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Three Lives of a Warrior

Three Lives

of a Warrior

Phillip Butler

A Camelot Press Book

Copyright © 2010 by Phillip Butler

All Rights Reserved

______________________________________

Cover Art by Ron Chironna

Five drawings by former POW Mike McGrath, courtesy of the U.S. Naval Institute Press

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information, please contact:

phil@phillipbutlerphd.com

ISBN : 1452885036 EAN-13 : 9781452885032

Smashwords Edition

Dedication

Three Lives of a Warrior is dedicated to all warriors
who never got the chance to live their third lives.

Contents

Foreword

It was a cold, gray day in March 1973. I was standing on the tarmac at Andrews Air Force base, waiting for the arrival of several men who had recently been released from prison in Hanoi. Some of these American POWs had been held for years.

It was a conflicting situation for me, though I didn’t know it until I was ready to leave. I had been vocal in my opposition to the war we had waged in Vietnam since 1965, when I had first researched our involvement in their country for a lengthy paper I wrote in prep school. American involvement went back to the Second World War, when President Roosevelt had promised Ho Chi Minh that in honor of his fighting against the Japanese the United States would support his bid for independence against the French.

But that policy changed under Truman, and then Eisenhower and Nixon. In fact, when the French were about to fall at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Nixon persuaded Eisenhower to let him offer nuclear weapons to the beleaguered French garrison. It was too late for them, however. But the U.S. then inserted itself into the post-war Geneva negotiations that determined the political settlement which paved the way for the Ho Chi Minh government to take control the country in 1956.

That plan was thwarted unilaterally by the United States, as we built a puppet government in the southern part of Vietnam, headed first by Bao Dai, a minion from the French era, and then others named Diem, Ky and Thieu. The U.S. poured billions of dollars into the south, to prop up the government and to militarize their effort against the north. Much of the design was promulgated by the Dulles brothers – John Foster as Secretary of State and Allen at CIA – and heavily weighted by the anti-communist, red scare politics of the time.

The behind-the-scenes activities continued into the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Some historians say that at the time Kennedy was killed in 1963 – three weeks after the Diem assassination – he was planning to wind down our involvement there, but Johnson went the other way, sending in hundreds of thousands of troops backed by the Air Force and Navy.

This policy shift was made possible by a public relations gambit. The military reported attacks by North Vietnamese patrol boats against the Maddox and Turner Joy in the Gulf of Tonkin in August of 1964. One of these reports wasn’t true, and the other was greatly over blown, but the Congress was persuaded to authorize war against the North Vietnamese, and so began the full-fledged tragedy we refer to today as the Vietnam conflict.

During the course of the Vietnam war, more than 58,000 Americans were killed and three times that many were wounded. Many thousands of returning military came back home with serious emotional problems and addictions. There were more than 60,000 Vietnam veteran suicides.

The North Vietnamese reported 1,100,000 million killed while the South said it lost 184,000 military. The estimates of civilian deaths throughout the country range up to 4,000,000.

It took some time for the extent of the horror of that war to be learned. The release of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 illuminated a political conspiracy by the military to sustain and expand their murderous adventurism. They were abetted by Henry Kissinger, who kept the war going much longer than it need have been, with his “Peace is at hand” remark just before the 1972 presidential elections, and then the Christmas bombing of the North a month later.

Public outrage at those bombings forced a different posture at the seemingly-endless peace talks, and finally an agreement was made that winter.

So the American war in Vietnam was essentially over by that March day in 1973. The American-made regime in the South would continue the battle for another two years before falling. Their fate had been inevitable for two decades. There would be more unnecessary bloodshed, but at least, for all of our culpability in the killing, it wouldn’t be Americans who were dying 12,000 miles away.

Personally, I was angry with my government and the people who had supported this tragic war that created a permanent scar on our nation’s reputation. Professionally, though, I was stoic, standing there in the drizzle, producing the coverage for ABC News. It was a simple assignment. The camera crew filmed the arrival of the plane, the door opening, a man climbing down the steps, his family rushing toward him.

That’s when I started to cry.

The number of Americans captured in that war was relatively small, 730, and 664 were returned alive. Others who were listed as missing might also have been captured. We don’t know what happened to them.

Recently I met one of the men who’d been captured by the North Vietnamese. Phillip Butler was a 26-year-old U.S. Navy pilot when he was shot down. He was imprisoned in the Hanoi Hilton and spent almost eight years in prison. I interviewed Phil twice on a radio program called “America Back on Track,” and later we became friends.

More to the point, I was interested as a journalist in his story. It is an important story. Few in the military are willing to admit they were wrong, especially those who killed, and those who suffered. Phil Butler’s story is one of courage and insight. It is of considerable value to a nation, and a world, that needs to shift course; to recognize that war is a primitive exercise, and that we must all be warriors for peace to bring about our evolution.

There is more to be added to this introduction, now that I’ve spent three months with Phil’s story, through hours of interviews and editing the lengthy debriefing that followed his release from the Vietnamese. Phil Butler is a mensch, which is a term I don’t use often. He’s a man of integrity, character, and purpose, as you shall see in the following pages. He lays fair claim, too, to the term warrior, and in this book he recounts what have been three separate lives as a warrior, and the threads that have run through them.

