Blue Side of Lonesome

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JakeRivers
JakeRivers
1,057 Followers

About a year after I married Jenny, I saw my first combat. I saved from a local paper one of the sidebar articles that described the purpose of Operation Just Cause.

On December 20, 1989, the 504th was sent into battle as part of Operation Just Cause. The intent of this operation was to protect U.S. civilians in Panama, secure key facilities, neutralize both the Panamanian Defense Forces (PDF) and the "Dignity Battalions," and restore the elected government of Panama by ousting General Manuel Noriega.

The 3rd Battalion conducted air and sea assaults in northern and central Panama to seize the dam that controlled the water in the Panama canal, a prison, several police stations, several key bridges, a PDF supply point, the PDF demolitions school and an intelligence training facility. These operations were designed to neutralize the PDF while protecting U.S. nationals and the canal itself during the first few hours of the battle.

The 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 504th, along with 4th Battalion of the 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment and the 1st Battalion of the 75th Ranger Regiment, conducted a parachute assault on the Omar Torrijos International Airport. Following the airborne assault, the paratroopers soon found themselves engaged in fierce combat in urban and rural areas. As a testament to the discipline of the soldiers, however, the unit achieved all key objectives while causing only minimal collateral damage.

It turned out I was one of those casualties, albeit less severe than most. Essentially I had my ear lobe shot off. When they told me that I'd get a purple heart I was going to argue, but then I thought that if the bullet had been an inch or so to the left the award would have been posthumous. It did bleed like crazy.

The 82nd made their first jump since the Second World War on the Airport. It was a clean drop with a very few minor injuries and we quickly secured the Airport.

On December 22, we were assigned to clear Panama City of hostiles (i.e., Dignity Battalions), enforce a curfew, stop chaos and looting, and assume temporary law enforcement functions. At one point our company was pinned down, and even though I was the radio operator for the company commander, I was asked to take on a sniper role. Captain Adams was the kind of officer that knew the capabilities of his men and he knew I could take out someone at six hundred yards.

I stood behind a jeep with a mounted .50 caliber machine gun and started picking them off. The machine gun wasn't effective because they would just pop up their heads and shoot. They did have a machine gun behind a makeshift brick wall.

It was weird because it was so much easier to shoot someone than I would have thought. I knew that killing an enemy soldier could always happen and, of course, I'd certainly thought about it. Killing enemy combatants took up most of our training time. I'd hear these stories about "the first time you kill somebody is very hard."

It was like being on one of the test firing courses where they had pop up targets. I'd see a head stick around a corner and I would squeeze off a round like I'd done so many times before. These guys would just pop up like targets except a good shot was marked with a burst of blood rather than only a clang and the target falling.

I wasn't using a scope – I had hardly planned this. With a scope at this range I would expect pretty much a one hundred per cent kill rate. I was doing about fifty per cent on mostly snap shots. I'd killed four or five of them when the rest dissolved away. I never got a medal or anything – the Captain said he wasn't sure whether I was supposed to have done what he told me to. I didn't care so it was fine with me.

Even though my wound wasn't too serious, they sent me on home the day after my looks were forever marred by losing part of my ear.

The discussion with Jenny was interesting. She wasn't too concerned about my ear – she didn't seem to get how close the ear and the brain are. She was horrified though when one of my buddies and his wife were over for a barbeque a few months later and he told about what I had done. She was mad at me for a couple of months until David was born and then she seemed to forget about it.

I wound up staying in the Army until I got my twenty in. Jenny said, "… that's damn well enough." She had been pretty good about it through the years so I went along with her.

After about ten years I had switched over to Public Relations and was stationed mostly in DC. We moved back to Denver and I got on at the Rocky Mountain News writing about Government Affairs. I'd also started writing, war novels mostly, but later some romance stuff and some westerns. I can't say that I was always (or ever!) in the top ten best sellers, but I had a loyal following and it paid enough to make it worthwhile.

David had gone to high school in Germany for the first two years and finished his senior year at Cherry Creek High School, the same place I'd attended. And yes, he went out for track and beat all the meet records I'd set in the half-mile and mile.

