money. Stories like mine, dealing with reality unalterable and ineluctable are therefore unacceptable— unbelievable. Until a few hours ago, as a matter of fact, I still didn’t know how to tell my story, much less dissolve the Marie Antoinette Myth cocoon that America lives in.

Then I read an article in Selecciones, the Spanish language version of the Reader’s Digest.

The Reader’s Digest story is entitled Me Robaron la Vida—they stole my life. It tells of David Shephard, a man convicted and sentenced to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. It tells of the brutalizing effects of twelve years of imprisonment, of being deprived of human dignity, of being attacked and beaten by fellow inmates, of learning that he must fight back, and of being released by his captors without regard for how he would survive afterward. Finally, Selecciones tells of the cruel and irreparable injury done David Shephard’s family, and the devastating effect of imprisonment on the mind and spirit of a man wrongfully accused.

I read the story, and I knew how to tell my own story. My story, you see, is very like that of David Shephard. There are differences in my story, though. The differences are that I was imprisoned for twenty-six years. Driven from my home into the streets, I was imprisoned where I didn’t receive three meals a day from my captors. Oh, I could travel about, but not without relentless pursuit and interference. More than a hundred nine times—before I started counting, there were as many as twenty such incidents—I was stopped and questioned by the nation’s police. Frequently, I was pushed, slapped around—frisking is the preferred euphemism—menaced, and threatened by belligerent officers of the law.

In my prison, prevented by seizure of business and funds by which to do business and denied employment by threat to employers, I had to hunt and dig for my food, quench thirst from a stream, lake, or pond. Neither did my captors provide me the information and education that might have resulted in my early release. I had to fight in self-defense, too, but I was shot at, shot, cut with knives, attacked by would-be muggers, and rammed by motor vehicles. In my prison, the guards harassed me mercilessly, and invaded my living quarters and personal effects as though I were a captive animal. During my captivity, both the inmates and guards who attacked me were employed and dispatched by the state to do just that.

And where David’s wife and family ultimately were restored to him, no such thing is possible for me. I lost forever my relationship with a son. I, too, was forced to know that my wife was turning to other men for the sexuality and romance a woman needs. That singularly exquisite torture was inflicted on me twice, and by people who took particular delight in telling me about it and confronting me with it. As a matter of fact, Karen, second of the two women in question, seemed affected by a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, having gone over to the enemy in her cruel willingness to publicly flaunt her affair with a lover.

Where David Shephard’s ever-loyal wife came back to him I lost mine, not once, but twice.

David Shephard and I will never recover from what the United States of America and its people—you—did to us. We will always remember what was, and what might be again. It’s that kind of country, that kind of government, and that kind of people.

The Hal Lübbert Story is my account of what happens when a people and nation supplant the responsibility imposed by truth with decadence and moral drift disguised by nationally institutionalized myth. It tells what happens when government is left by its constituency to do as it pleases. If you’re smart, you’ll take my story as a warning. You see, the people of the United States are about to make the same journey I made when she attacked me, the journey from conditioned ignorance to incontrovertible realization. When epiphany finally comes for the people who arrogantly call themselves alone the Americans, it may very well be too late.

The fact is, my story is really written for the young people of the future who will one day reap the whirlwind you, their parents and grandparents, have sown. The continent you will leave them is already despoiled and poisoned, and will soon be the source of widespread, continentally endemic sickness and disease. Their once proud nation, whose profligate greed has already made it despised and hated over most of the world, will have become a pariah among nations.

In their parents’ and grandparents’ self-indulgent drive for ease and degenerate pleasure, America’s young people will have been spent relentlessly into irretrievable bankruptcy. More, and perhaps worst of all, Americans’ cowardly demand for security without responsibility—provided by government hirelings, that is—will have made their nation a vast sheep pen, a totalitarian prison.

That, my fellow Americans will be the legacy you leave to your children, and, to quote Benjamin Franklin, they will piss on your graves.

