Framing the Sacred: The Shadow of Death

By William Jeffries

Bill Jeffries in his favorite Deer Valley, Utah, hideaway

Please, show some respect. As our Arab brothers say, Let the baker bake your bread, even if he eats half of it; in other words, hire a professional and pay him whatever he demands. I am not a hired hand, as you phrase it. I am the baker, if you will, a paid professional, a modern assassin, a proud follower of the ancient Nizari Ismaili state sect founded in the eleventh century by Ismail bin Jafarwhat your history books say at the Point. Yes, I see your rather ostentatious West Point ring whose sapphire star probably knocked out my expensive crown earlier, most likely referred to as the Persian Hashshashin. Hash is just one of the many gifts we have bequeathed to the west over the centuries. Since we are more powerful than they and have ties far beyond their border, the Irani mullahs tolerate us much as the old European kings and queens and popes, if you must know, tolerated the Masonsyou know, those secret subversives you modeled your nations capitol after. SAVAK seems to appreciate our tradition and methods and provides a well-stocked treasury for my services.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781546216636

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© 2017 William Jeffries. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 11/29/2017

ISBN: 978-1-5462-1664-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-1663-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017917328

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Dedication

Refrigerator Art

Pbz

Back Story

A Very Lucky Man

Tri Ba Sao Prison

The Boys

Foggy Bottom

From the Ashes

The Basement of Nowhere

Holiday Hook Up

Cajun Country

Gator Storage Facility

Defense Sciences Office

Tempus Fugit

Dick’s Dock

Friends From the Past

Yeu not Thóung

Darpa Airlines

Buddha Smiles on Shakespeare

Starbucks Brigade

Temporary Reprieve

Dso, Redoux

Putting The I in Team

Gold Cards Only

Fortress of Solitude

On the Trail

The New Gold Room

Turning up the Heat

The Buddha’s Reprieve

Ethnic Delights

Gator Remains

Bombay Sapphire Interruptus

Oval Office Recap

The Secret Society

The Lobby

The Caddy Express

About Time

The Web

Paying Our Dues

The Gang’s All Here

The Situation Room

Unit 3

On the Hot Seat

Shadows Becoming Reality

The Deep Web

Headquarters, Brpd

Alert Order

Road Trip

Site Confusion

Rest Area

Welcome To Waterford

Site Director

Burn Notice

The Waterford Brain Trust

Safety First

Here’s Looking At You

Nukeboy

Dni On The Line

Buggin’ Out

Cool Down

Cool Libations And Warm Liberian Breezes

About The Author

DEDICATION

My Guardian Angel

REFRIGERATOR ART

P rofessor Giang giggled quietly to herself as she thought about all the stories she had heard over the years about American children using the front doors of their refrigerators to display their art work. If the stories shared over coffee by her university colleagues were true, every American home seemed to use the kitchen as the loci of their museum of fine art. Budding Picassos and Monets, it seemed, routinely had their finger paintings and macaroni figures glued onto construction paper displayed on the fronts of Kitchen Aide, Samsung, and Whirlpool appliances. Lai Tai never had such an experience because she had no children and, quite frankly, she had never had a refrigerator in her home.

Truth be known, Lai Tai had never even had a kitchen in the dilapidated shacks and long houses she had been hustled between as a young girl in Vietnam. By the time she was a teenager, she was a prisoner in a fenced in reeducation camp nestled in a damp misty valley located deep in the Annamese Mountains. Her two sparse meals a day were scooped into wooden bowls by two aged crones who had been given more or less free range inside the camps, because, even though they at one time had worked as clerks in the American Embassy in the Imperial capital of Hue, they were now too infirm to try to escape or give the guards any cause for concern. The younger of the two had her left arm missing from the elbow down, courtesy of the NVA when they had caught her shredding classified documents as they over ran the US Embassy, and the other severely wrinkled mama san had a left eye that never seemed to be looking in the right direction. There was no need, let alone capability, in the camps to refrigerate food which was always freshly killed, trapped, gutted, or stewed over open fires in the main yard. Any sparse leftovers were dumped into the weeds or poured into the rancid green stream running along the barbed wire fence surrounding the wooden tables where the women captives were fed.

