I hated school and had a low opinion of anyone—teacher or student—who participated in what I deemed a culturally imposed prison. So I found a way to punish my jailers. In the library, I would grab a popular book—say, Moby Dick or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—and when no one was looking, I’d rip out the last five pages. That way, whoever had invested all those hours reading the story would never know the ending.

Trapped in the library one day, I came across the book, and I do mean the book. This was the book that changed my life. It connected me to the vast universe and to the unimaginably tiny particles that make it up. It described everything: light, sound, gravity, heat, electricity, the workings of atoms, and even the theory of relativity. The book, The Boy Scientist, by John Lewellen (1955), had to be mine. I couldn’t borrow it or take the chance that some other young vandal would destroy it, so I slipped it into my jeans and walked out after class.

That semester, because of ongoing misconduct, I was transferred to Harms Elementary School. But the book was mine. And it has since traveled with me around the world, to be read and reread over the years. Although I’ve legitimately acquired many other books since then, none of them ever had such a magical effect on me. The book taught me that I wasn’t a freak, that I was just different. And what’s more, if given a chance to study something I cared about, I actually loved learning!

But that opportunity to study would have to wait. For the time being, my sights were set on the U.S. Army paratroops. Meanwhile, in my dreams, I continued to imagine grabbing an electron or proton and putting it to my mouth to find out, does subatomic matter have any taste?

Criminals, cockroaches, rats, and I have something in common: we all spring to life at night. It’s as if, once the sun had set, someone magically fired up a little backup generator in our brains, and we suddenly became energized, hungry, and full of life.

I also share something personal with those critters. We’re fringe creatures, out there alone a lot, but we adapt and survive. Growing up in Detroit, I knew from an early age that audacity and imagination were a natural fit with criminal ways. And I knew that I could get away with a lot. This escalated from simple vandalism and shoplifting to smash-and-grabs at night. It had a certain bonding experience in it—something like when a family shares supper together—only much more exciting.

When I reached 16, I knew that my game had to change. I could hear the cops’ warnings echoing in my brain: “Just wait till you’re seventeen! You’re gonna be ours, without getting released to your mom anymore!”

But the warnings didn’t really stick. I didn’t get the message until the real blow came, at Wayne County Juvenile Court, when my friend and fellow garage-burning arsonist was sent to the juvenile home—what the generation before us referred to as “reform school.” I, on the other hand, was given one last chance. I’m still not sure why.

With my partner in crime gone, my neighborhood didn’t seem quite the same. I had already dropped out of junior high school and knew I was standing still. I had to find a better way before I landed in prison and turned bad for good. That line of thinking led me to the US Army, Vietnam, and the Rangers, then on to the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department in Detroit, as a police officer. Both jobs gave me ample opportunities to get an adrenaline fix and to use creative thinking—the very things that had drawn me to a life of juvenile delinquency. And they gave me something else, too. The real missing ingredient: the opportunity to develop self-discipline. It was sublimation, really—channeling my instinctive impulses into socially acceptable forms. And the one thing, more than any other, that made this possible was self-observation. This ability to step outside and look at myself began with fleeting glimpses of where I was headed if I didn’t make some changes. Then I began doing it consciously, and the more I practiced it, the more ingrained the habit of self-observation became.

Inscribed in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi were the words “Know thyself.” I decided I’d better take the ancient Greeks up on it. That quest propelled me from a GED to a PhD in criminology—that and the fact that graduate courses are taught at night, when my criminal-rat-cockroach gene really kicks my functioning into high gear. I was still moved by the same impulses, though with a much-needed bit of redirecting. The same drives that made me a decorated Ranger and police detective could just as easily have taken me to prison and an early end, leaving only sorrow and broken things in my wake. I was lucky, and I owe much of that luck to the Army, my parents, all the cops who ever tried to shake some sense into me, and a family court judge who, long ago, decided to give me one last chance.

On Tuesday morning, March 3, 1975, when Deputy Ken Crowley and I reported for roll call at the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department Patrol and Investigation Division, it was overcast and eighteen degrees. We would be working the scout car in Romulus, a nothing-special suburb west of Detroit.

Ken was a former captain in the US Army Twelfth Special Forces Group, and I was a former Army Ranger, both of us with combat experience in Vietnam. Ken and I usually worked nights together, but there was a shortage of men, so our double shift, starting at 6:45 a.m., wouldn’t be over till eleven at night.

Working the scout car was a major juggling act. The pay was great, but you seldom got a weekend off, and never a holiday unless it just happened to fall on your leave day. Both Ken and I were attending college in the mornings, and since we also had to be in court every morning after we made an arrest and anytime someone contested a ticket, working nights made it that much worse. And today we were working back-to-back shifts, with no chance to go home to our wives, who worked days.

I pulled the scout car out, and we headed south. We did our usual traffic stops, responding to family disputes and other complaints on our sixteen-square-mile area of patrol. Late that night, exhausted, we were making one last sweep before heading back to the station. We drove through a tavern parking lot and saw couples holding hands, walking to and from their cars. I was thinking, someday, my wife and I are gonna have time to do just that, when a call came over the radio: “Car Thirty-one. Two o five five! Huron River Drive, west of Haggerty.”

“Huron River Drive, west of Haggerty. Car Thirty-one, en route,” Ken responded, turning on our overhead lights and siren. A 2055 meant an injury accident with people needing help.

The accident was in Van Buren Township, way out in western Wayne County, but we were the only car nearby. As I sped to the scene on Interstate 94 another call came: “Car Thirty-one, pick it up. We have reports of people in the water.”

The sky was black and the roads were bad as we headed into the rural township. At the scene, three young men had been drinking and lost control of their car on the ice-covered Huron River Bridge. Slamming through the guardrail, their car had plunged thirty feet into the river. The weather conditions were gnarly—twenty-six degrees, twenty-five-mile-per-hour wind, and light snow—and the cold, dark water was zipping by at eleven miles an hour.

Two men were inside the almost totally submerged two-door hardtop, which had come to rest on its side, facing upstream. One man was already dead, and his body was pinning the other guy, whose head and arms protruded just above the water inside the car.

When we arrived no one else was around except for the third man, who had escaped the car and swum to the far shore. He was helpless and in shock. Meanwhile, for the trapped man, time was everything. As other cars sped to the scene, Ken and I dropped our pistol belts and portable radios on the icy shore and jumped into the thirty-three-degree water. We swam to the trapped man, but the powerful current rushing over the door added to the force pinning him inside. It also tore Ken and me off the vehicle again and again as we took turns, one of us struggling to lift the door while the other tried to untangle the trapped man from his dead friend.

Arriving officers threw ropes from the bridge above and illuminated the scene with flashlights. One of our helicopters arrived and hovered low, blazing its intense spotlight down at us. The light helped, but the hundred-mile-an-hour rotor wash blasted through our nearly frozen uniforms, multiplying the wind-chill factor on our already frostbitten skin. The helicopter crew didn’t know they were hurting more than helping, and the scene was one of general bedlam: noise from the chopper, screaming pleas from the trapped man, officers on shore hollering, and our bodies and mental faculties steadily shutting down from the cold.

After more than half an hour in the water, we were ordered to shore. The trapped man heard the command, too, and frantically grabbed us. Staring into our eyes, he begged, “Don’t leave me! Please, don’t leave me!”

But there was nothing more that Ken and I could do. We had to let go. We could hardly think, our hands and feet had turned into numb, useless clubs, and even our vision was fading. We were succumbing to hypothermia, and we ourselves were drowning.

As we floundered to shore the young man’s screams suddenly stopped. The current had flipped the car onto its roof, and he sank into the dark, frigid waters of the Huron River, drowning with a last, gurgling scream that no one else would ever hear.

On shore, officers grabbed Ken and me and rushed us to Wayne County General Hospital as we sat in the back of the scout car, huddled together and convulsing uncontrollably.

Two weeks later, Sheriff William Lucas presented Ken and me with the Departmental Citation of Valor, our department's highest award. The next month, my wife asked me for a divorce, and Ken separated from (and soon divorced) his wife.

Everything changed on Wednesday, November 12, 1980. Suddenly, I could hold the world in my hands. It was the day after Veterans Day, and Ronald Reagan had just won a landslide election victory over President Jimmy Carter. I was a sergeant in the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department, Patrol and Investigation Division, and had stopped at Wyandotte General Hospital to hold my first child one more time and look at her sweet face. Born that morning, she weighed in at six pounds, twelve ounces.

From the start, it seemed that Catherine was always right there, waiting for me to come home or riding escort on her bike as I ran for miles, telling her scary stories about movies such as Forbidden Planet, Psycho, The Thing, and Predator. She couldn’t get enough, even while coaching me on my six-mile speed runs. The deal was, she would earn a dollar or get to have a sleepover if she got me back in less than fifty minutes. If we went one second over, she lost.

To ramp up the tension, we invented two imaginary skeletons that trailed behind us—a dad on foot and a little girl skeleton on a bicycle—who would steal our bodies if I didn’t finish in time. “Hurry, Daddy! Hurry! They’re catching up!” she would scream, bouncing up and down on her bike as I checked my watch, sprinting down streets and ducking through “secret passages.”

Sometimes, I’d tell her the skeleton caught me and I was covered in artificial skin. She would get so scared, she’d make me open my mouth so she could see if there was any flesh inside. “Don’t worry, I’m still your dad,” I would answer through clenched teeth. That always got her going faster.

The weather didn’t matter. Catherine was always there, even in winter, bicycling with our dogs and me. If her hands got cold, I’d stop and rub them and take off my socks and put them over her gloves. Then I’d say, “Don’t worry, angel, if your hands get worse, I’ll make you a pair of gloves from the dogs.”

Catherine was born tough, and, of course, being a former Army Ranger, I encouraged her in that direction: teaching her how to climb over obstacles, swim in the canal by our house in Grosse Ile, and run distance even before she was in grade school. But those were small things. Her mother, Cathy, provided everything else. Catherine was motivated and had a natural flare for helping and leading other kids, and like her mom, she was a social butterfly.

In what seemed like the blink of an eye, Catherine became a cross-country runner in middle school and an honor student in high school. She could outswim and outrun me. A soldier in mind, body, and spirit, she applied to the United States Military Academy at West Point and the United States Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs. Both accepted her immediately. She chose the Air Force Academy, and less than twenty-four hours after she walked across the high school stage with her diploma, we were driving our little girl to Detroit Metropolitan Airport.

It was still pre-9/11, and we walked with her to the gate for her flight to Alabama and the prep school, Marion Military Institute. She had to bring her newly bought black leather combat boots and was told not to pack them but to carry them on her. So she flung them around her neck and gave her last hugs and kisses. And just like that, our beautiful, talented 18-year-old girl disappeared down the jetway. The reality of it came crashing in on us, and all we could do was cry.

* * *

Our tears eventually dried, and we watched with pride as our grown-up girl kept on growing. In 2004, Catherine graduated from the Air Force Academy after meeting her future husband, Craig Christ, in an Arabic class. She flew gliders, made five free-fall jumps, earned her parachutist wings, received a bachelor of science degree in biology, and was accepted for flight school. Two years later, in March 2006, she earned her pilot’s wings and went on to fly the KC-135 Stratotanker, a four-engine turbofan refueler.

Catherine deployed six times to Kyrgyzstan, to refuel aircraft over Afghanistan. One Sunday morning, February 18, 2007, Catherine’s tanker was in the air when a long-range twin-rotor MH-47 Chinook Special Operations helicopter suffered engine failure. Loaded with twenty-two troops, it crashed under overcast skies, on a dusty mountain plain.

Eight troops were killed, and everyone else was injured. The enemy suddenly appeared and closed in on the burning wreckage. The less seriously injured on board were desperately providing assistance and getting others out of the aircraft, and now they had to defend their position.

Twin-engine F-15 Eagle all-weather fighters, loaded with bombs and missiles but low on fuel, scrambled to the area. Other tankers were airborne, but they were either far away refueling aircraft or returning to base, empty. Catherine maneuvered to the location and continuously circled, refueling one fighter after another. She could hear the frantic pleas of the survivors on the strike frequency as each F-15, topped with fuel, veered off and plunged 18,000 feet to bomb and strafe the enemy. Unbeknownst to her, one of the survivors was U.S. Army Ranger Jon-Erik Watson, from her own little island hometown of Grosse Ile.[1]

* * *

Catherine soldiered on and completed an Ironman, multiple other triathlons, and seven marathons. She earned a master’s degree in business administration and became a KC-135 aircraft commander, a student pilot instructor, and a major. She and her husband and four young children are now at their last duty station: Edwards Air Force Base, California, only a few hours away from our Huntington Beach home.

After sixteen years of not living in the same time zone or even the same hemisphere, our girl is just up the road. And soon enough, her and Craig’s kids will be old enough to bike along on my runs, just as their mom did once upon a time.

_____________________________

[1] On Wednesday, May 2, 2007, Grosse Ile Township hosted a welcome-home parade down Macomb Street for its seriously injured native son, U.S. Army Ranger Jon-Erik Watson.

* Special thanks to Tammy Travis-Taylor of the Grosse Ile Historical Society for providing this document.

Wednesday evening, March 8, 1972, I was assigned to the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department Metropolitan Narcotics Squad, more commonly known as “Metro Squad.” We were in Romulus, at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport, doing surveillance with the FBI. They had intel that Black Panthers were planning to hijack an aircraft or seize a terminal, that night or early the next day, and demand the release of other Panthers in custody at the time. I was 23 years old.

Accompanying us were US sky marshals and members of Detroit Police Intelligence. We frequently worked with the feds since we needed them for big-money narcotics buys and to do wiretaps. And they needed us for additional manpower to do surveillance. (We had more than a dozen undercover officers, half of them black, half white.) We were also an asset because we had a lot of experience with violent criminals—there’s nothing quite like making several drug raids a day for keeping your skills honed.

The Sheriff’s Department was in charge of patrolling the airport, so those units as well as our entire road patrol were on alert. We positioned undercover officers in both the North and South Terminals and had unmarked cars at all entrances and exits. An epidemic of armed hijackings was raging in the United States and all over the world as various radical groups took hostages for ransom and for the release of political prisoners.

It was a contentious time. President Nixon had recently ordered the heaviest bombings of North Vietnamese infiltration routes into South Vietnam. At home, meanwhile, a fight was under way over nationwide court-ordered busing to force school desegregation. With all this going on domestically and abroad, we were at the airport, armed to the teeth and ready for war. But hour after hour passed, and no Panthers showed. It was getting monotonous, but we had to hold our positions until all late-night flights arrived.

Lorenzo Hart, Jimmy Fowlkes, and I were patrolling the airport in one of our undercover narcotics cars. We usually worked together and got along great, socially as well as on the job. Jimmy and Lorenzo were black, and I was a dark-skinned Arab who could also pass for Latino or Italian. We could blend into a lot of situations, and this made us an effective team.

I was exhausted after spending the morning in my college classes and pulling my National Guard weekend with Company F, 425th Infantry (Ranger). We were saddled up for two days to do a jump, but the winds stayed above the thirteen-knot cutoff. Also, I was in a committed relationship, and a girl I was once engaged to had come back into my life. So I had a lot on my plate.

I was cold after taking my turn walking outside both terminals. “Turn up the heat, Butch,” I said, climbing into the backseat. “Butch” was Lorenzo’s radio call sign, and Fowlkes’s was “Sundance.” I grabbed a slice of cold pizza as Fowlkes handed me a beer.

“Thanks! I froze my ass off out there!”

We were laughing but kept our eyes open for suspicious vehicles and people. The radio suddenly got busy, and we heard a lot of traffic between our Patrol and Investigation Division in western Wayne County, and headquarters in Detroit. Now in the wee hours of Thursday, March 9, it was nineteen degrees with a fifteen mile-an-hour wind.

Twenty-three miles east of us, by the corner of Dexter and West Chicago, in Detroit’s near north side, several black Wayne County sheriff deputies were facing something much more ominous than freezing weather. They were experiencing a cop’s worst nightmare.

Three off-duty friends of ours had been playing poker at Aaron Vincent’s apartment on Rochester Street. The others were Henry “Hank” Henderson, David E. Davis, and Vincent’s next-door neighbor, Richard Sain, a hospital orderly. They all knew each other either from working the county jail or from attending Central High School a half mile east.

Two other deputies arrived separately. Henry Duvall was walking to Vincent’s apartment, and James Jenkins had just finished his shift at the county jail in Detroit. Now in civilian dress, Jenkins parked his car by Vincent’s apartment, grabbed his holstered .38 Special revolver, and stepped out. (Wayne County deputies are required to be armed when off duty, and the weapon was department issued.) Jenkins secured the revolver under his winter coat. Vincent’s apartment was in the Tenth Precinct––the “Livernois,” where the 1967 riots started, and the highest-crime area in the city.

Parked on the street not far from Jenkins were three members of the Detroit Police Department’s STRESS unit, on another investigation. Detroit Police Commissioner John Nichols had formed STRESS (Stop the Robberies, Enjoy Safe Streets) the year before. In one decade, from 1960 to 1970, Detroit’s population had dropped by 170,000 people, yet its murder rate nearly tripled, from 172 to 495. The city also experienced a sharp increase in street muggings, which corresponded with the rise of the drug culture. In 1970, Detroit, with a population of 1.5 million, had 22,000 robberies, 69 of which involved the murder of the robbery victim.

Concealed-carry permits were not commonly issued, and the STRESS unit, unaware that Jenkins was a cop, watched him head toward Vincent’s apartment at 3210 Rochester. Their unit was dramatically reducing robberies and other crimes throughout Detroit by posing as vulnerable decoys, often as women or old men. It was a very dangerous assignment. But STRESS was highly controversial among radical white students at Wayne State University in Detroit, and among many in the black community, who argued that too often the suspects getting shot were unarmed blacks.[1] Yet many black clergy and community leaders supported STRESS because they were making the streets dramatically safer, since the criminals didn’t know if the old lady or crippled man they were about to mug was actually an armed undercover cop with good aim.

Ronald Martin, James Harris, and Virgil Starkey were three black STRESS officers. They had seen Jenkins put the gun under his coat, and so they ran after him through the cold, dimly lit street. But before they could catch up to him, they saw him enter Vincent’s second-floor apartment.

Jenkins stepped inside to the sound of loud conversation and laughter from Duvall and the others seated at the kitchen table. The room was thick with cigarette smoke, and Jenkins closed the screen but left the door slightly ajar.

Believing that armed criminal activity was taking place, STRESS Officers Martin and Harris climbed the stairway leading to Vincent’s apartment while Officer Starkey kept lookout from below. Officer Martin opened the screen door, shoved his badge in, and pointed his pistol inside as Harris stood beside him, hollering “Police Officers!”

It’s unclear what happened next, but Martin and Harris said they were suddenly shot at, so they returned fire with their 9mm Browning Hi-Power pistols. The Hi-Power is a semiautomatic that holds thirteen rounds in the magazine plus one in the chamber. Because of its large-capacity magazine and faster firing and reloading than is possible with a revolver, this weapon was a favorite with “big city” plainclothes cops working high-crime areas.

According to the deputies sitting at Vincent’s kitchen table, they didn’t fire first. They heard derogatory shouts, then shots, and watched Duvall fall to the floor. Thinking the men at the door were robbers, Jenkins fired three rounds from his six-shot revolver at the two STRESS officers as they retreated back onto the balcony. Shocked by the suddenness of it all, Duvall stayed low on the kitchen floor with a gunshot wound to his leg as Jenkins and the other deputies scattered to different areas of the apartment, seeking cover and concealment.

Officer Starkey, believing that one of his partners had been shot, charged up the stairs, and the three STRESS officers unleashed a volley of shots toward the back of the apartment. Neighbors, hearing the all-too-familiar sound of gunfire, sought cover.

The STRESS team shouted, identifying themselves as police officers, to which the deputies yelled out, “We’re police, too! We’re deputies!” But more and more shots were fired, and at 12:10 a.m., STRESS made frantic radio calls about “barricaded gunmen” and “officers in trouble.”

When an officer-in-trouble call goes out, every second counts, so all the cops in the vicinity head to the area. Those calls brought dozens of uniformed and plainclothes officers from surrounding precincts, and freeway patrol cars, with lights blazing and sirens wailing.

Something less obvious was also happening. When an officer believes that fellow cops are in mortal danger, this triggers the brain to release adrenaline and endorphins, giving the responding officer a massive rush of both energy and potent pain killers. The heart beats faster, and the lungs suck in oxygen more deeply as blood vessels closer to the surface of the body constrict the inner ones dilate. These automatic functions are vital to enriching blood, minimizing blood loss, and rushing blood to muscles. Like soldiers in combat, responding officers arrive ready to fight, without a clear picture of where all the good guys are, how many bad guys there are, or who is positioned where. It’s pandemonium, and the only certainty is that your brothers are in trouble. The arriving officers move into the danger to best position themselves to join the battle.

The STRESS officers held their ground on the balcony as Car 10-22 from the Tenth Precinct, manned by black officer David Marshall and white officer Dennis Shiemke, arrived on the scene. Armed with .357 Magnum revolvers and a 12-gauge riot shotgun, they raced up the balcony to back up the STRESS officers as other responding officers surrounded the building.

The scores of blue emergency lights flashing from patrol vehicles reflected off apartment windows as police radio traffic and shouts resounded through the neighborhood.

After a couple of minutes, the shooting subsided with shouts of “Detroit Police! Come on out!”

Jenkins and other men in the bedroom repeated their pleas, “We’re Wayne County deputies!”

“Show some ID, you fuckers!”

The deputies answered by throwing out badges and their guns.

“Okay,” someone shouted. “Then come on out with your hands up!”

More hollering followed, and Jenkins stepped out of the bedroom and yelled, “We’re police! I’m coming out! I have no gun! I’ve got my badge in my hands, and my hands up!”

But the moment he became visible to the STRESS officers standing outside on the balcony, Jenkins was dropped with a single shot to the temple. Apparently, the STRESS officers didn’t see the badge or else thought it was a gun.

The three STRESS officers regularly dealt with armed and dangerous criminals. They stormed inside the small one-bedroom apartment, with Officers Marshall and Shiemke following, systematically taking out any perceived threats. Henderson, standing with his arms up and his back against the bathroom wall, was shot five times by Martin. As he fell to the floor, screams were heard from the deputies, and Shiemke shot Henderson once in the buttocks. The bullet traveled upward and exited from his torso. Jenkins was shot again through his arms and abdomen as he lay by the bedroom door. And Vincent, in the bedroom, received a grazing bullet wound to the head.

The smell of detonated gunpowder permeated every room, and STRESS quickly secured the apartment. All the deputies were lying handcuffed on the kitchen floor or in back, critically wounded or dead. For whatever reason, the STRESS officers started kicking and beating the deputies with their pistols and heavy four-cell flashlights, yelling, “We’re going to kill you motherfuckers!”

Vincent, lying facedown on the floor with his arms cuffed behind him and blood pouring from the bullet wound to his head, was struck in the head with a shotgun butt by one of the uniformed cops.

“Why are you doing this?” the deputies pleaded. “We’re cops!”

No command officers were present, and the situation was out of control as STRESS and the two uniformed officers ignored the deputies’ pleas and also their badges in plain view on the floor.

At this point, another uniform and three plainclothes officers charged into the apartment. One of the officers was Richard Herold, a black crew chief of a “Big Four” cruiser from the Tenth Precinct. He was a former navy seaman and a Wayne State University criminal justice graduate.[2] The Big Four were tough street cops who drove black four-door sedans manned by a uniformed driver and three men dressed in suits and ties. Each precinct had one. They handled heavy crimes such as homicide and armed robbery and dealt with street gangs. They kept a shotgun in front and a .45-caliber Thompson submachine gun in the trunk, loaded with a thirty-round magazine of tracers. Herold had a commanding presence, especially when carrying the Thompson.

Duvall had worked undercover for our department and was lying on the kitchen floor with blood rushing from the bullet hole in his thigh. One of the uniformed cops knelt beside him, holding the muzzle of his revolver at Duvall’s head with the hammer cocked, threatening to shoot.

Duvall saw Herold run in and cried, “Richard! Richard, we’re cops! I’m Duvall! You know me from the Argyle bar!” (The Argyle was a west side tavern frequented by cops.)

Recognizing Duvall, Herold shouted to the officers, “Stop this fuckin’ shit! They’re cops!”

“I don’t give a fuck!” the uniformed officer next to Duvall yelled.

“He’s a policeman!” Herold repeated.

“How the hell do I know?” the uniformed cop asked.

Placing the muzzle of his Thompson to the cop’s head, Herold shouted, “You know now because I’m telling you! Now, get the fuck away from him!” he yelled, shoving the cop with his foot.

Herold and his crew were patrolmen just like all the other cops in the apartment, but their actions caused the mayhem to end as suddenly as it began. There was no doubt among the captive deputies that if Herold hadn’t arrived, the STRESS officers were going to murder everyone.

Herold carried Duvall out of the apartment while some cops stood around refusing to help. The shooters gathered in a corner to get their stories together.

Uniformed officers in patrol cars transported the deputies to Detroit General Hospital. Jenkins was critically wounded with gunshots to his head, arms, and abdomen.[3] Duvall was treated for a leg wound, and Vincent for the grazing head wound. Davis and Sain had multiple bruises from the beatings, as did Vincent. At 1:05 a.m., Henry Henderson, 33, was pronounced dead of multiple gunshot wounds.

