Glenn Beck - Miracles and Massacres - True and Untold Stories of the Making of America

Before the wheels on the upside-down sedan had stopped spinning, White reared back and heaved another bundle of dynamite toward the jail.

There was another earsplitting explosion, but once again, the dynamite had landed too far short of the jail to seriously damage it.

“We’re going to have to get some charges up there on the building,” Bill said to Buttram. Both men knew the risks inherent in that proposition. The last time any GIs had exposed themselves in the area near the jail, a single shotgun blast had taken out Edgar Miller and Harold Powers. But compared to what he’d faced in the jungles of Guadalcanal and the beaches of Tarawa, this current mission seemed almost safe.

Bill put together another bundle and crawled under the cover of the earlier explosions’ smoke. He slid right up to the overturned cars, lit a fuse, and pitched the dynamite onto the jail’s front porch. This time he was plenty close enough. The blast shook the jail to its foundation and wooden porch planks flew into the night sky. Windows in neighboring stores rattled.

With the floors beneath them shaking and the ceiling above them trembling, the jail’s defenders, except for Sheriff Mansfield, who had previously managed to sneak into an ambulance that had come to carry away wounded deputies, came rushing out of the battered building they had once been so confident would protect them. With smoke in their eyes and white handkerchiefs held high, the once-arrogant group of deputies tumbled out into the street.

5:45 A.M.

It would be a day before Paul Cantrell, who skipped town in disguise, conceded defeat. And it would be longer than that before Windy Wise felt safe showing his face again in Athens. Not that he had much choice. Wise was tried and sentenced to one to three years in prison for the shooting of Tom Gillespie.

It had taken several hours to deal with the other Cantrell deputies who surrendered to Athens’s GIs that morning. Largely for their own protection, the men, most of whom were out-of-towners, had been returned to the jail they’d fled and locked away until it was safe for them to go home.

Somehow, in a six-hour gunfight involving hundreds of people, no one had died, and in the predawn hours after the shooting stopped, the mature and less vindictive of the GIs made sure it stayed that way.

Bill White finally headed from the city center to his parents’ farm, past the old sign that read “Welcome to Athens, the Friendly City.” He moved at a slightly quicker pace than normal, even though his body ached from almost twenty-four hours on his feet. Some of the speed came from the adrenaline that still flowed through his body. War was hell, but it also provided an unparalleled rush.

As the sun rose over the Smoky Mountains and Bill rounded the bend toward home, the tired young man slowed just a bit. He began to wonder what he would do with his life now that the campaign was over. He’d tried the GI Bill for a few months, but college wasn’t for him. He wanted to find something else like the campaign, a corner of the world where he could right wrongs and stand up to crooks and thugs. He wanted a job that came not just with a paycheck, but also with a purpose.

There was a familiar tune playing in his head as he pondered his prospects; the same melody that had kept coming to mind throughout the night’s battle. It was a song he had heard many times, but one whose title, the “William Tell Overture,” he would never have been able to identify if asked.

“Maybe I’ll be a lawman,” Bill said to himself, holding his shotgun over one shoulder and resting his rifle on the other. “With a silver star on my shirt and a loaded gun in my holster.”

He stopped and looked back toward the town he loved.

After all , Bill thought with a smile, Athens is gonna need some new deputy sheriffs .

11

The My Lai Massacre: A Light in the Darkness

Tuttle-Woods Convalescent Home

Camden, New Jersey

March 15, 2008

Close to midnight, a commotion started halfway down the D-Ward corridor. Though outbursts weren’t all that unusual, this one was different: unceasingly shrill and somewhat violent, like some old codger was trying to raise the dead.

Sticking to unofficial procedure, Everly Davison ignored the rising clatter and pressed on with his crossword puzzle.

Everly, who was better known as E-bomb among his off-duty circle of friends, was head of the security shift that night. This temporary promotion had been awarded by default, not by merit. All three of his useless superiors had called in sick on this cold, rainy, late winter evening.

Not that Everly was complaining. He so rarely got the chance to be the boss that he was making the most of it: feet up on the desk, microwaved hot chocolate with hazelnut Coffee Mate and a secret splash of Jim Beam, and the keys to all the snack machines on his utility belt. Hell, if this was work, he couldn’t wait to see vacation.

That one disturbed resident down the hall was the only thing keeping this from being a great night. No need to make an issue of it , Everly thought. Not just yet. Even crazy people have to blow off a little steam once in a while. Waiting out his outburst would be safer and simpler for all concerned—and keeping things simple was what Everly did best.

Following his early release from Riverfront State Prison, Everly had swabbed out a few thousand of the world’s nastiest porta-johns, manned a medical waste incinerator, delivered pizzas on foot through the worst gang-war hot zones of Newark, washed a nightly truckload of dishes in an institutional kitchen, and spent three bloody weeks as an apprentice on the kill-floor at a slaughterhouse. After all that, he’d finally stuffed enough padding into his ex-con’s résumé to land his first real, full-time job: janitor at Tuttle-Woods.

Everly was perfectly happy with the work—climate control was a wonderful thing—but a few months later things got even better when he was promoted to security guard. To most people, walking the halls of an old folks’ home on the graveyard shift might not seem that glamorous, but to Everly Davison it was like winning the lottery—even though he knew that lottery ticket was being cashed at someone else’s expense.

A couple of weeks earlier, one of the guards had called the home’s outside security contractor for help with an elderly lady who’d gotten it into her head that her daughter-in-law was coming to kill her and steal all her money. She’d taken a swing at the doctor who was trying to bring her meds, then she grabbed some silverware and holed up in the public bathroom. The rulebook says to call in reinforcements, so to speak, when things get out of hand, and that’s what the guard on duty had done.

The rent-a-cops arrived at the home in riot gear and cleared out the regular workers. They hit the old woman with a Taser and a twelve-gauge beanbag gun, and she died right where she fell.

The security contractors later issued a report saying that the woman had come at them with a butcher knife. The guard who’d called for reinforcements was quickly fired for making noise about what he’d seen, and with nobody else alive willing to say otherwise, that was the end of it. Everly Davison happily accepted his promotion from the janitorial department into his new cushy security job.

The lady from Human Resources had laid out the requirements for the promotion, adding at the very end that she was specifically looking for someone who understood that discretion was the better part of valor. Whatever that phrase had meant when it was first written down, Everly knew what she was getting at. See nothing; say nothing . He nodded his head in agreement and that was that—Everly Davison was officially a security guard.