Introduction

I’m retired master sergeant James Olsen and this is my story. About fifty years ago, when I was a few weeks from both graduation and my eighteenth birthday, a drunk driver killed my parents. I was able to get to him and beat him almost to death before the cops arrived. At two inches over six feet and about 220 pounds of blond, blue eyed, Scandinavian farm boy muscle, I was able to do some serious damage in Viking berserker mode before the cops pulled me off of him. He ended up in the hospital and I ended up in jail.

A few weeks later when the whole mess went before a judge, the drunk got a few years in the state pen, and I got a choice. “Olsen, its prison for assault and battery with grievous bodily injury, or the army for you, pick one. You get a criminal record that will dog your life forever, or you get to serve your country and the paper work of your arrest gets lost, it’s up to you.” I didn’t realize at the time what a big break the sympathetic judge and sheriff were giving me, but I knew what the smart move was.

Thanks to the judge, I got my diploma a week early. Then, with the farm sold and the money banked, I reported for basic training. Basic and then advanced infantry training presented no challenge for a smart, hard working, farm boy who had spent as much time as possible in the woods hunting and fishing, and knew how to follow orders and keep his mouth shut.

After my training was completed, I soon found myself in the central highlands of Vietnam. It didn’t take long for command to realize that my skill set was best utilized as a scout sniper. By the time my first tour was over I spent most of my time leading small patrols to locate the enemy. As my tour was winding down I was asked to volunteer for Special Forces training. I was planning to stay in the army and the extra training seemed to be a good idea, so I volunteered and my future path was set.

Thirty years later I retired. With numerous rotations to S E Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and several operations, which officially never happened, when I was on loan to the CIA, I had an exciting career. But, for the past few years I was considered too old for field work, so I had been filling training slots and doing a lot of staff work. It was time to go.

After my going away party at the NCO club, I loaded up my pickup and camper trailer and headed out. Due to the type of work I did, I had never married and had always lived on base. I never wasted money, and invested most of what I earned. With the addition of my pension and the money from the farm, I was set financially as long as I did nothing foolish.

Over the next few years I traveled around the country, enjoying my hobby of cowboy action shooting, doing a lot of hunting and fishing, and visiting a few old buddies who had retired. From time to time I did a few well paid jobs for some of the alphabet soup agencies in DC who needed a long range shooter who could keep his mouth shut. As I got older, those job offers dried up.

Eventually I started to notice that I was getting weak and tired, and as time went on it was getting worse. I had intended to attend a cowboy shooting contest in Tombstone Arizona so I made an appointment with a VA doc in Tucson. After some testing, the news was not good. My days were numbered and the number was a low one. I decided that there was nothing I could do about my condition so I might as well continue on to Tombstone and have fun in a shooting competition one last time. Driving south from Tucson, I eventually pulled into a campground full of snowbirds near Tombstone, where I set up my camper. As I warmed up a can of stew and drank a beer, I sat and considered my options. None of them looked good. That’s when Fred showed up.