From The Wilderness, Article Five
THE RAIDER Newsreel The FBI recently served a warrant on Trump’s home in Florida. The warrant was a search document that specified classified documents illegally removed from official depositories and never returned when the President became the ex-President. No...
From The Wilderness, Article Four
GHOSTLY WEAPONS AND PLATFORMS NEWSREEL BY JAMES STRAUSS Back in 1980, while taking my daily run up and down the beach that fronts the western side of San Clemente, California, I saw a strange chunk of frayed and worn plastic bobbing in the surf line. I stopped and...
From The Wilderness, Article Three
From The Wilderness Article Three THE STARS UP ABOVE The first Star Trek television series came out on television just as I was heading off to Vietnam in 1968. Later versions came along after I got home. All of them had some fantastic electronic equipment that the...
From The Wilderness, Article Two
From The Wilderness Article Two Confidential The war in Ukraine. The war is not about Russia invading to take over one of the independent countries that left the Soviet Union…so that Putin can rebuild that fallen empire. No, the Ukrainian war is about nuclear...
From The Wilderness, Article One
FROM THE WILDERNESS Confidential Streaming Newsreel Article One Have you noticed the real foundational problem so well illustrated by the current political environment in the United States? The problem is not really about bad leadership. That’s the result of the...
THE COWARDLY LION, Volume Two, Chapter X
I entered the Union Bank Building elevator, the building itself located on the grounds of the Fashion Island shopping center in Newport Beach. The building was just another square high rise but the elevator buttons pointed out one uncommon irregularity. The address I...
THE COWARDLY LION, Volume Two, Chapter IX
The driver of the Lincoln limo was a man I didn’t recognize from the compound, but then I wasn’t surprised. I circulated among but knew very few of the men and women who constantly flowed in, through and around the Western White House and its grounds. I was so low on...
THE COWARDLY LION, Volume Two, Chapter VIII
I left the compound as I’d come in, feeling about the same. Although the Beach Patrol part of my life with the San Clemente Police Department was unsettled, it was at least predictable and there also seemed to be no inherent danger in working with the personnel, the...
The King, Arch Patton Adventure
It was Eritrea. A country that was even more impoverished than the neighboring Ethiopia, but not as well advertised as being so bereft of money, or any of the niceties related to the possession or spending of money. Asmara is the capital of Eritrea, not that more...
THE COWARDLY LION, Volume Two, Chapter VII
The one thing I’d come to understand about whatever it was I was supposed to be doing for the Western Whitehouse, at first with Haldeman and now no doubt with Mardian, was immediacy. When people in their positions wanted something, they wanted it right now. Physically...
THE COWARDLY LION, Volume Two, Chapter VI
The front hubs on the Bronco had obviously never been turned before. It took all the strength I had in my wrists to slowly move the hubs a hundred and eighty degrees. Finally, they were turned. I got back in the Bronco, backed up, and faced the six-foot-high berm of...
THE COWARDLY LION, Volume Two, Chapter V
Chapter V Chief Murray and I stood, looking at the specially equipped and painted Boeing 707, with a big American flag painted brilliantly on the vertical part of its tail, until Kissinger, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman disappeared into its side door. The plane was called...
THE COWARDLY LION, Volume Two, Chapter IV
Chapter IV I pulled away from home in the Volks, only wanting to escape back onto the stretches of beach I realized I was finding some solace driving, if not doing anything else productive. Vietnam had come again out of nowhere. Nguyen, reaching forward from the past,...
THE COWARDLY LION, Volume Two, CHAPTER III
I spent the next four days working out, as best I could. I had the endurance to run five miles straight, but I hadn’t regained the speed I one had before being shot and operated on so much. My fears about the coming academy stretch were active, particularly at...
THE COWARDLY LION, Volume Two, Chapter II
The uniform shop in Santa Ana was located on the main drive passing through the center of the rather over-populated and kind of ragged city. San Clemente was much smaller, tighter and kept its streets, sidewalks and plant life in much better shape. Of course, San...
The Cowardly Lion, Volume Two, Chapter I
My first day working with the Home of the Western White House, as the Cotton Estate was becoming known everywhere in and around the town of San Clemente, wasn’t a workday at all. After reporting in to the remarkably strange and alienating H.R. Haldeman, there was...
The Cowardly Lion, Chapter XXVII
Craig and I rode in his 1960 Pontiac Bonneville Convertible. He’d driven in and picked me up outside my apartment, as he lived at the bachelor officer’s quarters on the base. We didn’t drive from there in silence, but we drove without talking. The Bonneville’s...
The Cowardly Lion, Chapter XXVI
This Chapter is dedicated to Jim Flynn The entire mess of paperwork that transferred the GTO to Slate and the 1969 Volkswagen bug to me took almost an hour. The Volkswagen was brought out from the back of the dealership and parked for me to drive. The GTO had...
