Adriane's Heritage

While writing my more ambitious novel, Adriane, one part of the story led me to research the Spanish Civil War. Because Adriane is French, with a Basque heritage from Southern France that crosses the Pyrenees into Spain, I wondered about her father and mother's involvement during that period. I am an amateur history buff, especially the histories that are not covered in the mainstream. In this case it is the popular resistance movements against Fascism in France and Spain.

   I grew up in a working class neighborhood in the 50's. Every boy in that time would ask each of his buddies; "What did your dad to in The War?" meaning, of course, WWII. There wasn't anyone among my playmates whose father hadn't been in the Army, Navy, or Marine Corps. My father has been with Patton in the Third Army at the Battle of the Bulge and had witnessed the atrocities at Buchenwald. I wondered too what French kids of that era asked of their friends. I could imagine that they too asked each other the same sort of question.

   The involvement of the Resistance that secured Southern France, before the sands of the beaches of Normandy were soaked in the blood of our fathers, is a history that escaped my attention previously. As I researched the French Resistance of WWII an awareness lit up the role of the Basques of Northern Spain and Southern France during and after the Spanish Civil War...  and even during and after WWII in the form of what the post war media called Basque Separatists in Spain. It was no small matter that I found that the Basque regions of Southern France were completely liberated from the Nazi Occupation before the Normandy landings.
 
   This research has been stalling the writing of Adriane but the trade-off has been rewarding. It is a rich history that has had the affect of nothing less than awe in my mind. It has taken me through the agony of Europe from Spain to Poland but my story concentrates on characters from Southern France and Spain.

   I should add that my own ex-mother-in-law, Lucyna Radlo (nee Kocharski), had participated in the Polish resistance in Warsaw and at 15  her father was one of those lost in Auschwitz and she was interred in one of Hitler's munition factories along with her mother. She wrote about it before she passed away in her account; Between Two Evils. Her experience is fodder for another story.

 

A Simple Bond or Hook

Patrick Ryan

Ryan stood by the water cooler oblivious that he was smoking in the non-smoking police station. It was a new rule: first it was restaurants... then bars... and, even before the jails, the police station.

Richards approached him waving the smoke aside and coughing… “What do you think?”

“He didn’t do it.” He blew smoke in Richard’s face.

“What do you mean, he didn’t do it? Nick saw him coming up the hill on his motorcycle…”

“You mean, Mr. Baker?” Ryan didn’t like Richards… a sloppy cop that was too enthralled with the power a badge gave him. “Then how did McKee drop her off at the hospital in his taxi?” He glared at Richards now, “Don’t piss me off, Dan. The receptionist at the ER witnessed that much and we already know Mr. Baker is a damned good liar.”

Ryan thought of himself as a good cop. He looked forward to starting each day with a good case to investigate.  Most cases were as simple as putting together a kindergarten picture puzzle. However, he hated cases where influence and old debts, favors filtered into his judgment… the pieces of the puzzle get smaller and it takes on a three dimensional one. He didn’t know what to do about Nick Baker because Nick Baker was a part of that kind of a puzzle. Now we had this Max McKee getting entangled in this mess with Richards pissing on the case files.

Ryan had served four years on swift boats in Viet Nam before he went over to O.N.I. (Office of Naval Intelligence). It was on a job with O.N.I. and the C.I.A. that he’d a few jobs with a contractor, Harry Baker, sent by O.N.I. from the Saigon Embassy. Harry Baker was one of those people you had to work with in the services that you respected but would not want to have anything to do with off the job. However, the way it works with the intelligence services, there is no such thing as off the job. They were investigating a case about the China White that was being stuffed into the body cavities of dead G.I’s in those aluminum coffins before being shipped from Da Nang to Travis Air Force Base. Harry Baker wasn’t instrumental in uncovering who was exporting it and to whom it was imported but he was involved in taking care of the problem. To Ryan, the O.N.I., and the C.I.A., it was supposed to be about investigating and accumulating evidence to be turned over to Hoover’s suits for prosecution stateside. But for independent contractors such as Harry Baker, it was about eliminating the problem altogether. There was no official need for Ryan to bloody his gloves over a personal problem like that, now was there?

