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Sean Murphy's Home Page

My life and story starts in a very rough & poor part of London, England.

I was born Maurice Sean Murphy on a wet and chilly late winter morning in 1957 in a large public hospital in the inner London borough of Saint Pancras, next to Westminster, or very close to the sounds of the London Clock, 'Big Ben' is the largest bell inside & up-top of that large clock tower (connected to the British Parliament complex, the Houses of Lords & Commons) as it is correctly named, and the entire ancient structure, an iconic land-mark of any London post-card mistakenly called 'Big Ben' even by those who grew up there and know the difference, making me officially a Cockney by birth or so the ancient tradition goes. There is not one drop of English blood in my family tree so being British is by birth only, my 1st pass-port was emerald green and had a golden harp on the front, the passport of Erie. Raised in an East-End London mid 1950's shit-hole slum, but Irish by virtue of all of my father's heritage and 1/2 of my Mother's. I am an only child of that cursed union and have no children of my own. My ethnic make-up is 1/4 German and 3/4's Celtic. U.K. citizen by birth (London) but Irish by citizenship from my immigrant to England Irish dead-beat father. My Mother's name was Monica, the last and maybe the prettiest, most reserved yet very well educated in all the 'proper' subjects a daughter of seven children excelled in (five girls and two boys), born to my mostly Irish and Scottish (Celtic) Grandmother Catherine Sullivan, and my (1st generation German immigrant to England) Grandfather Ernst. I have an uncle Terry in Ohio, now the Patriarch of that line, and in California aunts Audrey, the eldest of my grandmothers 7 children, but sadly we don't have much in common that would bring us back into contact, I will probably hear more about her than I ever will from her, or her husband Jim. Then my God Mother Aunt Bernadette who in October 2010 passed away after fighting the illnesses of aging and was buried with her husband (my God-Father Eddie Facundo) who had been interred there in the mid-1980's with full military honors for the life long military man he was, a Master Sergeant in the U.S. Army respected by so many. They now rest side by side in the Presidio of San Francisco the 'Gardens of Stone' in the city by the bay. I was not able to attend, travel and failing health limit me to short drives around town, since arriving in Spokane in July 2001, I have never been able to drive more than 30-miles from the city without it becoming a battle with Hep-C fatigue and shattered-spine grinding back pain. I arranged to have a professional Scots bag-piper named Fred Payne in his full kilt, tartan and sporran regalia play for the gathering to open and close the solemn event with something a little better than small-talk and tears, it put a memory of well known and timeless songs like 'Scotland the Great' and 'Amazing Grace' into a context that was well received by the guests and echoed the Scottish music my God Mother loved hearing in her life. It was a very fitting culmination to mark her passing and end to her mortal suffering. It was a ceremony that brought my cousins (lst & now grown 2nd cousins with their young live ahead of them) all together, plus my now grown up 2nd cousins and family & friends who punctuated my life in America, on and off, over decades since my first 6-week summer visit in 1972, to a land I would one day call home. So back-track some more over a century. My My Grandfather was the son of a German migrant who moved to England in the latter part of the 19th century (probably for a better chance at a better life, or to escape an ever warring mainland Europe) from a large family who fixed fine mechanical ornate clocks and repaired broken fine china dining sets. Using diamond tipped tools it was much cheaper to pay a craftsman to repair a single chipped tea-cup than toss it all away and buy a new complete 30-50 piece gold inlaid china dinner set, even back then they were expensive and today in good condition sell for tens of thousands of British pounds! Some were called to a life on the seas and as ships crew or even one captain I heard stories about from my Grandmother, who kept the family history locked inside her brain and only let it all spill out after a few glasses of brandy did we discover the lives, fame and trades of relatives who were around when events changed our world. They came from Northern Germany, Hanover I think. I convoyed through that city on the main autobahn, not even stopping to fuel-up on our way to a cross channel ships taking us to Dover then onto cross-training with British troops for a month. It was not my fate to stop and flirt with the local pretty and young waving frualines, now that IS cruel and unusual testosterone induced punishment even when they became pretty young British gals on our trek to link up with our Limey liaison officers and NCO's! That is where my the Germanic 'designer-genes' enters into my bloodline. Growing up his entire life in England Ernst Meins owed his loyalties to a British Crown, not a spiky Kaiser's helmet, so at 17 he joined the local British Infantry regiment and after training was packed off to war. He fought in every major bloody-carnage battle, doing and seeing things which haunted him for the rest of his life. As a young man he fought against the Germans in World War One, probably trading fire with some of his own kin! He left as a young raw recruit and came back as a changed different man, like so many world-wide Vets before and after him through today. In retrospect it was a given that had the Brits ever turned too red and posed a threat to U.S. interests, and we had to fight them, I would have had no moral or ethical conflict of interests and I would have followed orders to engage them as enemy combatant. That would have been tough ONLY because they have a very well equipped and trained military as the invaders of the Falkland Islands found out when the British lion roared and the General Belgrano battleship sank to the Argentine final surrender to SAS/SBS forces at Port Stanley a job accepted by British Paratrooper, some of NATO's finest! My Grandfather was gassed and survived four long years in the trenches. His civilian trade was a coal stoker, a hard life until he married my grandmother and together they leased and ran a inn/boarding-house for sailors and merchant marines. WW I was something so terrible to endure for 4 long years of bloody trench warfare, gas attacks, mass-wave human slaughter and utter carnage (on both sides) that he never talked about it to me or anyone else, I don't think he could bear to remember the carnage so he blocked it out with fits of rage at times for no good reason, then cried like a baby, something known today as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but back then called 'shell-shock' a badge of cowardice that could get a soldier shot for incapacitating fear. My Grandmother told me that a rat was considered a good meal by the starving British troops. The rats grew fat on the un-buried bodies of Tommy and Kraut alike that no one could recover, so they just lay out in 'No-Mans Land' for months and rotted, a smell so strong it drifted to G.B. when the winds blew from the east. The first battle of the Somme (in France) was so loud that it was clearly heard across the North Sea back in England, lighting up night skies for days and worrying my grandmother and many other wives too misery that no letters had come back from her once dashing/charming young lance-corporal husband in months. They lived in South Shields in County Durham in the north of England when my grandfather came back a very different person, quick to anger and stern with anyone. During the next World War too old to serve as a soldier again already the father of a growing family, My grandfather 40+ was too old when WW II broke out for recall to front-line combat duty, but as required of any able bodied male he became a member of the Home-Guard helping out during and after German air-raids or manning 'pom-pom' guns (derived name for the sound they made with each volley), heavy anti-aircraft machine guns designed to bring down Nazi bombers. His duties were as a Home Guard air-raid warden/rescue worker after Luftwaffe air-raids, or V-1 Buzz-Bombs (safe if they buzzed on by, but deadly if the buzz sound stopped and it dropped into your street or factory, and near Hitler's desperate end the Nazi secret weapon of terror, the supersonic 1-ton of high-explosive loaded V-2 rockets that took out entire city blocks with no notice, and he dealt with death again but this time in his own neighborhood and the dead were mostly the old, younger civilian women and kids he probably knew well, a double P.T.S.D. hit on an already fractured mind. Around this time the start of WW II (1939) was when Monica aged 10 (my Mother to be 18 years later) the youngest girl contracted and suffered through 2-years of tuberculosis was confined to a sanitarium in Durham. Totally isolated from the rest of the family for their protection from a disease which was common in the 1930's, where she suffered along with the 50% who never left that sanitarium alive, but at the cost of a lost lung to a primitive medical procedure (fluid decompression by needle insertion) to save her life at age 12, so all through her life she was always sucking for more air that folks with 2 lungs took for granted. Upon her release my Mother was evacuated as were so many other children out of target areas. In her case a way out in the country-side rural Vicarage to avoid Hitler's constant Blitzkriegs which were bombing vital war-effort supply depots, rail lines and factories of any city, especially the prime targets of the dock lands and rail-heads of the river Tyne where my Grandparents still owned and ran a boarding house for dockers, Royal Navy sailors and merchant seamen. She told me they were some very good years amongst loving people, she was 16 when the war ended and she returned to help my grandmother run that boarding-house doing menial chores for many years. Out of all the girls, my Mother stayed while the others found 'G.I. Joes' to take them to America as wives and 4 of them followed that route in the 1950's. My Uncle Donald became a Merchant Seaman at age 16, and went off on convoy duty from England to Murmansk, Russia. He survived several direct torpedo hits from U-Boats on the vessels he served on, sending many to the bottom, and leaving him afloat in a lifeboat for days in the freezing Barents Sea. Convoys who stopped to pick-up survivors often joined their comrades in disaster. He could not survive the alcohol which took him in the end many years later, a broken man who shook with the fits of the addiction, never worked and drank his life away. He was buried at sea over the wreck of the Titanic by the Captain of the Q.E.II, arranged by my late aunt Vera, his twin by birth, and a good person who I loved dearly in her sorrow filled life. On my Mother's side of the family, Ernst remains the only soldier I know of in my lineage, until me, some 60 years later when I became one, but in a very different Army. I remember him as a bitter old man who died of colon cancer when I was still young. My Grandmother was a wonderful person who I loved dearly. I was raised very close to the Common Gate Pub in Walthamstow, (the urban mess that is part of the expanding Cockney East End of) London E-17, England. My Irish born father's first name was also Maurice Patrick, so very early in my life my Mother, in her wisdom, called me by my middle name: 'Sean' and it stuck throughout my life. It is the Gaelic name for John. It is the name I still go by to all my friends and family, except when dealing with official 'stuff' or folks. I should have dropped the Maurice part when I became a U.S. Army Combat Engineer, then a Combat Medic, then a U.S. citizen. Oh well! That name alone got me into more fights after school as a kid. It originated as 'Moorish' or 'Dark Skinned' and dates on record from the Muslim Moors who conquered most of Spain, until Christian Knights (Crusaders) chased them all the way back to their deserts. That name had one benefit I didn't fully appreciate at the time. I was getting good at fighting and soon earned a reputation for it. "Hey More-Rice where'd you get that pansy name from?" WHACK! Two years of formal training in Shotokan karate (later in my teens) made me an even better and effective weapon. The rigorous training eventually taught me that walking away, which sometimes is not an option to a real bad ending for me back then, now and will not change me into a cringing coward and easy picking for street punks.<Thankfully it's been years since I last had to use it on anyone. Violence (IMHO) is the last option of dialogue. The English waves of invaders couldn't pronounce the name of my clan O Morchoe,so they morphed it into Murphy a name of English creation as so many Irish names are today. Real Celtic language or names were prohibited to even be spoken under pain of death from Norman then Plantagenet then Tudor kings and a brutal Liz I to Oliver Cromwell, the only (non-royal) dictator and ruler of England after a bloody civil war (1599-1658) found itself rued by 'Ollie' when he had King Charles Stewart I's head lopped-off at the Tower of London for being a tad too anal and in the bad habit of dissolving parliaments that were supposed to represent the English people (landowners, not the tenants who were just boned slaves or the property of their English masters with no rights to do much but put up, shut up and do as they were told), or who (unless they were the king's landed and titled court gentry "Yes Sire!" sycophants) saw no use in waging very bloody wars in distant Europe, getting issued armor, sword, and shields then off they went following the local knight wherever the king sent them, or staying home, farming the lands, paying taxes for royalist armies off fighting all takers over trivial matters and staying broke at home in England wondering WTF their monarch was up to and why the only thing coming home was bad news or broken veterans of those follies. The (Catholic) Irish people were never much more than bonded chattel to their hated (Protestant) English masters until Eire found freedom circa 1921 following centuries of bloody and almost always fruitless bitter revolts and bitter defeats, but still leaving 6 counties up north still under the rule of the British (Protestant) crown but still full of Catholic Irish who had lived there from birth thru death since Saint Patrick or Padriag, a Roman pilgrim & Christian convert who sold them all on the proper way to worship God, in Latin of course not even understood by any but the rich educated classes of Europe or the Romans whose mastery of it was total. Padriag is also credited for casting (Wizard stuff) those nasty snakes out of the island, or so the fable goes, more likely any snake caught by a starving peasant was a meal so they were probably consumed into extinction, not cast-out! That religious hatred made growing up in the 1970's an exercise in avoiding IRA bombs in major U.K. cities with London (my original miserable digs) a prime target. N. Ireland violence filled our mid 1960-1970's evening news and hunger strikers became (Catholic Irish) martyrs when in fact most had a lot of innocent blood on their hands and weren't in HMP Long Kesh, Belfast for shop-lifting, generating more agro each time one died, or a Brit Paratrooper shot a brainwashed kid for throwing a petrol bomb at a patrol. Murphy (in Gaelic O Morchoe) is a masculine surname that pre-dates Christianity meaning 'sea-warrior'. One of the ancient kings of the clan was always present at the Halls of Tara, the place now called Newgrange where a highly civilized Celtic culture once ruled Erin that rivaled ancient Greece at its climax. It marked all who bore it as originating from southern Ireland around modern day County Cork in Eire where around 500BCE their Bronze-Age men-folk made a decent living raiding, sacking and pirating any Phoenician traders and later Roman galleys. Enough history to fill a library, seldom taught (correctly) in British vetted history books, but facts on my home page that is already way too big, to convince you that somewhere way back all of my clan had a common royal distant clan chief or Celtic royal ancestor. "Every Irishman thinks he's a king or descended from one!" were not kind words but they mocked only a much deeper truth. That 80-year [abbreviated] snap-shot of my family history is but the very start or prelude of my own life's story, which now follows:

