Regular Army Corporal: Growing up in the Depression, World War II, and the Korean and Cold Wars

17..........Epilogue

Introduction

If God will allow us to wear T-shirts in heaven, like printed T-shirts that will tell people about things we did or who we were, I want mine to say SOLDIER— and that’s all—nothing more.

I guess the first reasonably mature aspiration I ever had was to go to sea, and maybe be a commercial fisherman. The Lord let me do that eventually, and I would still rather do that than most other things I have done, but now I am too old for that. Instead, the Lord led me to the army, where I did manage to become a soldier. And that was what He meant me to be, and that is what I have always been in my heart, even after my short career in the army. Later the Lord had other things for me to do and I became a lawyer. It seemed like a logical progression because I found after Vietnam that many people dislike soldiers some of the time and everybody hates lawyers all of the time.

I also wanted to be an adventurer. My earliest ideas about adventurers came from the ubiquitous cowboy movies of the 1930s that all little boys revered, wherein the good- guy hero, after he finished shooting up the bad guys, would ride off into the sunset, leaving the tearful and beautiful girl behind who would eagerly await his return. In spite of all my mother did to disabuse me of such fantasies, it wasn’t until very late in life that I realized that a realistic sequel to those movies would have shown the rancher’s daughter quickly wiping away her tears and latching on to the next guy she could find who had money or good chances of acquiring it.

I soon realized that while adventures were great, they came with a price that usually involved being scared, tired, and miserable, and for the most part girls didn’t care to participate in them. But nonetheless I persisted because I thought that was the way to become a man. My father, in those times early in marriage when my mother gave him a hard time, would articulate a thought that always stayed with me. Women! he would say, You can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them. I thought that if that was true, I would try to do without them, at least for awhile, until I had some adventures behind me and had become a man ready to settle down. But alas, when that finally came about it was too late. There were no longer any available women who would tolerate me.

So the long and short of it is now in my declining years I find myself surrounded by mostly younger people who labored under none of the illusions that I did, who have devoted themselves unabashedly to the pursuit of romance and the fairer sex and the comforts of the American dream. Out of empathy or sometimes feigned admiration, they ask me to tell them about my experiences, and some go so far as to tell me I should write a book, and I tell them I don’t want to do that. Telling war stories is a vice peculiar to all old soldiers, but it’s not so bad when we do it at military reunions or memorials amongst our veteran buddies, because they understand that we are telling them to persuade ourselves that in battle we weren’t always cowards, and we enjoy associating ourselves with the real heroes, most of whom have not survived. And although we may exaggerate, we cannot tell bald-faced lies, as those who have experienced combat would recognize them immediately. Telling such tales without these constraints to naïve Americans who have not experienced wars and combat seems to me an obscene indulgence. Particularly so, because I have since learned that a man’s greatest adventure should be marriage and parenthood. It takes far more guts and long-term perseverance for a man to become a good husband and father than it does to go to war.

However, now that I am old, inactive, and useless, I feel a compulsion to record some of the events and lessons of life that may be of benefit to others, and to defend and even celebrate the few intelligent decisions that I made during my productive years.

In the years since I left the army I have depended greatly on Christian Radio to keep my head straight and clear of the garbage on TV. I am particularly enamored of the classic long-running radio drama called Unshackled, and I often wonder if an account of my own disturbed adolescence and subsequent life in Christ could be as enthralling and inspirational to others as those radio dramas are to me.

As a military history buff I am also an avid reader of war stories, even though they often disturb and sadden me, but I find most of the stories written by professional journalists repugnant. I must admit that I harbor a prejudice against journalists in general. I know that there is a public prejudice against lawyers, and I live with that knowing that so many of us have earned the public’s disdain, and I feel that our contemporary journalists are doing the same. They seem to me for the most part to consider themselves members of the intellectually elite and entitled to impose their politically correct opinions upon the public by any means available, including lies and distortions. Most have never served in the military and would never interrupt their lives and subject themselves to the discipline, sacrifices, and hardships that might entail, but nevertheless they are convinced that their opinions are vastly superior to those of any military leader or professional.

