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מצנחים קטנים בתוך מכתשים קטנים - זה מה שנשאר אחרי הטלת פצצת מצרר נ"ט

The Ethical Outlaw
If the Chocolate Mountains were a spine laid sideways, Jacob Ray Taylor—J.R., of course, to those who know him—would be found down in the lumbar.

For nearly 90 km the mountains trend in a languid south-easterly: beginning about 240-km east of San Diego, to just this side of the Mexican frontier. They are as remote and gloriously unsettled as California gets, a rolling savannah of spiny scrub trees, badlands, lava fields and the Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range, an 184,000 ha set aside for the U.S. Navy, Marines, National Guard, visiting NATO wings and various helicopter detachments.

They are why Taylor's directions to his spread, relayed by cell phone in an Arkansas twang that sways between nicotine raspy and sing-songy, include a distracting caveat: "If you see the 'Danger: Bombing Range' signs, you've gone too far."

He and his wife, Lorelei, own 10 acres spilling over with trailers, shotgun shacks, seven dogs, 45 chickens and roosters, even more cats and a cache of spent military ordnance and bomb fins. To the north is where Patton's Third Army trained in the early 1940s. To the west is where B-29s dropped mock-ups of "Little Boy" and "Fat Man," the atomic bombs destined for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, over the cognac-colour Salton Sea. The thrust of the blades of military choppers on more recent missions over the Chocolates has been known to bend antennae on the Taylor’s' property.

Perhaps there's some good reason that J.R. settled here, 100-km from potable water. To begin with, he's an ex-soldier. A "Mud Marine" who served three tours in Vietnam, one in Lebanon, then a stint with a “covert” unit in Colombia, during, he says, "the first drug war there." After leaving what he calls the "black" world, he found work with Red Adair, the famed American oil field fire-fighter. "That owed to my knowledge of explosives," Taylor explains. But eventually he returned to making a living from war, or from the rehearsals for it, scrounging the range for reclaimable bomb and missile metals—primarily aluminium and brass—then selling them to a local yard for as much as 400-Eur a ton.

If the work wasn't exactly legal, it wasn't exactly immoral, either. Scrappers like Taylor who roamed the Chocolates in days gone by respected a code: steering clear when the range was "hot," namely when manoeuvres were being conducted, and maintaining a quietly amiable “don’t ask/don’t tell” relationship with the military authorities.

"I got along with them," Taylor claims. "But then again, they didn't see me and I didn't see them."

Now the range Taylor long defied is being overrun by what he considers a reckless new generation of outlaws: methamphetamine addicts, human traffickers and drug runners, among others. Taylor complains that pirates shake down or kidnap human-cargo loads from range runners and coyotes. That vanloads of illegal immigrants are dumped, left to wander a theatre of war, sometimes to die.

And then, the worst of the lot: seekers of ordnance packed with plastic explosives, the malleable and undetectable stuff of IED, shoe and backpack bombs. Figuring out how to secure the materiel from a live bomb or missile isn't rocket science. And a healthy portion of what rains down on the Chocolates remains live. (The US Department of Defence estimates that 5% to 20% of bombs dropped during training dud, or fail to detonate.)

J.R. Taylor sees the bombing range slouching toward anarchy. He aims to do something about it. As W. is the illegitimate sheriff on the world stage to some, Taylor is the hegemonic if stealthy force in the Chocolate Mountains.

"You have to play by the rules," he says.

Behind the wheel of one of his five primer-grey Volkswagen Bugs, Taylor is ascending a 180-metre hogback of loose grey shale. At the summit the wind begins to gust; so does Taylor’s rhetoric. He relates what he told one of the ne'er-do-wells: “‘you ain't going to see me. You're going to hear one crack at your motor, and it's going to fly past your feet.' "

Until the early '80s, J.R. and Lorelei lived in Niland, California, on the Chocolates' west side. It's a town of fewer than 1,500, a maybe kilometre and half-long grid of humble stucco houses, trailers in various states of decay and dry-land vegetable fields. On training days on the range, all of it heaves with aftershocks.

And most days are training days, with jets and choppers from the Yuma Marine Corps Air Station in Arizona, or aircraft carriers in the Pacific bombing and strafing and turning the air anxious with drops of 226 to 900-km bombs, rockets and missiles, as well as fusillades of cluster-type munitions. Each type of ordnance wields its own unique percussion. For instance, the audio signature of cluster bombs begins with a deep, rumbling thud, not unlike a sonic boom. A series of sharp thunderclaps, maybe a half-dozen, immediately follows. The sound travels upwind from somewhere deep in the Chocolates' broad midsection.

Before you hear the sound, a 408-kg, 233-cm long cluster bomb (designed for "multiple kills" and "soft target lethality," as the military puts it) will have detonated, releasing hundreds of soda-can or hockey puck-sized submunitions blasting outward at the speed of bullets.

None of that compelled the Taylors to quit Niland; it's not a whole lot more peaceful where they ended up. "We just wanted to get away from everything and everybody” says J.R. "I could see Niland's future: the dingalings, the druggies, the sleaze. No thank you."