ANGLO-AMERICAN seeds are sown, and take root.

I detested the poverty I was born into and soon realized after exposure to American culture (almost from infancy) that there were better places or ways to live than my miserable part of England. By age 10 I had already seen almost every touristy item that London had to offer, some many times, so please excuse me if I take for granted the Tower of London, containing the Crown Jewels, the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace or Tower Bridge that still spans the Thames. I had seen and lived with the freedoms and luxuries of the United States throughout my most formative first years and then later into my teens without even leaving Britain. My first exposure to American 'norms' was when I lived/visited with my Anglo-American God Parents and their first two children; my cousins (big-sis) Cathy and (my age) Liz, in Banbury, United Kingdom. Normal working class Americans who took for granted a life-style not common (or even affordable) on most British salaries. These were constant extended visits throughout the late 50's and early 60's to bases like Mildenhall or Lakenheath. My uncle and God Father, Manual Eduardo 'Eddie' Facundo; a Hispanic American patriot was a young handsome Tech-Sergeant stationed at a U.S. Air Force Base 2 hours ride by train from London. He married my Mother's next elder sister, my God Mother, Bernadette. So for periods of many months unbroken we were a combined family and life was happy. Or so I thought, and forgot about the mean guy Mum never talked about. My own father was rotting in one of the most notorious prisons in England called Dartmoor. Not a place for mere shoplifters! By U.S. standards an San-Quintan for the worst of the worst. For what I don't remember but our trips to Banbury ended shortly after his release. Then my uncle Eddie's tour was up and he took his family back States-side to a new duty assignment in Texas complete with his new son Edward, my cousin Eddie Jr. They went on to have two more boys, David and Patrick over the next few years. And out of them all he turned out to be a royal pain in everyone's' ass, now at the prime of his life, an alumni of San-Quintan, and not a person my family or many others can even tolerate let alone trust, he will not abuse or rip them off, or steal what he can't con or borrow. If you ever see these words then do yourself a favor and stay away from me, there are much softer targets for you to roll than trying your usual tricks & cons with me. I drew a gun on you once in 1999 for very good legal reasons, don't make me have to repeat that act of self-defense again, as you know if I fear for my life from your overtly aggressive, hair-trigger and thoughtless actions, in this 'stand your ground' state I don't have to do much but react in a lawful manner. They left a lasting impression on me and a void that was very hard to fill. I stayed in mail and sometimes even phone contact with them in America throughout the years from the early 1960's when they left England to go back to the USA, and dreamt of emigration. I didn't see them again until 1972, aged 15, and again in 1975 at age 18. Both trips were for two-month vacations spent in places from San Francisco's hippy havens, camping trips all over Northern California's many beautiful lakes, mountains, National parks and forests. I enjoyed great concerts galore, to the wonders of Disney Land in Los Angeles! Blasting rock from to Rod Stewart to Zeppelin! Much of summer 1975 further saturated me in U.S. culture, and I literally drank it up with honorable men like Ed O'Shea a true mentor for me. A Korean War Veteran and ex-Prisoner of War. He earned this Nation's 2nd highest military award for valor; the Navy Cross, awarded to him once he came home, an empty shell of a human after years of North Korean captivity and torture. Bastards! Then there was CRAZY Vietnam Veteran Bruce Liker, U.S.M.C. sniper. "Reach out and touch someone!", 1-shot, 1-kill with over 100 confirmed kills to his credit and his tormented memory/flash-backs! The combination of Uncle Eddie, Ed O'Shea and Bruce Liker made a U.S. military experience something I had to pursue, but I would have to return to London and wait another long year before I could follow that path for real. Too much to tell in depth on a Home Page I AM trying to stop becoming an e-book ! Stop now for a sec please, or revisit when you have more time.