I want our children and their children to know that I fought every step of the way, with every cell and fiber of my being, to prevent what their faithless nation, their parents and grandparents, are doing to them.

This book is the story of that struggle, and it is written in the hope that my grave will be one they leave flowers on.

PROLOGUE

I was a couple weeks past my thirteenth birthday when a trio of what today we’d call motorcycle bums caught me as I wandered along the Cedar River back home. Still incredibly weak and puny from the ravages of the poliomyelitis I’d recovered from only few years before, there was nothing I could do. They were three grown men, they were strong, and I was puny. Helpless. They stuck their dicks in just about every orifice. They had a good time. I cried, pleaded, and begged. When they finally threw me in the river, though, I got away. I’m sure they thought I’d drown. Better for them if I had. They humiliated me, and I still haven’t forgotten it. I still recognize their kind.

The gang came back every year to camp out by the river. Bold as brass. I think they were carnie workers at the County Fair in Osage a few miles away, because each year at Mitchell County Fair time, they would show up at their favorite campsite. I knew because I lived by the river not far away, in a sod hut I built myself.

I would watch the men from my much-loved sanctuary, the night and its darkness. One night, I followed the men as they went on what I heard them laughingly call a pussy raid. Following was a mistake. It turned out then that the men had discovered that a young Indian woman who lived some distance away with an old Canadian trapper went customarily down to the river to bathe. I watched as they caught her. The woman had no one to protect her, and she suffered every indignity the predator sonofabitches could think of, several times all three of them at once. Just like me, she wept and pleaded with her tormentors.

It was futile—power, in all its forms, takes whatever it wants, does whatever it chooses. It was probably my first real confrontation with a truth I’d one day live.

I had never seen anything like this, the humiliating cruelty or otherwise. It went on and on, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I damned near died of shame and frustrated rage that night. Too puny and too scared to help, I could only watch until the woman’s tormentors finally let her go.

But the incident changed me. I’d experienced epiphany, and it made me despise and hate cruelty in all its forms. My epiphany had another result, too. In a short time, I wasn’t afraid anymore. I wasn’t afraid because I wasn’t puny any more, either. My hatred of cruelty had driven me to the decision that I would make myself strong or die in the effort. No one would ever humiliate me with impunity again. No one would ever be humiliated again while I looked on, either. Never! In the years to come, I would always have the feeling that I had made a deal with God. I’ve always held up my end of the bargain. Don’t— ever—abuse or hurt anyone while I’m watching.

Every single day thereafter, I trained until exhaustion or dizziness stopped me. I ran or snowshoed, I lifted weights, I played judo and wrestled, and I got strong. I got very strong. When I say I’m strong, you won’t have any way to understand what I mean. You don’t live in that kind of society or country. It will suffice to say that the training the way I did—and do still—makes for far more than physical fortitude. It also builds an unbendable and unbreakable will. I was strong, all right. But you wouldn’t understand.

In fact, when I caught the bikers by the river again, the United States had already singled me out—shanghaied me—for my strength. The Land of the Free, they said bluntly, wanted me because I was so strong, so strong that I would be a perfect killer. It was when I learned that that’s all I was to my country that I thought of the men who came back every year to camp and hunt by the Cedar. I thought about what they had done to the Indian woman—and to me, too. Before I went into the government’s service, I would finish what I had been training for. Besides, if it was all right to kill for their purposes, why should it be wrong to kill for my purposes?

The campsite was a long way from town, and a long way from any farmhouses in the area. The bikers, I suppose, had chosen that way to suit their sinister purposes. Too bad for them that they weren’t smart enough—or were too arrogant and sure of their strength—to reconnoiter enough to find my hut nearby.

From the darkness only a few feet from the carnies, I heard them wonder aloud one night if they’d be able to catch that squaw again. I smiled to myself. Roy Gibeau and his woman had moved away the same summer as the attack on her, and I had helped. This night, though, I walked into the men’s camp, made sure they remembered me, and reminded them of the Indian woman. I knew what they’d done, I said.

