Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Sliding by the Bakaara Market
On Friday, 19 JUN, I got a call from code name SPAWN OF MONGO, from here out known as Spawn. He told me the story. I took the call on my earbuds, then turned them off and handed the phone to the Lovely and Talented Mrs. Mongo (aka SuperNurse), then I put the phone on speaker and we all talked it through again. I listened through the lens of tactics and Situational Awareness. TL&TMM listened through the filter of being a nurse and caregiver. Then we spent about an hour talking it through together on speakerphone. I purposefully broke up the discussion, so that Spawn would have to to tell the story over and again. That works to settle the mind and hold the demons at bay. He told me straight up when he called, he needed to talk in order to tamp down on the endocrine hurricane that hits in traumatic situations. I could hear it in his voice; not shaky, so much, as trying to speak through all the hormones, as tho from a deep well.
This is the story as relayed to us. Any incorrect statements are my fault, not Spawn’s. Plus, I’m Irish; you want the facts or you want the truth?
Spawn was moving from a good part of town to a better part of town to check on his contracts. Between the good and better, there was a not-so-good, very bad, kind of awful part of town. No worries. Zip through, get from A to B, and keep on making money.
Spawn was moving from east to west on the upper part of a “T” intersection. The north-south part of the “T” that terminated at his road had a stop sign on it; there was not a light, nor a stop or yield sign on Spawn’s piece of road. As he approached the intersection, he espied a guy on a bicycle that had a little lawnmower engine attached to the rear sprocket (to, you know, save all them valuable calories one would otherwise expend pedaling). The guy was blowing down the sidewalk and used the last driveway before the intersection to pull onto the road.
As spawn passed the intersection, he felt a big thump vibrate through the vehicle, accompanied by a bang. What the? Given that he was driving just under the posted 25 mph speed limit, he was able to bring the truck to an almost immediate stop. He cut the ignition off, exited the truck, and begin to do a walk-around, headed for the rear of the pickup. As he did, the driver of the car that had traversed the intersection at the same time he did and yelled, “there’s a dude there!”
Spawn raced around to the rear of the truck to find Bike Boy lying on the street. His bike was crumpled up, and his saddlebags had exploded, littering the road with small glassine baggies that Spawn could only assume were drugs. Turning to the other driver, and pointing with a blade hand in order to assign responsibility, he pushed out a loud and thunderous, “Call 911!!”
Spawn reached into the cab of the truck and grabbed his aid bag. The company vehicle came with a little first aid kit, probably for insurance purposes. His personal aid bag was much more…extensive. Spawn used the time asking the standard pre-aid questions, Sir, are you okay? Can you hear me? Are you all right? to glove up. As he finished getting the gloves on and hollering, Bike Boy—choking—semi-rolled to his side and started spitting teeth out. As he did so, great gouts of blood began spurting out of the back of his head. Nothing bleeds like a head wound, but Spawn thought that the amount was excessive.
Gloves on, Spawn moved to Bike Boy. He hitched up the fanny pack that he regularly wore slung diagonally across his chest, and did a finger sweep of Bike Boy’s mouth. Not much chance of getting bit, this guy’s corn is well and truly shelled. It took two swipes to get the dental debris out of his mouth and let Bike Boy breathe. Still, his respiration was choky and labored due to the amount of blood pouring into his ruined mouth. Spawn pulled a hemostatic bandage out of his backpack and laid it out next to Bike Boy. Bike Boy started the kind of deep, guttural moaning that Spawn had ever only heard from people very badly injured. Gently, he tried to feel out Bike Boy’s head to determine whether he was dealing with a big bleed or a shattered skull. Bike Boy’s melon felt like it maintained integrity through the impact, but it would take the ED and imagery to truly determine the extent of the damage.
As Spawn began to work free the bandage one-handed while trying to support Bike Boy’s head at the best angle to keep his airway clear and not let him drown in his own blood, three cars pulled up to all three points of the intersection. Two Beamers and a Mercedes. The drivers exited their vehicles and faced outward. It was like they were pulling security. Passengers got out and approached Spawn and Bike Boy. All the passengers were expensively dressed, with jewelry, mostly gold and diamonds, dripping off of them. With nary a glance or a word, they began policing up the little transparent baggies. They pulled the saddlebags off of the bike and loaded all the baggies into them. Then, they went back to their cars and left.
Makes sense, thought Spawn. Transport the drugs by mule, but keep the mule under surveillance to make sure he gets where he’s going, with no loss of product.
While the Armani mafia had been securing the baggies and sterilizing the area, quite a crowd had begun to form. Spawn could see, through his peripheral vision, cell phones aimed at him, no doubt taking video. He couldn’t help but notice that he was the only white boy in sight. He could also hear the comments from the crowd, the gestational mutterings of a crowd blossoming into a mob.
“Another white man running down a black man, same as it ever was.”
“Man, he just ran that boy right over without a second thought.”
Hello? I’m right here, and I seem to be the only one ready, willing, or able to provide first aid.
This scene, thought Spawn, definitely has the potential to devolve into the Bakaara market. Some of the ladies in the crowd were even wearing linen dresses and muumuus colorfully dyed in East African patterns. As a kid, Spawn had obsessed over the Battle of Mogadishu. He could recite the minute-by-minute chronology of events probably better than Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down. He knew the names not only of every soldier killed, but also of every soldier wounded, and most of those who were on the op. He knew a lot of them, was friends with and went to school with their kids. He knew all about what could happen if things went Bakaara. He was concerned, but not worried.
