A Boy and a Nation, a Rambling Tale - and a Warning!

Last night, still more symptoms of our national mental illness. Britt Hume of FoxNews, having first proclaimed in that imperious manner of his that a “growing number” of scientists is speaking either negatively or voicing uncertainty about the causes of global warming (logic: we don’t know for certain what it is, so we shouldn’t change anything we’re doing even it we have a very good suspect), proceeded to announce in pedagogue’s tone “findings” (with truth serum, it would be “gropings”) “proving” that ethanol and bio-fuels will contribute more to “air pollution” than petroleum-based fuels, and we should therefore stay with what we arte doing.

Read that again. I’m too tired of this rationally spastic crap to bother myself, anymore. I only mention it, as I said, it because it’s so symptomatic. Call it a warning, one I’ve been trying to sound for thirty-five years.

But the nation listens to the likes of Britt Hume or his FoxFriends, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and the rest friends. And “growing numbers . . .” All, no doubt, “Reliable sources.” Good grief!

Change the subject, Hal.

Okay, here’s another. It’s that I don’t like to be afraid. I’ve hated it since classmate bullies taking advantage of my polio-resulted puniness made each and every walk to and from school a nightmare of terror. At one point, I so feared what nearly daily beatings was doing to my features that I would no longer be recognizable. It wasn’t, however, until a teacher honored my nearly-closed eyes, broken nose (seven times before reaching the end of my freshman year in high school), and broken teeth with laughter and a comic line in a school play’s script, that humiliation became a factor.

When a big girl – she outweighed me by at least thirty pounds - who was a classmate threw me to the ground, then straddled my chest and proceeded to punch me in the face, the witches brew that is hate due humiliation overflowed its cup. In a men’s magazine, one of several subscribed to for me by grandparents with whom I stayed during the years I “lost the use of” my legs – as “the folks” euphemistically termed my paralysis - I found an add selling a book. “Bernard Cosneck’s American Combat Judo” cost nine, ninety-five, and I ordered it – having it sent to the school in order that pacifist grandparents wouldn’t learn of my ominous intent.

“Combat Judo” wasn’t much of a book. Even then, the world’s men’s magazines were a macho-minimalist place; bullshit, in other words. Everything in the book required strength I didn’t have, not even close. Hell, I couldn’t do ONE pushup. That, I’d learned a few days after joining Troop 43 of the Boy Scouts of America. Encouraged to try earning the Athletic Merit Badge several other scouts had decided to work on, I did likewise. The result was more humiliation.

Not to fear, said Scoutmaster Vince Miller, where there was a will, there was a way. I know you think that’s trite, the mantra of a nation devoted to the platitude and lie. Maybe, but I was desperate, and Mr. Miller was one hell of a man. Farmer and wrestler that almost all the men in the area were, he was muscular and powerful, able to handle an animal like a two hundred pound hog during castration or administration of antibiotic shots as though it were a cat. His recommendation was that I begin doing pushups against a wall, by leaning forward to fall against it with outstretched arms. When I had added a couple of repetitions, he instructed, I should move my feet back farther from the wall and continue.

I did as he said, and a red-letter day of my life – equal to my first airplane solo, my first parachute jump, marriage, the birth of my first child, and the like – was the first time I did twenty-five honestly classic pushups.

From there, I became a local legend. Everywhere in the area, people saw “that crazy Luebbert kid” running. Or snowshoeing – even in an Iowa blizzard. When that resulted in the Indian wife of a local trapper calling me “Walks-in-Storms,” the name stuck with her people. Even at work, jobs for local farmers, I did pushups and sit-ups by the hundreds, and pull-ups by the score. I ran everywhere I went, sometimes as far as Charles City, eighteen miles away and back. I ran weekly to Osage, nine miles, in order to go swimming and visit the library. Dropped off each night by a boss, the man would see me run to the hay rope hanging from the barn’s hay-mow track and begin climbing. Having gone up and down the sixteen foot rope three times, I would run to the walnut tree in the front yard, to begin chin-ups and parallel bar presses there. And so on.