OUT OF SYNC

Eleven seconds! Eleven damned seconds. That's how long it took for my life to fall apart. Before the eleven seconds took place I was happily married and living with my lovely wife of twenty-five years in satisfaction and comfort in our upscale house in the lovely Cherry Creek neighborhood in Denver. After the eleven seconds – but not too damn much after – I was living near my son in a less than no-frills one-bedroom house not too far from Adams State College in Alamosa. I'd had my suspicions about Jenny, but that's light years away from knowing. Now I knew and I was truly pissed!

The whole thing was really my son's fault … though later we spent many long nights and cold beers arguing the point. David took after me: we were both tall and slender and definitely serious runners. The difference was that while I'd been one of the best runners in the state while in high school, David was one of the best in the country. The assistant coach for the Olympic team was the coach at Adams State. David had run into him a number of times at invitational cross-country meets and wanted to be on his team. I mean this guy was a multiple time Cross Country coach of the year!

A full-ride scholarship made it a lot more palatable to me. It worked well for David too; he was interested in their award-winning program on Human Performance & Physical Education. He hadn't decided on whether he would major in Coaching or in Exercise Science & Sport Administration but there was no need to make a decision for a year or two.

When your life falls apart you tend to later go back and look for the one thing that led to various other things that eventually ended in catastrophe. At least I was like that. Which of the many events, the decisions made and not made, the fork in the road taken or not taken, led to a total life change for me? For example, if I had decided one day to buy a lottery ticket and it turned out to be a loser it would have negligible impact on my life. If I had purchased a ten million dollar winner … well, that certainly would have led to many changes in my life.

Now you can really take this too far. If Columbus had died of scurvy before his discovery of the new world, would I have wound up living in the San Luis Valley near my twenty-five year old son?

Or maybe, more to the point, if my girlfriend, Mary Lou Fossett had not come down with chicken pox three days before the senior prom, would I have still met Jenny Wilson – who later became Jenny Johnson, wife of Jack Johnson. That just leads to too many "what ifs"?

No, if I were really going to track down the one single event that ended my so-called happy marriage, it would be my brief, and seeming innocuous (at the time) conversation with my son. It took place in mid-July, just a bit over a month before he was to move to Alamosa.

"Dad, ya gotta minute? I need to talk to you about wheels."

I must have looked a tad befuddled (as usual when talking with my son), because he continued, "Dad, you know, a car. Or more specifically, a truck … your truck."

"Uh, what about my truck?"

Well, it turned out that he noticed I really wasn't using my two-year-old F-150 all that much and he felt I should give it to him.

"Dad, it would be perfect for me."

I understood that to mean he liked the six hundred dollar sound system he had somehow talked me into getting as an upgrade. But he was right, I didn't really need the truck and had been talking to Jenny that I wanted to get something smaller – something that would fit in the garage and would get decent gas mileage.

So, the end result was I gave him my truck and I went shopping for a new car. He was eighteen and going off on his own.

Jenny knew the routine by now. Whenever I started looking for a "new toy" (her words) I would kinda go through the same process. I'd get all of the appropriate trade magazines, read and compare the factual reviews, and then, in this case, go by all the dealers and listen to the blatant lies of the sales types and take the cars out for a test drive. My wife didn't seem too interested in all this. When I asked her to take a look at one of the cars she muttered something about, "… the difference between men and boys is the cost of their toys!"

But I persevered, did the research and bought a car that turned out to be a lot more fun than I expected. I wound up with a Ford Focus. The 2008 model was a complete redesign and made in the good ol' USA instead of overseas. But the really neat thing was SYNC. This was a cooperative development between Microsoft and Ford. Essentially it gave you a verbal command media environment.

After buying the car and playing with SYNC I learned it did a lot more than I realized. I knew about the hands free phone environment. If you wanted to make a call you just spoke aloud, "Phone 18008887777" and lo and behold it made the call. If I wanted to call my buddy Cal, I would say, "Call Cal" and it would digest the phonebook and call Cal for me. Pretty slick stuff. For phones that had Bluetooth, the SYNC system would sense when you came in the car with one and automatically set everything up.

