Dad, please don’t shoot me in the back, I thought to myself. I’d been retrieving pellets from the wooden board used for our target practice, when the vision of him shooting me from behind appeared. Several times, I turned my head for a sideways glance, making sure the gun was not pointed at me. Dad just looked at me and said nothing, but the Larkin boys laughed heartily at my paranoia. I thought of my ancestors lined up at the edge of mass graves, waiting to be shot in the back, one by one, like a factory line of executions; the soon to be executioners finding humor and a perverse justice in their victims’ predicament.
My dad loved his guns, collected them, mostly the wartime variety, including old muskets, civil war rifles, and pistols from both world wars and Nam. He relished his days in the trenches, telling us war stories as he disassembled, cleaned and reassembled each gun on the living room couch, a weekly ritual. The brand new pellet gun was to be used for our father and son bonding, and to transform me into his idea of a real man at age fourteen.
He worried about mom coddling me too much. Extended moments of affection between mom and me were met with his scorn. “Enough of this already!” he would bellow at us. “You will turn him into a sissy!” His eyes glaring at me with a look of disgust, until I escaped mom’s embrace and stood at attention, waiting for his eyes to soften and the berating to stop. Mom always remained passive and silent, throwing her hands up in surrender, giving my face a quick caress when he wasn’t looking.
I was clueless as to what pissed him off about mom holding my hand while we watched scary Boris Karloff movies. What was so wrong about it? She was my mother after all. And dad was welcome to the same kind of affection with mom. She would have allowed it, even welcomed it wholeheartedly – I think she was missing out on that big time. Never was there any sign of affection between them: never a shared laugh, not a hug or kiss on the cheek even, and never any smiles between them. It seemed like mom saved all that up for me, which did not sit well with dad. I think he wondered why mom never responded to him the same way, but he gave her no reason to. No flowers, no I love you, no come here baby…none of that mushy stuff that always makes a lady feel good. But you know, dad was her main man and I never tried to interfere with what goes on, or should go on, between a man and his woman. So what was his problem? Jealousy over me being mom’s go to cuddler? Something else, maybe?
Yep, I knew there were problems in their bedroom at night, as dad often left the bedroom at two or three in the morning in a huff, locking himself in that closet and sometimes breathing heavy there. Things fell into place during one of my snoop sessions, upon finding a stash of porn magazines behind one of those metal gun cases on the back shelf. I discovered what getting it up was generally used for, as the magazine pics enlightened me, even disturbed me – those Nam girls never looking happy about what the man was doing to them, which didn’t look natural or asked for. And those mags, they didn’t look like other mags. There was nothing pro about them, looking like black and whites in plastic sleeves, all of it stitched together. Did dad know these girls? Did the mag photos come from the B & W camera sitting next to the metal gun case? In my gut, I felt the answers to be yes, and this sickened me deep inside.
I buried my head under the pillow at night when my mom’s distressed mumbling and whimpering began in the bedroom, followed by dad’s expletives over her not keeping still enough to finish whatever he was doing. Their bed would creak a lot for a while, muffling mom’s distress. But it would abruptly stop, not having lasted long, and that is when dad left for the closet in that huff. The expressions of those mag girls, the fear on their faces juxtaposed against mom’s weeping and dad’s angry cussing, all of that haunted me to no end. Still does! Some things you never forget.
I had my issues too, but mostly of the getting it down variety, since my body was being flooded with lots of hormone. Seriously, I didn’t know what to do with the damn thing when it misbehaved like that against my will – that morning biological thing that can embarrass a boy at the worst possible moment. Dad caught me like that a few times, especially in the mornings when I ran to the bathroom while trying to hide myself. He would block me from the bathroom, look down at the problem, and then look me in the eyes with a wink and say, “I was young once too, son. Be careful with that God given weapon of yours! Use it wisely.”
A weapon? I didn’t want to know what he meant exactly, but knew there was some connection with those awful porn mags and Nam. I think those girls, as sweet as they looked, were seen as the enemy during that war, something to be hunted down and conquered while their boyfriends, hubbies, and daddies were out fighting, or already dead. That is what my friend Jack told me. He’d heard about this on one of them public television programs about the war. Dad’s mind was still in that war it seemed, poisoned by it, still fighting the enemy, maybe. That is what Jack guessed when I told him about the pics. I concurred with him.