Later that morning, Wayne County Sheriff’s Lieutenant Warren Woods and Officer Bobby Hawkins went to the apartment at 3210 Rochester Street. They found furniture toppled, cards and shattered liquor bottles on the kitchen floor, blood spattered on walls, and pools of blood on floors and carpeting. The large plate-glass windows outside were shattered by gunshots, and the roof overhang had bullet holes. There were also forty-four bullet holes in the apartment. The bathroom toilet was shot off its base, and the bathtub was riddled with holes. There was no question that Henderson had been shot as he stood against the wall just outside the bathroom. Jenkins was shot outside the bedroom door, and Duvall was shot at the kitchen table.

Five days later, on Tuesday, March 14, I went to the Girrbach-Krasun Funeral Home, on West Jefferson in River Rouge, with all the members of Metro Squad, to pay our respects to Deputy Henry Henderson. Most of our squad’s leaders were Detroit Police officers, and we had excellent rapport with DPD. Hundreds of uniformed officers and dozens of scout cars were there. Most were from our (Wayne County Sheriff’s) department and DPD, but there were also officers from the Michigan State Police and other counties and cities, including the Windsor, Ontario, PD, in Canada.

It’s always heartbreaking to see a dead cop surrounded by a grieving family, but this tragedy was even more horrible because Henry died at the hands of fellow cops. After the service, we followed the motorcade to Woodmere Cemetery in southwest Detroit, just a few blocks from my home, where Deputy Henry “Hank” Henderson was buried.

From there, Lorenzo Hart, Jimmy Fowlkes, Al Wallace, and I stopped at my mom’s house on Woodmere. Because we often worked Detroit, her house was well located, and we stopped there frequently. The black deputies called her “Mama Ankony.” She loved that, and she enjoyed having us stop by, because it made her feel safe. My mom was a superb cook, and luckily, she had just finished making a pot of stuffed zucchini on the stove. She usually enjoyed hearing our stories, but this time we didn’t talk much.

The shooting, quickly dubbed the “Rochester Street Massacre,” prompted more public outcry than ever, seeking to ban STRESS. Detroit Police Commissioner John Nichols and Wayne County Sheriff William Lucas, a former FBI agent and New York City undercover cop, held news conferences to calm the public’s concerns, saying it was just a “tragic case of mistaken identity.”[4] Detroit Mayor Roman Gribbs, a former Wayne County sheriff, concurred that it was a “serious tragedy of mistaken identity” and refused to disband the unit, reminding the public that STRESS was averaging 250 felony arrests per month. And DPD District Inspector James Bannon added, “STRESS is a viable, active unit of the police department and we have no intentions of retreating.”

Separate investigations were conducted by DPD Internal Affairs and the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department Internal Security Bureau. Their findings were not consistent with the mayor’s, police commissioner’s, or sheriff’s initial account. Armed with that information, Wayne County Prosecutor William Cahalan charged STRESS officers Ronald Martin, 37, James Harris, 25, and Virgil Starkey, 24, with murder, attempted murder, felonious assault, and committing a felony with a firearm––a mandatory two-year consecutive sentence on top of the felony life murder sentence. Cahalan did not charge Officers Marshall and Shiemke from the Tenth Precinct, because he believed they were acting on reliable information from the radio calls and from the STRESS officers on the scene, telling them that they were dealing with dangerous criminals.

On Friday, March 24, Martin, Harris, and Starkey were arraigned in Detroit before Recorder’s Court Judge Frank Shemanske and remanded to the Wayne County Jail under two thousand dollars’ bond. Each bond was promptly posted by family and police friends, who worried about violence against them, both from fellow prisoners and from the deputies who would be guarding them.

The trial took place in Judge William Giovan’s courtroom at Recorder’s Court, just across the street from Detroit General Hospital and Detroit Police Headquarters, and right next door to the Wayne County Jail. Wayne County Assistant Prosecutor Michael Connor and defense attorneys Norman Lippitt and George Lee argued the case. To ease tensions between DPD and our department, Sheriff Lucas prohibited any off-duty deputies from attending the trial. He did not want things to degenerate into one law enforcement agency against another. Detroit Police Commissioner John Nichols did not reciprocate.[5]

With credible testimony from the STRESS officers and our deputies, each side saying the others shot first, the trial was difficult. There was also a contradictory account given initially by Duvall, at Detroit General Hospital, to DPD Homicide Detective Sgt. Michael Babiuk and Wayne County Sheriff Sgt. Raymond McGee. Duvall said Jenkins had fired first when he saw the arm with the handgun protrude through the apartment doorway.[6]

Martin, who was the senior STRESS officer and had done most of the shooting, said, “I believed a robbery was going on inside the apartment. I had to make a split-second judgment that’s taken us [the court] three months to decide. If faced with the same problem, I’d do exactly what I did that night, because Jenkins and Henderson were armed when I shot them.”

Richard Herold, the DPD Big Four crew chief, testified, “They [the Detroit officers] acted like something was funny. It was unbelievable. They didn’t give a damn, even though there were sheriff’s IDs and badges all over the floor.”

In his closing remarks, Connor said, “It doesn’t matter who fired first, because the STRESS officers illegally entered the apartment without probable cause and started the incident.” Pointing then at Martin, Harris, and Starkey, he said, “These three men are trained killers. When you create a special force, be it Army Rangers or STRESS, and you tell an officer he’s special and he’s supposed to stop robberies, and you put him out there with his .357 Magnum, he tends to believe he’s a law unto himself.”

Lippitt responded, “Martin, Harris, and Starkey would have been negligent if they had not followed to investigate a man carrying a gun at midnight in the crime-ridden Tenth Precinct.” He then added to the jurors, “Don’t you dare bring in a split verdict. Don’t you dare find one of these men guilty and two not guilty.”

The next day, Thursday, August 10, 1972, I worked with Gerald Scotti and Michael Geldmacher from our squad, and Ron Garibaldi’s crew from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (the DEA’s predecessor). We raided a house on Ohio and Curtis in Detroit’s north side, where we confiscated heroin, weapons, and cash and arrested three men. On that same day, after only one hour of deliberation, jury foreman Tony Hendrix, 25, gave the unanimous decision. The jury of ten whites and two blacks (eleven women and one man) acquitted Officers Martin, Harris, and Starkey of all charges, believing, as the mayor, police commissioner, and sheriff had already stated, that it was a horrible case of mistaken identity and that the STRESS officers had acted with probable cause to effect what they believed was a lawful arrest.[7]

The next day, Wayne County Prosecutor William Cahalan stood alongside Michael Connor and said, “It was up to the jury to determine whether or not the STRESS officers acted reasonably under the circumstances. No new facts were uncovered during the trial which would lead me to issue new warrants.”

That was it. The trial was over, other than civil lawsuits and the fact that STRESS had become anathema among many citizens, including some in law enforcement.

That December, six STRESS officers were shot in two separate ambushes by three black militants wielding a shotgun and sawed-off .30-caliber M1 carbines.[8] One white STRESS officer, Robert Bradford, 25, was murdered on Wednesday, December 27, with multiple shots to the head as he lay critically wounded with his partner, Robert Dooley, 28, on the sidewalk. I was in the area and responded to the “Officers down!” radio call, but the killers, Mark Bethune, 21, John Percy Boyd, 23, and Hayward Brown, 18, got away in the frantic, unfocused police search. The “mad-dog killers” fled Michigan and were pursued in one of the largest police manhunts in US history.[9]

The next year, a mayoral election took place in Detroit after Mayor Roman Gribbs declined to seek office again.[10] Many whites saw Police Commissioner John Nichols as the “law-and-order man.”[11] Opposing him was Coleman Young, a black former Tuskegee airman, civil rights activist, and state senator whose campaign promise was “It’s time for a change.” Detroit was nearly half African American yet was policed mainly by whites. The Rochester Street Massacre was fresh on citizens’ minds and helped tip the scale. Coleman Young narrowly won the election, and in 1974, one of his first acts was to disband STRESS. He was Detroit’s first black mayor and served for twenty years, until 1994.

____________________________________

My deepest thanks go out to retired Wayne County Sheriff Sgt. Bobby Hawkins for his help in this research, for providing newspaper articles, and for generously contributing his personal knowledge of the Rochester Street investigation. Thanks also to Wayne County Sheriff Benny Napoleon for providing photos. And to my wife, Cathy, the unseen editor of all my work; and my editor, Michael J. Carr, for tidying up.

* Having served in the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department and knowing the deputies involved, I found this story especially difficult to write. As a Detroit resident and cop at the time, I saw the sacrifices made by STRESS and members of our department, who fought some of the city’s toughest, most dangerous criminals. As with any controversial subject, there are many conflicting accounts of this event. I made every effort to capture the different perspectives of all involved.

____________________________________

[1] During its three-year existence, STRESS killed twenty-two suspected criminals and wounded dozens of others. One white STRESS officer, Raymond Peterson, 40, was involved in twelve shootings, resulting in the deaths of five people. Peterson was highly decorated, but the last person he killed, Robert Hoyt, 24, a black man, took place during a traffic stop. Hoyt was unarmed, so Peterson planted a knife beside him. But DPD evidence technicians found hairs in the knife—hairs that came from Peterson’s cat. Peterson was fired and charged with second-degree murder but was acquitted when his attorney successfully convinced the jury that he was suffering from PTSD. He was awarded two years’ back pay and given a disability retirement.

[2] In the fall of 1972, Officer Richard Herold––the Tenth Precinct Big Four crew chief who saved Duvall and the other four from being killed––was charged by the RCMP in Toronto, Ontario (Canada), for trafficking cocaine. Herold was fired but was eventually acquitted of that charge and testified against DPD Deputy Chief George Bennett. Bennett was black, and Herold accused Bennett of using heavy-handed methods in trying to solicit his help to testify against a number of officers, most of them white, at the Tenth Precinct. Bennett knew that the Precinct Narcotics Unit and other well-positioned officers at the precinct were taking bribes from major heroin dealers, then seizing narcotics and cash from rival dealers and redistributing it back to the favored drug dealers. It became known as the “Tenth Precinct Conspiracy,” and Bennett’s methods were deemed necessary to weed out rotten apples. Nine officers were charged, and three were convicted of conspiracy to sell narcotics and conspiracy to obstruct justice. Among those convicted was Officer Richard Herold, 33, a six-year veteran. He was sentenced to three to five years in Jackson State Prison. Research for this story uncovered a seemingly bottomless pit of information about DPD corruption, ranging from appalling to hilarious. Incidentally, Herold was married with kids and was in Toronto taking a girlfriend for an abortion when the RCMP busted him. His whereabouts today are unknown. Cops who knew him think he is either dead or in witness protection.

[3] Deputy James Jenkins, 29, never returned to work, because of his wounds and the loss of sight in one eye. In Wayne County Probate Court, he received a one-million-dollar settlement from Detroit, and his wife received 150,000 dollars for loss of companionship and for caregiving.

[4] Cops shooting cops, referred to as “blue on blue,” happens rarely. But “friendly fire” in the military occurs far more frequently. (See “Four Second-Floor Narcotics Stories,” endnote 12).

[5] Our department had about twelve hundred sworn officers, and DPD had four thousand.

[6] In January 1987, Deputy Henry Duvall, a twenty-year veteran of the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department, was convicted of two counts of embezzling one thousand dollars in bail money that he received on two separate occasions while working the front desk at the county jail.

[7] In 1972, Michigan State Law stipulated: “In effecting a lawful arrest for a felony, a peace officer may use that degree of force reasonably necessary to effect that arrest including deadly force. A peace officer may use deadly force in defense of his own life, in defense of another, or in pursuit of a fleeing felon.”

[8] The four STRESS officers shot in the first ambush, on Monday, December 4, 1972, were Richard Grapp, 41, William Price, 32, Eugene Fuller, 24, and Robert Rosenow, 23.The officers stopped the trio driving a Volkswagen near the University of Detroit, but the gunmen leaped out first, firing at the officers as the officers struggled to get out of their vehicle. Each officer was hit multiple times but survived.

[9] On Tuesday, January 2, 1973, our squad, with STRESS, made two raids in Detroit in search of the killers, based on information from Officer Michael Geldmacher from our unit. The first raid was on Mendota, south of Six Mile Road, where we confiscated one “Detroit Police Department”‑marked .38 Special revolver and several long arms. The second raid was an apartment on 14th Street and Magnolia, where we arrested two more people wanted on warrants but had no luck finding the cop killers. (For more on their fate, see http://www.robertankony.com/blog/officers-down.)

[10] Following Mayor Gribbs’s time in office, the US Drug Enforcement Agency launched a federal grand jury investigation into widespread narcotics payoffs to top DPD officials. On Wednesday morning, September 30, 1976, Deputy Chief Reginald Harvel, 47, whose name was allegedly on the payoff list, was found dead by his wife in the upstairs bathroom of their Detroit home. Harvel, a twenty-one-year police veteran, was shot twice in the chest with his .38-caliber police revolver. Gunshot marks were found on his pajama top, and the revolver was found near his body. An autopsy was conducted, but apparently no paraffin tests were performed to determine if gunshot residue was on Harvel’s hands. Despite Harvel’s having been shot twice in the chest, Wayne County Medical Examiner Werner Spitz, MD, stated, “There’s absolutely no doubt that it was a suicide.” Harvel is remembered in Detroit law enforcement circles as the only man who committed suicide twice.

[11] John Nichols was eventually elected sheriff of Oakland County, just north of Detroit.

By the time I was 15, I had nearly forty military rifles and pistols in our basement in southwest Detroit. Surplus firearms were dirt cheap, and I earned plenty of money through my paper route and other odd jobs. My dad and I built several racks to keep up with my collection, and he taught me the mechanics of weapons and how to restore them. Often, he would drive me to rifle ranges or to the nearby woods, where we’d fire the weapons.

One day, I realized I could make a semiautomatic rifle from one of my ten-shot .303-caliber bolt-action British Enfields. The Lee Enfield, the standard firearm for British forces from 1895 to 1957, is an extraordinarily solid rifle with a beautiful brass buttplate (changed to aluminum in World War II). I had plenty of firearms books, but I got this idea all on my own, from playing endlessly with the weapon’s action.

It wasn’t all that tricky to work out, and I was surprised the British hadn’t thought of it in the First or Second War. The Americans had done it by fitting their 1903 Springfield bolt-action rifle with the Pedersen device. This gave the infantryman vastly more firepower: instead of five overpowered rifle cartridges, he could fire forty smaller .30-caliber pistol cartridges—adequate for the close quarters of trench warfare—as fast as he could pull the trigger. But my idea would be much simpler. The Enfield wouldn’t need a hole milled through the receiver to create an ejection port, and it could still fire the same full-size rifle cartridge without replacing the weapon’s bolt to install a semiautomatic device such as the Pedersen. Having a dozen Enfields already, and with thousands of surplus ones still available through the mail for only thirteen dollars each, I knew that my invention would soon have me rolling in dough—which I could use to buy even more weaponry!

More importantly, I knew that my dad would be proud of me. After all, the first rifle I bought through the mail was an Enfield, which I got just by lying on the form, saying I was 18. My dad didn’t mind, and we spent many hours in the garage “sporterizing” it. First, we removed the front bayonet lug and the upper stock, which covered the barrel. Then we cut down the forearm (the lower stock beneath the barrel) by about half so it would look like a sportsman’s hunting rifle instead of a military weapon. We then sanded and stained the forearm and buttstock and coated them with gloss varnish. We also buffed all the metal parts to get rid of the dull black military finish and cold blued them so they would be shiny black. My dad finished it off by fitting the front of the forearm with a clear black plastic cap.[1]

At the local hardware store, I bought a stiff coil spring about ten inches long and an inch and a half in diameter. The coils on the spring were almost a quarter-inch thick, and it was hard to compress. I also bought an eight-inch length of threaded rod—basically, a bolt with all threads and no head. In the garage, I used my dad’s drill press and bored a vertical hole straight down through the buttstock, about midway between the firing mechanism and the buttplate. Running the threaded rod through the hole so that it protruded three or four inches above the buttstock, I secured it to the stock with two nuts and lock washers. Then I secured one end of the long spring to the rear of the rifle’s bolt (which slips over the cocking device). Then, at the other end of the spring, I forced the protruding threaded rod up between the spring’s coils, at a right angle to the spring. Now I had a long, stiff spring, in line with the chamber and barrel, running back from the rifle’s bolt to the threaded rod that protruded up from the buttstock. It was simple enough, and once I ground off some headspace from the action, it was ready to go. If I kept the rifle’s bolt unlocked and fired the weapon, the chamber pressure would force the bolt backward, compressing the spring and extracting and ejecting the spent cartridge. Then the bolt would rebound forward, chambering a fresh round and recocking the striker. All I had to do was keep pulling the trigger.

Test firing would be simple. I slept in the basement, where I kept all my weapons. My dad and I had cleaned and painted our old coal room and turned it into my gun room. Underneath my workbench, I had stockpiles of ammo and a big log to shoot into, to make sure my weapons were functioning properly before I started restoring or customizing them.

Just when I was starting to load the Enfield’s magazine, my dad, who had gotten home from work, came in the side door.

“Look what I made, Dad!” I said, holding the rifle up. “You’re just in time to see me test-fire it.”

He stepped downstairs, and his thick, weathered hands picked up the rifle and manipulated the action. To my great surprise, I could see he was upset, because when he was angry he had a habit of biting his tongue.

“Aw, Robert, what were you thinking?”

“What do you mean?” I said. “What’s wrong, Dad?”

“Robert, look at the problem,” he said. And I could hear the little quiver in his voice.

“It’ll work great, Dad. Here, lemme show you.”

“Robert, there’s no locking mechanism! If you had fired this, the bolt would’ve shot back into your head with the same force as the bullet leaving the muzzle.”

“But the spring  . . .”

“No!” he insisted. “We have to get rid of this rifle! It’s ruined, and it’s not safe now.” And upstairs he went, rifle in hand. And that was the last I ever saw of that Enfield.

Maybe my dad understood my mechanical curiosity and my unquenchable thirst for knowledge of how things work. But this I know for sure: my dad never expressed anger or disappointment in me.

That incident with the rifle taught me a physics lesson that is indelibly etched in my mind. It’s known as Newton’s Third Law of Motion: “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” The 174-grain bullet, propelled by a .303 British Enfield cartridge with thirty-eight grains of nitrocellulose gunpowder and a chamber pressure of over 20,000 tons per square inch, would have shot out of the muzzle at 2,500 feet per second as the bolt flew backward at a similar velocity—leaving a gooey, bloody mess in our basement, right where my head had been.

It’s said that God protects fools and little children. But on that day, it was my dad, coming home from work right on time, who saved me.

___________________________________

[1] We did this to two rifles before I realized that we were actually lowering their value. Our sporterizing efforts would have been better spent rehabilitating the rifle back to its as-issued condition.

When I was a kid, I spent endless fascinating hours with my dad in the garage of our southwest Detroit home. The floor-to-ceiling shelves were crammed with boxes of spare parts and electric motors. On the floor and the workbench were large and small tools, acetylene tanks, a grinder, a drill press, and a lathe. My dad was a heating and air-conditioning serviceman, and he loved explaining and showing me how things work: things like his Triplett electrical tester. This black box, with dials, gauges, wires, and switches, looked to my 9-year-old eyes like some exotic scientific instrument from the future.

When trying to explain how volts times amps equals watts, he said, “Robert, picture in your mind a two-hundred-and-twenty-foot water tower.”

“Okay, Dad.”

“Now, say we drill a one-inch hole in the tower, one foot down from top.”

“Okay. Got it.”

“Because there’s not much water pressure just a foot down, it’s not going to squirt out very far—maybe just a lazy dribble. We’ll call that one volt.”

“Gotcha,” I said. “Low pressure—one lousy volt.”

“Now we drill the same size hole a hundred and ten feet down. That water’s going to squirt out a whole lot farther, with a lot more force. That would be like a hundred and ten volts.”

“Sure, Dad, like a lightbulb!”

“Exactly. Every electrical fixture and appliance requires a specific voltage—a certain pressure—to work. Most window air conditioners need a hundred and ten volts, but a house air conditioner needs two hundred and twenty. That’s because the condenser is bigger and needs more energy to compress the freon vapor back into a liquid.”

“So where do the amps come in?” I said.

“Amps are the size of the hole we drilled. If we drilled a two-inch hole, it would have four times the amps, and the product of the two—the size times depth—is watts.”

“Why four instead of two times?”

“Because it’s larger left and right, and up and down.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to remember it all. “But your electric tester says ‘ohms.’ What’s that?”

“That’s resistance. Electricity flows better in copper than aluminum.”

“Can electricity flow in me?”

“Yes, but not very well,” he said, picking up a nine-volt transistor-radio battery from his cluttered workbench. It had double prongs on top, and he touched them to his tongue for a moment. “Put it to your tongue, Robert, and feel the tingle.”

“Is it gonna hurt?”

“No, but you can feel it.”

“Wow, that feels funny!” I said.

But that demonstration just spawned more curiosity. There was something magical about electricity. I couldn’t see it or taste it, but I could see and feel its effect. It was like fire that gave heat and light and could move from one place to another like a living thing. I knew that magnetism could be used to make electricity and that electricity could make magnetism. I had made an electromagnet with a flashlight battery, a small coil of wire, and a nail. So another day, when only my mom was home, I unscrewed a 110-volt lightbulb from a socket in the basement where I slept, and stuck a screwdriver in, holding it by the shank. I can’t say exactly what I was thinking, other than that I wanted to learn. The shock hit me so hard, a big flash went off in my head and I froze stiff. I couldn’t even scream or let go of the screwdriver for several seconds.

It certainly wasn’t a pleasant experience. But in time, I learned that electricity is electrons in motion. An electric current is commonly believed to move at the speed of light, but that isn’t entirely accurate. The speed of sound is a better analogy. Air molecules vibrate into one another, creating a wave effect of 767 miles per hour at sea level.[1] Electricity is similar. The electrons aren’t moving along a wire at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second) but are typically flowing at about fourteen inches per hour. But like air molecules at the speed of sound, they’re vibrating into one another, creating wave forms. These wave forms move at their respective speeds (sound 767 miles per hour, and light at 186,000 miles per second). The life-threatening shock I felt was the zillions of electrons in my body suddenly vibrating into one another at the speed of light.

Through unconventional experimentation, I learned that sometimes, when you push the envelope, the envelope pushes back.

_________________________

[1] The electrons surrounding the sphere of an atomic or molecular nucleus in air don’t actually touch but repel one another upon approaching the same negative charge. The same effect happens with electrons in an electric current.

It was a hot summer afternoon in 1971, and I was a 22-year-old undercover narcotics officer in the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department, with a year and a half on the job. I was also a former US Army Ranger with a year in Vietnam. We were in Detroit’s east side, getting ready to make a raid.

By 1971, the Motor City had 1.4 million people, many of them employed in manufacturing millions of fabulous cars and trucks. But behind the veil of prosperity, a social pathology was brewing. Since the late 1960s, the drug culture had taken off, and Detroit had seen an exodus of nearly 300,000 people. The city had 15 percent of Michigan’s population, yet it accounted for 60 percent of murders statewide (561 out of 942). Homicides had more than doubled, and property crimes tripled. Fatal overdoses were commonplace, and drug-related crime, especially armed robberies and home invasions, was destroying the city and spreading into the suburbs.[1]

Sheriff William Lucas, newly armed with a $200,000 federal grant, had fifty young officers from our 1,200-man department interviewed to determine their suitability for undercover work.[2] Twelve men were selected, and Sheriff Lucas created our Metropolitan Narcotics Bureau, more commonly known as Metro Squad. It was located in our Patrol and Investigation Division in western Wayne County.

Because the Detroit Police had much more experience with narcotics trafficking, our bureau was led by two DPD crew chiefs, Bob Krichke and Bill Sherwood, along with Lieutenant Frank VanWulfen and Sergeant Vahan Kapagian. VanWulfen was from our department, but our real expert was Sgt. Kapagian, known on the street as “Louie.”[3] Kapagian had worked undercover for DPD and the feds and was a legend in Michigan for arresting John Sinclair, chairman of the White Panther Party.[4] We also had a chemist, Bohdar Komonytsky, a secretary, Darnell Cotham, and constant access to Chuck Art’s drug-sniffing dogs.

Our vehicles, ranging from a compact Mercury Comet to a full-size Lincoln Continental for bigger buys, were equipped with concealed police radios and sirens. I drove a Mustang and always kept a selective-fire .30-caliber M2 carbine and a 12-gauge High Standard riot shotgun in my trunk. Even before Vietnam, I had always been into weapons, and on the Metro Squad, seeing all the violent crime in the city, I felt that we should have a bit more firepower. So I did what seemed the logical thing: converted my M1 carbine into an M2 so that it could fire in fully automatic mode.

To ensure the confidentiality of our work, our cars had suppressed license plates that would come up blank if anyone ran them, and we had fake driver’s licenses issued by Michigan. I lived in Detroit and chose an address a couple of miles from home, where I knew the layout. I picked the alias “Bob Bezhani,” which went well with my dark complexion and vaguely Middle Eastern features, in a city with the largest ethnic Arab population in the country.

