TRIGGER WARNING

Hi, y'all.  I'm 62 years old now, but I'm still having flashbacks from when I was 15 years old and on Dec. 8, 1973 I was tortured by a military death squad under a dictatorship in South America where I grew up as a missionary kid.  I had PTSD insomnia last night all the way up to 5a.m., and all day I've relived that day.  I've got to get it off my chest, so please bear with me.  After all, this is how I got PTSD, this is really how I came here in the first place.  Be warned, though, it's long.

Years later when I won a Fulbright Scholarship and wrote my doctoral dissertation for a US university on the history of that time in South America, I found out why that was the day I was tortured.  The coup had just happened on June 27, 1973, and the military was still consolidating its power for the 12 year night of its dictatorship ahead. Netflix has now made a movie about that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y97o1phiyRY

On Dec. 8, 1973, though, the military wasn't sure its takeover was complete.  To assure itself of having control, the generals decided they had to do away with the leaders of all of the country's labor unions.  

So that's why on that day, a sunny Southern Hemishphere Sunday afternoon at 4pm, that military death squad's vehicle was on my street.  I lived in a ritzy beachside suburban neighborhood filled with wealthy families and the families of foreign diplomats.  The South American headquarters of the Mormon church was 4 blocks from my house on my street, and I was walking there with my only 3 other friends from the USA, missionary kids like me from the States, though I was Pentecostal, not Mormon.  We were all in high spirits because the school year had just ended in the Southern Hemisphere, and summer vacation was starting.

We didn't even notice the death squad's vehicle though we walked right past it.  The squad had hidden it in the tall grass of a rare vacant lot between the fancy houses on my street.  They waited until we had passed them, and then gunned the engine to make their vehicle leap out from its hiding place to come screeching to a halt behind us.

The vehicle wasn't a Jeep or a Humvee, it was a specialized kind of military green SUV we locals had come to refer to by way of the Spanish word "canguro" because it was as if they carried their occupants in a pouch like a mother kangaroo and then leapt out at people to ambush them.  Their occupants were called "death squads" for literal reasons:  they took no prisoners.  Whomever they ambushed, they killed. 

The bodies were "disappeared,"either by throwing them into unmarked mass graves or by dumping them from helicopters into the Atlantic Ocean off the beach nearby.  They were known as the "desaparecidos" or "disappeared ones," which led to that being the title of a song later on by the song "Desaparecido" by Steve Van Zandt, the guitarist of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band.  To this day, 30,000 have never been found again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e951wEChrjc

When I turned around to see that particular kind of vehicle behind us on my suburban street, then, I knew something was really wrong.  Those vehicles didn't patrol like other military vehicles did, they weren't out and about as a show of strength.  They were the kind that were only seen when they were on a mission.  Somebody was going to die.

It turned out to be me.  When I interviewed the leader of the US CIA mission in the country, he let me know that US torture advisers from the CIA had taught the country's new military regime what happened to me that day.  He shared with that experience in Brazil and Chile beforehand had taught him and his men that torture works better when it isn't actually aimed at extracting information from the torture subject him or herself.  That, they found, could actually harden the torture subject, it might make them clam up and be brave.  Instead, what they learned worked better was to pick a random torture subject and torture them in front of friends or family, refuse to listen to anything he or she said to save themselves, and demand answers from the others instead--or else.

People felt entitled to refuse to answer questions and take the consequences for themselves, but they did not feel entitled to make that decision for another person.  The guilt they felt at seeing someone else suffer based on whether they opened up or not often made them start talking when they would never have said a word if they had been the one being tortured.  In a perverse way, then, the whole torture exercise was a testing of the notion of being your brother's keeper.  

That's how it came to pass that I was tortured on my knees prostrate before my high school buddies, who were made to line up in front of me to watch while the officer in charge asked questions of them, not me.  I just got hurt, no matter what I said or did not say.  I was nobody and just a body all at once.

Since we were US citizens and just kids from a posh neighborhood, of course my high school pals and I had no information of any values.  As far as our identities were concerned, we were about as far from being South American blue collar union workers as a person could  could get.  Our neighborhood was geographically far from the eight union leaders they did kill that day, too.  They were across town at least 45 minutes' drive away, by the docks of the city's harbor.  We were far from the industrial side on town on the fancy beach front in a neighborhood more like Santa Monica near Los Angeles in California.

The death squad, though, was well trained, and so once they went to work who we were and where we were made no difference to them.  As they hurt me, I was still able to keep from crying or crying out.  I had learned well that boys don't cy in the six years before the coup when anti-military rebels had waged a civil war in our town.  When I was nine one of the rebels had hit my family's car with all of us in it with an improvised explosive device, a "Molotov cocktail" like the kind Russian troops had used on Hitler's tanks in World War II.  I wasn't sympathetic to the rebel cause, then, as my family assured me that those they fought against in the military would never have treated us that way.

They were wrong.  Throwing the Molotov cocktail at our family car was bad, but it was a momentary impulse in the heat of battle.  This military torture was slow and deliberate, which made it merciless and mean beyond anything that bomb was to me or my family.