Tony Seton

Monterey, California

June 2010

Preface

Warrior (n)

One who is engaged in or experienced in battle.

One who is engaged aggressively or energetically in an activity, cause, or conflict: neighborhood warriors fighting against developers.

This book is about my life transition. It has actually been a journey through three lives. My self perception is clear about those lives. I even like to call them my “before, during and after” lives. They are the three lives of a warrior. Of course I’m the same guy with the same body, heart and brain. But in each case there existed a totally different Phil Butler.

In the beginning, becoming a warrior took some socialization and training. During the first life Phil goes through the experiences of growing up to maturity and learning to be a warrior, a killer of other humans. In the second life the warrior has to not only survive the North Vietnam hell holes as a POW, but to do it in such a way as to return with honor. In the third life, the warrior returns home to eventually focus warrior skills on a more circumspect life. Now the warrior turns away from killing and survival to making a contribution to earth and humanity. But in each case I believe there has been a warrior within me that pushes forward.

For years I considered writing a book about my eight year experience of being a Prisoner of War in Vietnam. But somehow that never seemed to be quite right for me. Countless people have encouraged me to write one, especially during the 20 years I was a professional speaker. Many of my fellow POWs have written books about their experiences, probably numbering close to 50 by now. And several documentaries on our trials there are now available. So that subject, in itself, is pretty well covered, albeit always from the viewpoints and biases of each individual writer. And as I’ve often told friends: Why should I just write another “hair, teeth and eyeballs” story about our POW experience? At least those have been the excuses for my procrastination.

So why wait until I’m 71 to write this book? One reason is I find myself in a very different life space from most of my fellow POWs, Naval Academy shipmates and veterans. So how did that come about? Why am I a committed environmental, peace and justice activist, dedicated to the welfare of our earth and to all of those less fortunate than myself? How and why did I become a warrior in my first life, make war in my second, and want to be of service as a warrior for peace, justice and environment in the third?

Now that I am 71 the time seems right to tell about my life experiences. Maybe it’s my time to look back and analyze it all. But more than that, I want this book to have a forward trajectory for readers. I want other warriors, veterans or non-veterans, to see how and why my life dedication has changed from destruction to construction. Nevertheless, I don’t want the book to be preachy or advisory. I have meant throughout for it to be descriptive, not prescriptive. Three Lives of a Warrior is simply my legacy for family, friends, supporters, detractors, military and non-military readers, workers, searchers, volunteers, students and anyone else who cares to find out about all the stuff that has happened to this guy.

I want to thank my Naval Intelligence debriefer, Brian Kelly, who met me first when I came home and stayed to support me. Our official Navy debriefing took a total of 36 hours and was recorded on reel to reel tapes in 1973. The transcripts I gained later and edited for clarity form the “Second Life” section of this book. It is the harsh and graphic truth about my experiences as a POW in North Vietnam, as related by a very angry man.

I am grateful for the counsel and expert assistance of Tony Seton for helping make this book a reality. I must confess that book writing is just not something I enjoy doing. I managed to get it done the first time with my PhD dissertation. That agonizing process took three years of data gathering and then the better part of two years to write. Unfortunately completing that task left me with enough negative memories to remain in a procrastinating mode for over 25 years. But with Tony’s encouragement and invaluable expert assistance, I have been motivated to carry this project to completion.

I had never wanted to write “just another POW book” because there are enough of those out now to satisfy any casual reader or serious scholar engaging in research. But with Tony’s help, I began to visualize a book that made more sense to me. The concept, a book about my three lives and the life transitions I’ve experienced, seemed more important and worth the effort. I was interviewed on the experiences of my first and third lives for over 24 hours by Tony. He got them transcribed and then put all that data into categorical and chronological order for me. That made writing those two life stories easier, to show how they flow together with my second life-story from my returned POW debrief.

Tony has lived a full and diverse life. He is a writer, journalist, producer, professional speaker, radio host, TV personality and quintessential communicator. He is also exceedingly patient and soft spoken, great skills to have when working with a warrior-spirited man. Above all Tony is one of the most generous men I’ve ever met. I am fortunate that Tony Seton has become a good friend and colleague. Who knows? We may yet collaborate on another story. But the next one will for sure have to be fiction, not another agonizing autobiography.

I want to thank some expert and persistent people who edited my manuscript. They are Phyllis Cleveland and Jean Stallings, who along with my wife Barbara made literally hundreds of typographical and grammatical corrections. I also greatly appreciate Kedron Bryson who professionally formatted the book for publication.

I have been blessed in life to have a wonderful sister, Linda, who stood by me always, even during those terrible eight POW years. I have great love for her and we share the powerful bond that only siblings who have suffered parental abuse together can know.

Now I have another “brother and sister,” Barbara’s brother Chuck and his wife Terry. We are both family and close friends who truly enjoy each other’s company on a regular basis. I married well and got a new brother and sister in the bargain.