I recently read a Vietnam war story, A Rumor of War, by Phillip Caputo, that did indeed sadden and disturb me, just as the author intended it to do. Although Mr. Caputo has since become a journalist, he in no wise conforms to my disparaging assessment of journalists in general. He opted for a military career as a young man and became a dedicated and capable Marine officer and experienced intense and protracted combat in an unpopular and frustrating war under the worst tropical terrain and weather conditions imaginable. Certainly no one who has experienced war would glorify it, and no one hates wars and the causes and persons that precipitate them more than those who have fought in them, but yet in spite of all our prayers and aspirations war is always with us or threatening us, just as Jesus Christ said it would two thousand years ago.¹ Phillip Caputo seems to attribute the Vietnam conflict’s horrors, incredible cruelty, and the moral degradation it imposed upon him to the U.S. government, the Marine Corps and military leaders, and Vietnamese corruption. In doing so he follows a pattern set by many observers and participants in the Vietnam conflict and some of our previous wars as well. I find a stark contrast to this in the writings of Oliver North, who also distinguished himself in combat as a Marine infantry platoon leader in Vietnam, and later went on to become a military aide to the Reagan administration. Like Caputo, his military career was compromised by the very government and leaders to whom he had devoted his allegiance, but North continues to revere and respect his country and the Marine Corps in which he feels he was privileged to serve. I find the contrast thought-provoking.

Recently I have been befriended by a retired soldier and World War II veteran, Ollen Hunt, who has written a book, the Buffalo Soldier, which I think is truly a classic. He is presently the only friend I have who is older than I, six years older in fact, and I am saddened by that because he is the kind of man that America needs so badly. Ollen, an African American, was born on a Tennessee farm and grew to manhood in the darkest years of the Great Depression and was subsequently swept into the fury of World War II. An original member of the 92nd Infantry Division, our only all-black combat division in World War II, he survived the long and arduous Italian campaign. Although sometimes maligned and often distrusted by both the white hierarchy and the rank and file of our segregated army, the 92nd Division carried on through long commitments and heavy losses to distinguish itself in the tradition of the all-black units of the Civil and Indian wars, hence the name Buffalo Soldiers. Ollen went on to an army career, served mostly in Europe, where he established his young family, later moving them to the United States and after his retirement to Alaska, where he became a leading entrepreneur and businessman in that new state, where he makes his home today.

Ollen Hunt suffered grievous indignities and prejudice during his military career and as a father of a bicultural and biracial family at a time when such unions were less accepted than now. He records some of it as matters of fact and history, but without rancor or bitterness, mostly to emphasize and honor the accomplishments of his 92nd Division comrades, many of whom went on to become military, political, and professional leaders of national stature. He subtitled his book What my Country did for me and does not deviate from that positive tone. What is it that makes Ollen Hunt and Oliver North so radically different from the multitude of other writers who emerge from their experiences of war with demolished allegiances and bitter antagonisms toward their governments, their leadership, or the established social order? I think I know. Both of these men are devout Christians who served God and country with a firm awareness of their salvation in Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ makes the difference!

I know now that my attachment to the army and the alternating love and hate relationship I had with it was largely the product of a disturbed adolescence in a wartime society, my delinquency, and my budding alcoholism. Many of my youthful contemporaries, who were far more stable, intelligent, and amenable to education than I, regarded military service, whether compelled or voluntary, as the worst period of their lives. But nevertheless, for me, enlisting in the army was one of the best and probably almost the most important decision I ever made. The most important decision came several years later, when I walked down the aisle of a tin hut chapel on the island of Okinawa and accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior. Now I am compelled to tell of all that led to and followed from that decision, including the defeats and failures and especially the purpose, direction, and fulfillment that came into my life as a result of it. I am well aware that Christians are obligated to witness to others about their faith, but I fail miserably to do so in most of my personal encounters. I am unable to tell people who have achieved status and success and established marriages and families and raised children that I, who have done none of those things, have the answers. Now I hope the perspective of old age will enable me to write about my life and faith for those who are searching for or reinforcing their own. It’s something I must do, and I want to get on with it.

Dick Ellmers, July 5, 2008

Individual names in my narratives have either been omitted or changed for virtually all persons mentioned to prevent controversy or embarrassment for their survivors or for those few still living. Some, however, were such magnificent men that it would be a disservice to their memories if I did not properly identify them. I am sure the reader will recognize these exceptions.