The Journey Begins...

I do not know how old I was when I first imprinted memories that I can still recall, most are just fuzzy memories of events around age 2-3 that were either very good or (mostly) very bad. 4-year fast-forward to my first trip out of England. When I was 7 I spent the summer of 1964 living in Marseilles, France where my (recently released from prison) father played chauffeur to some rich big-wig. Living in a nice hotel on the beach for free, learning to swim in the Mediterranean c/o my always drunk father who repeatedly threw me off the end of a long pier and pushed my head down until I frantically learnt to swim away from the bastard who would have called it an "accident" if I didn't surface. His first real attempt at getting rid of me for ever (and not his last) may have worked, but turned me into one hell of a swimmer. I picked-up some French words which kept me busy and sun-burnt. I watched artists with crayons producing wonders on flag stones, with a small can near by and the word 'Merci' on a sign next to it. I soon emulated their gig, and earned centimes for my hours of meticulous coloring. I guess that was the 1st job I ever enjoyed and even made money from. It amazed my Mum when I could buy her an ice cream cone from my own supply of francs and showed her how I had made my first real pay. It did provide quality time which I could spend with my Mother away from the nightly binges of 'dear old dad', off chasing the local whores, or hitting the casino. Driving through France in a Rolls Royce hauling a luxury yacht for his boss, we visited most tourist traps from Paris to the more famous 'must-see' relics of their past heading south to Marseilles. Yawn! I'd seen much better castles, bridges and churches in England. Although Notre Dame cathedral was impressive, even if trash blew around everywhere outside it. My Mother brought a complete photo-album in black & white with her to America which I now own. Some photos were taken before I was even born. A time capsule proper. Priceless! My father's only 'legal' hobby was photography, and he recorded the whole trip, and much more of our life in England on those photos he developed himself. It's a hobby I too adopted over time but all my photo gear was paid for and my photos became digital. A legal hobby if you consider that all the cameras Maurice P owned were stolen, as were all his suits and anything he could get his thieving hands on. He never left our home without wearing a complete expensive tailor-made (stolen) suit and tie, he had a wardrobe full of them, and was so vain in other's trappings, when his drinking chums wore plain old (honest) working clothes of course. He drove wealthy people around, gained their confidence, and then robbed them. I thought most of France was dirty and the French were (in comparison to the English 'norms' I knew) rude, unwashed and their food was the cause of constant viral food poisoning we all suffered through. Later in life ('77-'79) I trained with French conscripts. They were poorly led, arrogant from Private on up, insubordinate slackers during training, ill equipped and fed like convicts. They made us look like Rangers in comparison! Not sure who they hated more, the Soviets or us U.S. soldiers. Many stole from us at every chance and stayed drunk even on duty. I guess saving their ass twice in the 20th century was something often (conveniently) forgotten by most baby-boomer French people who never endured conquest that I have ever met, and that has been many over the years with only a few exceptions. Even to this day when a French skier comes to my favorite diner here and complains about the Rockies not being as good as the Alps. Then go home Jacques and don't come back! Their Government's favorite word seems to be: "Veto!". Friggin Frogs! I guess that makes me a racist, but there are a few cultures and places I have seen that I don't want to revisit, starting with London, E17 and moving into a few which were, and still are even in the United States. No offense meant Amish folks, or gang-bangers in da hood, but I don't plan on moving in! It was during my stay in the south of France that I got to shake the hand of (then) President Charles De Gaulle in Marseilles when he visited in his new aircraft-carrier, named after him of course! Thousands of singing & cheering Frogs going nuts drew/pushed me to the front of the crowd. This was a first for me, and him. I had never even seen our Queen, or any other person so famous, let alone shook their hand. I had seen our crown jewels in the Tower of London (many times) and wondered why I was always hungry when she had all this wealth just behind the glass. At age 7 there were many things I had not yet been exposed to, but I was learning fast. That was as far as I got away from London I got, except for the few wonderful trips I tagged along with my friend's family, or my own parent's caravan (U.S. call them campers or 3rd wheelers) vacations to the Isle of Wight with forays into spooky Hearst Castle, my best friend as scared as me, with it's Mad Monk ghost legend. My next trip out of England was a few years later (without my Mother, or any friends) for a month in Cork City, Eire living with my dirt poor (boozing) Irish grandmother, father, half-brothers from my dad's first married fling during and right after W.W.II, which he sat out safe as an Irish citizen in Blackpool. Eire was not at odds with anyone but the British. Maurice P had women a-plenty whose husbands were off fighting a war against Adolph and his crazies. Being Irish there was no conscription for him. His first wife Margery gave him my half-brothers (Michael and Tony Murphy) who were criminal clones of my father. Both were trouble. If either of you aging wankers ever reads this, leaving you crooks in England was almost as good as leaving our dear bastard of a father; bugger off! A trip to 'see me' in America may be your last trip anywhere, you have been warned! Add many shifty uncles, a few cowed aunts and a load of cousins I had never met before, for a long drawn-out drunken clan funeral & wake during the late 60's. I think my paternal relative's funeral may have had IRA connections, as they even showed up at the grave-site in ski-masks and camouflaged uniforms! They even fired off a rifle salute over his grave then raced away in a V.W. Microbus. Literally thousands of other mourners followed the Hearse, or were leaning out their windows crying and shouting as we walked to Seven Hills cemetery with me and my cousin (?) leading the entire way. Weird. I wonder what that bastard did in life to merit that outpouring, and I never asked. My Mother had barely survived two IRA bombings in the business district of London, one of which trapped her and hundreds of others in a smoke filled tube (or subway) for hours killing some and hospitalizing the rest, remember she only had 1 working lung! For that reason alone I disliked their cowardly methods, them, and stayed clear of any who boasted support for those early terrorists! Like I distanced myself from all of my father's crazy/criminal clan. Coal Quay, Cork was enough to see what real poverty really meant and I actually missed London! Ireland was beautiful and green once you left the slummy cities. Loads of rolling hills, ancient churches and pubs, farms with cows, pigs, sheep and horse-drawn wagons, but little for any kid to do. That was the last time I saw most of them, thank God. The rest of my most vivid recollections concerns my best friend then (met at the age of four when we both started in our 1st class together, 1st lesson was memorize our Roman Catholic catechisms!) and now some 49 years later, Mick is still a presence in my life. I had the honor of introducing him to the young woman he would go on to marry, a relationship that still endures and he bore two fine sons. The years and miles that separates us have made us different people, but we both bear the London, E17 'stamp' from the Cockney neighborhood we grew up in. He often reminds me that I will always be older than him the more years we live out, if you count 57 days I guess he will always be a young(er) pup :-)

Surviving the Monster!