Most of all I thank my wife, Barbara Baldock, for loving, supporting and always being there for me. She is ever the consummate voice of reason, my business partner, my sounding board, my best friend and the love of my life.

Phillip Butler

Monterey, California

June 2010

The First Life of a Warrior

Introduction

I had to learn how to be a warrior. It probably doesn’t come naturally for most people, as I believe it did not for me. But like many kids who grow up in our United States, I was taught early on that our service men and women, and the wars they fight, are to be held in utmost honor.

People of my generation, born before or during World War II, grew up with first-hand accounts from relatives and friends of combat, service and self sacrifice. Unlike the wars and military interventions our country has engaged in since, that was a war of national salvation. There was no question after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and German invasions of European countries that we had to fight for our very way of life.

So my childhood and youthful socialization to serve my country were powerful. I learned about “Fidelity and Obedience” years before I would enter the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. And I aspired to “Duty, Honor, Country” before I would ever find out about the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

I was indoctrinated, one might even say imprinted, on flying from a very early age. Aviation was almost in my genes because the man I revered most, my father, was crazy about flying. Some of my earliest memories are of airplanes and flying because of him. And he was even my first instructor.

But that’s all in my first story here. It’s about how I learned to be a warrior during my first life.

1. Early Lessons on War

1938 - 1945

I was born on a hot day in Oklahoma, August 11, 1938. Of course it was hot. It was Tulsa, Oklahoma in August.

My earliest recollection wasn’t until I was about four. It was probably just a typical childhood event. I was on the front lawn of somebody's house. I'm not sure if it was our house or the house of an aunt and uncle. I was with a couple of cousins; girls who were each a year older than I. The lawn was filled with clover and there were bees all over the place. One of my neat cousins told me to catch a bee with my hands. I did and it stung me, indelibly etching my earliest memory in my hand and my mind. I remember that it really hurt but it probably served as an early lesson - about reactively doing whatever people tell you to do.

I was born two years before the “Last Good War.” Oklahoma, like much of the nation, was climbing out of The Great Depression. I think by and large Oklahoma, and most of the United States for that matter, was pretty much isolated within itself as the result of the massive financial dislocation. What may surprise some readers is the degree of that isolation. In Oklahoma, as in many parts of the country, there was a lot of labor and anti-war protest in 1938, ‘39 and ‘40. The Communist Party was active as was the Workers' Party and Socialist Party. It was a very tough time for ordinary people.

I learned from my mother and father later on, when I was old enough to understand what they were saying, that 1938 was still the Depression where we lived. We didn't really come out of it until things turned around when the government under Franklin Roosevelt began to flood the economy with jobs and money. He had started many public works projects, which helped tremendously the people who were trying to dig themselves out. Then in 1941 the build-up for World War II started. But 1938, from what they told me, was still pretty much a tough year for people. My family was acutely aware of the dust bowl hardships people in our area suffered. So I was raised and encouraged to appreciate all that I had, so I wouldn’t take my relatively good life for granted.

My father, R.B Butler, was the son of Baptist minister who had complicated his family’s lives with philandering and by being abusive to his children. Dad’s birth name was Roy Bertram Butler, Jr. But he disliked my grandfather, “Pappy,” so much he always went by “R.B.” and he even claimed that was his legal name. Dad graduated from Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College in 1936, two years before I arrived. It later became Oklahoma State University. He was a hail-fellow-well-met, President of his Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity. I got the sense that academics were not very rigorous in those days for a business major like my father. But it was tough finding enough money to complete college during the Depression. Nevertheless he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Business and went on with his life from there.

After graduation he married his high school sweetheart, Mae, who was a year younger. My mother had two years of secretarial training at Tulsa University. They started life working for businesses in Tulsa and after being married for about two years I came along. I was their only child until my sister was born in 1949, almost eleven years later. Unfortunately, they had my sister in a vain attempt to save their marriage. It’s the very last thing you want to do to save a marriage, but that's what they did, and it didn't save their marriage.

During the early years R.B. and Maewere loving parents. My mother doted on me as an only child. My father was a very nice guy. He was a man you could immediately warm up to. He had an outgoing personality. One of the most important things to R. B. Butler, a lesson he repeated frequently, was to be liked by other people. I think he worried about me. He wanted to make sure I knew that the most important thing for me to do in school was to be liked. But I didn't always quite see it that way because very early on I saw that some people didn't like me and sometimes I didn't like them.

But they were very good parents in those early years. For instance, when I was five years old my mom convinced dad to buy a cheap upright piano. Then she sat me down and began to teach me scales and a little bit of piano that she knew. She spent about a year teaching me what she knew about the basics of reading music and then she arranged for piano lessons. I loved the piano and took lessons for about six years before I quit. Regrettably I didn’t take it up again until thirty-five years later at age 56.

I quit for two reasons. One was I got really interested in playing neighborhood sports with my friends. Typically, for all the kids in those days it was football in the fall, basketball in the winter, and baseball in spring and summer. Sports seemed to always interfere with my piano practicing. And I was forever banging up my fingers, strategically just before a recital. The other reason is that my parents began to have their own problems, both individually and with each other. They started paying less attention to me. They weren’t telling me what I needed to be doing and so I did what I wanted. That started with quitting piano and playing neighborhood sports with my pals when I was twelve and in the seventh grade.

