Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [148]
One day, after losing a night’s sleep to these sounds, I asked my mother: “Do you ever hear anything odd during the night?”
“Almost every night,” she replied, “I hear voices. Sometimes, they sound like they are upstairs, in one of our bedrooms. Sometimes, they’re in other rooms, or just somewhere in the air. They speak low, but I think I know what they are saying. They are talking about our future and how they plan on taking the life out of each of us.”
I thought to myself: Great—I’m becoming as crazy as everybody else in this damn family. After that, I started sleeping with a pillow over my head. It kept out the voices of the ghosts.
FRANK’S TERM IN THE ARMY PROVED ROUGH FROM THE START. His commanders knew he was a Jehovah’s Witness and opposed to armed service. They didn’t have much sympathy for such a stance. They would dress him down in front of the other men, calling him names, telling him they were going to break him.
For a while, Frank tried to become a medic. But that wasn’t good enough for his superiors. They wanted Frank to learn to load, carry, and fire a rifle, and to learn how to wield a bayonet. His commander told him: “You will have to do things according to the military, or you will be subject to court-martial.”
Frank replied: “I can’t do things according to the military. It goes against my religious beliefs.”
The officer ordered Frank to pack his duffel bag and march over to the Fort Ord stockade, two miles away. He would have to stay there until he could be court-martialed. “They had no guard on me during my march over there,” Frank said. “I mean, I could have easily taken off. The bus station was over there. I could have gone there, bought a ticket, and been gone. I could have been in Canada in two days. But I knew if I did that, this thing would have been dragging on for the rest of my life. I thought I may as well get it over with. Still, all the way over there, I kept thinking: ‘I wish they would accept me as a medic.’ I wanted to go in and do my duty and come out with a good name. But I didn’t want to violate my beliefs, and I didn’t want to take off running and be AWOL.”
While the enlisted men and draftees were in the stockade, awaiting courts-martial, the military guards put them on endless work details. “It would be pointless stuff,” said Frank, “like picking crabgrass out of the sand. It was just a nonsense thing, to make you sore and tired—a form of harassment. You would do it for hours and hours.
“We were out on detail one time, and this young kid standing by me just kind of snapped. He turned to me and said: ‘I’m going to try to escape. You better hit the ground.’ He started running and the guard fired and hit the kid. Later, I heard the guard got another stripe on his shoulder for shooting the guy. That bothered me, to shoot a kid and cripple him. He wasn’t a bad kid at all. Why couldn’t the guard have shot in the air and warned him? But they had this strict thing: Don’t let anybody escape. And while I was there, nobody did escape. After I saw that, I got badly depressed. That’s when I knew I was in for hell.”
FRANK WAS IN THE STOCKADE FOR THREE MONTHS before his court-martial. The charge was: disobeying a direct order from a commanding officer. It was a one-day trial—another open-and-shut affair. The military prosecutor charged that my brother was as bad as the enemy. In fact, he claimed, Frank was worse than a communist: He was a coward. “I knew better,” Frank said: “I was no more of a coward than any of them.
“I told them that. I told them I was happy to work as a medic. But I wasn’t going to line up and go out and kill somebody or be killed on the front. I was afraid that if I killed somebody, I would probably have become ruthless. I probably would have become a maniac on the battlefield, to be honest. I thought about that many times. And I knew if that happened, in my mind and heart, I would have been lost. I would have been one of the worst. And then I wouldn’t be able to live with myself. I