Introduction

This is the introduction of the protagonist, namely me, in a series of stories that follow. I am an average guy who has been fortunate to have some experiences worth writing about. For the record, names and some details have been changed to protect the guilty. Some of the details have been exaggerated. But there are some true elements in each of the stories.

My name is William James Hadley, Jr. but I go by Bill. My family still calls me Billy because that's what they called me when I was young. To our family, my father was the Bill Hadley. Actually my grandfather had been named William J. Hadley too, but he was killed in a farm accident when my father was a teenager. I was born late in 1946, part of the leading edge of the baby boom following World War II.

Like tens of thousands of others, my father enlisted within a couple of months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He wound up serving as an aircraft mechanic with the Army Air Corp mostly in England thus never facing combat. That's not to say that the job wasn't tough and dangerous. After VE day, his unit moved to Germany for a few months to support aircraft used in the occupation of Germany. While he was there, he fell in love with a German girl. Unfortunately at that time the US Army forbade its soldiers to marry German nationals. He mustered out of the military in March of 1946 and headed home. He took advantage of some family connections with a US Senator from our state to get a visa for his girlfriend. He brought her over as quickly as possible and they were married in late May. Since I was born in October, she must have already been pregnant with me before my father was discharged from the army. Our family never openly discussed the circumstances of their courtship and marriage. Once he was back, Dad got a job as a mechanic in a local manufacturing plant eventually rising to Plant Manager. We lived in the southern state where my father had grown up. Mom had three more children after me. My sister, Greta, was two years younger than I; my brother, Paul, was four years younger; and my youngest sister, Sharon, was six years younger.

Our parents pushed us all to do well in school. Dad had no chance to go to college because of the depression and the war. The same was true for Mom. But they both knew the value of a good education. Both were avid readers, a habit that my siblings and I developed as well. I especially liked history and biographies. I did well in all my classes and graduated near the top of my high school class. Even though we lived in a small town in the south the schools were quite good. That was because the State University was also there. Many of our high school teachers were the spouses of college professors and many of the students, our peers, were their children.

There had never been any question of whether or where I would go to college. We were comfortably middle class but not wealthy. It was a given that I would attend the university in my hometown. My father wanted me to study engineering, but I majored in history and philosophy with a minor in languages. I had taken four years of Latin in high school. From Mom I was already proficient in German. I took enough German in college to minor in that alone. I also took four semesters each of Russian and French. I started college in 1964 just when the war in Vietnam was heating up. Our college was a land grant school that required every male student to spend two years in the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) learning to be a military officer. I volunteered for the second two years that led to a commission as a Second Lieutenant with an obligation to complete two years of active duty service. My rationale was that it would be better to serve as an officer than to be drafted and serve as an enlisted man.

In our senior year, we had to document our preferences of which MOS (Military Occupation Specialty) we preferred. I put Military Intelligence at the top of my list. If at all possible, I wanted to avoid the combat arms like infantry, armor and artillery. I had no desire to dodge bullets if that could be avoided. Despite the military's penchant for making the most illogical assignments, luck was with me. They had a need for translators in Europe because of the cold war, the epicenter of which was in Berlin, Germany. My knowledge of history and politics complemented my fluency in German and Russian. I was assigned to a base in Germany to spend my two years translating Russian documents and intercepted messages trying to analyze the intentions of the Russians in Eastern Europe. I had a top-secret security clearance that gave me access to material that would astound and dismay the average citizen. Although I got excellent ratings on my proficiency reports, I had no intention of staying in the army even one day past my two-year obligation. I had seen first hand how our military and foreign policies had betrayed the ideals of our nation's founders. While I was waiting for my discharge to complete, the CIA tried hard to recruit me. However, I had no more interest in working for them than I did to remain in the military.

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