THE SMUGGLERS LAMENT

Doug Chesler

Description

A story of crazy times of sex, drugs and rock and roll and the Vietnam War. It continues behind the Iron Curtain ending in the war against the sex trafficking ghouls.
Ever since he was a young man he would write long letters to his family and friends. Many people liked them and even saved them. Some said that he would be a great writer someday. Growing up in the wild days of the late 60s gave him plenty to write about. Living through the hippie daze of sex, and drugs and rock and roll put him on the search for that cosmic consciousness, if there was really such a thing ? Getting drafted really changed all that. What started as a bunch of guys chipping in to cop some grass in the Village ended up on speed boats and planes. Then the United States Air Force became the biggest smugglers in the world. Nothing was what it seemed to be, deception ruled. Join Doug on a wild ride through the California coast and America, SE Asia, Europe , Africa and behind the Iron Curtain. After all of that it was time to switch the tables and go after sex trafficking and the human smugglers. But the biggest journey was finding love and then finding God.

Sujets

• Vietnam
• NATO
• Berlin Wall
• Viêt Nam
• Romance
• Fiction
• Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique Nord

Informations

• Publié par: LifeRich Publishing
• Date de parution: 09 février 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781489733771
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE SMUGGLERS LAMENT



DOUG CHESLER






Copyright © 2021 Doug Chesler.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

LifeRich Publishing is a registered trademark of The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

ISBN: 978-1-4897-3376-4 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-4897-3377-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021902375

LifeRich Publishing rev. date: 08/29/2023


Contents
Chapter 1 The Ba sics
Chapter 2 Tony and The Twins; Califo rnia
Chapter 3 Vie tnam
Chapter 4 Germany and The Wall
Chapter 5 The CIA
Chapter 6 The Big Blue Mediterranean Sea
Chapter 7 Of Human Bon dage