Author with Machine Gun Combs in Korea, Spring 1951.

Author with Marine Advisor in Vietnam, 1963 or 1964.

¹Matthew 24:6

Chapter I

Family, Depression, and War

I was born in 1929 and raised on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio, mostly in the suburbs. Both my mother and father were children of German-speaking immigrant families. Dad grew up in the East 55th and St. Clair area of Cleveland, which was a rough German-Irish neighborhood then and still is rough today, although there have been multiple changes in its ethnicity. My mother’s family came from an area of northeast Germany, or sometimes Poland, where the people are quite different from the Bavarians on my Father’s side. She was several years older than Dad—a fact she always kept secret— and had a more proper upbringing. Her folks lived in a big frame house on Cleveland’s near west side, overlooking the steel mills and docks in the Cuyahoga River valley and she attended the German Lutheran school and church that was then the core of the neighborhood. Strangely though, unlike my father, whose memories always went back to St. Clair Street, Mom had few fond recollections of her ethnic upbringing. She particularly disliked the Lutheran school she attended and the clergy leadership, whom she considered dummies who couldn’t talk about anything except the Bible and thought that God spoke only German. In her final years after Dad was gone, I often tried to entice her into visiting her old neighborhood, which had become an interesting residential inner city enclave, but she would not go.

I have often wondered how it was that Mom and Dad came together, since they had such disparate backgrounds and lived in distant neighborhoods in a big city, but neither of them ever said a word about the origins of their romance. I’m sure it would have been an interesting story.

My father’s boyhood world was St. Clair Street, a main traffic artery for the burgeoning city, the adjacent Lake Erie shoreline, and the interstate New York to Chicago railways and yards that ran along it. That was the home turf for him and his buddies in the Grogan gang. The Irish kids tended to be the leaders, probably because English was their mother tongue, and the Grogan brothers were to become later prohibition-era gangsters. In their juvenile stage they preyed primarily on boxcars on the railway sidings and then sold the stolen merchandise for a pittance to the newly arriving and naïve Polish immigrants. They then watched gleefully as the railway police ransacked the neighborhood, roughed up the Poles, and took back the merchandise. Fortunately for my father he later distanced himself from the gang, not because of any moral influences but because of common sense, and a fortuitous episode. St. Clair was the primary route for the farm wagons coming into the city from the farms to the east, en route to the downtown central market. The kids were quite adept at approaching the wagons from the rear, climbing in over the tailgates and pilfering produce. Winter was the best time for this, as the wagons had covers on them and there was sometimes deep snow alongside the road. After a surreptitious entry one could find eggs and toss them gently out the back into the snow, where the others could retrieve them unbroken. On one bright, sunny day after a snowstorm my father was the hero who ran up behind the wagon and climbed in through the cover. Once inside the dark cover Dad found that he could see nothing, but the farmer who was sitting in the back of the wagon with a baseball bat didn’t have any trouble seeing him at all. So it turned out that it was he that got tossed out into the snow and not the eggs, and with broken teeth and a banged-up head to boot. After that he concluded there had to be better ways to make a dime.

Some years ago, when I was a novice lawyer practicing law in Cleveland and sometimes in Dad’s old neighborhood, I reflected on his experiences there. The times and ethnicities had changed greatly, but analogous incidents are just as common now as then. However, our criminal and civil justice systems have evolved with the times, and presently if a crime victim acted as the farmer in the wagon did, his finances would be devastated and he might well do some prison time as well, and a thief such as my dad would be sent home to his parents, and they and their lawyer would be compensated handsomely. I wondered, is that progress?