“You need to be tougher, son, before you get the girlies. They go for the tough guys…they respect tough guys, just like those Larkin boys down the street. You need to be a man’s man with them.” He told me this often, repeated it many times, sometimes with a hint of compassion in his usually uptight face – those jaw muscles taking a break from all that continuous clenching.
“Maybe roughhouse with the Larkin kids down the street,” he would say. “Take a few bumps and bruises to get toughened up for the world and the girlies you like. Stop the sissy stuff with mom.” He repeated this often as well, but the Larkin boys were the same punks that terrorized me at school on a daily basis. They were built like adult wrestlers by the seventh grade, being tall, full of muscle, sporting hairy arms and some beard growth, and full of a steroidal like rage that got targeted on the defenseless ones, including me at the time. I was not about to tangle with them outside of school, as they would surely leave me broken up and bloody, and mom would have none of that. She would’ve been horrified at my daily abuse at school, which I kept a secret from her.
Mom came up with a solution one day though, after dad had another fit about me staying home so much with her. She came up with the idea of “Gun Play!” I was shocked at first, that my mom who despised any kind of violence, would suggest something like this, but it actually made sense after thinking about it.
Dad loved his guns, and it seemed like a harmless activity to share with me in the privacy of our backyard, as long as real bullets were not used, something mom insisted upon. Both dad and I liked the concept of it, as he equated manhood with weaponry, and I could avoid after school beatings with the Larkin boys.
The pellet gun was a high powered air pistol meant for target practice, but capable of penetrating flesh – how far I didn’t know. We picked it out together one Sunday afternoon at the local sporting goods store, after trying out several models. The salesman said that the pellets could travel faster than 1,000 feet per second, and could kill a small animal if shot at close range. Dad was intrigued and said, “Oh really, that much firepower, huh?” He aimed the gun at something – I don’t know what – and whispered “bang” while dramatizing the recoil of a high powered gun – a real one with gun powder and all. His eyes looked glazed over, as if he were back in Nam, reliving or relishing a special moment, maybe putting a bullet into Charlie. I felt sick inside watching him, but wondered what was wrong with me.
Do most boys my age want to be like their dad? A dad that daydreams about his former kills in Nam – real human beings? I wondered about this.
I knew the Larkin boys were aching to kill something or someone by the time they reached seventh grade. I remember that one awful day, during recess, when they and a crowd of other boys, took pleasure in stoning a crippled bird to death, an early version of gang rape I guess, something I could not wrap my head around back then. I was horrified at what they did to that poor little birdie, still am. They were like the bigger boys in Nam who did awful things to those girls. There was no proper supervision or an assertive momma to tell them what not to do.
Anyways, dad told mom it was not a firearm, since only compressed air was used, not explosive gun powder. I guess that fooled mom and me, thinking it was not much different than one of my cap guns. A cap gun it was not though, and my hand, smaller than the hands of most boys, was a problem. The handgrip was too wide to comfortably fit my hand, making the trigger difficult to pull. This pissed off dad, and he said, “If you lifted weights and played football like other boys, your hand would not be so small and dainty. This is the pellet gun we’re getting, nothing will fit that hand of yours, not until you man up!” That sick feeling in my belly turned to a feeling of dread.
Maybe taking my licks from the Larkin duo is the better option? I thought that to myself.
It was not that I had anything against guns. I loved guns, not real ones, but the make believe kind that fit my hand perfectly. Me and Jack – my neighborhood buddy – had been playing cops and robbers with our cap guns for several years. In fact, we had our own arsenal of toy pistols and rifles that we’d pooled together at the back wall of dad’s shed. The summers, when dad was too busy to notice me, were the best summers of all – they felt like endless summers. Jack and I created imaginary worlds in my yard. We could be anything that made us feel good and strong: cops, SWAT teams, war heroes, cowboys, bad guys that eventually turned good, and just about anything else that suited our fancy at the time. Our guns are what made it all possible – replicas that could be mistaken for the real thing unless examined up close, and that was enough for the fantasy. I was a man’s man, a good man, the son that dad wanted when I was packing heat – albeit toy heat.
That pellet gun though, well, it was not something to horse around with, and dad warned me about this on the day we met in his walk-in closet, his man cave furnished with suits, ties, dress shirts, stacks of sixers, wall to wall shelving for his assortment of weaponry, Nam memorabilia, hidden cash, those nasty porn mags, and only God knows what else – to be further investigated during future snoop sessions. But on this day, I wasn’t supposed to be in there, and he wasn’t supposed to be home when he walked in on me.
