I spent a great deal of time searching for the meaning of her name. I asked numerous people I knew or have met from India, as well as those who speak numerous dialects of Hindi. None were able to translate the name. Eventually, after I started working at Stanford Research Institute International (SRI) following my retirement, I spent a weekend attending a special exhibit of Hindu gods and deities at the museum in the main park in downtown San Francisco. In one of the rooms was a huge multilevel altar, with dozens of small statues displayed on it. On the very bottom shelf, toward the rear, was a tiny statue of a slightly pudgy woman in Indian garb. They listed her as a minor deity, with the name spelled Kiranja, which, translated from some archaic dialect, means "bringer or carrier or light."
Knowing what I do now, and thinking as I do now about how space/time might be imagined to work—I could have, at that precise point in time, created all of my experiences with her up until this very moment. You see, I believe we fool ourselves into thinking that things are linear simply because we normally experience them in that fashion. But in reality, anomalous events happen and we experience them outside of the linear-time framework. In a simple sense, it's like saying that since I will eventually know the answer to a question for which I currently have no answer—it will eventually be inside my head as knowledge. Therefore, if you change how you think about time, I can view the information as always being in my mind from the beginning. In other words, maybe information doesn't travel to us—it's just always there until it is necessary to complete the time/space framework.
One thing is for sure, she will always be one of the great mysteries in my life that will keep me interested in the paranormal and how reality might or might not work.
The second thing that happened at that specific Gateway was a simple and kind gesture that brought my third and final wife into my life. I was allowed to ride along to feed a couple of dogs.
One afternoon, during lunch, I was talking to Nancy Honeycutt, when she said that she had to go and feed Caesar. For some reason, the name conjured up an image of a huge cat, a Bengal tiger wearing heaving chains in a basement cage. Or perhaps a regal Doberman, guarding a small stone cottage in the woods. Whatever the image, it intrigued me, and I asked to go along. At first she was reluctant. I didn't know it, but the rules strictly forbid any of the trainers getting chummy with individual participants. These were rules she knew well, because these were rules she drafted for all the trainers. But, I pressed her and she finally relented.
We drove over to her home, an old farmhouse, sort of an ugly shade of faded yellow she quaintly called the "Col. Mustard House." She warned me that Caesar could at times be overly protective, but his son, Higgins, was only a puppy. So, I was nervously having images of major-large Doberman, and smaller, puppy Doberman who the larger Doberman would kill to protect. I tentatively moved to the backyard, while she entered her house calling out for them. She slid the rear deck door open, and out burst Caesar—all eight pounds of him. He looked like a blend of poodle, corgi, and terrier, with a sort of a schnauzer haircut. He came right over to me and stiffened, bristling at the neck and growled a low, guttural growl. Right behind him, with his ears hiked halfway up in the air, was two pounds of Higgins, his tail whipping back and forth.
She told me that Caesar was just checking me out. He'd calm down after a few minutes. He gave me a quick second look and then took off after Higgins. They had a great time in the yard.
Sitting under an old walnut tree, she told me about how little Caesar had looked at her a few years back when she had to go out to California to work. (For a couple of years she did sales work for a couple of major publishing houses selling textbooks to colleges on both the West and the East Coast, before coming back to work at the Institute as its director.) She said it broke her heart leaving him at home. It was evident that she loved her two little fur babies quite a bit. We just sat by the walnut tree and talked, and I felt something turning over inside me. It scared the hell out of me, though. There was no way that I would entertain any concept of a third marriage. I had already destroyed two; a third was out of the question. I tried very hard to stay away from her after that, but over time it became more and more difficult.
One of the things I had to do to prepare for retirement was take a complete physical at Walter Reed Medical Center. And, it was complete—properly crossing all the t's and dotting all the i's. They annotated the fact that I had severe disc disease and multiple hairline stress fractures throughout my spine, which qualified me for 30 percent disability. No surprise to me, because I had spent the past sixteen years living with pain. Surprisingly, I also got another 10 percent for arthritis in my left wrist, right hand, and spine, a result of other injuries I sustained during service.
Then I learned one of the interesting things about military service they don't tell you when you sign up and are doing your time. Even if your disability is severe enough that you can no longer work to support your family, it doesn't mean anything in terms of additional money.
Congress passed a law over a hundred years ago that prevents retired veterans from receiving both retirement pay and whatever percentage of disability they end up with as a result of wounds or injuries sustained in service to the country. In fact, once you are retired, you get to pay your own disability. For every dollar you receive in disability, you have a dollar deducted from your retirement salary. The only good part is that the percentage paid in disability is not taxed.
Now, if, as a retired military officer or enlisted man, you go to work for the government after you retire, then you retire from government service, the disability—whatever percentage it might be—can be a result of government service and not military service and you can draw your full retirement and disability. Or, if you are a congressman or senator and you are disabled while serving (even just one term), you can draw both retirement and full disability. Or of course if you are the president of the United States, who is also the commander in chief, you can draw both because you would draw it as the president and not as commander.
