Chapter 18: Tuesday

Breakfast Tuesday morning was much better than the day before’s. Alice fixed scrambled eggs and some bacon while Melanie and I were in the shower, then she showered while we ate. After that I drove them home and left them there while I went on to the school.

Their house looked like it had been left alone while we were gone. Her car was still in the garage and there was mail in the box.

They were going to gather some things so they could change clothes and do their makeup when they were at my house, then Alice was going to try to get her license replaced. She said they would probably run some other errands, then do a proper raid on a real grocery store so we wouldn’t have to always eat out or stop at convenience stores.

My office only had five people in it when I showed up. Well, four, if you don’t count the coach who was supposed to be in there. The city, state, and FBI had apparently decided that they needed someone to check in with me this morning but they may not stay for long if I didn’t have any new information. The city policeman went first.

“I understand you met Patrolman Anderson and his partner last night. You made a very strong impression on him. You were polite, but you made it clear that you will probably never be a member of the Policemen’s Benevolent Society. In fact, he said that you scared the shit out of him and he would absolutely refuse to ever talk to you without his partner standing ten feet back with his hand on his gun.”

“It’s not me, it’s you. I can’t help being black. I never had any say in it. My parents did that to me before I was born. This whole state is filled with policemen who assume that any black man they see is a criminal who just hasn’t been put in jail yet. I believe that it’s possible that at least two or three of the black men in New York are not yet criminals. We’re working on it, we’ll teach them how to loot and steal when we catch them, but we haven’t caught them all yet. There are still a few innocent black men out there.”

He looked at me for a few seconds, then looked around at everyone else. “Completely off the record, Coach, what’s your opinion of Jesse Jackson?”

“He’s a great man! He’s doing everything he can to help black people rise up from their oppressors! Off the record? If I ran across him and no one else was around? I don’t think that his body would ever be found. Jackass Jackson is NOT helping us. All he’s doing is stirring up shit for personal power. We don’t need his kind of help. We need Martin Luther King’s kind of help. HE was a good man and he was murdered for it by the KKK.”

“Alright, we need to stop talking about that because I agree with everything you just said and it’s just going to cause trouble if we don’t drop it. Okay, we have some new players today. Mr. Erics is with the Justice Department and he has some questions for you.” He waved at one of the new faces, a black man in a suit, about maybe 30 or so.

“Good morning. I was not an athlete, either in high school or college, but I’m told that you prefer to be addressed as ‘Coach Wilkins’. That’s fine with me, whatever you like. I’m John Erics, and I understand that you are a veteran who has seen combat, so you know exactly what Washington means when they say ‘I’m with the government and I’m here to help’.”

Okay, I had to laugh at that. So did several others in there with us.

“Right. So, no, I’m not here to help anyone. Frankly, I’m here to cause as much trouble as I can for some particular people. I need to find out if you are one of those people or not. If you are, I’m in the right place. If you aren’t, then I should go bother someone else. Now, I understand that you have some friends who are also veterans, and sometimes you get together to have fun. As long as that just means having some beer and playing volleyball, that’s fine. Everybody knows that Army guys are into volleyball.”

“Yeah, everybody knows that. We play volleyball all the time in between firefights. Sometimes we even get the enemy soldiers to pick teams and play against us in the evenings when we aren’t fighting.”

I don’t think I’d ever played volleyball anywhere except in W-C’s gym. I’d played some when I was a student and they made us play in gym class when it was rainy or cold outside. Okay, yeah, I’d played it some in college, when I’d had to go to various schools for my student teacher time.

I’d played it a lot more when I came home again and got a job here as one of the coaches. We all had to be able to help out in any sport or game the school supported. Football, soccer, basketball, baseball, softball, field hockey, tennis, badminton. And the other coaches frowned on us if we weren’t better at it than any of the students. Lemme tell ya, I’m a great badminton player! Now, THAT’s a manly sport if there ever was one!

“So, I understand that you offered for you and some of your friends to help the FBI out, if they found some of the kidnapped girls but were having trouble getting permission to go in and get them.”

“Yeah. We’ll all take some volleyballs and throw them at the kidnappers until they surrender.”

“Of course. Anyway, I work with an Organized Crime task force that investigates militia groups. Some of them are just getting ready in case Canada invades us again and our Army is busy keeping the Cubans out of Florida. Those guys are mostly harmless and we keep an eye on them but we don’t worry about them too much.”

“Oh, yeah. Listen, if the Canadians get this far we’ll do our part. We don’t want no funny-talking foreigners running around telling us how to live.”

“I’m pretty sure that they are more worried about us invading them than we are about them invading us.”

“Well, yeah. That’s what Americans do. We go all over the world telling funny-talking foreigners how to live. It’s what we’re known for. I was good at it.”

