Chapter 1

Well; I had finally seen it.

My grandfather's headstone was no different from any of the others--marble, simple, neatly aligned with others in its row; and even aligned with others in almost any direction I looked throughout the Fort Snelling National Cemetery, just outside of the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. Except that the lines of the inscription on his headstone connected with my life and me personally, and the others did not.

Andrew C. Blasington
CW3, US Army
Vietnam
May 7 1937
Apr 5 1971
Purple Heart
Silver Star
Beloved Husband
And Father

Yeah, my grandfather had flown a helicopter gunship in Vietnam. Not ever being in the military myself, I later learned from some veterans that he would have been called a 'Snake Driver'--strange term, if you ask me. It was on his second tour there that he had caught the magic bullet that had somehow reached him through the barriers of his cockpit, including a supposedly armored seat.

He had exited this life, according to what Gran told me, while his number two guy brought the Cobra gunship ('Snake') back to Pleiku with Granddad's body in the seat behind him--he didn't even know that his partner was already dead until they had landed and the medics showed up just as they got the canopy open, even before the rotors had stopped turning.

Before Granddad had gone through the Army's Warrant Officer Candidate School--where he became a Warrant Officer Candidate, or WOC; and later became a trained Army Aviator at Fort Rucker in Alabama--he had served as an Enlisted Soldier in "The Old Guard" at Fort Meyer, Virginia, just outside of Washington, DC. The Third Infantry Regiment, or "The Old Guard," performs many duties in and around the nation's capital, including the very photogenic and ceremonial guarding of the Tomb of the Unknown at Arlington National Cemetery.

As a tall, handsome young Soldier (I had seen his pictures in his dress blues), Granddad had served in the Caisson Platoon, participating in the ceremonial burials of the remains of many a returning young hero who had given the 'last full measure' from one of our nation's conflicts --or even an old hero who had simply passed away in due time well after his or her own conflict was well into the past. It was during one of these ceremonies that Granddad had spotted the daughter of one of the Arlington Ladies, and had immediately fallen for her; later looking her up and dating and then marrying her in 1957--making her my Gran.

Back in 1948, Mrs. Gladys Vandenberg, wife of then Air Force Chief of Staff, General Hoyt Vandenberg, had noted the burial of a young Airman with no family present--it was too expensive in those days for many families throughout the country to travel all the way to Arlington, Virginia. She had vowed that, from that point on, no Airman would be buried without "someone" present besides the honor guard and the Chaplain. She had organized ladies from the Officers' Wives Club at nearby Bolling Air Force Base to form the Arlington Ladies group to ensure that, on a rotating basis, at least one of the ladies would see that no Airman was buried without "someone" to represent the absent family members. The Army wives began to do this in 1972 and the Navy wives joined the cause in 1985.

Regardless of service affiliation, The Army's Old Guard had provided honor guards for service members buried at Arlington Cemetery for decades when Granddad was assigned there in the mid-to-late 1950s. Being from Minnesota himself, he had been proud to learn that The Old Guard traced some of its unit history to frontier units that had served at Fort Snelling, Minnesota, during the Black Hawk Wars of the 1830s. That was when he had decided that, when he finally died, he wanted his interment to be at Fort Snelling, near his boyhood home and his extended family, instead of at Arlington. His death, needless to say, happened earlier in his life than he or his family had anticipated; and Gran had grieved, had him buried there with honors according to his wishes, and had settled down back near her family in Maryland at the ripe old age of 33--never marrying again.

My mom, who was just short of twelve when he died, had been born just two years after Gran had married Granddad, having been conceived during a brief leave he'd had in the fall of 1958, when he and Gran had arranged a 'hop' on an Air Force cargo plane and had flown to Hawaii for a week of passion in Waikiki. Mom had many stories of Granddad during her childhood and pictures that she had collected from Gran while growing up in Leonardtown, Maryland.

Later, Mom had met Dad at the University of Maryland in College Park; married him; and settled into life--first as an Air Force wife, and then as the wife of a pilot with Delta Air Lines and living in Covington, Georgia, just outside of metropolitan Atlanta. My younger brother, Carl, and I were born and grew up there; me in 1979, and him in 1981.

My name is Louis Chandler, by the way--Lou to my friends--and "Lou-Zer" to my ex-wife.

Why am I here in Minnesota, you ask?