My father used his B.A. in business by going into accounting. Though it doesn’t seem like accounting would have fit him, because he was never very good at math. But I guess he did understand the fundamentals of accounting so that’s what he was doing before the war broke out. As I was told later, at the beginning of 1941 he and his best friend found out that the U.S. government was gearing up for war and they needed aviators.

The Battle of Britain had shown how important the air war would be. So our government put out the word to anybody who had a private pilot's license that they could train to become a civilian instructor for the Army Air Corps. My dad and his pal jumped on this opportunity. They got some quick flying time to qualify for a private pilot’s license. My dad loved to say they even got some “P-51” flying time. He would laugh and say that meant “Parker 51,” a common fountain pen of the day. They went to the Spartan School of Aviation in Tulsa for training to become civilian instructors for the Army Air Corps. About mid 1942 my dad qualified to be an instructor and we moved to a little town south of Oklahoma City called Chickasha – there are lots of town with Indian names in Oklahoma – where there was a small Army airfield.

If you've ever flown down low over Oklahoma and Texas, everywhere you look there are the remnants of air fields. There were literally hundreds of airfields throughout the Midwest that the Army Air Corps built and used during World War II. My father’s job there was to train Army Air Corps Cadets in PT-19s. They were the primary trainers of the day. They were fabric-covered, low-wing, tandem-seated, airplanes with conventional landing gear.

That’s really how I started getting interested in being a pilot. My dad preached flying to me from the time I was born. I think I knew about flying when I came out of the hospital. I have an airplane picture I drew with crayons in kindergarten. I found it among my mother’s things after her death in 2006. Flying was dad’s true life love. I can still remember being there in the house during the time my father was instructing. He would finish up with a class of students, usually eight or ten of these guys, and he'd have them over to the house. They would all sit around on the floor and what little furniture we had and, I guess, talk aviation and stuff. It was kind of their little going away party.

My dad had a little yellow model of a PT-19 and he would bring me out into the middle of the group, much to my terror, hand me the model and have me go through the various parts. “Now what is this Phil?” And with each question I would reply “This is the wing, aileron, propeller, rudder and so on.” I still remember how this produced peels of laughter from his students, that this four year old kid had memorized all of this stuff on the airplane. My dad worked diligently with me to get me to memorize the parts of the airplane. I remember it wasn’t easy.

Dad got another opportunity in 1943 or ‘44. This was what amounted in those days to become a military air transport pilot. It meant that we moved to Dallas, Texas so he could be a co-pilot in a DC-3 for Braniff Airlines. Braniff, like other airlines in those days, was not really civilian. The airlines had pretty much been nationalized for the war effort. They were working for the military, transporting people and supplies in DC-3s. My dad was a co-pilot for Braniff Airlines until the end of the war in August of 1945.

Then my dad was faced with a life-changing decision. He could stay in Dallas as an airline pilot, or move back to Tulsa and go into business with his mother in real estate. Grandma Butler had separated from Pappy some years before and had started her own business. She was an independent and powerful woman, the matriarch of our family. He opted to return to work with his mother. It was a mistake, one that he recalled vocally for the rest of his life. Many times I heard him say that he wished he stayed in Dallas as an airline pilot.

The culture of Oklahoma and the South was very patriotic. During the post-war era America was the world’s savior while at the same time we were bursting out of the Depression era mentality. My family was patriotic. I grew up with this notion of patriotism. When my dad went to Dallas to be a Braniff pilot in 1944, we lived right across the street from Love Field in a prefab duplex. I remember sitting on our porch, watching them firing and sighting in the guns on P-51aircraft. It was very exciting.

So at the early age of five or six I wanted to be a fighter pilot in the military, and be a hero. My uncle was a bomber pilot in the Army Air Corps. He came out of the war a Colonel, and he was a hero with a chest-full of medals and great stories. Early on I had the notion that it was important to serve, and to serve when I was growing up meant going into the military. That's the way young men served their country. There were other ways that were less esteemed but to really serve meant the military. That was the belief I had growing up and going to the Naval Academy. I viewed becoming a naval officer a lot like becoming a priest or a peace officer. I was serving my country and that was very important. It seemed like a calling, an avocation, something over and above just an ordinary job.

2. R.B.

My father was an acute alcoholic and he became a severe binge drinker. He would go for anywhere from a month to as short as a week or two in sobriety and then he would binge drink. When he'd binge he would find a place to be alone, sometimes our living room, one of the houses that he was building or even a closet. Then he would just up-end the bottle, open his throat and pour a quart of bourbon, gin or whatever he had down his throat. Then he would pass out.

Towards the end of his life he was drinking himself almost into a coma. I would take him to the hospital on these many occasions. There was a ward at Hillcrest Hospital in Tulsa called Forty-Two North, a place for alcoholics to dry out.