It was a very personal problem for Ryan. His brother was stationed in Da Nang… William Ryan, Spec-4, of the Mortuary Affairs Unit. The O.N.I. boys had pulled the covers on most of those involved in the smuggling racket. William Ryan's part in it was that of an amateur, way over his head in it. Harry Baker’s motives were oftentimes vague to Ryan but, suffice it to say, that he always knew what strings to jerk, how hard to jerk them, and how to use what he knew to some future advantage. And Harry was expert at seeing opportunities to put a hook in someone. The then Chief Warrant Officer Ryan liked Harry Baker’s ability to get things done but his likes and dislikes didn’t interest, or were of little influence, on him. Ryan was up for a promotion and the fact that his own brother might be involved in smuggling heroin made him particularly vulnerable. 

Da Nang

Harry met with William Ryan at the China Beach Surf Club. It was a casual meeting in front of the beer stand. Surf boards leaned against the beer shack, GI’s in knee length cut-off baggies hung around with bottles in hand, waiting for a set: it could have been from an instamatic picture of any scene in Baja California or anywhere else every surfer dreams of. The surrealism of a war going on just a few klics away didn’t escape anyone’s consciousness. That is what the beer, the rum, the vodka, the gin or the pot, heroin, and for some… some are even said to chew on a taste of C-4 to get a kick assed mother-fuckin’ trippin’ high… that’s what all of that was for… to blot out the faces of smiling gooks from out of the dark of a hootch or the thump of mortars and the AK’s staccato clack of caps busted... decapitations… punji sticks, legs and limbs… bloody shit and guts spilled out… all of it that was surely awaiting the next patrol. The chances that the award for service, beyond getting fucked up in one of the above aforementioned  ways, was very likely to be in one of those aluminum boxes Army Specialist William Ryan had been packing up to be shipped back to Travis for the last six months.

Reaching out a hand to greet Harry, Willy offered, “Ya fuckin’ wanna Tiger Piss?”

Harry put a hand forth, wrapping his huge paw around the un-calloused hand of a man who’d not done a lick of work in several years. “No thanks, I’ll stick with a Schlitz.”

“Pat told me you’re a Skivvy Honcho… got some fuckin’ MoJo of some sort, eh?”

The word, fuck… Harry never did like it…, no matter where there were GI’s in Vietnam everything was fuckin’ fuckin’… mother fucker…, fucked up, fucked over and fuckin’ this or fuckin’ that. No offense was meant by the term and no offense was taken but Harry just wanted to get on with his business and get it fuckin’ over with.

“I want you to listen real close to me,” Harry paused long enough to make sure the kid was listening.

“I’m all fuckin’ ears,” Willy’s brain was in high gear wondering, who the fuck did my brother send over here behind these pilot’s sunglasses?

“You have a choice… You need a change of scenery,” Harry pulled out a manila envelope. “Read ‘em.”,

Willy held the papers away from the sunlight for longer than it would have taken him to read them twice… Transfer to the Marines… report to Camp Schwab… a lateral transfer… rank and all. He knew the training camp in Okinawa… he’d stuffed enough of the Corps’ corpses to know what the line at the bottom of the form meant… Marine Recon units were trained there.

“Okinawa? What the fuck? A Marine recon unit? Who the fuck are you?” The papers trembled in his grip. “Shit, I ain’t been fuckin’ trained for fuckin’ recon… I ain’t never even been through grunt fuckin’ boot camp! How can I…?”

“Your question ought to be, what is my choice?”

“I fuckin’ don’t get it.” Like a rat in a maze… Willy’s mind had no idea where it was being led. It hit on the idea that this had to do with an O.N.I. investigation, or something like that… maybe his brother was tipping him off by sending this guy. “You got fuckin’ nothing on me. Even if you fuckin’ did, I’d take the Stockade at Presidio over humpin’ the paddies like a pig-fuckin’ grunt.

“No one said anything about Fort Mason.” Harry took off his shades so that there was no doubt left at all about his steel grey eyes.

“Hey, does the lieutenant know about this?”

“No, you’re in the clear… just another body-bagger that can’t take it anymore.”

Willy tried to stay composed but he was damned near shittin’ his pants, “Let me get this straight, you ain’t talkin’ the stockade?”

“No, I’m not talkin’ prison.”

Peculiar things happen in life that turn a guy like Willy around. His first tour in Recon gave him a taste of blood… he loved it… loved it so much that he re-upped… loved it so much that, after he recovered from shrapnel wounds in Okinawa, a couple Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart, he went civilian contractor for the P.R.U. He took his bullet in Cambodia or Laos… no one says… no one cares… he was a civilian and the body counts are for G.I.’s. He never got to go home in one of the silver caskets either. But CWO Patrick Ryan was beholden to Harry Baker because, in a way, he’d saved his brother and, well, these are the bonds that aren’t broken very easily.