Sneering derision, one man taunted me by asking whether I intended to do something about it. Yeah, I said, and loudmouth and his group were outraged and indignant when I flicked out a hand to catch him between thumb and forefinger by the upper lip. That was bad for him—the fingers holding him had been trained until they could crush a bathroom scales to its limit—and his eyes popped as the excruciating fingers closed. Aaaaaaaaaaaaah, he said.

Using the pain, I pulled the man writhing at the end of my arm to his feet, then blasted him back onto the log again with the judo throw we call osotogari. Stunned by impact with the wood, he bounced off to land on his butt and stare at me stupidly. Before him, a toe quivered reflexively and uncontrollably. I think I’d broken his back.

The action brought the others to their feet, faces wild with rage, mouths spouting menacing curses and invective. Typical. Also typical was the way all that belligerence turned to sniveling fear when I snapped out my 1911 .45 and blew their torturer buddy’s bestial brains across the log he’d been sitting on into the campfire. I remember being very calm, even wisecracking. A guy should never lose his head, I said, he might lose his brains in the bargain. I’ve always been witty, you know, and I laughed. Like they laughed when they took Gibeaus’s woman.

Still, I was careful to be exactly as responsive to the squealing entreaties that punctuated the statement made by the shot as they had once been with my tears and cries, or hers. The Goddess Justice’s scales are a balance scales, after all, and I believe in justice. I made three shots, three precise hits, the target in each instance the upper lip. A man killed that way dies instantly, like one hit by lightning. Easier for the carnies than they were to their prey. And, for these predators, no more prey—ever. The cruel world became less cruel by three.

How did I get away with it? Well, a farmer named Freddie Wieland had a herd of Hampshire hogs just across the river from the campsite. I worked for three consecutive days with a chain saw, an axe and a big butcher’s grinder, but the hogs loved every morsel I was very careful to be sure they ingested. There was a farm-boy witticism back then. He went to shit, it said, and the hogs ate him. Then he went to shit again. Now he’ll never go to shit again. I’ve always appreciated humor, always laugh a lot.

The homely witticism was pretty good science, too. Went to shit also means that once a man has been run through a hog, in the parlance of those crusaders for truth, justice, and the American way, the FBI, no trace—including DNA—remains. Life has a way of being funny, too—especially where the swaggering loudmouth, American male is concerned. A few months after the river incident, a U.S. Army instructor was to ask me derisively and rhetorically, You got any idea what it’s like to kill a man, trooper? Yes, I said, I had. He laughed scornfully. I laughed, too. Little did he know. Dumb shit.

* * *

 -

ONE

"Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he

potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality."

—Erich Fromm, German Psychoanalyst and Writer

Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich starker—What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger. German Sprichwort (motto) on a Bierkrug owned by the author’s Grandfather

Always a good place to start is the beginning. Well, I can’t remember the beginning—too young—but I can remember using Opa’s oil can to lubricate the wheels on my kiddy-cart tricycle. Oma took the picture with her box camera, and on the back of the print, wrote Harland—fifteen months.

Let’s stop right there. You’re going to say, Oh, for Christ’s sake, he can’t remember when he was fifteen months old. You’re wrong, because I can. And that’s what’s going to happen throughout this book. You won’t believe most of what I have to say. I don’t care, but you should. You won’t believe my story— until or unless you have to live it—because you habitually try to measure other people by using yourself as a measure. It’s called intuitive thinking, and epistemologists—people who study truth and its understanding—know it well. Intuitive thinking won’t work with me, because I’m nothing like you. That’s something almost any of the people who’ve known me for a long time would tell you. Ask them, if you like. Your government knows it, too. Ask them.

