I passed through Miami for thirty days en route back to Europe. At that point I had spent less than three months with either my son or my wife since his birth. It is difficult to explain how this affects someone. During my time in Thailand, I withdrew from everyone. The emotional pain that I was dealing with as a result of only having letter contact with my wife and seeing only pictures of my son was cutting to my core. I can only imagine what this must have been doing to them. I had an active and sometimes difficult mission to occupy my time, where they only had to wait. I knew by the tone of her letters that she was having a hard time. I was in agony over it. My increased sensitivity made it worse. I could feel her ache through the pages I held in my hand. When I finally returned home, what I found wasn't encouraging nor surprising. In my absence something had changed dramatically in our relationship.
It was obvious to me that she had been seeing someone else while I was away. Not only that, but she had also gotten involved with a group of people who were very much into free love, whirlwind parties, and smoking pot. Rather than losing it in anger, I wanted to hold on to what little I had: I chose to ignore the past and concentrate on the future. I thought that by moving her back to Europe with me, getting her away from the area, things would change. We arrived a month later at what was then the world's largest military intelligence collection site, Augsburg, Germany.
Because of my past experience in running isolated detachments, the border site commander called me in for an interview. He was the man in charge of a dozen or so remote intelligence collection sites along the borders to East Germany and other Eastern bloc countries. He desperately wanted me to take charge of a site that was giving him trouble. I politely refused. I knew that my marriage would not stand up to that kind of pressure, and I needed time to try and heal the problems in my relationship with my wife. He reluctantly agreed to my assignment elsewhere, which guaranteed a nearly normal home life.
I tried spending as much time as possible with both my son and my wife. I took him to the playground a lot, and we spent hours playing games on the floor of the apartment we had in on-post quarters.
Once again, just to demonstrate how little a psychic can pick up on when it's about them, it was a complete surprise when I returned home from work one day a month or so later to find my wife packed and going out the door with my son. I could not dissuade her from leaving. To say that it was a devastating blow would be an understatement. I knew instinctively that something was wrong, but never in a million years would I have thought that she would just up and leave me and take my son with her. I was absolutely shattered. And to make matters worse, one reason she said she couldn't be with me anymore was that I was spending more time with Scott than I was with her. There didn't seem to be any single answer for my situation, and I was almost incapable of rational thought.
The day she left, I went to my commander and asked for an emergency reassignment back to the States. This request was denied.
He essentially said that my problems were not the Army's problems.
His attitude was a total surprise to me. I had given everything but my life to the United States Army and when I asked for help received only a hostile attitude. What I was actually encountering was to be a common experience in the latter years of my service—it's called jealousy. My commander, like many others in the unit, had never been to Southeast Asia. For this reason, I was treated differently and it was obvious. I'm not really sure if it was a form of personal jealousy or just anger at not having served a tour himself, but it sure made a difference in how I and many other Southeast Asian veterans were treated. The war was winding down quickly. So, those who had not served seemed embarrassed by it.
Still hoping to find a way back to my wife and son, I went to the American Red Cross and asked for them to intercede on my behalf. They tried, but failed. In desperation I even tried going to the battalion sergeant major, but he wouldn't see me. His clerk told me that my situation had already been decided by my company commander so there was nothing else he could do. He wouldn't ask the battalion commander to intercede.
I remained in a sort of limbo state mentally and emotionally for nearly a month, with very little recall of what I was doing or where I was going on a day-to-day basis. I spent a great deal of time in the senior noncommissioned officers club.
Toward the end of the fifth week, there was a knock on my door. It was my mother-in-law and her sister. They had flown over to try and talk me into not filing for a divorce. They felt that with time, things could be healed. Unfortunately, I don't heal well when my son is separated from me by thousands of miles of ocean. I especially don't heal well when I know in my heart of hearts that there is another man who carries the interest of my wife. I was enraged and irrational, but was able to politely ask them both to leave. If my wife wanted to make a go of it, she would have to be the one to tell me. In my heart I hoped she would come and tell me this herself. I carried a hope that she would change her mind.
Little did I know that my mother-in-law was headed back to the States to give follow-on advice to my wife, "Dump the bum."
I received separation papers the following month from a Miami judge. I had no say in custody or anything else. I was actually billed for the proceedings and ordered by the court to pay $350 a month in child support, half my monthly income. I could have fought it under the Soldiers and Sailors Act, which would have dragged it out in courts for months, if not years. Instead, I simply paid it.
While a lot could be said about how it all happened, I never spoke to anyone about it. It is true that my wife chose to leave me, that she chose to take my son away from me, and that she sued for separation and divorce, as well as custody. But, it is also true that I put her in harm's way, expected her to take whatever I was taking, and filled her life with stress and difficulty. There probably should be a course for women who fall in love with soldiers, titled "Warning: This is what it's going to be like."