“What are you doing in here, son? I told you to stay out of here.” He gave me that, You better have a good excuse or make one up quickly look, with those scrunched up forehead wrinkles and deadened eyes, as if he heard a branch snap in the brush and was on high alert, ready to blow Charlie to smithereens. That angry, raging part of dad was always one short step away from being triggered. Yep, a hair trigger personality they sometimes called it.
Swallowing hard, I said, “Mom told me to grab another sixer for the refrigerator,” hoping mom would have my back on this, knowing his bad temper and all. His head drooped slightly and eyes deadened even more while they focused on me, followed by seconds of silence, before turning to retrieve the new pellet gun and box of pellets from the high shelf.
“The pellets could poke your eye out, son. This is not a toy,” he said, as he affectionately wiped down the gun with a clean white cloth, looking as though he were about to kiss the damn thing. “I better not catch you snooping around in this closet again, or you and your queer friend Jack fucking with this gun. Okay, boy?” I nodded, unable to vocalize anything while silently choking on my own saliva, my eyes unintentionally drifting to the spot on the shelf where I found those mags. Dad immediately followed my eyes there, and said, “Looking for something, son?”
“No dad, just looking.”
He gave me that deadened stare again, but even more dead this time, like he was waiting for his POW to crack under pressure, but I admitted to nothing. He knew that I found those mags, I was sure of it, but he let it go for the time being.
“Okay son, but THIS HERE GUN better not move an inch on this shelf…not until we take it out on Saturday, okay? Are we clear on this, BOY?” His voice reached a crescendo with the articulation of “boy,” and he looked ready to erupt, his eyes dilating and all, but he kept it barely contained, like a shaky lid on top of a boiling pot of water.
“Yes, Dad,” I replied.
I imagined him checking the closet shelf every night, measuring the distance between the gun and edge of the shelf, maybe even dusting it for Jack’s fingerprints. And those mags, I could not stop seeing those scared girls in my head, and he knew it I think, and me and mom being so close…this spelled trouble for me. I was not a tattle-tale, but if mom knew about those mags and what he did with them at night after making her cry, or what I think he’d done to girls like that in Nam…oh my God, he would’ve wanted to kill me for telling on him. I never in fact told on dad, but what he thought is what mattered, and he suspected me for sure. I knew it in my gut from those deadpan eyes of his.
Things would have been different had mom been like dad’s mom, a self-assertive woman who never minced words, telling it the way it was. Mom told me that grandma hollered a lot, always keeping dad in his place until he left for Nam, where she could not watch him anymore. She would have wooped his butt if catching him with those dirty mags, and maybe even pushed a bar of soap into his mouth. That is what the moms from them old days used to do. Shooting me in the yard would never have come up with a mom like grandma, but that was not my reality, not with a mom as sweet and passive as those Nam girls.
When Saturday finally came, I was scared out of my pants! The routine was to remove the pellets from the wooden target after each round of target practice, and I was elected to be the remover. I didn’t like the idea of turning my back on dad when he had that loaded gun in his hand, was frightened of it, especially with all this stuff going on with mom and me and that porn stash I found. So, after the first round – dad’s round – I looked back at dad again and again, to make sure his gun was not pointed at my back while removing them pellets.
“Aw Isaac, are you afraid that your pop is going to pop you in the back? Pull out the pellets you fairy!” Lenny Larkin said this to me while continuing that obnoxious laugh with his drunk brother Lucas, both of them drinking dad’s beers. Dad had invited both Larkin boys and Mr. Larkin, a big game hunter and Nam vet, to our backyard for the Saturday unveiling of the pellet gun.
They are going to ambush me!
My backyard, the place where I’d felt the most safe and had my fondest memories with my pal Jack, had become my execution chamber, so I thought. The executioners: my dad who wanted to kill me over mom and those magazine girls I’d found; Mr. Larkin, the big game hunter who saw anything and everything as prey; and them Larkin boys who were always up for a bloody slaughter and hated my guts.
This is the end of the line for me, for sure. That thought kept running through my head, every second almost.