Some folks are unlucky enough to have rotten or dead beat fathers, plain old bums, my Mother married a real charmer who turned into evil incarnate within a year of the worst mistake of her life, giving me life. My (way-jealous since my Mother shared her maternal love with my newly born self) father was a explosive, racist, violent, abusive bastard to anyone at any time, making me and my Mother an easy outlet after a bad day at the pub, a horse or greyhound race betting loss, or most often for no reason at all. Often putting us both in the local Emergency Room with serious injuries. File charges and live! Not likely! Yet he could be charming to those he wanted to impress, then later exploit, then rob them. From blasting (State forbidden) IRA revolutionary marches or ballads out our open front window while screaming drunken obscenities at anyone fool enough to say something, to Bobbies bashing down our front door was not uncommon, as he fled out the back way, or was hiding-out in London's criminal underworld. I seldom visited him in prison and my Mother told me he was "working overseas". Time passed as did that charade. Most of our family, friends and neighbors avoided us when he was around. It is terrible to be shunned for the crimes of another, which my Mother and I certainly didn't benefit from. When money was short, which was any time Maurice P. was around, he often took all her money by force and spent it all on himself in one night, then later beat us up because there was no food or heat in the place! For so many years we lived off her income alone or at the worst times the charity of others. She worked in central London for small pay and very long hours of arduous secretarial work she had done since I was a newborn. My father was a habitual violent drunk, career criminal, gambler, womanizer and very possibly a murderer. He carried a small semi-auto pistol, more as a last-resort weapon if the odds stacked up against him, but used a thick steel dog chain like a steel whip. Less noise and more 'effect'. We had a black terrier mix dog he took everywhere he went, and chains were expected with any dog. One heartless and brutal bastard! I had seen him fight and not many people he worked-over were even conscious (alive?) afterwards. I once saw him throw petrol over a poor fella who (he later claimed) owed him money, then he lit a cigar and burned the poor bastard alive as he tossed the lit match onto the bloke, I know not if he even lived and never asked. He constantly boasted about throwing acid in peoples faces, and I'd seen the results that caused when they got out of hospital disfigured and even blinded for life. That was his favorite threat to my Mother and her worst fear. May his evil soul rot in hell!!!! Nice thing to show your young son! Threats of reporting these acts of utter sadism to my: "Whore of a Mother if I ever told anyone..." ensured I remained too terrified to do much but keep my mouth shut and even wet my pants at times with fear when he turned his anger or pistol on me. Leaving him in prison seemed our only way to escape his psychotic brutality. He 'obliged' us by being incarcerated for armed robbery three years prior to us finally leaving. It made the T.V. news and all the major Brit newspaper headlines earning more ignominy for us; losing me my first real girlfriend of three years, and more importantly, my Mother, her job! She soon found other work under similar conditions but for even less pay. I soon found other girls existed, so we survived, barely. It was during this time that me and my Mother, in tandem with our family (the Facundos I knew as a toddler) in the United States, worked on emigration plans. A slow and bureaucratic two year process. Annual U.S. immigration quota caps was the main obstacle. I found out later in life that he died of alcoholism, alone and in the same city we left him in. A very fitting end for a monster who made so many other people's lives hell on earth, or worse. I hope it was long and very painful to this very day. That rushes 19 years of my life to this point. On 31 October 1976, my Mother and me left our (built in 1870!) slum in Walthamstow having sold or given away almost everything we owned, and carrying two suitcases each, headed west on a Boeing 747 arriving in the Untied States 15 hours later exhausted but jubilant. It was the first time she had flown in a plane and my third! My maternal Grandmother also came with us in her late-80's, but returned to London within months as (at her age) England was all she knew and the cultural shock of even suburban California was not something she could handle. She died alone in London some years later aged 94 when I was stationed in Hawaii. We were only able to emigrate through the sponsorship and kindness of my Aunt and Uncle, Bernadette and Eddie Facundo, who then lived in Petaluma, California. They literally saved us from a continuous reign of terror once my loser father emerged from prison, the very day after we had already split. Oh to have been a fly on the wall to see the look on dad's face when he arrived at a flat no longer his, with his bags packed outside. Homicidal might sum it up! He mailed a hate-filled letter to my Mother and divorced her many years after we left. Guess he'd found someone else to torment. Per his death certificate he died on the exact same day that I retired from a 20-year career in the United States Army. Many such unexplained ccoincidences abounded in my family. I won't list them as you, the reader, may think I'm making them up, yet others (family & friends) witnessed those eerie events too, so no list on this page ever.

Schools 'n Stuff!

