Prison Boot Camp
"Nobody knew who might be HIV positive. The state had recently enacted a law, intended to subvert discrimination, that prohibited the staff from even knowing who's blood might be lethal. We'd been bleeding on each other since the first day on the bus, but never was this terrifying risk presented in such a dangerously obvious fashion - but still we were ordered to press on, with the drill instructor's boots on our backs to make us fall into the blood if we were strong enough to avoid it on our own."
Sometimes everything just goes completely wrong. When I married my first wife I was on supervised release from federal prison, where I'd spent over two years behind bars for failure to pay tax on some of my firearms. My supervised release officer had denied me permission to get married because he claimed that it constituted a 'legal contract' that I was prohibited from entering into. I knew that was an excuse. The truth was that the FBI, who I'd been working with in an undercover capacity for years, wanted me kept on a short leash. So, since all is fair in love and war I ignored that prohibition, as I think any real man would have, and married the woman I loved anyway. Faced with a return to prison for my devotion to her and determined to provide for my new family in spite of being dealt a rather bad hand - we fled the country together. Being the young hothead that I still was, I sent my supervised release officer a Christmas card with our wedding photo. Not to be outdone, however, he sent after me a small army of federal agents, FBI and U.S. Marshals, who made life miserable for our friends and families. Because of my past as a Branch Davidian from Waco, I was categorized as a 'most wanted' fugitive - armed and extremely dangerous in spite of the petty offenses I was arguably guilty of. While safe out of the country and living under an assumed name, I soon realized that we could not sustain ourselves indefinitely with no ability to make money in a land devoid of much spoken English and with no working papers. We slipped back into the States, I started a new job under my new identity, and within a few months we learned that we were expecting a baby. Exactly one week later our small apartment was raided by federal agents and I was arrested. I remember peering out a tiny window in a cement holding cell, trying to call to my sobbing wife who was barely visible down the hallway: "I love you! Honey! I'm so sorry!"
That was 17 years ago. In 2015 I was responding to a Facebook thread begun by my friend Wayne Laugesen, who is now Editor for the Colorado Springs Gazette, but used to be a writer for the Boulder Weekly. In that latter capacity he'd written many articles about me and my political crusades during the 1990's - including at least two that described the events above. In the thread response I'd mentioned some details about my prison boot camp experience that followed my capture, and several people immediately expressed shock and outrage in the face of what I'd revealed. Since I'm typically the last person to experience an injustice and not shout to high heaven about it later, I was surprised. I'd never said very much about my period in boot camp to anyone previously. My wife hadn't let me mention it around her out of the pain those memories brought again to the surface, and I suppose I just let the whole thing slip my mind. But in the face of strangers on Wayne's Facebook thread who were shouting for an investigation and urging Wayne to write a story about it, I decided that perhaps my experience was worth telling.
In the wake of my arrest that November of 1999 near Ft. Collins, Colorado, there was something akin to a feeding frenzy among the various law enforcement entities who felt they were in a position to charge me with something. That was political. My face was all over the news. I'd been well known in Colorado since the 1993 Waco fire that propelled me into the national spotlight as an outspoken critic of law enforcement. They wanted to show the world what happened to a critic, and as corrupt as that is in a system where justice is supposed to be blind - I couldn't really blame them. While that may sound entirely too forgiving I'd already started to question the wisdom and fairness of some of my previous tactics, angry as I'd been over the deaths of my brethren in Waco, among other things. As I'd just turned 30 years old I think I was then starting to settle myself down. Learning that I was going to be a father had changed me, too, but none of that was going to keep the wolves at bay now that they smelled my blood.
After some of the dust had settled and I was moved to a local jail, I took stock of the charges against me: violation of federal probation on a string of counts, possession of my new identity papers (a passport and social security card - hey, I did nothing half-way), and state charges for possessing a new driver's license. For someone who had never so much as thrown a punch in his life or served a day of detention in high school, and considering my only motive behind everything was to marry my wife and live in peace - I could sure rack 'em up.
For the next four months I was dragged from one jail to the next as I went through the legal process within two different jurisdictions: state and federal. My attorney told me that under any normal circumstances the state charges would have been dropped, but that because I was who I was I shouldn't expect it. No doubt the state and federal judges would essentially combine the sentences to be served in federal custody at the same time, but the state wanted to be able to say, for the record, that they'd independently convicted the notorious Ron Cole. Meanwhile, my wife had moved in with my parents and was starting to enjoy the rigors of being a first-time expecting mother.
I was finally sentenced by both the state and the feds, more or less as expected, to a period in prison equal to about a year and a half. I could have received more, but as the federal judge said during my sentencing hearing, "Your story reads like a Greek tragedy," and gave me the minimum that he could under the guidelines. The state judge was happy to stipulate that my state sentence would be served in the federal Bureau of Prisons. I would miss the birth of my child but there was light at the end of a tolerably long tunnel. Eighteen months. I'd already started counting down the days and the hours. I would read books. I would probably wash dishes in the chow hall and my wife would visit every week.
Then disaster struck.
I was in the federal jail awaiting transport to the minimum security camp next door, which I expected to take a few weeks, when at 4:30 am I was jarred awake by a guard who shouted, "Cole! Pack your shit!" I was absolutely confused. Turns out that I was on a list to be transferred to the courthouse that morning, for some reason unknown to me or the guards. Nobody knew anything more than that. My wife was supposed to visit me in the jail later that day, and due to security I couldn't even use the telephones. I couldn't contact my lawyer. All I could do was follow orders and hope that whatever was happening to me was some kind of mistake. Handcuffs, shackles, the lock box, the works, and off I went.
Seven hours later I found myself back in a state jail, and I still had no idea why. I contacted my lawyer and he was as confused as I was. Finally the mystery was solved: the U.S. Marshals had decided to transport me out of federal custody and back into state custody. They had no court order to do that, but they'd done it, and now they were "refusing" to return me to federal jurisdiction. "I've never seen anything like this in over 20 years in practice," my lawyer told me. The net effect of the move was that the state would have to process me through their own prison system, and once I had completed my state sentence the U.S. Marshals would be forced to transport me back into federal custody - where I'd have to start, anew, my separate federal sentence. Worse, because I'd be ineligible for any early release by the state due to my federal detainment order, I'd have to serve a state sentence far in excess of anything intended by the judge - I was looking at over four years in state prison, after which I'd then start my 18 months in the feds! All of this was due to a deliberate and brutally vicious move by the U.S. Marshals that subverted the intentions of two sitting judges. I'd gone from being able to hold my son before he could walk, to holding my son only after he could articulate complete sentences. Could my wife even hang on by herself for that long?
Amid this unbelievable twist I had to keep going through the unmerciful process of being a convicted prisoner in the state's system, among rapists and muggers and all of the sordid 'gang bangers' that my time in the federal system had largely shielded me from. Long before I could mentally process what had happened I was shipped off to the state's maximum security prison designation facility. My poor wife never knew where I was from one day to the next. While there I was probed and tested in various ways, and somewhere along that blurred string of events I was asked if I wanted to volunteer for the state's correctional boot camp program. "You're old, but still eligible," I was told. I asked if it would get me back to the feds sooner. "You'd be eligible for re-sentencing if you graduate." I signed up, thinking only about the vague possibility of rejoining my family sooner rather than later.
What I did not know then was that only about 15% of those who entered boot camp ultimately graduated from boot camp, and that the only way out of it was to 'disobey a lawful order' by quitting - which was regarded as another state charge. I also did not know that the average age of volunteers was 20 years old, which made me an old man by comparison. I was also unaware of the pending lawsuits against penal boot camp programs due to the deaths of volunteers who had succumbed to their conditions in various ways, and that the nationwide prison boot camp experiment as a whole was under fierce scrutiny and was ultimately doomed. I suppose that none of those things would have dissuaded me anyway. It was a means to an end.
So it was that I found myself one among about 40 'kids' on a barred-window converted school bus, bumping along a dirt road in the middle of nowhere headed for the unknown. I'd been in boot camp-like conditions before: in the Civil Air Patrol and in the ROTC. I'd also been as absorbed in the military way of life as any person could be - short of active duty - by being the son of an Army officer, a student of military history, and a person who had close friends in military services all over the world. If my buddy Phil could stand boot camp in the French Foreign Legion and go on to be an instructor himself, I could take whatever was coming - or so I told myself with confidence. I also knew the psychological war that was about to play out, and above all I believed that I could not be physically struck by the drill instructors. Mind games, nothing more. I'll show them who's mind is a rock, I thought. Off in the distance, at the edge of the plain, the unmistakable gleam of sun-lit razor wire hove into view.