Well, my job had brought me here--my new job, I should say. Even as the divorce papers had been served, my now ex-father-in-law had fired me quicker than a circus cannon. That way, he could bring the full pressure of his money and influence down on me with a top-notch legal team to hammer me on behalf of his daughter--his princess--the bitch.

The speed with which my ex-father-in-law had gotten rid of me had not really surprised me. After all, he had become aware that I had begun to gain some insights into some of the devious methods that he was using in his business dealings--not that I would have had the guts to confront him or do anything with the information; but, numbers do not lie. Not only that, but he had had his IT guys come in on the day that I was fired so that they could wipe the hard drive on my computer; as well as my shared folder on the network server where I had begun storing evidence of his ... well ... let us simply call it his 'imaginative' ways of handling his responsibilities where the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission were concerned. My proof of his criminality and ethical lapses had disappeared from the company's network faster than my building and office keys and parking pass had disappeared from my personal possession.

Thankfully, I had maintained a personal network of friends and professional connections in the area so that I could land another job near my home; a friend named Bill Gray had snatched me up and put me to work within a week of my being let go by my father-in-law's company. I would not be destitute, but I'd had to take an appreciable cut in income in order to start over with Bill's company. At least it was only about a fifteen-minute drive from where I had been working for well over seventeen years.

As for my Minnesota trip, Bill, my new boss, had needed to stick someone on a plane to go and straighten out an account in St. Paul and I was the stuck-ee. Normally, one of the other accountants who work in my department would get that task, but Bill knew that I needed a fresh outlook on life in general.

My divorce had been final for three months and I was still morose. After fifteen years of marriage--mostly a period of strife and turmoil--I was now a thirty-nine-year-old bachelor again.

My ex-wife, Francine, along with her lover, had really taken me to the cleaners. She had gotten the house (where Asshole Baby was now shacked up with her openly), custody of our two girls (Gracie, 12, and Chelsea, 14), and a sizeable chunk of our joint finances in terms of lump sums and alimony. She and the asshole were also not planning to marry anytime soon; which meant my alimony payments kept coming to her until they did.

During courtroom hearings involving visitation deliberations, I had discovered that my ex had been turning the girls against me for years. So, I was not surprised to find that my 'visitation rights' were minimal and just might become almost non-existent due to 'difficulties' with the timing of my visits--Bitch!

I was now living in a small apartment in Sandy Springs, off Mount Vernon Road, on the north side of Atlanta, just outside the I-285 Perimeter. It wasn't quite a dump, but it was not luxurious either. I did not consider myself as 'living' in Sandy Springs; I only slept there. It seemed that, nowadays, I 'lived' at work; and work was much more enjoyable these days, although less lucrative, than it had been for over a decade before.

And now my work had required me to travel to the Twin Cities; and I was taking a short break to see where Granddad was buried before returning to my hotel. I was flying out of MSP in the morning, but it was still early in the evening. So, I decided to get a drink before calling it a night.

That is how I ended up meeting Mukhtaar Faruk Dhuhulow.

I was just about to reach the bar located near my hotel--located using one of my phone apps--when I heard a commotion in the alley nearby. Now, I am not a brave soul at all; but I am normally curious about the world around me--sometimes to my detriment. But, this time, when I indulged my curiosity by stopping to glance into the alley from its entrance, I set events in motion that would have profound implications for my life.

Three men were standing over and around the form of another man on the ground in their midst just a few feet into the alley. The man on the ground was attempting to rise when one of the men kicked him and said something in a language that I could not understand. Then another man, who seemed to have the air of being the one in charge of the others, said something in English.

"You owe me nine thousand, Mookie (at least that's how it sounded to me), and I want it now." His English was clear, but with the trace of an accent that I could not place. Seeing one of the men suddenly brandish a knife in one hand, I reacted out of shock and fear without thinking.

"Hey!" I yelled. They all looked at me as I stood at the end of the alley. I guess my shadow and the silhouette of my form in the fading daylight must have made them believe that I was bigger than I really am; or else the three assailants may have been unsure of how many other men might have been with me. In any event, the man who appeared to be in charge kicked the man on the ground once more in the side before leading the other two away at a slow run.