I was educated under the 'tender' whips and canes of the Roman Catholic Church for most of my early youth.  They did a pretty good job of beating ANY religion out of me for many years to come. The beatings from the nuns and monks sucked, but the education was superior to the State operated schooling system. Corporal punishment was the domain of slackers or trouble-makers, like me! Even though I aced every exam they threw @ me. Art was the subject I always excelled in. 'Trouble' could be something as simple as a dropped pencil resulting in many lashes of a bamboo cane across the hands or backs of the legs delivered first by the Sisters of Mercy, my often bamboo-cane traumatized ass! I actually developed callouses on my hands and legs. I forced myself to smile when I was being beaten. This drove those sanctimonious child abusers into caning frenzies and there was no punishment they could inflict that I had not become immune to. In comparison to what my father dished-out to me for no good reason on a much more frequent basis, to the MANY serious and very brutal beatings my Mother endured and sometimes even to my aging Grandmother, who he once threw down a 15 ft flight of stairs one drunken night. We all suffered through the years and those sisters and a brother who had already emigrated to America after World War II and became richer faster than the Facundos ever did, yet refused to sponsor us, or we may have left England in the 60's, I thank them in retrospect for their apathy! The Catholic's punishments were mild, even after they'd broken most of their canes on me. I ran from an Anglican 'priest' who lured young boys into his vicarage home with promises of "fun things to do". I was one aged 8 who found out once inside his home that he wanted much more than I cared to give him and found evil wearing white collars, in 'holy' places. I bolted and blabbed it all to my Mother. She called the police who would not believe her story. "A Church of England priest would NEVER do that, it's all Catholic gossip, click!" But as the complaints rolled in, and the young Church of England rectums got torn up by this rapist pedophile fuck head who finally went on to do hard time for his criminal perversions, but not before he messed-up many a-kid's life & mind. Further convincing me that any religion was crap. We evolved end of story. Today I am old enough to know I'm not wise enough to prove a Higher Power doesn't exist, so I have faith but still many questions. The Higher Power I do venerate is One that ties in with a 7-year duty-stationing in the islands of Hawaii, and is not a common deity outside of Hawaii to place my faith into. I find it very hard to believe that in an endless universe full of billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars, probability dictates that some sentient life exists other than here. Running with that logical premise, how does the Maker present Himself to them? Or because if they ate meat on a Friday on a distant planet orbiting a star like ours, they're heading for a Catholic's version of Hell? How does one explain dinosaurs? Beta builds of hominids? Doesn't zound quite fair on E.T. or T-Rex to me! I didn't buy the 2 by 2 Noah's Ark story, yet I find it easy to accept that there was once a place called Atlantis and we are it's progeny. I resented being born with unbaptised original sin, as if it did go wrong in Eden, don't blame me not even born yet or old enough to lie well! That's a sin I learned for self-preservation in my childhood, and didn't like it then as much I disdain lies now. I lied to my teachers (from nuns, thru monks to non religious teachers) about where I picked-up so many black eyes, bruises or split lips. I was a frequent patient at Whipps Cross Emergency Room. So they thought I was a real brawler in & out of school, which did nothing to improve my standing with anyone. If I told them it was my own father's fault, then I had just signed my own death warrant or had my face burnt off with acid! I may have ended up in a foster home for my own protection, and this web-page would not have been created because I'd still be trapped in England, or dead by the hand of my own father. The school administered beatings finally stopped when I hit a State operated school after the private Catholic school I was in folded due to lack of fund$. Funny they had plenty of money to buy new whipping canes each semester! This was new to me, a place where no one gave a damn if you learnt or skipped. Now beatings were the domain of school bullies. After a few bad rumbles with much larger, older than me, and meaner bullies I started fighting back like a crazed imitation of my father. My M8's often asked me why I carried a small sturdy dog chain in my pocket, my reply was "In case I found a lost puppy to love!" A few others found out what it is capable of doubling up as when they double-teamed me into a corner. I soon became a fast slim dirty fighter others even older and larger than me learnt to leave alone, using some tactics I'd learnt from Maurice P. I admit I messed-up any punk who wanted to rumble, sometimes badly enough that they spent the rest of their time in that school dodging me, but I never seriously injured even the worst bullies, fear is a potent tool and using the unexpected got me results I wanted, I was seldom bothered by bullies, never got into trouble for those incidents, even the worse scum-bags who I always thrashed, left me alone as too much to handle. I'd be damned if I would take the same from these brainless racist (Irish surname hating) jerks too! I grew up in a city that the IRA bombed numerous times, and sporting Murphy as my surname made me, and my Mother the target of what later became known as racial profiling and hatred. In England we start school at age four and continue until we are 16, ending (12 years of education) in either (Ordinary) O-level exams or GCSE's, or CSE's when I took them. Run a search my non-Brit friends! Not as prestigious as the harder O-Level exams, but still valuable. Talented kids who did not have to go to work at 16, and had passed 6 or more O-levels and/or GCSE's often earned themselves a scholarship to 3 or (pushing-it) 4 (Advanced) A-level courses at a college. Two year courses of study putting them at U.S. Junior College Graduate education level by age 18 or even younger for truly talented kids, with 14 years of schooling behind them. England back then when your brain could get you into college, not the money you could tap into had a few benefits! For the elite or smart that was/is the doorway to higher college education. But for the majority of average working class kids who left school with only a few O-levels, GCSE's or nothing, normal entry-level work started at age 16 for very little pay. And Army recruiters filled their heads with dreams, leaving out any mention of a place called Northern Ireland! I started my school dayzzz in St. Patrick's Elementary Catholic School (Nuns!), then 6 years later entered St. Egbert's Catholic College for Boys, (Monks!) the place that went broke & closed. Then into the State run schooling of Heathcote Secondary Modern School (punks and skin-heads) and then 4 years at Sir George Monoux High School for Boys, a pretty nice place! I went on to do a year at Loughton College of Further Education studying A-levels in Psychology, Sociology and English Literature. 5 O-levels and 3 CSE's were my ticket to no-cost higher (literally!) education. I was also specializing in Badminton and chasing college girls. Dire Straights was an unknown band @ that time who played there regularly as many of their members were seniors in that college. Priorities: One year into that part of my life I had to leave college to earn money for emigration. During this period I also counted David (Blip) B. and Robin N. as close friends, involving them in many a party, pub-crawl or concert. From T-Rex to David Bowie I saw them all. I have lost contact with all my college days friends, maybe they'll find me here one day. I had worked in several small stores starting on weekends at the age of 10, and then moved into larger warehouses since I was 12 years old, on weekends or most nights earning me the pocket money my Mother couldn't afford to give me. By age 14 turned those 'skills' into a semi-full-time trade after school and college dayzzzz. Enough to convince me I didn't want to spend my life stocking shelves for a living, even with a fork-lift I learned to drive like a pro by age 15! At 16 I spent a year as a courier in London wearing suits and hopping taxi-cabs, busses, tubes or hoofing-it to deliver valuable or time sensitive documents/items all over the city which was decent work for good pay + tips and gave me an understanding of most roads and alleys in the HUGE capitol that normally only cabbies spend years training to pass a test they call: 'The Knowledge' a must if your calling puts you driving one of those black London cabs so common all over down-town. Wild wombats couldn't coax me into returning forever to live out my remaining years there. Even a short visit is a distasteful concept for me. I am now a Yank and damn proud of that more so than I was ever proud to boast about the Victorian slums and poverty I left behind me, or would not even recognize now with a heavy Asian-Brit population who turned my memories of a white working class life into a place that has more in common with any Asian community when you start talking about Londonistan! British citizens all and loving the freedoms/money Britain gave them, but refusing to act like they were anywhere but still living in some shit-hole in Pakistan or India or name a shadow of the long gone empire that made them Brits 2nd but ALWAYS good Muslims or Hindus 1st. I may say the same about any community or nation when migration changes or displaces the norms of established folks. My journey through life continues, but I will never forget my roots nor the people, places and things who helped mold me into the wild-eyed teen who got onto a 747 on Halloween 1976 and never came back to London to stay, nothing personal to any Brits reading this, but that place was not for me, I had tasted America and that is where I wanted to move to, and for my sins I got my wishes granted. America is my home of choice and a place I love. The idea of going back there repulses me, remembering how much I hated living there and growing up to be a young adult there holds only bitter memories of not belonging.

What follows is my history, and many comments about my English youth, thru a 20-year career in the United States Army, to the present day Veteran I am:

From Combat Engineer to Combat Medic.

