Colonel Crystal's Parallel Universe

by Hufferd, James;

  “And besides that, who in the world could that one lone guy, who’s always there next to me and doesn’t see it, be? Who is he supposed to represent? And why is it he can’t ever see what I see? Why? Others talk, say I can see too clearly, what isn’t even there, they say. But, why me always, and only me? Could it be that all others won’t see it, because they can’t face it? Absolutely no one anywhere ever raises the alarm! Is that because the catastrophe is seen as simply immutable? trivial because unavoidable? Because it is not a media-peddled myth perhaps? Involves forces too big maybe? Again, of course, it’s only a dream, But still, no one else! Why such a dream? No one ever! Never! And no remedies! Even dream remedies! Why? Why? Why? What’s the purpose? Why four times in a one week, each time more menacing? I know it’s not real, may be an allegory, or… but, still… I’m not sure I even want to know, or ever sleep again! Not in the daytime…”

  Getting up, he shuffled in his tasseled slippers to the parlor window, looking out on his wild but lovely “courtyard," as he called it, tranquil at midday, with its palms and concrete benches, sawgrass, its barbeque smoke pit lit up by the sun in the silence of approaching early afternoon.

  “They ain’t no shrinks in Steinhatchee,” he reminded himself in his mock-up approximation to Cracker talk and his faux self-reproach. “Nope! Just them old county boys down the line…”

  And, with that, he threw his robe on and traipsed back across the parlor to the kitchen and started his time-worn waking and stretching exercises all over again. As every day, now that he was out of service, and just as when he’d gotten up earlier that morning, to face the remains of the day to come sane as anybody.

  III

  Too Many Damned Wars

  Few would deny that Colonel Crystal was rather peculiar, and in some ways, a perverse, man. What Colonel Alva Crystal did after he retired was unheard-of. But, we’ll get to that…

  “Who in blazes is this AF Colonel Alva Abelard Crystal, Retired?” John V. Deggit of the Federal Investigation Bureau (FIB) was asking everyone in sight a day later while sifting through untold numbers of files, cyber, card, bound paper, and old and new ledger books for an answer. A fellow by that particular name and distinction was again making a lot of the same sort of inquiries, now on one particular matter, as had not uncommon for him for some time, asking something like “Who is who? Who is saying who is who? Who is saying who is saying who is who’s saying, and who isn’t? etc., etc..” That sort of thing – proving most plaintively to Deggit’s whole team, if nothing else, that more than one can play that kind of game.

  “Now, this is what we know about him (or it),” he sighed, as he it wrote in an encrypted email to Chief Kirby Blaskett in the Tampa bureau. “The man is, or seems to be, from all available indications, a private citizen, 6’1," 163 pounds soaking wet (not all the time, I presume); age 57 or 58, possibly a tad younger, once a crack Air Force aerial gunnery officer and regional battle commander in Iraq, starting in the Mosul corridor in 2006-07. Also, one tour in Afghanistan, Eastern Zone. Twice cited for valor. Nicknamed “Ace” or “Crystal-man” by fellow air-gunners and pilots before attaining command level based at the Mosul Air Station, USAF. A veteran of 14 years, he abruptly resigned his command and exited the service, effective November 20, 2009, saying he ‘wanted to be home in time for Thanksgiving.’ Married twice; present wife – Felicia Foster Crystal, in Charlotte, NC, May 7, 2014 to present, no known issue.

  “Settled briefly in ancestral small home town, near Syracuse, NY. Reported to have joined ‘We Are Change’ – get this – an alleged peacenik organization locally. Moved to Steinhatchee, Florida, August 2010. Considered a dissident and likely a so-called ‘Truther’. Making unusual inquiries to FBI (a.k.a. FIB) and USD headquarters of late, involving, among topics of inquiry, FIB’s dealings with and withdrawn and re-opened files regarding late actress Jean Seberg, comedian Will Goldsby, and the interagency COINTELPRO and MONARCH Programs, 1960s to present.”

  “Kirb,” the bureau chief went on, addressing an immediate subordinate, “This is a strange one. Keep an eye on him, will you? Plant bugs where and as might be even conceivably warranted.”

  “Aye-aye!”

