3.

Hell Is for Children

As a child, I learned to endure forces beyond my control. My mother had me when she was sixteen years old—a child having a child—on November 8, 1961, in Weems Free Clinic, Boynton Beach, Florida. She couldn’t afford a regular hospital. Born two months prematurely, with hazel eyes and black hair, I only weighed 3 pounds 2 ounces. The clinic was so poor that it didn’t have the incubator a little one like me needed. I was so small, and a baby carrier would’ve been so big, that my mother literally carried me home in a shoe box. The bassinet at home was too large, so they pulled out a drawer from one of the dressers, put blankets in it, and that’s where I slept.

My mother, Millie Kirkman, came from Scottish ancestry and was hardheaded as bricks in a wall. She didn’t show emotion and didn’t show flexibility toward life, working hard every day in a sewing factory to help support my sisters and me. I probably inherited my hardheaded, refusing-to-quit-if-you-think-you’re-right attitude from her—to a fault.

When I was nine years old, she would tell me that Ben Wilbanks, my biological father, had run off and abandoned us. I hated him for that.

The earliest memory I have of my childhood is in West Palm Beach, Florida, when I was four years old—awakened in the middle of the night by a huge man reeking of liquor. His name was Leon, and my mother was dating him. She first met Leon while working as a waitress at a truck stop.

They had just come back from a date. Leon snatched me out of the top bunk, questioning me about why I’d done something wrong that day. Then he slapped me around, hitting me in the face, to the point where I could taste my own blood. That was Leon’s way of helping my mother keep her male child on the straight and narrow.

This was only the beginning. It didn’t always happen at night. Whenever Leon came to the house, he took it upon himself to discipline me. I was terrified, dreading Mom’s next date—literally shaking. My heart felt as though it would beat out of my chest. How bad is it going to be this time? A beating could happen when Leon arrived at the house while my mother got ready or when they came home. Leon wasn’t picky about when he let me have it.

One day after kindergarten, I ran away. On purpose, I got on the wrong school bus. This guy isn’t going to beat me anymore. I’m outta here. The bus took me out in the country somewhere. I had no idea where I was. There were only a few kids left on the bus. It stopped. A kid stood up. I followed him off the bus. The kid walked down the dirt road to his house. I didn’t know what to do at that point—at five years old, I hadn’t put a lot of thought into it. I walked down the dirt road until I got to the house at the end. Then I hung around outside not knowing what to do except stay away from the main road.

After a couple of hours, a man and a woman came home to find me sitting on the back porch, staying out of sight from the main road. The woman asked, “What’s your name?”

“Howard.”

“You must be hungry.” They took me in and fed me.

Later, the woman said, “You know, we got to get hold of your parents. Get you back home.”

“No, no,” I said. “Please, please don’t call my mom. Is there any way I could just live here with y’all?”

They laughed.

I didn’t know what was so funny, but I didn’t tell them the situation. “No, don’t call my mom. Can I just live here with y’all?”

“No, honey. You don’t understand. Your mama’s probably worried sick. What’s your phone number?”

I honestly didn’t know.

“Where do you live?”

I tried to tell them how to get to my house in Lake Worth, Florida, but the bus had taken so many winding roads and turns that I couldn’t remember. Finally, they took me back to my school. There they found my aunt looking for me.

My escape plan had failed. I lied to my mom, telling her I got on the wrong bus by accident.

Within a year or two, my mom married Leon.

Soon afterward, we moved to Screven, Georgia, and we went to see the judge there. In the car, my mother said, “When we see the judge, he’s going to ask you if you want Mr. Leon to be your daddy. You’re supposed to tell him yes.” Leon was the last thing in the world I wanted in my life, but I knew damn well I better say yes, because if I didn’t, I’d probably be killed when we got home. So I did my duty.

The next day, before I went to school, my parents told me, “You tell them at school you’re not a Wilbanks anymore—you’re a Wasdin.” So I did.

