Apaches, Glocks, Hellfires, and TV Remotes

It’s day three of this forty year visit with my family in western South Carolina, and I’ve moved on from the carrion-shredded-by-demons stage of my extreme state of consciousness. I’m now in the depersonalized- long-distance-puppet-recieving- command-hallucinations-from-the- end-of-a-tunnel stage. A relative relief. This state I can manage. I might make it to the end of this.

We set off to hike on our family land, my brother our old childhood friend and me. I’m ready to go with the same clothes I wore to dinner the night before, but they’re rummaging around in closets and car trunks to emerge with all kinds of Gear: heavy boots, flannel shirts, a machete, eye protectors, camoflauge utility belt, and a .40 Glock semi-automatic pistol. Where the hell are we going?

I thought we were on a stroll out beyond the back yard, but apparently we are penetrating enemy territory. Red clay, pine trees, kudzu vines. A number of deer blinds, unsure which side of the property line they’re on, this is very important, where the property lines extend and don’t extend and which side you’re on. One of the neighbor kids climbs out of a stand toting a high-powered rifle under his arm, and tells us about killng and eating wild pigs. His truck is enormous. Good for tracking, this clay, mostly deer prints and some rabbit, and what about these, are they wild pig? The brambles are a dire threat, met with machete slices. I’m plowing through these perils, heedless. I start telling them some of my Hawaii stories, volcano climbing and schools of sharks and wild boar scat, trying to get some proportion here, but they’re deliberating about how soon the sun will set and we’d better turn back now, the air is getting colder. We’re half a mile from the interstate and it’s 52 degrees.

Every time I visit South Carolina I feel drafted into a Flannery O’Connor short story, one of the more obscure ones that doesn’t quite hold together but is centered around senseless violence. And inevitably there will be the James Dickey references, the banjo riff from Deliverance. They tell me we are stranded in a sea of lawless macho Confederate illiteracy, threatened with sodomy by faceless deranged rednecks who might have crossed the property line. Am I naive for dismissing their wilderness terror / hillbilly horror as classist media fantasy, and treating things instead like an herb walk? Are we going to make it back home?

Fortunately my biggest fear doesn’t materialize: the glock automatic pistol doesn’t go off accidentally.

Discussion turns to how much security planting a stand of bamboo along the driveway road would offer: more, because you can’t see the house from a passing car? Or less, because, well, you can’t see the house from a passing car? A sick sour smell signals the remains of a deer or other animal left for some reason, and soon we’re staring at a pile of half decayed rib bones a few hundred yards from the house.

Across a gulley and to the wellhouse and when we get back to the yard the wolves and dogs and are yowling and pacing the pen, unaccustomed to people walking the woods on this side. They’re stir crazy from being confined, running back and forth, jumping around to lick our hands, coming close then darting away.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Blair Witch and Deliverance and Red Sammy’s Barbecue: these aren’t the horrors preoccupying me. There are real horrors. Lobo died. Shadow died. Mozart died. Tanza died. They’re slowly dying, the wolves and half wolves and dogs. Two were poisoned by a man who worked on house renovations and was caught stealing. My dad turned him in and he decided to take out his revenge by lacing rat poison on a shank of rotten beef and tossing it over the fence one night. Not a horror monster, just a thief caught and turned vengeful. He and his accomplice girlfriend are doing 5-8 years now. The animals still alive are desperate to escape their tiny pen.

The whole culture surrounding my South Carolina childhood is permeated with death these days. At lunch we meet one of my father’s friends, a photographer who takes a shot of us in front of the christmas tree. A journalist for the local newspaper who covers the crime beat, he’s on his way to photograph a double murder suspect. “A black guy,” he says. The prosecutor will probably seek the death penalty, he says. He and my dad debate the technical definition of serial killer, as opposed to mass murderer: the FBI says it has to be three or more murders over an extended period of time, or else they just qualify as a mass murderer or spree killer. My dad knows these things. He writes about serial killers. If they do seek the death penalty, the photographer says, he will be there to witness it. The problem is you don’t know the exact moment they die. With this lethal injection they just put you to sleep and you can’t tell. I want to be able to see when it happens.

