Admit it or not, authority figures wield great power among the young.
The court rules required that a parent or guardian be present when a minor entered a plea to a traffic offense. In Texas, a moving violation was a crime, albeit a petty misdemeanor. So I first met the young man accompanied by his mother, who asked for a word with me in private.
The boy’s father was out the door before she finished the second syllable of “pregnant,” leaving her a single mom with a decent job that took every one of the 40 hours required on paper and sometimes more. She could not keep both the job and her rowdy son locked down. Would I try to talk to him?
Of course I would. I was all of 31 years old but I had made my way as much without adult supervision as without a high school diploma. I knew what it took: a prize you can keep your eye on for years.
So I didn’t chew him out about the ticket. I tried to engage him in a conversation about life choices. He seemed engaged.
He was either impressed by the majesty of my office, I figured, or he had never seen a grown man prancing around in public wearing a black nightgown.
I saw him again periodically all the way through my two year term and into my next one. At first, he was accepting my invitation to come in and talk. But he graduated from traffic offenses to more serious misdemeanors and I had to do my job, which drove a wedge between us.
I last saw him when he was 17 years old and charged with two counts of capital murder. Apparently, his first car was as junky as mine was, and when it gave out he determined to steal another. The married couple who owned it did not give it up easily. He slipped their bodies into a lake two counties away from Austin and left a trail of forensic clues a blind man could follow, not the least of which was that he continued to drive their car.
My efforts taught me in my first year that I can’t save them all and at some point I have to let go. Life lessons are not always pleasant and that one left me nauseated.
I had been his age, 17 years old, when I raised my right hand and repeated after somebody whose identity slips my mind over a half century later:
I, Stephen Teehee, do solemnly affirm that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
How in the world could I take that oath? Surely, I must’ve had my fingers crossed?
Nope. Then and now, I considered a warrior’s proper role to be defense of people who need defending. I cannot imagine a situation where the United States needs defending but the Cherokee Nation does not.
Good thing for me the enlistment was for a term of years rather than “for the duration.” I’m told there is a ceremony for breaking an oath. It requires a very good reason and it’s still unpleasant.
It did not take me long to understand we would never save Vietnam from the Vietnamese, and it set me to thinking about why we were stepping into France’s shoes.
Why was a Roman Catholic minority claiming a right to rule a Buddhist majority? How many monks were willing to incinerate themselves to prevent that result?
A problem when you start thinking like that is there’s no end to it. Why did the Cherokee Nation fail to join Tecumseh? Why did we fight the Red Stick Creeks along side Andrew Jackson? Was it just so there would be a convincing illustration in encyclopedias for “betrayal?”
Without regard to my growing doubts, the U.S. Air Force trained me to know a bit more about the use of firearms than I knew when I enlisted. As a pre-teen, I had some kind of junior membership in the National Rifle Association that came with a BB gun from the Sears Wish Book. That may sound funny, but an errant BB can do a lot of harm. Still, the unlikelihood of the harm makes BB guns good for teaching basic firearms safety. The price of an error is acceptable unless it’s an eye.
In the Boy Scouts, we graduated to real weapons in .22 caliber. By that time, I had been hunting small game with those kinds of rifles and birds with borrowed shotguns. I had never taken a deer and still haven’t. I never had need for more than a quarter, and I could acquire that much venison for doing some of the dirty work.
The Scouts taught range discipline. Keep the barrel down range. Fire when told and cease firing when told. Try to clear your own jam, but if you can’t raise your hand. If you get more than one jam, put the rifle aside and take another to finish the day’s instruction but come back and clean the one that jammed yourself. We learned to shoot from several positions, but everybody preferred prone. You may not look cool lying on your belly but there sure was a difference in accuracy.
By the time I took that enlistment oath, I had spent a couple of years in the Civil Air Patrol. We trained to the purpose of flying low and slow over natural disasters and spotting people in need of rescue and to the skill of patrolling search grids for missing vehicles or persons. Because we were teenagers, we naturally wanted to fly those contraptions in which we were relegated to the spotter seat.
The adult pilots put together a “ground school” by popular demand. Just often enough to keep the popular demand to a low roar, they would allow us to briefly put our hands and feet on the dual controls and “fly” our one airplane, a retired Grasshopper acquired from the Air Force that was a Vietnam FAC (Forward Air Controller) only in our imaginations.
That was the extent of the skill I could bring to stopping the Viet Cong before they took Sausalito. I thought that might happen because my information came from Oklahoma newspapers, and I did not yet understand that there were no real newspapers in Oklahoma.
In basic training, I stacked on some more skills obscure in civilian life. I consider it a skill to not freak out when crawling under barbed wire with bullets being fired overhead and it got to be a very useful skill to tolerate tear gas.
The standard weapon for all GIs was the Colt M-16 — we called it the “plastic gun.” The USAF had a problem in that every recruit had to qualify on the firing range. However, the procurement of M-16s had just begun in 1964, and those few that had been delivered were going to Vietnam. As a stop gap measure, we shot until we qualified on the M-14, the rifle that the plastic gun was replacing. Nobody would be sent home for poor marksmanship, but if you took too long to qualify you might be “recycled” for another run at the instruction, and that was a fate worse than death because firearms instruction was not all you would have to do over.
I was in love with the M-14, partially because I had no trouble qualifying on it. In my first permanent assignment, I was picked to be an auxiliary air policeman. I was activated whenever the base went on alert and at those times I was issued an M-14 and never more than one magazine of ammo. I always got to visit with my M-14 when LBJ left Air Force One parked at Randolph AFB on his way to the LBJ Ranch.
It was some months after basic training when I was sent off to Camp Bullis, all of 25 miles away, and handed an M-16. I kept the plastic gun all day, absorbing how to field strip and clean it.