Now I was the adopted child and had to see Leon every day. When a lion acquires a lioness with cubs, he kills them. Leon didn’t kill me, but anything that was not done exactly right, I paid for. Sometimes even when things were done right, I paid.

We had pecan trees in the yard. It was my job to pick up the pecans. Leon was a truck driver, and when he came home, if he heard any pecans pop under his wheels, that was my ass. Didn’t matter if any had fallen since I had picked them all up. It was my fault for not showing due diligence. When I got home from school, I’d have to go straight to the bedroom and lie down on the bed, and Leon would mercilessly beat me with a belt.

The next day at school, whenever I used the toilet, I would have to peel my underwear away from the blood and scabs on my butt to sit down. I never got mad at God, but sometimes I asked Him for help: “God, please kill Leon.”

After so much, it got to the point that when the 250-pound man’s belt cut across my lower back, butt, and legs, I wasn’t afraid anymore. Calm down. Stop shaking. It isn’t going to make it any better or any worse. Just take it. I could literally lie there on the bed, close down, and block out the pain. That zombielike state only pissed Leon off more.

*   *   *

My first sniper op came after Christmas when I was seven years old. A ten-year-old boy named Gary, who was the school bully, was big for his age and had beaten up one of my friends. That afternoon, I gathered four of my buddies together. We knew Gary was too big for us to fight using conventional means, but most of us got BB guns for Christmas. “Tomorrow morning, bring your guns to school,” I said. “We’ll wait in the tree at the edge of the playground and get him when he walks to school.” Gary would have to walk down a narrow pathway that served as a natural choke point. The next day, we waited. We had the tactical advantage in numbers, firepower, and high ground. When Gary entered the kill zone, we let him have it. You’d think he’d start running after the first shot—but he didn’t. He just stood there screaming like he’d been attacked by a swarm of bees, grabbing his shoulders, back, and head. We kept shooting. Ms. Waters, one of the teachers, ran toward us screaming bloody murder. Another teacher shouted for us to get down from the tree. Gary had curled up on the ground and hyperventilated as he cried. I felt bad for him because blood was streaming down his head, where most of the BBs had hit him, but I also felt he deserved it for beating up my buddy the previous day. Gary’s shirt was stuck to his back. A teacher took out his handkerchief and wiped Gary’s face.

We had to go to the principal’s office. Our local law enforcement officer sat in, trying not to laugh. I explained, “This kid’s bigger than all of us, and he beat up Chris yesterday.” In my mind, I didn’t understand what we’d done wrong. They confiscated our guns and called our parents. Of course, my dad let me have it big-time when I got home.

Years later, prior to becoming a SEAL, I came home on leave from the navy and sat in a truck with Gary as he drove for my dad. Gary asked me, “You remember shooting me with the BB gun?”

I felt embarrassed. “Yeah, I remember. You know, we were kids.”

“No, no, it’s OK.” He pointed to his left shoulder. “Feel right here.”

I touched his left shoulder—and felt a BB beneath his skin.

“Every once in a while, one of those will work its way out,” he said matter-of-factly. “Sometimes they come out of my scalp. Sometimes they come out of my shoulder.”

“Oh, man. I’m so sorry.”

Later we had a couple of beers and laughed about it.

*   *   *

When I was eight years old, I returned to Florida with Leon and some others to do some peddling, riding around selling produce out of the back of a pickup truck. I handled the sales from the back of the truck while an alcoholic redneck named Ralph Miller drove us around. He would often stop at a liquor store. “I’m stopping here to get some tomato juice. Don’t you like tomato juice?”

“I guess I like tomato juice.”

He would buy a can of tomato juice for me. Later, he started buying a light, zesty tomato juice mixed with onions, celery, spices, and a dash of clam juice: Mott’s Clamato. Ralph drank the same himself.

One time, from the back of the pickup truck, I snuck a peek into the cab. Ralph unzipped his pants and pulled out a bottle of vodka, mixing it in his own Clamato drink. What’s the fun in that? He’s just messing up some good Clamato.

