Chapter 1

My name is Scott Radner and it was the end of May 1970 and I had been out of the United States Marine Corps for a grand total of 9 weeks. I had returned Stateside from 'Nam nearly 6 months ago on a medical evacuation flight after I had gotten busted up when the chopper I was traveling on was shot down. I was a 2 digit midget as they used to say when you were really short in your tour and about to be rotated back to the States when it had happened.

I was finishing up my 2nd tour in 'Nam as the team leader of a Battalion Recon unit and this was likely the last trip into the boonies I would ever have to make. We had been playing up near (over) the DMZ having dropped in by night with a primary task of gathering intelligence We had ambushed a small motorized patrol and found we had captured a full blown NVA Lieutenant General and a Chinese Colonel doing a little sightseeing and I had split the team 5/4 with the 5 guys taking them back while the 4 of us set a false trail for those who were going to be following us. We led them on a merry chase for a week before slipping back across the DMZ and heading for our pickup point.

I had an open offer to go to OCS sitting in my file, but had decided that I had seen enough, heard enough, done enough and I was simply going to get out when my enlistment was up in March. I was pretty fucked up at the time and getting very hostile toward authority, especially the assholes that didn't have a clue what they were doing, but gave us fucked up orders anyway - 'Nam had a way of doing that.

Anyway I noticed that the chopper carrying my team and I away from our pickup point was flying really low and asked the Crew Chief if there was a problem. He covered the mouthpiece of his headset and said there sure was and his name was 1st Lieutenant Chambers, the birds' pilot. It seemed he was looking to score "brownie points" with the squadron's CO by trying to spot 'charlie" on the ground so was flying below regulation height. Normal height he said was usually 1500 meters or so and here we were not more than 150 off the deck. I was just getting ready to move forward and have a "word" with this wannabe john wayne pilot when all hell broke loose. The bird took a burst of fire from the ground that killed the pilot, severely wounded the co-pilot and damaged the front rotor.

The co-pilot did a hell of a job keeping the bird (a Ch-46 without power has the glide ratio of a brick) in the air and managed to get us about 8 klicks downrange from where we initially took fire, screaming out Mayday, Mayday, Mayday, as he gave our coordinates on the radio. We finally came down and came down hard. Everyone in the back of the Chinook was pretty busted up with lots of broken bones and a number of severe looking gashes and cuts, me being one of them. Well everybody but our "medic," a short little Mexican-American with a perverse sense of humor named Miguel Gomez, who got bruised up a bit, but nothing broken or busted. We scrambled and set up a defensive perimeter as best we could, knowing that if the VC found us before help arrived we were dead meat and we hoped like hell that help was on the way. We found out later that there was 3 full battalions of VC and a full regiment of NVA in the area and the pilots had been cautioned about flying too low. Hell I haven't yet figured out why they sent that big bastard to pick us up in the first place other than I had heard that it was a tad faster than most of the other choppers with a bit greater range.

The crew chief and another crew member got the co-pilot out and applied temporary bandages to the 3 bullet wounds he had and left that dead son of a bitch pilot handing from his straps. I recommended the co-pilot for the CMH and he ended up with a Navy Cross which I thought grossly unfair considering what he had done.

I had a pretty good gash across my forehead and another down my cheek that bled pretty badly, and I knew that more than a couple ribs were busted because I could feel them grating whenever I moved too quickly. Miguel told me that the co-pilot would live if we got him to help fairly soon and then said that Steve Michaels, our explosives guy and Joe Barton, who handled heavy weapons were mirror images of one another in that their injuries were exactly the opposite of each other. Me, he said, would have a bunch of nice sinister looking scars on my face and for me not to try passing them off as dueling scars because everyone would think I was a lousy swordsman.

The first incoming rounds started to go ping off the body of the chopper when 3 gunships showed up and began blowing the shit out of the bad guys. A couple of jets then moved in and dropped napalm on 3 sides of us and two dust-offs were right behind them and behind them a sky-crane to retrieve the downed bird. We got loaded on board the dust-off and were soon on our way to the hospital.

I was lucky as the x-rays confirmed that I had 4 broken ribs, but they weren't broken all the way through, they were what were called non-displaced rib fractures. The biggest danger was the possibility of pneumonia setting in so after they had strapped me up they started me on breathing treatments that forced me to take deep breaths and it hurt like a son of a bitch! The biggest problem was my face. Oh nothing was broken, but my face was criss-crossed with a bunch of cuts and gouges that became infected. Sure, the docs finally got all the infections under control and I eventually healed. When all was said and done my face was a mass of scar tissue and I looked pretty gastly. Since I was so short on my tour it was decided that I would be shipped home to recover and get out. I ended up in Balboa Naval Hospital where I spent my days laying in the sun and healing. Finally the day arrived and I was discharged from the hospital and 3 weeks later the Corps and I parted ways.

