Project Vigil: Remembering the Heroes of Normandy

Seventy-Two Years Ago Today...

Seventy-two years ago, the biggest sea-borne invasion in the history of mankind was occurring at this very moment, an invasion that would change the course of history. It was an invasion that involved over 156,000 Allied troops from thirteen countries, pitted against Nazi Adolph Hitler’s ‘Atlantic Wall’. Here’s a few facts you may not have known about this significant turning point in World War II:

- Many people mistake the landings as being codenamed ‘Operation Overlord’; that was the overall title for the establishment of an Allied foothold in Europe. ‘Operation Neptune’ was the actual designation for the beach landings at Normandy.

- Actual American deaths directly related to D-Day first occurred on April 28^th, 1944, when a convoy of troop ships involved in a dress rehearsal for the landings were torpedoed by German U-boats off the coast of England. 946 American soldiers were killed.

- James Doohan, known to millions of ‘Star Trek’ fans as Mister Scott, was shot in the chest and hand during his Canadian division’s landing on Juno Beach. A silver cigarette case in Doohan’s shirt pocket saved him from death, although he did lose a finger.

- Preliminary plans for ‘Operation Neptune’ blew out an open window at Supreme Allied Headquarters in London in the summer of 1943; they were found by an elderly pedestrian who immediately returned them, saying his poor eyesight kept him from reading any of the top-secret documents.

- Famed American author J. D. Salinger landed on Omaha Beach with the American 4^th Infantry Division carrying his unfinished Catcher in the Rye in his pack. Salinger would go on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge and the Battle of Hurtgen Forest.

- A Spanish-born double agent working for British intelligence, Juan Pujol, was so adept at his craft that he convinced Hitler that the D-Day invasion would not occur in June of 1944. Adolph Hitler awarded Pujol with the Iron Cross for his service without ever realizing he’d been mightily duped.

- The ‘D’ in D-Day means nothing; many believe it stood for ‘Deliverance’, ‘Doom’ or ‘Debarkation’ but that was never the case.

- War photographer Robert Capa came onshore with the second wave of troops at Omaha Beach. Despite taking two reels of film, only eleven survived for publication. An assistant developing his pictures over-dried the rest, ruining them.

- John Steele of the American 505^th Parachute Infantry Regiment was part of the unit that was mistakenly dropped into the French town of St Mere Eglise; his ‘chute snagged on a church steeple, where he hung for two hours before finally being taken prisoner. Steele later escaped and rejoined his unit, which took the village from the Nazis. For his actions and injuries during combat, Steele was awarded a Bronze Star and Purple Heart. Steele was so enamored with St Mere Eglise and its townspeople that he often visited after the war; a tavern, Auberge John Steele, is named after him there. Steele died in 1969 of throat cancer.

Dinosaurs

That’s what I consider myself and those I worked with in law enforcement back in the day.

The job was a lot different back in 1979, when I began my career. There was more respect for police officers from the public…and the media. We were allowed to do our jobs and we were effective. You could call a scumbag a scumbag without fear of a personnel complaint because, back then, there was no such thing as ‘political correctness’. A mope wants to fight with the police? Most times, he went to the hospital before he went to jail. The next time, he knew better.

Back then a police officer always wanted to have an edge when it came to physical confrontation with a mope. That’s why we had sap gloves, convoys, blackjacks and billy clubs. A true copper used those tools as a last resort, after it became clear that talking wasn’t going to solve the issue with a subject who was bent on violence. Those things are all gone now. The new generation is the ‘kinder, gentler’ police officer…for the most part. If a criminal is struggling with you to gain control of your sidearm, you can’t slap him in the jaw with a blackjack anymore. That would be an open invitation for the mope to file suit against you and the police department, and would probably cause the cop to lose his/her job for using excessive force.

Now, police officers carry tools such as pepper spray, Tasers and PR 24s, otherwise known as ‘side-handled batons’.  A few things about those items: pepper spray…I’ve seen people high on dope walk right through it. During training back in the early 90s, we were told it was ‘target-specific’ because it comes out of the canister in a stream. Ask any officer who’s been in close proximity to a ‘specific target’ and they’ll tell you it isn’t, that they, too, were significantly affected by pepper spray.