If I sound a bit peeved here, it's because I am. Any of my readers who believes that the military veterans who are retired and 100 percent disabled are well cared for should check it out. They aren't. Men who make it to retirement and end up crippled as a result of earlier wounds or injuries while in service, and who are now stuck in wheelchairs, get to pay their own disability. This is a tragedy, especially when they are in their early forties, and their kids are hitting college age, or the family needs medical insurance, or a home, or food. Try it as a retired sergeant first class with three kids, living with some bizarre disease they found in your blood as a result of kicking in the wrong bunker door over in Iraq back in 1991—a disease that won't let you roll out of bed.
It's an unconscionable crime that the bills of war are always paid when it comes to a new multibillion-dollar technology, but the cost in human terms—like the lives of Americans—always seems to get lost somewhere in the shuffle. Excepting of course everyone else who serves, but not in the military. I suppose the government contractors and other lobby groups are much stronger than the ones representing the military retiree, or maybe those in the retiree lobby serve two masters.
I won't apologize for the strength of my feelings on this issue. I've seen too many of my compatriots go down hard after significant sacrifices on behalf of their country. The people who are making the decisions to send soldiers to war also make the decisions not to care for them afterward.
While in Walter Reed, they also gave me a full-blown heart stress test on a treadmill connected to a computer. They put me through a grueling 45 minutes of jogging up and down hill, which got my heart rate up to about 225 beats per minute for about a ten-minute stretch of simulated hill climb. The computer declared me (aside from my entire spine, which the testing actually trashed again) as fit as someone age 39 should be. I limped out of Walter Reed satisfied that there wasn't anything too terribly wrong with me.
The following week, one of t
he strangest incidents in my career occurred. When I walked into the office on a Thursday morning, the boss asked me to give the chief of staff a call. He said it was urgent. I called him right away. When the chief of staff took the phone from his secretary, he immediately started chewing on me like a piranha. He said he was going to have the military police pick me up and bring me to Arlington Hall Station in irons. He was absolutely infuriated like I had never before heard him. When he finally stopped yelling into the phone, I asked him what in the hell it was that I was supposed to have done.
"You mean you don't know?" he responded, incredulous.
"No. I haven't got a clue, Colonel," I yelled back.
He took a deep breath. "We have a formal signed complaint from a lieutenant colonel doctor at Walter Reed who says he was physically assaulted by you last week."
I had been there the Monday before for the retirement physical and had not even seen a lieutenant colonel, never mind assaulted one. I tentatively asked, "When was this supposed to have occurred?" I could hear him shuffling papers.
"Wednesday afternoon."
I let my breath out in relief. I didn't even know that I had been holding it. "Well, it wasn't me. I was standing in the Capitol building with the assistant deputy chief of staff for HUMINT, and my boss," I replied.
More paper shuffling.
"Something's wrong here then," he replied. "He says in his statement that he identified you by the identification badge on your dress greens. He describes you almost perfectly head to toes. And, he claims you jumped him in a deserted corridor for no reason."
"It wasn't me," I exclaimed again, repeating what I had said before.
He didn't believe me.
"I want you in my office in an hour!" he said, then hung up.
I went to my boss and told him what had happened and he went with me to the chief of staff's office at Arlington. When we got there, there was a lieutenant colonel in the outer office, who nervously watched us as we entered. The chief of staff's secretary announced our arrival and he came out to meet us.
Looking at the lieutenant colonel with the medical insignia on his collar, he asked, "Is this the guy?" pointing to me.
The lieutenant colonel nodded in the affirmative, but watched me really carefully, nervously. I guess he was afraid that I'd be jumping him again.
"Well, I wasn't at Walter Reed on Wednesday. I was there on Monday getting my retirement physical, and this man," I pointed to the lieutenant colonel, "is a liar."
All hell broke loose when I called him a liar. The commotion was loud enough to bring the general in from across the hall, asking what was going on. The chief of staff explained the entire situation.
The general picked up the phone and called the assistant deputy chief of staff for HUMINT, and asked him where he was on Wednesday. After a few minutes he asked him who was with him. Nodding his head, he hung up the phone and looked toward the lieutenant colonel.
"Well, sir. You are wrong. This man," he said, pointing to me, "was in a room of the Rayburn Building at the Capitol with the assistant deputy chief of staff for HUMINT, his boss here, and two congressmen and a senator when you were assaulted."
The room became very quiet. The lieutenant colonel medical officer had the most perplexed look on his face. He just picked up his briefcase and turned and walked out of the office. The chief of staff dropped the paperwork in his secretary's wastebasket on the way back to his office. Everyone just sort of walked away from me.
"Well?" My boss inquired. "You coming?"
I followed him out to the car and we drove back to Fort Meade.
To this day, I haven't got a clue to what has to be the strangest incident in my twenty years in the Army. On the way back to Meade, my boss kept ribbing me about beating up on people while out of body. At that point in my service there were only two other McMoneagles serving in any service of the DoD that I was aware of, neither of them locally and neither of them relatives.