We drove through some of the most dangerous parts of town, selling watermelons and cantaloupes. Once when we stopped in a town called Dania, two guys came up to the back of the truck asking for the price of our produce. One took a watermelon, put it in his car, and then walked to the cab as if to pay Ralph.

Pow!

I turned around and saw the man pointing a .38 revolver at Ralph. Ralph’s leg was bleeding. Shaking, Ralph handed the man his wallet.

The man with the gun asked Ralph, “You didn’t think I’d shoot you, did you?”

I moved to get off the truck.

The gunman’s accomplice told me, “Just stay there.”

Then the gunman pointed his pistol at me.

I jumped off the passenger side of the truck tailgate and hauled butt, expecting to get hit by a bullet any second. I ran so fast that my favorite red straw cowboy hat, which I got from Grandma Beulah’s dime store, flew off my head. For a split second I thought about running back to get my hat, but I decided, That man is going to shoot me if I go back.

I circled around a couple of blocks and found Ralph pulled up to the phone booth in front of a convenience store. I was so happy that he was still alive. Ralph called an ambulance.

The police arrived shortly before the ambulance. As I listened to the cops question Ralph, I found out that he had offered to give the two thugs his money, but not his wallet. That’s when Ralph got shot.

While Ralph went into surgery in the hospital, the police took me to the Dania police station. The detectives questioned me, took me back to the scene, and had me talk through the incident. They had a suspect but realized I was too young and too shocked by what happened to be a credible witness.

It was the first time I had been around such professional men. They took time with me, told me what it was like to be a police officer, and told me what they had to do to become police officers. I was amazed. A narcotics detective showed me all the different kinds of drugs they had taken off the street. They gave me a tour of the police station, and the paramedics next door gave me a tour of their facility. Man, this is so cool. The paramedics even let me slide down the pole. I would never forget them.

That night, they still couldn’t find my dad, so a detective drove me to his home to spend the night. His wife asked, “Have you had anything to eat yet?”

I hadn’t eaten since breakfast. “No, ma’am.”

“Are you hungry?”

“A little bit.”

“OK, let me fix you something to eat.”

The detective said, “We brought him to the station this afternoon, but none of us thought about feeding him.”

“Don’t you know he’s a growing boy?” She gave me a plate of food.

I ate ravenously. Maybe I could just live with these people forever … After my meal, I fell asleep. I was awakened at five o’clock the next morning. The detective took me to the police station, where Dad and his brother, my uncle Carroll, were waiting for me.

The two of them owned a watermelon field where I started working after school and during the summer. Those two were all about work. When they weren’t working their farm, they were driving trucks. As I started contributing to the family, my relationship with Dad, who had stopped drinking, improved.

In South Georgia, where the heat exceeded 100 degrees and the humidity neared 100 percent, I would walk through the field cutting 30-pound watermelons off the vine, place them in a line to throw them over to the road, and then toss them up onto the pickup truck. One of the older guys would back the truck up to the trailer of an 18-wheeler, where I helped pack the watermelons onto the rig. After loading thousands of watermelons, I’d ride on the truck up to Columbia, South Carolina, in the early hours of the next morning to unload and sell the watermelons. I’d get about two hours of sleep before riding back.

When there was an hour or two to spare, my family would sometimes go for a picnic. On one of these picnics, I taught myself how to swim in the slow-moving waters of the Little Satilla River. I had no swimming technique whatsoever, but I felt at home in the water. We went there on a number of weekends: swimming and fishing for largemouth bass, crappie, redbreast, and bluegill.

Occasionally, after working in the watermelon patch, the crew and I went blackwater swimming in Lake Grace. Because of all the tannic acid from the pine trees and other vegetation, both the Little Satilla River and Lake Grace are so black on a good day that you can’t see your feet in the water. In the summer, dragonflies hunt down mosquitoes. From the surrounding woods, squirrels chirp, ducks quack, and wild turkeys squawk. Those dark waters hold a mysterious beauty.