It was the instruction at Camp Bullis that first acquainted me with the idea that lethality was not necessary to make an outstanding assault rifle. Stopping power was important, but all the better if the casualty were grievously wounded rather than killed. That takes two soldiers out of the fight when somebody has to help the one you shot.
Finally, it was out to the range, where I had to qualify again with the M-16, having already qualified with the M-14. I shot “expert” once, but I can’t remember with which weapon. I do remember getting yelled at for firing the M-16 on full auto and watching the magazine sucked dry instantly. I felt lucky they didn’t make me pay for the bullets, but I know now that a statement of charges would have been too much paperwork.
Over a year after basic training, I was 18 years old and had shot nobody. Out of the blue, I was tasked to fill out a long and complicated form accounting for my time before the Air Force and giving references in each location: Bristow, Oklahoma and Odessa, Texas and Beaverton, Oregon. What if, I wondered, I was in my thirties and had lived a dozen places?
The OSI (Office of Special Investigations) investigated me in a few weeks and I was able to go to work with my top secret codeword security clearance at headquarters, USAF Security Service. I was no longer an auxiliary air policeman and I never touched a government weapon again. I was, from that time, chairborne.
I was still under a sworn duty to defend the United States with firearms, if necessary. It would be almost three years before I would approach the age of Patrick Crusius, a young man who undertook what I was sworn to do if ordered by the commander in chief or his designate.
Crusius, apparently without military training, heard an exhortation by the commander in chief to repel an invasion from Mexico. The commander in chief also deployed active duty troops to defend the border, withdrawing them without having engaged as soon as the midterm elections were over.
Since the commander in chief or his designate did not issue a weapon to Patriot Crusius like he did to Airman Teehee, the older “man” took the initiative and mail ordered a WASR-10, an AK-47 knockoff in semiautomatic only produced in Romania. The federal agency we used to call ATF (Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms) has had Explosives added to its portfolio and I’m not informed if it’s now known as ATFE, but its annual report claimed about 9,000 Romanian assault rifles came to the U.S. in 2018.
In a statement to the El Paso Police released to the media by the Texas Department of Public Safety, Crusius claimed his motive was “to kill as many Mexicans as possible.” That’s how you repel an invasion, I suppose.
I do hope I’m not letting any felines out of the sack when I give this piece of legal advice. I rendered my law license inactive when I got cancer, but this should require no credential:
As a defense to murder charges, “just following orders” is not going to fly.
Of the 21 names of victims set out in the indictment, only four bear no trace of Hispanic heritage. When I was stationed in San Antonio, I had a romance with a WAF who was a Mexican citizen, and her name was German. People in the borderlands know a Mexican might carry a name from anywhere.
I read in the newspapers that the Crusius indictment is assigned by luck of the draw to the 346th District Court, Judge Angie Juarez Barrill presiding. It brought to mind the commander in chief of the U.S. military getting sued for fraud in connection with the scam called Trump University.
The lawsuit was assigned by luck of the draw to Judge Gonzalo Curiel. President Trump repeatedly complained that he could not get a fair trial from “a Mexican.” Trump’s complaint fails on its own terms because Judge Curiel was born in Indiana but it fails on my terms because Judge Curiel has an excellent reputation.
To this day, it’s hard to get my head around that kind of attack on a judge and it’s not only when I wear my judicial hat or my lawyer hat. What could be more un-American and racist than attacking a judge based on where his parents were born? Claiming a fellow born in Hawaii is not American because his father was born in Kenya, I suppose.
I digress. So much corruption; so little time.
Twenty-one people died taking advantage of the sales tax holiday to pick up school supplies at Wal-Mart. Some were American citizens and some were Mexican citizens and, for all we know, some might have been those Norwegians President Trump believes would make dandy immigrants. It does not matter.
America is a nation of immigrants excepting people like myself whose ancestors, as Will Rogers famously said, “met the boat.” A real American does not treat people badly because of where their parents were born.
I guess I just implied that Donald John Trump is not a real American. Of course he is. We don’t take away citizenship for odious opinions. Racists have rights in this country. But what are we saying about ourselves when we install a racist as president of these United States?
Patrick Crusius would say that we have legitimized hatred of Mexicans and rendered Mr. Trump’s alleged invasion credible. Maybe Mr. Crusius is expecting a pardon?
If he was defending his country at the behest of the commander in chief, why would he not expect a pardon?
Seventeen is old enough to be tried as an adult for a crime in Texas, and Mr. Crusius is 21. That is old enough in any state.
I was in the real military at an age when Mr. Crusius was in his imaginary military. My son was as well and I made no effort to stop him. None of us were paragons of good judgment at age 21, but if stupid were a defense to capital murder there would be very few convictions. I note that the major change in law proposed in Austin in response to mass shootings is to speed up application of the death penalty.
I keep going back to that oath I took and refused to break even when presented with reason to break it. I invested the commander in chief with the power to decide when I would put my life at risk, partially because I was raised to believe that all elders owe all young people truthful role models, but elders put in leadership positions owe the young examples of correct behavior before any other duty.
Polls asking about the most admired men and women in the world seldom fail to rank the president of the United States. In 2019, the YouGov poll ranks Donald Trump number 15, just ahead of Pope Francis and just behind Elon Musk. This poll covers the world — not just the United States.
The fifteenth most admired man in the world is also the commander in chief of the U.S. armed services. From those lofty positions, he told an impressionable young man, Patrick Crusius, that his country is being invaded by Mexico.
If Trump is telling the truth, what should Crusius do?
If Trump is not telling the truth, what should we do?
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This post was previously published on Medium and is republished here with permission from the author.
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