Since relocating to the opposite side of the Chocolates they've collected an ever-expanding fleet of beefed-up four-wheel-drive vehicles, the most recent addition being a late '90s Chevy Suburban, which J.R. says was abandoned by a "wet runner." While Lorelei prefers to ramble aboard a Quad-Runner ATV, J.R.'s regular drives are the Bugs, which intentionally lack tops or windshields. In lieu of a rear seat, each has a steel basin about the size of a large chest or desk for loading bomb fins—the wind-correcting tail kits that improve delivery accuracy—and spent rounds of ammo regularly shot into the surplus tanks and other ersatz military targets scattered around the range.

By virtue of their precision grade and relative lightness, there's long been a robust market for salvaged bomb and missile metals. Reflexively, for a generation or more, scrappers have scoured the Chocolates as if they were a post-apocalypse gold field. Officials with the Yuma Marine Corps Air Station, which oversees the range, won't comment on any illegal activity that might take place on the range or on military efforts to combat it. They have no public comment about Taylor, either. A spokesman would say only: "The range is secured by military police."

In the old days, Taylor's scrapping shift was from midnight to 3 a.m., and this was purposeful: He worked in the wee hours so as not "to get in the way." "I was the only one I ever knew who ran the range at night, save for Christmas. The key was I liked the night." And while others tended toward big rigs, such as burly pickup trucks pulling trailers, Taylor preferred a smaller footprint, and the nimbleness it afforded. "Cut-down VW Bugs. I've had as many as 18 sets of tail fins in one."

As for his operating principle, in his scrapping heyday it was more gut than strategic. "I have no rhyme or reason in how I do this. If it hits me, I just go." He never took to spirits or drugs and that, coupled with steady nerves, might help explain his longevity. In fact, he has all appendages intact. Being shot by other scrappers, suffering shrapnel wounds and burns from exploding fuel-air bombs (the new and improved napalm)—all that Taylor accepted "as part of the territory." But he didn't take unnecessary risks, attentive to Rule No. 1: "Never interrupt a military exercise to scrap." The newcomers don't know from rules. They're as likely to scrap, or smuggle, when it's hot as not. "You can't pay me to go in there," Taylor says. "Would you go into a minefield?"

What sane person would? Taylor calls the whole lot of them powerfully stupid. Worse, their kind of commerce has raised the profile for everyone. Now the Chocolates have the attention of military police, US Border Patrol agents and the rest of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

A fistful of remote passes that seam the Chocolates are used by those who traffic predominantly in illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America. As a way to reduce the fees they pay to smugglers, some immigrants carry marijuana and methamphetamine in backpacks when crossing the range. Larger loads, meth in the 125-135 kg range, pot five to seven times that figure, move through the Chocolates in other conveyances, predominantly late-model Chevy four-wheel drive wagons and built-up Dodge Power Ram pickups.

No matter what they're transporting or pilfering, the amateurs aren't welcome. At least not by Taylor: the ethical outlaw. "They've changed the whole program," he says, and not for the good.

So J.R. canvasses his backyard nearly every day, protecting his homestead. When he is out scrapping, he's always on the lookout for the breakers of the rules. To that end, he claims to have run off more than a few brazen "coyotes and wet runners." At the same time, he says, he passes on the makes and descriptions of out-of-place vehicles to federal agents.

"Those wet and drug runners, they don't have much for brains," Taylor says, straining to be heard over the exhaust of the VW. "Every once in a while you get an idiot who doesn't know any better and wanders over this way." Abandoned vehicles litter most of the passes through the range, which has come to resemble something akin to a pick-a-part salvage yard for the more enterprising range runner or coyote.

He points out a bullet-riddled late model green Chevy pickup that is mired in a sandy wash, absent its tires and wheels. "They're mine," Taylor grins. Taylor describes the alleged gunplay as necessary, an act of self-defence. He doesn't exactly back-pedal from rumours that he dropped a meth cook or two, or more. "They used this range to cook drugs. I turned it over. Put five men in the ground. I had one come up from the bottom of a bomb crater with a rifle. He went away."

Is he serious? Certainly—it's a central element of the J.R. mystique. "Some people see the law as black and white, right and wrong," he says. "Some people see it as black/white with a grey stripe down the middle. That's where I drive. That's the world I navigate."

On a glorious fall day Taylor guides the VW through expanses of sandy flats that climb into gravely volcanic hills. Showy flowers bloom on diminutive fishhook, claret cup and beavertail cactus. Thrashers and shrikes and a phainopepla flit from tall, sinewy ocotillo stalks to thickets of mesquite. We share sandy jeep trails with roadrunners and prairie falcons.

Though just when it seems the bombing range is magically shape-shifting into a wilderness preserve, the VW rolls by an intact bomb. Taylor doesn't stop. He gives the 223-cm long, 229-kg MK-82 the same regard others would a Happy Meal discarded on the side of a highway, continuing up and down gullies and over more cacti and blooming annuals than at any Wal-Mart or Home Depot garden section. "I hardly get out of second gear," he says. In this watchdog business, "you have to have the patience of Job."