By the time I was thirteen or fourteen, I was running the field crew. I’d leave the side of town where the whites lived and cross the tracks to the Quarters, where the blacks lived. I’d pick up the fifteen to twenty people who were going to work in the field that day and drive them out to the field, organize them, and then work beside them, even though they were almost twice my size.

After work one day, my watermelon crew and I had a contest to see who could swim the farthest from the pier underwater at Lake Grace. The occasional family picnic had offered me the time to improve my swimming. As I swam beneath the surface of the dark brown water, I swallowed with my mouth closed and let a little air out. When I came up, someone said, “You had to be farting. There’s no way you had that much air in your lungs.” Times like this were very rare for me. They were the few times I could truly relax and enjoy myself. Occasionally, we built campfires and talked at night.

Dad didn’t mind if we spent a few hours swimming or fishing, but we never went hunting. My dad let me shoot his gun once in a while, but hunting was an all-day event. That would take too much time away from work. Work was his focus. If I made a mistake or didn’t work hard enough, he beat me.

*   *   *

In junior high school, I hurt my leg playing football in gym class. One of the coaches said, “Let me check your hip out.” He pulled my pants down so he could examine my right hip. He saw the hell that covered me from my lower back down to my upper legs where my dad had recently beaten me. The coach gasped. “Oh, my…” After checking my hip, he pulled my pants up and never said another word. In those days, whatever happened in the home stayed in the home. I remember feeling so embarrassed that someone had discovered my secret.

Despite everything, I loved my parents. It wasn’t entirely their fault they were uneducated and didn’t know how to nurture children. It was all they could do to put food on the table and keep four kids clothed. In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we never got up to self-actualization because we were still on the bottom of the pyramid—trying to feed and clothe ourselves. For the most part, my parents never used bad language. They were God-fearing people. Mom took my sisters and me to church every Sunday. They saw nothing wrong with their child-rearing skills.

Because I was the older brother, Dad expected me to take care of my sisters, Rebecca, Tammy, and Sue Anne. Tammy was always the bigmouthed, crap-stirring troublemaker. From the time she started elementary school, I lost track of how many times she ran her mouth and I had to stick up for her. When I was in the fifth grade, she mouthed off to a guy in the eighth grade. The eighth grader cleaned my clock, giving me two black eyes, a broken nose, and a chipped tooth. When I got home, my dad was the proudest man there was. Never mind that Tammy had done something senseless and provoked a fight. I looked like road kill. No matter how badly that kid beat me, though, if I hadn’t stood up to him, my dad would’ve beaten me worse.

*   *   *

At the age of seventeen, the summer of my junior year in high school, I returned home one afternoon from working all day in the watermelon field, took a shower, and sat in the living room wearing nothing but a pair of shorts. A little while later, Tammy came in the door crying.

My hair was still wet from the shower. “What is it?”

“My head hurts.”

“What do you mean your head hurts, baby?”

“Feel right here.”

I felt her head. She had a knot on top of it.

“We were playing volleyball at the church. When I spiked the volleyball, Timmy picked it up and threw it at me. So I threw it back. He grabbed me and put me in a headlock. Then he punched me on top of the head.”

I went through the roof. Now I was a bull seeing red. Possessed. I ran out of the house, off the porch, vaulted the chain link, and ran down the road one block to the First Baptist Church. Kids and parents were coming out of church from summer Bible school. Deacons stood out front. I spotted Timmy, a boy my age—the boy who’d hurt my little sister.

He turned around just in time to see me coming. “Howard, we need to talk.”

“Oh, no we don’t, you son of a bitch.” I nailed him right in the face, plowing him. I got on top of the boy, straddled his upper body, and pummeled him half to death, cussing up a storm. All I could see in my mind was my baby sister crying with a knot on her head.

A deacon tried to pull me off, but I was seventeen years old and had worked like a dog every day of my life. It took several more deacons to separate me from the boy.

Brother Ron appeared. “Howard, stop.” I believed in Brother Ron and looked up to him. He was like the town celebrity.