We were called 'Humps' by the Infantry who we called 'Grunts'. We combined their 8 weeks of basic combat training (BCT) for any soldier along with the additional 8 weeks requirements for becoming a basic Combat Engineer learning infantry & engineer skills from week one through week 16. But we never trained with them during that time. A Combat Engineer is a grunt who has more training in building and destroying stuff on the front lines, and in the rear. But make no mistake, our primary skills were Infantry pure. Keeping us apart meant less dead trainees as we hated each other's guts. The reason we were called 'Humps', a nick-name we earned was not by getting laid more often, but by humping (lifting and positioning) 600 - 1,500 pound steel components of the W.W.II (British designed) Bailey Bridge into a solid robust structure. I learnt to hate that bloody thing! The constant bridge drills got old, dangerous (crushed or drowned friends) and repetitious REAL fast. Throwing one across the mile-wide Rhine river was some tough duty which was an annual exercise (BRIDGE-EX) in physical and mental endurance and always done in mid winter and in the dark! Back then Uncle Sam paid $10-million a day to our allies to close Germany's main river outlet to the sea and trade, so we had to span it quickly and get it packed-up even faster. Any delays cost Company Commanders their jobs and some Humps their lives. Although most volunteered for any DEMEX, or demolitions, mines and booby-trap exercises. Big kids all. At times we actually did helpful selfless acts for the town of Ettlingen. One winter we had a 100-year flood that sent huge whole big-ass trees, V.W. Bugs, dead animals and a few bloated human bodies crashing down the river that flowed through town, smashing ancient stone bridges into rubble. The Germans freaked as the water level rose and flooded streets and cellars. We mobilized and in 3 days filled 1.5 million (!) sand bags, building a levee which prevented disaster. We even threw a Bailey Bridge across their river and left it there. It still is there today and for a week no Hump could buy a meal or a beer in a VERY thankful town we saved, who gave us all we wanted for free, well almost everything! Great time for one night stands! The sheer effort required to emplace a mile of sand bags on both sides of the river was a challenge compounded by torrents of unending rain, cold and gale force winds, shared by G.I. & German alike. In November '79 I got out or ETS-ed as an E-4 or Specialist 4th Class. I had grown way disenchanted with the job, my Yank peers, the omnipresent crime/drugs and a life spent mostly in the field doing the same things over and over again. When lakes in France start looking like ones in Holland and England, mountains are just obstacles not stark beauty and all trees blend into green, from endless patrols & road-marches to trucks to hover-craft, boats to ships add helicopters to jets I covered tens of thousands of miles in just 3 short years, just a taste of what the next 17 would be like. Then you have seen enough that even the most magnificent nature can throw at you pales into setting up tents, fixing your gear and shitting in the bushes, hot or freezing cold. Deployments equated to prolonged sobriety as the fastest way to lose a stripe (or your life) was being drunk (or stoned) and trying to build a bridge or blow-up old deserted buildings, which the Germans no longer needed. Blowing up an entire German ghost town was a fantastic rush, but we had to haul away what we destroyed using shovels, picks, manual labor, bull-dozers, back-hoe's and 5-ton dump trucks, the less glamorous part of the op. We trained, they gained in slum removal for free, making room for new German urban developments. I do not even count those few initial years as anything that had words like responsibility, duty, loyalty, honor or commitment connected with them. Survival maybe, amid dangerous fellow soldiers, often hostile German street gangs and huge Warsaw Pact opponents waiting to strike. I was just one tough worker-bee in a job I grew to hate. I knew 40 year-old E4/Specialists in trades like carpentry, or plumbing who had served almost 20 years doing the same job they'd done from day 1 in uniform. In those days a Specialist-4, 5, 6 or even 7 was a non-leadership job that many soldiers who had no desires to lead troops, but had unique skills/trades stayed put at that pay-grade and retired happy as lower to mid level enlisted workers/techs. Up or out came into Army doctrine around 1980. I may have worn a soldier's uniform but it held no pride for me. In retrospect I was no mentor or a leader, I had regressed not advanced, and my Chain of Command wrote me off as a rebel biding his time to get out, especially after the Space-A SNAFU when I tried to avail myself of a benefit the Army promised all it's troops, but in reality was only the domain of the brass. I managed to make 20 years without a single reprimand, or run-in with an Article-15 or Courts Martial punishment that awaited those who screwed-up bad, lost stripes, pay and their freedom for. At times I came close when I lost my military composure and shot back with insubordination, but I knew who to pick my fights with, and when to shut my mouth even as a senior NCO nearing retirement. When it came time to leave Germany, I had second thoughts about it and actually thought about staying put as a civilian. But I had a Mother in America who I had to return to after a 2.5 year absence. I had learnt not only the language fluently which seemed to come naturally to me the more I heard it spoken over the years. I watched ZDF T.V., or read Der Spiegel newspaper not the Starts & Stripes G.I. Joe newspaper, and I also had fallen in love with the place. I spent more of my off-duty time with Germans than with the Yanks the longer I stayed in-country. I have many pictures of those days. I had forgotten about pocked-marked London and anti-German sentiments.   I ate German food, drank their beer and schnapps, and by 1979 I had more German and a few British (migrant worker) friends than I did Yanks/G.I.'s. Life was safer that way! We called it: "Gone Native". Some G.I.'s did exactly that and stayed there as civilian ex-patriots. Especially the got rich drug dealers and black marketeers. One guy we called 'Uncle Harold' (the richest loan shark we had) had so much cash he bought a German disco in Karlsruhe and made a mint legally but was still loan-sharking on the side when he got out. This fella never deployed, he paid off medics (for non-deployment, non-existent medical conditions) to corrupt company commanders (short on change) to pull permanent rear duty, and his room/loan office in the barracks was palatial complete with total room service and 24/7 body guards the size of pro body-builders, with the morality of well-paid assassins.

Returning home so changed and feeling out of phase with the normality of a rigid military life-style around civilians who had no way of even comprehending what makes a soldier very different than any (never been in the military) Joe Public.

Returning to my Mother's new modular home in Santa Rosa, California, and the family I had in Petaluma, it didn't take me long to discover that there weren't any job opportunities for guys who blow stuff up for a living in the civilian community.  12B10 converts to civilian laborer. Sod that! The local Mafia didn't have any openings at that time for demolitions jobs (joke!), so six months later I reentered service; this time as a Medical Specialist (91 Bravo).  My recruiter filled my head with dreams of pretty nurses in nice warm hospitals. I could retain my rank (E4) and not have to revisit Basic Training.  PERFECT! NOT!!! I did my medical training at Ft. Sam Houston, TX, and was promptly flown to the (now deactivated) 9th Infantry Division (Motorized), in Bravo Company, 9th Medical Battalion, Fort Lewis, Washington State. The first place in America I had the chance to actually work in, almost 4 years after emigrating! I was still a British citizen and remained so until ex-president Gerald Ford swore me and about 400 other legal aliens into American citizenship in Denver, Colorado, summer 1991. He was my Commander in Chief and the President when I first entered service. So for 14 years of my Army career I was a Limey serving in the YANK's Army. I wonder if that made me a mercenary? I still wear the ring with the winged sword on my middle finger to remind me that I was classified as a merc by the Brit government long before I became a U.S. citizen and I wear it with pride. Who cares! I was on the same 'side' I guess. I was earning my own keep at last and sending my hard working Mother what I could, until my bills out-did hers, very soon after I married a fellow military woman/medical NCO, who spent her pay and mine before I knew it was even gone. Rambo I wasn't, just doing a job that many folks born American avoided like the plague. If I could not have emigrated to the U.S., I would have joined (almost) anyone's army to escape London; British, Canadian, Israeli, Aussie, Kiwi or South African. I always knew I'd be a soldier and I was right. As a brand new medic (1980) I soon found that there were no pretty nurses or warm hospitals for me, just back to back field training exercises with tough infantry, armor or artillery units. Not much of a change from being a Hump! We also medically supported the crazy 2nd Battalion/75th Ranger Regiment at Ft. Lewis.  One of my regular missions was ambulance coverage for the drop zone in 'Ranger Country'. One lazy afternoon I was the driver with a female medic on-board in a 'Cracker-Box' field ambulance, as the C130 aircraft came in for a routine training drop. Two shoots streamered or tangled, and sent their human cargo plummeting to their instant deaths. Tag and bag the splattered remains. The female medic threw her guts up and was useless screaming in shock and shaking like a leaf. I got better & faster help from the (non-medical) Rangers who converged on me ASAP. I then reevaluated my idea to reapply for Jump School and discovered I didn't like mixed or male and female field units. With very few notable exceptions, the hardest labor was always the male medic's job. Setting up a large tent-city field hospital or clearing station was more like Combat Engineer work, and I knew that very well. Same pay but most of the fairer sex got over as much as they could. "It's too heavy!" became an excuse I got fucking sick of hearing. Shower runs for women who stayed on their periods for 30 days (!!!), depriving male medics any showers for 30-day durations and forcing us to stay funky, washing ourselves out of our steel helmets flipped up-side-down and filled with cold water, a 'whore's bath' was the common name given to that 'hygiene'. Dual standards always disgusted me. Especially when a female medical service corps officer or (worse) a senior female NCO was calling the shots for her gals! Or the pre-deployment pregnancies that always preceded any major training exercise, and were nearly always aborted the moment the last troops drove out the gate, were moral busting slaps in the face for those who did deploy. All male Infantry units were tough and (Thank God) not complicated by most female's limitations, excuses or lures. Totally different opinion of female medics in hospital 911 ambulance & E.R.'s. Many knew more medicine than some (commissioned) nurses and taught me much about my trade. My attitude about the Army had changed drastically, and I knew I planned on making it a career, instead of just another adventure. Good timing as the entire U.S. military had just introduced a urinalysis for all drugs. That alone weeded out (no pun meant) the 'Nam-era dopers, changing many into boozers, an acceptable addiction if you stayed sober on duty. The days of the '2 beer lunch' (more like a 6-pack!) were abolished. I complied with the rules and went for a career. I could run like a gazelle and was in my best physical condition of my life. It was at this time that I became the adrenaline 'junkie' that goes with being the first person on the scene of some poor soul who had been injured or killed, and everyone (still alive) now looked to me for help.   No longer as a Combat Engineer bystander. Suicides were frequent throughout my career (I'd seen many staring in basic training to Germany and in every unit I served in) from start to finish of my 20 years. My first real hands-on casualty was at Ft. Lewis, WA in 1980 a few months after I arrived as a brand new medic/E4, ex-combat engineer field trooper. The victim was a young way-depressed Hispanic Medic who'd taken a loaded M-16 to his barracks room after a night firing exercise, unbeknownst to anyone. Sticking his mouth over the barrel, he literally blew the top of his head off when he pulled the trigger. Needless to say he was very-dead before I even arrived, hearing the shot in the quiet of the barracks night while on duty as Charge of Quarters, or CQ. The place was suddenly crawling with everyone from Military Police to our Commanding General. Very bad P.R. We were ordered to clean his room afterwards, and that was worse than any cleaning job I had yet encountered. What a bloody mess that I became used to as the years rushed by. This began a stigma which was to follow me through the next 17 years.  I detested and barely tolerated hospitals, except when operating out of Ambulance Sections or Emergency Rooms/Departments.   That was where the life and death 'action' I craved existed.  And for my sins, they managed to slot me right where I belonged. Whether operating out of an M5 (30lb) aid bag, a G.P. Small tent (Battalion Aid Station), a M577 Mech Aid Station on tracks, a tent-city field hospital ala MASH, or fixed modern military hospitals over the next 17 years, saving lives became my passion.  I made E-5/Sergeant my first year back in uniform. I can honestly say that over the next 17 years I saw almost every possible way that a human can die (something that still haunts my dreams) as I progressed through the ranks and became intimate with emergency medicine.  I had found my true calling in life and it was more demanding than any Combat Engineer mission where physical agony was now compounded with emotional trauma. Easy to deal with, pop a beer (or 6) and try to forget about the ones who died on your watch that day. And boy did I ever see some badly messed-up patients over the years on a very regular basis.