That night we’re off to meet more childhood friends, one of whom just returned from a year and a half rotation in Iraq. He’s an Apache helicopter pilot. (Why do they like to name their weapons after conquered Indian nations?) It’s an old model aircraft, he says, but with modern weapon systems plugged in like computer peripherals. My brother and he start discussing night vision equipment and hi-g turns. Dissociated paralysis is whispering in my ear, so to keep up my end of the conversation I’m trying to turn it into guy geek technology banter. Any TOW missiles, I ask, remembering my wargaming days as a teenager. No, Hellfires. Oh right, no need for wires when you’ve got laser guided. What’s it like when it hits something? It is devastating, just devastating. Big smiles all around. Other weapons? A 30mm Boeing M230 automatic chain gun that fires 625 times a minute. Only carries 1200 rounds, so it runs out of ammunition quickly. A note of disappointment.

I know this is complicated, I say to myself. He also flies medevac ambulance helicopters when he’s back in the US in his civilian job, rushing people to emergency surgeries and delivering transplanted organs. I’m listening and observing, wondering what the human mind like in this role, who are these soldiers who fly multi-million dollar tank killing weapons platforms with such enjoyment and enthusiasm on the other side of the world and then come home to shuttle people across the state for life-saving operations? I’m curious. He describes the display on his helmet that projects onto his face screen, and how he sets the chain gun to match where his head is looking, so he can aim just by looking in the direction of his target. Then my curiousity stops cold: he uses that word, terrifying brew of moral license, hatred, and mind control: insurgents. They know our tactics, he says. They’ll attack ground units and by the time the air support comes in they’ve pulled back and the insurgents are dressed like sheep herders.

It’s christmas and we’re in a remodeled kitchen in western South Carolina talking about killing people.

Saturday finally comes around and yes, my ticket does say today is my flight back north, about sixty million miles across four oceans, over five mountain ranges and across six time zones. My mom, brother and I make it out of the house, out of the driveway, out of the state and into Atlanta to visit another old family friend, a housekeeper who lived with us and helped raise me. Not far enough though: my cell phone rings and it’s dad. Angry. What the hell did you do to the TV? He can’t get the remote to work. The TV remote. i want to attribute this to old age, senility, alzheimers, something, except he’s always been like this, worse actually. The pills he’s always taken don’t help, but the problem is really with him, or who he is. Or who he became, after all he’s been through: child of my grandfather, locked up in the psych system, shooting and being shot in Korea, incarcerated in prisons in different countries. He’s been through a lot. Yes, I can go to that place of understanding and forgiveness, he is after all a survivor of trauma, and I know something, a little, of how trauma can twist even the most sincere love into cruelty and I have empathy. I can go there too easily, so I’m not going to. You need to speak to me respectfully, I say firmly. He hangs up.

And that’s the last I heard from my father, yelling insults at me on the phone during christmas vacation because he can’t get the TV remote to work and he wants to watch the Saddam Hussein execution.

So where does the mullein come in? On our walk through the woods I could find nothing I recognized as medicinal, not a scrap of dandelion or hint of burdock, just red clay and winter brown brush. Then we crossed back up a rise, quickening the pace as if the coming sunset was a strict deadline. Down the other side and stop, there it is, a patch of ten, fifteen, twenty mullein plants, hugging the ground in clumps, still green and fuzzy that way mullein is, despite the occasional frost of South Carolina December. More in one place than I’ve ever seen. I start tearing the choicest leaves for a nice strong tea. My friend is very interested in what I’m up to, asks me what mullein is for, what you do with it, what other herbs he might find around here if he starts looking. I’m going to buy him a medicinal plant guide to the Southeast. Wolf pens and serial killers and apaches and hellfires and tv remotes and all, this is still my home.