Let me give you some examples, things I’ve discovered by actually doing research of the subject. You get bored. That’s because your brain isn’t capable of keeping you interested. In a situation where you are unable to do any of the few things that you find pleasurable, you are unable to think of anything to do. More, there is nothing in your mind that is capable of keeping you interested or entertained. Hell of a state to be in, if you ask me, but don’t bother to tell me it’s not so, because I have tons of data from the field of psychology that says it is.

I, on the other hand, have never been bored in my life. That’s because I’ve always had literally thousands of things to think about. In school, high school and college included, I didn’t miss a single day. Why? Because it was interesting. There was always something to learn, and one of the things I learned was that I would never learn everything there was to learn. But I could keep trying, and I’ve been in college now for fifty-two years. Know a lot of people like that, do you?

In fact, I’m nothing like you mentally. I don’t dream, don’t even have REM— Rapid Eye Movement—when I sleep. I make things like pain, fear, and illnesses go away by thinking about it. Don’t laugh. The Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, one of the most famous medical establishments on Planet Earth, once documented it.

I can find my way to places where I have never been and have no directions or information about. That’s also been witnessed by numbers of people, once a whole judo team. It’s a fact.

You do crossword puzzles; I buy old algebra and calculus books and do the problems in the back. You play volleyball, basketball, golf and watch television. You go to movies. I live in the wilderness off the land and without shelter, climb high places, wrestle, and play judo. You eat out and go to night clubs for diversion, I go trolling for muggers and pick fights with the federal government. You think money and wealth have something to do with strength, I know from experience that wealth is really dependence, weakness. I’m nothing like you. Not even close.

The reason that I am so different probably comes from the way I was raised. I had no parents, grew up in that sod hut I mentioned, a home I built myself by the Cedar River back home in Iowa. I had no socialization, learned almost everything by necessity and experience. As a result, I have none of your creeds, accepted ideas, and foibles. Few of my opinions and little of my formative information comes from those of other people. But I did, and have, spent a great deal of time studying humans, and the further result is that I know that without the support of civilization, you would die. It wouldn’t make any difference to me, and in fact, I wish civilization would go away. There are just too damned many of you.

I started investigating the world when I was still a kid. In fact, my veritable lust for knowledge became so apparent to classmates and townspeople that my high school graduating class predicted that I would one day be the man who found the Abominable Snowman. I investigated everything within my reach— haunted houses, news stories of all kinds, and more. I experimented with Roman war machines, natural poisons, animal and human snares and traps, archery, bridge building, skin-diving, snowshoeing, rock climbing and rappelling, flying, judo, wrestling, fast draw and long range shooting, and fifty things more. I soloed an airplane a few days after my fourteenth birthday. I was running decades before people started jogging, and long distance biking long before the bicycle craze hit.

Decades before there were archery enthusiasts and bow hunting seasons for game, I made my own bow and arrows, and hunted both big and small game. I once killed a deer with a homemade javelin. I learned and experimented with explosives, too. I have a right to do that, by the way, just as I have a right to keep and carry arms with which to protect myself. You can’t do anything about it anyway, because I can make ammunition or bomb explosives from my own urine.

I’m physically different, too. My medical history includes at least one case of what doctors were forced to call spontaneous remission of a laboratory-diagnosed cancer. When an entire battalion of soldiers came down with Asian Flu when the vaccine we all got proved still virulent, one man in more than fifteen hundred who took the shot didn’t get the disease. Me. In childhood when three younger siblings got measles, mumps, chicken pox and the other childhood diseases, I didn’t.

In a recent physical, my heart rate on a treadmill reached one hundred sixty five. That’s not a maximum for me, by the way—and I stayed there for fifteen minutes. U.S. Army Ranger qualifiers today do six pull-ups, fifty-two pushups in two minutes, sixty-two sit-ups in two minutes, run two miles in fifteen minutes, run five miles in forty minutes, thirty seconds, and hump a seventy pound pack twenty five miles. I do twenty-three pull-ups, sixty pushups in sixty seconds, sixty sit-ups in sixty seconds, run two miles in fourteen minutes flat, run five miles in thirty nine minutes, and walk all day with a sixty pound pack. A couple of years ago, I did the Ranger Q course and finished in the ninety second percentile among guys less than thirty-five. I’m sixty eight.