Both dad and Mr. Larkin stood there silent though, with deadpan expressions, doing nothing to control the boys – their rage getting bolstered with that sixer of dad’s Heinikens, waiting for their drunken turn with my dad’s pellet gun. Lord help me, I thought. Mr. Larson’s hand kept absent-mindedly feeling between his legs while discreetly looking towards the house from time to time, looking for my mom maybe – he looked like that kind, the kind that looked at those magazines too, or maybe made them. Dad held the pellet gun to his side, watching me carefully, as if waiting to get an unobstructed view of Charlie’s back, before drawing his semi-automatic and firing.
Dad is having flashbacks of Nam, like the ones Jack told me about! He thinks I’m Charlie! I feared this something bad and was terrified.
I looked up and saw mom peering out the kitchen window, tears rolling down her cheeks from seeing the fear on my face and the behavior of the others, looking scared for both of us, realizing the mistake she’d made with her suggestion of “Gun Play,” and maybe the mistake she made marrying dad.
I heard mom’s anguished mumbling and weeping from the night before, saw the faces of those terrified young girls in the mags; all those horrors replaying in my mind again. I imagined my great papa and nana standing at the edge of the mass grave, looking down into it, their backs to the Nazi henchmen, passively waiting for their ending – no fight left in them, not after being led to their slaughter with lies, betrayed by trusted neighbors even. I remembered Lenny, Lucas, and them other boys beating the injured birdie to death. I was getting drunk too, but on these replays in my mind, imagining them over and over, fermenting them into a cauldron of rage, until my mind began to act upon it and create an alternative ending…Maladaptive daydreaming the doctors would call it nowadays.
The daydream went something like this:
I pick up the wooden board and hold it high above my head while letting out a guttural groan and baring my teeth.
“What are you doing son?” dad asks me. “Put the wood down son.”
Lenny, still laughing and burping on the beer, exclaims, “What the fuck is this moron doing! Put the board down asshole!”
I struggle to maintain the board over my head, the wood is too thick for my smallish hands and too heavy – weighing maybe 75 pounds – but I keep this hidden from the others, showing no sign of my weakness.
I tell them, “Get the hell out of my backyard, ALL OF YOU! The pellet gun is for me and my dad to play around with, and that beer is his. Put down the beers and leave our yard, now! I’m giving you until the count of 10 to pick up your things and leave!”
Lenny’s previous ear to ear smile quickly turns upside down into a sharply defined frown, pulling down every visible muscle and tendon in his face. For once, his stupid looking smile has been wiped clean from his face, because of me! The replacement frown is hideously ugly, making me hate him even more. This hate is palpable in every muscle in my body, making them stronger. I’m wanting to hurt him, hurt him bad!
Dad just watches the spectacle of my meltdown, maybe recognizing the signs of a MAN ready to act and pull the trigger, so to speak. He’s seen it often enough in Nam, I suppose. His war buddy, Mr. Larkin, appears to be frozen, looking at dad and then back at me, and then repeating this several times like a broken record, before folding his arms and stepping back a few feet, not knowing what to make of the unfolding scenario, and stunned by my transformation.
Lenny’s massive frown, now stretching almost to the ground, begins moving towards me, with just a hint of hesitation. That is all I see, his ugly frown moving towards me, nothing else, no body or nothing.
“Come on tough guy, give me the wood.” His voice stumbles a bit and he clears it several times, trying to maintain some appearance of composure. His eyes scan my entire face like he is looking for a tick stuck in it, wondering what to make of me now, or maybe looking for some hint of fear in me, but I reveal nothing except resolve. I stand there staring him down, feeling my legs become firmly locked into the ground, my arms bulging with muscle while keeping the wood above my head. The blood in my veins pumping forcefully – feeling my neck pulsating with it.
“COME ON!!!” Lenny pushes out with all his strength, as if constipated in the bathroom, the space between his front teeth now clearly visible to me, his left cheek twitching badly. I don’t move though. I continue to hold my ground and the wood above me. And so he tries a softer approach. “Give me the wood, Isaac, just give it to me!” But this don’t work either.
And now brother Lucas takes his turn, after having moved near the yard gate, apparently ready to leave Lenny and dad Larkin to fend for themselves. “Yeah, come on dude, give Lenny the wood,” he says. “Come on Isaac, just give it to him, we were just playing with you.”
This is the first time either of them have ever used my real name. They don’t know me anymore, they don’t know what I am willing or not willing to do, and so first names are now the protocol for them. I’m now just as dangerous as dad’s pellet gun, nobody knowing what will pull the trigger in my head, including shaming me with names like “fairy” and “asshole.”
