A while back, I posted a blog entry entitled “Everybody has a Story to Tell – This is a bit of Mine”. Here is a bit more of my story.
Argentina 1972
The alarm went off in my room and I knew that it was time for my shower. My mother had set the alarm a while earlier, giving me a half hour to continue playing before bathing. I had already hit the snooze button twice, so figured it was finally time to “man up” and hit the shower. Strange that my mother hadn’t checked up on me. I could usually get away with a few extra minutes of play time, but normally not more than that.
I flipped on the light in the spare bedroom of our house where we kept our towels only to hear my father yell “turn that light off!” My heart nearly jumped out of my throat as I saw the 6’2” frame of my father at the front window pointing a rifle at an unknown target. I stumbled and slapped at the light before crawling out of the room in search of my mother to find out what was going on. I think that was the first time that it really hit home who my father was.
Sure, I had known in theory that my father was a DEA agent. I had seen him lifting weights in our back yard, tooling a holster out of leather in our garage, or cleaning his guns. I had played with his handcuffs. I had even gone shooting with him a couple of times. And I had seen him with his gun strapped to his waist heading off to work. But it never occurred to me that there was any real danger involved. It had always been a cool thing – my dad, the Federal Agent. But suddenly, here he is hanging out of our front window pointing an M1 Carbine at shadows in the dark. And it all hit home.
Little did I know, my parents had a contingency plan. We had a hiding place that we set up in our house in the event that anything bad were to happen, but again, to a 10-year-old kid, it was all a game. I had gone there on several occasions when I had friends over playing hide-and-go-seek, and always won. But suddenly, as my mother shot past me also carrying a rifle and began giving instructions to my sister and I about going to the hiding place, it all became very real.
I guess that I always knew that there were good guys and bad guys in the world. My favorite shows on television were always “cops & robbers” or “gangster” movies. But I never thought that real danger would reach my life. It was always abstract – something that happened on television for my entertainment benefit. Something fun to watch. But here I was in the safety of my own home getting ready to hide away as my father was prepared to fend off a real and very present threat.
That was a defining moment in my life.
It was the moment that I realized that there was good and bad. That there was kindness and evil. That there was right and wrong. That there were those born to prey, and those born to protect. And without even knowing it, it was the moment that I chose sides.
And that choice became an inbred part of me. Of my personality. Of my being. Of my world view and my order. Right or wrong.
I came to learn later that the threat that so defined my childhood, adolescence and adult life, was never an actual threat in the first place. My father had been pointing a gun at a vehicle that had stopped in front of our house and remained there for a period of time with the occupants in place. As my father covered his back, the guard that we had protecting our house cautiously moved in to check out the vehicle, only to find a young couple that had selected a deserted spot for some romantic time. The couple was chased off and life returned to normal. Yet something in me had changed.
I also came to learn later that it was not paranoia on my father’s part. Information surfaced a few weeks later regarding a list of authorities wanted dead by a local urban terrorist organization. My father’s name was the third on that list. And while protecting us was at the top of his priorities, my father’s resolve in going after the traffickers over the years never wavered. And my view of right and wrong remains strong to this day.