Editorial Published In The Geneva Shore Report September 1, 2021
OPINION/EDITORIAL THE THIRTEEN SAMURAI Thirteen American warriors died at a gate leading into Kabul Airport in Afghanistan the other day. Those warfighters belonged to the same unit I was wounded while serving in Vietnam so many years before. Sometimes those...
THE COWARDLY LION, Chapter XXV
The day wore on, my time spent playing with Julie, watching her sleep, and trying most unsuccessfully to write about what had happened to me in Vietnam. How to tell a story and have it accepted in a time when no such story was going to be received by anything other...
THE COWARDLY LION, Chapter XXIV
Piaget, the man who owned, with his prisoner brother, the San Clemente Hotel, was a font of information and assistance, although arcane in attire, language usage, and personal style. “Do you have a first name?” was one of the first things I asked him when we got a...
THE COWARDLY LION, Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIII The trip onto the base was quick and easy, although getting through the gate for the first time without having to travel ten more miles to Mainside to sit, qualify for, and get a base sticker, was a bit problematic. The two guards were suspicious of the...
THE COWARDLY LION, Chapter XXII
It was hard to imagine, much less witness, that everything my wife, daughter and I owned could be fit into the interior spaces of a 1966 GTO. Nothing was attached or tied on the outside. I’d been raised in a Coast Guard family where the frequent moves were paid for by...
Fourth of July, 2021
Thoughts on July Fourth, 2021 If you do not have power in a democracy, or in any other structure of cultural gathering, then you damn well better have the potential to get power and to be able to transmit the image of that potential to others around you. On this 4th...
The Crumbling System…
Where is the logic and why is the might, the huge and world-shaking might, of the United States of America so fractured and rendered powerless and little more than useless in emergency situations? Where was the body of investigative forces that should have gone...
The Cowardly Lion, Chapter XXI.
The crowd was stirred up for the coming run, as Danny Ongais climbed into the GTO and belted up. Mickey and his helpers, many more than had been around before, gathered behind the car and pushed it to a place just a few feet from the starting line. The near-identical...
The Cowardly Lion, Chapter XX
I walked into the room, turned, and handed the orders to my wife, tossing the useless envelope it’d come in onto the couch located across our small living room. “Hand-delivered by a Naval messenger,” I said, not knowing what else to say, my mind already beginning to...
THE COWARDLY LION, Chapter XIX
I was surprised by the obvious difference in the way I was received at the gas station from previous visits. I knew it was the uniform, as well as the Saran treatment that kept me from looking like a weakened Hunchback of Notre Dame creature. Mickey’s friends, those...
The Cowardly Lion, Chapter XVIII
The trip to Yerba Buena Island wasn’t remarkable in any way, except for the fact that I remained entranced with the passing scenes of difference and beauty that the entire San Francisco basin always offered. Pat drove her low-powered Pontiac to the parking lot and I...
THE COWARDLY LION. Chapter XVII
I walked outside the office and onto the gravel trail leading up to the parking lot I’d come down from earlier in the day. I heard a motorcycle start up behind me. I stopped and turned. The motorcycle drove slowly up to me on the gravel. I stepped off to one side....
THE COWARDLY LION, Chapter XVI
Getting a full Marine Corps Class-A green uniform together took more work than I expected. My report date was for the next day, as there were no free or lull days in Marine Corps life. I had been determined to be available for duty and ordered to my duty station....
THE COWARDLY LION, Chapter XV
My wife drove Mickey’s 442, since she wouldn’t let me drive, as we made our way to Highway 280, then 80 across the Bay Bridge, onto 580 to head back south to where the hospital was set back on Mountain Boulevard some distance from the MacArthur Freeway. “Why do all...
The Cowardly Lion, Chapter XIV
I’d been home for a week before my first contact came in from Oak Knoll, but it wasn’t from the medical side. It was from Johannson, the Marine Corps liaison officer both Mary and I’d dealt with when I was in the ward with the other prisoners. The call came in at...
THE COWARDLY LION, Chapter XIII
The .45 was in the box it’d come in when the commanding general of the base at Quantico had awarded it to me. My wife had put it up, and as far back on the top shelf of our bedroom closet, as she could. She and Pat had taken Julie to the shopping center for some...
THE COWARDLY LION, Chapter XII
My daughter was a very definitive curly blond thing that was simply delightful at every point of her five-month existence, and for some unknown reason, in spite of my shattered condition, colostomy bag, and scant physical presence, she found me to be the apple of her...
The Cowardly Lion, Chapter XI
There was no delay, no time given, no quarter extended by my body, nor begged for by my mind. I’d never detoxed before, although the pain had become an old bad friend. The codeine tablets in my nearby metal drawer, twenty-three of them, got me through the night and...
THE COWARDLY LION, Chapter X
The flight was nothing more or less than a disjointed series of buzzing noises, vibrations, and brief bouncing bouts where my plastic cocoon swayed out a few inches from the metal bulkhead, and then gently smacked back into it. I was aware, but unaware, both at the...