I kept it together on my knees during the torture part, which went on as my friends stood there in a line failing to give any acceptable answers to the questions they were asked.  One of the guys, though, one of the Mormon missionary kids, was new in town.  Even as he failed to give the right answers to the questions put to them all, then, his North American aceent in Spanish gave the fact that he was a US citizen away.  By about the third round of questioning, then, the officer in charge of the death squad halted the interrogation.  He realized he and his men had netted the wrong catch.  Their US sponsors would not be pleased. 

The Chilean coup had just happened on September 11, 1973.  In its mass arrests a young US citizen named Charlie Horman had been executed by mistake, which led to a grave scandal for the Chilean dictators with the release of the movie about it called Missing starring Sissy Spacek and Oscar winner Jack Lemmon.  They didn't need to make another Charlie Horman out of me.

The officer in charge needed to back off of torturing me without having me run squealing to the US embassy, though, so he decided to end our street session with a warning.  It wasn't spoken, since speaking hadn't been part of my torture session at all.  He'd been solely talking to my friends the whole time instead, and he didn't alter that now.  Instead, without saying word by way of warning or explanation, he just drew his side arm from his hip holster instead.

His squad members all carried US made M-16 rifles, but as the officer in charge carried a semiautomatic pistol instead.  I was somewhat familiar with military weapons from the previous six years of civil war in our town.  After all, at one point three years back soldiers had taken over my house for a day during combat.  They had poked their guns out of my own boyhood bedroom windown, so I'd had a good close look at them.  I couldn't tell whether the weapon the officer drew now from his holster was a 9 millimeter or a .45 caliber pistol, it just wasn't a revolver, that was for sure.

That's why I couldn't tell if it was loaded or not, which was crucial now that it was held to my head, its barrel pressed against my temple above my right ear.  Most revolvers have a closed cylinder where the bullets are, but some have open cylinder chambers that would allow someone to eyeball the tips of their bullets if the gun was actually loaded.  With 9 millimeter or .45 caliber pistols, though, the bullets load into a clip that slides into the hand grip, so it's hidden.  There's no chance at all of eyeballing what's in there or not one way or the other.

That's how I've been left now with a question since that day lo these 47 years.  Was the gun loaded and my life was spared by a weapon failure as a miracle from God?  Or was the gun never loaded, so rather than being a miracle from God it was a sick joke meant to traumatize me for life and shut me up?

I'll never know.  I've gone through many decades of good and helpful PTSD therapy since then, and done rather well with trying not to be OCD about this central question of my life for me ever since.  But on this day every year, the nagging question returns, and now it comes back after Thanksgiving, just in time to ruin the lead up to the Christmas holidays for me. 

Loaded or not, after putting the gun to my head, the officer pulled the trigger.  I held my breath, but no bullet fired.  Instead of hearing a shot, I just heard a dry click.  The officer then went through the motion of clearing it as if it had jammed, and put the barrel to my temple once again.  I was lucky once, I thought to myself, but I can't be so lucky twice.

That's when, though I never did cry nor cry out, I lost control of myself.  To my great embarassment, I wet my pants in a gush of urine such as never burst out of me before nor since.  In a split second, at the realization that that officer was going to pull that trigger again, suddenly the entire front side of my blue jeans was wet.

The officer laughed upon seeing his silent actions were having their desired effect on me.  Pants now wt with fear, I prepared to die as I felt the cold metal of the barrel touch the skin of my temple for a secon time.

It seemed as if the trigger squeeze was done in slow motion the second time, though I'm sure it wasn't any different from the first.  I expected a burst, warmth, wetness from my head, and then darkness.  Instead, I just got another dry clicking sound coming to me loud and clear from that spot right there near my ear.  

And that was it.  The officer laughed a mocking laugh, the cause of which I'll never know.  Was he laughing at the Russian roulette trick he'd played on me with an empty gun?  Or was he laughing at how absurdly lucky I was to have a loaded gun jam twice by accident?  Whatever the case may have been, after a chuckle or two he was back behind the wheel of his truck.  His troops loaded up into the cab with him, and with that they were off as quickly as they had ambushed us.

For a high school boy to be bullied and mocked in front of his peers is embarrassing enough, but as I knelt there stunned in the street after peeing my pants, I was more than mortified.  It's lucky that I was mortified instead of dead, but I was dying of humiliation nonetheless.

As can be expected, we boys didn't talk about what had happened ever again--not that day, not ever.  I avoided PTSD therapy for years because I didn't want to describe my shame.  Moreover, because I'd never know, I didn't want to have to face the central question of the episode's ending.  Was it a bona fide execution attempt gone wrong?  Or was it a mock execution acting out a message?  If so, what message?

Even though after my doctoral dissertation wrote the history of that period, and I went on to publish a history book about that period that allowed me to earn tenure at a good mid-sized university, I'll never know.  I simply do not have the answers to these greatest life and death question of them all for me.  

I have prayed many times asking God to take my curiosity away from me about that day, but all to no avail.  I have flashbacks, insomnia, hypervigilance, and insomnia PTSD symptoms about it, but they yield me no answers.

As my favorite great writer Kurt Vonnegut, who had PTSD and wrote his classic novel Slaughterhouse Five because he survived being a POW in WWII would say, "so it goes."

Indeed.  Support welcome.