Reality Check!

Few civilians realize that continuous real-world military medical missions or intense training, generates as many casualties as some quick and famous conflicts like Grenada or Panama did. The Pentagon just released a medal that few young military members will ever get to wear. The Cold War Medal. Some have called it the not so cold World War III, and it produced a LOT of dead, from Korea, to Vietnam to the thousands pushed beyond their limits, where the cost of fielding a new weapons system was bought with much blood. The coldest day of my life (emotionally not weather) was looking across the DMZ at the check-point @ Panmunjong, while North Korean soldiers stared back across barbed/razor wire, mine fields and guard-towers, knowing I was meters away from certain death. None of the units I was in when major combat went down participated. No longer a member of an elite 'mobile strike force', if your highly effective unit (e.g. the urban light fighters of 25th I.D.L.) were not called upon to engage the enemy when a closer unit could and did, we didn't. We trained to fight future wars, where I have seen a many of my old unit's patches on T.V. war coverage from Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile although Emergency Rooms and 911 runs were as exciting as hell, few deployed from MEDDAC's in the pre 9/11 dayz. The Army didn't just shut down a major military hospital when whole divisions were going off to war, especially one that's receiving plenty of inbound casualties! Many of my peers and supervisors thought I was nuts for volunteering for any and all combat duty wherever it happened. "Death-Wish Murph" became my nick-name. I tried desperately to get some of Desert Storm. Constant calls to the Division Surgeons Office got me nowhere, and only a handful of my junior medics, Privates all, went as last-minute replacements. One young and talented African American medic, Private First Class (E3) Clark returned to us with a Silver Star. He'd crawled out through an enemy mine-field in the dark to retrieve a wounded U.S. soldier under constant Iraqi fire, and dragged him back under more enemy fire saving his life. I lost him real fast upon his return, promoted to Corporal overnight, he became the Commanding General's driver, 24/7 on call. The conditions were he had to wear his dress uniforms with that Silver Star as his highest award (and all the other Desert Storm medals/ribbons that came with the conflict to include the coveted Combat Medic badge he certainly earned) everywhere he went with our CG, even into field environments where no one would even dream of messing-up a set of ($400) Dress Blues or even Class-A green formal uniforms, so our CG could show off the only 4th Infantry Division soldier who went to Desert Storm to be awarded a Silver Star from a division that did not even deploy. He hated that job and a beeper that he had to carry at all times, but enjoyed the comforts afforded any 2-star General tag-along. I asked for my medic back and ended up having most of my ass ripped off by everyone in my chain of command. Seems they had no need of another Medical Platoon Sergeant in Iraq, and in 100 hours it had ended! The 4th Infantry Division (Mech) I was in was 'out of action' for upgrades to newer (Abrams) main battle tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Any of this information is available all over the Internet, so I am divulging no secrets! Hint, look up Battle Streamers for the 4th I.D.(M) and realize my situation. Desert Storm/Shield is not one of them. By the time we'd made the long transition and the troops had learnt to use their new equipment (11B to 11M), Desert Storm was one year-old history. The 4th I.D. (M) is now one of our finest armored/infantry units with a LOT of experience in Iraq. Ironic that 1st or 'Raider Brigade', my old unit in the 4th Infantry Division, were the guys who dug Saddam (now worm-food) out of his hole some years after I left them. Nice catch! A peacetime Army trains in conditions which are often as dangerous as most combat! Gung-Ho Hot-Shot Generals ensure that. Whether I was taking fire from hostiles during drug eradication operations or illegal alien interdiction ops, reacting to training gone badly wrong, generating hundreds of real-world mass-casualty (MASCAL) patients, rushing into burning buildings or vehicles with ammo and/or gasoline cooking off to save lives, pulling casualties and bodies from a frozen Korean reservoir after half the unit skidded off an icy mountain road 1 K above. Triaging & treating casualties from military and civilian vehicle or aviation disasters like the Aloha Airlines 'T-Top' when it landed at Honolulu International minus it's forward roof section (and some passengers) which peeled off after it left Hilo (April 28, 1988), or going down hard in an auto-gyrating Chinook helicopter that lost power to it's huge front rotor on a MEDEVAC mission. I'll bore you no more with the many way-dangerous situations (war stories) I've found myself confronted with over the years. In my humble opinion I did my job well as others now do theirs in a very public war on terrorism. I should have been killed for some of the stunts I pulled, but survived when those around me died or got mangled. Most of our military now ply their skills under much harder and more frequent hostile situations than I ever faced. Watch your six and trust the good NCO's! This IS prolonged war, and we have not lost this many troops to combat since Vietnam. Hello! Read the fine print! I did, and understood the consequences involved in our profession peering through binos at our Soviet or North Korean 'friends'. If you get bored run a search on training fatalities/accidents, suicides, homicides, etc, ('80-'97) then add 6 years of U.S. Army (MEDDAC) hospital ER /ambulance duty, with patient loads of thousands per month, and get back with me. I was at many of the real bad ones. The U.S. Army had 20 years to send me off to war and didn't, even when I asked/begged to go, so I have no medals or honors that decorate those who were chosen to go. My mind and body had gone through countless battles, saving lives on a VERY regular basis. I have done enough way-hairy things that almost got me killed many times, injured me often, in places which made few headlines, produced no awards for heroism, yet generated many real casualties, or fatalities! All combat or accidents result in the Medic being called on first to salvage whatever is left. Big myth: you have to go to war to be shot at, not so! I spent many a 911 ambulance call responding to a 'man-down' situation in very bad places where the locals took pop-shots at us with fully-auto weapons/gang wars, or flying in to clear pot growing operations located a drug farm hidden on federal land guarded 24/7 by armed men who used our helicopters as targets, booby-traps all over the brush, I have taken a lot of hot lead that God only knows why didn't kill me but took out the troop only 10 feet away, or even 10-inches! I have saved thousands, but lost many over my medical career who no medical care could save.   No matter how many times you see death (morticians excepted I guess), it is impossible to become immune to it's impact. Medics who treated death and suffering with flippant attitudes I made a personal point of removing them from their responsibilities. Injured, sick, dying or sexually molested children left the deepest scars on my psyche. On the flip-side probably the most rewarding experience ANY pre-hospital/EMT medic can perform is bringing life into this world. Something I've done so many times at homes, offices, in the back of speeding ambulances or MEDEVAC helicopters. The care I gave both mom and baby has at least two kids (I know of) named 'Sean' after the happy event. Poor sods! Thank God for umbilical cords, the only thing that held Mom to her new-born baby when my over-zealous drivers/helo-pilots took those 4-G turns! Those who say you get used to daily gruesome trauma, IMHO, lie! The burn-out rate for even civilian EMS jockeys is amongst the highest of any job a person can choose, and hope to retire from happily married, sober, sane, or even alive! Nancy Cody (RN), Major, ANC you showed me how to endure when the horrific unfolded and we were left to deal with it as a team of two, even after seasoned first responders were losing their composure (and lunches) with sights so graphic and gory that they fled, but you kept me focused and guided me through situations no human should see or (God forbid) even remember. If there is a heaven, I know you have a first-class seat in the front row waiting for you. Your courage was only equaled by your skills and Texas tenacity. I count you as my finest medical mentor period! May you read these words one day. The picture that follows shows me wearing a MEDCOM patch on my left arm. I was still running the Emergency Room and 911/Ambulance Section for Schofield Barracks on Oahu, Hawaii when this was taken, and Major Nancy Cody was still my boss/Head Nurse.