Parked astride a low-roofed building that looked right out of Gomer Pyle, only the thrum of the bus's engine could be heard. We sat in silence as a long line of men wearing large brimmed campaign hats slowly marched towards us. About twenty feet from the bus they suddenly broke into a run, all screaming at the top of their lungs, "Get off of my God-damned bus!" Here we go, I thought, and actually smiled. I felt totally prepared and ran for the bus's rear emergency exit, which had been flung open. As soon as I bailed out, however, the shouts changed, "What the hell are you doing? Who told you to get off my bus? Back onto the God-damned bus!" On, and off. Back on, back off. I don't know how many times we repeated the process but it went on for about two hours under the hot sun. And, somehow, subconsciously, in spite of all my self-contrived awareness and prior mental preparation - I started to feel myself wear down.
Nobody had struck me, I don't think. I don't remember it if someone did, but somehow in the blur of 40 guys and 20 drill instructors running and screaming over the course of two hours on and off of that bus, I'd accumulated uncountable bruises and cuts. Sure, I vaguely remembered falling out of the bus onto the ground a few times, and someone fell on me, and then I remembered a shove in an isle after which I seemed to black out for a second or two, get back up . . . But all of the little voices in my head that had been cheering me on at the beginning of this process had gone silent, and I was going through the various motions like an automaton. After the bus we were chased onto the parade deck, where, evidently because my file included my prior military experience, I was singled out for harsher treatment. Push ups and sharp gravel biting into the palms of my hands. Losing a boot somewhere running uncountable laps. Periodically being sprayed in the face by a high pressure water hose. I feel like a weakling for admitting it now, but I was all but done in during the blur of those first hours of that first day. Where had all of my resilience gone? Where was my rock? I was vomiting, as were many others, down our own shirts because that's what we were told to do in order to spare the parade deck from the filth. Vomiting and running. Being knocked over by a spray of cold water. More running, vomiting, and yelling.
It might have been minutes or hours later, I was summoned to the camp commander's office. "Strip off your clothes, Recruit!" I was ordered. I responded with the prescribed "Sir, yes, Sir!" and flew out of my clothes without even thinking. The room was filled with most of the drill instructors from earlier in the day. I had no idea what was going on and was beyond caring. My undershirt was still soaked in my own puke.
"Where did you get all those bruises, Recruit?" I was puzzled. I tried to force my brain to work but I could only stammer. There were muted words between the drill instructors (DIs). "Did someone beat you up?" one of them shouted at me. Suddenly my brain kicked into gear and I became angry. Some self awareness returned to me at those words, and I realized, No! You assholes have been purposely running me at top speed into solid objects all day long! How do you expect a person to look after that? But, having rediscovered my strength to a point, I only said, "Sir, no, sir! This recruit was trampled on the bus, Sir!" That was probably true anyway, at least in part. They eventually accepted that and told me to report to sick call later on to receive some aspirin. I then blurted out, "Sir, this recruit does not require aspirin, Sir!" which invoked a crescendo of 'oh, so you're a tough guy' remarks and verbal abuse from everyone in attendance. Even as a shattered wreck, I could still be belligerent in my own way.
I don't remember anything else from that first day. I know that there were meals, during which we were taught how to eat while at attention - eyes front, scoop, lift straight up, stop, proceed straight into mouth, retrace steps and repeat. No talking if you value your life, etc. God help you if you were caught making eye contact with a DI. Those sorts of things I had expected. But, and I only remember this because it became a very serious problem over the next several days even after I started to adjust - I could not eat, not a bite, and I could only barely drink. Again, I feel silly admitting it now, but evidently I was so stressed or in some kind of shock that the muscles in my throat that controlled swallowing were simply unable to function. I would try. I'd be surrounded by screaming DIs ordering me to swallow, but it was physically impossible. The strange and alarming condition was effecting others in our platoon, too. By the third day, with no let up in the physical routine and without any significant calorie intake - people started passing out. By the third day our platoon of 40 was down to 32, with most of the absentees gone due to medical discharges.
We were also moved into our squad bay that first day, and instructed in the ways of maintaining our lockers and making our beds. Blowing air into partially used toothpaste tubes in order to maintain their proper shape was new to me, but everything else I'd experienced before; hospital corners and all of that. They represented convenient distractions from the madness of the parade deck and just about everywhere else. So long as they were showing us how to fold a sheet they were not running us into each other and we were not vomiting. We were all shaved bald and we were forced to stuff our hair down our shirts to mix with the puke.
The puking thing deserves more attention, because it was not something that happened by accident and it lever let up for the entire time I was in boot camp. Inducing recruits into vomiting seemed to be a sport among the DIs. The easiest way to make it happen involved forcing us to chug the entire contents of our canteens at some random moment during an exhausting run. Our canteens smelled and tasted like bleach, which was used to clean them out, and that only faded after weeks of use. Few recruits could stomach this. After that we'd be run into the head to refill our canteens with warm tap water (a practice modified only much later when it was learned that using warm water in such a way could be fatal), marched to the parade deck double time, and ordered to chug another canteen full. Puke and repeat upon the DI's orders. When anyone missed vomiting down their shirts, they were ordered to roll around in the mess, pick it up, carry it in their hands while running laps, or whatever variation any given DI might come up with. But I never had that happen to me. After awhile we got used to throwing up and became experts at accurately predicting ahead of time when it was going to happen. Someone would suddenly stop their sit ups, snap to attention, and shout, "Sir, this recruit requests permission to hurl, Sir!" and after permission was given the inevitable occurred - like a well running but twisted machine of some kind.
That first day brought only one pleasant surprise: after lights out the DIs went home and stayed home until reveille the next morning. We were still under the strict watch of a guard, were not allowed to speak, and had to formally request permission to use the head - but nobody came after us. That was the only time you could really process the preceding day's events. That was also when, devoid of distractions, I became lost in thought over my wife and unborn child from whom I'd been separated. There were no telephones in boot camp and no visitations. Letters could come in and eventually we'd be allowed letters out. Our baby was due to be born before graduation, in a matter of weeks, and I had no way of knowing how things were going. There was no reassurance of anything and no assurance was to be expected. I used to brood over what circumstances might allow me to receive news from my wife: would they tell me if she had a miscarriage? How long before I'd be told anything if she died in labor? But I was so exhausted at the conclusion of each day that even these dreadful forebodings, thankfully, were soon overwhelmed by sleep.
We'd been standing at attention for hours in our squad bay; two lines of us facing each other. This wasn't punishment for anything specific, but was a simple side effect of having too many platoons and too few DIs. It was a mixed blessing. We got to hear how hard the other platoons were being driven out in the yard and in the halls, but standing like that for so long was a physical test of endurance on its own. The poor guy across the line from me quivered uncontrollably after the first couple of hours, and his legs had swollen to twice their normal circumference above his tube socks. I could hear a DI out in the hall dressing down some unfortunate recruit. He was whispering - never a good sign - while the kid stood at attention. My eyes front, I could just see them in my peripheral vision. "What kind of lie did you ever tell yourself that led you to believe you were ever worthy of being a father?" the voice hissed. "Do you hear me?" No response. "What gave you the right to bring a child into this world that came from your pathetic loins?" Silence, then I heard the kid crying softly. "I'll bet that you wish to God you could take it all back. I bet you wish you could go back before that fateful fuck and castrate yourself." A pause amid sobs. "Am I right?" Then I heard the kid reply, in a mouse's voice, "Sir, yes, sir." And the DI said in a low voice, "Go away."
Obviously I came to despise some of those DIs with an intense passion, as did we all. They were all brutal, but some possessed a sense of justice while others, like the sadist in the hallway, seemed to enjoy destroying people's souls. I knew that the idea of boot camp, in a military context, was simple and had a clearly defined purpose: break you down and build you up; make you into a Superman. But this prison boot camp was not designed after that proven model, a reality which I was slowly realizing as I adjusted and began eating small amounts of solid food late into the first week. In this place it was about breaking you down, and down, and down . . . with no positive goal in mind other than making you suffer via torture that skirted the line of legality. Nobody wanted stronger inmates out the other end of this program - they wanted cowed inmates. It was my challenge to keep that from happening to myself while still managing to get through the program. At no point did I ever regard that as a sure thing.