And I studied ways to fight. After experimenting with boxing, I discarded “the sweet science” as stupid, not unlike mountain sheep butting heads. Besides, watching boxing matches made it very clear how generally ineffective punching was. Boxers threw literally hundreds of punches without significant effect. I wrestled, but the rules of folkstyle and freestyle wrestling prohibited the armlock I recognized early on as the most effective of fighting tactics. When I had researched carefully and exhaustively, I found the sport called judo. Formulated for the express purpose of being the state of the art for hand to hand combat, I knew it was for me the first time I saw it.

And I grew strong. I grew fearsomely strong. When one day the farmer brother of the man who was my employer playfully challenged me, I threw him and forced his surrender easily. A powerful man used to the hard labor of farming then and a former state champion in high school wrestling, he outweighed me by forty pounds. When a local bully, an all-state tackle on the Osage High football team wouldn’t take “no” for an answer from my cousin Beverly, I invited him outside the skating rink where our confrontation had begun; there, using a particular judo throw, I proceeded to literally pound the street’s parking area with his body. He was sitting on the curb vomiting when the police arrived.

I learned to shoot, too. Initiated at five into the fraternity of German hunters to which all my family belonged, I knew how to shoot and handle a weapon long before my travail with polio and the bullies of my youth. While still a sophomore in high school, however, I bought my first Browning Model 1911 pistol in .45 caliber and began practice. As I said in my book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story,” you wouldn’t believe how I practiced. Few people have ever practiced as I practiced.

I practiced until I could do what would one day be dubbed by the U.S. Army “the Mongoose Trick.” The Mongoose Trick is to draw a loaded, cocked, and locked Model 1911, .45 caliber handgun from concealment under a shirt or jacket, and fire it accurately at a target – in less than two-fifths of a second, the time it takes a coin held at holster level to fall to the floor.

It is also the time it takes a human being to react, to know he is being killed.

I practiced until I could do the Mongoose Trick with either hand, and from any of several holster positions. In a roomful of U.S. Army Generals and Colonels I would one day demonstrate the trick for Lt. Gen. Thomas Hickey and then Brigadier General Thomas Van Natta. It was only a little while later that the tactic got its then derisive name. Told by anyone who had seen it, the listener would invariably scoff. Arrogant stupidity has been S.O.P. – Standard Operating Policy – in the United States and its military establishment for a very long time.

The Mongoose Tactic would develop and evolve into what is today called “SWAT” – the acronym for Special Weapons And Training. SWAT is based on the idea of overcoming a daunting enemy or situation with surprise, speed, and decisively overwhelming force – the Mongoose Trick. It was after having been asked that day at Fort Polk, Louisiana how I would deal with a situation like that of No Gun Ri (when North Korean soldiers fired upon our troops from among refugees streaming south and our troops returned fire), I did my demonstration. Asked how it applied, I explained and added that in the alternative, one might kill a hostage taker for long range with a high-powered rifle.

Pressed a few weeks later at Fort Benning by General Hickey, a contingent of U.S. Marine officers, and others, I promised that provided a suitable fifty caliber rifle, I would be able to kill at two thousand yards. The idea was roundly jeered. That was, let’s remember, 1958.

Don’t forget that military arrogance I mentioned, either.

In 1966, while a correspondence student in criminology for Dr. Stuart Holcomb at the University of Iowa, I reprised the paper first written for General Hickey. It drew the same kind of reaction it had at first. “Lunacy,” an assistant to Professor Holcomb wrote across the paper. A few months later, when a sniper shooting from the tower at the University of Texas had killed fourteen people and wounded thirty-one others, an official of the Los Angeles Police Department, one Daryl Gates, organized the first SWAT team. The idea, it was said, was that of another LAPD officer – in 1965. The idea, you’ll notice, was no longer considered “lunacy.”