His self-declared war on wickedness in the Chocolates has earned Taylor a few enemies—though not, perhaps, among the authorities. One Border Patrol agent, who works undercover and asks not to be named, doesn't condemn Taylor's low-plains law when it comes to drug runners and people smugglers. "Well, if they want to roll through his area, that's the price they're going to pay."

As for all the talk, including Taylor's, about his resorting to terminating some interlopers, the agent does something of a can-can around the answer. "How is someone, a surviving family member, going to reach out to authorities if their son was involved in smuggling? Those people are basically invisible."

Downey Holcomb, for one, isn't impressed with J.R. Taylor. He complains that Taylor "thinks he owns all of that out there," looking toward the range from the confines of the old Airstreams trailer he shares with girlfriend Jesse. "I told him, 'You don't own this sucker.' "

The trigger-nerved Taylor shoots back that it's the likes of Holcomb who are the problem. Inasmuch, Holcomb's attraction to the Chocolates does seem to verge on fatal. The range, the constant death dance, like the methamphetamine and Kentucky mash is in his blood.

"When I hear the jets or the cluster bombs, I know it's time to get up and go to work," he says. The convulsions that rock Niland act like a factory whistle, more often than not drawing him to what's known as Cluster Heaven, arguably the most lethal impact area on the range.

A few years ago, Holcomb recalls, he was riding shotgun when a former partner lost a leg to an unexploded cluster submunition. The BLU-97 blew up under their truck. He then tells the tale of another fellow who was completely eviscerated by a cluster bomb unit. "All they found of him was his lower leg and a boot up in a tree."

During a pursuit two winters back involving U.S. Marine range patrolmen, Holcomb says his load of water-heater-sized cluster bomb bellies shifted violently. Before he knew it 1500-1800 kg worth of raw-edged metal came careening through the cab. Declares Randy Boirum, a former scrapping partner and long-time friend: "He was lucky not to be decapitated."

On one rather hectic day on the range, Boirum and Holcomb decide to make an audacious run for Cluster Heaven. Their transportation is a borrowed two-wheel-drive pickup. The latter was winched off the range by Big Daddy, a former scrapper who helps himself to vehicles abandoned on the range. The loaner’s windshield is spider-webbed, the radiator hisses and the ignition has been punched out. Tearing toward Iris Wash, a five-km wide cleave in the Chocolates' up-sloping north end, the route follows a series of barely there trails. On the approach to Cluster Heaven, Holcomb notes that the RAF (British Royal Air Force) has just dropped; which is good in one sense, because it's "always the British whose cluster bombs fall everywhere but on target." On the other hand, there's the danger of potential encounters with wayward cluster munitions.

Binoculars bring the impact area into sharp relief: Hundreds of large silver casks lay spread across the mountains, catching the afternoon sun. More immediately threatening is the spectre of two Apache attack helicopters circling overhead like hammerhead sharks. The pickup is stashed beneath a smoke tree, and the two scrappers pull a black canvas tarp over the windshield and roof to defeat the sun's reflection. The glint would betray their presence. They locate negligible shade beside a creosote bush. About 18-m away looms a ghostly column of shot-up Vietnam-era tanks, their turrets blown akimbo. Shards of twisted bomb fins and shrapnel lie half-buried in every direction. The Apaches finally disengage and fly off.

Back in the pickup, and after another kilometre or so, Holcomb lands the thing in a sand trap. The pickup overheats. Cluster Heaven is elusive. The wisdom of crossing the proving ground in 46C heat in an underpowered two-wheel drive has collapsed under its questionable weight. With a swig from a plain-wrap bottle of whiskey Holcomb looks across the broad, 820-metre Chocolates with a deep respect.

“Every walk of life has passed through that range,” he says. “All those poor bastards want is a better life, really and truly.” Yet it’s hard to tell who’s worse off: Downey, who can barely afford petrol for the loaner, pushed to gamble day-in/day out with life and limb; or the immigrants who he admits put their lives in his hands. Holcomb relates having lost an opportunity—being vehicle challenged—to take two illegal all the way to Los Angeles. “The price was nearly $1000 (800-Eur) each. But that passed me by.” That admission could be the catalyst for today’s half-baked endeavour.

A savvy local who knows both men, Mike Aleksick, says “Downey is radioactive.” The Marine patrol pursuit on the range, coupled with a more recent high speed chase across the Chocolates and the most recent in a string of arrests for methamphetamine possession and transportation has Holcomb too hot to touch. He'll try for it another day. Maybe J.R. will be watching.

Says Taylor of Holcomb: "He's not worth the bullet." Holcomb's retort: "I've been doing this long enough. When it's my time to go, it's my time to go." Aleksick, Niland's long-time fire chief, explains that in the Chocolates, no matter which side of the law you claim to be on, it's all the same: a mystery. "When you choose to live out in the middle of nowhere, who knows you? Or what you did before you found your way out there? And who's going to know what you're up to?"

מקור: http://www.zreportage.com/ETHICAL/index.shtml

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ציטוט:

במקור נכתב על ידי סירפד מצנחים קטנים בתוך מכתשים קטנים - זה מה שנשאר אחרי הטלת פצצת מצרר נ"ט מקור: http://www.zreportage.com/ETHICAL/index.shtml

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