This was an era well before the Internet, cell phones, or Google Maps. Our ability to do our job depended on living the streets, socializing with seedy people, and developing a network of snitches.[5] Six of our undercover officers—Jimmy Fowlkes, Lorenzo Hart, William Pack, Mel Turner, Al Wallace, and James West—were black. They gave us the ability to make buys and do surveillance in communities where a white guy would stand out. Frank Longhi was the unit’s investigator and surveillance expert. Our six white undercover officers were Michael Geldmacher, Gerald Scotti, and me. The other whites were from suburban departments, mainly Dearborn, Livonia, and Wayne State University in central Detroit. (Wayne State sent officers because the students there were in constant uproar against the Vietnam War and our government, and often protested in support of America’s enemies.)

Jimmy Fowlkes had already made heroin buys from the occupants of the house we were about to raid. He wore a bug, and if, for any reason, it quit transmitting or he uttered the prearranged code word, we would hit the house immediately. In making a raid, surprise is everything. Hesitate, and you give the bad guys time to grab weapons and start firing, or flush drugs down toilets.

I usually wore grungy motorcycle clothes with doubled-soled boots for kicking in doors, and a Mickey Mouse watch that was popular with hippies. My fellow officers called me “Iceman” because I was often first through the door. They thought I had nerves of steel, but it wasn’t really that. I just liked the rush.

Lorenzo Hart and I hit the door with a heavy metal ram and smashed it open. We seldom wore protective gear, because Kevlar vests were just coming into service, and our military flak vests were too heavy and cumbersome. As uniform and narcotics officers rushed in, Lorenzo and I charged upstairs into one of the second-floor bedrooms to grab suspects. The ones who didn’t try to run out the doors or jump from windows would usually flee upstairs and hide under beds or in closets, as if we wouldn’t think to look there. The bedroom is often where the dealers stash drugs, money, and weapons, and it’s generally there, in their last refuge, that they decide to fight or not.

Having Lorenzo at my side was a tremendous asset. A stocky former Marine Corps boxer who had served at Guantánamo, he could handle himself well. I carried a 9mm German Walther P1 semiautomatic pistol. (Since cops had revolvers, carrying one would have raised suspicions.) For backup, I kept a .25-caliber “Baby” Browning in a boot holster.

I swung open a bedroom closet door as Lorenzo covered me with a 12-gauge High Standard riot shotgun loaded with five Remington Magnum double-O bucks. Each round contained twelve .32-caliber lead balls. The recoil feels like a mule kick, but the effect on the other end is like being shot with twelve .32-caliber pistols at once.

I pushed away the crammed clothes and junk in the closet with one hand while pointing my pistol inside with the other, in case someone was hiding there. Suddenly, I saw an arm with a pistol leveled right at my chest. With no time to lose, I started to squeeze the long double-action trigger. But just when the sear would have dropped the hammer and fired the weapon, I realized I was staring into my own reflection from a mirror.

“Can you believe that?” I said. “I almost shot a fuckin’ mirror!” Lorenzo laughed, and we charged off to another room.

But we both understood the seriousness of such moments. Sometimes, fear of becoming a laughingstock in front of fellow officers can make a cop hesitate just long enough to cost him or a fellow officer his life.

 * * *

It was another hot summer afternoon in 1971, and I was working on Bill Sherwood’s crew. This time, we were hitting what had once been a big, beautiful upscale house near Wayne State University in Detroit. Its occupants were selling marijuana and hallucinogenic drugs. Gerald Scotti had already made a buy, so we were good to go. Because large amounts of drugs and money were usually on the premises, drug dealers were often more afraid of other dealers ripping them off or killing them than of cops arresting them. So it was safe to assume that they would be armed.

As with most raids, surprise and speed were essential, and so was “violence of action.” This is a tactic used by police and special-operations troops to maintain psychological momentum, or “shock effect,” and get people under control quickly. Any sign of weakness when dealing with dangerous people can fast lead to a breakdown of control, and the consequent police use of deadly force—or, worse, deadly force being used against the police.

When conducting a raid, we typically had uniformed officers present so there could be no mistaking who was at the door, and no excuse for shooting because they “didn’t know it was the police.” To aid in prosecution, we tried to have several buys into the house and, if we could determine the suspect’s name or alias, come armed with a search or arrest warrant. But with a population of 1.4 million in the city, and over a million more throughout the county, there were just too many drug houses and not enough narcotics cops. So we adapted by doing “buy and busts.” That is, we made an undercover purchase and did a field litmus test on the suspected drugs. If specific colors appeared, we had probable cause, and since delivering controlled substances was a felony, no search or arrest warrant was needed. Thus, we could immediately hit the house and arrest the dealer, along with everyone else for the misdemeanor of loitering in a place where an illegal business is conducted.

It was great public relations, too, since most local residents were all for removing from their neighborhoods the unsavory people that drug houses attracted. Also, it gave cops the chance to do background checks and gather intel from those arrested.[6] And if the raid happened in a neighborhood where people didn’t particularly respect the law, the dealer got a memorable send-off: once we rolled away with our prisoners, the neighbors would come in and strip the house of anything valuable.

Both our crews were involved, so we had enough people to do the raid and for two of us to stay outside, secure the cars, and watch in case anyone jumped from a window. (Because speed during a raid was paramount, we didn’t lock our doors, and our cars had weapons, portable radios, and all the necessary paperwork to process those arrested.) Having the paperwork on hand also gave us the ability to turn someone we arrested into a confidential informant (CI), or “snitch.” Then we could go directly to the CI’s supplier and have him introduce an undercover officer so he could make buys later, thereby keeping suspicion from falling on the CI. Then we could raid that house, eventually working our way up the food chain to the top suppliers. At that point, we would collaborate with the feds, who had the money to make major buys.

When Sherwood gave the word “the deal’s down,” everyone sped to the house in their cars and charged out. I was on the ram with Mel Turner. We slammed the door open, and as we ran in I saw a group of people in the front living room, and a guy dashing up a long flight of stairs. I charged after him. The guy made it to the bathroom and was halfway out the window when I grabbed him by the seat of his pants. There was a narrow roof ledge under the window, and from there he could have shinnied down a pipe and gotten away. The bathroom had a shit-stained toilet, and there was piss all over the floor. The guy was freaked out and put up a fight, so we ended up wrestling in the piss on the floor.

I was by myself, but I got on top and cuffed him. I hauled him to his feet and started to walk him away, hanging on to his long hair and the handcuffs. Even then, he kept thrashing about.

As I got to the top of the stairs, still struggling with my captive, Sherwood was at the bottom, shouting, “Where the fuck were you!” Apparently, they’d had problems subduing everyone downstairs.

“I was getting this asshole!” I hollered.

“Then bring his fuckin’ ass down!”

Sherwood was a great officer, but at that moment he was mad as hell. I was standing there covered in piss, when suddenly the prisoner lurched and I lost my balance. We tumbled down the stairs and landed at Sherwood’s feet. I was uninjured, but the prisoner, who bounced down the stairs with his arms cuffed behind him, wasn’t as lucky.

“Here’s his fuckin’ ass!” I said.

Sherwood looked at the prisoner moaning on the floor, then at me, and said, “Next time, don’t go it alone, Iceman, or I’m gonna put you on a tight leash!” 

* * * 

Not far from my home in southwest Detroit was a big two-story duplex on West Grand Boulevard and I-75. Once a very fashionable neighborhood, the area had fallen on hard times. And now, in the summer of 1971, both flats had people dealing drugs. Mel Turner and Michael Geldmacher had already made buys into both homes. Our plan was to raid them simultaneously.

Many drug dealers had Rottweilers or Dobermans. Dogs are loyal, no matter who owns them, and they will fight to the end protecting their turf. Both homes had dogs.

We decided to make forced entries through the front doors, followed quickly by entries through the back doors. A wooden stairway in back led to the back door of the upper flat. As soon as we heard the other officers storming in through the front doors of both units, Al Wallace kicked in the upstairs rear door as I started to do the same downstairs. But as the upstairs door flew open, a snarling Doberman charged out. Al started shooting it with his 9mm pistol. To a big, vicious dog, a nine-millimeter is like an ice pick—it makes a deep puncture, but it just doesn’t have the stopping power of a shotgun. So it took a lot of shots, and every time Al fired, the bullet whizzed right through the wooden porch deck, onto my position.

“Stop! Stop! I’m here!” I hollered, frantically trying to stay out of the way of bullets blasting down through the deck above.

Al killed the dog, and with no time to lose, we each charged inside to back up our fellow officers. We made arrests; confiscated drugs, weapons, and money; and moved on to hit another house. Just another wild day working narcotics in the Detroit Metro Squad. 

* * * 

On Wednesday, December 6, 1972, I was sitting in our Narcotics Bureau sharing a bucket of fried chicken with fellow undercover officer William Pack. We were alone in one of our offices, talking about weapons, when Pack pulled out his new 9mm Browning Hi Power pistol.

“That’s a great gun,” I said, “but I prefer my Walther because it’s double action.”

“But this has a double-stacked mag that holds thirteen rounds,” Pack replied, slapping the magazine back in.

“I know, but it’s single action, and that can be dangerous.”

“How’s that?” Pack asked.

“When I was in Nam, I was showing my Nineteen-eleven to our medic when it went off.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, we were in my hooch and I was playing with the hammer just like you, trying to put it on half cocked, when I almost shot him.”[7]

“No, shit,” Pack said when suddenly, POW! The 9mm went off. The bullet zipped past my head and out the large plate-glass window behind me.[8]

“Wow! That was fuckin’ close!” I cried.

“I’m sorry, man!” Pack said, setting his weapon down. “Think anybody heard?”

“I don’t know about anyone else, but my ears are still ringing.”

Pack and I waited for the rush of officers to charge in with guns drawn, ready for a fight, but nothing happened. We looked outside the second-story window at the dozens of black and white scout cars parked in the lot. Nobody was there. So I grabbed a chicken bone, stuck it in the bullet hole, and said, “Good kill, Pack!” We laughed, and I took a picture of Pack standing next to the window holding his 9mm.

Somehow, no one ever said anything about the window. I think it was because of the crazy times and the danger of our job. Two of our twelve undercover officers, Lorenzo Hart and Mel Turner, were shot in Detroit by criminals using .30-caliber M1 carbines. Lorenzo lost a lung but survived. He was one of the most loyal officers I knew. Mel Turner recovered from his wound and later became undersheriff. Other officers from our bureau became inspectors, police chiefs, federal agents, or heads of security.[9]

In March 1973, Pack and I were transferred out of the Narcotics Bureau for disciplinary reasons. My department and the feds had come down on me when they realized that I had illegally converted a .30-caliber M1 carbine into a selective-fire M2 carbine—that is, I had made a machine gun, which I kept in the trunk of the car. As a result, I was assigned to uniformed motorized patrol. Meanwhile, Pack had to work the county jail. Seven years later, in 1980, I returned to the bureau as a detective sergeant and crew chief.[10]

During the fifteen years I served as a cop, I was shot at three times—once by bad guys and twice, accidentally, by other cops—all while working narcotics in the early 1970s.[11] It sounds odd, but working narcotics was the most fun I had in my life.[12]

_____________________________________

[1] When I became a detective and went to our morgue, I would occasionally see a young mother laid out on a gurney, dead from an overdose, with her infant at her feet, dead from neglect.

[2] Sheriff Lucas was a West Indian orphan, raised by his aunt in the Bronx. He was a high school track star, New York City undercover cop, law school grad, former FBI agent, and the most qualified sheriff Wayne County ever had. Though I was suspended four times without pay under his watch, I loved the guy because he gave me the opportunity to learn and move on. He was sheriff during 1970‑82, and Wayne County executive during 1983‑87.

[3] Vahan Kapagian had served in World War II at Saipan and Guam, as a 17-year-old Seabee. He contracted malaria but then served on destroyers and in the Marine Corps until joining the Detroit Police Department in 1954. He was in five shootouts but was never injured until he suffered a motorcycle accident in 1973. He retired as a lieutenant. Of all the officers I served with, Vahan was the best at understanding criminal minds. His wisdom and humor were matched only by his genuine concern for his men. Vahan is 88 now and in failing health, but I routinely call to swap stories and chuckle at his “colorful” descriptions of people and events.

[4] When I worked the Wayne County Jail in Detroit in 1970, we had about 1,100 inmates. Two inmates on my floor were John Sinclair, a Wayne State University grad student, and his “Secretary of Defense,” Lawrence “Pun” Plamondon. Both were radical revolutionaries in the White Panther Party and had previously been arrested by the FBI for bombing a CIA office in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Later, in cooperation with the FBI, Vahan Kapagian infiltrated a drug ring and arrested John Sinclair for the second time, for possession of marijuana.

[5] People become narcotics informants for many reasons. Some want a break on criminal charges they are facing. Some just need money for drugs. Some call in anonymously to eliminate competitors, want to divert us from larger activities, are seeking revenge for bad drugs or high prices, want to play narcotics cop, want the police to owe them a favor, or want inside knowledge of narcotics officers. Some are scorned women or betrayed lovers. And every now and then, people do it because they’re just decent citizens.

[6] In the nineteenth century, Mark Twain quipped, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.” It should be noted that drug statistics are among the most unreliable of all crime data. When different agencies work together, contributing significant manpower to a task, they often add the arrests, drugs, and weapons confiscations to each department’s records. It’s still common practice, and these inflated stats are reported to the FBI and the public annually, just as, conversely, some communities underreport crime so they will appear safer. Only in homicides where there is an actual body accompanying the crime can the statistic be accepted as reflecting reality.

[7] The medic was Forrest Decker. We pulled seven long-range patrols together and stayed friends throughout the years, but he never came back into my hooch after the accidental discharge.

[8] For confidence and luck, I carried an 1879 silver dollar that my father, Edmond, had given me when I entered the army. The coin’s date is when his father, Alie, was born, and my dad had stamped my initials, “R.C.A.,” on its face. His coin was with me on every parachute jump I ever made in the States and in Europe, and on every patrol in Vietnam. I carried it always as a cop and finally removed it from my pocket when I retired on December 5, 1984. I gave it to my daughter, Catherine, who is now a major in the United States Air Force.

[9] One former narcotics officer and friend, Gerald Scotti, killed himself in Redondo Beach, California, after murdering a man. (See www.robertankony.com/blog/running-shoes.)

[10] For another second-floor narcotics story, see www.robertankony.com/blog/party-store-adventure.

[11] At 10:15 p.m. Wednesday, August 11, 1971, while I was conducting a raid in Detroit with Central Narcotics, one of the occupants shot through the door as we were ramming it open.

[12] Before becoming a cop, during the year I served as an Army Ranger in Vietnam, I was shot at by the enemy on only a few occasions. But friendly fire happened frequently. This included South Vietnamese soldiers shooting at us during the Tet Offensive, a quad .50-caliber machine gun crew testing its weapons and mistakenly lighting up our small reconnaissance team’s position outside their base, near hits by cold, impersonal mortars and artillery, helicopter door gunners strafing us, and deadly helicopter gunships mistaking us for the enemy and firing rockets and miniguns at us. And there were equally scary random events: narrowly escaping the slashing rotors as a helicopter crashed down on my position in A Shau Valley, getting stalked (twice) by tigers, and a McGuire rig extraction gone horribly wrong at Khe Sanh.

Most people Downriver know my husband, Bob Ankony, as the “Tan Running Man of Grosse Ile.” Bob has been running the island and throughout Downriver since 1979.

Bob runs in all weather, from below zero to above a hundred. Oddly enough, as he gets older, he enjoys running in the heat more and more. He comes alive in hot, humid weather—says the heat acts as a natural lubricant for aging joints—and he loves the idea that wherever he is, he can always run home. On average, he runs 2,800 miles a year. So far, he’s run more than 130,000 miles. That’s more than five laps around the earth—more than half the distance to the moon. And he has logged a lot of those miles in faraway places such as Stalingrad, Moscow, Leningrad, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Okinawa.

On the island, he could be seen running anywhere from Hennepin Pointe in the north to Hickory Island and the Ford Yacht Club in the south. His favorite runs were two fourteen-mile off-island routes. Since pedestrians couldn’t use the toll bridge, Bob always ran across the county bridge with his dogs and then headed either north or south. The north route would take him to Sibley and Fort, and the south route to Gibraltar and Fort, then back to Van Horn and the bridge. If it was hot and sunny, he would add a couple of miles and make a sixteen-miler to Southgate Lowes or Allen Road and back.

I often dropped him and our dogs off at Sam’s Club, and they would run home as I shopped, or on summer days I’d drop them off by the Edison Plant in Monroe County and they’d run all the way back on Jefferson. Bob knew where all the watering holes and fruit trees were for his dogs. Along the way, he’d pick mulberries, apples, and pears and share them with his loyal running partners. And once they crossed back onto the island, they would swim in the Trenton Channel, where I’d meet them on my bike, and we all would head home.

I think Bob is happiest when he’s running. This past summer, he suffered plantar fasciitis, a painful long-term foot injury that prevented him from running. So to work up a sweat and burn off energy, he cycled daily twenty-one miles to Lincoln Park and back home.

Two of Bob’s most memorable running experiences involved saving lives. The first incident happened in the Ferry Woods not far from our home, on a hot summer afternoon, Tuesday, August 29, 1995. I was cycling alongside Bob when we came upon a young teenage boy sitting slumped off a dirt trail, with a man standing over him. Bob asked if they were okay, and the man said, “Yeah, we’re all right. He just fell off his bike.”

But something seemed odd. The boy had dirt all over him and wasn’t talking, so Bob asked again if they were okay.

In a quiet voice, the kid said, “Please, don’t go! He’s trying to kill me!” The kid’s shirt was off, and he had footprints on the skin of his chest from being repeatedly stomped on. Apparently, the man was lying in wait to rape a girl, and when the long-haired teenager came sailing by on his bike, he made the wrong grab. Then, realizing that his victim was a boy, he stomped on him and was in the process of dragging him to the Thoroughfare Canal to drown him.

Bob helped the young boy up, then grabbed the man, whose ankle was sprained or broken during the incident, and hauled him out of the woods. I walked ahead with the boy to the nearest house and called an ambulance and the police. Bob later testified at the Thirty-third District Court, along with SGT Joe Porcarelli of the Grosse Ile Police. The boy's attacker, 28-year-old Brett Wilson Sowers, was charged with assault with intent to commit murder but was found guilty of felonious assault. (He went to prison and died nineteen years later, on Wednesday, August 12, 2015.)

The other incident took place in Killeen, Texas, in 2005, when Bob and I were at an Army Rangers reunion. Bob had just been down with heat exhaustion for two days. After feeling nauseated for the entire flight, he had immediately gone on a long run as soon as we arrived in the humid ninety-six-degree heat. By Friday, June 24, he was feeling better, so he got out of bed and took off, believing, as always, that a run is good for what ails you. About an hour later, he was cutting through a parking lot when he heard faint cries. “Please help! Please help!” Stopping, he looked inside a car and saw an elderly woman lying on the front seat. She was barely conscious and fumbling weakly with the latch, trying to open the door. Bob couldn’t open any of the doors. He didn’t know whether she was suffering from heat exhaustion or something else—only that if she wasn’t rescued soon, she would be dead. Fortunately, cell phones were common by then, and he called the police, who got the woman out.

Bob’s worst running memory happened on Grosse Ile, when one of his young dogs, Sergeant, climbed over our backyard fence and caught up to Bob, who was running with his other dog, Ranger, on Parke Lane. Before Bob could do anything, Sergeant darted across the street and was hit by a car. Sergeant died in Bob’s arms.

On a lighter note, many kids on Grosse Ile knew that Bob had served in Vietnam, was once a cop, and had traveled to the Soviet Union in 1989, the same year it collapsed. They would ask him so many hilarious questions as he ran, he started collecting them and writing them down: “Don’t you gotta run because you got a bullet in your heart and if you stop running the bullet will move and you’ll die?” Or “I saw you in the newspaper, and my dad said you’re a spy for the CIA. Is that true?” Or “I heard you run because you lost a lot of friends in Vietnam.” Bob tried to dispel the rumors by explaining that he simply loved running. But they still preferred to believe that he was instrumental in toppling the Soviet Empire and ending the Cold War, among many other theories.

After decades of running in Michigan winters and tolerating the dark, overcast skies, it was finally time to move where Bob had always wanted to be: by an ocean where he could live his dream of perfect weather and an endless sunny beach to run on. That dream place was in southern California, where members of our family were already living or in the process of relocating. We chose a home in Huntington Beach, “Surf City USA,” just five houses away from a harbor beach, and a mile from the open ocean.

Upon arriving in California, Bob could do short runs and recover from his plantar fasciitis till he was back up to fourteen-milers. He usually runs south on the beach, to Huntington Beach Pier, where he stops and has a Pepsi or jelly doughnuts, or else heads north to the Seal Beach Pier to reward himself with a Cold Stone ice cream. Other than those little snacks, he never eats till after dark and then eats only one meal a day. I think it’s a habit he picked up in Vietnam or maybe from working odd police shifts.

When Bob enlisted in the Army, he had accomplished little more than a junior high school education and many run-ins with the police. At the age of 17, he became a paratrooper and served in Germany, where he earned his GED. He then volunteered for Vietnam and became a member of one of the world’s elite infantry forces, the US Army Rangers. He served during the two biggest battles of the war: the Tet Offensive and the siege of Khe Sanh, and saw combat in A Shau Valley, near Laos. After returning home as a highly decorated Ranger, he became an undercover narcotics officer and a detective sergeant with the Wayne County Sheriff’s Department.

Bob retired as one of the most decorated officers in the 1,200-man department. As for his GED, that proved to be the launching point into an academic career spanning nearly three decades. He has an insatiable appetite for knowledge and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan; a master’s in correctional sciences from the University of Detroit; and an MS, an MA, and a PhD in sociology (criminology) from Wayne State University. He now writes criminological, firearms, and military articles for scientific and professional journals and special-interest magazines.

Bob misses all the people who have waved, honked, and stopped to talk with him or give him and his dogs water through the years. And he loved to hear their stories of how they grew up seeing him out there running, over the years and decades, whatever the weather. Several people shared that they were raised Downriver, moved away, and moved back years later, pleasantly amazed to find him still running with his dogs, anywhere and everywhere. Bob wants to let everyone know that he’s still running and that his fourteen-year-old black dog, Sarge, is doing fine, though arthritis limits him to only a couple of miles. All Bob’s running dogs lived for fourteen to sixteen years, and most continued to run until their very last days.

Bob will return for visits Downriver from time to time, and when he does, you’ll see him running his favorite route on Fort Street. To keep up with him, please visit his new Facebook page “The TAN Running MAN of Grosse Ile and Beyond,” www.facebook.com/ankony.robert, or his Web site at www.robertankony.com.

 _____________________________________

 This article was originally published in the Ile Camera on Friday, January 2, 2015, and by the News-Herald, on Sunday, January 4,  2015.

It was 1966, and the United States was at war again, this time in Southeast Asia, fighting Communists in South Vietnam. Our forces were also holding the line against the same foe in Europe and in faraway places such as Korea. My name is Bill Carpenter, and I was 24 years old. I had just graduated in March from Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, with a bachelor of science degree in wildlife management. I’m originally from the hills of West Virginia, but my family moved to Denver after I graduated from high school.

Ever since Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, the fighting in Vietnam was increasingly on the news. The resolution granted President Lyndon Johnson virtually unlimited power to stop the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia. In the spring of 1965, the president sent several thousand marines to assist the 23,000 US military advisers already there. In August, the US Army’s First Cavalry Division followed that commitment with its 20,000 men and 450 helicopters. This first-of-its-kind “airmobile” division was based at Camp Radcliff, along Route 19, by An Khe City in the Central Highlands. This was where US military strategists thought the enemy planned to cut South Vietnam in half with one powerful thrust from Cambodia to the South China Sea.

At home, an antiwar movement was developing because of the draft, our increasing casualties, and a growing sentiment that South Vietnam’s government was more oppressive than the North’s. The sharp rise in US causalities began in November 1965, when members of the First Cavalry fought the first large-scale battle against the North Vietnamese Army (NVA).[1] It happened in the Ia Drang Valley, west of Camp Radcliff. In that short four-day fight, the First Cav suffered 237 men killed.[2] The enemy lost more than 1,500 men, many of them from close-support air strikes and B-52 bombardments.

Military life was not a tradition in my family, and I didn’t want to go to war. But I was a college grad who had been in ROTC, and I figured I could serve my country as an army officer. I was sworn into the army on Tuesday, May 10, 1966, with the understanding that upon completing basic training and advanced individual training (AIT) as an infantryman, I would attend Officer Candidate School (OCS).

During AIT, a few second lieutenants who had just finished OCS gave us pep talks. The message I got was that OCS basically resembled a college fraternity initiation that lasted six months. Though it was probably not the intent of the talks, I heard a lot of stories about pranks and not much about learning to lead. I knew I would head for Vietnam and be given a platoon of about thirty-six men to keep alive. I also knew that if I was going to be a competent officer, I needed real military experience. So I dropped OCS and became just another army private.