The madness during the first week had prevented any sort of relationships from forming between ourselves or between ourselves and our DI, but that did slowly begin to change. Our drill instructor was appropriately named Butcher, and while we interacted with numerous DIs every day we were Butcher's platoon and it was Butcher who skulked up and down our squad bay regularly barking out orders, outlining expectations, and tormenting anyone who gave him any excuse to do so during the process. But it was also Butcher who had an unusual degree of former military experience for a prison DI - he had been a Green Beret in Desert Storm - and with that came an air of professionalism and a certain sense of justice. I also respected him for his service and the trials that I knew were in his own past - thus when he was forcing me to do push ups with his boot in my back I resented it a lot less. If I'd been forced into continuous conflict with any other DI, especially any of them with no military experience and younger than I, I don't know if I would have been able to hold myself in check. If I'd been that poor fellow in the hall, having my manhood cut to pieces - certainly not, not as the expectant father that I was then, and I lived in dread of being thrust into a similar sort of situation. I played the gray man, desperately trying to hide in plain sight, not inviting any attention - good or bad - not too fast, not too slow; just like those Army manuals I'd read about how to survive being a captive of the enemy. As week one came to a close - we were down to 26 out of our original platoon. One week down, eleven to go.
The pressure eased slightly when we started our afternoon classes, usually about substance abuse or some derivative that in no way applied to my situation, and we discovered ways to communicate with each other - or rather, we became confident enough to dare where we had not dared before. While standing on line in the squad bay we could talk so long as we were careful about it. After lights out we discovered that the night guard wasn't very strict. During runs we could sometimes even speak openly to each other and not even hide it. At chow we could exchange a few words through our clenched teeth, so long as our lips didn't move. Friendships did form and a sense of comradeship made us all stronger as individuals. When someone was at the end of their tether on a long forced march, so many other recruits would come to their aid that it was almost too much - the guy would be virtually carried the rest of the way. It didn't matter what color anyone was, or where they'd come from before. Individuals also started to stand out at this time. I stood out among the members of the platoon for having gone from seemingly near death to outrunning nearly everyone in the space of a week, Quarles stood out for being physically un-phased by any amount of punishment, Goree, for acting deliberately effeminate at every opportunity, Bailey, for being the shortest guy among us and the strongest all at once, and Dipotino, for being the only other 30 year old ex-military guy. Dippy, as we came to call him, became my best friend of the group and I looked out for him whenever I could.
Standing out in the face of Butcher, however, was still something that everyone avoided, until one day I couldn't help myself. Butcher used to carry on about his military experience in the Gulf War as a means of, so he claimed, impressing upon the young gang members among us that they did not know what 'tough' was. He often repeated himself and gave the same speeches, one of which included this rhetorical question: "Have you ever seen what a .223 caliber bullet does to a human body?" pitched at supersonic volume. Of course his assumption was that no one had, including myself, and in those pre-War on Terror days it was usually a pretty safe thing to assume. But I had. In fact one of my darkest memories was of walking into the Waco morgue with Ritta Riddle to help her identify the shot, burned, and mutilated remains of her baby brother, Jimmy. His body had been shot by federal agents on the day of the Waco fire (friends of Butcher for all I knew) and the sight and smell will remain with me for the rest of my life. Every time our DI reached that point in his speech where I knew he'd ask that repeated question, my heart would throb and my fists would clench.
"Have you ever seen what a .223 caliber bullet does to a human body?" he yelled again.
"Sir! Yes, Sir!" I shouted, with my eyes bulging from their sockets. There I was. It had taken some time but the old me had not been driven out permanently.
The reaction was at first like something out of a predictable B movie: gasps, silence, the slowly rotating turret of Butcher's head taking aim at the source of the unexpected retort. He walked over to me. "And how is that, Cole?" he said with a steely tone.
"Sir . . . " and I explained the situation as it happened, preceding it with only just enough history to frame the context - I was in Waco, and now I was in prison boot camp.
"So!" he shot back. "You support those crazies who shot at the police and then killed themselves?" turning this exchange into a deliberate show.
"Sir! That is not how it happened, Sir!"
"And how would you know, Cole?"
"Sir! Because I lived there for two years! They were and are my family! We believe in God and don't believe in suicide, Sir!"
Silence. A pin drop would have made everyone jump.
"Well, I don't know because I was not there. That was a terrible situation," he continued, using the first semi-casual tone of voice I'd ever heard him use. Then he skillfully switched gears, and went back to his otherwise justified rant against gang pride. But every eye of every member of the platoon was on me, and every eye seemed to be asking me if I'd gone off of my rocker.
For the remainder of the day I braced myself for Butcher's eventual reprisal, but it never came. I eventually learned that my speaking up that day caused him to read several accounts about Waco, and the subject along with my association with it became a topic of debate and discussion among the other DIs and the facility's staff. That both helped me and hurt me throughout the remainder of my time in the program, depending upon where each individual DI stood on the issue. Many times I noticed that I'd be inexplicably given some slack by one person, only to be punished triple by someone else.
That night after lights out, Goree spoke up and said, "Hey, I think that Cole deserves a big 'hoorah' from all of us for standing up to Butcher today," and in spite of orders from the night guard for us to shut up, that's what I got: "Hoorah, Cole!"
The days slogged into each other with little variation in pressure or exertion - always the same ingredients, only presented as different dishes. I discovered my own physical strengths and weaknesses: I attacked the obstacle course with a fury that no one could match, but carrying another recruit on my shoulders nearly made my collar bone snap. In or out of shape I still possessed the build of a slightly starved greyhound and nothing would ever change that. I flew up the climbing wall like Spider Man, and even Butcher cheered me on, but when it came to vaulting leg-first over a shorter wall - I found the task absolutely impossible. I hated that stupid little wall on a deeply personal level. By the time I reached it on the O course I was almost always leading the pack and was thus very conspicuous. I'd meet it at a full sprint, throw my arms atop it and muster all of my strength to throw my legs over . . . only to crash and fall on my ass. I'd back up a few yards, shout a battle cry, and rush it again with the same result. Finally, after several attempts, red faced and furious, I'd run around it just in time to save myself from being the last one to finish. I knew that Butcher and the other DIs had to have been watching me, and based upon my experience up until then I recognized that my failures were providing the perfect fodder for abuse and retribution - but that never happened. I think they realized that I was half-killing myself trying to get over that stubborn thing and were fair enough to ignore it.
"You have five minutes to get from here to the squad bay, wrap all your shit up into your blankets, and stand by for inspection on the parade deck! Starting . . . now!" They knew we'd never make it. We knew we'd never make it. Epic failure had been incorporated into the plan from the start. But we still tried to our own determent, crashing into each other and drawing each other's blood, all in a furious panic to accomplish what we all knew was an impossible task. When the whistle blew there were recruits sprawled out on the parade deck with their sordid gear scattered over a twenty square yard area - bed sheets blowing away softly downwind. Guys were crumpled in the mud halfway between the squad bay and the yard with their arms wrapped around bundles like they were cradling their babies - a trail of tooth brushes, soap, towels, shoes, and underwear all mixed together that marked where we'd all stumbled. This was why we were told to mark our initials on everything we were issued. Of course we'd failed, but the DIs deserved Oscars for their feigned shock and disappointment. "Are you kidding me? You had five whole minutes!" And the punishments were meted out over the blur that became the remainder of the day, only ending at lights out, after which we'd all fall dead asleep.
Sometimes I'd wake up on my own before reveille. There were no windows in the squad bay, but right above my bunk there was a small skylight. I remember staring into it and trying to guess the time based upon the brightness of the sky and wondering how long it would be until the room exploded, the dread slowly building up amid a silence only broken by a few rumbling snores.
The DIs invented sinister games that seemed to serve no purpose and turned simple logistical tasks, like traversing the distance between the chow hall and the squad bay, into interminable nightmares. We'd be ordered to form a line and then get down on all fours in push up position, but placing our legs around the neck of the recruit behind us, until we resembled one long human snake. With only our quivering arms holding all of our collective weight above the floor, and with someone else's hard boots in each of our faces, we were told, "March!"
The struggle would have been funny if it had not been so bloody. Our snake was constantly collapsing in places, as legs and boots flailed to reattach themselves around the necks of the poor fellows behind who were then kicked in their faces repeatedly. I remember looking straight down onto the deck as we inched forward, stopped, inched forward again, and beheld a river of blood, slime, perspiration, and spit. Whenever anyone fell, or was forced to collapse by others falling around them, their bloody faces met that sticky mess, adding more blood and slime and spreading it further for the next victim. Nobody knew who might be HIV positive. The state had recently enacted a law, intended to subvert discrimination, that prohibited the staff from even knowing who's blood might be lethal. We'd been bleeding on each other since the first day on the bus, but never was this terrifying risk presented in such a dangerously obvious fashion. But still we were ordered to press on, with the drill instructor's boots on our backs to make us fall into the blood if we were strong enough to avoid it on our own.
