Non-fiction / Above All Else

PROLOGUE
US Mexican Border
September 10th 1917
11:50 pm
Lt. John Turner, the sixth generation of Turner men to bear that name, peered across the windswept desert as the monsoonal flow from the southwest brought droplets of cool rain to their outpost. It didn’t last long nor did the rain amount to much, but after three months in this hellhole it was a welcome diversion. He brushed the dust from his army uniform and prepared his report to his commanding officer, Captain George Patton, located somewhere south and east of his present location.
Turner commanded the Culpeper Minuteman Detachment of the Virginia National Guard led by General Pershing. They were assigned the   task of locating and killing, if possible, a Mexican outlaw named Doroteo Arango, but known to the troops and everyone along this border as “Pancho Villa.”
Mr. Villa had, figuratively speaking, taken a stick and poked the eye of President Woodrow Wilson.  Then, to pay Wilson back for supporting his rival, Villa crossed over into Columbus New Mexico and slaughtered many in the town. Ever since, “Black Jack” Pershing was a man on a mission, chasing the bandito across New Mexico, Arizona, Texas and ultimately half way across Mexico and back.
Turner looked with honor upon his service. The white Culpeper Minuteman Flag flew from his sandbagged outpost proudly, displaying the coiled rattlesnake and the words “Don’t Tread On Me.”  It was his Great Great–Great Grandfather that helped organize the Minuteman group in 1775 and mustered them at Old Clayton’s Field in Culpeper, Virginia to take on an advancing British Army led by Lord Dunsmore.  They made their stand at the Old Great Bridge and stand they did as the farmers laid waste to an entire legion of British soldiers and Grenadiers cementing their place in American history. His grandfather served with the same detachment in the Civil War with Lt. Hugh Mercer Patton, ancestor to his own fearless leader and his father again served in the same detachment in the Spanish American War. Now, here he was, a Culpeper Minuteman, once again facing down another timeless villain with sword in hand.
His horse “Durango” snorted loudly like he always did when spooked. Faintly, Turner heard voices in Spanish on the other side of the Canyon. He had learned at a grave price indeed, that sound travels a long distance in these Mountains and one could easily be fooled into thinking they were closer than they actually were or vice versa. A hand reached over and, grabbing his arm, gently pulled him down to the safety of the sandbags. The arm belonged to his guide, Border Patrol Agent Jefferson Milton, a legend already in the border protection service. Milton had chased outlaws and smugglers of all kinds of things, especially people, as long as anybody else and he sensed a confrontation was about to begin. These rarely ended well. If it were Villa himself, there would be a violent firefight and the Minutemen to his left and right would likely die. Perhaps he hoped, it was just a peasant leading his goats down a lonely trail in the dead of night.
The voice or voices got closer and the clucking of the mule’s hooves could almost be felt as they stomped along the granite trail.
Suddenly, a few feet away a man and his burro turned the corner catching all but Milton, totally by surprise. The echoes from the canyon walls, once again, deceived them into looking in the wrong direction.
Had the man gazed up he would have seen the flag and the row of white faces looking down at him. He led a beast of burden, laden down with supplies and what looked like jugs of water.  He was talking to his animal no doubt to pass the time and assuage his fears of loneliness in the high desert. Just as Turner was to let the man pass without incident, more voices were heard and several dozen men, women and children turned the corner and followed the man at a discrete distance. He was their guide and they were about to cross illegally into the United States. Thousands of Mexicans, Chinese, even Irishman, made this trek each year looking for work in the US and had done so for at least 50 years. Turner’s orders were clear. No one comes across the border in his sector: no one.  They would need to check this bunch and make sure no Villaista’s were in their midst. His men stepped from the rocks and it was then, on that misty night in the high desert of California, that all hell broke loose.

88 YEARS LATER

September 11, 2005
Boulevard, CA

        The exoskeleton of the strange looking insect slithered down the windshield of my white Silverado pickup truck. The combination of one hundred degree heat and seventy-five miles per hour became natures own convection oven and baked the bug, or whatever it was to the glass in seconds. It would require an ice scraper to remove the next day, which happily I still possessed after years of living in Minnesota. It hung on the wall in my office, as a reminder of just how fortunate I was to now be living in San Diego, home of the world’s finest weather. I reasoned that I deserved it after eight years of shoveling snow and frozen horse manure, in sub-zero temperatures.