I finished AIT at the end of September and was assigned to the Third Infantry Regiment, “the Old Guard,” at Arlington National Cemetery, just across the Potomac River from Washington, DC. The Old Guard, the oldest active-duty regiment in the US Army, has been around since 1784. Our mission was ceremonial: to honor fallen soldiers and visiting foreign dignitaries. The Vietnam War was still ramping up, so the army started gutting units Stateside and in Europe to meet the demand. Since the Old Guard was, first and foremost, an infantry unit, we all knew we might see combat.

Thursday, January 5, 1967, twelve men from my platoon and one guard of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier––where three men lay interred after sacrificing not only their lives but their very identities in answering our nation’s call––received orders assigning us to the Ninetieth Replacement Battalion in Vietnam.

* * *

On Wednesday, March 15, 1967, I arrive in Vietnam at Ton Son Nhut, a massive army and air force base near Saigon. Five days later, I’m assigned to the First Cavalry Division. I figure an infantryman is an infantryman, so it doesn’t matter where I go. I’m just glad I’m not a marine up by the DMZ—those guys are getting the shit shot out of them. I’m flown north to Camp Radcliff, at An Khe. Camp Radcliff is a large base not far from the Ia Drang Valley, where, two years back, more than 200 cavalrymen were killed and over 500 wounded.

While I’m at the First Cav’s Replacement Center, Captain James D. James, from the division’s Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols––small, heavily armed teams that patrol deep in enemy-held territory—comes to talk to us about joining. His unit, LRRP (pronounced “Lurp”) Detachment G2, became operational just months before, on January 1, 1967, and is under the direct command of division intelligence (G2).[3] Captain James is a Special Forces‑trained officer who previously commanded the Airborne Recon Platoon, First Combat Aviation Company (Provisional), in Verona, Italy. He emphasizes that all LRRPs are volunteers and that we can leave his unit at any time, with no repercussions. He also says we won’t be put on a team until after we complete LRRP training by his cadre. After that, if we don’t uphold professional standards, we’ll be reassigned out of his unit. This sounds a lot like the “real military experience” I was looking for, and I’m thinking, Why not? I’ll be with better-trained troops, who will keep me safer.

When Captain James speaks with me, I tell him, “The West Virginia hills where I was raised are a lot like the Vietnam hills. And I spent years hunting and camping, so sleeping on the ground in the rain won’t be anything new.”

Captain James takes my name, and Tuesday, March 28, 1967, I’m shipped farther north to Company A, First Battalion, Eighth Cavalry Regiment––one of our division’s infantry regiments––at Landing Zone (LZ) English. The LZ is just off Route 1, near Bong Son Village and the South China Sea. My company executive officer (XO) is a Montana State grad who, like me, has a degree in wildlife management. He says, “Hang in a few weeks. You’ll be better use to us as a ‘Remington raider’”—that is, a company clerk, so called because desk jobs often mean using a Remington typewriter.

Since I’m a private, I spend the next week doing maintenance on the barbed wire and bunkers along our perimeter and pulling nighttime security. I also get intimately acquainted with the true meaning of the term “shit detail.” The infamous task known as “shit burning” involves using a tent pole to haul cutoff fifty-five-gallon drums out from under latrines, dousing the contents with fuel, and stirring it while it burns. The black smoke is vile, and I do my best to stay upwind.

Six days later, Monday, April 3, my XO hands me orders transferring me to the LRRPs. He’s ticked because he had offered me a safe job with his company, and the LRRPs are getting a reputation for taking the best men from field units. I look at my orders and pause, wondering whether I made the right decision. But I figure, the LRRPs will be a challenge, and the real job of a soldier is to be out in the field, keeping other men alive.

Five other soldiers and I return to the LRRPs at Camp Radcliff. Since the unit is new, it has only eighteen men—and, now, the six of us. Captain James is the commanding officer, Lieutenant Ron Hall is XO, Sergeant First Class (SFC) Fred Kelly is first sergeant, Staff Sergeant (SSG) Tom Campbell is our operations sergeant, and SSG Rudy Torres is our communications specialist. The unit has only two six-man teams: Team 1, led by SSG Ron Christopher, and Team 2, led by SSG Pat O’Brien. We new guys set up our tent and then spend a few days scrounging around Camp Radcliff, “requisitioning” canvas cots from other units (never mind the paperwork).

US Army Special Forces have been training South Vietnamese soldiers (ARVNs) and conducting covert operations in Vietnam since 1957, perfecting the art of long-range patrolling along the Cambodian and Laotian borders. But the idea of division LRRP units is new. In Europe, two LRRP companies, D and C, were attached to V Corps in Frankfurt and VII Corps in Stuttgart. But because of South Vietnam’s dense mountainous, often uninhabited terrain and the questionable loyalty of the locals––we’re fighting both conventional forces from the North and local guerrillas, the Vietcong (VC)––it is decided that every US Army division and brigade will respectively have a company or platoon of LRRPs. This way, every divisional or brigade commander can always have eyes and ears in the field to report where the enemy is and where he isn’t.

US Marines already employ a reconnaissance battalion attached to each division, modeled off the Marine Raiders of World War II. But their teams are eight- to twelve-man squads equipped with heavy 7.62mm M14 rifles and belt-fed 7.62mm M60 machine guns to take on the enemy. The army follows the Fifth Special Forces Group’s principle of using five- or six-man teams, which are much stealthier than larger platoons, provided with some of the latest weapons and dehydrated LRRP rations, and supported by the most modern rotary aircraft in existence. The tradeoff is, the odds are against us if we make direct enemy contact. Thus, our mission is to engage the enemy only as a last resort. If we do our job right and have that vital ingredient, luck, we’ll discover the enemy without being seen, and direct air strikes, artillery, or large infantry units to kill them.

Our training will be by the other noncommissioned officers (NCOs) in our unit. Fortunately, most of the NCOs are Ranger trained, which mean they have graduated from one of the finest light-infantry courses in the world. They’re also experienced, having served in the field with line infantry units and, now, as LRRPs.

Team 1 has been pulling missions since January, and Team 2 since February. They have targeted and killed numerous enemy troops while remaining undetected and haven’t made serious direct contact with the enemy yet.

For the next two weeks, SFC Kelly and SSG Torres teach us everything they know. And our XO, tall, thin LT Hall, loves to run, so when it comes time for daily PT, he runs the wind out of us. The training is intense and focused on weapons, explosives, radio procedures and techniques for calling in airstrikes and artillery, first aid, the art of patrolling, and enemy organization and strength. I had a lot of training about topography maps and first aid when I served in the Civil Air Patrol in high school and as a Forest Service hotshot fire crew member in Colorado, so no problem there. But I’m not comfortable with radios, and the idea of calling in air and artillery strikes worries me. SSG Torres is intimidating, though, and he makes sure I learn.

We complete training in mid-April, just as several more new guys come in to train for Team 4. We’re issued tigerstripe camouflage fatigues worn only by special-operations troops such as the Army Special Forces, Navy SEALs, and LRRPs. We’re also issued 5.56mm CAR-15 carbines, “Commando Armalite rifles,” instead of the larger 5.56mm M16 rifles that most army infantrymen carry.

Team 1 is now down to four members. One member completed his yearlong tour and was rotated home, and the other was transferred out. It is the army’s policy at the time to rotate men in and out of combat as individuals, not as units. Our team positions are Art Guerrero, front scout; John Simones, team leader (TL); David Ives (one of the new guys who came with me, communications specialist with the Second Battalion, Twelfth Cavalry), radiotelephone operator (RTO); Geoff Koper, medic; Doug Fletcher assistant team leader (ATL); with me as rear scout. Simones is a sergeant and I’m a private first class, but everyone else is a corporal. And other than David Ives, who is 20, we’re all in our mid-twenties.

We’ll soon be heading out on a mission, so the other team members take David Ives and me to the NCO club on base for a few beers, to get to know each other. From inside the club, a jukebox keeps playing the Beatles’ newly released “Strawberry Fields Forever.” An hour later, as we all walk back to our unit, John Simones starts humming the song and David Ives joins in: “Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about . . .” The melody is comforting on this dark night, in this strange country.[4]

Art was raised in Denver’s inner city and served with the Fifth Battalion, Seventh Calvary Regiment—Custer’s old outfit. He earned a Silver Star––our nation’s third-highest medal for gallantry––in the An Lao Valley, where the NVA and VC had a long-established sanctuary. John served in the Marine Force Recon in Southern Europe before coming to the army, where he believed promotions happened faster. Geoff was a combat medic who served in the Forty-Seventh Medical Battalion. Doug served with the Fifth Battalion, Seventh Cavalry Regiment, and was also awarded a Silver Star for action in the An Lao Valley. Everyone but David Ives and me had several months in-country before coming to the LRRPs. They’re experienced and have pulled about ten missions as LRRPs. They will take care of David Ives and me.

At dusk, Thursday, April 20, 1967, Team 1 is inserted by helicopter into our area of operation, north of Camp Radcliff and An Khe. We’re put in at the head of a shallow valley, where a stream begins on top of a 2,000-foot mountain. The surrounding slopes are covered with double- and triple-canopy forest, but clear areas lie along the stream. Intelligence has it that small Vietcong units are operating in this area and grouping together for attacks. By using established trails, an enemy battalion of 600 men could leave this mountain; spend a day traveling, and attack Camp Radcliff that night.

It’s hot and humid, and the mosquitoes start in on us as soon as our birds lift away. We are to follow this southwest-flowing stream and look for any sign of the enemy, since people never stray too far from a reliable source of water. We will stay in the field for seven days with only what we’re carrying. Thus, having a source of water is as vital for us as for the enemy, because no one can carry a week’s supply.

The closest US Army troops are at Camp Radcliff, fifteen kilometers south. The nearest friendlies of any kind are at Kan Nak, seven kilometers away. Kan Nak is where this stream empties into the Song Ba River. The Green Berets once had a base there, but only ARVNs are there now. Our escape-and-evasion plan, if we should make contact and can’t get extracted, is to hightail it on foot to Kan Nak.

We are outside our artillery cover. And because of the mountains and the lack of any radio relay points, radio contact will be difficult. We have only one twenty-three-pound PRC-25 radio and two spare batteries. The PRC-25 has a range of twenty-four kilometers, but that’s in ideal terrain and weather conditions. It is VHF, which has more range than the lower frequencies and can penetrate adverse weather. But VHF doesn’t hug the earth as well, and here, bracketed by the wall of mountains around us, its effectiveness will be limited.

We are to radio only a brief situation report, once in the morning and once in the evening, so that enemy troops listening in on radios can’t triangulate our position. Most of the time, to make radio contact, our tactical operations center (TOC) at Camp Radcliff will need to put a chopper in the air.

On our second day, Friday, April 21, we continue downstream, making our way through thick eight-foot-high elephant grass. I quickly learn more than I ever wanted to know about leeches. The elephant grass is loaded with them. Walk a hundred meters; pick off six or eight leeches; walk, and pick off six or eight more.

We hear someone chopping wood—not necessarily a problem, since some friendly locals live out here. I later hear a hen cackling, but apparently, they run wild in the Central Highlands. This isn’t West Virginia; chickens didn’t necessarily mean people. It’s going to take some time getting the hang of all this.

Saturday morning, April 22, we move through open timber and into thick new-growth jungle, still gradually descending into the valley. Unable to see more than ten or fifteen feet in any direction, we move slowly to keep as quiet as possible. We stop in this dense foliage and eat a LRRP ration—the first meal of the day. With the heat and humping heavy gear, we’re low on water, and all our rations are dehydrated.

Art and I take the canteens down to the stream, about forty meters away, but on the way we discover a major trail––a “high-speeder.” The tall timber keeps the trail hidden from aircraft. Only someone on the ground can see it. Finding this sort of thing is exactly why the LRRPs are out here. This trail is wide and smooth enough to drive a jeep on. This means it sees a lot of foot traffic and is likely an enemy transit route that leads directly to An Khe and Camp Radcliff.

A thatched hut stands on low stilts by the trail. The trail runs close to the hooch and curves below it. There are several firing positions on the downhill side of the hooch, overlooking the trail. The door to the hooch is on the uphill side, and Art and I don’t see or hear anyone.

Art decides to check out the hooch. We left our rucksacks with the rest of the team, but we’re carrying our rifles, wearing our web gear with ammo pouches and grenades. Art peeks inside and sees papers on a shelf. I pull security while he goes after the papers. Art is a big guy and his web gear gets stuck in the small door.

Hearing non-English voices from the other side of the hooch, I let Art know we have company. He gets free from the door without making any noise and hand signals me to get back to our team while he pulls rear security.

The high-speed trail lies between me and the welcoming cover of the jungle. I take off too fast and hit the brush too hard—this by a guy who spent his life in the woods and knows how not to spook the game. Back across the trail, Art links up with me again. He says a woman and several men were on the other side of the hooch, and when I hit the brush, she screamed and threw what she was carrying up in the air. They’re wearing the typical black pajamas—most likely Vietcong.

We get back to the team, and they ask what took us so long to go forty meters. We quickly explain and call in a situation report to TOC—which takes several attempts because of our radio’s limitations. We’ll get water another time.

A hillside across the stream from us has a clearing big enough to get a chopper in, but it’s getting late. John decides to move across beside the clearing and set up for the night in case we need to be extracted. We hear something behind us as we moved––we have an enemy trailer.

After crossing the stream, we buttonhook near the clearing to see if we can pick up our trailer. This is a standard maneuver going all the way back to Rogers’ Rangers during the French and Indian Wars.[5] The team simply curls back onto its own trail to see if anyone is following. We set an ambush but see no one. When it’s darker, we move about thirty meters to a position that John checked before we buttonhooked.

Procedure permits a team leader who believes his team has been compromised to call for an extraction. Since we didn’t detect a trailer and since our job is to find the enemy, who we now know is out there, Simones decides to continue the patrol. Also, there’s a nagging suspicion at headquarters that Simones doesn’t want to reinforce: a LRRP team leader was recently transferred out of our unit for emptying his magazine into the jungle and radioing for an extraction when the other team members knew that no one was there.[6]

We set up a night defensive position in a small cove with heavy brush around us and place claymore mines facing likely enemy approaches. We have the open field uphill and are in an excellent fighting position should the enemy decide to take us on.

Art Guerrero and Geoff Koper, our front scout and medic, take a position slightly downhill and to the right of me. David Ives, our RTO, is to my left, next to a huge tree with big exposed roots. Behind the tree, facing the other direction, are our TL, John Simones, and our ATL, Doug Fletcher.

In the middle of the night, we hear movement. It’s pitch black, and we can’t see anything, but something is approaching Art and Geoff. They raise their CAR-15s, ready to fire but not wanting to shoot prematurely and give away our position. Meanwhile, the noise keeps coming and getting steadily louder. Just as they’re ready to fire, they hear snorting and snuffling that sounds like a wild boar. It heads away, but just in case the enemy is out there, I pull out the eight-inch Buck hunting knife I brought from home. I’m wondering what it’s like to kill a man in hand-to-hand combat.

When my turn comes to rest, I sleep well. I’m exhausted from humping eighty-five pounds through the jungle all day. I don’t know how Geoff does it—he weighs only 150 pounds.

Sunday, April 23, 1967, is our fourth day in the field. David Ives and I are sleeping side by side, sharing a poncho liner to protect us from the bugs. We wake for the five to seven a.m. watch. Not a morning person, I sit leaning against my pack, which is propped against the tree. There’s a good chance the enemy is still searching for us, so I try not to sit too high. But I don’t want to lie down too flat, either, and risk nodding off.

There’s another problem. The LRRP rations, the malaria pills, or maybe the stream water has given me diarrhea. It’s about six a.m., and the sun is rising. I tell Dave, pick up my rifle and some toilet paper, and walk a short distance away to let ’er rip. Then I go back and sit against my pack while the other men stir a little, ready to start another day.

The next thing I know, a bright flash dazzles my eyes and I’m lying ten feet down the hill. A hand grenade has gone off, and I just became the LRRP’s first wounded in action. I can’t hear a thing and feel no pain, but I know I’m hit. Shrapnel has chewed up my face and left arm, and I’m covered in dirt, sweat, and blood.

I crawl back up the hill to my weapon and rucksack. The explosion has also hit my rucksack, the tree, and, I think, Dave Ives. As I approach my pack, a burst of automatic gunfire hits the ground in front of me, spitting dirt and rocks up into my face. I come out of my daze and realize that one of the “rocks” is a ricocheted bullet. The round goes through my lower left jaw and breaks it, taking out a bunch of teeth.

The impact knocks me out. After this, events come as intermittent flashes of awareness.

During periods of semiconsciousness, I want to cover my sector by returning fire, but I can’t see. I feel a disturbing lump dangling under my left eye and reach up to touch it. The pressure I put on the lump makes me dizzy, and I realize that this is what remains of my left eye and lower eyelid. I wipe dirt and blood out of my right eye, and for a moment I can see. I think that with just the right pressure, I’ll be able be able to hold my left eye in place and return fire.

I try to raise my rifle and fire, but my left arm is too weak to support it. I realize that the grenade tore muscles from my forearm, which are hanging out in shreds, and that one of my knuckles is torn open and broken. With my right hand, I try to shove the muscles back into my arm, where they belong. It doesn’t work, so I prop up my left arm and rifle with my right hand, but when I move my right hand to the trigger, the rifle sinks. Damn, I think, I need another hand!

When the grenade went off, Dave and I were shoulder to shoulder. The grenade exploded to my left—on Dave’s side of me. Through my blurred vision, I can see he’s lying on his back, next to the radio. I can’t see any wounds on him, but he’s not moving, and somehow, I know, Dave is dead. I later learn he was wounded shouting for help and lived long enough to get the radio operational with the long-range antenna—just before he took a round to the head.[7]

I can hear automatic rifle fire and smell gunpowder and explosives. I’m slipping in and out of consciousness more rapidly and still feel no pain. Art reaches up and yanks my foot to wake me. The nerve damage from the bullet and the grenade has almost deafened me. I hear high-pitched ringing in my right ear, echoing cracks and the earth shaking from grenades exploding, and Art shouting, “Get me the radio!”

“I can’t see to return fire!” I yell.

“I know! Just get the radio!”

“But Dave’s dead!” I shout.

“I know! That’s why I need the radio!”

Dave’s rucksack and the radio in it are on the other side of Dave. Still hearing weapons firing, I crawl on top of Dave to reach his pack. Blood is pouring from my face and arm onto his body. The pack and radio weigh sixty-five pounds. I grab it with my right hand but can’t pick it up. So I try sliding it down to Art, but I can’t, because I’m lying on my chest, and with one hand it’s too heavy and I’m too weak. I don’t get it all the way to Art.

Suddenly, I hear Art yelling, “I’m hit!” He’s shot through a leg and a shoulder, but he’s still fighting, using our sawed-off 40mm M-79 grenade launcher, lobbing one high-explosive fragmentation round after another at the enemy, who are spread out behind a small nearby ridge.

John and Doug are on the other side of the tree, and they must be okay, because I can hear them firing. The twenty-round magazines in our rifles are loaded with tracers, so on initial contact the enemy see solid streams of red tracers sailing at them and, hopefully, think there are more of us.

Our medic, Geoff, starts crawling up the embankment to help me and to check on Dave, not knowing for certain that Dave is dead. As he reaches me, Geoff suddenly takes a round to the left shoulder and is knocked unconscious. I’m hit again by another round, which slices through my left hip and sails out the thigh without hitting bones.

We’re losing the battle, but I’m not experiencing fear. Okay, you’re bleeding, but do your job, soldier! The other guys’ lives depend on you!

I try again to return fire but have the same problem with my arm.

Geoff comes to and grabs the radio but is incoherent from his wound. Art finally grabs it and lets TOC know we need the Quick Reaction Force (QRF) and a medevac.

The enemy tries to seize the moment and overrun us in one desperate charge. There are about a dozen of them. Perhaps they think there are only the four of us who are either wounded or dead. Our TL and ATL, John Simones and Doug Fletcher, have been firing from behind the roots on the far side of the tree, but apparently, in all the noise and confusion, the enemy doesn’t know they are there—until suddenly, John and Doug stand up and boldly face the attackers. They raise their CAR-15s, flick the selectors to auto, and fire aimed bursts. Art Guerrero, lying on the ground closest to the enemy, takes aim with the grenade launcher and fires another high-explosive round at the attackers. He sees it hit a woman in the chest and explode. Her head flies up in the air, arms fly outward, legs drop, and the torso disappears in a pinkish mist.

John yells, “Take cover!” We duck, and he squeezes the small handheld generator of a claymore mine facing the enemy. It detonates, shaking the earth and hurling 700 eighth-inch steel balls at the enemy at 4,000 feet per second.

The enemy stop their attack and retreat. John and Doug rush to take care of our wounds, and I pass out again.

The first chopper arrives. It’s from the 229th Assault Helicopter Battalion and is piloted by Warrant Officer James Bracewell, a former air force enlisted man and Distinguished Flying Cross recipient who now regularly inserts and extracts our LRRP teams. The QRF isn’t airborne, so Bracewell keys the intercom to his copilot and two door gunners.

“Guys, we got six LRRPs down there. One’s dead and three’s wounded. We can wait for more birds and risk hauling out six bodies, or go in now and risk putting four more bodies on the ground. Your call?”[8]

The helicopter lands in the open field just up the hill.

I come to, and Doug is carrying me to the Huey. Still no pain, but I hear rotor noise, and Doug has me in his arms like a baby. I’m six feet and weigh 225, and Doug is six-two and 210 pounds—not big enough to carry me alone. And yet, he’s doing it. John is walking beside him. I think he’s carrying someone.

Suddenly, I realize my rifle is in my left hand. My right side is toward Doug, and the rifle is dangling down. Is the weapon on safe? What if the trigger catches a branch, and a bullet hits someone? I better check the safety. I can’t flex my left arm, so I move my right hand to check the rifle.

Doug says, “It’s okay; it’s over . . . it’s over.” His voice is calm, like a father comforting a child after a bad dream. I pass out again.

I come to, and it’s cool. We’re up in the air, heading to Camp Radcliff, and wind is rushing over my body. I lift my head and see my blood on the chopper floor. If I can see my blood, I must be alive. I look out the side of the chopper at the forest below: so green, so quiet, so calm, just like my old West Virginia hills. It would be fun to walk in the woods, to watch the squirrels. Maybe I can take the old redtick out and let him run a coon.

I see feet to my left. There’s a pool of blood around the feet. Someone is sitting on the bench. It’s Art, and he says, “We’re safe now, buddy. Lay down.” I raise my head and look to my right and see another pair of feet but no blood. I try to lift my head to see a face, but I can’t. Somehow, I know it’s Geoff.

In a blur of thoughts I wonder where John, Doug, and Dave are. I guess they’re taking another chopper. I know they wouldn’t leave Dave behind.[9]

I come to again, and they’re taking me off the chopper. They put me on a stretcher on the ground. A female in olive drab fatigues, with curly red hair and freckles, bends over me. She smiles, and I try to smile back. I’m thinking, Little Orphan Annie’s grown up, and she’s in the army! She then talks to someone else. “You’ll be fine, soldier. You’re at the hospital now.”

I come to, and Art and I are in the Second Surgical Hospital at Camp Radcliff. They’re using scissors to cut off all my clothes. In the confusion of it all, I think, don’t take my boots! I want my boots! And then I pass out.

Geoff is flown to the Forty-Seventh Medical Battalion, his old unit, because he’s just bleeding slightly from one clean hole in his shoulder. But when they can't find an exit wound and his heart rate increases and blood pressure drops off the chart, they rush him by ambulance and he joins us at the Second Surgical Hospital.

He’s still conscious, and they hurry him to an operating room where he’s placed spread-eagled and naked on a table. He has to be embarrassed, just as I was, what with nurses walking everywhere. He’s operated on, and doctors find the bullet that entered his shoulder, penetrated down through his chest and abdomen, and ended in his pelvis. It did a lot of damage in between and destroyed his spleen.

I come to on a gurney being wheeled down a hallway. Someone is holding my hand.

I come to again, and they’re putting me on an X-ray table. They lay me on my chest and extend my head forward, then rest my chin on the table. Horrific pain––the first I’ve felt since I was wounded. “My jaw’s broke!” I mumble through whatever teeth I have left. They pad my chin and do the x-rays.

Art and I are given IVs and stabilized in different operating rooms and undergo our initial surgeries. The ricochet was a .45—probably from a Thompson submachine gun spitting out ten rounds a second from its thirty-round magazine. The round had smashed my lower left jaw and ten teeth, pierced the roof of my mouth, severed the nerve to my left ear and several nerves to my left cheek, and stopped a half inch from my brain.

The next day, the three of us are rushed by choppers to the Sixty-Seventh Evacuation Hospital at Qui Nhon, where we undergo more surgeries.

The following day, April 25, 1967, my parents receive this message:

WESTERN UNION TELEGRAM

APRIL 25, 1967 

Mr. and Mrs. Ova M. Carpenter, don’t phone, report delivery

The Secretary of the Navy has asked me to express his deep regret that your son, PFC William D. Carpenter was placed on the seriously ill list in Vietnam on 23 April 67 as the result of gunshot wounds to left arm, left thigh, buttocks, facial fractures and loss of left eye. He was on reconnaissance patrol when hit by hostile small arms fire. In the judgment of the attending physician, his condition is of such severity that there is cause for concern, but no imminent danger of life. Please be assured that the best medical facilities and doctors have been made available and every measure is being taken to aid him. If there is a change in his condition you will be advised immediately. Address mail to him at 67th Evacuation Hospital, APO San Francisco 96238

Kenneth G Wickham Major General USA[10]

The next day, I’m moved to where Art and Geoff are. We learn that eight Vietcong bodies were found at the battle site.

