“It appears the commanding general of the Eighty-second won’t drop the charges so that you can be medically discharged; he is forcing you to stand trial. Apparently he’s gone so far as to call the hospital commander to demand that you be moved back under his control. I’m really very sorry. I’ve been told in no uncertain terms to step aside.”
Debbie was shaking with rage. “I feel so violated and helpless. He’ll drop the charges to let David resign so he can give him an ‘other than honorable’ discharge, but he won’t let him be discharged so that he can get medical attention. What kind of animal is this man?”
During the next two days Debbie wrote letters to congressmen, phoned officer friends all over the world, even wrote the general’s superior officer. But nothing worked. The decision was now etched in stone: I had to return to Fort Bragg. Instead of being thirty minutes away from my family, instead of getting supportive care, I would be alone in the darkness again. It was just how they wanted it.
On a Wednesday morning, I bade farewell to the hospital staff who had become my friends, who had cared and helped me to understand the many levels on which I was fighting. I lay on a gurney as instructed and was strapped in; a nurse who had been with me held my hand, tenderly stroking it and looking into my eyes.
“You remember one thing, Major Morehouse.” Her eyes misted with emotion. “Trust in God! He knows what you’re going through; you trust in Him and everything will be all right.”
Dr. Damioli approached me just as they wheeled me to the door of the van that would transport me to Andrews Air Force Base. She, too, held my hand. “You get well, my friend; you fight and get well.”
The hollow doors to the van slammed shut with the finality of a death sentence. I tried to weep, but nothing came; the drugs held their ground.
EIGHT
THE REBIRTH
A thousand times I have been visited by the memory of the night; and I know that I shall be visited a thousand times again. The earth shall forget the pain of furrows plowed, ere I shall forget the lessons of the night.
The medevac plane touched down at Pope Air Force Base; I was transported to Womack Army Hospital and processed into the psychiatric ward. Within hours I was ordered into a uniform and driven to the courtroom, where for the first time in nearly three months I saw my legal counsel.
He filled me in on the proceedings. “They will read the charges against you, and then you will be asked to enter a plea. At that time you must stand and face the judge and say, ‘Not guilty, Your Honor.’ I’ll take it from there, and we should be out in fifteen to twenty minutes. I should tell you that I’m trying to make this a classified trial so that I can bring in the issue of Sun Streak. If they’re going to railroad you for your disclosure, I think they should have to face it openly.”
“What will that do for us?”
“Well, they will have to read everyone on to the program—the judge, court officers, jury, defense, prosecution, maybe even all of the witnesses. I don’t know for sure. It’ll make them think twice about how far they want to take this charade.”
“Thank you.”
“How are you feeling? I understand they have you on some pretty powerful medications. In fact, the skin around your eyes looks green.”
The hearing—the first of many over the next ten weeks—was called to order. It proceeded just as my lawyer had said. Enduring the humiliation of court-martial was certainly one of the most difficult things I’ve ever had to do. Worst of all was the realization that everything I’d done in my life up to that point meant nothing. If it had been only me being abandoned after sixteen years, I could probably have understood, but the Army turned its back on an entire family. One good thing that came out of this experience was that I learned who would stand by me, who believed in me.
During the trial, Debbie, my parents, my friends, and my brother and sister rallied to my side. They wrote letters extolling my virtues and my sacrifices; my record was described, and all of my friends pleaded for mercy. They explained that since becoming a part of Sun Streak I had become reclusive, had cut myself off from everything I once knew and trusted. But it was no use. I had broken ranks, and I came to realize that no mercy would be shown to me or to my family.
In late August, with Debbie and my parents by my side, I asked to be released from the hospital. My days consisted of taking drugs and sitting through classes designed for substance abusers preparing to go to one of the military rehabilitation centers.2 Group therapy was performed by orderlies in a makeshift weight room; for exercise I was allowed several minutes on a caged rooftop with the other patients twice a day. It took Debbie six hours to drive to Fayetteville for a brief visit—when she could get time off from work. One physician had told us frankly that he was too close to retirement to get involved in this case, with its connection to Sun Streak. Another just avoided me as much as possible. I just played the game, proving myself a compliant patient.
In the first week of September, Debbie signed her husband, the father of her children, out of the Fort Bragg hospital. The months we both had endured while I was there had been for nothing. Debbie was understandably bitter. All these years, she had believed that the army would take care of its own, would care about a soldier and his family, would help him get well again. Now, she realized she had been betrayed, and she hated the army, hated it more than she had ever thought she was capable of hating anything. I had taken her away from her family and friends and introduced her to life in the army, to a profession that I believed would protect me from false accusations and unjust treatment. Instead, the army became the tool the intelligence community used to destroy me and my family. Far from standing by me, the commander of my division vowed to take away everything I had.
After my release from the hospital I was assigned to write a “Leader’s Guide to Caring for Families” for the 82nd Airborne Division—an assignment that added insult to injury.