Yet there were moments of genuine levity in spite of everything. Once a guy in our platoon, early on in the program when we were still figuring out the procedures, whispered to us that he needed toilet paper and didn't know how to get any. It was a completely reasonable question in light of what the procedure actually was: a recruit had to double time to the DI's office, stand at attention until addressed, shout out his request in the only acceptable and specific fashion, and then wait for the DI to either hand over the roll, or throw it across the room, bounce it off the recruit's head . . . whatever fancied the drill instructor. But in the interests of amusing ourselves at this recruit's expense we changed a key detail. "Don't ask for toilet paper, man!" someone advised. "Remember? It's not a toilet here - it's 'the head', so you have to ask the DI for head paper!"
He ran off and did just that: "Sir! This recruit requests head paper, Sir!" And a few minutes later he staggered back into the squad bay with an entire roll of toilet paper wrapped around his head like a giant Q-tip, with tiny slits just big enough to see through and to breath. He had to keep it on all day until lights out, even for chow.
Another incident took place in the chow hall. One of my friends opened a small plastic container of grape jelly, which he quietly noted had hardened into a gummy bear-like substance. Almost instantly Dippy whispered, "Go trade it in to the DI on the food line. He'll give you another one." and before anyone could stop him he took off like a shot with the hard jelly in hand as evidence to show Butcher. That was one problem with being so accustomed to acting before thinking - a habit that took a long time to wear off completely. To everyone's shock he came back within a minute with a hand full of new jelly!
But we all smelled an ambush in the near future.
Sure enough, the next day at lunch, a completely different DI shouted for our hapless buddy to report "front and center" as soon as our platoon ran into the chow hall. "You, Recruit, are to stand here on this chow line and inspect every article of food stuffs which is passed onto every tray! I want to know the status of every hot dog - if they're too hard, soft, burned or broken . . . anything that would not pass your own previously demonstrated standards! Then you are to report to my office at 13:00 hours for further instruction! Dismissed!"
Some days we picked weeds out of the parade deck with our bare hands for as long as six hours without a break, except for water. Some days we were run outside the wire for well over ten miles and long after many recruits had dropped far behind or outright collapsed. We did push ups, sit ups, 'hit 'ems' and squat thrusts by the hundreds every day - probably thousands. I tried to keep track of our exercises once, and after a 24 hour period came up with numbers like 700, 900, 1200 . . . for each respective type of exercise. I didn't mind those numbers, actually, I was just astounded by my own previously untapped resources to keep up with them. Butcher noticed it, too. One day a recruit in our platoon cried out in pain, "Sir, I can't do any more, Sir!" And Butcher retorted, "Why not? Cole can do 'em!" He was a skinny fellow, too, but had invoked that excuse one too many times.
Six weeks into the program we considered ourselves veterans. We'd also lost more than half of our original platoon. Of those who were no longer among us, only eight had outright quit. All the others, the vast majority, had been given medical discharges for one reason or another. Of the several guys who shared my initial inability to eat anything, I was the only one who didn't succumb to it and wash out. While it might be tempting to suspect that some of our medical discharges were inventions by people who wanted to quit without the repercussions of quitting, I never saw any evidence of that. One of the guys in our platoon actually broke his foot two weeks in and hid the fact until after graduation. Occasionally, when someone was dropped for a medical reason, they'd come back in with another platoon - but that meant starting all over again.
"Cole!" A voice cracked like a bullet fired into the squad bay, where we stood in a state of semi-attention at the ends of our bunks, writing letters home. I looked up, startled and understandably alarmed upon hearing my name called. I dropped my pencil and ran to the DI to report myself present.
"Phone call," he said stoically, pointing to a land line phone in the guard's observation room. I think my heart skipped a beat.
"Hello?" I stuttered, conscious of the DI hovering inches behind my right shoulder.
"You have a son!" the faint voice called to me from what seemed a thousand miles away. "Congratulations, sweetie!"
I was in shock. It hadn't seemed real, especially since I hadn't even seen my wife in more than two months. I hadn't heard her voice, either. All of everything outside my razor wire and drill and screams had become make believe, like a distant dream, but I'd been brought back to what was real and permanent - unlike what had become my daily life. "Honey! Are you okay?" I had a hundred questions!
"Hurry up, Cole," the DI seethed. Really? While I've just became a father, you're going to pull rank on me after two minutes? But I ignored him. He could trash me all day and I wouldn't care. Not after this.
We talked for five minutes, and it probably couldn't have been much longer due to the drugs still in my wife's system. The labor had been hard and very painful, but quick. We had a perfect little baby boy, and I'd never been happier in my life. "Sir! Thank you, Sir!" I croaked.
"Go away," he said, walking past me. But I still smiled.
Not long after my son was born I decided to start keeping a journal. I'd been issued an old school Avery comp book as part of my class program and nobody had yet opened it during an inspection. Our time in the squad bay had been increasing somewhat - we'd arrived at a period in the boot camp program that was unofficially referred to as "pause" - and as a new father I'd realized that someday my son might want to try and understand the circumstances of his birth and where I'd been at the time. Most of my daily submissions were short and banal:
August 11: [Drill Instructor] O'Brian ran us into the ground this morning, but I kept up. Good run! Butcher gave me an over-sized potato last night. Everyone in the platoon is learning a bit about military firearms and small unit tactics. My wife and son seem okay. I love them so much. I want to go home.
At this time I was pleased to be 'promoted' to color guard, along with my pal Dippy. I was made flag bearer. There were very few such honors provided in boot camp: guidon, squad leader, and color guard. The guidon was always the recruit with the best running stamina, as his job while out on a run was to literally run circles around the rest of the platoon. Squad leader, which I admit I coveted early on, was deliberately given to a seemingly random recruit to frustrate everyone like me who was actually working for it - or so the DIs told us later. Thus color guard, comprised of three recruits, including myself, was the only place of any real honor in our platoon where our overall performance was recognized in any tangible way. As a guy ten years older than nearly everyone else, and as someone who feared a medical discharge during that first week, I was immensely proud of myself. I also noticed that when it came to handing out our covers or other rare 'treats' that we occasionally received, Butcher always called our guidon, Quarles, first - followed by me. Everyone recognized that the order wasn't random. Perhaps those small gestures amid a system that was extremely disagreeable should not have mattered at all to me, and maybe I was a vain man for my pride, but in that world where every day we were treated as creatures less than human - I took whatever I could get.
August 18: Hard [physical training] this am. O course, 5 mile run, etc. [Drill instructor] Dent in rare form! Starting to look more to graduation. U.S. flag went up only part way thanks to Dippy. Oh, well. I can't wait to see my son! My wife is beautiful! Flew over climbing wall this am. Feel good about that. Oh, yeah, I'm still Ron Cole. I know what that means.
August 22: I herded cattle on the 20th. Dippy low-crawled through a huge pile of cow patties. Butcher kind of being a pain, but he goes on vacation on Wednesday. I can't wait to see my wife and son. I'm going nuts!
One week to graduation: 11 out of 40. For anyone aware of military boot camp graduation statistics, our wash out percentage exceeded that of the U.S. Navy Seals. Apples and oranges, I suppose, but the few of us left from among those who arrived almost three months before were aware of the numbers. Sometimes we felt bad for the ones who, if they'd just hung on a little longer, would have made it. Our platoon was actually graduating 23 - but that was only because of transfers from other platoons (recruits who were regressed a month for some slight), medical returnees, and other odd cases. That morning we'd all taken the official U.S. Army Physical Training Test, administered by Butcher. To my obvious glee I'd scored second from the top of my platoon - with Quarles predictably beating me out by a hair. Who said skinny guys were weak? Dippy, who was my age but with the opposite physical problem - he'd been too fat - finished about average, but by graduation had lost over 100 pounds!
I'd hated prison boot camp; hated everything about it - officially. I hated the bestial treatment. I hated the unnecessarily brutal attacks against our souls - like that poor young father who was forced to admit his shame - and while I understood and respected brutality in the context of a military program, to remake men into Terminators, I will never forgive some of the sadists who used it to tear us down, and down, and down. Brutality with no justification is just brutality - no different than Stormtroopers in Poland. Period. And I'm sticking to that position. But, at least for me and a few others, the way in which we managed to survive and thrive in that environment almost undercuts my primary argument. Somehow I turned brutality into a fuel that propelled me to new heights - physically and emotionally. To this day I regard the closing phase of boot camp, and my graduation, as one of my finest hours. Whenever I'm in doubt about myself for any reason, my mind immediately goes back to those days nearly 15 years ago, and my chest puffs out a little. When I'm on some verbal tirade on the subject of anything important, usually religious or political but not always, and people see a steely look in my eyes and hear an edge in my voice - that's boot camp.