Spawn had been training for as long as he could remember. He’d tapped out his first Green Beret at the age of 16. He’d then been stupid enough, when his old man was able to make one of his infrequent calls home from Iraq, to crow about it and say, “Come on home, Old Man, I’ve got something for you!” His old man had taken it gracefully and when he got home beaten Spawn mercilessly, on the mats. He’d had an avid interest in firearms, working in a series of different firearm establishments just to get his shooting and gunsmithing skills up to where he assessed they should be.
The fanny pack that he habitually wore across his chest held a Glock 19X, loaded out with a 23-round extended mag, plus two extra extended mags, and an aircraft aluminum LED flashlight in one of the packs exterior pockets, just to give him a less-than-lethal option, and, uh, sometimes you need a flashlight for light. If ya’ll kick this off, I got all kind of friends to bring to the party.
One voice rang out of the crowd as Spawn heard the approaching sirens, “Man, I saw the whole thing. That dumb brother blew right through the stop sign and piled his dumb ass up on the side of that truck. You think the white boy was able to swipe him head-on with the side of his truck? C’mon, use your damn head.”
That seemed to mollify the crowd a little bit, and Spawn hoped it would help abrogate the crowd-to-mob slow boil.
Soon, the police and the EMTs showed up. Spawn knew most of the police, despite the fact that they were all masked. He trained at the local dojo with most of them. The EMTs took over the care, treatment, and evacuation of Bike Boy. The police pulled Spawn to the far side of the road, and formed an ad hoc cordon between him and the crowd of still possibly volatile onlookers. Finally, statement given, he slung his aid bag over his shoulder and prepared to sit the truck and get out of Dodge.
“Eh,” said one of the cops, “why don’t I follow you out of the neighborhood, at least a coupla blocks.”
Published in General
Whoa. That was close.
Wondering about the security. That’s a lot of guys. Must have been quite a load.
Oooh, fun, fun, fun. Hope the lad is through it by now.
Harrowing stuff, but once he’s through the shakes you have to needle him about it. I suggest, “Jason Bourne would have gotten the license plates of the drug cars”.
Yikes
This is the most disturbing part of a disturbing account.
I’ve heard and seen a few accounts of blatant lying and extreme anti-white racism in circumstances like this. Going through the Michael Brown FBI report, I was appalled by the very high percentage of black witnesses in that neighborhood who were giving accounts that were not remotely in accord with the facts.
I have no idea whether this is common. Any insights?
All too common. For one thing, in a situation like that, everyone is amped up. Even hearing someone say something like that can change the memory to conform. Memory is highly unreliable. So are the senses. People see what they want to see and disregard the rest, as the old song goes.
All I’ve got is, chip off the ole block.
Outstanding. Boss, you trained him well. He performed magnificently when it came time to put up or shut up.
And studying incidents as he has, isn’t as good as in-person experience in developing wisdom, it still pays off in experiencing small doses of adrenaline as if he were there (“joining the parade” we call it), it still helps when one realizes, okay, here we go. This one’s real.
He knows he made mistakes (but it doesn’t sound like he made many). He needs to think – talk them through, think about what he can do better next time, and see about some more training. Because whatever went on before, training takes on a whole new meaning now.
Glock, don’t leave home without it.
Yikes! Indeed…
From the old Bob Newhart driving school instructor bit. “No, no, it’s my fault. You were in the left turn lane, and you had your left blinker on. I just assumed you were going to turn left.”
Yeah, he delivered it better. Point is, you never want to assume that the other guy on the road is going to do the reasonable thing.
All in all I feel for the poor, toothless idiot.
It makes me wonder whether the claims of racism, based on “lived experience,” are based on this psychology.
And I like the S&G reference.
Quite a bit of it, yes. You see what you expect to see.
I’ve had that experience of false witness. I had a minor accident in downtown Philadelphia. A black man driving a delivery truck hit me . It was clearly his fault. It wasn’t a ‘scene’ but one black person began claiming it was all my fault. Just sticking up for his own I guess. This was pre-OJ. It wasn’t a big deal as PA was no-fault anyway.
Great writing, Boss!
Wow! So glad he’s safe and nothing bad happened while he was doing good. With hindsight, maybe better to take the long way around and miss the bad areas.
Great news that he made it out of there safely.
Seems like you did ok. If it were one of your fictional works I’d say you ought to give this character more human flaws to make him more believable.
But I guess I can’t make that criticism, since he’s a real person and he really was that prepared to serve and really did serve, just the way you said.
That’s what I meant by you did ok.
Thanks, Mark. The kid’s got flaws for days–as he’d be the first to tell you. But most of those are in the performance of mundane, mind-numbing drudgery. As the stakes go up, so too does his performance.
Big time! It’s strange, but I guess we all pick our preferred form of suffering.
My preferred form would be beautiful sex-crazed women who think I’m irresistible. Still waiting to suffer in that way.
Wait. We can call that suffering? I’m copycatting you.
We all have our crosses to bear, Boss.
Given that, as a human, he has to have flaws, that’s a good kind to have. I guess that this pattern is common to great men, judging by history. Of the first few examples that flew into my head as I tried to build a case for this new thought, Grant stood out. What a mediocre small-town storekeeper he was! But then the stakes went up by an unusual amount, and how his performance did as well!
Yeeaah, about that…
If I get the permission from Spawn, I’ll list out the circumstances of two/tree times he’s been fired. Not one of them were reasons I could criticize. Heck, most of them I’d have done the exact same thing. But the list is interesting. More to follow.
She sounds expensive.
To Spawn:
Hoot approves.
Death by snu-snu?
Don’t say that around @mattbalzer. He has the videos.
It’s not as much fun as it sounds.
Still, I’d like to try it sometime.