I would have to carry my father to the car, take him there and they would bring him in on a stretcher. Then three or four days later I would go pick him up. He would always be terribly embarrassed and contrite. And he would also be going through the delirium tremens, shaking uncontrollably. I would take him home and try to help take care of him.

I could almost always tell when he was going to go on a bender because he would get depressed and start speaking negatively. He would begin to say things like, “Oh, I don't know if it's worth it Phil. I don't know if life is worth it. I don't even know why I'm here.” He'd start to talk like that and I'd know that he was about ready to start drinking again. Today we know more about such behavior and hindsight would indicate that my dad was suffering from depression. But in the 1950s I doubt they had identified that problem completely and they certainly didn’t have medications for it like they do now.

We always got two weeks of annual leave to go home for Christmas at the Naval Academy. During my second class year in 1959, I went home to Tulsa. When it came time for me to return after Christmas, we sat down in the living room and talked. He was acting depressed again. I just pleaded with him. I said, "Dad, don't start drinking. Please don't start drinking after I'm gone." He said, "Oh, okay, all right. I won't do that." Of course I knew he was going back to the bottle, but I couldn’t stay with him.

I got on an airplane, flew back to the Naval Academy and reported in about January 2nd, 1960. Two days later I got an emergency notice to report to the main office at Bancroft Hall and I knew something bad had happened. When I got there, the officer of the day informed me that my father was dead. He had drunk himself into a coma. When they found him in his bedroom, he was dead. He had finally abused his body to the point where his heart just couldn't take it anymore and it quit.

I was absolutely devastated. I had just lost probably the most important person in my life. Going through high school and college, he had been a combination of my dad, my son, my brother and my best friend. I could hardly maintain a sense of self that day, waiting for the opportunity to go to Washington DC and get on an airplane to fly back home. I didn't have any money but the Naval Academy had an emergency fund for things like that. So I was given enough money to buy an airplane ticket and a few extra dollars to come home.

I went home and found myself in the midst of my family, naturally, but not pleasantly. Ironically and sadly it turned out that my Aunt Mary, my dad's sister who was also an alcoholic, had drunk herself to death seven hours before my dad drank himself to death. It was almost like they had a kind of simultaneous suicide pact, though I couldn’t imagine it. At the time I thought it had to be just coincidental. The word in the family was that they had been drinking together the day they both died.

A nurse who had gone to the house to look after my father found him. The family sent her there after Mary died and she found him dead too. My father and my aunt had been very close. In fact Dad was pretty close to all three of his sisters. Two of them were older and one younger. My grandmother was shattered. I don't think she ever really recovered from the suicides, emotionally or physically.

We wound up burying my dad and my aunt in a dual funeral and burial ceremony. I was with my little sister. Linda was only ten years old and I had to go back to the Naval Academy, leaving her with our mother who was psychologically unbalanced. I constantly worried about Linda’s well-being after I left.

I was the executor of the estate and I saw to it that from what little money Dad had there was some set aside for Linda's care until she was eighteen, at which time she got the majority of the money that was left over. That was the story of my dad's death. I’ve lived many years now, looking back and missing him terribly. To this very day my sister and I really miss the guy because in truth he was a very sweet man. It was hard for me to think that he was so proud of me being a midshipman at the Naval Academy and that he missed my graduation, my marriage, and the birth of his granddaughter, Diane. He missed so much and his life ended so prematurely at just age 44.

Dad had been really depressed about his divorce. He was supposedly madly in love with my mother all those years. He dated after he split with my mother. He had girlfriends, but he always seemed to be able to find things to be depressed about. It could be anything, like our dog being sick, or a house that wasn’t selling.

I think that psychologically he probably had depression for a long time and might have been compensating for it by being the hail-fellow-well-met and wanting to be liked. But I think my dad never really liked himself all that much. He had some insecurities. At least that’s what I surmise these many years later.

3. Mae

Effie Mae Butler, called Mae because she hated the name “Effie,” was my mother. Growing up until I was about 14 years old, she was “Mom” to me but after that age she became “Mother.” That’s because “mom” seemed to carry more the feeling of a loving closeness than “mother.”

Mae was a loving and doting mom until sometime in my early puberty. She was very affectionate, caring and responsive to whatever I got interested in or wanted to do. She started giving me piano lessons at age five and hired a piano teacher for me at age seven. She taught and gave me a lifetime appreciation for music and art. I remember attending classical concerts with her at the Tulsa Convention Center when I was a child.

But things really started falling apart for me sometime when I was about 12. She became abusive toward my father and often depressed. She never had many friends but sometime in the early 1950s, while still in her late 30s, she became confrontational and angry towards our family members, friends and acquaintances. It seemed that dad’s alcoholism and her abusive personality fed off each other, each making the other more acute. I was young then and can’t say for sure which caused the other. But in retrospect they seemed to bloom together.

Then mother started seeing her doctor who, after the medical style of the day for women patients, gave her sedatives. These were called “sleeping pills” back then and he prescribed them in unending quantities. I believe they were Seconal and drugs of that kind. She obviously became hooked on her prescription drugs. And she became more abusive, angry and profane year by year.