Another of my ideas of the time I might mention here by way of demonstration and to make the record was that of a suitable battle shield for close quarters combat, a light-weight shield not unlike, worn and used in a manner similar to that of the “target” of medieval times, except for use with a handgun rather than sword. With today’s Kevlar and materials the like, the shield would be immensely practical, and it will soon now gain acceptance in house-to-house fighting like that in Iraq, or in other forms of Close Quarters Combat. That’s because even in theory a soldier armed with a powerful handgun and hand-held shield would be multiples more effective than one armed with things like execrable M-16 rifle and its variants and protected by rather impractical armored vests now in use.

The “target” shield, like a number of combat tactics of the Mongoose Trick genre, is something I have recommended repeatedly over the years. An idea, it’s been said, must always pass through four stages – ridicule, tolerance, acceptance, and theft. It’s the way things are in the world of capitalism. This is, after all, the Land of the Fee, and of corporate capitalism, where stolen ideas pay off as well as stolen property, and are much easier to “fence.”

But as I often say – and do – I digress. To continue, I found it interesting to note that first organizational descriptions of the SWAT idea, as well as first organizational manuals, contained verbatim whole sentences also found not only in my 1958, U.S. Army paper, but in my subsequent, “lunacy” paper. It, as I said, happens. Yeah, I know – but can you imagine a corporation with honor? Against its “bottom line?” Imagine the stock-holders of a corporations’ reaction to an honor against profits policy?

Do I have a point to make here? Yup, and it’s this. The reaction of the townspeople in my little home town back in Iowa when observing my self-training, together with the strength and skill resulting from it so obviously, was to find it all very unsettling. The easy prey victim, butt of any annoyance or meanness otherwise they might feel, the weakling societally dependent upon them for kindness and protection, was somehow far more lovable than the formidably powerful and skilled, independent stalwart. It wasn’t good to fight, everyone agreed, not good to “study war.” I should turn the other cheek, even “offer up” to god “in expiation of sin” the injury, pain, and humiliation inflicted by my fellow student and human being.

When Sister Mary Pacifica found the book “Combat Judo” in the mail, she asked what it was. I told her. I wasn’t going to accept any more torment, I said defiantly. The nun only laughed, her eyes running over my rail-thin and puny arms and shoulders. She handed me the book.

In a book written many years ago – so long ago that I can’t find it even with the Internet – historian Etienne de Groef wrote that the people of the United States, desirous of freedom from all hardship and fear, would one day legislate themselves into virtual prison. In “Untergang Durch Instinkt,” he accurately predicted decades ago what we have today, doing so on the basis of extrapolation from observation of the forces with which I was forced to deal as a boy. Having come to the same conclusions many years before that, even, I chose to rebel against the supposed authority of the community, and to refuse to submit to the odious premise that in order to provide the community peace, one – I – or a few should submit to being beaten, tortured, and humiliated.

Faith – in a rigidly Catholic, small town community the surrogate for government under neo-conservative capitalism and humanist-feminist socialism – demanded that I submit to the modern equivalent of a tracking device on my ankle. When the Catholic Church, and so-called Christian religious dogma like it in effect murdered my wife and made me an accomplice, I rejected once and for all the rule of those who profess to talk to god.

Anyone who professes to do that is in fact a devil – that according to the man they profess and proclaim to worship as god. “False prophets.” We are again – how many times have we done this? – at war, surely, a work of the devil, in the name of religion, and god. My god – how obvious can your “devil” be?

I’ve written a book, and this is a blatant promotion. I’ve written the book because it tells a story that is the parallel and corollary of this government by military industrial corporation’s abuse of the public and their nation. An individual – me -has lived through everything that is happening to the nation and its society today.

Oh, I can hear the individual reared and indoctrinated in capitalism think – I learned to do that long ago. Forget it! I have no need at all of money. I have no need of society, even civilization. Deprivation resulted when IRS seized everything, drove from me my wives, and drove my teenage son to several attempts at suicide, taught me to live the way a wolf or coyote lives. I don’t need you at all. The book is written for the same reason this is.

I want you to destroy this government. If you don’t learn what I already know, from what I have already experienced, you will suffer what I have already suffered. Government in the Land of the Free, become the Land of the Fee, will imprison - or destroy - you.

Your choice.



P.S. I made my choice, you'll recall, long ago . . .