It was last light, and my front scout, Gair Anderson, my assistant team leader, Bruce Cain, and I were each placing a claymore mine facing an enemy trail. It was a well-used trail, four miles west-southwest of Quang Tri City, and only the night before we had heard enemy troops casually talking as they walked along. We were confident that more enemy troops would return. Then, just as we slipped in the detonators, a dark figure suddenly appeared on another trail, a hundred feet away.
It was my sixth year with the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department in Detroit, and I was assigned to uniformed motorized patrol at the Patrol and Investigation Division in western Wayne County. Six years on the force meant I no longer had to work nights, afternoons, or the shift that was toughest on the social life: seven at night to three in the morning. The best part of days was that if I had to go to court, I could do it while I was working—no more having to lose sleep. And I could go to college in the evening without any scheduling hassles.
It was 12:05 a.m., and I was lying alone in bed, heartbroken after a recent divorce. She and I were both cops, she with Detroit Police and I with the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department. I had worked the scout car all day and then gone out on a date that evening, but I knew she wasn’t the one for me. I had finally dropped off to sleep when the telephone by my bed jangled me awake.
“Hello?” I said, grabbing the phone.
“Bobby! Please help!” It was my mother’s frantic voice.
“What’s wrong, Mom?”
“There’s people breaking in our house!”
January 25, 2014, was a beautiful Saturday afternoon in Surf City, USA—also known as Huntington Beach, California. It was a pleasant seventy-two degrees, with not a cloud in the sky. The weather was especially nice since, just the evening before, I had flown out of Detroit, where it was two degrees with biting forty-mile-an-hour gusts. I had been in Detroit for a week of unavoidable family business with three self-absorbed siblings.
My two-years-older brother was an inspiration to me—a giant. As a teenager, he was fascinated with military airplanes. Hanging on strings from our basement bedroom ceiling and covering every shelf were more than a hundred plastic model planes he had meticulously assembled and painted, making sure every color and decal matched the real thing. His airplane collection ran from the de Havilland biplanes and Fokker triplanes of the First World War to the Vietnam-era F-111 “fast movers” and B-52 bombers. He even had Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo spacecraft models.
Christmastime 1972 was one for the ages. I was a 24-year-old undercover cop assigned to the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department Metropolitan Narcotics Squad. It was December, and I was also serving with Company F, 425th Infantry (Ranger), in the Michigan National Guard.
How, after spending eight years on the Wayne County Sheriff’s force and three years in the Narcotics Bureau, did I end up in the Detective Bureau, shuffling papers and answering phones? Answer: because I decided it would be a good idea to illegally convert two semiauto M1 carbines to fully automatic. The Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms didn’t agree with my assessment. Neither did my department—never mind that these were weapons I used in my work as an undercover cop. So I worked patrol till I was promoted to detective, but what I really wanted was to get back to the Narcotics Bureau, where everything was fast, exciting, and fun.
Letter to Elizabeth,
I was thinking of the book you're reading on quantum physics and postulating how particle physics could relate to the social world, when I remembered you jokingly saying you don't want your molecules intermingling with certain people. I understand and trust me, in a very real sense we never touch anything. Everything we touch when reduced to the quantum level is electromagnetic repulsion. Surrounding every nucleus of every atom or molecule in our body is a sphere of negatively charged electrons orbiting at near light speed. Since they're orbiting so fast around such an extraordinarily small space, the electrons create an impenetrable sphere, sort of like an elite bodyguard of soldiers that will never allow another electron to touch or pass through.
Maturity takes time:
Mine started twelve time zones away in the triple-canopied jungles of Vietnam. Southeast Asia is such a lovely, lush green wonderland, but it was 1968, the peak of the war. There were 540,000 Americans in South Vietnam and more than a million enemy soldiers, each young man determined to kill the other. As the 19th century Prussian General, Carl von Clausewitz said, "War is the continuation of politics by other means."
Friday, November 9, 1962, was sunny and mild—a perfect day for skipping school. (Of course, even bad days were a fine time to ditch classes at Wilson Junior High.) I was 14 and had already failed seventh grade. I had plenty of friends in southwest Detroit, and Wilson had lots of kids just like me. It took only a minute to find my friend Ron, and we took off walking from Detroit to Dearborn to see the Ford Rotunda.