Lai Tai’s current home on the fourth floor of the Addison, a high end apartment complex in Baton Rouge that cost her $ 1,500.00 per month for a one bedroom apartment, was a step above that, and her black Sub-Zero side-by-side held more than enough gourmet food than a physically fit single young woman needed. Life had changed dramatically for her in the last few years, and she was a respected member of the liberal arts faculty teaching comparative world literature, and linguistics at LSU. Of late, her research interests had morphed rather dramatically, and she now found herself almost unaccountably working with a US government agency that most Americans have never heard of, in ways that years earlier she would not have been able to conceive. Since Lai Tai had no young children in her life, just a slightly younger half-sister who had recently emigrated from Southeast Asia, no art work hung on her refrigerator, just a curious bureaucratic request for proposals that had been posted on the DARPA web site three years earlier, that Lai Tai had taped to the door.

DARPA is soliciting innovative research projects in the areas of the quantitative analysis of written narratives or electronic conversations with an eye to understanding the effects such narratives can have on the neural framework of the brain and the impact such structuring can have on how such neuro-biological pathways, particularly at the most primitive level of reflection and sub-conscious understanding, can elicit behaviors that may be contrary to embedded values. Proposers to this effort will be experts in the development and deconstruction of literary texts, a familiarity with several linguistic forms, and will be expected to advance the linkages between narrative analysis and neuroscience in order to frame and predict behavior.

Lai Tai kept the RFP posted on the door so her focus would rarely drift away from it for more than a few hours. Over the previous two years, she had become consumed by the implications of her work in ways that staggered her imagination. An expert in the analysis of literary texts and a brilliant researcher in ways that the human brain constantly structures and restructures neural input, sometimes unconsciously, she had been accepted as the major researcher on this top secret government project. Even though her research was reaching into the most advanced technologies available to the US military, her recent work probing the deep structure of linguistic forms in the languages of primitive peoples in Costa Rica and former friends who were mon Khmer speakers in Vietnam suggested that the implications were ancient in origin and universal in potential application. If she was correct in her findings, everyone was a potential terrorist. At the bottom of the RFP she has scribbled a simple note:

Get in touch with Christian and let him know what you found in Costa Rica and Vietnam. This will save lives and maybe prevent future slaughters of innocents like at the Orlando Nightclub shooting, and the massacre at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. They could be everywhere. Lone wolf doesn’t mean what we think it does.

When she received an unexpected text one rainy afternoon, she was ecstatic. Grabbing the note off the refrigerator and stuffing it into the pocket of her jeans, she raced out the door yelling over her shoulder, back in the morning.

PBZ

T he crosshairs settle on the target. The target lies over three hundred meters down range, yet it seems like a mere ten feet to an eye too skilled at parsing death. It is all so easy. I slide the safety forward and rest the first digit of my right index finger on the trigger. Now it is all up to the lungs. I take a deep breath and then exhale to that point between the inhale and the exhale that is the ideal place for a steady shot. Most adults have about two seconds in that limbo, but I had been coached to linger in that valley of the shadow of breath for over ten seconds. The six-pound trigger pull feels like a mere feather, but then I had been trained on a heavy-hammered TCI M89-SR in Israel, a Russian Makarov in Afghanistan, and an H&K MSG 90 when serving as a military advisor with the elite German hostage rescue group, Deutsche GSG9.

Moi Sai Tan, the young raven-haired female sniper who worked with me in the Bahnar Province of Vietnam many years ago, used to tell me that the human head has the identical mass and consistency as a dragon fruit, or a ripe melon. I am sure that any CSI or EMT you might have in your local Bible-study or book club will confirm that detail for me. When the prop comedian Gallagher, in his Sledge-a-matic show, smashes his juicy watermelon with a large wooden mallet and juicy red meat and black seeds go spewing out over the front four rows of the audience, scurrying to dive under plastic sheets, it is about the same as watching a .50 caliber full metal jacket round slam into a kaffiyeh-wrapped Al-Shabab or ISIS head. The exploding melon act might be fun, but watching some Al-Quaeda terrorist’s skull pureed by just one round is almost glorious. There is an instant pink blur in my scope as a smile snakes across my lips. Another ambush foiled from 400 meters out. Precious American lives saved, and a bearded terrorist dispatched to virgin Hell.