I had taken my discharge on the West Coast and had saved up the vast majority of my earnings while in the Corps. That and a really good run of luck at the nightly poker games has given me a respectable road stake of about 30 grand, most of which I had converted to traveler's checks. I had no real family to return to as dad had died when I was very young, mom had passed during my first tour in 'Nam, and I had no brothers or sisters. I had a couple of aunts and uncles and a slew of cousins, but I was never close to any of them and had never, in fact, met the majority. I was just drifting around the country traveling where I wanted, doing what I wanted. I had a really short fuse to my temper, probably drank too much, and was very sexually frustrated because when girls saw my face they just avoided me. Oh, I was ugly, ugly with my own halloween mask and a far cry from my pre-war self! I picked up the occasional hooker and got my rocks off, but it wasn't the same as there was no emotional attachment.

I used to be fairly good looking; at least I never had a real problem getting into a girl's pants when I was in high school especially once the word of my abnormality spread. I stood 6' 3" tall and weighed 195 lbs and I was blond haired and blue eyed. I had an average size cock of some 6 ½ inches in length and maybe 4 ½ inches around behind the helmet. I did have one somewhat unusual physical attribute in that I was able to take my tongue and completely cover the end of my nose with it or, if I went the other way, I could place the tip of my tongue under my chin. When I stuck it out from my mouth it measured nearly 5 inches from my lips to the tip, yet somewhat surprisingly, it never affected my speech or gave me any other problems. A doctor I had talked to at the hospital said that it had to do with a sub-conscious ability on my part to relax and manipulate the extrinsic and intrinsic muscles of my tongue and while that was not common it wasn't all that unusual. I had let my blond hair start growing a couple of months before I got out and now it hung to my shoulders and was raggedy looking because I never had it cut or shaped. I made a conscious effort to keep in shape running a couple of miles every day and doing a minimum of 50 push-ups, sit-ups, and bends and mothers every morning.

I was feeling pretty good, it was a nice and warm, sunny Friday, I had cash in my pocket and the '63 MGB I was driving was purring along I-70 in Kansas when I hit a section of highway that would make a laundry washboard look and feel like a smooth slab of steel. I was doing about 70 mph when it happened. I figure that the rapid up and down motion caused the rear leaf springs to fail because one moment the ass end of the little car was in the air and the next the whole ass end of the car was dragging on the interstate. Then the rear wheels blew from the force of the car's body rubbing on them. I managed to steer to the side of the highway and sat there for a minute or two thinking that this was really fucking weird, then I smelled gasoline. I unassed myself from the car real quick pulling the dry chemical fire extinguisher from the back storage area with me as I went. I scurried to the back of the car and saw a thick trail of gas leading back onto the roadway. Christ I thought, all I need is for some asshole to come along and flick out a cigarette butt and poof no more Scott and no more MGB. I pulled the pin on the fire extinguisher and covered the gas trail from the roadway in and then sprayed as much of the dry chemical powder under the car as I could or rather until I ran out of the shit.

So there I was sitting on the side of the road completely broke down and not a pay phone in sight. It wasn't long before a State Trooper showed up and after looking at my paperwork said that while he couldn't give me a ride he would tell the wrecker service in the next town to come and get me. He asked me a bunch of questions about myself like how long I had been out, where I had served, and where I was heading. It wasn't the 3rd degree, but it got real close to it. After about 20 minutes I saw a tow truck heading in the opposite direction and watched as he drove on past to a turnaround about a half mile away. Five minutes later he was pulling up to the back of my car. He introduced himself as Jack Savage of Jack's Towing, Auto Repair, and Salvage in Paxico, KS.

"Hell of a mess you got there Scott" said Jack after he had looked the situation over for a bit. He got in and turned his truck around so that his hook was at the back of my car. He then threw a couple of chains around the rear axle and started lifting the ass end of the car in the air. As he did so the drive shaft hit the ground with a loud "thunk" and Jake reached under and pulled it free of the transmission. He got out a series of straps and lashed the steering wheel so that the front tires faced directly forward and said "Let's go." I climbed in the cab and when a break in the traffic happened he pulled a fast u-turn and we were off. It was only 4 miles to his exit and it wasn't long before we were sitting in his office having a cold beer.