She came after dad with kitchen knives on numerous occasions. She was prone to throwing things, whatever there was at hand; plates, pots, pans, a vase or whatever. Then she began doing the same to me, saying, “You are just like your father.” She came after me twice with a butcher knife. In both cases my life was in danger. The second time she did it happened in our garage, where I finally defensively struck her with a forceful slap, knocking her down on the garage floor. On another occasion, she drove to a baseball game my dad and I were attending and began to entertain the crowd with screaming, slapping and profanity. Dad and I beat a hasty retreat up the stands and out onto the passageway. There was a guard rail protecting people from a four story drop where we stopped when she caught up with us. I had my back turned to her when she ran with all her force and tried to shove me over the guard rail. My dad grabbed me, preventing the fall, and saved my life.

I left her when she and dad divorced, thus escaping her at about age 14. But my poor sister Linda had to endure her for yet another 10 or 11 years. I think my sister went through far more than I did with our mother because she had to live with her all that time. While I was still living there, my mother would spank and later she would slap and hit. Linda was abused and persecuted, emotionally and physically, until she was about fourteen or fifteen and could defend herself. That’s when all the physical abuse stopped because Linda could fight back and she stopped my mother the same way I had.

Obviously our mother was sick. She was manic, abusive and paranoid. But after the divorce it was too late for us to do anything about it. Dad could no longer legally mandate treatment for her because he wasn’t married to her any longer. We even tried to get her parents to help by having her committed to treatment but they refused to interfere.

It was emotionally draining to have such a mother. You are supposed to love and respect your mother first, above all other people in your life. She is the woman who gave you life. So you feel you owe her all of that. But it takes more than just giving birth to qualify as a true mother. A real mother doesn’t curse, embarrass, torment and abuse her children. As it turned out, this woman, our birth-mother was to live yet another 50 years to age 90. And she never changed her vicious behavior. Linda and I both have the emotional scars to prove it.

4. Growing Up

1945 - 1956

We returned to Tulsa after the war and I entered second grade at Sidney Lanier grade school. Many people were returning to their home towns and their roots at this time. Men and women who had served in the military came home. Many of my school mates were kids whose families had returned to make a living in Tulsa.

In the beginning we moved into the house with my grandmother Butler and I was reunited with my cousins, aunts and uncles. Shortly after that we moved into a small house dad had built. He was taking over the home building part of grandmother’s business. Businesses were booming after the war and people were buy homes on the G.I. Bill by the millions. Dad had a successful new business going in no time.

Mother didn't work. She was a homemaker. She took care of me and my father, and later my sister. In those days, the mode was for the man to work and the woman to stay home and take care of the hearth and children, and that's pretty much the way it worked in our family. Most of the thousands of women who had worked for the war effort were now without jobs and relegated to returning home. It wasn’t until years later that the culture shifted and women joined the workforce in large numbers. We lived more modestly back then. We listened to the radio and television didn’t appear in our house until the early 1950s. There was no television blaring all the time about what people should buy, so we didn’t need two incomes to afford what we didn’t need. Back then we didn’t hunger for a washer, dryer, second cars, bigger homes and things like that. That came later.

I don’t really know what caused the rift between my parents. I was young, so I'm not sure. I know there were fatal flaws in both of them. My father had an extreme sensitivity to alcohol. He could drink one beer and become pretty happy and mellow. Alcohol affected him dramatically and by the time I was around twelve or thirteen he had become an alcoholic and then a binge drinker. He tried to stay away from booze and would manage to do so for maybe a month or two, then later on for only for a couple of weeks.

At the same time my mother began to have psychological problems. Her behavior changed and she began to react to people with wild temper outbursts. She would use incredible profanity. She became physically abusive to my father and to me. Later she also became abusive to my sister.

So my mother was addicted to prescription drugs and my father to alcohol. But before their problems fully bloomed, around the time I was in fifth grade, they decided that what they needed to keep the marriage together was another child. So they had my sister in February 1949, But of course that didn't do any good at all. In fact it made things even worse. Their relationship got worse and worse, their own problems became more and more severe, until they got a divorce.

They split up in 1952 when I was in eighth grade. I felt loyal to my father because I thought he needed somebody to be with him and help take care of him. So I requested that the judge allow me to live with my father who had moved a few blocks away to an apartment. The judge agreed and I moved in with my father. Unfortunately my sister had to stay with mother, which meant that my baby sister and I were split up. She was only two or three then and I was worried about her. I did everything I could to continue to see her as much as possible and my father got to have her on weekends. At least we had the weekends together.

Aside from the personal trauma the divorce caused, it was compounded by the fact that it wasn’t nearly as common as it is today. Not only was it unusual, but it was really looked at in a very negative way. So I pretty much kept it a secret from people that my parents were divorced. It was something that wasn’t talked about because it was a very bad thing. It was a social blight to be from a divorced family. I had little choice but to internalize my problems so by the time I got to high school I became a pretty angry kid. I remember acting out in wild driving, on my motorcycle and later in my car.