I've never said much about it to anyone. I guess in my heart, I can sense what it must have been like to a young girl from Miami, just graduated from high school, to be moved to a foreign country where she didn't know the language, etc. But as much as I missed her, it was my son whose innocence fed my heart. He was the tiny little fellow I most loved escaping to when I was home. I could spend hours with him and it never seemed enough. Since it seemed that I was never at home as much as I wanted to be, in the eyes of my wife it probably appeared a sort of competition. Feeling that she was not getting enough attention, along with the other challenges she faced, and the secret mail I wasn't supposed to know about from her boyfriend back in the States did not improve the situation. In later years, once the personalized pain had dulled, we both went on to live our own lives . . . but the real tragedy was the loss of my son. He truly was the light of my life, and I know he grew up far away from me apparently thinking or believing, despite the letters I initially wrote to him, which were returned unopened, that all the stories he was hearing were probably true. At the time it was all that I could do.
A few years later I actually spent a week in Miami on leave, parked in a rental car across the street from the home in which he was living. My ex-wife Sue had married her boyfriend and they all lived together in a duplex apartment in the Miami Shores area. I sat for hours watching him playing in the yard, observing his interaction with his stepfather (which appeared healthy and loving), all the while fighting the urge to make my presence known. I was at war with myself, wondering if suddenly reappearing in his life wouldn't undo all the stability that he now enjoyed. In the end, I drove away feeling as though I had been gutted hara-kiri style with a rusty knife and that somehow I deserved the pain I was feeling. I'd trashed Sue's life and my own; I felt I had no right to trash Scott's as well, at least any more than I had already.
I stayed in accompanied quarters because they had no room for me at the bachelor senior noncommissioned officers quarters, and spent almost eight months working at the huge field station building just outside of Augsb
urg. It was pleasant, because I was almost always drunk. I think it was one way of dealing (or not dealing) with the feelings that I needed to integrate. Since I was drunk so much of the time, I wasn't really working, either. This was an easy state to maintain in Germany, which is the land of liter-sized beer mugs. Also, the field station was so large and there were so many people, one could get lost in the crowd.
I was also obviously on the rebound, which has a tendency to draw lonely women to a man. I had a number of parties in my quarters that were greatly frowned on by the married couples and families living in the same stairwell. I would invite ten or more women to my party, leaving them with the impression that there would be a lot of guys present as well, but when they'd show up at the door they'd find out it was only me and them. Once they discovered I had no sexual goals in mind, we'd all have a great time, playing games like Monopoly and cards, while running the stereo at maximum bass, all the while putting a major dent in my liquor supply. I know my neighbors complained to the military police, but the problem was that most of the women I invited were MPs. Some mornings I'd find complete strangers sleeping in my bathtub, on the living room couch, or more than one sharing the guest room bed. In hindsight, I think I was trying to repair my personal image of my manhood, but without any form of commitment. Eventually, I burned myself out with the partying and began to dry out. I realized that I would either have to straighten out my life, or I'd end up one morning blowing my brains out on the golf course with my .45 automatic. I made a concerted effort to bring structure back into my life and carry out my duties as a noncommissioned officer.
After a few months, I met my second wife, Specialist Four Margaret Mary Murphy, while working a late-night shift. When I met her, she was actually called Murph by her workmates. Since I didn't know that we would eventually marry, we became very good friends. We would meet at the local Gasthaus (bar/restaurant) just off of Sheridan Kaserne, in Augsburg, after working a Mid shift (that's midnight to 8:00 A.M.). I actually liked working those late shifts because there were fewer people there, and they were of lesser rank, and they left you alone if you got the job done. When we met at the Gasthaus, we would consume scrambled eggs with ham, and drink a couple of liters of beer for breakfast, while writing letters home. She usually did the letter writing, and I did more of the drinking and watching. She took very good care of me. She always got me to my quarters when I was intoxicated and was able to keep me out of trouble with the locals.
The Oktoberfest that year got me off dead center. We all met at a friend's house where we warmed up on Harvey Wallbangers made in liter mugs. You know your drinking is out of control when you don't care how large the mug is they are mixing your drink in. I had two of those before we headed out for town and the beer fest. I drove, because I was the (comparatively) sober one in the crowd. We spent six hours at the beer fest, going from tent to tent, swilling beer out of more liter mugs, and chugging Steinhagger shots in between. At this point it gets sort of fuzzy for some reason. But, according to reports, I took everyone out to dinner at a very expensive nightspot on the top of a building in downtown Augsburg, one of those new rotating restaurants.
We had numerous bottles of wine with the meal, which everyone assures me were excellent. They also assured me that I was the soberest one of the bunch and was a perfect gentleman. The problem was that when the maid woke me up in a strange hotel room the following noon I couldn't remember where I was or where I had left my car. Actually, I couldn't remember much about what had happened after 7:00 P.M. On top of that, I knew that I had been robbed. I had started the previous evening with approximately $280 in my pocket, but now had a five and some change.
