A Henchman's Honor

August 1997

The Reaper and I sat on my bedroom floor. We had been close for as long as I could remember. He was often offered the chance to take me without resistance. In fact, I had stalked him for a lifetime. Now, I would force the issue.

The message I left on my brother’s answering machine from Ottawa was brief. “I’m finished. There’s nothing left for me to do. I’m just calling to say goodbye.”

The cold steel of my Beretta 92F pistol pressed hard into my temple. If you’re truly intent on suicide, you need to know the best place to put a bullet. You don’t want to fuck it up. I knew if I put the weapon in my mouth I might just blow my face or my jaw off. But a bullet to the temple meant swift and sure death. I had seen it hundreds of times.

The weapon felt as comfortable in my hand as a pen would to an accountant. I’d pointed weapons with malicious intent many, many times before—but never at myself.

I was eight years old the first time I held a gun in my hand. It was a .22 caliber rifle, almost as tall as I was. I’d fire at every tin can or tree stump that got in my way and tallied how many times I hit the target.

Two years later a bird would become my first genuine casualty. Killing a living creature for the first time was an unforgettable experience. It was summer and I was out by the marsh with a few of my friends. As we approached a copse of trees, a snipe—a little bird about the size of my hand—swooped down at us, squawking frantically. We realized that the fierce and furious little bird was protecting its nest and wouldn’t go anywhere. I put the shotgun up to my shoulder and followed the bird’s repeated swooping, circular flight path with the barrel. It was easy to anticipate where it would be next. I lead the gun a little ahead of the bird and squeezed the trigger. There was a puff of feathers and the bird dropped like a rock. My buddies yelled, “Holy shit! Good shot!” We walked over to where the bird lay in a tousled heap of feathers. I had no feelings of sadness or elation, just a hollow feeling of accomplishing a task. In many cases, successfully killing something comes down to really wanting the target dead. The first one to calmly aim will usually win the scrap.

I held the barrel of my Beretta to my head with justice in mind and grim intentions in my heart. Death wasn’t a shocking subject. But fucking things up and ending up as a disfigured incompetent was not an option. My hand was steady. I smirked. I’ve always smirked as the stress of any situation cooled and I became focused. Clarity is joy. Suicide was just another dark mission that would end in peace. I was very pleased with myself for buying the pistol years before. It had become my best friend. What would I do without it? I would be forced to cut myself or strangle myself at the end of a rope. A bullet would be an instant, painless death. Humane.

As I fingered the trigger a deluge of thoughts raced through my head. I wondered if suicide was honorable—or an act of cowardice? The ancient Japanese considered it an act of courage to end one’s own life. The ultimate dishonor was for a warrior to survive a defeat in battle. It meant he had failed, and required the Samurai warrior to kneel down and plunge his sword into his belly, right under his chest. The Samurai killed themselves with the same stoicism with which they did battle. The bushido—the ‘way of the warrior’ demanded that a soldier be brave and honorable. Failing to uphold the bushido virtues in any way was dishonorable. According to the tenets of bushido, a soldier should be victorious or dead.

After twelve years as a NATO soldier, had I been victorious? Had I advanced the cause of freedom? Or had I been instrumental in exchanging one evil cause for another? Or worse, had I magnified an evil force? Was freedom even my mission? Was I a failure and therefore subject to the tenets of bushido? One thing was for certain. As with many soldiers, I had been a complete rube. But I had been warned and had been given signs before I departed. I had chosen not to take any advice seriously. It was certain that I had dishonored myself. If the tenets of bushido applied, then my demise was imminent.

I was one of sixty thousand NATO soldiers who had gone to Bosnia to replace the impotent bureaucracy that is the United Nations – an organization that embezzles money and solves nothing. The worthless façade of big government. NATO had one purpose: to fight for democracy—we had been duped into believing that democracy was the ultimate freedom. But Bosnia was a democracy before the war. We had simply re-established the same bad system. But I have since come to realize that democracy is not freedom. Not for Bosnia, not for anywhere else in the world, and not for me. It functions as a giant noose that tightens with every law that promises to better protect us - the gullible sheep.