I come to again, and CPT James, LT Hall, and John Simones are standing by my bed. Privates salute officers, so I sit up and salute, say, “Hello, sir,” and go back to sleep.

Sometime later, a Donut Dolly wakes me. “Would you like to write a letter home?” she says.

“I can’t. My left arm’s messed, and I’m left-handed.”

“I’ll write it for you.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“I’m sure you’ll think of something,” she says. I talk a little and go back to sleep, and when I wake up, she’s still sitting next to me. This happens repeatedly until, after some unknown number of starts, we have a letter to my family, letting them know I’m alive and being well looked after and will be coming home as soon as I’m stable.

A few days later, I’m a little stronger and able to stay awake longer. I’m put on a stretcher and loaded onto a US Air Force four-engine C-141 Starlifter. The aircraft is a jet built to hold 155 paratroops, but it’s gutted and refitted to carry wounded. Eighty of us are stacked on metal racks three high, with several docs and nurses along to help us.

I leave Vietnam completely naked, with only a thin blanket. I have served four days in the field, seen one firefight, and never fired my weapon. I don’t think I even had a chance to flick the safety off. (The average infantryman serving a one-year tour participates in several campaigns and battles, and the average LRRP pulls twenty-five to thirty missions.)[11]

I have my pocketknife, Buck hunting knife, and one dog tag in a paper bag on my stretcher. I don’t know what happened to my other dog tag. These three items are my entire memorabilia from Vietnam except for some shrapnel in my body, and one .45-caliber submachine-gun slug still inside my head.[12]

We fly to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, where I spend one night in a hospital. The next morning, we’re off again to the closest hospital with beds available. It’s in Japan at Camp Zama, near Tokyo. This will be my eighth location in two months. My mail will never find me, and we can’t call home.

The next day, a Japanese woman comes to change my bed. She grabs the sheet I’m under and pulls it down. I’m still naked, so she hollers to another nurse to bring me pajamas. Later, I need to urinate, so I grab my IV stand and try to use it as a cane. The bathroom is only a few beds away, and I’m a LRRP, after all––I can walk that far. A medic sitting at a desk at the far end of the room yells, “Where ya goin’?” I tell him and he says, “Get back in bed. I’ll bring a pee jug.”

Later, a medic wakes me. He wants me to sit up so they can x-ray my chest. Instead of wheeling me to X-ray, they bring a portable machine to my bed. “Why do you want to x-ray me?” I ask.

“You’re not breathing well and you have a fever over a hundred and three.” They x-ray me, and I undergo a number of reconstructive surgeries.

Weeks pass, and it’s Saturday, May 20. I’m at the debarkation center in Tokyo, awaiting my flight home, when up walks Geoff, our medic. He’s headed home and has somehow found me. He’s ambulatory, though he walks with a slump and has difficulty breathing. But we’re both alive. We make small talk, and he leaves to catch his flight. How can we sum up what happened?

A bunch of us walking wounded are sitting on benches, waiting to board the plane. An air force one-star general comes and shakes each man’s hand, saying, “Thank you!” When he comes to me, I come to attention and he says, “Sit back down. I’m here to salute you, soldier!”

Tuesday, May 23, 1967, is my twenty-fifth birthday, and the C-141 I’m in lands in Denver. I’m finally home! A major gets on the plane and is looking for Private Carpenter. Uh-oh, I think, what’d I do? Majors don’t escort privates, but he does and I’m first off the plane.

Standing at the bottom of the ramp is my entire family. My parents, Ova and Sarah, my older brother, Tom, and his wife, Ann, my older sister, Barbara, my younger sister, Carolyn, and my baby brother, Ronnie. Ann had raised hell with everyone until she learned from the Red Cross when I was returning.

I’m forty-five pounds lighter and don’t look the same as the last time they saw me, two months ago. But I’m thrilled to be home again with everybody.

I spend the next month as an inpatient at Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Aurora, Colorado, having reconstructive surgery on my face, left arm, and hip. Aurora is a suburb of Denver, so Art Guerrero visits me regularly. He’s still being treated for his wounds, as an outpatient.

After a couple of weeks at Fitzsimons, I’m given a weekend pass. The first day home, my mother fixes my favorite meal: brown beans and corn bread. My mouth is wired shut so my broken jaw can heal. I stuff food through the hole where my teeth were, and smash it with my tongue. It’s the first solid food I’ve had in almost two months, and it tastes like heaven. Some of the beans get stuck in the wire holding my mouth shut, but I don’t care. Until now, the only food I had was through a straw. Try sucking thinned mashed potatoes through a straw sometime.

On Friday, June 23, 1967, exactly two months since I was shot, and one month after I returned to the States, I’m released from Fitzsimons, on outpatient status. I’m to return periodically for more facial surgeries and physical therapy on my left arm. I eventually get a plastic prosthetic eye fitted where my left eye was.

When I’m healthier, Art and I get together and we hit most of the bars in Denver. The wife of a friend of mine decides it’s time for me to settle down. She introduces me to this cute girl, Pam, who lives next door to her. Pam is no doubt apprehensive about dating this scarred-up veteran with an eye patch, so she insists on a double date. She has a friend, Ellen, and, of course, I have Art. The four of us go on first dates together, to a silver mine up in the Rockies that’s been turned into a tourist attraction.

Art and Ellen are married on November 26, 1967. Two days later, on Thanksgiving, I ask Pam’s parents for permission to marry her.[13]

A year later, in the fall of 1968, I’m back at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, working to fulfill the requirements to be accepted into veterinary college. One afternoon, I get a phone call from a woman who says she’s Geoff Koper’s mother and asks if I’m the Bill Carpenter who served with him in the LRRPs. “Yes, I am,” I reply. She sobs and says Geoff passed from his wounds two days ago. I’m dumbfounded but finally manage to mumble something. Tears flow from my remaining eye. She doesn’t say anything more, and I thank her for calling and hang up.

Geoff was shot trying to give me medical aid. I realize I forgot to ask where his funeral will be, where to send flowers, or even how she found me. The last I knew, Geoff was doing okay in New Jersey. I had hoped no one else would die in “my war.”

I decide to call Art in Denver and share the sad news. He tells me Geoff isn’t dead unless he just kicked the bucket in the past few hours, since they spoke on the phone. He reminds me about the Denver Post article on him a few weeks ago, which also mentioned Geoff and me. We decide the lady’s either a wack job or a war protester who gets her jollies inflicting emotional pain on returning soldiers, or both.

The thing is, I’m sure it never occurred to her that there is no way she could inflict more harm on me than the pain and loss I suffered serving my country in the war she so despises. She doesn’t realize that the biggest opponent to war is the person being shot at.

And nothing to get hung about, Strawberry Fields Forever.

_________________________________________

*David Allen Ives was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart for wounds received against a hostile force, and a Silver Star for gallantry in action. John Simones, Doug Fletcher, and Art Guerrero were also awarded Silver Stars. It was Doug and Art’s second Silver Star, and Art was also awarded a Purple Heart and the Army Commendation Medal with “V” device for valor. Geoff Koper and Bill Carpenter were each awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star (First Oak Leaf Cluster) and “V” device. Bill said, “I’m not sure why I received my medal. I feel the only constructive thing I did was try to get our radio to Art. Perhaps any soldier who is half a world from home, trying to take on a bunch of bad guys, deserves something. But what I really did was get the shit shot out of my team because of the noise I made running into the tree line.”

*CPT James D. James returned from Vietnam as a major assigned to the Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg. His last duty station was at the Pentagon, and he retired as a full colonel. In 1974, Bill Carpenter completed his degree in veterinary medicine and returned to West Virginia with his wife. He established a private practice and became a professor of veterinary technology at Fairmont State University. Art Guerrero returned to his job at the Denver Post and became the distribution manager and national president of the Newspaper Guild. Art had been shot in the leg, but the bullet wound to his shoulder was near his spine, and over the next fifteen years, it caused spinal degeneration, paralyzing him from the waist down. But Art isn’t stopped. On the 9/11 anniversary, he wheelchaired 226 miles from New York City to Washington, DC. He testified before Congress in behalf of disabled veterans and was instrumental in the new billion-dollar VA Medical Center under construction where the Fitzsimons once stood. John Simones made a career of the army, then went to college and became a schoolteacher in Boston, and a veterans’ advocate. Doug Fletcher got a master’s degree and worked for the National Security Agency. He died of diabetes in 1999. Goeff Koper became an architect on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. And David Allen Ives is forever a 20-year-old LRRP, laid to rest at Cedar Lawn Cemetery, Council Bluffs, Iowa.

*Special thanks to Geoff Koper for the detailed account he sent to Bill Carpenter on January 2, 2002, describing the firefight and subsequent hospitalization. And thanks to Kregg P. J. Jorgenson, former First Cav LRRP and author of The Ghost of the Highlands: 1st Cav LRRPs in Vietnam, 1966‑67 (New York: Ivy Books, 1999) for his research about this patrol. Thanks also to the First Cavalry Division LRRP/Rangers Association of the Vietnam War for information, photos, and documents, and to COL James D. James for his input. Thanks to CDR Ken Davis, US Navy (ret.), and his associates of the Coffelt Database of Vietnam casualties, for their invaluable help with our research. And to Robert Ankony’s wife, Cathy, the unseen editor of all his work; and to his editor, Michael J. Carr, for tidying up.

_________________________________________

[1] The battle of the Ia Drang Valley was the first large-scale battle against the NVA. However, the first large-scale battle against the Vietcong occurred six days before, on November 8, 1965, when members of the US Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade took on the enemy at Hill 65 near Saigon. In that two-day battle, the 173rd lost forty-nine men.

[2] In the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley, the First Cavalry Division was awarded its second Presidential Unit Citation. The first was awarded in 1945, when the division liberated Manila in the Philippines.

[3] LRRP Detachment G2 was redesignated “Headquarters & Headquarters Company LRRP Detachment” in April 1967, then redesignated “Company E, Fifty-Second Infantry (LRP)” on December 20, 1967. Later, when all LRRP units were folded into the US Army Rangers on February 1, 1969, Company E was redesignated “H Company, Seventy-Fifth Infantry (Ranger).” It is credited with the longest continuous combat tenure of any Ranger outfit in US military history and became the most decorated unit in LRP/Ranger history. Its colors and lineage were passed to the Second Ranger Battalion, Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment.

[4] For the rest of Bill Carpenter’s life, whenever he feels down he quietly sings the refrain from “Strawberry Fields Forever” to remind him that things aren’t too bad after all.

[5] Major Robert Rogers is considered the father of the US Army Rangers. His legacy dates back to colonial North America, when rifle companies from Rogers’ Rangers made long-range attacks against French forces and their Indian allies. During the Revolutionary War, many colonial commanders were former Rangers.

[6] Faking enemy contact to get out of the field happened rarely, but those few incidents would haunt LRRP units throughout the war.

[7] David Allen Ives was the first to die in action in the First Cav LRRPs. Our company later fought in Cambodia and, on June 9, 1972, lost SGT Elvis Weldon Osborne Jr. and CPL Jeffrey Alan Maurer to enemy action. They were the last Rangers killed in the Vietnam War.

[8] CPT James was in his jeep at Camp Radcliff and heard Art’s radio call for the QRF. James Bracewell’s helicopter had lifted off and was en route, but the QRF didn’t respond. CPT James raced to their chopper pad and found the men shirtless outside, playing basketball. “What the hell’s going on?” he asked a lieutenant. The lieutenant said the team was outside artillery range and that he needed battalion approval before they could respond. CPT James flew to the battle site in another chopper but could not touch down, because it was low on fuel. Other helicopters and gunships were already there.

[9] The First Cavalry Division suffered more casualties than any other army division in the Vietnam War: 5,444 men killed in action and 26,592 wounded in action. LRRP Team 1 is part of these statistics.

[10] The telegram read “Department of the Navy” because Western Union operators were receiving so many messages about killed or wounded serviceman in Vietnam, they often failed to start a new message header and just added the message and sent it off.

[11] Over 1,000 men served in the First Cav LRRP/Rangers in Vietnam. More than half were wounded, yet only 35 were killed in action.

[12] In 1969, the flattened .45-caliber slug eroded its way through the roof of Bill Carpenter’s mouth. He spat it out and picked it up off the ground.

[13] On Sunday, April 9, 2006, Bill’s wife, Pam, died from multiple sclerosis. The disease started when she was in junior high school, and she spent the last four years of her life a quadriplegic.

In the summer of 1961, Cold War tensions heightened when East Germany built the Berlin Wall to halt the exodus of its citizens seeking freedom in West Berlin. US troops from the Berlin Brigade stood ready for war, just feet away from their Communist adversaries, safeguarding West Berlin and any who sought asylum there. A year later, in 1962, global destruction appeared imminent when the Soviets installed nuclear missiles in Cuba, aimed at the United States. That conflict was resolved diplomatically at the eleventh hour, when the Soviets agreed to remove their missiles in exchange for the removal of US missiles from Turkey.

Soon, it appeared that instead of duking it out in a head-to-head war, the two superpowers might settle their differences—or at least champion their opposing ideologies—in Southeast Asia. There, a conflict was brewing between Communist North Vietnam and the emerging democratic nation of South Vietnam. By 1967, the United States had lost some 8,500 troops and military advisers in South Vietnam. Nearly half a million Americans were stationed there, with another 350,000 stationed in Europe. Meanwhile, an antiwar movement at home was gathering steam.[i]

A 20-year-old kid from Fort Myers, Florida, was in the middle of it all. Robert Eugene Whitten was a member of the Berlin Brigade—three US Army infantry battalions supported by armor and artillery. Their job was to be the trip wire should the vastly more powerful Soviet ground forces invade the small enclave of West Berlin. In that event, the Western powers would be outnumbered by hundreds to one, and the United States would likely opt for nuclear war.

To uphold the US presence, Bob Whitten made daily patrols in a quarter-ton M151 jeep, armed with a 106mm antitank recoilless rifle, opposite East German and Soviet troops in East Berlin. And in the summer of 1967, when tens of thousands of North Vietnamese Army (NVA) troops were attacking US Marines along the DMZ or swarming out of neutral Laos and Cambodia against the US soldiers defending South Vietnam, Bob did what he felt was the right thing: he volunteered for Vietnam.

He arrived at Cam Ranh Bay on Tuesday, August 8, and again he volunteered, this time for the LRRP/Rangers—small, heavily armed long-range reconnaissance teams that patrolled deep in enemy-held territory. His unit, assigned to the First Air Cavalry Division, fought in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam against local Communist guerrillas—the Vietcong—and their better trained, equipped, and led collaborators, the NVA.

On Thursday, January 11, 1968, I was assigned to Bob’s Second Platoon at LZ (for “landing zone”) English. By then the NVA had launched a massive offensive against the marines at the Khe Sanh combat base, a remote outpost near Laos and the DMZ, so our division was ordered north to I Corps. It was a hurried affair, and our platoon arrived just south of Quang Tri City on the rainy Friday evening of January 19. We were twenty-five miles east of Khe Sanh and sixteen miles south of the DMZ, in a destroyed former French army camp. We pitched our tents over the ruined walls of buildings and made hooches inside, with dirt-filled ammo boxes protecting where we slept. We named the place “LZ Betty.”

Both Bob and I were corporals, and since we each had served in Germany, we became hooch mates and friends. The general shoddiness of our LZ, combined with its location next to Quang Tri, meant that rats, snakes, and cockroaches were a fact of life.

But our bigger battle concerned food. With our sudden move north, the lack of supplies and refrigeration had taken a grim toll on the menu, until we were reduced to eating black-eyed peas whipped into a greasy beige glop. The other dishes were awful, too—just varying shades and consistencies of bland: cornbread, powdered eggs, instant potatoes, and, to quench our thirst, powdered Jell-O poured into a large pot of room-temperature water. The mess hall was in one of the raggedy bombed-out buildings, where the food was unrefrigerated and left open to the flies and cockroaches. Soon, anyone foolhardy enough to eat in the mess hall was racked with vomiting and diarrhea—except for the cooks, of course, who had their own stash of real food. With no end to the monsoon rain and mud, the whole LZ stank of rot and excrement. Indeed, conditions were vastly more sanitary out on patrol. We resorted to eating dehydrated LRRP rations—the same food we ate in the field. It got so bad, we even fell back on the canned C-rations that line infantrymen carried—nasty-tasting slop bearing the dubious label “ham and eggs” or, even worse, the universally loathed “ham and lima beans,” more commonly referred to as “ham and motherfuckers.” Even the rats would eat the latter only as a last resort.

On January 21, the 304th and 325th NVA divisions completed their encirclement of the Khe Sanh combat base and its hill outposts and cut off Route 9, forcing all marine reinforcements and supplies to be ferried in by air. On January 29, we learned that North Korea had seized the USS Pueblo a week earlier, killing one crewman and imprisoning eighty-two others. The world seemed on the brink of apocalypse, but at Quang Tri, all we saw of battle was jet fighter-bombers winging off to North Vietnam, and low-flying helicopters lumbering over to Khe Sanh. So far, our fight was limited to scrounging for food and killing rats.

Two days later, early on the morning of Wednesday, January 31, 84,000 enemy soldiers across South Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive—the biggest battle of the war. Suddenly, the fight came to us. Five enemy battalions and a platoon of sappers attacked Quang Tri City and our LZ. To stop allied troops from intervening, three other enemy infantry battalions deployed around the city as blocking forces, supported by a 122mm-rocket battalion and two heavy-weapons companies armed with 82mm mortars and 75mm recoilless rifles.

In launching this massive coordinated attack, the enemy had hoped to take over a number of cities and spark a popular uprising. Instead, by fighting a set-piece battle against armed forces backed by aircraft and armor, more than 900 NVA and Vietcong soldiers were killed in and around Quang Tri City and our LZ. But across South Vietnam, 1,000 Americans, 2,100 South Vietnamese soldiers, 14,000 Vietnamese civilians, and 32,000 NVA and Vietcong lay dead.

After Tet, I went on eight reconnaissance patrols. Then, on my ninth, Bob Whitten was made assistant team leader (ATL) on SGT Doug Parkinson’s six-man team, which I was also on. On that patrol, we killed two NVA soldiers and almost got killed when enemy troops saw us approaching their bunker. But apparently, they mistook us for a much larger nearby US infantry company, so they fled from a tiny force they could easily have annihilated.

A few days later, everyone in our division was pulled out of the field for a developing operation. On Thursday, April 4, 1968, our team arrived at LZ Stud, nine miles east of Khe Sanh. Stud was a quickly improvised staging area for the First Air Cavalry Division’s Operation Pegasus, to break the siege of the marine combat base at Khe Sanh––the second-largest battle of the war. When we arrived, all three brigades from our 20,000-man division, and all its 450 helicopters, had already launched this vast airmobile operation in concert with a marine armor thrust west from Ca Lu, along Route 9.

Sunday evening, April 7, at 1905 hours, an hour before dusk, our team was inserted into the ongoing battle. Corporal Dish, a Montagnard, was front scout, followed by Parkinson as TL, me as radiotelephone operator, Bruce Cain as medic, Bob Whitten as ATL, and Corporal Pong, another Montagnard, as rear scout. Our mission: make a reconnaissance patrol on Dong Tri, an eight-mile-wide, 3,300-foot mountain overlooking the combat base believed to be occupied by the 66th Regiment, 304th NVA Division. Hidden deep beneath triple-canopy rain forest, our team started climbing Dong Tri from bottom to top, in search of the enemy.

The next evening, after an exhausting climb with a heavy load and limited food and water, we made it halfway up the mountain and stopped to bivouac. We hadn’t found the enemy yet, though we could hear helicopters and jets attacking various positions, and the prolonged rumble of B-52s dropping their massive high-explosive payloads. Later that night, at 0330 hours on Tuesday, April 9, those of us not sitting watch were suddenly awakened by the high-pitched scream of an incoming artillery shell. Seconds later, it exploded in a blinding flash forty feet below us, shaking the earth and showering us with dirt and stinging gravel.

Birds erupted noisily from the trees, and moments later we heard stealthy movement coming our way. As we stared into the black void, weapons ready, we heard the loud, throaty growl of a tiger. It was close enough for us to smell its musky reek. Preferring to face the teeth and claws of a single tiger over the crack troops of the NVA, we didn’t shoot. The beast stood snorting and huffing for a few more seconds, then turned and padded silently away—discouraged, perhaps, by our strange potpourri of scents.

At 0735 hours, shortly after sunrise, our Tactical Operations Center (TOC) came on the radio and informed us we were going to be extracted in one hour because a sweep of the mountain was scheduled, starting with an artillery barrage. Since we were on the side of the mountain deep in the jungle, we would be extracted by McGuire rig––a 120-foot rope with a loop on the bottom to sit in.

A short while later, we found a small hole in the trees, where the rigs could be dropped. To avoid getting entangled on the way up, we stomped the undergrowth down and made a small perimeter to provide security. At that point, Parkinson said, “I want Ankony, Cain, and Whitten to go out on the first lift. Dish and Pong go out with me.”

At 0900 hours, we heard a chopper approaching, and Sergeant Parkinson guided it in on the radio. Once it came to a hover overhead, our company’s operations sergeant, Tom Campbell, dropped two McGuire rigs, rolled and weighted with sandbags to get through the trees. Parkinson moved out with Dish and Pong to secure our perimeter.

Seeing only two rigs instead of the three we had expected, Whitten turned to me and said, “Since you’ve got the heaviest load, Ankony, why don’t you take this one, and Cain and I’ll take the other.”

“Up we go,” I said, grabbing a sling.

As the two of them stepped into their loop and sat tightly together, Cain put his wrist through the single safety strap, and I did the same in mine, wrapping my legs around Whitten and Cain to keep us together. When we were set, Whitten waved, and the three of us were suddenly yanked up out of the dark, damp world of heat and bugs and up into cool blue sky.

Soon we were a thousand feet over Dong Tri Mountain, heading northeast above ravines brimming with soft, white morning fog. Taking in the lovely view, I kept my legs tight around Cain and Whitten. But after bucking ninety-mile-an-hour winds for a minute or so, straining all the while to stay upright with the heavy load on my back, I couldn’t make my legs hold on any longer.

Instantly, we were swinging wide apart and spinning like dervishes. Clutching the rope in a death grip, I looked up at the helicopter, praying that one of the door gunners would see our plight. But nobody looked down. As we swung wildly back and forth, missing each other by inches, I was terrified, thinking, what’s gonna happen if we hit? when suddenly I smacked, rucksack first, into Cain and Whitten.

The collision pushed me halfway out of my rig, leaving me balanced on the small of my back. Cain was knocked all the way out, dangling by his wrist safety strap and grabbing frantically on to the rig with his other hand, while Whitten hung upside down by his knees, watching his rifle and rucksack tumble lazily earthward beneath us. If something didn’t change in a hurry, we would be following a similar trajectory.

As we continued swinging wildly past one another like fairgoers on a carnival ride gone amok, through the wind blast I could hear Cain and Whitten screaming, “Stop! Stop! Help! Oh, God, please help!”

I screamed, too, for my arms were fast losing the fight to the wind and the weight of my rucksack. But with the three of us strung so far below the aircraft, and the aircrew wearing helmets and exposed to wind, rotor, and engine noise, there was little chance of anyone hearing.

As we struggled, I stared at the radio handset fastened next to my chin, then at my rucksack’s quick-release strap underneath, wishing I could use either one. But that would require freeing one of my hands, which I couldn’t do if I wanted to avoid Whitten’s plight. At a loss, I glanced at my .45, hanging upside down at my hip, holster flap whipping in the wind, and had the idle thought, why isn’t that thing falling?

Then the screams of Cain and Whitten brought me back to the terror at hand. Glancing around, I realized there was nothing I could do but help myself. If I wanted to live, I had to get right-side up in a hurry; otherwise, gravity and my rucksack would win the battle and pull me out.

Mustering the last of my strength for one final effort, I slowly heaved myself up against the wind and the weight of my rucksack. At that instant, Sergeant Campbell leaned out of the helicopter and saw the trouble we were in. At once, the pilot dived toward a clearing on the far side of the mountain while we fought to hold on just a few seconds longer.

In not much more time than it would have taken us to fall the distance, we were within feet of the ground, being lowered onto a rocky streambed. Lying there motionless, exhausted, and dizzy, I stared at the fresh, glistening water flowing by until Sergeant Campbell and a door gunner ran up from the helicopter.

“Are you guys all right?” Campbell hollered.

“I, uh . . . think so,” Whitten said feebly as they lifted him from the stream and helped him walk to the helicopter.

Moments later, they came back to help Cain and me to the helicopter, where we sat silently on the floor with Whitten. After everyone was aboard, we lifted off and were soon back at LZ Stud. By then our strength had returned, and the three of us stepped out into the hot sun and whirling dust being kicked up as other helicopters took off and landed.

“I thought I’d never see this place again,” Whitten said, looking around. Then, resting his hand on my shoulder as we walked away, he said, “Bob, I saw you coming after we broke apart, but I didn’t wanna stop you with my feet.”

