Blown for Good - Marc Morgan Headley [108]
Dave promptly ordered someone to go find Marc Yager and to call everyone from the day’s meeting back in to the property immediately. He was going to make sure there was hell to pay for this. And to make sure this never happened again, we were all going to go overboard right here, right now.
“Come on, Norman, you read the quote,’ Dave prodded. “Come on, let’s get this going.”
We lined up at the diving board of the pool. Norman Starkey recited the age-old Flag Order for the overboard drill. “We commit your sins to the waves. May you arise a better thetan.” Or something to that effect. After Norman said this, a person would jump off the diving board into the pool, swim over to the side, climb out and stand back in line around the pool. It was more weird than embarrassing. The pool was heated. I mean it was not like this was really that horrible. I am sure some people were glad that their uniforms were now going to get a free wash, and as an added bonus they would get a bath in as well.
What was worse about this particular incident was that one gal got up on the diving board — if she weighed less than 250 pounds I would have been surprised. You would have to butter this girl’s hips to squeeze her through a doorway. She was not only big but she was very rotund. She was the last person to have to go in. You could see that she was worried and did not think that she should be getting up on the board. She was clearly expecting someone to stop her from doing it, but that never came. When she got up on that diving board and started walking forward, the end of the board was, literally, touching the water. In the back of my head, I was truly concerned that she might get hurt if she tried to walk off, the sheer force of the diving board springing back up would surely catch her in the back as she moved off the end. As Norman read out the obligatory line, the end of the board was literally dipping into the water.
Dave was watching from the side of the pool. Was he really going to let this take place? I was disgusted. I mean, I could care less that I had gotten wet and was standing there in my uniform dripping wet, but making this poor woman do this was just plain wrong. She must have been in her 50s and had been at the base for at least 25 years.
“Wait a minute, Rae!” Dave finally said, “Come back.”
She barely maneuvered turning around on the end of the diving board. I was sure she was somehow going to get hurt here.
Wow, that was close. I really thought he was going to make her do it. But then, just when I thought Dave Miscavige possibly might have some tiny shred of decency left somewhere in him, he yelled out, “Go and walk into the shallow end!”
He made her walk back off the board and then all the way to the other end of the pool and slowly walk into the shallow end, down the steps and, holding onto the railing, go under water and then walk back out.
This sucks, I said to myself. There was nothing to be learned here. All Dave had done that night was prove to us that he was evil and enjoyed watching other people suffer. Not only had we all been dragged back in from our beds, we were now wet and presumably we should not go back home fearing that we might get chucked back in the pool a few hours later. What kind of lesson did we learn? I don’t even know what lesson we were supposed to learn that night. I just don’t know. Even though this was a pain that I was used to, I know that for me personally, another switch flipped in my head and it was not one in favor of Dave Miscavige.
Chapter Twenty-One – More Than A Party
t was another day in hell. We had been restricted to the CMO Int/WDC conference room for two months now. The basic explanation was that until all org boards and postings for the Int Base, Middle Management and Class V Orgs were done (the entire management and organizational structure of Scientology), we were not allowed to leave. We had to sleep under our desks each night and food was brought in. We were allowed to go down to the Gold Estates building for showers