There were times when I wondered, rhetorically, if I had been mistakenly switched at birth. I was very shy growing up. I have a cousin, C.J. Luton, who was like an older brother to me. He was five years older and to this very day he tells me, "You know when we were kids, and we had the family get-togethers people hardly knew you existed." He said, "Nobody heard boo from you Phil. You were always the quietest kid in the world and you always seemed to be observing and not saying anything."

I think he was right. I didn’t feel as though I fit in. I always felt better off observing from the sidelines. I remember my experience going through grade school, junior high and high school was similar. I was shy and never wanted to get up in front of people to speak or anything like that. I think I lived a quiet introspective life though I didn't realize what I was doing at the time. It seems clearer to me now, and I have friends from high school days who tell me that I was an introspective kid.

But it wasn’t like I was alone or a loner. I had friends in grade school; a cadre of three or four or five guys. In junior high school, I think I had fewer friends. But in high school there was a group of five or six guys I ran around with. We hunted and went fishing together. One of the guy’s parents owned a cabin on Grand Lake which was a couple of hours from Tulsa. We boys would go up there and stay for three or four days, getting drunk while hunting, fishing and swimming. We had a good time. We also often had a poker game going. One of the guy's parents had taught us all to play poker when we were about thirteen years old. Poker has been an abiding hobby of mine since then. It was great to learn the game as a kid.

Some of these guys were very good friends. In fact, I'm still in touch with several of them. One, Upton Hudson, went to Yale, graduated and ultimately became an executive for US Steel. He's very right wing in his political views but I'm still working on twisting his brain around, though unsuccessfully so far. Upton and I shared many experiences together as paper boys, double dating, hunting, fishing, playing poker and underage drinking. We are still good friends. Nick Fate, Upton’s cousin and our pal, died before reaching 40 of a brain tumor. Wally Davis and I bowled, ice skated and caroused together during my senior year. Other friends to this day go all the way back to the beginning of grade school. Leonard Krisman and Dave Shoemaker have been my pals for over 60 years.

Then there were airplanes and girls. Girls and airplanes. One of my earliest memories is from 1943 when I was five at Kindergarten in Dallas, Texas. I still have the airplane drawing I did that year. And I still remember the little girl who sat at our table and pulled her pants down to give us boys a look. Not much else sticks in my mind from kindergarten.

I had girl friends after that, even in grade school and junior high school. But my relationships with girls were pretty platonic until high school. I remember “it” happened when I was just 16 and Sue (last name with-held) was 15. I put this in just in case someone from a much younger generation might be reading this book. Young people always seem to think they invented early sex. I know I did, until my dad questioned me one day about my relationship with Sue. I admitted the truth to him because I trusted him. And would you believe? He admitted to me that he had his first sexual experience at age 16, back in 1931. I was astounded! Did they really do that way back then? But even more impressive was the next day when he gave me a package of condoms and said, “Always have one of these in your wallet son.” He was a wonderful father and friend in many ways.

As a kid growing up in Oklahoma I was outside most of the time when I wasn’t in school. Life for us kids, boys at least, was very physical. We were always running around in the neighborhood, playing cops and robbers, playing military war games, football, basketball, baseball or riding our bicycles. Kids then had roller skates that hooked onto our shoes and we roller skated around on the sidewalks and streets. We also played in fields and woods that were nearby; running around in nature. Sometimes we would go out into the woods, make a fire and camp overnight with just a blanket, some hot dogs, our guns and dogs.

Our bikes were important to us. That’s how we got around. I can recall riding my Schwinn; no gearshifts, of course, just a straight fat-tire bicycle. Going up hills on that thing was really exhausting work, especially if the basket in front was full of newspapers when I delivered my paper route. It was certainly good exercise. I was a “paper boy” for the Tulsa World and Tulsa Tribune a total of five years. It was wonderful training for life experience in business and how to deal with customers. My boss, Charlie Beach, was our route manager. He was a great early mentor and teacher of good values and work ethic.

My dad loved dogs and I inherited that love too. The only time I remember not having a dog or two was at the Naval Academy and in prison. I had a small female Boxer when I was a paper boy. She followed me on my bicycle to my route every day. Then when I got a Cushman Eagle motorcycle she learned to ride on the seat. I’d put her in front of me, between my arms, and her head stuck up above mine so I had to look around her to drive. We would pass cars and get incredulous stares, smiles and frequent honks.

I didn't play sports at Will Rogers High School because I worked all the time instead, but I was still in good physical condition. Sports or working, I was able to build a strong body like we did in those days. There was no sitting in front of a television set or doing video games. It was a very active outside kind of growing up that I remember. I did learn two “sports” from dad. They were pool and shuffleboard, excellent skills to have even today. Shuffleboard earned me a few extra bucks when I worked in a beer bar at Oklahoma University for extra money.

I mentioned that we played cops and robbers. There were some cowboys and Indians, too, but since it was right after World War II, the favorite conflict in our neighborhood was playing at war with each other. At some point, we took it to a higher level because we all had Red Rider, lever action BB guns and would occasionally shoot each other. Actually, the BBs could be quite painful but we had our own war rules in the neighborhood, one of which was you couldn’t shoot anyone above the waist. Since we were all wearing blue jeans it stung like hell but no one was going to seriously injure anybody.