THE COWARDLY LION, Chapter IX
I watched Japanese television. I didn’t understand almost any of it, but Shoot had clued me in, early on, that the Japanese had no qualms about showing bare female breasts on their regular programming. That part of Japanese television was okay. Rory had come and gone...
THE COWARDLY LION, Chapter VIII
I was awakened by the pain and by the noises being emitted from within my room. I stared over at the figures of Pus, Kathy and Barbara, gathered together as they worked to set up an additional bed and get all the connections correct. Barbara was the first to notice...
Genuflection, an Arch Patton Adventure
The mission was over and there was nothing to be done for it. New orders would find him no matter where he went or what he did. His control didn’t care and would never inquire. But there was to be no celebration of wine in Paris or guzzling of beer along the banks of...
THE COWARDLY LION, Chapter VII
THE COWARDLY LIONChapter Seven I went on my Sippy diet a few days later, while also being proud of myself for not giving in to the morphine shots coming every three hours instead of every four. General Masters visited all the time, and even went to the extra effort of...
The Duke, Part Thirty-Nine
The Duke Part XXXIX The Blue Island waited, quietly tucked in between two other buildings, all three linked together instead of having any space between them at all. A small neon sign in the front window indicated that it was open, although, upon getting close,...
The Thanksgiving Bear
THANKSGIVING BEAR By James Strauss The cut was two and a half miles wide. That’s what the data beamed down from the satellite told Straight when he’d first checked two years before. The short distance across the cut was vital because the tide was fast, hard, vicious,...
The Duke, Part Thirty-Eight
THE DUKE Part XXXVIII Darren followed Star into the home, expecting a party atmosphere, or to hear Elvis singing off in some corner of the living room like had been the case the previous time he’d met him. But there was none of that. Instead, once he made the turn...
The Duke, Part Thirty-Seven
THE DUKE Part XXXVII Darren stopped at the wall, waited a few seconds before leaping up, and then, once atop the wall, sat down on a projecting rock instead of jumping over the wire and down to the other side. He had to think the whole thing through, as best he could....
The Duke, Part Thirty-Six
THE DUKE Part XXXVI Darren walked toward his home, wanting nothing more than a hot shower to remove the nearly ingrained aroma of cooked meat and shellfish following his shift at the Cannon Club. The waitresses had been stunned by the fifty dollar tip the Colonel...
The Duke, Part Thirty-Five
THE DUKE Part XXXV In the short time that it took for the Duke to isolate and pull Star aside, and Judy and her sister were treated like they didn’t exist on the planet, Darren considered what had happened, and what had almost happened. His mind ran at light speed,...
THE COWARDLY LION, Chapter VI
THE COWARDLY LION Chapter VI Shoot appeared from seeming nowhere. I hadn’t noticed the doors swinging at all. He helped my brother back to a vertical position and gave him a towel, and then went to work cleaning up the mess on the...
The Duke, Part Thirty-Four
THE DUKE Part XXXIV Darren hadn’t even seen Judy since the very first discussion he’d had with Mrs. Levy and he instantly regretted that their first encounter would be in such an exposed and potentially embarrassing place and situation. He decided that, since there...
THE COWARDLY LION, Chapter V
THE COWARDLY LION Chapter Five There was night and day in the I.C.U., only the night was brought about by merely dimming the existent lighting enough so that the pain drug clock could barely be seen. Visitors did not come at night. Doctors only came if emergency care...
The Duke, Part Thirty-Three
THE DUKE Part XXXIII Jimmy and Darren climbed the steps onto the small long lanai that ran out from the center of the main building, and a low white fence made of what looked like narrow bowling pins. There were Koa wood chairs, of the most expensive sort, lined...
The Duke, Part Thirty-Two
THE DUKE Part XXXII Darren staggered out from the breakfast, his face so white that Henrietta ran after him to make sure he was okay. “You Haole boy, but you okay,” she said when he stopped briefly to respond to the grip she had on his left forearm. “Your mom...
The Duke, Part Thirty-One
THE DUKE Part XXXI Jimmy’s usual parking place was available, without any cars in the slots in front of or behind it. No parallel parking was necessary. Jimmy pulled right in, slightly sliding the rear end almost into contact with the curb before stopping. Darren...
THE COWARDLY LION, Chapter IV
The room was silent, as the three colonels shifted and arranged papers in their laps. The major held up a single sheet of thick paper and began to read, as the staff sergeant readied her hands over a small electronic device that sat on the tiny top shelf of her...
The Duke, Part Thirty
THE DUKE Part XXX The night’s work was one of intent busy work, Darren running back and forth to the kitchen from all dining positions out on the open floor. A small musical group played on the small stage set behind the open-air dance floor. Darren avoided the...Subscribe to FROM THE WILDERNESS
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