by Weston Ochse
“She waited as long as she could, Sam. She didn’t get married until 1978, after they declared you dead. She still loves you, I hear.”
Sam watched as his wife and a family that could’ve been his stepped into a car and drove away.
“I suppose I should tell you your surprise, now.”
Sam twisted and glared at the Commandant – the man that had been a major part of his life for twenty years – the man whom he’d known better than any lover.
“What do you mean? Isn’t this the surprise?”
“Ah, yes. I suppose it is. But this one’s even better.”
Sam stared at his nemesis afraid to say anything. He was afraid that if he even breathed it would change everything.
“You’re going home, Sam.”
A dam that had been in place for almost a quarter of a century suddenly crumbled and broke. His system was flooded with enough stored emotion to make him gag. He alternated between crying and laughing and coughing as he realized that after all this time he’d finally won.
TWO DAYS later and there was only one thing on his mind. He was going to have surgery tomorrow. They were going to remove his tongue. They were going to tell the Red Cross it was because of an infection. The truth was that they didn’t want him telling anything. With no voice and only one finger, his ability to communicate was severely restricted. He’d merely shrugged his shoulders when they’d told him. He was willing to trade anything for his family.
The Commandant told him his government needed some leverage – specifically, money. The International Monetary Fund said Vietnam’s credit was no good. If they could suddenly show some POWs they’d discovered being held by some radical patriots, however, the American outcry would be incredible. People would reward their old enemy. Vietnam would apologize and Sam would become not only a symbol of American fortitude, but of a suddenly benevolent Vietnam. The more he thought of it, the more he didn’t like it.
He thought of his abbreviated body and could not use the term benevolent to describe any part of it. In fact, he had begun thinking of it more often. It had always been about survival, about beating the odds, and the animals, and the Commandant’s tests. Perception had never mattered. But suddenly, he tried to picture how his family would receive him – perceive him. He imagined polite silence and private repugnance.
He stared at his finger, the only perfect thing left about him. They were going to use it to identify him. His finger was the only part of himself that was beautiful. To others it was probably ordinary. It was just like any other finger, nothing special, but, to Sam, it was the only one of its kind.
Sam stuck the finger in his mouth and sucked on it carefully. Thoughts spun through his mind.
Why had he survived all this time?
His family didn’t need a slug – a Ran Ong.
Why was it so hard to be a man?
Anger and frustration heated his veins. He stopped sucking and bit down hard. His weak teeth threatened to shatter and ached with as much pain as his bite. Finally, with an explosion of blood, he bit through. He gagged, but forced himself to swallow. Blood found its way out of the corners of his mouth. The color reminded him of the roses he’d given his wife on their wedding day. Sam began to weep and closed his eyes tightly.
He chewed down again, biting deeper. He felt his teeth touch bone and slide sickly for an inch as he ripped upwards. Meat came away and he swallowed it. His wife was happy. She had a family she’d been with longer than she’d known Sam. His son had his own problems. Sam jammed his entire fingerless fist down his throat and choked as he felt his trachea rupture in a sparkling storm of pain. He tried to scream, but couldn’t force the air past his fist. His family would never know of his sacrifice. Then they didn’t really need to know. This was his time.
He’d finally be the family man he had never been allowed to be.
* * *
Notes from the Author: I wrote ‘Family Man’ sometime within the first two years I began writing. I think it was one of the best things I’d written during that period and feel that it’s stood the test of time. Noted crime fiction author and child protection champion Andrew Vachss provided laudatory and helpful comments regarding ‘Family Man’ after I succeeded in bringing it to his attention. This marked the first time that an author of his magnitude and stature had taken the time to provide me feedback and has fueled me ever since. I conceived of this story when one day the image of a single pristine finger on a torture victim flashed into my mind. Then I had to figure out what that finger represented and why the victim needed to keep it intact. I’ve been criticized that the glue that holds this story together doesn’t bind because of the advent of DNA testing. Sadly, our hero wouldn’t have known about that since he was captured in 1968. Had he known the story might have turned out differently. He might have died sooner instead of majestically, sacrificing himself so that he could finally become that which had forever been denied him – a family man.
We All Wanted to Be Heroes When We Were Young
My Observations on the Writing of SEAL Team 666
WHEN I WAS a kid, every boy wanted to grow up and be a warrior. Some wanted to be soldiers, others marines, still others U.S. Navy SEALs. Some boys wanted to drive tanks, some wanted to fly jets, and others wanted to slay dragons. Regardless of whom they wanted to be, or whom they turned out to be, the notion of fighting for something greater than ourselves drove us through our childhoods. From games of cowboys and Indians to cops and robbers, to my personal favorite, pretending I was Sergeant Nick Fury, we as kids slayed invisible foes. Games like capture the flag and paintball became vicious battles in miniature, most often leaving adolescent warriors bloody and limping from the battlefield. But what really sent my heart soaring towards impossible heroic heights was reading war stories, sometimes long into the night, most often under the covers with a flashlight.