Tasers….the name stands for ‘Thomas A. Swift Electronic Rifle’. A guy by the name of Jack Cover, who was a fan of the Tom Swift series of young adult action books when he was a kid, invented the device. A Taser delivers very quick, repeated jolts of electricity through two darts connected to the device via small, thin wires. Both darts must have contact within two inches of the target’s skin surface in order for them to deliver the voltage, which then interrupts the neuromuscular messages from the brain that controls limb movement, causing muscles to ‘lock up’. It is also very painful. If one of the darts miss, the device doesn’t work. If the target is wearing thick, winter clothing that inhibits dart penetration, it doesn’t work. You can’t use it on children, obviously pregnant women or persons with heart issues. You can’t use a Taser if a subject is at a height which would cause injury if he/she falls. You can’t use it in a flammable environment, nor can you employ a Taser on someone behind the wheel of a vehicle that is in gear. You do not want to use it on someone holding a firearm.

In other words, there are numerous things to consider before using a Taser. Sometimes, those things must be decided in the blink of an eye.

I’ve often wondered what the ‘PR’ stands for in PR-24; I’ve heard several different terms, but ‘Police Restraint’ seems the most logical. Its 24 inches long, which is self-explanatory. I can count on one hand the number of times I witnessed a PR-24 used in the field…and not use all my fingers. I never used it because I had no confidence in it; I had TOTAL confidence in the blackjack I carried in my back pocket so many years ago and, in this day and age, if I knew where I could still get one I’d buy it. I cannot tell you the last time I’ve even seen an officer anywhere with a -24 hanging from their gun belt, which might mean they’re no longer in use. Oh, they’re still out there, but either in a locker or a cruiser’s trunk, covered with dust, road flares, rolls of ‘Police Line – Do Not Cross’ tape, the med kit, the fluorescent orange reflective vest cops have to wear seemingly every time they get out of the cruiser….you get the idea.

Technology has, and will constantly, change the job. Disappearing is the written incident report; everything is seemingly done via laptop computers in the cruisers; no more barely legible words due to poor penmanship. Computerized traffic tickets, printed by the Mobile Data Terminal, are becoming the norm. Cops no longer have to radio in a license plate number for owner information; they run it themselves. Automatic License Plate Readers, mounted on the trunk decks of police vehicles, scan thousands of registration plates on cars and trucks passing by, alerting the on-board officer to such things as stolen, lost, expired and wanted plates.

It is also breeding laziness in some police officers. I’ve heard numerous car stops initiated by officers who ‘cherry-pick’; they’ll drive through a business lot packed with cars and run license plates. Eventually they come across one that’s expired or whose owner is under a driver’s license suspension. Once they find one of those, they’ll bring up the owner’s picture on the on-board monitor in order to verify that the car’s driver is in fact the subject under license suspension. The officer then parks away from the vehicle and watches it, waiting for the driver to get into the car and enter onto the public roadway, where the officer then initiates a traffic stop. The driver gets cited, the car gets towed and the officer pads his/her stats.

Peachy, right? In my opinion it is laziness. The time you’re spending surveilling that car could be better spent patrolling a high-crime area or any other of a myriad of tasks. Then there’s the whole liability issue: what if that suspended driver pulls onto the roadway and hits a pedestrian or another car, causing injury? The officer had prior knowledge of the owner/driver being under a license suspension yet still allowed that person to get behind the wheel…all for the sake of a traffic ticket. Same thing with the practice of sitting on a bar at closing time, watching a patron stagger and stumble their way to a vehicle and get behind the wheel. The drinking driver pulls onto the public roadway and BAM! The officer stops them and makes a DWI arrest.

Let me say this: I am not, and will not, defend suspended or impaired drivers. There are better, time-tested ways of taking those people off our roadways that actually might involve thought and good-old probable cause. It also involves a little more effort.

To a man, all my retired law enforcement buddies agree: if we could go back in time and do it all again, we would. In a heartbeat. But to start today, right now, and do thirty-plus years?

Not on your life.

Memorial Day 2016

Memorial Day.

Remember when it used to be called ‘Decoration Day’? I do, back when I was a kid in the early 60s. It officially became Memorial Day and a federal holiday in 1971, although, in 1966, President Lyndon Johnson designated Waterloo, New York as the birthplace of the holiday. Waterloo has held an annual observance of Decoration/Memorial Day since 1866.

This annual day of remembrance started the year after the Civil War ended, to honor both Union and Confederate soldiers who gave their lives in the four-year struggle. General John Garfield of the Union Army spoke before a crowd of 5,000 people at Arlington National Cemetery ( which had been part of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s plantation at the war’s outset ), after which more than twenty thousand graves of war dead were decorated with flowers.