I’m strong, and what’s more, I know that I have a right to be strong. You and your government don’t like that, but just like my knowledge of explosives, poisons, and survival method, there isn’t anything you can do about that, either. I’ll stay strong no matter what you do.

There’s a good deal more, but that will suffice. You think I’m boasting, anyway. It’s how you are. I don’t care what you think, because what you think means absolutely nothing to me. I don’t need anything from you, sure as hell not your approval. What I tell you is out of sense of fair play, like handicapping or the seedings in a sporting tournament. Actually, if you were smart, you’d consider what I’ve said military intelligence—knowledge of what you’re up against. You made me your enemy, don’t forget.

But you’re far too stupid, emotional, and mentally immature to do productive self-assessment, a factor I’ve been taking advantage of all my life. A few nut cases you call terrorists—name calling seems to give you all the satisfaction and surcease you need—knock down a building, and you think you’re hurt. Maybe you should watch the History Channel more often. You’re cringing in fear of a hissing housecat like Osama bin Laden, while a six hundred pound Siberian Tiger you’ve wounded crouches in the darkness, watching you. Me.

If I’m anything like you, it’s general appearance only. Even that’s not likely— two-thirds of Americans are grossly overweight, disgustingly obese.

I was about four when I lost the use of my legs—as the folks put it. It was poliomyelitis, clearly, but no one then would say so where I could hear it. Fooling me was benevolent, I guess.

Parenthetically—nothing to do with my subject, really—I remember a time when the local priest was called to administer Extreme Unction, last rites of the Catholic Church so important to grandfather and Grandmother Green. I also remember hearing them outside my room, discussing their having assured that I wouldn’t go to hell when I died. I guess they didn’t realize I could hear. I was pretty scared.

I recovered use of my legs just in time to enjoy the warfare of my parents’ divorce and my dad’s abrupt departure. I was nine or so, then, but I got over it. When my mother found another husband, she left, too—taking my sister and two brothers with her. Grandma and Grandpa needed me. I saw my family seldom after that.

A couple of years later, I started having what were then referred to as nocturnal emissions. Oma, benightedly Catholic, was convinced that only a devil behaved like that, and would not suffer a devil to live under her roof. Father Entringer, pastor of the local church, agreed. I was thrown out of her house.

The wet dreams episode was the first of what was to be countless times, I paid a price for something I had no control or complicity in whatever. I think nocturnal emissions mean you’re supposed to have a nice, erotic dream in the process, but I always seem to get short-changed somehow, and this was no exception. I literally didn’t know what was happening. You see, it is in the first place a clinical fact that I don’t dream, and haven’t since I was a little boy who wet the bed. My nightmares then would drive me out of the house and into the night where my folks would find me wandering aimlessly, still asleep, and terrified. When enough hell had been raised, it seems I decided subconsciously not to dream anymore. The fact is—as I said a minute ago—that I don’t even have REM—Rapid Eye Movement—sleep. I didn’t want to put up with nightmares, so I stopped dreaming altogether. It’s the way I am.

Anyway, it was somehow necessary to hide what had happened from the community. To fool them, in other words. You should think about that. It’s intelligence about your enemy. It also explains some of what follows here in this book.

Beside the fact that I had no dream to relate to my problem, it was against Catholic Church Canon Law then to discuss things like that anywhere. For me to learn the mechanics of male ejaculation had to wait for a few weeks and two female classmates who were for some reason—they were Catholic, too—eager to see the phenomenon for themselves. To recreate the occurrence required only a minute or two of their . . . , manipulation, shall we say. Well, it was one way to find out.

Of course, it was important to the girls that no one find out about their curiosity.