  “The retired colonel’s repeated questions – 18 times over in one case – dealt with areas we won’t be divulging openly. And, of course, anyone endeavoring to investigate what he deigns to call the ‘Federal Investigation Bureau’ has got to have noteworthy issues himself, and that’s for a certainty.

  And, of course, there’s a lot more to it than that, I’m sure. There always is.”

  “Yes, Sir, there is, Sir!”

  And there was more to it. First, Colonel Crystal was the only man he himself knew – except for a caustic, like-minded military mentor of his, now likewise retired, Air Force General Arnold Frank (A.F.) Montmoracy, who, no doubt by way of partial explanation, imbibed pretty copiously and solely a particular brand of dry vermouth neat from the bottle on the go as a daily elixir, or tonic, drug of choice.

  It was Montmoracy who had first put him onto his favorite true bit of scuttlebutt, that the attack, by hijacked airliners on the World Trade Center had been weirdly played out several months beforehand, in an infamous bizarre episode of mainstream commercial TV’s “Lone Gunman” series: “Uncanny!” he was fond of pronouncing it. And matched, in his mind, only by a bizarre novel that was published two years before the OKC bombing, which occurred some four years earlier, by the Oklahoma governor, Frank Keating’s kid brother, Martin, portraying that infamous event almost down to the second, with the name assigned to the government’s patsy being “Tom McVey."

  Colonel Crystal, like his semi-hero and virtual demi-god at that time, General A.F., had become enthralled by, and a serial-repeater of, the many such curious anecdotes, all found verifiable and, at least in his view, “sign-posts” of a slew (or, in his restive mind, slough) of curious things continuously going down in the present, about to metastasize, pair of wars.

  The whole of which eventually comprised a good part, it seemed, of the reason he had removed himself from active Air Force battle zone status, to a de facto semi-refugee status, at remote but not unamenable Steinhatchee there on ‘the Forgotten Coast of Florida’, after studying slews of maps: he had detected such disquieting high-level beyond-coincidence patterns he plainly detected as very troubling. And obviously, if he hadn’t resigned, he’d have had to be terminated at the very least from his commission and probably the service as well, for raising the irrepressible and uncomfortable questions respecting whatever did and would have arisen. The reason being that, “If he’s not unquestionably committed to the team and mission, then what is he committed to?” And now, he seriously intuited that he was being surveilled, even here.

  On old Montmoracy’s recommendation, he read whatever he could on Operations Gladio, Mockingbird, MK-Ultra, Paperclip, and all the others, all CIA, and some administered partly or wholly by the military branches, NSA, and all cursorily disclosed and discussed with what seemed totally redacted, fact-starved lack of detail on Internet sites, the whole lot highly prominent on the circulated Air Force verboten list, to be scorned and avoided in toto by service personnel and dependents.

  And said Montmoracy, after Colonel Alva A. Crystal had known him for nine months, was transferred, along with his too-forward notions, to who-knows-where; if not eliminated or, a possibility, was a fabricated hoax all along. Indeed, Colonel Crystal’s search had never discovered any proof, while still in active service or until recently since. Could they have sicced a figment or imposter on him? They could.

  Out of it all, it was “Operation Gladio” that Colonel Alva himself had found particularly galling in his burgeoning purely extra-curricular continuing attempts at directed studies. The same had then only recently been uncovered and disclosed only in those scorned, practically banned web sites he had found, and perhaps in a few other similar sites, that the alleged commie gangs that had caused such a furor across Western Europe three decades before and g
reatly hyped in public media , were created virtually out of whole cloth by the Western allies themselves. That is, the real perps were commissioned, directed, and funded by, as well as answerable to, the CIA and its Western Intelligence counterparts. Murders and mayhem galore were shamelessly committed by these allies’ handcrafted puppets and blamed on the designated enemy of that day. And such, he was convinced, was the case with ISIS, et al, today.

  In fact, it didn’t take all that much imagination for him to suspect that the same was more than likely the true nature and status of al-Qaeda, and likewise the same with more accurately-denominated Usama (Osama) bin-Laden himself, no doubt in his mind linked with fraudulent ISIS or ISIL, the head honchos’ currently in vogue crazed spawn of the devil. Didn’t they know it? Of course, some must have.