“I’m sure you were. Anyway, your offer got passed up the line until we heard about it, and that concerned the very important people I work for. It concerned them enough to send me to investigate since I’m black and you’ll trust me.”

He took a deep breath. “I’m supposed to find out all about this new militia group we’ve never heard of that formed right here under our noses. So, if you don’t mind, I’d like you to give me a complete report I can take back to my bosses. You know, how large it is, how it’s organized, what training you have, what equipment you have, where all your bases are, whether or not you have any operations planned, all that stuff. If you can throw in your complete roster with phone numbers and addresses and a history of your past operations that would be great!”

I had to just shake my head and chuckle for a while. “Sure, no problem. I’ll get right on that for you. Do you mind if I have my secretary type it up, or does it have to be in my own handwriting?” I waved at Melanie, who was ... NOT sitting safe in the corner. Shit. “Okay, my secretary is out sick this week.”

“You’re a high school coach, right? Can anyone actually READ your handwriting?”

“They’ve got me teaching a couple of classes. Government and history, mostly. That means I end up grading a lot of papers. There are some students out there with better handwriting than mine, but mine isn’t too bad. It’s less work for me if I have my secretary do it, though.”

“Sure, that’d be great. Okay, now that I’ve bullshit you until you trust me and you’ve let down your guard and you’ve completely forgotten all the other police officers listening in, what’s going on? You’ve gotta know that finding out about a new militia right under our noses scares the shit out of a lot of people.”

“I don’t think that ‘militia’ is a good word for it. It’s more like a bunch of people with a common history who occasionally talk. Since we’re all Army vets, that’s your training if you want to freak out your bosses. You can tell them that everyone in this new militia is trained in all parts of infantry operations as part of an integrated army and they are completely loyal to their leader. You don’t have to tell them that their leader is the US Army Chief of Staff, whoever that is this year.”

“Here in Plattsburgh we’re mostly black just because I’m black and I live in a predominantly black neighborhood, but I know a lot of white vets, too, and some of the honkies are okay. I expect that every one that I know knows several more vets that I don’t know. I don’t think there’s any organization at all. It’s just a bunch of veterans who talk sometimes, and we all know that if shit goes down we might be better at stopping it than, say, a bunch of cops who spend all day eating donuts and handing out speeding tickets.”

I teach Government here, and I had a thought. “John, what’s your degree in?”

“Political Science. Penn State. Why?”

“And you’ve been a cop ever since you graduated?”

“Well, I’m not really a cop. I’m a field agent, an investigator for the Justice Department. And you aren’t supposed to know any of that, anyway. I’m your friend, right?”

“Right, you’re my new friend who dresses funny, almost like a cop who wants to work undercover but doesn’t have the first idea how to do it. So, have you ever seen or heard the oath of enlistment for the US Army?”

“I’m sure I have, but it wasn’t important at the time. Why?”

“It’s important because it’s one of the biggest differences between the US and, say, Nazi Germany. Men joining the army in Germany, in the years leading up to World War Two, made an oath to support, defend, and obey their supreme leader, der oberst fuhrer. At the time, that was a very smooth-talking guy named Hitler. That wasn’t even his real name, it was an assumed name like ‘Malcom X’. Well, he turned out to be crazy and he caused an amazing amount of trouble before they got rid of him. You may have heard of him, even at Penn State.”

“Anyway, I don’t think their oaths actually said anything about Germany, just about obeying their leader. I believe that the Russian soldiers make an oath to obey their commanding officers. Here in the US, when we join the army we don’t swear to obey the President. Everyone knows he’s an idiot and a politician and no one should ever trust him. Instead, we make an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, and to obey the lawful orders of those officers appointed over us.”

“Us American soldiers aren’t there to obey someone. We are there to defend the country. That’s a big difference between our soldiers and other countries. In Basic, we actually get classes on how to identify an illegal order. We aren’t supposed to murder children and old people, even if the Lieutenant tells us to. Anyway, every veteran I know, every veteran I don’t know, every veteran out there, made that oath. We all made that oath even knowing that we might get sent into combat and could get killed. Now, a lot of us are dishonest and screwed up and some of us are just flat-out crazy, but we all made that oath. Even though we aren’t active duty any more, we keep that oath.”

“So, you can go back to your bosses and tell them that they are all a bunch of fucking morons. The name of this new militia they are worried about is “The American Veterans”. If they want some organization they can go look at the VA. That’s what it’s for, right? To support us vets? We don’t have any operations planned beyond maybe a parade on July 4th, but if the country ever needs us we’ll be there. And, if the FBI ever needs to break some laws to help someone who needs help, well, call us. We’ll do it for them. Even as broken as a lot of us are, we’ll do a better job of storming a strong point than a bunch of feebies ever will.”