Road Map to a Suicide

I was in a fraternity in college, and we had all these deep, dark secrets that you're never supposed to tell anyone about. You are supposed to take them to the grave. Enhanced interrogation techniques should never pry these stories out of your tortured breast.

Wanna hear one?

We had a ceremony that we enacted in December that was supposed to kick off the end of pledge training in the fall semester. This was back in the days that pledge training meant hazing, pure and simple. We heard about how much harder it was in the old days, and how much easier we had it than our fathers. Nowadays, there is no pledge training. Nothing much is required to get in, so I guess I sound like those people that used to tell me what a wimp I was for the pledge training I endured.

We called the week before Finals Week Dead Week. It was called Dead Week because you didn't do anything but study, and if you did attend class, they were just review sessions, no assignments. So, in the spirit of Dead Week, we had to dial back the intensity of pledge training for finals. So the Friday before Dead Week, we did an interesting thing. We kidnapped each of the pledges separately. We did it during study hours, so no one would be able to see the others being taken. Two actives would go up to the pledge and tell them to close their books and come with them. We took them down to the sleeping dorm and had them get a pillow case off their bed. Then we took them out to our car, handed them a bent dime, and had them put their pillowcase over their head and get in the back seat. We then took them out to some remote place, sometimes after driving for a long time, and assembled them together in a group, yanked off their hoods, and shouted "Surprise!" We gave them a bunch of beer and told them to have a party and have fun and when they came back, pledge training would be over. So you spend this tense hour or so thinking you're going to be dumped somewhere out in the countryside and you'll have to bash the dime out flat and walk a couple of miles to the nearest pay phone. Instead, you get released from PT (Pledge Training) torture and you get a party.

We all had it happen to us, and so we all enjoyed turning around and doing it to others. It was a fun story and a fun little trip. The year I was a junior, my cousin Jerry and I were asked to find the party location for the affair. We went up to Tuttle Creek Reservoir north of Manhattan (Kansas - we were at KSU) for a location. We found this place where a road ran into the lake from before the lake filled up. It was a parking lot, and there was the remnant of an old rock quarry right next to it, making the perfect party protection area. We drew a map up, made copies and distributed it to the Actives. Obviously, you were supposed to keep it away from the Pledges so as not to ruin the surprise, but someone left theirs out and it got stolen. The pledge that found it took a friend and followed the map one night right before the ceremony.

You have to put yourself in the Pledge's state of mind. They were being messed with and harassed constantly and this strange map had an unspoken promise of something unpleasant to come. So the night they followed the line on the map to the big X that it ended at, they did not know what to expect.

What they found was a dead body.

By some very strange coincidence, some guy decided to end it all right where the X marked the spot on the map, right before the Pledges went out to follow the map.

The freaked out, drove away, and anonymously phoned it in to the police. Then they spent the next few days quietly asking themselves "What the f***!?"

I found out about it the night of the ceremony when two of the Freshmen found out who drew the map and selected the spot and dragged Jerry and I out to the gravel parking lot to show us the spot. There was a dark stain on the ground where the guy landed and bled out.

That's the secret story and as wild as it sounds, it is 100% true.

The Black Marble

It's harder to do a book review of a book that you read almost 30 years ago. The Black Marble by Joseph Wambaugh was written in 1978. I probably read it within 5 years after it was written, I don't remember. I probably reread it 2 or 3 times.

It's a story about fate. The main character, Homicide Detective Sgt. Valnikov had recently lost his detective partner who had died. He was quickly drinking himself to death. He was assigned a new partner, Sgt. Natalie Zimmerman, who thinks he is going nuts. He's of Russian descent and so he drinks vodka. His new partner keeps coming this close to turning him in, but something always intervenes. Natalie gets him really drunk one night to pump him for information. She only finds that he enjoys Russian classical music and has a poetic streak. You can see her heart softening to the guy.

The story revolves around a dog groomer named Philo Skinner. This guy is down on luck, owes a lot of money to the mob for bad gambling debts. In order to get money to pay back his debt, he kidnaps a prizewinning purebred dog to ransom him back to the rich owner. The dog's owner, Madeline Whitfield, is actually not rich, she is practically broke, but maintaining a facade and holding out, waiting until she loses it all. She loves the dog like it is her child, but she is very unstable because she drinks excessively. Detective Valnikov finds a case he can really get into in this dog kidnapping, and even begins to sober up. In the course of helping her, they end up having sex, even though they are both over the hill lushes.