  When asked to name his favorite book by the Discharge Committee, when he resigned the Air Force and his commission, Colonel Crystal responded without hesitation that it was War is a Racket penned by Brigadier General of the Marines Smedley D. Butler in 1935, a slim book by a reputedly formidable patriot, introduced to him by General Montmoracy, of which his discharge inquisitors claimed, quite believably, to never have heard.

  In fact, the now ex-Colonel perversely regarded the prominent “Disturbed," scrawled in distinct black letters across his discharge certificate, indeed a mark of highest distinction and improbable esteem, without ever inquiring how it got there. In fact, he was, indeed, “disturbed” about a good number of things. But could anything be done? Was that dream an omen? If it could be, he resolved it would.

  IV

  More Facets, Deeper Thoughts

  Sometimes Kirby Blaskett, “FIB” station chief in Tampa, wondered himself if General A.F. Montmoracy had ever actually existed. Because there seemed to be no trace or readily accessible record of him that even he could find. Nothing. And indeed, some days, unbeknownst to Chief Blaskett, Colonel Crystal was still prone to wondering about that: Had he been primed for being singled out and entrapped lest his disposition (or distemper) become contagious? And, if so, why so? And by whom?

  But yes, indeed, there was more to it – that is, to explaining him and his mysterious, unique brand of nonviolent uber-belligerence. Another part of it – of him – to be sure, had to be his ultimately becoming sated with, even physically repulsed by, routine killings in the Near East/Southwest Asia sector, in which he had appeared to partake with admirable gusto, even what one surveilling agent referred to as “special glee," and another as his especial “blood brio” – completely negating the loving care and resources that had gone into his advanced military insensitivity training. Indeed, as early preparation, as a strapping boy still in high school and even prior to that, he had read of and watched, back in small-town New York cinemas, the adventures of war pilots and air-gunners on a hundred Saturdays. Helpful, however air-brushed. A singular specimen, he had, in fact, been singled out by them quite young. Others wanted to be sports heroes and astronauts; he had wanted nothing more, ever, than to bear down on the would-be destroyers of his country and its vaunted “way of life," albeit in relative safety, from thirty-one-thousand feet, with lethal force. He wanted nothing more than to blow the bastards to smithereens who would reign destruction, if he didn’t personally take care of them himself and see to it that they couldn’t desecrate and destroy America, his real America.

  He’d grown up a rowdy but, simultaneously, precociously scholarly and nerdy kid, at the head of his high school class, but forever questioning everyone and everything. And his eminently moldable tendency inevitably rubbed off on the local young rowdies of whom he’d become a natural leader and, even more, an idol. They came to call him “aloof," “the scholar," “wise one."

  He was always, it seems, on the wrong side of his typically “progressive” teachers, whose pronouncements he was forever questioning, armed with a headful of inconvenient facts. And meanwhile, his jump shot managed to keep his school’s undermanned team from being totally embarrassed by bigger schools’ teams with the kind of swift, looming giants Baldwinsville Prep always somehow seemed to lack.

  Girls, meanwhile, invariably found him a little too strange and, almost without exception, maintained their distance, leaving him to revel most often in his own bemused, exalted social company. Alone. But, even so, he hated the assumed threats to his country’s most sacred supremacy and swagger in the world, ballyhooed by the increasingly ‘peacenik’ media at that time, from whatever vile quarter they came.

  And when he hit the Air Force after graduation and rose through the ranks for twenty solid years, following indoctrination by intensive training and flight school, he was more than anxious to get up into the ether on his own and pound the depraved snot-nosed troops of first the Iraqi and then Afghani insurgency who plotted and fought against American hegemony and military might in “their” ahem region.

  If America wanted it, he reasoned, then that was more than adequate justification that we ought to have it – that we must, and we would have it, whatever it was. That had been his highly-commended attitude. And any who stood in his way must die and die quickly, without mercy. A good day, he bragged, mostly to himself, would be a day when he could “take out” a hundred or a thousand of the perverse bastards who personally opposed America.