I found my car four days later, after spending a lot of time walking around Augsburg looking for it. I had spent all my money buying the dinner for which everyone was profusely thankful. But the whole experience scared the hell out of me. How could someone act perfectly normal, perfectly sober, act like a perfect gentleman, and have no memory of it? What if I had killed someone while my consciousness was out to lunch?
While this may be a somewhat foreign thought to most civilians, it is not for a soldier who has spent time in a combat zone. It sometimes doesn't take much to trigger the kind of reaction that results in a quick death, especially if you are not conscious of what you are doing or if your self-control has been altered by drinking. I could have ended up doing life in prison with absolutely no knowledge of having done the crime! A completely scary thought.
I immediately cut my drinking back to almost nothing, maybe a beer or glass of wine with dinner.
They say the best way to change something is to first alter the setting. So the following month, after thoroughly drying out and cleaning up my act, I requested a meeting with the border site commander and volunteered my services at a remote collection site. I was moved immediately to Schleswig am Zee, which back then was a small village up near the Danish border.
Schleswig was a damp and dreary place. In the winter there was very little sunlight, and everything was always covered in mist, fog, and rain. During the summer it was reversed, with darkness never quite descending over the land. It was the perfect little Viking village. It was a place on a deep fjord, where they still built magnificent boats for rich Europeans and Americans.
My tour there was fine initially. I was the detachment commander and made all the decisions. I had replaced a first lieutenant, who had "misplaced" a key component for an encryption system. (I later found it nailed over the door of the dump manager's shack. It still had the classified keys set on it.)
The only truly scary event was my own guard almost shooting me one night when I surprised him by walking into the operations building at 3:00 A.M. He had just reloaded his .45 automatic and had jacked a round in the chamber. When I suddenly opened the door and walked in, I startled him and the gun went off, burning a small scar across my left armpit. Good thing I had raised my arms while shouting at him. I think it scared him a lot more than it did me, if that's possible.
Eventually, the detachment became one of the best in Europe. It was so much in the limelight, in fact, that they eventually assigned a captain as the commander and my replacement. While there, I again applied for warrant officer, and again was turned down. They said I was needed where I was.
Not long after the captain arrived, a warrant supply officer was also assigned. Soon after that, a first lieutenant arrived, who became the operations officer. All of these people were doing the single job that I had been doing alone for nearly a year. It was clear to me that with the closing of all the other intelligence bases in Europe and consolidation at Augsburg, and the withdrawals of personnel from the Far East, they were running out of things for officers to do.
As a result however, I had lots of time at my disposal for goofing off. This allowed me to make a number of trips down to Augsburg over long weekends. I started seeing Murph again—now known to me as Peggy, as she had informed me her family addressed her as Peggy.
Eventually, Peggy finished her time in the Army and rather than reenlist, she quit. After a short visit to her home in St. Louis, she showed up at my apartment door in Schleswig. We lived together there until my divorce finally came through. In hindsight, marrying her was probably about the worst thing I could have done for her or me. But that's nevertheless what I did. I was still desperately in search of love, or at least what I understood it to be.
Immediately after the wedding, we both started trying very hard to change one another. Although we never did prior to the wedding, we started fighting with each other almost from that first day. We would have been better off if we had just stayed close friends. Repeating myself—being married to a husband assigned to a remote detachment is probably the most devastating thing that can happen to a military wife. And there I was, putting Peggy into the same circumstances that so aggravated my relationship with my first wife. Eventually, the marital stress got to me. I requested reassignment back to the Augsburg area. At least there, she would be among
a lot more Americans, and I would no longer have to cater to what had grown to a handful of officers trying to manipulate their way to the top-dog position in the detachment.
A couple of days after my return to Augsburg, I was asked to drop in on the S-2, a Colonel David Schofield, who was the man in charge of physical and personnel security for the Augsburg field station. He said that he had followed my career at the detachments with great care and liked the way I handled security problems. Would I consider working for him? I agreed, even though I knew it would tick off the others in my MOS.
The single greatest insult to your comrades in arms is to abandon your primary MOS for another job, or so it would seem. But at the time, I really didn't care. I was burned out with all the emotional ups and downs with my second wife, and I just wanted a nice, stable job that wouldn't be too much trouble to my marriage. I was also fed up with those in charge within my MOS structure, because they had ignored my third request for warrant officer.
I must point out that applying for warrant officer is no easy task. It involves nearly three hundred pages of materials, including at minimum full-length photographs in dress uniform, medical papers, educational papers, test papers, and a few dozen specifically written recommendations from light colonels and up, as well as your entire military history, and supplemental forms for additional background security checks. If your application is accepted, you have to sit two boards, where you are grilled on your MOS, and you are competing with dozens of others of equal capability as yourself. One in a hundred applications eventually makes it. It was an exhaustive process that I'd already been through three times. This time I was not as well qualified as many others, although I had twice the field experience of anyone else applying. So, I decided to move to S-2. I accepted his offer.
The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy Page 9