Around 1/2 way through a 20 year military career if you start in your late teens, and you completely understand the military is not a normal job that you can quit when the going gets tough, and it does starting around day 1 in boot-camp, but a calling only few civilians choose, that requires you take it very seriously striving to be the very best you can be in so many skills and positions, or do little and always end up a private with a lot of supervision and lots of manual labor to perform pushes most to strive for any leadership position or quit and leave service as a lower enlisted wash-out. Around 10 years in most reach a point where mentally & physically they are peaking, or they have already been booted out for any number of reasons, or quit after a 1st, 2nd or 3rd enlistment, wounded and discharged, or killed/missing in action or become the victim of so many accidents, and some opted for a suicide as the only way out of whatever demons consumed them, which I have seen way too many from the start to the end of my career to list even the more creative ones nearly always ending their lives fast. Swan-dives off high structures onto the stone ground 4-6 stories below was a common and nearly always fatal way out, very fast & very KA-SPLAT messy clean ups!!! Overdoses or range fire turning the gun on themselves were the next most common planned check-out ways we had to deal with. Sure there is always more to learn, more responsibility to grab, but when you can run 5 miles every morning in 45 minutes and not break a sweat, max your P.T. score, hump forced marches for 20 kilometers daily for a week with maybe 4 hours sleep per night, with a 70lb Alice ruck-sack on your back and a 30lb M-3 aid-bag strapped to your chest to balance out the load, add your weapon, web-gear and other kit like canteens of water and pouches of ammo, (100lbs of extra/vital kit strapped to my 160lb lean body) push yourself and those you lead further, faster and better than your peers, help the injured as they dropped, then catch up with your unit after calling in a MEDEVAC helicopter dust-off. Be it day, night, baking hot, freezing cold, dry or wet then you are ready for anything, and this was me a 29 y/o young (Staff-Sergeant) platoon sergeant with 30-40 medics I was charged with leading, training and molding into great medics, rewarding/promoting the good and getting rid of the slackers. Some we called ROAD which means Retired On Active Duty, if you were known as road then the Army lets no soldier reach 20 years as a private (E-1) or a 2nd lieutenant (O-1)! Move up in rank or move out of the way and get a civilian job which many did. You get nowhere fast if you don't volunteer for the toughest missions that so often ended up in my lap, and lead from the front, or ahead of it in a Bell Huey Iroquois UH-1D helicopter (nice picture of the MEDEVAC models I flew in below) if I needed to get in fast ahead of ground-bound on foot or motorized/mechanized medics to set up a CCP or casualty collection point and begin triage, sorting the sick or wounded into 4 groups with priority given to saving those who needed a simple procedure like a chest-tube to save their lives. On the other end were expectant, those you ministered to last as they were normally too close to death and too far from anywhere that could have saved them. With 3-years behind me as a Combat Engineer I knew so many non-medical tactical skills that amazed the Infantry I was integrated with, add 7 more years as an Emergency Medical Technician 91-B Medic, maxing every medical/tactical or administrative skill in the field, or in a fixed hospital Emergency Room/911 Ambulance Sections, to mechanized or motorized aid-stations, field evacuation hospitals/clearing stations, and cross-training in skills from communications to helicopter operations and able to drive (and maintain) any wheeled or tracked military or civilian made to tactical ambulance or cargo hauling vehicle, then pass those skills onto my men. I had been trained in weapons and tactics few medics ever encounter, and in the shot above I am setting another record that lasted for a few years: Task: Disassemble, then reassemble, then perform a functions check on the M16-A1 rifle in under 2 minutes. I did it in 58-seconds, to the amazement of those who made me repeat this with the basic tool of my trade, so someone took this picture, few knew I had trained blind-folded many times to make this weapon just an extension of my mind and body, for me it was easy, for others I was becoming a best-by-test celebrity model medic/soldier and raising eye-brows at high levels. That record stood for a few years until some young super-infantry/airborne Ranger @ Ft. Benning (home of the Infantry) beat my time by 3 seconds. I was making rank before my peers, breaking records, inventing rules or procedures in their absence (like the Combat Lifesaver program), that later became U.S. Army doctrine now trained to all medics & many non-medical soldiers, rising fast through positions I soon mastered as a hard charging soldier/medic which was not lost on those who placed me into ever tougher positions of authority, only to find out that in 6 months I had skipped a step, or 3, and now was working for the Division Surgeon, or one of the major area Medical Commands (MEDCOM) in charge of the peace-time and war-time medical operations for units of 20-30K soldiers and maybe 10K DOD civilians. I kept getting offers to be some tag-along to a senior non-com or officer, as their aide, I ducked each one, leading troops is what I did best, not being a 24/7 on-call valet, driver or 'go-for' for a 2-star general, although that would have been a comfortable way to cruise through my career & get a medal for kissing-butt and having a sharp uniform. No sir! My awards were earned not given as tokens. Mass-casualty exercises, evacuation missions, drug interdiction, humanitarian-operations, peace-keeping ops, medical plans, operations and training became my forte and the (Cold-War) world where many nations were communist ones was where I was forged. You may think I am bragging, I don't brag, but to rise so fast and walk away alive from so many real life disasters when others who I knew and called them my friends didn't, and I buried them took it's toll in many ways. Never happy at home, married more to the Army than my wife and relaxing for me was reading a Field Manual then teaching it to my troops. Those who chose an easier path through their careers seldom made it to retirement, or were never trusted far from a nice warm office or motor-pool, always wondering why they supervised no one, had 1 or 2 medals and 10 years in were told "Don't bother to enlist for another 3 years, it will be denied." Only 15 out of 100 who start as PVT/E1 make it to a 20-year retirement at a much higher rank, and when you are getting close to 40 you maybe glance at a chest full of ribbons & badges putting on your dress uniforms and know why that you did take a hard road and left your name in every post you served at. The privates you trained are now fine senior NCO's or even officers with their own units & troops to lead & train as you taught them by example not by delegation. But your body tells you that you pushed it very hard with every joint that pops or back pain that lingers all day reminds you that you have past your physical prime/peaked even if your mind is still learning. To make it both your mind and body have to keep pace or if one folds so do you as a soldier. Or you take an easier path and are forgotten; just did enough to get by probably never hitting a retirement ceremony. Now it matters little, as a Veteran time served equates to nothing except a pay-check which is not a whole lot of cash unless you made a lot of rank and have a good civilian job waiting on the other side of that military retirement, or some V.A. disability pay to off-set food-stamps and a very meager/frugal existence. If you end up minus your legs or eyesight 6 months into your 1st tour of duty you are out, young & disabled, or denied that last 3 or 4 year enlistment that would have got you to a 20-year retirement for a mistake or a single bad evaluation report is all it takes when you wear those stripes, bars or eagles, have a ton of responsibility and carry so much riding on every move you make, all eyes watch you and plenty of hard-charging studs are just waiting to take your job if you falter. So I do take the constant discomfort, the V.A. disability checks, my retirement pay, and thank my Lord that I walked off that final parade field on my own 2 legs with a tear in my eye for those who should have too, but didn't for so many reasons.