Molon Labe! (22 page)

I do not blame the Creator. His love for us and His creation remains quite evident through the persistent beauty and wonder we cannot quite manage to completely smother.

No, this earthly putrescence we've made ourselves.

Cowardice (and its first cousin, Apathy) creates the same hell on earth as does Evil. It just takes a bit longer, that's all. Edmund Burke said it best, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." You see, evil is the default of humanity. It is a spiritual force of gravity. It is always present, and it is always to be resisted. Good people, through rare effort, can and have resisted the gravity of evil. America always had powerful legs for jumping, but never developed wings to stay aloft.

I couldn't tolerate it any longer. The trouble with cynicism these days is that you just can't keep up.

I had a good run. I served my country during WWII when the government still served America. I enjoyed the undeserved love and companionship of my dear wife, Dolores, for 55 years, and the gift of our two perfect children, Michael and Rachel. I experienced what Twain perfectly described as a "thunderclap of grief." Its suddenness terrifying; intensity deafening; its effect devastating.

Their death in a small plane crash last year extinguished my last three reasons to carry on past the age of 85. I might as well have been in that plane with them, for we all died in that smoking scar left on a Utah mountainside.

My beautiful America is gone. My beloved wife and children are gone. The rest of my family are gone. Most of my friends are gone. After months of slogging through the endless sludge of mourning, it dawned on me that my life was effectively over.

Not, however, without a little "account balancing" before I went; before my health was irretrievably affected.

Our cultural and economic masters have (through the gradual assent of the people, to be sure) created an impenetrable, soul-sucking web of regulation and oppression. They control our diets, our money, our education, our political institutions, our travel, our communications, and our recreation. The rural sanctuary of ranch and farm are being assaulted. There is nowhere to hide. We have been transformed into cogs of a great machine, all within my lifetime. There will not be, within the next decade or two, any escape from this. After a generation, perhaps, though I never would have seen it.

Our rulers left one crucial element out of their vast equation. Desperation. They disregarded Sun Tzu's wise counsel of leaving a way of escape to a surrounded enemy. Average people sentenced to what is effectually life imprisonment will begin to realize they have nothing to lose. A few of them will, as I did, "connect the dots" — forming a line leading to their jailers.

I once read, "Wisdom is knowing what to do next. Courage is doing it."

If that's true, then integrity is
caring
to know what to do next.

I was a warrior. I flew fighters six miles high over Nazi Germany. 343rd Fighter Squadron, 55th Fighter Group, 8th Air Force. I had eleven confirmed aerial kills, and five probables.

When I arrived at the 55th's first base in Nuthampstead in the fall of 1943, I flew a P-38 Lightning, arguably the world's coldest airplane. It had little cockpit heat, and no combination of cold weather gear really worked. (Once we switched over to P-51s we gave our leather fleece-lined suits and boots to the Red Cross girls for their winter wear. They looked like little brown bears.)

Great instruments and an excellent shooting platform with lovely handling and no torque, but the P-38 was far too fussy. The Curtiss electric props were very complicated and twitchy, and maintenance on those tightly-cowled twin Allisons was a nightmare. There was always some coolant leak to chase. The superchargers were controlled by an oil regulator which often froze at high altitude, giving the pilot only two throttle settings: 10 or 80 inches of mercury — too little to sustain flight or too much for the supercharger. Finally, the plane's stab elevator and twin booms looked like nothing else in the sky, making us easily recognizable to the enemy. P-38 pilots got only 1.5 Germans per loss, the worst record of the ETO (though they did much better in the Pacific). I had only two kills and one probable in mine.

The P-38 did, however, make me a lot of money. We used to bet on who would first get from our hardstands to the taxi strip, and I would always win. How? I had learned to contort my arms, hands, and fingers in such a way so that I could start both engines at once. I spent many a fine weekend in London on that trick!

Just when I'd nearly pulled off a transfer to "Hub" Zemke's P-47 squadron in the 56th FG, we got our P-51D Mustangs. About the same time (this was spring of 1944) our 55th FG transferred to its new base at Wormingford, about six miles from Colchester. No more quagmire mud of Nuthampstead; no more P-38s! Our 343rd FS Mustangs ($51,572 in 1944 dollars!) had a distinctive paint scheme: yellow/green nose and spinner, OD rear fuselage, and yellow rudder. The P-51D was a nearly perfect fighter. The liquid-cooled V-12 Merlin was a joy, it handled like a sports car, and with those drop tanks it had legs for Berlin and back. Good guns, too. If you could get a shot inside 300yds with less than 20 degrees of deflection, those six .50s really did the job. The Mustang wasn't as robust as the Thunderbolt, but it had a much greater range. Most of our missions were long-range escorts of B-17Gs. Bomber crews had to do 25 missions for their tour, but fighter pilots had to do 50. At the end, you got a 50 mission "crush" hat. That and your white silk scarf just drove the ladies wild.

I'll never forget 1944 Wormingford. The Tannoy public address system constantly droning on. All of us (officers, too) painting invasion stripes on our planes for D-Day. The stray dogs we quickly adopted once threatened with extermination. That day in early August when a horde of G.I.s hopped the fence behind the work line and shocked the entire wheat field because the English farmers were doing it too slowly. Red Cross girls with doughnuts on their fingers like a dozen rings. That lone V1 buzz bomb. The old ruined windmill just below the prop shop. My ground crew waiting like puppies for my return, with smiles and thumbs up when they saw that the red gun tape had been shot off. The huge Christmas Eve air armada with 2,046 bombers and 853 fighters.