        I flipped on the wipers and squirted some washer fluid onto the offending hitchhiker, which of course only made it worse and spread the goo in an arc across my field of vision. Craig, my neighbor and seated to my right, commented on the errant decision to add water and soap to the mix and we both laughed at the old joke about the first thing a bug sees when it hits a windshield…its asshole.
        At 7:30 am, the sun was now above the Laguna Mountains and we were driving straight into the reddish fiery mass. The Chevy truck labored a bit as it climbed to the Laguna Summit, 4,000 feet above sea level on Highway 8, before cresting the ridge and dropping 1,000 feet more into Pine Valley. We’d been on this rollercoaster ride for the last few minutes though to be honest the trip had been mostly up with very little down.  From zero, quite literally at sea level, to three quarters of a mile up above the ocean in around half an hour, give or take.
        For my entire forty-eight years I had been a flatlander so to speak. I grew up at the Jersey Shore, lived in a cornfield in Ohio and on a horse farm, nestled in the center of a prehistoric; mosquito infested peat bog in Columbus, MN. I loved mountains but just never found myself living in them. I had driven through the Appalachians more than thirty times ferrying my family from Ohio back to New Jersey each year to visit relatives and marveled at the majestic peaks and how the weather could be vastly different from one mountain range to another. You could enter a tunnel in the sunshine and emerge in a veritable typhoon. It was cool, for a flatlander.
        These mountains however were like nothing I had ever seen before in my life. Towering edifices of round boulders, some the size of school buses hanging precariously over the highway and the few homes that dotted the landscape.  The earth was charred from the sun and the occasional wildfire that swept through the region. The last one, reportedly started by an illegal immigrant in this very area, consumed more than a million acres and 2,500 homes before being brought under control.  An occasional cactus reminded us we a were on our way to the high desert of Southern California, an area covered with the aforementioned boulders, Manzanita trees and millions of jackrabbits being chased by hundreds of thousands of coyotes.
The area was starkly beautiful, yet to a flatlander like me was also one of the most godforsaken places I had ever seen. I took it all in, knowing in the back of my mind that I would never set foot on this space again. So much for intuition.
Craig and I got to this place like most Minutemen. We are both parents and both reasonably successful, middle aged white guys. Craig was about ten years older than me, tall and had a full head of hair, which being both follicly and vertically challenged just pissed me off. Our kids were grown up and had turned out pretty darn well. We were both fiscally conservative and socially moderate to liberal. Craig’s wife is Asian and mine is a card carrying full-blooded Italian both of whom got along like sisters. We were sitting by the pool a few weeks earlier and solving all of the world’s problems over a large martini with jalapeno stuffed olives.  When we got to the topic of illegal immigration, somewhere between resolving the Middle East crisis and discovering the cure for cancer, Craig announced he was going to join the Minutemen.  I too had just recently checked out their website and was taken by the call to protect America’s borders. A year or so prior I had watched 60 Minutes, 20/20 or one of those news magazine shows and saw ranchers in Texas fending off a wave of invaders from the south. The media called them “undocumented migrant workers” but the ranchers had other choice words for the people that destroyed their property on the way north to Valhalla.
On first coming to California in 2003, I had no idea this issue even existed. It was way off of my radar screen until one day I ventured from my secluded island community of Coronado and drove a few miles south to Imperial Beach. Comparatively speaking, you would have thought I had just descended from Mount Olympus into the gates of hell.  Border Patrol helicopters flew in a 24-hour racetrack pattern over the community and the Mexican border a mile or two further down the coast.  There were bars on the windows and the billboards were nearly all in Spanish. Had someone dropped me there in the middle of the night and removed my blindfold, I would have immediately figured out which way was north and started heading for the US border.  Only Imperial Beach was firmly inside the confines of the US already. As I journeyed into other communities nearby like Chula Vista and National City I was also struck by the poverty. English was very definitely a second language here and all it took was a trip to the local Home Depot or Costco to see how pervasive the language issue was.  I was totally cool with people of another culture speaking their native language amongst themselves. After all, we do it and if I were to venture south to Mexico to work I am sure I would be expected to speak Spanish in public and English amongst other Americans. Trouble was, this wasn’t Mexico, yet I was being forced to learn Spanish if I wanted to get along in these communities. That did bug me. Unlike the legal immigrants that preceded them, this illegal crowd had no interest in learning our language or assimilating into our culture.