  But then, something happened. His F-16 Fighting Falcon stalled at 14,000 feet, after a remote, high-altitude strafe of a suspected enemy base north of Kirkuk and he parachuted the long way to earth, landing in a thorn-brush thicket, literally swimming through air, frantically pushing himself aside and just missing the plummeting aircraft itself, which nosedived down into an Armageddon-like explosion fifty feet away, badly searing his eyebrows and singeing his lungs. Colonel Alva Crystal suddenly found himself badly banged up, bridge of nose broke, left foot shattered, on the edge of a schoolyard. And as he slowly came to, his first sight was of a sensitive-looking kid, not gook or geek-looking, as he was conditioned to expect, but the very spit and image of his big sister Margaret’s only child, his one and only favorite nephew, young Colby Gilibray. And this, Colby’s uncannily-seeming double, apparently unhurt, was bawling his head off, shrieking, screaming, shaking and pointing toward the still-smoldering wreckage of the plane – underneath which, after being chased by its downward-rumbling giant shadow, several of his school friends had perished in an instant. And there he was, left alone, clinging to a soccer ball. He alone had survived. A warning siren sounded off toward the village and an ambulance could be seen rattling up the road toward that wrongly-violated little outlying school playground crash-site.

  And a not-so-young Alva – not the brusque, jaded Colonel Crystal of today, but just Alva – reverted to the once-lovable, honorable little 10-year-old Alva – unthinkingly and quite automatically approached the hopelessly distraught boy and tried to console, even embrace him, while neither the boy’s face nor his slumping little-boy body registered the slightest awareness that he, Colonel Crystal, was even there.

  Indeed, the infinitely evil sky-borne assassin-come-to-earth wondered for just a moment how the boy himself had not been very seriously wounded physically, perhaps even fatally, by the crash. How, or why, had he himself and this one that looked like Colby survived?

  The pathetic little ambulance, little more than a toy, arrived with some dozen or so ordinary-looking Arab townsmen, who set out at once to somehow lug major pieces of the wrecked aircraft aside and pick up the smashed unbelievably small, though somehow mostly intact, remains of the flattened school children. Alva saw a little blond girl in now-shattered glasses and a print dress and a fat kid with his arms mangled and arm and hand bobbing almost severed alongside as they carried him, and several others who appeared beyond recognition, literally de-faced. And he began to cry. The local men who came – indeed, first-responders – looked to him a lot like members of the American Legion back in Baldwinsville, without malice.

  Then, last, as a gesture, they came and gently lifted their enemy fighter pilot, Alva, himself and loaded him u
p, too – ever-so-carefully, so as not to break anything that was not broken already, into the bay of the ambulance for the trip to the appallingly badly equipped little hospital in the town, where he was, miraculously, cared for.

  And when a U.S. Army rough-armored cavalry unit swept in to rescue him, largely whole, a week later, he wasn’t sure he wanted to go with them – except that the food at the hospital was pretty awful.

  Left a new man, he had now taken on board one more inarguable reason for flipping out.

  V

  A Different Trajectory

  In fact, his reveries began to shoot off after that in a whole new, wild, and very different direction. In fact, his reflexive questioning – the habit of mind that had always made him just a wee bit odd, a little different, a little frightening in his aloof, devil-may-care sort of way, started to take a very new and different tack.

  Had those comrades he’d lost, shot down, killed by roadside bombs, or riddled to shreds with shrapnel and/or rendered incoherent, babbling fools by what they’d encountered or been ordered to do by malicious senior officers in the war zone, really sacrificed their all for the benefit of the helpful hardware man or his wife, the housewife, desperate or not, or for the small dirt farmer dodging insolvency and hailstones back home in the states – or, for that matter, his own nephew, Colby Edward Gilabray?

  Or did they sacrifice their young selves and anyone opposed just to warm the cockles and fatten the offshore accounts of Lockheed-Martin-Marietta and DuPont, Exxon, Raytheon, Haliburton, Blackwater, Inc. (XiXi), and the rest of that gang of avaricious remote psycho killers – and a hundred top-echelon investment-oligarch families who’d bolstered and quietly high-fived Rumsfeld, Cheney, the Pentagon brass – and had probably never came within a thousand-million miles of any war for generations?