"Well now" said Jake, "let's see what the damage is and we can take it from there" He had spotted my car over a lift when he brought it into his yard and now he hit the hydraulic levers to raise it up in the air. The muffler was gone from the headers back, well not exactly gone as it had been squashed pretty flat when the body fell on it. It was the muffler that had punched a hole in the gas tank and Jake whistled when he saw that. "Scott" he said "you have to be one lucky son of a bitch that your car didn't go up in flames." I already knew that the tires were gone, but when I looked at the rims I could see they were badly damaged as well. The leaf springs were simply gone, the drive shaft and u-joint were damaged, and I didn't know whether the transmission had taken a hit or not. The car was a wreck and we both knew it.

Back in Jake's office, drinking another cold beer, we went over the list with Jake telling me that I would be lucky if parts could be found in Kansas City. More likely he said it was going to be either Chicago or New York and was the car worth that much to me. We drank a couple more beers and he said he would call around and let me know what he had found. There wasn't a hotel or motel around, but I was used to camping out so that wasn't a problem. Jake offered me his couch as he said he was going over to his girlfriends in the next town over and wouldn't be back until morning. I said thanks and asked him if there was a place I could pitch my tent and he pointed down his yard and said that all the way at the end there was a nice shady spot and pond the local kids sometimes used for swimming and making out, but he doubted anyone would be there tonight to hassle me. I thanked him and grabbing my pack and throwing it over my shoulders I picked up my ice chest, to which I added the six pack Jake had given me, and turned to start trudging when Jake called out "Here" and tossed me the keys to a vintage 1943 Dodge WC-62 1 1/2-ton 6x6. "I trust you not to run off with it."

"Thanks Jake" I said as I tossed my gear in back. The truck fired right off and sure didn't sound like the stock 218 CID engine. I quickly figured the shift pattern and away I went in search of a little peace and quiet. I spent an uneventful night and the next morning got up early and headed back up to Jake's office. Jake had been in the office for nearly an hour by the time I arrived and after I had poured a cup of coffee and sat down he tossed me a yellow legal pad. On it, neatly listed, was every part I needed for the MGB to put it right and out to the side the cost to replace. The total came to just under $1,800 and I sat there for a minute soaking it in.

"Look Scott, I know this is a hard decision to make, but in all honesty it would cost more to fix your car than it's worth" said Jake.

"I know that," I replied, "but they are the only set of wheels I have and I have nowhere else to go."

"What about your family" Jake asked me.

I explained that I was an orphan and my car and the gear in it were the sum total of my worldly possessions. I felt a twinge of sadness go through me as I said that, but nothing showed on my face.

Jake said he would sell me the Dodge truck I had driven the previous night for an even $1,000 and take my MGB figuring that he could get maybe another $750 to $1000 for it in parts. The truck, he said, was one that his dad had bought surplus with the idea of making a wrecker out of it, but couldn't find the right engine. "Then" he said, "the son the biggest farmer in the area and a real prick, you know quarterback of the high school football team and "stud" about town, had rolled the pretty and shiny 1967 Dodge RamCharger 4x4, with its special ordered Mopar 440 engine, his daddy had brought him for graduation." This is a prick who less than six months before he finished high school and just after football season was mysteriously classified 4-F by the draft board.

Now I have a great deal of respect for those who were legitimately against the war (and still do) and refused to fight for moral or religious reasons and even those that fled to Canada to avoid having to serve because they were acting out of strong personal convictions, but I cannot stand a punk that has daddy find him a cushy slot in the Guard or claims 4-F status under false pretenses. It just really pisses me off.

"Well," said Jake "I towed the truck in here and when his daddy showed up the next day told him that the frame had been bent." "Well he got all excited at that and said he was calling his insurance company to have the truck declared totaled and then signed the truck over to me for the cost of the towing charges before storming out." "Hell" said Jake "I didn't even get the chance to explain to him that the frame was only bent a little at the very back end and that I could most probably straighten it for a couple of hundred dollars."

"Anyway he tried to claim I cheated him by saying the truck was totaled when it was not and we had words." "I called him a fucking liar in front of his wife, son, and daughter and told him that if he continued spreading lies about me I was going to make him tell the truth," said Jake as he continued with the story. "His son, who has less sense than a rock, took a swing at me and tagged me one on the jaw screaming that I can't talk to his daddy like that." "Well I turned toward him because he had sucker punched me and backhanded him to the floor." "I started to get in his face tell him what a goddamned fool he was when someone shouted "Look Out!"