I was spending more and more time down in the Charlottesville area, and less time at Fort Meade. When I was in my quarters on base it was uncomfortable. I was alone with my dog, Barney, and we were missing things like the stereo and some of the other things that make a home more livable. We'd spend a lot of time together taking longer and longer walks on base. It was also uncomfortable being there alone in the middle of the week, especially during the day. Some of the other wives in the quadrangle of town homes knew that I was permanently separated from Peggy and would show up at my door, sometimes looking for an extra light bulb, but mostly looking for other things. I stayed away as much as possible.
When I drove south, I took Barney along with me on a few of the runs. He really liked riding in the car. He'd sit up front like a regular passenger and watch stuff go by. He really loved looking at cows. I think he thought they were just larger dogs.
On one of my trips down to the Institute I brought him by Nancy's house to meet Caesar. It was a really big mistake. Barney and I had had a fight with a pack of dogs on Fort Meade. We were jumped by a pack of four dogs, all family pets that people had let out to roam the neighborhood after dark—a malamute, an Irish setter, a German shepherd, and a springer spaniel. I put the malamute in a parked car, the springer spaniel in a dumpster, and killed the German shepherd. Barney killed the leader, the Irish setter, and kept the German shepherd at bay until I had a chance to defend myself. I spent three days in the contagious infection ward at Fort Meade's hospital, getting my wounds scrubbed out every two to four hours. After that, Barney would never let another dog get close to me—even smaller ones like Caesar and Higgins. Caesar, protecting his territory, of course charged right up growling. Barney snatched him up like a roll of paper towels and took off across the yard with him, shaking him like a rag doll. Higgins took off for cover. I took off after Barney with an umbrella. Barney wasn't afraid of much, but snapping any umbrella open in front of him really generated a great startle response. Barney startled—Caesar hit the ground running, no worse for wear, and I reconnected Barney's leash.
In the beginning, whenever I visited Nancy, we would put Barney on the second floor and keep the other two dogs downstairs. Otherwise, Barney was always kept on a leash, especially when I walked him. I could tell it was putting a strain on her, and on all the other four-legged ones. I knew in my heart that it was only a matter of time until Barney would get another shot at Caesar or Higgins—and the next time we might not be so lucky.
I knew if there was ever going to be a permanent relationship between Nancy and me, I was going to have to give Barney up. I thought about it a lot and we discussed it a number of times. We even considered turning the oversized garage into a kennel, and connecting it to a full-sized, covered run outside. A grand idea, but I just couldn't envision being able to watch him like a hawk all the time. In my own mind, it would have been too much to ask her to give up both of her dogs for my sake. It was just one more of those incredibly painful events in one's life that one has to deal with. It was certainly one of the most painful in my life up until that point. Barney was my friend and confidant, something you don't have a lot of in the intelligence business. I could share time with him and he made no demands, other than to be there with me, sharing in whatever I was doing. He even carried his own food and water in a set of saddlebags I had made for him. It wasn't the same as a relationship with another person. That's always a two-way street. With Barney it always felt like it was one way—him to me. It didn't take much to have him crawl up next to me on a couch and lay his head in my lap, or give me a gentle woof when my alarm had run down. His demands were quite simple—"Just take care of me."
That's the part that made it so painful. He wasn't asking much, but it was more than I could manage.
It was equally hard on Nancy. Actually, I should begin to refer to her by her nickname, Scooter. (When she was a tiny baby, the woman who helped take care of her started calling her Scooter, after small little cakes they used to sell with the same name.) She had really strong feelings
about the issue as well. She would have done anything I asked, modified any part of the house, or done almost anything to ensure keeping Barney and me together. That was one of the things I fell in love with Scooter for—she always put herself in someone else's shoes before she made judgments about them or made comments about the situations they were in. In this case, I knew she was imagining how it would feel for her to give up her own two dogs and it generated an almost unbearable amount of imagined grief for her. But, it was one of those things in life that has to be done, and it was really my decision all along. I told her that I was going to find a solution and that it probably meant giving Barney up to another good home. I can't think of too many other times that I've seen her cry so hard or feel so bad about something she couldn't do anything about.
When I got back to Fort Meade, I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote a letter from Barney to whomever the new owner might end up being. In it, I explained that I (speaking for Barney) was overly protective of my family members, that I really liked hot dogs a lot. I listed my favorite words, especially the ones I knew really well, like sit, stay, lay, that sort of thing, then explained that more than anything, I loved being with family and riding in the car. I took Barney to his vet—who absolutely loved him anyway—and she started looking for a new home for him. Within a few weeks, a saleswoman saw the letter that I had written for him. She worked the Southwest territories and wanted a traveling companion to protect her and her things. When she sat down in the vet's office and they let Barney in, he went over to the couch, climbed up, and laid his head in her lap—about as sure a sign as any could be. I received a single letter from the woman after the first sales trip that Barney accompanied her on. It was quite simple and straightforward—the message, abbreviated, was "I love Barney, he loves me, and you can't have him back." So, in my heart, I am eternally grateful to the woman who gave Barney his new home and role in life. He was almost trained for it. But even now, I keep a folder with pictures of Barney on my desk. He will always have—as all my fur children do—a very special place in my heart.
The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy Page 23