I knew I could use verbal commands with my iPod. I just needed to plug the USB cable from the iPod to the USB port on the dash. Then I could do neat things like "Play track Hotel California" and the Eagles would sing to me. Or I could say "Play genre Classical Guitar" and John Williams' incredible talent would come out of my speakers.

Another neat command was "Play similar." It would search the iPod for similar music to what was playing. But the thing that sneaked through that the dealer never told me about was that I could hook various types of USB devices to SYNC, like a hard disk. So to try it out I took the hard disk from my Mac laptop and plugged it in to the USB port.

It searched the hard disk for audio formats like MP3, and created an index so you could use the commands. Admittedly, if you had a 550 GB hard disk it took a while to create the index. Then I could verbally play music with commands like "Play Artist Carl Smith" or "Play playlist Country Female Vocal." There were also commands for things like "Pause," "What's playing," "Shuffle on," etc.

Well, of course I thought this was hot shit. But Jenny's reaction was a low key, "Yes, dear, it's nice." I made a big sacrifice and offered to drive her to the store just so I could show off the neat things in my car (like lighted cup holders). I had her bring her new iPhone – I just knew if she could see how easy it was she would fall in love with it.

On the way to the store I showed her all the neat things, starting with the media. Jenny loves music so this caught her attention. Then a few minutes from the store I showed her the phone stuff. I had her call her best friend just by hitting the phone button on the steering wheel and saying, "Call Patty." It, of course, worked perfectly.

She admitted that this was slick stuff and started asking how she could get it. One thing I hadn't told her about was the ability to convert an incoming text message to voice and speak the message over the car speakers. I heard the chime sound that she uses for text messages and I figured I'd really show her.

I hit the phone button and said, "Read message." Immediately that synthesized voice spoke, "Hey, Jenny, this is Bob. Martha is gone on Tuesday so we can go to my place. You were so damn hot last week; okay with you?"

I timed it later and it took exactly eleven seconds for my life as I knew it to end. It took a moment for the context of the message to sink in then I jerked across the freeway to the next exit and stopped on a side street.

I hit the phone button on the steering wheel again and said, "Read message." With computerized exactitude, the speaker droned out, "Hey, Jenny, this is Bob. Martha is gone on Tuesday so we can go to my place. You were so damn hot last week; okay with you?"

I looked over at Jenny and she was looking out the window. I was in some level of shock. Staring straight ahead I asked my loving wife, "Was that Bob Sanderson?"

She didn't answer so I looked over at her and shouted, "God damn it, don't ignore me. Was that Bob Sanderson?"

She made a small nod but didn't look at me. The strip mall next to the car must have been quite interesting. I started the car and drove under the freeway and went back home. Halfway there I saw her reaching for her cell phone. I'd put it in the little cubbyhole under all the dash instruments. I grabbed it before she could and put it in my coat pocket.

When I pulled in the driveway I hit the garage door opener and told her, "I'm going out for a while. Be ready to talk to me when I get back. Do not call Bob. Do you understand?" She nodded but didn't move. I reached across and opened her door and gave her a none too gentle shove. She fell on the grass ass up and gave me a nice shot of her pink panties but for some reason I didn't find it particularly erotic right then.

DAMNED LIES

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

Disraeli as attributed by Mark Twain

In this case it turned out to be damned lies. It was way bigger than a lie and I just couldn't find the energy or desire to get the numbers on my wife's infidelity. I mean, does it really mean anything that my wife had been shagging good old Bob 3.7 times a week for the last six weeks? Or that she paid for the hotel room 45% of the time? No, once the gist of the content of the damned lies came out, I just didn't give a shit. As far as I was concerned, once was enough to send my loving wife to eternal perdition.

Some people want to know all the facts and nitty-gritty details about anything. I've never really been that way. Give me the facts and I'll make a decision or derive an opinion. I don't care if Frankie did truly love Johnny ... the fact is she shot him dead when she caught him cheating. Frankie was sure regretful but Johnny was still stone cold dead.