Debbie, as well as other family members and friends, wrote to the division commander countless times, pleading with him to reconsider his plan to proceed with the court-martial. They asked for appointments with him, and he refused. He refused my wife and my father. He refused the father of a soldier, a father who had fought the enemies of this nation in two wars. He refused the wife of a soldier, a wife who had spent thousands of hours in the service of this nation, counseling the wives of her husband’s subordinates, balancing their checkbooks, shopping for them, cooking for their children and caring for them when they were ill just as she would have cared for her own family; a wife who had cared for the men serving with her husband and made them a part of our family. Worst of all, he abandoned a woman who believed in the cause and taught her children to believe in the cause although every night they lay in their beds with their father gone. He abandoned our family.
God must have known that I could go no lower, that I could not drag my family deeper into the pit that was being dug for me. In the third week of November 1994, the phone rang at our house in Bowie.
“David, you won’t remember me and I don’t want you to. There are several of us who worked with you many years ago when you were a lieutenant and young captain, and we know what’s been happening. I just want to tell you something about what is happening to you and then I’m going to hang up and let you make your decision. You cannot go through with the court-martial. It’s a setup. You’re going to court to defend yourself and your name, correct?”
“Of course.”
“When you can’t back out of a trial, they will try to charge you with wrongful disclosure of classified information.” If the military judge allowed this brutal strategy, it would force a continuance on the army prosecutors so my attorneys could prepare for the new charge. But by then my tormentors would have me where they wanted me—committed to a defense I couldn’t win. The caller agreed. “You won’t beat that charge, David. They know what you’ve done and they’ll give the prosecutors the necessary evidence to convict you and put you in prison.”
“I see.”
“You thought the charges were foolish. They were, though maybe not to the Eighty-second. But they were perfect—foolish enough to encourage your lawyer to try and fight them in court, which is exactly where they wanted you. You’d be focusing all your energy on charges you thought you could beat easily, while they prepared a case that would send you to Leavenworth for years. You’d never see it coming until too late.”
“What can I do?”
“They still have to let you resign; the charges pending aren’t serious enough for them to do otherwise. It may piss them off, but they’ll have to comply. If the convening authority drags his feet, others will get involved. You still have some friends left, David; it hasn’t all been for nothing.”
“So I should tell my counsel that I want to resign?”
“Yes, and as soon as possible. If they get word that you plan to resign they’ll up the ante—that means bringing more charges if they have to. Remember, they don’t have to have definite proof; all they need is an allegation, and the entire process begins again. Resign as soon as possible—and good luck, David.”
The phone went dead before I could say good-bye.
I returned to Fort Bragg the next day. My parents were with me, as they had been since my release from the hospital. I needed constant supervision because of the medications and my unstable emotional condition. I was deeply embarrassed by that—I was a thirty-nine-year-old man who had to be baby-sat by his seventy-year-old parents—but I couldn’t function without them. While my father waited in the hall, tears in his eyes, I stepped into my lawyer’s office for the final time and agreed to resign my commission in the United States Army for the good of the service. Then I notified my supervisor, who said sadly, “I wish it had gone another way for you, but I understand your decision.” Then I drove home, took off the uniform I had so proudly donned sixteen years ago, and walked out of the life I had sacrificed everything for.
Thirty days later the charges against me were dropped, and after yet another barrage of supportive letters from friends and family the undersecretary of the army approved my resignation and bestowed upon me an “other than honorable” discharge, ensuring that all our devotion to the army was wiped away. It was as if the last nineteen years of our lives had never existed.
And every decision by the division leadership and even the undersecretary of the army was made without any evidence being presented in my behalf. Not once in over a year did the government ever perform any investigations on my behalf. My attorney never deposed anyone, never petitioned the court for an investigator; and never was any evidence supporting me presented to either my commanding general, the judge, the commander of PERSCOM, or the undersecretary of the army. The only depositions made on my behalf were those I personally paid a private investigator $5,000 to obtain, and they were never used, although they would have destroyed the government’s case. During the hearings I was never allowed to tell my side of the story. I think that was the most frustrating part of the whole experience—I couldn’t stand up in my own defense, explain that the charges were false and were meant only to discredit me. And my mental state aided and abetted my opponents all the way. In many ways I had played right into their hands—but of course, they did have my psychological profile, and I suppose they knew me better than I knew myself.
There were so many people who could have helped but didn’t for fear of destroying their own careers. So now Debbie and I were starting over with nothing but each other. I’d lost our retirement benefits, the VA loan on our home, the right to unemployment benefits, the right to be buried in a military cemetery. I was even denied access to the American Legion. Once I’d been an officer “destined to wear stars”; now I was a worthless outcast, still suffering from visions and nightmares unless I drugged myself with poisons.
My beautiful wife took these blows like the trooper she was. “It wasn’t worth losing you to prison,” she said. “We’ve been through enough. Now let’s get you well, and get on with our lives.” But I felt hopeless, and I didn’t want to suffer any longer.
As soon as the medications ran out, I did without; we couldn’t afford a civilian doctor, to renew the prescription; nor could we afford the medications. Because I had a preexisting condition we couldn’t begin to afford insurance, either.
I routinely contemplated my death, wondering what it would be like to join Mike Foley and the others I’d seen in the ether over the years. One moment of pain and shock and it would all be over, for eternity. I wouldn’t embarrass anyone again. I wouldn’t have to endure one more vision, one more nightmare. I could experience peace.