I’m often asked why I wrote SEAL Team 666. My response is normally how could I not write it? After all, I lived and breathed and ate war and idolized the men who fought them all the while I was growing up. Hell, I eventually became one.
The first war story I remember reading was the book My Brother Sam is Dead. The tale of an unlikely Revolutionary War fighter, it taught me that even children fought in wars. I progressed through the usual military fiction, consuming in great quantities anything written by Bernard Cornwall and W.E.B. Griffon. I discovered Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, the warring armies of Tolkien and the improbably hobbit heroes. I fought in Vietnam with Joe Haldeman and Leonard B. Scott. I fought in World War II with John Dos Passos, Norman Mailer and Alistair MacLean. I stared through the fields of Gettysburg with The Killer Angels.
Growing up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I had a special relationship with the Civil War. I’ve never seen a town with as many front yards or hill crests with monuments dedicated to this dead battalion or that decimated regiment. From Missionary Ridge to Lookout Mountain to Chickamauga, enough men died to seed war into the physical structure of the land. So when I decided to join the Army, it came as little surprise.
Movies and television were a tremendous influence, as well. The usual roll call of terrific movies included The Guns of Navarone, Kelly’s Heroes, They Were Expendable, Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. The Boys of Company C and Top Gun were two of my favorites, the former because of its lesson on the imperfection of heroism, and the latter because of its lesson on the necessity of hubris, both hard lessons taught with blood and bone.
But even with all this talk of hubris, I still wanted so badly to be John Wayne. What kid didn’t? For a great many of us he was the icon of everything right and proper for being a ‘man.’ He had a way of speaking about complex topics in a very practical way. In the movie In Harm’s Way, he said, “All battles are fought by scared men who’d rather be someplace else.” I think up until that moment I might have believed that real soldiers didn’t show fear. I have, of course
, come to realize that it is in the knowing of that fear and the molding of it that makes us even better soldiers.
By this time I was a corporal in the Army and on my way to a twenty-year career. I’d been stationed in Korea and had returned to Fort Carson. Little did I know I’d soon be breathing the rare air of Fort Bragg’s Smoke Bomb Hill special operations community and traveling to more than fifty countries, more often than not with a copy of Soldier of Fortune on the top of my ruck as part of my reading material. I was a full blown soldier. No need to pretend at war, I was doing it. I was in foreign lands, teaching indigs how to fire Ultimax 1000s, SA80s, bullpup versions of the AR15, and any number of weapons used to conduct or counter insurgencies. I didn’t realize it then, but I was living the life I’d wanted to live when I was five and firing finger pistols at invisible bad guys as I desperately tried to save the world and be a hero.
When I sat down to write SEAL Team 666, I didn’t intentionally take pieces from these books and movies. I never sat down and planned to take this character from here, and that theme from there. Just as you who are reading this was influenced by everything you’ve ever read and seen, I was influenced in the same manner – military osmosis. Those books and movies were like a red, white and blue Monster energy drink that powered me through the writing process, often leaving me to write without knowing where I was going, but trusting in my instincts to lead me through the story. There are hero and villain types you’ll recognize. The action is real. Using current combat techniques, tactics and procedures, I built a fighting modality that carries our SEALs through their battles.
But of course it’s not real. Instead of fighting Al Qaida, or Somali pirates, the members of SEAL Team 666 fight all manner of dark demonic creatures. They’ve been doing this, in one incarnation or the other, since the inception of America. Every president has had access to that special team of five men and a dog to fight against those things best kept secret. As quoted in the New York Times, when asked why I write dark fiction, I said, “I’m a dark fiction author. That’s the stuff I like to write and the kind of stuff I like to read, and I just thought to myself, what if there was a special SEAL team – an even more special SEAL team – that protected America against supernatural attack? And what if this was a secret? And even, what if some of the bad guys out there that we’re following aren’t really human?”
SEAL Team 666 is my 12th book, all of which are dark fiction of one kind or another. But this is the first novel where I brought in my own history and knowledge of the military. One of the most important aspects of the novel was to be able to characterize the members of the team in the right way. They’re not just any group of guys. Much like the members of a Special Forces ODA form intense bonds, so do those of a SEAL team. I knew that for this novel to succeed that I had to create a believable group of guys and place them within a construct. They had to have that special cohesion we can all recognize but can’t identify. You know what I’m talking about. Band of Brothers, perhaps the greatest television miniseries of all time, did this perfectly. I have to admit that when I was writing about the team in SEAL Team 666, I thought of Band of Brothers, and hoped I could get close to the brotherly truths breathed into it by the writer and director.
I’m rather lucky. As a boy I wanted to be a soldier. As a young man I was a soldier. As a middle-aged man I was able to write a book about soldiers, in this case SEALs. There’s a responsibility inherent in the process. Not only is there an issue of trust between the reader and the author, but I owe an obligation to every soldier, sailor, airman, or marine who preceded me, served concurrent to me, and will serve after me to write with that hallowed military spirit that first caused me as a child to lift my hand and go ”Bang.” When I was a child I couldn’t express the feelings that were going through me, but as an adult I was taught how to say them.