Not today, however. This is Indiana, after-all: unimportant flyover country to most politicians. We’re some of those ignorant rubes that Barack Obama slighted during his first presidential run whining that when things got tough we had to cling to our religion and guns. Amen, brother! Unlike his Washington cronies and too many overpaid professional athletes, we also stand for the National Anthem and revere the concepts embedded in the Constitution. But that is just a depressing distraction for the moment. Today, I am just happily target shooting with my youngest son, helping him become user friendly with some of the weapons we keep in our home for self defense and hunting. Yes, self defense. That is what the Founders had in mind. Defense against those who seek to do us harm. Most importantly, defense against an oppressive federal government that intrudes on our God-given rights—natural rights as our founders envisioned them—wipes its feet on the Constitution, and impugns those who fight for the rights of the unborn and those who operate their businesses on Biblical principles. As the sign at our front door warmly announces, Nothing inside is worth dying for. Love that Indiana Castle Law! You might find a way into our home, but you certainly will not get out alive. The weapon of choice today is an unassuming Remington Model 700, bolt-action center-fire 30-06. Not necessarily a great home defense weapon, but it will do in a pinch. It is great, though, for bringing down deer and elk on our Utah property. Today we are just shooting for fun.

Locate the butt of the rifle snugly into the crotch of your shoulder. Make sure there is no separation, so you can minimize the kick. Slide the safety forward. Sight in your target, place the cross hairs on the top center of the target, relax and squeeze; don’t pull…squeeze the trigger with a slow steady movement, I advise him, and the target will be eliminated.

He fires a single round, and to his elation, the bowling pin we set up at a little over six hundred feet down range disintegrates.

Gee Dad, that was really easy, he tells me. If I shoot that way, I can’t miss.

That’s the idea, son, I admit. One shot, one kill; it’s easier for everyone that way.

He is mostly right. Just like pitching a baseball, which he did so well; it’s all in the mechanics. What I hadn’t gotten into yet is the feel. But that will come later. You sight in the target and do all the technical parts correctly. The scope is aligned, and the finger placement is just right. That is the skill part. Next comes the art. You have to feel the world around you, much the same way the quarterback, after he has called the right play, broken the huddle, and drops five steps back into the pocket, has to feel the blitz. He doesn’t see the defensive end rushing in from his blind side; he just feels it and trusts his blind side tackle to take care of business. The shooter feels the wind and knows what slight adjustment to make to the azimuth—how much lead or how much lag. He has to know the approximate distance to the target and sense how much higher to aim for the particular charge he is using, in order to accommodate the relentless vicissitudes of gravity. Is he shooting uphill or downhill? All those details influence the quality of the aim. That’s the art. That is what my spiritual brother Chris Kyle always did so well.

Next, comes the squeeze. One aged Montagnard sniper who had served on my Phu Dung (Opium Haze) Team in Laos in the late 1960’s, a band of misfits and experts in the lethal arts I had assembled to find and rescue American POW’s, had one time advised me to slide my whole index finger through the trigger housing group to get more force on the trigger. That technique would never draw high marks in the 197th Infantry Brigade’s Sniper School at Fort Benning, Georgia, but she claimed that the joint of my finger next to my hand made the six-pound trigger pull feel like just two pounds. I never needed to do that when I was the shooter, but she had elegant long thin piano playing fingers and was the best sniper I had ever known, logging over a hundred and twenty confirmed Viet Minh, NVA, and VC kills during the nine months we worked together. For me the mere tip of my index finger always proved more than adequate for the less sexy French carbine that I preferred to carry.

This time my son and I were target shooting at Waveland Gun Club in Waveland, Indiana: a run down, over-grown dump of a place, but one where for just ten bucks a shooter we can practice our marksmanship without the neighbors back in the cobblestone streets of Zionsville becoming apoplectic. I was taking my last shot before handing the weapon over to him to let him try his luck, when three guys to my right opened up with AK-47’s on full automatic, another guy to our left started pumping out 10-gauge shotgun shells, two or three people further down the line were firing rifles of various calibers, and several shooters began firing Desert Eagles and Glocks at the pistol range located next to ours. The 12-gauge shotgun shells popping off at the skeet range behind the dingy, white, main house filled in any silent gaps.

