I said to one of my buddies, “Pass the word that no one’s going to want to get near me. If they do, they’ll regret it.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ll see.”
During break, the guys started to approach me. I was sitting on the ground in my flight suit, my plastic baggie filled with feces beside me. The plan was perfect, but the guys beat me to the punch.
Just as I was preparing to smear the shit all over my flight suit, one of the guys came up behind me and got me in a choke hold. I came to duct-taped to a medical backboard in the trunk of a car that was traveling down dirt roads at fifty miles an hour, the trunk’s lid banging down on my stretcher. Just before they closed the trunk, the guys had stood over me pouring hot sauce down my nose and mouth. And that was just the beginning. They got me good.
Kim and I had been together since she was a teenager back in Rhode Island. She had driven with me to BUD/S and stayed with me through my three years in California, where we married in 1982. Now we were living in Virginia Beach in a house we’d bought.
She was a wonderful person and I loved her, but I didn’t give her the time she deserved. She wanted a life together. Instead, I was an adrenaline junkie, addicted to the high energy and action of SEALs.
One night I returned at two in the morning from a dive trip to Puerto Rico and found no one home. So I knocked on the neighbor’s door and asked if she knew where Kim was. She said no.
As I turned to go back home, I heard my neighbor talking on the phone. I heard her say, “Kim, you’d better think quick. Don’s home.”
About thirty minutes later, a car pulled up and Kim and this guy named Pat came into our house.
I watched them enter, thinking, What do I do now? What do I do?
I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach, but I realized that it was my own damn fault. I’d been living for the moment. Having fun. Thinking of no one but myself. Sadly, we divorced. Kim later remarried and had two boys. I still wish her the best.
I tried to pick up the emotional pieces and move on. The first months were rough. Then, at the end of 1989, ST-6 sent me to language school in Monterey, California. My German teacher was a petite, blue-eyed beauty named Shannon Bailey.
We called her Frau Bailey. She referred to me as Herr Mann.
All of us were crazy about our sexy German teacher—especially me. The attraction was mutual. Even though Frau Bailey wasn’t supposed to fraternize with students, the two of us started going for long rides together on my ’85 Softail Harley. She introduced me to her beautiful three-year-old daughter, Chonie.
We dated and fell in love. But neither of us knew that the military action I had been craving would soon arrive.
Chapter Eleven
Panama
General Noriega’s reckless threats and attacks upon Americans in Panama created an imminent danger to the 35,000 American citizens in Panama. As President, I have no higher obligation than to safeguard the lives of American citizens.
—President George H. W. Bush announcing Operation Just Cause, December 20, 1989
Panama is a narrow neck of tropical land populated by 3.5 million people and intersected by one of the most important strategic waterways in the world—the Panama Canal. Back in the late 1980s it was run by a short, pugnacious military dictator named General Manuel Noriega. Noriega had been the right-hand man of General Omar Torrijos, who assumed power in a military coup in 1968 and instituted a number of progressive political, economic, and social reforms, including initiating massive coverage of social security services and expanding public education that transformed the country.
When General Torrijos died in a helicopter crash in 1981, General Noriega seized control of the country and expanded the role of the Panamanian Defense Forces (PDF) until they dominated Panamanian political life. Noriega, who had operated as a CIA asset, bought the loyalty of PDF officers and their cronies with revenues from drug smuggling and money laundering.
Under Noriega’s rule, Panama became the major trans-shipment site for illegal drugs from South America bound for the United States. While elements in the PDF prospered, Noriega’s regime grew increasingly repressive, and hundreds of political opponents of his regime were tortured and killed; hundreds more were forced into exile.
Political demonstrations against the regime were met with violence. A popular vocal critic named Hugo Spadafora was pulled off a bus by Noriega’s men at the Costa Rican border. ■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■