Final Entry August 31: **Thou hast graduated!!!!**
- Ron Cole
Addendum: The plot by the U.S. Marshals to subvert two judge's orders was ultimately subverted - but only long after I graduated from the boot camp program. In the face of events, both judges were outraged over what had happened and the state judge suspended my sentence entirely. But that took many months during which I never knew if I'd be home in 5 months or 5 years. That was a very hard time - probably harder for my wife than it was for me. Once I was back in federal custody, with my boot camp hair finally grown out and I'd stopped shouting "Sir!" at every staff member, I received news that I would be released in only a matter of weeks - thanks to unexpectedly counted 'good time'. While ultimately a victory, and one that, ironically, never had to include my trip to boot camp at all, it was by far the most trying and literally gut-wrenching experience of my life.
But I have to admit that I'm stronger for it.
Colorado's Buena Vista Alternative Corrections Program - boot camp - was shut down in 2010 due to budget cuts. Newspaper reports mentioned at the time that the shutdown was only considered temporary, and that "our program still has a future."
- R
That was 17 years ago. In 2015 I was responding to a Facebook thread begun by my friend Wayne Laugesen, who is now Editor for the Colorado Springs Gazette, but used to be a writer for the Boulder Weekly. In that latter capacity he'd written many articles about me and my political crusades during the 1990's - including at least two that described the events above. In the thread response I'd mentioned some details about my prison boot camp experience that followed my capture, and several people immediately expressed shock and outrage in the face of what I'd revealed. Since I'm typically the last person to experience an injustice and not shout to high heaven about it later, I was surprised. I'd never said very much about my period in boot camp to anyone previously. My wife hadn't let me mention it around her out of the pain those memories brought again to the surface, and I suppose I just let the whole thing slip my mind. But in the face of strangers on Wayne's Facebook thread who were shouting for an investigation and urging Wayne to write a story about it, I decided that perhaps my experience was worth telling.
In the wake of my arrest that November of 1999 near Ft. Collins, Colorado, there was something akin to a feeding frenzy among the various law enforcement entities who felt they were in a position to charge me with something. That was political. My face was all over the news. I'd been well known in Colorado since the 1993 Waco fire that propelled me into the national spotlight as an outspoken critic of law enforcement. They wanted to show the world what happened to a critic, and as corrupt as that is in a system where justice is supposed to be blind - I couldn't really blame them. While that may sound entirely too forgiving I'd already started to question the wisdom and fairness of some of my previous tactics, angry as I'd been over the deaths of my brethren in Waco, among other things. As I'd just turned 30 years old I think I was then starting to settle myself down. Learning that I was going to be a father had changed me, too, but none of that was going to keep the wolves at bay now that they smelled my blood.
After some of the dust had settled and I was moved to a local jail, I took stock of the charges against me: violation of federal probation on a string of counts, possession of my new identity papers (a passport and social security card - hey, I did nothing half-way), and state charges for possessing a new driver's license. For someone who had never so much as thrown a punch in his life or served a day of detention in high school, and considering my only motive behind everything was to marry my wife and live in peace - I could sure rack 'em up.
For the next four months I was dragged from one jail to the next as I went through the legal process within two different jurisdictions: state and federal. My attorney told me that under any normal circumstances the state charges would have been dropped, but that because I was who I was I shouldn't expect it. No doubt the state and federal judges would essentially combine the sentences to be served in federal custody at the same time, but the state wanted to be able to say, for the record, that they'd independently convicted the notorious Ron Cole. Meanwhile, my wife had moved in with my parents and was starting to enjoy the rigors of being a first-time expecting mother.
I was finally sentenced by both the state and the feds, more or less as expected, to a period in prison equal to about a year and a half. I could have received more, but as the federal judge said during my sentencing hearing, "Your story reads like a Greek tragedy," and gave me the minimum that he could under the guidelines. The state judge was happy to stipulate that my state sentence would be served in the federal Bureau of Prisons. I would miss the birth of my child but there was light at the end of a tolerably long tunnel. Eighteen months. I'd already started counting down the days and the hours. I would read books. I would probably wash dishes in the chow hall and my wife would visit every week.
Then disaster struck.
I was in the federal jail awaiting transport to the minimum security camp next door, which I expected to take a few weeks, when at 4:30 am I was jarred awake by a guard who shouted, "Cole! Pack your shit!" I was absolutely confused. Turns out that I was on a list to be transferred to the courthouse that morning, for some reason unknown to me or the guards. Nobody knew anything more than that. My wife was supposed to visit me in the jail later that day, and due to security I couldn't even use the telephones. I couldn't contact my lawyer. All I could do was follow orders and hope that whatever was happening to me was some kind of mistake. Handcuffs, shackles, the lock box, the works, and off I went.
Seven hours later I found myself back in a state jail, and I still had no idea why. I contacted my lawyer and he was as confused as I was. Finally the mystery was solved: the U.S. Marshals had decided to transport me out of federal custody and back into state custody. They had no court order to do that, but they'd done it, and now they were "refusing" to return me to federal jurisdiction. "I've never seen anything like this in over 20 years in practice," my lawyer told me. The net effect of the move was that the state would have to process me through their own prison system, and once I had completed my state sentence the U.S. Marshals would be forced to transport me back into federal custody - where I'd have to start, anew, my separate federal sentence. Worse, because I'd be ineligible for any early release by the state due to my federal detainment order, I'd have to serve a state sentence far in excess of anything intended by the judge - I was looking at over four years in state prison, after which I'd then start my 18 months in the feds! All of this was due to a deliberate and brutally vicious move by the U.S. Marshals that subverted the intentions of two sitting judges. I'd gone from being able to hold my son before he could walk, to holding my son only after he could articulate complete sentences. Could my wife even hang on by herself for that long?
Amid this unbelievable twist I had to keep going through the unmerciful process of being a convicted prisoner in the state's system, among rapists and muggers and all of the sordid 'gang bangers' that my time in the federal system had largely shielded me from. Long before I could mentally process what had happened I was shipped off to the state's maximum security prison designation facility. My poor wife never knew where I was from one day to the next. While there I was probed and tested in various ways, and somewhere along that blurred string of events I was asked if I wanted to volunteer for the state's correctional boot camp program. "You're old, but still eligible," I was told. I asked if it would get me back to the feds sooner. "You'd be eligible for re-sentencing if you graduate." I signed up, thinking only about the vague possibility of rejoining my family sooner rather than later.
What I did not know then was that only about 15% of those who entered boot camp ultimately graduated from boot camp, and that the only way out of it was to 'disobey a lawful order' by quitting - which was regarded as another state charge. I also did not know that the average age of volunteers was 20 years old, which made me an old man by comparison. I was also unaware of the pending lawsuits against penal boot camp programs due to the deaths of volunteers who had succumbed to their conditions in various ways, and that the nationwide prison boot camp experiment as a whole was under fierce scrutiny and was ultimately doomed. I suppose that none of those things would have dissuaded me anyway. It was a means to an end.
So it was that I found myself one among about 40 'kids' on a barred-window converted school bus, bumping along a dirt road in the middle of nowhere headed for the unknown. I'd been in boot camp-like conditions before: in the Civil Air Patrol and in the ROTC. I'd also been as absorbed in the military way of life as any person could be - short of active duty - by being the son of an Army officer, a student of military history, and a person who had close friends in military services all over the world. If my buddy Phil could stand boot camp in the French Foreign Legion and go on to be an instructor himself, I could take whatever was coming - or so I told myself with confidence. I also knew the psychological war that was about to play out, and above all I believed that I could not be physically struck by the drill instructors. Mind games, nothing more. I'll show them who's mind is a rock, I thought. Off in the distance, at the edge of the plain, the unmistakable gleam of sun-lit razor wire hove into view.
Parked astride a low-roofed building that looked right out of Gomer Pyle, only the thrum of the bus's engine could be heard. We sat in silence as a long line of men wearing large brimmed campaign hats slowly marched towards us. About twenty feet from the bus they suddenly broke into a run, all screaming at the top of their lungs, "Get off of my God-damned bus!" Here we go, I thought, and actually smiled. I felt totally prepared and ran for the bus's rear emergency exit, which had been flung open. As soon as I bailed out, however, the shouts changed, "What the hell are you doing? Who told you to get off my bus? Back onto the God-damned bus!" On, and off. Back on, back off. I don't know how many times we repeated the process but it went on for about two hours under the hot sun. And, somehow, subconsciously, in spite of all my self-contrived awareness and prior mental preparation - I started to feel myself wear down.