Since then, Memorial Day has expanded to honor all those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our great nation in the name of freedom, including soldiers from wars that occurred prior to the War Between the States.

Here is a non-comprehensive list of American soldiers killed in action in correlation to the wars in which they died:

American Revolution: 4,435. War of 1812: 2,260. Mexican War: 1,733. Civil War, Union: 140,414. Civil War, Confederate: 74,524. Spanish-American War: 385. World War I: 53,402. World War II: 291,557. Korean War: 33,739. Vietnam War: 47,434. Gulf War: 148.

The Global War on Terrorism is still ongoing; as such I can’t include a final sum of American heroes.

Through the Gulf War, over 650,000 American soldiers have given their lives in combat to preserve this great Republic, and untold millions more suffered wounds as a direct result of battlefield violence.

Over six-hundred-fifty-thousand.

On this Memorial Day 2016 I honor those dead, those heroes from just yesterday back to the Revolutionary War. Those long since forgotten and the names of the places they fought. From Bunker Hill to Fort Dearborn; From El Brazito to New Market to Fredericksburg; from Belleau Wood to Chateau-Thierry; from Pearl Harbor to Guadalcanal to Normandy to the Ardennes to Anzio; from Inchon to Kapyong to the Chosin Reservoir; from Ap Bak to Ia Drang to Khe Sahn to Hue; from Fallujah to Khafji to Qom, and all the places over the last 242 years that most of us have forgotten or don’t know about.

As you enjoy your long holiday weekend…be it at family gatherings, on the road traveling or just flipping burgers on your backyard grill…remember those who made it all possible.

God Bless the United States of America.

Has It Really Been Forty-One Years?

‘Madison Graduates 180’.

One-hundred-eighty, according to the Mansfield News Journal.

Only 180? Can that be right?

Seems like a paltry number when compared to that June day in 1975 when I sat in one of the multitude of rows of green and white-clad graduates. I can’t remember the exact number in my graduating class, but I can tell you this: it was somewhere around four hundred fifty, give or take a dozen.

At that time, we were the largest class ever to graduate from Madison High School, which added ‘Comprehensive’ right after ‘Madison’ soon after we left. I don’t know why they did that, but it was right after they opened the new wing of the high school. The Class of ‘75’s record was broken a couple of years later, I believe by the Class of ’77.

And now they graduate one-hundred-eighty?

I remember these things about graduation: it was a beautiful day, warm but not hot. Big puffy white clouds set against a crystal blue sky. The ceremony seemed to take forever. I just wanted to walk across that platform in the middle of Ram Field, grab my diploma and get into the ‘real’ world. Leaving afterwards in my beat-up blue AMC Rambler, Rare Earth’s ‘I Just Want to Celebrate’ blaring from my 8-track tape player as I drove home with the windows down, longish hair waving in the breeze.

I had no clue what the next step would be.

Well, I did have somewhat of a plan. I knew college wasn’t for me; I’d just kind of breezed through my senior year because I’d only needed 3 1/2 credits to graduate. During one semester I had four study halls. Four, out of eight classes during the school day. I didn’t really apply myself to anything that year and couldn’t see the value of sitting in classrooms for another 4 years in college. That being said, here was the Grand Plan: if I didn’t have a full-time job by July 1^st I would enlist in the US Navy.

I got a full-time job eleven days before my deadline. I worked at Wolf Plumbing and Heating, installing seamless aluminum spouting on houses. Not very glamorous and definitely not a career.

After that I bounced around between a few jobs, got married at nineteen to my high school sweetheart ( we were too young and I was too immature ) before finally taking a position with the Ohio State Highway Patrol as a cadet/dispatcher.

That job set the hook.

Thus began my journey in the law enforcement world. I’d always dreamed of being a police officer, ever since I was a kid; the Blamers, who lived two doors away on Hout Road, had a couple of boys I hung out with…Dean Jr and Dale. If I wasn’t at their house they were at mine, and I’d heard a lot of cop tales from Dean Sr,, who was a Sergeant at Mansfield PD. He would come home from work and talk about things that had happened during his shift, exciting stuff for a thirteen year old to hear. I remember thinking wow, what a cool job! He gets to see everything that most people only read about in the newspaper!