The first several times I was evicted from my home, I was scornfully forgiven, then restored to scornful favor. It wouldn’t be good, after all, if the neighbors found out about the evictions, or the reason. After a while, I tired of dealing with something I couldn’t do anything but go without sleep about, and I just stayed away. Simpler that way. I began to handle a lot of similar problems that way. People and the way they are tend to be a pain in the ass, and I was beginning to learn to deal with it.

That, by the parenthetical way, may also give you some insight into what’s to come. I am not a man to harbor illusions. I take the world, and the people in it, for what they are. That means for what they do. By their fruits . . . I don’t care about good intentions, celebrated diversity, child of God, equal under the law, and Orwellian newspeak generally. I don’t care who or what you are. You are what you do, that’s what I have to deal with, and that’s how I relate with you. Forewarned is fair warned. Got it?

Anyway, I got tired of being used like a yo-yo in order that Grandma might fool the local townspeople, and using plans from a Boys Life magazine, I built a sod hut on a kind of island in the middle of the Cedar River. By kind of, I mean that the river divided to run around a piece of woods, then re-joined downstream a little way. The island was actually wider than the river, one branch of which was shallow, more like a creek.

That was 1950, and I lived in the hut for most of four years. Grandmother Green was something of a local aristocrat, daughter of the man who had founded New Haven, Iowa, and built the first church. Karl—Charlie, to locals—was not an aristocrat, and Oma treated him for all the world like a servant—a butler, matter of fact. When I stopped coming home, it was by a kind of mutual consent that no one in the community found out. For the first time, I noted that people know, therefore don’t know, what they don’t want to know. Those same people always refer to themselves as honest people.

In the first place, her daughter’s failed marriage was the source of humiliated, almost demented, torment for Bertha M. Green. Departure of her daughter and a second marriage—like nocturnal emissions, the Catholic Church and grandma did not recognize divorce—nearly unhinged her. That Bertha and Charlie were caring for daughter Mary Eleanor’s oldest provided in Oma’s mind the basis for a kind of social pride and redemption. It looked good to the community, a thing very important to Grandma. When I left, the old people were quite content to keep my absence quiet, even cover it up. Appearances, I was learning, are of paramount importance.

I was also learning to fear government. For me, then, government meant only the branch of government that calls itself Social Services. When my mother was obliged by circumstance to return with her four kids to her parents’ house, it was totally without financial support from anyone. While I knew, and know, few of the details, I do know that my maternal grandparents were people frugal beyond anything the reader would believe. To attempt to describe one culture to another, after all, is something language has always found daunting in some degree, and the gulf between our nation then and our nation now is the gulf between galaxies or space-time dimensions. I’ll try, nonetheless. It’s important here.

Bertha and Charlie Green lived through the Great Depression, for instance. The gulf between the Jeffersonian republic we had before the Sixteenth Amendment, Internal Revenue Service, and the socialist state it created is one not navigable by the mind of today’s behaviorally altered citizen. Trust me, you don’t understand. You never will. Besides, like the people of New Haven, Iowa, circa 1950, you like to be fooled. It’s easier that way.

Let it suffice to say that the culture I grew up in was one made up of totally independent individuals. That in itself is a concept few people in today’s socialized culture will understand. It’s one of the few things I got from people around me as I grew up. My grandparents, for instance, bought something only when they could pay for it. They wanted to own it, and if they couldn’t, they found a way to do without it. There was no shame in not having. Quite the contrary, there was a kind of pride. Respectability depended on air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat, and the freedom to care for and govern oneself. To have more than that was shameful, evidence of avarice and dishonesty. Opulent wealth was contemptible. I was taught that. Maybe they didn’t intend for the lesson to take so well, but that’s how I took it. It’s what I learned. I still feel that way. It’s another way we’re different: you admire—nearly worship, in fact—the rich, famous, and powerful; I put them on the same level as the profligate, addicted, and mentally ill. They’re parasites and predators. I eradicate parasites and kill predators.