In December 1944 I was hit by flak over Dortmund. My wing-man was also hit and went down. While trying to limp back to base alone a Focke-Wulf 190A-8 hammered me at 900 yards with his four 20mm cannons. I tried to split-S for the deck, but my damaged Mustang just wasn't up to it. I bailed out in the Dutch clouds to fight my way to the Allied lines 50km away. In getting there, however, three Germans died from my Colt .45. I took one of their Lugers, which was easier to scrounge up ammo for, just in case.

Thompkins' cell phone rudely interrupts. It is the night manager. He found Harold Krassny in the bathtub, quite dead. Thompkins tells him that he is en-route and will cancel the EMT. He grudgingly disconnects the call, as if the action somehow makes Krassny's death a certainty.

He turns to his assistant and says, "You can slow it down a bit, Charlie. We're not in any hurry now."

After two days in southern Holland I found the Canadian lines west of Nijmegen and caught a C-47 right back to Wormingford. My ground crew wept openly and unashamedly. They'd heard I went down with my wingman. They were mighty relieved when I assured them of no mechanical failure. I was issued another P-51D just in time for the Battle of the Bulge. I flew that plane, tail number 472138, for the rest of the war, including a few weeks from our Occupation base in Kaufbeuren, Germany.

Sorry to blab on about this. Dolores often urged me to write my wartime memoirs, but since the USAAF trained about 35,000 fighter pilots I didn't figure I had all that much unique to say.

Anyway, I was a warrior once again, sixty years later. I discovered a new enemy of America and went to make war upon him before I died. Now, I have a total of sixteen confirmed kills. Fourteen during WWII, and two this week. Back in the 1940s, the government trained me to kill national socialists. I simply used that training to kill two international socialists six decades later.

The first was a modern reincarnation of Josef Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister. His lifetime work in Hollywood to debase and putrefy all that was decent for the sake of "entertainment" was well known. When the man became a US Senator with his eye on the presidency, I felt that I could no longer turn a blind eye. Easier to get him before he announced his candidacy and got Secret Service protection. It was my honor to cleave his vile corporeal self from his eternally damned soul. You will find his body in the boathouse of his cabin in the Sierras.

Thompkins rereads the paragraph. He'd no idea Krassny was so . . . so
intense.
Especially for a guy in his eighties!

The second was an avowed globalist, and a quite famous one, at that. American only in the geographical sense, the man was consumed with creating a one-world government to rule over deflated nations (and thus powerless peoples). He has actively conspired to deliver us over to jurisdiction of the UN. The arrogant evil of the man was quite insufferable to me. His body will never be found. It will probably take several days for anyone to be sure of whom it is I have described.

So, meanwhile, please do a bed-check.

One of your globalists is missing.

Thompkins laughs out loud. Charlie looks at him, questioning. Thompkins says, "Man, is the shit ever gonna fly!"

But that's not quite all. After WWII I was trained for intelligence. Donovan of the OSS liked how I had fought my way out of Occupied Territory. "We want shooters and looters!" he once told me. They taught us that merely killing the enemy was not enough. We had to
know
the enemy and his plans as well as he did. Before I was mustered out as a lieutenant colonel, I spent three years in postwar Germany gathering intelligence on the Soviets.

But enough about me.

Before they died by my hand several days ago, I squeezed much useful information from that rotten pair. (It is easy to get to such people. Their smugness leads to gaping holes in their personal security. Cats don't fear mice. Maybe they will now.) Meetings, key players, upcoming events to expect, timetables, addresses, phone numbers, etc.

I got both of their laptops, too. Before they died, I "persuaded" them to reveal all the necessary passphrases. My old OSS training came in handy there . . .

The hard drives I copied onto CDs and sent to whom I am sure would be interested parties. A transcript digest of our "inter-views" was emailed to several dozen freedom-oriented individuals and organizations all over the world. It is my hope that this information will be stepping stones for further action against our would-be enslavers.

Thompkins suddenly realizes that he will be given a harsh grilling about Krassny. A
"What-did-you-know-and-when-did-you-know-it?"
type of thing. He'd better keep his wits about him. He can't look like he's rooting for Krassny's one-man cleanup act.

I had several other enemy targets on my list, but the financial expense and physical stress of the first two ops have drained me. I could not manage a third, much less a thirteenth. To attempt it would risk capture, trial, etc., and I won't be made a public spectacle anymore than I have to. Thus, I will have to be satisfied with just the two. Still, not bad for an octogenarian!

My assets have already been liquidated. My home sold, my possessions distributed. All incriminating records destroyed. All they can do now is call me names and pee on my grave.

None of us is immortal; none of us is free. We really have nothing to lose by at last going on the offensive. Claire Wolfe once wrote, "America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."

Obviously, I think it's high time we shoot the bastards, but everyone runs on a different calender. My fight was over, and I was pleased to get in a few good punches before I left the ring. Who knows what it will take to knock out the giant? Let's find out! Get in there and do him some damage!

I have proved, twice, that it can be done. Pick targets who are truly deserving of your attention, but be sure that nothing personally links you with them. Do not, for example, choose the prosecutor who sent your brother up the river for tax evasion. No, choose a public figure whose treason to America and to the Bill of Rights is well-known, but unconnected with you and yours.

The most important thing is to act
totally
on your own. Three may keep a secret if two are dead, as Ben Franklin once wrote. Do your own research and planning, be extremely thorough, leave as little to chance as you possibly can, and act alone. Destroy all notes and keep no "trophies" (this especially includes newspaper articles). Finally, keep your mouth
shut
! Do all this, and there will be practically
zero
chance of your ever being investigated, arrested, prosecuted, and convicted of action.