Nobody had struck me, I don't think. I don't remember it if someone did, but somehow in the blur of 40 guys and 20 drill instructors running and screaming over the course of two hours on and off of that bus, I'd accumulated uncountable bruises and cuts. Sure, I vaguely remembered falling out of the bus onto the ground a few times, and someone fell on me, and then I remembered a shove in an isle after which I seemed to black out for a second or two, get back up . . . But all of the little voices in my head that had been cheering me on at the beginning of this process had gone silent, and I was going through the various motions like an automaton. After the bus we were chased onto the parade deck, where, evidently because my file included my prior military experience, I was singled out for harsher treatment. Push ups and sharp gravel biting into the palms of my hands. Losing a boot somewhere running uncountable laps. Periodically being sprayed in the face by a high pressure water hose. I feel like a weakling for admitting it now, but I was all but done in during the blur of those first hours of that first day. Where had all of my resilience gone? Where was my rock? I was vomiting, as were many others, down our own shirts because that's what we were told to do in order to spare the parade deck from the filth. Vomiting and running. Being knocked over by a spray of cold water. More running, vomiting, and yelling.
It might have been minutes or hours later, I was summoned to the camp commander's office. "Strip off your clothes, Recruit!" I was ordered. I responded with the prescribed "Sir, yes, Sir!" and flew out of my clothes without even thinking. The room was filled with most of the drill instructors from earlier in the day. I had no idea what was going on and was beyond caring. My undershirt was still soaked in my own puke.
"Where did you get all those bruises, Recruit?" I was puzzled. I tried to force my brain to work but I could only stammer. There were muted words between the drill instructors (DIs). "Did someone beat you up?" one of them shouted at me. Suddenly my brain kicked into gear and I became angry. Some self awareness returned to me at those words, and I realized, No! You assholes have been purposely running me at top speed into solid objects all day long! How do you expect a person to look after that? But, having rediscovered my strength to a point, I only said, "Sir, no, sir! This recruit was trampled on the bus, Sir!" That was probably true anyway, at least in part. They eventually accepted that and told me to report to sick call later on to receive some aspirin. I then blurted out, "Sir, this recruit does not require aspirin, Sir!" which invoked a crescendo of 'oh, so you're a tough guy' remarks and verbal abuse from everyone in attendance. Even as a shattered wreck, I could still be belligerent in my own way.
I don't remember anything else from that first day. I know that there were meals, during which we were taught how to eat while at attention - eyes front, scoop, lift straight up, stop, proceed straight into mouth, retrace steps and repeat. No talking if you value your life, etc. God help you if you were caught making eye contact with a DI. Those sorts of things I had expected. But, and I only remember this because it became a very serious problem over the next several days even after I started to adjust - I could not eat, not a bite, and I could only barely drink. Again, I feel silly admitting it now, but evidently I was so stressed or in some kind of shock that the muscles in my throat that controlled swallowing were simply unable to function. I would try. I'd be surrounded by screaming DIs ordering me to swallow, but it was physically impossible. The strange and alarming condition was effecting others in our platoon, too. By the third day, with no let up in the physical routine and without any significant calorie intake - people started passing out. By the third day our platoon of 40 was down to 32, with most of the absentees gone due to medical discharges.
We were also moved into our squad bay that first day, and instructed in the ways of maintaining our lockers and making our beds. Blowing air into partially used toothpaste tubes in order to maintain their proper shape was new to me, but everything else I'd experienced before; hospital corners and all of that. They represented convenient distractions from the madness of the parade deck and just about everywhere else. So long as they were showing us how to fold a sheet they were not running us into each other and we were not vomiting. We were all shaved bald and we were forced to stuff our hair down our shirts to mix with the puke.
The puking thing deserves more attention, because it was not something that happened by accident and it lever let up for the entire time I was in boot camp. Inducing recruits into vomiting seemed to be a sport among the DIs. The easiest way to make it happen involved forcing us to chug the entire contents of our canteens at some random moment during an exhausting run. Our canteens smelled and tasted like bleach, which was used to clean them out, and that only faded after weeks of use. Few recruits could stomach this. After that we'd be run into the head to refill our canteens with warm tap water (a practice modified only much later when it was learned that using warm water in such a way could be fatal), marched to the parade deck double time, and ordered to chug another canteen full. Puke and repeat upon the DI's orders. When anyone missed vomiting down their shirts, they were ordered to roll around in the mess, pick it up, carry it in their hands while running laps, or whatever variation any given DI might come up with. But I never had that happen to me. After awhile we got used to throwing up and became experts at accurately predicting ahead of time when it was going to happen. Someone would suddenly stop their sit ups, snap to attention, and shout, "Sir, this recruit requests permission to hurl, Sir!" and after permission was given the inevitable occurred - like a well running but twisted machine of some kind.
That first day brought only one pleasant surprise: after lights out the DIs went home and stayed home until reveille the next morning. We were still under the strict watch of a guard, were not allowed to speak, and had to formally request permission to use the head - but nobody came after us. That was the only time you could really process the preceding day's events. That was also when, devoid of distractions, I became lost in thought over my wife and unborn child from whom I'd been separated. There were no telephones in boot camp and no visitations. Letters could come in and eventually we'd be allowed letters out. Our baby was due to be born before graduation, in a matter of weeks, and I had no way of knowing how things were going. There was no reassurance of anything and no assurance was to be expected. I used to brood over what circumstances might allow me to receive news from my wife: would they tell me if she had a miscarriage? How long before I'd be told anything if she died in labor? But I was so exhausted at the conclusion of each day that even these dreadful forebodings, thankfully, were soon overwhelmed by sleep.
We'd been standing at attention for hours in our squad bay; two lines of us facing each other. This wasn't punishment for anything specific, but was a simple side effect of having too many platoons and too few DIs. It was a mixed blessing. We got to hear how hard the other platoons were being driven out in the yard and in the halls, but standing like that for so long was a physical test of endurance on its own. The poor guy across the line from me quivered uncontrollably after the first couple of hours, and his legs had swollen to twice their normal circumference above his tube socks. I could hear a DI out in the hall dressing down some unfortunate recruit. He was whispering - never a good sign - while the kid stood at attention. My eyes front, I could just see them in my peripheral vision. "What kind of lie did you ever tell yourself that led you to believe you were ever worthy of being a father?" the voice hissed. "Do you hear me?" No response. "What gave you the right to bring a child into this world that came from your pathetic loins?" Silence, then I heard the kid crying softly. "I'll bet that you wish to God you could take it all back. I bet you wish you could go back before that fateful fuck and castrate yourself." A pause amid sobs. "Am I right?" Then I heard the kid reply, in a mouse's voice, "Sir, yes, sir." And the DI said in a low voice, "Go away."
Obviously I came to despise some of those DIs with an intense passion, as did we all. They were all brutal, but some possessed a sense of justice while others, like the sadist in the hallway, seemed to enjoy destroying people's souls. I knew that the idea of boot camp, in a military context, was simple and had a clearly defined purpose: break you down and build you up; make you into a Superman. But this prison boot camp was not designed after that proven model, a reality which I was slowly realizing as I adjusted and began eating small amounts of solid food late into the first week. In this place it was about breaking you down, and down, and down . . . with no positive goal in mind other than making you suffer via torture that skirted the line of legality. Nobody wanted stronger inmates out the other end of this program - they wanted cowed inmates. It was my challenge to keep that from happening to myself while still managing to get through the program. At no point did I ever regard that as a sure thing.
The madness during the first week had prevented any sort of relationships from forming between ourselves or between ourselves and our DI, but that did slowly begin to change. Our drill instructor was appropriately named Butcher, and while we interacted with numerous DIs every day we were Butcher's platoon and it was Butcher who skulked up and down our squad bay regularly barking out orders, outlining expectations, and tormenting anyone who gave him any excuse to do so during the process. But it was also Butcher who had an unusual degree of former military experience for a prison DI - he had been a Green Beret in Desert Storm - and with that came an air of professionalism and a certain sense of justice. I also respected him for his service and the trials that I knew were in his own past - thus when he was forcing me to do push ups with his boot in my back I resented it a lot less. If I'd been forced into continuous conflict with any other DI, especially any of them with no military experience and younger than I, I don't know if I would have been able to hold myself in check. If I'd been that poor fellow in the hall, having my manhood cut to pieces - certainly not, not as the expectant father that I was then, and I lived in dread of being thrust into a similar sort of situation. I played the gray man, desperately trying to hide in plain sight, not inviting any attention - good or bad - not too fast, not too slow; just like those Army manuals I'd read about how to survive being a captive of the enemy. As week one came to a close - we were down to 26 out of our original platoon. One week down, eleven to go.