You wouldn’t understand, so let’s skip it. Let’s just say that when the folks gave their daughter shelter, it was both demanded and grudging. My maternal grandmother was the one human being I ever met who could demand that you accept her help, then scorn you for taking it. But it was all-important to maintain those all-important appearances.

Once we were in her house, she let few days pass without reminding us that we were sponging off her largesse. She used the threat of eviction to enforce demands concerning whatever her whims dictated, mostly religious in nature. The lady saw no contradiction in using the creed of forgiveness for an instrument of domination. I had my own, personal, Spanish Inquisition.

Does any of this remind you of the nation we live in today? No, I don’t suppose.

The threat of having no place to live, of being thrown out whenever Oma’s puritanical tyranny so ordained, was a daily one. It didn’t square well with the pride of independence I was observing everywhere around me, a fact that with time became formative and decisive for me. Even worse than Grandma’s exactions was the fact that Mom applied for and briefly received Aid to Dependent Children, which brings me back to government and my fear of the organized stupidity and incompetence it always means. In my mind, my M’Choakumchild grandmother and government are inextricably associated. They behave the same way.

The Social Worker threat underscored another, my worst, fear. During the time we got aid from the state, the woman from town was there regularly to assure that we weren’t spending the princely sums frivolously, and to tacitly, sometimes openly, threaten protection from the government. From the time I recovered use of my legs, I was continually threatened with exile to an orphanage. I was supposed to be grateful for everything that was being done for me, and the threat of imprisonment in an orphanage was held over me to assure my proper behavior. Parents, educators, and townspeople drummed it in daily. Without god, country, and Grandma I was nothing. If I forgot that, I would wind up first in an orphanage, then a prison. I seemed to be living in a Dickens novel.

I suppose that’s what made me pretty sure I knew about orphanages. Two of the host of novels I read during my convalescence from polio were David Copperfield and Oliver Twist. For me, prison was college to the orphanage’s high school. I was twelve when I swore that I would never be taken to an orphanage or prison alive, and I was probably a long time ahead of my country’s generals where recognition of the need for S.E.R.E. training was concerned. For me, there were Murdstones, Uriah Heeps, and Bumble the Beadles everywhere, and probably the first science I made an actual study was that of Survival, Escape, Resistance, and Evasion after capture. I was already well versed in history, and there was no doubt in my mind that government and captivity were related. Nothing in life ever taught me otherwise. Still hasn’t.

Then, finally, there were the Noah Claypooles, Bumble the Beadle, and Judge Fang—the bullies. I was puny, like I said. Charles Atlas’ ninety-eight pounds may have been an embarrassment for him; for me, it was a goal. Worse, the fates decree found me first in a public school during World War Two. I wore a scapular, had an obviously German last name, and spoke English with a German accent.

A scapular, by the way, is a kind of badge or medallion worn around your neck—just in case prospective bullies happened to miss the last name or the accent, I thought.

When Mom and her parents triumphed—that’s how I was given to understand it—in their war with Dad and his parents, I was transferred to a Catholic School. The school, St Mary’s Academy, was in a small farming community; I was from the city. There, I was recognized as both Protestant and the product of what was referred to contemptuously as a broken home. The community was very prosperous; I wore hand-me-down, rummage sale, and homemade clothes. Trouble? Yeah, trouble.

Herd animals, flocking birds, and creatures who socialize instinctively attack any of their number they perceive to be different. Worst of the kind is the human being. I was tormented continually, almost constantly, things like having my new first baseman’s mitt—nine dollars, ninety-five cents, earned working for fifty cents an hour with migrant workers in the fields—thrown down an outdoor toilet, and being subjected to Mallo-cupping—having a kind of meringue-filled candy cup smeared on the privates. I was subjected at least four times that I can remember to what today’s carping and whining female calls rape. Being beaten up by classmates was weekly, sometimes daily routine. Tough, but good training for what government was to serve up decades later.