Nonetheless, I think my father had a happy childhood, in spite of a long bout with typhoid fever contracted from swimming in the creek mouth at the foot of East 55th, to which he ascribed his premature baldness, and he grew to be a streetwise, husky, and personable youth who even attended high school and made a try at professional boxing. Somewhere along the line he learned to drive a car, which was a note worthy thing in those days, something akin to being a pilot in the time when I came to Alaska. It enabled you to do lots of illegal things you could make money at. That talent brought him to his first significant employment as a chauffeur for a Jewish man named Shondor Birns, who ultimately became Cleveland’s longest-lived and possibly most successful crime syndicate leader. Dad never told me anything about that job, but he soon concluded that it was every bit as hazardous as the Grogan gang, and he was again fortunate to be able to disassociate himself. At some point in those times he was caught up in the World War I draft, but a medical examiner disqualified him and sent him home, without explanation, much to my father’s delight. But he always wondered about it. Was it because he was a German immigrant kid whose loyalty was suspect, or perhaps the doctor just thought he shouldn’t have to go to France and shoot at relatives? He never knew but I know it was God’s inscrutable will. Paradoxically, many years after my father’s death, I was a distant witness to a carefully orchestrated, probably remotely detonated car bomb explosion in an empty suburban parking lot that sent Shondor Birns to his Creator. Many people wondered just what he could have been into that would cause someone to go to that much trouble to kill a man well over 80 years old.

Eventually Dad got a good job as a bank teller. (Apparently they didn’t do very good background checks in those days.) From there he moved out into the business world where, by virtue of his street smarts and his gregarious affability, he found his niche as a salesman.

By the time I came along in 1929 dad was establishing Mom and my three-and-a- half-year old brother in a newly constructed home in a developing middle class suburban neighborhood. He was doing well in an industrial tool and supply business, and even had a Studebaker car that was often operable, which we came to refer to as our steadybreaker. It was a good place for kids to grow up, with vacant lots to play in and an undeveloped area with a small lake and park just a long walk or a bicycle ride away. Small stores and a streetcar line were also only a block or so away. The neighbors were mostly U.S. born with German and quite a few blue-collar and upwardly mobile Italian families as well, and it was with them that I had my closest associations.

Even though I was only a kindergarten-aged child when the Great Depression hit, I had some awareness of its effects. Mom and Dad told my brother Chuck and me many times then and in the years following that we could never go to college because all of their savings had been lost in the bank closures, but they managed to remain solvent and we never lost the house. Although we didn’t have any expensive toys, my brother and I never suffered any real hunger or material need, but when we went downtown or out and about with Dad, even kids could sense the poverty of people scrounging scrap metal for pennies and patrolling the railroad tracks to gather coal for heating, digging dandelion greens and poaching fish and game for food. Dad did start bringing chickens home that we raised in our yard, and some years ducks or geese too. Some people complained but Dad insisted they were just educational pets for us kids. Some of the Italian neighbors followed suit, and for a few years the neighborhood was something like a poultry farm.

I later learned that prior to the Depression my father had been the star salesman for an industrial supply company, and that his employer took advantage of the situation by selling the company for a substantial price and covertly financing my father’s establishment of a new company that capitalized on the contacts and customers that stayed with him. Dad’s sales techniques were questionable even for those times, but he sincerely believed that a salesman’s prime objective was to please, serve, and befriend the purchasing agents and business and plant managers who were his customers, and that the quality and value of what he sold, which he felt differed little from his competitor’s, were a secondary issue. Even though he maintained an office of sorts, most of his business contacts were in his old neighborhood haunts and downtown bars and clubs. His sales promotions consisted mostly of golf dates and country club and beach picnics in the summer and house parties and hotel bashes in the winter. My mother, who was pretty, gregarious, and a social climber, participated enthusiastically in the more proper entertainments, even though she disliked alcohol and drank little or nothing. But there were other, less publicized parties and outings, especially for out-of-town visitors, where any female guests present were not wives. Of course, my mother generally knew about these and when dad came home, often under the weather, there was hell to pay in our house. My brother and I knew nothing about why this was happening, but even though there was never any physical violence we were scared to death and depressed by the emotional conflicts and arguments between Mom and Dad that went on and on. I thank God that about the only grounds for divorce in those days was clear and convincing evidence of adultery. If the stipulated dissolutions and uncontested divorces of today’s law had been available then, I am sure the marriage would have ended, and that would have been catastrophic for Chuck and me and a tragedy for them, as in later years they became as devoted to one another as any married couple could ever be.