I stopped. Brother Ron had exorcised the demon.

Unfortunately, the incident started a feud. The guy’s dad was kind of a psycho, and my dad was a hothead who wouldn’t back down from anybody.

Psycho drove to my house.

Dad met him outside.

“If I see that bastard son of yours somewhere, he may not be making it back home,” Psycho said.

Dad walked into the house and grabbed a shotgun. As he exited the front door, my grandfather met him outside. With my grandfather stood Brother Ron. Dad was about to put a load of double-aught buck in Psycho’s ass. Grandfather and Brother Ron calmed Dad down.

The next weeks were tense for me, looking over my shoulder for a grown man everywhere I went. Timmy had two brothers, too. I rounded up my posse to protect me and didn’t go anywhere alone.

Brother Ron got Dad and Psycho together and had a peaceful “Come to Jesus” meeting. It turned out that things didn’t happen quite the way my smart-mouthed sister had said. Tammy had done something to Timmy. After that, he’d only given her a playful noogie—rubbing his knuckles on her head. I had imagined a bigger bump on her head than there actually was. Our fathers agreed to put everything aside.

Now, I knew I was going to be in big trouble.

Instead, Dad said, “You know, I’d have done the same exact thing, though I might not have cussed as much as you did in the churchyard.”

I wore that like a badge of honor. In spite of my dad’s faults, protecting his family was important to him, and I respected his desire to protect me.

Brother Ron was the glue that held the community together, and the community helped shape who I was.

Besides Brother Ron, another man who influenced me was Uncle Carroll, Dad’s older brother. Uncle Carroll didn’t have a hot temper. He may not have been well educated, but he was intelligent—especially in his dealings with people. Uncle Carroll had friends everywhere. He taught me how to drive a truck because Leon didn’t have the patience. Leon would be angry at the first mistake I made picking watermelons, driving, or anything—it didn’t matter. Uncle Carroll took the time to explain things. When I was learning how to drive an 18-wheeler, Uncle Carroll said, “Well, Howard, no, you shouldn’t have flipped the split axle right then. You should get your RPMs up a little bit more. Now gear back down and go back up…” Being around Uncle Carroll, I learned people skills. Leon and I would be in a truck driving from West Palm Beach, Florida, to Screven, Georgia—eight hours—and hardly speak. We didn’t have conversations. He might say something like, “Do you need to go to the bathroom?” Unless it concerned bodily functions or getting something to eat, we didn’t talk. Both Mom and Dad told us, “Children are supposed to be seen, not heard.” They weren’t BSing, either. If we were ever out in public and said something without someone asking us a question, when we got home, we knew what we were in for. Uncle Carroll was the only one who ever showed me any affection. On occasion, he’d put his arm around my shoulders if he knew Leon had been on my tail unrelentingly the way he usually was. He gave moral support, even a kind word on occasion. Through everything, Uncle Carroll’s support was priceless. If he and I were in the truck, we would stop, go into a restaurant, and eat: breakfast and lunch. With Leon, we would go into a grocery store and get some salami and cheese and make a sandwich in the truck while driving—Leon couldn’t be slowed down. The best thing was that Uncle Carroll gave me words of encouragement. His influence was as critical as Brother Ron’s, maybe even more. Without them, I would’ve harbored some dark thoughts. Probably suicide.

*   *   *

I spent my high school years as an Air Force Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps (JROTC) geek. I loved JROTC, with its discipline, structure, and nice uniform. I was always the outstanding cadet: ranking officer, color guard commander—it gave me something to do and excel at. The light came on, and I learned that I could lead pretty easily.

When it came to girls, though, I was a late bloomer. In October, a month away from being eighteen years old, I asked a buddy, “How does this whole French kissing thing work? What do you do?”

“Howard, you just reach over, put your mouth on hers, stick your tongue in, and go to town.”