The icon of the Black Marble is from a saying, "Why do I always get the black marble?" That means why am I always getting the bad choices, why do I have such bad luck? The story is a black comedy. None of the characters is noble, perfect, or even completely respectable. The funny things that happen are usually painful or tragic to the people that experience them. Somehow, rather than becoming distressed and dragged down by the characters' pathetic lives, you find sympathy and humor for them.

Valnikov's problem ends up being that he has been slowly losing it over seeing too much death. Most cases he studies are actually suicides. His old partner seemed to be following a similar path before Valnikov. He was slowly getting more and more depressed by what he saw, people doing themselves in. He became an expert at recognizing it and eventually committed suicide himself. Many of Valnikov's random memories thoughtout the book are a series of flashbacks of the horrific ways that people did themselves in.

In the end, he solves the crime, saves the dog, saves his own life, and gets the girl. Strangely, the happy ending is not what you remember most about this story over the years, only the struggle to persevere when life hands you the Black Marble.

Why not suicide?

Leaders like General Eisenhower on D-Day and General Grant during the Civil War were leaders that were willing to risk men's lives to achieve their military goals. In times of great crisis, there is a need to spend lives. We were keeping the nation together and fighting global domination by a madman.

Antietam was the single bloodiest day in American History. We spent 60,000 lives that day. The Iraq war has cost 3,300 lives and 20,000 injuries over 4 years. People look at these numbers and argue them both ways. Some say that those lives are not much, the casualty rate is very low. Others say that those lives are buying nothing, so their loss is not acceptable.

Everyone seems to have a great deal of derision and distain for the suicide bomber. I think that in order to defend against attacks such as this, you have to try to look at an insurgent's point of view. Last week, a man blew up a the gasoline truck on a bridge. He was the driver of the truck. I remember thinking, "this guy was a suicider and he had a regular job as a gasoline truck driver?" That's a guy that seems pretty normal and he's capable of sacrificing himself in order to further his cause. Was he just crazy?

Iraq is not a stand up war. If insurgents wore uniforms and tried to make coordinated attacks with conventional weapons against our forces, we would wipe them out completely and decisively. If you look at combat, willing combat against a foe you are determined to never quit fighting, as a situation where you have a high chance of dying, then suiciders are actually doing something that makes good military sense. If they stood up, they would have been shot down in battle. Since they know they are going to die, they can pick a place and make it happen for maximum effect. One life, spent like a smart bomb, right to the heart of matter.

We in Western Society, with our history and our traditions can understand sacrifices like D-Day. Valiant struggles against the odds to complete a dire mission. I was talking about operation Market garden with a friend, who talked about how that was a waste. I would normally have agreed, but I realized that a bold stroke like that would have saved lives if it would have shortened the war.

The thing that we cannot understand is the choice of target. Choosing civilians as targets seems so alien. If the goal is to simply reap chaos, they are achieving that goal. If the goal is to provoke an over response in order to paint the occupiers as evil and gain recruits, they are probably doing that. If the goal is to hurt us, striking civilian targets do not do that. If the killings are simply sectarian targets of opportunity, then our presence isn't doing anything at all, we're just watching a civil war.

The more I think about it, the more I think we should just get out. There's no point in any of it. I don't believe that they will be over here if we don't fight them over there. That's doesn't make any sense. The presence of our troops over there doesn't change the tactics that you would use to attack the U.S. You would still try to send a small number of people to blend in and try to form an attack that can't be protected against. Say a backpack of explosives in Times Square. I fail to see how the Iraq war prevents someone from doing this. If we were going to quit defending ourselves and our borders after we withdraw from Iraq, then we would be more vulnerable. No one has ever suggested this. I think the insurgents will stay in Iraq to gain control from the opposing factions. That will probably keep them tied up for quite some while. When all that is done, they'll have to consolidate and hold power and stave off an insurgency from their opponents. I just don't buy the thought that staying in Iraq makes us more safe.