This by itself was striking but as an executive recruiter for most of my life, it wasn’t the culture or even the language that disturbed me most. It was the ambivalence that was alarming. Their willingness to bring the abject poverty and crime, akin to that in Tijuana, Managua or Bogota for  example, WITH THEM, into the United States without reservation. Most people left one thing to achieve something better yet here I saw a group of people that just wanted to move their way of life to a new neighborhood where the government sponsored social benefits were better. I had dedicated my career to helping people find equal employment opportunity in corporate America. I am NOT an insulated white guy unfamiliar with the challenges of minority communities. I had worked with them on various levels for a long time and had gained respect in Asian, Black, American Indian and Hispanic communities.  In 20 plus years I had been responsible for literally thousands of people finding gainful employment and many of them were highly qualified minorities and women. I had started one of the first Hispanic Job Boards on the Internet (Hispanicareers.com) and was the president of the largest job boards on the web as well as vice-president of a prominent minority focused magazine. In fact, in most circles I am regarded as one of the godfathers of “diversity recruiting” online. For me though (and this is a big distinction), diversity was not about giving any one person or groups an advantage. It was about ensuring that no one, regardless of his or her ethnicity, race, gender, religion, physical ability or sexual preference was actively discriminated against in employment. It includes all people regardless of their skin color. White, black, brown or whatever didn’t matter. Giving people advantages over someone else based on anything but qualifications did not benefit anyone. Give every qualified candidate an invitation to the party and let the best person win based on their abilities; that was what I was fighting for. It goes beyond just employment though.  In the common practice today, we are encouraged to “celebrate our uniqueness” and respect those that are different than we are. That’s GREAT, as long as one person’s culture doesn’t negatively impact another’s. Trouble is the left has co-opted diversity into giving one group “specific advantages” based on their ethnic background. Organizations like La Raza seemingly don’t give a rats-ass about white people or black people or Asians or Eskimos. They are only concerned about how they can get more for Hispanics and the rest be damned.
        America is a wonderful melting pot of cultures. It is our greatest strength. Historically, people come here to BECOME Americans. They bring with them their traditions and they make an overall contribution to our society through natural diversity.  They assimilate into OUR culture without forgetting where they came from. They left for a reason and that was to be part of the great American Experiment. After all, if you are so attached to your roots, stay closer to the tree.
Cultural acceptance takes a lot of understanding and an open-mind. I had both, though I’ll confess, the culture piece got under my skin from time to time. One day I was driving down Hwy 54 in Chula Vista and a beat up old car with Baja California Mexican license plates was in front of me. The child in the back seat was not strapped in and bounced around the vehicle like a ping-pong ball. All at once, she grabbed a handful of empty McDonalds wrappers and cups, opened the window and tossed them out. As they cascaded over my truck, I damn near lost control and started honking my horn at this poor woman who was no doubt, now fearing for her life and had absolutely no idea why.  Here in the US for the most part we take pride in our country. Many of us, like me, grew up during the “Don’t Be a Litter Bug” campaign, which can be credited, I think, with cleaning up America. My brother has been bugging me to mention the commercial with the Indian crying over pollution. Remember that one? We developed an ingrained attitude towards litter and the environment.  In Mexico and Central America however, they had no such program and to take it a step further viewed throwing garbage out the window as a way of employing someone who had to pick it up; only no one ever appeared to apply for the job. This would not be the first time this happened to me and I was to discover it was a fairly common practice along with throwing lighted cigarette butts out the window though the latter was not confined to cars with Baja CA plates. Plenty of gringo’s did it as well and roadside fires in this dry desert area were almost a daily occurrence somewhere in San Diego County.  It is a big county to be sure. You could fit Delaware and Rhode Island in San Diego County and still have about 550 square miles left over. That’s a lot of garbage and a lot of fires.