Growing up with my big brother Chuck couldn’t have been anything but fun. He never objected to me tagging along with him, and back then as well as in later years he always seemed glad when I was around. He always got me in with the big kids and the fun things they were doing, and we rampaged though the neighbor’s yards and the vacant lots with our squirt guns and cap pistols, and later with our BB guns, shooting at birds and bottles and old light bulbs in the spring ponds and puddles. Chuck’s best buddy was a kid named Warren, who was neat and smart, and unlike all the rest of us, well behaved. He was the only child of a quiet couple with the smallest house in the neighborhood, who worked in a downtown department store. Warren’s dad had given him a single-shot .22- caliber rifle, and Warren and my brother let me do the greatest thing in my life up till then when we went out in a vacant lot, set a tin can up against an embankment, and they taught me how to shoot the rifle. But I guess Warren never knew that he was introducing me to a trade that was to occupy the most important years of my life. It seemed like only a few years later that Warren died in the battle for Aachen, Germany.

Our times together were to be limited and shortened, as the difference in our ages separated us in the oblivion of the public school system, which we both hated from day one. Kindergarten didn’t seem so bad, but the long days at school from first grade on were intolerable. Mom was no doubt glad to have us both out of the house, since she was an active socialite who wanted to be out and about, but I would go into tantrums trying to stay home. I remember her dutifully taking me by the hand and walking her tearful little boy the three blocks to the elementary school, where she turned me over to the sympathetic teacher who would be stuck with one more mad little stinker for the rest of the day.

With the increasing separation from my brother and the absences of the folks, who usually went out most nights, I began to feel isolated, and I really got bummed out when summer vacation came and I thought I’d be able to stay at home with Mom, but some how the folks would come up with money to send me to a day camp. My custodians would come every morning with a bus or cars and take me out to a park or swimming pool or farm, where we would play games or go on tours to the Zoo or museums. Sometimes it was OK but I wanted to be home with Mom and not out with a bunch of strange kids, and lots of times I got home to find the folks were going out and I didn’t know where my brother was.

There was a good thing about the day camps in that I learned there was a fascinating world just outside my neighborhood with open fields and woods and creeks, and undeveloped subdivisions with miles of empty streets to explore. As I grew older, my interests always gravitated outward and eastward into these rural areas, and by the time I was in my mid-teens my adventurous buddies and I were into the Chagrin River valley where we spent most of our spare time with our guns, fishing and camping gear. It was grand place for adventurous kids. The problem was that I was allergic to ragweed and anything that would cause contact dermatitis, such as poison ivy, and every summer by late August I was a sick kid, as my genes were really set up for places like the Alps, Alaska, and northern Europe.

After a while Dad noticed that I was alone too much and he bought a Boston terrier pup we called Picklepuss, Pickles for short. Pickles was a great addition to our family. We all loved her, and she was my special home buddy through my childhood and adolescence until I went into the army. The only problem with her was that even though I learned to avoid poison ivy and sumac and such, she never did, and would romp through it gleefully and then come back and jump all over me and want to wrestle, so I always had poison ivy all summer no matter how careful I was.

Usually in the summer we and some of the other neighbors would try to get the family cars to run as far as a distant place on the Lake Erie shore called Mentor Headlands, where there were lagoons, boat harbors, cottages, and miles of beaches with impenetrable elm forest swamps behind them that stretched eastward to the Grand River and Fairport, a small steel mill town in those days. My brother and I were both totally captivated by the area, and neither of us ever got over our fascination with it. Today it’s just another outlying suburb of Cleveland easily accessible by freeways, and the beaches are either parkland or private property, and most of the remaining swamps are open wetlands. But my brother always loved it and spent his happiest and final years there.

One of the reasons we went out to Mentor was to visit my mother’s girlfriend Lois and her husband, Otto. They had two daughters that Mom always wanted Chuck and me to get interested in, but that never happened. Otto was a stalwart and macho German who for some reason just didn’t fit in even after being here most of his life. My dad admired him because he was a real-jack-of-all trades, and in the more limited technology of those times there was nothing that he couldn’t build or repair. Even though he was often unemployed, he had acquired a piece of rural property not far from the lake and built a nice stone and masonry house on it. He even had a small unfinished cabin cruiser he had built, but much to my sorrow it lacked an engine. But one thing that bothered my father was that he belonged to something called the German American Bund and he always listened on his shortwave radio to speeches by somebody in Germany called Hitler. Dad never said anything about it, except to comment that although some of the old folks thought the Kaiser had been OK, they thought this guy Hitler was a nut. I think Otto died before he was 50, and he probably saved his wife and kids a lot of grief by doing so.