So I didn't ask Jenny for details. I didn't want to know when and how it started. I didn't care if was my fault or not. Jenny cheated, a fact, ergo Jenny was history.

It could have been messy. I didn't want that. Give me a nice, clean, quick separation and I'm happy. Pissed as all get out, but happy. I talked to David and enlisted his aid. He was as teed off as I was and glad to help out. I set up a meeting for Jenny, David and I to talk. Jenny didn't look happy … do I give a shit if she feels like she was ganged up on? David kicked it off.

"Mom, I am terribly disappointed with you." Here, Jenny had the grace to look embarrassed and looked carefully at the floor – she was so intent I thought maybe we had cockroaches or something. "Dad is going to make a proposal to you that I think is fair. None of us wants a long drawn out battle that accomplishes nothing other that making a bunch of lawyers rich. You are still my mom and I want you in my life. Can you please listen to him?"

With that David left. Jenny looked up and asked, "I guess it's clear that you are set on divorce? There is no hope for a reconciliation?"

Quietly, I told her, "No, Jenny. No hope. As you should realize, I'm just not wired that way."

She leaned on the table and quietly sobbed for what turned out to be about ten minutes. I got myself a glass of wine and a wet washcloth from the hallway bathroom. I handed her the damp cloth and gave her time to pull herself together. Finally she looked up, sadness clear in her pale gray eyes.

"Okay, I'll listen. What do you want to do?"

"First, an immediate separation. I'll be moving down to Alamosa. David is living on campus – I'll try to find myself something down there. I'm resigning my position with the paper. I've talked to them about being a stringer for news from the Alamosa area, but that's chancy. What I really want to do is write full time. Sometimes the money is good, sometimes it's not.

"So I won't really be able to pay any money in alimony. You can fight that if you want but it might take me five years to finish my next book if you do. I'll take care of David's school stuff and your job pays enough for you to get by.

"I know the house has gone down in value over the last couple of years but it still has around twenty grand in equity. I'll sign the house over to you and you can try to keep it or sell it. I just don't give a damn which.

"If you want a divorce go ahead and do it. Just don't ask for anything other than what we talk about or you will get nothing. Last, but the least, please stay the hell away from me. I don't want to ever see you again."

"I really hurt you, didn't I, Jack?"

"Yes, you damn well did."

David had taken my Focus on down to Alamosa and I had rented a trailer. I'd packed it already and hooked it to the truck so with no fanfare I turned around and left.

Except for one brief meeting at the Brown Palace in Denver, the next time I saw Jenny was at David's graduation four years later.

BURNING MEMORIES (MEL TILLIS/WAYNE P. WALKER)

"Tonight I'm burning old love letters, photographs and memories of you.

Hoping somehow I'll feel better and when the smoke is gone I won't want you."

Mel Tillis

I found a small one bedroom apartment but I didn't like it at all and was looking 'round for something better. I'd started going to David's cross-country practices and would sometimes run through some of the workouts with them. It felt good to run seriously for the first time since high school instead of "jogging."

I was way out of shape at first but I was surprised how quickly I got in shape. After six weeks I'd got my pace down from eight-minute miles to seven. I'd been looking around for a place to stay and one night after practice David introduced me to a woman I'd seen at the workouts with the women's team.

"Dad, this is Dana Ross, the coach of the woman squad. Her team has won the Division II cross-country championships the last five years in a row. Dana, this is my Dad, Jack.

"Dad, she wants to talk to you about a place to stay."

I'd seen her around but I thought she was one of the runners. She looked like she was twenty but I later found she was two years short of thirty.

She shook my hand as David left. "I'm glad David mentioned you were looking for a place. My family had a ranch North of here just before you get to Mosca. It's up off of Highway 17 – turn right on Lane 4 North and you can't miss it. We had a couple of thousand acres but sold all of it a few years ago except for the original homestead. What we have left is one hundred sixty acres with the ranch house and all of the outbuildings, corrals and such. We have a first rate spring that has never dried up.

JakeRivers
JakeRivers
1,057 Followers