Suddenly realizing what I had done, and the danger in which I had placed myself, I began to shake. I stayed rooted to where I was standing for a moment until I could get my breathing and heart rate under sufficient control to keep me from fainting or running away in stark terror. I guess it was the pitiful groan of the man lying before me that caused me to move out of the panic mode and into the help mode.

"Are you okay?" I asked as I stepped closer to him, before realizing that had to be just about the stupidest question anyone can ask at a moment such as this. "I mean ... do you need an ambulance, or..."

"No!" the man said with emphasis. His voice was relatively strong, indicating that he was simply taking a moment to get himself together before rising. He was taking deep breaths and holding his side--the one that had received the kick--as he evidently performed a hasty self-assessment. Then he said, "Do not call anyone; please." His voice was relatively clear, with no trace of accent.

In the glow of the light fixture at the back of one of the buildings framing the alley, I could see him now as I got closer. He was Black. I do not simply mean that he was African-American; he was really Black--as in African 'Black.'

"I just need a moment," the man said as he rose now to one knee, took a couple of deep, testing breaths, and then extended one hand, obviously seeking for my assistance to him. As I pulled, the man stood and looked in the direction in which his assailants had run. Seeing that they were nowhere in sight, he turned to me and I saw what could be interpreted as a smile in the dim light.

"Thank you, My Friend," he said. "You saved me from what would probably have been a terrible beating at their hands. I guess that is what I get for borrowing money from the MWA." I only found out later that he was referring to the Somali gang, Madhibaan with Attitude, who owned significant gang 'turf' in the Twin Cities area, and were opposed by a rival gang, the Somali Outlaws.

I nodded and looked around, suspecting that, at any moment, other gangbangers of the same stripe as those I had seen attacking the man earlier would step out of the nearest shadows to get me. Seeing my unease, the man placed a hand on my elbow.

"Now," he said, "We must leave this place. Come with."

I was too keyed-up to have the inclination to respond to his statement by asking him, "Come with ... whom ... or what?" Midwesterners with whom I'd had business dealings during my adult life had often left me hanging with their proclivity to end a sentence with this phraseology. It left a Southerner, like me, with the feeling of leaning forward mentally, waiting for the rest of the sentence.

I simply nodded and turned back to the entryway to the alley and access to the street ... and safety--I hoped.

Moving my feet on autopilot at that point, I walked on toward the bar that had been my original destination with this man still gently holding my elbow. When he saw that I was turning in toward the doorway of a bar, he hesitated for a moment, and then continued inside with me, after a furtive glance in both directions along the sidewalk.

I asked for CC and ginger at the bar, but the man with me simply waved his hand when the bartender looked his way. My companion shrugged and told me that he was Muslim--nominally, anyway--and did not drink alcohol.

I threw my first drink down my throat and asked the bartender for another. While I was waiting for the second drink, I realized that my own bodily and emotional functions had returned to a sufficiently normal level in order to ask the man about what had been happening when I had intervened on his behalf.

"Oh, I am behind on the payment of a loan that I had gotten from them," said Mookie, as he asked me to call him, after telling me his whole name and hearing me mangle it in my attempt to pronounce it. "Today, I discovered just how much ... or rather, how little ... patience they have when collecting on unpaid debts." He went on to give me a brief idea of who these gang members were and how they fit into the way of life here in the 'Little Somalia' section of Minneapolis' Cedar-Riverside neighborhoods.

I did not say anything, as my second drink arrived and I took a sip. Mookie went on to give me a short, but thorough, description of life among the fifteen-to-twenty-thousand-some-odd Somali expatriates living in the Twin Cities area. Most of them had fled the civil war in the east African country in the early nineties, but some, like his family, had come in the early eighties. Mookie had U.S. citizenship by virtue of having been born here.

Mookie told me a little more about his growing-up years in Minneapolis among the Somali ex-pat community and described his learning to survive independently of his family. He evidently had been able to support himself by a series of low-paying jobs--some of them not necessarily above-board--so he had never been truly destitute. But, the one time he had needed some money above his normal means, the MWA had turned out to be his only salvation--at least temporarily. From that point on, they were his nemesis--demanding usurious rates of return on his unpaid debt.

"Speaking of unpaid debts," Mookie said at last, "I cannot repay you sufficiently for your assistance back in the alley." I simply waved my hand in his direction, indicating that it was nothing, really; and it had been just that--nothing; as I really had been frozen in place after calling out before thinking about the possible consequences.