So culturally, Illegal Immigration was becoming a concern for me. As I researched some of the other issues I discovered equally alarming facts:
•        More than 27% of all criminals in US Jails were illegal aliens.
•        While everyone crossing the border illegally is technically a criminal, one out of five were guilty of felonies.
•        Of the 12-20 million illegal aliens in the US only 1.8 million were actually migrant workers and employed in agriculture representing between 4% and 9%
•        The State of CA was spending upwards of $10 billion dollars per year in medical and social services to people who were here illegally.
•        Eighty-four hospitals in the state had closed their doors because of the onslaught of illegal aliens demanding free medical care.
The list went on and on and the more I read, the more incensed I became with the lunacy of it all. For me, I also saw a different side of the equation. The roughly 5-8 million jobs that the other “undocumented workers” were filling outside of agriculture, were jobs once held by urban youth, college students and early career folks, many of whom were minorities and all of whom were here legally. It just wasn’t right.
The President was dead wrong on this issue, Craig and I decided. These illegal aliens, wherever they came from, were not doing the jobs Americans wouldn’t do, they were doing the jobs Americans USED TO DO.
        Though somewhat skeptical about the Minuteman’s real intentions we went out to the website together, read the Standard Operating Procedures and noted with interest the groups claims to be anti-racist and pro border security. It was important for both of us to not associate ourselves with any organization that was even remotely racist, bigoted or xenophobic. Satisfied it was the real deal we each plopped down fifty dollars to join and authorized them to do a felony background check on us. We sat back and waited for several weeks without any word and began to wonder if we’d just been scammed for fifty dollars, when one day the phone rang and an interviewer named Connie wanted to interview me. She had just finished the same process with Craig minutes before.
As it turned out, we were among many thousands of Americans doing the same thing at about the same time and the organization was overwhelmed with volunteers; a challenge that would continue for at least another year before they could get caught up with the demand.
        During my interview I made the mistake of saying I too was an interviewer and a recruiter. My phone rang the next day and a man named Brandon, who had made a similar error in his own interview, called to ask me if I could help out vetting new potential members.  Craig too received a call and both of us “volunteered” to conduct the first level interviews of future Minutemen and women. We each reasoned that we had a vested interest in ensuring those around us shared a similar value system. It was late August 2005.
        We were told that some guy named Gregg would give us a call to talk about the upcoming October Muster. Both Craig and I were Military veterans, he a Medic in Vietnam and I a Security Policemen in the Air Force.  The term “muster” meant more to him than it did to me but I got the gist of it. We were going to get together in a month, for a month and watch the border.  I was given a list of new members and asked to follow an interview script that was designed to engage the person in discussion about illegal immigration and assess their true feelings about the issue, and illegal aliens in general. I was to flag anyone that sounded radical or racist for another more in-depth interview. With a few exceptions, each person was approved and I was beginning to get a good feel for the type of individual that volunteered for this duty.  They were fiercely patriotic, loved their country, despised do-nothing politicians and almost everyone had been personally touched in some way, shape or form by this illegal immigration issue.
        Brandon called me one day and informed me I had been promoted to S1 Chief of Staff. I had no idea what that was actually but Chief of Staff sounded like a lot of work. He assured me it would be a little more involved than what I was currently doing and invited me to lunch in Carlsbad to discuss it.  My life at this juncture was pretty full. A couple of weeks earlier I had gotten married to my childhood sweetheart Susan. We were just catching our breath from the year’s worth of wedding planning. I really didn’t need more work. My business was going well but could be better. I initially declined his generous offer for the non-paid position but then Gregg Imus called me, used his considerable charm and thanked me for accepting the important role. I’d seen this tactic used before in volunteer organizations, and had even, truth be told, used it myself from time to time. We called it “railroad to a chairmanship” in the Jaycees and I had just climbed aboard this fast moving train. It was to change my life.