Little Sarge

By SSG D.C. Carson

Rising from the ashes of an abusive childhood came a strong, loving, and protective fighter. Little Sarge is the inspiring true story of an eighteen–year old young woman who joined the Army as soon as age permitted after graduating from high school. She overcame all the tremendous challenges and obstacles that were placed in her path. Her accomplishments include saving a life in basic training with a piece of hair, pulling twenty–seven of her fellow comrades out of the rubble from a surprise attack in Vietnam, rescuing a fellow soldier from a group of six drunken young men in a motel room, and becoming "mom" to two hundred young women who looked to her for guidance and help. She is a fierce protector of her fellow soldiers in battles and bars. She is a highly decorated soldier who always makes an impression. You will not be disappointed by her feisty attitude and heroic acts that have truly shaped hundreds of lives. Find out who Little Sarge is for yourself. –Megan Palmer

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: May 6, 2019
• ISBN: 9781684560387

Book preview

The Protector

Some people are made of steel, some are made of rubber, and some people are made of clay, and sooner or later you find out what you are made of. The year that I was twelve years old, I discovered that I was made of steel. That you could pound on me, hammer on me, beat me to a pulp, and I would survive. I did survive, a horrible, brutal childhood. I am the second of four children: all girls, Linda, Diana, Susan and Kristie. I am known as the black sheep of the family, a title my own father gave me.

I was twelve, and Kristie was five years old the summer that I found out I was a protector. It was July, which meant no school. She was outside in the backyard, and I had just left the house and walked onto the covered patio. I could hear her gasping and trying to talk. I stepped into the backyard and could see her lying on the grass, with the two neighborhood boys who were her age, one who lived right next door to us, and the other one lived in the next house, holding her down.

One was sitting on her stomach and stuffing her nose and mouth full of grass, the other boy was kneeling on her arms and holding her hands down. She had asthma and had trouble breathing sometimes and to suddenly find her being tortured by these two neighborhood brats, something inside me snapped.

As I was striding toward the first boy, I yelled for one of my sisters to call an ambulance. I took three strides, grabbed the one sitting on her stomach by the front of his shirt, lifted him off her, and brought him up near my face, closed my fist and punched him in the face twice, just as hard as I could. Blood started pouring out of his nose and mouth. I threw him down the hill toward the fence between our two houses. The other boy was next and received exactly the same treatment, two punches in the face and a throw down the hill.

I sat my sister up and cleared as much grass and dirt out of her mouth and nose as I could. Now I could only wait for the ambulance. When it arrived and the paramedics were helping her they asked me where our parents were. Working, I snapped. My parents want her taken to the hospital.

Well, we need an adult to authorize transport.

Fine! I yelled. Go in the house and use our phone and call my mother at work, she should still be there, she is closer to the hospital, but my father has already headed to the hospital. They went inside and called.

I turned my attention back to the brats. One had managed to get up and start for his home, a couple houses away, but the other one was still lying by the fence. I picked him up once again, this time by the back of his shirt, and yanked him to his feet. I proceeded to drag him to the front door of the house next door, where I rang the doorbell and waited. His mother saw the boy and screamed, What happened? as I yanked open the screen door and threw him in at her feet. I told her what he had done, and also told her that if he EVER came into our yard or came near my sister again, that next time I would do more than punch him in the face, I would kill him.

Then I turned around and went home. Lin, Sue, and I stayed at home while both of our parents went to the hospital. Eventually my dad came home from the hospital while my mom stayed because Kris had been admitted. He wasn’t home even five minutes before the neighbors from next door were at the front door, yelling and screaming at him about their son who had a broken nose.

Wah…Wah…Wah…He deserved much more than a broken nose as far as I was concerned for what he had done; Kris could have died. I listened from the hallway just beyond the living room, out of my dad’s and the neighbors’ view, and listened to the entire conversation.

They insisted that my parents pay for the medical bills that they had been forced to pay due to my actions, that those same actions had broken their son’s nose as well as bruising his face. (I would like to add here that I would have loved to have knocked all his teeth out as well as breaking his nose, the little brat.) My father was unusually calm— not his normal behavior—and was quiet for a few moments. Then he agreed to pay for the medical bills for their son, with one condition. He would pay for their medical expenses, but that they would have to pay ALL of the medical expenses that he incurred because of the actions of their son’s behavior. That would include the ambulance ride, the oxygen, the special medical treatment she would have to have for the next few days while she was in the hospital, along with the actual hospital bill. They went home without any refund. I started to laugh and ducked down the hall to my room, hoping that my father and the neighbors hadn’t heard. I thought, I did something good for the first time ever.