In regards to the cowboys and Indians playing, that was really less of a genre for us because even though Oklahoma was still pretty rugged and cowboy in nature, there were Indian folks everywhere and they were pretty well integrated into our society at the time. I know there was a lot of intermarriage. There was even some intermarriage with Indians in my own family. My aunt married a man who was half Cherokee. My mother’s family passed down that our great grandmother was half Choctaw. So if that’s true, despite growing up a blond with blue eyes, I must be one sixteenth Choctaw.

Guns were also an important part of the culture, partly because it was Oklahoma and also because it was pretty rural. My father bought me a .22 caliber rifle and taught me how to shoot when I was eight or nine. I remember it fondly, a little Remington, bolt action .22 rifle. We would shoot at targets. Then we would go home and he taught me how to clean it after firing. But when we were finished, he kept the gun.

Then when I was ten he just gave me the gun and said I could go target practice or hunting when I wanted to, telling me to just be safe like I had been taught. I had other friends around the neighborhood that also had guns by that time. We lived on the outskirts of Tulsa near open fields, so we kids would go out and shoot target practice. We also shot at rabbits and squirrels.

A bunch of us kids got interested in hunting rabbits on winter mornings when the snow was on the ground and it was easier to track them. I talked my father into buying me a shotgun. He got me a Mossberg .410 gauge shotgun. I remember that it had three different chokes with it that I could screw on to the end of the barrel. I would put on the “open,” “modified” or the “full” choke according to what I was hunting and what range I was shooting. (The chokes would modify the shot pattern.)

It might seem strange today, but back then, on a Sunday some of us would go out at four o'clock in the morning and throw our paper routes. We’d bring our shotguns with us and when we finished our routes we would ride off to some farmer's field, leave our bicycles, and go hunt rabbits. I would be home by nine or ten o'clock in the morning with a couple of rabbits, which I would skin and prepare for cooking. My mother always hated me bringing home the rabbits. Basically she didn't like the idea of killing things. But I had been taught that it was a normal thing and no big deal to kill animals or to catch fish.

I must admit that I became a pretty angry guy during my high school years because of all the problems with my mother and father. When I was old enough to buy a motorcycle, a Cushman Eagle, I drove it fast and started hanging out with other motorcycle guys. I even raced motorcycles on dirt tracks. When I bought my first car at age 16 I became a relentlessly reckless driver. When dad was drunk I would take his Oldsmobile out and drive it over 100 mph. No seat belts or safety equipment in those days. I got numerous tickets for speeding and even was once thrown in jail for reckless driving. Dad had to come bail me out. I made up my mind then to never get put in jail again. That resolution held up until 1965.

I got in trouble numerous times in high school for doing stupid pranks. Each time I would be sent to see our Will Rogers High School principal, Doctor Raymond Knight. This man was an angel in disguise. He would always tell me to hang in there, that I was going to be something really good in life because I had the stuff to achieve. He meant a lot to me back in those days. He believed in me, and I think he even convinced me to believe in myself.

5. Always an Okie

It may surprise some people that I still consider myself an Okie, at least in part. That's where I was born and brought up. That's where I grew up. Oklahomans are proud of that name. It means you are tough and can survive hardships, like our forbearers did during the dustbowl days. Maybe that's the origin of my warrior spirit, as later it began to appear when it was called up by necessity.

My grandparents on both sides reinforced that Oklahoma heritage. All of them migrated there in the late 1800s, even before Oklahoma was a state. The grandparents on my father's side came from Tennessee and on my mother's they came from Missouri. So they were all second or third generation Americans themselves. On my father's side I have an English-Irish heritage and on my mother's side English and “Pennsylvania Dutch” (German) heritage. But I know my genealogy includes much more, with probably some Native American Indian, so I really think of myself as just a mutt in terms of genealogical heritage.

My family on both sides spent their lives in and around Tulsa. Also both sides were staunch Southern Baptists. So I was a product of my heritage and my culture. I didn't know a lot about the outside world. I did, however, have an abiding curiosity about it, something that didn't seem to come with my genes. There was one incident in particular that provoked – or revealed – my interest in what was happening outside of my home state.

My aunt Marguerite, one of my dad’s three sisters, was a fiery woman. She had been married four or five times and I guess nobody in the family was quite sure. But at the end of one of her divorces she went to live in Los Angeles, California. I think it was with a boyfriend or new husband or maybe just by herself. Anyway, she got into clothes designing and selling there, where she was fairly successful at it. One Christmas she came back to Tulsa for our family reunion when I was around ten years old.

Aunt Marguerite talked about California and I was amazed and intrigued at the notion of what California was like. She kept saying how free it was there and how it was so different. She said there were so many different kinds of people and ideas there. It was incredibly appealing to me, and probably to no one else in the room. But at that moment it was so compelling I made the decision that when I grew up I wanted to go live in California. So I had the notion very early on of wanting to get away from Tulsa and find something else.

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