I needed a date for the JROTC military ball. My JROTC buddy had a sister named Dianne; everyone called her Dee Dee. I hadn’t really thought about her, but now I figured maybe she would go with me to the ball. Scared and embarrassed, I asked her, “Will you go to the military ball with me?”

“Yes,” she said.

After the dance, Dee Dee said, “Let’s go to the Ghost Light.” I took her to the old make-out spot—where legend said that the ghost of an old decapitated railroad worker walked the railroad tracks searching with his lantern.

When we parked the car, I was petrified. When do I put my lips on hers? What the hell does “stick your tongue in and go to town” mean? Do I go around in circles? What am I supposed to do? So I pretty much talked myself out of it. I turned to tell Dee Dee, You know, we better get back home. She had already moved in for the kill. Her face was right on mine. She gave me my first French kiss. Needless to say, I figured out, This is not quantum physics, and this is OK. We dated the rest of the school year until spring.

The prom was coming, but someone had already asked Dee Dee to it. During home economics class, I asked her friend Laura to the prom—our first date. Laura had a nice body and big breasts. After the prom, in the car, we kissed for the first time. Well, she kissed me and I didn’t resist. Because I grew up in a family that didn’t show affection, her interest in me meant a lot.

*   *   *

Thinking back on my teenage years, I can remember my first surveillance op. There’s not a lot to do in Screven, Georgia, so sometimes we had to create our own fun. One Friday night, Greg, Phil, Dan, and I drove down to the river. We found an old suitcase that had fallen off somebody’s car. We opened it. Inside were some clothes. We threw it in the back of Greg’s truck and thought nothing else about it. As we camped near the river, sitting around a campfire drinking beer and roasting wieners, a malnourished, mangy cat approached us. It looked too wild to come near us, but it must’ve been desperate for food. We threw it a piece of wiener, and the cat gulped it down. One of us tried to pick up the feline, and it went berserk—claws and teeth everywhere. That cat was bad. We used the suitcase to set a trap for it, propping the lid open and putting a wiener inside. When the cat went inside to eat, we dropped the top and zipped up the suitcase. We laughed. Hearing the cat go crazy in the suitcase made us laugh harder. The cat kept going until it was exhausted.

I got an idea. “You know how we wanted to open the suitcase? If we put this on the road, someone will stop and open it.” So we took the suitcase to the road and stood it up on the shoulder near a bridge. Then we concealed ourselves nearby, lying flat on a slope that descended from the street. We waited awhile before the first car drove by. It wasn’t a well-traveled road.

Another car came by, and the brake lights flashed. Then it proceeded forward, did a U-turn, and came back. It passed us and did another U-turn, finally stopping next to the suitcase. An overweight black woman stepped out of the car and picked up the suitcase. After she returned to the car and closed the door, we heard excited talk, as if they had dug up a treasure chest. The car moved forward. Suddenly, the brake lights came back on and the car screeched to a halt. Three of the four doors popped open, and three people ran out of the car cussing at the top of their lungs.

We tried not to laugh.

One of the passengers threw the suitcase down the hill.

“Get it out from under the seat!” another yelled.

A third person grabbed a stick and started poking inside the car to get the cat out from under the seat. The cat finally escaped.

We hadn’t expected them to open the suitcase in the car while it was moving, and we hadn’t intended to harm anyone. Fortunately no one was hurt. The incident gave us a story to keep the laughter roaring at night. I’ll bet those people never picked up anything from the side of the road again. It also became my first covert observation operation.

*   *   *

When I graduated from high school, I stood 5'11" tall, and I’d saved up money for a car and Cumberland College in Williamsburg, Kentucky—a Christian school. All the work saving up for a car had been to no avail, because Tammy totaled my blue 1970 Ford LTD before I even left home, so I had to take the bus instead. Before I stepped on the bus, my mother told Dad, “Hug Howard.” Then she told me, “Go hug your daddy.” Leon put his arms out. We did an awkward hug. It was the first time we had ever hugged each other. Then I had a rare hug with my mother. I got on the bus glad to get the hell out of there.