“How come?” I asked.

“Because I figured I’d knock you out of your rig.”

“Well, thanks,” I said, realizing he had risked his life to save mine.

Moments later, we passed a big twin-engine C-123 Provider parked on the tarmac, where a row of twenty or so dead American soldiers lay faceup on the ground. Each body was wrapped in a poncho, on a stretcher, awaiting shipment to Graves Registration and then home. Pausing a minute, saying nothing, we stared at the dark human shapes under the rubberized ponchos and forgot our problems.

We returned to our company area, relieved to see the rest of our team there for the debriefing. They, too, had experienced some of the same problems. But our company commander, CPT Michael Gooding, had more time to prepare for their extraction. He had pulled them out on three rigs, not two, and set them down before anyone broke loose.

When our debriefing was over, we learned that the siege of Khe Sanh had ended the morning before. The fight cost the lives of 205 marines on the base, another 200 in the hill fights, and 59 cavalrymen. In turn, because of concentrated bombardment that made Khe Sanh the most heavily bombed area on earth, the enemy lost more than 10,000 men.

Our platoon returned to LZ Betty, and by then Bob was smoking heavily. He and I had three and six months respectively left in the field, and we knew that the odds were stacking up against us. We both had served in the battles of Tet and Khe Sanh and, in the process, had learned that survival in combat depended not just on skill but also on sheer dumb luck. As small five- and six-man reconnaissance teams, we faced the enemy, sure, but the greatest threat came from friendly fire: US artillery, mortars, and aircraft. And there were also the unexpected threats from tigers, McGuire rigs, and whatever else humans or nature might throw our way.

With nationwide antiwar protests back home, Walter Cronkite’s negative on-air assessments of the war, riots happening everywhere following Martin Luther King’s assassination, and President Johnson’s halt to most bombing of North Vietnam, the world seemed to be going crazy. Bob and I knew we were winning the battles, and we had faith we were winning the war. We talked about this and about our experiences in Germany. I had served near the Fulda Gap, where the Soviets were expected to launch World War III. Bob joked that at least I would have had a fighting chance, whereas his little garrison in West Berlin would have become the Custer’s Last Stand of the twentieth century. That struck us both as immensely funny.

Our next patrol took place on Sunday morning, April 21. Operation Delaware had already begun two days before, with two brigades—about 11,000 men and 300 helicopters—from our division air-assaulting A Shau Valley, near Laos. This was the most formidable enemy-held territory in South Vietnam. Teams from our company rappelled down to the 5,000-foot peak of Dong Re Lao, the mountain known as “Signal Hill.” We were there to provide a vital radio relay site for the troops slugging it out in the valley, for approaching aircraft, and for communication with headquarters in the rear. This was day three, and a lot of the fighting had already happened. Approaching Signal Hill from the air, we could see a crashed helicopter on the peak, several dead Americans, and dozens of men who had survived the fight so far.

Enemy snipers were still a problem, so Captain Gooding ordered Sergeant Parkinson to make a patrol around the peak. Parkinson mapped out the details with Whitten, and we slogged through the mud to the western side of the mountain, where we pushed through a dense wall of mud-covered branches and trees that had been twisted and broken by the blasts to clear the LZ.

After an hour of slow, painstaking progress, I had just grabbed a sapling so I could step onto the roots below, when shots went off right in front of me. Raising my rifle, knowing that Whitten and two other men were covering the rear, I crept forward to find an NVA soldier lying on his back. Parkinson and Dish were still shooting him, making his body quiver with every shot. Since the shooting had compromised our position, we returned to the mountaintop.

Ten days later, on the drizzly morning of Wednesday, May 1, Captain Gooding ordered me to attend the US Army’s Fifth Special Forces Recondo School in Nha Trang, a big, modern base way down south, near Cam Ranh Bay. Why he picked me at that time, I never learned. But just after I gathered my mud-covered gear, Bob walked over, lit up a Pall Mall, and said, “Well, Ankony, I don’t know how you pulled it with Gooding, but you’re one lucky bastard to be gettin’ outta here!”

“Damned if I know, Bob,” I said, giving him a backslap and a grin. “But I’ll try not to miss you too bad!”

Unbuttoning his shirt pocket, Bob pulled out a handwritten note on the back of a cardboard C-ration lid. He said, “Mail this as a postcard when you get back to Evans.” It was addressed to his fiancée, Anna, letting her know that he was okay and couldn’t wait to get home in July, in time for their September wedding. I boarded a Huey for Camp Evans; and as we lifted off, I waved to Bob and the rest of the team, content to let the battle of A Shau finish up without me.

Operation Delaware came to an end a few days later. The enemy lost 800 dead, and our division suffered more than a 140 dead and 530 wounded. Because of operational needs, LRRP team One Zulu was quickly cobbled together to make a patrol in the mountains southwest of Camp Evans, near enemy Base Area 114. That area of Thua Thien province had been patrolled by our first and third platoons, and Bob was made a sergeant and team leader of men he hadn’t worked with before, in an area of operation he was unfamiliar with.

Our company had suffered numerous casualties in recent battles, but there was an urgent need for intelligence. NVA regiments were thought to be preparing another attack against the city of Hue, where four thousand civilians were killed during Tet. The enemy was in steep mountain terrain ranging from two thousand to four thousand feet in elevation and marked on military maps as a “national forest reserve.” It was a hot area, and Bob’s team called it “Cherry Valley” because this was his teammate Red McConnel’s first patrol.

On Tuesday evening, May 7, Bob’s team made several false helicopter insertions, to confuse the enemy about their actual landing site, and were inserted on a mountain ridge. Bob Teagle was front scout, Bob Whitten was TL, Pat Lyons was radiotelephone operator, Al Voelkel was medic, Randy Kimes was ATL, and Gerald “Red” McConnel was rear scout. Bob Teagle had volunteered for the mission even though he was being treated for battle fatigue. He had just been awarded the Silver Star for rescuing men pinned by enemy fire on Signal Hill and for recovering the dead and dying.

Immediately after insertion, the team discovered two freshly abandoned enemy bunkers dug into the mountainside. Whitten knew that his team was compromised in remote, difficult terrain, so he started maneuvering them down the ridge. Bracing their feet against the trunks of trees to keep from sliding, they hurried to escape the line of enemy fortifications. As darkness fell, they seemed to have left the enemy behind, so they set up a nighttime defensive perimeter, with claymore mines facing the likely approaches.

The next morning, they continued to maneuver and discovered another bunker. Whitten signaled his team to halt and listen. Just then sharp cracks of semiautomatic gunfire erupted. Red McConnel was hit by five bullets and fell dead almost at Teagle’s feet. Raising his CAR-15, Teagle emptied two twenty-round magazines at the bunker. From another direction, automatic rifle fire let loose, and the team returned fire to establish fire superiority. Whitten then ordered his men to set up a defensive position, spreading far enough apart that one grenade wouldn’t take them all out. He then radioed for helicopter gunships and the “Blues”––a highly experienced quick-reaction infantry platoon.

Small-arms fire erupted again, and both sides threw grenades. Kimes unslung his cutoff M79 40mm grenade launcher and loaded one fragmentation round after another, firing them at the enemy. The NVA were close enough that the LRRPs could hear distinct metallic clacks as they inserted fresh thirty-round magazines into their AK47s. The enemy closed in, and Whitten continued to lead his team, firing bursts from his CAR-15, until a bullet grazed his head, another penetrated his chest, and shrapnel peppered his body. Voelkel exposed himself to enemy fire and rushed to Whitten’s aid.

A gunship arrived, and after working the surrounding area with rockets and machine guns, the door gunner was hit by enemy fire. The helicopter crew dropped a stretcher through the jungle canopy so the team could carry Whitten, then flew off to care for their wounded, leaving the team on its own.

The enemy inched forward, and an RPG zipped in and exploded in a thunderous flash. Teagle was blown down the hill and landed next to an enemy bunker, with shrapnel wounds to his chest, left elbow, and arm. Someone above yelled, “I’m hit! I’m hit!” Teagle recovered from the blast and tried to throw a grenade into a group of enemy soldiers. Kimes reached him and tossed the grenade, stopping enemy fire from that direction.

Teagle and Kimes regrouped with Voelkel above and grabbed Whitten and laid him on the stretcher, but they couldn’t find Lyons even after repeatedly hollering for him. They started to carry Whitten, with Kimes leading the way through thick undergrowth in steep terrain, stumbling and falling as they fled. They had gone only a short distance when an automatic weapon let loose. A bullet grazed Voelkel’s neck, and another hit him in the back. The team sought cover and returned fire. As green tracer rounds sailed in from several directions, Whitten stopped breathing and died quietly on the stretcher.

The enemy was now attacking from multiple directions with a much larger force, and the survivors had no choice but to flee the murderous fire, leaving McConnel’s and Whitten’s bodies behind and Lyons, the radiotelephone operator, still missing. Not only were the three men now on their own, but they had no way to communicate with the outside world.

By this time, TOC was uncertain whether any of the team had even survived, so they pounded the surrounding area with 105mm artillery as more helicopter gunships scrambled. The smell of high explosives and gunpowder permeated the musty jungle.

Kimes led the two remaining team members farther down the ridge as Teagle covered the rear, clutching his .45-caliber sidearm in his right hand, his useless left arm dangling at his side. Each man carried a rifle, rucksack, and web gear weighing eighty pounds, and Voelkel carried Teagle’s CAR-15. Maneuvering quickly through steep, difficult terrain, Voelkel fired Teagle’s weapon in the direction of the enemy, emptying the twenty-round magazine. “They’re still coming!” Voelkel cried, his voice trembling with emotion. The team continued to flee, with Voelkel still carrying both weapons and bearing the agony of his wounds.

It began to rain, and the three exhausted men hid for the evening in the killing zone, with artillery pounding all around them. Sitting huddled back-to-back in a small ravine, hearing each other’s quick breaths, they waited for dawn. Throughout the night, shells screamed in, exploding in thunderous bright-red flashes and slinging shrapnel and mud through the trees. Illumination shells burst overhead, casting eerie moving shadows over the ground as they floated down, hissing beneath their little parachutes.

The next morning, the rain and artillery stopped, and through an opening in the vegetation, the survivors spotted a helicopter gunship far below on the ridge. It was rocketing and machine-gunning enemy positions, assisting the advancing infantry, whose casualties mounted. Having no other way to communicate, Teagle dropped his .45 and pulled out his signal mirror, flashing it repeatedly at the helicopter. The helicopter saw the reflection and climbed to the team’s position. Circling for a moment, it tilted its nose at the survivors, in preparation to fire. Teagle took off his hat and waved so the crew could see his light complexion and light-brown hair. After seconds that seemed like hours, the pilot gave thumbs-up and came to a hover low enough that the three men could run through the rotor wash and climb onto the skid. A door gunner hauled them aboard through the gap between the rocket pod and his M60 machine gun.

Meanwhile, Lyons was still alive on the ridge, hiding in dense vegetation. During the ambush, an RPG had hit his position. When his team yelled for him, he couldn’t respond, because he was wounded and struggling to stay silent as the enemy took up a position only a few yards away from him. Hours later, with the enemy still lurking nearby, he managed to break squelch on his radio handset a predetermined number of times, quietly informing TOC that someone was alive.

The infantry platoon sent to rescue the team got pinned on the ridge and lost three men and several wounded. An infantry company eventually rescued the platoon, and together, the next morning, they slowly made their way up the ridge and rescued Lyons. They also recovered Whitten’s and McConnel’s bodies but lost another man.[ii] The enemy lost forty-seven.

Every team member was recognized for his action. Randy Kimes and Al Voelkel were awarded the Silver Star for gallantry in action, the third-highest military decoration for valor that the United States Armed Forces can confer. For Bob Whitten’s leadership, he was posthumously awarded a Silver Star and Purple Heart. For his past twenty-six combat patrols and military service, he was awarded a Bronze Star, Air Medal, Combat Infantryman Badge, Expert Rifleman Badge with Expert Pistol Clasp, Vietnam Campaign Medal, Vietnam Service Medal, Army of Occupation Medal with Germany Clasp, and National Defense Service Medal.

Following the normal process for our killed in action, Bob’s body was sent to Graves Registration at Camp Evans for identification by two LRRP members. He was then flown south to the US Army Mortuary at Da Nang Air Base, where he was positively identified through medical records. His body was bathed and embalmed by civilian morticians and placed in a body bag inside a sealed metal container.

At 4:30 p.m. on Sunday, May 12, an Army sergeant carried the news of Bob’s death to his home in Fort Meyers, Florida. It was Mother’s Day, and Bob’s mother, Mildred, answered the door. The sergeant, struggling for words, said, “Your son, Bobby, is dead. He was killed in Vietnam as a result of enemy action.” The words washed over Mildred, leaving her too stunned to react. Then the tears came and wouldn’t stop as her husband, Paul, their daughter, Linda, and sons Paul Jr. and Harry gathered in the family’s living room, giving each other what meager comfort they could as they awaited details of Bob’s return.

One week later, a US Army colonel and a major, both of whom had served in Vietnam, came to the Whitten home to convey the nation’s gratitude. They carried with them a small box containing Bob’s medals—a sad reminder of his bravery and sacrifice. In the highest tradition of service to his country, Bob had disregarded his personal safety to protect his men. In the first two weeks of May 1968, over 1,300 US servicemen died in Vietnam, 750 in the first week alone, overwhelming the two mortuary facilities at Da Nang and Tan Son Nhut.

Near the end of May, Bob’s body was flown, with dozens of other casualties, on a commercial Boeing 707 to Alaska, where it stopped to refuel. Afterward, the plane touched down at McChord Air Force Base, Washington, the destination of some of the onboard personnel. It then departed for Travis Air Force Base, California, with other personnel and the sad cargo of fallen servicemen. At the Center for Mortuary Affairs, Travis AFB, a dress green uniform with appropriate awards was added to the metal container, and a soldier escorted Bob’s body to Dover Air Force Base, Delaware. He was then escorted on another commercial aircraft to his hometown.

At the funeral home, Bob was dressed in his uniform and placed in a casket. In accordance with US Army regulations, an honor guard of six servicemen and one bugler, dressed in class A uniforms, arrived from MacDill Air Force Base. An army chaplain conducted the funeral service. On Sunday afternoon, June 2, beneath the thick black clouds that accompany a typical Florida thunderstorm, Mildred Whitten pleaded, “Dear God, he lived in the rain for the last eight months. Can’t he at least be buried when it’s dry?”

Three volleys from six M14 rifles cracked in the air and resounded in the broken hearts of Bob’s loved ones. The honor guard meticulously folded the United States flag that draped Bob’s casket, twelve times, into the shape of a tricorne hat in remembrance of George Washington. The stars of the flag pointed up, in homage to our nation’s motto, In God We Trust. The escort walked to Bob’s mother, Mildred, holding the flag to his heart, in white-gloved hands. He knelt and presented it to her, saying, “On behalf of the president of the United States, the United States Army, and a grateful nation, please accept this flag as a symbol of our appreciation for your loved one’s honorable and faithful service.” One hundred feet from the graveside, the lone bugler stood in the rain and sounded “Taps.” Its mournful melody ended with “’Neath the sun, ’neath the stars, ’neath the sky, As we go, this we know, God is nigh.” The honor guard and escort rendered a final salute.[iii]

Bob Whitten, Gerald McConnel, and seventy-eight other US servicemen were killed on Wednesday, May 8, 1968. Bob’s death in the Vietnam War was number 27,285. When the war eventually ended on April 30, 1975, 58,191 men and 7 women had died. Bob is memorialized on panel 57E, row 12, of the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. His body lies at Fort Meyers Memorial Gardens Cemetery.

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* My deepest thanks go out to Bob Teagle, both for his service and for providing information on Bob Whitten’s last patrol. And I am grateful to my former team leader, SGT Douglas Parkinson, for his wealth of knowledge on our unit’s history, and to Curtis “Randy” Kimes, for his book One-Zulu (Auburn, CA: Paper Marche, 2009). Thanks also to CDR Ken Davis, US Navy (ret.), of the Coffelt Database of Vietnam casualties, for his invaluable help in my research and for his 220 bombing missions over North Vietnam and Laos. His service as an A-6 Intruder pilot undoubtedly saved many American lives. And I thank my wife, Cathy, the unseen editor of all my work, for her years of proofing the text on emotionally difficult subjects; my editor, Michael J. Carr, for tidying things up and correcting errors of fact; and my Webmaster and friend SFC Kelly Hyde at Airborne Ranger, for his input. And I especially want to express my gratitude to Harry Whitten, Bob’s brother, for his personal insights.

* Bob Whitten’s engagement announcement to his sweetheart, Anna, was published in the Fort Meyers News-Press on Sunday, April 21, 1968, the day Bob and I touched down in A Shau Valley.

Robert C. Ankony, PhD, is the author of Lurps: A Ranger’s Diary of Tet, Khe Sanh, A Shau, and Quang Tri, revised ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009).

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[i] It was widely believed that if South Vietnam fell to Communism, neighboring countries would fall one after another, like dominoes. This “domino theory,” first proposed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, had its skeptics. It can be argued, however, that America’s lack of political and domestic resolve allowed South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to fall to Communism in 1975; and Afghanistan, Grenada, and Nicaragua to follow in 1979. Also in 1979, a similar lack of political will allowed Iran to capitulate to religious fundamentalism when President Carter abandoned our ally, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, paving the way for Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s return from exile. Our decades-long fight against radical Islam is thus intricately linked, through Iran, to the Vietnam War.

[ii] The infantry company sent to rescue the team was the Second Platoon of Bravo Company, 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry, 196th Light Infantry Brigade. The company that fought its way up the ridge, rescued Lyons, and recovered Whitten’s and McConnel’s bodies was Alpha Company of the same battalion. Killed by enemy action were CPL Jimmy Ray Brown, CPL Terrence Arthur Kandler, CPL Jimmy Ray Wheless, and a medic, PFC Russell William Jarick. The two units also suffered twenty-eight wounded, ten requiring field evacuation. Information provided by the Coffelt Database of Vietnam casualties.

[iii] Gerald Wayne McConnel Jr.’s body was escorted by Army personnel from Travis Air Force Base to his family in Moses Lake, Washington. He rests at Pioneer Memorial Gardens, Moses Lake.

I was a Special Forces Recondo School grad, and though just nineteen, I had been in the battles of Tet, Khe Sanh, and A Shau Valley, where I learned that surviving in combat rested not just on skill but also on sheer dumb luck. Since luck was purely arbitrary, I figured that improving my skills was the only real way to increase my odds for survival. Fortunately, I was mentored by the legendary Sergeant Douglas B. Parkinson, a marine biologist turned LRRP team leader, whose quiet strength of character, sound thinking, and kind, fatherly manner brought out the best in every man he led.

As I got into my fatigues and boots, I looked out at the rice paddies and jungle-clad mountains growing slowly visible under a faint blue sky, unaware that I would soon have to call on all my skills and an extra measure of luck. I daubed on the facial camouflage wax, slung my rucksack over my shoulders and grabbed the CAR-15, and crawled out of my hooch to meet my team, gathering outside.

My front scout was Cpl. Charles Williams, a mild-mannered new replacement from Ohio. I followed as team leader, with Cpl. Bill Ward from California behind me as radio operator. Then came my friend and assistant team leader, Cpl. Tony Griffith from Tennessee, who always seemed to have a smile on his face. Cpl. John Bedford, a stocky black man from Pennsylvania, was rear scout. But since the front scout was so vital to team security, and everyone else was best suited in his assigned slot, I took Williams’s position so he could gain experience following me.

Our area of patrol was four miles southwest of LZ Betty, two miles south of the Quang Tri River, on the east side of a half-mile-long reservoir that had once irrigated a wide expanse of rice paddies. The terrain consisted of small rolling hills perhaps a hundred feet high. Although few trees grew there, all the hills were covered in five to eight feet of dense brush, with plenty of vines and thorns. Our mission: set up a fixed observation post (OP) on a hill across from the reservoir and keep constant surveillance on the north-south trails along its shore.

Like most areas of patrol, ours would be four thousand meters by four thousand meters, with the outer thousand meters serving as a no-fire zone to protect us from friendly fire by our own ground, artillery, or aviation forces. Our team wouldn’t venture into that zone, and our ground forces wouldn’t enter without notifying us first.

The air was hot and humid, without a breath of wind, when we were inserted at 0715 hours near the reservoir, a few hundred meters north of the hill where I wanted to establish our OP. After our insertion ships flew away, the bushes around us gradually came alive with birds and whirring insects. I whispered to Williams, standing behind me, “You always wanna stop, look, and listen right after you land, so you can hear and see what’s going on.” He nodded. “And you wanna keep doing it every so often—oh, and one more thing,” I said, pulling on the heavy leather gloves worn by the front scout, “always take a zigzag path to make it hard for anybody to pull an ambush.”

At that point I started the slow, laborious task of making a path through the six-foot wall of vines, thorns, burrs, and branches we’d jumped into, prying them apart with my hands and body or trampling them underfoot to clear a way for the next man. Drenched in sweat and constantly harassed by the bugs and leeches, we had inched our way south, halfway up a hill, when we heard a helicopter approaching from the north.

As we hurriedly took cover behind the walls of our path, I looked back and saw a lone Cobra gunship from our division, with a shark’s mouth painted on its nose, flying low three-quarters of a mile away. Since the Cobra had plenty of speed and hence a wide area of patrol, I figured the aircrew had little idea of its exact location, let alone ours, so we stayed hidden inside the vegetation, waiting for it to leave.

Within seconds the Cobra flew out of sight, so we came out into our path. Glancing back one last time at the hills and sky, I saw no sign of aircraft, so we moved on.

But minutes later, just as we neared the top of the hill, we heard another helicopter approaching from our rear. Looking back as I scrambled for concealment, I saw the same gunship, at a much higher altitude now, diving straight at us to attack. Knowing that it was armed with seventy-six 2.75-inch rockets, each packing a ten-pound warhead, a 7.62mm minigun that could fire a hundred rounds a second, and an automatic 40mm grenade launcher that kicked out five high-explosives shells a second, I had little doubt what we were facing.

Worse, not knowing what unit the gunship was from and thus with no way to determine its frequency—and with no time to radio them even if we had known—I yelled to my team, “Pop smoke!” hoping that this customary self-identification procedure would cause the Cobra to break off its attack. As it continued to dive at nearly 170 miles an hour, I stared at the four rocket pods on its sides and yanked the phosphorus grenade off my pistol belt, hoping it could substitute for one of the smoke grenades on the back of my rucksack, which weren’t close enough to grab quickly.

But as I grabbed the cotter pin and struggled to yank it out, I found that I couldn’t because I had bent it too much to keep it from snagging on vines and brush. Terrified, I dropped my rifle and grenade on the ground and reached for the luminous red cloth signal panel in my pants pocket.

But just as I grabbed the signal panel, with the Cobra three hundred meters away and closing fast, I saw puffs of black smoke on both sides of the fuselage. The worst of my nightmares was coming true, and I thought, Aw, shit, we’re gonna die!

The four rockets struck just meters north of us in a series of thunderous explosions and blinding flashes. Dropping my signal panel, I wrapped my arms around my face and dived to the ground, feeling a blast of leaves and hot, swirling air. After the cloud of smoke and dust shot past us, hearing a high-pitched ringing in my ears, I picked myself up off the ground and glanced at my team. Everyone was okay, and I realized that the dense vegetation that had once tormented our every step had saved us by absorbing the blast.

Unfortunately, there was no time to rejoice, since the gunship, still thinking we were the enemy, was quickly banking to one side to make another pass. Just then Griffith popped a smoke grenade in front of our position. Not certain if one was enough, I dropped my rucksack and grabbed a smoke off the back.

But just as a thick cloud of yellow smoke drifted up from Griffith’s grenade, a LOH and an OH-13 suddenly appeared and started flying in wide circles around us. Shocked by all the noise and aware that we were now facing two scout helicopters as well as a Cobra—which would be emboldened by the smoke grenade Griffith had popped, reasoning that it had been dropped by one of the scouts to mark our position—I dropped my smoke grenade and reached to the ground for the dropped signal panel, now our only hope.

By then the Cobra had completed its turn and was diving at us for the kill. As other team members shouted, “Get ’em on the radio, Ward!” and “Hit the dirt!” I opened and closed my cloth signal panel high over my head, desperately hoping the Cobra could see its bright red in spite of the smoke.

The next instant, the LOH suddenly flew low into the Cobra’s path and faced us. As vegetation whipped from the rotor blast and the air echoed with the whine of its engine, I looked at the minigun on its side and continued to collapse my panel, knowing there was nothing else I could do.

Just then the Cobra broke from its dive, and the LOH started to land in the small clearing the rockets had made. Falling to my knees in relief, I picked up my rifle.

After I could find my feet, I stood up and worked my way through the vegetation to the LOH on the ground, waiting with its engine running and rotors spinning. When I approached, the warrant officer piloting the craft leaned out and shouted, “Is everyone all right?”

“We’re okay,” I replied, still numb.

“Do you need anything?”

I shook my head in a silent reply.

“I knew that smoke wasn’t ours,” the pilot said, grinning, “but with things happening so fast, I didn’t have time to radio the Cobra, so I just blocked for you guys!”