Lenny moves closer to me, more deliberately now, but dragging along his perpetual frown that seems reluctant to follow…as if pulling a screaming child who refuses to walk. For just an instant, I feel some compassion for Lenny, the predicament he created for himself, but there is no turning back for me. Posing but not following through is nothing but posing, which is NOTHING!
“DO IT NOW!” I hear those words, like they are coming from the top of Mount Sinai. I need to do this for mom, those magazine girls, the little birdie, my great nana and papa, and most of all for me.
I fall back a few steps like a quarterback, cock my arms with the wood slightly above and behind my head, and then RELEASE, with the loudest and most dreadful sounding scream to ever come from me. The sound of it reverberates throughout the entire neighborhood, bouncing between walls, off of trees, shaking windows, making wall paintings crooked! Like a projectile coming off a slingshot, the 75 pounds of wood flies through the air like a football, striking Lenny Larkin’s ugly face, knocking out his front teeth, breaking his nose and jaw, and lacerating his cornea with a splinter of wood. The blood spurts in every direction.
Lenny stands there at first, stunned in disbelief, his messed up face silently communicating the words, HOW COULD YOU? He stares at me for several moments before covering his face with both hands and falling to the ground. Had I violated some unwritten rule or pact between victim and bully? Was I supposed to embrace my role as victim? Frankly, I didn’t give a shit in that moment of glory! I fucked up Lenny Larkin and staked my claim to life!
Lucas cries out next, “Look what you’ve done to my brother!” He wants to swear at me, tries to, but can only stare at me and make mouth movements that never come together into words. His angry, impotent, crunched up face almost looking as bad as Lenny’s horrid frown that is all broken up now and bloody. His dad runs to Lenny’s side, attending to his wounds.
Dad just stands there with a smirk, and gives me his nod of approval, handing me the pellet gun, which I discharge into the ground several times, leaving it empty of pellets. I go off into the house and collapse into mom’s arms, crying hard like a baby.
In the epilogue of the daydream, dad goes on to have a weird sense of pride about the entire affair, bragging about HIS SON’s confrontation with the big bully, even though Mr. Larkin would sue dad for Lenny’s facial reconstruction and dental work. That would have been the turning point between us, if only it happened that way, but it really didn’t.
I could have imagined more, but the immediate REALITY of the situation was upon me: two thugs wanting to see my blood being spilled; my dad having the motive to snuff me out with the pellet gun in hand; Mr. Larkin, the big game hunter, itching to kill something, anything, or do bad things to mom like what happened to them girls in Nam; and mom looking upon all this with tears streaming down her tender face, frightened that my death would leave her own longevity or dignity in jeopardy, as I was the only thing between her and this yard full of crazies. I could not escape this any further, not even through such a great daydream – which was nothing but a temporary escape or reprieve at most.
My fight-or-flight response was now in high gear, prompting me for a decision – whether to flee the scene, taking mom with me, or going into battle with dad and the Larkins. Everything was hanging in the balance: the dignity of mom and those girls in the mags and Nam, justice for the little birdie and my great papa and nana, and personal redemption for all those times I didn’t stand up for myself and others. The weight of the world was upon me in that moment of decision.
But as usual, I did nothing. What could I have done with those small hands of mine? And so, I pulled out those pellets while praying for my continued existence, and then watched Mr. Larkin take his turn. There wasn’t time to do much else though.
Mom came out of the house in a rage – like I’d never seen before – and hollered something fierce at dad about them boys drinking the beers, and that is when the shooting stopped. Mom was passive about a lot, but giving underage boys beer around a loaded gun was crossing the line, even for her, so she hollered about it like a crazy woman, and embarrassed dad a LOT – he turned all colors out there, something else I’d never seen before. I thought maybe he was having flashbacks of grandma – his mom – being alive again, hollering at him and setting him straight, like she’d done way back.
Mr. Larkin got a chuckle from mom’s hollering while staring her up and down – sending a chill down my spine – but mom gave him this long stare with no blinking, like she was about to kill the guy. This turned his head around in a hurry, and I didn’t see him look at her again, not even a sideways glance. Something about that stare scared him – maybe his momma stared him down that way too. The Larkin boys just stood there, looking puzzled about the entire episode. Mom had suddenly become a force to be reckoned with. Nobody was happy about it, except for maybe me.