Soldiers need to feel important. They have to know that the risk they encounter is for a just cause and that it is a benefit to their country or mankind. But being home was far stranger than going overseas was. I was shocked that no one understood the lessons of Bosnia. Society is oblivious to events that don’t directly affect it. Where would I go from here? Where would I fit in? The answer seemed to be: nowhere. While civilians went to work, had kids and paid the mortgage, we went overseas on NATO missions and participated in events that got our friends disfigured or killed. It made us feel like the lions that protected the lambs. We risked our lives to expand the free world. In reality, soldiers are the lambs sent to the slaughter by the vicious hyenas in government.

I was determined to let go of the army and to try and assimilate into a life where people didn’t generally get up in the morning and make plans to kill each other. Presumably, I was free to do whatever I wanted.

Bullshit. I was not free. I was restrained by memories that strangled me like a uniform three sizes too small. It was as hard for me to step back into society as it would have been for someone to go to another country where everybody looks different and speaks a different language, but what separated me from civilians was not skin color or culture. It was my very dark experiences and my belief in freedom. To strangers I appeared to be happy, healthy and carefree. But to the few who really knew me and had heard of my experiences, I was a man who had committed exceptionally dark actions requiring force, intimidation and often death.

Yet I could no longer spend time with soldiers. They still believed that democracy was freedom and that killing foreigners was a valuable service. We weren’t philosophically similar anymore. And I couldn’t find any civilians with my life experience. I was a foreign pariah.

Throughout my life I had either stalked the Grim Reaper or he had stalked me many times. Every near miss was accompanied by a feeling of euphoria. I had finally come to the point where I’d stopped caring about cheating the Reaper. I wanted to punish myself for betraying honor and failing to implement freedom. Worse, some very decent, innocent people were dead because of my actions. So I concluded the only way justice could prevail was to punish myself. It was also about the only path I could see that would allow me inner peace. The Samurai used a sword. I would use my pistol. It would be like taking a pill of peace at the speed of sound.

As I sat there -- pistol pointed at my head -- the phone rang and scared the shit out of me.

“Holy fuck, I’m kind of busy here,” I said out loud.

I picked up the phone with my non-pistol-holding hand, “Hello.”

It was my brother. “What’s with the ominous message on my answering machine?” he asked.

My brother’s call wasn’t like a lifesaver to a drowning victim, or the cavalry coming over the hill. It simply interrupted me before I squeezed the trigger.

“Come to Edmonton and stay with us,” he said.

My brother didn’t know that there had been a silent trial run in my head. I had been convicted and sentenced to death. It didn’t matter to me where the gallows were. So I traveled to Edmonton to get to know my brother a little better before I carried out my punishment. I felt my brother’s phone call only served to complicate things and prolonged my agony. He would not change the end result of my will.

JULY 2003

A Henchman’s Honor is about the events that sent me on my self-destructive path. It is a cathartic exercise, but it is also a warning to civilians and soldiers alike. What they see is false and they are in grave danger. Writing about the events that brought me to this point is a public guilty plea to a self-indictment. It would be much easier to sleep like everyone else and just go with the flow, but I owe society something. The most valuable thing in the world is information. I will donate shocking information in exchange for my past transgressions. I will speak out and risk public scorn. Ultimately, I have to live with myself. The aim of what I say is to render a payment, clear my conscience and regain some of the honor I have lost when I committed moral crimes for terrible people. The public can use what I write to forearm themselves or not. My ten year book writing project, along with the mental torture I have endured, is payment for my sins. I have been punished and have paid restitution. I should be free to move on.

I need to spread the message passed to me by those who didn’t understand the message themselves until it was too late. For twelve years I was a hammer of the state. By conducting many immoral state-sanctioned acts, I learned that no “ism” benefits society. Freedom is not an “ism.” It is a belief in oneself, friends, family and charity. It is the antithesis of believing in government solutions. I am ashamed of many of the acts I’ve committed. I fired many shots in the name of immoral big government. This is my cannon shot from the besieged and burning fort of freedom. If the fort falls—so do we all.

But the most important of my questions and self-examination were not only about freedom versus government. They were much more personal. How does one get in over his head and end up doing evil things? I couldn’t help thinking: What was it in my life that had steered me toward immoral actions? Was I born this way? Was I predisposed to deceit and moral corruption? To answer that requires a very serious, thorough and honest investigation of the events, the consequences and myself. This narrative of events, and following short commentary from hindsight, may seem contradictory. You may ask, “Why would a man who believes this, do what he admits to in the preceding chapter?” You’ll have to bear in mind that at the time of the event, I was not as enlightened and didn’t hold the views I do now.