Still dazed, ears still ringing, I nodded and waved.

“You sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, we’re all right.”

“Well, you Lurps take care,” he said, giving me a salute.

As I returned his salute, he increased engine power and pulled back the stick, lifting off and heading west to meet the other helicopters.

Silence returned, and I worked my way back to my team.

“What’d they say, Sarge?” Bedford asked when I returned.

“The pilot said he knew that smoke wasn’t theirs, so he blocked the Cobra so it wouldn’t shoot.”

“He didn’t see your panel?” Williams asked.

“No, just the smoke.”

“Damn!” Ward cried. “If it wasn’t for that guy, graves registration would be out here now sponging us up!”

“You mean that guy and Griffith,” I added.

“Yeah, you’re right,” Ward said.

“The sad thing is, I forgot to thank him.”

“Hey, nothing you can do about that,” said Bedford.

“Yeah, there is,” Griffith said, smiling. “You can thank me!”

“You’re right, Tony,” I said, looking at his warm, smiling face. “We owe you.”

With nothing else to do but continue the patrol, we mounted our gear and resumed our slow trek south through the continuous wall of vegetation. By 1300 hours we had moved another three hundred meters and reached a seventy-foot hill, where we set up an OP on the west side because it provided a clear view of the reservoir and two trails. But after several hours passed and we saw no sign of the enemy, we set up claymores around our perimeter, and Bedford and I worked our way west a hundred meters to check out one of the north-south trails.

That night at 2200 hours, Griffith caught sight of several small lights heading east toward us a couple of miles away. “Take a look, Sarge,” he whispered, nudging me with his hand.

“Damn, that’s gotta be gooks with flashlights!” I said, watching the lights bob and then suddenly disappear.

With such a brief sighting, we had no accurate range for a fire mission, but just in case, I notified our tactical operations center (TOC), who confirmed that we had no friendly forces in the area. But after spending a couple more hours without another sighting, I allowed all but one man to sleep, since I was confident the enemy wouldn’t continue toward us with all the hills and the water reservoir in their path.

However, at 0210 hours that night, Bedford woke me and the rest of the team, whispering, “We’ve got movement!”

“Okay,” I said, clutching my rifle as my heart began to pound.

By then each of us was sitting, straining to hear under the black, moonless sky, when we caught the sound of vegetation and branches moving fifty meters west. The crickets must have heard it, too, because they stopped singing.

“What do you think, Sarge?” Williams whispered as the sounds grew closer.

“I don’t know. . . . Hold your fire!” I said as my mind raced with questions: How’d they see us? How’d they get here so quick? Is it just by chance they maneuvered around the reservoir and back to us? Are they coming because of the rocket attack? Did they see Bedford and me when we went to the trail? How many men are coming? Are they coming from other directions as well? Should I fire our claymores? Should I tell my team to just throw grenades so we don’t give away our position? If I do, will one of the grenades hit the vegetation and bounce back? If I tell ’em, will the enemy hear me? What should I do? Where in the hell did I go wrong?

Recovering my senses, I whispered to Ward, “Give me your handset.” After he gave it to me, I put it to my ear and signaled TOC that we had movement nearby, by breaking squelch a certain number of times, hoping that if things did go to hell, TOC would know our situation and could mount a rescue.

But with our position so far from friendlies, and TOC unable to do anything in so short a time, we sat huddled in the dark vegetation with our rifles and claymore generators, knowing we were on our own. Just then the noise came to within twenty meters and then suddenly diminished from a loud, steady ruckus to a quiet, stealthy advance that I knew only a large predatory animal could make.

Relieved that we were facing an animal rather than the enemy, Ward notified TOC of our status just as the noise separated into two encircling paths, ten meters out.

“Tigers!” Bedford whispered, hearing snorting and heavy footfalls.

“Sounds like big-ass Bengals,” I added. “Don’t shoot unless you gotta.”

“For sure,” Bedford replied as the tigers circled at a constant distance.

But when they continued circling for a couple of minutes, Bedford said, “Let’s try scaring ’em off with rocks.”

“Yeah, why not, John?” I said, reaching to the ground and feeling blindly for rocks.

Once we all had some, we lobbed them over the vegetation at the tigers, which caused them to leap to one side, but they quickly returned. As this went on for the next hour or so, with the beasts not coming closer but not leaving, either, we knew we could keep them at bay as long as we could find enough rocks.

“I think we can forget about sleep,” I whispered, reaching for another rock.

Just before dawn a cold rain developed, and finally the tigers left. With all of us exhausted, hungry, and wet, I had two men keep watch on the reservoir and trails as the others ate and went to sleep.

An hour later Bedford and Ward were sitting watch as Griffith and I slept, when a piercing scream suddenly came at us out of the dark clouds. Glancing up, I saw one of two camouflage-painted F-4s diving directly over our position, and we all hit the cold, muddy dirt, thinking it was coming at us. Within seconds it broke from its dive with a loud explosive noise as the twin afterburners hurled the twenty-ton jet back up into the sky.

Still lying on the ground, we felt the earth shake and, a few seconds later, heard the air thunder as two 500-pound bombs exploded on the far side of the reservoir, three-quarters of a mile away. At that instant the second jet dived from the clouds and dropped two bombs as the first prepared to dive again. Curious why they were striking so close, I had Ward radio TOC, who told us the jets were targeting an area they had struck before.

Minutes later the Phantoms had dropped all their bombs, and low-flying helicopters started to roam our area, moving in and out of LZs Betty and Sharon. Frustrated by all the activity, we stayed buried in the vegetation, waiting for them to leave, figuring any enemy troops in the area would be doing the same.

It kept raining the rest of that day, and we stayed wet and shivering. But just after dusk we again heard movement, this time approaching from the south. Sitting in place with our weapons in hand, we realized that the tigers were back. But after nearing our position and circling us as before, they started to come closer, clearly less intimidated by our rocks.

For the rest of that night the tigers tormented us as before, departing at dawn just as the two Phantoms returned for another bombing run. After the jets completed their attack, the low-flying helicopters returned; the tigers came back again that night, and the cold, rainy weather continued. Then the cycle continued for yet another day, only without the Phantoms, with the tigers becoming more emboldened each night.

Just before dusk on our last evening of patrol, Griffith sat heating a cup of water for his usual chicken-and-rice LRRP ration. Ward sat under a poncho next to him, eating a spaghetti ration. But once Ward was halfway through, he suddenly stopped eating and said, “Hey, Sarge, I’ve been thinking about tonight.”

“What about tonight?” I asked, eating the skin of an orange.

“There’s no way those tigers can come closer without ’em getting one of us.”

“We’ll be all right.”

“Maybe you, but not me.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Because it’s me they’re after.”

“What makes you say that?”

“’Cause I’m the biggest.”

“Gimme a break, Ward; you’re big but you’re stupid.”

“Oh, yeah? I’ll show you who’s stupid!” he said, picking up his half-eaten LRRP ration and crawling in the mud toward me.

“What the hell you doing?” I asked as he crawled over my legs and past my feet.

“I’m gonna put this by you so they’ll eat your ugly ass!”

“Okay, Ward,” I said as he set the ration at arm’s length in front of my feet. “If that helps you relax. . . ”

After he crawled back, I grabbed another orange from my rucksack, careful not to move Ward’s ration and ruin his fun.

When night fell, the tigers returned like clockwork, and we started throwing rocks. But halfway through the night, during the early morning hours of Wednesday, September 4, one of them approached me. Unable to see anything in front of me but a black void, I pulled my feet in and sat up. Pointing my CAR-15 at the sounds, I flicked the selector to semi as the tiger paused and then cautiously stepped toward the ration Ward had placed by my feet.

I could hear it as it reached the plastic bag the ration was in and began to eat. As I listened carefully, with my finger next to the trigger in case it should make a sudden move, it finished the meal and started to lick inside the wrapper. I couldn’t help thinking how much it sounded like my cat, Fluffy, back home. At that instant the tiger stopped licking and stood silently. Apparently not satisfied with the skimpy meal Ward had left, it stepped toward me. Aware of every lump and contour of the ground after five days of stationary patrol in this spot, I knew there wasn’t another morsel of food between the big cat and my team—except me.

So with no time to lose, I fired two quick shots.

As each shot echoed through the night with a bright flash, I heard the tiger leap to one side. Satisfied that it wasn’t coming closer, I held my fire, not wanting to give enemy troops more of a fix on our position. But instead of falling or running away, I heard it pad calmly over to its companion, whereupon the two walked away.

“Man, that thing wasn’t even scared!” I whispered. “I know I didn’t miss it!”

“That cat just used two of its lives!” Ward muttered.

“Hey, Sarge,” Griffith said, “since we’re getting out at first light, why don’t we zap ’em with claymores when they come back?”

“You know, Tony,” I said, “they’ve dicked with us long enough. Let’s do that.”

But hours passed and daybreak came, and the tigers didn’t return. We then prepared for our extraction by retrieving our claymores and gathering our gear. At 0705 hours TOC radioed for our extraction, so we headed north a short distance to a bomb crater we had passed, which would serve as a pickup zone.Take

Once there, we sat exhausted inside the wet vegetation surrounding the crater, and I dozed off. Just then a flock of birds flew up from the brush, waking me just before I heard the heavy whump, whump, whump of a helicopter rotor approaching.

Suspicious of the timing, I stood up and peeked out to see a lone Huey gunship a quarter mile to the north, a pair of gold crossed sabers painted on the nose, flying low directly at us.

“Take cover!” I shouted, plunging into the crater.

At that second the gunship’s nose-mounted minigun opened fire with a long burst at a tall clump of vegetation two hundred meters north of us. As a hail of bullets interspersed with red tracers ricocheted and whined through the air, the gunship started to work its fire toward us.

“They’re from the First of the Ninth, Ward!” I hollered. “Get ’em on the horn and tell ’em we’re here!”

Ward, who had already pulled his rucksack in front of him, quickly switched frequencies and was soon in contact with the gunship, yelling, “Cease fire, Blue Max! Cease fire! Slashing Talon Five Nine a hundred meters south, over!”

At that instant the gunship quit firing and the pilot radioed, “Sorry about that. We were reconning by fire, over.”

“Roger, Blue Max,” Ward replied as the gunship turned and flew away.

Shaken by the event, I pulled out one of my last fruitcake bars. “I told ya, Sarge, your last patrol was gonna bring bad luck,” Griffith said, taking a seat.

“Bad luck, Tony?” I replied, staring at the exhausted, weathered faces of my team. “It’s been a fuckin' nightmare!”

We saw several Hueys approaching below thick black clouds to our north, but we stayed hidden even though we knew that our extraction ships were in the air. Once radio contact was made, we crawled out of the crater into the vegetation surrounding the crater’s edge.

Bedford guided a Huey to a hover by holding his rifle high over his head as the other birds circled above. When it reached our crater we ran through the mud and rotor wash and leaped inside as each door gunner trained his M60 beyond us, watching for the enemy. We lifted off into the cold, drizzly sky as I sat on the floor with my CAR-15 in hand and my wet, muddy feet hanging out the door. Speeding back to our LZ, I leaned against Griffith’s leg, knowing that my patrols were over and I would make it home.

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Five months later, during the early morning hours of Wednesday, February 5, 1969, Sergeant Tony L. Griffith from Company H, 75th Infantry (Ranger) led his five-man long-range reconnaissance team through thick fog and dense, short brush between An Loc and the Cambodian border, wearing my old flop hat, which I had given him for luck. Hearing wood being chopped not far off a trail they were assigned to surveil, the experienced Recondo School grad had his team set up an ambush. But members of the North Vietnamese Army had also detected the team.

At dawn several enemy soldiers stole through the fog and flung a grenade into the middle of the team, who were spread in a line by the trail, in sight of each other. The grenade exploded next to the front scout, Cpl. Richard E. Wilkie, showering him with shrapnel. As the enemy opened fire, the two team members on Wilkie’s left panicked and fired in the direction of the grenade’s blast. Caught in an intense crossfire, Wilkie, a Special Forces veteran, was shot five times—once by the enemy, twice by his team, and twice by bullets that passed through him. Miraculously, he survived. So, too, did the assistant team leader, Lewis D. Davidson, who was hit twice in the leg. Tony Griffith’s luck, however, ended that morning, when he was hit by multiple gunshots to the chest, just days before his twenty-first birthday.

What a joy it was yesterday to receive a signed copy of Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story, by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, best-selling author, and Washington Post associate editor David Maraniss.

Once in a Great City covers life in the Motor City from the autumn of 1962 through the spring of 1964, when Detroit was still an industrial juggernaut and world player. I had the pleasure of driving Mr. Maraniss around the streets of my home town and to many of the sites he talks about in his fascinating book. Who could have imagined this 14-year-old juvenile delinquent and middle school dropout playing a part in this story?

I felt a little flush of pride at how David signed my book: “To Bob Ankony. With great thanks for your help––and honesty.” The driving force in everything I write has always been brutal honesty. I believe that is the only way we can understand the social context of human behavior. This sometimes horrifies my wife, Cathy, who is the constant voice of restraint when she sees me barreling headlong down the path of being way too candid.

If you want to experience the intriguing history of my Once Great City, pick up a copy and take a drive through the Motor City, circa 1962.

Deputy Inspector Jellyfish owned a major police equipment and uniform distribution center in Metropolitan Detroit. Because of this, he was given the rank of deputy inspector in our department, even though he had never attended a police academy and didn’t have a bit of scout car experience. What Jellyfish did have was plenty of disposable income. He rode his own Harley Davidson, complete with lights and siren. He dressed the part, too, wearing his brown motorcycle breeches, gold helmet, and Colt Python .357 with a six-inch barrel. The way he strutted around our station, I couldn’t help wondering if maybe the firearm’s model name and barrel length were compensating for something a bit less substantial he was packing in those riding breeches.

It was only a matter of time before we collided. It happened on the muggy eighty-degree evening of Tuesday, August 12, 1980, when two police officers in Inkster (a high-crime suburb west of Detroit) responded to a man-with-a-gun complaint. When the officers stepped onto the front porch a young man charged out the door and blasted them both with a shotgun.

Officers from nearby departments sped to the scene and somehow managed to remove the critically wounded officers even though the shooter was still in the house. No command officer was at the scene, so the call went out for one.

I was a sergeant at our Patrol and Investigation Division, and the only command officer on duty. I heard the frantic pleas on the radio, but the rules dictated that I couldn’t leave the station if no other command officer was on duty. So I had our dispatchers call Deputy Inspector Jellyfish, who was supposed to be at home on standby.

Since he didn’t answer and I had an experienced detective at our station, I grabbed a tear-gas rifle off the rack, along with several cartridges. I also grabbed my .30-caliber M2 carbine, loaded with a thirty-round magazine of tracer bullets and with two more fifteen-round magazines in a pouch on the stock.

When I arrived the street was blocked by scout cars, so I ran with several officers along the opposite sidewalk, taking cover with two of them behind a tree across from the shooter’s small home. It was still hot and sunny. The house was securely surrounded, and the neighbors had been evacuated. I could see the pools of blood on the porch.

Inserting a cartridge into the tear-gas rifle, I took aim at the living room window—an easy shot—and pulled the trigger. But the cartridge must have been old, because the firing pin only pierced the primer and shot a jet of tear gas in my face.

“Son of a bitch!” I yowled as I loaded another cartridge and took aim. But the same thing happened again, with more tear gas shooting into my face.

“Okay,” I growled, unslinging the M2 carbine, “it’s his bad luck the tear gas is shit.” With tears streaming down my face, I radioed the men at the rear of the house to clear the area.

Mapping out every step and obstacle in my mind and visualizingthe tight stitch of rounds I was going to fire just above the first floor of the house, I yelled, “Come out, you little cocksucker, or I’m going to come in right now and end your worthless fuckin’ excuse for a life!”

With no SWAT or hostage rescue team at the scene, there really was no other option. Police were expected to make it work at the scene or suffer the consequences of failing. So we had to get this guy out of the house before nightfall, when the situation would become much more dangerous for everyone.

I had just switched the selector on my rifle to full automatic and taken the safety off when the front screen door suddenly swung open. An arm popped out and dropped a shotgun. At that instant, a swarm of officers rushed inside. Apparently, the shooter resisted, because he got the ass beating of his life.

Once the paperwork was done and the scumbag was in our lockup, Deputy Inspector Jellyfish showed up at the station. And he was steaming—not about the officers being shot, the tear gas not working, or the fact that no other command officer from any department, including himself, had responded to the call. No, Jellyfish was angry because the prisoner took a beating and also because, had the tear gas worked properly, it could have started a house fire. So Jellyfish directed his rage at me and wrote me up for suspension. His papers went promptly to the Sheriff’s Headquarters in downtown Detroit. But instead of suspending me, Sheriff William Lucas tossed the papers in the trash and awarded me, along with the two officers closest to the scene, Danny Strickland and William Coleman, a Departmental Citation—our department’s second-highest award.

And in case Deputy Inspector Jellyfish hadn’t gotten the message, some officers opened his car and left a road-killed dog on the driver’s seat.

I was up on the roof yesterday, watching the sun go down and sitting really still, thinking. At this latitude, the Earth’s surface is rotating eastward on its axis at 750 miles per hour, while sailing west around the sun at 20 miles per second. The sun, meanwhile, is in the outer spirals of our galaxy, orbiting up and to my left around the center of the galaxy at 150 miles per second, as our galaxy barrels in God knows what direction at 200 miles per second. All this is happening as the universe itself expands perhaps even faster than the speed of light (186,000 miles per second).

So much for thinking I was up there sitting still.

On Monday, February 10, 1975, my partner, Ken Crowley, and I were assigned to a sixteen-square-mile area in the City of Romulus, a large suburb ten miles southwest of Detroit. Romulus’s most noteworthy attribute, other than hotels and crime, is that it surrounds Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Every shift, four sheriff’s cars patrolled the city, and Ken and I were working the eleven p.m.‑seven a.m. shift.

Ken was a former captain in the US Army Twelfth Special Forces Group, and I was a former Army Ranger. Both of us had combat experience in Vietnam. We often worked together. We both worked nights and attended college in the mornings, and since we also had to be in court every morning after we made an arrest and anytime someone contested a ticket, we were always low on sleep.

It was a bitter ten-degree evening, but the roads were clear and dry. Driving to our assigned area, we heard other cars on the radio, making traffic stops or being dispatched in the districts and county parks. It was quiet in our area, and the hours ticked by as we drove along farm roads, though subdivisions, and around strip centers. We were talking about the sergeant exam we had just taken, and problems we were experiencing with our wives, who worked days.

Driving in circles was getting tiresome, so I decided to play a joke on our dispatchers. The county morgue used the same frequency as our patrol cars, and when nothing was happening I would occasionally radio dispatch, pretending we were one of the Detroit wagons en route to pick up bodies. In ten years, homicides had shot up fivefold, and the Motor City had earned a new moniker: “Murder City,” the most dangerous place to live in America.[1]

If the morgue responded to Detroit or Highland Park, another very high-crime city in the center of the county, it was a common thing to hear them radio that they were picking up two, three, or even four bodies. For these cities outside our patrol area, the dispatchers only logged the morgue runs but had absolutely no follow-up or other interaction—as sheriff’s dispatchers, they already had more than enough on their plate. Thus, there was no way for them to get the scoop on what happened.

Our dispatchers knew I lived in Detroit and, moreover, had worked narcotics there, which meant I had surely seen some crazy stuff in the trenches. Thus, after hearing one of these calls, the dispatchers, eager for an inside scoop, would often take me aside back at the station to get my take on what happened. The joke was to use a convincing foreign accent so they wouldn’t recognize my voice, and ratchet up the body count for the benefit of our dispatchers and any other of our cars that were listening. Since the morgue used the same frequency as the sheriff’s dispatch, there was no way of knowing who was actually making the call.

The trick was to give a high enough body count to amaze the dispatchers, but not so high that they would suspect a prank. Then, sure enough, when we got back to the station, the dispatchers would be all over me with questions about the latest shootout. “Christ, Ankony,” they’d say, “it’s the freakin’ OK Corral in your town! What the hell is going on over there?” Of course, the real challenge in all this was to keep a straight face back at the station when offering my expert opinion on what went down in Murder City that night.

It was harmless, and it was a dead night anyway, so I grabbed the mike from the dash and said with a gravelly Eastern European accent, “Er-uh, One Fifty-One ta radio.”

“Go ahead, One Five One.”

“We’re en route to Euclid and Linwood ta pick up nine.”

“We have Euclid and Linwood, One Five One––for nine. Your time is zero two thirty-seven hours.”

“One Fifty-One, okay,” I said, placing the mike back on the hook and then laughing. Euclid and Linwood, in west-central Detroit, was a war zone, especially at bar-closing time.

“Hey, Ken,” I said, still giggling, “can you imagine what everybody’s thinking right now? I mean, all the guys gotta be saying, ‘What a shootout! There’s gotta be blood and bodies everywhere!’”

Ken laughed and said, “A typical night in Detroit.”

We drove around more, and Ken said, “Circuit court sucked it out of me . . . I can’t stay awake.”

“I hear ya.”

“Can you drive while I nod off?”

“For sure, but better yet, I’ll find a place to hide and we’ll both nod off.”

“Okay.”

A few minutes later, I pulled into the end of a narrow dirt road and parked with our engine on and doors locked. “This oughta do,” I said.

It was winter, so I made sure our exhaust was downwind and free of any obstacles. I had once found a couple dead in their car. They were having sex in the backseat and died of carbon monoxide poisoning because the vehicle’s exhaust was backed into a snowbank.

“We’re okay?” Ken asked.

“For sure. When I’m asleep, I can focus my brain to hear nothing but our car number.”

“No foolin’!”

“Yeah, I was an RTO [radiotelephone operator] in Nam and could home in on ‘Slashing Talon Five-Nine’ even with minimum volume.”

“That was your team?”

“Yeah. So rack out. I already plugged ‘Thirty-seven’ into my brain.”

We closed our eyes as the radio periodically called one car, then another.

Suddenly, a spotlight blasted in Ken’s and my eyes. It was another car, manned by Officers Gesch and McKinnon. We had worked with them before. They pulled alongside, and I rolled my window down.

“We’ve been looking all over for you guys!” Gesch said.

“Really?” I moaned, still coming around.

“Yeah, radio’s been calling you for two hours.”

“Two hours—wow!”

“All our cars, plus the state police, were looking for you.”

“Ah, shit!” I said, as Ken looked at me and said quietly, “I was relying on you, Bob.”

“I know. Just give me a minute to think.”

“Maybe say our radio broke,” Ken said.

“But it isn’t broke. And if it was, they’d want to know how I drove two hours without hearing traffic.”

Gesch laughed and said, “Then think of something.”

“I just did: I’ll loosen the antenna jack and say the radio was working intermittently––you know, we heard traffic but just didn’t hear our calls.”

“That should do it,” McKinnon said.

“You think it’ll work?” Ken asked.

“We don’t have a choice,” I said, popping our trunk.

I stepped out and loosened the antenna jack to the large steel-cased receiver just enough so it would still work, and shut the trunk. Stepping back in, I grabbed the mike and said, “Uh, radio, this is Car Thirty-Seven. Were you trying to reach us?”

“Car Thirty-Seven?”

“Yes, this is Thirty-Seven.”

“Thirty-Seven! Two-o-two-two!” (A 2022 meant return to the station immediately.)

Ten minutes later, we pulled in the back of the station. I was the senior officer, and one of our dispatchers, Charlie Howell, met me as I stepped inside. Charlie was a great officer and the top pistol shooter in our department. More importantly, he knew the importance of answering radio calls promptly. “What the fuck happened!” he barked.

“Our antenna was loose, and I had to tighten the damn thing.”

“That’s bullshit!”

“Hey, you know how shitty the roads are. Chuckhole musta’ shaken it loose.”

“Try explaining that to the lieutenant.”

Ken and I walked to the front desk. Lieutenant Hamilton, six-two and 240 pounds of solid muscle, was standing behind the desk, looking down at us. “So you had radio problems all that time, Ankony?”

“Yeah. Antenna jack was loose, but I fixed it.”

“So that’s never gonna happen again, right?”

“No way, Lieutenant. I’m gonna check the antenna every time I take a car.”

He nodded with a slight smile and said, “Good idea.”

As we turned to leave, Hamilton pulled me aside.

“Ankony, what the hell do you think happened there? Nine bodies—holy shit!”

“Hey, Lieutenant,” I said, “that’s pretty standard shit since Coleman Young became mayor.”[2]

“I guess you’re right,” he said. “Okay, get back out there, guys, and stop some crime.”

Ken and I hightailed it out of the station. Back in the cruiser, after we had put a couple of blocks behind us and it was safe to laugh, Ken said, “Jeez, Ankony, just think what you could accomplish if you put that devious mind to work for the forces of good!”[3]

________________________

[1] Detroit periodically led the nation as the most dangerous big city in both murder and violent crime rates, and it “won” again in 2013. Christine MacDonald, “Detroit Led U.S. in Murder, Crime Rates, FBI Says,” Detroit News, Nov. 11, 2014, www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/wayne-county/2014/11/10/detroit-led-us-murder-crime-rates-fbi-says/18793923/.