The moppet muggings started right after I could walk again, and they continued until I was about thirteen. Beaten mercilessly, I would go home only to reproach from mother and grandparents. It must be my fault. There had to be something I was doing that incited violence from good—proper families, you know—kids. I must have a big mouth. In school, nuns who inquired about my black eyes, cut eyebrows, and broken teeth could only recommend that I turn the other cheek and offer up to God my obvious pain and humiliation. It wasn’t Christ-like to fight back. One teacher made a joke of my battered appearance, including a derisive line referring to it in a class play. Revenge was out of the question, of course.

But I was learning—getting harder and harder to fool with those appearances.

About that time, however, a Boy Scout Troop was formed in New Haven. How I happened to join Troop 43, I don’t recall, but it was a turning point. Scoutmasters Vince Miller and Bob Slaughter took us swimming, camping, and hiking on a regular and regimented basis. Oh, at first, the bullies were there, too—I was nearly drowned twice by one or the other—but they were not condoned or tolerated for long. Camping and hiking, the wilderness and the night were places I was free of everything associated with town, church, and home. No government. No more torment, no more beatings, no more humiliation. The wilderness was like paradise.

Looking back, it seems to me that it was then everything came together, something clicked. Still, the Scouts meant working for merit badges, and when Scoutmaster Miller steered everyone toward the Athletic Badge, I was more than a little crestfallen. Hell, I couldn’t do one pushup. Miller wasn’t stinted. Where there’s will, there’s a way, he would always say. So I tried. I liked Vince Miller.

Like I said, things came together. Someone, a former president, I think, once said that persistence is the paramount virtue. He was right. When I was talking a minute ago about the few claims to fame I might have, the one that is most singularly mine is persistence. Nobody can match me where dogged persistence is the game. You don’t do the things necessary to learn to beat poliomyelitis and walk a second time without persistence. I was walking again, and by God, I would do the rest, too.

But that wouldn’t be enough, either. I told you about Opa’s Sprichwort— motto. There’s another one. I won’t bore you with the German, but it’s Goethe, and it says, You must conquer and rule, or lose and serve; suffer or triumph, be the hammer or the anvil. I believe in things like that, and life as the anvil was torture. It was slavery, and that meant the one thing I would not endure, humiliation. From now on, I would try to end my hell with effort. If I died, I would be free. If I got strong, I would also be free. That simple. No illusions, no deception, no appearances.

Already afraid to sit down for fear that having done so I might find that I couldn’t stand again, I walked—even paced the floor when studying or reading— almost relentlessly. From walking everywhere, I graduated to running, and at every opportunity. From circuits of the farmhouse where I lived, I moved to circuits of the four mile section south of the farmstead. I literally ran everywhere I went. The road and the running told me everything in absolutes totally devoid of the need for outside opinion, commentary or interpretation. Truth. It was exhilarating.

One winter, having followed instructions in a magazine to make a pair of snowshoes, I found an activity that resulted in ever greater sense of freedom. On the snow, I could go anywhere. When I had begun to trail animals, I discovered that I could actually run down a fox! It took an entire weekend to do, but the animal just couldn’t understand how anything could see through the ruses he customarily employed to throw off pursuit. Cornered, he would make a stand, then sit looking after me in wonderment as I shuffled away to leave him unscathed. He and I, I knew, we knew the truth. Fun. Exhilarating. I might not be able to fight the bullies yet, but they sure as hell weren’t likely to catch me.

But I wasn’t satisfied with that. I didn’t intend to run away ever again. And the running had taught me something. The fight goes invariably to him who can fight the longest. Once I had begun running the four mile square around our farm’s section, I started doing push-ups—first, because I was so arm weak, against the wall, then a counter top, and finally the real thing, up from the floor. From regular pushups, I graduated to the paratrooper variety, with each repetition flinging myself off the floor to clap hands and feet together before coming down. From pushups alone, I added pull-ups, and sit-ups, in each instance striving to find