Just for a couple seconds, I was back. I am never very far away, but for a few seconds I was back…back in Laos, pinned down by a group of seasoned Viet Minh guerillas or across the invisible border as North Vietnamese regulars or equally lethal black pajama-clad Viet Cong as they attempted to storm the razor wire encircling our Montagnard compound in the Bahnar Province. That past is always near, hovering in a parallel universe like an evil, leering, drooling succubus attempting to drag me back into another alien world. Usually those midnight thoughts slither in through nightmares or shadowy experiences, late nights and early mornings when sleep evades, but occasionally daylight events invite them in as well. The shadow, that part of our despised and rejected unconscious that the good Dr. Jung cautioned about, is always there, just beyond the veil, whispering, whimpering, and occasionally screaming at us to gain our attention, begging to be let in.

PBZ I shout, Point Blank Zero, 1st target appearance, I advise my sniper. But she isn’t there, and my son stares blankly at me as though I were a stranger, a strange and at times forbidding long haired specter by his side.

Sorry, son, I mean, fire point blank. Um, I mean, it is your turn. Go for the empty milk jug on the right. I place the safety on the .30-06 and hand him the Makarov…I mean…the Remington…and shiver down the recurring chills as I help him adjust the rifle on his shoulder with my hand that still has the hint of a tremor remaining in it.

BACK STORY

"T here’s a nightmare much darker than the shadow of death, when you fear the Reaper might not come tonight."

Reba, you sly, sultry wench, you are always a truth teller. It isn’t always a truth I am anxious to hear, but you probe my soul with your songs. Sometimes death is all you can long for, but its specter remains distant and uncooperative. I didn’t understand that verity when I was a naïve Red Raider in Ocean City High School back on the Jersey shore. I still did not entertain such possibilities as a cadet at West Point preparing for a future filled with Ranger School, Airborne School, Jungle Warfare School, Pathfinder School, and subsequent tours in remote locations in Laos, Cambodia, and South Vietnam. No, it took toe poppers, silent black helicopters, two-steppers, Montagnard shamen, pungi stakes in black water, screaming Viet Cong sappers pouring over tangle foot and concertina barriers, bamboo vipers with hideous golden eyes hiding in the green, the lingering smell of napalm and foo gas, bodies left over from the previous night’s firefight, still caught in the concertina, already bloated and rotting in the steaming Asian sun, and teenage boys lying in blood-drenched rice paddies screaming for their mothers and long-forsaken gods as OJT corpsmen hacked off shattered limbs with bloody K-bars, in too often futile efforts to save their lives. And then there was the shaman, our medicine man cum spiritual leader, his ubiquitous earthen jug of cobra venom mixed with buffalo milk in hand—shaken not stirred—dancing and conjuring his magic arts all around the perimeter, blessing our patrols, sprinkling sacred Cong bo, water buffalo, blood on our choppers, and helping us light candles as we buried our dead.

All those memories were times when the shadow hovered like an acidic fog just out of reach. Those funereal events began to awaken me to the beauty of life and the spiritual consequences of ignoring them. There’s the conundrum that most folks dwelling in their safe, green, hermetically sealed, heavily-mortgaged houses back in civilization will never understand. There is life and vitality in the air when death is all around. There was a time when I was always on the cusp of death but never so much alive. I was born for those moments. I lived for those times. God help me. I actually miss those moments. But, sadly, all that was a long time ago. Life in Zionsville, Indiana is too comfortable, safe, homogenized, and pedestrian.