I would find out during the thirty-one years I spent wearing a badge that that wasn’t always a good thing, that some of those things would cause sleepless nights and nightmares, memories that still haunt me to this day.

It’s been a very long journey from that June afternoon forty-one years ago and now, here I am so many decades removed from graduation day, living less than two hundred yards from where that stage sat that I couldn’t wait to walk across, retired.

What a ride it’s been.

Calvin Graham

Calvin L. Graham served aboard the USS South Dakota in World War II, having enlisted in the post-Pearl Harbor surge of volunteers. The brand-new battleship, designated BB 57, sailed from port in New York on March 20, 1942, completed fitting-out at the Philadelphia Navy Yard and then transited the Panama Canal en route to Pearl Harbor. She arrived there September 12.

The South Dakota’s crew were virtually all green sailors, with the exception of the section chiefs and command staff. Graham was the youngest aboard ship, assigned as a loader on a quad-40mm anti-aircraft mount. Once they sailed from Pearl, assigned as part of a task force which included the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, the South Dakota met the Japanese at Santa Cruz Islands, downing twenty-six Japanese planes while protecting the Enterprise.

Eighteen days later the task force engaged in the Battle of Guadalcanal; during fierce fighting the South Dakota had significant damage inflicted from constant Japanese air attacks and ship bombardment. Seaman 2^nd Class Graham, though suffering wounds of his own from shrapnel fragments and burns to his arms, heroically saved several shipmates by dragging them to safety and administering first aid. For his actions Graham was awarded a Bronze Star with Combat ‘V’ ( for valor ) device, along with two Purple Hearts.

Calvin Graham was twelve years old.

That’s right, 12. Graham, one of seven children, had extreme hardship at home because of his alcoholic stepfather’s abuse of he, his siblings and his mother. Graham left the home with one of his brothers and ended up living in a boarding house, eventually joining the Navy by forging his mother’s signature on enlistment papers and claiming to be seventeen. Calvin Graham had told his mother that he was going to live with relatives one hundred fifty miles from their Houston, Texas home when he enlisted; she had no idea that her young son had been a hero in combat off Guadalcanal until she saw his name in the papers. Nora then contacted the Navy and told them what her son had done. Graham was released from service April 1^st, 1943.

Calvin Leon Graham died in 1992, having been the youngest military combatant for the United States during WW II.

Mopes Who Know They're Criminals

It’s happened to me more than a few times, yet it still surprises me. Twice during my career and then again just yesterday, I’ve had encounters with people I had arrested in the past who flat-out admitted they were criminals. I’m not talking about the guy who confesses to breaking the speed limit when you’re giving him a traffic citation; I am referring to those handful of individuals that tell you they make their living by committing crimes. Or used to.

The first time, in the mid-80s, I was working off-duty, uniformed security at the old Blue Goose on Park Avenue East. Back in the day, we were permitted to do that…work security in a liquor establishment. That’s not the case anymore, which is probably a good thing; the two quickest ways for a male copper to get into trouble is booze and women, of which both are plentiful in a bar environment.

The band, right at last call, starts playing their version of ‘Freebird’, the old Lynyrd Skynyrd tune…and it was pretty bad, too. Anyway, a guy I’ve known since middle school was a regular in the place; we’d played baseball together in school but I can’t exactly say that Pete ( not his real name ) and I were friends. Pete had a knack of always being in some sort of trouble in school and I tried to stay away from those type of people. That behavior carried on into adulthood for Pete; he’d been in prison more than once. You see, Pete was, at one time, one of the premier safe-crackers in about a four-state area. All of us in law enforcement knew him and what it was he did, and eventually he’d gotten caught somewhere in Kentucky.

This night, as usual, Pete was pretty drunk. He’d always spoken to me in a cordial manner but stayed away when he was with his pals; I suppose he didn’t want to damage his reputation in the criminal community. As the band drones on with the last song, Pete staggers over, bleary-eyed, and tells me he respects me, and that he wished he’d made better life-choices when he was younger ( not his exact words, but that was the gist of it ). He then starts crying and tells me that he’d recently ‘done something’ and was so ashamed that he wanted to die, that he never would have imagined doing something so horrible. I gently prodded him to tell me, careful not to make it appear I was interrogating him. Pete, arm around my shoulder, looks me square in the eye and says he can’t admit to it because he knows he’d go back to prison for a long time. “I can’t go back there. I’ll die first”, he told me, “…and I know you’ll have to do your job if I tell you. I know that you know I’m a criminal; I am, but I’ve never hurt anyone before.” Pete then staggered away.