After the neighbors left, my father went downstairs to his workroom. About ten minutes later he came to my room and told me to follow him. I knew at that moment, that I hadn’t done something good, and that the punishment was going to be pretty severe. I was right. We went down the stairs, and when he parted the curtain that covered the entrance to his workshop, he motioned me to enter. I was sure this was going to be bad, and I was right. The whipping as my father called it, was given with a bicycle chain.

The lecture began with the first hit across my back and the words, How many times have I told you NOT to hit people? Hit number two across my back, You have got to learn to control your temper. Hit number three, What is wrong with you, anyway? Hit number four, Why are you so stupid all the time? Every blow seemed harder than the previous one, and with every blow he inflicted with the chain, he had something else to say to me. I don’t remember how many times he hit me, I lost count after four. I could feel the blood running down my back and legs. I started to cry and begged him to stop. He either ignored me or just didn’t care. He kept right on hitting me.

By the time he was through, my shoulders, upper arms, back, butt, and thighs were bleeding. He grabbed me by the hair and dragged me upstairs to shower and ordered me to rinse out my clothes to get the blood out of them and then ordered me to put them in the washing machine. I didn’t see the point of washing my clothes out…after all, my shirt and shorts were both badly torn due to the chain. My shirt was in shreds. But that didn’t even occur to my father as he probably never even noticed that. He seemed oblivious to the blood that was running down my body. After that I was to stay in my room until he decided he would let me out. I spent the next eight days in my room.

Besides the beating, I was grounded for the rest of the summer until school would start. That meant no going outside, no friends, no phone calls, no jigsaw puzzles, no books, no music, no television, nothing, just me and my room. Alone with my thoughts and my bubbling anger that was turning into hatred, a form of pure undiluted aggression that was fermenting, growing with each passing day, each hour, each minute, each second.

The anger and the hatred and aggression came out at night in my sleep, yelling and screaming, talking in my sleep and sometimes sleep walking. That was my only release, my only recourse. One morning my mother asked me, What were you yelling about last night? You were certainly doing a lot of swearing. Where did you learn to talk like that?

Was she kidding? Was she really that stupid that she couldn’t figure it out? My father couldn’t speak a single sentence without it being punctuated by at least four cuss words. Where did I learn to talk like that? I learned to talk that way because that was the everyday language in our house; even she had a great vocabulary of swear words. Maybe in my own weird way I was trying to protect myself subconsciously by not using names while I was sleeping. I certainly couldn’t protect myself during the day.

It was several days before the cuts and gouges caused by the bicycle chain began to heal and even longer for the bruises. It hurt to sit, so I spent all my time lying on my bed on my stomach, so that I could tolerate the pain and healing process.

Bayer aspirin became my best friend, every four hours for days and days. It was kept in the hall linen closest right next to the bathroom, two doors away from my room. It’s a wonder that none of those wounds got infected. No one looked at them, no one treated them, and all I could do was shower, try to keep them clean and dry, and hope that I made it through.

I had to be my own doctor and nurse. I tried to remember everything I had ever read or heard about first aid (which was not much!), and I put into practice what I had learned from my Grandma and Grandpa while they were on the farm. I remembered the chicken scratch and how Grandma had treated it, so while I was in the basement doing laundry, I put some bleach into a small jelly jar and took it back upstairs with me. I hid it in the hall linen closest where the bath towels were so that I could get it out when I was ready to shower.

When I went to shower I took a small empty new plastic sandwich bag with me and filled it with warm water, then added a couple of drops of bleach to it. I shampooed my hair and washed the rest of my body, and then I would turn around and face the shower so the water was hitting me in the front. I would pour that bleach and water combination over each shoulder so that it could run down my back and cover all the open wounds. I would let the bleach water stay on for about a minute, then would turn around and rinse it off. The bleach and water solution burned like crazy, but I didn’t know what else to do.

Every day I wished that I would just die, then when they examined my dead body, someone would see what had been done to me. But apparently that was not in God’s master plan, and eventually I did heal.

My oldest sister Linda, Lin for short, was designated as my jailer, a job that she took to whole heartedly. For many years, I have called her the wicked witch of the west, w.w.w. for short. She made sure that my father knew every word I uttered during the day while confined to my room.