After calming down a bit, mom provided us with hot dogs, chips, and soda. All of us sat around the picnic table in the yard, including my two sisters who laughed nonstop at the disgusting antics of the Larkin boys. Those boys spared me any further humiliation though, maybe some kind of remote sense of table etiquette, even for thugs like them…or maybe mom scared them too. But still, I wish that I’d stood up to them, like in the daydream, or been able to scare them with one of my proper fitting cap guns, but life didn’t work that way, not for me, not for someone with small hands like mine. Lenny ended up in some kind of juvenile jail a few weeks later, and I never heard a thing about him again. Lucas just ignored me without his brother being around anymore. That was all well and good, but I still felt like a coward, still do.
After the Saturday shootout, I decided to stay out of the closet, and mom and me saved the hugging and cuddles for when dad was not around, kind of like our own secret affair. I’d decided that not doing anything to upset dad was the secret to avoiding his wrath and attention. And so dad never bothered me again about the pellet gun – I never saw it again. Come to think of it, he stopped bothering me in just about every way. Never as much as a nod or word from him, other than things like, “Time for dinner Isaac” or “Pick up your things before mom gets mad, Isaac.” Things like that. And this was fine with me, and mom I think.
I kind of liked the change in dad, I’m sorry to say. I knew that being rough and tough and manly was important to him, but mom had emasculated him with that hollering on the day of the shootout. Something had snapped inside mom that day and she was never the same. After that, she continued hollering at just about anything she didn’t like, and dad became the passive one. The balance of power had changed. Mom was now in control, and maybe dad’s mom was too, thru them flashbacks, even though she’d passed a long while ago. Enough was enough for the moms. It was so bad for dad that he stopped playing with his guns on the couch, and I never heard mom mumble or cry again in the bedroom – I think she was done with him in that way, as he’d become more like a passive child now, and he had to accept it or be hollered at some more.
Dad began avoiding his closet too, except for quickly getting his ties and shirts, maybe not wanting to draw attention after I discovered his perverted stash, and wanting to avoid mom’s wrath of course. In fact, one day he suddenly got real old and shaky, and cleaned out the closet with the help of Mr. Larkin, who took a lot of the stuff with him after giving dad some cash. Mom stood close by watching over things with her arms folded. Funny thing was that Mr. Larkin still could not look at mom anymore. She’d done something to him too with that hollering and hostile staring in the yard that day.
Anyway, nothing was left but cleaning supplies and other household stuff, and mom finally had access to the closet, it became like hers. I think dad lost his identity that day, his man cave being invaded, scoured out, and occupied by the moms.
Dad just slowly withered away after that, supposedly from something called Agent Orange – that crap they dropped on the forests of Vietnam to expose Charlie. I guess that he got too many whiffs of it. The poison weakened him badly until he just died one day. I felt kind of bad for him, but there is something called poetic justice in the world. It is real you know. Dad sealed his fate with all that Nam stuff and his secret wish to shoot me dead in the yard – maybe over those mags I’d snooped, or because mom was more mine than his. Mom stepped in though and set him straight, brought him under control, maybe with the help of grandma or the flashbacks of her. That is what I think anyway. I just wish that the moms took control before those Nam girls got dealt with. But you know, that is life. Always a day late and a dollar short – Jack’s favorite saying.
© 2019 David M. Rubin. All rights reserved.
Glossary:
Charlie – During the Vietnam war, American soldiers often used the name “Charlie” when referring to the enemy – individuals aligned with communist forces in Vietnam.
Nam – An abbreviation for Vietnam, often used by veterans of the Vietnam war.
Sixer – Six pack of beer
POW – Prisoner of war
Notes:
1)This story is entirely fictional. All events, situations, circumstances, and characters depicted in this story are the products of my creative imagination. Any similarities between story characters and specific people in the real world are purely coincidental and unintentional. My characters are composites of “possible” personality types, behaviors, and quirks that interest me.
2)The majority of soldiers in the Vietnam war made great personal sacrifices and performed their duty with honor, dignity, and compassion. This story does not intend to imply otherwise, but focuses on the boys and men who exploit others when given the opportunity – often the end result of antisocial upbringing or the damaging effects of childhood abuse, bullying, and/or the traumas of war.
Notes from David 