Stroll down the four blocks of Main Street any evening in the spring and smell the lilacs perfuming the air. Listen to the music lilting from the white pagoda in Lion’s Park, or watch the majestic blue cranes soaring over the stream splashing by the little league fields and you can easily forget that some of our soldiers and Marines are still fighting for their lives in Afghanistan, Syria, and North Africa, recovering from lost limbs and traumatic head wounds sustained during our eighteen years playing world policeman in Southwest Asia and the Middle East, that 50,000 veterans in this rich God blessed land are homeless and have no place to rest their heads at night, that our special operations units are involved in clandestine activities in forty other countries, and SEAL Team 6, special operations detachment Delta, and Green Berets are continuously stalking other Al-Qaeda and ISIS or DASH butchers in locales most Americans couldn’t locate on a map if their own lives depended on it.

We didn’t have time for PTSD and other self-coddling diagnoses. Today it seems a third of our returning combat vets are scripted to believe they have symptoms of something. The dysfunctional VA notifies our government of their infirmities and the best among us are then too often denied the right to purchase firearms, get a responsible job, or obtain a concealed carry permit in those few states remaining where our Constitutional rights have not been totally abrogated by progressive politicians and their oppressive Departments of Justice, and ignorant state legislatures. Such hypochondriacal madness! Throw the shrinks out and let these damaged warriors get on with their lives.

I know that sounds like I come from the George S. Patton School of leadership, but….no, you are right, I do. All of you, get out of the pathetic shrink ward and get back to the front. That is what a soldier, dare I say in this PC obsessed culture, a real man does. I don’t care if you are straight, gay, male, female, or think you are some bizarre aberration in between. Be as gender fluid as you like. If you want to be a soldier, stop whining and act like one; get back to the front or on with your life. While some of our brothers really do suffer with such post combat demons, PTSD for most of our returning warriors is a government sponsored myth as real as human induced global warming and about as necessary as crying rooms and trauma dogs for the little snowflakes and cupcakes haunting most uber-liberal college campuses.

We let our memories overwhelm us and too easily succumb to sweat drenched moments of ebony terror. After my last time back from the green, I spent two weeks stalking unfamiliar sounds every night in my Philadelphia City Line Avenue apartment, with my Browning 9 mm drawn, loaded, and cocked, looking for some sapper to waste. Every cab, honking horn, creaking floor board, or mouse scurrying down the hallway was a potential threat, until I decided, with the good Lord’s help, that such actions were stupid, and it was time to let the past be the past, let the Hound Of Heaven catch up and devour the demons and free me. Now I live in a different world. It was simply a matter of choice. Nobody talks about those sordid details, though, here in flyover country, as you order another Oreo Blizzard and a half dozen micro-waved chicken fingers from Susan and Mark working the drive through window at the Dairy Queen, just across the street from the Friendly Tavern and the Zionsville weekend farmer’s market.

I had just spent the previous week working with some of our severely wounded veterans at Walter Reed, trying to assist them in dealing with the loss of limbs and disfiguring wounds caused by IED’s in the dusty streets of Iraq or craggy mountain ambushes in Afghanistan. Many of them had begged for the Reaper to come swiftly at first, but their frantic pleas had gone unanswered, and now they were just clinging to a lonely existence in the sterile, white, antiseptic confines of hospital wards. The persistent familiar smells of cordite, hot sand, soggy mountain rocks, and blood-splattered up-armored Hum-V’s, have been supplanted by the frightening stench of sterility. At least they get three squares a day and have what passes for a bed for the evenings.

I am no therapist and certainly no expert at rehabilitation, but I had been where they were in a much more unpopular war, so I was frequently asked down to DC to talk with them about the challenges they would face as they tried to reintegrate themselves into society, or save their marriages, once they returned from the sand box. My war in South East Asia was in the distant past, and in a totally different terrain, but it had cost me dearly, both personally and professionally, so I had continued to work with a couple of our PMC’s doing specialized work in the Middle East region. Black ops in out of the way places help to keep me physically and mentally sharp and plaster over debilitating memories.

Having served side-by-side with our special operators in that region gave me unique credibility with them, even though I came from an earlier generation and had long since traded high and tight sidewalls for a long ponytail, a gold chain or two, and too many unwelcome pounds.

All of us who served as mentors for these returning vets through the Wounded Warriors Foundation or Special Operations Warrior Foundation were doing so ostensibly to help them, but truth be told, we were still trying to help ourselves recover more