Sometime after the big ruckus I made about having to go to school Mom decided maybe I should go to Sunday school too. Chuck didn’t have to go, I guess because he was quiet and not as obnoxious as I was. There was a small Evangelical Reformed Church only a few minute’s walk away, so sometimes on Sunday she would dress me up and send me on my way. Actually it wasn’t so bad, as there was music and games, and the one song I learned was Onward Christian Soldiers. I thought that was pretty neat because the grownups were all unhappy about the armies and German soldiers in Europe, so maybe Christian soldiers were good guys. They told me some things about Jesus too, but it would be many years before I got the facts straight. I remember thinking at Easter that back in the dark days of winter, when I was just a little kid, we were celebrating Jesus being born, and now they were talking about him being crucified and dying. That surprised me, because even though I had made a lot of teachers and people mad at me, He had managed grow up and get a whole bunch of people mad at Him in a lot less time than it would take me. Heaven was easier for me to understand, and as I got older I liked to think that maybe after I died I could go to a place where I could stay out in the woods all the time and there wouldn’t be any poison ivy, ragweed, bugs or snakes.

There was also a large well-established Baptist church a mile or two away and some otherwise Catholic families sometimes went there because Catholic churches were even farther away, but some of the Italian kids I hung out with had bad experiences with it. Their father had a grievance with the village priest in the old country that he never got over and he wanted the whole family to go to the Baptist church, and they did until the pastor came for a home visitation. They took all the covers off the living room furniture and the whole large family entertained him there with a snack served with a bottle of their family wine from the basement. That was a big thing because their father had brought his inherited expertise from the old country and they dug out a special cellar in the basement equipped with specially seasoned barrels and so forth, and friends and relatives were greatly blessed if they got a sample of the family table wine. The pastor, however, promptly refused his glass and launched into a sermon on abstinence, condemning it as the devil’s own brew that would better be poured into a sewer, and that they were all bound to hell if they persisted in being wine bibbers, and so forth. The father lapsed into an embarrassed silence, but the older kids in the family, who were almost adults,

had always been told that their family should always be first in their lives and they were always to defend everybody in it. The pastor was soon on his way out the door and given to understand that it would be best if he never came back. Their Dad continued to go to that Church, but the kids would never go again.

In the years since I have come to the Lord I have fellowshipped much of the time with Baptist believers and my theological views differ little from theirs. My own problems with alcohol and the problems with it that I saw in the army and see now in Alaska, where it wrecks particular havoc, have made me acutely aware of its dangers. I found it necessary to abstain entirely from alcohol during some difficult periods of my life, and some must do so for their lifetimes. But I still have problems with those who will place a legalistic promotion of their cultural mores ahead of the Gospel.

There were other things that happened in those childhood years that either my brother or I would remember for the rest of our lives. There was one really unimportant thing that Chuck just couldn’t forget. One summer evening Chuck and Warren and I and a bunch of the other neighborhood kids got involved in a mock battle in a vacant lot and we were throwing mud and rocks at one another. Only a day or so before another neighborhood kid, who had a penchant for peeing on other little kids, had caught me unawares and got me good. I had run home crying and Mom gave me some clean clothes but no sympathy and I was bummed out about it. So when Chuck accidentally grazed my head with a chunk of mud or a small rock, I decided that even though it didn’t really hurt much I would take advantage of the situation, and I ran home crying to Mama. I never knew what the folks said to him, but years later when we were drinking and reminiscing he would apologize for it again and again, and I would always tell him it was just a hoax, but even the last time we were together before he died, he brought it up again.