The pressure eased slightly when we started our afternoon classes, usually about substance abuse or some derivative that in no way applied to my situation, and we discovered ways to communicate with each other - or rather, we became confident enough to dare where we had not dared before. While standing on line in the squad bay we could talk so long as we were careful about it. After lights out we discovered that the night guard wasn't very strict. During runs we could sometimes even speak openly to each other and not even hide it. At chow we could exchange a few words through our clenched teeth, so long as our lips didn't move. Friendships did form and a sense of comradeship made us all stronger as individuals. When someone was at the end of their tether on a long forced march, so many other recruits would come to their aid that it was almost too much - the guy would be virtually carried the rest of the way. It didn't matter what color anyone was, or where they'd come from before. Individuals also started to stand out at this time. I stood out among the members of the platoon for having gone from seemingly near death to outrunning nearly everyone in the space of a week, Quarles stood out for being physically un-phased by any amount of punishment, Goree, for acting deliberately effeminate at every opportunity, Bailey, for being the shortest guy among us and the strongest all at once, and Dipotino, for being the only other 30 year old ex-military guy. Dippy, as we came to call him, became my best friend of the group and I looked out for him whenever I could.
Standing out in the face of Butcher, however, was still something that everyone avoided, until one day I couldn't help myself. Butcher used to carry on about his military experience in the Gulf War as a means of, so he claimed, impressing upon the young gang members among us that they did not know what 'tough' was. He often repeated himself and gave the same speeches, one of which included this rhetorical question: "Have you ever seen what a .223 caliber bullet does to a human body?" pitched at supersonic volume. Of course his assumption was that no one had, including myself, and in those pre-War on Terror days it was usually a pretty safe thing to assume. But I had. In fact one of my darkest memories was of walking into the Waco morgue with Ritta Riddle to help her identify the shot, burned, and mutilated remains of her baby brother, Jimmy. His body had been shot by federal agents on the day of the Waco fire (friends of Butcher for all I knew) and the sight and smell will remain with me for the rest of my life. Every time our DI reached that point in his speech where I knew he'd ask that repeated question, my heart would throb and my fists would clench.
"Have you ever seen what a .223 caliber bullet does to a human body?" he yelled again.
"Sir! Yes, Sir!" I shouted, with my eyes bulging from their sockets. There I was. It had taken some time but the old me had not been driven out permanently.
The reaction was at first like something out of a predictable B movie: gasps, silence, the slowly rotating turret of Butcher's head taking aim at the source of the unexpected retort. He walked over to me. "And how is that, Cole?" he said with a steely tone.
"Sir . . . " and I explained the situation as it happened, preceding it with only just enough history to frame the context - I was in Waco, and now I was in prison boot camp.
"So!" he shot back. "You support those crazies who shot at the police and then killed themselves?" turning this exchange into a deliberate show.
"Sir! That is not how it happened, Sir!"
"And how would you know, Cole?"
"Sir! Because I lived there for two years! They were and are my family! We believe in God and don't believe in suicide, Sir!"
Silence. A pin drop would have made everyone jump.
"Well, I don't know because I was not there. That was a terrible situation," he continued, using the first semi-casual tone of voice I'd ever heard him use. Then he skillfully switched gears, and went back to his otherwise justified rant against gang pride. But every eye of every member of the platoon was on me, and every eye seemed to be asking me if I'd gone off of my rocker.
For the remainder of the day I braced myself for Butcher's eventual reprisal, but it never came. I eventually learned that my speaking up that day caused him to read several accounts about Waco, and the subject along with my association with it became a topic of debate and discussion among the other DIs and the facility's staff. That both helped me and hurt me throughout the remainder of my time in the program, depending upon where each individual DI stood on the issue. Many times I noticed that I'd be inexplicably given some slack by one person, only to be punished triple by someone else.
That night after lights out, Goree spoke up and said, "Hey, I think that Cole deserves a big 'hoorah' from all of us for standing up to Butcher today," and in spite of orders from the night guard for us to shut up, that's what I got: "Hoorah, Cole!"
The days slogged into each other with little variation in pressure or exertion - always the same ingredients, only presented as different dishes. I discovered my own physical strengths and weaknesses: I attacked the obstacle course with a fury that no one could match, but carrying another recruit on my shoulders nearly made my collar bone snap. In or out of shape I still possessed the build of a slightly starved greyhound and nothing would ever change that. I flew up the climbing wall like Spider Man, and even Butcher cheered me on, but when it came to vaulting leg-first over a shorter wall - I found the task absolutely impossible. I hated that stupid little wall on a deeply personal level. By the time I reached it on the O course I was almost always leading the pack and was thus very conspicuous. I'd meet it at a full sprint, throw my arms atop it and muster all of my strength to throw my legs over . . . only to crash and fall on my ass. I'd back up a few yards, shout a battle cry, and rush it again with the same result. Finally, after several attempts, red faced and furious, I'd run around it just in time to save myself from being the last one to finish. I knew that Butcher and the other DIs had to have been watching me, and based upon my experience up until then I recognized that my failures were providing the perfect fodder for abuse and retribution - but that never happened. I think they realized that I was half-killing myself trying to get over that stubborn thing and were fair enough to ignore it.
"You have five minutes to get from here to the squad bay, wrap all your shit up into your blankets, and stand by for inspection on the parade deck! Starting . . . now!" They knew we'd never make it. We knew we'd never make it. Epic failure had been incorporated into the plan from the start. But we still tried to our own determent, crashing into each other and drawing each other's blood, all in a furious panic to accomplish what we all knew was an impossible task. When the whistle blew there were recruits sprawled out on the parade deck with their sordid gear scattered over a twenty square yard area - bed sheets blowing away softly downwind. Guys were crumpled in the mud halfway between the squad bay and the yard with their arms wrapped around bundles like they were cradling their babies - a trail of tooth brushes, soap, towels, shoes, and underwear all mixed together that marked where we'd all stumbled. This was why we were told to mark our initials on everything we were issued. Of course we'd failed, but the DIs deserved Oscars for their feigned shock and disappointment. "Are you kidding me? You had five whole minutes!" And the punishments were meted out over the blur that became the remainder of the day, only ending at lights out, after which we'd all fall dead asleep.
Sometimes I'd wake up on my own before reveille. There were no windows in the squad bay, but right above my bunk there was a small skylight. I remember staring into it and trying to guess the time based upon the brightness of the sky and wondering how long it would be until the room exploded, the dread slowly building up amid a silence only broken by a few rumbling snores.
The DIs invented sinister games that seemed to serve no purpose and turned simple logistical tasks, like traversing the distance between the chow hall and the squad bay, into interminable nightmares. We'd be ordered to form a line and then get down on all fours in push up position, but placing our legs around the neck of the recruit behind us, until we resembled one long human snake. With only our quivering arms holding all of our collective weight above the floor, and with someone else's hard boots in each of our faces, we were told, "March!"
The struggle would have been funny if it had not been so bloody. Our snake was constantly collapsing in places, as legs and boots flailed to reattach themselves around the necks of the poor fellows behind who were then kicked in their faces repeatedly. I remember looking straight down onto the deck as we inched forward, stopped, inched forward again, and beheld a river of blood, slime, perspiration, and spit. Whenever anyone fell, or was forced to collapse by others falling around them, their bloody faces met that sticky mess, adding more blood and slime and spreading it further for the next victim. Nobody knew who might be HIV positive. The state had recently enacted a law, intended to subvert discrimination, that prohibited the staff from even knowing who's blood might be lethal. We'd been bleeding on each other since the first day on the bus, but never was this terrifying risk presented in such a dangerously obvious fashion. But still we were ordered to press on, with the drill instructor's boots on our backs to make us fall into the blood if we were strong enough to avoid it on our own.
Yet there were moments of genuine levity in spite of everything. Once a guy in our platoon, early on in the program when we were still figuring out the procedures, whispered to us that he needed toilet paper and didn't know how to get any. It was a completely reasonable question in light of what the procedure actually was: a recruit had to double time to the DI's office, stand at attention until addressed, shout out his request in the only acceptable and specific fashion, and then wait for the DI to either hand over the roll, or throw it across the room, bounce it off the recruit's head . . . whatever fancied the drill instructor. But in the interests of amusing ourselves at this recruit's expense we changed a key detail. "Don't ask for toilet paper, man!" someone advised. "Remember? It's not a toilet here - it's 'the head', so you have to ask the DI for head paper!"
He ran off and did just that: "Sir! This recruit requests head paper, Sir!" And a few minutes later he staggered back into the squad bay with an entire roll of toilet paper wrapped around his head like a giant Q-tip, with tiny slits just big enough to see through and to breath. He had to keep it on all day until lights out, even for chow.