"Now when a person yells something like that to me I just naturally duck as low as I can and it was a good thing too or his daddy would have smeared my brains all over that place with the barstool he was swinging." "I came up out of my crouch with a hard uppercut to his wind followed by a rising knee to his face and that was the fight." "His son had a broken nose and he was out cold and you know" he said to me "I could swear that it was his daughter that gave me that warning." "I grabbed a pitcher of beer and poured it all over his face and when he started to come around I grabbed him by the hair and poked my pen in the side of his neck like it was a knife blade. I told him he had better start telling the truth as I was tired of his lies and bullshit and if he didn't I was going to cut his throat and to hell with the consequences."

"He started mumbling something and I told him to speak more clearly," said Jake "That's when I discovered that I had broken his jaw" he said to me "so I grabbed a waitress's pad, handed him my pen, and told him to by god write the truth about everything or I was going to break his goddamned neck after I had dismantled his body." "He sat there and scribbled for a good 5 minutes before coming to a stop. I took it from his hands and I asked one of the Deputy Sheriffs that had arrived on the scene to read what he had written so folks couldn't say I was telling stories.

"Now I must have either really put the fear of god into that sorry bastard or my knee had shocked his brain something awful because he cracked. I mean he was a broken man, all the fight, bluster, and spirit was knocked completely out of him. I talked with a psychiatrist I knew about it later and he said that Hansen had suffered a complete mental breakdown when the entire world he had built over the years crashed around him. Not only did he confess to lying about what I had said about the truck, but he also admitted to having an affair with another woman." "He said that for several years he had been blackmailing a woman that worked for him to having sex any time he wanted and his "rights" included both he and his son molesting her three underage children!"

"Now let me tell you that this bit of news sent shockwaves around the room, but he wasn't finished, no, not by a long shot." "He went on" said Jake with relish in his voice, "to confess to working with two local bankers to advance loans to local farmers who were having difficulties and when they defaulted he had a dummy corporation, which he and the bankers had set up, buy the property from the bank at a steep discount and then sell it to him at yet another steep discount."

"Oh he was a slimy bastard all right," he went on, "he, and his son when old enough, were involved in ripping off people in 3 counties." "Using his influence and power he has bought of forced his way into dozens of small businesses in the tri-county area." "He even tried to get the 3 counties voted dry because he couldn't get the local beer distributor and several of the bars to sell a piece of their business to him." "Scott," Jake said, "I want to tell you that by that point, the men wanted to take him and his son out and string them up, and the women, well they wanted to cut off his and his son's balls with dull scissors and then feed them to each other." "If it hadn't been for those two Deputy Sheriffs and a half dozen more they had called in for backup there would have been blood spilled that night" he finished.

"Anyway" Jake said, "he had pulled the original engine out of the old dodge and replaced it with the blown Mopar 440, the transmission, transfer case, rear axle and far too much other stuff to list. "Basically what you have here Scott" he went on, " is a truck that looks exactly like a lengthened and slightly modified 1943 Dodge WC-54 on a 1 1/2-ton 6x6 frame, but under the skin is a completely modern vehicle." "Now I am not going to drive that truck, I started it as a restoration project and got carried away." "95% of the parts came from my salvage yard and what I did have to buy was pretty cheap" he said, "and besides you need a vehicle."

"I won't argue with you Jake" I said "and the truck would work perfectly for me." "With a little work inside I could easily turn the space in the back into a nice small camper and with its off road capabilities go places I could never have reached with the MG." "Let me think about it and I'll tell you in the morning" I said.

"Now I'm curious" I said to Jake, "that's one hell of a story and I would like to know what happened to them after that night?"

"Well the Feds claimed precedence and after the trial they were convicted and are serving 25 years to life for everything from tax evasion, violation of federal banking laws, kidnapping and violation of the Mann Act and a whole slew of other crimes" said Jake smiling, I think it's what is called "piling on" as they added every small violation they could find." Then, to top it off" Jake continued, "the State decided to hold their trial as well." "Normally the State will withhold taking someone to trial if they are being tried by the Feds', but in this case, since the pair of them had done so much damage locally it was decided to try them anyway." "The jury convicted them both of every single charge the Grand Jury brought against them and the Court sentenced the pair to another 35 years each with the sentence to run consecutively to the federal one so should he or his son ever get paroled they will move from the federal pen right to the state pen!"

"Ok, so what happened to the mother and daughter" I asked? "I figure they got divorced and moved, but did they end up with anything at all after the dust and restitution claims were settled?" "It just seems unfair that they would be made to suffer because of those two assholes" I went on.