She would sometimes sit just outside my bedroom door in the hallway on the floor with a tablet, just so she could write things down. If I left my room for any reason, even to go to the bathroom, she wrote it down. And if, when my father heard what I had done or said during the day, and he didn’t approve, additional punishment was doled out to me. The warden and the jailer, what a life I had.

The additional punishment was whatever my father felt was necessary to teach me how to behave. He hit me, screamed at me, called me names, nothing was left to chance.

I wrote a letter to my grandparents (my mother’s folks), or at least tried to, but my jailer, the w.w.w. found the letter. It had been attached to the mailbox. The w.w.w. had retrieved it before it got into the postal service hands. She gave it to my father when he got home from work.

He opened the envelope and read the letter, and then the shit hit the fan, and once again the punishment was severe. My father told me that if I ever told anyone such lies again, that the punishment that would come my way would be unimaginable.

What could possibly be more unimaginable than being whipped with a bicycle chain until my body was lacerated, and I couldn’t even sit down? Was he kidding?

This letter writing infraction was accompanied by being bent over the bed and my having my back, butt, and legs whipped with his belt, and then a thorough search of my room. All paper, envelopes, even pens and pencils were removed, so that he could prevent me from writing anyone, contacting anyone, or telling anyone. I was a prisoner in my own room, in our so called home.

But I was determined to write down what was happening, if for no other reason so that I could try and make some sense of what was occurring. Also because I wanted to keep a record of the abuse that I had been put through.

I had to keep telling myself that I wasn’t the things he called me. I wasn’t stupid, I wasn’t worthless, and I wasn’t a piece of garbage. I wanted desperately to believe that I was worth something, that I was a good person.

Then one night, I found my way. It was about 0200, the house was quiet, and I could hear snoring from my parents’ room. I went to the kitchen and took three sheets of writing paper from my mother’s letter writing tablet, a pen, two rubber bands, an empty paper towel roll, a butcher knife and went back to my room.

I stepped on the paper towel cardboard until it was completely flat, then I rolled the pen up in the paper and put them inside the paper towel cardboard, so I could hide it more easily, then put a rubber band on each end so the paper and pen wouldn’t fall out.

I took the sheets off my bed, and I cut a small hole in the mattress of my twin bed along one of the black design lines on the mattress so that it wouldn’t show as much, just big enough to get the paper towel cardboard in, and returned the knife to the kitchen, then remade my bed.

No one knew, and no one found out about that secret hiding place. So at night for the rest of that summer I would sneak out to the kitchen and take two or three pieces of paper from my mother’s writing tablet, just so I could keep a record.

I was only twelve years old, and I wished that someone would find out what was going on in our house…I wished someone would help me…I wished someone would come and rescue me…I wished the beatings would stop…but mostly I wished I was dead.

But there was something inside me that was stronger than a death wish, an indomitable will to live, a survival instinct that I didn’t know I had, something that wouldn’t let me quit or give up. The bubbling anger, the hatred, the aggression that continued to grow inside me kept me strong. I was not going to let him win. I was not going to let him beat me into submission. I would survive; I had the strength to take everything he dished out and never give up. One day I would be free of him.

But that one day would not happen for another six years. Some days I was sure I would never survive that long in that house, and other days were easier. I tried to be quiet and disappear into the woodwork, so that I couldn’t be seen.

When I gave one word answers to his questions, then I was being deceitful again, trying to keep secrets from him, and I would undergo interrogation, and if my answers were not to his liking, there would always be punishment of some type. If I wouldn’t talk or make conversation at the dinner table, and just look down at my plate and push the food around on it, I would get in trouble for not eating what he worked so hard to provide for me. Why was I so ungrateful? Everything I did or tried to do was wrong.

Being so far away from my grandparents (my mother’s parents) was the hardest thing. They were more than six hundred miles away. I missed the farm; I missed Grandma and Grandpa, who always loved me, and loved me unconditionally. No matter what I did, or how dirty I got, or if I did something wrong, I was always met with a hug, a kiss, and love. No whippings, no spankings, no beatings.

On the very rare occasion that I got to speak to them on the telephone, my father was always standing right next to me, so that if I said anything wrong, he could grab the phone out of my hand, so I kept silent, and every time I got off the phone with them I was in tears. Wishing I was there with them instead of being where I was.

I always felt like a stranger in our house. The best thing