There was another thing that my brother did to me that he never apologized for, as it taught me something I had to learn. In the storefronts at the end of our block there was one with a soda fountain and ice cream counter that sold candy, magazines, and miscellaneous other things, but what drew us kids there for almost daily visits was the penny-candy counters. Candy bars were a nickel even then, but there were all sorts of small candies that sold for a penny, and some for even two or three for a penny. Even in those Depression years a smart kid could accumulate a few pennies here and there, and for less than a nickel a guy could buy much more candy than was good for a kid. Before long another kid and I noticed that the store was sometimes full of other customers, and it was possible to pilfer and conceal pieces of candy from the open displays in addition to the ones we were paying for, and afterwards we would go behind the stores and gleefully inventory and consume our stash. Unfortunately on about the third foray I learned that the proprietor had mirrors behind the soda fountain and in other places, and he collared me and made me empty my pockets. There was another more important thing I hadn’t noticed and that was my brother, who was sitting at a table in the back of the store. I ran out of the store and went home, where I sat in my room at didn’t even want to eat the candy I had paid for. I hoped my brother wouldn’t tell on me, but thankfully he did. When Dad got home it was one of the worst nights of my life. My father wasn’t reluctant about spanking us when it was required, and when I was a little older and more obnoxious Mom would flat clobber me when she lost her temper, but that night neither happened. Later in life after I learned about my father’s experience with the farmer in the wagon I wondered why, but my father’s suppressed rage, his recriminations, and his shock and disappointment hurt me more than any physical punishment could ever have. I was always too ashamed to even talk about that episode with my brother, and I never got around to thanking him for what he did until I spoke at his memorial service.

What I learned then was a temporal lesson, perhaps sufficient for a kid, that might have been summed up in the time-worn adage that crime does not pay, but later that would wear thin, when in my human experiences I found that this adage—or perhaps it is only a cliché—was not literally and necessarily true. It wasn’t until after I came to the Lord that I understood the scope of my problem. My stealing wasn’t the big problem. Sin was the problem, sin against both my human father and my Eternal Father.

There was one thing that happened in my last year of elementary school that I never told anybody about, and it made my later adolescence more difficult than it should have been. By the sixth grade I was halfway reconciled to school as I was a big boy on the playground then and we were all members of the Safety Council, which meant that we could wear orange belts and hold the stop signs for the adult guards at the crosswalks. We also had council meetings, and by some procedural fluke I was elected vice president. I was totally befuddled by it, as it was the only political or elective office that I have ever held, before or since. At a meeting some weeks later we were informed by the principal via our teacher that kids leaving the school in the afternoons were having snowball fights and local pedestrians who were getting caught in the crossfire were very upset about it. Being that I was now an officer of the establishment, I immediately proposed that any sixth grade kid caught throwing snowballs should be expelled from the safety council. With approving nods from the teacher, my motion was promptly seconded and passed. Little did I know that I had sealed my own demise.

Possibly a week later I went out for recess in the schoolyard in front of the building, where the flagpole was. There had been a fresh heavy snowfall, and I made a bet with another kid that he couldn’t throw a snowball over the flagpole like I could, and we commenced the contest. I never even thought about the fact that there was a flag on the pole, or that the country was in a state of patriotic fervor. Although we weren’t yet at war, Britain and Canada were and President Roosevelt was giving weekly speeches condemning German aggression. While I was oblivious of all this, Mrs. Hamilton, the 250-pound 6-foot-tall teacher who was supervising the playground, definitely was not. Before I could even throw the third snowball she had me by the scruff of the neck, dragging me ignominiously into the building and on into the principal’s office, where she announced the charges against me in stentorian tones that could be heard even outside in the hallways. "This boy was throwing things at the American Flag!. Standing there under the indignant stares of the principal’s staff, I was unable to articulate any response to the principal’s demanding questions as I began to comprehend the monstrosity of my crime. I was subsequently delivered to my sixth-grade teacher, where the process was repeated, and by that time I was afraid they were going to find out about Uncle" Otto and the shortwave radio he used to listen to Hitler. I think it was later that same day that the teacher convened the safety council and I was summarily impeached from my office and dismissed from the council. No doubt the other kids forgot all about it by the next week, but I think I was almost as discomforted by those events as President Clinton was by his impeachment hearings. I never told my parents or my brother or anyone anything about it. Looking back, I think that was where my adolescent rebellion and antiestablishment attitudes began.

About 40 years later when I was a first-year law student studying criminal law, our instructor dealt at great length with the actus rea and mens rea concepts that describe the necessary elements that constitute a crime, requiring prohibited acts on one hand and a conscious intent to do wrong, or criminal mind on the other. If only Mrs. Hamilton had known about that! And if only I