It dawned on me what he was talking about; a month prior, a business had been burglarized during the nighttime by professionals; they’d defeated the alarm system and entered in such a manner that wouldn’t leave any trace of how they’d gotten in. When the crew was finished and were leaving the place, a woman who happened to live right next door came out of her home to let her little dog out. She saw them and they saw her. These scum bags then beat her badly enough to put her in the hospital, leaving her with the threat that they’d be back if she talked to the police. She didn’t out of fear for her life. Pete, in his drunken state, hadn’t given me anything that was useable in court and there was nothing else that could be used to even establish basis for questioning. I sent it up the chain but, as far as I know, nothing came of my encounter with Pete. 

I heard recently that he was in pretty bad shape health-wise; it is un-Christian for me to say this but I hope Pete is suffering every single day.

Then there was Larry. Law enforcement in this county had been dealing with Larry, his buddy and also a girlfriend seemingly every other week for some type of business burglary. Their specialty was stealing high-dollar lawn tractors. Not the Sears model you mow the yard with, but rather those bigger suckers that aren’t quite farm tractors but still cost a small fortune. Larry, too, had been in prison but he certainly hadn’t been rehabilitated. Later on, he and his friends moved on to bigger and worse crimes…drug trafficking, mainly cocaine. Not in small amounts, either. Larry eventually became a suspect in a yet-to-be-solved homicide but nothing concrete enough to charge him was ever developed.

I was attending a wedding reception in 2001, during the three-year span I was out of the cop business due to a pretty bad spinal injury; Larry was there, too, as he was somehow related to the groom. Larry had always been friendly with me during past encounters; he never took it personally when he’d been arrested. He came over and started talking to me, saying he’d heard I wasn’t on the job anymore because of my back. “That’s too bad, Clark, because I always liked you. You’re a good dude, not like some of those other cops. I was a criminal and it was your job to catch me; sometimes I won, sometimes you guys did.” We talked for another few minutes and that was it. I never saw him again. Larry died a few years ago when his heart just quit working, I’m sure because of all the coke in his system.

The last time was Friday, mid-morning; I was out metal detecting in a small city park located right next to a business. I was in the process of wrapping things up and had wandered over to check out the area around an old set of bleachers before walking the 30 yards to where I’d parked. Head down, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and looked up; a black guy I’ll call ‘Harold’ was walking towards me. I knew the face but couldn’t remember his name, knowing only that I’d dealt with him on occasion while working for Mansfield PD.

“I know you…”, I said to him, which kind of took him aback.

“Know me? How you know me?”

When I answered that I knew his face and that I’d worked at MPD for a number of years, his face lit up. “Yeah, you’re Cigar!” ( pronounced ‘cee-gar' ; I almost always had one while I was working the street ).

We exchanged names and then it all came back. Harold hadn’t been a bad criminal, having only one 3^rd degree, non-violent felony on his record ( for which he got probation ) but several misdemeanor arrests. I remembered him because it seemed like that, every time we were sent to a disturbance at the old Jimmy’s Lounge on the square, Harold was there smiling his gap-toothed smile. After a bar fight at Jimmy’s one night I’d pulled him aside to question him as a witness. “I saw it, but I ain’t tellin’ nuthin’”, he’d said, “don’t wanna be no rat.” But after that time, if we had something happen and Harold was there, he made it a point to greet me by my then-street name. A few of those times Harold would give up a little information, too.

Harold and I talked for twenty minutes about the old days, with him asking about some of the guys I used to work with and me asking about the mopes he used to run with. As for him, Harold said he’d quit running the bars and was staying out of trouble, having taken on a full-time job at the business next door to the park. He’d come over to let me know that I was on the business’ property next to the bleachers. Again, I got the ‘you was a good dude’ number, with Harold admitting to me that he’d run afoul of the law on a few things but not gotten caught, except for the one felony. “I grew up”, Harold told me, “and wish I’d done it a lot sooner.”

It makes me feel good when criminals tell me I was a good cop back in the day, because I know it’s due to the way I treated them. Fairly. Everyone’s human and makes mistakes.

I just wish Pete had admitted to his disgusting crime that night so many decades ago, because I would have taken great pleasure in locking him away.