Chapter On e THE BASICS
“The Army teaches boys to think like men.”
Elvis Pre sley
T he transfer cases were never supposed to be stacked higher than 5 feet so they did not draw attention to themselves. This was the height of the Vietnam War so we were receiving over 100 cases a day. These transfer cases were considered top priority cargo so we had to keep them moving until we got them home. This was a major part of my job to get Sgt. Donald Scarborough from Russell, Mississippi back to his hometown so his family can bury him. The cases were a brushed aluminum and a lot of airmen working on the flight line were spooked by them and couldn’t muster up the strength to lift them even when they were empty. I was used to them so we used them as a table or a bench and on night shift we would even get some shut eye on them. But when I had to pull their orders to identify who was inside and where they were going was when it got more personal. If it was Lieutenant Thomas Murphy from Dover, New Jersey who died in the line of duty during a firefight up north in Danang, then I had to make the connecting flights to get his remains home, ASAP. It was a sad job but somebody had to do it. The worse detail was having to accompany the dead soldier all the way home and to be the one to deliver the body and the bad news. My home base in Northern California was receiving over 500 transfer cases a week; so many that we would have to fill in for the Chaplains and accompany the bodies to the funeral homes. I am sorry to inform you Mr. & Mrs. Lee but your son died bravely during combat in Vietnam defending the United States of America. In reality, him and his squad were way up north in Cambodia where they shouldn’t be and they all got hit by an incoming US rocket. Friendly Fire is what we called it. We found his dog tags mixed up with his squad’s all over the side of the hill and we really don’t know who or what is in this box. Sometimes the dog tags were all we had to go on. Our bombs blew everything to smither eens
Back in the Fall of 1969 everything was going really good for me as a freshman at one of the big partying schools on the east coast. I was, at this time, a young hippie type going to UMASS up in Amherst, with about 10 other good schools in the area, it was party city. It was getting hard to wake up for my 8 am statistics class so I figured I would drop the course and just take it next semester. But next semester never came. The hardest thing in my life came as a result of dropping that course because by Christmas I was at Lackland Air Force Base in southern Texas in basic training. One of the stupidest things I ever did was drop that math class and lose my 4-F deferment. My draft number was 37 so the government grabbed me just like that. I had to go to Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn to get my physical and I enlisted in the Air Force to get out of the draft. I spent Christmas down in San Antonio, Texas and this wasn’t quite how I planned to spend the holidays. We had the choice of getting drafted into the Army or the Marine Corps for 2 years or enlist for 4 years in the Navy, the USAF or the Coast Guard. I just couldn’t see myself crawling through the rice paddies with the snakes and the leaches in the rain. Then there was the problem of those Oriental people hell bent on trying to kill you. Boot Camp was a far cry from The University of Massachus etts-
A good night sleep was always just a short dream in basic training, there was the Vietnam War going on so things were taken very seriously. We didn’t get enough sleep as it was, and the days were long and challenging. Just about every other day your tour came up to pull a 3-hour guard duty during the night protecting the guys from the threat of communism. Armed with my rifle and flashlight I had to keep moving so I didn’t fall asleep standing in one spot. The rhythmic sounds of the snoring would sometimes reach the pitch of the cicadas scream and how it drops off into the night only to then notice the constant farting noises of my sleeping comrades. I wasn’t really scared armed with a flashlight and an M-16 military assault rifle and, at 18, I was in the best shape of my life. Listening to the guys yelling out from their crazy dreams and talking in their sleep entire conversations was always unsettling and when you started trying to answer them you knew you were in trouble as well. The reality check came from the constant yelling and screaming from the Tactical Instructors that were supposed to break you down and then they start to build you up again. The first month was absolutely insane until we started getting the hang of th ings.
Three times a day we had to march into the mess hall and all the companies strutted in the order of their training. The company that was getting ready to graduate looked like some drill team, they looked like they were a well-oiled machine. Since we were the “rainbows” we looked like a can of worms, our TI’s would bark “Company Halt” and we would all bump into each other. Our TI would yell “Right Face” and some of the guys would turn left so the TI would yell “YOUR OTHER RIGHT ASSHOLE”! It took a long time to get this regimental thing down and some guys had it easier than others. It was grueling to watch the weaker, dumber guys get a ton of crap. The TI’s had about a month to send the guys with more serious issues home so that the Air Force didn’t have to own them and pay for them the rest of their lives. You could tell the guys who weren’t going to make it as they looked ready to pop and it was a sad process to weed them out. They were going to be a lot better off going home and then the instructors could concentrate on busting our balls big time. I felt sorry for the guys that looked like deer in the headlights, but I couldn’t spend much time with them because I had enough problems of my own. Then there were the guys trying to walk over me like they thought we were playing “King of The Hill”. That is what we had to learn, teamwork, and how to help each other reach the teams’ goals. But some guys didn’t know and some didn’t want to know. We all fall short and that is when we are supposed to help each othe r up.
We were called Rainbows because we had not been issued our green fatigues yet so our clothes and hair had some color to it. Soon we got our GI haircuts and the barbers shaved our heads bald. I looked like Uncle Fester on the Adams Family. When we got our fatigues and our white underwear, we all looked the same. It took me days to recognize the guys that I came down with from Ft Hamilton in Brooklyn. When we had to hit the showers at night, we had two minutes to shower and dry off. The weird thing was that the only thing we had on was our dog tags and we sounded like a bunch of cows in a barn. Eventually we bought the little rubber jackets so they didn’t make such a racket all the time. A lot of basic training was about stripping you down and then starting to build you up, their way. To fall in and drill together as a team we had to lose the “I” by surrendering some of our ego and learning how to take orders from our superiors, even if they were assholes. A hard thing to have to swallow was when we were really right but we had to act like we were wrong to avoid any confrontation with our superiors. There were always some show offs that wanted to look good in front of the instructors. When we ran in formation, a few guys thought that they should run way out in front of the pack. Our Tactical Instructors made sure that they were rewarded with extra work and they lived at the back of the line.
I was standing on the chow line at attention (of course) and I heard this commotion coming from around the corner towards the other chow line. It was some prisoners all chained up to each other and standing heel to toe so that the first guy was commanded to take a step forward, and one by one, they all did the same. They were forced to move looking like a crawling centipede. I figured that we had it hard enough so I couldn’t