I am an American fighting man.
I serve in the forces which guard my country and our way of life.
I am prepared to give my life in their defense.
That same spirit lives in the hearts of the SEALs in Team 666, just as it does in all of us.
* * *
Notes from the Author: To be able to write for Soldier of Fortune magazine was an incredible honor. It wasn’t automatic either. The editor is United States Army Lieutenant Colonel (R) Brown and he insisted on interviewing me. He wanted to make sure I knew what the hell I was talking about. So after several back and forth emails where I provided my military bonafides, we then talked about what type of article I was going to write. While writing this, I remember as if it were yesterday, a ten year old me in the woods of Signal Mountain, Tennessee, standing on my rock ‘fortress,’ pretending to be wounded as I directed my invisible soldiers to fight invisible enemies. I made one hell of a Sergeant Fury back then.
The Last Kobyashi Maru
EVEN IN THE end the children still dance.
Through fields of dead flowers under a red-gray sky, they dance, arms flapping like the wings of dying butterflies. Desperate to hearken in the city of Dali’s famed Butterfly Spring, they spin and jump as best they can, sometimes falling, sometimes staggering.
But their movements have slowed.
No longer are they the children who rushed towards the survivors’ downed plane, each laughing, chatty, buoyant child a living reason why the crew did what they did. Sparks of future brilliance, the children balanced on tiny feet, holding hands as they danced around the survivors, butterflies rising with childish laughter in the broad green field between pagodas that would eventually become the home of the lost bomber crew.
But that was then.
That was when hope still existed.
Now the lone survivor wants nothing more than to reach out and take them into his arms like he did that first day. He wants to promise them that he’ll find a way to turn back time and never do what he’s done. He wants to fix it so that it won’t end this way.
Oh God, but that first day had seemed so positive.
Everyone had been so happy then.
So happy to be alive.
To have been saved from the conflagrations.
So happy to have come together in this forgotten corner of a rad-blasted planet, far from the politicians and the armies and the need to wage war.
It should have lasted.
It should have been happily ever after.
In the end, it was his hubris that killed them all.
FOURTH IN the assault wing formation, all panels within the command module of the B1B intercontinental bomber Morning Star read green. Colonel Dewey Freed held the stick ready for auto-pilot shutoff. His co-pilot, Major Nathan Rasheen, spoke hurriedly into the microphone, his face white with fear. Behind them, the navigator, Captain Rick Matthews scoured map scenarios for backup landing zones, punching keys and scrolling through map screens like a madman in the unlikely event they would survive the assault.
All the while, the bombardier stared morosely at the series of buttons the Air Force had spent a thousand hours training him to press. Selected for his professional competence, tested for his courage and determination, this was Major Leroy Pearson’s reason for being – the reason the United States Air Force had decided that a black man born a peanut farmer could graduate from Valdosta State University, earn a commission, and sit elbow to elbow with the finest creations of the Air Force Academy.
They should have left him to hunt swamp gators like his father and his father before him. Although he was riding in a state-of-the-art, $238 million war machine at the end of the world, he’d rather be in the back of his father’s old GMC Cyclone staring up at a southern Georgia night with Carla in his arms and a beer in his hand, pretending that the stars in the sky weren’t incoming ICBMs destined to destroy everything that he held dear. For this thing, this horrible thing that they were about to do, would throw an apocalyptic shadow across everything he’d ever done and would come to represent who he
was.
In the training rooms of Ellsworth and Mountain Home Air Force Bases, red, white and blue patriotism had fueled dreams of global domination where American Democracy could be made through shows of power rendering dictators into third world puppets and theocratic despots into footnotes. America was never supposed to get this far. Nuclear war was a deterrent. Nuclear war was that big stick no one would ever really use. The problem was that mutually assured destruction meant nothing to those who didn’t give a damn. Except what was never considered during the careful construction of war plans and contingencies was what to do if there was an enemy who was willing to destroy itself just for the sake of seeing America fall.
“Target acquisition stand by for global light up.”
Major Dupree straightened his back, rekindled his determination and added his target package to the global acquisition computer linking their flight of B1Bs. With Shanghai on the horizon, targeting computers on all four bombers lit up, target areas color coded with numerical values including wind directions and speed to help determine where best to drop which kind of nuclear explosive. The plan was for total nuclear annihilation, doing to Shanghai with four planes what it had taken a thousand to do to Bremen, Germany.
This was not a deterrent. This was revenge.
Pearson shook the thought free. “Global acquisition online. Awaiting final confirmation.”
Pearson sat stock still as he watched Rasheen out of the corner of his eye. The co-pilot had turned into the bulkhead and screamed into the microphone. His words were garbled, but the words “fucking... kill... we can’t... this is insane...” left no doubt to his meaning.
But Colonel Freed would have none of it. “Rasheen, give final confirmation.”