Another incident took place in the chow hall. One of my friends opened a small plastic container of grape jelly, which he quietly noted had hardened into a gummy bear-like substance. Almost instantly Dippy whispered, "Go trade it in to the DI on the food line. He'll give you another one." and before anyone could stop him he took off like a shot with the hard jelly in hand as evidence to show Butcher. That was one problem with being so accustomed to acting before thinking - a habit that took a long time to wear off completely. To everyone's shock he came back within a minute with a hand full of new jelly!
But we all smelled an ambush in the near future.
Sure enough, the next day at lunch, a completely different DI shouted for our hapless buddy to report "front and center" as soon as our platoon ran into the chow hall. "You, Recruit, are to stand here on this chow line and inspect every article of food stuffs which is passed onto every tray! I want to know the status of every hot dog - if they're too hard, soft, burned or broken . . . anything that would not pass your own previously demonstrated standards! Then you are to report to my office at 13:00 hours for further instruction! Dismissed!"
Some days we picked weeds out of the parade deck with our bare hands for as long as six hours without a break, except for water. Some days we were run outside the wire for well over ten miles and long after many recruits had dropped far behind or outright collapsed. We did push ups, sit ups, 'hit 'ems' and squat thrusts by the hundreds every day - probably thousands. I tried to keep track of our exercises once, and after a 24 hour period came up with numbers like 700, 900, 1200 . . . for each respective type of exercise. I didn't mind those numbers, actually, I was just astounded by my own previously untapped resources to keep up with them. Butcher noticed it, too. One day a recruit in our platoon cried out in pain, "Sir, I can't do any more, Sir!" And Butcher retorted, "Why not? Cole can do 'em!" He was a skinny fellow, too, but had invoked that excuse one too many times.
Six weeks into the program we considered ourselves veterans. We'd also lost more than half of our original platoon. Of those who were no longer among us, only eight had outright quit. All the others, the vast majority, had been given medical discharges for one reason or another. Of the several guys who shared my initial inability to eat anything, I was the only one who didn't succumb to it and wash out. While it might be tempting to suspect that some of our medical discharges were inventions by people who wanted to quit without the repercussions of quitting, I never saw any evidence of that. One of the guys in our platoon actually broke his foot two weeks in and hid the fact until after graduation. Occasionally, when someone was dropped for a medical reason, they'd come back in with another platoon - but that meant starting all over again.
"Cole!" A voice cracked like a bullet fired into the squad bay, where we stood in a state of semi-attention at the ends of our bunks, writing letters home. I looked up, startled and understandably alarmed upon hearing my name called. I dropped my pencil and ran to the DI to report myself present.
"Phone call," he said stoically, pointing to a land line phone in the guard's observation room. I think my heart skipped a beat.
"Hello?" I stuttered, conscious of the DI hovering inches behind my right shoulder.
"You have a son!" the faint voice called to me from what seemed a thousand miles away. "Congratulations, sweetie!"
I was in shock. It hadn't seemed real, especially since I hadn't even seen my wife in more than two months. I hadn't heard her voice, either. All of everything outside my razor wire and drill and screams had become make believe, like a distant dream, but I'd been brought back to what was real and permanent - unlike what had become my daily life. "Honey! Are you okay?" I had a hundred questions!
"Hurry up, Cole," the DI seethed. Really? While I've just became a father, you're going to pull rank on me after two minutes? But I ignored him. He could trash me all day and I wouldn't care. Not after this.
We talked for five minutes, and it probably couldn't have been much longer due to the drugs still in my wife's system. The labor had been hard and very painful, but quick. We had a perfect little baby boy, and I'd never been happier in my life. "Sir! Thank you, Sir!" I croaked.
"Go away," he said, walking past me. But I still smiled.
Not long after my son was born I decided to start keeping a journal. I'd been issued an old school Avery comp book as part of my class program and nobody had yet opened it during an inspection. Our time in the squad bay had been increasing somewhat - we'd arrived at a period in the boot camp program that was unofficially referred to as "pause" - and as a new father I'd realized that someday my son might want to try and understand the circumstances of his birth and where I'd been at the time. Most of my daily submissions were short and banal:
August 11: [Drill Instructor] O'Brian ran us into the ground this morning, but I kept up. Good run! Butcher gave me an over-sized potato last night. Everyone in the platoon is learning a bit about military firearms and small unit tactics. My wife and son seem okay. I love them so much. I want to go home.
At this time I was pleased to be 'promoted' to color guard, along with my pal Dippy. I was made flag bearer. There were very few such honors provided in boot camp: guidon, squad leader, and color guard. The guidon was always the recruit with the best running stamina, as his job while out on a run was to literally run circles around the rest of the platoon. Squad leader, which I admit I coveted early on, was deliberately given to a seemingly random recruit to frustrate everyone like me who was actually working for it - or so the DIs told us later. Thus color guard, comprised of three recruits, including myself, was the only place of any real honor in our platoon where our overall performance was recognized in any tangible way. As a guy ten years older than nearly everyone else, and as someone who feared a medical discharge during that first week, I was immensely proud of myself. I also noticed that when it came to handing out our covers or other rare 'treats' that we occasionally received, Butcher always called our guidon, Quarles, first - followed by me. Everyone recognized that the order wasn't random. Perhaps those small gestures amid a system that was extremely disagreeable should not have mattered at all to me, and maybe I was a vain man for my pride, but in that world where every day we were treated as creatures less than human - I took whatever I could get.
August 18: Hard [physical training] this am. O course, 5 mile run, etc. [Drill instructor] Dent in rare form! Starting to look more to graduation. U.S. flag went up only part way thanks to Dippy. Oh, well. I can't wait to see my son! My wife is beautiful! Flew over climbing wall this am. Feel good about that. Oh, yeah, I'm still Ron Cole. I know what that means.
August 22: I herded cattle on the 20th. Dippy low-crawled through a huge pile of cow patties. Butcher kind of being a pain, but he goes on vacation on Wednesday. I can't wait to see my wife and son. I'm going nuts!
One week to graduation: 11 out of 40. For anyone aware of military boot camp graduation statistics, our wash out percentage exceeded that of the U.S. Navy Seals. Apples and oranges, I suppose, but the few of us left from among those who arrived almost three months before were aware of the numbers. Sometimes we felt bad for the ones who, if they'd just hung on a little longer, would have made it. Our platoon was actually graduating 23 - but that was only because of transfers from other platoons (recruits who were regressed a month for some slight), medical returnees, and other odd cases. That morning we'd all taken the official U.S. Army Physical Training Test, administered by Butcher. To my obvious glee I'd scored second from the top of my platoon - with Quarles predictably beating me out by a hair. Who said skinny guys were weak? Dippy, who was my age but with the opposite physical problem - he'd been too fat - finished about average, but by graduation had lost over 100 pounds!
I'd hated prison boot camp; hated everything about it - officially. I hated the bestial treatment. I hated the unnecessarily brutal attacks against our souls - like that poor young father who was forced to admit his shame - and while I understood and respected brutality in the context of a military program, to remake men into Terminators, I will never forgive some of the sadists who used it to tear us down, and down, and down. Brutality with no justification is just brutality - no different than Stormtroopers in Poland. Period. And I'm sticking to that position. But, at least for me and a few others, the way in which we managed to survive and thrive in that environment almost undercuts my primary argument. Somehow I turned brutality into a fuel that propelled me to new heights - physically and emotionally. To this day I regard the closing phase of boot camp, and my graduation, as one of my finest hours. Whenever I'm in doubt about myself for any reason, my mind immediately goes back to those days nearly 15 years ago, and my chest puffs out a little. When I'm on some verbal tirade on the subject of anything important, usually religious or political but not always, and people see a steely look in my eyes and hear an edge in my voice - that's boot camp.
Final Entry August 31: **Thou hast graduated!!!!**
- Ron Cole
Addendum: The plot by the U.S. Marshals to subvert two judge's orders was ultimately subverted - but only long after I graduated from the boot camp program. In the face of events, both judges were outraged over what had happened and the state judge suspended my sentence entirely. But that took many months during which I never knew if I'd be home in 5 months or 5 years. That was a very hard time - probably harder for my wife than it was for me. Once I was back in federal custody, with my boot camp hair finally grown out and I'd stopped shouting "Sir!" at every staff member, I received news that I would be released in only a matter of weeks - thanks to unexpectedly counted 'good time'. While ultimately a victory, and one that, ironically, never had to include my trip to boot camp at all, it was by far the most trying and literally gut-wrenching experience of my life.
But I have to admit that I'm stronger for it.
Colorado's Buena Vista Alternative Corrections Program - boot camp - was shut down in 2010 due to budget cuts. Newspaper reports mentioned at the time that the shutdown was only considered temporary, and that "our program still has a future."
- R