I decided several times to take my life, but each time something stopped me. First, the faces of Michael, Mariah, and Danielle came to me magically each time I went too far. And then there was Debbie’s angelic face, her kind eyes leading me away from what would harm me and back to safety. She always told me that my most valued possession had never been lost: the love of my family.
“We will always be here for you, David,” she said to comfort me. But who gave her comfort? I was a cripple, incapable of life on my own. Debbie struggled to hold the family together, pay the bills, and care for a husband who was sinking deeper and deeper into despair by the hour. It wasn’t long before she, too, began to disintegrate emotionally. She’d married a strong, promising young infantry officer; sixteen years later, she had a devastated, empty shell of a man who could no more be a father and husband than he could care for himself, who was a melancholy testimonial to what he could have been. Each day was a struggle to keep her own sanity, her own sense of worth, and to somehow instill in our children a belief in themselves and a renewed love and understanding for what was once their father.
In April 1995, Debbie loaded me in a car and drove nineteen hours to Russellville, Wisconsin.
“How is he?” Mel asked quietly.
“See for yourself,” Debbie said, and broke down sobbing in his arms. He gently passed her to Edith, who helped her into the house.
Mel looked at me. “How you doing, brother?”
“Not so good.”
Mel recognized that only half a man stood before him, and he knew what had to be done to free me from whatever held me in darkness. While I rested in the house, he prepared a very sacred ceremony to save his brother. He made four small cloth bundles of bits of bone, claw, and hide scrapings from a black bear; these he set in the four corners of his property. That night he brought me to his tepee; we sat inside with a small fire fueled by the purifying green sage and the flat leaves of the white cedar. He tied a large black-and-white eagle feather to the top of the entrance, where it hung to ward off unwanted spirits.
The fire heated the interior of the tepee until sweat poured from me, soaking my shirt and pants. I watched as Mel pulled a pipe from a hand-sewn bag. Its long stem was adorned with horsehair, feathers, and intricate beadwork; he reverently packed the bowl with a mixture of sacred tobacco, the inner bark of the red willow, and dried sumac leaves. He lit the pipe and took a long draw, then exhaled the smoke as a pious offering to the Great Spirit. Holding the burning pipe, he respectfully offered smoke to the four corners of the world and to Mother Earth. He passed the pipe to me and I repeated his offering; the aromatic smoke swirled about my head, intoxicating and freeing my dead spirit. I sat there feeling it begin to turn and shift within me. My walled-up emotions gently came to life as I watched Mel slowly and deliberately empty the ashes of the pipe into the burning embers of the fire.
Around my neck, he placed the rock medicine he’d given me years ago, and with a paint he’d made from clay he drew two horizontal lines across my forehead, the top one black and the lower one red. He then painted my chin red and placed a small pouch of tobacco in my left hand. This was a symbolic offering in a ceremony of death and in preparation for the rebirth of my spirit. As he did so a strange rush of wind rattled the walls of the tepee, and the grunts and rootings of a large animal circled outside. As if all that was as he had expected, Me
l calmly packed away his pipe and stowed the sacred tobacco. Next to me he placed a small war bundle containing weapons to be used by the spirit to combat evil in the ether; his final preparatory act was to unveil the skull of “George,” an ancient Indian medicine man who had been with him for decades; this he placed opposite me, the fire between us.
I remained as reverent as I could; though I didn’t fully understand what my friend was doing, I did know that he was trying to help me, and that his methods were sacred and powerful.
“Go into the ether, Wank‘hok’isak‘a [Half Man],” he said in a tribal tongue. “There you must look for Rezi-wak’ antcank‘a [the Holy Tongue]. I will be outside praying for you on the rock near the water.”
Mel left me alone in the lodge, taking his medicine and pipe with him for use during his prayers. I sat staring into the flame, inhaling the scent of the smoke and entering the ether.
I plunged into the tunnel of light, falling toward something I didn’t know, some place and time I’d never been. I tumbled in the rush and flurry of sounds and images that filled the signal line. I fell until I pierced the veil and found myself in a strange world laced with a mixture of darkness and color.
“A-Ho(! Wank‘hok‘isak‘a, I have been waiting for you.”
I stood in the presence of the elderly medicine man whom Mel affectionately called George. George had been watching over Mel ever since the early sixties, when he had rescued the skull from a pair of traders who were planning to defile it by driving an arrowhead into it. Their aim was to increase its value to unsuspecting tourists or novice collectors. Mel gave a week’s pay to liberate George from his captors, and ever since the Indian’s spirit had been with him, guiding and comforting Mel and his family in times of crisis. Every Riley had a story of how George had manifested himself to them. And countless remote-viewing sessions had been run at Sun Streak to learn George’s history and fate. Many years ago, as a greenhorn remote viewer, I, too, had searched his past; now I stood before him in all his glory. A red and blue blanket covered him from shoulders to thighs; a single eagle feather crested his head. His powerful hands were exposed only at the fingertips; his legs and feet were covered in finely sewn deerhide. A brightly colored and meticulously beaded bag hung from his shoulder; I assume it held his spirit medicine.
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