[2] Coleman Young, who led the city from 1974‑94, is generally acknowledged one of the worst mayors Detroit ever had.

[3] Three weeks later, Ken and I would be in the fight of our lives: http://www.drrobertankony.com/blog/please-dont-leave-me.

The falls have long been a special place for my wife, Cathy, and me. We spent our honeymoon there in 1978 and have returned once or twice a year for decades. What drew us was not just the majestic beauty of six million cubic feet of water each minute plunging 165 feet into Niagara Gorge, or the festive atmosphere of Clifton Hill’s restaurants, taverns, and wax museums, but also the thirty miles of scenic parkway for running, biking, and swimming.

Our three children loved it, and that Wednesday, we were at the Chippewa Slip, about a mile upstream from the Falls, where a portion of the Niagara River diverts to become the Welland River with its lovely beach and boat docks.[1] I had just finished a nine-mile run with my 12-year-old daughter, Catherine, riding escort on her bicycle, and we met my wife and our boys, Bobby and Mikey, at the beach.

It was eighty-five degrees and humid, so I swam across the river with Catherine and made another trip with Bobby as Cathy watched from the beach. Bobby was 9 years old and a good swimmer. It wasn’t a far swim, and I was confident of my kids’ abilities. Still, I had taught them that if they ever got tired, they could just put their hand on my shoulder and hitch a ride. An avid swimmer, I always paid special attention to motorboats. I had had several close calls with them, and as a detective I once handled a manslaughter case when a boater cruising too close to shore killed a swimmer while the swimmer’s daughter looked on helplessly from the water’s edge.

Chippewa Beach was routinely patrolled by Saint John Rescue. They had sixteen-foot boats equipped with twin 90-horsepower Mercury outboard engines. The two-person crew would motor to the entrance of the slip, turn the engines off, and drift quietly in the current, watching for any boater or swimmer in need of help. And that’s just what they were doing when Bobby and I headed back to the beach from the far side. We were approaching the middle of the river as the rescue boat drifted slowly past. A man stood at the center control console, and a young woman was in the bow.

Seeing us approach, the woman gestured for us to swim ahead and pass. Bobby was following immediately behind me. But just as I got in front of the boat, the man must have seen something that concerned him. Apparently, he didn’t know we were there, and he switched on the engines. The twin props sent the boat surging forward. The bow was coming straight at my head, and all I could do was push off from the keel and shove myself deep below with a couple of desperate strokes from my arms.

In a second that seemed to draw out into eternity, I thought of Bobby, small and vulnerable there in the water, and nothing I could do to protect him. I heard the screaming whine of the props and saw their spiraling cavitations. Sunlight shimmered and sparkled off the air bubbles moving gently below the stern as the world seemed to stop.

Somehow, in a whirl of surging water and high, shrieking engine noise, the props sailed over me. The boat shot past, and I could hear the woman screaming even before I popped up to the surface. The engines died, and the man looked back, wide-eyed and speechless.

The lady hollered, “Are you okay?”

Seeing Bobby swimming to me, I said, “I’m fine,” though I still felt the adrenaline charge.

The boat had narrowly missed Bobby. I wanted to continue our swim so he wouldn’t develop a morbid fear of open water, but the woman insisted that we climb aboard and they take us to the beach. So we climbed in and met Cathy and the kids, who hadn’t realized anything was wrong until they saw us getting aboard.

That evening, Bobby and I swam in the Niagara River by our motel, and every year since that little nightmare, we finished each vacation at the Falls with the three kids and me swimming a half mile in the Niagara River and on into Chippewa Slip and the beach. Invigorated after the long swim, we would stop at Tim Hortons and drive off with a box of doughnuts.

* Bobby is now married and works as a computer engineer with Boeing Defense, Space & Security in Southern California. He lives only a few miles from us, and we still swim together in open water.

__________________________

[1] Chippewa Slip was featured in the 1953 movie Niagara, staring Marilyn Monroe and Joseph Cotten.

I love doughnuts! Especially big cream-filled ones covered with powdered sugar. And that’s exactly what I was having, while chatting with Joe Porcarelli, the owner of Amy Joy Donuts on Michigan Avenue in Dearborn, when I glanced outside and saw a raggedy blue Chevy with a defective brake light pull up next to my scout car. Joe was handing me my glass of orange juice as Ishmael Ahmed, 27, stepped out of the car. It was Monday morning, September 6, 1976.

I had first met Ishmael three years earlier, attending classes at Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn. I was walking through a crowded hall of students—wall-to-wall tie-dye, bell-bottoms, beads, beards, and Afros—when he approached me and asked if I wanted to buy some grass. He was soft spoken and would have remained unremarkable if he weren’t a repeat criminal. Perhaps he felt safe because I looked even grungier than he, or because he could see I was a fellow Arab. But Ishmael didn’t know I was an off-duty undercover cop, assigned to the Wayne County Sheriff’s Metropolitan Narcotic Bureau.

Proud of his grass, Ishmael discreetly opened a bag to let me have a sniff. I smiled and said, “Decent, man! How much?”

“Ten bucks,” he whispered.

I could have arrested him on the spot, but college campuses in ’73 were hotbeds of civil unrest. And in Michigan, multiply that by a factor of three. Crime was skyrocketing, and all across America, campus uprisings and riots were still erupting over the Vietnam War, drugs, and the recently developing Watergate scandal. With the antiauthoritarian sentiments prevalent on campus, a simple arrest could escalate into something ugly. I knew I couldn’t arrest him by myself.

“Hey,” I said, “I’m getting together with some people this Friday. Can you get six lids?”

“Yeah, sure, I can do that. What’s your name?”

“Kamel. What’s yours?”

“Ishmael.”

“That’s cool! What’s your number?”

Ishmael didn’t seem like a big dealer, but one bust often results in that person ratting on another, all the way up to major guys, so when he gave his number I hoped for bigger things to come.

I called Ishmael the next morning, and he wanted to meet where he felt safe. I suggested Vernor Highway and Riverside, on the Dearborn side of Patton Park. I figured that being an Arab, he had to know the area since it was next to the mosque in the largest Arabic community in the country. I lived on the Detroit side of the park, so I knew the area, too. There were no homes nearby—just the park, a cemetery, a gas station, and some stores—so people could meet without arousing suspicion. As a bonus, surveilling officers could easily watch our moves. And it didn’t hurt that two of our officers were from Dearborn PD, so getting an arrest in their city was good for stats.

Ishmael gave me a description of his car, and as I pulled up in a Mustang that Friday afternoon, February 2, 1973, he was waiting. So were members of our Narcotics Bureau, who had already taken positions. Ishmael sold me six bags for fifty dollars. A few seconds later, he was arrested and charged with violation of the Controlled Substances Act––unlawful sale of marijuana, a four-year felony.

Ishmael ratted on a petty dealer, so we released his car, but then he never showed for district court, and a warrant was issued. Our county was one of the ten most populous in the United States. It included all of Detroit and over thirty other cities, and our detective bureau had file cabinets full of warrants: people wanted for everything from hot checks to rape, robbery, and murder.

Ishmael wasn’t important enough to get the attention of detectives, but I kept track of guys like him because he was my arrest. Besides, once a warrant goes out and a person doesn’t show for court, the statute of limitations no longer applies. Sure enough, four months later, Monday, June 4, 1973, I learned where he lived. I was working uniformed patrol on the seven p.m.‑three a.m. shift with Deputy Ken Crowley. What with court and college classes in the morning, it was a difficult shift, but it’s also the most exciting—criminals tend to sleep in during the day and come alive at night.

We had just pulled out from the county jail in Detroit after transporting a prisoner. I said, “Hey, Ken, there’s a little shit I know who’s wanted on a felony warrant.”

“What’d he do?” Ken asked as I turned onto Gratiot Avenue.

“Sold me some grass when I was working narcotics.”

“Oh, yeah? Where’s he live?”

“By Patton Park. Upstairs apartment next to Roman Village.”

“That’s convenient.”

“Yeah, I have his number. We can drop a dime from Roman Village, and if he isn’t there, we’ll grab something to eat.”

Twenty minutes later, we parked at Roman Village and I called our station from the public phone inside to let them know we might be executing a warrant. Then I dialed the number I had for Ishmael.

“Hello?” a young woman answered.

“Hey, this is Bakastello. Is Ishmael around?”

“Uh . . . yeah, I’ll get ’im.”

I hung up the phone. Ken radioed the station, who notified Dearborn PD, and Ken and I ran west two buildings, raced up a flight of stairs, and kicked in the door. That’s how it’s done for felons who don’t show for court. You never know if the guy’s armed or who else is there, but you know that surprise and speed mean more safety and greater odds for success.

The woman screamed as we charged in with flashlights and guns out, hollering “Police!” We found Ishmael in a back bedroom with his hands up. He had a .22-caliber rifle by the front door, so we confiscated it. We noticed stacks of posters with the image of a raised arm clutching an AK47, calling for the overthrow of Israel, and other posters showing a map of Israel with a swastika above.

“What’s with this?” I asked.

“They took our land,” Ishmael replied.

“So you sell drugs?”

“Just that time.”

“Sure, and you don’t show for court, either.”

We patted him down and transported him to our station for booking. Dearborn PD was notified to pick him up.

Two months later, Monday, August 6, 1973, I appeared at Wayne County Circuit Court in Detroit, Judge Irwin Burdick’s courtroom, for Ishmael’s trial. Ishmael didn’t stand much chance, since he had sold drugs directly to a police officer, witnessed by other officers, and had pocketed funds with prerecorded serial numbers. The failure-to-appear didn’t help his case, either. But everything is relative, and courts in Detroit are overwhelmed with violent crime. Faced with an inevitable guilty verdict, Ishmael took a plea and was released on probation.[1]

That was the last time I saw Ishmael until that Monday morning three years later, when he stepped inside Amy Joy Donuts.

I gave him a big smile and said, “Hey, what’s happening, Ishmael?”

“Uh, not much.”

“Still selling drugs to college students?”

“No, I got a job.”

“That’s good. Where?” I asked, finishing my cream-filled frosted doughnut.

“Project Acorn.”

“I heard about that place. You know your left brake light’s out?”

“It is?”

“Yeah, let me see your license.”

He handed it to me, and I ran a warrant check with my portable radio. Sure enough, it came back with a hit.

“Hey, guess what, Ishmael,” I said. “Today’s your lucky day!”

“Huh?”

“Dearborn has an outstanding warrant on you for driving while suspended.”

“I paid that ticket.”

“That’s what everyone says. So I’m trying to decide what to do. I could write you a ticket and let you walk, or I can arrest you and do an inventory search of your ride. Lemme see . . . Okay, I decided. Got any drugs in there?”

“No. No.”

I patted Ishmael down and cuffed him.

Joe Porcarelli stepped out from back and said, “What’s going on, Bob?”

“He’s wanted on a warrant.”

“Okay. Get him outta here.”

I placed Ishmael in the backseat of my scout car and called for a wrecker. While I waited, I did an inventory search of Ishmael’s car and found a bag of grass in the glove box. I walked back to my car holding up the bag. “Hey, look what I found!” I said. “What are the odds?”

“That’s not mine! A friend was using my car.”

“I don’t get it, Ishmael,” I said, getting in the car. “You park right next to my car and walk up to me like we're friends.”

“Um . . .”

“I tell you what: you got one humongous pair of clangers. Either that, or you’re the most shit-for-brains dumb-ass I ever met! With jihadis like you, I’m thinkin’ the Israelis won’t have too much to worry about.”

* * *

I never saw Ishmael again, but in 1980 I returned to the Narcotics Bureau as a sergeant and crew chief. In cooperation with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, using wiretaps, we arrested three Canadian citizens and two men Ishmael had associated with from the same Dearborn neighborhood. They were trafficking large quantities of marijuana, hidden inside spare tires, across the Detroit-Windsor Ambassador Bridge. The arrests were deliberately made on the Canadian side of the bridge, where the penalty for trafficking was more severe.

* * *

Amy Joy Donuts was on the far west side of the city. Frequented by cops from Dearborn, Dearborn Heights, Inkster, and the Sheriff’s Department, it had to be about the most crime-free establishment in the county. Joe Porcarelli, the owner, never accepted a dime from any cop for his doughnuts or drinks, and I enjoyed talking with him over the years about the Second World War. Joe was wounded on Tuesday morning, June 6, 1944—also known as D-day—when he and other paratroopers of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, liberated Sainte Mère Église, the first French town secured in the Normandy invasion. He later jumped into Holland, in Operation Market Garden, and served in Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge. Joe has three accomplished sons: Jim, John, and Joe. Two years after I moved to Grosse Ile in 1979 I met John, a Golden Gloves champion and clinical psychologist, when we crossed paths running in negative-six-degree weather. I became a friend of his family, and John was instrumental in motivating me to go for my PhD. Jim is an advertising executive in New York City. The youngest son, Joe, is the police chief of Grosse Ile. He picked me up at home many times after I retired, so I could once again hang around cops and ride the scout car. Joe senior passed away on Tuesday, February 14, 2012.

[1] Seven weeks later, on Monday, September 24, 1973, Deputy Ed Reedy and I arrested two men at Amy Joy Donuts and confiscated a .32-caliber Czech CZ model 27 pistol, thirty-nine packets of cocaine, and some grass. Both Ed and I had worked narcotics and had information from four people we had arrested the day before with 400 tabs of LSD, along with packets of cocaine and heroin, in Cass Benton Park. We arranged the transaction at Amy Joy Donuts because it provided an inconspicuous location and Dearborn’s court was much closer to our homes. The two men were waiting in their car, expecting to meet a buyer, when we rolled up in our scout car.

On April 9, 1966, I stood in formation by the three red and white 250-foot steel-girder jump towers at Fort Benning, Georgia. It was a warm Saturday afternoon, and I had just completed Airborne School after making five static-line jumps at 1,250 feet from a twin-tailed C-119 Flying Boxcar in Alabama. My sergeant handed me my orders and a small pair of silver-plated jump wings, shook my hand, and said, “Good luck!”

In the tradition of the airborne, I pinned my wings above my left breast pocket. I also wore a parachute glider patch above my folding dress hat and tucked my trousers into the elastic blousing bands above my new spit-shined jump boots. I was then placed on jump status and got an extra fifty-five dollars in jump pay each month––a status that required making a jump every three months.

I opened my orders and found that I was transferred to the riggers there on base until I could be sent to rigger school, six hundred miles away. I put my orders in my pocket and walked away feeling proud and strong. I was part of something great!

Three months later, Thursday, July 7, I graduated from Rigger School at Fort Lee, Virginia, and earned another set of wings. I was now qualified to pack and repair personnel parachutes and rig vehicles and artillery for aerial delivery. Under the terms of my enlistment, I was sent to Germany, where I hoped to see some of the battlefields of World War Two. Having missed out on parachuting into Normandy in the largest seaborne invasion in history, I always felt that I was born a generation too late.

There was nothing I could do about the circumstances of my birth, but I could certainly relive the experience by studying everything. I touched down at Rhein-Main Air Base on Friday, July 29. From there, I was driven to the General Charles Canham Kaserne in Bad Kreuznach, headquarters of the Eight Infantry Division (Mechanized).

The kaserne took its name from an American brigadier general who, three months after the Normandy invasion, took several high-ranking Nazis prisoner in the French port city of Brest. The senior Nazis, displeased at submitting to an officer of subordinate rank, demanded, “What are your credentials?”

Canham gestured to the tired, rugged infantrymen standing behind him, M1 rifles at the ready, and said, “These are my credentials!” Those words became the motto of the Eighth Infantry Division, which finished the war by liberating the Neuengamme concentration camp in northern Germany.

Proud of my assignment, I took my fatigues to the base tailors to have them sew on the division’s blue shoulder patch, bearing a white number “8” and a gold sword. Two days later, I got them back. Looking at the matching color airborne tabs sewn above, and my gold PFC stripes below, I felt a little thrill. I was to be no longer in training, but a member of the real army.

From Bad Kreuznach, I was assigned to the Eleventh Quartermaster Company, Aerial Equipment and Support, at the Rhine Kaserne in Wiesbaden. A large four-story red-brick building housed our company and members of the 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion. The barracks, built at the turn of the twentieth century, had billeted German soldiers in both world wars.

I was placed in the Air Delivery Platoon, which rigged vehicles and packed huge hundred-foot-diameter G-11 cargo parachutes at the Robert E. Lee Barracks on the west bank of the Rhine, in Mainz.

My platoon had twenty men, and six were assigned to a room. In mine were Corporals Adams, Bosk, Browning, and Shehan and PFC Sikes, our company clerk. I was 17, without even a high school education. Everyone else was two or three years older than me. All had graduated from high school, and Sikes had finished college.

Life was great. I finally had my own bed, footlocker, and large two-door wall locker. So I unpacked my duffel bag, had my clothes pressed and starched at the base cleaners, polished my brass and boots, and got all my field gear assembled and stowed according to regulations. A couple of days later, Platoon Sergeant Selnick inspected our room. Looking inside my lockers, he turned to the other men and said, “This is how you should have your gear!” He then glanced over at their lockers and walked out of the room.

No one said anything. Perhaps I had committed some other offense, but that’s when I started getting “the treatment.” That night, around three in the morning, someone flipped me over in my bunk, and I slammed onto the hard slate floor. I saw a flash of light as my head hit, then bright hall lights as the door to our room flew open. Looking out from beneath the next bunk, I saw a pair of legs, fully dressed in trousers and boots, running out of the room, and heard a voice cackle with glee.

The next day, when we returned from work at the Robert E. Lee Barracks, I found my helmet and web gear, which we all stored on top of our wall lockers, on the floor. Opening my footlocker and wall locker, I found everything in disarray. Both lockers had locks, and the wall locker was so big it would have taken two or three men to flip or shake it. Obviously, several people were in on it, yet no one in my room said a thing. So I quietly straightened everything. Then, as I sat on my footlocker polishing my boots or lay on my bunk reading, I discreetly glanced at the other men’s faces, wondering who, exactly, was behind it.

That night, the same thing happened, and I realized that all the men were in their bunks, as they had been the night before. Therefore, the CQ (Charge of Quarters)—a corporal who was always on duty in case of fire and to answer the company phone—had to be the person flipping me over. But a different CQ was standing watch every night. I didn’t know anyone in our unit and was baffled that I could have offended so many people without knowing it. Then I thought of Sikes, whose bunk was right next to mine, who seemed to be taking great pleasure in it all. Sikes was smart, good with words, and guys listened to him. Company clerks, supply clerks, and cooks all have considerable leverage because they have access to information and goods that others need. Besides, I could see it in Sikes’s eyes—just the way he looked at me: arrogance and a complete lack of compassion.

When I returned from work the next day, I found my lockers in the same disarray, and someone had hawked a huge lugie on the middle of my bed. It was slimy and green, and I had no choice but to clean up the mess. I could usually think my way through difficult situations or, as a kid used to getting in trouble, just run away. But now I was trapped. There were several hundred men in my kaserne, and I felt alone in a crowd. Everyone was bigger than I, and I knew that if I reported it to my sergeant, he would talk to our platoon, and that would only anger them all, alienating me even more. Our company commander and platoon sergeant lived off base, so in our barracks at night, we had only the CQ to protect us—and our company CQs were apparently the very ones flipping me over.

I didn’t know what to do other than stick it out and hope it would stop. I thought of my mom, who was always there to talk when I was in trouble, and I thought of my father, who seldom said anything but was good at getting back at people in clever ways. But letters from Europe took three weeks to get home and another three weeks back. As for telephones, no one ever used them, because they had to be coordinated by operators on both continents, at enormous cost. The only time someone got a call was if a family member died or was about to. Being stationed in Europe was like living on an outer planet, and in a matter of days I had gone from on top of the world to rock bottom.

What I really needed was my two-years-older brother, Richard. He was six feet one, and guys in our Detroit neighborhood called him “Big A-rab.” A couple years earlier, a tall neighborhood punk named Buttski had punched me in the face to show off in front of his girl. “I’ll get ’im for you, Bob,” my brother said when I told him.

The next day, I waited with my brother as Buttski came strutting down the alley on Vernor Highway by our home. “Hey, Buttski, come over here!” my brother said.

“What’s up, Big A-rab?” Buttski asked.

Pow! My brother’s fist slammed into Buttski’s face, knocking him down.

“What’s that for, A-rab?” Buttski yelped.

“How’s it feel, fuck face?” my brother yelled.

“Hey, I’m sorry, man!”

“You better be!”

It felt good at the time, but at this moment, my brother was four thousand miles away.

The treatment continued day and night, with someone always spitting on my bed, trashing my lockers, and flipping me over. But I never said a word. A few weeks later, just when I was allowed to have a pass and go off base and drink with the guys, the treatment suddenly stopped. I became friends with everyone, but never with Sikes. He just didn’t like me, and I learned not to like him.

Fourteen months later, I volunteered for Vietnam, had completed my GED, and became an Army Ranger.

I never asked why the treatment happened. I just moved on, empowered by something Gen. George S. Patton once said: “I don’t measure a man’s success by how high he climbs but by how high he bounces when he hits bottom.”

On a muggy Saturday evening, May 26, 1973, I was driving the scout car with Deputy Ken Crowley in Edward Hines Park. We were approaching Cass Benton Hill, an eighteen-mile-long parkway running northwest from the City of Dearborn to Northville Township. Hines Park was notorious for drug and alcohol abuse, and Cass Benton was one of the main hangouts for hundreds of young adults from Detroit’s suburbs.

I had worked this location before as an undercover narcotics officer on a motorcycle. It wasn’t difficult to find people selling marijuana, LSD, or heroin. Overdoses weren’t all that uncommon in the park. Neither were gang rapes. It was the early 1970s, and the drug culture was in full swing, with violent crime and property crime soaring nearly fivefold in the past ten years.[i] People from my age group were self-destructing every day.

Three cars usually patrolled Hines Park on weekend nights, but this evening it was just Ken and me. Ken was a former captain in the US Army Twelfth Special Forces Group, and I was a former Army Ranger, both of us with combat experience in Vietnam. We both were married and attending college, and I was also serving with Company F, 425th Infantry (Ranger) in the Michigan National Guard. We were young but battle tested and confident. I was the senior officer.

As we reached Cass Benton Hill, the parking lot was crammed, and cars overflowed onto the shoulder and hillside. There were people staggering and boom boxes blaring. But parking infractions and spaced-out idiots weren’t our concern. We wanted the drug dealers who frequented the park and blended anonymously into the crowd.

One way to flush them out was to appear suddenly and slowly approach the crowd with overheads flashing and spotlights on. Most people would just move out of the way, but those holding drugs or wanted on warrants would often bolt and run. Ken hit the lights, and I swung the car cautiously up the hill, watching for those “special-interest” characters dashing away. Sure enough, a guy and a girl took off running. They looked like promising targets. (Drug dealers often used women to carry the stash in their bra or pants, because women appeared less suspect and were more problematic to frisk.)

I stopped halfway up the hill and ran after the two while Ken stayed with the car. The girl dropped a bag of little cubical white tablets—most likely LSD. I grabbed it and caught up to both of them. I cuffed the guy’s hands behind his back and started leading them to the car, holding the links of his cuffs in one hand, and her arm in my other.

The crowd, more than two hundred strong, started yelling, “Let her go, you fuckin’ pig! You ain’t shit without your gun!” Ken was outside the car, and beer and wine bottles started flying at him. A bottle hit the back of his helmet and shattered, sending shards of glass into his neck and head. I made it back to Ken with the prisoners as bottles continued to rain down on us and our car.

We put both prisoners in back, and as we started to get in, we saw a guy brazenly throwing bottles at us from the edge of the crowd. Ken and I both ran the distance and grabbed him just as he ducked back into the crowd. And suddenly, we had several people on us, punching and kicking. It happened so fast, all we could do was defend ourselves with our heavy four-cell Kel-Lite flashlights and our portable radio, but we were quickly overwhelmed and shoved to the ground, wrestling one person after another.

As the battle continued, the crowd swarmed around us and we lost the bottle thrower we had just arrested. Meanwhile, others freed the two prisoners from our car. Somehow, Ken and I managed to get on our feet again. We drew our revolvers, and the crowd backed away. We were hurting, and although a few catcalls and profanities continued, for the most part there was only an eerie silence. Ken had already called for backup, but help had to come from other areas of the county.

Ken was bleeding quite a bit, and we made our way back to the car, our uniforms tattered and dirty. Ken fell into the passenger seat, and I grabbed a couple of Kotex pads from the trunk, where we kept our emergency medical gear, and put them on his head and neck to soak up the blood. I fired up the engine, and we sped the fourteen miles to Wayne County General Hospital, humiliated and defeated. Other cars were en route to Cass Benton, and we radioed an all-points bulletin about the escaped prisoners.

Everything we ever fought for seemed lost. Our neighborhoods in Detroit and Lincoln Park were going to shit, South Vietnam was falling fast to the Communists, and our peers hated us because we were cops, just as they had despised us when we were soldiers.

Ken got stitched up at the hospital, I was treated for minor injuries, and we both reported for duty the next day. Sometimes, cops and soldiers don’t win the battle, but they just keep showing up for the fight.

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[i] Blumstein. Alfred, "Crime's Decline-Why?" National Institute of Justice Journal, US Department of Justice, Oct. 1998, 7-20.